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n2doc's JournalA 31-Year-Old Is Tearing Apart the Heritage Foundation
Think Republicans have been making fools of themselves? Blame Michael Needham.
BY JULIA IOFFE
On a Thursday evening at the end of August, a respectable, older crowd waited in the ballroom of the Double Tree in Wilmington, Delaware, to hear Jim DeMint speak. The dashing former South Carolina senator and Tea Party icon had been flying around the country on a private jet to stump for the cause of defunding Obamacare, and Wilmington was the last stop on his nine-city tour. In Dallas, he was joined by his protégé Ted Cruz, but most of the time it was just DeMint and his barker, Michael Needham.
In that Delaware ballroom, Needham, a dark-haired, square-jawed young man, dressed in a sensibly checkered button-down shirt and pleated khaki pants, was warming up the crowd. He strutted around the makeshift stage with the kind of robustness that masks a certain Washington stiffness. “Can we, in the month of September, achieve defunding Obamacare?” he boomed. “Yes, we can!” yelled the crowd.
Needham is the 31-year-old CEO of Heritage Action, the relatively new activist branch of the Heritage Foundation, the storied Washington think tank that was one of the leaders of the conservative war of ideas ever since it provided the blueprint for Ronald Reagan’s first term. Although DeMint is Heritage’s president, it was Needham who had designed much of the defund Obamacare strategy. Beginning in 2010, when Heritage Action was founded, Needham pushed the GOP to use Congress’s power of the purse to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act. He formed a grassroots army, which he used to keep congressional Republicans in line. “They make six hundred phone calls and have a member of Congress in the fetal position,” says one GOP congressional staffer.
After months of furious lobbying, Needham sold, at most, 20 members of the House on his plan of attack. In the end, this was enough to cement the party line—and lead the GOP to a spectacular, deafening loss.
more
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115688/heritage-foundations-michael-needham-tears-apart-right-wing
There's a Mouse Crisis in Scientific Research
BY ALICE ROBB
Are scientists less rigorous about applying proper research standards when their subjects are mice? That’s the question Jennifer Couzin-Frankel investigates in the latest issue of Science—and her findings are disturbing. According to her paper, “When Mice Mislead,” scientists working with mice routinely use small sample sizes, select their subjects unsystematically, and even lose track of their data or—most ominously of all—leave out results that don’t support their research. The problems with extrapolating findings from rodents to humans are well-known, but if the research is sloppy, the links could be even more tenuous than scientists realized.
Ulrich Dirnagl, a researcher in Berlin, told Couzin-Frankel he was reviewing a paper examining rodents’ response to a new drug to treat strokes when he realized something was off: The study tested 20 mice—but only 17 were represented on a graph of the final results. When Dirnagl wrote to the paper’s editor, he learned that the three missing mice had suffered strokes and died. Rather than dealing with the implications of this for the drug, the researchers decided to drop them out of the study.
"This isn't fraud," says Dirnagl, who often works with mice. Dropping animals from a research study for any number of reasons, he explains, is an entrenched, accepted part of the culture. "You look at your data, there are no rules.… People exclude animals at their whim, they just do it and they don't report it."
That sounds a lot like fraud. Understandably, the scientists Couzin-Frankel interviewed were wary of tarnishing the public’s perception of animal research—but their revelations are worrying nonetheless.
more
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115754/mice-studies-researchers-are-ignoring-deaths
Mafia Don Eaten Alive By Pigs In Revenge Murder
In a plot stolen straight out of "Hannibal", Italian police are saying that Calabrian mobsters recently murdered a mafia don by beating the man with a spade and then throwing him into a sty, where he was eaten alive by pigs.
Francesco Raccosta, the don of the ‘Ndrangheta crime family in Calabria, disappeared last year amidst whispers that he had been responsible for the murder of a rival mob boss, Domenico Bonarrigo, of the Mazzagatti family.
Bonarrigo was shot and killed while driving his car. Eleven days later, Raccosta disappeared without a trace.
Italian police sent in an undercover officer to investigate and made the gory results public this month.
more
http://gawker.com/mafia-don-eaten-alive-by-pigs-in-revenge-murder-1474000709
Teaching While Black and Blue
by SHANNON GIBNEY
I. I am waiting for a letter to arrive in the mail. It will be short, no more than one page, and will be covered in black ink, with the occasional flourish of institutional logo. The signature at the bottom will belong to a high-ranking officer at my Midwestern college of 12,000 students, and the words that preface it will briefly explain the method and, more importantly, the verdict, of an almost three-week long investigation, in which students, faculty, and staff were questioned by the school’s legal staff as to if, in fact, I had committed acts constituting an official case of racial harassment.
What happened to me recently did not happen because I am a young, Black female faculty member at school that has over 50 percent students of color; what happened to me occurred because I turned the world backwards on an angry White male student. We were in a regular weekly meeting of the newspaper staff, and the students were discussing the fact of the new edition, how well it had turned out, and the editor-in-chief said that although he was proud of the paper’s developments, he was not pleased with the fact that so few students regularly picked up the publication. Theories were thrown around as to why this was—the aesthetics were all wrong, the design didn’t pop, the stories could be flashier. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a noose hanging from the ceiling. When I looked again, it was gone.
Another white male student, angry that writers had not made deadline, had thought it prudent to make a noose of his sweatshirt drawstring the fall before, to step up on the table and hang it, along with a menacing note to writers about the seriousness of deadlines. The two Black students in the room at the time protested, and asked him to take the noose down, but he didn’t listen.
When they told the faculty newspaper adviser of the incident, he told them that he was not such a big deal, that the student had not meant the noose in a racist way. And when the students finally filed a formal legal complaint against their colleague, seeking some kind of institutional acknowledgment of this trauma, they were effectively gagged by the same academic powers that have been conducting the investigation. You see, once language enters the legal realm, it no longer belongs to us—it becomes the sole property of whatever individual or institution is under its employ.
more
http://gawker.com/teaching-while-black-and-blue-1473659925
Brown Friday
You've heard of Black Friday, the darkest day for American capitalism; Cyber Monday, where everyone gets out their latent shopping aggression online; now there's even Grey Thursday, as retailers open on Thanksgiving Eve to get an edge on the competition. But, friends, have you heard of Brown Friday?
On today's day-after-Thanksgiving madness, in their frenzy to GET THOSE DEALS, shoppers will make all sorts of bad decisions when it comes to properly evacuating their bowels. In fact, stores across America are already inevitably besmirched by poop. All of which is no doubt exacerbated by the fact that the entire country has just spent the past 24 hours eating their biggest meal of the year. (For the ones who make it to the toilet, Roto-Rooter sees a "substantial uptick in calls" for service on the day after Thanksgiving, says spokesman Paul Abrams. "Usually between 47 to 51 percent."
It's a phenomenon that you likely haven't heard about unless you've worked in retail, but there are some scary stories out there if you know where to look.
Reddit user Dave_Versus_Volcano posted his story about working at a Best Buy one Brown Friday. When an estimated 1,500 people entered the building at 6:00 a.m., the line for the checkout snaked deep into the store, all the way into the appliance department. After responding to a customer's complaint, the employees discovered a "turd of good size" and "solid consistency" sitting in one of the dryers. "A lady who did not want to lose her spot opened the dryer, and shat right there in front of everyone," he reported.
more
http://gizmodo.com/for-retailers-today-really-is-the-shittiest-day-of-the-1472695215
The photo that changed the face of AIDS
In November 1990 LIFE magazine published a photograph of a young man named David Kirby — his body wasted by AIDS, his gaze locked on something beyond this world — surrounded by anguished family members as he took his last breaths. The haunting image of Kirby on his death bed, taken by a journalism student named Therese Frare, quickly became the one photograph most powerfully identified with the HIV/AIDS epidemic that, by then, had seen millions of people infected (many of them unknowingly) around the globe.
More than two decades later, on the 25th World AIDS Day, LIFE.com shares the deeply moving story behind that picture, along with Frare’s own memories of those harrowing, transformative years.
“I started grad school at Ohio University in Athens in January 1990,” Frare told LIFE.com. “Right away, I began volunteering at the Pater Noster House, an AIDS hospice in Columbus. In March I started taking photos there and got to know the staff — and one volunteer, in particular, named Peta — who were caring for David and the other patients.”
David Kirby was born and raised in a small town in Ohio. A gay activist in the 1980s, he learned in the late Eighties — while he was living in California and estranged from his family — that he had contracted HIV. He got in touch with his parents and asked if he could come home; he wanted, he said, to die with his family around him. The Kirbys welcomed their son back.
Read more: World AIDS Day: The 1990 Photo That Changed the Face of the Epidemic | LIFE.com http://life.time.com/history/world-aids-day-the-1990-photo-that-changed-the-face-of-the-epidemic/
Tomorrow is World AIDS Day.
The Environmental Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of
Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel spill
BY DAVID CORREIA
The fighter jets and military planes that blast into the skies each day above Albuquerque’s Kirtland Air Force Base (KAFB) consume millions of gallons of jet fuel each year. In order to serve this fleet, the Air Force stores enormous amounts of fuel and distributes it throughout the base via a network of tanks, pipes and pumps. In the early 1950s, the base replaced leaking tanks and aging pipelines with a new fuels facility it promised would modernize and make more safe the handling and distribution of jet fuel. The facility received its first trainload of jet fuel and aviation gas in 1953. Almost immediately, and for the next 45 years, it has leaked jet fuel into the surrounding soil.
The “leak” continued, undetected, until 1992 when workers observed a huge surface plume in the soil surrounding the fuel facility. The Air Force largely ignored requests by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate the plume’s source and extent and instead, in 1994, gave itself a waiver from conducting military-mandated tests of the facility pipeline. Under pressure from the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), the Air Force finally conducted pressure tests of the pipelines in 1999. They failed spectacularly. The added pressure blew massive holes in the pipeline. The test appeared to prove the pipes were leaking. In a comic/tragic, nothing-to-see-here moment in May 2000, Mark Holmes, a civilian project manager for Kirtland’s environmental unit, told the Albuquerque Journal that everything was fine: The 100,000 gallons of missing fuel could be explained by a simple accounting error. NMED staffer Dennis McQuillan, however, told the Journal that if it were a 100,000 gallon spill, it “would be a big spill, one of the biggest” in state history.
They were both wrong. In 2006 an Air Force contractor drilled an exploratory well in southeast Albuquerque’s Bullhead Park, just outside the base's northern boundary. He found four feet of jet fuel floating on top of the aquifer. Additional monitoring wells found a plume of jet fuel slithering northeast from the original spill location and well beyond the northern boundary of the base. Kirtland estimated the plume at between one and two million gallons, but NMED raised that estimate to eight million gallons. Two years later, with more monitoring and evidence of the true scale of the spill, NMED revised the estimate dramatically to 24 million gallons, an amount 240 times larger than the 2000 estimate.
For comparison's sake, the KAFB spill is larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, which dumped more than 12 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound, killing an estimated quarter-million seabirds, 3,000 otters, hundreds of harbor seals and bald eagles and nearly two dozen killer whales. The KAFB jet fuel spill—the Air Force calls it a “leak”—is the largest toxic contamination of an aquifer in US history, and it could be twice the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster.
more
http://alibi.com/feature/45896/The-Environmental-Disaster-Youve-Never-Heard-Of.html
Sriracha hot sauce factory in Irwindale raises banner: ‘No Tear Gas Made Here’
By Sarah Favot, Pasadena Star-News
The maker of popular hot chili sauce Sriracha made a bold statement Friday with a banner reading, “No tear gas made here,” placed outside its North Azusa Canyon Road factory.
Huy Fong Foods CEO David Tran had released a statement with the same sentiment Wednesday morning following a ruling from a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge that said Tran must partially shut down his factory due to odor complaints from residents near the factory.
The city of Irwindale had sued Huy Fong Foods claiming the smells coming from the factory created a “public nuisance” after residents began complaining the odor caused their eyes to burn, gave them coughing fits, created gagging sensations, and gave them heartburn and even nosebleeds.
One resident compared a whiff of odors emanating from the factory to pepper spray, according to court documents.
more
http://www.sgvtribune.com/business/20131129/sriracha-hot-sauce-factory-in-irwindale-raises-banner-no-tear-gas-made-here
Longest covered bridge in Asia is destroyed after massive fire
By MATT BLAKE
The longest covered bridge in Asia has been destroyed after a fire roared through the wooden structure last night.
The Feng Yu Covered Bridge, in Chongqing, China, is known throughout the Far East for its traditional beauty topped by a pagoda-style roof that stretched 303 metres across the region's Apeng River.
But last night the five-metre-wide crossing, first built in 1591, collapsed into the waters as the blaze turned it to ashes.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2515693/Longest-covered-bridge-Asia-destroyed-massive-ripped-303-metre-wooden-structure.html
What it was:
Seven Democratic lawmakers on Friday issued a statement of support for those picketing Wal-Mart
Seven Democratic lawmakers on Friday issued a statement of support for those picketing Wal-Mart to urge the company to provide higher wages.
The company and labor rights activists are set to square off on Black Friday, one of the busiest retail shopping days of the year.
An estimated 1,500 protests will take place nationwide, one of the largest ever, activists say.
Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and Reps. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), Judy Chu (D-Calif.), Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) Gwen Moore (D-Wis.) and Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) issued a statement of solidarity with the workers.
“We stand with the courageous Walmart workers who are demanding better wages and an end to illegal retaliation,” the lawmakers wrote. “Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States, has a responsibility to their employees and our country to respect workers and their rights. No one should have to fear losing their jobs just for speaking up.”
United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), a subsidiary of a labor union, is helping workers organize and rally support.
more
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/191650-dem-lawmakers-back-walmart-workers-wage-fight
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