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Meet the St. Louis Alderman Who’s Keeping an Eye on Ferguson’s Cops

by AlannahVKGC Posted on August 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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If you watched some truly jaw-dropping Vines of tear-gassing and smoke-bomb-throwing from Ferguson this week, chances are they came from Antonio French, the social-media-loving St. Louis alderman who’s been spending lots of time with the protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, since the shooting of Michael Brown. He also spent a night in jail after Ferguson police arrested him late Wednesday, initially without giving a reason and later saying it was for “unlawful assembly.” (He captured the moment of his arrest in a Vine, naturally.) French still hasn’t been given any documents related to his arrest, but he’s back to keeping his Twitter followers—there are now nearly 80,000 of them—up to speed on what’s happening on the ground.

We asked him about his arrest, what happens next in Ferguson, and his secret to keeping his phone charged while documenting the protests.

What’s the No. 1 question you want answered right now?

Right now the thing that we still don’t know is the physical evidence in the case. Specifically, autopsy results will be able to answer a lot of questions. At least two witnesses have come forward to date, and both have described almost an execution style murder on the streets. Location of gun wounds, number of gun wounds—any of those would really give some more info about exactly what happened.

The fact that police in Ferguson arrested an elected local official is pretty stunning. Has anyone at any level of law enforcement there reached out to you to talk about why this happened?

Oh, absolutely not. When I was released from jail, I was still outside as I bailed out some of my staff who were also arrested. While I was waiting, the chief of police just walked past me.

Are you expecting anyone to reach out to you?

Expecting anyone from Ferguson? No.

How did you think the press conference by the Ferguson Police chief this morning went?

Let me be very clear about this: they need to take the microphone away from that Ferguson police chief. All he does is make things worse. The captain from the Missouri Highway Patrol made clear after the press conference that he was not consulted about it, and in no way we would he have released negative or insinuating information about Michael Brown at the same time as you’re releasing the name of this police officer. The mishandling of this whole situation continues. The governor was right to take the security out of the hands of the local authorities and now somebody needs to shut the mics off and let the adults handle it.

The press conference ends, and the crowd has a negative, angry mood again when we should be there celebrating what was a peaceful night. The first hour from the Ferguson police chief now has everybody pissed off again!

What were you doing right before you were arrested?

I was in my vehicle, as the officers there had thrown smoke bombs, flashbang bombs, and they tear gassed. When the tear gas started, I rolled up my windows. Because I went through this a couple days ago, I know that the best way to be was inside your car with the windows up and closing the vents. So that’s what I did. My car was surrounded by officers in riot gear and assault rifles. One opened my door and asked me to step out. Before he arrests me, I was actually recording all the way up to that moment, then my phone died and I wasn’t able to post or even view the video until the next day when I was released. and when I viewed it, the Vine was incredible, it recorded exactly that moment as the officers were in my car and pulled me out. If you ever shoot Vine videos, you know how difficult it is to get like, the moment within that six seconds! It was pure luck.

What are you up to today?

Man, I’m very thankful of the new guy in charge Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol. He gets it. He’s doing a great job. What a difference 24 hours makes. It went from horrific to beautiful in 24 hours. And so now that peace is restored I’m gonna be out there with the youth as they continue to demonstrate again.

I think one of my roles now is to kind of articulate to the greater community and even to white America what it is they’re seeing. Explain the young people’s point of view. This is really a youth-led movement. I’m not old—I’m 36, so not necessarily young anymore—so my role is to be out there and to lead when necessary, intervene if things get out of control one way or another, and really just to be there to support. And at times, to protect these young people from more well-off people who are very aggressive and do not love these young people like we do.

If there was one thing you hope people outside of Ferguson take away from this…

For me, this is a very personal situation, a very local situation. These are issues that I’ve been talking about with great frustration myself for as long as I’ve been an elected official and even before that when I was just an activist-journalist. And it has just been so frustrating here in St. Louis. We talk about these issues and they are clear to those of us that are in the community, and they go completely unheard outside of our community. It’s almost like you have two St. Louises here, and getting the one to care about the other has been so frustrating. I hope that this invisible St. Louis is now visible, and that it starts the conversations between the two that have to happen if we’re ever going to become one St. Louis.

Where can these conversations happen?

There’s kind of two levels. You have the top level, which is that in media outlets, your roundtable discussions, even conversations on the local radio about the future of our city, very often these are all the same demographics: these are a table of white St. Louisans, young or old but all white, talking about the future of our city, which is majority black. Those conversations have to become more diverse. And then, on a more personal one-on-one level, people have to start being around each other. We’re such a segregated city that it is possible for people to go from the time they wake to the time they go to sleep and not interact with anyone, on any significant level, of another race.

In my life I’ve been blessed in that because of what I do, I bounce between so many different worlds. It’s very comfortable for me to be sitting at a table with a millionaire for lunch, and then out on the street with gangbangers at midnight. But that’s not typical. I get to see firsthand how these folks don’t know anything about each other. Zilch. It’s troubling.

A news outlet took the angle of going to interview white people in St. Louis County who live within five or six miles of ground zero of this protest movement, to hear what they have to say about it. It broke my heart. They just have a very negative feeling about it. Dismissed it as “thuggery.” I think a great percentage of white St. Louisans right now are still not getting it.

The first part was to stop the violence. And we have: we had our first peaceful night yesterday, and it was beautiful. So the next phase now is to initiate the difficult conversations. Part of my media schedule this week is going on some outlets that aren’t really friendly territory for me to talk to that audience. KMLX, the biggest talk radio station in town, has probably a 90 percent white audience. Going on Fox News with Sean Hannity later tonight. You gotta talk directly to those folks, and explain what’s happening here.

What do you say to folks asking “where is the black leadership” right now?

I would say that’s a good and fair question. What this thing has brought out is not only a division between black community and white community, or even between young people and the people who police the neighborhood, but also between black youth and their elected leaders. There’s a disconnect. I by no means went out there to be directly involved or to be a voice for this thing. I went down there to observe, and I was expecting local leaders to be taking the lead. That didn’t happen. I personally called an old friend of mine who is a state senator, Maria Chapelle Nadal, and told her she needs to get her butt over there. To her credit, she’s been there ever since.

That first night, when it got very violent and the riots happened and the looting happened, I was out there and that was the first time I put my camera down and got involved. That was when the young guys were first starting to come up to that line of police in riot gear. I was trying to calm them down, pushing them back. There were a couple young men who were angry and I had to physically constrain and try to talk to them and they weren’t trying to hear it. And later, they may have been involved in the violence. But fast forward 48 hours and these same men, the same exact boys, were leading the youth non-violent protests. And then last night they were out there and I hugged one of them and I said “Man, I am very proud of you.” And he said he was proud of me too. What’s happening is we’re having rapid maturity right now. We gotta put these guys on the fast track to becoming the leaders I know they can be.

What else can the young people in Ferguson be doing now?

One of these guys that’s been very involved down here who I’m also very proud of is a local rapper by the name of Tef Poe. He has a unique opportunity through music. He brings people of a lot of different races together. He’s been tweeting about this constantly, and he’s been down on the ground. It’s brought a lot of young white people down. Last night was one of the most diverse groups we’ve ever seen here. I posted a picture last night on Twitter, there’s a beautiful blonde white woman walking through the crowd holding a sign that says, “I support the black youth of St. Louis.” That’s what it takes. By reaching her, she can then convey the message to her community when she goes back.

What do you say to police who claim that if Eric Garner and some of the other black men who’ve been killed by police recently hadn’t allegedly resisted arrest, they would be alive today?

I think the statistics show that American police kill black people too often. The use of deadly force should be avoided by all means, and only used when absolutely necessary. If a police officer is in fear of being hit, that is not in fear of your life. If you think somebody’s gonna hit you that does not give you the right to take their life. That trigger is pulled a little bit too often. There’s a scale. If a child walks up to a police officer and hits him, he’s not gonna pull gun out and shoot him. If a white woman slaps a police officer in the face, she’s probably not gonna be shot. But if a black man rubs up against a police officer in the wrong way, he is in fear for his life.

African-American men are taught this at a very early age. You have be on guard, be careful around police. So if that’s what you’re taught to survive, then you’re not being taught that these are the good guys, these are the people who will protect you and serve you. You’re being taught that this is somebody who will probably kill you under certain circumstances. We have to change that relationship.

The first thing police always say is, “well, community doesn’t cooperate, they don’t tell us.” Well, they don’t trust you! When there is a crime, I make it a point as an elected official to go to the crime scene. I’ve seen too many crime scenes. I’ve seen dozens of young men’s bodies on the street. I go because people in the community will talk to me before they’ll talk to the police. If we wanna catch the person who killed somebody, it’s important for someone to be there who they trust.

Do you have some kind of secret industrial grade battery pack on your phone? How were you able to take so many Vines!?

My secret is that I park my car kind of strategically and keep coming back during breaks charging a little bit and charging a little bit. But I’ll tell you I have not seen 100 percent on my iPhone in like 5 days (laughs). I’m constantly living with 25 percent. I’m gonna recharge it fully today and I’m gonna post a picture of the 100 percent.

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Meet the St. Louis Alderman Who’s Keeping an Eye on Ferguson’s Cops

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Here’s How Many Ridiculously Hot Days Your City Will Have in the Future

by LeesaClinton Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Have you felt unbearably hot this summer, and wondered to yourself, is this what global warming feels like?

Chances are that someone living almost 90 years from now would consider you a big whiner. Over at Climate Central, a new interactive tool shows how often your city might suffer through temperatures above either 90 degrees, 100 degrees, or 110 degrees by the year 2050 and the year 2100. It includes projections for 87 cities under four different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, and it’s terrifying. You can try it out below:

Thus, while Washington, DC, currently sees only about one day per year over 100 degrees, that is projected to go up to eight days by 2050 and to 24 days by 2100 under the worst emissions scenario—which is the pathway we’re currently on.

The only good news: There are three other emissions scenarios accessible in the interactive that aren’t as bad. And our current decisions just might get us off the scorchingly hot path, and onto something more tolerable.

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Here’s How Many Ridiculously Hot Days Your City Will Have in the Future

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Chart of the Day: Oil Is Getting Harder and Harder to Find

by JulianaWillifor Posted on July 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Oil expert James Hamilton has an interesting summary of the current world oil market up today, and it’s worth a read. His bottom line, however, is that $100-per-barrel oil is here to stay:

The run-up of oil prices over the last decade resulted from strong growth of demand from emerging economies confronting limited physical potential to increase production from conventional sources. Certainly a change in those fundamentals could shift the equation dramatically. If China were to face a financial crisis, or if peace and stability were suddenly to break out in the Middle East and North Africa, a sharp drop in oil prices would be expected. But even if such events were to occur, the emerging economies would surely subsequently resume their growth, in which case any gains in production from Libya or Iraq would only buy a few more years.

The chart on the right shows the situation dramatically. In just the past ten years, capital spending by major oil companies on exploration and extraction has tripled. And the result? Those same companies are producing less oil than they were in 2004. There’s still new oil out there, but it’s increasingly both expensive to get and expensive to refine.

(And all the hype to the contrary, the fracking revolution hasn’t changed that. There’s oil in those formations in Texas and North Dakota, but the wells only produce for a few years each and production costs are sky high compared to conventional oil.)

In a hypertechnical sense, the peak oil optimists were right: New technology has been able to keep global oil production growing longer than the pessimists thought. But, it turns out, not by much. Global oil production is growing very slowly; the cost of new oil is skyrocketing; the quality of new oil is mostly lousy; and we continue to bump up right against the edge of global demand, which means that even a small disruption in supply can send the world into an economic tailspin. So details aside, the pessimists continue to be right in practice even if they didn’t predict the exact date we’d hit peak oil. It’s long past time to get dead serious about finding renewable replacements on a very large scale.

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Chart of the Day: Oil Is Getting Harder and Harder to Find

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Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?

by PBIJannieaz Posted on July 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Ever since unaccompanied child migrants became a national news story six weeks ago, many people have started asking: Is this an immigration crisis, or is it a refugee crisis? In response, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said last week it hopes to designate many of the Central Americans fleeing regional violence and gang extortion as refugees.

The announcement comes amid mounting evidence of the horrific conditions causing so many people to flee Honduras, El Salvador, and parts of Guatemala: kids escaping rape, gang recruitment, and murder all around them, as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Sonia Nazario detailed in a chilling op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times. With this new designation, the UNHCR hopes to pressure the United States to give more immigrants, including many of the 70,000-plus unaccompanied minors likely to arrive at the US border this year, political asylum.


70,000 Kids Will Show Up Alone at Our Border This Year. What Happens to Them?


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


Map: These Are the Places Central American Child Migrants Are Fleeing


Why Our Immigration Courts Can’t Handle the Child Migrant Crisis


GOP Congressman Who Warned About Unvaccinated Migrants Opposed Vaccination

See MoJo‘s full coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.

But if the UNHCR were to make such a move, it still would have no legal significance for the United States. So is it really that important? Yes and no, says Michelle Brané, director of migrant rights at the Women’s Refugee Commission. Brané and I talked about what a “refugee” designation could mean, and other ways the US can help ease the pain for immigrants—particularly those who’ve experienced targeted violence. Here are nine key takeaways from our conversation:

1. Casting this as a “refugee situation” isn’t necessarily the important part.
“This population contains within it many children and mothers and parents bringing their children who qualify for refugee protection or for protection under international law. Whether you formally call it a ‘refugee situation’—that to me is less relevant than acknowledging that this is a population that is being driven out of their country. And their government is not willing or able to protect them.”

2. It’s not just general violence and unrest that’s causing people to flee Central America and Mexico.
“It’s true that general conditions of war or of danger are not sufficient to qualify for asylum. But the UN agency of refugees, in interviewing 400 of these children, for over an hour each, they found that 58 percent expressed a targeted fear. Not just, ‘I was scared because my neighborhood was dangerous.’ Fifty-eight percent of the kids said, ‘I received a death threat.’ Or, ‘I had a body cut up in a plastic bag left on my doorstep as a warning.’ One hundred percent come from a dangerous place. That we know. But 58 percent were targeted. That’s the piece that people are not getting.”

3. Using gang violence as grounds for international protection is not a novel idea.
“The UN committee for refugees has recognized for many years now that gang violence absolutely qualifies, depending on the circumstances, as persecution and as qualifying for status under the refugee commission. And the US has granted many claims. People talk about this being difficult to do. It is difficult, especially if you don’t have an attorney. But children with attorneys requesting asylum are winning those cases. It’s absolutely a grounds that has been accepted in the US. It’s not something revolutionary.”

4. Yes, this is a crisis—but we shouldn’t throw our hands up.
“The numbers are small if you compare them to refugee situations worldwide. Like look at Syria. There’s over a million Syrian refugees in Turkey. There’s over 2 million Syrian refugees in Jordan. Those countries are tiny compared to the US, and the numbers are much bigger. It’s absolutely our responsibility as the United States to manage this and handle it in a way that does not roll back protections. We have been the ones to stand up there and say to Turkey:’ You’ve got to take these refugees’. For us to say, because of this small number, ‘Oh, maybe we’ll reconsider,’ is crazy. It’s absolutely manageable.”

5. Very few migrants are faking persecution in order to get to stay in the United States.
“The US has excellent asylum screening procedures. The problem is, you need to beef up the system in order to accommodate these numbers. But that’s something we need to do anyway. I know there’s been a lot of allegations and concern that it’s a system that can easily be gamed, and you can fake it—but it actually it’s quite a rigorous process. There’s several screening hurdles you have to get over, and then you have to go in front of a judge, and then there’s security clearance.”

6. And many of them migrate for multiple reasons.
“When people say they have family here, yes, that’s true. But that’s not what made them come entirely. Why are they coming now? A smuggler offered them passage to the US. Is the smuggler the reason you left? Part of it. But really, the reason you were looking for a way to come, again, goes back to the violence. Poverty, also. The majority of the kids coming also are experiencing poverty in their home country. Is that the main reason? Maybe, maybe not. It’s combined.

“One interesting Vanderbilt study found that people who’d been victim of a crime were more likely to migrate than those who had not. It also found that people who feel their government is not responsive to their needs were much more likely to migrate than someone who’s government didn’t protect them. When you combine those two factors—both been a victim of a crime and felt their government couldn’t protect them—they’re exponentially more likely to migrate. It’s always a combination of factors.”

7. Requiring international protection, or refugee designation, for more migrants is the right start—but the US can’t solve this crisis alone.
“Mexico also has to acknowledge that many of these children need protection. Mexico also has very good asylum laws on the books. What they don’t have is the resources and the infrastructure to support implementing those policies. Frankly, I think one of the things the US should be doing, and could do if they talk about this in the context of a refugee crisis, is to provide support regionally, not just to Mexico but also to Belize, to Costa Rica, to Panama, all of the countries that are also seeing influxes of these children. Provide them with the support to implement their protection policies consistent with international law. And not all of these kids have to come to the US, right? The burden can sort of be shared in the region.”

8. We don’t have to wait to act until migrants get to our borders—we could process them before they leave their country.
“We’ve done that before: with the Vietnamese in the past, with Haitians, and with Cubans. The first thing that needs to happen is you have to set up what the criteria are going to be; who qualifies to be sort of preprocessed. You could limit it to kids with strong family connection to the US, who have been targeted and pass some sort of criteria. It can be done administratively. You do not need legislation to do that. And in doing it you basically cut out the smugglers. If you process the kids internally, they can get on a plane for $300 and fly over here—they don’t have to pay $3,000 to a criminal organization. It really undercuts the smugglers and trafficking operation in a huge way.

“If children see there’s a legal way that’s safer to come—without taking this horrible journey—maybe they’ll wait a little bit. And at the same time, you’re building up the child welfare system and funding safehouses and anti-corruption campaigns. Maybe they’ll see things get a little bit better; I can wait, I don’t have to leave today. You slow the flow at that end. Not just by deporting people summarily, without a hearing. If you do that, and that’s all you do, they’re going to turn right around and come back.”

9. Even if Obama’s request for emergency supplemental funding to deal with this crisis isn’t perfect, it’s better than nothing.
“While we may not agree with all the details of where some of the money is going to—it’s sort of heavy on enforcement, in my view—there’s no question that they desperately need this money in order to be able manage the situation and get a handle on it. Frankly, it needs to go through. Blocking it will make the situation worse. They won’t have any place to hold these kids while they process them, they won’t have money to process them and deport them, and they won’t have money to put them on planes and send them back. So it’s crazy that there’s discussion about blocking it.”

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Are the Kids Showing Up at the Border Really Refugees?

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You’ll Be Shocked to Learn That Rupert Murdoch Is Wrong About Climate Change

by Louise6qy Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Rupert Murdoch shrugged off the notion that climate change is a big deal in an interview on Sunday.

Speaking to Sky News Australia (which he partially owns), Murdoch dismissed the alarming reports coming from scientists about the devastating impact that climate change is causing to the planet.

“We should approach climate change with great skepticism,” he said. “Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here. There will always be a little bit of it.”

Murdoch acknowledged that the changing planet could wipe out small countries like the Maldives, but he had a quick fix for that.

“We can’t stop it, we’ve just got to stop building vast houses on seashores,” he added. “The world has been changing for thousands and thousands of years, it’s just a lot more complicated today because we are more advanced.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Murdoch’s Fox News has been found to give its viewers the most inaccurate information on climate change of any American network.

(h/t Guardian)

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You’ll Be Shocked to Learn That Rupert Murdoch Is Wrong About Climate Change

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Obamacare is Working, and It Will Probably Continue to Work

by MarcyHamblin Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

Tyler Cowen isn’t satisfied with current answers to the question of how well Obamacare is working. But although no one has firm answers to the questions he asks, I think we know more than he implies we do—especially when you widen your scope beyond just the details of the Obamacare transition over the next few years. Here are a few quick responses to his questions:

1. Five to ten years from now, how much do we think employment will have gone down as a result of ACA?

Take a look at Europe. The answer almost certainly is (a) perhaps a little, but not much, and (b) it’s going to be swamped by other factors anyway. In fact, if Obamacare eventually leads to the end of employers being responsible for health insurance, it could end up helping employment. More generally, though, if you’re worried about employment trends, then health care taxes and mandates should be the least of your concerns. They’re just a blip by comparison to everything else going on.

1b. How will the effort to introduce greater equality of health care consumption fare if wage and income inequality continue to rise? Will this attempt at consumption near-equalization require massively distorting incentives?

No. Even if we move to full universal health care, it will likely raise marginal tax rates by something in the neighborhood of 6-7 points. That’s nothing to sneeze at, but the bulk of it will replace current spending by employers and will do little to distort anything. The remainder is simply too little to introduce more than a modest amount of distortion in a $15 trillion economy.

2. Will ACA even have improved overall health in America?

Probably a little bit, but not a lot—though it depends on how you measure it. Especially in the under-65 age group, for example, it will do little to reduce mortality. However—and this is something I can’t repeat often enough—this is not the main point of universal care anyway. The main point is to improve quality of life and reduce the life-shattering financial consequences of serious medical emergencies.

3. Given that prices in the individual insurance market already seem to have gone up 14-28 percent, and may go up more once political scrutiny of insurance companies lessens, what is the overall individual welfare calculation from this policy change?

Actually, prices will probably go up less in future years. The initial increase was a one-time response to the new requirements of the law, especially the addition of lots of sicker people to the insurance pool. In the future, given the competition between insurance companies, increases are likely to roughly match the rate of health care inflation.

4. Given supply side constraints, how much did ACA increase the consumption of health services in the United States?

We don’t know yet. But obviously the answer is that, yes, any kind of universal health care entitlement will increase consumption. Once again, though, look at Europe. We have decades of experience in lots of different countries with a wide array of different forms of universal health care, and in every case health consumption is lower than in the US. There may well be birthing pains associated with Obamacare, but in the longer run there’s simply no reason to think that it inevitably has to lead to a significant increase in consumption.

5. How much of the apparent slowdown of health care cost inflation is a) permanent, b) not just due to the slow economy, and c) due to ACA? Or how about d) the result of trends which have been operating slowly for the last 10-20 years?

Obviously historical evidence is never conclusive, but the historical evidence we have points very, very strongly to a permanent slowdown. There’s a lot of variability in medical inflation, but one of the most underreported trends in health care reporting has been our steady, 30-year-long decline in medical inflation. There’s no special reason to think this is suddenly going to change.

If I were allowed only one answer to all these questions, it would be this: Just look at the rest of the world. Health care is not an area where we’re confined to econometric studies and CBO models. There are dozens of countries that have implemented national health care in dozens of different ways, and we can look at how they’ve actually done in the real world. Almost universally, the answer is that they’ve done better than us on virtually every metric. Unless you really, truly believe that the United States is a unique outlier to the laws of economics, there’s very little reason to believe that national health care in America would fare any worse.

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Obamacare is Working, and It Will Probably Continue to Work

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Life Is Meaningless

by JerrellRosas Posted on June 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Hello. Good day.

How are you? Are you feeling alive? Are you feeling like life is worth living? Perhaps there is a bounce in your step? Optimism in your eye? Are you eager to embrace the world as it is today and forge an even better one in the smithy of tomorrow?

Good luck with that:

There’s a new app called Yo that does simply that: It sends your friends a “Yo” notification with a tiny little robotic voice.

It’s hard to take the app seriously, after all the app was created in only eight hours, but Yo already has 50,000 users who have sent approximately 4 million Yos.

The team has also already raised $1 million in funding.

In unrelated news, more than 1.5 million households in America live on $2.00 a day.

Have a nice day.

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Life Is Meaningless

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Why Is the Abortion Rate Down Since 2008?

by DeneseLamble Posted on June 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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National Review‘s Michael New is unhappy with Guttmacher’s latest report on the abortion rate:

Last week, the Guttmacher Institute released an analysis of the recent decline in the incidence of abortion. Overall, the abortion rate declined by an impressive 13 percent between 2008 and 2011 and reached its lowest level since 1973. This Guttmacher analysis joins a chorus of pundits — including Andrew Sullivan — who were quick to credit contraception for this decline in the abortion rate. And like most Guttmacher studies, this analysis is quick to downplay pro-life laws and other pro-life efforts.

…There is less than meets the eye here, however. The author finds that fewer women under 30 at risk for an unintended pregnancy were forgoing contraception. Yet the decline was slight — only three percentage points.

…The author makes a fair point that the abortion decline was fairly consistent throughout the country….However, the study presents a false dichotomy between either crediting legislation or crediting contraceptives for the falling abortion numbers….The link between abortion attitudes and abortion incidence is not well documented. That said, the shift in public opinion is still worth considering.

Well, look: the abortion rate in America has been steadily declining since 1973. Trying to figure out why it dropped specifically between 2008 and 2011 is a mug’s game. There’s just nothing unusual going on that even requires an explanation. It’s true that the post-1973 decline continued at a rate that was slightly higher than before—but so slightly that it’s just as likely to be statistical noise as anything else.

Both sides should probably stand down in the face of the long-term evidence. Most likely, neither contraceptives nor state laws nor public opinion played a substantial role that was any different from the role they’ve played since 1973. Over the long term, there’s less teen pregnancy, more use of contraceptives, and, as near as I can tell, barely any change in public opinion at all. Beyond that, who knows?

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Why Is the Abortion Rate Down Since 2008?

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The Earth’s Hidden Ocean

by Myrna Posted on June 16, 2014

An ocean of water appears to be tied up in minerals of the mantle 400 miles below the surface, according to an analysis of seismic waves passing through the deep earth. Link:  The Earth’s Hidden Ocean ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth: Indian Point’s Tritium Problem and the N.R.C.’s Regulatory ProblemDot Earth Blog: Indian Point’s Tritium Problem and the N.R.C.’s Regulatory ProblemWith Data and Resolve, Tacoma Fights Pollution ;

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The Earth’s Hidden Ocean

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Though Not Quietly, Kentucky Moves to Cut Reliance on Coal

by Myrna Posted on June 7, 2014

Despite cries of a “war on coal” that echo through mining country in eastern Kentucky, the region is already taking hardheaded steps toward a post-coal economy. Original article: Though Not Quietly, Kentucky Moves to Cut Reliance on Coal Related ArticlesIn Some States, Emissions Cuts Defy SkepticsDot Earth Blog: Roundup: Can New E.P.A. CO2 Rules Have a Climate Impact?Off the Shelf: Review of Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper

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Though Not Quietly, Kentucky Moves to Cut Reliance on Coal

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