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What Is a Derecho, Anyway?

by hanhuogekennog Posted on June 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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You’ve probably heard that a massive system of storms is currently bearing down on the Midwest and expected to reach the mid-Atlantic on Thursday. Meteorologists are warning that the storms may turn into derechos, or “land hurricanes.” Almost 75 million people are in the path of the storms, and forecasters believe that conditions are favorable for one or more derechos this week. So what can we expect from these intense storms?

What is a derecho?

According to NOAA, a derecho is a “widespread, long-lived windstorm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms.” In order for a weather event to be classified as a derecho, the wind damage zone must extend more than 240 miles and include wind gusts of at least 58 miles per hour. In “super” derechos, wind gusts can top 100 miles per hour. “You can think of a derecho as a tropical cyclone over land,” NOAA research meteorologist Ken Pryor told Discovery Magazine. “The impacts are very similar. There are damaging winds that cover a significant area.” The storms are known to occur frequently at night, and they often bring hail, flooding, and tornadoes.

Is it like a tornado?

Not exactly. The two types of storms can occur in the same system, but the damage of a derecho is directed along a fairly straight path and tornadoes are more isolated events. “A tornado, when it does occur, may be on the magnitude of a mile or two wide; a derecho could go for hundreds of miles producing significant damage,” Jim Keeney, weather program manager at the national weather service’s office in Kansas City, Miss., told CBS.

What causes it?

Derechos are associated with showers and thunderstorms where there are strong outflow winds that “move preferentially in one direction,” and are the products of downbursts, according to NOAA. “Imagine taking a water balloon and dropping it, where you see the balloon break and splatter on the ground. That’s basically how a downburst works,” Ken Pryor told NBC News. “And you can think of a derecho as a large cluster of those downbursts all happening simultaneously.”

NOAA

When and where do they usually occur?

They are most common in late spring and summer with more than 75 percent occurring between April and August. Check out this handy NOAA map below to see how frequently they hit different regions:

NOAA

When was the last one?

A particularly destructive derecho causing $1 billion in damage hit a 700 mile swath between the Ohio Valley and the mid Atlantic last June. FIVE million people from Chicago to the mid Atlantic Coast lost power, and 22 were killed. NOAA has documented 26 noteworthy derechos since the late 1960s. Below is a diagram of one that hit Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas in 2001:

Area affected by the May 27-28, 2001 derecho (outlined in blue). Curved purple lines represent the approximate locations of the gust front at three-hourly intervals. “+” symbols indicate the locations of wind damage or wind gusts (measured or estimated) above severe limits (58 mph or greater). Red dots and lines denote tornadoes. NOAA

Is climate change involved?

According to NOAA, “Some of the most intense summer derechos, especially those of the progressive type, occur on the fringes of extreme heat waves.” After last year’s deadly derecho, some wondered if climate change caused or intensified it:

“Since climate change can boost the odds of major heat waves such as this one, and the extreme heat contributed to the severe weather, it’s plausible—albeit rather speculative at this point—that climate change played some sort of role in the derecho event. However, it will require rigorous scientific analysis to determine whether this may have been the case.”

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What Is a Derecho, Anyway?

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TV Weathermen and Climate Scientists Kiss and Make Up

by Hadwin Partize Posted on June 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Weather forecasters and climate scientists aren’t exactly known for being the best of buds. Several surveys have shown that among members of the American Meteorological Society—and especially among professional TV forecasters—there’s a substantial degree of global warming skepticism. Indeed, more than half of AMS members perceive conflict within the organization over the issue of climate change. Meanwhile, members of the climate science community are sometimes accused of speaking down to their weather geek brethren.

Given this tense history, what happened at the most recent Climate Desk Live event, featuring Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis and Stu Ostro, senior meteorologist at the Weather Channel, might be considered fairly remarkable.

“Jennifer’s coming at it from a different direction than I am,” said Ostro after he and Francis delivered complementary analyses of how global warming is upending our weather. “But what’s interesting is that we have converged on a very similar spot—I as a day to day weather forecaster, and Jennifer, who has a background in meteorology but who’s in more of a climate science research area.”

Ostro believes that climate change is increasing the atmosphere’s overall thickness and, thereby, forcing weather patterns to stay in place for longer—with sometimes devastating results. Francis, meanwhile, argues that the dramatic warming of the Arctic is, in turn, slowing down the hemisphere-sized loopings of the jet stream—with very similar consequences.

And there are other signs that relations between climate scientists and weather forecasters are improving—signs that go considerably beyond the scientific mutual admiration society that is Francis and Ostro. “I think for the mainstream broadcasters, who may have been sort of agnostic, it’s getting harder and harder, the evidence is becoming a little bit stronger with each passing day, and certainly as the years go by,” says Bob Ryan, a meteorologist for over 30 years with NBC and ABC affiliates in the DC area, and a former president of the American Meteorological Society.

Indeed, the past several years have seen a growing number of forecast meteorologists speaking out about climate change. There’s the Weather Channel’s Ostro, who attests that “something ain’t right with the weather.” There’s Ryan, who produced a 6 part series on global warming at WRC-TV in 2009.

There’s Paul Douglas, the Minneapolis St. Paul area forecaster—and a Republican—who last year drew massive attention after he proclaimed that “acknowledging climate science doesn’t make you a liberal.” There’s Jim Gandy, chief meteorologist at South Carolina’s CBS affiliate, WLTX-TV, who just won the American Meteorological Society’s “Excellence in Science Reporting” award for segments on climate change.

But why is this rapprochement happening now? In significant part, it’s because of increasingly wacky weather itself–from 2012’s dramatically warm winter to, just this week, extreme floods in Europe that were recently called “unprecedented since the Middle Ages.” “Meteorologists are trained to look at the atmosphere, and generally are pretty intelligent. And anybody with that sort of training, watching the atmosphere, is going to notice that there are new patterns emerging,” explains Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground and a leading commenter on climate change and weather.

The history of meteorology is, in one sense, a history of divides between scientists who approached the very act of research in a different ways. “Meteorology has often been an apple of contention, as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect on the minds of those who attempted to study them,” wrote the Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry in 1858. Henry was referring to the mid-19th century “American Storm Controversy,” in which two pioneering meteorologists, William Redfield and James Espy, engaged in a vitriolic battle over the nature of storms. Redfield was an empiricist, a data gatherer, who collected large numbers of observations on storms. Espy, in contrast, had a theory rooted in fundamental physics and the behavior of moisture and gases in the atmosphere.

It’s a striking parallel to the modern rift between forecast meteorologists, who focus on large numbers of daily weather observations and analyze them for very practical reasons (like keeping people safe), and climate scientists, who are often trying to understand, based on equations and first principles, how the system works.

“Climate scientists look at things differently than meteorologists do,” explains South Carolina TV forecaster Jim Gandy, who works for the CBS affiliate WLTX-TV. “The fundamental difference is that we don’t really have to think too much about the physics of infrared radiation”—the heat radiation that is being trapped at the level of the Earth’s atmosphere by carbon dioxide. Or as the pioneering Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron put it in 1959: “This seems to be a rule in our science: progress is impeded by want of meteorological knowledge on the part of the theoreticians and by a too poor mathematical training of weather-men.”

Stu Ostro fits the empiricist mold to a T. His documentation of the wild weather that he’s been seeing takes the form of a 1072 slide (and growing) powerpoint—the work of a data gatherer through and through. Jennifer Francis, in contrast, writes in a recent scientific paper of how Rossby wave theory helps to explain the hypothesized effect of greater Arctic warming on weather in the mid-latitudes. Her paper has plenty of data too—but much more in service of an overarching theoretical account of what the atmosphere is doing.

But methodological rifts can also heal, once theory and data line up and naturally push empiricists and theoreticians back together. “What’s happening is that the theorists saw this coming ahead of time, but the data wasn’t supporting it,” explains Jeff Masters. “Now that we’re seeing the impacts, the climate is changing before our eyes, the empiricists are recognizing this and saying, the theorists were right.”

How’s this for evidence: In two weeks in Nashville, the American Meteorological Society will be offering a short course on climate science for forecast meteorologists, taught by leading climate scientists. The room is oversold—there’s already a waiting list.

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TV Weathermen and Climate Scientists Kiss and Make Up

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Does Sen. Jeff Sessions Think Obama is Secretly a "Radical Machiavelli"?

by Selina R. Pinkstaff Posted on June 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Is Barack Obama a “radical Machiavelli” bent on destroying American society so he can shape it into a totalitarian state? In February, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) endorsed a book that makes such a case.

Speaking at a conference run by David Horowitz, the onetime 1960s radical who remade himself as a conservative provocateur, Sessions, the ranking member of the Senate budget committee, opened his remarks with praise for Horowitz and his books:

I really liked A Point in Time. If you haven’t read that, it is a good book, a wise book, well in the tradition of the Western heritage of faith and reason, and gives us some perspective about who we are. And recently reading Radicals, I hit the last chapter lying in bed, and I awakened myself and had an epiphany ’cause he was talking about our president. And I’ve been wrestling with how do we deal, what is this, how has this been working, and how can we do better, and how can we understand better, how to respond to his quite successful tactics politically. So I was so moved. I called Horowitz. He gave me some ideas. He’s written some papers. I passed them around—the draft—a bunch of senators, and shared those thoughts. I know Sen. Ron Johnson—I don’t know if Ron’s still here or not. He and I definitely have discussed what you shared with us, and it will make a difference in how we approach things.

Here’s the video:

On the surface, Sessions’ comments seemed relatively benign. But the senator was embracing a depiction of Obama in which Horowitz presents him as a lying and conniving radical who will do or say anything to amass more power and assert authoritarian control over the United States.

The last chapter of Horowitz’s 2012 book, Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Passion—which prompted Sessions’ eureka moment—is entitled, “A Radical Machiavelli,” and it opens with a quote from Obama: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” In this chapter, Horowitz attempts to explain the progressive mindset. The key to understanding these folks and their ultimate aims, Horowitz contends, is Saul Alinsky, the legendary organizer. His influence, Horowitz notes, has extended to Obama and “captured the heart of the Democratic Party.”

Horowitz conflates Obama with Alinsky and then proceeds to describe Alinsky in the harshest terms, asserting that his “entire career was devoted to the destruction of America’s social order.” Alinsky’s progressivism, Horowitz huffs, was “a declaration of war on a democracy whose individual freedoms are rooted in the institutions of private property, due process, and limited government, all of which his prescriptions would destroy.” And perhaps worse, Alinksy urged “radicals to infiltrate the Democratic Party and traditional institutions with the goal of subverting them.”

You can see where this is heading: Obama is an Alinskyite who has burrowed his way to the pinnacle of power. This is hardly a surprise, coming from Horowitz. One of his websites bears this slogan: “Inside Every Liberal Is A Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out.” And in the chapter Sessions hailed, Horowitz describes Alinsky’s disciples in stark terms: “Within the framework of their revolutionary agendas, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is power.”

And what do these people want to do with this power? Horowitz has the answer:

to create a new race of men and women who are able to live in harmony and according to the principles of social justice. To be as God. Creating such a race requires the total control—the totalitarian control—of individual behavior.

Horowitz elaborates:

In other words, the system—the American system—should be burned to the ground, but to achieve this goal you must conceal your intentions. Conceal the goal and you can accomplish anything.

Horowitz clearly is saying that the president is a burn-down-the-system nogoodnik masquerading as a pragmatic moderate. There’s even evidence—if you look closely enough. Horowitz points to the speech Michelle Obama delivered at the 2008 Democratic convention, in which she described her husband’s work as a community organizer: “Barack…spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about ‘the world as it is’ and ‘the world as it should be.’ And he said that, all too often, we accept the distance between the two and we settle for the world as it is, even when it doesn’t reflect our values and aspirations.” Believing he has unearthed a damning clue, Horowitz declares, “It was pitch-perfect Alinskyism.” He adds, “There is nothing new in the strategy of appearing moderate in order to disarm your opposition. It was Lenin’s idea, too.”

Having equated the Obamas with Alinsky, Horrowitz goes on to say that Alinsky-style radicals have no scruples. They deceive, they lie, and sometimes they even murder to achieve their goals. They are, he says, in “a permanent war” and do not “worry about the legality or morality” of their actions. Referring to “revolutionaries” like Alinsky and Lenin, Horowitz asserts, “What they offer is a destructive rage against the worlds they inhabit” and “a chaos designed to produce a totalitarian state.”

This is heady stuff. Horowitz paints a picture of radicals who abide by no legal or moral codes and who desire to destroy the current order in order to create a totalitarian state. And Sessions told the assembled that he found this chapter so illuminating that he asked Horowitz for further advice on how to deal with the wily president. (Radicals features a front-cover blurb from former GOP Senator Jon Kyl: “David Horowitz knows more about the Left than anyone in America.”)

But when Mother Jones asked Sessions if he shares the over-the-top, Horowitzian view of Obama, a Sessions aide insisted that the senator does not see the president in such terms and sent this statement:

Senator Sessions has always been respectful in his critiques of the President’s policies. If you listen to the Senator’s address it’s obvious that he’s not saying anything remotely along the lines of what you suggest.

The Senator’s comment was explicitly in reference to the White House’s communications strategy. As he explained in his speech: “President Obama has framed every fiscal issue and his own reelection campaign as a choice between his compassion and Republicans’ uncaring fiscal discipline emphasis. According to this fiction, Republicans are the protectors of the rich, while the President and his party are champions of the poor and the middle class. The Left’s big spending policies are portrayed as expressions of concern for those in need, while conservatives’ desire to achieve financial stability and economic growth are portrayed as heartless and uncaring. To an alarming degree, the President has succeeded in framing the debate around this fundamentally egregious falsehood… We must and will make the moral case for conservative reform, and explain the fundamental truth—that our ideas are the only real way to reduce poverty in America. Truth is always the best defense against slander… We will offer real jobs, real independence and prosperity to the American people. The real measure of compassion, we will explain, is not how much money we spend on poverty, but how many people we help to rise out of poverty.”

Sessions did devote part of his speech to complaining that the left has too often succeeded in defining conservatives as heartless and handmaidens of the well-to-do, a point that he and Horowitz have often been keen to make. (Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment.) Yet the book chapter that jazzed Sessions is predominantly Horowitz’s attempt to explain what he fervently considers to be the dark, unprincipled, and inevitably totalitarian mindset of Alinskyites—with whom he associates the Obamas. This chapter is not about how best to frame debates over spending and taxes, and it is certainly no respectful critique of the president. If Sessions does believe, as he told Horowitz and his crowd, that this chapter explains Obama, he has accepted a fundamentally radical and terrifying assessment of the man.

Research assistance provided by James Carter IV.

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Does Sen. Jeff Sessions Think Obama is Secretly a "Radical Machiavelli"?

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Santa Monica Killer John Zawahri: A Familiar Profile

by Susie Quan Posted on June 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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More details have emerged about John Zawahri, who murdered five people and wounded several others in a gun rampage on Friday before police shot him dead on the campus of Santa Monica College. He is the kind of mass killer we’ve come to see all too often in recent years, from his gender and age to the type of weapons he used to his mental health history. With our in-depth investigation of 62 mass shootings over the last 30 years we identified strong patterns among the killers, and Zawahri fits several of them:

Shooter’s identity: Zawahri was an adult male, age 23. All but one of the killers in the cases we analyzed were male, most of them young adult to middle-age. (Whereas the majority of killers in our dataset were Caucasian, Zawahri was the son of Lebanese immigrants.)

Weapons used: Zawahri committed the killings using an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle and high capacity-magazines. According to the LA Times, investigators said he carried nearly 40 magazines capable of holding 30 bullets each. Some were in a duffel bag along with a handgun; he also wore ammunition strapped to his chest and thighs. Investigators estimated that Zawahri used more than 1,000 rounds during last Friday’s rampage. As our study showed, more than half of all mass shooters had assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and many were armed with multiple guns:

The data we gathered also shows that most mass shooters—nearly 80 percent of them—obtained their weapons legally. We don’t yet know how Zawahri got his guns; law enforcement officials say they’re in the process of tracing them. But it’s possible he obtained them using the Internet: As early as 2006, according to the LA Times, word had spread among Zawahri’s high school classmates and teachers that he’d spent time surfing for assault weapons online. It remains very easy to buy guns on the Internet, a key issue addressed by the legislation mandating broader background checks that died in the Senate in April.

Mental health problems: Zawahri had shown troubling signs years ago, according to the LA Times. In 2006, a teacher learned of Zawahri’s interest in assault weapons—as well as violent threats he’d voiced about specific classmates—and reported Zawahri to the police. Soon after, Zawahri was admitted to UCLA’s psychiatric ward for a brief period. In the 62 cases we studied, a majority of the killers were mentally ill, with many showing signs of it prior to their attacks.

There’s another pattern that Zawahri fits: Like the young male killers in Newtown, Aurora, and Columbine before him, he was apparently into video games. According to the LA Times, his school transcripts show that he was “sporadically” enrolled in his high school’s entertainment technology program in 2009 and 2010, taking courses in animation and video game development. But as Erik Kain cautions in an in-depth explainer on violent video games published on our site today, that fact may ultimately tell us nothing about what caused Zawahri to bring horror to Santa Monica late last week.

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Santa Monica Killer John Zawahri: A Familiar Profile

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Steubenville Sequel: Can Anonymous Crack a 12-Year-Old Case?

by Cindy Lin Posted on June 11, 2013

Mother Jones

­­A few weeks after Amanda Stevenson was allegedly drugged and gang-raped, the 14-year-old high-school freshman packed a bag and fled her tiny hometown of Laurelville, Ohio, for a new life in suburban Virginia. But memories of that horrific night still haunt her, she says: the party in the hunting cabin deep in the woods. The locked room full of laughing young men. Trying to fight her way out of a fog of tranquilizer to say, “I feel strange” or “Take me home” or even simply “No.” Her naked body flopping like a rag doll as the teens passed her around and fondled her. Blacking out and awakening to find one guy after another climbing atop and penetrating her.

More MoJo Anonymous coverage


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Despite the passing of years, Stevenson, now 26, says she still has trouble sleeping, still winces at any mention of the word “rape,” and still sometimes curls up in a corner, sobbing and angry. So one day this past January her fiancé, Tim Tolka, offered to help her go after the rapists, if that what she wanted.

She wasn’t sure it was. But then she read a story about a high-school rape in Steubenville, Ohio, that had become national news thanks to the efforts of Anonymous, the hacker collective. “It was just so similar to what I had experienced,” Stevenson recalls. She decided then and there that her silence made her part of the problem.

The very next day, using a pseudonym, Tolka posted a plea on the Anonymous website AnonNews.org. “I have information about a second case of gang rape by local athletes in a small Ohio town that was squashed by the authorities,” he wrote. The couple went on to post the names, a phone number, and links to the Facebook pages of two of the men Stevenson said had raped her.

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Steubenville Sequel: Can Anonymous Crack a 12-Year-Old Case?

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The Truth About Video Games and Gun Violence

by Polly Browder Posted on June 11, 2013

Mother Jones

It was one of the most brutal video games imaginable—players used cars to murder people in broad daylight. Parents were outraged, and behavioral experts warned of real-world carnage. “In this game a player takes the first step to creating violence,” a psychologist from the National Safety Council told the New York Times. “And I shudder to think what will come next if this is encouraged. It’ll be pretty gory.”

To earn points, Death Race encouraged players to mow down pedestrians. Given that it was 1976, those pedestrians were little pixel-gremlins in a 2-D black-and-white universe that bore almost no recognizable likeness to real people.

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The Truth About Video Games and Gun Violence

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Spy Kids: The NSA Is Looking for the Next Generation of Sneaky Geeks

by Billy Jobs Posted on June 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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Although the National Security Agency is incredibly secretive and could probably care less what you think, it does have an interest in helping our kids become great mathematicians. The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the country, so, the agency explains, it is “critically dependent on the continuing development of first-class American mathematicians.”

Enter the CryptoKids, the NSA’s band of codemaking and codebreaking cartoon characters. There’s Cyndi, one half of the CyberTwins, a cat with braces, two-tone hair, and what may be Google Glass. Her advice for online-savvy kids: “Mom says that once something is out on the Internet, it will be there forever, and ‘might come back to haunt us one day.'” Her brother Cy, a malware victim, also values his digital privacy and security: “The stuff on my computer is really important to me, and I don’t want anyone getting in and messing it up again!”

The CryptoKids. NSA

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Spy Kids: The NSA Is Looking for the Next Generation of Sneaky Geeks

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Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance

by nortom23 Posted on June 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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More on the NSA’s electronic surveillance program.


NSA Spying: An Obama Scandal?


The Domestic Surveillance Boom, From Bush to Obama


Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance


Judge at Center of NSA Spying Controversy Attended Expenses-Paid Terrorism Seminar


What Is the NSA Doing With All Those Phone Records?

In the midst of revelations that the government has conducted extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records and internet communications, the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.

This important case—all the more relevant in the wake of this week’s disclosures—was triggered after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, started crying foul in 2011 about US government snooping. As a member of the intelligence committee, he had learned about domestic surveillance activity affecting American citizens that he believed was improper. He and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), another intelligence committee member, raised only vague warnings about this data collection, because they could not reveal the details of the classified program that concerned them. But in July 2012, Wyden was able to get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify two statements that he wanted to issue publicly. They were:

* On at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

* I believe that the government’s implementation of Section 702 of FISA the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion.

For those who follow the secret and often complex world of high-tech government spying, this was an aha moment. The FISA court Wyden referred to oversees the surveillance programs run by the government, authorizing requests for various surveillance activities related to national security, and it does this behind a thick cloak of secrecy. Wyden’s statements led to an obvious conclusion: He had seen a secret FISA court opinion that ruled that one surveillance program was unconstitutional and violated the spirit of the law. But, yet again, Wyden could not publicly identify this program.

Enter the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest group focused on digital rights. It quickly filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Justice Department for any written opinion or order of the FISA court that held government surveillance was improper or unconstitutional. The Justice Department did not respond, and EFF was forced to file a lawsuit a month later.

It took the Justice Department four months to reply. The government’s lawyers noted that they had located records responsive to the request, including a FISA court opinion. But the department was withholding the opinion because it was classified.

EFF pushed ahead with its lawsuit, and in a filing in April, the Justice Department acknowledged that the document in question was an 86-page opinion the FISA court had issued on October 3, 2011. Again, there was no reference to the specific surveillance activity that the court had found improper or unconstitutional. And now the department argued that the opinion was controlled by the FISA court and could only be released by that body, not by the Justice Department or through an order of a federal district court. In other words, leave us alone and take this case to the secret FISA court itself.

This was puzzling to EFF, according to David Sobel, a lawyer for the group. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union had asked the FISA court to release an opinion, and the court had informed the ACLU to take the matter up with the Justice Department and work through a district court, if necessary.

So there was a contradiction within the government. “It’s a bizarre catch-22,” Sobel says. On its website, EFF compared this situation to a Kafka plot: “A public trapped between conflicting rules and a secret judicial body, with little transparency or public oversight, seems like a page ripped from The Trial.”

Before EFF could get a ruling on whether this opinion can be declassified and released, it had to first sort out this Alice in Wonderland situation. Consequently, last month, it filed a motion with the FISA court to resolve this aspect of the case. “We want the FISA court to say that if the district court says the opinion should be released, there is noting in its rules that prevents that,” Sobel says. Then EFF can resume its battle with the Justice Department in federal district court for the release of the opinion. The Justice Department was ordered by the FISA court to respond by June 7 to the motion EFF submitted to the FISA court.

Currently, given the conflicting positions of the Justice Department and the FISA court, Sobel notes, “there is no court you can go to to challenge the secrecy” protecting an opinion noting that the government acted unconstitutionally. On its website, EFF observes, “Granted, it’s likely that some of the information contained within FISC opinions should be kept secret; but, when the government hides court opinions describing unconstitutional government action, America’s national security is harmed: not by disclosure of our intelligence capabilities, but through the erosion of our commitment to the rule of law.”

As news reports emerge about the massive phone records and internet surveillance programs—each of which began during the Bush administration and were carried out under congressional oversight and FISA court review—critics on the left and right have accused the government of going too far in sweeping up data, including information related to Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing. There’s no telling if the 86-page FISA court opinion EFF seeks is directly related to either of these two programs, but EFF’s pursuit of this document shows just how difficult it is—perhaps impossible—for the public to pry from the government information about domestic surveillance gone wrong.

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Justice Department Fights Release of Secret Court Opinion Finding Unconstitutional Surveillance

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"The East": How Two Filmmakers’ Freegan Summer Road Trip Became a New Political Thriller Starring a "True Blood" Vampire

by p9zyztu Posted on June 7, 2013

Mother Jones

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The East
Fox Searchlight Pictures
116 minutes

The East, a new thriller directed by relative newcomer Zal Batmanglij, follows an eco-terrorist collective that finds elaborate ways to punish CEOs and pharmaceutical companies for committing “worldwide terrorism.” The eco-terrorists, who call themselves The East, are infiltrated by Sarah Moss (played by Brit Marling), a former fed who works as an undercover operative for a private intel firm that looks out for rich polluters. A morally conflicted Sarah quickly comes to sympathize with East members including Izzy (Ellen Page), and grows increasingly attracted to their ringleader Benji (Alexander Skarsgård, of True Blood vamp fame). Bullets fly, sex in the woods occurs, and alliances are tested.

This political thriller is technically based on a true story. But the real-world inspiration for the script didn’t involve any shoot-out or corporate espionage; it started with a rather unusual summer road trip.

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"The East": How Two Filmmakers’ Freegan Summer Road Trip Became a New Political Thriller Starring a "True Blood" Vampire

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Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

by Mstyslava7ju Posted on June 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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If you’ve ever visited a cave, you know the rules: Stay on the path, and keep your greasy paws off the formations. So Stacy Carolin was a bit taken aback the first time she headed into a cave not as a tourist, but as a scientist, and took a step off the beaten path. “I was a city girl back then,” she recalls. “It was very muddy and slippery… and also completely pitch black.” Not exactly the setting you’d expect for cutting-edge climate change research.

A few years later, Carolin, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, is breaking ground in the field of paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climates, using an unconventional but increasingly prevalent tool: “speleothems,” a catch-all term for cave formations that includes stalagmites (remember the mnemonic: those that “mite” reach the ceiling from the floor) and stalactites (those that hold “tite” to the ceiling).

In a study released today in the journal Science, Carolin and her colleagues outline 100,000-year-old rainfall conditions in Borneo, mapped from chemical clues in cave formations there. Like most historic climate reconstructions, the goal is to compile real-life data against which to test predictive models; if scientists know how much rainfall there was in the tropics in the past, they can see how well their models are able to replicate those conditions, and tweak accordingly. But the most commonly-used “proxies” for ancient climates, including tree rings and ice cores, are notoriously inadequate in the tropics, leaving holes in scientists’ geographic picture of the past and making it difficult to measure historic changes in tropical weather systems, like monsoons, which can themselves have major impacts on global climate.

Deep inside caves in Mexico, Southeast Asia, China, and other limestone-rich locales worldwide, scientists have found rich troves of data in speleothems. Researchers look for formations that have already fallen over or broken off, so as not to damage the cave, haul these back to the lab, slice them open (“like a hot dog,” Carolin says), and study the ancient atoms within to discover how old they are and how much rainfall there was at different points in their past (speleothems form when rainwater drips through the limestone, picking up acid and minerals that pile up in the cave).

Tim McDonnell

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Slicing Open Stalagmites to Reveal Climate Secrets

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