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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

by RandallEZML Posted on October 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is some video, they are dangerous and venomous, don’t get close to them. Rescued this sea snake today on the beach here at Silverstrand in Oxnard. Prior to this there was only a report of them being seen as far north as Orange County. El Niño has definitely brought a lot of strange and unusual aquatic fish and animals up. Caution these snakes are venomous and should be avoided and not handled. And yes it is alive.

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Robert Forbes on Friday, October 16, 2015

On Friday, Southern Californians began freaking out after a surfer discovered a venomous sea snake on a beach north of Los Angeles. The species, the yellow-bellied sea snake, normally keeps to tropical waters and has not been reported on the Golden State’s shores for more than 30 years, and never as far north as Ventura County. The snake died shortly after it was found, but not before adding to El Niño apocalypse anxiety. Local wildlife experts have hypothesized that the snake traveled this far north because of unusually warm waters off of the California coast due to El Niño.

If you suffer from ophidiophobia, these reports probably gave you a scare. But we have some good news: While venomous snakes are a significant danger in other parts of the world, the United States is almost certainly not going to see a wave of deadly snake attacks, even with a strong El Niño. Yes, sea snakes might be feeding further north this winter, but that does not mean they are going to be out for human prey; likely the only reason this snake came ashore is because it was injured or sick.

Furthermore, according to David Steen, a snake expert and researcher at Auburn University’s Museum of Natural History, there are no known human deaths attributed to the yellow-bellied sea snake, and only about five people per year are killed by venomous snakes of any kind in the United States. By contrast, there were 42 reports of dog-bite fatalities in the United States last year.

“Venomous snakes deserve our respect but in many cases the danger they represent is exaggerated,” Steen wrote me in an email, adding that a sea snake would have no reason to attack a human unless it was picked up or harassed. “If you don’t already know that it is a bad idea to pick up snakes that you do not recognize then you probably have bigger problems.”

This story has been revised.

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No, Californians, Venomous El Niño Snakes Are Not Going to Kill You

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Here’s What Bernie Sanders Is Like as a Debater

by DebbraOXFM Posted on October 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Forty-three years ago, moments before the final debate of his first ever political campaign, Bernie Sanders turned to one of his rivals for Vermont’s governorship, Fred Hackett, and made an unusual proposal: What if they switched outfits? The Republican could take off his tie, don Sanders’ ratty blazer, and mess up his hair. Bernie could borrow Hackett’s suit. “I tried to convince Fred that a great historical moment was at hand—that tens of thousands of people would turn on their TV sets and there, right before their uncomprehending eyes, would be a new Fred Hackett,” he recalled in an essay a few months later. “Fred didn’t take my advice—which is probably why he lost the election.” (Sanders, who was running on the third-party Liberty Union ticket, also lost the election.)

That scenario is unlikely to repeat itself on Tuesday, when Sanders faces off against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Democratic presidential field at the Wynn hotel and casino in Las Vegas. After four decades in politics, Sanders is as veteran a debater as they come—but is he any good at it?

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Here’s What Bernie Sanders Is Like as a Debater

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Outrage is Boiling Over the Outcome of New Probes Into the Police Shooting of a 12-year-old. Here Are 6 Takeaways.

by MariMacDonnell Posted on October 11, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update, 1:45 p.m. EDT: In the hours since two new investigations into the fatal police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice concluded that a Cleveland police officer’s actions were “reasonable,” outrage has spread on Twitter and protesters have taken to the streets. Some called on authorities to redefine what is legally “reasonable.”

Activists in Cleveland and elsewhere saw the reports as a sign that it’s unlikely Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann will face criminal charges for his actions. As demonstrations took place in cities such as Cleveland and Oakland, several high-profile figures weighed in:

Meanwhile, a police union attorney for Frank Garmback, the officer who drove the squad car near Rice before Loehmann opened fire, told Mother Jones Garmback has decided that he will not testify before the grand jury.

Garmback is still considering submitting a written statement to Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty, according to his lawyer Michael Maloney.

“While we are not facing a strict deadline at the moment, it is clear we have to advise the prosecutor of our intentions fairly soon,” he said. Maloney declined to comment further on questions about whether Loehmann will testify or submit a statement soon.

Previously:

Late on Saturday night, the Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office released conclusions from three additional investigations into the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a police officer at a Cleveland park last November.

Two of the reports, written by police use-of-force experts, determined that the actions of Cleveland officer Timothy Loehmann, who fatally wounded Rice within a few seconds of arriving at the scene on November 22, were “objectively reasonable” under federal case law and did not violate the Fourth Amendment. A third investigation reconstructed the shooting scene at the Cudell Recreation Center and examined how quickly the police car was moving when it pulled up to Rice.

Here are the key takeaways from the reports, and questions that remain almost a year since Rice’s death:

The fact that Rice was a kid, or that his gun turned out to be fake, are “irrelevant” in determining whether Loehmann’s actions were reasonable under federal law. According to use of force experts S. Lamar Sims and Kimberly Crawford, the available evidence shows Loehmann could not have known at the time of the shooting that Rice was a boy with a toy gun. Therefore Loehmann acted reasonably—as defined by previous US Supreme Court decisions—when he fired his weapon at Rice, Sims and Crawford concluded. And while key details in the 911 call—that Rice was “probably a juvenile” waving a gun that was “probably fake”—were not relayed to the officers, they “cannot be considered,” Crawford wrote.

Whether Loehmann and the officer who drove the squad car, Frank Garmback, used appropriate tactics also fell outside the scope of Sims and Crawford’s investigations, they said. Garmback pulled the police vehicle to within several feet of Rice, and Loehmann fired shots within two seconds.

“To suggest that Officer Garmback should have stopped the car at another location is to engage in exactly the kind of ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ the case law exhorts us to avoid,” Sims wrote. While it could be argued that the officers escalated the situation “by entering the park and stopping their vehicle so close to a potentially armed subject,” Crawford added, that speculation has “no place in determining the reasonableness of an officer’s use of force.”

The reports do not discuss the fact that Loehmann and Garmback did not administer first aid while Rice lay bleeding. Surveillance footage of the incident showed Loehmann and Garmback stood around for about four minutes without attempting to give any medical attention to Rice. When Rice’s sister approached, Garmback tackled her to the ground. Later, an FBI agent arrived and began to tend to Rice’s wound before an ambulance took him to a hospital. Rice died the next day.

A fundamental principle of policing is that once a threat has been eliminated and a scene secured, an officer’s first priority is to aid an injured person, Seth Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina studying policing, told Mother Jones in May. “At that point, the officer and his medical kit might be the only thing between the suspect and death,” said Stoughton, who who previously served as a police officer in Florida for five years. “It’s not only an ethical requirement, but almost certainly a departmental imperative to do what they can to save the life of the suspect. The failure to do that is really disturbing.”

The officers still aren’t talking to investigators. Both Loehmann and Garmback have declined to give statements to investigators or the county prosecutor, under the advice of their lawyers. In June, their attorney Michael Maloney told Mother Jones that the officers “have not ruled out the possibility” of providing a written statement to the prosecutor. They have not decided whether they will testify before the grand jury.

It’s unclear whether Loehmann will face criminal charges. A total of four investigations have now been made public in the wake of Rice’s death, none of which are intended to draw conclusions about whether officer Loehmann should be charged. As county prosecutor Timothy McGinty explains, all reports will be reviewed by a grand jury, which will then determine whether Loehmann will face criminal charges.

The officer who drove the car may face scrutiny, too. Thus far, the investigation into Rice’s death has focused on Loehmann, and it remains unclear whether the actions of Garmback will warrant a separate criminal or departmental investigation.

Stoughton, the law enforcement expert, told Mother Jones, “It was a ludicrous way to approach a scene where you’ve been told that there is a person with a gun who has been aiming it at bystanders. I would expect the officers would park at a safe distance and walk up, using cover and concealment, and try to initiate communication at a distance. That’s the ‘three Cs’ of tactical response.”

It’s unclear when a grand jury will take up the case. The new documents, along with the initial probe into the shooting led by the county sheriff’s office, will be presented to a grand jury as it decides whether to indict Loehmann, McGinty said in Saturday’s press release. McGinty’s office declined to comment further on the grand jury process. It remains unclear whether a grand jury has been impaneled and when a hearing will take place.

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Outrage is Boiling Over the Outcome of New Probes Into the Police Shooting of a 12-year-old. Here Are 6 Takeaways.

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See How Your Life Would Change If We Cloned Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by CarrolD46q Posted on October 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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In 2012, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made headlines by saying she hoped to see an all-female Supreme Court one day. “When I’m sometimes asked when there will be enough women justices and I say, ‘When there are nine,’ people are shocked,” she explained during a legal conference in Colorado. Nobody “ever raised a question” when nine men dominated the court, added the now-82-year-old, one of three women on the bench today.

If Ginsburg got her wish, what might that mean for America? And what if women had taken a majority of seats on the highest court a long time ago? That’s a question raised by dozens of feminist law scholars and lawyers across the United States who are putting together a new book, Feminist Judgments, in which they re-examine 24 of the most significant Supreme Court cases related to gender—dating from the 1800s to the present day—and rewrite the court’s final decisions as if they had been the judges.

More than 100 people applied to help write the book, which will be published sometime next spring, according to Kathryn Stanchi, a law professor at Temple University and one of three editors overseeing the project. All selected applicants agreed to follow an important rule: They could only base their revision on the legal precedent that bound the Supreme Court back when the case was first decided.

Some original rulings had little chance of surviving the rewrite.

Geduldig v. Aiello: In this 1974 decision, an all-male court upheld a California statute that denied disability benefits to women with pregnancy-related disabilities. Lucinda Finley, a professor at the University of Buffalo who analyzed the case for Feminist Judgments, says she disagreed with Justice Potter Stewart, who had written for the majority that the California law did not constitute sex discrimination because it distinguished not between women and men but between “pregnant women and nonpregnant persons.”
Harris v. McRae: The court in this 1980 decision upheld the Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress several years earlier to ban the use of federal funds for reimbursements of most abortion services under Medicaid. Leslie Griffin, a professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas who reviewed the case for the book, took issue with the ruling: “Animus against poor pregnant women motivated the amendment and cannot survive even rational basis review,” Griffin explains.

Feminist Judgments also re-examines decisions that at the surface level appeared to help women, but that also contained rationale later used to restrict their rights.

Roe v. Wade: The landmark 1973 ruling on abortion declared unconstitutional a state law that banned abortions except to save a mother’s life. Rutgers School of Law professor Kimberly Mutcherson says that in her rewrite of Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion, she agreed that the Fourteenth Amendment protects a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy; but she diverged from Blackmun’s opinion by rejecting the trimester approach, in which states can regulate abortion after the first trimester and ban it completely after viability.
Oncale v. Sundowner: The court found in this 1998 decision that same-sex sexual harassment could be actionable under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act; Ann McGinley, another professor from the University of Nevada who re-examined the case for the book, agreed but went a step further, noting that discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity could also be actionable under the law.
Griswold v. Connecticut: This case came about after the executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut was convicted under a state law that made it illegal to offer married people counseling or medical treatment related to birth control. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled that the law violated sexual privacy rights for married couples. In Feminist Judgments, Laura Rosenbury, dean of the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law, says she “extended the scope of this liberty interest to all personal relationships between adults—whether married or unmarried and without regard to the adults’ sexual orientation.” She also pointed out that the Connecticut law violated equal protection for women by allowing the sale of condoms but not other types of birth control.

Stanchi says Feminist Judgments was inspired by similar projects in Canada and the United Kingdom, and that legal scholars in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand are working on their own versions. The goal, she adds, is to demonstrate that it’s not “pie in the sky or outrageous” to protect women’s rights with the law of the land. “You can have feminist jurisprudence with the precedent that we have now,” she says. “We just have to view it differently.”

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See How Your Life Would Change If We Cloned Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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We’re About to Cause the Worst Coral Die-Off in History

by KerstinBowling Posted on October 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Scientists have confirmed the third-ever global bleaching of coral reefs is under way and warned it could see the biggest coral die-off in history.

Since 2014, a massive underwater heat wave, driven by climate change, has caused corals to lose their brilliance and die in every ocean. By the end of this year 38 percent of the world’s reefs will have been affected. About 5 percent will have died forever.

But with a very strong El Niño driving record global temperatures and a huge patch of hot water, known as “the Blob,” hanging obstinately in the north-western Pacific, things look far worse again for 2016.

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We’re About to Cause the Worst Coral Die-Off in History

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The Not-So-Great Moments of One of the Guys Still Running for Speaker

by WilfredDonato Posted on October 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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When Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) suddenly dropped out of the running for House Speaker Thursday, it wasn’t immediately clear who was the odds-on pick to succeed outgoing House Speaker John Boehner. But there were two contenders who remained in the race: Reps. Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Daniel Webster of Florida. And some eyes turned quickly to Utah’s Jason Chaffetz, who is perhaps the more prominent of the pair and who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

McCarthy’s surprising self-defenestration, though, did not immediately boost Chaffetz’s chances; other names were quickly floated by House Republicans and pundits. Yet the story of Chaffetz’s rise from kicker on the Brigham Young University football team to a speaker contender is an intriguing tale, in which he has hit several rough spots. A small sampling:

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The Not-So-Great Moments of One of the Guys Still Running for Speaker

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

by RoseannSchaeffer Posted on October 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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New research from the University of Texas—Austin has found that women seeking abortions in cities such as Dallas, Forth Worth, and Austin face staggering wait times of up to 20 days before they can get the procedure. The data, which researchers working for the Texas Policy Evaluation Project released Monday, provides a startling look at the effects of abortion clinic closures in Texas just as the Supreme Court is deciding whether or not to hear a case that could slash the number of remaining clinics by half.

Wait times at abortion clinics in Austin, Texas.

Researchers documented wait times for clinics in Forth Worth, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston from November 2014 to September 2015. In Austin, the average wait over the course of those 11 months was 10 days. In Dallas and Fort Worth, the annual average was 5 days. They also calculated the average monthly wait times and the range of wait times in a given month and found that average wait times within a single month reached up to 20 days in the Dallas-Fort Worth area—where there are five abortion clinics—and wait times for individual patients could reach up to 23 days.

The escalating wait times are a result of successful efforts to close more than half of Texas’s abortion clinics. Most of those clinics were closed by HB 2, a 2013 anti-abortion law that many consider to be the harshest in the nation. Its provisions included a requirement that clinics must have admitting privileges with a hospital no more than 30 miles away. Before the measure, Texas had 41 clinics; four months after it took effect, there were only 22. Today, there are 19.

A final provision of the law, which may be the subject of a Supreme Court battle later this year, would close all but 10 clinics if it goes into effect. That measure requires abortion clinics to be regulated similarly to hospitals, which makes it dramatically more expensive to operate an abortion clinic. Leading medical organizations, such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, maintain this level of medical infrastructure is not necessary to safely perform most abortions. Whole Woman’s Health, a chain of abortion clinics with several providers in Texas, sued in federal court and succeeded in having the Supreme Court temporarily block the law. The court could make a decision to hear the full case as soon as this month.

A wait time of almost three weeks has serious consequences for women seeking abortions, ranging from her ability to afford an abortion, which becomes more expensive as the pregnancy progresses, to intensity of the procedure. In the second trimester, the cost of an abortion may go up by a hundred dollars every week. The researchers found that if the Supreme Court were to allow all but 10 clinics to close, it would almost double the number of second-trimester procedures in Texas—from 6,600 in 2013 to 12,400.

The researchers also predicted that if the Supreme Court upheld HB 2, the 10 clinics that would remain open would not have the capacity to meet demand. Those clinics today provide only one-fifth of abortions in Texas. If they were the only clinics in Texas, they would probably experience consistent wait times of around three weeks. For instance, the Houston area saw an average wait time of less than five days. But Houston has six clinics. If the law were fully in place, it would only have two clinics. And as clinics closed around the state, the number of abortions taking place in Houston would rise from 3,900 in 2013 to more than 11,000.

Clinics in states bordering Texas are already feeling the crush. Kathaleen Pittman, an official with Hope Medical Group of Shreveport, Louisiana, said in an interview that the proportion of Texans going to Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, Louisiana, has leapt from 15 percent of patients in 2011 to 23 percent in 2014.

And the South isn’t the only region where clinic closures have sent a wave of patients looking for new providers. The problem is also pronounced in Ohio, where eight clinics have closed since 2011. Officials for Preterm, a clinic in Cleveland, say the number of patients traveling from a different part of Ohio has jumped 160 percent, and the number of patients from out of state has almost doubled.

As Mother Jones reported in a recent feature, a clinic called the Cherry Hill Women’s Center in southern New Jersey is seeing more and more patients from Virginia, because clinics in Maryland and Delaware are overbooked, and from the Midwest, because many clinics there have closed. An analysis by Mother Jones found that clinics are closing at a rate of 1.5 per week. If the trend keeps up, the new data from Texas may turn out to be a bellwether for the rest of the nation.

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Women in Texas May Have to Wait an Extra 20 Days for an Abortion

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These Photos Will Make You Want to Quit Your Job and Ride a Mustang From Mexico to Canada

by AllenWaring Posted on September 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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On a midsummer afternoon in 2013, in the wilds of southern Utah, Ben Masters jumped off his horse, tied it to a tree, and watched his three friends ride off into the mountains in the wrong direction. It had been a tough day. They’d already been forced to turn back after trying to scale the Wasatch Plateau, snow-choked at 10,500 feet above sea level; the horses struggled and postholed through thick snowdrifts, and the group could go no farther.

Two of the 16 mustangs Ben Masters and his pals adopted from BLM. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

The setback had wasted precious hours. The four men needed to find, before nightfall, a camp with grass for their 16 horses—including pack animals—to graze. That already looked uncertain. Then, as they made their down from the snowy pass, the mustangs were startled by the thrum of engines from some off-road vehicles in the area. They began to spook and bolt, one after another. Left with just five horses, the friends threw together a hasty plan: Masters would stay put while the others attempted to chase down the runaways.

At that point, the men were two months into a journey that would take them through 3,000 miles of America’s backcountry, primarily public lands, from Mexico to Canada. They still had a long way to go. “What the hell?” Masters remembers thinking after 48 hours of waiting. “This whole thing is going to unravel.”

Masters consults his GPS in the Montana backcountry. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

“That was the lowest point of the journey for me,” he told me, “just waiting, twiddling my thumbs. It’s funny now, but when you’ve put that much time and energy into something and you think the whole trip is being undone—the horses have run off and you’re never going to find them again—it was scary.”

Their epic undertaking, the subject of a photo book and a new documentary film opening this week, was born out of a desire for adventure and freedom, at least for a little while, from societal obligations. Masters had been on one long-distance horse trip before. In 2010, he and two friends decided over tequila to take a semester off college and ride through the state of Colorado. That trip ended with sore legs, wet clothes, cold fingers, empty bellies, and a decision to never endure that kind of suffering again. But just three weeks later, Masters started planning for his next adventure.

Day 5: Southern Arizona. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

This time, one state wasn’t enough. Masters wanted to ride through the longest stretch of contiguous backcountry remaining in America, and he wanted to film it. He found a crew headed by adventure filmmaker Phillip Baribeau and recruited three other friends who knew their way around a horse. These included Jonny Fitzsimons, who grew up on a cattle ranch Thomas Glover, who had once worked at a dude ranch, and Masters’ childhood pal Ben Thamer.

As he’d done the first time around, Masters arranged to adopt a team of unwanted wild mustangs from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which manages more than 50,000 wild horses and burros on public lands in the West. With a mustang population that can double every four years, the BLM offers thousands of horses for sale or adoption, but the demand rarely meets the supply. “I wanted to show that mustangs aren’t the worthless beasts that are currently wasting away in holding pens but are excellent, usable stock,” Masters writes in the book Unbranded: Four Men and Sixteen Mustangs. Three Thousand Miles Across the American West. (The BLM disputes the “holding pen” characterization.) “I hoped to inspire adoptions and educate viewers on the necessity of population control.”

Thamer brews coffee during a freak Arizona snowstorm. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

A trip on horseback from Mexico to Canada wasn’t unprecedented, of course, but there would be some notable differences between Masters’ group and its forebears. Sure, Masters was equipped with modern GPS gadgetry, which he says “tells you more about where you can’t go than where you can go”—revealing sheer cliffs and private land boundaries, for example. Yet the terrain they faced was arguably more challenging than it would have been in those cowboy days of yore: “What separated this journey from Kit Carson, the explorers, or the cavalry is they mainly stuck to the valley bottoms and the easy avenues of travel. There was no reason to go into the mountains. Well, a lot of those valley bottoms and easy places to travel now have golf courses and subdivisions and cities in them. That’s where people settled. What was made public was mainly stuff the early settlers didn’t want.”

Fitzsimons and Thamer in the southern Utah desert. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Back in southern Utah, the men finally managed to round up all their animals, reunite, and journey on. Over the next four months, they wound through the rest of Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. They fly-fished, sometimes from horseback and in thunderstorms. They crossed treacherous rivers, cooked over open stoves, and lounged around bonfires. Even with the GPS, they got lost plenty and had to reroute around impossible terrain and territorial ranchers. There were injuries, too: “One guy got kicked in the head,” says Masters. And a cameraman took a good kick to the thigh: “He had this massive bruise and this big blood bubble. He couldn’t walk for about two weeks. We thought he broke his femur.” And Thamer came down with a case of dysentery. “He was a grumpy bastard after that, too,” Masters says, laughing.

From left: Masters, Thamer, Glover, and Fitzsimons. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Eventually, three of the four—for sentimental reasons, Fitzsimons turned around just one mile short of the border—reached Canada. The end of the trip, punctuated by a simple green road sign reading, “LEAVING USA. STOP AND REPORT TO CANADIAN CUSTOMS,” brought with it a strange mix of emotions. There were the bonds the riders had forged with their horses. Despite the setbacks, there was a nagging feeling that maybe their trip wasn’t challenging enough. (Throughout Montana, for example, the men were never more than a few hours drive from their film crew’s base, and safety.) For the last 1,000 miles, the guys had mostly run out of things to say to each other, and they felt confused, even sad, as the trip came to a close. But for Masters, at least, it was all worth it. “I feel as if I get a lot of pressure from school, my family, from society in general, saying, ‘Ben you need to go to college, get a job, get a house, do these things and take the steps to becoming a successful person,'” he says. “And that’s all good, but for six months of my life I wanted to do what I wanted to do. And I did. And I will never regret that.”

You’ll find more stunning images from the adventure, along with details and reflections on the trip, in the book and in Unbranded, the film, which has been winning rave reviews and audience awards at festivals across the United States. It will be showing in select theaters starting this weekend. To whet your appetite, here’s a trailer and some additional photos from the book. Wish you were there.

A river crossing in Wyoming. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Fly fishing, with lightning. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Fitzsimons fords the treacherous Gallatin River in Southern Montana. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

Glacier National Park, the last leg before the Canadian border. Unbranded/Texas A&M University Press

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These Photos Will Make You Want to Quit Your Job and Ride a Mustang From Mexico to Canada

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The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

by krynicki Posted on September 23, 2015

The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

By on 23 Sep 2015 4:08 pmcommentsShare

The best part about the end of the world will undoubtedly be the photo ops. Whatever the cause — aliens, viral outbreak, our own self-destruction — the apocalypse will be nothing if not full of ruin porn. Planet of the Apes gave us this iconic image of the fallen Statue of Liberty; The Day After Tomorrow brought us a Manhattan skyline half covered in snow; 28 Days Later showed us the eerily quiet streets of a deserted London. But in real life, things might get a bit more Waterworld.

A recent report from NASA warned that a significant portion of the space agency’s infrastructure is now under threat due to climate change-induced sea-level rise. And as great as a defunct and inundated Kennedy Space Center would look in black and white, this is bad news. Here’s more from NASA:

Sea level rise hits especially close to home because half to two-thirds of NASA’s infrastructure and assets stand within 16 feet (5 meters) of sea level. With at least $32 billion in laboratories, launch pads, airfields, testing facilities, data centers, and other infrastructure spread out across 330 square miles (850 square kilometers)—plus 60,000 employees—NASA has an awful lot of people and property in harm’s way.

The average global sea-level has risen eight inches since 1870, NASA reports, but the rate of rise is getting faster and actually doubled over the last 20 years. NASA’s Climate Adaptation Science Investigators (CASI) Working Group recently reported that the agency’s five coastal facilities can expect between 5 and 27 inches of sea-level rise by 2050. It also warned that the coastal flooding that usually happens about once a decade in these areas will become more frequent. In the case of the San Francisco Bay/Ames Research Center area, it could become up to ten times more frequent. Here’s a look at how these areas will fair under a rise of 12 inches:

NASA/NOAA

John Jaeger, a coastal geologist from the University of Florida, told NASA that waves could be “lapping at the launch pads” of the Kennedy Space Center within decades.

So it looks like the moon-landing, Mars-exploring, child-inspiring space agency is in a bit of a pickle. On the one hand, it wants to keep civilians safe by launching off of coasts. On the other hand, the ocean is trying to engulf it. At the same time, mean old Uncle Sam is cutting NASA’s allowance so much that it has to ask its Russian friends for rides to the International Space Station.

The agency’s report ended with a look toward the future. It’s pretty depressing, but if you imagine James Earl Jones reading it aloud amid slow pans of launch pads and space shuttles, astronauts walking in slow motion, and something symphonic playing in the background, you can’t help but believe that NASA’s going to figure this one out:

In some places, they will need to design smarter buildings; in others, they will retrofit and harden old infrastructure. If a facility must stay within sight of the water, then maybe the important laboratories, storage, or assembly rooms should not be on the ground floor. For the launch facilities, which must remain along the shore, beach replenishment, sea wall repair, and dune building may become part of routine maintenance.

But across the space agency, from lab manager to center director to NASA administrator, people will have to continually ask the question: is it time to abandon this place and move inland? It’s a question everyone with coastal property in America will eventually have to answer.

Seriously, though, more than half of U.S. citizens live on the coasts, and a recent study estimated that between $66 billion and $106 billion in infrastructure could be under water by 2050, and between $238 billion to $507 billion in infrastructure could be under by the end of the century. That’s a hell of a lot of ruin porn, but we seem to be doing OK with sparse abandoned factories and boarded up homes. How about we leave the serious stuff to Hollywood?

Source:

Sea Level Rise Hits Home at NASA

, NASA.

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The rising oceans could drown a lot of NASA launch sites

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Sexual Violence on Campus Is Even Worse Than We Thought

by Claudia58Q Posted on September 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Association of American Universities released findings Monday from one of the largest-ever surveys on college sexual violence—comprising more than 150,000 students across 27 colleges—and they paint a bleak picture of sexual assault on college campuses.

The survey asked students whether they had experienced events ranging from sexual touching to forcible penetration. If they answered affirmatively, they were asked follow-up questions about the circumstances and the event’s aftermath, including whether they reported the incident to law enforcement or a campus authority. Some scenarios that appeared in the survey fit the legal definitions for rape and sexual battery, while others involved incidents that universities typically consider to be sexual misconduct. Other questions measured attitudes toward campus sexual assault and how often students intervened when they observed potentially risky situations.

Here are a few takeaways:

More than 1 in 5 undergraduate women are victims of sexual assault. The AAU’s findings suggest sexual-assault rates are slightly higher than the widely cited yet disputed statistic that 1 in 5 college women are victims of sexual assault. According to the survey, 23 percent of female respondents said they experienced nonconsensual sexual contact due to physical force, under the threat of physical force, or while they were incapacitated by drugs or alcohol. Among seniors nearing graduation, that number rises to 1 in 3.
In the last academic year alone, 11 percent of respondents said they experienced nonconsensual sexual contact. That’s around 16,500 students across the 27 institutions.
First-year students are are the most vulnerable to sexual assault. Sixteen percent of freshman women said they experienced sexual contact under physical force or incapacitation.
The vast majority of students don’t report sexual assault or misconduct. While most victims said they confided in a friend, family member or someone else, only 26 percent of students who experienced forcible penetration filed an official report. More than half of those victims said they didn’t consider the event serious enough to go to the authorities, while one-third of said they were “embarrassed, ashamed, or that it would be too emotionally difficult.” Others said they “did not think anything would be done about it.” Students were much more likely to report certain kinds of events than others, with reports filed by 28 percent of stalking victims but only 5 percent of those who experienced unwanted sexual touching while they were incapacitated by drugs or alcohol.â&#128;&#139;
Transgender and gender-nonconforming students experience sexual assault and misconduct at higher rates than their peers. These students comprised 1.5 percent of survey respondents, but nearly 40 percent of seniors identifying with this group said they had experienced nonconsensual sexual contact in college, compared to a third of senior women. They’re also less likely to believe the university will conduct a fair investigation or take their reports seriously.
Response rates were low. About 19 percent of students across the 27 universities chose to respond to the online survey, which was conducted during a three-week period in April. The survey notes that nonvictims may be less likely to participate, skewing incidence rates slightly upward. Still, final participation rates were well below the the rates of similar studies.

At least 12 of the colleges that released results on Monday are currently facing federal scrutiny from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for their handling of sexual-assault cases under federal Title IX standards. Several universities on the list have been found in violation of Title IX, including the University of Virginia, Harvard University, Yale University, and Michigan State University.

Given a range of responses across institutions, the study’s authors caution against generalizing the results on a national scale. As Slate points out, the researchers declined to explain the variation in sexual-assault rates or students’ attitudes at different institutions. “The analyses did not find a clear explanation for why there is such wide variation,” the authors write. “Some university characteristics, such as size, were correlated with certain outcomes. But the correlation is not particularly strong.”

This post has been updated.

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Sexual Violence on Campus Is Even Worse Than We Thought

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