Tag Archives: university

Your favorite climate doc is getting a sequel because, it turns out, we couldn’t handle the truth.

by LeolaChristians Posted on March 30, 2017

Some kids dream of being a movie star or an astronaut, but not Karina Castillo. “Hurricane Andrew hit when I was 6, and it changed who I was,” she says of the historic storm that devastated a swath of South Florida near where her family lived. She decided right then to become a hurricane forecaster.

The youngest daughter of Nicaraguan immigrants, Castillo pursued her dream with the intensity of the storms that fascinated her, earning two meteorology degrees at the University of Miami, then working at NOAA and the Miami-Dade County Office of Emergency Management. But the young scientist soon made an important discovery: “I didn’t want to sit behind a computer and program models,” she says. “I knew I could help communicate science to the public.”

After a stint developing climate curricula at the Miami-based CLEO Institute, she took a job with Moms Clean Air Force, a national coalition of parents and caretakers fighting climate change and air pollution. Castillo is now the point of contact for Florida’s nearly 100,000 MCAF members, guiding them through meetings with policymakers, media appearances, and other climate and clean-air advocacy work. She also conducts national Latino outreach for the group, work she’s eager to ramp up in 2017.

“In the Latino community, the ideas of legacy and conservation are really important,” says Castillo. “When you talk about protecting children, the mama bear comes out of people. And that’s an unstoppable force.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Your favorite climate doc is getting a sequel because, it turns out, we couldn’t handle the truth.

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To reduce obesity and depression, we need more nature in our lives.

by AveryGrafton Posted on March 22, 2017

U.S. cities are packed with about 5 million medium-sized buildings — schools, churches, community centers, apartment buildings. Most use way more energy than they should. Many also have poor airflow and dirty, out-of-date heating and electrical systems. Those conditions contribute to high inner-city asthma rates and other health concerns.

“These buildings are actually making children sick,” says Donnel Baird, who grew up in such a place. His parents, immigrants from Guyana, raised their kids in a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, relying on a cooking stove for heat. Baird eventually moved to the South and then attended Duke University, before returning to New York as a community organizer in 2008.

In 2013, Baird launched BlocPower, which provides engineering and financial know-how to retrofit city buildings. The technical part is cool: Engineers survey structures with sensors and smartphone apps, figuring out the best ways to reduce energy use, like replacing oil boilers with solar hot water. But the financing is critical; BlocPower builds the case for each project and connects owners with lenders. It has already retrofitted more than 500 buildings in New York and is expanding into Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

“The biggest way for us to reduce carbon emissions right now,” Baird says, “is efficiency.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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To reduce obesity and depression, we need more nature in our lives.

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

by ThorsteDailey Posted on March 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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This post is longish and doesn’t really have much payoff at the end. It’s just something that turned into a bit of snark hunt, so I figured I’d document it. You have been warned.

It starts with a column by Mona Chalabi, the Guardian’s “data editor,” which claims to outline her research on the question of whether illegal immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. It’s faintly ridiculous and I’m a little annoyed by it, but then I come to this:

I find a study by Bianca E Bersani. I look her up — she’s a associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Using numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, her study finds that about 17% of all first-generation immigrants who are age 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months….But wait. Is that number high or low? I decide to find out how often native-born people in the US commit crimes. Luckily, her study has that too. It’s higher: about 25% of all native-born people in the US who are 16 have committed a crime in the past 12 months.

That seems kind of high, doesn’t it? Then again, “committed a crime” could encompass things like smoking a joint or stealing a box of paper clips from school, so who knows? The data comes from a paper called “A Game of Catch-Up? The Offending Experience of Second-Generation Immigrants,” so I check it out. But there’s nothing there. The paper has nothing whatsoever to say about either 16-year-olds or first-generation immigrants. What’s going on? Here’s the chart Chalabi presents:

This is a little odd. It suggests that 25 percent of 16-year-olds have committed a crime in the past year, but only 20% of 17-year-olds. That doesn’t jibe with what I know about crime rates. And the source is Pew Research. So let’s go look at the Pew article. It’s a lengthy description of Bersani’s article, and it includes this chart:

This is odd again. It’s the same chart, all right, and the author spends a lot of time describing “A Game of Catch-Up?” But as I mentioned above, that article contains nothing like this at all. What’s more, it appeared in Crime and Delinquency, but the chart is sourced to Justice Quarterly.

So now it’s off to Justice Quarterly. It turns out that everyone is describing the wrong article. I wonder if any of them actually read it? The correct article is “An Examination of First and Second Generation Immigrant Offending Trajectories,” also by Bianca Bersani. Fine. What does that article say? Here is Bersani’s chart, colorized for your viewing enjoyment:

It appears that everyone has been copying the chart properly. For what it’s worth, though, I’d make a few comments:

This data is for all immigrants. Donald Trump’s focus is solely on illegal immigrant crime.

Bersani’s data is from 1997-2005. That’s pretty old. Crime and arrest rates of juveniles have gone down more than 50 percent since then, and the population of illegal immigrants has gone up more than 50 percent since then. I don’t know if that changes the relative values in this chart, but it would certainly change the absolute values.

The data comes from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which uses a very large oversample of Hispanic and black youth. Bersani appears to be using the full sample, and since Hispanic and black adolescents commit crimes at higher rates than whites, it means the numbers for native-born Americans are exaggerated. At a guess, the real figures are 2-3 percentage points lower.

The NLSY97 data includes six types of crime that were included in Bersani’s study: (1) damaging property, (2 and 3) stealing less or more than $50, (4) other property crimes, (5) assault/serious fighting, and (6) selling drugs. By far the biggest contributors were property damage and petty theft, with fighting in third place and the others far behind. Auto theft and using a gun to steal (not included in Bersani’s study) were minuscule:
Since the vast majority of the crimes in this study are minor—and we can assume that serious violent crime is even less prevalent—it’s not clear how much this tells us. I don’t think anyone cares much whether immigrant teenagers steal six packs of beer at a greater rate than native-born Americans. We mainly care about more serious violent crimes: robbery, rape, murder, and aggravated assault. Those aren’t addressed at all.

I’d add that Bersani didn’t just add up all the crimes committed by various groups. Her methodology is pretty impenetrable to anyone who’s not an expert:

I use group-based trajectory modeling…identifies clusters of individuals who display similar behavioral trajectories over a period of time…Nagin and Land’s (1993) semiparametric group-based modeling approach…estimated using a zero-inflated Poisson form of a group-based trajectory model:

where ln(kjit) is the natural logarithm of the number of total crimes for persons i in group j at each age t. The equation specified above follows a quadratic function of age (age and age2)….

I have no idea what this means or whether it’s appropriate, but I’m a little skeptical about a model that suggests that 17- and 18-year-olds commit crimes at lower rates than 16-year-olds. Most crime data I’ve seen shows the opposite. Then again, most crime data doesn’t include extremely minor crimes like shoplifting and property destruction. It’s possible that adolescents age out of that stuff pretty early.

Long story short, I wouldn’t draw too many conclusions from this study. The data is old; it’s not limited to illegal immigrants; it looks only at adolescents; the crimes under consideration are pretty minor; and the methodology is probably OK, but who knows? Put it all together, and I’d say it doesn’t tell us too much one way or the other about the serious crime rate of illegal immigrants as a whole.

I have yet to see a study that persuasively suggests a higher crime rate for immigrants than for anyone else. Let’s face it: if there’s anything we native-born Americans excel at, it’s crime. That said, the Guardian’s data editor should have known better. There are tons of studies out there that try to estimate the relative crime rates of native-born Americans compared to undocumented immigrants, and cherry picking this particular one makes no sense. It does provide a rough data point suggesting that crime rates of immigrants aren’t any different from the rest of the population, but it’s nowhere near the best study out there. Citing this one and calling it a day is a real disservice.

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Immigration and Crime: A Mini Data Dive

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Can Jeff Sessions Be Prosecuted for Perjury?

by LaverneSomers Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Late Wednesday night, the Washington Post broke the news that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had twice met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential campaign, contacts he failed to disclose during his Senate confirmation hearings. “I did not have communications with the Russians,” said Sessions during his sworn testimony. As a growing list of lawmakers call for Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election—and some Democrats demand his resignation—an open question remains: Can Jeff Sessions be prosecuted for perjury?

The answer is not exactly cut and dry. At the time of his confirmation hearings, Sessions was still serving as a senator from Alabama. The Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause shields lawmakers from prosecution for lying during proceedings in the House or Senate. The clause was written with the intent to foster debate in Congress without the threat of lawsuits stifling discussion. So, since Sessions was a sitting Senator when he allegedly misled Congress, does that mean he’s off the hook? Mother Jones put the question to three constitutional law experts.

“There might be other things he can be prosecuted for,” says Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Cornell University, referencing laws that allow Congress to hold individuals in contempt for providing false testimony. But, says Chafetz, Sessions can’t be prosecuted for perjury.

Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe sees it differently. “That would be a laughable misuse of the Speech and Debate Clause,” he says. “He was testifying under oath as an Attorney General nominee, not in the discharge of any Senatorial business of his own.”

Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman says he’s inclined to believe that Sessions is not protected by the clause. Still, Ackerman says there’s no decisive case law on the issue, which muddies the waters. “Only one thing is clear,” he says, “Sessions must recuse himself, and it is incumbent on the Administration to appoint a special prosecutor.”

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Can Jeff Sessions Be Prosecuted for Perjury?

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George Saunders Has Written a Weird and Brilliant Novel

by HopeUJXWtwmhw Posted on February 11, 2017

Mother Jones

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Chloe Aftel

George Saunders used to be a short-fiction guy. A creative-writing instructor at Syracuse University, he was a 2013 National Book Award finalist for Tenth of December, his fourth story collection. But seeds for a novel were planted years earlier during a visit to Washington, when a relative pointed out Willie Lincoln’s crypt. The third child of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln died of typhoid in the winter of 1862, and the president was said to have sneaked out of the White House alone several times to visit his son’s corpse. “I imagined Lincoln with the body across his knees, like a mash-up of the Pietà and the Lincoln Memorial, and it just kind of stuck in my head,” Saunders says.

Much of the dialogue in his haunting debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, out February 14, is relayed by the bickering spirits of the cemetery in the days after Willie’s death—”bardo” is a Buddhist version of purgatory. Saunders spent much of 2016 in a purgatory of a different sort, attending campaign rallies for a deep-dive New Yorker piece on the psychology of Donald Trump’s supporters. I caught up with him a few weeks after the election to talk about ghosts, inspiring authors, and just what the heck is happening to America.

Mother Jones: Why write a novel after all these years?

George Saunders: I was trying like hell not to! This idea had been around for like 20 years, and about 5 years ago I gave myself permission just to fart around with it a little bit, and it kind of caught on.

MJ: Your book has no narrator. It’s really an extended dialogue among the characters—a few living, but most dead.

GS: Lincoln in the graveyard is pretty hard to dramatize because it’s just one guy. I thought, “Well, I need some witnesses.” And since it was at night, the idea of ghosts came up. I couldn’t figure out a way to tell that story in a more conventional format. In a lot of ways, these questions we refer to as structure or form or style are really just evasions. You’re trying to evade suckiness, and by maximally evading suckiness you might come up with something original.

MJ: Tell me about your research process.

GS: I’ve got hundreds of books on Lincoln from the Syracuse library and that I bought. When I wasn’t writing, I’d be just poring through. I got so addicted, it was almost like the contemporary world wasn’t so interesting and only 1862 was cool. But one of the focusing things about this is it’s just one night. I had to remind myself early and often that it’s not a biography of Lincoln. It’s not even about Lincoln!

The Lincoln family in 1861, from left: Mary, Willie, Robert, ‘Tad,’ and Abe. Library of Congress

MJ: Are you a Civil War buff?

GS: I never really was, but nothing will turn you into a Civil War buff like five years of reading. Some of the letters that people wrote from that time are so deep and so beautifully articulate. And you realize, especially with the stuff that’s going on now in the country, that it’s always been chaos—people were disagreeing at least as much as they are now and 20,000 people would die in a day. It’s the scale that’s amazing, and also the proximity to our own time. I remember at one point seeing a photograph of basically a slave store in Atlanta. It’s where you’d go if you needed a slave. And you think, “Wow! That was not a long time ago.”

MJ: You dedicate this book to your kids. What was it like, as a parent, to spend so much time thinking about the death of a child?

GS: It was touchy. I honestly couldn’t have done it when they were Willie’s age, little kids. It sounds kind of corny, but we seem programmed to love each other and to have our special attachments to people, and certainly our kids. And those are so raw and so powerful, you can’t even turn your mind in a direction of that kind of a loss. When you’re talking about Abe Lincoln, you’re like, “Okay, now he’s got to dust himself off and go win the war.” That’s not how that works. The historical accounts indicate that he never recovered. And he didn’t live that much longer.

Willie Lincoln died in 1862. He was 12. Wikipedia Commons

MJ: Do you believe in ghosts?

GS: Do you?

MJ: From time to time.

GS: I definitely believe in them dramatically. For example, I’m standing here in front of this 1920s bungalow in LA. If you just describe the physicality of the place, you’re only getting a fraction of the truth, which is that if you went back to 1946 there was some dude standing here in a fedora who’s now dead. That’s as true as the fact that there’s a lawn chair sitting here in front of me. To give a story broader shoulders, you have to sometimes push off into the supernatural or the sci-fi, not as a way of avoiding reality, but of accommodating it correctly. I actually do believe in life after death. In the book, I tried to make it funny and weird enough that it didn’t resemble an afterlife that we had seen somewhere else. When you die you don‘t go, “Oh, it’s just like I read about.” It’s more like, “Oh shit, what is this?”

MJ: Your New Yorker piece nicely captures our cultural divide—is it surmountable?

GS: I got so many letters from Trump supporters on that piece, and they start off really rough. I try to engage each person somewhat deeply, and I can point to the moment in the exchanges when it goes from that mode to a personal mode. Suddenly all their decency comes out. But in the public sphere: At a rally it’s bad; on the internet it’s 10 times worse. We’ve got a real problem with social media that we didn’t know we were going to have. It’s almost like the demons have gotten out of the box. I’m thinking I’m going to stay off the internet as much as possible and try to change my data mix so that more of it is coming from firsthand experience and interactions.

MJ: Your data mix?

GS: I’m repledging myself to human-scale values. As a fiction writer, the best data comes through the senses and is then processed through many revisions. We have to learn to be intelligent assessors of the data coming in to us and what it’s doing to our mental process. It’s one thing if the two of us are sitting at a table talking about something charged, and I know you and you’re a friend and we have a history, but a great deal is coming into our heads that’s agenda-laced and written quickly from someone you have no connection with. Human beings are not necessarily designed for a high level of that kind of data.

One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can’t tell you how many times a conversation went like this: “We’ve got to stop these immigrants, because it’s terrible.” I’d say, “Okay, what personally have you observed about this?” And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I’d say, “Where’d you get your information?” thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, “Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources.” Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.

MJ: What do you read to take your mind off the world?

GS: I read more to put my mind back on it. I have a pretty active work and travel life, and several days will go by when I haven’t had a deep feeling—I’ve just been kind of checking off the boxes. So I read to make myself feel awake. Zadie Smith has a new book called call Swing Time and I just had a beautiful experience with that where, suddenly, you know that feeling where you read something and then you walk out on the street and suddenly everything is three- or four-dimensional again? Everything smells more. The light is brighter.

MJ: So what’s your next dream project?

GS: That’s exactly what I’m asking myself. I’m turning 58, and you get that kind of weird, old-guy feeling of you don’t have an infinite number of years left and if there’s anything you want to say or represent, it’s time to try it. I’m a big lover of America. I love the people, but also the weird berms, the strange little high schools tucked away in different places, and just the whole geography and the psycho­logical apparatus of Americans. Up until now, my work has always been kind of empowered by constraint. You say, “Okay, I’m writing a six-page story. It’s set in a theme park.” I’ve been almost like a piranha—I’ll dart off and take a little bite of a little side and come out. I’d like to try to take on the whole thing.

MJ: Who inspires you to write?

GS: Hemingway was a big influence early—In Our Time and those books. And Tobias Wolff is a huge hero of mine. Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Stuart Dybek. I’m a big fan of the Russians: Isaac Babel is just an exquisite line-to-line stylist.

MJ: That’s an ironic name for a wordsmith.

GS: He was a cool dude, a Jew who traveled with the Cossacks. He was killed by Stalin. Babel was like, “I’m going to talk to everybody, honor everybody’s viewpoints, and then I’m going to present it in this really complicated stew that feels almost insanely true.” It’s violent and it’s contradictory and people are beautiful and savage in the same paragraph. It might have a particular relevance for right now. We’ve been very fortunate the last X number of years to have our political fights in roped-off spheres, very safe. Now we’re starting to see how nasty it can get. I just got a text from a friend in Missouri. He’s driving in his BMW and this guy pulls up alongside him, pulls a .350 Magnum, and says, “Why don’t you buy a fucking American car, motherfucker?”

MJ: Oh wow.

GS: So Babel is a good writer for now because he was the darling of the Soviets and then one day he wasn’t. They beat all these confessions out of him, and then he recovered enough to ask them to please retract those—and they shot him.

The DC crypt where Willie Lincoln’s body rested prior to his funeral. Flickr/Tim Evanson

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George Saunders Has Written a Weird and Brilliant Novel

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Here’s Why Donald Trump Can’t Defund “Out-of-Control” California

by WendyWWQHcs Posted on February 9, 2017

Mother Jones

One of President Donald Trump’s favorite threats is cutting federal government funding to states, cities, and other entities that refuse to cooperate with his policies. On January 25, he issued an executive order titled “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” which warns “sanctuary cities” that they could lose federal funds if they continue to protect undocumented residents from deportation. After an appearance by Breitbart‘s Milo Yiannopoulos at the University of California-Berkeley was canceled amid violent protests, Trump tapped out the following tweet:

And during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Trump doubled down on California: “If we have to, we’ll defund…We give tremendous amounts of money to California. California in many ways is out of control, as you know.”

Here’s the thing: Trump can’t just yank funding from states or cities or universities that upset him. Yet the matter is far from resolved: Several cities and one state have already filed lawsuits against the Trump administration over its threats, all but ensuring a battle that could end up before the Supreme Court. Here’s what you need to know about the legal issues behind this fight.

Why can’t the president withhold federal money from states or cities?

The short answer is that Congress, not the White House, has ultimate power over the federal purse. The president’s budget requests may direct Congress how to allocate federal spending, but the matter is not entirely in his hands. And he has no authority to withhold or rescind spending that’s already been authorized.

So couldn’t Congress defund a state or city if the president asked it to?

Hypothetically, Congress could pass a law or budget bill that puts conditions on the federal funding provided to, say, out-of-control California. But numerous Supreme Court decisions protect state and local governments against this type of vindictive policymaking. When the federal government raised the national minimum drinking age to 21 in 1984, it prodded states into enforcing the new law by stipulating that any state that didn’t comply would lose 5 percent of its federal highway construction funds. South Dakota wasn’t happy about this and filed a lawsuit against the federal government. South Dakota v. Dole worked its way up to the Supreme Court, which found that the federal government can apply conditions to funding—with a few limits. One of those limits is the stipulation that any conditional spending must not be “coercive.” As Justice William Rehnquist wrote, there is a point when “pressure turns into compulsion,” and a state might unconstitutionally be forced to comply because it needs the federal money to operate. Additionally, conditional funding can only apply to new money, not funding that’s already been committed.

As a practical matter, states and cities receive federal money through hundreds of different appropriations bills and programs. If Trump and congressional Republicans wanted to effectively defund California, they would have to modify each federal spending provision that affects the state. Conceivably, they could pass a bill that instructs the Department of the Treasury to stop sending money to Sacramento, but that would spark an enormous constitutional crisis.

But aren’t states and cities required to follow federal laws whether they like it or not?

Yes—but again there are limits. When the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of Obamacare in 2012, it also considered the law’s expansion of state Medicaid programs. The Affordable Care Act had threatened to cut off all Medicaid funding to states should they fail to expand the program in accordance with its standards. Citing South Dakota v. Dole, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion that this ultimatum was “a gun to the head” of the states. For many states, federal Medicaid money comprises more than 10 percent of total revenue, and losing that money would effectively cripple them. Six other justices agreed with Roberts on this point, and Medicaid expansion was left to the states.

What about the 10th Amendment?

The 10th Amendment of the Constitution says that any power not delegated to the federal government becomes the responsibility of the states. This is the basis of America’s federal system, whereby states have the freedom to pass laws that are distinct from those passed by Congress.

The Supreme Court has long interpreted the 10th Amendment as the foundation for a check on federal power. Take the case of Printz v. United States. After Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in 1993, a Montana sheriff named Jay Printz challenged its requirement that local law enforcement agencies conduct background checks on gun buyers. He argued that Congress was acting outside of its authority to compel state-level officials to enforce federal law. In 1997, five Supreme Court justices, led by Antonin Scalia, agreed.

The Printz decision underscores what Duke University law professor Matthew Adler calls “an external constraint upon congressional power—analogous to the constraints set forth in the Bill of Rights—but one that lacks an explicit textual basis.” In other words, decades of Supreme Court rulings on the 10th Amendment have formed an effective check on federal power by the states. And that could mean that just as Printz was allowed to resist conducting federally mandated background checks, a court could find that officials in sanctuary states and cities are allowed to avoid enforcing federal immigration law.

Don’t conservatives like the 10th Amendment more than progressives?

In the past, the 10th Amendment has provided cover for advocates of states’ rights and efforts to resist federal civil rights efforts such as integrating schools. More recently, the 10th Amendment became a rallying cry for the Obama administration’s opponents. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is a big fan of the 10th, and tea partiers and “Tenthers” invoked the amendment to push back against Obamacare and even call for secession.

Now it’s liberals who are warming to the promise of the 10th Amendment. San Francisco’s recently filed federal lawsuit against the Trump administration argues that, defunding aside, the anti-sanctuary-city executive order violates the 10th Amendment. The city claims that it is within its rights to not cooperate with federal authorities under the “anti-commandeering” precedent set in Printz, which says higher jurisdictions may not “commandeer” local resources to enforce federal rules. Likewise, Massachusetts has also invoked the 10th amendment against Trump’s “Muslim ban” executive order. Several Boston suburbs have also cited the 10th in their lawsuits against the administration’s sanctuary city order, as has Santa Clara County, California, the home of Silicon Valley. Last week, Portland’s mayor issued a statement that the 10th Amendment protects its sanctuary city policies too.

How could this battle play out?

The feds depend on state and local officials to enforce their policies. The federal system is set up to encourage cooperation between state and federal officials. If that falls apart, Trump will have difficulty enacting his agenda. As Yale law professor Heather Gerken recently argued on Vox, “Even if President Trump spends enough political capital to win this or that battle against blue cities and states, he cannot win the war. The federal government doesn’t have the resources to carry out Trump’s policies.”

The funding question remains up in the air since Trump hasn’t given any indication to how, exactly, he would defund cities and states. However, given that California is in the process of passing legislation that effectively makes the entire state a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants, and given that its elected officials have been vocal about their opposition to Trump, we could see a California v. U.S. case in the near future if Trump tries to follow through. On Monday, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra reiterated his commitment to pushing back against Trump’s defunding threat. “We will fight anyone who wants to take away dollars that we have earned and are qualified for simply because we are unwilling to violate the Constitution under these defective executive orders,” he said.

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Here’s Why Donald Trump Can’t Defund “Out-of-Control” California

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Trump’s ban puts a chill on science and cleantech

by Leonor1385 Posted on February 1, 2017

Samira Samimi knew she wanted to be a scientist the first time she saw a glacier. “This is what I want to do,” she remembers thinking on her trip to the mountains. “This is who I want to be.”

She was 16 years old, growing up in Iran, where glaciers are less than plentiful. She knew she would have to leave her home country to study them, so she applied to Canadian universities with an eye on the Arctic. Now 30, she’s in her first year of a glaciology PhD at the University of Calgary, and — dream come true — part of a NASA-funded team studying the Greenland ice sheet.

But on Friday, the Trump administration’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries threw her planned research trip to Greenland this spring into jeopardy. Her cargo plane flight takes off in April from a U.S. Air National Guard base in Albany.

In the days since President Trump signed the executive order, it has already disrupted science communities in the United States and around the globe. Students and researchers have found themselves trapped out of the country, seen field work plans scuttled, or had long-awaited visits canceled. For many scientists engaged in the work of understanding and addressing the world’s next great challenge — a changing climate and the transition to cleaner energy sources — it’s clear that you can’t stifle immigration without stifling innovation, too.

“Think of the STEM fields as the engine of the American economy. That engine has gotten so big and so powerful that it can’t be fueled by talent within the U.S. itself.”

Moh El-Naggar, biophysicist at the University of Southern California

“We live in an extremely competitive global environment,” says Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Just because we want to do this ‘America First’ thing doesn’t mean the rest of the world is going to stop being entrepreneurial and get out of the way.”

Told one way, the story of America the superpower is the story of innovation. Our history books and homegrown myths are crowded with inventors and entrepreneurs, from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. In the 20th century, America earned its place in world events, more often than not, by MacGyvering one unlikely technological triumph after another: over disease, over German nuclear physicists and Cold War cosmonauts, over the pull of Earth’s gravity itself. And immigration played a critical role in that progress.

As The Hill pointed out last year, all six American Nobel laureates in 2016 were foreign-born. That’s not unusual: According to a 2014 study by Stanford scientists, the number of U.S. patent filings increased by 30 percent in the wake of Jewish immigrants fleeing Nazi Germany. So did the number of Nobel prizes.

In general, the less open a society is, the more likely its scientists and innovators are to go elsewhere — and for a long time, that “elsewhere” has been the United States.

One in six U.S. scientists is an immigrant, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation report. Of those, a majority are naturalized citizens, but many hold green cards or long-term visas to study and work in the United States. And those 5 million scientists have had a measurable effect on science in their adopted country.

“We’re at a point where changes in our technology are happening so quickly, we can either sit it out, or we can be full participants,” Rosenberg says. “We have some natural competitive advantages, but we could lose them simply by taking this nationalist line.”

A chart from 2011 shows Nobel Laureates by location of affiliation at the time of the win.Jon Bruner/Forbes

“Think of the STEM fields as the engine of the American economy,” says Moh El-Naggar, a biophysicist at the University of Southern California, where he studies the weird things microbes can do — including, potentially, playing a role in renewable energy technologies. “That engine has gotten so big and so powerful that it can’t be fueled by talent within the U.S. itself.”

El-Naggar was born in Libya, one of the seven countries placed under travel restrictions by Trump’s executive order. He’s now an American citizen and worries about the toll of a travel ban on the morale of his fellow foreign-born scientists — and the impact on their research.

“I look at my own work,” he says, “and I feel that almost every good thing that’s ever happened had its genesis in some unexpected conversation in some unexpected conference with some unexpected colleague. We are in a situation where we’ve put barriers on these unexpected conversations.”

Last week’s news came with a personal cost, too. His parents had been planning a trip to California in April to meet their grandchildren for the first time. Now those plans are on hold, indefinitely.

“A lot of people like me ended up in this country, doing what we love, because it was a better place to come to than where we grew up,” El-Naggar says. “So when I say that this looks bad to me right now, I hope that carries extra weight. This is coming from someone who has seen bad.”

U.S. scientific organizations have put out strong statements condemning the entry ban, including a letter sent by the AAAS and co-signed by more than 150 other institutions. Massachusetts Institute of Technology President L. Rafael Reif called the policy “a stunning violation of our deepest American values” in an email to students, while John Holdren, science advisor to the Obama administration, had even stronger words for the executive action, calling it “perverse,” an “abomination,” and a “terrible, terrible idea” in an interview with Nature.

An online petition to lift the restrictions has already been signed by tens of thousands of academics and researchers. Many tech companies — often sponsors of visas for foreign-born engineers, if not founded and led by immigrants themselves — have spoken out against the move, as well.

Their concern is amplified by additional anti-science moves by the Trump administration. In orders leaked last week, the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered to cease all external communication, including scientific releases, until they could be reviewed and approved by a member of the administration.

“You should never get to the point where someone in political power gets to decide what’s the good science and what’s the bad science,” the UCS’s Rosenberg says. “You have to worry about that.”

For Samimi, there’s very specific climate research at stake. She made a trip to Greenland last year, installing instruments in the ice sheet that need to be maintained and adjusted. If she can’t get back, she might have to abandon her PhD experiment.

“If I’m not able to work there …” she says. “I don’t even want to think about alternatives. This doesn’t make sense, you know?” Right now, a lot of the scientific community is reaching the same conclusion.

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Trump’s ban puts a chill on science and cleantech

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In Flint, We Are Laying Tragedy on Top of Tragedy on Top of Tragedy

by ClarkPieqnhkoxxd Posted on January 26, 2017

Mother Jones

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I mentioned yesterday that continuing to keep Flint residents in terror of their water, even though it’s now safe, is just compounding tragedy with tragedy. Today, however, a friend directs me to another example of this, from a New Yorker story about Maya Shankar, an Obama staffer who was looking at ways that behavioral science might be put to work in Flint. It starts with a conversation between Shankar and Kent Key, who works at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine:

Key shared a personal story about the son of a family friend who had begun acting out in school. The boy’s mother had come to Key for help. When Key asked the boy what was going on, he replied, “Well, they said I’m not going to be smart anyway.”

“These kids are internalizing the messages about how the lead is affecting them,” Key said….It wasn’t immediately clear what had come out of the gathering. But, as she and Tucker-Ray left for their next appointment, Shankar began contemplating aloud the possibilities. She said to Tucker-Ray, “Did you see how my eyes widened when he said that thing about the kids giving up because they think they’re going to be dumb?”

….As their last day in Flint drew to a close, Shankar and Tucker-Ray hurried to a final meeting. They had arranged to talk with a disabled Gulf War veteran and community activist named Art Woodson, who didn’t think much of the federal government. At a local municipal building, where an enlarged photograph of corroded lead pipes adorned one wall, Woodson told Shankar about his worry that local kids would give up when lead’s symptoms surfaced, or even before. “What I see,” he said, “is hopelessness.”

This is yet another tragedy. Children in Flint had mildly elevated levels of lead in their bloodstream for about a year or two. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but the effects of this are fairly modest. To put it in terms most people will recognize, it means that some children in Flint will lose about one IQ point. Maybe two. That’s a tragedy, but it’s an even bigger tragedy if kids and their parents respond to this by thinking their lives are permanently ruined. The truth is that in nearly all children, the effects will be only barely noticeable.

I don’t know what the right response is here. On the one hand, nobody pays attention unless you yell and scream and demand attention. If it weren’t for this, authorities would have ignored Flint even longer than they did. On the other hand, the effects of all this yelling and screaming can be disastrous in the long term if residents end up with the belief that Flint’s kids are now all destined for a life of misery and cognitive decline.

What’s the answer? I’m just some white guy in California, and nobody in Flint is going to pay any attention to what I’m saying. I don’t blame them. Nor do doctors want to publicly agree with me, because nobody wants to downplay the effects of lead poisoning. I get that too. I can already imagine the number of tweets and emails I’m going to get demanding to know why I think Flint is no big deal. And yet, the effects of not acknowledging the truth in a serious but sober way can be devastating. There has to be a better way.

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In Flint, We Are Laying Tragedy on Top of Tragedy on Top of Tragedy

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Cops’ Feelings on Race Show How Far We Have to Go

by johnsmithwindows Posted on January 16, 2017

Mother Jones

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This week, the Pew Research Center released a report entitled “Behind the Badge,” a comprehensive survey of nearly 8,000 law enforcement officials across the United States examining their attitudes toward their jobs, police protests, interactions with their communities, racial issues, and much more. The report states that it is appearing “at a crisis point in America’s relationship with the men and women who enforce its laws, precipitated by a series of deaths of black Americans during encounters with the police.”

According to 2016 University of Louisville and University of South Carolina study, police fatally shoot black men at disproportionate rates. Since the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the last few years have been marked with protests leading to a national discussion around race and policing. This report explores how law enforcement officers in the United States view the intersection of policing and race—often, not surprisingly, with very different perspectives between white and black officers.

Here are some of the highlights:

Racial equality: When asked about racial inequality in the country, 92 percent of white officers answered that the United States does not need to make any more changes to achieve equal rights for black Americans. Only 29 percent of black cops agreed. This is in sharp contrast to white civilians, the report notes: Only 57 percent of white adults believe that equal rights have been secured for black people; a mere 8 percent of black people agree, Pew found in a separate survey.
Demonstrations against police: Sixty-eight percent of the officers interviewed say demonstrations against police brutality are motivated by anti-police bias, and 67 percent say the deaths of black people at the hands of police are isolated incidents. Once more, there is a significant racial divide between the respondents: 57 percent of black cops think the high-profile incidents point to a larger problem, while only 27 percent of their white colleagues agree.
Police involvement in immigrant deportation: During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump supported local law enforcement having more of a role in deporting undocumented immigrants, and a small majority of cops agree. Overall, 52 percent of police officers believe they should have an active role in immigration enforcement; 59 percent of white cops agree, compared with 35 percent of black officers and 38 percent of Hispanic police officers.
Community policing: The idea of training police officers to work with community members to achieve better policing has become the center of the conversation surrounding police reform since President Barack Obama organized a task force around the “community policing” concept. But 56 percent of all police officers interviewed consider an aggressive approach to policing more appropriate in certain neighborhoods than the approach of being courteous. There was no racial breakdown for this result.
Physical confrontation: For most police officers, according to the report, physical confrontations do not occur every day, but one-third of those interviewed reported having a physical struggle with a suspect who was resisting arrest within the last month. Thirty-six percent of white officers reported having such an incident, while 33 percent of Hispanic officers reported the same thing. Only 20 percent of black officers said they had a physical altercation with a suspect.

The report also includes police officers attitudes on job satisfaction and police reform proposals. “Police and the public hold sharply different views about key aspects of policing as well as on some major policy issues facing the country,” the report concludes.

Read the full report here.

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Cops’ Feelings on Race Show How Far We Have to Go

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How the LGBT Community Can Fight Back Against Trump

by elaine07n53512 Posted on January 14, 2017

Mother Jones

After every major LGBT rights group in America campaigned in support of Donald Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, it came as little surprise that Trump won just 14 percent of the LGBT vote on November 8. Yet, one of Trump’s most vocal and controversial cheerleaders has been a gay man, political provocateur and Breibart News writer Milo Yiannopolous. Yiannopolous—who has penned columns such as “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “The Conservative Father’s Guide to Cutting Off Activist Children”—repeatedly made headlines last year for his inflammatory rhetoric. At his gays-for-Trump event at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last summer, Yiannopolous argued the Democratic Party was “nannying us about transgender pronouns” while “pandering to an ideology that wants me dead”—his take on Islam as an anti-gay religion. He declared Trump “the most pro-gay candidate in American electoral history,” arguing Trump would be great for gay people.

Last July, Yiannopolous was banned from Twitter after inciting his followers to make racist attacks against black actress Leslie Jones. More recently, he mocked a transgender student at a college campus where he was giving a speech. Stops on Yiannopolous’ campus tour have regularly been met with protests and calls for university administrations to cancel his appearances.

When gay magazine Out put Yiannopolous on its cover last summer, the backlash was fierce and swift—especially from LGBT people of color, who recognized all too well the dangers of “normalizing” champions of bigotry.

So how should queer folk react to Yiannopolous’ hatred, and what can we do to combat it? I talked to Preston Mitchum, an LGBT rights and racial justice advocate, to find out. Mitchum—whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Huffington Post, Ebony, and more—is also a policy analyst at the Center for Health and Gender Equity and a legal research professor at Georgetown University.

What follows is our conversation about racism and sexism in the LGBT community, and what queer solidarity looks like in the face of hatred.

Mother Jones: Milo is an admitted troll, and his rhetoric is over-the-top. Should we even take him seriously?

Preston Mitchum: Queer people of color have always taken those kinds of hateful ideas—and the actions that flow therefrom—seriously. Bias is not new to the LGBT community. Our community is racist, sexist, and transphobic. But Milo feels different because of the extreme nature of his statements. His views aren’t common. But he is setting the stage for what vitriol can look like in the community if left unchecked.

Preston Mitchum

MJ: Queer folk—even white ones—are marginalized too. Why would some be receptive to ideas like Milo’s?

PM: Racism, sexism, and transphobia are foundational to this country. Queer people didn’t invent them, but we can’t separate them from the LGBT community. We internalize what we see every day. I think about people like Ben Carson, who pushes ideas that have been popularized by racists. We also learn from our experiences. So Milo being a gay man does not mean that he’s going to believe everything that I believe, because I am a black man who experiences racism and homophobia at the same time. Milo doesn’t have that experience. Part of fixing this is to first recognize that we are predisposed to discrimination and then intentionally work to undo what we have been taught about racism and misogyny.

MJ: A lot of people don’t get that.

PM: They don’t. They might understand what their own oppression looks like as a white gay man, but systemically that looks different for someone who is a woman and black and gay. People who are part of multiple marginalized communities face harsher treatment just because of their intersections. Many people don’t understand privilege. What’s worse is they don’t recognize that they contribute to other queer people’s oppression, either. The same goes for a lot of mainstream white-led LGBT organizations.

MJ: Talk about that.

PM: Mainstream white individuals and white-led organizations are oftentimes the ones who sweep statements like Milo’s under the rug. A lot of it has to do with responding to donors’ demands. If your donors are sending you money to advocate for marriage equality, that’s what you’re going to do. But there are other communities who also need the support of those groups but who have been made invisible because they don’t have the money to give them to focus on their needs. It’s incumbent on those organizations who say they care about all LGBT people to find it within their capacity to still do work on behalf of black and brown LGBT people even if they’re not paying for it. That’s what solidarity looks like.

In the past few years, I’ve noticed a more concerted effort to address certain racism, certain violence against black trans people—mainly black trans women. But I’m ready to see what that can look like big picture. What does it look like to have a black trans person on your board? What does it look like when you are actually starting something separate for black trans people in your organization? That is what I have yet to see.

At the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, which was led immediately by black queer and trans folk, you didn’t hear much from many white-led LGBT organizations, which was frustrating because a lot of the immediate leaders of the movement were black queer and trans people. And earlier than that, when there was a campaign to repeal DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, many white-led orgs sought the support of the NAACP. But when the crux of the Voting Rights Act was struck down by the Supreme Court that same year, there was silence from those same groups. I talked to people in LGBT organizations who were immediately defensive when that critique was brought to their attention. We have to be willing to have these conversations about racism that require us to be critiqued.

MJ: Why are those conversations difficult to have?

PM: Part of the problem is that progressives are so focused on unifying against conservatives. Unity is good, but it often silences more marginalized groups. We have to be honest about what’s happening within our own community if we want to push back against Trump. It’s easy to point out people who don’t identify as you and say, “You’re the bad person here.” It’s more difficult to look within our own community and say, “We identify and have some common ground, but there’s something about you that I know is vehemently opposed to me.”

MJ: How has this bias been manifest within the LGBT community historically?

PM: It’s hard to say. LGBT people have vocally been discussed only for the past 40 years. But even in that, the way we talk about our history is racist. Only in the past couple years have we started to mention some of the black and Puerto Rican trans women who were really at the start of Stonewall. Or acknowledge people like Bayard Rustin, who was the architect of the 1963 March on Washington. We know that is the whitewashing of history. LGBT history is no different.

MJ: How are queer people of color pushing back on that exclusion—and how can the larger community root out the bias that drives that exclusion?

PM: Black Youth Project 100—which I’m a part of—has been challenging that erasure of black queer and trans folk for the past two and a half to three years, and making sure that people who are marginalized within the LGBT community are centered and that work is done to organize around their needs. There are others doing this work. But there are things that everyone can do—and that many people have been doing. One is to come prepared with information to push back on racist and sexist rhetoric. Social media is a huge way people have been doing that. Black and brown people also need to be very blunt about how oppression treats us as queer and trans folk.

One of the things that I always want to discuss is believing the experiences of people of color. We often aren’t believed until a white person confirms our stories. I would also encourage people to donate money to organizations that do this work. That’s what people can do to help fix the problem.

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How the LGBT Community Can Fight Back Against Trump

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