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Does our state constitution protect the environment?
Environmental activist and lawyer Maya K. van Rossum comes to Boulder to discuss how to states can pass ‘green’ amendments
Does our state constitution protect the environment?
Environmental activist and lawyer Maya K. van Rossum comes to Boulder to discuss how to states can pass ‘green’ amendments
In 2014, there was an effort in Colorado to cement the public’s right to clean air, water and environment in the state constitution. Citing numerous health and safety hazards born out of oil and gas operations, the backers of the amendment, Coloradans for Safe and Clean Energy, gathered signatures for that amendment and another initiative that would’ve required new oil and gas operations be set 2,000 feet away from existing structures.
If you’ve read Boulder Weekly since, you know what happened next. The state’s Democrats “cut a deal” and the initiatives were pulled after they were submitted for signature verification.
So Boulder County environmentalists know a thing or two about what activist and lawyer Maya K. van Rossum calls a “green amendment,” a constitutional amendment at the state or federal level that guarantees rights to clean air, water and habitat. And van Rossum knows that what happened in 2014 is exactly why another push for a green amendment in Colorado, other states and at the federal level is necessary.
“Just as recognizing the value of environmental protection can be nonpartisan, so too can the sellout of our government,” van Rossum says. “The truth is President Obama, President Clinton, under their administrations we did not see great protection for our environment being carried out. The devastation of the oil and gas industry was very much supported and advanced by the Democratic legislators at all levels of government.”
Van Rossum says it’s only been since Trump has been in office that more people have begun to see how feckless many of our local, state and federal environmental protections are. …
‘Your racist side slipped out a little’: How the anthem protests split one small town
The sharp divisions of the Trump era were laid bare in rural North Carolina when a rumor circulated that the high school football team would be forced to kneel for the Star-Spangled Banner.
“I am so pissed this morning,” began a soon-to-be viral Facebook post. “KIPP Gaston College prep is trying to make my granddaughter kneel for the national anthem at the football game Friday night.”
It was the tail end of September 2017, past the midway point of the most politically charged year since the last one, and President Trump had just ignited a national controversy over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. In an act of Twitter jujitsu, Trump turned Colin Kaepernick’s protest against social injustice into a referendum on patriotism, the military and the flag, opening the latest front in his ongoing culture war.
Now the battle had come to a charter school in rural North Carolina. For a few hours on social media, the national debate over Kaepernick’s protest movement exploded inside one school in a small town, exposing how the polarized politics of the Trump era have trickled from Washington DC down into America’s communities.
That school, KIPP Gaston College Preparatory, was founded in 2001 with a mission to prepare the historically disadvantaged students in the region for college and to fight for social justice. In the years since, its predominantly African American student body has regularly outperformed other public schools in the region, with a curriculum that stresses the systemic inequities they are surmounting through education.
But for as long as the school has existed, there’s been a vocal minority of white families in the school community who have rejected KIPP’s social justice mission. These families chose to send their children to the school because they believed it provided a stronger education and a safer environment than the other schools in the region, but they didn’t want their children to adopt KIPP’s politics. …
Why the financial world and big business will never have a #MeToo moment
Boys Will Be Boys
“It’s all just banter.”
The world took a collective, digital gasp when the Financial Times unloaded its jaw-dropping investigation into The Presidents Club—an annual men only charity fundraiser that features the (alleged) sexual harassment of hostesses as the plat du jour on its menu of events.
Under the pretext of a black-tie dinner and auction, around 130 young, female hostesses are hired to attend to the needs of the business barons who bid on things like lunch with UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson, and tea with Bank of England governor Mark Carney.
According to the article, the hostesses are told their job is merely to ensure their designated tables of attendees have all the alcohol they want. But as they try to get on with it, they are met with groping, come-ons, and other inappropriate behavior that only gets worse as the rich, privileged men get drunker; at the after party, one captain of industry encouraged a hostess to remove her underwear and dance on a table.
In the new era of gender politics, where there has been a paradigm shift in power across various industries following #MeToo movement, one would be forgiven in thinking the Financial Times investigation, which had seeming unequivocal evidence of heinous acts of harassment, would signal the end of this behavior.
But, any who know or have experienced the world of big business and finance know that it’s unlikely anything will actually change. …
How the far right has perfected the art of deniable racism
Electoral successes in Europe and the US are the result of a process whereby bigotry is made palatable.
In July 2016 the bigoted troll Milo Yiannopoulos, a British darling of the American far right, was banned from Twitter after encouraging a torrent of racist abuse at Leslie Jones, a black actor who starred in the remake of Ghostbusters. In one example he branded her “barely literate”. A few months later it emerged that Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, had given Yiannopoulos, 33, who calls feminism “cancer” and Donald Trump “Daddy”, a $255,000 book deal. “I met with top execs … earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions,” he said. “I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building – but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”
A few months after that, he suggested that sex between 13-year-old boys and adult men and women could “happen perfectly consensually”. This was apparently one “outrageous opinion” too far. Simon & Schuster cancelled the book. Yiannopoulos sued.
In the subsequent court submissions we see the critical notes of his editor, Mitchell Ivers. Yiannopoulos argues: “Given my penchant for black denizens of the dark continent I can’t be accused of being racist … I’m the left’s worst nightmare.” Ivers replies: “Having sex with black people does not prove someone is [not] racist.” Elsewhere the editor demands: “Delete irrelevant and superfluous ethnic joke.”
In a section on feminism, Ivers says: “Don’t start chapter with accusation that feminists = fat.” Tellingly, he adds: “It destroys any seriousness of purpose.”
When the notes were made public, some liberals hailed them as evidence of Yiannopoulos’s shallow thinking. But they actually lay bare a far more sinister process. Simon & Schuster knew who he was when it signed him. Ivers’ job was to get him into shape, to coach him in how to make his racism and misogyny palatable. What we see in those notes is the strenuous, and ultimately doomed, effort to lend Yiannopoulos’s bigotry gravity; to extract from the dung heap of his hateful worldview “the seriousness of [his] purpose”; to locate the boundaries of acceptable prejudice so that those borders can be more effectively breached. He was not just an editor but an enabler. …
At Davos, George Soros tears into Facebook and Google
Freedom Of Mind
Fighting words.
Financier and philanthropist George Soros criticized Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at his annual Davos dinner, decried the state of global democracy, and warned about the rising threat of nuclear war.
While his words were certainly chilling, Soros has sounded some of these warnings before. This year, though, he flagged a brand new threat—the unchecked power of Google and Facebook, which Soros feels now have “monolithic power” that they’re using to manipulate and deceive consumers. The net result could be totalitarian control, Soros said. Here is a transcript of his full remarks on the topic:
These companies have often played an innovative and liberating role. But as Facebook and Google have grown into ever more powerful monopolies, they have become obstacles to innovation, and they have caused a variety of problems of which we are only now beginning to become aware.
Companies earn their profits by exploiting their environment. Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment. This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.
The distinguishing feature of internet platform companies is that they are networks and they enjoy rising marginal returns; that accounts for their phenomenal growth. The network effect is truly unprecedented and transformative, but it is also unsustainable. It took Facebook eight and a half years to reach a billion users and half that time to reach the second billion. At this rate, Facebook will run out of people to convert in less than 3 years. …
The Dark Side of America’s Rise to Oil Superpower
It sounds good, but be careful what you wish for.
The last time U.S. drillers pumped 10 million barrels of crude a day, Richard Nixon was in the White House. The first oil crisis hadn’t yet scared Americans into buying Toyotas, and fracking was an experimental technique a handful of engineers were trying, with meager success, to popularize. It was 1970, and oil sold for $1.80 a barrel.
Almost five decades later, with oil hovering near $65 a barrel, daily U.S. crude output is about to hit the eight-digit mark again. It’s a significant milestone on the way to fulfilling a dream that a generation ago seemed far-fetched: By the end of the year, the U.S. may well be the world’s biggest oil producer. With that, America takes a big step toward energy independence.
The U.S. crowing from the top of a hill long occupied by Saudi Arabia or Russia would scramble geopolitics. A new world energy order could emerge. That shuffling will be good for America but not so much for the planet.
For one, the influence of one of the most powerful forces of the past half-century, the modern petrostate, would be diminished. No longer would “America First” diplomats need to tiptoe around oil-supplying nations such as Saudi Arabia. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries would find it tougher to agree on production guidelines, and lower prices could result, reopening old wounds in the cartel. That would take some muscle out of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy, while Russia’s oligarchs would find it more difficult to maintain the lifestyles to which they’ve become accustomed.
President Donald Trump, sensing an opportunity, is looking past independence to what he calls energy dominance. His administration plans to open vast ocean acreage to offshore exploration and for the first time in 40 years allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It may take years to tap, but the Alaska payoff alone is eye-popping—an estimated 11.8 billion barrels of technically recoverable crude. …
5 Movie Stunts That Looked Even Crazier Behind The Scenes
It’s hard to impress people with a really amazing camera shot nowadays, because they’ll assume it was all done by some nerd in front of a computer. But every once in a blood moon, when you see a really insane shot in a movie, that’s because there’s an even more insane story behind it. Such as how …
#5. The Bourne Movies’ Cameramen Had To Leap Between Buildings
The Bourne series found success by posing a fascinating question: “What if James Bond was even more of a reckless maniac?” One notable sequence from The Bourne Ultimatum has the camera following Jason Bourne as he jumps off a building into another building via the window, because if your derring-do isn’t as painful as possible, you may as well be riding a tricycle.
Bourne’s skin is 50 percent glass fragments by now.
So how did they get a camera crane to move so fluently? They didn’t. In what you’re hopefully starting to recognize as a pattern in this article, they just tied up a cameraman and had him jump off a building.
It was about time Peter Parker graduated to bigger cameras.
We say “just,” but this shot took months of preparation in order to find a suitable window-jumping-through location, as well as build the rig that would let the cameraman jump safely while filming (the actual stuntman’s safety equipment consisted of crossed fingers and a will). And on top of that, the harness got stuck, and they had to film the leap a second time. For the sake of comparison, we got tired merely writing that sentence. …
Why was this man arrested for giving water to migrants crossing the border?
Scott Warren was arrested after he helped migrants – but he’s a humanitarian aid worker trying to save lives in a place where so many find death.
Cabeza Prieta national wildlife refuge, which includes 56 miles of Sonoran Desert along the US-Mexico border, is a stunningly beautiful wilderness. There are saguaros, endangered Sonoran pronghorn, petroglyphs, and jagged mountain ranges.
It is also where in the past year alone, humanitarian workers have discovered the bodies of 32 people. These remains were found by volunteers from No More Deaths and other humanitarian aid organizations that work to reduce deaths and suffering along the US-Mexico border.
If you go to Cabeza Prieta and walk along its arroyos, chances are you’ll find human remains too. While volunteering for No More Deaths, I’ve come across scattered rib bones, a femur, and a skull resting beneath a mesquite tree, 10 shades whiter than anything else around it.
On 17 January, No More Deaths released a report documenting the systematic destruction by border patrol of water and food supplies left in the desert for migrants. Over a nearly four-year period, 3,856 gallons of water had been destroyed. The report linked to video showing border patrol kicking over gallons and pouring them out onto the ground.
Hours after the report was released, Scott Warren, a volunteer with No More Deaths, was arrested and charged with a felony for harboring migrants after Border Patrol allegedly witnessed him giving food and water to two migrants in the west desert near Cabeza Prieta.
If convicted, he could face five years in prison. …
‘Still fighting’: Africatown, site of last US slave shipment, sues over pollution
In 1860 the last, illegal, shipment of slaves to the US landed in this part of Alabama. Now hundreds of the largely African American residents are suing an industrial plant claiming it released toxic chemicals linked to cancer.
From he front seat of his truck, Joe Womack points out the site where the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to enter the US, landed in 1860, 52 years after it outlawed the international slave trade.
Womack, a retired army major who grew up in the area and is now the leader of a local environmental justice group, has parked on a patch of dirt under a stories-high interstate bridge, wedged between a paper mill, oil storage tanks and an industrial railroad.
Between the tangle of heavy industry, it’s about as close as you can still get to the area where the Clotilda and the 110 kidnapped west Africans aboard are said to have first touched ground – and where the remains of what might in fact be the ship were recently discovered, thanks to unusual weather conditions.
Several years after emancipation many of the Clotilda survivors would return here to start an independent settlement governed by native traditions.
The Clotilda was sponsored by Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Alabama businessman, on a bet that he could evade authorities and successfully land an illegal slave ship (he was caught but never convicted). The landing site, now covered by oil storage tanks, is on land still owned by the Meaher family, along with several other lucrative industrial plots in the area.
Today, this mostly black, low-income community has more than just a unique history as an against-the-odds bolthole of black independence in the Reconstruction south. Residents say they also have a serious industrial pollution and public health problem, and a group of about 1,200 have launched a lawsuit against the owners of a now-shuttered paper plant that was built in 1928 on land that was then owned by A Meaher Jr. …
‘Expensive’ placebos work better than ‘cheap’ ones, study finds
Placebos — or dummy pills — work better when patients think they are expensive, a new study finds.
How do you convert a simple saline solution into a useful treatment for people with Parkinson’s disease? Tell them it’s a drug that costs $100 per dose. And if you want to make it even more effective, tell them it costs $1,500 instead.
That’s what researchers from the University of Cincinnati discovered in an unusual clinical trial. Instead of testing a placebo against an actual drug, they pitted two placebos against each other. The only difference between the two sham treatments was their purported price.
Medical researchers are well aware that the dummy pills used in clinical trials often provide as much relief as the actual drugs being tested. This is what’s known as the placebo effect, and it’s quite common in people with Parkinson’s, a movement disorder that causes tremors, stiffness and balance problems. A 2008 meta-analysis found that placebos used in clinical trials of Parkinson’s treatments improved symptoms by an average of 16%.
The team from the University of Cincinnati and their colleagues had a hunch that patients would be more responsive to a fake drug they thought was real if it came with a heftier price tag. The higher price would be seen as a signal that the treatment was better, they figured. …
Nutella ‘riots’ spread across French supermarkets
“Nutella arouses your enthusiasm,” the slogan on the pot reads.
A discount on Nutella has led to violent scenes in a chain of French supermarkets, as shoppers jostled to grab a bargain on the sweet spread.
Intermarché supermarkets offered a 70% discount on Nutella, bringing the price down from €4.50 (£3.90) to €1.40.
But police were called when people began fighting and pushing one another.
“They are like animals. A woman had her hair pulled, an elderly lady took a box on her head, another had a bloody hand,” one customer told French media.
A member of staff at one Intermarché shop in central France told the regional newspaper Le Progrès: “We were trying to get in between the customers but they were pushing us.”
All of its stock was snapped up within 15 minutes and one customer was given a black eye, the report adds. …
Is “Murder by Machine Learning” the New “Death by PowerPoint”?
Software doesn’t always end up being the productivity panacea that it promises to be. As its victims know all too well, “death by PowerPoint,” the poor use of the presentation software, sucks the life and energy out of far too many meetings. And audit after enterprise audit reveals spreadsheets rife with errors and macro miscalculations. Email and chat facilitate similar dysfunction; inbox overload demonstrably hurts managerial performance and morale. No surprises here — this is sadly a global reality that we’re all too familiar with.
So what makes artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) champions confident that their technologies will be immune to comparably counterproductive outcomes? They shouldn’t be so sure. Digital empowerment all too frequently leads to organizational mismanagement and abuse. The enterprise history of personal productivity tools offers plenty of unhappy litanies of unintended consequences. For too many managers, the technology’s costs often rival its benefits.
It’s precisely because machine learning and artificial intelligence platforms are supposed to be “smart” that they pose uniquely challenging organizational risks. They are likelier to inspire false and/or misplaced confidence in their findings; to amplify or further entrench data-based biases; and to reinforce — or even exacerbate — the very human flaws of the people who deploy them.
The problem is not that these innovative technologies don’t work; it’s that users will inadvertently make choices and take chances that undermine colleagues and customers. Ostensibly smarter software could perversely convert yesterday’s “death by Powerpoint” into tomorrow’s “murder by machine learning.” Nobody wants to produce boring presentations that waste everybody’s time, but they do; nobody wants to train machine learning algorithms that produce misleading predictions, but they will. The intelligent networks to counter-productivity hell are wired with good intentions. …
Video Goodnesses and not-so-goodnesses
VICE News correspondent Dexter Thomas is absolutely terrified of heights. A tiny startup called Limbix thinks they can cure him with a VR headset.
Now that virtual reality is getting cheaper, it’s becoming a more accessible option for use in exposure therapy. It allows, for example, a therapist to take their patient to a plane, or a cave full of spiders, or a street corner where they were mugged ten years ago — all without the cost and danger of “in vivo” treatment.
Dexter Thomas went to Palo Alto to test out what some people are hoping will be the next big thing in therapy.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Conservatives push a conspiracy theory that FBI agents have a “secret society” trying to bring down President Trump under the guise of investigating his Russian ties.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
President Trump told reporters he was ‘looking forward’ to his interview with Robert Mueller. Same.
Newly released text messages between FBI agents show an elaborate plan to joke about creating a secret society.
THANKS to CBS and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
Seth takes a closer look at Trump meeting with financial elites in Davos while the lives of nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants are in limbo.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyeres for making this program available on YouTube.
Max and his bottle along with a tp tube.
FINALLY . . .
Most unhappy people are unhappy for the exact same reason
The Bluest Light
Put down your phone and go do something – just about anything – else.
We’d all like to be a little happier.
The problem is that much of what determines happiness is outside of our control. Some of us are genetically predisposed to see the world through rose-colored glasses, while others have a generally negative outlook. Bad things happen, to us and in the world. People can be unkind, and jobs can be tedious.
But we do have some control over how we spend our leisure time. That’s one reason why it’s worth asking which leisure time activities are linked to happiness, and which aren’t.
In a new analysis of 1 million U.S. teens, my co-authors and I looked at how teens were spending their free time and which activities correlated with happiness, and which didn’t.
We wanted to see if changes in the way teens spend their free time might partially explain a startling drop in teens’ happiness after 2012 – and perhaps the decline in adults’ happiness since 2000 as well. …
While pasting up these errant ramblings, ‘er barely uninteresting at all things, I’ve been streaming Blank & Jones Relax, Edition 1. Sends my head to some pretty nie places.
Summer is coming…
Here’s the whole playlist.
Ed. More tomorrow? Probably. Possibly. Maybe. Not?