Tag Archives: story

What Can the Developer of the Polio Vaccine Teach Us About Ebola?

by Sylvest1344 Posted on October 30, 2014

Mother Jones

This story was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

Had he lived, Dr. Jonas Salk would have turned 100 this week. Salk was a young man when in the spring of 1955 he announced his discovery of a vaccine that could prevent polio. He was hailed as a modern miracle worker. He went on to lead scientists from from around the world in studies of cancer, heredity, the brain, the immune system and AIDS at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

In this age of Ebola, it’s enlightening and inspiring to hear Salk talk about the lessons he learned in developing the polio vaccine, and how they might be applicable to the AIDS crisis, which was raging at the time of this interview with Bill Moyers recorded in 1990.

Salk died five years after this interview was broadcast. His memorial at the Salk Institute reads: “Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality.”

TRANSCRIPT

SALK: What we’re doing now is trying to think like nature, in the sense that we are aware that species that have gone before us have disappeared from the face of the Earth. We’d like to use our intelligence and our creative capacity to prolong our presence on the face of the Earth as long as possible. It requires, therefore, that we develop the kinds of tactics and strategies amongst ourselves so as to assure that this can occur, to assure that we will not destroy ourselves or the planet, to make it uninhabitable and to allow the fullness of the potential of the individual to be expressed, to flower. That is—

MOYERS: What is—

SALK: —awfully ideal. The question now is how can we translate this, how can we make this operative? If you want me to give you an example—

MOYERS: Yeah.

SALK: —of how people can solve problems for themselves? When the problem of polio confronted this nation, confronted the world, there was an organization that formed in this country called the March of Dimes. Volunteers. They were not government-directed or -led. They didn’t ask the government to do anything. They did it themselves. That’s just a small illustration of what has happened in the past and can happen again and is happening continuously now here and, I think, in other parts of the world.

MOYERS: I read the other day, coming out here, in fact, that by the year 2000, which is not very far from now, there will be some 20 million people in the world carrying the AIDS virus. Is that a comparable challenge to what you faced with polio 50 years ago?

SALK: Well, it’s an even more difficult challenge, but that’s what evokes a response on the part of those who want to solve the problem, who are addressing themselves to just that question and philosophically, in approaching it. The virus, if it prevails, then we will lose. But if we are able to reduce the damage caused by the virus and, at the same time, try to enhance the immune response to the virus and establish a more favorable balance between the two, then we will be doing in relation to that problem what we want to do in relation to the world and that is to reduce the negative and enhance the positive at one and the same time.

MOYERS: The good news would be that there is a vaccine that protects us and immunizes us, against the AIDS virus. Are we going to have that good news, do you think, in your time and mine?

SALK: My expectation is that we will solve the problem. It’s just a matter of time and just a matter of strategy. Now, why do I say that this is the case? It’s because I think solutions come through evolution. It comes through asking the right question, because the answer pre-exists. But it’s the question that we have to define and discover, to discover and to define.

MOYERS: You mean, when you asked the question about how to defeat polio, the answer was already there?

SALK: Mm-hmm, in a way. If you think of David and Michelangelo, it was in the stone, but it had to be unveiled and revealed. You don’t invent the answer. You reveal the answer.

MOYERS: From nature.

SALK: From nature.

MOYERS: From the life process.

SALK: Yes.

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What Can the Developer of the Polio Vaccine Teach Us About Ebola?

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The Craziest Things Republican Candidates Have Said About Climate Change In One Video

by Nathan64Pdlnc Posted on October 28, 2014

Mother Jones

This story originally appeared in the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Can the GOP’s 2014 candidates give a straight answer on climate change? It appears not.

Many Republican candidates have offered roundabout answers to climate change questions. Some have said the climate isn’t changing at all, while others have disputed research showing that human activity is driving those changes. Then there’s Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM), who said during a debate this year that he’s confident our climate isn’t changing because he has “Googled this issue.”

Lee Fang of The Republic Report put together a mash-up of Republican candidates’ greatest hits on climate change this year.

Watch it above.

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The Craziest Things Republican Candidates Have Said About Climate Change In One Video

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Inside the Bizarre, Unregulated World of Debt Collection

by Fern6331kdffr Posted on October 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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One evening a few years ago, a wealthy former Wall Street banker and a convicted armed robber walked into a fancy club in Buffalo, New York—the fading industrial city that, oddly enough, has become America’s debt-collection capital. The banker, Aaron Siegel, and the ex-con, Brandon Wilson, were there to meet with Jake Halpern, a hometown boy turned New Yorker writer. Halpern wanted to know what was up with these strange bedfellows, and how they managed to recover a huge bundle of consumer debt—an Excel spreadsheet packed with debtor data that they’d dubbed “the package”—they believed had been stolen from them.

Halpern turned the tale into a book titled, Bad Paper: Chasing Debt From Wall Street to the Underworld. In the book, which published earlier this month, he follows how credit card balances, payday loans, even plastic-surgery debts, move down the food chain from the big banks to ever-smaller, ever-sketchier collection firms that scrap and claw to wring every last penny out of those in hock. I caught up with Halpern to talk about his adventures in this lawless realm. (I also asked him to provide some tips for people who are worried about debt collectors.)

Mother Jones: How did you get interested in this story?

Jake Halpern: My mother was being hounded by a debt collector over a debt that she didn’t owe, and she eventually just paid it because she wanted the calls to stop. I was very surprised. It sounded so strange. I started poking around on the internet and found this was extremely common. There was this world where these debts were sold off by the banks for pennies on the dollar and bought and sold.

I was really interested in the idea that these debts were out there in the form of Excel spreadsheets. I wrote up a brief pitch for the New Yorker and sent it over to my editor, Daniel Zalewski, and he wrote back and said “Remnick greenlighted it. When can you get us 5,000 words?” I had really puffed up my chest and said I was a Buffalo boy and could get all of these people to talk to me, and now I was on the hook. So I went back to Buffalo and no one would talk to me! Then I sent Facebook messages to everyone I knew in high school and everyone my brother knew in high school, asking who would let me in the door.

At the time, Brad Pitt’s production company wanted to turn this idea into an HBO show. So I set up all these interviews and there were all these people who didn’t want to speak with me for the magazine but were happy to talk for the TV show. Among them were Aaron Siegel and Brandon Wilson. As I heard them start to tell their story my eyes lit up. I spent the next year and a half trying to get those guys to cooperate. And that’s the genesis.

I hope readers just enjoy a rollicking good tale about a banker and an armed robber who become friends and go into business to track down this debt that’s stolen from them and takes them into the underworld of the buying and selling of debt. There’s an element of this story that felt like a Quentin Tarantino film, and that’s what drew me in. That was my concept from the beginning—a crazy caper that’s a parable for what happens in the absence of regulation.

MJ: It seems as though you really liked your main characters.

JH: The very first time I saw those guys interact, I knew that was a book. I was interested in this relationship between the armed robber and the banker who were from different worlds but had similar goals. It was kind of a metaphor for this larger marriage of the banks selling off their debt and these street guys scrapping over it.

They needed each other. Aaron needed Brandon for someone who could get good deals on paper and Brandon needed Aaron because he needed someone to be the respectable face of the operation. But they didn’t fully trust each other. Then there’s the personal dynamic. Aaron thinks it’s cool to be friends with an armed robber, and Brandon feels good that he’s being invited to Clinton fundraisers.

MJ: Your sources really opened up to you. I loved the scene in which Jimmy, an ex-con-turned-debt-collector, talks about his drug-dealing days and how, when he saw his heroin-addicted father for the last time, his gold chain dangled down and blocked his view of his passed-out father’s face. How did you get people to talk to you like that?

JH: There were a number of people who were just extremely candid. I don’t know. Sometimes I found myself mystified that they were so open. I think part of it was that no one ever asked them—there was no one there to witness their pain and their struggles, and it just kind of gushed out. I would just leave the recorder on and Jimmy would just talk. It’s almost easier to tell someone who’s so different from you.

MJ: I also enjoyed the scene in which a judge told you that you couldn’t use a court hearing in your book, and a lawyer for a creditor threatened to have you prosecuted for “practicing law without a license.” What was your reaction to that?

JH: I was genuinely spooked—even though I’m the son of a law professor and a journalist. Looking back, it seems so comical, or absurd. It wasn’t until two weeks later that I realized that that was probably one of the more important moments in the book.

MJ: I also loved the part about Tony Scott, who runs a buy-here-pay-here car lot in Georgia: You write, “Tony’s business model, I realized, existed at the rock bottom of the credit market. It was what existed in the complete absence of trust: a marketplace where creditors had lost faith in debtors and debtors had lost any sense of obligation—or ability—to pay….. With him, it was back to basics. There was a guy named Tony. He was your last resort. He charged you 24 percent interest, and, if you wanted a car, you paid it. If you didn’t pay, Tony took the car. And if you caused trouble, Tony made it known that he was only too happy to whip out his Ruger LCP .380 compact pistol and add some ventilation to your shirt.” Did you just trick me into reading a book about poverty?

JH: It’s difficult to write about poverty in a way that doesn’t feel clichéd. In one version of this book I started the book out with Joanna and Teresa, two debtors listed in the stolen “package”, and my editor suggested I not do that, because as important as their stories were, they felt really familiar. I had to find a way to put the stories about poverty in there in a way that slipped them in—if it’s expected, you just kind of gloss over it.

When we were selling the proposal, we got a response back from a very reputable publishing house saying, “Basically this is a book about poor people, and poor people don’t buy books, so ‘No.'” The trick then becomes: How do you tell this story in a way that doesn’t turn people off before they’re really into it?

MJ: What policy changes could help improve debt collection in America?

JH: I think the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on the right track. There are issues I point out in the book—they’re policing the largest companies, but there are something like 9,000 debt-collection companies in the US. I think that you need more policing on the state attorney general level. The CFPB’s budget is just 2 percent of what JPMorganChase set aside for litigation and fees for 2014.

One other huge problem is there’s no system in place for tracking who owns these debts. Imagine a system where there’s no chain of titles for cars, no VIN numbers, and no DMV. There’d be total chaos! But that’s basically the system for debt. There are signs it will continue to improve but it’s not fixed.

MJ: Anything else you think our readers should know?

JH: The guy that ended up with the stolen debt, I identify him simply as Bill. He didn’t want to talk to me at first, and then just before I finished writing the book, he talked to me at length, a three-hour taped interview. At the end of it, I asked him the same question you just asked me. And he said, “I just want to make it clear in no uncertain terms that when Brandon came down and visited my shop, he didn’t punk me off. I didn’t back down.” His main thing was he wanted to make sure that his tough-guy credentials were intact. I guess it made sense, but it just goes to show that you never know why someone will talk.

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Inside the Bizarre, Unregulated World of Debt Collection

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Yet More Housekeeping

by RaymonGillen Posted on October 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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How much detail do you want about my medical woes? Well, I’m bored, so you’re going to get more.

By the time you read this, I should be sedated and ready for a something-plasty, a procedure that injects bone cement into my fractured L3 lumbar vertebra. In other words, I will become a low-grade Wolverine in one teeny-tiny part of my body. According to the doctors, the cement dries instantly and should relieve my back pain almost completely. It sounds too good to be true, and of course it’s always possible that I have some other source of back pain in addition to the compression fracture. But this should help a lot.

There is more to this story, and hopefully tomorrow will wrap everything up as all the rest of the test results come back. I’ll keep you posted.

On a related subject, I have to say that the Irvine Kaiser hospital is excellent. I have a very nice little single room with good visiting accommodations. It features all the usual annoyances of a hospital, some of which have made me grumpy, but everyone has been very nice and professional. They’ve made my stay about as nice as it could be under the circumstances.

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Yet More Housekeeping

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The Anthropocene is here, whether geologists make it official or not

by Brittan6935 Posted on October 18, 2014

Age of Us

The Anthropocene is here, whether geologists make it official or not

By

18 Oct 2014 7:00 AM

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Humans rule the world, for worse or for worse. This week, a 30-strong team of geologists, ecologists, and climate scientists from around the globe are meeting in Berlin to discuss whether we’ve entered into a new geologic “epoch of humans.” Their question, in Greek-inspired sciencese (scienglish? scienceGreek?): Is it time to declare the Holocene officially over and the Anthropocene underway?

Our question, in plain English: Does it even matter what these highbrows decide? The sixth mass extinction, a remarkable build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide, rapid sea-level rise, and the halving of the world’s wildlife populations — all human-caused — prove that the Anthropocene is upon us.

Popular discourse and scientists of every stripe aren’t waiting around for a royal decree from the egghead society to declare the Age of People a real phenomenon. CBS News reports that more than 500 scientific studies published this year alone have referred to the current time period as the Anthropocene. Grist has published dozens of stories about the Anthropocene concept, dating back to this 2008 think piece.

The big bureaucratic body that makes decisions about geologic time periods — the International Commission on Stratigraphy — responded to the overwhelming adoption of a term they’ve not formally approved by setting up this Anthropocene Working Group and giving it until 2016 to hash out a proposal.

So who’s in this little club? Twenty-nine men and one woman, which prompted this from the Twittersphere:

What these mostly white men are debating is whether humanity is leaving an impact on the earth that will affect the geologic record as much as other events that have marked new chapters in the planet’s history. If the ICS ultimately approves such an amendment to the geologic time scale, then somewhere a golden spike will be driven into a particular exposed rock layer to mark the epochal transformation.

Making it all official would be cool, but we don’t need their gilded nail to identify where humans took over the globe. That point in time will be distinguished by a layer of substances practically nonexistent in the pre-industrial geologic record: plastic particles, plutonium and other radioactive isotopes, as well as polyaromatic hydrocarbons and lead released by fossil fuel burning.

It would be a downer note to leave the story on that note. Instead, a poignant response to ecological-economic thinker Kate Raworth’s “Manthropocene” tweet:

Source:
Anthropocene: is this the new epoch of humans?

, The Guardian.

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The Anthropocene is here, whether geologists make it official or not

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The little island that could is going 100 percent renewable

by UTKJaimiesgne Posted on September 30, 2014

Isla Bonita

The little island that could is going 100 percent renewable

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30 Sep 2014 7:30 AM

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Europeans thought the tiny island of El Hierro was the end of the world before Cristobal Colon sailed to that other hemisphere. Now it’s the beginning of a post-fossil energy world.

One of Spain’s Canary Islands off Africa’s coast, El Hierro is an active volcanic landmass too remote to hook up to the motherland’s electricity grid. Until recently, 6,600 tons of barged-in diesel were burned each year to generate power for the island’s 10,000 residents.

But today, El Hierro stands mere months away from its goal of 100-percent renewable electricity — thanks to a wind farm that stores excess energy in a connected water turbine system. NPR’s Lauren Frayer tells the story:

This past summer, El Hierro inaugurated the Gorona del Viento power plant, a $110 million wind and water turbine farm. By the end of this year, the plant will generate all of the island’s energy needs of up to 48 gigawatt hours per year.

The plant consists of five big industrial windmills and two lakes. On windy days — and there are plenty — the windmills harness the Canary Islands’ Atlantic gusts. When production exceeds demand, such as at night, excess energy is used to pump water from a sea-level lake up into a natural volcanic crater half a mile uphill.

When the wind dies down, the water is released down through a pipe connecting the two lakes. On its way, it passes through turbines, which generate hydro-power.

Everything is connected with sensors so that within five seconds of the wind dying down, the hydro portion of the plant kicks in. For island residents, the lights don’t even flicker.

The technology used in both the wind and water portions of the plant is simple, but El Hierro is the first to combine the two components, says Juan Manuel Quintero, an engineer who serves on the board of the Gorona del Viento plant.

Next up for the little island that could: completing the transition to energy independence by making every car on El Hierro electric by 2020.

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Sam Brownback’s Administration Is Auctioning Off Some Incredibly NSFW Sex Toys

by KristinKellway Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback drove his state into the gutter with a string of income tax cuts that were among the largest in history. As I explained in my story on Brownback’s struggling campaign, many typical Republican voters turned against the governor after it became clear that his trickle-down promises of wild economic growth looked a lot more like a sop to the state’s richest denizens, such as Charles Koch.

Read more about how Sam Brownback’s red-state experiment could turn Kansas purple.

State revenues have regularly come in below projections this year. The state legislature’s nonpartisan numbers crunchers expect a $238 million budget deficit by summer 2016, and things will only grow worse as further tax cuts go into effect. How is the state going to make up the difference? Perhaps by getting into the sex toy business. From the Topeka Capital-Journal:

Kansas state government is on the verge of a financial windfall with the auctioning of thousands of sex toys seized by the revenue department for nonpayment of income, withholding and sales taxes, an official said Wednesday.

Online shoppers for adult DVDs, novelty items, clothing and other products can participate in a bonanza shopping experience resulting from the four-county raid on a Kansas company known as United Outlets LLC.

Owner Larry Minkoff, who was doing business under the Bang label, apparently resisted requests from the Kansas Department of Revenue for payment of $163,986 in state taxes.

…

The online site lists about 400 lots — individual lots can contain dozens of items — that include the Pipedream Fantasy Love Swing, books, hundreds of DVDs, sex and drinking games, a wide assortment of sexually oriented equipment, carrying cases for devices, the Glass Pleasure Wand, bundles of lingerie and the Cyberskin Foot Stroker.

Kansas officials explained to the Capital-Journal that this is the standard operating procedure when businesses can’t pay off their tax debts, though the list of available wares is a bit more colorful than usual.

The full online auction is available here, (that link takes you to the entry landing page, but should you venture past that it becomes quite NSFW).

The “Booty Parlor Good Girl Bad Girl Wrist Cuffs,” one of the few SFW images we could find in the auction Equip-Bid

The timing isn’t ideal for Brownback, though, as he’s been busy trying to capitalize on a racey scandal involving his Democratic opponent. Last week the Coffeyville Journal, a small-town, twice-weekly paper that lacks a website, revealed that in 1998, Brownback challenger Paul Davis had been at a strip club when the cops showed up in a drug raid. Davis, 26 at the time, counted the club owner among his firm’s legal clients, though at the time cops busted down the door he was receiving a lap dance from a topless dancer.

Davis wasn’t charged or implicated in the drug dealings, but Brownback’s camp has been using the incident to smear the Democrat as out of step with heartland values. Now that the Brownback administration has gotten into the sex toys business, that could be a tougher sell.

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Sam Brownback’s Administration Is Auctioning Off Some Incredibly NSFW Sex Toys

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Republicans Still Having a Hard Time Believing In Racism

by HolleyJaynes Posted on September 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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The chart below, from a recent PRRI survey, has gotten a fair amount of attention on the intertubes over the past couple of days:

Adam Serwer thinks the change between 2013 and 2014 is due to backlash from the Ferguson shooting, but I suspect that’s only part of the story. The poll was done over the course of four weeks, and only the final week overlapped with the shooting of Michael Brown and its aftermath. Those folks in the final week would have had to change their opinions massively to produce the 5-10 point difference we see in the survey population as a whole.

So there’s probably more to it, and that’s a good thing. It suggests the shift in opinion might be more durable than one motivated by a single incident.

But I want to play partisan hack today and just focus on the far left bar, which shows that Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to think that blacks don’t get a fair shake from the criminal justice system. At first glance, you might figure that’s just demographics at work. Republicans are heavily white and old, and those two groups are the ones least likely to think blacks are treated unfairly.

But take another look. The mere fact of being Republican makes you less likely than even whites and seniors to believe blacks don’t get fair treatment. Why? Call it the Fox News effect. If you’re exposed day after day to Fox and Drudge and Limbaugh, it means you’re being overwhelmed with the message that blacks are dangerous, blacks are thuggish, and blacks are forever whining about wanting special treatment. This message is so overwhelming that even after Ferguson, Republicans are far less likely than any other group to acknowledge the simple fact that blacks might occasionally get treated a little roughly by cops and DAs.

That’s changed by ten points in the past year, so maybe there’s hope. Perhaps Fox and the others have toned down their obsession with racial hot buttons over the past year. Perhaps.

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Republicans Still Having a Hard Time Believing In Racism

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Why the Kashmir Floods Have Been So Deadly

by Rocco2294huv Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Junaid Rashid finally got his father on the phone today. For the past six days, he had no idea if his family in Srinagar city was safe. Rashid’s family and an estimated 600,000 others have been stranded in India’s flooded Kashmir region for the past week.

“In my 30 years, I haven’t seen a flood like this,” says Rashid, a doctor based in Delhi. An estimated 200 people have lost their lives on the Indian side of the contested border (another 250 or more are estimated to have died on the Pakistani side). As rescue operations continue, the number is only going up.

How can there have been so many fatalities in a region long known to be flood-prone?

Continue Reading »

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Why the Kashmir Floods Have Been So Deadly

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When Adding Bike Lanes Actually Reduces Traffic Delays

by RositaRCOdtxyl Posted on September 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A big reason for opposition to bike lanes is that, according to the rules of traffic engineering, they lead to car congestion. The metric determining this outcome (known as “level of service”) is quite complicated, but its underlying logic is simple: less road space for automobiles means more delay at intersections. Progressive cities have pushed back against this conventional belief—California, in particular, has led the charge against level of service—but it remains an obstacle to bike lanes (and multi-modal streets more broadly) across the country.

But the general wisdom doesn’t tell the whole story here. On the contrary, smart street design can eliminate many of the traffic problems anticipated by alternative mode elements like bike lanes. A new report on protected bike lanes released by the New York City Department of Transportation offers a great example of how rider safety can be increased even while car speed is maintained.

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When Adding Bike Lanes Actually Reduces Traffic Delays

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