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Rolling Stone Owes Readers, Jackie, and Survivors Everywhere An Explanation

by HeatherBurchfie Posted on December 9, 2014

Mother Jones

Three weeks after a bombshell Rolling Stone feature that described a brutal gang rape that it indicated was part of a University of Virginia fraternity’s initiation rites, the magazine—which has been under fire as other news outlets, notably the Washington Post, found discrepancies in the account of the victim, identified as Jackie—suddenly seemed to retract its story. In a statement, Rolling Stone said that it had “come to the conclusion that our trust in Jackie was misplaced.” Rolling Stone has since walked back that statement—and the Post story that may have prompted it to turn so brutally on its source also seems to have changed in a few key spots. In neither case were readers informed that the text had been altered.

I, uh, have some issues with all of this, particularly about the effect the rush to reporting/retraction may have not just on Jackie’s welfare (though assuredly that), but on that of other sexual assault survivors to date and yet to come. What follows is a collection of tweets on this story. Many of them lead to threads well worth following.

As these statistics show, making up rape is very rare. Whatever the verdict on the Rolling Stone piece ends up being, what has transpired is a reminder how careful we journalists need to be, especially with a story that’s so explosive.

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Rolling Stone Owes Readers, Jackie, and Survivors Everywhere An Explanation

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Two Important Notes For Anyone Renewing Obamacare Coverage

by MaikSeibert Posted on November 15, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Today is the first day of the 2015 signup period for Obamacare. If you currently have coverage, you need to decide whether to keep the plan you have or shop around for a different one. Here are a couple of key things to keep in mind—whether you’re buying coverage for yourself or know friends who are:

As the New York Times points out today, it’s possible that the net price of your current coverage could go up substantially this year. Here’s why: the size of the federal subsidy depends on the price of your plan relative to other plans. If your plan was the cheapest on offer last year, it qualified for a maximum subsidy. But if other, cheaper plans are offered this year, and your plan is now, say, only the fourth cheapest, you’ll get a smaller subsidy. So even if your actual plan premium stays the same, your net cost could go up a lot.

This is, naturally, becoming a partisan attack point, but don’t ignore it just because the usual suspects are making hay with it. It’s a real issue that anyone buying insurance on a state or federal exchange should be aware of.

Bottom line: shop around. Don’t just hit the renew button without checking things out.
Andrew Sprung has been writing tirelessly about something called Cost Sharing Reduction. It’s not well known, but it could be important to you. Today, Sprung tells us that the new version of healthcare.gov has a pretty nice shoparound feature that allows you to enter some basic information and then provides a comparison of all plans in your area. I tried it myself, and sure enough, the “window shopping” feature works nicely and is easily accessible from the home page.

However, it doesn’t do a good job of steering you toward silver-level plans, which are the only ones eligible for Cost Sharing Reduction. For example, I shopped for a plan for a low-income family of three in Missouri, and the cost of the cheapest bronze plan was $0. The cost of the cheapest silver plan was $90 per month. That’s an extra $1,000 per year, and a lot of low-income families will naturally gravitate toward the cheaper plan, especially since it’s the first one they see.

But the bronze plan has both a deductible and an out-of-pocket cap of $12,600. The silver plan with CSR has a deductible of $2,000 and an out-of-pocket cap of $3,700. Unless you’re literally rolling the dice that you’re never going to see a doctor this year, you’re almost certain to be better off with the silver plan, even though the up-front monthly premium is a little higher.

Bottom line: shop around. The plan that looks cheapest often isn’t, and for low-income buyers a silver plan is often your best bet. For more, here’s the CSR page at healthcare.gov. And for even more, Sprung has details about shopping at the new site here and here.

I guess the bottom line is obvious by now: shop around. Even if you can navigate the website yourself, be careful. Not everything is obvious at first glance. And if you’re not comfortable doing it by yourself, don’t. Get help from an expert in your state. You have three months to sign up, so there’s no rush.

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Two Important Notes For Anyone Renewing Obamacare Coverage

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Röyksopp and Robyn Meet the Inevitable End

by Finley Kay Posted on November 10, 2014

Mother Jones

Most bands don’t announce their final album in advance. That designation is typically applied post-facto, when once-harmonious bandmates descend into irreparable squabbles on the road. But Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp has declared that its aptly named new LP, The Inevitable End, out this week, its last.

But Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland aren’t disbanding. Instead, they simply plan to ditch the old long-play format. “We feel like this is a goodbye to the traditional album,” the duo wrote on their website.

I caught up with Berge and Brundtland alongside Swedish pop star Robyn, as the three toured to promote their collective EP, Do It Again. The three performers opened up about how they got together, how the internet has changed the game, and the joys of not being beholden to record executives.

Mother Jones: Your first song together was 2009’s “Girl and The Robot,” on a Röyksopp album. Had you known each other before that?

Robyn: Nope. We met the first day we went into the studio and wrote that song.

MJ: Röyksopp had sent you some tracks in advance, though? Did you turn anything down?

Robyn: No, I turned some things up. Laughs. I don’t turn anything down. There were so many things they sent that I really liked, but just liking something doesn’t always mean that you can use it. Some things just evoke ideas and feelings in you, and that has nothing to do with good or bad—it’s just what resonates at the time.

MJ: Were you trading ideas back and forth beforehand?

Brundtland: Robyn had heard some instrumental bits, beats and stuff like that, but I don’t think that was necessary. Either way, it can be slightly—I wouldn’t say scary—but you can crash and burn. That’s what it can feel like when you’re meeting up with someone and you’re supposed to make something that’s really good. But when we met up it wasn’t like that at all.

Robyn: No. And all my past experiences are like that. ‘Cause I had a period when I working and writing with professional songwriters, and I always dreaded it. It was so horrible to work that way.

MJ: What made it so horrible?

Robyn: It was early on in my career when I was in another type of world. It was never really people that I liked what they did. It’s never like, “Oh, I don’t really like this guy, but maybe, maybe if we work together some more we’ll start to like each other.” It’s either you click or you don’t.

MJ: I’ve read that each of you was each at an impasse before deciding to do this current album. How so?

Robyn: I don’t know how detailed I would like to be, but I was definitely exhausted after touring a long time. I was not in a good place at all. I was really looking forward to making more music, but I just didn’t feel like I had had enough time off after the Body Talk albums to make my own album. And I was looking to start collaborating with other people in a different way, where I didn’t want the music to become an album. I just wanted to make music and see what happened.

Brundtland: Looking back, I think that we subconsciously thought that we’ve had a nice run with our albums. They represent something different, all of them, and conceptually it’s just progressed. So I guess we were looking for something to break up that thing a little bit.

Berge: I think doing what we did with Robyn felt—this sounds a bit cheesy—but a bit cathartic. To make it even more cheesy, it gives life a bit of purpose. I personally was in a place that I wasn’t too comfortable with.

Brundtland: It felt new, because we didn’t really set out with that plan or anything like that. But just creating this album, which is referred to as an EP, you get a feeling of “I want more.” We have heard people say that they wish it was longer, and that’s so much better than “I wish the album was shorter.”

MJ: And people skipping past tracks.

Brundtland: Yeah. That exists—18-song albums with a lot of unnecessary stuff.

MJ: Robyn’s Body Talk was a series of three shorter releases. Do you think that sort of capital-A album—where you pack in as many songs as possible—has lost relevance?

Robyn: I hope so. It’s a horrible way of working, actually. I mean, I don’t mind taking time off to make an album. If it takes a long time, it does. But then to spend two or three years promoting it? It’s fucking insane. I’d rather spend that time making new music. I think back in the day when pop music started, people made albums every year, and you played music live that people hadn’t heard before you released the album. It was like a constant production period. Everything was slower and you could sell more records, of course, but it kind of worked in a different way then.

Then the ’90s came, and everything changed and became really heavy marketing. It totally destroyed everything. We all started our careers around that time. The way it is now is so much better creatively. You can set your own pace. It’s not weird to release short albums anymore, and people get better music too.

MJ: So you’re are no longer beholden to big record labels?

Robyn: Yeah. I don’t make any records anymore in collaboration with the record company. I make them on my own, and deliver them when they’re done. There’s this way of thinking about an album like it’s something that doesn’t exist anymore, but I don’t think it’s true. It’s just chopped up into different parts. You might release it in parts like I did with Body Talk, or do a mixtape and album, or a mixtape and an EP. For me, an album is more like a period of time where you’re thinking in a special way, exploring something. It doesn’t have to be one release.

MJ: Do you guys have a similar setup?

Berge: We’ve always done it so that we make the album and then sort of say, take it or leave it. We have our own label, same setup as Robyn. When we’ve said what we want to say, we’re finished. No fillers. It’s not like your 1998 hip-hop album, which is 80 minutes long and 48 tracks.

MJ: Did you have a bigger collaboration in mind when you started working on these songs?

Brundtland: We just enjoyed getting together. When we’re together we do things like we’re a band, so then we are a band I guess.

Berge: And although there is Robyn and there is Röyksopp, the tracks are neither Robyn nor Röyksopp; it’s something else.

MJ: You’ve referred to “Do It Again” as an accidental song. How is a song accidental?

Robyn: It wasn’t accidental in that “Wow, I wrote a song without knowing it.”

Brundtland: Well, the monkeys and the typewriters.

Berge: Shakespeare. Sometimes we have an idea: Let’s write a song about sadness, whatever, and it’s going to be 94 beats per minute. Let’s go. But in this instance the track sort of dictated itself. We didn’t know where to take it.

Robyn: We followed it, kind of.

MJ: How often do you start taking something in one direction and have to pull back?

Berge: We’re so professional and good that we don’t do that anymore.

Robyn: We don’t make mistakes.

Berge: Never. Laughter. Sometimes we would try a few things you know will absolutely not work, but you have to do it. Just like I had to see the latest Spiderman movie. I knew it would be shit, but I had to just see it anyway. It’s a bit like that.

Robyn: But I also think when you’ve made music a long time—I’m not trying to sound like a prick—but you kind of know. Like, let’s not try anything that isn’t good enough.

MJ: How does The Inevitable End compare to Senior, your previous album?

Berge: It’s not like Senior. It’s got a dark energy and I think it’s very sincere in many ways.

MJ: It feels closer to the heart?

Berge: They all do; it’s like comparing children.

Robyn: It’s very inviting. It’s sad, but it’s not cold. It’s very warm.

Berge: That’s very well put. I’m going to steal that.

MJ: How about you, Robyn?

Robyn: Markus Jägerstedt from her touring band and I are working on an album that we’ve made together with a producer.

Berge: And it’s fucking awesome.

Robyn: Will be. The album is made with producer Christian Falk. I worked with him on my first album that I recorded when I was 16. So I’ve known him half of my life. We became good friends and we kept working in different ways and he passed away a couple of weeks ago from cancer. We’re finishing without him, which is a really strange experience, but also a really beautiful thing because we get to be around the memory of him and the music a little bit longer. It was something we started before he knew he was sick. So it was a real collaboration between me and Christian, and then Markus came in as well. It was like a band effort.

MJ: How does it compare with Body Talk?

Robyn: We’ll see. I think it’s messier than what I usually do, because Christian was messy. It’s a raw energy and it’s based on a club world. I think it’s going to be fantastic, I’m really happy about it.

MJ: Do you think you’ll join up again for a sequel to Do It Again?

Robyn: Never ever.

Berge: We say be-bop-a-lula she’s my baby, Scooby Doo, Daddy-o. We don’t have any plans. That’s the way we operate.

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Röyksopp and Robyn Meet the Inevitable End

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The One Percent Just Keeps Getting Richer, According to the 2014 Global Wealth Report

by LyndonSkene Posted on November 3, 2014

Mother Jones

This story was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

Global inequality, like global warming, is a disease that may be too far along to ever be cured.

We seem helpless, both in the US and around the world, to stop the incessant flow of wealth to an elitist group of people who are simply building on their existing riches. The increasing rate of their takeaway is the message derived from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook (GWD).

It’s already been made clear that the richest Americans have taken almost all the gains in US wealth since the recession. But the unrelenting money grab is a global phenomenon. The GWD confirms just how bad it’s getting for the great majority of us.

1. US: Even the upper middle class is losing

In just three years, from 2011 to 2014, the bottom half of Americans lost almost half of their share of the nation’s wealth, dropping from a 2.5 percent share to a 1.3 percent share (detail is here).

Most of the top half lost ground, too. The 36 million upper middle class households just above the median (sixth, seventh, and eighth deciles) dropped from a 13.4 percent share to an 11.9 percent share. Much of their portion went to the richest one percent.

This is big money. With total US wealth of $84 trillion, the three-year change represents a transfer of wealth of over a trillion dollars from the bottom half of America to the richest one percent, and another trillion dollars from the upper middle class to the one percent.

2. US: In three years, an average of $5 million went to every household in the one percent

A closer look at the numbers shows the frightening extremes. The bottom half of America, according to GWD, owned $1.5 trillion in 2011. Now their wealth is down to $1.1 trillion. Much of their wealth is in housing equity, which was depleted by the recession.

The richest Americans, on the other hand, took incomprehensible amounts of wealth from the rest of us, largely by being already rich, and by being heavily invested in the stock market. The following summary is based on GWD figures and reliable estimates of the makeup of the richest one percent, and on the fact that almost all the nation’s wealth is in the form of private households and business assets:

In three years the average household in the top one percent (just over a million households) increased its net worth by about $4.5 million.
In three years the average household in the top .1 percent (just over 100,000 households) increased its net worth by about $18 million.
In three years the average household in the top .01 percent (12,000 households) increased its net worth by about $180 million.
In three years the average member of the Forbes 400 increased his/her net worth by about $2 billion.

3. World: The one percent’s wealth grew from $100 trillion to $127 trillion in three years

A stunning 95 percent of the world’s population lost a share of its wealth over the past three years. Almost all of the gain went to the world’s richest one percent.

Again, the gains seem almost incomprehensible. The world’s wealth grew from $224 trillion to $263 trillion in three years. The world’s richest one percent, who owned a little under $100 trillion in 2011, now own almost $127 trillion. For every dollar they possessed just three years ago, they now have a dollar and a quarter.

From New York and LA and San Francisco to London and Kenya and Indonesia, the rich are pushing suffering populations out of the way to acquire land and build luxury homes. The “winner-take-all” attitude is breaking down society in the US and around the world.

More Madness

There’s a lot more in the GWD, and it doesn’t get any prettier. It tells us what unregulated capitalism does to a society.

In an upcoming post, we’ll consider what has to be done to end the madness.

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The One Percent Just Keeps Getting Richer, According to the 2014 Global Wealth Report

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Yes, candy is evil, but denying yourself on Halloween will only make you healthy and boring

by OLDLeviucxris Posted on October 30, 2014

I Want Candy

Yes, candy is evil, but denying yourself on Halloween will only make you healthy and boring

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30 Oct 2014 9:21 AM

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Yes, candy is evil, but denying yourself on Halloween will only make you healthy and boring

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Candy is bad for you and often unethical. It’s not even very satisfying. But here’s the thing: My mouth loves it. Three sentences into writing about candy, my salivary glands are spilling slobber. I’m craving a king-size Kit-Kat, or at least a bite of Krackle.

Last week, the Huffington Post blog alerted us once again to an ancient evil long practiced by the mega-confectioners that rule Halloween: Candy, like nearly everything that comes in a package, is made with lots of palm oil, a.k.a. orangutan blood. You probably know pervasive palm products arrive in our homes thanks to rainforest habitat hack-downs and horribly treated workers. But! Buying less candy is NOT the answer. Why not? Because — as fellow Gristfellow Eve Andrews reminded us in an story about the absurdity of lamenting toast’s environmental impact — conscious eating does not equal life hating.

The palm oil news (newsflash: not news) is disappointing but far from surprising. These days, candy makers serve up more tricks than treats. They trick well-intentioned buyers with meaningless green labels and fat-free candy corn. A few years back, Hershey’s got caught tricking foreign students into a “summer work and travel” program that’s effectively a summer of slavery in the company’s packing plants.

Earlier this week, funny guy John Oliver brilliantly reminded us how the sugar industry sneaks sugar into, well, everything, exacerbating our well-documented health problems. His point, though, was one Grist made four years ago, with a piece called “In defense of candy“: The problem is not sweets, it’s the candification of the rest of our food — from high-fructose corn syrupy drinks to mountains of sweetener in all types of secretly sugary packaged foods (like “healthy” granola bars and freezer pizza).

So: Big Candy is about as evil as the rest of Big Food, but candy itself is most definitely not the problem. And, even if it were, we’re not about to forego gobblin’ up Gobstoppers in our goblin suits this Hallow’s Eve. Giving out bullshit-healthy “treats” like Nutri-Grain bars is a good way to get your house TP’ed. Taking the actual-health-food route isn’t any better: It’s Halloween. (Ask your dentist if anyone likes her better for handing out baby carrots.)

Which all begs the question: What sweets do we buy for trick-or-treaters (and then inevitably keep for ourselves to snarf all evening and into the next week)? Spendy ethical chocolate, perhaps from a fair-trade cooperative? Soulless vegan M&M knockoffs? Home-cooked almond joy?

These are all yummy options for the mindful sweet-tooth, but is your 7-year-old neighbor in a Batman costume really going to notice he’s eating a carefully crafted eco-candy in the three-second interval between grabbing the wrapper and emptying its contents directly into his esophagus?

The HuffPost article misses the mark. After painstakingly describing the myriad threats palm oil poses to life and the climate, Diana Donlon of the Center for Food Safety earnestly touts a list of less tricky treats that won’t cost the planet as much, but will probably cost your wallet more than you want to spend on candy.

The solution isn’t to deny ourselves what we love and then spend wads of money on things we don’t love much more but enable us to emit smug out our buttholes. And the solution is definitely not to boycott candy. We all have sugar addictions to feed (guilty as charged).

Allow me to pontificate for one moment: In the fight for a more ecological and fair economy (and food system), voting with our puny candy change does not do much to destabilize the status quo. In fact, shitty candy is the exact right place for Big Sugar. Better to enjoy your once-a-year-binge. Or hell, fuel up on partially hydrogenated palm kernels any old time for a sugar-powered protest against deforestation and human rights abuses — or a transparent food system that doesn’t coddle Big Sugar.

In fact, leave the candy aside (or in my mouth): A better celebration of Halloween might start by not contributing to the $350 million Americans spend on brand-new costumes for pets. But I’ll save that for next Halloween (or tomorrow). Until then, check out all the great ideas from Grist’s guide to a green ‘ween.

Just remember: No handing out pumpkin hummus to trick-or-treaters, you ignorant hipsters.

Source:
Trick or Treat? The Frightening Climate Costs of Halloween Candy

, Huffington Post Blog.

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Yes, candy is evil, but denying yourself on Halloween will only make you healthy and boring

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John Boehner Still Hasn’t Sued Obama Over Obamacare. Why Not?

by Florencia4409 Posted on October 27, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Three months ago, John Boehner threw a bone to the tea-party faction that was nipping at his heels and demanding action against the lawless tyrant Obama and his executive orders that routinely defied both the Constitution and the duly enacted laws of the land. The bone took the form of a planned lawsuit against the administration because it had delayed certain aspects of the employer and employee mandates under Obamacare.

At the time, I was perfectly OK with Boehner doing this. Why not let courts decide this kind of dispute, after all? That’s what they’re for. What’s more, unlike most of the tea party complaints about lawless behavior, this one seemed at least defensible. And yet, three months later, we still have no lawsuit. Why? Simon Lazarus and Elisabeth Stein suspect that it has to do with Boehner asking for some legal advice from the Congressional Research Service and then quietly getting a report that he wasn’t expecting:

CRS reports such as this one are generated in response to requests by members or committees of Congress, though the CRS does not make public the identity of the requester or requesters. This particular report — of which House Democrats were unaware until it appeared — bears the earmarks of an inquiry, requested by the Speaker or his allies, to give some color of legitimacy to their charges of rampant presidential illegality. Instead, the result validates the lawyers’ maxim not to ask a question when unsure of the likely answer.

The Report offers two conclusions: First, under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), no rulemaking procedure was necessitated by the Administration’s initial one-year delay in enforcing the employer mandate, past the ACA’s prescribed January 1, 2014 effective date….Second, the Report states that, when, in February 2014, the Administration announced an additional year’s postponement of full enforcement of the mandate, until January 1, 2016, “informal rulemaking procedures” appeared to be required. In fact, as the report’s authors reference, the Administration had engaged in precisely the type of informal rulemaking process that, the report concluded, was called for. The Administration’s action finalized a September 2013 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, making adjustments in response to comments from interested parties, precisely as prescribed by the APA.

In other words, having been asked whether the Obama administration had crossed all its t’s and dotted its i’s, the CRS’ answer was unequivocal: yes it had. In bland CRS-speak, this seems like a veritable finger in the eye — or perhaps, a blunt warning to the Speaker to drop the lawsuit project.

Oops. This doesn’t mean Boehner can’t still file his lawsuit, of course. It was all pretty much symbolism and bone-tossing in the first place, so it hardly matters if he ends up losing the case a year or two from now. But it could have proven embarrassing, especially if the CRS report became public, which, inevitably, it did. This stuff never stays under wraps forever.

So perhaps Boehner has decided to hold his fire. He has bigger fish to fry right now, and I doubt he was ever all that excited about the lawsuit anyway. For now, it’s become just another shard on the ever-mounting bone pile of tea party outrage about a president doing stuff they don’t happen to approve of.

Continued:

John Boehner Still Hasn’t Sued Obama Over Obamacare. Why Not?

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Photos: This Year’s Strongest Typhoon Pounds Japan

by ElsaConnelly Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Typhoon Vongfong—the word means “wasp” in Cantonese—brought torrential rain and damaging winds to Japan overnight, as it continued its northward trajectory across the Japanese islands. The powerful storm arrived just a week after Japan was hit by another typhoon, Phanfone, which took the lives of three US airman off Okinawa, a southern Japanese island where the US maintains a large military base. Last week, Vongfong became the strongest cyclone system observed all year, anywhere in the world—equivalent to a category 5 hurricane. It was downgraded to a tropical storm as it hit the Japanese island of Kyushu. The Japan Times is reporting that the storm has left at least 61 people injured and one missing, with hundreds of thousands advised to evacuate. Authorities took steps to protect the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, the site of the 2011 meltdown.

Here are some photos of the storm as it moved through northeast Asia:

The storm created powerful waves in Wenling, in the coastal Chinese province of Zhejiang, on Sunday, drawing thrill-seeking crowds Whitehotpix/ZUMA

Not exactly the safest place to attempt a selfie. Whitehotpix/ZUMA

The view of the storm from the International Space Station last Thursday reveals its enormity. It was downgraded to a tropical storm as it made land fall in Japan. Alexander Gerst/NASA

A huge tree upended by Vongfong’s force on the coast of Setouchi, Kagoshima, on Sunday October 12. While the storm has been downgraded, it has increased in size, and still contains a huge amount of moisture. The Yomiuri Shimbun/AP

Waves pound the coast in the city of Kochi on the Japanese island of Shikoku on Monday October 13, 2014. The storm grounded 300 flights. Kyodo/AP

This photo of the super typhoon last week showed the eye of the storm was approximately 50 miles wide. NOAA/NASA

Streets were (almost) empty and shops shuttered in Toyko as Vongfong approached last night. The storm is expected to pass over the capital on Tuesday. kodomut/Flickr

Source: 

Photos: This Year’s Strongest Typhoon Pounds Japan

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We just had the hottest August ever

by TerranceTimperl Posted on September 18, 2014

we’re all in this pot together

We just had the hottest August ever

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18 Sep 2014 4:56 PM

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On the tails of the hottest May, one of the worst droughts in U.S. history, some of the earliest big hurricanes ever, and just generally one of the weirdest years of extremes, we now have the hottest August on record. NOAA announced that the global temperature average for August 2014 was 61 degrees Fahrenheit. Now that’s no sauna — what do you expect, it’s already PSL-season and half the planet is still shivering through a sub-equatorial winter — but it seems especially toasty when you realize that average includes both land and sea temperatures. In fact, this was the hottest month in the oceans EVER.

Yeah, you know what that means: There are a lot of sweaty mermaids down there right now. (This just in: I’m being told that’s not really what that means.)

NOAA

The previous all-time-hottest record for oceans was set in June of this year; now, just two months later, we have already busted that by a slight but definitive 0.05 degrees F. We know that the oceans have been quietly absorbing our extra heat and carbon emissions forever, but now we’re finally starting to feel it. And with the oceans heating up at unprecedented rates, we can expect everything else to get a whole lot hotter, too.

When we talk about global warming, we have a tendency to leave out a large part of the globe — specifically, the three-quarters of it that are covered with water. This makes sense — humans don’t live there, and we are very good at ignoring things that aren’t a part of our own experience — but it makes less sense when you consider the numbers: More that 90 percent of the earth’s total warming to date has been absorbed by the oceans.

skepticalscience

We’re already feeling the effects of that 2.3 percent of warming in our atmosphere — now picture what’s happening to the ocean ecosystems we depend on. (If you can’t picture it, Google it.) Then then there are the three billion of us who rely on the ocean as a primary source of protein.

Oh, and speaking of everything else getting a lot hotter — the three-month period from June to August this year? Another one for the books: On land and at sea, the hottest summer we’ve ever had. Period. Just something to think about when you head to the Climate March this weekend.

Everyone loves a record-breaker, but maybe we could slow it down on these temperature records for a bit?

Source:
Global Analysis – August 2014

, NOAA.

World Smashes All-Time Temperature Records Ahead of UN Climate Summit

, Mashable.

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We just had the hottest August ever

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Most Songs are Three Minutes Long Because That’s How Most of Us Like Them

by JayEastham Posted on August 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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Kelsey McKinney asks today why popular songs are almost all 3-5 minutes long. The historical basis for this is obvious: 45 rpm singles hold about three minutes of music, so modern pop music was born in an era when technology limited songs to about three minutes or so. But what about more recently?

It makes sense to assume that since the basis of the three-minute song was the 78 and then 45 rpm single, then songs would become longer as technology evolved….But the length of songs had its biggest jump, according to this data, between the ’60s and ’80s, and very little has changed from the ’90s to 2008, a time period when the technology of music changed drastically.

“What drives what is heard on the radio is an artist’s desire to have their music hit the mainstream, and a record label’s desire to profit from that,” Steve Jones, vice president at the Canadian radio firm Newcap, told NPR….Jones is right. The length of a song on an album doesn’t matter for anyone except for the artist and fans, but a song that hopes to make money and be played on the radio simply has to be a certain length. Either that, or radio stations will edit the song down to the standard, making it three to four minutes, just like the 45.

But this begs the question. Why do radio stations insist on three minutes? They don’t run ads after literally every song, so it’s not because advertisers demand it. The obvious answer is that this is, in fact, what most fans want.

The core explanation, I think, is that most popular music simply doesn’t have the complexity to sustain itself beyond a few minutes. Both the lyrics and the melodies tend to be fairly simple, and after a few minutes they’ve exhausted their potential. Compare this to classical music and you see it more clearly. Most classical music is considerably more complex than your average pop song, but even so a single movement of a sonata or a symphony usually clocks in at no more than ten minutes or so. Opera arias—which developed in a pre-technological age and with much more patient audiences—are closer in length to modern pop songs, typically lasting 3-7 minutes.

Obviously there are exceptions to this. There are plenty of examples of longish pop songs, just as there are examples of classical pieces longer than ten minutes. But generally speaking, you need a fair amount of complexity to sustain these lengths, and that’s not what most people want. They want simple and hummable, and that means not too long.

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Most Songs are Three Minutes Long Because That’s How Most of Us Like Them

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Watch Stephen Colbert Give Great, And Completely Unironic, Advice to Teen Girls

by BernardoLuna Posted on August 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Stephen Colbert’s wife of two decades, Evelyn McGee-Colbert, once told Oprah she didn’t like his TV alter-ego—someone she calls “that other guy.” In this video, as he offers advice to teenage girls wearing a plaid button-down and thick-framed hipster glasses, he’s definitely left the other guy behind.

When Loretta, 14, asks why some guys are jerks, he says to confront them (they may just be trying, badly, to get her attention), but also:

For this kind of thing to stop, boys have to be educated. Does our society educate boys to be misogynistic? It probably doesn’t value girls and women as much as it should, and boys probably see that as a signal that they can get away with things like devaluing women.

For Maria, 19, who asks how you can tell when someone likes you, he ends up defining love: when someone thinks “your happiness is more important than their happiness.” And cookies. “Cookies are also a really good sign that somebody likes you.”

The video is part of the girl-positive Rookie Magazine‘s series “Ask a Grown Man.” Earlier last year, Rookie’s fashionista founder, then 16-year-old Tavi Gevinson, was the youngest person ever to appear on The Colbert Report, where she gave the self-proclaimed “pear-shaped” Colbert style suggestions and called him a “Cool Dad” (capitals hers).

At the time, Colbert—a father of three, including 18-year-old Madeleine—wasn’t thinking of dispensing sage advice for Rookie. Instead he proposed a dad-inspired magazine project in which he would veto pictures of teen girls’ skin-baring outfits in a column called “You’re Not Wearing That.”

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Watch Stephen Colbert Give Great, And Completely Unironic, Advice to Teen Girls

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