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Bernie Sanders Has Really Pissed Off Margaret Archer

by Yvonne9866 Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bernie Sanders is headed to the Vatican:

Whether or not the pope shares the Vermont senator’s enthusiasm for Eugene Debs, he’s “feeling the Bern” enough to have invited the Jewish presidential candidate to speak at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, during a conference on social, economic, and environmental issues. Sanders will head to Rome immediately after the April 14 Democratic debate in Brooklyn.

But apparently the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is decidedly not feeling the Bern:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders reached out to obtain his invitation to the Vatican and showed “monumental discourtesy” in the process, a senior Vatican official said.

“Sanders made the first move, for the obvious reasons,” Margaret Archer, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is hosting the conference Sanders will attend, said in a telephone interview. “I think in a sense he may be going for the Catholic vote but this is not the Catholic vote and he should remember that and act accordingly—not that he will.“

Huh. I wonder what Bernie did to piss off Margaret Archer? Maybe it has something to do with his views on conflation:

Margaret Archer argues that much social theory suffers from the generic defect of conflation where, due to a reluctance or inability to theorize emergent relationships between social phenomena, causal autonomy is denied to one side of the relation. This can take the form of autonomy being denied to agency with causal efficacy only granted to structure (downwards conflation). Alternatively it can take the form of autonomy being denied to structure with causal efficacy only granted to agency (upwards conflation).

…In contradistinction Archer offers the approach of analytical dualism. While recognizing the interdependence of structure and agency (i.e. without people there would be no structures) she argues that they operate on different timescales. At any particular moment, antecedently existing structures constrain and enable agents, whose interactions produce intended and unintended consequences, which leads to structural elaboration and the etc. etc.

Does that help? No? Sorry about that. I guess someone will have to ask Archer just what Bernie did that was so monumentally discourteous. Was it merely asking for an invitation in the first place? Is it the fact that Bernie is pro-choice? Or something more? We need someone to dig into the Vatican gossip machine and let us know.

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Bernie Sanders Has Really Pissed Off Margaret Archer

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It’s Been Quiet Lately. Maybe a Little Too Quiet…

by FrederiSiemens Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Didn’t there used to be some guy named Donald Trump running for president? Whatever happened to him? It seems like days since I’ve heard a desperate cry for attention from the campaign trail.

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It’s Been Quiet Lately. Maybe a Little Too Quiet…

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Lackland Air Force Shooting Leaves At Least Two Dead

by EarthaTomasini Posted on April 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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At least two people are dead following a shooting at Texas’ Lackland Air Force Base on Friday morning that is being investigated as an apparent murder-suicide. Authorities say the shooting occurred at around 8:40 a.m. local time.

“We do feel like the situation is contained and everything is OK at this point,” James Keith, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office said. The area is no longer on lockdown.

This is a breaking news event. We will update when more information becomes available.

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Lackland Air Force Shooting Leaves At Least Two Dead

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Maybe Atrios Is Right About Driverless Cars

by TamikaEarp Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of weeks ago we bought a Neato robotic vacuum. It wouldn’t operate for more than five minutes at a time, so I called tech support. They were very nice, and said I had to “calibrate the battery.” Huh. I did that, and it got better, but then it wouldn’t return to its base. Calibrate it again, they said. So I did, and it started returning home. But then it started running into a wall and getting stuck. I don’t know why. It was just a bare wall. But the robot apparently wanted to climb up to the ceiling or something, and you know how robots are once they get an idea in their heads. Then it went under a chair and refused to come out.

So I returned the Neato and went to Fry’s, where I bought a Roomba. Much better! It worked the first time with no problems—except for one thing: it would only clean one room. Apparently some bright spark in the Roomba marketing department asked engineering to write a bit of additional firmware that would cripple the device so they could call it a new model and sell it at a new price point. But this makes it fairly useless, since the whole point of a device like this is to schedule it and forget it.

But I tried it anyway. Oddly, it worked OK upstairs, where there are many hallways and rooms. Downstairs, though, it would only clean the living room. I moved it to the kitchen, but no dice: it made a beeline for the living room and cleaned it again. So I tried one more time. Success! It started cleaning the kitchen. But then it developed a grudge against our dishwasher. I wish I had video of this, but basically it went nuts. It banged into it, circled around angrily, got up on its hind wheels (seriously) and banged away some more. It was pissed. I watched it do this for more than five minutes before I shut it off. I was afraid it would eventually wreck the dishwasher. It’s going back to Fry’s tomorrow.

For some time Atrios has been saying that driverless cars are a fantasy. I think he’s crazy. But I have to score this round in his favor. Robotic vacuums travel at about 1 mph; they don’t have to avoid other robotic vacuums; nothing in their path moves; and all they have to do is crudely recognize obstacles and map a way around them. And yet, after ten years of development, they still can’t do it reliably. Maybe driverless cars really are a fantasy.

But I have good tech news too. Many years ago I got tired of the lousy keyboards that come with modern computers, and bought an old IBM mechanical keyboard. It was nice, but it was so loud I stopped using it. The noise was so overpowering that it almost made conversation impossible.

Last week I decided to try again. You may not be aware of this, but thanks to gamers there’s been a renaissance in high-quality mechanical keyboards. The one I bought was insanely expensive (about $150), but also had some other features I wanted, and it’s killer. For the cognoscenti among you, it uses Cherry MX brown switches, and I love it. It has a great feel, but the sound is muffled just enough that it won’t wake the neighbors.

It even advanced the cause of journalism. Once I tried it out, I was so eager to type something substantial that I finally got back to a story I’m writing for the next issue of the magazine. It’s all finished now, and you’re probably going to hate it. Everyone’s going to hate it. But at least it was created using a really nice keyboard.

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Maybe Atrios Is Right About Driverless Cars

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Watch The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams Tear Down Fearmongering Bathroom Bills

by RafaelaSeitz Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday night, The Daily Show‘s Jessica Williams confronted the growing panic in state legislatures over transgender people and where they can go to the bathroom. North Carolina continues to face a massive backlash from the business community for the bathroom law it enacted in March that, among other things, requires people to pee in the location that corresponds with the sex on their birth certificates. Police departments in North Carolina say they’re puzzled by the law, which critics say will be all but impossible to enforce. On Wednesday, a state senator in South Carolina introduced another so-called bathroom bill, while the Tennessee House revived one of its own.

Williams interviewed several transgender people for her sketch, including a black trans woman who was arrested last year in Iowa—where she had traveled to attend a funeral—because she didn’t have a copy of her prescription for her hormone pills. (She spent eight days in jail and missed the funeral, and the charges were later dropped.) “Because of discrimination and profiling, at least 47 percent of black trans people will have at some point in their lives been incarcerated,” Williams explained. “You’d think there’d be laws to correct this. But instead, this year alone, state legislatures have introduced 175 anti-trans bills.”

Proponents of bathroom bills say they’re necessary to prevent trans women from acting as sexual predators on girls in bathrooms. But experts say these fears aren’t based on reality. “If anything, trans people are the ones getting assaulted,” one trans man told Williams. Watch the Daily Show clip above for more, and check out our coverage of anti-trans violence here.

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Watch The Daily Show’s Jessica Williams Tear Down Fearmongering Bathroom Bills

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Sheldon Adelson’s Casino Agrees to Pay $9 Million in Foreign Corruption Case

by RachaelDawbin Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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The casino run by major GOP financier Sheldon Adelson agreed today to settle a long-running Securities and Exchange Commission bribery investigation that has been swirling around Adelson’s Chinese operations. Las Vegas Sands will pay $9 million but won’t have to admit any guilt, and the SEC will close its investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

In 2011, the Department of Justice and the SEC launched an investigation into Adelson’s company after a former executive accused the company of paying an intermediary to hide the company’s role in a variety of transactions, including transferring money to Chinese public officials. In the SEC press release on today’s settlement, the agency said Las Vegas Sands had failed to keep accurate records for more than $62 million in payments to an intermediary. According to the SEC, the money was given to the intermediary to buy a basketball team and arrange the purchase of a building from a Chinese state-run entity, for a “business center” that was never built.

According to the former Sands‘ executive, Steve Jacobs, who is now embroiled in a lengthy court fight with Adelson over his firing several years ago, the intermediary was a man named Yang Saixin, who was helping to organize the Adelson Center for US-China Enterprise in Beijing. Yang has denied any wrongdoing, but an internal Sands memo described him as influential and said his parents “knew President Xi Jinping’s parents, implying a strong connection to Zhongnanhai (the White House of China).” Adelson himself has denied any knowledge of plans for the center.

While the SEC settlement does not make it clear what the true purpose of the spending was, it does show that Adelson’s Chinese operations handed an enormous amount of money over to the intermediary. That intermediary was referred to in Sands internal documents as a “beard,” the SEC announcement said. The payments cited by the SEC today included:

$6 million for the purchase of a Chinese basketball team. The “beard” was used for the purchase because gaming companies aren’t allowed to own basketball teams in China. An additional $8 million was paid to Yang for team operating costs, but no documentation for those costs exists, the SEC found.
$43 million in payments to Yang for the purchase and management of a building, once owned by a Chinese state entity, in order to build the business center. Las Vegas Sands employees were concerned that the payments were “solely for political purposes,” the SEC release said, but there was no documentation or research on the costs associated with the payments whatsoever. Included in the payments were $900,000 for property management costs, when no property management work was ever done, and $1.2 million for “arts and crafts.”

In addition to paying the $9 million fine, Adelson’s company agreed to hire an independent consultant to monitor its internal finances for two years.

In its own statement, Las Vegas Sands downplayed Jacobs’ role in launching the investigation, and quoted Adelson as saying he was “pleased to have the matter resolved…We will build on this experience, which has reemphasized to our 50,000 team members worldwide the same values I have made the foundation of my seven decades in business—integrity and reputation matter.”

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Sheldon Adelson’s Casino Agrees to Pay $9 Million in Foreign Corruption Case

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Disturbing Video Shows Cop Body-Slamming 12-Year-Old Girl at School

by DIFAdantfywuy Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Authorities in San Antonio are investigating a video that surfaced Tuesday showing a uniformed police officer restraining a middle-school student from behind and slamming her to the ground. The video, recorded on a cellphone at Rhodes Middle School, shows a scene that quickly turns tense, with one student repeatedly asking 12-year-old Janissa Valdez if she’s okay as Officer Joshua Kehm handcuffs Valdez on the ground.

San Antonio Independent School District spokeswoman Leslie Price told MySanAntonio.com that Kehm intervened after two female students “became verbally aggressive toward each other” in the March 29 incident. Kehm has been placed on administrative leave while the district and its police department conduct the investigation.

Also: Chokeholds, Brain Injuries, Beatings: When School Cops Go Bad

The video has reignited the debate over the use of force by school resource officers. As Mother Jones has previously reported, at least 28 students have been seriously harmed by sworn police officers on K-12 campuses over the last five years. The incidents raise questions over the officers’ lack of training and oversight, along with the disproportionate impact such incidents have on minority and disabled students. Data released by the Department of Education in March 2014 found that of 92,000 students arrested enrolled in the 2011-12 school year, black students accounted for 31 percent of arrests and students with disabilities made up a quarter of arrests, despite comprising 16 percent and 12 percent, respectively, of total enrolled students.

What’s more, as education news site The 74 recently reported, 4 of the 10 largest public school districts in the country have more security officers than school counselors.

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Disturbing Video Shows Cop Body-Slamming 12-Year-Old Girl at School

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Does It Really Matter if Bernie Called Hillary Unqualified?

by PenneyBarge4101 Posted on April 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Josh Marshall weighs in on the flap over Bernie Sanders saying that Hillary Clinton is unqualified to be president:

Various things Clinton said can be reasonably interpreted as questioning whether Sanders is up to the job of the presidency. But it is an entirely different matter when an opponent, in his own voice, says flatly his challenger is “unqualified” to serve as President of the country. That’s something that cannot be unsaid. If Clinton is the nominee, it will undoubtedly be a staples of GOP stump speeches in the Fall. These are simple realities of political campaigns.

I’m curious about something: is this actually true? I hear it every four years. At some point, the primary races always get a little (or a lot) nasty, and the candidates start saying things that seem like they’d be great fodder for attack ads by the other side in the general election. But are they? Do these kinds of comments ever end up as a major theme in political ads?

I never see it. Of course, I live in California, and nobody ever bothers advertising here. Still, I never really hear about it elsewhere either. By the time the general election comes along, both sides have far more important attacks to make. And they probably assume—rightly—that most undecided voters don’t care much what some angry primary opponent said six months before.

I’d prefer that both Bernie and Hillary dial it back a notch. But is Donald Trump really going to attack Hillary by showing footage of Bernie saying she’s not qualified to be president, nyah nyah nyah? I doubt it. Even low-information voters know that this is the kind of thing that happens in the heat of campaigns, and it doesn’t really mean anything.

Does anyone know the answer to this? In 2012, for example, did the Obama campaign run attack ads featuring Newt Gingrich saying that Romney kept money in the Cayman Islands? Did the McCain campaign in 2008 use footage of Hillary attacking Obama? Just how common—or not—is this?

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Does It Really Matter if Bernie Called Hillary Unqualified?

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San Francisco Just Did Something Really Cool for Working Parents

by JacobHaralson Posted on April 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, San Francisco became the first US city to require that all new parents—mothers, fathers, and same-sex partners—get fully paid parental leave for six weeks after giving birth or adopting a child. The new law follows the efforts by tech companies in the area, including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Twitter, to offer employees robust parental leave policies in an effort to increase work-life balance.

California is one of only five states that already offers some form of parental leave, but this new city-wide law is one of the most generous in the country. Workers in the Golden State now get six weeks off, but they receive just 55 percent of their pay. New Jersey and Rhode Island have similar laws, and Washington state recently passed a parental leave law that has not taken effect. In March, the New York legislature approved a parental leave policy that will cover 12 weeks of paid time off, though the law will go into effect in 2018 and will initially cover only 50 percent of average pay.

The United States, which guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid parental leave, is the only developed country that does not guarantee all new parents paid parental leave. Expectant mothers get 18 weeks of paid leave in Australia, 39 weeks in the UK, and 480 days in Sweden.

For workers in both California and New York, paid parental leave was one of two victories this week. Governors in both states also signed legislation Monday that will increase the minimum wage in each state to $15 an hour, to be phased in over about seven years. The higher wages, which are more than double the federal minimum wage, will affect roughly 60 million Americans. President Obama responded to the wage increases by asking Congress to follow suit.

“Since I first called on Congress to increase the federal minimum wage in 2013, 18 states and more than 40 cities and counties have acted on their own—thanks to the strong leadership of elected officials, businesses, and workers who organized and fought so hard for the economic security families deserve,” he said in a statement. “Now Congress needs to act to raise the federal minimum wage and expand access to paid leave for all Americans.”

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San Francisco Just Did Something Really Cool for Working Parents

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The End of Heart Disease – Dr. Joel Fuhrman

by Myrna Posted on April 6, 2016

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The End of Heart Disease

The Eat to Live Plan to Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease

Dr. Joel Fuhrman

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: April 5, 2016

Publisher: HarperOne

Seller: HarperCollins


The New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Live, Super Immunity, The End of Diabetes, and The End of Dieting presents a scientifically proven, practical program to prevent and reverse heart disease, the leading cause of death in America—coinciding with the author’s new medical study revealing headline-making findings. Dr. Joel Fuhrman, one of the country’s leading experts on preventative medicine, offers his science-backed nutritional plan that addresses the leading cause of death in America: heart disease. An expert in the science of food, Dr. Fuhrman speaks directly to readers who want to take control of their health and avoid taking medication or undergoing complicated, expensive surgery, the two standard treatments prescribed today. Following the model of his previous programs that have successfully tackled conditions from diabetes to dieting, Dr. Fuhrman’s plan begins with the food we eat. He focuses on a high nutrient per calorie ratio, with a range of options for different needs and conditions. He shows us what to remove and what to add to our diets for optimum heart health, provides menu plans and recipes for heart-healthy meals and snacks, and includes helpful questions for doctors and patients. By understanding heart disease and its triggers, Dr. Fuhrman gives us the knowledge to counter-attack this widespread epidemic and lead longer, healthier lives.

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The End of Heart Disease – Dr. Joel Fuhrman

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