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"Seinfeld" Writer Takes on Conservative Outrage Over Holiday Festivus Pole Protests

by IvaTruebridge Posted on December 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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A fake holiday popularized by Seinfeld has become the symbol of secular pushback against religious dominion over American public life. Or something like that.

The Wisconsin and Florida state capitols currently have Festivus poles on display. To the uninitiated, the Festivus pole is a key component in the celebration of Festivus, a bizarre and agonizing December 23 holiday made famous by “The Strike,” a 1997 episode of the beloved NBC sitcom Seinfeld. Since the episode aired, the holiday has taken on a life of its own. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has thrown Festivus fundraisers, for example. And at the Florida Capitol in Tallahassee on Wednesday, self-proclaimed “militant atheist” activist Chaz Stevens erected a 6-foot Festivus pole made out of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans in the state house rotunda in protest of the privately funded nativity scene at the capitol.

Harry Mihet, of the “religious liberty” law firm Liberty Counsel, called Stevens’ views “extreme” and his display offensive. “Is this how PC we’ve gotten in our society, really?” Fox News host Gretchen Carlson said on Tuesday. “I am so outraged by this. Why do I have to drive around with my kids to look for nativity scenes and be like, ‘Oh, yeah, kids, look. There’s Baby Jesus behind the Festivus pole made out of beer cans!”

So what does the man responsible for the world’s long love affair with Festivus think about all of this?

“Am I to understand that some humanoid expressed outrage that the baby Jesus was behind a pole made of beer cans?” Dan O’Keefe, who co-wrote the Seinfeld episode, tells Mother Jones. O’Keefe (whose other credits include The League, The Drew Carey Show, and Mike Judge’s upcoming Silicon Valley comedy on HBO) claims he hadn’t even heard the Festivus-pole protest news until Mother Jones reached out to him. But having Googled around a bit, he’s rendered a verdict.

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"Seinfeld" Writer Takes on Conservative Outrage Over Holiday Festivus Pole Protests

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You Own Your DNA, But Who Gets to Interpret It?

by DorothyUn Posted on November 26, 2013

Mother Jones

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Yesterday the FDA ordered 23andMe to immediately stop selling its DNA testing service until and unless it gets agency approval. This is the end game of a very long cycle: regulatory reviews of genetic testing have been going on, in one form or another, for more than 15 years, and along the way there have been repeated bipartisan calls for more rigorous rules to ensure that consumers get accurate and judicious information. In 2010, for example, the GAO conducted an undercover investigation of four genetic testing companies and concluded that “GAO’s fictitious consumers received test results that are misleading and of little or no practical use.”

Nonetheless, the FDA’s action yesterday produced a flurry of criticism, especially from the libertarian right. Alex Tabarrok is typical:

The FDA wants to judge not the analytic validity of the tests … but the clinical validity, whether particular identified alleles are causal for conditions or disease. The latter requirement is the death-knell for the products because of the expense and time it takes to prove specific genes are causal for diseases….Here is why I think the FDA’s actions are unconstitutional. Reading an individual’s code is safe and effective. Interpreting the code and communicating opinions about it may or may not be safe—just like all communication—but it falls squarely under the First Amendment.

I’m pretty sure this is nowhere near so cut and dried. The relevant distinction here is between medical information and medical advice: the former is protected speech while the latter isn’t. And while your genome may be medical information, interpreting your genome and explaining whether it puts you at risk for different diseases is very close to medical advice. And not just general medical advice, of the kind that Dr. Oz purveys on television. It’s specific, personal medical advice, of the kind that only licensed physicians are allowed to provide.

That’s the argument, anyway. If 23andMe is going to perform a lab test and then send you a personal letter suggesting that you, personally, are or aren’t at high risk for some disease, it’s acting an awful lot like a doctor. But for better or worse, only doctors are allowed to act like doctors, and the FDA thinks that complex and sometimes ambiguous test results should be communicated to patients by licensed MDs who know what they mean.

It turns out there’s more to this particular case, of course: the FDA’s letter makes it pretty clear that they’re fed up with 23andMe, which has apparently been almost arrogantly unresponsive to standard requests for documentation:

As part of our interactions with you, including more than 14 face-to-face and teleconference meetings, hundreds of email exchanges, and dozens of written communications, we provided you with specific feedback on study protocols and clinical and analytical validation requirements, discussed potential classifications and regulatory pathways (including reasonable submission timelines), provided statistical advice, and discussed potential risk mitigation strategies.

….However, even after these many interactions with 23andMe, we still do not have any assurance that the firm has analytically or clinically validated the PGS for its intended uses….Months after you submitted your 510(k)s and more than 5 years after you began marketing, you still had not completed some of the studies and had not even started other studies….FDA has not received any communication from 23andMe since May. Instead, we have become aware that you have initiated new marketing campaigns, including television commercials that, together with an increasing list of indications, show that you plan to expand the PGS’s uses and consumer base without obtaining marketing authorization from FDA.

Ouch. By happenstance, this brought to mind a Felix Salmon post from yesterday. It was about GoldieBlox, another high-flying Silicon Valley startup that apparently believes federal laws apply only to ordinary mortals—not to rebelliously innovative and disruptive companies that are going to change the very way we interact with the world. Salmon describes the “Silicon Valley way” like this: “First you make your own rules — and then, if anybody tries to slap you down, you don’t apologize, you fight.”

This sure sounds an awful lot like 23andMe. I’m actually sort of agnostic about the issue of whether personal genome services should fall into the category of highly regulated diagnostic tests. The line between information and advice is genuinely gray here. But regardless of that, this isn’t something that suddenly popped up out of nowhere. It’s been on the FDA’s radar for a long time, and 23andMe was well aware of the FDA’s requirements. They sure look an awful lot like a Silicon Valley company that figured they could stall them forever and never pay a price.

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You Own Your DNA, But Who Gets to Interpret It?

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Eight more U.S. coal generators bite the dust

by 0df53x21 Posted on November 18, 2013

Eight more U.S. coal generators bite the dust

By

JHP

The Paradise Fossil Plant in Kentucky will shut down two of its three coal-burning units.

The Tennessee Valley Authority plans to shut down eight of its coal-burning generating stations in Alabama and Kentucky. Board members of the federally owned utility agreed to the plan last week, reacting to changing market conditions and federal environmental rules. The move will reduce coal generation by 3,300 megawatts in the two states.

The decision is being seen as a blow to the local coal industry, but a boon for the region’s air quality. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) met with TVA’s CEO in a bid to dissuade the utility from shuttering coal plants, but to no avail. Enviros, meanwhile, cheered the development.

Absent from the seemingly positive news, however, is any mention of renewables. Wind and solar farms are being built across the country, but TVA said it’s hoping to turn to natural gas and nuclear power to help it plug the gaps created by its abandonment of coal.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Forty years ago, the TVA got more than 80% of its power from coal. Today coal accounts for 38%, a number that is dropping fast as a drilling boom in the U.S. pushes down the price of natural gas, the fuel that competes with coal for power generation.

When the TVA is done with its announced coal-plant retirements, only 33 of its 59 coal units will remain in service. Some of those are still under review, said TVA spokesman Duncan Mansfield. …

The company said that continuing to run the plants would risk noncompliance with new mercury rules coming into effect.

TVA leaders weren’t happy about the decision, but they can see the writing on the wall: Coal power is dying in the U.S. “This is a personal nightmare for me,” one board member told the Associated Press. “But I must support what I believe to be in the best interest of TVA’s customers.”


Source
In Blow to Coal, TVA to Shut 8 Units, The Wall Street Journal
Largest US public utility votes to close six coal-powered plants in Alabama, The Associated Press

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Eight more U.S. coal generators bite the dust

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The Loophole That Allows Facebook to Avoid Paying Taxes on Billions of Earnings

by Lionel4334 Posted on November 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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Most Americans assume that Silicon Valley, a shining beacon of US economic growth, will give a lot of dough back to Uncle Sam over the next few years. But thanks to a controversial loophole in US tax code, 12 tech companies—including Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin—are poised to avoid paying income taxes on their next $11.4 billion in earnings, netting the companies a collective savings of $4 billion, according to a report put out this week by the Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ).

The way the law stands now, US companies get big tax deductions when they pay their employees in stock options. For example, if an executive is given the option to buy a million shares of a company at five cents a share and later cashes those options in when they’re selling for $20 a share, the company can deduct the price difference in tax breaks, even though they never actually paid that higher salary. This is especially profitable to emerging industries, like tech, where companies give stock options to young executives when they’re still coding out of their parents’ basements. These tech employees have an incentive to stay with the company over the long-term, and then cash in once the company is profitable. That means that companies get to store these tax breaks until—ta-da!—they’re not paying income taxes for years. Here’s how much these 12 companies have saved:

CTJ

Twitter is the latest company that stands to profit from this, since it just went public. But in this latest report, CTJ determined that Facebook still has the highest amount of stock deductions to cash in—about $6.2 billion worth, allowing it to avoid income taxes for almost five years. And it’s not just tech companies. In April, CTJ found that 280 Fortune 500 companies have benefited from this break in the last three years alone.

Tony Nitti from Forbes argues that even with this loophole, Uncle Sam isn’t losing money, since as Facebook deducts $5 billion in taxes from Mark Zuckerberg’s stock, Zuckerberg is taxed on $5 billion in income, and the individual rate is higher than the corporate rate. Facebook did not immediately respond to comment on the report, but a spokesperson told the Huffington Post earlier this year that “it’s a mistake to look at only the corporate tax revenue while ignoring the billions of taxes paid from initial shareholders.”â&#128;&#139;

But Matt Gardner, executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, tells Mother Jones that the IRS is still losing money, since Zuckerberg would be taxed on his income no matter where it came from, and under the loophole, the company is able to write off his income without corporate income taxes. “If Facebook buys Zuckerberg a lottery ticket for a buck, and then he wins a million dollars, should the company be able the write off that million? That’s absurd, but that gives you a sense of what’s going on here,” says Gardner.

Bipartisan lawmakers have recently started to denounce this loophole, and in February of 2013, Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) proposed a bill that would limit how high companies could go with their stock-option tax breaks.

“People recognize that these loopholes are not fair. They are wrong in every sense that a policy can be wrong—wrong fiscally, wrong economically, wrong ethically,” said Levin in a statement.

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The Loophole That Allows Facebook to Avoid Paying Taxes on Billions of Earnings

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What the Dog Saw – Malcolm Gladwell

by Myrna Posted on October 2, 2013

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

What the Dog Saw
And Other Adventures
Malcolm Gladwell

Genre: Psychology

Price: $3.99

Publish Date: October 20, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20 th century? In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves: The Tipping Point ; Blink ; and Outliers. Now, in What the Dog Saw , he brings together, for the first time, the best of his writing from The New Yorker over the same period. Here is the bittersweet tale of the inventor of the birth control pill, and the dazzling inventions of the pasta sauce pioneer Howard Moscowitz. Gladwell sits with Ron Popeil, the king of the American kitchen, as he sells rotisserie ovens, and divines the secrets of Cesar Millan, the &quot;dog whisperer&quot; who can calm savage animals with the touch of his hand. He explores intelligence tests and ethnic profiling and &quot;hindsight bias&quot; and why it was that everyone in Silicon Valley once tripped over themselves to hire the same college graduate. &quot;Good writing,&quot; Gladwell says in his preface, &quot;does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head.&quot; What the Dog Saw is yet another example of the buoyant spirit and unflagging curiosity that have made Malcolm Gladwell our most brilliant investigator of the hidden extraordinary.

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What the Dog Saw – Malcolm Gladwell

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Frackers are chewing up Pennsylvania’s forests

by u60uurf Posted on October 1, 2013

Frackers are chewing up Pennsylvania’s forests

By

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Roads carved through Pennsylvania’s forests cause habitat fragmentation and reduce biodiversity.

Frackers don’t just foul the air and the water — they trample nature and carve up ecosystems into inadequate little pieces.

That’s the message coming out of the U.S. Geological Survey, which studied aerial photographs of a handful of Pennsylvania counties where gas companies are using hydraulic fracturing to tap deposits in  the Marcellus Shale. The survey’s analysis revealed sweeping damage and forests fragmented by new well pads, roads, and pipelines.

Jason Bell, a member of Marcellus Outreach Butler, told the Valley News Dispatch that the new study offers yet another example of why more careful regulation of the fracking boom is needed. “Often we don’t get a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening,” he said. “It’s easy to see one or two wells and think it’s having isolated effects.”

Here’s what the boom looks like when viewed from above. “Before” shots are on the left, “after” on the right:

USGSExamples of how drilling permits have led to the fragmentation of habitat in Pennsylvania’s Washington County. Click to embiggen.

In Butler County alone, the study found that fracking and conventional drilling — and the road-building required to service 109 drilling sites — had disturbed 325 acres of forest by 2010. Compared to a decade earlier, there were 36 more patches of forest in the county, and the average size of each patch was smaller — a change that the researchers said was mostly due to the drilling boom.

Even Beaver County, which is relatively untouched by frackers save for a couple drilling sites in its northeastern corner, endured 13 acres of disruption during the same period. Forests in Lackawanna and Wayne counties were also heavily affected by fracking despite being home to a small number of drilling wells.

It’s not just the acreage of disturbance that causes concern. It’s what all that drilling and road building do to the forests in between. Whenever habitat is broken up into smaller pieces, the theory of island biogeography tells us that the area’s biodiversity plummets. That’s because some wildlife can only survive deep in the woods — far away from its edges.

“Landscape disturbance can have a major impact on ecological resources and the services they provide,” USGS researcher Lesley Milheim said in a statement.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Frackers are chewing up Pennsylvania’s forests

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the 2nd Quarter—Thanks to the Government

by Myrna Posted on August 8, 2013

Charts: Without subsidies, Elon Musk’s electric-car startup wouldn’t have rolled this far. jdlasica/Flickr Tesla Motors surprised Wall Street this afternoon, announcing second-quarter profits of $26 million on $405 million in revenue. Since it reported its first modest profit in May, the electric-car company cofounded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk already had seen its share price more than double, and you can expect it to soar even higher when the markets open tomorrow. Many analysts, after all, were expecting Tesla to take a hit. But so far, the company’s profits have relied on government subsidies and initiatives. Tesla’s own accomplishments are impressive. The company, founded in 2004, is selling its all-electric cars as fast as it can produce them, even though the baseline price for a Model S sedan is nearly $70,000. Car and Driver says the Model S is possibly the best car it has ever tested. Musk has built a successful company after years of scraping by low on funds while sinking money into researching and developing amazing cars. To keep reading, click here. Read original article –  Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the 2nd Quarter—Thanks to the Government ; ;Related ArticlesIs Keystone XL a Distraction From More Important Climate Fights?Keystone Light: The Keystone XL Alternative You’ve Never Heard of Is Probably Going to Be BuiltThe Rise and Rise of American Carbon ;

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Tesla Motors Earns $26 Million in the 2nd Quarter—Thanks to the Government

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Offshore fracking in California: What could go wrong?

by london Posted on August 5, 2013

Offshore fracking in California: What could go wrong?

By Claire Thompson

Exciting new update in the chronicles of America’s domestic oil-and-gas boom: Not only is offshore fracking a thing, but it’s been happening off the coast of California for a good 15 years now, in the same sensitive marine environments where new oil leases have been banned since a disastrous 1969 spill.

Berardo62

Drillin’ U.S.A.

If that’s news to you, you’re not alone — the California Coastal Commission was unaware, until recently, that the seafloor was being fracked. Because these drilling operations happen more than three miles off the coast, they’re under federal jurisdiction, but the state has the power to reject federal permits if water quality is endangered.

The Associated Press has the story:

Federal regulators thus far have exempted the chemical fluids used in offshore fracking from the nation’s clean water laws, allowing companies to release fracking fluid into the sea without filing a separate environmental impact report or statement looking at the possible effects. That exemption was affirmed this year by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to the internal emails reviewed by the AP. …

The EPA and the federal agency that oversees offshore drilling, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement or BSEE, conduct some routine inspections during fracking projects, but any spills or leaks are largely left to the oil companies to report.

Although new drilling leases in the Santa Barbara Channel’s undersea oil fields are banned, drilling rights at 23 existing platforms were grandfathered in. Offshore fracking — pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals into the sea floor — can stimulate these old wells into production again.

Companies don’t have to disclose the exact combination of chemicals in their fracking fluids — that information is protected as a trade secret — and none of the experts AP interviewed knew of any study on the fluids’ underwater effects. But some of the chemicals known to be used in fracking are toxic to bottom dwellers like fish larvae and crustaceans, and research has shown that fluids used in traditional offshore drilling can mess with some marine animals’ reproductive systems.

The AP describes one major offshore fracking operation:

In January 2010, oil and gas company Venoco Inc. set out to improve the production of one of its old wells with what federal drilling records show was the largest offshore fracking operation attempted in federal waters off California’s coast. The target: the Monterey Shale, a vast formation that extends from California’s Central Valley farmlands to offshore and could ultimately comprise two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil reserves.

Six different fracks were completed during the project, during which engineers funneled a mix of about 300,000 pounds of fracking fluids, sand and seawater 4,500 feet beneath the seabed, according to BSEE documents.

Venoco’s attempt only mildly increased production, according to the documents. Venoco declined to comment.

Other companies’ offshore fracking explorations have yielded similarly lukewarm results. Chevron’s one effort failed, and only one of Nuevo Energy’s nine attempts was considered successful.

Now that the Coastal Commission has wised up, it plans to ask operators proposing new offshore drilling projects whether they’ll be fracking, and may look into requiring a separate permit and stricter review process for such operations.

At least one BSEE employee appeared skeptical of the environmental safety of offshore fracking, according to internal agency emails obtained by AP. Pacific regional environmental officer Kenneth Seeley wrote this in an email to colleagues in February:

We have an operator proposing to use “hydraulic stimulation” (which has not been done very often here) and I’m trying to run through the list of potential concerns. The operator says their produced water is Superclean! but the way they responded to my questions kind of made me think this was worth following up on.

Still, that application, from privately held oil-and-gas company DCOR LLC, ended up being approved.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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You get my drift? Pesticides cause big problems when they go where they’re not wanted

by Laura Posted on July 31, 2013

You get my drift? Pesticides cause big problems when they go where they’re not wanted

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Please be careful where you dump that toxic load.

Too many crop dusters are accidentally missing their targets and spraying poisonous pesticides where they’re not supposed to go, killing crops and sickening farmers’ neighbors.

Indiana Public Media reports that three-quarters of farm pesticide violations in the state involve what is euphemistically called “drift.” That is, the chemicals don’t land where they’re intended to. From the report, which is the first in a three-part series on the problem:

[Farmer Brett] Middlesworth grows about 300 acres of tomatoes each year, but last summer he saw about a tenth of his yield damaged by a single instance of pesticide drift.

It happened halfway through the growing season. His neighbor was spraying a soybean field with Roundup herbicide. The wind picked up and carried the spray across the property line and onto Middlesworth’s tomatoes.

As Roundup targets broadleaf weeds, and tomatoes are broadleaf plants, the area closest to his neighbor was a total loss. …

[T]he Office of the Indiana State Chemist, the agency tasked with enforcing state pesticide laws, documented 97 cases from 2010 through 2012 where applicators spraying farms violated anti-drift laws.

Most reports of harm caused by pesticides drifting onto someone’s property involve damage to plants. But in the last several years, the state has documented a dozen violations where someone said exposure to drifting pesticides made them sick.

Growers report making headway in the last few years with voluntary efforts aimed at preventing drift damage, but produce industry leaders say they are worried the approval of new genetically modified crops could undo that progress.

And other kinds of problems can arise from unintended pesticide fallout. We told you earlier this week that pesticides appear to be blowing from California’s Central Valley into the state’s mountains, where they are accumulating in the bodies of frogs.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Harry Reid blames climate change for fires ravaging his state

by Aale Thomas Posted on July 19, 2013

Harry Reid blames climate change for fires ravaging his state

By John Upton

Center for American Progress

Give ‘em hell, Harry!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has no doubt about what’s causing this summer’s disastrous Western fire season: climate change.

During a meeting with reporters this week, Reid linked global warming to a 28,000-acre blaze in Nevada that caused hundreds to be evacuated from their homes. After being mocked by conservative media, he doubled down and made his points again in front of a group of reporters.

Steve Dunleavy

This month’s Bison Fire burning in Carson Valley, Nev.

“The West is being devastated by wildfires. Millions of acres are burning. Millions of acres have burned,” Reid said on Thursday. “Why? Because the climate has changed. The winters are shorter; the summers are hotter; the moisture patterns have changed.”

Asked by a reporter what needs to be done, Reid said, “Talk about climate change as if it really exists, not beat around the bush.”

He also called for more federal spending to prevent wildfires.

Watch the video:

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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