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Northern Canada is On Fire, And It’s Making Global Warming Worse

by yiszkj53 Posted on July 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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This article originally appeared at Climate Central and is reproduced here with permission.

For the past few weeks, dry and warm weather have fueled large forest fires across Canada’s remote Northwest Territories. The extent of those fires is well above average for the year to-date, and is in line with climate trends of more fires burning in the northern reaches of the globe.

Of the 186 wildfires in the Northwest Territories to-date this year, 156 of them are currently burning. That includes the Birch Creek Fire complex, which stretches over 250,000 acres.

The amount of acres burned in the Northwest Territories is six times greater than the 25-year average to-date according to data from the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center.

Boreal forests like those in the Northwest Territories are burning at rates “unprecedented” in the past 10,000 years according to the authors of a study put out last year. The northern reaches of the globe are warming at twice the rate as areas closer to the equator, and those hotter conditions are contributing to more widespread burns.

A satellite image of the smoke plume from fires burning in the Northwest Territories captured on July 7, 2014. NASA Earth Observatory

The combined boreal forests of Canada, Europe, Russia and Alaska, account for 30 percent of the world’s carbon stored in land, carbon that’s taken up to centuries to store. Forest fires like those currently raging in the Northwest Territories, as well as ones in 2012 and 2013 in Russia, can release that stored carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Warmer temperatures can in turn create a feedback loop, priming forests for wildfires that release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause more warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s landmark climate report released earlier this year indicates that for every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit rise in temperatures, wildfire activity is expected to double.

In addition, soot from forest fires can also darken ice in the Arctic and melt it faster. The 2012 fires in Siberia released so much soot that they helped create a shocking melt of Greenland’s ice sheet. Over the course of a few weeks in July that year, 95 percent of the surface melted. That could become a yearly occurrence by 2100 if temperatures continue to rise along with wildfire activity.

Forest in other parts of the globe are also feeling the effects of climate change. In the western U.S., wildfire season has lengthened by 75 days compared to 40 years ago. Additionally, rising temperatures and shrinking snowpack have helped drive an increase in the number of large forest fires. In Australia, fire danger is also increasing, if not the total number of fires, due to a similar trend of hotter, dryer weather.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, the current Northwest Territories fires have been fueled by hot and dry weather. Yellowknife’s June high temperatures were 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit above normal highs while rainfall was only 15 percent of normal. Through July 15, high temperatures have been running 4 degrees Fahrenheit above July averages and the city has only seen 2 percent of its normal rainfall for the month. While these conditions can’t be tied specifically to climate change, they’re in line with those trends.

The fires have shut down parts of territory’s Highway 3, a main thoroughfare, and inundated Yellowknife with a thick haze of smoke and ash. The city’s 19,000 residents are also under a health warning. At points last week, the smoke plume was whisked south across the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan and even reaching the Dakotas, 2,000 miles away.

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Northern Canada is On Fire, And It’s Making Global Warming Worse

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How "Citizen Koch" Saw the Light of Day After Public TV Snubbed It

by KrystalMckenney Posted on July 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Oscar-nominated filmmakers Carl Deal and Tia Lessin were steeped in the production of a documentary on the influence of money in politics, but it wasn’t until funding for their project was unceremoniously yanked last year that the power of big donors truly hit home.

The pair had received a $150,000 commitment from the Independent Television Service (ITVS), a Corporation for Public Broadcasting-funded organization that bankrolls projects aired on PBS. They would later learn that their film, Citizen Koch, which explores the post-Citizen United political landscape and the rise of the tea party, had touched a nerve among public television officials worried about angering a generous benefactor, David Koch, who served on the boards of Boston’s WGBH and New York City’s WNET. In the fall of 2012, PBS had aired Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream, which featured a highly unflattering portrait of the billionaire, including an interview with a former doorman at Koch’s elite Manhattan apartment building who singled him out as its most miserly resident. Public television officials were sensitive about offending Koch again.

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How "Citizen Koch" Saw the Light of Day After Public TV Snubbed It

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Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

by Kandace86G Posted on July 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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At exactly 10 a.m. on Monday, hundreds of school cafeteria professionals ran hooting and clapping down an escalator into an exhibition hall that looked like a cross between a mall food court and the set of Barney. Pharrell blared over loudspeakers. The Pillsbury Doughboy was on hand for photo ops, as was Chester the Cheetah (the Cheetos mascot) and a dancing corn dog on a stick. Attendees queued up to be contestants in a quiz show called “Do You Eat Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” and flocked toward trays groaning with every kind of kid food one could imagine: tater tots, PB&Js with crusts pre-removed, toaster waffles with built-in syrup, and endless variations on the theme of breaded poultry: chicken tenders, chicken bites, chicken rings, chicken patties, and of course chicken nuggets.

I was at the annual conference of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), the professional group that represents the nation’s 55,000 school food workers, and the biggest draw of the event—the exhibition hall—had just opened for business. More than 400 vendors vied for the attention of the conference’s 6,500 attendees, who had descended on the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center with one main goal: to find new foods to serve at their schools.

Many of the vendors were household names: Sara Lee, Kraft, Perdue, Uno, and Pizza Hut, to name a few. Among the corporate sponsors who collectively put up about $200,000 to help stage the affair were Domino’s Pizza, PepsiCo, Tyson, General Mills, and AdvancePierre Foods, which bills itself as “the No. 1 provider of fully-cooked protein and assembled sandwiches to school systems across the country.”

The Pizza Hut booth. Kiera Butler

To be sure, you won’t find most of the items on exhibit in supermarkets or restaurants. That’s because they are specially made to conform to the new federal school nutrition standards, some of which took effect July 1. There are new fruit and vegetable requirements; limits on calories, sodium, and saturated fats; and a mandate that more than half of the grains in products be whole grains. The rules—which I’ll cover in more detail in a subsequent post—are contentious, and the SNA opposes some of them. Politico‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reported that after First Lady Michelle Obama spoke out in favor of the rules, organizers told the White House that its senior advisor for nutrition policy, Sam Kass, would not be allowed to speak at the conference.

Politics aside, the vendors were armed with newly formulated products designed to conform to the rules. At the Kraft booth, a rep gushed about the virtues of the company’s new flavored cream cheeses, available in milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and caramel, “with half the calories of Nutella.” She told me they were designed as dips for fruits with the new produce rule in mind. “Nowadays, it’s the only way to get kids to eat anything that’s good for them,” she said.

The Smuckers “Uncrustables” mascot and his disaffected handler.

Indeed, the exhibitors’ guiding principle seemed to be something like: “Whatever you do, don’t tell them it’s healthy.” I watched as a Sara Lee rep promised a cafeteria director from Louisiana that her students wouldn’t be able to detect the whole-grain flour in her company’s chocolate muffin. The PepsiCo booth stocked a flier (below) informing attendees that newly formulated Cheetos fit with the guidelines. When I sampled a vitamin-fortified, low-cal Slush Puppy, the rep asked me, “Doesn’t that taste just as good as a regular slushy?” (It didn’t.) A food service company rep promised me that his funnel cake was “plenty sweet,” even though it fit within the calorie limits. (It was.)

I picked up this flier from the PepsiCo booth.

While the exhibitors were eager to show off their products’ nutritional stats, few offered actual ingredients lists. When I asked the rep at the Uno pizza booth why ingredients weren’t included on his nutrition information sheet, he told me the list wouldn’t fit on the page.

“Don’t the school nutritionists ask you what’s in this?” I asked. Nope, he said. Most of them just wanted to know whether the product met the legal guidelines. He offered to email me the list later. When he did, I learned that Uno’s Whole Grain Low Sodium Sweet Potato Crust Pepperoni Pizza contained nearly 50 ingredients, including sodium nitrite, which has been linked to cancer. I also persuaded the Domino’s rep to email me a list of ingredients in his company’s specially formulated school pizza, SmartSlice. It was also nearly 50 items long, and included silicone dioxide, otherwise known as sand.

After wandering through most of the 180,000 square feet of exhibits, I came across an earnest gray-haired woman in the back of the cavernous room selling frozen “pulses”—mostly lentils and chickpeas—to stir into soups and sauces. I was the only one at her booth. Had she noticed that everyone seemed drawn to the big-name foods up front? She responded that she hoped attendees would consider fortifying their name-brand meals with some of her lentils. “If you add a pulse product to a potato salad, it steps up the nutrition,” she offered hopefully.

But the attendees would have to find her first, and that would be a tall order: Corporations such as PepsiCo and General Mills had rented out multiple exhibit spaces ($2,400 to $2,600 a pop) in the high-traffic front and central aisles of the exhibit floor. Some big booths even had café-style seating areas where attendees chatted as they gobbled up samples. “You have to go in the far corners to find the more interesting stuff,” says Steve Marinelli, who runs the food program for a rural Vermont school district and told me he was having trouble locating the wholesome foods he wanted. “Someone was selling this really cool hummus, but you really had to look hard to find it.”

The lentil lady didn’t stand a chance.

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Yes, Cheetos, Funnel Cake, and Domino’s Are Approved School Lunch Items

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This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

by NickolasPaz Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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Terry Dunn, a top Alabama utility regulator, is an EPA-bashing, fossil-fuel-boosting, dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Or so he thought. But last year, he tried to convince his colleagues on the three-member Alabama Public Service Commission to discuss lowering customer payments to Alabama Power, the state’s largest utility. Now he is the target of an unprecedented half-million dollar campaign, led by Alabama’s powerful coal lobby, to boot him out of office.

“I’ve been a delegate to the last three Republican presidential conventions,” Dunn says. “I’m about as Republican as my opponent—or more so. ‘Environmentalist’—in Alabama, that’s code to damage me. I’ve been fighting Environment Protection Agency regulation since the day I got into office.”

John Archibald, a political commentator for Al.com, agrees with Dunn’s self-assessment: “Dunn’s a good old boy. He asked hard questions, and kind of got punched for it.”

The energy industry’s chosen candidate is Chris “Chip” Beeker, a Republican challenging Dunn in the GOP primary. And there is no mistaking Beeker for an environmentalist: On his campaign website, Beeker claims the planet is cooling, not warming. “The so-called ‘climate change crisis’ is about as real as unicorns and little green men from Mars,” he says.

Beeker’s backers in Tuesday’s race include Drummond Co., a global coal giant headquartered in Birmingham, which has given him $50,000; R.E.M. Directional, a drilling company near Tuscaloosa that donated $20,000; and ENPAC, a political action committee connected to the Alabama Coal Association that gave him $38,000. Two trade groups, the Alabama Coal Association and Manufacture Alabama, have endorsed Beeker, and big-name Republicans, including former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, have hosted fundraisers for him.

Beeker was the leading vote-getter in the first round of the primary, which was held on June 3, taking 39 percent to Dunn’s 33 percent. A runoff, scheduled for Tuesday, will determine the winner, as there is no Democrat running for the seat.

Dunn’s troubles started in January 2013, when he proposed holding a formal meeting to examine Alabama Power’s rates. The utility, which has a monopoly on the Alabama grid, charges customers more and has larger profit margins than utilities in surrounding states.

“From that point on, Dunn was declared an environmental wacko—and there is a concerted effort to paint him that way,” Archibald says. “But he’s not a tree-hugger. Under normal circumstances, you’d consider him far to the right.”

Dunn had antagonized the coal industry before he called for the meeting, by pushing utilities to increase their use of natural gas, a cheaper alternative to coal, in order to bring down energy prices. But proposing talks about rate reductions escalated the dispute. Coal miners filed ethics complaints against Dunn’s staff, and critics slammed him as a Republican in Name Only and environmentalist. Dunn tells Mother Jones that a man who identified himself as a private investigator—Dunn never found out who employed him—followed his car home from a commission meeting and photographed his chief of staff at home.

Dunn’s colleagues issued fiery, public denunciations of his proposal to consider cutting rates. Twinkle Cavanaugh, the commission president, said talking about rate reductions would allow “environmental extremist groups” to “trot out their fancy San Francisco environmental lawyers and junk science hucksters to make what amounts to a legal, judicial case against coal production within our borders.” She said Dunn’s proposal was orchestrated by environmentalists “hiding behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz.”

The commission eventually held an informal meeting and approved changes to Alabama Power’s rate formula that Dunn denounced as weak.

To call Dunn’s proposal an attack on coal is preposterous, Archibald says—Alabama Power isn’t strictly a coal utility, and it imports a lot of coal from out-of-state. “But it seemed to work in getting the industry riled up,” he says. Utilities, such as Alabama Power, can’t spend money in Public Service Commission races. But energy wholesalers, including the companies lined up against Dunn, face no such restriction.

Dunn tells E & E News that some donors who previously supported him have abandoned him out of fear of industry backlash. He has not exactly made things easy on them: In February, he called for a bill to ban coal, gas, and electricity companies from donating to Public Service Commission candidates in future elections. The bill failed.

Alabama Power did not reply to requests for comment, but a spokesman previously told AL.com that the company had not become involved in the race. Beeker did not reply to messages left with his campaign and Beeker Catfish & Cattle Farms. Twinkle Cavanaugh, Drummond Company, Manufacture Alabama, and the Alabama Coal Association did not reply to requests for comment.

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This GOP Regulator Questioned Energy Companies—So They Spent Almost $500,000 to Defeat Him

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With the World Cup Over, What’s Next for Brazil?

by Benito46Kjksdbk Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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The most expensive World Cup ever has come and gone with a German victory and a Brazilian implosion. The hosts suffered an embarrassing two-game skid at the end of the tournament—losing by a combined 10-1 score in the semifinals and third-place game—leaving Seleção fans from Rio de Janeiro to Manaus longing for the days of jogo bonito.

But as Slate‘s Joshua Keating pointed out, they also might be ready for change at the top. During Brazil’s historic 7-1 loss to Germany on Tuesday, fans reportedly started an obscene anti-Dilma Rousseff chant; the president decided to stop attending games after enduring taunts in the national team’s opener against Croatia. Meanwhile, the government crackdown on Cup protests recommenced on Saturday, when some 17 people were arrested in advance of the final.

With all the tensions surrounding the World Cup and the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics, I reached out to Juliana Barbassa, a former Rio-based Associated Press reporter. Barbassa is now finishing up a book about the upheaval in Brazilian society that led to last year’s national protests and today’s lingering violence. We talked about the country’s growing middle class, soccer’s effect on the national psyche, and the post-World Cup/pre-Olympics political dynamic:

Mother Jones: How did you come to this topic?

Juliana Barbassa: My whole family is from Brazil. I ended up in the US because of my father’s work, and ended up going to college and graduate school and becoming a journalist there. Then I had this chance to come here as the AP’s correspondent in Rio, and I started thinking about this. In 2009-10, Rio had just gotten the Olympics. It already had the hosting of the World Cup up its sleeve, and growth was tremendous. It seemed like Brazil and Rio were on everyone’s radar.

Having known Brazil and Rio in the ’80s and ’90s, post-transition-to-democracy when the economy was in the dumps—hyperinflation, Brazilians leaving Brazil for the first time—I had some real questions about whether what was happening now was addressing these inequalities that had hamstrung the country. So I wanted to spend time with the people who, because of their jobs or where they lived or who they are, were at the nexus of some particular aspect of this change.

Once I started going through the process, I started to feel like the really important change that was happening here was happening in the middle class and the lower middle class. Yes, there are these Brazillionaires who have more money than they’ve ever had before and go on mega shopping sprees in New York. But we’ve always had the hyperrich. It felt like the real shift was happening among the lower socioeconomic classes.

MJ: What’s most notable?

JB: There’s a visible reduction in punch-in-the-gut poverty. People aren’t hungry in the same way that they were. This new middle-class thing is very real, and you see it in things like the number of adults wearing braces. It’s shocking. Also, the number of first-time Brazilian fliers—people who could never afford an air ticket. At the same time, part of what’s interesting is a sense of affluence that’s kind of based on stuff. Some of that’s access to food and basic needs, but also cellphones, credit cards, cars—all those things are selling like they never have before.

But you can have the stuff of the middle class and still lead a life that lacks a lot of the things that the middle class expect, like access to good education, decent transportation, sewage treatment, basic things like that. The rest of the services and rights and expectations haven’t been met yet.

MJ: What role did this group play in the protests we saw last year?

JB: The protests were very heterogeneous: people from all over, all walks of life, a lot of university-educated people, some of this new middle class. But these protests were sparked by a revolt over an increase in the bus fare of 10 cents American—a wealthy person isn’t going protest over that. The other demands they were making I see as generally very middle-class demands: A lot of the signs read things like “I want FIFA-quality schools,” “I want FIFA-quality hospitals,” “If my kid gets sick, I can’t take him to a stadium.”

And also the next step—a government that pays attention to the needs of the population and tries to meet them instead of putting on these big events that people were starting to feel maybe detract attention from the things that are really necessary, a government that’s less corrupt, these kinds of things. These are demands of a growing middle class that’s finding its voice.

MJ: Do people think of the World Cup and Olympics megaprojects as separate phenomena?

JB: I think most Brazilians have been thinking of them as one. Also, because of the way that projects have been hooked onto this event and that event, it isn’t necessarily clear. Here in Rio it doesn’t make sense. For one of the World Cup projects, one of the big deliverables was this transit route that was supposed to go from the airport to the far west. The far west is where we’re going to have a lot of the Olympic installation. There’s nothing related to the World Cup. So why is this rapid transit route part of the World Cup? Who knows. People didn’t really have a sense of what it would cost or what it would mean until we started to get close to the World Cup. I think it will be the same for the Olympics.

MJ: After all of the buildup, what was it like once the World Cup actually got here?

JB: Just before it started there was a lot of tension in the air. There was a poll that said the majority of Brazilians did not think that this was a positive thing for Brazil. There was a bit of grumpiness. There was basically like a holding back that is absolutely not the way that Brazil usually approaches the World Cup. So there were a lot of questions about how people would react when it started. What if Brazil loses? Will there be a big explosion of protests again? But there hasn’t.

I think a lot of people were really turned off by how violent these protests have been: violence by the police, which is heavily armed in these sort of Robocop outfits—full body armor, massive weapons, very ready with the pepper spray and stun grenades and things like that—and then these black blocs: people who use these violent tactics. I don’t think there is sense that it’s all forgotten and over. President Dilma Rousseff’s approval ratings are very low. I just don’t think that it’s manifesting as an anti-World Cup feeling. People are separating those things.

I feel like Brazilians used to identify with soccer. It was Brazil’s face abroad. Our national team, our biggest players, Pele and all that. There’s a Brazilian writer, Nelson Rodriguez, who was a real chronicler of soccer, who once said, “The national team was the nation in cleats.” It was that for a very long time. Ironically, now that the World Cup is here and the world is seeing Brazil and seeing the good and the bad, there is a little bit of a separation there. Brazilians by and large love their soccer, love their national team, but they don’t feel like either of them represents them—or that everything depends on whether Brazil wins or loses on the pitch.

MJ: Do you think the protests will return, and if so, will they be as large as last year? And what role will all of this play at the polls?

JB: It’s very unpredictable. Last year, nobody saw them coming. I do think people are more awake and aware about their rights and what’s owed to them. I don’t know if they’re unhappy enough to change it, but I do think that the country that we’ll have in 2016 is going to depend on how Brazilians process this change and how they see themselves, and the economic moment. We’re definitely post-boom. We haven’t grown since 2010. Jobs are still plentiful. Inflation is rising, but it’s not out of control. If those numbers start to change and people start to feel like they’re going to the supermarket and they can’t get as much as they used to—if it starts hitting people in the areas where it matters—I think that we might see more unrest.

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With the World Cup Over, What’s Next for Brazil?

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

by JannNQLGzck Posted on July 14, 2014

Mother Jones

As part of his proposal for dealing with the crisis of child migrants crossing the border, President Obama has asked Congress for $3.7 billion in funding that would be used for, among other things, hiring more judges for the nation’s 59 immigration courts. Those courts have been overwhelmed by the influx of kids coming to the United States without parents or other relatives. But they were overwhelmed even before the children started showing up, in large part because of Republicans’ unwillingness to fund and staff them like other federal courts.

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


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


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


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


“In Texas, We Don’t Turn Our Back on Children”


Mexican Government: Freight Trains Are Now Off-Limits to Central American Migrants

For years, since the second Bush administration radically stepped up, and Obama continued, deportation efforts targeted at undocumented immigrants, advocates have been begging Congress to beef up the funding for the courts that must process those new cases. As far back as 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recognized that the immigration courts were woefully understaffed to process a backlog of cases that back then stood at 169,000. Gonzales called for more funding to increase resources for the courts, including adding more 40 judges.

But then his office proceeded to attempt to fill those jobs (and others at the Department of Justice) with political hacks who couldn’t make it through the Senate confirmation process to land on a regular federal court. (Immigration courts fall under the jurisdiction of the DOJ, and their judges don’t require Senate confirmation.) One example: Carey Holliday, a Louisiana delegate to the 2004 GOP convention who made headlines for trash-talking former Mother Jones editor Michael Moore, who was at the convention filing dispatches for USA Today.

Other Bush appointees had a distinctly pro-government bias. One judge, Thomas Roepke, appointed to a court in El Paso, Texas, in 2005, denied fully 96.3 percent of all asylum cases that came before him between 2007 and 2012, according to records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

Before he got very far with the immigration judge hiring spree, Gonzales resigned under fire for politicizing hiring at the DOJ, and by 2008, the immigration courts had eight fewer judges than when Gonzales launched his clarion call.

Meanwhile, while guys like Holliday were taking slots on the immigration bench, poor working conditions, crushing caseloads, and the overly politicized nature of the appointment process left the courts hemorrhaging other judges during the Bush administration. By the time Obama took office, immigration courts had a vacancy rate that reached 1 in 6 judgeships. The new Obama administration began hiring judges furiously, eventually adding an additional 44 new bodies to the immigration bench. Even so, his concurrent move to step up border enforcement meant that the deportation caseloads were growing even faster:

Immigration judges can expect to handle 1,500 cases at any given time. By comparison, Article I federal district judges handle about 440 cases, and they get several law clerks to help manage the load. Immigration judges have to share a single clerk with two or three other judges. (For more, see Casey Miner’s “Judges on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” from our November/December 2010 issue.) The lack of staffing creates an irony that seems to be lost on the current Congress: Too few judges means that people with strong cases languish for years waiting for them to get resolved, while people with weak cases who should probably be sent home quickly get to stay in the United States a few years waiting for a decision.

That dynamic is only getting compounded with the recent influx of unaccompanied juveniles, who usually don’t have lawyers to represent them in court. “It’s ironic and counterintuitive that we should not give enough money to the system to allow it to work more quickly,” says Dana Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

In 2010, the American Bar Association called on Congress and the White House to immediately initiate the hiring of at least 100 new judges to help relieve the existing crisis in the courts. Instead, Congress failed to deal with the budget of any agency, sequestration happened, and the Justice Department started a hiring freeze that didn’t end until December 2013, even though at least 100 sitting immigration judges are eligible to retire this year. Meanwhile, the comprehensive immigration bill passed in the Senate last year would have added 225 new judges to the immigration courts over three years (along with clerks and support staff), but Republicans killed the bill in the House.

Today, there are 243 judges—just 13 more than in 2006 and 21 fewer than at the end of 2012—and more than 30 vacancies the government is trying to fill. All this despite the fact that the immigration court backlog has increased nearly 120 percent since 2006. And that was before the kids started coming. Last week, TRAC reported that the official immigration court backlog in June hit 375,503, up by 50,000 since the start of 2013. Among the languishing cases: more than 12,000 kids each from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. All told, more than 40,000 cases in the current court backlog involve children, and the numbers are growing. The average time an immigration case has been pending is now up to 587 days:

Marks says the long-running court crisis has hindered judges’ ability to respond to what’s happening with the onslaught of unaccompanied kids. “The whole problem with this surge,” she says, “is that it has occurred on top of a crisis in the court that no one was talking about.”

Obama is trying to change that equation. His budget request would add 40 new judges to the 35 he has already requested for next year, with the goal of creating enough capacity to handle an additional 55,000 to 75,000 cases a year. But the disconnect between what the country spends apprehending and detaining undocumented immigrants and what it spends processing them is still stark. While Obama has requested an additional $64 million to fund the immigration courts, that figure is dwarfed by the $1.5 billion he requested for border security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In the end, the extra enforcement funding is likely to generate so many new cases that any judges added to the court will be just as backlogged as the ones there now, offering little hope of speeding up the process for all those kids currently languishing in border detention centers.

For more of Mother Jones‘ reporting on unaccompanied child migrants, see all of our latest coverage here.

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

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Designer Butterflies, See-Through Frogs, Giant Neural Networks…and Other Works of Modern Art

by aleidasharrington Posted on July 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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American artist Deborah Aschheim makes the “invisible visible”: In one series of works, she created room-size installations that allowed art lovers to walk through a nervous system, with each subsequent installation becoming “smarter” than the previous one. The sixth and final piece in the series was the most like a real brain—using motion sensors, closed circuit TVs and baby monitors, the network responded to the movement of its audience, capturing their actions and encoding “experiences” into “memories.” (For images of the fourth installation in the series, see below.)

Ascheim’s work calls into question an idea that was once widely accepted: That no two disciplines differ more greatly than science and art. The scientifically trained British novelist C.P. Snow crystallized this notion in his famed 1959 lecture about the “two cultures.” Scientists and those in the humanities, Snow said, just couldn’t communicate.

But to hear Arthur I. Miller tell it, that’s an antiquated point of view. Miller is a physics Ph.D., a science historian, and a philosopher—and an art aficionado to boot. And in his new book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, he makes the case for the existence of a “third culture” that, today, is mashing together art, science, and technology into one big domain. “There are still people who think science is science, and art is art,” says Miller on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “But that is very far from the situation because it is very, very common and meaningful today for artists to indulge in science and technology in doing their work.”

Miller’s argument is supported not only by the myriad examples of artists who, like Aschheim, are highly reliant on science, but also by the surprising symmetries between how artists and scientists go about their work. One of his most important points: Scientists not only appreciate, but are in some cases driven by, aesthetic considerations. And artists don’t just pull ideas out of their imaginations: They engage in detailed work that often resembles scientific research.

“There’s aesthetics in biology: form is beautiful in biology, but it’s form as adapted to nature,” says Miller. “And when one gets into the physical sciences, one can even quantify aesthetics even more, in that, for example, we’ve heard the phrase, ‘This is a beautiful equation.'” Einstein, famously, put it like this: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

At the frontier of this new culture, there is a blossoming of workshops and events in which artists and scientists are thrown together into a room and forced to interact. The thinking is that cross-pollination will occur and new creative ideas will emerge. The CERN laboratory, home to the Large Hadron Collider, even has an artist in residency program.

Here are five artists who are using cutting edge science and technology to change the landscape of contemporary art:

Deborah Aschheim—Neural Architecture. Aschheim‘s installations are inspired by her personal connection to neurological disorders; her focus has been on investigating memory, both autobiographical and collective—in part because memory disorders like Alzheimer’s disease run in her family. She’s worked as an artist-in-residence at several academic institutions, and she immerses herself into the science behind her pieces. (At the University of California, San Francisco, she and I worked together on a piece that explored the subjectivity of neuroimaging.)

Panopticon (neural architecture no. 4). Deborah Aschheim

In the work pictured here, entitled Panopticon, Ascheim used 260 light cells on motion sensors, 23 pocket televisions, 3 DVDs, 3 closed circuit TV cameras, 14 nanny cams, and 4,000 feet of clear PVC tubing to create a series of “cells” in a type of neural network. This work was the fourth installment in her Neural Architecture series, in which each subsequent piece was “smarter” than the previous one—in essence, the architecture was “learning.” As people walked through the Panopticon installation, they triggered motion sensors that altered which cells were “on,” as lights in the nodes would turn on and off depending on the signal from the sensors. (See a video here.) Then, monitors inside the piece screened video footage from external galleries at the college, as well as a live feed of viewers from embedded spy cameras. This installation was not only responsive, it could also “remember”: monitors played short animated “memories” from the previous installation.

Here’s a close-up of the Panopticon:

Marta de Menezes—Modified Butterflies. Menezes creates “designer” butterflies: Not through genetic engineering, but by “interfering with the normal development of the wing, inducing the development of a new pattern never seen before in nature.” Her work of “art,” then, is actually the live animal that was altered by her vision. For examples of these butterflies see the lead image above, or below:

Modified butterfly. Marta de Menezes.

“They’re not genetically modified at all,” explains Miller of Menezes’ butterflies. “That’s the big thing about them. Menezes takes a hot needle and probes into the caterpillar. And out comes butterflies with asymmetrical wings.” Here’s Menezes’s description of her work:

These wings are an example of something simultaneously natural, but resulting from human intervention. The artistic intervention leaves the butterfly genes unchanged. Thus, the new patterns are not transmitted to the offspring of the modified butterflies. The new patterns are something that never existed before in nature, and that rapidly disappear from nature not to be seen again. These artworks literally live and die. They are an example of art with a lifespan—the lifespan of a butterfly. They are an example of something that is simultaneously art and life.

Brandon Ballengée—Ecological Art. Ballengée is an artist, activist and ecological researcher. He participates in biology field studies, works in a lab and uses his art to document the changes that are happening in various ecosystems. His artistic products put his biological specimens on display, and his most common subjects are frogs, toads and salamanders. In his book, Miller quotes Ballengée as saying that “amphibians are a ‘sentinel’ species, the environmental ‘canaries in the coal mine.'”

In some pieces, like the one pictured here, Ballengée uses biological technology to “clear and stain” a specimen, making it transparent and highlighting certain parts. DFA186:Hades, below, was created using more than 10 different chemicals and dyes.

Hades. Brandon Ballengee

According to Ballengée’s website, his work is designed to “re-examine the context of the art object from a static form (implying rationality and control) into a more organic structure reflecting the inherent chaos found within evolutionary processes, biological systems and nature herself.”

Mark Ackerley—DNA Melody. Ackerley is a composer and former employee of 23andMe, a biotech company that pulls genetic information out of a sample of your spit and helps you research your ancestry. While working at 23andMe, Ackerley developed an algorithm that translated snippets of DNA into music. Using four different musical parameters—rhythm, pitch, timbre and key signature—he turned genes into melodies. To hear an excerpt of a DNA melody played by a string quartet, click here.

Ken Perlin—Perlin Noise. At NYU’s Media Research Lab, Perlin invented a new way of making animation more life-like. His technique, called Perlin Noise, is used by animators world-wide, including in Pixar movies. He’s even won an Academy Award for his work. “Which is something pretty good for somebody who has an undergraduate degree in physics and a graduate degree in computer science,” comments Miller.

Watch this video to see how Pixar used mathematics and Perlin Noise to create life-like moss in the film Brave:

“When I asked Perlin what he considers himself to be—either an artist or a scientist—he said neither,” recalls Miller. Rather, Perlin identifies himself simply as “a researcher.”

“In other words,” argues Miller, “the labels ‘artist’ and ‘scientist’ are becoming increasingly irrelevant.”

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a short discussion with Joe Hanson, writer and host of the “It’s Okay to Be Smart” video series, about the science of Game of Thrones, what blowing on Nintendo cartridges has to do with your cognitive biases, new evidence disproving Bigfoot, the relationship between seeing UFOs and alcohol consumption, why men born in winter are more likely to be left-handed…and more.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Designer Butterflies, See-Through Frogs, Giant Neural Networks…and Other Works of Modern Art

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The Polar Vortex Is Coming Back Next Week

by KatherineUbc Posted on July 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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

Remember the polar vortex? Weather so cold that boiling water froze in midair?

Well buckle up, America. We’re getting another dose of polar air next week, and just in time for what is normally the hottest week of the year.

While next week’s mid-summer cold snap won’t send you rushing for the nearest space heater, its origins are similar to the cold snaps that defined the brutal winter just past.

The same basic large-scale weather pattern has been settled in over North America for months now, and it even has a name: the ridiculously resilient ridge. Coupled with the occasional cut-off low pressure center dawdling over the Great Lakes region (next week’s will camp out over Quebec), it’s been a recipe for extreme warmth on the West Coast and colder than average weather out East. On the west side of the Rockies, tropical Pacific air gets funneled northward from around Hawaii toward Alaska while California dries out and roasts; on the other side, cold air from the Yukon cascades southward toward the Midwest and East Coast.

Winter 2013-14: The result of multiple polar vortexes NOAA National Climatic Data Center

But before I go any further: North America’s polar vortex-filled winter was almost certainly overhyped. I’ll probably get loads of hate mail from fellow meteorologists for even invoking it here—and in a strict sense, they’re right. The polar vortex isn’t a new phenomenon, nor was it behind every cold snap of the past six months. According to NOAA, while last winter was below average (by one degree Fahrenheit), winters are warming for virtually every corner of the continental United States (save one corner of southwest Louisiana).

This winter was an aberration, not the rule—a dip in the long-term trend of global warming. Further proof: the first five months of 2014 were collectively the fifth warmest such period globally since records began. This winter was a temporary cold blip in a small corner of the Earth. We just happen to live there.

As for the polar vortex itself, its resonance within the American zeitgeist is proof that sometimes it helps us cope to have something special to blame for all the crazy weather (even if it’s not always totally scientifically correct in popular usage). That’s OK. For the science purists, there’s a great explainer of the phenomenon by Weather Underground’s Jon Erdman and perhaps an even better one (with stunning visuals) by NASA’s Eric Fetzer. As crazy as it sounds, there’s even a line of scientific evidence that connects an increasing frequency of extreme weather events (like the cold snaps of earlier this year) to abnormal shifts in the jet stream caused by melting Arctic sea ice and global warming. It’s a hot topic of debate right now among climate scientists.

The forecast for mid-July: look familiar? NOAA Climate Prediction Center

As for next week’s weather, polar air will again be spilling southward from the Arctic Ocean. That’ll be good enough to convert what’s typically Chicago’s hottest week of the year to an unseasonably pleasant early Autumn-style respite that will have folks begging for more. Chicago’s forecast high of 72 degrees Fahrenheit next Wednesday is historically much more likely to happen on September 16th than July 16th.

Cooler than normal weather is expected across much of the eastern two-thirds of the country as well, with mild temperatures from Boston to New York City to Washington, though not nearly as dramatic as in the Midwest. All in all, you really can’t ask for much better weather than what’s on offer next week.

Though at some point, enough is enough. A reverse trajectory model shows the air supplying next week’s mid-summer Chicago cold snap is currently (as of Thursday) sitting over Canada’s far North. Let’s hope the atmosphere gets all this out of its system before December. But for now? Long live the polar vortex.

NOAA Air Resources Laboratory HYSPLIT model

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The Polar Vortex Is Coming Back Next Week

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Mitch McConnell Runs Away From Paul Ryan

by JoleneTKWwi Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Three years ago, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was a huge cheerleader for the controversial budget plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that would have partially privatized Medicare and slashed social spending programs. Now McConnell, who’s in a tough reelection fight, is backing away from his support and trying to suggest he was not an outright champion of this draconian budget measure.

In an ad released this week, McConnell’s Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, attacks the GOP senator for backing Ryan’s 2011 budget proposal, which would have essentially ended Medicare as a guaranteed federal program, slashed Medicaid, and repealed Obamacare. In the ad, an elderly Kentucky man named Don Disney asks why McConnell voted to raise his medical costs by thousands of dollars a year—referring to a provision in the Ryan budget that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would hike out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries by $6,000.

McConnell’s campaign fired back, pointing out that the senator did not vote for the proposal itself, but rather only voted in favor of bringing the measure to the Senate floor for a vote. “There is no way to speculate” what McConnell would have done regarding a final vote on the Ryan budget, his campaign insists.

But that’s cutting the legislative sausage rather thin. The vote on whether to bring the Ryan plan to the Senate floor for an up-or-down vote was the key vote—and McConnell voted in favor of the proposal. It was only because the majority Democrats blocked the bill from reaching a final vote that McConnell did not have a chance to officially vote for passage of the budget proposal. But McConnell himself bragged about having “voted” for the Ryan budget. And he repeatedly praised the Ryan plan and expressed support for the measure.

In a speech on the Senate floor in April 2011, McConnell called Ryan’s budget a “serious and detailed plan for getting our nation’s fiscal house in order.” He maintained that it would “strengthen the social safety net.”

That month, he also called Ryan’s budget “a serious, good-faith effort to do something good and necessary for the future of our nation and…for the good of the nation,” according to Congressional Quarterly.

In May 2011, McConnell, appearing on Fox News, vowed to vote for Ryan’s proposal. He said Ryan’s plan was “a very sensible way to go to try to save Medicare.”

Even though the Senate never held a final vote on the Ryan budget, McConnell’s backing for the plan—which included large tax cuts for the wealthy—was full-throated and unambiguous. “He’s probably relieved that it never came to a final vote,” says Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University.

In responding to the Grimes ad, McConnell’s campaign also took issue with the charge that he voted to raise medical costs for Kentucky seniors by $6,000 each. The campaign claimed that this figure is out of date because Ryan’s subsequent budget plans—which also were not passed by Congress—would raise Medicare beneficiaries’ out-of-pocket costs by much less. Yet Paul Van De Water, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, says that the Grimes campaign “accurately” cited what the 2011 plan would have done.

Ryan’s 2011 budget would have slashed Medicare by $389 billion by raising the eligibility age and partly privatizing the program, dramatically increasing costs for new retirees. Under the same plan, funding for Medicaid would have been slashed by 35 percent over 10 years. The proposal additionally would have ended Obamacare, preventing millions from obtaining affordable health insurance. At the time, Senate majority leader Harry Reid warned the Ryan budget “would be one of the worst things that could happen in this country if it went into effect.”

As the McConnell-Grimes race—one of the most closely watched Senate contests of the year—heats up, Grimes is attempting to tar McConnell with the extreme budget plan that he once embraced. McConnell, the veteran Capitol Hill wheeler-and-dealer, is trying to wiggle out of the trap through a legislative loophole—creating a false impression and distancing himself from his party’s policymaker-in-chief.

His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

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Mitch McConnell Runs Away From Paul Ryan

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Here’s How Obama Wants to Spend $3.7 Billion on the Child Migrant Crisis

by FernandSmith Posted on July 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, President Obama asked Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency supplemental appropriations to address the rapidly growing number of unaccompanied Central American children attempting to enter the United States. The Border Patrol apprehended 38,833 unaccompanied kids in fiscal year 2013, and it already has caught more than 52,000 in fiscal 2014.

More MoJo coverage of the surge of unaccompanied child migrants from Central America.


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


What’s Next for the Children We Deport?


This Is Where the Government Houses the Tens of Thousands of Kids Who Get Caught Crossing the Border


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


4 Reasons Why Border Agents Shouldn’t Get to Decide Whether Child Migrants Can Stay in the US

The requested appropriations include:

$1.8 billion to the HHS’s Administration for Children and Families: to provide more stable, cost-effective arrangements and medical care for unaccompanied children.
$1.1 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): for the detention, prosecution, and removal of undocumented families, as well as transportation costs for unaccompanied children.
$432 million to Customs and Border Protection: for operational costs, an expanded Border Enforcement Security Task Force, and increased air surveillance in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley.
$295 million to the State Department’s (and other international programs’) Economic Support Fund: for the repatriation and reintegration of deported migrants, and to address the root causes of migration in Central America.
$62 million to the Department of Justice: for additional immigration judges and legal representation for the children.

Notably, Obama’s letter to House Speaker John Boehner did not include a request to alter the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) of 2008. That law requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to turn over unaccompanied children from countries other than Canada and Mexico to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which temporarily houses them in shelters while it locates US-based family members or sponsors. (The kids are in removal proceedings throughout.)

Here’s the full letter:

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Emergency Supplemental Request to Congress (PDF)

Emergency Supplemental Request to Congress (Text)

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Here’s How Obama Wants to Spend $3.7 Billion on the Child Migrant Crisis

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