I have to say I’m sensing a groundswell around this issue – of a kind I once saw with marriage equality. Once an issue hits around 50 percent, the consensus doesn’t stand pat; it tends to evolve more swiftly to a definitive resolution of the question at hand. Even MoDo is hanging out with Willie Nelson, who makes a simple case for his own use of cannabis over alcohol:
“Everybody’s got to kill their own snakes, as they say. I found out that pot is the best thing for me because I needed something to slow me down a little bit.” He was such a mean drunk, he said, that if he’d kept drinking heavily, “there’s no telling how many people I would have killed by now.”
Know dope.
Update from a reader with “another Willie Nelson reefer story”:
A couple of years ago he gets busted on his tour bus (can’t remember where) for possession of a small amount of marijuana. At the same time the news is full of stories about spinach being recalled across the country because of E.coli. A lot of people are hospitalized, some serious. The cameras are waiting for Willie as he leaves the cop shop. All he says (with a wonderful cockeyed grin) is: “Well, at least they didn’t catch me with any spinach.”
Philip Klein calls the NFL’s tax-exempt status “bad policy that exemplifies the problems with the nation’s disastrous tax code”:
The NFL’s nonprofit status was enshrined into law in a 1966 act meant to protect the league from antitrust issues surrounding its merger with the rival AFL (which was considered a lesser league until my Jets pulled off the greatest upset in football history in the 1969 Super Bowl). The same law added, “professional football leagues” to the part of the tax code listing entities granted nonprofit status.
Though the league distributes lucrative television and licensing revenue among the 32 teams, which do pay taxes on their earnings, the teams also send dues to the NFL league office. The office does not pay taxes on those dues, and the fees could be deducted from the teams’ taxes.
The NFL reported total revenue of $326 million for the 2012 tax year, according to its most recent publicly available filing with the Internal Revenue Service. During that year alone, the NFL paid $44.2 million in compensation to commissioner Roger Goodell. Goodell earned $105 million over the course of the five-year period from 2008 through 2012, according to a CNN report – more than any player.
Well, it might fall under the religious exemption, no? At this point, it requires blind faith to believe in its future. But Jordan Weissmann notes that revoking the NFL’s tax-exempt status “wouldn’t drastically change its finances”:
Only the league office, which considers itself a trade association for its clubs – just like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the National Dairy Council—is a nonprofit; the teams themselves are purely for-profit. As a result, pro football’s copious TV revenues are taxed once they’re passed down to the franchises. A separate, for-profit company called NFL Ventures, co-owned by the teams, handles the league’s merchandising and sponsorship earnings. Finally, the league office often operates at a loss—in 2011 it finished more than $77 million in the red, while in 2012 it only had $9 million left at year’s end. Without profits, of course, there’s nothing for the government to tax. …
Congress itself doesn’t think the NFL’s tax bill would be that big. [Tom] Coburn has suggested that taxing the NFL and NHL alone would raise about $91 million per year. But the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation – probably a bit more credible in this instance – believes ending tax exemptions for all sports leagues would bring in just under $11 million per year. Booker hopes his bill would raise about $100 million over a decade, which would go to support domestic abuse programs. That’s a mere trickle compared with the geyser of cash the NFL generates each year.
However, he adds:
If money isn’t really the issue, what is? It’s about principles. Letting the NFL operate tax-free makes a mockery of the entire concept behind nonprofits, which is that we should give a special break to organizations that do the useful, unprofitable work normal corporations won’t.
Update from a reader with expertise on the subject:
As an accounting professor specializing in nonprofits, I wanted to reiterate the view that the NFL is not really avoiding any taxes with its status (true, it has a lot of revenues, but it shows even more expenses, so the profits are really held by the for-profit teams). I would also like to add that one big benefit of the NFL’s nonprofit status is that it requires the NFL to make its financial statements and executive pay public (without the required form 990, we never would have known that Goodell got a $40 million bonus in 2013). Here is a bit more on the misconceptions about the NFL’s nonprofit status.
In short, does the NFL deserve its nonprofit status? Probably not. Does stripping the status accomplish anything? Again, probably not.
By the way, thanks for your team’s consistently great work.
Katie Zavadski flags a new White House campaign to raise awareness about sexual violence on college campuses:
Officials are hoping the new ads will be screened on youth-oriented television networks and shown at sporting events. In order to appeal to the collegiate demographic, the White House recruited celebrities like Questlove, Jon Hamm, Rose Byrne, and Cleveland Cavaliers center Kevin Love to film spots.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who has addressed campus rape in the past, has some doubts:
Reading [Jeffrey] Zients’ post, I was reminded of author and professor Joel Best speaking on the hallmarks of how media hype (and the attendent bogus statistics) get promulgated: First there is a high-profile tragic event, then the need to define the event as part of an identifiable Problem (“the heroin epidemic”), and then a desire to quantify the problem so as to place it in a larger context. I put “campus rape crisis” in quotes not to diminish the seriousness of sexual assault but because I think the phrase is a prime example of the phenomenon Best describes. Rape is a problem wherever it happens, which is sometimes on campus and more frequently not. The “campus rape crisis” is a thing perpetuated by people interested in profiting from the fear in various ways.
When you make up a problem—and again, let’s be clear that I’m not saying rape, the underreporting of rape, or the way campuses handle rape is a made-up problem, but rather the idea that college campuses are some sort of rape epicenter—it is much easier to get credit for solving that problem. The White House doesn’t actually have to impact rape rates or rape prosecution rates or anything tangible, because that’s not how it has defined the problem. Its central concern is raising awareness about rape on college campus, a goal both amorphous and measurable in Facebook likes.
Meanwhile, the movement against college sexual assault continues on the campuses themselves. Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress project is back in the news. Vanessa Grigoriadis contextualizes Sulkowicz within broader cultural trends:
A few years ago, an Ivy League student going public about her rape, telling the world her real name—let alone trying to attract attention by lugging around a mattress—would have been a rare bird. In America, after all, we still assume rape survivors want, and need, their identities protected by the press. But shattering silence, in 2014, means not just coming out with an atrocity tale about your assault but offering what Danielle Dirks, a sociologist at Occidental, calls “an atrocity tale about how poorly you were treated by the people you pay $62,500 a year to protect you.” By owning those accusations, and pointing a finger not only at assailants but also the American university, the ivory tower of privilege, these survivors have built the most effective, organized anti-rape movement since the late ’70s. Rape activists now don’t talk much about women’s self-care and protection like they did in the ’90s with Take Back the Night marches, self-defense classes, and cans of Mace. Today, the militant cry is aimed at the university: Kick the bastards out.
[W]hile Cruz resembles McCain and Graham in hyping threats and dropping bombs, he morphs into Rand Paul when the subject turns to political engagement overseas. McCain and Graham want to train and arm the Free Syrian Army so that when America bombs ISIS, non-jihadist rebels seize their territory and eventually pressure Bashar al-Assad into a political settlement. Cruz doesn’t. When it comes to Syria’s “moderate” opposition, he’s doubtful that the United States “can tell the good guys from the bad guys.”
That may be true. But most commentators who share Cruz’s skepticism about arming the rebels are skeptical of a bombing campaign too, arguing that it won’t do much good on the ground. Cruz doesn’t care. He wants to pulverize Syria from the air without any effort at political change on the ground. America’s strategy against ISIS, he insists, should not be “laden with impractical contingencies, such as resolving the Syrian civil war.”
The collapse of the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 was a signal event in diplomatic history, calling into question the ability of our societies to act cooperatively in the face of clear scientific warnings. There is no prospect of anything much happening next week at the climate summit, either. As Mark Bittman memorably put it in the New York Times: “The summit is a little like a professional wrestling match: There appears to be action but it’s fake, and the winner is predetermined. The loser will be anyone who expects serious government movement dictating industry reductions in emissions.”
Which is why McKibben helped organize Sunday’s climate march. His reasons for marching:
As individuals, there’s not much we can do. We can change our light bulbs—and we should—but doing so won’t change global warming. It’s a structural, systemic problem that needs to be addressed structurally and systemically. The most important rule for an individual in this fight is to figure out how not to remain an individual, how to join a movement big enough to change the politics. There’s no guarantee that we’re going to win, because it’s a timed test. In this case, if we don’t win pretty soon, it’s going to be a moot point.
Amy Davidson asks, “Whom did the march change?” She figures this is possibly “a more enduring question than what it changed, which, on an immediate policy level, might not be so much”:
Though the march was big, the coverage was fairly muted. Maybe it will still be effective; perhaps the numbers will persuade some politicians that more people care than they thought. But its less predictable legacy might be helping some people who were in the crowd, or who saw pictures of it, realize that they care more than they thought. Some might even become leaders, or—stranger things have happened—politicians. Marches like this may not be the planet’s last hope, but they may be a last chance to persuade a generation that the profession of politics is not entirely disconnected from the planet’s great problem.
Ronald Bailey takes issue with the marchers’ opposition to biotech, fracking, and nuclear. And with their hostility to capitalism:
[T]here is one placard with which I wholeheartedly agreed, “Enough, For All, Forever.” Sadly, many of the marchers oppose the only system that has ever enabled hundreds of millions of people to rise above humanity’s natural state of abject poverty.
[T]he People’s Climate March was one long, loud, loosely organized demand that vast sums of money be taken from the wealthy and given to the clients of the coalitions and alliances and networks and task forces that make up today’s environmental justice movement. They’ve had enough of debating climate models. They want to start taking — now.
I just do have to point out that holding large rallies doesn’t always result in political change. It is by organizing at the district level, walking neighborhoods, and putting pressure on those running for Congress that we would get real legislative change. Some activists are such purists that they sniff at giving political contributions. Likewise, disinvestment from oil and gas companies is a great symbolic gesture but it doesn’t stop global warming.
He argues that “a single-issue Climate PAC, if well-funded, would make far more difference than standing in the street.” Sally Cohn is more upbeat:
The big greens “have to shift the way they do business, from being large top-down institutions to being accountable to democratic bases and practicing democratic decision-making,” said Ananda Lee Tan, representing the Climate Justice Alliance as a lead organizer behind the march. There are also still political rifts; the grassroots groups oppose big green support for corporate-backed cap-and-trade, and the big green groups refused to officially support the Flood Wall Street action the day after the march that will connect climate change with structural inequalities in capitalism.
These rifts may not be resolved any time soon. But for the first time in recent memory, grassroots organizations have been equal partners at the table with national groups, working in coordination, cross-racially, to organize a massive event. Whatever the outcome of the march, this process — and the relationships built as a result — will hopefully transform and strengthen the movement for the future.
Here’s the problem. If the nationalists had won, they’d have started a risky, costly transition, but the final destination would have been clear. The unionists’ victory avoids that short-term pain but prolongs the constitutional uncertainty indefinitely. Cameron might wish things were “settled,” but they aren’t. The demand for independence isn’t going away. When you consider the apocalyptic predictions of the No campaign, the Yes campaign’s transparent dishonesty (on taxes and spending) and incoherence (on the currency), the threats of Scottish businesses to move south, and the rock-solid consensus outside Scotland that leaving the union would be a tragic error, 45 percent support for independence suggests a certain resilience.
As we have already seen, instead of settling anything the referendum has produced new promises of devolution for Scotland and increased demands in England for significant changes to the current system. The former probably can’t or won’t be honored, since they were made on the fly without the consent of the rest of the U.K., and that will eventually mean another referendum. In that case, unionists won’t be able to make credible offers of greater devolution, and that would make it more difficult to avert independence later on.
I suspect British politics will return to normal fairly quickly. Some have also predicted that the independence movement isn’t quite done yet, and that there’s potential for a Quebec-style “neverendum” in which independence becomes a perennial debate. But with the aftermath of the euro crisis and an unpopular Conservative government in power in London, this was probably the best opportunity available for Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party. The independence advocates took their best shot, missed, and probably won’t get another one as good for a while.
Meanwhile, John Cassidy notes that “As Salmond and the ‘Scottish question’ recede from the headlines, the ‘English question’ could well replace them.” Crook explains:
Recall that the Scots, despite having their own parliament in Edinburgh, currently enjoy the bizarre privilege of sending Scottish members of parliament to Westminster to vote on English-only matters (not to mention a fiscal bonus called the Barnett formula, which underwrites higher public spending in Scotland). Because Scotland leans to the left, this arrangement has been vital in maintaining the strength of the Labour Party in the south. You’ll be shocked to learn that it was a Labour government (led by Tony Blair, born and educated in Scotland, and Gordon Brown, a Scot representing a Scottish constituency) that enacted it.
A new round of devolution, with Tories in charge in London, opens this Pandora’s box. To meet the demands of English conservatives, Cameron has said that the rest of the U.K. must now get devolution, too –English votes on English policies. The prospect is a constitutional restructuring almost as radical as the one implied by full independence for Scotland.
On Friday morning, the No victory in Scotland’s independence referendum just hours old, David Cameron stood before 10 Downing Street and set a trap for the opposition. The new powers pledged to Edinburgh during the campaign would be transferred on the promised, fast timetable, he confirmed. On the same timetable, he added (in a barb reportedly devised over curry with George Osborne the night before), William Hague would work on plans for English-only votes on English matters. …
So far Labour has brushed aside the proposal. It is self-interested, cynical and drawn up on the back of a fag packet, party figures avow, rightly pointing out that there had been no agreement to link new Scottish devolution to solving the English question. In an interview with Andrew Marr this morning Ed Miliband countered that it would be hard to separate parts of legislation only affecting England from those affecting the rest of Britain, and that EVEL would create two classes of MPs. He wants a constitutional convention, a longer, more exhaustive and more bottom-up process than the constitutional supermarket-sweep proposed by Mr Cameron, one also encompassing devolution to city and regional authorities within England.
These points are all entirely valid. But they risk making Labour look as self-interested as the Conservatives. And the question is not likely to go away. According to the British Social Attitudes and Future of England surveys, the proportion of voters “strongly” supporting EVEL rose from 18 percent in 2000 to 55 percent in 2012. The imminent transfer of new powers (particularly tax-raising ones) to Holyrood will only accentuate that trend.
Zooming out, political scientist Graeme Robertson suggests that “the key lesson from the Scottish referendum is something that scholars have long known but that citizens and politicians often seem to miss – allegiance to states is highly malleable and can be quickly changed by events, even in an old country like Scotland.”
On Tuesday, world leaders will meet to discuss climate change. A while back, Michael Bechtel and Kenneth Scheve did a survey “to find out what features of an agreement were important to the public.” The results:
But it’s hard to reach such a deal when some big names aren’t attending this week’s climate summit:
Notably, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi are skipping the event. In empirical terms, it’s hard to think of two more important leaders in the world right now: Together they lead more than 2.5 billion people, more than a third of the world’s population.
And the two countries are not only the first and second most populous countries on Earth; research shows they also were the first- and third-biggest producers of carbon dioxide emissions (the United States holds the No. 2 spot). That figure can only partly be explained away by their huge populations: One study showed that per capita emissions from China recently surpassed that of the European Union, and India is predicted to follow suit in five years.
Take China: Just recently, Chinese leaders announced that a national carbon emissions trading program would begin in 2016, building on the experience gained through the seven regional programs now underway. While China remains the world’s largest emitter, the nation’s emissions intensity, which is the amount of emissions produced for each unit of GDP growth, has declined. And just last week, China’s State Council put forward the draft version of a new law to crack down on air pollution from coal burning, which severely affects Chinese citizens’ health. China will be represented at the New York Summit next week by Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli, who will be the most senior Chinese official to attend a climate talk since the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. He is expected to elaborate on China’s plans to put limits on its consumption of coal, which is the source of some 80 percent of the country’s carbon emissions.
Dave Roberts agrees that the changes to China’s coal policy could be a “a Big F’in Deal.” But India is another story. Rebecca Leber explains:
Several recent comments made by [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi suggest little commitment to global warming, by implying it is a natural phenonemon. “We should also ask is this climate change or have we changed. We have battled against nature. That is why we should live with nature rather than battle it,” Modi said, in a departure from stronger remarks on climate action Indian officials made in 2011.
Regardless, Bloomberg View’s editors hope that some good will come from the meeting:
A particular focus will be cities, which produce 70 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Many have set their own targets for cutting them and have announced specific measures to that end. In some cases, they’re aiming to improve on the targets set by their respective national governments. (Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, and the UN’s special envoy for cities and climate change.)
The point isn’t to reduce the costs of carbon pollution in their neighborhoods: A ton of carbon released in one place does the same harm to the planet, climate-wise, as a ton released anywhere else. Rather, it’s to show that stronger measures are no great burden. Cities can take them in stride.
Gary Stephen Ross deems Steven Pinker’s new book The Sense of Style as “a manual worthy of a place on a shelf just below Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.” He appreciates Pinker’s book for its “painstaking dissection of the many ways in which language both serves and fails us”:
It’s fascinating to learn the science that underlies the stylistic techniques good writers seem to intuit—for example, a list is most easily grasped if the bulkiest item comes at the end (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ; or The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle; or Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!). “Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics,” Pinker writes, “having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Pānini.” Why? Because the mind must hold the early items in suspension before incorporating the final one, and it’s easier to retain simple things than more complex elements.
John Preston is less taken with Pinker’s analysis, scoffing, “it becomes increasingly clear that Pinker doesn’t have anything new to say, and that anyone who follows his example is far more likely to end up writing waffle and bilge than War and Peace“:
If you had to boil down Pinker’s advice into two main points, they would be: “Keep it snappy” and “Keep it simple”. Unfortunately, he proves wholly incapable of abiding by his own rules. Rather, he’s a colossal windbag, never using three words when 35 can be rammed into the breach, and frequently writing sentences so tortuous that they seem to be eating themselves. He even manages to define what a coherent text is in a way that made my eyeballs rotate in opposite directions: “A coherent text is one in which the reader always knows which coherence relation holds between one sentence and the next.”
Got that? All right then, try this: “In fact, coherence extends beyond individual sentences and also applies to entire branches in the discourse tree (in other words, to items in an essay outline).” I may be excessively picky here, but I can’t help feeling that the phrase “in other words” doesn’t belong in a sentence about the virtues of coherence.
The ancestors of flesh-eating carrion beetles like the one above offer, according to new research, the “earliest evidence of parental care,” dating back to 125 million years ago. The beetles were not only “exceptional parents, but they also represent the oldest known example of active parenting on the planet”:
Finding traces of exceptional parenting in the fossil record is exceedingly difficult. In this case, the team managed it by studying fossils from China and Myanmar. The fossils showed that ancient beetles from the Early Cretaceous possessed special bodily structures close to those modern beetles possess that allow them to communicate with their young. Additionally, an amber fossil they uncovered caught the beetle parents in action, showing “elaborate biparental care and defense of small vertebrate carcasses for their larvae.”
The researchers also note that several types of modern carrion beetles are endangered:
The American burying beetle, for example, is down to fewer than 1,000 individuals that live east of the Mississippi River. Even the most experienced parents in the world can’t shield their babies from the ill-effects of human-driven habitat fragmentation, it seems.
A new study suggests heavy coffee-drinkers “find it more difficult to identify and describe their own emotions”:
“Alexithymia” – Greek for “no words for feelings” – is the psychological terminology for an inability to put ones emotions into words. [Researcher Michael] Lyvers et al did a survey study of 106 university students and found that alexithymia was correlated with the amount of caffeine consumed per day…. Lyvers et al say that
Alexithymics reported consuming nearly twice as much caffeine per day on average compared to non-alexithymic controls or those with borderline alexithymia.
As to why this is the case, the authors speculate that
Perhaps those with alexithymia consume caffeine more heavily than non-alexithymics in an attempt to optimize inherently low arousal levels.
Reviewing the results, Neuroskeptic stays true to his nom de plume:
My concern here is that because this is a self-report questionnaire, the [Toronto Alexithymia Scale] is measuring worries over alexithymia as opposed to alexithymia per se. Moreover, I notice that in Lyver’s dataset, the TAS was quite strongly correlated with self-reported anxiety, apathy, dis-inhibition and executive dysfunction. So I’d say that it’s plausible that all of these self-report scores are reflecting some basic ‘tendency to give negative answers on questionnaires’ which might reflect neuroticism, low self-esteem or (if you prefer) just realism.
The Dish 