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Reactions – Theodore Gray

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Reactions

An Illustrated Exploration of Elements, Molecules, and Change in the Universe

Theodore Gray

Genre: Chemistry

Price: $2.99

Publish Date: November 7, 2017

Publisher: Hachette Books

Seller: Hachette Digital, Inc.


The long-awaited third installment in Theodore Gray's iconic "Elements" trilogy. The first two titles, Elements and Molecules , have sold more than 1.5 million copies worldwide. With Reactions bestselling author Theodore Gray continues the journey through our molecular and chemical world that began with the tour de force The Elements and continued with Molecules . In The Elements, Gray gave us a never-before-seen, mesmerizing photographic view of the 118 elements in the periodic table. In Molecules , with the same phenomenal photographic acumen, plus beautifully rendered computer generated graphics, he showed us how the elements combine to form the content that makes up our universe, from table salt to oxygen to the panoply of colors and smells that surround us. At last, we've reached Reactions, in which Gray once again puts his photography and storytelling to work demonstrating how molecules interact in ways that are essential to our very existence. The book begins with a brief recap of elements and molecules and then goes on to explain important concepts the characterize a chemical reaction, including Energy, Entropy, and Time. It is then organized by type of reaction including chapters such as "Fantastic Reactions and Where to Find Them," "On the Origin of Light and Color," "The Boring Chapter," in which we learn about reactions such as paint drying, grass growing, and water boiling, and "The Need for Speed," including topics such as weather, ignition, and fire.

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Reactions – Theodore Gray

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A Czech nuclear plant staged a bikini contest to hire its next intern.

The new Museum of Capitalism in Oakland, California, explores “the ideology, history, and legacy of capitalism.” Surprise! One of the most detrimental legacies of capitalism is … climate change.

Bear with us (and the museum’s curators): The fossil fuel production that drives climate change is due to global (read: American) desire for profit and growth.

The museum — funded largely through a grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation — exhibits several works examining how humans despoil the environment in our quest for more things. Some are simple, like a bright blue baseball cap emblazoned with “COAL = JOBS” in white, akin to the ubiquitous MAGA accessory.

“American Domain,” an exhibit curated by Erin Elder (below), explores the ways in which land in the U.S. has been “continually staked and claimed.” Photographs of the Mexican-American border hang alongside images of drilling equipment, suggesting inconsistency in the United States’ attitude toward borders when it comes to fossil fuel access versus immigration.

“American Domain”Brea McAnally/Brea Photography

In another section of the museum, a video by Kota Takeuchi shows a worker undertaking cleanup of the Fukushima disaster. The worker slowly points at the audience through the camera lens, a designation of blame lasting over 20 minutes.

It’s a succinct gesture that gets to the point of the whole museum: We’re all complicit.

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A Czech nuclear plant staged a bikini contest to hire its next intern.

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A Vet Turns to Farming to Heal His Wounds

Mother Jones

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Alex Sutton sorts through all of his prescribed medications. His regimen at the time included anxiety medication and pills that helped him deal with depression, nightmares, and low energy issues.

Alex Sutton is a decorated US Army veteran who served three tours in Iraq. Raised by his grandparents in Iowa, he joined the Army at 17, and served 13 years in the military. He has been wounded in combat and received the Purple Heart for his injuries. In 2011, he was honorably discharged and medically retired, and took up residence on an isolated farm in rural North Carolina with his fiancée Jessica. They raise heritage breed chickens, along with some pigs and sheep.

Beyond his physical wounds, Alex carries the weight of serious, and chronic, post-traumatic stress. The couple is dead set on healing his mental wounds through rigorous farm work and the space of time; however, healing from PTSD is a nonlinear process. In Alex’s case, it encompassed periods, even weeks, of progress punctuated with deep periods of depression and the constant fear of flashbacks and nightmares.

It’s a story playing out in similar ways in thousands of homes around the country. More than 393,000 US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with PTSD by the Veterans Health Administration. Meanwhile, a majority of US farms are in their last generation with no family members to carry on the tradition—40 percent of farmers are over the age of 65. Groups like SAVE Farm and the Farmer Veteran Coalition are pushing to reintegrate vets into civilian life and the workforce through farming.

The new film Farmer/Veteran follows Alex and Jessica’s story as they attempt to soothe some of the mental wounds of war through agricultural therapy. Farmer/Veteran premieres on Independent Lens Monday, May 29th.

Alex decided to sell some of his tactical weapons as a result of discussions with his psychologist. He has a kid on the way, and he says he is trying to leave the soldier part of his life behind. He will keep a few handguns and hunting rifles, but feels that selling his military style weaponry will help in his recovery.

Alex holds one of the many birds on his farm. Alex and his fiancée Jessica initially raised hundreds of heritage breed birds before the workload became too difficult to manage.

Jessica sits on her four-wheeler as Alex fishes. When he has bad days, he goes down to the pond on the farm to settle his mind and try and calm down.

On the way to a fishing trip on Badin Lake, Alex stops for bait fish.

Alex baits a hook while fishing on Badin Lake. Fishing is one of the few things that can calm his nerves.

A shot pheasant waits to be cleaned at a Patriot Hunts event for veterans from the Airborne and Special Forces communities. Alex served with the 82nd Airborne and has attended a few of these events that bring together vets from the region.

Jessica stands at the bed of the Sutton’s truck after a Patriot Hunts event.

A rifle cartridge sits on a table at the Sutton residence next to a mailer about veteran medical benefits.

Cattle push and bellow in a pen at a livestock auction in rural North Carolina. The Suttons came to try and a buy a cow or two and ended up with two alpacas, which Alex bought on a whim.

Alex and Jessica wait for the birth of their first child. After losing custody of his first daughter (from a previous marriage) after returning from his third tour in Iraq, Alex has always wanted, but feared, the arrival of his first child in his new relationship.

Alex shows his new haircut.

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A Vet Turns to Farming to Heal His Wounds

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"I Didn’t Come Here to Lose": How a Movement Was Born at Standing Rock

Mother Jones

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Ome Tlaloc walked through the North Dakota hills with a flashlight and a walkie-talkie, scouting for police in the prairie dark. Earlier that evening, I’d met the 30-year-old on Highway 1806, where he’d been sitting behind a makeshift barricade. Now he was doing reconnaissance. The Morton County Sheriff’s Department and the National Guard, stationed ahead of us on the road, were planning to raid the camp where Tlaloc and hundreds of other protesters had been living for the past week. The barricade was meant to stop the cops, or at least to slow them down. As he walked, Tlaloc listened to his radio for the code words that would signal when he and his comrades were to spring into action: “Eagle’s Claw.”

The Standing Rock Sioux reservation sits in the Dakota Prairie Grasslands, an endless sweep of elephan­tine hills once home to millions of members of the Lakota Nation. Today, it’s inhabited by fewer than 9,000 of their surviving descendants, and one of the few places in America where buffalo roam wild. In late July, the Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners informed the Standing Rock Sioux that in five days its subsidiary would begin construction on a section of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) next to the reservation. After that, members of more than 200 Native American tribes and their allies gathered to block what would be America’s longest crude oil pipeline. Their encampments of teepees, tents, and RVs were mostly ignored by the media until private security guards set dogs on protesters and a few journalists were arrested, sparking a national conversation about tribal sovereignty, environmental racism, and police brutality.

The October night I met Tlaloc, the stakes in the #NoDAPL movement were as high as they’d ever been. If the “water protectors,” as the protesters called themselves, were cleared out, the pipeline would continue east under the Missouri River, coming within 1,500 feet of Lake Oahe, the Standing Rock Sioux’s water supply. A leak or spill, activists believed, would poison the drinking water of as many as 10 million people, nearly all of them on Native American reservations. The protesters’ goal was to block construction until March 2017, when Dakota Access would have to reapply for a federal construction permit—a delay that might make the project financially unfeasible. If the protesters were removed before then, Dakota Access would complete the 1,172-mile pipeline that would transport up to 570,000 barrels of crude a day. (On December 4, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would not approve a permit for the pipeline to run beneath Lake Oahe.)

Police have responded to the protests with teargas, tasers, water cannons, rubber bullets, and armored vehicles.

Native Americans of all ages have protested against the pipeline.

Tlaloc stopped at the top of a ridge. Off in the distance was the trench holding the lengths of 30-inch metal pipe. “An old Sioux prophecy says that a black snake will come to destroy the world at a moment of great uncertainty,” he said. “Unless the youth stop it.”

Back at the barricade, men in camo fatigues sipped cowboy coffee and waited. Pup tents formed a circle around a pit fire. “They’ve killed us before,” said Harry Beauchamp, a 63-year-old Assiniboine from Montana. Resting his cowboy boots on a soup pot, he told us about his participation in the 1973 standoff between members of the American Indian Movement and law enforcement agents in South Dakota that ended in the deaths of two Native American activists. A few weeks earlier, he’d been attacked by a dog brought in by a pipeline security contractor. His future son-in-law, he said, was bringing him a rifle. “I’m not going to let this be another Wounded Knee,” he said.

Left: Chanse Adams-Zavalla. The #NoDAPL protesters have occupied three main encampments.

Dancers in front of a sacred fire in a protest camp

The next day, a pale sun burned through the morning haze, backlighting 200 sheriff’s deputies and National Guardsmen in full riot gear. Behind them were an armored personnel carrier, a land-mine-resistant truck, and the pipeline’s private security force—overseen by TigerSwan, a North Carolina firm that’s done work for the US government in Afghanistan and Iraq. “This is a state highway,” a police commander said into a loudspeaker. “You must clear the road.”

On August 19, North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple, who served as an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, had declared a state of emergency, and the National Guard mobilized three weeks later. On September 3, security contractors turned dogs on the protesters. Not long afterward, Standing Rock Sioux tribal chairman Dave Archambault II asked the Justice Department to investigate civil rights violations against activists. “This country has a long and sad history of using military force against indigenous people—including the Sioux Nation,” he wrote. “When I see the militarization taking place in North Dakota against Indian people, I am genuinely concerned.”

Over the next 12 hours, I watched as grandmothers with red feathers in their hair, Oglala elders in cer­emonial regalia, and teens astride horses were teargassed, tased, and arrested. Cops fired rubber bullets at protesters and blasted them with earsplitting whines from Long Range Acoustic Devices. As the police marched down the highway, the crowd, echoing Black Lives Matter protesters, held their arms in the air and shouted, “Hands up, don’t shoot!”

Native Americans are more likely to be killed by police than members of any other group, even African Americans. More than 1 in 4 Native people live in poverty. (The average individual income on the Standing Rock reservation is $4,421.) Native unemployment levels are nearly double those of the overall population; their youth suicide rate is the highest in the nation.

Protesters watch as the police destroy a campsite.

A Sioux leader asked the Justice Department to investigate “the militarization taking place in North Dakota against Indian people.”

Many at Standing Rock saw the threat of environmental catastrophe as inextricable from racial injustice. An early proposal to route the Dakota Access Pipeline through Bismarck, 45 miles north of the reservation, was rejected by the US Army Corps of Engineers because of concerns that it could harm the municipal water supply. (Bismarck’s population is 92 percent white.) “But it’s okay if it poisons Natives’ water, right?” said Chanse Adams-Zavalla, a 22-year-old who grew up on the Maidu reservation just north of Santa Barbara, California. He wore a camouflage backpack that had “Fuck Off” written on it and a matching camo cap that said “Smile More.” In May 2015, the coastline near his reservation was ravaged by the rupture of an oil pipeline. “It’s disgusting what happened to my people, bro, and we’re still being treated that way,” he said.

Young protesters with red bandannas over their faces dragged tree trunks onto the highway and set them on fire. A heavyset teen stood before the flaming barricade, his back to the police. “Stop lighting these barricades on fire, brothers!” he said. “I’m a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.” He paused and looked at his feet like he might cry. “After this, I have to live here.”

“Sellout!” a young man in a balaclava shouted, hurling a tire onto the pyre. Someone else picked up the chant. “Sellout! Sellout!”

The scene underscored the conflicts within the anti-pipeline movement. Some activists, led in part by a group of protesters who lived in a compound called Red Warrior Camp, were committed to stopping the pipeline through direct action. While many Standing Rock Sioux were out on the front lines, Archambault was also lobbying Washington in hopes of a legal victory. In early November, Red Warrior Camp was asked to leave Standing Rock for promoting tactics that the tribal leadership thought were too extreme. There were also tensions between white-led environmental groups like 350.org, which focuses on climate change, and Native activists, who believe the larger issue is one of tribal sovereignty and the unfinished struggle for Native American rights. The protesters were spread among three encampments, including a largely Native camp and another filled with white activists that I heard described as the “Brooklyn” of Standing Rock.

Back at the barricades, Miles Allard, a Sioux man with a white mullet, rushed to the assistance of the teen who’d tried to calm the crowd. “The only way we’re going to win this is by prayer,” Allard said. “If we use violence, we will lose.”

“I didn’t come here to lose,” Beauchamp said, dropping a bundle of kindling onto the pavement before walking off in anger. “And I didn’t come here to fight my own brothers. I quit. I’m going home.”

“Why do they want to kill us?” asked LaDonna Allard over breakfast at the Prairie Knights Casino and Resort, the area’s largest employer. Allard, a Sioux woman, was hosting a protest camp on her land; she was accompanied by her husband, Miles, who had called for nonviolence at the barricades a few days earlier. The police had won those clashes, clearing the road and arrest­ing 142 protesters, including the Allards’ daughter, Prairie. (During a prior arrest, Allard said, her daughter was stripped naked, left in a cell overnight, and asked repeatedly, “Who’s your mother?”) Construction resumed on the pipeline, whose North Dakota section was roughly 95 percent complete.

Allard recalled the life of her great-great-grandmother, Nape Hote Win, who as a nine-year-old survived the 1863 Whitestone massacre, an attack by the US Army 50 miles east of Standing Rock. She was held in a prisoner-of-war camp for seven years. That battle paved the way for the Standing Rock Sioux to be confined to their current reservation. Allard’s father had to flee his land in 1948 after the government dammed the Missouri, flooding his farm. Her father and son were buried along the pipeline’s path.

On Election Day, Energy Transfer Partners announced that it would defy a request from the Obama administration to postpone construction and would begin tunnel­ing under Lake Oahe in two weeks. CEO Kelcy Warren had given more than $100,000 to support Trump, a stockholder. “Overall, I’m very, very enthusiastic about what’s going to happen with our country,” Warren told investors after the election. In mid-November, the Army Corps of Engineers stepped in and said it would not allow completion of the pipeline until there had been further review of its environmental impact. Reaffirming that decision in early December, the Corps said it would consider alternate routes for the pipeline. ETP attacked the decision as “the latest in a series of overt and transparent political actions by an administration which has abandoned the rule of law in favor of currying favor with a narrow and extreme political constituency.”

“We’re in a war,” Allard said, beginning to cry. “How did this happen? I did nothing wrong. I have a right to say ‘no.’ I have a right to live in my own country, on my own land.”

Police spray water on demonstrators in below-freezing temperatures.

Left: Nighttime protests on Highway 1806. Right: Medics assist an injured protester.

Later that night, I passed Beauchamp’s tent, but it was empty. He had gone back to Montana, feeling bitter and defeated. Adams-Zavalla, however, was in great spirits. “This isn’t the end of our movement,” he said. “It’s the beginning.” Fifty horses had just arrived from the Oglala-Sioux reservation, as had 100 Native American youth runners who’d jogged from Arizona. That afternoon the Seven Council Fires had been lit for the second time since 1862, a ceremony in which the seven branches of the Dakota Sioux demonstrated their unity. “When my grandkids ask me where I was during Standing Rock,” Adams-Zavalla said, “I know what I’m going to tell them.”

“Even if somehow, someway, they build this pipeline,” he went on, “they’ve inadvertently sparked a whole generation of us indigenous folks and everyone who wants to stand with us to fight for Mother Earth. We’re going to inherit this planet, bro, and everyone’s welcome to inherit it with us if they want.”

Around us, protesters were chopping wood, battening down tarps, and getting ready for the long Dakota winter. On a hill overlooking the camp, DAPL roughnecks labored away. The moment was uncertain, yet jubi­lant—each side racing toward the future it imagined.

Inside the main protest camp.

Police sprayed mace at protesters who crossed the Cannonball River.

Water protectors march from the main camp to the bridge on Highway 1806.

These horseback riders traveled for three days along the pipeline.

The first snowfall in Standing Rock

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"I Didn’t Come Here to Lose": How a Movement Was Born at Standing Rock

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Powerful Photos From One of Texas’ Most Historic Black Communities

Mother Jones

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Johnny Jones
Whether singing in a choir or playing keyboards on stage Saturday nights, music is been Jones’ passion. He spent his career working on the railroad tracks that run through Tamina. Now retired, Jones devotes his time to singing and recording Gospel music.

When photographer Marti Corn moved to The Woodlands, Texas, in 1996, she found herself living next to the subject of what would become her first book: the town of Tamina.

“Literally across the tracks” from The Woodlands, as Corn says, Tamina is a small community just north of Houston. Founded in 1871 by freed slaves, Tamina (originally known as Tammany) flourished for decades, benefiting from the logging industry and a railroad that ran from Houston to Conroe. It’s the oldest freedman town in Texas and one of the last emancipation communities of its kind left in the country; descendants of the original freed-slave founders still live in town.

But in the 1960s and ’70s, affluent suburbs like Shenandoah, Chateau Woods, Oak Ridge, and The Woodlands grew, pushing up against poorer, rural Tamina . This juxtaposition is what drew Corn to Tamina. As she met its residents, she thought she could help create awareness of the town and its history through her photography. “At the very least,” Corn says, “I could gift those who live in Tamina with a book of portraits and their stories so their descendants would know where they came from.”

Consider Corn’s mission accomplished. Her book, The Ground on Which I Stand (published by Texas A&M University as part of its Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life), is a nuanced portrait of the town, filled out by archival family photos and a history of the town

The book compiles oral histories of 15 families, from those whose trace their lineage in Tamina for seven generations to relative newcomers. Resilience and pride in Tamina are common threads throughout the book, tying together family stories into a wonderful tribute.

As Annette Hardin, one of the descendants of the founding families, told Corn, “The value developers place on our land is vastly different than ours. What they don’t understand is that it’s not just our property—it’s our legacy. The land represents the blood, heart, and soul of our African American heritage.”

Live Oak
This emancipation town’s landscape has a unique pastoral charm. Eighty-year-old live oaks shade houses built years ago. Horses can be found along most streets behind the wooden fences or tethered to a tree.

Molly
“The prejudice we have felt might be one of the reasons we are such a close community.”

Lonnie

Horse and Trailer
This is a community that is at risk of gentrification as real estate values escalate and surrounding cities eye Tamina land for development.

Bubba

Joe
“Five-fifty a week, that’s what we made cuttin’ wood. We’d cut four cords a day to make that dollar. Times sure could be real hard, and we had many hungry days.”

Ruth
Faith plays an important role in Tamina. There are five churches, many of which line the railroad tracks.

Sweet Rest Cemetery
Many headstones at Tamina’s Sweet Rest Cemetery are hand-made with names either painted onto crosses or etched into concrete markers. The cemetery floods every time there is a heavy rain, causing headstones to sink into the ground.

Jada
Tamina has the opportunity to send its children to some of the best schools in the country, thanks to the growth of surrounding cities. But that growth also puts the town at risk of gentrification.

The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedman’s Town
Sam Rayburn Series on Rural Life, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Commerce

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Powerful Photos From One of Texas’ Most Historic Black Communities

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Sublime Photos of African Wildlife Roaming Their Lost Habitat

Mother Jones

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As an ardent conservationist, photographer Nick Brandt’s early work showing the majesty of the large animals that once ruled East Africa wasn’t enough. Brandt created three gorgeous photo books focused on African animals in danger of extinction: On This Earth (2005), A Shadow Falls (2009) and Across the Ravaged Land (2013). As a result of that work, what he saw, and what he learned, in 2010 he created the Big Life Foundation with conservationist Richard Bonham. Big Life protects more than 2 million acres of the Amboseli-Tsavo-Kilimanjaro ecosystem in East Africa.

Brandt’s new project, Inherit the Dust, pushes his photography further to help visualize the impact poaching and development has on wildlife. Inherit the Dust helps viewers see areas where elephants, giraffes, lions and other animals once roamed by placing 30-foot panels with photographs in the now industrialized landscapes. You see elephants sauntering through large dumps or under overpasses, giraffes blending in with machinery at mining sites. It’s a striking and effective technique. The book includes 68 images that, though admittedly repetitive in their execution and style, are no less impactful.

Wasteland with Elephant 2015

The work in the book has a beautiful bleakness to it. Looking at the photos alone leaves you feeling depressed. But the images also raise an important issue: Who is Brandt to question—let alone criticize—African nations for developing their countries? Brandt addresses this in the introduction. “I had to stop and ask myself, am I just grieving for the loss of this world because as a privileged white guy from the West, I’ll never again be able to see these animals in the wild?”

He answers by taking a subtle swipe at China for its role in the blink-of-an-eye pace of development in African countries. He also says just because Western nations trampled their environments in the name of progress, that doesn’t mean it’s a model to follow. With his work as a photographer and with the Big Life Foundation, Brandt asserts that environmental consciousness and growing a country’s economy “do not have to be mutually exclusive.”

Brandt punctuates his argument with Inherit the Dust‘s sweeping, somewhat painful panoramic photos.

All photos by Nick Brandt, Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.

Quarry with Giraffe 2014

Quarry with Lion 2014

Alleyway with Chimpanzee 2014

Road to Factory with Zebra 2014

Underpass with Elephants (Lean Back, Your Life is on Track) 2015

Wasteland with Rhinos & Residents 2015

Behind the scenes: Giraffe & Goats

Crew wrapping elephant panel at sunset, November 2014

Photos from Inherit the Dust are on exhibition at Edwynn Houck Gallery in New York (March 10 to April 30, 2016); Fahey Klein Gallery in Los Angeles (March 24 to May 14); and Camerawork in Berlin (May 12 to July 8). Nick Brandt is a featured speaker at this year’s LOOK3 Festival of Photography in Charlottesville, Virginia (June 13-19).

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Sublime Photos of African Wildlife Roaming Their Lost Habitat

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The New York Public Library Just Unleashed 180,000 Free Images. We Can’t Stop Looking at Them.

Mother Jones

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Blossom Restaurant, 103 Bowery, Manhattan Bernice Abbott/The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

The New York Public Library just digitized and made available more than 180,000 high resolution items, which the public can download for free.

The images come from pieces in the library’s collection that have fallen out of copyright or are otherwise in the public domain. This includes botanical illustrations, ancient texts, historical maps–including the incredible Green Book collection of travel guides for African American travelers in mid-1900s. They’ve also released more than 40,000 stereoscopes, Berenice Abbott’s amazing documentation of New York City in 1930s and Lewis Hines’ photos of Ellis Island immigrants, as well as the letters of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among other political figures.

One of the related projects they’ve created with this release is a cool visualization tool that lets you browse every item released.

It’s a true treasure trove and–warning!–a total time suck.

Say goodbye to your afternoon.

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The New York Public Library Just Unleashed 180,000 Free Images. We Can’t Stop Looking at Them.

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Here’s What Actually Happened in the Great Sanders-Clinton Data Theft

Mother Jones

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I haven’t yet written anything about the great Clinton vs. Sanders vs. DNC battle over whether the Sanders campaign downloaded a bunch of information from the Clinton campaign during a short glitch that allowed them access they shouldn’t have had. There are a couple of reasons for this:

Everything I’ve read has pretty clearly been written by either Clinton or Sanders loyalists, who have put their own spin on what happened, most of it faintly ridiculous.
To truly understand what happened, you need to know the technical details of how the NGPVAN database and front-end search tools are set up. I don’t know this, and apparently nobody I’ve read knows it either.

Today, however, David Atkins has weighed in see update below, and he does know how the software is set up. I don’t know his loyalties in the presidential race, but he nonetheless seems to have a pretty solid take on the whole thing:

An important piece of information to note is the difference between a “saved search” and a “saved list.”…You really only want to pull a static list if you’re doing something specific like creating a list for a targeted mail piece—or if you want a quick snapshot in time of a raw voter list.

….However, the access logs do show that Sanders staff pulled not one but multiple lists—not searches, but lists—a fact that shows intent to export and use. And the lists were highly sensitive material. News reports have indicated that the data was “sent to personal folders” of the campaign staffers—but those refer to personal folders within NGPVAN, which are near useless without the ability to export the data locally….Even without being to export, however, merely seeing the topline numbers of, say, how many voters the Clinton campaign had managed to bank as “strong yes” votes would be a valuable piece of oppo.

…This doesn’t mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasn’t, in David Axelrod’s words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign….Still, the Sanders camp’s reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clinton’s data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasn’t honeypotted into doing it—their people did it of their own accord…. What’s very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.

Read the whole thing for more detail. Overall, though, this gibes with my tentative view of the matter. The DNC may have overreacted, and maybe NGPVAN is incompetent. I’m agnostic on those issues. But there’s not much question that the Sanders campaign acted badly here, and then tried to pretend that they were merely “testing” the system’s security—which is, as Atkins says, laughable. They pulled dozens of lists from the Clinton campaign and, according to news reports, never notified anyone they had done it.

This was stupid, and Sanders has been ill-served by his team. He’s rightfully fired the guy who did it, and probably ought to fire the subordinates who joined in. And that should be the end of it.

UPDATE: I mistook David Atkins for his brother Dante in the original post. Apologies for that. I’ve corrected the post and removed the reference to Atkins’ “boss.”

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Here’s What Actually Happened in the Great Sanders-Clinton Data Theft

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 December 2015

Mother Jones

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A couple of months ago, Kendrick Brinson came over to take pictures of me for the current issue of MoJo. Kendrick is a cat person, so while she was snapping away she snapped some pictures of the cats as well. She very nicely told me I was welcome to use one for catblogging, so today you get a first: the first professional photograph ever featured on Friday Catblogging. Isn’t Hilbert handsome?

But what about Hopper? Well, she mostly ran away, so we have no pictures of her. Hilbert, by contrast, followed us around the house and preened for the camera like a pro. This is his reward.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 18 December 2015

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We Are Being Tested By God. We’re Failing.

Mother Jones

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Oh come on, now he’s just trolling us for sure:

Brzezinski: Do you like Vladimir Putin’s comments about you?

Trump: Sure. When people call you brilliant, it’s always good, especially when the person heads up Russia.

Scarborough: Well, I mean, also, it’s a person that kills journalists, political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously, that would be a concern, would it not?

Trump: He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.

Scarborough: Yeah. But, again, he kills journalists that don’t agree with him.

Trump: Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, you know.

Scarborough: What do you mean by that?

Trump: There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, Joe. A lot of killing going on. A lot of stupidity. And that’s the way it is. But you didn’t ask me the question. You asked me a different question. So that’s fine.

“Joseph Kony? Bad guy, no doubt about it. But at least he’s a Christian, unlike what we have now. And a tough guy too, a leader. He knows what he wants and he’s willing to fight for it.”

This is turning into a bad Mel Brooks film.

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We Are Being Tested By God. We’re Failing.

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