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Shooting in Rural Washington Leaves 5 Dead, Including Gunman

by AdellHemphill Posted on February 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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A gunman shot and killed four people at a house in rural western Washington state on Friday before he turned the gun on himself, Mason County officials have confirmed.

The incident in Belfair, Washington, started Friday morning, when authorities received a call from a man who said he had shot four people. A SWAT team responded to the house, where authorities attempted to negotiate with the suspected gunman for several hours.

Mason County Sheriff Casey Salisbury told reporters that the gunman stepped out of the house and shot himself in front of deputies. “It’s a terrible tragedy,” Salisbury told the Seattle Times.

According to the Associated Press, a girl who survived has been taken to the hospital for an evaluation.

This is a breaking news post. We will update as more information becomes available.

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Shooting in Rural Washington Leaves 5 Dead, Including Gunman

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Donald Trump Supporters Are Even Scarier Than You Think. These Numbers Prove It.

by SunnyCorin33131 Posted on February 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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In an election season dominated by racist and xenophobic language on the right, Donald Trump distinguishes himself even among his more outspoken Republican challengers. And according to a New York Times analysis of voters, so do his supporters, a majority of whom carry deeply intolerant attitudes toward gay people, Muslims, immigrants, and African Americans.

In fact, the report found 20 percent of Trump’s base disagree with the freeing of slaves after the Civil War, and a staggering 70 percent would still like to see the Confederate flag flying above official grounds in their states.

One-third of Trump’s primary supporters in South Carolina favored “barring gays and lesbians from entering the country.” According to the Times, this is more than twice the support this proposal received by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio backers.

Another third of his supporters think Japanese internment was an appropriate measure.

The analysis, which used polling data from recent YouGov and Public Policy Polling results, paints a disturbing portrait of the kind of voters with whom Trump’s inflammatory messages are resonating. It could in part explain how the Republican fron-trunner has managed to clear yet another primary victory in Nevada this week.

For more on how Trump successfully tapped into South Carolina’s angry and xenophobic voters, read our deep-dive on how the state became Trump country.

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Donald Trump Supporters Are Even Scarier Than You Think. These Numbers Prove It.

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Netflix and Grill: Michael Pollan Takes His Food Evangelism to the Small Screen

by DanaOFerrall Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Fire,” the first episode of a new docuseries called Cooked, opens with sweeping shots of a barren landscape in western Australia, dotted with huge, roaring fires. At dusk, Aborigine families gather around the flames to roast bush turkeys and goannas—a large Australian lizard—beneath the glowing embers. A mother baptizes her toddler in the smoke as it rises.

The four-part docuseries that premiered on Friday is based on the New York Times best-selling book Cooked. Its author, science writer Michael Pollan, has built an empire writing books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Food Rules) that argue Americans should eat simple, home-cooked foods. Each episode in the Netflix series is inspired by the four elements used to transform raw ingredients into food—fire (barbeque), water (braising), air (bread making), and earth (fermentation). Each episode has a different director and follows the everyday cooks profiled in Pollan’s book, as well as the writer’s own culinary quests.

In “Fire” we meet Ed Mitchell, the pit master from North Carolina who grills hogs on the barbeque with techniques passed down from his great-grandfather, and we watch Pollan attempt to create a whole-hog cookout himself. Later, in the Earth episode, Noella Marcellino, a nun in Connecticut with a doctorate in microbiology, separates curds and whey in a large wooden barrel to make cheese.

Pollan’s prolific body of work asks readers to question what and how much they eat. (On an Inquiring Minds podcast in 2014, he argued that the Paleo diet is nowhere near how hunter-gatherers actually ate.)

But Cooked is different. Instead of evangelizing about which foods to eat, Pollan urges us to prepare our own.

“I’m hopeful that there will be a renaissance in cooking,” Pollan says in the series. “If we’re going to cook, it’s going to be because we decide we want to, that it is important enough to us, pleasurable enough to us, necessary enough to our health and our happiness.”

“Cooked” premiers on Netflix February 19. Photo courtesy of Netflix

Much of the information presented in the Cooked Netflix series won’t be new to foodies who follow Pollan’s work. It touches on the rise of industrialization and processed food, the beneficial gut microbes that thrive when we eat fermented food, and the importance of eating meat that came from ethically treated animals. However, even viewers obsessed with health food trends will be seduced by the series’ vibrant scenes, which provide a glimpse of how cultures around the world make—and break—their proverbial bread.

We’re told that the United States spends less time on cooking than any other nation in the world, and Pollan stresses that “time is the missing ingredient in our recipes and in our lives.” Yet the series doesn’t offer viewers detailed advice about how to increase how much they cook. Cooked offers only a few general tips, such as doing meal prep on Sundays.

Pollan got blowback for an essay he wrote in the New York Times in 2009 that suggested that Betty Friedman’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique got women out of the kitchen and was linked to the decline of home cooking. In Water, the episode that addresses the realities of processed foods and the restaurant industry, Pollan and director Caroline Suh said they were careful how they approached the issue.

“The collapse of cooking can be interpreted as a byproduct of feminism, but it’s a lot more complicated and a lot more interesting than that,” Pollan said in an interview. “Getting it right in the film took some time, but it was important to tell the story of the insinuation of industry into our kitchens, and show how the decline of cooking was a supply-driven phenomenon.”

Richard Bourdon makes his sourdough with three ingredients: wheat, water, and salt. Photo courtesy of Netflix.

Whether it’s men or women who wear the apron, the message of Cooked is clear—we should make home-cooked meals a habit, for our bodies and for our souls.

Jessica Prentice, author of Full Moon Feast and coiner of the term “locavore,” once wrote that if someone cannot drive we find it incomprehensible, yet if someone admits to not knowing how to cook, we see it as normal.

Cooked aims to get us back in the driver’s seat.

“Is there any practice less selfish,” Pollan asks in Cooked, “any time less wasted than preparing something nourishing and delicious for the people you love?”

The series premiered at the Berlin Film Festival on February 16 and on Netflix on February 19.

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Netflix and Grill: Michael Pollan Takes His Food Evangelism to the Small Screen

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Facebook Is Banning Private Gun Sales

by ShermanArkwooke Posted on January 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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Facebook just announced that it is going to ban its users from coordinating private gun sales on its site and through the photo sharing service Instagram, according to the New York Times. The new rules do not apply to licensed gun dealers, who can still post to Facebook so long as they do not complete transactions on the site. The move, which extends to gun parts and ammunition, targets private, person-to-person gun sales, which do not require background checks in many states.

This is the second major action Facebook has taken on gun sales. In March 2014, partly in response in to groups such as Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, the social network warned users promoting private sales to comply with state and federal gun laws. Posts discussing firearms sales were restricted to users over 18. At the same time, Instagram introduced “in-app education” for users searching for gun promotions.

The new policy adds firearms to Facebook’s existing bans on selling marijuana, pharmaceuticals, and illegal drugs through the network. In a statement to the New York Times, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of product policy, said, “Over the last two years, more and more people have been using Facebook to discover products and to buy and sell things to one another. We are continuing to develop, test and launch new products to make this experience even better for people and are updating our regulated goods policies to reflect this evolution.”

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Facebook Is Banning Private Gun Sales

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What Wrecked Ben Carson’s Campaign? Ex-Staffers Blame His Close Friend.

by NoreenOuthwaite Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ben Carson took to a stage in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday to let the world know that just because Armstrong Williams, his longtime friend and close adviser, says something, that doesn’t mean it’s true. That remark was a kick in the teeth to Williams, a prominent and controversial black conservative pundit and PR specialist who calls himself Carson’s business manager, and it naturally made headlines. But hours later, Carson joined Williams on Williams’ nightly radio show and declared that he had complete faith in Williams, who has played an outsize—and perhaps negative—role in Carson’s presidential campaign.

What the heck was going on? The Carson campaign already had enough to worry about in the final days before the Iowa caucuses. Carson at one point led the GOP pack in Iowa, but for weeks he’s been stuck in single digits in the polls. And once more the story for his campaign was internal chaos and Carson’s odd relationship with Williams. It was the latest iteration of a deep problem that, according to Carson staffers who recently quit, has dogged the campaign from the beginning and may well doom it.

From the start, the Carson campaign has seemed afflicted with a split personality caused by Caron’s relationship with Williams. Carson’s campaign staffers, seasoned GOP operatives, were trying to conduct a professional effort with an orderly chain of command. Yet Williams would make decisions on his own and on the fly that would contradict or undermine the campaign’s plans. And Carson—too often, according to his former staffers—did what Williams advised him to do. For instance, Williams, without informing the campaign brass, often set up media interviews that ended up hurting Carson and the campaign.

A strange pattern developed. Carson would publicly deny that Williams, who years ago worked for Sen. Strom Thurmond and then Clarence Thomas before his appointment to the Supreme Court, had any significant role in the campaign. But days later, Williams would pop up on television, speaking on behalf of the former neurosurgeon. Apparently in charge. Or something.

Several former staffers now say that Williams was always at the helm of the campaign—without any official title—and Carson constantly followed his guidance. In other words, when Carson was publicly stating that Williams did not have much to do with the campaign, he was not speaking truthfully.

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What Wrecked Ben Carson’s Campaign? Ex-Staffers Blame His Close Friend.

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Almonds Are Getting Cheaper, But Here’s the Catch

by SalvadoJ36 Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Ye almond-loving hipsters, rejoice! The revered—and lately quite expensive—nut is likely to get cheaper soon. The wholesale price for almonds—the one paid by supermarkets to stock their bulk bins, or by processors to make their trail mixes—has fallen from a high of $4.70 last August down to $2.60, reports the Financial Times.

And the reason has nothing to do with a viral screed against almond milk penned by a certain wag in 2014. Rather, it’s the same set of forces that triggered California’s massive almond boom in the first place: the vagaries of global demand.

The state’s growers, who churn out 99 percent of almonds grown in the United States, have rapidly expanded their almond groves over the past decade and a half.

But that expansion didn’t happen just to satisfy your trendy almond-milk latte habit. California farmers are almond growers to the world: They supply about 80 percent of the almonds consumed globally, and export demand has risen steadily for most of the past 15 years. About 70 percent of California’s almonds are exported. According to the Almond Board of California, the great bulk of this massive outflow goes to Asia, the destination of 44 percent of California’s almond exports, and Western Europe, which gets about 40 percent.

As a result of that booming global demand, the price farmers get for almonds has risen dramatically despite the big acreage expansion.

But in recent months, the global appetite for almonds has plunged. Here’s the Financial Times:

Last year’s surge in prices depressed demand, and buyers in China, the Middle East and India, who have led consumption over the past three to four years, have disappeared. Trading has ground to a halt as prices continue to decline and the number of rejected containers by buyers refusing to honor contracts has jumped.

“It’s a bloodbath,” one California-based nut trader told the Financial Times. What happened was that California’s multiyear drought took a bite out of crop yields, making almonds more scarce and pushing up their price. And then, in 2014, the US dollar began to rise in value against major Asian currencies and the euro, making US exports, including almonds, even more expensive in those regions.

To make matters worse, the European economy stagnated, and China—the globe’s biggest almond importer—saw its economic growth slow and its stock market tumble. Snack makers in Asia and Europe began to balk at pricey almonds, putting fewer in nut mixes and reducing the portion size of almond offerings, the FT reports. In 2015, almond exports to Asia and Western Europe fell 12 percent and 7 percent, respectively, according to the Almond Board of California.

And now, with a historic El Niño triggering a wet and snowy winter in California, the market expects a big harvest in 2016. Econ 101 tells us that abundant supply and weak demand means lower prices going forward. That likely means you’ll soon be getting at least a slight break on that bag of salty roasted almonds you keep at your desk. But what does it mean for California’s almond boom?

In previous posts, I’ve questioned whether the state has the water resources—or access to sufficient bee hives for pollination—to continue devoting ever more land to the crunchy treat. Unlike, say, vegetables or cotton, which can be fallowed during dry years, planting an almond grove requires farmers to commit to finding a steady water source for about 20 years, or risk losing a very expensive investment. (According to the Almond Board of California, establishing an almond grove—paying for land, saplings, an irrigation system, etc.—costs about $8,700 per acre, or about $2.6 million for a new 300-acre grove.)

During the drought, water from California’s massive irrigation projects, which deliver melted Sierra Nevada snow to the state’s farms, was largely cut off. Farmers responded by fallowing a portion of annual crops like cotton and vegetables and irrigating the rest—including their ever-expanding almond groves—with water drawn from finite underground aquifers. While the current El Niño might spell the end of a drought that has haunted California since 2012, California agriculture has gotten so ravenous for water that aquifers in its largest (and most almond-centered) growing region, the Central Valley, have been declining steadily for decades.

For my deep dive into the almond boom last year, I asked David Doll, an orchard adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension, how long growers could keep devoting ever more land to almonds despite the long-term water crunch. He told me it would only stop “when the crop stops making money.”

I checked back in with him to see what he thought about the current price drop. He said under normal conditions, when water is flowing from the state’s irrigation projects, the break-even farmer price for almonds is about $1.45 per pound—at that price, farmers neither lose nor make money. But when water is scarce, farmers face higher irrigation costs, and the break-even price rises to somewhere between $2.60 and $2.85—roughly where prices are now. So even with the current price drop, most almond growers are breaking even. But if we get another wet winter this year, water prices could drop by 2017 and almond farmers will be right back to profitability.

If the Asian and European appetite for almonds returns to normal growth rates, Doll added, the almond expansion will likely continue unabated, which will in turn limit large upward price swings as supply rises to meet demand. The limiting factor, of course, is water. Back in 2014, California shook off a history of Wild West aquifer stewardship and passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires that by 2025, the state’s aquifers can’t be drawn down faster than they’re recharged—a dramatic reversal of the status quo. “From my observations, there are many almond operations that are not planning for this policy,” Doll said, meaning they’re not prepared for a future when aquifers can’t be tapped at will.

But 2025 is nearly a decade away. Enjoy those relatively inexpensive almonds, you ignorant hipsters.

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Almonds Are Getting Cheaper, But Here’s the Catch

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35,000 Cows: Is That a Lot or a Little?

by VilmaMerrill Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Here’s a little quiz. Based on the teaser on the right from the New York Times, how serious would you say this blizzard was in terms of milk production? It sounds pretty serious, no?

But nowhere in either the teaser or the linked article does the Times tell you just how much 35,000 cows is. Here’s the answer: there are 9.3 million dairy cows in the United States, so 35,000 represents….

About 0.4 percent.

I don’t get it. The blizzard is a worthwhile story, and the hit to farmers in the region is serious. No problem there. Still, why not take the extra five minutes required to dig up a couple of numbers and give readers a sense of whether this is a big problem from a national perspective? The only hint is 13 paragraphs down: “Consumers should not expect noticeable increases in the prices of milk or milk products.”

Instead, why not put something like this at the top of the story: “So far, more than 35,000 dairy cows have been found dead. Although this represents less than 1 percent of the nation’s dairy herd, for regional farmers it’s etc. etc….” Context is everything.

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35,000 Cows: Is That a Lot or a Little?

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Bowe Bergdahl Ordered to Face Court Martial

by CassieMzgyvibyns Posted on December 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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Bowe Bergdahl, the Army sergeant whose 2014 release by the Taliban prompted a firestorm of controversy over the nature of his five-year captivity, was ordered by a high-ranking Army commander on Monday to face a court martial on charges of desertion and endangering his fellow soldiers.

If convicted of leaving his post in Afghanistan without permission, the New York Times reports, Bergdahl could face a life sentence. The date of the hearing will be announced at a later time.

An Army lawyer had previously recommended Bergdahl face lesser charges for his alleged offenses. The decision on Monday also comes just days after the popular podcast Serial launched its second season, which will investigate Bergdahl’s divisive story.

In 2014, five Taliban leaders were released in exchange for the Taliban’s release of Bergdahl.

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Bowe Bergdahl Ordered to Face Court Martial

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Diabetes Rates Are Finally Starting to Fall

by Tatiana95B Posted on December 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Americans have been slowly improving their diets, moving away from sugary drinks and highly processed food. And they’re starting to reap the fruits, so to speak, of this shift.

The latest evidence: After a quarter century of steady rise, new cases of diabetes declined by a fifth between 2008 and 2014, reports The New York Times’ Sabrina Tavernise, pointing to a new release from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tavernise puts the trend into context:

There is growing evidence that eating habits, after decades of deterioration, have finally begun to improve. The amount of soda Americans drink has declined by about a quarter since the late 1990s, and the average number of daily calories children and adults consume also has fallen. Physical activity has started to rise, and once-surging rates of obesity, a major driver of Type 2 diabetes, the most common form of the disease, have flattened.

The situation is hardly rosy, she makes clear: New diabetes cases still accumulate at double the rate they did in the ’90s, and most of the declines have accrued to college graduates, while the “rates for the less educated have flattened but not declined.” And large racial disparities remain:

CDC

But the trends point downward. That’s something to celebrate.

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Diabetes Rates Are Finally Starting to Fall

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Paying extra to get that new iPhone faster? It’s a bad deal

by mkrgmyrao Posted on October 22, 2015

Paying extra to get that new iPhone faster? It’s a bad deal

By on 22 Oct 2015commentsShare

The problem with tech companies — you know, besides all of these ones — is that when it comes to fighting climate change, they’re about as committed to the cause as your friend was that one time she went vegetarian for a guy.

Sure, the big tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple can throw money at the problem. Or they can build little eco-utopias for themselves, where their workers can forget about all the poverty, pollution, and tragic dearth of free snacks that plague the real world. But considering that these companies have tremendous power over society through the devices and services that they sell us, none of that really matters. Until they make sustainability as important to their core operations as sleek aesthetics and performance, they’ll continue to be part of the problem.

Exhibit A: The smartphone industry’s new “equipment installment plans.” These plans allow consumers to lease smartphones with monthly payments, rather than buy them outright. They also allow consumers to upgrade to a new phone every year, rather than suffer through the two whole years that it usually takes to get an upgrade through standard plans.

The New York Times did a price comparison on the two options for various phone companies and found that it’s actually cheaper to just buy the phones outright. For a 64GB iPhone 6S you might pay Apple, AT&T, or Verizon a total of $438.96, $450, and $425.07 a year, respectively. By contrast, if you just buy a $750 iPhone and use it for two years, that’s $375 per year. Plus, the Times points out, you could then just sell that old phone for around $175.

Basically, the main incentive to lease a smartphone is to get an early upgrade, which, the Times concludes, might be a good enough reason for someone who can afford it.

But woefully absent from this discussion over whether or not it’s better to buy or lease a phone is any mention of sustainability — save for one lone voice of reason at the end of the article:

“Why do we constantly need new things?” said Kyle Wiens, the chief executive of iFixit, a company that sells parts for people to repair products. “Why can’t we be happy with what we have?”

In an ideal world, where we all live in eco-utopias, I understand how to do my taxes, and sustainability is an integral part of tech culture, these companies — and the media outlets that cover them — would have to answer questions like: How many new phones would factories have to churn out every year if everyone opts for these frequent upgrades? How much would that increase resource extraction? What eventually happens to all of these leased phones? Is e-waste going to be a problem? Because if we’ve learned anything in recent decades, it’s that we’re in for a rough ride, unless we fundamentally change how we think and live on this planet — and that means throwing away our throwaway culture.

But alas, sustainability isn’t an integral part of tech culture at the moment, just like your friend’s foray into the veg life wasn’t part of some new moral code. In the end, they’re all just in it to impress someone.

Source:

Lease a Smartphone or Buy It? The Pros and Cons

, The New York Times.

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Paying extra to get that new iPhone faster? It’s a bad deal

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