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Like Most Libertarians, Iron Man Grows Up and Moves On

by Shannon Walters Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Iron Man 3
Walt Disney Studios
129 minutes

“There’s no politics here; it’s just good old-fashioned revenge,” Tony Stark (a.k.a., Iron Man) declares to a swarm of TV news reporters, following a terrorist attack that leaves a good friend of his in a coma. “There’s no Pentagon, it’s just you and me,” Stark says to his latest nemesis.

This statement also applies to the film itself.

The third installment in Marvel’s Iron Man series is the first in the franchise that wasn’t directed by Jon Favreau. The man at the helm this time around is writer/director Shane Black, who is famous for penning Hollywood action flicks like 1987’s Lethal Weapon, and for directing 2005’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, also starring Robert Downey, Jr. The first two films portrayed Tony Stark/Iron Man as he was intended to be depicted: as a suave, hard-partying, right-wing billionaire who battles America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. In the DVD commentary of the first Iron Man, Marvel frontman Stan Lee discusses why he created the character in the first place. He wanted to piss off some hippies:

It was the height of the Cold War. The readers—the young readers—if there was one thing they hated it was war, it was the military, or, as Eisenhower called it, the military-industrial complex. So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree. He was a weapons manufacturer. He was providing weapons for the army. He was rich. He was an industrialist. But he was good-looking guy and he was courageous…I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like—that none of our readers would like—and shove him down their throats and make them like him.

Though no one should ever accuse the Iron Man movies of pulling for any particular political agenda, the first two films did preserve the comic books’ gleefully rightward lean. (After all, Favreau identified Elon Musk, the libertarian billionaire who co-founded the galactic transport company SpaceX, as the inspiration for the on-screen version of Tony Stark; Musk also had a cameo in Iron Man 2.)

In the first Iron Man, Stark’s bad-boy charisma is defined by his belief in a Peace-Through-Strength-on-steroids mindset:

Although he undergoes something of a personal and political makeover later in the film, the beginning of Iron Man 2 shows Stark in familiar form. When he’s called to a hearing on Capitol Hill, lawmakers pressure him to turn over his terrorism-fighting toys to the US government and military. In response, a defiant Stark denies the government his property, cockily mocks the panel of lawmakers, and brags that he “successfully privatized world peace.” This is met with wild cheers from the gallery.

There are no politics to Iron Man 3, beyond the political assertion that lethal and indiscriminate terrorism is bad. Director Shane Black, who co-wrote the screenplay, is far more concerned with the slam-bang fight scenes and the romance between Stark and his live-in girlfriend Virginia “Pepper” Potts (played by Gwyneth Paltrow). So much of the film focuses on Stark, once the consummate care-free playboy, settling down with the love of his life. It’s a genuinely interesting and tender part of the story—and the best and most convincing romance in the modern comic-books-as-film cannon. Their relationship demonstrates just how softened and vulnerable (touchingly so) Tony Stark can get.

With his single life, goes his ideology.

Check out the trailer for Iron Man 3:

Iron Man 3 gets a wide US release on Friday, May 3. The film is rated PG-13 for sequences of intense sci-fi action and violence throughout, and brief suggestive content. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin co-hosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

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Like Most Libertarians, Iron Man Grows Up and Moves On

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How Michael Pollan Inspired Zac Efron’s Latest Movie

by Kyung Wilhoite Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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At Any Price
Sony Pictures Classics
105 minutes

At Any Price, a bleak family drama set against the backdrop of the Corn Belt, is essentially Death of a Salesman, but with genetically modified superseeds.

The film is co-written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, who the late critic Roger Ebert dubbed the new “director of the decade,” soon after seeing Bahrani’s 2007 film Chop Shop. At Any Price stars Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron (last seen getting peed on by Nicole Kidman in a Lee Daniels art film last year) as a father and son living their lives of noisy desperation.

Quaid plays Henry Whipple (no, not that Henry Whipple), an adulterous farmer and salesman entrenched in the ruthless, multimillion-dollar rivalry between Iowa’s big-business farmers. Henry becomes the target of a corporate investigation after illegally washing and reselling patented genetically modified seeds. Efron plays Dean, a local stock car racing champion who dreams of ditching the family business and making a name for himself as a NASCAR driver.

The pair’s disenchantment and bitterness result in a wave of betrayal, anger, and violence in their otherwise peaceful Midwestern town. The film is a quietly disturbing little picture, and features some magnificent acting, especially by Quaid.

The film is not (as Bahrani is quick to point out) in any way political, even though the story prominently involves GMOs, a controversial and extremely political topic these days. The origin of this apolitical film, however, is indeed rooted in Bahrani’s very political interests. In a conversation I had with Bahrani and Quaid, the 38-year-old director explained how he went about writing At Any Price:

I was curious where my food was coming from. I was reading authors like Michael Pollan…And I started realizing that farms aren’t romantic places anymore—they’re big businesses. So Michael Pollan and I became email friends, and I asked him to introduce me to George Naylor, who’s a farmer in Iowa who was featured in Pollan’s 2006 book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. So I went out and I lived with George for many months, and when I went out there, all the farmers kept telling me, “expand or die, get big or get out.” And I met a seed salesman, and I never knew there was such an occupation as “GMO seed salesman”…And he made me think of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. And I thought combining these things would be a way to tell a human and emotional story…When you have a lot of race cars and infidelity, it’s hard to be an “agenda film.”

(So there you have it: You can thank Michael Pollan for indirectly causing the development of Zac Efron‘s newest movie.)

Bahrani pulled from John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Peter Bogdanovich for narrative and stylistic influences. He also shadowed several Iowa farmers, incorporating their sentiments and commentary into his screenplay. One day, Bahrani noticed that a customer of one of the farmers owned a stock car for figure 8 racing—an observation he used to craft Efron’s character. “I YouTube’d figure 8 racing that night, and I made a point to keep going to Iowa to go see races,” Bahrani says. “I thought it would be a good contrast for the two characters…It had a different pace, and a different energy, and a different adrenaline.”

Dennis Quaid didn’t have time to conduct anything close to this level of research for his role. His learning experiences were all in the midst of production: “We shot it on a real farm,” Quaid says. “I didn’t have a trailer for this; it was my car or the living-room couch of the Hermans, the family whose farm we were shooting on… I spent my time with them, trying to soak up the atmosphere.”

Check out the trailer for this tense and surprising drama:

At Any Price gets a wider release on Friday, May 3. The film is rated R for sexual content including a strong graphic image, and for language. Click here for local showtimes and tickets.

Click here for more movie and TV coverage from Mother Jones.

To read more of Asawin’s reviews, click here.

To listen to the movie and pop-culture podcast that Asawin co-hosts with ThinkProgress critic Alyssa Rosenberg, click here.

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How Michael Pollan Inspired Zac Efron’s Latest Movie

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The 10 Worst Prisons in America: Tent City

by Andrew Brentford Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Tent City is Joe Arapaio’s baby Jack Kurtz/ZumaPress.com

Part 3 in an 11-part series.


#1: ADX (federal supermax)


#2: Polunsky Unit (TX Death Row)


#3: Tent City Jail (Phoenix)

Read the complete introduction to our 10 Worst Prisons project.

Serving time in prison is not supposed to be pleasant. Nor, however, is it supposed to include being raped by fellow prisoners or staff, beaten by guards for the slightest provocation, driven mad by long-term solitary confinement, or killed off by medical neglect. These are the fates of thousands of prisoners every year—men, women, and children housed in lockups that give Gitmo and Abu Ghraib a run for their money.

While there’s plenty of blame to go around, and while not all of the facilities described in this series have all of the problems we explore, some stand out as particularly bad actors. We’ve compiled this subjective list of America’s 10 worst lockups (plus a handful of dishonorable mentions) based on three years of research, correspondence with prisoners, and interviews with criminal-justice reform advocates concerning the penal facilities with the grimmest claims to infamy.

We will be rolling out profiles of all of the contenders in the coming days, complete with photos and video. Our third contender you’re probably already familiar with, thanks to a proudly defiant boss who takes pride in humiliating his heavily Latino jail population, and pinching pennies at the expense of their humane treatment.

3] Tent City Jail (Phoenix, Arizona)

Number of prisoners: ~2,000

Who’s in charge: Joe Arpaio, warden and sheriff of Maricopa County

The basics: No jail is more closely associated with its jailer than Tent City, the 20-year-old brainchild of Maricopa County’s infamous tough-guy sheriff Joe Arpaio. In 1993, to save the county the cost of building a new jail, Arpaio set up hundreds of Army surplus tents from the Korean War era and used them to house prisoners. Tent City residents now number more than 2,000, most of them awaiting trial. (See this county press release (PDF) for an event celebrating its 20th year.) The tents are unheated in winter and uncooled in summer—temperatures inside them have been clocked as high as 145 degrees. A few permanent buildings suffice for showers and meals, and a guard tower displays a permanent “vacancy” sign, warning passersby to stay in line. Arpaio himself has called the place a “concentration camp,” while Tent City’s prisoners have gone so far as to cobble together a survival guide.

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The 10 Worst Prisons in America: Tent City

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Europe Bans Bee-Harming Pesticides; US Keeps Spraying

by Isela Harris Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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On Monday, the European Commission voted to place a two-year moratorium on most uses of neonicotinoid pesticides, which are a widely used class of chemicals suspected of contributing to a severe global decline in honeybee health.

In the wake of Europe’s decisive action, the US Environmental Protection Agency dithered. Well, it did release a joint report with the US Department of Agriculture on Thursday, generated from a “National Honey Bee Health Stakeholder Conference” the two agencies held last fall. The report fingered no single culprit behind colony collapse disorder (CCD), the name for the steep annual bee die-offs that have been stumping beekeepers since 2006. Instead, it pointed to a “complex set of stressors and pathogens,” including poor nutrition (mainly from loss of flowering weeds due to increased herbicide use), viruses, gut parasites, and, yes, pesticides. But it includes a summary of a presentation by a USDA scientist Jeff Pettis noting that “several studies” have shown that low-level exposure to neonics make bees more vulnerable to the common gut parasite Nosema. (Pettis himself is the co-author of one of those studies.) .

Yet, as Natural Resources Defense Council senior scientist Jennifer Sass put it in a Thursday blog post, the joint EPA/USDA report limits itself to “recommendations about best management practices and technical advancements for applying pesticides to reduce dust,” while avoiding “recommendations that would reduce the overall sales and profits for chemical makers.”

Nor does the report express much urgency; it promises an “action plan that will outline major priorities to be addressed in the next 5-10 years.”

Meanwhile, the European Commission’s decisive action came amid what the Guardian called a “fierce behind-the-scenes campaign” to stop it from Syngenta and Bayer, the Europe-based chemical giants that market them. The move was prompted by a January report by the European Food Safety Authority, which identified “high acute risks” for bees from exposure to neonic-treated crops like corn and sunflower. And studies from independent researchers implicating neonics in declining bee health have mounted.

Even before the decision, France, Italy and Slovenia, and Bayer’s home country, Germany, had all suspend use of the chemicals pending more research on bee health. Now neonics will face severe restriction in all 27 European Union countries for two-year period starting Dec. 1, 2013, during which time the Commission will continue its assessment of their impact.

The move trains a harsh light on the EPA, which approved the chemicals based on what its own scientists have called flawed research and is currently reviewing them in light of the threat to bees and other pollinators. Earlier this month, an agency spokesperson told CBS News that the review would take five years—meaning that they’ll continue to be used widely on farmland in the US during that period. As I reported a while back, neonic-treated crops cover between 150 million to 200 million acres of farmland in the US each year—a land mass equivalent to as much as twice the size of the California.

I contacted the EPA to ask whether the EC decision might speed the agency’s timeline on reassessing neonics and their threat to bees. The response, in an emailed statement: “At this time, the data available to the EPA do not support a moratorium.” The time frame for completing the reassessment remains in place, the statement added, with this caveat: “If at any time the EPA determines there are urgent human and/or environmental risks from pesticide exposures that require prompt attention, the agency will take appropriate regulatory action, regardless of the registration review status of that pesticide.”

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Europe Bans Bee-Harming Pesticides; US Keeps Spraying

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What If We Never Run Out of Oil?

by bestpage Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared in The Atlantic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill’s world. Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill’s outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated.

Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. With characteristic vigor and verve, he set about modernizing the Royal Navy, jewel of the empire. The revamped fleet, he proclaimed, should be fueled with oil, rather than coal—a decision that continues to reverberate in the present. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. Because of this greater energy density, oil could push ships faster and farther than coal could.

Churchill’s proposal led to emphatic dispute. The United Kingdom had lots of coal but next to no oil. At the time, the United States produced almost two-thirds of the world’s petroleum; Russia produced another fifth. Both were allies of Great Britain. Nonetheless, Whitehall was uneasy about the prospect of the Navy’s falling under the thumb of foreign entities, even if friendly. The solution, Churchill told Parliament in 1913, was for Britons to become “the owners, or at any rate, the controllers at the source of at least a proportion of the supply of natural oil which we require.” Spurred by the Admiralty, the U.K. soon bought 51 percent of what is now British Petroleum, which had rights to oil “at the source”: Iran (then known as Persia). The concessions’ terms were so unpopular in Iran that they helped spark a revolution. London worked to suppress it. Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

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What If We Never Run Out of Oil?

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How Shutterfly and Other Social Sites Leave Your Kids Vulnerable to Hackers

by Cynthia Trevino Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This spring, with millions of kids across the United States participating in sports leagues and other activities, coaches and harried parents are turning to social sharing websites to keep everything running smoothly. The most popular option is Shutterfly, which boasted around 5 million visitors per month as of March 2012. Shutterfly’s free “Team” service allows users (which includes anyone over 13) to upload photos of kids, home addresses, emails, gender information, phone numbers, school names, jersey numbers, and game schedules—all in one place. The American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) has a partnership with Shutterfly, and coaches actively encourage parents and coaches from over 50,000 soccer teams to utilize the service.

But there’s a catch: Even though Shutterfly’s privacy policy claims that the whole site is protected with SSL—a strong form of Internet security used to prevent websites from being hacked into—it isn’t actually using the encryption for much of the website, including the team pages that contain detailed information on the kids. While plenty of sites across the web don’t use this extra security, it’s more worrisome for a large social sharing site not to do so, especially one that features kids’ sensitive data. (Facebook, Twitter, and Google all use SSL, as do banks and many sites that conduct credit card transactions.)

Emails from representatives for Shutterfly, obtained by Mother Jones, show that the photo-sharing company has been aware of the problem for at least six months, but hasn’t taken action to fix it, nor asked users to remove their kids’ information from the site. That means that sensitive information about children can be easily obtained by anyone with basic tech skills, a quick download of a program called “Cookie Cadger,” and a computer with the right equipment.

“I was an AYSO coach for my younger son last fall, and I went to a coach training session where I was given a flyer about how to set up a Shutterfly account for my team,” says Tony Porterfield, who is also a technical lead engineer for Cisco in Los Altos, California. “So I went on, I set up a roster, and then I realized right away that there was no SSL security. I couldn’t believe it. I thought: ‘We’re protecting our credit cards, but we’re not protecting our kids?'”â&#128;&#139;

Eteamz, which claimed “at least several million members” as of 2008, is another social sharing site catering to youth sports teams that doesn’t use SSL across its entire site, also in apparent contradiction to its privacy policy. And TeamSnap, which has about 2 million users, two thirds of which are children, didn’t use SSL across much of its website until being contacted by Mother Jones on May 2. At that point the company moved swiftly to encrypt most pages containing sensitive personal information, though some pages on the site remain vulnerable.

As you’ll see in our following video demo, Porterfield used a computer to set up fake accounts on these websites. Then, with very little technical know-how needed, Porterfield was able to use another computer to download a program called Cookie Cadger and hack into these fake pages with just a few keystrokes. He was able to view and tamper with hypothetically sensitive information—such as home addresses and team schedules—as well as add his email to the team mailing lists to get updates on the whereabouts of the kids. (We’ve blurred and left out key steps in this process in the video.)

“We are aware of this issue and are actively working on a technology solution,” says Gretchen Sloan, a spokesperson for Shutterfly. “In the meantime, we recommend users avoid sending or receiving sensitive information over unsecured Wi-Fi networks.”

Dave DuPont, a spokesman for TeamSnap, said: “The security of any computer system hinges not on any single tool or element, but on a systemic approach to protecting all data, which we steadfastly employ. We’ve since expanded SSL encryption to the Roster and Photo pages, and it is a solid complement to TeamSnap data security strategy.”

A spokesperson for Eteamz declined to comment.

To understand how easy it is to break into a website without SSL security, it helps to know what SSL is. SSL (which stands for Secure Sockets Layer) is protocol that provides assurance that a site is legitimate, that the connection to the site hasn’t been modified by a hacker, and that no one is intercepting information flowing between the user and the site. Secure website addresses will start with “https” instead of “http.” When a website doesn’t use SSL, cookies—the small pieces of data that store your username and password—are not secure and can easily be obtained by a hacker, whose computer can “grab” the cookies over an open wi-fi network.

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How Shutterfly and Other Social Sites Leave Your Kids Vulnerable to Hackers

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Lethal Battlefield Robots: Sci-Fi or The Future of War?

by gammak Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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“We are not talking about things that will look like an army of Terminators,” Steve Goose, a spokesman for the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, tells me. “Stealth bombers and armored vehicles—not Terminators.” Goose, the director of Human Rights Watch’s arms division, has been working with activists and other experts to demand an international ban on robotic military weapons capable of eliminating targets without the aid of human interaction or intervention, i.e., killer robots.

The bluntly titled campaign, which at sounds like something from a Michael Bay flick or Austin Powers, involves nine organizations, including the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. The campaign is spearheading a preemptive push against efforts to develop and potentially deploy fully autonomous killer robots—a form of hi-tech weaponry that doesn’t actually exist yet.

“I’m not against autonomous robots—my vacuum is an autonomous robot,” says Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield and chair of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (and a fixture on British television). “We are simply calling for a prohibition on the kill function on such robots. A robot doesn’t have moral agency, and can’t be held accountable for crimes. There’s no way to punish a robot.”

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Lethal Battlefield Robots: Sci-Fi or The Future of War?

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Yes, People Are Giving Their Pets Medical Marijuana

by DenaeTina858 Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Is it ever a good idea to get your dog or cat stoned? California veterinarian Doug Kramer says the answer depends on whether your pet could be classified as a medical marijuana patient.

“I do think there are therapeutic benefits to it,” says Kramer, who some years ago found that his homemade pot tinctures helped his own dog, a husky named Nikita, fight pain and regain her appetite after she came down with cancer.

Despite the spread of medical pot laws around the country, marijuana still remains taboo within the veterinary establishment; its medical journals won’t publish anything about it, and Kramer is one of the few veterinarians even willing to discuss using medical marijuana for pets. He points out that a slew of medical studies on the effects of pot have relied on rats and dogs as substitutes for humans, suggesting that “mammals have the same cannabinoid receptors as humans do” and “would benefit in the same ways.”

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Yes, People Are Giving Their Pets Medical Marijuana

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This Is Why Michael Bay Gets To Keep On Making Movies

by johnsmith2345as Posted on May 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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Michael Bay is one of the most intensely reviled filmmakers of the past 30 years.

“The crassest hack in the business,” Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers—perhaps Bay’s least generous critic—said of the director after watching 2003’s Bad Boys II. “Is Michael Bay the Devil?” an Entertainment Weekly headline read in 1998. South Park co-creator Trey Parker wrote an entire love song for Team America: World Police about how much he thinks Michael Bay is terrible.

Bay has been nominated for four different “Worst Director” Golden Raspberry Awards—a near-record. “Michael Bay is quite the perennial!” says John Wilson, founder of the Golden Raspberry Awards. “I don’t think he’s an adult filmmaker. He has this tendency to revert to the model of, ‘It’s Been 7 Minutes, Something Has To Blow Up Now.'”

This near-constant stream of criticism and condemnation of which the director is fully aware.

And he insists he couldn’t possibly care less about it.

“I really, really don’t care,” Bay tells me, calling from Los Angeles. “For instance, you look at the box-office returns: Break it down, and you see that 120 million people went to see Transformers 3. So, you know, 500 critics are not going to take the fun out of it for me. I make movies for people. I make movies for audiences to enjoy. A few sour apples are not going to spoil my fun.”

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This Is Why Michael Bay Gets To Keep On Making Movies

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Why Darrell Issa Should Hold Hearings on Space Aliens

by Hadwin Partize Posted on May 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Roscoe Bartlett is pissed.

“It’s outrageous!” thunders the recently retired 10-term Republican congressman from Maryland. “It’s outrageous!”

The source of his ire is a stack of newspaper clippings about 20 feet away from where he’s standing in the wood-paneled ballroom of National Press Club in downtown DC. For the last three days, Bartlett and five other retired members of Congress have been holding hearings on the “truth embargo”—that is, the government’s decades-long silence on unidentified flying objects. Next to the empty bottle of Honest Tea orange–mango Honest Ade, which he has been drinking out of a wine glass, Bartlett has a pile of stories from mainstream news sources that have dismissed the privately organized hearings. On top is a New York Daily News story featuring a photo of a woman with a headband featuring a “third eye” that, she maintains, allows her to contact beings in other dimensions. (It includes this caption: “Ex-Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (center) and ex-Sen. Mike Gravel (right) listen to testimony without cracking a smile.”)

The hearings are being sponsored by the Paradigm Research Group, the nation’s only organization dedicated to lobbying Washington on UFO disclosure. Its president, Stephen Bassett, is a full-time lobbyist on this front.

(MoJo readers might remember Bassett for his theory that alien technology recovered at Roswell holds the secret to stopping climate change, and for his endorsement of the Exopolitics Institute, which contends that the Iraq War was a ruse to recover an ancient inter-stellar portal that had been buried in Mesopotamia.)

In addition to Bartlett, Bassett recruited former Reps. Carolyn Kilpatrick (D-Mich.), Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.), Darlene Hooley (D-Ore.), Merrill Cook (R-Utah), and ex-Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) to come to DC to hear testimony about aliens.

Bassett doesn’t have much influence in Congress, but his organization apparently does have some money. The former members will receive $20,000 apiece for five days work.

“It helped,” Woolsey says, of the honorarium. “It was nice, and I think…let’s put it that way.” As she puts maintains, it’s standard operating procedure for retired politicians to make money on the speaking circuit; learning about UFOs is kind of like getting paid to speak to a trade association. Cook says the money was a big part of Bassett’s pitch, but it’s not why he’s here. “Even though the fee was offered up first thing, that still didn’t convince me,” the barrel-chested former talk radio host says. “It really didn’t.” Kilpatrick called the honorarium “miniscule,” adding, “And I’m appalled that someone would even raise that.” Bartlett is likewise appalled that anyone would associate his participation in the hearings with the appearance fee. “It’s an insult to infer that that’s why I’m here.” Hooley insists she’s actually losing money by taking a week off from her consulting firm.

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Why Darrell Issa Should Hold Hearings on Space Aliens

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