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MAP: Global Flood Damage Could Exceed $1 Trillion Annually by 2050

by Cindy Holman Posted on August 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Tim McDonnell/Climate Desk

As climate change intensifies, one of the most surefire threats we’re bound to face is increased flooding of coastal cities brought on by sea level rise. Taxpayers worldwide will be faced with more whopping bills—like the estimated $60 billion cost of Superstorm Sandy—to clean up damage in the wake of these events. But just how much money are we talking about here? According to a study out today in Nature, it’s a freakishly large number: A dangerous combination of rising seas, sinking land, and growing coastal development could push global flood damages to well over $1 trillion every year by 2050.

Stephane Hallegatte, an economist at the World Bank, and his coauthors tallied up estimated flood damage losses for the world’s 136 largest coastal cities, on the basis of local population and real estate and infrastructure values crunched with data on each location’s elevation, exposure to extreme weather like hurricanes, and existing coastal protection infrastructure. Then he extrapolated these costs into the future using UN population and urbanization models, economic models from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and climate models of future sea level rise. The results were staggering: The $1 trillion figure, Hallegatte says, is just the bare minimum.

Without action to better protect these vulnerable metropolises, he says, “even in cities that are very well-protected today, losses will reach levels that are completely impossible to imagine.” The map above shows the 20 cities with the highest estimated losses in the absence of any proactive measures.

Sounds grim, but there’s a silver lining: Installing robust protective infrastructure that accounts not just for sea level rise but also population growth and future shoreline development could reduce annual losses to $52 billion. As is so often the case with climate change preparation, investment up front can save big bucks down the road. After all, Hallegatte says, even the cost of massive sea walls, natural barriers, and other coastal protection will seem like chump change compared to a scenario where “we have cities destroyed and we have to rebuild them again and again.”

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MAP: Global Flood Damage Could Exceed $1 Trillion Annually by 2050

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Gay Mayor of Vicco, Kentucky, Reacts to the "Best Segment of ‘The Colbert Report’ Ever"

by jogakatowicefitness Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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It’s being called the greatest segment The Colbert Report has ever done.

On Wednesday night, the Comedy Central news-satire program aired the latest installment in its “People Who Are Destroying America” series. The segment is on Johnny Cummings, the openly gay mayor—and a part-time hairdresser—of Vicco, Kentucky, a hamlet of about 330 people. Vicco made news earlier this year when it became the smallest town in the United States to pass a ban on discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. (The ordinance passed by a 3-1 city-commission vote. According to Cummings, who introduced the ordinance to the city council, representatives from five other towns told him that they want to be the next ones to pass such a “fairness ordinance.”)

“Everything considered, I was remarkably pleased with the way the Colbert segment turned out,” Cummings tells Mother Jones.

“Russia‘s not the only place trying to defend its family values,” host Stephen Colbert says, referring to the culture war over America’s traditional “small-town morals,” as he introduces the clip. What follows is a touching, funny, and stereotype-pulverizing look at a tiny Appalachian town and how its residents feel about the anti-discrimination policy and their mayor. Watch it here:

“If God makes ’em born gay, then why is he against it?” a Vicco resident says, in the clip’s moving final moments. “I can’t understand that. I’ve tried and tried and tried to understand that, and I can’t.”

The night after the segment aired, Cummings told Mother Jones about why he agreed to do it. “We got a lot of attention after that New York Times article ran in January, and we got these offers from production companies wanting to do all this crap,” Cummings recalls. The “crap” here refers to how five production companies, including that of ABC, have recently shown interest in filming a reality TV show in Vicco. “So when some of them called, I was often quite rude to them…But then I got a call from The Colbert Report. I always watch The Colbert Report…To get your point across, sometimes you just gotta laugh. That’s how I look at it. So I thought, okay, The Colbert Report would be perfect.”

The Comedy Central film crew came to town to shoot footage last February. The show also featured a pastor named Truman Hurt, the lone voice in the segment raising objections to the so-called gay lifestyle. The pastor’s objections, as well as local confusion over the legal specifics of the ordinance, were framed by some media outlets (such as MSNBC’s Maddow Blog) as a backlash and controversy. In Cummings’ view, no backlash actually occurred, and the town has been overwhelmingly supportive. “The only negative response we really got was the local TV station that played it up…and tried to cover it as ‘backlash,'” Cummings says. “If you check out my Facebook page, there’s not a negative thing on there about this. But some people tried to create a ‘backlash,’ I guess.”

The 50-year-old Cummings has been praised by residents and others for leading efforts to revitalize the Kentucky town’s infrastructure. Cummings is a Democrat (as is the majority of Vicco’s population) but has switched between Republican and Democratic party affiliation. Aside from his mayorship and his gig as a local hairdresser, he plays the blues on his saxophone in his spare time. He is also a big fan of Josephine Baker, the jazz singer and political activist who helped the French Resistance fight the Nazis.

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Gay Mayor of Vicco, Kentucky, Reacts to the "Best Segment of ‘The Colbert Report’ Ever"

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VIDEO: Sen. David Vitter’s Own 47 Percent Moment

by IvyUDD Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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Video taken by YouTube user Fireezdragon

Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) appeared at a town hall in a local library in East Baton Rouge Parish on Thursday, where he made some news by saying he favored a complete shutdown of the US government over funding Obamacare.

Near the end of the event, Vitter responded to a audience member’s criticism of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, with a comment of his own that veered awfully close to Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” moment, when he said at a private fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans were Obama-loving government mooches who won’t take responsibility for their lives.

Here’s what Vitter had to say in response to a questioner’s criticism of Obamacare:

The only thing I’d add is, I wish you were right that nobody wants Obamacare. That’s not true. And in fact, the other side, who absolutely wants it, most of whom are getting something for nothing, came out in droves for the last election and our side sat at home.

Vitter didn’t expand on what he meant by “getting something for nothing”—free health care? Free food? Free Obamaphones?—but the gist was clear enough. By “the other side,” he means Obamacare supporters and also those people, most of them Democrats, who voted for President Obama last November. These Obama backers, Vitter seems to say, are mostly deadbeats living off the government.

There’s been plenty written about how accusing Democrats of being government leeches, as Romney and now Vitter have, isn’t fair or accurate. These kinds of comments also ignore the fact that Republicans rely on the welfare state, too. A recent Bloomberg News analysis found that Romney won 213 of the 254 counties in the US where the number of food-stamp recipients doubled from 2007 to 2011.

In Louisiana alone, 914,196 people receive food stamps. That’s 20 percent of the state’s population. Does Sen. Vitter think all of those people are Obama-loving government mooches?

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VIDEO: Sen. David Vitter’s Own 47 Percent Moment

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Race, Lead, and Juvenile Crime

by Joan Rivera Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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I know, I know: I’m a broken record on the subject of lead exposure in kids and crime rates 20 years later. But there’s lately been a renewed focus on black crime and black incarceration rates, as well as the racial profiling of blacks and Hispanics in New York City’s stop-and-frisk program. Guess what? The lead theory has something to say about that.

For starters, did you know that arrest rates for violent crime have fallen much faster among black juveniles than among white juveniles? They have, as the charts below show. Rick Nevin explains why:

African-American boys disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system were also disproportionately exposed to lead contaminated dust as young children, because black children were disproportionately concentrated in large cities and older housing. In 1976-1980, 15.3% of black children under the age of three had blood lead above 30 mcg/dl (micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood), when just 2.5% of white children had blood lead that high. In 1988-1991, after the elimination of leaded gasoline, 1.4% of black children and 0.4% of white children under the age of three had blood lead above 25 mcg/dl.

In other words, black juvenile crime rates fell further than white juvenile crime rates because they had been artificially elevated by lead exposure at a much higher rate. In the early 80s, black kids had elevated lead levels at 6x the rate of white kids. After the elimination of leaded gasoline, black kids still had elevated lead levels at 3x the rate of white kids, which explains some of the continued disparity in juvenile crime rates, but that still represented enormous progress. Not only was the ratio lower, but the absolute numbers were far lower too.

There have been, and still are, lots of potential explanations for the disparity in violent crime rates between black and white teens: the toxic legacy of racism and slavery; poverty rates in inner cities; gang culture; and many more. But as Nevin points out, none of the popular theories explains the dramatic rise and fall of crime over the past 50 years, nor in particular why black crime declined more than white crime starting in the early 90s. That’s because none of the usual suspects has varied dramatically in the past 20 years. Family structure in black households has been largely unchanged; poverty went down but then went back up; and incarceration rates haven’t increased.

But the number of kids with toxic levels of exposure has decreased steadily throughout the entire period, and it decreased far more among black kids than white kids. It’s true that black juvenile crime rates are still higher than white juvenile crime rates, but they’re nowhere near the levels that caused so many people to live in fear in the 70s and 80s. Nevin wishes more people knew about this:

If the public were more aware of the magnitude of the ongoing changes in juvenile arrest rates, then law-abiding youths might not be unfairly viewed as interchangeable with juvenile criminals….The fact that black children still had disproportionately elevated blood lead in 2007-2010 is an egregious racial injustice. The fact that the news media fails to recognize the magnitude of ongoing declines in juvenile arrest rates creates other injustices, sometimes veiled in a cloak of sympathy, sometimes in the form of an ominous lecture, and sometimes in the form of arrest rate trends for minor offenses.

No one pretends that lead exposure is the only source of crime, or the only source of disparity in crime rates. But it’s a big part of the picture, and the plain fact is that a lot of people are still living in the past when it comes to fear of black teens. Thanks to falling lead exposure, both black and white teens are far less violent than in the past, and the fall has been most pronounced among blacks. If we wanted to, we could produce even further declines by reducing lead exposure among black toddlers to the same levels as white toddlers, but we’re not there yet because blacks still live disproportionately in old housing and in areas where lead dust from nearby highways settled into the soil decades ago. That’s due to the toxic legacy of racism, redlining, poverty, and more. But we could fix it, even if we can’t entirely overcome racism itself.

The bottom line is simple: We poisoned them. We owe it to them to clean up the poison, not just lock up their kids.

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Race, Lead, and Juvenile Crime

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Meet the Journalist Spreading Michael Hastings Conspiracy Theories

by Emil8up51 Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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The Los Angeles Police Department has ruled out foul play in journalist Michael Hastings’ fatal car crash two months ago in Hollywood, but several media outlets are continuing to promote conspiracy theories about the circumstances surrounding his death. The theories, which suggest Hastings was assassinated shortly after sending friends a frantic email, have received attention beyond the usual fringe suspects partly because of ongoing reporting by freelance blogger Kimberly Dvorak for the CW Television Network affiliate San Diego 6.

Dvorak, whom the station touts as an “investigative journalist,” is a “National Homeland Security Correspondent” for Examiner.com, a blog network owned by Republican billionaire Philip Anschutz that has minimal editorial oversight. Since Hastings’ death, San Diego 6 has repeatedly given Dvorak airtime to float conspiracy theories—that the crash was not consistent with a car accident, that Hastings was cremated to cover-up foul play, that federal officials may have ordered him killed. None of these theories, which often come from unnamed sources, are backed up by convincing evidence, but reputable media outlets keep falling for Dvorak’s reporting anyway.

Last month, for example, the Independent, a major British newspaper, picked up Dvorak’s report claiming that Hastings’ body “was cremated and it wasn’t the request of the family…in fact, the family wanted Michael’s body to go home.” But on Tuesday, veteran journalist Russ Baker dispelled the myth on his news site WhoWhatWhy by talking to a family member who confirmed that the cremation was done at the family’s request. Dvorak later removed the passage saying Hastings’ family wanted his body to “go home,” but her story still hints at a cover-up, calling the cremation a “macabre twist.”

Dvorak’s other theories are just as questionable. She claimed on air that the engine of Hastings’ Mercedes C250 coupe had been found behind the crash site, which would have been impossible with the forward velocity of an ordinary accident. The engine was found in front of the crash site. Her suggestion that a grainy video of the crash showed evidence of a “pre-explosion” sabotage has been dismissed by car experts. She has also reported that the intensity of the resulting fire might suggest the use of thermite accelerants—a popular theory among 9/11 truthers who believe thermite was used to melt the World Trade Center towers’ steel columns. She’s written credulously about the theory that President Barack Obama may not have been born in the United States. And Dvorak has repeated speculation by Richard Clarke, the former Bush and Clinton-era counterterrorism czar, that Hastings’ car’s computer system may have been remotely hacked—something that’s technically possible but highly unlikely.

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Meet the Journalist Spreading Michael Hastings Conspiracy Theories

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Oregon’s GOP Chair Wants to Sprinkle Nuclear Waste From Airplanes

by mklabs1234 Posted on August 16, 2013

Mother Jones

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After months of in-fighting, the beleaguered Oregon Republican Party elected a new chairman last weekend. His name is Art Robinson, and he wants to sprinkle radioactive waste from airplanes to build up our resistance to degenerative illnesses. Robinson, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress against progressive Rep. Peter DeFazio in 2010 and 2012, took over after the previous chair resigned in advance of a recall campaign over her alleged financial mismanagement.

Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, has marketed himself for the last three decades as an expert on everything from nuclear fallout, to AIDS, to climate science in the pages of a monthly newsletter, Access to Technology, which he published from his compound in the small town of Cave Junction. A quick glance at his writings, which were publicized during his ill-fated challenges to DeFazio, suggest that whatever the failings of the previous party leadership—Democrats now hold all statewide elected offices and control both houses of the state legislature—Robinson brings with him a new set of challenges entirely.

On nuclear waste: “All we need do with nuclear waste is dilute it to a low radiation level and sprinkle it over the ocean—or even over America after hormesis is better understood and verified with respect to more diseases.” And: “If we could use it to enhance our own drinking water here in Oregon, where background radiation is low, it would hormetically enhance our resistance to degenerative diseases. Alas, this would be against the law.”

On public schools: “Public education (tax-financed socialism) has become the most widespread and devastating form of child abuse and racism in the United States. Moreover, people who have been cut off at the knees by public education are so mentally handicapped that they cannot be responsible custodians of the energy technology base or other advanced accomplishments of our civilization.” (Robinson, a home-schooling activist, sells a DIY curriculum for $195.)

On AIDS: “There is a possibility that the entire ‘war’ on HIV and AIDS is in error. U.S. government AIDS programs are now receiving $6 billion per year and are based entirely upon the hypothesis that HIV virus causes AIDS. Yet, the articles referenced above and numerous additional publications by scientists who have become involved in this controversy state that: attempts to cause AIDS experimentally with HIV have completely failed; thousands of AIDS victims are HIV-free; and HIV shows none of the classical characteristics of a disease-producing organism. Moreover, AIDS is not a unique disease—it is an increased susceptibility to many ordinary diseases presumably as a result of depressed immune response. This depressed immunity can result from many other factors including those especially prevalent in the AIDS afflicted population—drug abuse and unhygienic exposure to very large numbers of different disease vectors. Moreover, large numbers of HIV carriers who are symptom-free are being treated by powerful life-threatening drugs that kill people in ways very similar to AIDS.”

(His conclusion on the AIDS epidemic: homosexuality might be a natural consequence of the gay lifestyle, and the federal government had cooked the books “as an excuse for all sorts of social engineering, especially in the public schools.”)

On climate change: “There is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

On diversity: The white-male imbalance at his alma mater, Cal Tech, Robinson argued, was due to the fact that “its applicants are weighted toward those who seek severe, difficult, total-immersion training in science—an experience few women and blacks desire.”

During his campaigns, Robinson distanced himself from his past writings—without overtly rejeting them. He conceded that the nuclear waste proposal was “politically impossible” and a “complicated scientific subject“, and on the subject of public education, admitted that “Had I known I would ever run for office, I’d have said it differently.” In an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, he justified his AIDS theory by noting that “15 years ago, the scientific debate was different than it is today,” before attempting to change the subject to taxes.

Still, Robinson’s questionable scientific theories could make him some bipartisan allies; the deep-blue voters of Portland recently voted to ban fluoride from the city’s drinking water.

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Oregon’s GOP Chair Wants to Sprinkle Nuclear Waste From Airplanes

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The Pentagon’s Transgender Problem

by oliwia_konarzewska@o2.pl Posted on August 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Ever since she was a boy growing up in small-town Pennsylvania, Zoey Gearhart had “tendencies that were odd.” Raised as Robert Gearhart, she would identify with female characters in books and on TV, in video games and movies. She would also wear her mother’s fake nails, or make her own out of clay. “I was told to stop in no uncertain terms by my father,” she said. In 2007, at the age of 19, she decided to join the Navy. “I thought maybe joining the military would just help straighten me out,” she said. “Make me into a normal individual.”

At first, Gearhart tried to prove her machismo by applying and becoming accepted into the Navy SEALs program, the elite force that killed Osama bin Laden. “I used to be in incredible shape,” she said. She did preliminary training with the SEALs, but after an ex-fiancé pleaded with her not to continue on to BUDS (Basic Underwater Demolition School) training, Gearhart decided to become a linguist instead. The first known transgender SEAL, Kristin Beck, first came out on her LinkedIn profile earlier this year and in her tell-all book, Warrior Princess. On the cover, she sports a long, bushy beard from the days she went by “Chris.”

While in the Navy, Gearhart kept her female identity a secret, hiding it from a Marine staff sergeant roommate whom she described as a “cave-dwelling dude-bro.” After her enlistment term expired in March, she decided not to reenlist so that she could begin her transition to womanhood in earnest. Had Beck or Gearhart revealed that they were trans while still in uniform, they would have received a medical or administrative discharge. Even after the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in 2011, the military still officially forbids openly transgender people from serving. The end of DADT, Gearhart said, “is this landmark for the LGBT movement. But there’s that hanging T. Trans service was not even addressed.”

Transgender soldiers and sailors largely fly under the radar, but they are hardly uncommon. In a recent survey (PDF) by the Harvard Kennedy School’s LGBTQ Policy Journal, 20 percent of transgender people contacted said they had served in the military—that’s twice the rate of the general population. A 2011 study estimates there are nearly 700,000 transgender individuals (about three people per thousand) living in the United States. Meanwhile, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) is scheduled to release a report today, which draws from Department of Veterans Affairs data, showing that the number of veterans accepting treatment for transgender health issues has doubled in the past decade. (While viewing the full report requires a subscription, an abstract should be available online as of today.)

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The Pentagon’s Transgender Problem

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Video: Meet the Singing, Anti-Fracking Nuns

by Leon51tt8 Posted on August 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Down the road from the Maker’s Mark bourbon distillery in the central Kentucky town of Loretto, a feisty cadre of nuns has been tending crops and praying since the early 1800s. An order founded on social justice, the Sisters of Loretto are quickly becoming the face of a new grassroots campaign against what they see as a threat to holy land: the Bluegrass Pipeline. The 1,100-mile pipeline will carry natural gas liquids from the Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia fracking fields, and will pass through Kentucky—eventually connecting with an existing pipeline that runs all the way to the Gulf coast.

The pipeline is in its early stages of development, but the nuns have already refused to allow company representatives to survey their 800-acre campus, and they are taking their message to local community meetings…sometimes in the form of song.

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Video: Meet the Singing, Anti-Fracking Nuns

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Dems Defy Obama on Mortgage Protections

by torrie199 Posted on August 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Last week, President Barack Obama laid out his new housing plan, emphasizing the importance of safe, simple, affordable mortgages. But lawmakers in his own party are working against him, trying to gut historic new safeguards on home loans.

A new mortgage rule issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that takes effect January 1 limits fees on new home loans to three percent. The regulation is “one of the most direct and important responses to the mortgage crisis,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) argued in a recent editorial in American Banker. But 12 House Democrats and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have joined with Republicans to cosponsor bills that would eviscerate the new cap and clear the way for lenders to steer Americans into riskier, higher-cost loans.

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Dems Defy Obama on Mortgage Protections

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There Is No Such Thing As NSA-Proof Email

by torrie199 Posted on August 14, 2013

Mother Jones

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Since last June, when Edward Snowden tore the veil off the National Security Agency’s vast data dragnet, Americans have been flocking to ultrasecure email services in the hopes of keeping the government out of their private business. Use of the most popular email encryption software, PGP, tripled between June and July, while revenue for the data-encryption company Silent Circle has shot up 400 percent.

But even these services may not be able to protect your email from government prying. That fact came into stark relief last Thursday, when Lavabit, the secure email service used by Snowden, abruptly shut down. Lavabit’s 32-year-old founder, Ladar Levison, issued a statement saying he pulled the plug because he didn’t want to be “complicit in crimes against the American people.” He has since given up using email entirely, and he urges others to consider doing the same. “I would strongly recommend against entrusting your privacy to a company with physical ties to the United States,” he told Mother Jones. “I honestly don’t think it’s possible to provide a secure service in this country.”

Levison, who is reportedly under federal gag order, declined to elaborate (though he opined, based on his experience, that we’re a “whisper’s breath away” from becoming a society where all electronic communications are recorded and scrutinized by the government). But according to other industry insiders and cybersecurity experts, there’s good reason to be wary of transmitting sensitive information via email—even if your provider claims to have iron-clad safeguards.

Tech giants, such as the Microsoft subsidiary Hotmail, regularly hand over data to the government. In fact, in the last eight months of 2012 (the most recent period for which data is available), Hotmail, Google, Facebook, and Twitter provided law enforcement authorities with information on more than 64,000 users. And that doesn’t include responses to secret national security letters ordered by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, or FISA.

Secure emails services, such as Lavabit, are supposed to guard against this kind of snooping (as well as hackers and phishers) by encrypting email messages—turning them into gibberish that can only be read by people who have a password, or “key.” Theoretically, in most cases, the email provider can’t even decipher the contents, much less government agencies. But even the most secure email systems don’t completely encrypt “metadata,” the bits of identifying information that accompany messages, such as the sender’s name and IP address; the subject line; and the date and time the message was sent. Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University, says the government can tell a lot about a person from these details. “If you can map out who someone has talked to, that’s almost as useful as knowing what they were talking about,” he explained, “especially if you’re trying to map out a criminal conspiracy or find out who leaked information from reporters.”

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There Is No Such Thing As NSA-Proof Email

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