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Republicans Pretend They Want More Powerful Bank Oversight

by LatriceVaught Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Oh man, this is rich. Here is wingnut Rep. Jeb Hensarling griping about the fact that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau didn’t find out about the Well Fargo scandal sooner:

“Why does it take the L.A. Times to break this story, when we’re paying federal investigators to investigate?” Hensarling recently told Fox Business Network.

“Where was the CFPB? Why did they come in so late to the game?” he continued. “They have immense powers and this is their job to enforce these basic consumer laws and it appears they were asleep at the switch.” Hensarling also has criticized regulators for the $185-million settlement with the bank, which allowed Wells Fargo to avoid admitting any wrongdoing.

If Hensarling had his way, the CFPB would be eliminated and Wells Fargo might well have escaped from the whole affair unscathed. Now he’s pretending that he thinks the CFPB is too weak. Sen. Sherrod Brown has it right:

“Hensarling reminds me of the kid who kills his parents and then wants to collect orphan benefits,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), one of the CFPB’s biggest backers. “He’s tried to underfund it. He’s tried to undercut. He’s done all he could to block bank regulations.”

Make up your mind, Jeb. Do you want the CFPB to more powerful or less powerful? You can only have it one way.

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Republicans Pretend They Want More Powerful Bank Oversight

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McDonald’s Asked Teachers to Serve Fries for Free. Now the Teachers Are Fighting Back.

by ArielleRosales Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

Ah, McTeacher’s Night—the occasion for kids to watch their teachers peddle burgers, fries, and sugary drinks. In these tie-ups between schools and the fast-food giant, teachers encourage their students and their families to visit a McDonald’s outlet on a particular evening, and then work behind the counter (uncompensated) in McDonald’s t-shirts. A portion of the night’s sales are donated to the school. The above video depicts one such event held for an Illinois high school in 2012.

Sound like an edifying spectacle for youth? A labor union called United Teachers Los Angeles thinks not. In a blistering letter recently published in its union newspaper, UTLA vice president Cecily Myart-Cruz lays out the case against McTeacher’s Night. She claims that the events amount to “predatory marketing of fast food to children,” “exploits the trust between teachers and students to promote its junk food,” and “often raise as little as $1 per student, a ridiculously small amount compared to the time teachers must spend participating and recruiting their students to attend.”

In an emailed statement, a McDonald’s spokesperson defended the program:

McTeacher’s Night is an optional community-based program that supports schools seeking financial support for initiatives like sports equipment, band uniforms, iPads for the classroom, field trips and other programs. It is not a corporate mandated program, but a way our company-owned and franchised restaurants support the communities they serve at the request of and in partnership with local schools.

Like the sweet sauce that tops a soft-serve sundae, the LA teachers union critique comes after a campaign launched last year to kibosh McTeacher’s Nights, led by advocacy groups Corporate Accountability International and Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and and supported by 50 national, state and local teachers unions.

A spokesperson for Corporate Accountability International pointed out to me in an email that McTeacher’s Night events contradict sponsorship guidelines (downloadable here) issued by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) in 2011. The guidelines state: “Keep in mind we may not accept donations from or promote organizations that market, sell or produce products that may be harmful to children including but not limited to, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, gambling, or high fat and calorie foods and drinks.”

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, Corporate Accountability International and Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood have documented more than 120 McTeacher nights in greater LA since the start of 2013, including four this year. Their research suggests that the funds these events raise tend to be paltry. They obtained fundraising totals for around 30 LA-area McTeacher nights, for which the cash haul ranged from $67 to $1,000. Nationwide, the groups have counted more than 600 McTeacher Nights since 2013.

On Monday, the UTLA announced a formal policy “calling on McDonald’s to end these disrespectful marketing gimmicks once and for all,” Myart-Cruz said in a statement.

Like a class clown who doesn’t know when to stop, Ronald McDonald would appear to be no longer welcome as a fixture in LA public schools.

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McDonald’s Asked Teachers to Serve Fries for Free. Now the Teachers Are Fighting Back.

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Here’s Some Good News for Sexual-Assault Victims

by VonCourts447729 Posted on September 28, 2016

Mother Jones

The Department of Justice announced more than $38 million in funding on Monday to help state and local agencies address the backlog of untested sexual-assault kits. The funding, part of a national initiative launched last year, will go toward increasing the inventory and the testing of kits, training law enforcement officers on sexual-assault investigations, helping police departments collect DNA that could lead to the identification of serial sex offenders, as well as several other efforts.

Sexual-assault kits, more commonly known as rape kits, are the DNA swabs, hair, photographs, and detailed information gathered from victims of sexual assault and used as evidence for the prosecution of rapists. The forensic exam can often be long—from four to six hours—and, as activists note, invasive, but it can provide key evidence for identifying assailants. But getting the contents of a rape kit tested is expensive, costing between $1,000 and $1,500 on average. Lack of funding in police departments, as well as murky protocols around testing, has created a backlog of more than 400,000 untested kits across the country, according to a 2015 estimate. As a result, victims may never see their cases prosecuted, and serial rapists could go on to commit more crimes. New York, among other states, is still in the process of counting the number of untested kits it has, while others simply do not know how many untested kits there are, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation’s Accountability Project.

This round of funding could go a long way toward helping cities and police departments close cases, identify serial offenders, and better handle sexual-assault cases in the future. (Last fiscal year, the DOJ awarded nearly $80 million in grants to state and local agencies in 27 states, but there are still states that have yet to participate in the initiative.) After Detroit received a pilot grant to test rape kits, its police department has been able to make DNA matches, identify potential serial rapists, and secure convictions against perpetrators. In a 2011-13 DOJ-funded study on rape kit testing in Detroit, researchers had found that in many cases, law enforcement stopped investigating cases after minimal effort and were biased in how they conducted sexual assault investigations, with officers expressing “negative, victim-blaming beliefs about sexual assault victims.” The DOJ later released guidance on how police departments could better address gender biases in how they investigate sexual assault and domestic violence. A study this June by Case Western Reserve University of nearly 5,000 rape kits collected in and near Cleveland found that serial rapists are more common than previous research has suggested.

Maile M. Zambuto, CEO of the Joyful Heart Foundation, a sexual-assault advocacy organization, applauded the new funding in a statement. “Testing rape kits sends a fundamental and crucial message to victims of sexual violence,” she said. “You matter. What happened to you matters.”

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Here’s Some Good News for Sexual-Assault Victims

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

by JackMurrell231 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the past few years, sexual harassment in the sciences has become an increasingly visible problem. Disturbing allegations about the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, and the former head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have all made headlines. So have a number of cases involving prominent university professors.

On the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Kishore Hari talks to Sarah Ballard, an accomplished exoplanet researcher who was also a complainant in one of the most high-profile recent harassment controversies. Last year, Buzzfeed reported that Geoff Marcy, a renowned astronomer at the University of California-Berkeley, had faced sexual harassment accusations. A report produced by the university found that Marcy had “violated the relevant UC sexual harassment policies”; it cited allegations that he had inappropriately touched students. Initially, Marcy was placed on probation; he was instructed by the university to comply with its sexual harassment policies and to avoid physical contact with students (except to shake their hands).

But the Buzzfeed story sparked a national outcry, and many began demanding a more severe punishment. Marcy posted an apology on his website, though he denies some of the allegations in the report and says that his actions didn’t harm his students’ professional lives. He ultimately retired under pressure from faculty at the university.

On Inquiring Minds, Ballard depicts Marcy as a professor who praised her talent yet abused her trust. She first met him when she was an undergraduate student in one of his classes, but her excitement to work with one of the world’s foremost experts on exoplanets soon took a dark turn. On one occasion, Marcy told Ballard a detailed story about his sexual history. On another occasion, she says, he attempted to massage her neck after driving her home.

After that, Ballard agonized over whether to confront Marcy about his behavior, ultimately deciding to do so. As described in the Berkeley report, this prospect caused “great anxiety” for Ballard, “in part because she believed such a confrontation would effectively forfeit any opportunity of receiving a letter of recommendation” from Marcy. But it never came to that. Ballard says Marcy’s behavior suddenly changed and the harassment stopped. She later found out that a graduate student had confronted Marcy about unwelcome behavior Marcy had allegedly exhibited toward a different student.

Marcy didn’t deny Ballard’s allegations—though he does deny some of the other allegations in Berkeley’s report. (According to the Berkeley report, he told the university investigator that he didn’t recall touching Ballard in the car but that it was possible he did.) In an interview with Mother Jones, Marcy’s attorney, Elizabeth Grossman, argued that Marcy’s actions weren’t serious enough to justify the backlash he’s experienced. “There is not a single allegation of sexual assault against Marcy,” said Grossman. “There is not a single allegation of soliciting sex, of requesting sex in exchange for academic favor. There is not a single suggestion of his interfering with anyone’s ability to thrive on campus.”

Ballard, however, says she was deeply affected by her interactions with Marcy. “To have Marcy say, ‘You are talented, you are full of promise’— that is so compelling,” she explains. “And then to have all of the sudden the knowledge that…that message might not have been delivered in good faith: You feel like the rug has been pulled out under you. So does that mean that I’m not promising? Does that mean that all of it was a lie?…It was profoundly rattling to my nascent sense of self as an astronomer, as a scientist.”

Years later, when Ballard heard that allegations against Marcy were going to become public, she made the decision to come forward and identify herself as one of the victims. She hopes that by doing so, she’ll make things easier for other women.

“There was one principle which helped me to unravel the tangled knot of my feelings that I could always return to…and that was you have to be the woman you needed then,” says Ballard. “You couldn’t protect yourself then, but you can protect younger you today, and you can protect women who are 20 today.”

Ballard went on to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard (she notes that Marcy wrote a recommendation letter that helped her get into the prestigious university). She now researches exoplanets at MIT. But across the country, many other women have left the sciences. That’s partly because of widespread sexual harassment, argues Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.). Indeed, a 2014 study found that roughly two-thirds of female scientists surveyed said they had experienced harassment while doing field research.

In January, Speier gave a speech on the floor of the US House of Representatives recounting the allegations against Timothy Slater, who taught astronomy at the University of Arizona and is now a professor at the University of Wyoming. Speier had obtained the results of a confidential 2005 investigation conducted by the University of Arizona. “Dr. Slater himself admitted that he gave an employee a vegetable-shaped vibrator and that he frequently commented to his employees and students about the appearance of women,” said Speier on the House floor. “My staff spoke with one female grad student who was required to attend a strip club in order to discuss her academic work with Dr. Slater. The woman has since left the field of astronomy.” After reading the report, “I was physically sickened,” Speier says on Inquiring Minds.

Slater declined to answer specific questions from Mother Jones about the allegations, though he did provide a letter his lawyers had sent to the University of Arizona threatening to sue the university for defamation and breach of privacy over the release of the report. In the letter, Slater’s attorneys said the university’s report “contains numerous false and misleading allegations, which Rep. Speier and the media has reported as fact.” Specifically, the attorneys state that Slater “never gave a vibrator” to “any graduate student, ever” and that Slater “denies that he ever pressured anyone to go to the strip club or that anyone ever complained about going to strip club.”

Speier proposes one solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the sciences. The federal government has the power under Title IX to fight harassment, she notes. Because so many universities, even private ones, rely on federal dollars, they could lose federal funding in the form of grants or student loans if they violate the law. Last week, she introduced legislation requiring universities to inform federal grant-making institutions when they determine a professor has engaged in sexual harassment.

Speier isn’t optimistic that the bill will pass in the current Congress, but she wants harassment victims to know they have an advocate on Capitol Hill. Her message to them? “They’ve been heard.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Why One Scientist Went Public With Her Sexual Harassment Story

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Even in a Complex World, There Are Still Plenty of Facts That Can Be Checked

by MaurineGooding Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Over at the Corner, Patrick Brennan suggests that political journalists are lousy at fact checking, and debate moderators shouldn’t try to do it in real time. There’s a case to be made for this, but he sure picks a weird example:

Liberal Twitter was all a-huff about how the debate commissioner cites the unemployment rate as an area where the facts are up for debate — har har, they say, you know there literally is an official unemployment rate the government publishes, right?

Except anyone smart saying this is being remarkably coy: People of good faith and serious economic training debate about whether the “official” unemployment rate is a good representation of the unemployment rate all the time!

How absurd is it to complain about the commissioner’s statement here? Say Trump says something along the lines of “the real unemployment rate is much higher than the government tells you.”

This might well be true — although it all depends on what you mean by the real unemployment rate….The people braying for fact-checking in debates are thus asking for moderators to attempt, in real time, to adjudicate disputes that divide Ph.D. economists and of course, a whole range of other such disputes on which the respective experts — trade economists, classification experts, presidential historians, whatever — often don’t agree.

Brennan suggests this is all a high-minded argument about U3 vs. U6 and the declining labor force participation rate and so forth. Silly liberals! Who are they to say that the unemployment rate is a clear fact when even professional economists argue about it?

And, sure, fair point—if this is what Trump was talking about. He’s not. He’s said on multiple occasions that the unemployment rate is “really” 42 percent or 21 percent or 35 percent. The headline figure from the BLS (currently 4.9 percent) is a “hoax” and a “conspiracy.” In fact, it’s “one of the biggest hoaxes in politics.” This is presumably because Donald Trump doesn’t waste his time with anything other than the very best hoaxes.

This is not an academic argument about what unemployment “really” is. It’s idiocy. It’s a lie. It’s a shameless extension of Trump’s juvenile populism, and Brennan knows it. If he thinks debate moderators shouldn’t even push back on something this rank, he’s showing a contempt for the truth every bit as casual as Trump’s.

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Even in a Complex World, There Are Still Plenty of Facts That Can Be Checked

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Trump’s Tax Plan Reveals His Contempt for the Middle Class

by PQLZelma9382393 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago, NYU law professor Lily Batchelder released a paper that takes a close look at the details of Donald Trump’s tax plan. She concludes that several million middle-class families will pay more under Trump’s plan than they do now. Jim Tankersley reports the Trump campaign’s response:

The Trump campaign called the findings “pure fiction,” contending the analysis neglects a crucial benefit for low-income taxpayers….Most importantly, Miller said Trump will instruct the committees writing his plan into law to make sure that it does not raise taxes on any low- or middle-income earners. “In sending our proposal to the tax-writing committees we will include instructions to ensure all low and middle income households are protected,” Miller said.

This is obviously spin, but the funny thing is that it’s true. The details that Batchelder analyzed really won’t matter much once Trump’s proposal gets fed into the congressional sausage machine. Rather, his tax plan is essentially a statement of values. It tells the voting public what he believes in.

And that’s the problem. If Trump truly cared about the middle class, he and his team would have taken a very close look at the details to make sure his plan benefited the entire middle class. Obviously they didn’t. They treated it like a throwaway that Congress would iron out later.

Conversely, does anyone doubt that they were very careful indeed about vetting the effect of his plan on the rich? There’s surely not a single person in the top 1 percent who will accidentally end up paying higher taxes under Trump’s plan. Why? Because Trump cares about rich people. They’re winners.1 Struggling families and single mothers are losers. Why sweat the details for the likes of them?

1Also because his plan is so overwhelmingly favorable for rich people that it’s basically impossible for small details to wipe out their average gain.

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Trump’s Tax Plan Reveals His Contempt for the Middle Class

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Despite Donald Trump’s Massive Tax Bribes, Top CEOs Still Can’t Stand the Guy

by DEQCheryle Posted on September 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal has checked out every Fortune 100 CEO in the country, and not a single one supports Donald Trump:

Most have stayed on the sidelines, with 89 of the 100 top CEOs not supporting either presidential nominee, and 11 backing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton….Hope Hicks, Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman, said the candidate has “tremendous support from small and large business CEOs and business owners,” and added that he “is not beholden to supporters with agendas like CEOs of massive, publicly traded companies.”

You betcha, Hope. Trump never wanted the support of those guys anyway, amirite?

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Despite Donald Trump’s Massive Tax Bribes, Top CEOs Still Can’t Stand the Guy

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Seven Days of Donald Trump’s Lies

by ShaniceTxy Posted on September 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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The New York Times has compiled a list of 31 of Donald Trump’s “falsehoods, exaggerations and outright lies” today. “A closer examination,” they say, “revealed an unmistakable pattern: Virtually all of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods directly bolstered a powerful and self-aggrandizing narrative depicting him as a heroic savior for a nation menaced from every direction.”

Quite so, and this would seem unremarkable except for one thing: this list covers only the past week. And it doesn’t include “untruths that appeared to be mere hyperbole or humor, or delivered purely for effect, or what could generously be called rounding errors.”

In other words, just lies. For one week. And yet a lot of people still believe Trump is going to build a wall and has a foolproof secret plan to crush ISIS. Apparently we are a nation of patsies these days.

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Seven Days of Donald Trump’s Lies

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Stop Trying to Feel Awesome All the Time, Says Millennial Whisperer

by MargherClifford Posted on September 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Personal development” blogger Mark Manson got his start shelling out dating advice back in the mid-2000s, when The Game was making waves. Like every other twentysomething of a certain demographic, Manson, who hails from Austin, Texas, was hoping to cash in as a digital nomad: He moved abroad, started a blog, and attempted to earn a living working on internet marketing startups.

HarperOne

But the promise of the young web was elusive, Manson soon discovered. The startups and the jobs they offered were “not sustainable—they’re not real careers,” he says. “If you start looking out 20 years in the future, you have no stability. I started to realize this, and around the same time, I realized that writing is the only thing I’m good at, the only thing I really love about my job.”

So Manson, who is now 32, resolved to focus on his writing. In 2012, while living in Colombia, he penned his first viral post, “10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America.” The post received thousands of shares and crashed his website, he says. Manson continued writing in his plain, off-the-cuff style, appealing to millennials with posts like “Stop Trying to Be Happy,” “Love is Not Enough,” and “In Defense of Being Average.”

Nowadays, his eponymous advice blog (tagline: “Some people say I’m an idiot. Other people say I saved their life. Read and decide for yourself”) commands about 2 million unique visitors a month and covers topics from love to the development of habits. I reached out to Manson to talk about his new book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, and naturally, to get a little advice.

Mother Jones: What’s up with the book title?

Mark Manson: It actually comes from a blog article I wrote a couple of years ago. I was just joking around with a friend about not giving a fuck, and I think at one point, I said, “Not giving a fuck: It’s not easy, it’s a very subtle art form.” I have a Google Doc, and every time I have an idea for an article, I pull up my phone and jot down ideas. It took me a year to actually write the book, and one day when I was feeling irreverent and ridiculous, I was like, all right, let’s talk about giving fucks, not giving fucks, and just went for it.

MJ: How would you summarize the key takeaways?

MM: The central message is that, in general, people have spent way too much time trying to feel good all the time. Instead they should focus on deciphering what’s important and what’s not. Because problems are inevitable, pain is inevitable, and the only really reliable way to persevere or deal with those problems and pain is to find a worthy cause or a worthy reason for dealing with it. A lot of the culture at large, and self-help material in general, has gone down this rabbit hole of “You can feel great all the time and you’re amazing. You’re a special snowflake who’s going to be the next big thing in the world.” I think that’s really led to a culturewide sense of entitlement and just kind of being detached from reality and from each other.

MJ: So we should feel bad instead?

MM: Feeling good is nice, but the goal should be to find something meaningful and important.

MJ: But isn’t that what everyone is saying?

MM: Yeah, a lot of people, but it’s usually framed like, “You’ll feel really good if you find something meaningful.” It doesn’t work that way. The quality of your life is determined by how good your problems are, not how awesome you feel all the time. The whole point of the book is that self improvement isn’t about getting rid of pain. It’s about not giving a fuck about pain. That’s what growth is. It’s getting to the point where the pain you’re sustaining is a worthwhile thing to endure.

MJ: So how do you know which problem is the right one? For instance, a lot of people work really hard and suffer a lot—and they’re not satisfied.

MM: The quest here is to find better problems. A better problem is the one we have control over, that is pro-social and not antisocial. In a way, it’s about values. Good values are based in reality—they’re socially constructive and immediately controllable. Bad values are superstitious, socially destructive, and not immediate or controllable.

To use one of the facetious examples in the book: If the biggest problem in my life right now is that my favorite TV show got canceled, that’s a pretty poor reflection of my values and the quality of my life. That’s a poor thing to care about, it’s not controllable, it’s not immediate, it has no immediate effect on the people around me or the people I care about. The highest priorities in our life should be something that’s grounded in being constructive toward the people around us, and something that’s immediate and we have control over.

So if someone says they want to be a famous singer on TV, for example, it’s a poor value, because there’s so many factors that could influence that. The thing that will bring greater quality to life is something more controllable, more like, “I want to the best singer that I possibly can,” or “I want to move as many people as possible with my artwork as I can,” whether you’re singing in a coffee shop or onstage at Madison Square Garden.

MJ: That seems obvious. And yet I hadn’t really thought about it.

MM: Culturally speaking, we’re getting a bit lost. The side effect of all this marketing and consumerism is that we’re running into this constant state of distraction, and we don’t realize that a lot of the values that we end up adopting maybe aren’t even our own, or maybe were a little bit imposed on us through marketing messages and TV shows and movies.

I spent a lot of my early adulthood caring about a lot of things, and I was very upset when I discovered that they weren’t very important. I’ve watched a lot of my friends and my readers go through similar experiences. I think a lot of that comes with growing up with the internet and 500 channels on TV. We’re the first generation that grew up with this very distorted expectation of what the world is and what we should expect from it.

MJ: So what can we do?

MM: What needs to be done is a return to simplicity. The answer these days is not more, it’s less. It’s deciding what to cut off from our attention and our focus. There’s way more things out there than any single person people could pursue, way more opportunities and questions. I think the most important question is: What am I going to give up? What am I going to cut myself off from? What are the few things in my life that I am going to care about and focus on, understanding that I’m limited, and a lot of ideas so prevalent out there may not ever happen in my life? I think it’s a really hard thing to swallow.

MJ: So then it’s more like, “What do I actually want to give a fuck about?”

MM: Exactly. The not giving a fuck thing is actually just a silly tool to teach people to think about their values, about what are they choosing to find important in their life, and then finding a way to change those things.

MJ: But suppose I were to say, “Mark, I actually give a fuck about everything. What should I do?”

MM: I would tell you to prepare for a lot of disappointment, and it would really come down to how you react to that disappointment. It’s a process of letting go. Some people react by refusing to accept it. They give a fuck about everything and they’re constantly disappointed because nothing is living up to their expectations, but instead of accepting that their expectations are unrealistic, they blame groups of people and blame the government and blame everybody. What we have to get back to is that people are really limited and fallible. You need to choose the few things that you’re going to work really hard for, and accept the disappointment that comes with everything else.

It’s a very negative philosophy, but it makes people feel better because it relinquishes the pressure. If you think of your typical millennial, since that’s who most of my readers are, they have all these expectations. They went to a good school and they worked their asses off. They did an unpaid internship and they studied abroad and they want to have their amazing career and they want to get there faster than ever. And they want to make a certain amount of money and live in an awesome city, and it’s just, the pressure of having to care about everything weighs them down and creates a lot of unnecessary anxiety. Everything else will eventually come as a side effect: If you get good at a job, eventually you’ll get to live in a good city. If you get good at a skill, you’ll find a good job. If you find a skill that you care about and think is important, then you’ll naturally get good at it. Start at the beginning.

MJ: How do people respond to this advice?

MM: The most common thing I get from people is a sense of relief. People who come to self-improvement content are generally the type of people who are very hard on themselves and constantly feel a need to prove that they’re awesome and that their life is awesome. So when they come around and see something that’s like, “Hey, you don’t need to prove anything; it’s not going to work anyway”—even though it’s a negative message, they kind of feel relief. My goal is never to give algorithmic advice, but to explain the principles and a little bit of the framework, so people can decide for themselves. Because deciding for themselves is the most important thing people can do—it’s often the problem in the first place.

MJ: How did you come up with this stuff?

MM: I’m a recovered self-help junkie. I’ve always been a bookworm, so I’ve been reading about this stuff since I was a teenager. I guess it’s a classic case of what was a hobby through most of my life ended up becoming my profession, even if it wasn’t designed that way. That, and I’ve screwed up. There’s really no better teacher than your own screwups.

MJ: Where do you turn when you feel lost or in need of help?

MM: I have a great support network. My fiancée is amazing. I have some friends who are insanely intelligent and who are willing to keep me in check, and I have my family. Books are great, but for most people, if you’re going through hard times, step No. 1 should be friends and family and people close to you.

MJ: Your last chapter, fittingly, is about death. Why did you choose to write about that?

MM: Because the whole book is about people trying to avoid their problems, and death is the ultimate problem we try to avoid. There are entire religions about coming to terms with death and becoming more comfortable. To use that famous Steve Jobs YouTube video, when you think about death, it’s the only thing that kind of puts everything else in perspective. It is the only kind of objective yardstick for being able to recognize the values in one’s own life, and what they’re worth. So I think it’s important to think about it, and for people to imagine their own death, because it makes self discovery that much easier—even though it’s unpleasant.

MJ: So, um, how many times did you use the F-word in your book?

MM: Ha! I have no idea. A lot! Probably a couple hundred. The editor struck a few of them, because they were definitely gratuitous.

Original article: 

Stop Trying to Feel Awesome All the Time, Says Millennial Whisperer

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Remember When Ted Cruz Loathed Donald Trump?

by Tyrone2847 Posted on September 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today Ted Cruz endorsed Donald Trump, putting the cherry on top of the Texas senator’s complicated relationship with the Republican nominee—a relationship that’s involved a lot of vitriol, name-calling, a sprinkle of admiration, but mostly hate. Thankfully, it’s all captured on Twitter.

It began cordially enough. Cruz even called Trump “terrific.”

But things soon got ugly.

Then Trump got their wives involved…

At which point, Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward” and vowed to beat him.

Cruz called Trump a Democrat, compared him to Hillary Clinton, and called for him to release his tax returns.

Even when Cruz dropped out of the race, he refused to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention, urging people to vote their consciences.

Today, Cruz argues that he’s voting for Trump because Hillary Clinton is “manifestly unfit” to be president. “If Clinton wins, we know—with 100% certainty—that she would deliver on her left-wing promises, with devastating results for our country,” he wrote in his announcement.

Seems like only yesterday when Cruz tweeted:

More:

Remember When Ted Cruz Loathed Donald Trump?

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