Author: Andrew Sullivan

Anders Sandberg of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute took to Reddit earlier this week to explain what keeps him up at night. At the top of the list is nuclear war:

The typical mammalian species last for a few million years, which means that extinction risk (or turning-into-something-else-risk) is on the order of one in a million per year. Just looking at nuclear war, where we have had at least one close call in 69 years (the Cuban Missile Crisis, claimed by some of the participants to have had about one chance in three of having ended badly) gives a risk of 0.5 percent per year. Ouch. Of course, nuclear war might not be 100-percent extinction causing, but even if we agree it has just 10-percent or 1-percent chance, it is still way above the natural extinction rate.

What doesn’t worry him:

Overpopulation has actually dropped down the agenda since the ’70s. Back then it looked like there would literally be too many people to feed, and people would start starving soon. Then the green revolution happened, and crop yields went up. But birth rates also started declining, and have continued declining nearly everywhere (even if pretty backwards societies). The UN began to reassess their predictions, and things look much better. Or rather, we realized that the real problem is poverty rather than people. …

People actually seem to change the number of kids they have surprisingly easily (one would imagine evolution has predisposed us to have as many as we can, but human desires are stronger). A classic study showed that the introduction of TV soap operas – which generally show families with few kids – reduced birth rates in Indian and Brazilian villages. We might control our fertility more by what we see on the screen or how many playgrounds we have around us than we think.

(Hat tip: Mark Strauss)

In a lengthy exploration of the battle over GMO labeling, Molly Ball touches on how ideology injects itself into the debate:

The GMO debate has a frustrating quality, with one side decrying big corporations out to deceive us and the other pointing the finger at unscientific fearmongering. Both of these lines may be true as far as it goes; what the debate comes down to is politics. Though opposition to GMOs has its roots in the liberal environmental movement, an increasing number of environmental writers and thinkers have begun to take the industry’s side in the debate, pointing to an overwhelming scientific consensus—based on hundreds of independent, non-industry-funded, peer-reviewed, long-range studies—that GMOs are safe. …

And yet GMOs are the subject of widespread fear and antagonism.

University labs accused (not always accurately) of conducting GMO research funded by Monsanto have in the past been burned down by eco-terrorists. This type of sabotage has been rare in the past decade, but it may be making a comeback: Last year, a field of GMO sugar beets in Oregon was destroyed by vandals. Scientists and journalists who voice pro-GMO opinions are accustomed to being dismissed as industry shills, personally vilified, and even receiving death threats. Headlines on food blogs warn of“mutant GMO foods.” In the D.C. area, a car topped with a giant half-fish, half-tomato—the “fishy tomato”—roams the streets; the car’s hood reads “LABEL GMO FOOD.” In the popular imagination, GMOs are scary.

Freddie deBoer reads Ball’s article as an example of the culture war – not between left and right, but between the media’s elite readership and the masses:

Ball quotes an organizer, “I talk to Tea Party people, Occupy people, churches, everybody. Everywhere I go, people want labeling.” What unites the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, the religious? They are all groups that are typically treated with derision by media elites. They’re too grass roots, too passionate, too uneducated, too defined by cultural and social signifiers that are anathema to the bourgie, educated, arty-but-not-pretentious-about-it, smart-but-anti-academic types who write the internet. The anti-GMO movement ticks the right boxes: associated with both crazy Christian homeschool types and crunchy Whole Food liberal types, conveniently labelled as anti-science with all of the pretenses to objectivity and intelligence using that label brings, and generally not a threat to your professional or social standing if you criticize them. They’re an easy target and a risk-free one, if you’re a professional journalist or political writer.

If anything unites the presumed readership of our national newsmedia, it’s not ideology, but rather cultural and social positioning– the ideology of the elite. And the anti-GMO labeling position unites liberal journalists and writers, conservative journalists and writers, and libertarian journalists and writers in a shared distaste for the political machinations of those who they don’t deem up to their cultural standards.

Freddie prefaces this by saying that he doesn’t “really care about this issue” and is “perfectly willing to listen to an actual anti-labeling argument, rather than a pro-GMO argument, which is a separate thing.” Adam Ozimek attempts such an argument against labeling:

The information being conveyed to consumers is not simply the facts the government mandate says they must display, but THAT they say these facts must be displayed. In other words, when a consumer is confronted by what appears to be a mandated label they reasonably presume a few things:

1) direct content: a particular fact or set of facts about the product

2) implied content: the fact or facts are important for consumers to know for some reason

It can be the case that the direct content is absolutely true and implied content is absolutely false. For example, a food may be factually labeled as containing GMOs in a way that provides consumers truthful information. This is truthful direct content. However, the consumer is also likely to take from the existence of this label that “this food containing GMOs is important information that you should know”. This is the implied content, and from it consumers may reasonably conclude a few things.

One is that the GMO content of foods is something the government believes consumers may want to consider in their consumption decisions. This means that even if consumers had an accurate appraisal of the safety of GMOs coming in to the decision, this government message may change their beliefs. The GMO safety debate is in large part about whether or not a food containing GMOs is something consumers should consider. The label mandate sends the signal to consumers that the government believes the GMO critics are correct and have won this debate.

A study issued in the lead-up to the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education shows how our school system remains effectively segregated by race:

According to the UCLA Civil Rights Group, which conducted a similar study two years ago, minority students and white students attend demographically distinct institutions. On average, white students attend schools that are 72.5 percent white, Latino students attend schools that are 56.8 percent Latino, and black students attend schools that are 48.8 percent black. And minority students make up the vast majority of metropolitan public schools, whereas their white counterparts attend suburban institutions. In the suburbs of large, medium, and small cities, white students make up 50 percent, 60.3 percent, and 61.7 percent of public school populations, respectively.

Geographically, the highest rates of segregation occur in the West and South. Between 1991 and 2011, for instance, the percent of black students attending “racially isolated minority schools” in the South increased by more than 8 percent. The percent of black students enrolled in similarly segregated schools in the West rose by roughly 8 percent as well. In the same two decades, the percentage of Latino students in 90-100 percent minority schools jumped 16.2 percent in the West.

Emily Badger blames housing segregation:

Since the Civil Rights Era, residential racial segregation across the U.S. has steadily declined. But segregation among school-aged children has startlingly lagged behind this progress. In the communities where they live, black and white children — as well as the poor and non-poor — are more isolated from each other than adults in the U.S. population at large. …

How is it possible that school children would experience residential segregation at higher rates than the rest of us?

Think about who lives in the changing neighborhoods of Washington, Philadelphia or Brooklyn. Whites have begun to move back into urban neighborhoods – but, for the most part, they are not yet moving back with children. Young singles, childless professionals and empty-nesters are returning to cities that were abandoned by the white middle class decades ago in large part because of their struggling schools.

Bouie agrees:

School segregation doesn’t happen by accident; it flows inexorably from housing segregation. If most black Americans live near other blacks and in a level of neighborhood poverty unseen by the vast majority of white Americans, then in the same way, their children attend schools that are poorer and more segregated than anything experienced by their white peers.

We could fix this. If the only way to solve the problem of school segregation is to tackle housing, then we could commit to a national assault on concentrated poverty, entrenched segregation, and housing discrimination. We could mirror our decades of suburban investment with equal investment to our cities, with better transportation and more ways for families to find affordable housing. And we could do all of this with an eye toward racism—a recognition of our role in creating the conditions for hyper-segregation. To do this, however, requires a commitment to anti-racism in thought, word, and deed. And given our high national tolerance for racial inequality, I doubt we’ll rise to the challenge.

Well geez. Arit John adds that even in well-integrated schools, racial discrimination is pervasive:

A 2007 study from the Journal of Educational Psychology analyzed dozens of previous studies, spanning more than three decades, on how teachers interact with different kinds of students. Researchers found that, overall, teachers’ expectations and speech varied depending on the race of the student. Teachers directed the most positive behavior, like questions and encouragement, to white students.

A 2012 study from the American Sociological Association found, “Substantial scholarly evidence indicates that teachers—especially white teachers—evaluate black students’ behavior and academic potential more negatively than those of white students.” The study analyzed the results from the Education Longitudinal Study, a national survey of 15,362 high school sophomores, as well as their parents and teachers. Again, the evidence showed a bias among white teachers that favored white students.

With a more constructive take, Peg Tyre looks at some of the ways in which the Brown ruling backfired on black Americans:

[B]ecause the decision specified that black children would benefit from an education with white children, the grossly underfunded African-American run public education system, which for decades had been dedicated to serving children in black communities, was dismissed as inferior and dismantled. In the 1960s and 1970s, many more black schools than white schools were closed. African-American teachers and principals, who in many states held about the same level of professional certification as their white counterparts and who for decades had served as steadfast anchors in black communities, were fired en masse. African-Americans would never again have as great a role in educating our county’s youth. Sixty years later, at a time when nearly half of all public school children in the United States are black, Hispanic or Asian, 80 percent of public school teachers are white.

A new study out of Harvard appears to strengthen the case that neonicotinoid pesticides are behind the sharp decline in the honeybee population over the past six years:

According to lead author Chensheng (Alex) Lu, “We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering [Colony Collapse Disorder] in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter.” To perform the latest study, the researchers examined 18 bee colonies in three different locations in central Massachusetts. They split each colony into three groups — one treated with a neonicotinoid called imidacloprid, one with a neonicotinoid called clothianidin, and one left in pristine condition to serve as a control group. The scientists monitored the groups from October 2012 to April 2013 and found that, by the end of that period, half of the neonicotinoid colonies had been decimated, while only one of the control colonies was destroyed by a common intestinal parasite, Nosema cerenae.

But Lisa Beyer points out that the study fed the bees dosages of insecticides “far in excess of anything bees would encounter in agricultural fields”:

In any case, it should be noted that whatever results the researchers created in the lab, in trials in which bees have been placed in farm fields treated with neonicotinoids, the colonies have done fine.

Lu’s new study nonetheless is receiving significant — and largely uncritical — media attention and strengthening the call by some environmentalists to prohibit neonicotinoid use in the U.S. Such a ban would be a mistake. It would compel U.S. farmers to use older pesticides that haven’t been subjected to bee studies and may be more hazardous to cultivated bees, not to mention wildlife and humans.

What’s more, the focus on neonics draws attention away from more plausible causes of bee deaths. First is the Varroa mite, which spreads lethal infections and has developed resistance to miticides. More research is needed on strategies to defeat this parasite. Second is the decline in bee food sources. High corn and soybean prices have accelerated the conversion of open land to cropland, leaving bees little to eat outside of the few weeks when a crop blossoms. Maybe if the government limited the subsidies that encourage fence-to-fence single-crop planting, more marginal land would be left fallow and could feed bees.

Bryan Walsh weighs both sides of the debate:

The chemical companies that make neonicotinoids are, unsurprisingly, skeptical that their products are behind the plight of the honeybee. “Extensive research has shown that these products do not represent a long-term threat to bee colonies,” David Fischer, the director of pollinator safety at Bayer, said in recent Congressional testimony. But the very purpose of pesticides is to kill insects, and no one would deny that such chemicals are almost certainly one of many factors hurting honeybees today. (It’s notable that a recent study found that the diversity of pollinators like bees was 50% higher on organic farms than on conventional farms.)

Many independent experts, however, doubt that neonicotinoids should get all the blame. Australia still uses neonicotinoid pesticides, but honeybee populations there are not in decline—something that may be due to the fact that varroahave yet to infest the country’s hives.

Recent Dish on the beepocalypse here and here.

Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor is defending his seat against Republican Congressman Tom Cotton. Pryor has been doing surprisingly well as of late:

It’s impossible to say for sure why the race has turned around, or whether the trend will last. But it’s noteworthy that recently, the Pryor campaign has been aggressively advertising on just two issues: Medicare and Social Security.

Cotton “voted to raise the age to Medicare for 70,” one narrator intones. “Cotton would raise Medicare and Social Security to 70. Look it up! He’s a real threat to your retirement,” says an older woman named Linda. In another ad, Pryor himself says he wrote a bill to “stop politicians from destroying Medicare,” and helpfully adds, “My opponent voted to withhold benefits until age 70. And I’m trying to stop that.” The Pryor campaign has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars airing these ads in the past month.

Attacks against Republicans for supporting Paul Ryan’s budget are nothing new. Yet the most damaging claim here is that Cotton supports raising the beneficiary age to 70 — something Ryan’s budget specifically avoided doing. (It raises the Medicare age only to 67, and doesn’t even touch Social Security.)

But Charlie Cook sees Cotton’s farm bill vote as more signifiant:

My hunch is that a lot of people got a little ahead of their skis in pronouncing Pryor dead, but I also suspect that Cotton’s Jan. 29 vote against the farm bill—he was one of 63 House Republicans, mostly very conservative members, who voted against it, while 162 Republicans voted for it—had something to do with this. Among House Democrats, 89 voted for passage of the farm bill, 103—mostly pretty liberal members from urban districts and unhappy over food-stamp cuts—voted against it. No Republicans in Alabama, Iowa, Mississippi, or Missouri voted against the bill, and some of those folks are pretty conservative.

Although Cotton unquestionably has deeply held conservative principles that persuaded him to vote against the farm bill, it sure wasn’t politically expedient for the Senate candidate to vote in opposition. My hunch is that there is a lot of head-scratching over that vote among farmers and folks in rural and small-town Arkansas.

Nevertheless, The Monkey Cage’s model still gives the GOP a 77% chance of a Senate takeover:

Our earliest forecast showed that Republicans were already heavily favored due to the national landscape and the partisan complexion of the states holding Senate elections this year. We then showed that incorporating a measure of the “quality” of the candidates — prior experience in elective office — made things even more favorable to Republicans. Chris Cillizza and I discussed that forecast here. As we would expect, Republicans are recruiting and nominating relatively experienced and therefore more electable candidates.

Now, with fundraising in the model, the results are marginally more favorable to Democrats, but not by much.  This means that Democrats are mustering some advantages in fundraising, but not particularly large ones.