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Re-live the Kingbees’ Rockabilly Revival

by KashaLuciano Posted on May 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Kingbees
self-titled
Omnivore

The rise of punk and new wave back in the late ’70s and early ’80s was accompanied by a mini-rockabilly revival, the most notable commercial success being Brian Setzer’s Stray Cats. Another eminently satisfying act was Los Angeles’ Kingbees, a spunky trio fronted by Jamie James, a spirited dude seemingly possessed by the ghost of Buddy Holly. There’s nothing profound on the expanded edition of this crisp 1980 debut album—just a bunch of snappy originals, including the semi-hit “My Mistake” and deft covers of Don Gibson (“Sweet Sweet Girl to Me”), Eddie Cochran (“Somethin’ Else”) and Buddy himself (“Not Fade Away”). But if you need a quick pick-me-up, check out “Shake-Bop” or “Ting-a-Ling.” They’ll put a spring in your step, guaranteed.

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Re-live the Kingbees’ Rockabilly Revival

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Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular

by KimberlUMA Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

California’s thirsty almond orchards have been generating an impressive amount of debate as the state’s drought drags on. But that won’t likely stop their expansion. The title of a new report from the Dutch agribusiness-banking giant Rabobank explains why: “California Almonds: Maybe Money Does Grow on Trees.”

The report is “exclusive for business clients of Rabobank,” but an accompanying blog post offers some good tidbits. “Drought conditions and the stronger US dollar have increased the price of almonds for all buyers,” it states. On the US East Coast, wholesale prices for premium almonds have risen 20 percent since last year. “In Europe, the almond is becoming increasingly popular, not only as a nutritious snack but especially as a go-to ingredient for manufacturers,” it continues. There, wholesale prices are up 50 percent since last year, while “buyers in India and Hong Kong are paying 25 percent and 20 percent more, respectively.”

Those higher prices will evidently more than compensate California farmers for higher watering costs, and inspire than to expand acreage. Rabobank expects California almond production to rise by 2 percent to 3.5 percent per year over the next decade, accoring to Sacramento Bee‘s Dale Kasler, who got a look at the Rabobank study.

That’s impressive growth. If almond output expands by 3 percent per year over the next ten years, then—using this trusty formula—production will grow a whopping 34 percent between now and 2025. That’s a lot of growth for a state that already churns out 80 percent of the world’s almonds. This scenario doesn’t imply a 34 percent expansion in almond acreage—some of the almond trees that will contribute to that growth in output have already been planted and will be coming into production over the next few years (it takes almonds about four years to begin producing after they’re planted). But it does imply a robust expansion. Kasler quotes the study:

Higher prices and good profits for California almond growers will continue to encourage more planting of almond orchards…. Nurseries report very little slowing in orders of new trees.

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Say What You Will About Almonds, but They Are Wildly Popular

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My Travels on the Clinton Conspiracy Trail

by AlphonsDarr Posted on April 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Illustration by John S. Dykes

I met Larry Nichols, the self-described smut king of Arkansas, at a breakfast joint in Conway, not far from the spot where he claims Bill Clinton loyalists once fired on him and a reporter for London’s Sunday Telegraph. “You have to understand,” he said, looking up from his coffee, “you’re in Redneck City.” Nichols had declared war on the Clintons in 1988, when Bill was governor, after being canned from his job at a state agency for placing dozens of long-distance phone calls on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras. As he hunched over the table in four layers of winter clothing, Nichols indulged in the caginess that had once seduced a small army of conservative journalists seeking dirt on the Clintons—the lurching, twangy, conspiratorial tones of someone with a secret he wasn’t sure how to spill. For a moment, I felt as if I’d taken the wrong exit off I-40 and ended up in 1995.

But Nichols, who did as much as anyone in Arkansas to an image of the 42nd president as a womanizing, cocaine-snorting, dirty-dealing, drug-running mafioso, was ready to move on. “There is nothing you’re gonna find here,” he told me. “Pack your shit and go home. Good God, man—that was 20 years ago.”

With Hillary Clinton the odds-on favorite in next year’s Democratic presidential primary, all that was past is suddenly new again. The reinvestigation of the Clintons was already well underway by January, when Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus boasted to Bloomberg that he had dispatched a team of operatives to Little Rock to investigate the former first lady and secretary of state. “We’re not going to be shy about what we are doing,” he said. “We’re going to be active. We’re going to get whatever we have to in order to share with the American people the truth about Hillary and Bill Clinton.” Last year, America Rising, an opposition research firm/political action group that works with Republican candidates, placed a full-time researcher in Little Rock, where she pored over newly declassified documents at the Clinton Presidential Library.

But 20 years after the so-called Arkansas Project, the multimillion-dollar campaign financed by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife that turned Whitewater and Troopergate into household names, opposition researchers face a conundrum: Considering that the first expedition for dirt on the Clintons culminated in impeachment proceedings, are there any stones left unturned in Little Rock?

Few pieces of political turf have been excavated as thoroughly as Arkansas was in the 1990s, when conservatives scoured the Ozarks for evidence of everything from plastic surgery (to fix Bill’s supposedly cocaine-ravaged nose) to murder (a list of suspicious deaths, promoted by Nichols, became known as “Arkancides”) and, of course, womanizing. In the state capital, the return of the oppo researchers has been met with a sigh. “Bill and Hillary left here in December of 1992 and never came back,” said Max Brantley, a longtime political columnist at the Arkansas Times. “Kenneth Starr ran everything through that grand jury. There may be something, but I can’t imagine what.” Rex Nelson, a former aide to Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee, told me there was nothing left to unearth about the Clintons, “unless there’s ancient relics buried in the dirt under the Rose Law Firm,” where Hillary was once a partner.

In their quest for fresh muck, the diggers have fixated on a new chamber of secrets: archives. With a 40-year record to pore over, oppo researchers and journalists have been gifted an almost unprecedented trove of papers from former Clinton associates, and tens of millions of pages from the couple’s years in Arkansas and Washington, DC, some of which have only recently been made public. “Every chief of staff, every top official for any Clinton office dating back 40 years has donated their papers to a university,” said Tim Miller, a cofounder of America Rising. “We’ve gone to other libraries where staffers from the Clinton White House, or Clinton governor’s office, have donated papers, or authors have written profiles on the Clintons.” (Shortly after I spoke with him, Miller took a job with Jeb Bush’s campaign. Throw in material related to Bush, a former governor and kin to two presidents, and next November’s race might feature the longest collective paper trail in history.)

Last year, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet that wears its animus toward the Clintons as a badge of honor, hired an oppo researcher to help dig through special collections at the University of Arkansas in Fayette­ville. It came away with a series of journal excerpts from longtime Hillary confidante Diane Blair in which the first lady was quoted as calling Monica Lewinsky a “narcissistic loony toon.” The story made national news. “When those stories hit, we got busy for a week or so,” said Geoffrey Stark, the reading room supervisor at the university library’s special collections. The quiet basement room, with its oil paintings of homegrown artists and politicians looking on in judgment, filled up with reporters hungry for whatever scraps were left behind.

The Republican intelligence gathering has also spawned Democratic counterintelligence operations. Leaving nothing to chance, Correct the Record, a pro-Hillary group fronted by David Brock, the former right-wing journalist turned Clinton loyalist, dispatched a staffer to Fayetteville to scan the archives. Twenty-one years after he had blown open Troopergate, the bombshell that purported to detail how Bubba’s security detail facilitated his sexual liaisons, Brock was returning to Arkansas to put the genie back in the bottle. Correct the Record spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod confirmed that the group has been visiting the archives, but said, “We aren’t getting into the specifics of tactics or strategies.”

Yet even the field marshals of the new invasion recognize that the Clintons have moved on to bigger things. Miller expects the Arkansas cache to be used more as supporting evidence rather than the main indictment. The Whitewater scandal of 2016 won’t be set in Arkansas; given Republicans’ fixation on the family’s international nonprofit, the Clinton Foundation, it might not even be in the United States. “For me, the big difference between 2016 and 2008, from a research standpoint, is that their network of influence has grown exponentially,” Miller explained. “When you’re talking about crony capitalism and special deals in the ’90s, a lot of times the beneficiaries are, like, Arkansas lawyers. Now their influences are the global elites.” And what’s not in the Clintons’ archives may turn out to be just as damaging, as Hillary found out in March, when it was revealed that she had skirted public recordkeeping requirements by conducting all of her State Department business with a private email address.

The Arkansas the Clintons left behind isn’t just old news—it hardly exists anymore. One morning in February, using the Whitewater report as my Lonely Planet guide, I spent a few hours walking through a Little Rock neighborhood known as SoMa, searching for remnants of the real estate deals that compelled special investigator Kenneth Starr to set up shop in town. In testimony, the area was described as “a slum district,” but it has since flowered into a yuppie paradise. I got a blank stare when I mentioned Whitewater at the farm-to-table cafe across the street from the former headquarters of Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, the bank wrapped up in the Clintons’ scheme to turn a patch of land on the White River in the Ozarks into a summer resort. The young employee behind the counter seemed to think I was asking about whitewater rafting.

Now, in a salute to history, a subpoena-serving firm occupies the office that the state government once leased from the Clintons’ Whitewater banker pal. Next door at the Esse Purse Museum, I’d missed a special exhibit called “Handbags for Hillary,” a joint installation with the Clinton Library of pocketbooks given to the first lady (including one made out of socks, in honor of the family cat). The closest I came to scandal was at the Green Corner Store, purveyors of artisanal ice cream that, I was told, is whipped up in the very building “where Bill met Jessica Flowers.” (Bill’s alleged paramour was in fact named Gennifer.) The soda jerk who poured my small-batch lavenderade hinted that Hillary faces a more immediate challenge from another woman: She’s torn between Clinton and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

If the conspiracy-slinging Clinton antagonists are a bit quieter this time around, that’s also because—cue the ominous voice-over and shaky-cam footage—many of the loudest ones are now dead. John Brown, a sheriff’s deputy who alleged that the Clintons had murdered several Arkansans over a cocaine-trafficking operation, died in prison. Jim Johnson, the segregationist former Arkansas Supreme Court justice who lent a semblance of gravitas to the 1994 conspiracy flick The Clinton Chronicles, committed suicide five years ago. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, who sold 60,000 copies of the film, died in 2007. Parker Dozhier, the trapper and bait shop owner whom Scaife paid to find dirt on the Clintons, is, like his benefactor, dead.

Others have gotten out of the game. David Brock broke bad. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Sunday Telegraph scribe who reported in a gossip- and conspiracy-laden book that Bill liked to dance around in a black dress after doing cocaine with his brother, went back to Europe. “I think Hillary was a good secretary of state,” he said in an email, although he stands by his earlier work. (He doesn’t recall being shot at with Nichols.) When I reached Larry Patterson, the retired state policeman whose grudge against Bill over a forgotten transfer compelled him to talk to Brock for the Troopergate story, he was curt. “Sir, the Clintons have taught me a lesson,” he said. And then he hung up.

Of the original band of Clinton hunters, only Nichols kept up the ruse, doing interviews with fringe right-wing radio hosts, even boasting in 2013 that he had been Bill’s personal hit man, which he now says he didn’t mean and wouldn’t have said if he hadn’t been on painkillers.

But something strange has come over him. After six years of watching Barack Hussein Obama cower in the face of Islamists, Nichols believes the family he spent two decades tarring as cold-blooded crooks might just be the only people who can save the country. “I’m not saying I like Hillary, you hear me?” he said, defensively. “I am not saying I like Hillary Rodham Clinton. I’m not saying anything I’ve said I take back. But God help me, I’m going to have to stand up and tell conservative patriots we have no choice but to give Hillary her shot.”

“I know she won’t flinch,” he continued. “That’s a mean sonofabitch woman that can be laying over four people and say”—he paraphrased her now-infamous response to hostile congressional questioning on the deaths of four Americans in Libya—”‘What the hell difference did it make?'” He was against Clinton because of Whitewater. Now he’s voting for her because of Benghazi.

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My Travels on the Clinton Conspiracy Trail

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Why Is My Bank Teller Trying to Sell Me a Credit Card I Don’t Want?

by DennisTPWeivsg Posted on April 9, 2015

Mother Jones

Until recently, your typical banker was someone whose main job was to accept deposits, cash checks, and dispense basic financial advice. But now that job hardly exists anymore—at least not as we once knew it. Today’s front-line bank workers—tellers, loan interviewers, and customer-service reps—earn far too little money to be considered “bankers” in the traditional sense of the word. And though they still collect and dispense money, their main job involves hawking credit cards and loans you probably don’t need.

Rank-and-file bank workers are both causes and symptoms of America’s widening economic divide, says Aditi Sen, the author of Big Banks and the Dismantling of the Middle Class, a report released today by the Center for Popular Democracy. Based on union organizer interviews with hundreds of workers in the industry, Sen found that front-line bank workers often face quotas for hawking potentially exploitive financial products, often to low-income customers, even though the workers themselves barely qualify as middle class. “We can definitely see bank workers as part of the same continuum of issues facing all low-wage workers,” she says.

Banks are, of course, notorious for squeezing profits from their employees and customers. In 2011, the Federal Reserve Board fined Wells Fargo $85 million for forcing workers to sell expensive subprime mortgages to prime borrowers. And in late 2013, a judge slapped Bank of America with a $1.27 billion penalty for its “Hustle Program,” which rewarded employees for producing more loans and eliminating controls on the loans’ quality.

Yet, by some accounts, these sorts of practices are getting worse. In a 2013 study by the union-backed Committee for Better Banks, 35 percent of low-level bank workers surveyed reported increased sales pressure since 2008, and nearly 38 percent stated that there was no real avenue in the workplace to oppose such practices. One HSBC bank employee, according to the study, reported that workers who failed to meet their sales goals had the difference taken out of their paychecks.

The increasing sales pressure comes at a time when the fortunes of the banks and their low-level workers have diverged widely. Bank profits and CEO pay have rebounded to near record levels while wages for front-line workers are stuck in the gutter.

Bureau of Labor Statistics

And that’s not all. Nearly a quarter of bank workers surveyed in 2013 reported that their benefits had been cut since 2008, and 44 percent reported that their medical and life insurance was inadequate. A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that 31 percent of bank tellers’ families rely on public assistance at an annual cost of $900 million to taxpayers.

There are several factors in all of these woes. Mergers and consolidation have led some retail banks to shutter branches and lay people off. Many banks have outsourced customer-service jobs to overseas call centers, and the rise of internet and smartphone banking has further slashed demand for flesh-and-blood tellers. In other words, it’s basically the same mix of foreign and technological competition that has concentrated wealth and depressed middle-class wages throughout the economy. And it means that banks can get away with paying people less, and demanding more in return.

But now the Committee for Better Banks is trying to cultivate common cause between low-level bank workers and the customers they’re forced to target. The interviews featured in the new report show that many bank workers strongly oppose the sales quotas as unfair and exploitive. For instance:

A teller at a top-five bank reports that she is subject to stringent individual goals on a daily basis: If she does not make three sales-points (selling someone a new checking, savings, or debit card account) each day in a month, she gets written up.

Customer service representatives at a call center for another major bank report that each individual has to make 40 percent of the sales of the top seller to avoid being written up. Selling credit cards counts more towards sales goals than helping someone open up a checking account or savings account, thereby crafting skewed incentives based on the profitability of a product sold, not on how well it matched the needs of a customer.

“A lot of time people would call and already have one, two, or three credit cards with us,” says Liz, a member of the Committee for Better Banks who worked in a Bank of America call center for five years and did not want to give her last name. “They might have a situation where they are low on funds and we end up pushing another credit card on them. There was one guy who had three credit cards and I ended up pushing a fourth on him, even though I knew that was not good for him; he would just be in more debt. But if didn’t, I would end up being put in a reprimand.”

On Monday, members of the Committee for Better Banks will converge in Minnesota’s Twin Cities to deliver a petition to bank offices demanding better pay and more stable work hours for rank-and-file workers, and an end to sales goals that “push unnecessary products on our customers.”

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Why Is My Bank Teller Trying to Sell Me a Credit Card I Don’t Want?

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Rand Paul’s Announcement Video Pulled Over Copyright Issues

by Vian Crisanto Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning Rand Paul announced that he was running for president. There was a crowded auditorium and they were going wild and then he strode on up to the podium and music was blaring and it was all going great and he gave a speech and the crowd ate it up and they cheered his name and then he finished and they clapped and cheered and the campaign uploaded the video of the speech to YouTube so that the world could clap and cheer and…YouTube bots automatically pulled the video for unlicensed use of copyrighted material.

Womp womp.

Warner Music Group, the official owner of John Rich’s “Shutting Detroit Down,” a song about how much it sucks that rich corporations own things, has now shut Rand down.

Both Billboard and The Washington Post have reached out to get to the bottom of this and neither Warner or YouTube have commented on the situation.

The campaign’s video has been now been deleted from YouTube (C-PSAN’s remains) but you can still enjoy the song in its entirety if you play it through John Rich’s YouTube page, where you can also admire WMG’s copyright claim in plain view:

The lesson, kids, is: if you ever run for president be sure to get permission to use copyrighted material before using it in your announcement speech. Otherwise the dream could end before it ever really begins.

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Rand Paul’s Announcement Video Pulled Over Copyright Issues

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Fabulous Health News

by RickOuellette Posted on April 6, 2015

Mother Jones

I am blogging direct from the Apheresis Center at the City of Hope in Duarte, California. There’s a large machine to my left that makes ticking noises and—hopefully—is drawing blood from one of the catheters in my Hickman Port. The stem cells are then removed and the remaining blood is returned through the other catheter in the Hickman Port.

There was some question about whether this would happen today. You see, my daily Neupogen injections are supposed to stimulate my white blood cell production and therefore my plasma stem cell production. The goal is for my stem cell production to be above 10, and if it’s lower than that, there’s no point in doing the collection.

So earlier this morning they drew some blood to test my CD34 level. It was….

102.00.

This is superheroic performance, though the nurse declined to tell me if I had set a new world record. In any case, this is great news for two reasons. First, it means no more Neupogen shots. Second, it means that I’m likely to be finished here in two or three days. Yippee!

And this surely demands a treat for everyone. So here’s some bonus catblogging. As you can see, Hilbert has cleverly used staircase access to perch himself on the top of Karen’s bookcase, where he is lord of all he surveys. As usual.

Originally from: 

Fabulous Health News

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7 Key Facts About the Drought

by GrazynaGuffey Posted on April 6, 2015

Mother Jones

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the drought in California, especially since this past week, when Gov. Jerry Brown introduced mandatory water cuts for the first time in the state’s history. So what exactly makes this drought so bad? And what are people doing about it? Here are a few important points to keep in mind:

Drought is the norm in California. How bad is this one? There are always wet years and dry years, but the past three years have been among the driest on record—and state officials worry that 2015 will be even drier. Last week, for the first time in the state’s history, Brown imposed mandatory water restrictions, requiring all cities and towns to cut their water usage by 25 percent. Though agriculture uses more than 80 percent of the state’s water, the regulations merely require farmers to submit “water management plans.”

California’s reservoirs have about a year’s worth of water left. Groundwater levels, seen as a “savings account” that the state can draw from in dry times, are at an all-time low. The US Drought Monitor comes out with weekly drought maps based on satellite imagery, precipitation, and water flow data; the Central Valley—America’s bread basket—is covered in dark red, “exceptional drought.”

What exactly is groundwater, and why are people in California freaking out about it? Groundwater is the water that seeps through the ground when it rains. Over the centuries, it accumulates in vast underground aquifers, with older water found deeper in the earth’s crust. Accessed through wells, groundwater is often compared to a savings account in California—good to have in dry times but difficult to refill. The issue now is that with reservoirs (above ground) so depleted, groundwater use is spiking. Farmers are drilling deeper and deeper for water—using water that fell 20,000 years ago. Usually, groundwater makes up about 40 percent of the state’s freshwater usage, but with the recent drought, that number has leapt to 65 percent. This year, it may rise to 75 percent.

What are the state’s biggest water users? Farming in general, and alfalfa (used to feed cows) and almonds in particular. California grows half of the fruits and veggies produced in the States, including more than 90 percent of the country’s grapes, broccoli, almonds, and walnuts. Here are some of the state’s most thirsty crops:

Alfalfa is a superfood of sorts for cows, and it’s in high demand in the Golden State, which leads the country in dairy production and is also a major beef producer. (Fun fact: It takes nearly 700 gallons of water to grow the alfalfa necessary to produce one gallon of milk, and 425 gallons of water to produce 4 ounces of beef.) Almonds are second from the top, both because it takes a lot of water to produce nuts (a single almond takes a gallon of water) but also because the crunchy snack is in vogue in the United States and abroad. The water that’s used to grow the California almonds that are exported overseas in one year would be enough to fuel Los Angeles for nearly three years.

What about fracking? Fracking uses a lot of water, since the process involves injecting water and chemicals into the earth to release oil and gas. According to a recent Reuters article, California oil producers used about 70 million gallons of water in 2014—about the amount that San Francisco homes use collectively in two days. But that’s just the water from fracking. The amount of water that was produced by California’s oil and gas production in 2014—which is to say, the groundwater that bubbled up during production and wasn’t returned to the original aquifers—was about 42 billion gallons. That’s enough to fuel San Francisco homes for 3 years.

Will we get back the water we lose? Your elementary school teachers didn’t lie to you—the water cycle is really a thing. But as Peter Gleick, the president of the Pacific Institute, explained, the water that California is losing “is still falling—it’s just falling somewhere else.” It’s impossible to know exactly where the water that would normally fall in California is going, but there are plenty of places, especially in the North and Northeast, that have been having abnormally wet years. Scientists are also concerned that climate change is both increasing the likelihood of drought and accelerating its effects: As the earth warms, water evaporates more easily from reservoirs, rivers, and soil.

California is on the coast. Can’t we desalinize the ocean? Because desalinization technology is so expensive and energy-intensive, most water officials—and taxpayers—don’t see it as a viable option. The latest attempt is the Carlsbad desalinization plant, just outside of San Diego, which will be complete in 2016. The project will cost taxpayers $1 billion and produce 50 million gallons of water per day—the largest desalinization plant in the Western Hemisphere—and it will provide just 7 percent of the county’s total water needs.

Well, this is depressing. What are viable solutions? There’s no silver bullet, but the good news is that there are some good solutions. This chart, part of a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pacific Institute, sums up some of the options. California could reduce its water use by 17 to 22 percent with more efficient agricultural water use, including fixes like scheduling irrigation when plants need it and expanding drip and sprinkler irrigation. Urban water use could be reduced by 40 to 60 percent if residents replaced lawns with drought-tolerant plants, fixed water leaks, and replaced old toilets and showerheads with more water-efficient technology. And instead of channeling used water into the ocean, the state could treat it and reuse it—a practice that tends to gross some people out (because of the “drinking pee” factor) but has long been used in Orange County and is becoming more popular as the drought continues.

This article has been updated.

Taken from – 

7 Key Facts About the Drought

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Can This Social Network Make You Less Anxious?

by UhoceeFornachon Posted on April 3, 2015

Mother Jones

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Rob Morris started his PhD in media arts and sciences at MIT without having taken a single computer science class—”which, in retrospect, was really one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done,” he says. Scrambling to keep up with classmates who had far more coding experience, he found himself spending a lot of time on Stack Overflow, an online forum where programmers help each other write and debug code. He got better, but he couldn’t stop stressing out about what he saw as his inferior skills. Then he had an idea: “Just as we can get a crowd of people to help us find and fix bugs in our code, perhaps we can get people to help us fix bugs in our thinking.”

That insight led Morris to develop Panoply, an online tool that crowdsources treatment for depression and anxiety, which he’s now turning into a consumer app. (Currently the app, which is called Koko, is invite-only; prospective users can sign up here.) People with depression and anxiety often have irrational thought patterns that cause them to perceive normal situations in a distorted, often negative way. To break those thought patterns, Panoply relies on a technique that psychologists call cognitive reappraisal.

When a user is upset—say she’s lost her job and she doesn’t feel like she’ll ever find another one, or her roommate walked past without saying hi and she thinks he’s angry at her—she posts a description of the situation as she perceives it. Then other users point out specific ways in which she might be falling into distorted patterns of thinking and try to help her reframe the situation. Maybe the right job just hasn’t come along yet; maybe the roommate had a bad day at work and just doesn’t feel like talking.

A study published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Medical Internet Research this week suggests that Panoply’s engagement tactics—and its overall approach to improving mental health—are effective. Of 166 study participants who had previously exhibited symptoms of depression, those who spent three weeks using Panoply for at least 25 minutes a week ended up significantly less depressed and better at cognitive reappraisal than those who spent three weeks doing an expressive writing exercise, a typical treatment for depression.

Morris teamed up with Stephen Schueller, a clinical psychologist from Northwestern University, to design Panoply. But he has his own background in psychology: He majored in it as an undergraduate at Princeton, and he briefly worked in a clinic after college. He says he came to MIT knowing that he wanted to use technology to educate people about psychological health, especially people who wouldn’t or couldn’t seek traditional therapy.

A screenshot of Panoply. (Click to enlarge) Courtesy of MIT

Panoply wasn’t Morris’ first approach. “Being at the MIT Media Lab, you’re surrounded by so many crazy futuristic toys,” he says. “There’s a group next to mine that just has all these robots walking around and interacting with people. Of course I thought, I can steal one of those robots and create a robot therapist that follows you around.” He settled on creating a social network instead when he realized that copying the addictive qualities of Facebook and Twitter could solve a problem with existing mental health apps: There’s nothing to keep users coming back day after day. “They feel a bit like homework,” he says.

Like other social networks, Panoply pings users every time someone comments on one of their posts. Morris hopes the community-building aspect of the site will keep people engaged. “It’s a really powerful feeling to spend a few minutes thinking really hard about how to write two to three sentences to help someone and then finding out that you made someone feel better,” he says.

Still, Morris says he plans to roll out the mobile app slowly, in part so that he can ensure it won’t be plagued by trolls. He already has some safeguards in place. Every time someone posts a response, Mechanical Turk workers get paid a penny each to determine whether it passes certain criteria before it goes live. In addition, algorithms search the text of each post and quarantine those that feature potentially offensive words or phrases.

Even though the study of Panoply focused on depression symptoms, Morris says he doesn’t want to pigeonhole his app as “a depression app.” He prefers the term “stress-reduction app,” because he worries that stigma around the word “depression” will drive potential users away. He wants people to feel like they can use the app even if they don’t have a diagnosed mental health condition, if they’re just having a bad day. “I think in our society we spend a ton of attention on fitness and how to eat,” he says. “Not so much on emotional well-being.”

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Can This Social Network Make You Less Anxious?

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Our Meat Obsession May Kill Us. But Not How You Think.

by JosephOUPB Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The world is using more antibiotics than ever before—and showing no signs of stopping. A new analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science predicts that worldwide consumption of the drugs will grow 67 percent by 2030. Over the same period of time, in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, the authors expect that antibiotic use will double.

The reason for the dramatic increase in antibiotic use, say the authors, mostly has to do with the planet’s ever-increasing appetite for meat. Since the 1970s, meat producers have been dosing livestock with regular, low doses of antibiotics. For reasons not entirely understood, this regimen helps animals grow bigger. In the United States, 80 percent of all antibiotics already go to livestock, and the practice is becoming the norm the world over. This map shows the current global antibiotic consumption in livestock (in milligrams per 10 square kilometer pixels):

Map courtesy of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

As the middle class in the developing world grows, demand for meat—and use of the antibiotics to grow that meat cheaply and quickly—is expected to rise as well.

To get a sense of how quickly our global appetite for meat is growing, take a look at China. There, livestock producers are buying record amounts of corn and soy to feed a growing number of animals:

Jaeah Lee

As antibiotic use skyrockets, experts expect that germs will evolve to resist them. That’s scary, considering that some of the same drugs we use on livestock are also our best defense against infections in humans. And suberbugs, several recent studies have shown, can and do jump from animals to people. In fact, another recent study predicted that antibiotic resistant infections will kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

There’s also evidence that antibiotics might soon stop working the way that meat producers want them to: A recent analysis concluded that the drugs are no longer making pigs bigger.

The good news: Despite loose federal regulations around antibiotic use on farms, American consumers are beginning to favor meat grown without drugs. And manufacturers are taking notice: Earlier this month, McDonald’s pledged to serve only chicken raised without antibiotics, and Costco quickly followed suit.

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Our Meat Obsession May Kill Us. But Not How You Think.

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Cancer Experts Are Finally Feeling Optimistic. Here’s Why.

by BrendanPickel Posted on March 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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In Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, a three-part documentary executive-produced by Ken Burns and set to air on PBS March 30-April 1, director Barak Goodman delivers a sweeping (and fascinating, and tear-jerking, and horrifying) history of the science, politics, and culture of the disease we fear most.

The film, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, escorts viewers from our dismal past into a more-hopeful modern era in which genomics and big data promise actual breakthroughs after decades of crushing defeats and blunt-force treatments ranging from poisoning (chemo) to radical mastectomy.

Goodman, whose previous work has earned him two Emmys and a Oscar nomination—that was in 2001, for Scottsboro: An American Tragedy—introduces us to contemporary doctors and patients coping with the vast gaps that remain in our understanding of the disease, as well as to the historical figures who had the most profound impact—for good and for ill—on the lives of the stricken. Watch the trailer first, and then we’ll chat with the director.

Mother Jones: What drew you to this history? Have you been personally affected?

Barak Goodman: My beloved grandmother died of colon cancer when I was 20. I remember it being very traumatic. It’s one of the most avoidable kinds, but they caught it late and she died very suddenly. So that was lurking in the background, but the proximate cause was I got a phone call from WETA, expressing their interest in making the book into a film. The book is really a wonderful piece of work. It opened my eyes to a lot of things.

Children receiving blood tranfusions. Getty Images

MJ: How would you rate our success in the so-called war on cancer?

BG: Certainly it’s been a failure if you hold it up to its own expectations. At the time they declared it, in 1971, the goal was to solve the problem within a decade or less. Mortality rates now are down somewhat, but not strikingly so. But in terms of our understanding of what cancer is and what the cancer cell is, it’s been a huge success. It’s striking how little we knew then. In the film, people say it was compared with going to the moon, only that was much easier because we knew how to get to the moon, we knew where the moon was. In this case we knew next to nothing. A lot of progress has been made, and we’re really poised to translate that knowledge into therapies, so knowledgeable people are quite optimistic.

A cancer surgeon operates at John Hopkins University hospital in 1904. Associated Press

MJ: And yet cancer has always proved unexpectedly elusive.

BG: Unbelievable! It is the most devilishly complicated, resilient disease—set of diseases—that is possible to imagine. First, it’s harnessing the very forces that give us life—it’s life unleashed, in a way. To defeat it without killing you is very difficult. The second thing is, it changes so fast, mutation upon mutation, and it becomes not a single target but 100. Figuring out how to combat it with any one drug or any set of drugs, for most kinds of cancer, is almost impossible.

MJ: Chemotherapy works well for childhood leukemia, but not much else. It strikes me as incredibly primitive. You’re literally poisoning people hoping it’ll kill the cancer before it kills the patient. Some of these drugs can actually cause cancer! Do we know how many people die from their treatments versus how many are saved by them?

BG: That’s very hard to pin down, because it varies from cancer to cancer enormously, and the stage of cancer. But you’re right. Chemotherapy is an incredibly blunt instrument—and yet it still is the predominant therapy. There’s been lots of talk about therapies that are more specifically aimed at what’s wrong with a cancer cell, but really only a fairly small number of those targeted therapies have been developed. As you point out, chemotherapy sometimes extends life a few months, but often not much more—and it’s hellacious to go through.

MJ: We’re essentially using the same treatments we did 30 years ago.

BG: We are. They’re somewhat more effective, somewhat more targeted, and they use them in combinations that make them more effective, but the paradigm is the same. Of course, we haven’t discussed prevention and early detection. The decline of smoking rates alone has had more impact on mortality than anything else by far. So that’s a promising way of getting to cancer.

A cancer operation, circa 1890. Harvard Medical School

MJ: Okay, so if everyone quit smoking right now, today, what sort of drop would we see in cancer rates?

BG: I believe 30 percent. We have a quote in the film that if all known prevention methods were put into effect—not only stopping smoking but controlling obesity, less exposure to UV rays, and other things—we could cut cancer by 50 percent right now.

MJ: If you were to graph cancer mortality for nonsmokers over time, what would that look like?

BG: Pretty much flat. It’s a little tough, because you have to correct for an aging population, but when you compare apples to apples from today to 25 to 30 years ago, I think it’d be slightly declining. Early detection has had an impact on breast cancer death rates and certainly colonoscopy has had a huge impact on colon cancer. Vaccinations have had a huge impact on cervical cancer. But overall it’s a pretty flat chart, and that’s disturbing after spending billions of dollars. But if you stop the clock right now, it doesn’t account for the undercurrent of basic science that’s set us up for much more rapid advances in the next 30 years. I’m not trying to be Pollyanna-ish. With a couple of exceptions, every major researcher feels we’ve turned a corner.

MJ: But people have been saying things like that for decades.

BG: Yes, but that’s deceptive. As Sid Siddhartha Mukherjee says at the end of the film, there’s this superficial cycle of optimism followed by crushing disappointment all through the history of cancer. From radical surgery to chemotherapy to targeted therapy, it happens again and again. But what that discounts is a steady upward trajectory in knowledge. Already, immunotherapy, probably the most exciting new avenue of cancer therapy, is making a significant difference. These clinical trials are extremely promising for a certain subset of cancers.

Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote the book on which the film is based. Ark Media/Florentine Films

MJ: What about all of the other cancers?

BG: The most common cancers are also the hardest to attack with conventional therapies. All the smoking-related cancers, including lung and kidney cancer, and also melanoma, have too many mutations to target with drugs. On the other hand, those cancer cells look very different from healthy cells and are more vulnerable to immunotherapy. So immunotherapy may have the easiest time with the most complicated cancers, and those caused by the fewest mutations are probably the ones for which we’ll develop targeted drug therapies. The ones in the middle are going to be the biggest problem.

Radical mastectomy. Johns Hopkins Medical Archives

MJ: Your film really underscores the hubris of the medical profession—the jealous guarding of clinical turf against emerging facts. It covers, for example, how radical mastectomy was developed on the false assumption that cancers grow in an orderly pattern. Will you talk about what happened when Dr. Bernard Fischer challenged that prevailing dogma?

BG: With radical mastectomy there was a very logical assumption that the more you cut out, the more lives you save, but it was never subjected to clinical trials. In fact, there were no such thing as clinical trials when it was first developed. As Sid says, these half-truths become full truths in peoples’ minds, and the mere suggestion that they’re wrong triggers a hysterical reaction.

Bernie Fischer just had a very independent streak and was not someone who accepted received wisdom without question—and he was tough enough to undergo the bruising that happened when he proposed clinical trials on radical mastectomy. He was cut off from his grants. He was vilified. He was ostracized. He didn’t care! It takes someone like that to puncture these entrenched ideas.

MJ: Millions of women owe a debt to that guy.

BG: Huge debt! He is one of the real heroes of the cancer story. They’re few and far between.

MJ: Would breast cancer treatment have developed differently had it mainly affected men?

BG: Without a doubt. As Rose Kushner says in the film, nobody would cut off a man’s limb without his permission while he was asleep, but if it came to a woman’s breasts, they did it all the time. There was this paternalistic attitude—a kind of disregard for the notion that women’s breasts might be important to them in some way other than to feed children. It took not only Bernie Fischer, but the activism of women with breast cancer to overturn that. I think it’s no accident that breast cancer has triggered the most intense activism of any kind of cancer. It’s these women who have underwent the worst, most disfiguring, most debilitating kinds of treatments.

MJ: Also, now, when you put a promising new cancer drug in clinical trials, you get a lot of people saying, “I don’t want to be in a randomized trial, I just want the drug.” Will you reflect on the ethics of that situation?

BG: It’s a difficult problem. This cycle of optimism followed by disappointment—the only solution is to subject these things to disciplined trials. In the case of Herceptin, Genentech responsibly resisted opening its trials to lots of women who simply wanted the drug. As then-CEO Art Levinson says in the film, you want to be able to look people in the eye and say, “I know this drug can help you,” and you can’t do that without a clinical trial. As harsh as that may seem, it’s the best way of determining efficacy. We have a scene with parents of a little girl who are weighing whether to enroll her in a clinical trial and they’re struggling with the idea that a computer is gonna randomly pick the treatment their child gets. It’s very hard for people to accept, but it’s scientifically necessary.

MJ: Knowing everything you know, how do you suppose you would approach treatment if you were diagnosed?

BG: I ask myself that all the time. I think I would probably try anything, simply because you hear these stories of miracles. They do happen. I was just with a woman the other night who had stage four metastatic melanoma, which was 100 percent fatal until recently. She was told she had months to live and she decided to take one more step and enroll in this immunotherapy trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Now she’s three years cancer-free with prospects of living a normal life. I certainly don’t judge anyone who decides not to do that. I admire, in a way, people and doctors who accept the overwhelming likelihood that you won’t be cured. But I probably would take the chance.

MJ: I’m still trying to get a handle on whether chemo even helps people, other than kids with Leukemia.

BG: The problem is, chemotherapy is a one-size-fits-all solution but cancer is different for every person—literally. I don’t understand all the intricacies, but it’s very hard to say, “You’re gonna benefit from chemotherapy, and you’re not.” You kind of gotta try it. One of the promising avenues of research, by the way, is getting a better sense for each person which mutations underlie their cancer. Almost like you’d get a blood test, you’d get a genetic test and then they are able to target those things.

MJ: How long before that’s routine?

BG: Not long at all. If you’ve got the money you can already do that. But the costs of these kinds of genetic tests are nose-diving. I’d say in 5 to 10 years almost everybody will have their cancer sequenced, and then a better set of decisions can be made. Right now they’re still throwing the kitchen sink at people. But that will change.

Lori Wilson, an oncologist featured in the film, found herself battling cancer. Ark Media/Florentine Films

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Cancer Experts Are Finally Feeling Optimistic. Here’s Why.

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