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5 Things You Need to Know About Obama’s NSA Proposal

by Neal75Njqh Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday, the White House released its proposal to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection program, which hoovers up the phone records of millions of Americans. Currently, the NSA stores Americans’ phone metadata (which doesn’t include the content of calls) for five years. Under the President’s new proposal, phone companies will instead be tasked with holding onto this data, which will they will store for 18 months. Additionally, the government would only be allowed to query these records if it gets approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, though the president’s plan includes an exemption for as-yet-unspecified “emergency” situations. Here are five more things you need to know about the President’s proposal:

1. It only addresses the bulk collection of phone records.

The collection of telephone records has gotten a lot of attention from Congress—but documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have revealed many other controversial surveillance programs. Last October, for instance, the Washington Post reported that the NSA had broken Google and Yahoo’s encryption and was siphoning millions of their users records into the agency’s data centers. In a press call on Thursday with civil liberties groups, privacy experts argued that President Obama should make additional reforms that address these other alleged surveillance programs. “Our phone records are sensitive, but so are our financial records, Internet information, email data,” said Michelle Richardson, the ACLU’s legislative counsel. “It reveals who we know, where we go, what we do, what we think and what we believe, and those sorts of records need just as much protection.”

2. Phone companies aren’t too psyched about Obama’s plan, so the administration might compensate them.

On Thursday, Verizon announced that it opposes aspects of the plan. “If Verizon receives a valid request for business records, we will respond in a timely way, but companies should not be required to create, analyze or retain records for reasons other than business purposes,” Randal Milch, Verizon’s general counsel and executive vice president for public policy, said in a statement. In a call with reporters on Thurday, White House officials emphasized that the administration has been meeting with phone companies to come up with a workable solution, which could potentially include compensating them for their efforts. “I certainly would envision, consistent with what the government does today with respect to compensating phone companies and others for their production of records in response to lawful court process, I think we would see a similar approach,” said a senior administration official.

3. The plan is still missing a lot of key details.

According to a press release issued by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York School of Law on Thursday, the Obama administration has yet to “identify the standard that the government must meet to obtain a court order, beyond a vague reference to ‘national security concerns.’ Nor does the fact sheet identify any limits on the government’s ability to keep and search the records it obtains, which will necessarily include large amounts of information about innocent Americans.” In the White House press, a reporter asked senior administration officials how long the NSA could keep querying data once it had obtained a court order. An official responded: “I’m not going to presuppose what that time period would be right now.”

4. Obama could end the program now if he wanted to, but he’s waiting for Congress to act.

President Obama could end the NSA’s bulk collection program without congressional approval, but he’s choosing not to. A senior White House official said on Thursday, “The President believes the government should no longer collect and hold the bulk telephone metadata. He’s also got a responsibility as commander-in-chief to ensure that we maintain the capabilities of this program, and he wants to see it done in a way that also responds to the concerns that have been identified and to create a program and have a discussion about it, and have legislation that would promote confidence in our intelligence-gathering activities.”

5. There are competing bills to end the program. Privacy advocates hate one of them.

On Thursday, privacy advocates took issue with the NSA reform bill introduced this week by members of the House intelligence committee. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), ends the bulk collection program, but doesn’t require strict judicial review before the NSA queries phone companies for their customers’ records. President Obama’s proposal, in contrast, does require this review. The ACLU’s Richardson notes that the Rogers-Ruppersberger plan would allow the FBI and other agencies to directly demand information from companies. “It’s not a fix, it’s not even a half-measure,” she said. Privacy advocates support the USA Freedom Act, introduced by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), which includes more civil liberties protections.

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5 Things You Need to Know About Obama’s NSA Proposal

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Scenes from the Postdocalypse

by SpencerGrady Posted on March 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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How do you become a scientist? Ask anyone in the profession and you’ll probably hear some version of the following: get a Bachelor’s of Science degree, work in a lab, get into a PhD program, publish some papers, get a good post-doctoral position, publish some more papers and then apply for a tenure-track job at a large university. It’s a long road—and you get to spend those 10 to 15 years as a poor graduate student or underpaid postdoc, while you watch your peers launch careers, start families, and contribute to their 401(k) plans.

And then comes the academic job market. According to Brandeis University biochemist Dr. Gregory Petsko, who recently chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee on the postdoctoral experience in the US, less than 20 percent of aspiring postdocs today get highly coveted jobs in academia. That’s less than one in five. Naturally, many more end up in industry, in government, and in many other sectors—but not the one they were trained for or probably hoping for. “We’re fond of saying that we should prepare people for alternative careers,” explains Pesko, “without realizing that we’re the alternative career.”

Ethan Perlstein was one of these postdocs—before he decided he’d had enough. He had gotten his Ph.D. at Harvard under Stuart Schreiber, the legendary chemist, and then gone on to a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship in genomics at Princeton. He’d published in top journals, like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Genetics. He’d put in 13 years. But that “came to a close at the end of 2012,” says Perlstein on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, “when I encountered what I have been calling the postdocalypse, which is this pretty bad job market for professionally trained Ph.Ds—life scientists, in particular.” After two years of searching for an assistant professorship, going up against an army of highly qualified, job-hungry scientists, he gave up.

But it wasn’t just the competition for jobs that deterred Perlstein. Once you land a tenure-track job, you often have to get a big government grant in order to actually get tenure. And those grants are becoming ever more competitive, meaning that young faculty members usually need to apply multiple times before securing one. That is, if they actually do get one before the university that employs them loses patience.

“I guess I just thought, well, I don’t want to keep waiting any more,” recalls Perlstein. “At the time I was 33, and thought, well, I’m also seeing the statistic that says that the average age at which an independent biomedical research gets their first big grant from the NIH is 43 or 42. And I just thought, ‘Another 10 years of just waiting around for my turn in line?'”

You’ve probably heard the claim that the United States needs to produce more scientists, like Perlstein, to remain competitive with up-and-coming science powerhouses like India and China. It is a familiar litany whenever we hear laments about American science and its disturbing habit of resting on its laurels. But what you rarely hear in this argument is the fact that we don’t have nearly enough jobs to put to work the scientists we currently have. “U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings,” writes Harvard researcher Michael Teitelbaum, “the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.”

Ethan Perlstein.

This situation is not new. Eight years ago, in 2006, George W. Bush’s National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni lamented that by denying young scientists the opportunity to try out their ideas, we’re in effect “eating our seed corn,” likening the situation to farmers who fail to prepare for the future. And that was before budget fights and sequestration dealt a further blow to the science funding stream that heavily influences whether or not our country can provide opportunities for its talented young researchers.

The life sciences, the field in which Perlstein works, are a case in point—and arguably the most challenging arena of all. According to the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients, between the years 1993 and 2010, the number of US biomedical scientists with Ph.Ds rose from 105,000 to 180,000, even as the percentage employed in academia decreased from 58 percent to 51 percent, and the number holding tenured or tenure-track academic jobs decreased from 35 percent to 26 percent. That, in a nutshell, is the postdocalpyse. (Note that the vast majority of these Ph.Ds do find jobs somewhere, but fewer and fewer find the sort of academic jobs for which the postdoctoral experience is designed to train them.)

The ultimate cause? Funding. “Obama put out the latest 2015 budget for NIH—flat again. It’s been $30 billion ever since I basically entered grad school,” says Perlstein. “I was in college in the late 90s, when the NIH budget was doubling. So I remember someone telling me for the first time, ‘They pay you to go to graduate school.'” The NIH itself recognizes that its own budget largely determines how many Ph.D. students in life sciences there are, because these students are supported by grants: training grants, fellowships, and research grants.

A doubling of the NIH budget from 1998 to 2003 created dramatic growth in the biomedical science field—positions, infrastructure, postdocs, and everything else. But that set many people up for a fall. As Science magazine reported in 2007, the doubling “provoked a massive expansion in biomedical research, and expectations of federal support surged to a level that could not be sustained when the budget stopped growing. The crash is hitting labs, careers, and the psyches of scientists with a vengeance.” How did that affect postdocs? You can see as much in this NIH figure, showing that as the agency’s budget doubled, the length of time spent as a postdoc decreased, but once the doubling ended, it shot up:

National Institutes of Health

That’s right: The Postdocalypse is partly the result of science funding policies put in place by our legislators, who love science until they don’t any more, who double budgets and then slow or freeze them.

So what do the more than 80 percent of postdocs who leave academia do? Some get jobs in industry, with large pharmaceutical companies or engineering firms. Some get MBAs or law degrees and use their scientific training to carve out a niche in a different industry. Some teach. Some write. Some few remain unemployed.

Perlstein did something radically different—something gutsy and surprising that has garnered him recent profiles in The Wall Street Journal and Science Careers. He decided to break from tradition and forge a new path: build, fund and run his own independent science lab. To become an “indie scientist.” To in effect hack the scientific system, work within it yet outside of it, and support himself through crowdfunding, a compelling social media presence, and, of course, good ideas.

He’s not just building a biotech startup or monetizing some scientific finding. He is using alternative revenue sources to fund basic research, hearkening back to the 19th century, when citizen-scientists usually had family money, a rich patron or a day job

Doing science outside of science these days is far from easy or simple. Just consider the fact that if you’re not part of a university, it is very hard to get your hands on the research papers that are the lifeblood of knowledge exchange. “I’m part of the pay-walled 99 percent, the masses who don’t actually get access to all these great journals,” says Perlstein.

Then there’s the growing costs of technology, with most scientific endeavors relying on very expensive equipment. A university department might be able to purchase a multi-million-dollar MRI machine, for example. But it’s a lot harder for an independent scientist to make that investment.

But Perstein has figured out a way to make it work. His independent research focuses on so-called “orphan diseases,” which the FDA defines as conditions that afflict fewer than 200,000 people in the US. The NIH estimates that there are more than 6,800 rare diseases, which in aggregate affect more than 25 million Americans. Perlstein’s focus on orphan diseases satisfies his passion for basic science—giving him the opportunity to make long-lasting contributions to our understanding of our bodies—while also having a clear application that makes the work fundable. You might think that biotech and pharmaceutical companies would have little incentive to develop drugs for these diseases because the market is small compared to ailments than affect millions of people, like diabetes or Alzheimer’s. But orphan diseases have other incentives for investors: premium drug pricing, protection from competition, and expedited development timelines.

And then, there are the rich patrons who want to see them cured. Perlstein now has to actively court them. Foundations or wealthy families with a stake in finding a rare-disease treatment are increasingly becoming important funders of research. Perhaps the best example is the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which committed $75 million dollars to the development of an innovative new CF treatment approved in 2012.

“I want to take the best elements of academia, the best elements of industry, try to make a business model that is sustainable, and then push forwards toward a real scientific objective,” says Perlsten. “I call it a rare disease moonshot.”

To do his work, Perlstein raises money through crowdfunding sites like Experiment.com, and rents his own lab space in a San Francisco incubator called QB3, which offers the “biotech equivalent of garages: small spaces for entrepreneurs to lay the foundations for companies that may spearhead new industries.” Organizations like QB3 are now partnering with major research universities to create innovation hubs. In these hubs, you can rent bench space or share costs of expensive equipment with other independent scientists or academics, without having to make multi-million dollar investments yourself. This strategy reduces waste—not every lab needs an expensive MRI machine. If you can simply rent some time on a machine to meet your needs, science becomes much cheaper.

So is Perlstein an anomaly, or is he the new face of science? Maybe he’ll succeed as an indy scientist, and maybe he won’t. It’s hard not to cheer for him. But at the same time, perhaps the most resounding lesson is to lament a system that is forcing some of today’s best scientific minds out into the cold.

To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Ethan Perlstein, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a story about the upcoming release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report on global warming impacts, and a discussion about the difficult question of when screening for disease conditions is (and isn’t) a good idea.

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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Scenes from the Postdocalypse

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British Columbia Enacted the Most Significant Carbon Tax in the Western Hemisphere. What Happened Next Is It Worked.

by ElisabethFulker Posted on March 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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Suppose that you live in Vancouver and you drive a car to work. Naturally, you have to get gas regularly. When you stop at the pump, you may see a notice like the one above, explaining that part of the price you’re paying is, in effect, due to the cost of carbon. That’s because in 2008, the government of British Columbia decided to impose a tax on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, enacting what has been called “the most significant carbon tax in the Western Hemisphere by far.”

A carbon tax is just what it sounds like: The BC government levies a fee, currently 30 Canadian dollars, for every metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions resulting from the burning of various fuels, including gasoline, diesel, natural gas, and, of course, coal. That amount is then included in the price you pay at the pump—for gasoline, it’s 6.67 cents per liter (about 25 cents per gallon)—or on your home heating bill, or wherever else the tax applies. (Canadian dollars are currently worth about 89 American cents).

Watch our live Vancouver discussion of BC’s carbon tax, right here at 6:30 p.m. PDT/9:30 p.m. EDT, on Thursday, March 27. Brought to you by Climate Desk, Climate Access, and Bloomberg BNA.

If the goal was to reduce global warming pollution, then the BC carbon tax totally works. Since its passage, gasoline use in British Columbia has plummeted, declining seven times as much as might be expected from an equivalent rise in the market price of gas, according to a recent study by two researchers at the University of Ottawa. That’s apparently because the tax hasn’t just had an economic effect: It has also helped change the culture of energy use in BC. “I think it really increased the awareness about climate change and the need for carbon reduction, just because it was a daily, weekly thing that you saw,” says Merran Smith, the head of Clean Energy Canada. “It made climate action real to people.”

It also saved many of them a lot of money. Sure, the tax may cost you if you drive your car a great deal, or if you have high home gas heating costs. But it also gives you the opportunity to save a lot of money if you change your habits, for instance by driving less or buying a more fuel-efficient vehicle. That’s because the tax is designed to be “revenue neutral”—the money it raises goes right back to citizens in the form of tax breaks. Overall, the tax has brought in some $5 billion in revenue so far, and more than $3 billion has then been returned in the form of business tax cuts, along with over $1 billion in personal tax breaks, and nearly $1 billion in low-income tax credits (to protect those for whom rising fuel costs could mean the greatest economic hardship). According to the BC Ministry of Finance, for individuals who earn up to $122,000, income tax rates in the province are now Canada’s lowest.

So what’s the downside? Well, there really isn’t one for most British Columbians, unless they drive their gas-guzzling cars a lot. (But then, the whole point of taxing carbon is to use market forces to discourage such behavior.) The far bigger downside is for Canadians in other provinces who lack such a sensible policy—and especially for Americans. In the United States, the idea of doing anything about global warming is currently anathema, even though addressing the problem in the way that British Columbia has done would help the environment and could also put money back in many people’s pockets. Such is the depth of our dysfunction; but by looking closely at British Columbia, at least we can see that it doesn’t have to be that way.

English Bay, Vancouver Wikimedia Commons

British Columbia’s carbon tax was, by all accounts, a surprise at the outset. BC’s center-right Liberal Party, which introduced the policy, wasn’t exactly known at the time for its strong environmental track record. However, then-Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell was apparently much influenced by the business-friendly environmentalism of California’s then-governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Liberals were also very friendly with economists, 70 of whom came out in 2007 with a letter calling for a “revenue-neutral carbon tax.” (For a very helpful in-depth history of the BC tax, see here.)

Environmentalists and the business community also chimed in with support, and sure enough, in February 2008, BC Finance Minister Carole Taylor formally introduced the tax. It would be set at an initial low rate of $10 per metric ton of CO2 equivalent emissions, and scheduled to increase $5 per year until it reached $30 per metric ton (which it did on July 1, 2012). The revenue would go straight back to taxpayers, and all BC residents would get a one-time payment of $100—dubbed a “Climate Action Dividend“—when the policy first launched. There is also a “Climate Action Tax Credit” from the carbon tax, paid to low income persons or families, who currently receive $115.50 for each parent and $34.50 per child annually.

Legislative passage was more or less assured, because the Liberals controlled the provincial government. But shortly after it kicked in, opposition ramped up. After all, the tax took effect in July 2008, just prior to the worst part of the economic collapse. The recession greatly dampened support for climate action, strengthening political claims that reining in emissions would further damage an already deeply wounded economy. Rather surprisingly, BC’s left-of-center New Democratic Party, known for championing environmental causes, seized the moment to campaign against the tax, calling instead for a cap-and-trade policy and using the slogan “Axe the Tax.” Premier Campbell, though, stood strongly in favor of his party’s creation, reportedly insisting, according to the Vancouver Sun, that “if they wanted to get rid of the tax they would have to get rid of him.”

Thus, the carbon tax survived an initial trial by fire, and the opposition softened. After all, after a few years with the tax in place (and the resulting tax cuts for BC residents getting larger and larger), any repeal of the policy would amount to a highly unpopular tax increase. “The party that I represent opposed the legislation at the beginning, and we’ve changed our point of view now to embrace it,” says Spencer Chandra Herbert, a British Columbia legislator from the New Democratic Party who is the official opposition voice on environmental issues. “And we’re actually raising questions about what’s next.”

The tax has actually become quite popular. “Polls have shown anywhere from 55 to 65 percent support for the tax,” says Stewart Elgie, director of the University of Ottawa’s Institute of the Environment. “And it would be hard to find any tax that the majority of people say they like, but the majority of people say they like this tax.”

It certainly doesn’t hurt that the tax, well, worked. That’s clear on at least three fronts: Major reductions in fuel usage in BC, a corresponding decline in greenhouse gas emissions, and the lack of a negative impact on the BC economy.

Quantifying the effects of BC’s carbon tax is somewhat complicated by its timing: The 2008-09 economic collapse reduced overall emissions across Canada, and indeed, across the world. Moreover, British Columbia is somewhat of a unique place in that the No. 1 source of electricity is actually carbon-free hydroelectric power, not coal or natural gas.

Therefore, the most likely place for the carbon tax to make an impact would be in sales of carbon-intensive fuels like gasoline and diesel. Sure enough, a recent analysis by Seattle’s Sightline Institute shows that BC’s sales of motor fuels and other petroleum products declined by 15 percent in just the first four years of the carbon tax, much more than in the country as a whole:

Sightline Institute

Yet another analysis, by the research and policy group Sustainable Prosperity, finds a similar result: A 17 percent per capita decline in fuel consumption in BC.

Then there are greenhouse gas emissions. Again, comparing BC to the rest of Canada is a little tricky. Elsewhere in the country, the recent shift from coal-fired power plants to natural gas has lowered emissions, but that change has not been felt as much in BC because of its heavy use of hydropower. However, if you centrally look at either emissions from fuel or the sale of fuels subject to the tax (gasoline, diesel, and so on), the Sustainable Prosperity and the Sightline Institute reports broadly agree that there has been a considerable decline relative to the rest of Canada.

What’s more, this happened even as BC’s economy fared just as well as Canada’s economy in general. “BC’s fuel use has gone down dramatically, and its economy has kept pace with the rest of Canada at the same time,” says the University of Ottawa’s Stewart Elgie, a coauthor of the Sustainable Prosperity report.

Overall, then, that’s not a bad record for a tax that is just five years old. “What it has done is reduced our carbon emissions, reduced our fuel consumption, and in that period our GDP and our population has gone up,” says Clean Energy Canada’s Smith. “So it’s quite impressive what it has done.”

Not everyone would agree, of course; on the national level, Canada’s ruling Conservative Party is strongly opposed to a carbon tax. In 2008 (when a national version of the tax was under consideration), the party argued that it would “plunge Canada into a recession.”

“Politically, our federal government has tried to make carbon taxation toxic, saying it’s a job killer,” adds the New Democratic Party’s Spencer Chandra Herbert. “BC’s experience has proven that it doesn’t have to be, and I would argue, it can lead to more jobs.”

CANADIANS AREN’T THE ONLY ones who could benefit from emulating BC’s policies—so would Americans. Scholarly research suggests that a national carbon tax in the United States could be at least as effective as the BC tax, both in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and in lowering income taxes (or, lowering the deficit).

Take, for instance, a recent study from Resources for the Future, a prominent environmental policy think tank, that modeled the economic impact of different carbon taxes. The study found that a very modest $30 per ton carbon tax (roughly equivalent to BC’s tax, but in US dollars) would yield about $226 billion in annual revenues. If paid directly back to every American, that would equal a rebate of $876 per year; but of course, this vast sum of money could be used for a variety of purposes, including to greatly reduce the federal deficit.

Meanwhile, the Resources for the Future study found that emissions reductions in the US by the year 2025 would be on the order of 15 percent, and the economic costs would be small: Effects on GDP range from mildly positive to mildly negative depending upon the particular scenario used.

The bottom line, then, is that BC’s experience provides an exclamation point at the end of the long list of reasons to like a carbon tax. Perhaps the leading one, in the end, is that it’s a far simpler policy option than a cap and trade scheme, and is, as Harvard economist and Bush administration Council of Economic Advisers chair N. Gregory Mankiw has put it, “more effective and less invasive” than the sort of regulatory approaches that the government tends to implement.

Indeed, economists tend to adore carbon taxes. When the IGM forum asked a group of 51 prominent economists whether a carbon tax would be “a less expensive way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions than would be a collection of policies such as ‘corporate average fuel economy’ requirements for automobiles,” assent was extremely high: 90 percent either agreed or strongly agreed. Yale economist Christopher Udry commented, “This is as clear as economics gets; provides incentives to find minimally costly ways to reduce emissions.”

“Totally basic economics!” added Stanford’s Robert Hall.

Since 2012, British Columbia has not raised the carbon tax further. Instead, the government agreed to freeze the rate as it is for five years. And no wonder: BC is now far ahead of most of its neighbors, and most of North America, in taking action to curtail global warming. Many policy watchers think the BC carbon tax still needs more strengthening, however, to ultimately set in place the kinds of emissions cuts needed. Smith would like revenue from further increases to be used to advance further carbon reductions, rather than for more tax breaks.

In the meantime, another question is whether any other provinces or US states, seeing BC’s success, will wade into these waters. For instance, as part of the Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy, Washington state and Oregon have both pledged to join BC and California in putting a price on carbon emissions. (California already has a cap-and-trade program). The question is whether these states will decide that the far simpler (and more economically supported) carbon tax is the way to go.

In the meantime, BC can boast of the crown jewel of North American climate policy. “BC now has the lowest fuel use in Canada, the lowest tax rates in Canada, and a pretty healthy economy,” says the University of Ottawa’s Stewart Elgie. “It works.”

Taken from: 

British Columbia Enacted the Most Significant Carbon Tax in the Western Hemisphere. What Happened Next Is It Worked.

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Flight 370 Pilot Rejected Boston Marathon Conspiracy Theory

by AlysaHeiman Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Malaysian police announced that a flight simulator belonging to Zaharie Ahmad Shah, the captain of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, was missing data that had been erased about a month before the plane disappeared, potentially as part of routine computer maintenance. In an investigation that has produced precious few clues—on Thursday Australian officials were investigating debris found via satellite imagery—Shah’s background, naturally, is being closely analyzed by authorities, including the FBI. But Shah—who liked to cook, watched atheist videos, and who was a fan of a democratic opposition leader in Malaysia—didn’t express any suspicious sentiments on his public Facebook page. On the contrary, in an exchange that occurred shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings, he criticized his Facebook friend, Muhammad Khatif Mohd Talha, a self-identified former captain at Malaysia Airlines, for promoting the conspiracy theory that the bombing was a “False Flag attack by the Satanist elite.”

To convince Shah, Talha posted a clip from a press conference during which Boston authorities ignored a shouting conspiracy theorist who claimed that local officials had called for public calm before the bombings. Shah didn’t buy this, and he told Talha it would have been natural for authorities to request calm and order during a large public event.

In the second part of the discussion thread, Talha posted a tweet from the Boston Globe, reporting that Boston officials had announced a controlled explosion as part of post-attack bomb squad activities, as if this supported the notion that the Boston Marathon was some sort of inside job. Shah replied, sarcastically, “Wow now we get to believe the police (GOV) of blewing up people.”

The public Facebook postings do not indicate what kind of relationship Muhammad Khatif Mohd Talha and Shah maintained, if any, in real life. (Talha is one of Shah’s 239 friends.) But they do have several mutual Facebook friends who work in the airline industry. On his Facebook page, Talha, who refers to himself as a former pilot for Malaysia Airlines, expresses support for a wide range of conspiracy theories: “satanic” symbolism in Katy Perry videos, weather warfare, and vaccines and autism. He writes often of a coming apocalypse and is a member of a “Malaysian Preppers” Facebook group, and he posts regularly about his religious beliefs (including his support for Islamic law) and what he believes is the imminent collapse of the global economy. Shortly after the plane’s disappearance, Talha posted, in Malaysian, “Thank you all for your wishes for me. God- willing, I pray for the best for everyone.” Talha did not respond to requests for comment.

Yazran Ahmad, who replied to Talha’s Facebook post above, was Facebook friends with Talha and Shah, and he notes on his Facebook page that he studied at the Malaysian Flying Academy. On March 8, he wrote a poignant note regarding the missing airline. (Ahmad did not respond to request for comment.)

Source – 

Flight 370 Pilot Rejected Boston Marathon Conspiracy Theory

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The Money Bracket: What If the Richest Team Won?

by TangelaCulpeppe Posted on March 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Data from the US Department of Education

March Madness is big business. The tournament rakes in $1 billion in ad sales, $771 million in broadcast rights, and a countless amount in office pool payouts that you never win. (Players will make $0, though a select few are compensated in torn nylon.) Here’s what two NCAA tournament brackets would look like if teams advanced by measures other than points scored: total athletic revenue and total men’s basketball expenses per win this season.

How would the bracket look if it were based on funding for women’s teams?

Revenue
What’s amazing about filling out a bracket based on athletic department wealth (see above) is how similar it looks to a bracket based on real tournament predictions. The school with the least revenue, Mount St. Mary’s at $7.5 million, doesn’t even make it out of the play-in game with Albany (a result that mirrors real life). Deep-pocketed Texas emerges from a difficult region (Texas, Michigan, and Tennessee all have nine-figure revenues, with Louisville coming close) to take home the trophy.

Win Cost
By taking a school’s total men’s basketball expenses, we can figure out how much each team spent per win this season. North Carolina Central, with its relatively small budget and 28-5 record, spent only about $34,000 on each victory. (This ignores strength of schedule—wins in the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference can be easier to come by than wins in a more powerful conference). On the other end, Ohio State took home the “least efficient” title, dropping more than $750,000 per win. Five other teams—Duke, Kentucky, Louisville, Syracuse, and Oklahoma State—also broke the half-million-per-victory mark.

Data from the US Department of Education

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The Money Bracket: What If the Richest Team Won?

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These Pictures of Spring Flowers Will Melt Your Frozen Heart

by EWQRoderic Posted on March 17, 2014

Mother Jones

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Climate change might have had a hand in the exceptionally cold winter much of the country just suffered through, but on the upside, there’s new evidence that it’s sending spring in early, and giving us more time with wildflowers.

That’s the conclusion of one of the most exhaustive surveys ever conducted on flowering “phenology,” the term scientists use for the timing of seasonal events (such as the day the first migratory birds arrive in a given place or, in this case, the first day flowers open). The study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From 1974 to 2012, biologist David Inouye* of the University of Maryland took a team to Colorado just as the winter frost was beginning to thaw, and spent the spring and summer documenting when 60 common plant species had their first, last, and peak (i.e., the most individual plants) flowering.

In all but one of the species, the date of first flowering moved incrementally forward each year, by more than a month in at least one case. You can see a sampling of the flowers in these photos, along with how much earlier they are flowering these days compared to 39 years ago, when the study began. Overall, said study co-author Paul CaraDonna, the ecological onset of spring advanced by about 25 days, from mid-May to late April, mostly thanks to warming temperatures (about 0.7 degrees F per decade here) that melted snow early.

“With these changes in climate, the plants are coming out a lot sooner,” CaraDonna said.

In addition, CaraDonna said, last flowerings are happening later in the fall, so that the overall flower season is now about 35 days longer than it was 39 years ago.

Scientists have known for years that climate change messes with nature’s datebook, throwing off plants (including flowers and trees), animals (from birds to plankton), and even fungi that rely on clues like temperature and weather to know when to breed, migrate, come out of hibernation, and whatever else they need to do. In fact, one of the first great phenologists was Henry David Thoreau, whose notes on the first flowering of some 500 plant species around Walden Pond were recently tapped by a pair of Boston University biologists to inform modern-day research, which found flowering times for these plants to have advanced an average of 10 days.

What makes this new research unique is not only the sheer size of the dataset, but that it tracks the flowers through the spring and summer until the frost comes back in the fall. Knowing the date of first flowering is important, CaraDonna said, but limited.

“It’s like if the cover of a book looks cool, but you don’t know what the rest of the book is about,” he said. “We’re really curious about how these patterns contribute to other patterns in the community that you can’t see if you just look at first flowering.”

In other words, flower phenology has implications beyond making nice company for hikers. The early appearance of flowers increases competition amongst them for pollinators, like bees, which can in turn get thrown off by unusual dining options, and the effects cascade up the ecological pyramid from there. In the biological marketplace, “things that used to be on sale at different times are now on sale together,” said co-author Amy Iler.

CaraDonna said the next step in the study is to look more closely at how the shifted timing of flowers can destabilize an ecosystem, but even now he’s confident the impacts are underway: “If you change this much of an ecological community, there will be consequences.”

* Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to biologist David Inouye as “Daniel Inouye.” We regret the error.

Photo credits:

Lanceleaf springbeauty: Wikimedia Commons

Glacier lily: Wikimedia Commons

Heartleaf bittercress: Wikimedia Commons

Western monkshood: Eric Hunt/Flickr

Slenderleaf collomia: Wikimedia Commons

American vetch: Wikimedia Commons

Ballhead sandwort: Wikimedia Commons

Aspen fleabane: Wikimedia Commons

Creeping mahonia: Matt Lavin/Flickr

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These Pictures of Spring Flowers Will Melt Your Frozen Heart

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In a Radical Shift, California Police Chiefs Push for Regulation of Medical Marijuana

by Georgeysm Posted on March 13, 2014

Mother Jones


Maps: Will Your State Be Next to Legalize Pot?


How Industrial Pot Growers Ravage the Land: A Google Earth Tour


The New Marijuana Service Industry


When Republicans Love Legalized Pot


How to Get a Pot Card (Without Really Trying)


The New Dealers


Welcome to the Amsterdam of the Rockies

California was the first state to legalize medical marijuana, but like the pimply-faced stoner dude you may have known in high school, it hasn’t had the healthiest of relationships with Mary Jane. The Golden State differs from most others with medical pot laws in that it doesn’t actually regulate production and sale of the herb. Instead, it lets cities and counties enact their own laws—though in practice most haven’t. The result has been the Wild West of weed: Almost any adult can score a scrip and some bud from a local dispensary, assuming, of course, that it hasn’t yet been raided and shut down by the feds.

But all of that might be about to change. The California Police Chiefs Association (CPCA) recently announced support for a bill that would put the state in the business of regulating the medical pot trade. Though you’d think cops would have pushed for such a thing decades ago, the reality is quite the opposite: The CPCA and other law enforcement organizations have, until now, opposed pretty much every reform to California’s medical marijuana system for fear that anything short of completely abolishing it would legitimize it.

The CPCA’s change of heart “is a huge for us,” says Nate Bradley, executive director of the California Cannabis Industry Association, the state’s marijuana industry trade group. Bradley agrees with his police adversaries that tighter regs would legitimize medical marijuana, which is why the CCIA has pushed for them since the group’s inception four years ago. Bolstering his case, the US Department of Justice last year announced that it would no longer raid dispensaries in states that it believes are regulating them adequately—a formulation that seemed to exclude California. New rules issued last month by the Obama administration allow banks to accept funds from pot dealers, but only if they’re licensed in the state where they operate.

So why are California’s drug warriors reversing course? “We could no longer ignore that the political landscape on this issue was shifting,” the CPCA explained in a letter written jointly with the League of California Cities. Polls and changing federal policies suggest that medical pot reform “could be enacted,” and that “without our proactive intervention, it could take a form that was severely damaging to our interests.”

The bill that law enforcement groups are backing, SB 1262, is flawed, but it’s something that “we can work with,” says Bradley, who previously worked as a cop in California’s Yuba County. Advocates of medical pot don’t like how the bill constrains the ability of doctors to recommend marijuana, outlaws potent pot concentrates such as hash oil, and puts regulation in the hands of the Department of Public Health, rather than the Department of Alcoholic Beverages Control.

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In a Radical Shift, California Police Chiefs Push for Regulation of Medical Marijuana

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How We Survived Two Years of Hell As Hostages in Tehran

by Joe Mosh Posted on March 12, 2014

Mother Jones

—By , , and | March/April 2014 Issue

SHANE

The nightmare began on July 31, 2009. I was living in Damascus, covering the Middle East as a freelance journalist, with my girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, a teacher. Our friend Josh Fattal had come to see us, and to celebrate, we took a short trip to Iraqi Kurdistan. The autonomous region—isolated from the violence that wracked the rest of Iraq—was a budding Western tourist destination. After two days of visiting castles and museums, we headed to the Zagros Mountains, where locals directed us to a campground near a waterfall. After a breakfast of bread and cheese, we hiked up a trail we’d been told offered beautiful views. We walked for a few hours, up a winding valley between brown mountains mottled with patches of yellow grass that looked like lion’s fur. We didn’t know that we were headed toward the worst 26 months of our lives.

JOSH (July 31, 2009)

“You guys,” Sarah says with hesitancy. “I think we should head back.”

“Really?” Shane sounds surprised. “How could we not pop up to the ridge? We’re so close.”

Shane knows I want to reach the top. “Josh, what do you want to do?” he asks.

“I think we should just go to the ridge—it’s only a couple minutes away. Let’s take a quick peek, then come right back down.” Just as we’re setting out, Sarah stops in her tracks. “There’s a soldier on the ridge. He’s got a gun,” she says. “He’s waving us up the trail.” I pause and look at my friends. Maybe it’s an Iraqi army outpost. We stride silently uphill. I can feel my heart pounding against my ribs.

The soldier is young and nonchalant, and he beckons us to him with a wave. When we finally approach him, he asks, “Farsi?”

Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal, and Sarah Shourd hiking in the Zagros Mountains, shortly before their capture.

“Faransi?” Shane asks, then continues in Arabic. “I don’t speak French. Do you speak Arabic?”

“Shane!” I whisper urgently. “He asked if we speak Farsi!” I notice the red, white, and green flag on the soldier’s lapel. This isn’t an Iraqi soldier. We’re in Iran.

The soldier signals us to follow him to a small, unmarked building. Around us, mountains unfold in all directions. A portly man in a pink shirt who looks like he just woke up starts barking orders. He stays with us as his soldiers dig through our bags. His eyes are on Sarah—scanning up and down. I can feel her tensing up.

I keep asking, “Iran? Iraq?” trying to figure out where the border lies and pleading with them to let us go. Sarah finds a guy who speaks a little English and seems trustworthy. He points to the ground under his feet and says, “Iran.” Then he points to the road we came on and says, “Iraq.” We start making a fuss, insisting we should be allowed to leave because they called us over their border. He agrees and says in awkward English, “You are true.” It’s a remote outpost and our arrival is probably the most interesting thing that has happened for years.

The English speaker approaches us again after talking to the commander. “You. Go,” he says. “You. Go. Iran.”

SHANE (August 2, 2009)

Beneath the night sky, the city is smearing slowly past our windows. Who are these two men in the front seats? Where are they taking us? They aren’t speaking. The pudgy man in the passenger seat is making the little movements that nervous people do: coughing fake coughs; adjusting his seating position compulsively. Everyone in the car is trying to prove to one another, and maybe to ourselves, that we aren’t afraid.

But Sarah’s hand is growing limp in mine. Something is very wrong.

“He’s got a gun,” Josh says, startled but calm. “He just put it on the dash.”

“Where are we going?” Sarah asks in a disarming, honey-sweet voice. “Sssssss!” the pudgy man hisses, turning around and putting his finger to his lips. The headlights of the car trailing us light up his face, revealing his cold, bored eyes. He picks up the gun in his right hand and cocks it.

Sarah’s eyes widen. She leans toward the man in front and, with a note of desperation, says, “Ahmadinejad good!” (thumbs up) “Obama bad!” (thumbs down). The pistol is resting in his lap. He turns to face us again and holds both his hands out with palms facing each other. “Iran,” he says, nodding toward one hand. “America,” he says, lifting the other. “Problem,” he says, stretching out the distance between them.

Sarah turns to me. “Do you think he is going to hurt us?” she asks. I don’t know whether to respond or just stare at her.

In my mind, I see us pulling over to the side of the road and leaving the car quietly. My tremulous legs will convey me mechanically over the rocky earth. I will be holding Sarah’s hand and maybe Josh’s too, but I will be mostly gone already, walking flesh with no spirit. We won’t kiss passionately in our final moments before the trigger pull. We won’t scream. We won’t run. We won’t utter fabulous words of defiance as we stare down the gun barrel. We will be like mice, paralyzed by fear, limp in the slack jaw of a cat.

Each of us will fall, one by one, hitting the gravelly earth with a thud.

Sarah pumps Josh’s and my hands. Her eyes have sudden strength in them, forced yet somehow genuine. “We’re going to be okay, you guys. They are just trying to scare us.”

JOSH (August 4, 2009)

My sandals clap loudly on the floor as I try to catch my momentum and keep my balance. After every few steps, they spin me in circles. My mind tries desperately to remember the way back.

The door shuts behind me. The clanging metal reverberates until silence resumes. I stand at the door, distraught and disoriented. Whatever script, whatever drama I thought I was in, ends now. Whatever stage I thought I was on is now empty. I dodder to the corner of my cell and take a seat on the carpet. There is nothing in my 8-by-12-foot cell: no mattress, no chair—just a room, empty except for three wool blankets. My prison uniform—blue pants, blue collared shirt—blends with the blue marble wall behind me and the tight blue carpet below.

Shane and Sarah are probably sulking in the corners of their cells too. We agreed we’d hunger strike if we were split up. Now I don’t feel defiant. I just feel lost.

Sarah’s glasses are in my breast pocket. She gave them to me to hold when they made us wear blindfolds. She didn’t have pockets in her prison uniform—they dressed her in heaps of dark clothes, including a brown hijab. I empty my other pockets: lip balm from the hike and a wafer wrapper—the remnant of my measly lunch.

I don’t know what I’ll do in here for the rest of the day. I sense the hovering blankness—a zone of mindlessness that looms over my psyche and lives in the silence of my cell.

SARAH (August 6, 2009)

“Sarah, eat this cookie.”

“Not until I see Josh and Shane.”

I’m sitting blindfolded in a classroom chair. A cookie is on the desk in front of me.

“Do you think we care if you eat, Sarah?”

They do care. I know that much. I’ve been on hunger strike since they split us up two days ago. At first it was difficult, but I’m learning how to conserve my energy. When I stand up, my heart beats furiously, so I lie on the floor most of the day. Terrible thoughts and images occupy my mind—my mom balled up on the floor screaming when she learns I’ve been captured, masked prison guards coming into my cell to rape me—but I’ve found ways to distract myself, like slowly going over multiplication tables in my head.

“Sarah, why did you come to the Middle East to live in Damascus?” the interrogator asks. “Don’t you miss your family? Your country?”

“Yes, of course I do. But it’s only for a couple of years. I can’t believe you’re asking me this—do you realize how scared and worried my family must be? Why can’t I make a phone call and tell them I’m alive?”

There are four or five interrogators. The one who seems like the boss is pacing and talking angrily in Farsi. They tell me if I eat their cookie, I can see Shane and Josh.

“Let me see them first—then I’ll eat.”

“Sarah, you say you are a teacher. Have you ever been to the Pentagon?”

“No, I’ve never even been to Washington, DC.”

“Please, Sarah, tell the truth. How can you be a teacher, an educated person, and never go to the Pentagon? Describe to us just the lobby.”

“I’ve never been to the Pentagon. Teachers don’t go to the Pentagon!” I almost have to stop myself from laughing, partly because I’m weak from not eating and partly because I can’t really convince myself this nightmare is real.

JOSH (August 18, 2009)

In my mind I am already running. My feet patter quickly on the brick floor. All day, my energy is dammed up, but in the courtyard, energy courses through me. They take me for two half-hour sessions per day. I’m allotted a single lane next to other blindfolded prisoners. It’s the only time I feel alive all day—when I’m out here and thinking about escaping.

Once, when I heard a helicopter whirring near the prison, I deluded myself into believing freedom was imminent. I decided US officials must be negotiating our release and that I’d be free within three days. Now I cling to the idea of being released on Day 30. In the corner of my cell, the corner most difficult to see from the entryway, there are a host of tally marks scratched into the wall. I check the mean, median, and mode of the data sample. The longest detentions last three or four months, but most markings are less than 30 days. I remember an Iranian American was recently detained and released from prison. How long was she held? Thirty days seems like a fair enough time for the political maneuvering to sort itself out.

JOSH (August 30, 2009)

Suddenly, the metal door rattles. A guard signals me to clean my room and gather my belongings. I am prepared for this. The floor is already immaculate—sweeping the floor with my hands is one of my favorite activities. I grab my book and three dried dates stuffed with pistachio nuts to share with Sarah and Shane. I wasn’t crazy. Day 30 is for real.

When we’re in the car, I can hardly control my joy. I turn to Shane and Sarah, and we start giggling—nervous laughter—at the comfort of our companionship. Now that we’re together again, the weeks of solitude I’ve just endured seem like a distant memory. Was it really a month? Somehow this is funny to us.

Sarah tells me that she and Shane spoke to each other through a vent. They what? Sarah says, “I promise we didn’t do it much.” I can’t believe they were near each other. They had each other! I had nothing.

These guys don’t have a clue what I experienced. I would have done anything for a voice to talk to. I push the idea of them talking as far from my mind as possible, trying to convince myself of what I’d always assumed—we are in this together.

In the rearview mirror, I make eye contact with the stoic driver.

He slows to a stop, then lifts the emergency brake. His gaze, knowing and pitiless, conveys the truth. Shades and bars cover every window of the dirty, gray building before us. This is another prison.

JOSH (September 2, 2009)

In this prison, guards don’t hide their faces like they did in the last one. Some even talk to me. One guard, who speaks a little English, taught me the Farsi word for the courtyard we go to, hava khori. He told me that it literally means “eating air.”

I’ve even grown friendly with a guard I call “Friend.” I treated him amiably and he has responded in kind. He speaks awkward English and tries out colloquial expressions on me. He makes small talk, which can be the most significant event of my day. Friend gave me a bed and mattress, pistachios, bottled water, and crackers. He even gave me a small personal fridge that he put in the hallway in front of my cell. With snacks in front of me, I allowed myself to feel how hungry I’ve been, and how my stomach shrank after 11 days of hunger striking and four weeks on a prison diet.

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How We Survived Two Years of Hell As Hostages in Tehran

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The Senate-CIA Blowup Threatens a Constitutional Crisis

by KristinaRosenba Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

This morning, on C-SPAN, the foundation of the national security state exploded.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, took to the Senate floor and accused the CIA of spying on committee investigators tasked with probing the agency’s past use of harsh interrogation techniques (a.k.a. torture) and detention. Feinstein was responding to recent media stories reporting that the CIA had accessed computers used by intelligence committee staffers working on the committee’s investigation. The computers were set up by the CIA in a locked room in a secure facility separate from its headquarters, and CIA documents relevant to the inquiry were placed on these computers for the Senate investigators. But, it turns out, the Senate sleuths had also uncovered an internal CIA memo reviewing the interrogation program that had not been turned over by the agency. This document was far more critical of the interrogation program than the CIA’s official rebuttal to a still-classified, 6,300-page Senate intelligence committee report that slams it, and the CIA wanted to find out how the Senate investigators had gotten their mitts on this damaging memo.

The CIA’s infiltration of the Senate’s torture probe was a possible constitutional violation and perhaps a criminal one, too. The agency’s inspector general and the Justice Department have begun inquiries. And as the story recently broke, CIA sources—no names, please—told reporters that the real issue was whether the Senate investigators had hacked the CIA to obtain the internal review. Readers of the few newspaper stories on all this did not have to peer too far between the lines to discern a classic Washington battle was under way between Langley and Capitol Hill.

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The Senate-CIA Blowup Threatens a Constitutional Crisis

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The Financial Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its Lack of Diversity

by RolandoRoland Posted on March 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s not unusual for the banking industry to challenge a new government rule. Ever since Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, the banks have sent forth their army of lobbyists any time federal regulators try to enforce a new restriction, often resorting to the courts if they don’t get their way. But their latest objection is particularly galling: they don’t want the government or public to know about the diversity—or lack thereof—within their industry.

When Congress went about reforming the banking industry in 2010, Democrats made a specific point to encourage the financial industry to diversify its workforce. It has long needed a fix. The financial trade is controlled by old, rich white dudes, a cohort that doesn’t accurately reflect the country’s shifting demographics. The problem only gets worse when you look higher up the chain of command. Overall management in the financial services industry is 81 percent white as of 2011. African-Americans only account for 2.7 percent of senior-level staff in the financial industry, while women hold just 28.4 percent of upper management jobs.

Dodd-Frank, the Democrats’ bill to reform Wall Street following the crash, included a provision that creates Offices of Minority and Women Inclusion in each branch of the federal regulatory regime, such as the Department of Treasury and the Securities and Exchange Commission. (The provision doesn’t touch sexual orientation.) These new offices are tasked with boosting diversity within their own ranks and analyzing hiring practices of the businesses in their purview. Late last year, regulators from six of these offices wrote a rule, still in the proposal stage, to enforce the second half of that mandate. It’s a modest measure—a simple request that the banks conduct self-assessments based on a few best-practice guidelines, but it was enough to rile up the banks.

Complaint letters sent from the main lobbying arms of the financial industry to regulators show a concerted effort to avoid changing their hiring practices and to dissuade regulators from revealing the lack of diversity in the banking sector. “In an otherwise good-faith effort to utilize the joint standards and meet certain standards or metrics relating to ‘diversity,’” the Chamber of Commerce wrote in its letter, “regulated entities may inadvertently run afoul of federal workplace requirements by, for example, engaging in ‘reverse’ discrimination.” Smaller regional banks shared those concerns. The Missouri Bankers Association likened the agencies’ proposal to a “government mandated affirmative action program.”

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The Financial Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know About Its Lack of Diversity

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