If people knew how bad fast food is, they’d eat less, right? Not according to a new study highlighted by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. New York City recently enacted a law that forces chain restaurants to post the calorie counts on menus. Data published in Health Affairs journal found that about half of the people they interviewed hadn’t noticed the calorie counts (pdf), and only 15 percent took the labels into consideration when making choices. What’s worse, after inspecting the respondents food receipts, the researchers found that overall, people were actually buying more calories than before the law was put into place. Drum reports, “The results aren't statistically significant, though, so basically all the researchers can really say is that the law (so far) hasn't had any effect.” For advocates fighting obesity and fast food, the study seems to say activists should find different tack.

Source: Mother Jones 

A new, yet-to-be-named, local website will be forming next year to fill in the gaps left by regional newspaper shutterings in the Bay Area. The nonprofit site nabbed a hefty donation—$5 million—from San Francisco businessman F. Warren Hellman, and its expertise and manpower will come from “KQED-FM, which has a 28–person news staff, and the 120 students of the University of California, Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism,” the New York Times reports.

(Thanks, @MotherJones.)

Source: The New York Times

An arresting photo essay about the city of Janesville, Wisconsin, published in Mother Jones, serves as a stark illustration of the troubling numbers released in the new national poverty reports. For nearly four generations, the town was home to one of the oldest General Motors factories in the country. The plant abruptly halted its assembly line in December 2008.

The somber photos, taken by Danny Wilcox Frazier, capture Janesville’s remaining residents living like ghosts amid the ruins of a once-booming company town, where a defunct strip club has become a venue for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and empty hotels don’t bother leaving the light on for anyone.

Source: Mother Jones 

Pop songs romanticizing murder and corruption among drug cartels and federales (Mexican national police) have been a staple in Mexican culture since the '60s, writes William T. Vollmann in the July/August issue of Mother Jones.

Through a series of intimate encounters, Vollmann explores the complicated role the baladas prohibidas, or narcocorridos, play in the lives of people in Mexico, many of whom understandably vilify corrupt authorities and uphold drug lords as idyllic figures of honor and bravery, seemingly without a sense of fear for their own lives. But recently balladas prohibidas have come under fire, and even been banned from certain Mexican radio stations and outlawed altogether in Baja California. He writes:

The policeman Carlos Pérez said that some of the most famous ballads were about Jesús Malverde, whom he called the patron saint of the narcotraffickers. He lived in Sinaloa. He was Robin Hood. He sold drugs and used the money to help the people. He was killed in a gun battle because he didn't want to give himself up. Some say he was never caught. Some say he died of old age, and others say that he is still alive. Everybody has his own story

Below are some popular narcocorridos we dug up from YouTube.

Source: Mother Jones, YouTube 

Image biy DavidDennis, licensed under Creative Commons.

Will the death of journalism mean the end of democracy?  The newest issue of Mother Jones provides us with a rundown of depressing statistics about the state of media:

- 43% of Americans say it would hurt civil life “a lot” if their local newspapers closed.  Yet when asked if they’d miss their paper, 42% say “not much” or “not at all.”

- By one estimate, an entirely Web-based New York Times could generate only enough money to support about 20% of the paper’s current staff.

- The editor of the New York Times Magazine says a typical cover story costs more than $40,000 to produce—and that excludes editing, art, and fact-checking. That’s more than Mother Jones’ story budget for freelance writers for an entire issue.

- The top 10% of bloggers earn an average of $19,000 a year.  For all bloggers, the median is $200 for men, $100 for women.

Source: Mother Jones (article not yet available online)

Reports coming out of Iran from Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and various blogs are giving foreigners an unprecedented view into the ongoing political crisis in the country. The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, blogging from “a pier in Cape Cod,” has emerged as one of the major arbiters of information on the Iranian protests. Twitter and Facebook users are turning their profiles green in support of the protesters. The same technologies are giving idealists around the world the chance to engage in the crisis, both symbolically and actively. But just because people can engage, doesn’t mean they always should.

The raw, unedited nature of much of the information coming out of Iran could give every the impression that they know what’s really going on inside the country. The abject failure of cable news networks to cover the events reinforces that idea. Editor and Publisher recently admitted, “Web reports from Iranians, including Twitter feeds, have outflanked much of print and certainly cable TV.” With foreign reporters getting kicked out of the country, the reliance on social media for news will likely continue to grow.

As influential as social networking tools are in publicizing Iran’s conflict, much of that information has been unreliable. It was widely reported that opposition leader Mousavi was placed under house arrest, which was just one of many rumors that circulated and later turned out to be untrue. The best reporting, according to Kevin Drum writing for Mother Jones, may be coming from the BBC and the New York Times, and other mainstream, traditional outlets.

News from Iran has also made people “desperate to do something to show solidarity,” according to tech guru Clay Shirky in an interview with TED. Shirky said, “Reading personal messages from individuals on the ground prompts a whole other sense of involvement.” This has led people to help out the protesters, according to Shirky, by offering secure web proxies to help them mask their online identities. That sense of involvement, however, has the potential to lead people astray.

Some foreigners have been moved to launch web-based attacks against the Iranian state-run media, overwhelm the state’s servers with a constant stream of requests. Tech-President advocated this “bit of cyber aggression aimed at the Iranian government” as a way to channel the considerable energies of observers outside Iran. The process is so easy that I accidentally helped launch one of these attacks by clicking on an errant link while researching this blog post.

The motivation behind the web-attacks is understandable, but they may end up doing more harm than good. Evgeny Morozov, writing for Foreign Policy, points out that these attacks from other countries actually strengthen the Iranian government’s argument that “foreign intervention” is the driving force behind the protests. And if the attacks get bad enough, there’s a chance that the government could simply pull the plug on the highly centralized internet throughout the country, cutting off the Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube videos that feed the foreign knowledge of the protests.

Sources: The Atlantic, Editor and Publisher, Mother Jones, TED, Tech-President, Foreign Policy

Image by  Hamed Saber , licensed under  Creative Commons .

This morning, Obama announced his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Here’s a quick look at the blogosphere’s reactions so far.

Tom Goldstein at SCOTUSblog has an informative, balanced, and calm overview of Sotomayor’s qualifications, as well as a helpful warning about the controversy that’s already stirring:

Because proponents’ and opponents’ claims about nominees are provided for public consumption through the mass media, they involve bumper sticker messages; there is not much nuance. Almost always, they collapse into assertions of ideological extremism, as when some on the left attempted to portray John Roberts as a (secret) ideologue and single-minded tool of the government and corporations against individuals.

SCOTUSblog has also assembled a very helpful series of posts (here, here, and here) summarizing Sotomayor’s opinions in civil cases.

Mark Halperin predicts an easy confirmation at Time’s blog:

Obama has chosen a mainstream progressive, rather than a wild-eyed liberal. And he has chosen a rags-to-riches Hispanic woman. Her life story is inspirational—a political consultant's dream. Since she is certain to be confirmed, there are plenty of smart conservatives who will, by midday Tuesday, have done the political cost-benefit analysis: at a time when Republicans are trying to demonstrate that their party can reach beyond rich white men, what mileage is there in doing anything but celebrating such a historic choice?

At Mother Jones, David Corn parses the potential for a conservative “cat-fight”:

By selecting Sotomayor, Obama is forcing Senate GOPers to choose between attacking a Hispanic appointee (and possibly alienating Hispanic voters) and ticking off social conservatives. At the moment, the GOPers' calculation seems obvious. But it could come at a cost of a cat-fight on the right.

We have some hints of what the battle over Sotomayor’s nomination might look like because, as Steve Benen notes at the Washington Monthly, “many leading far-right activists—including Limbaugh and Fox News personalities—started the offensive against her weeks ago.”

It’s worth noting that they did so with help from the so-called “respectable intellectual center,” in the form of Jeffrey Rosen’s May 4 piece for The New Republic, “The Case Against Sotomayor.” The article, which has been debated and debunked by several bloggers, used mostly anonymous sources to paint a pretty negative picture of Sotomayor’s intellect, temperament, and general preparedness for the Supreme Court. As Jason Linkins puts it at Huffington Post, Rosen essentially characterized Sotomayor as “a not-smart person who nevertheless went to Princeton, and a hotheaded Latina whose ethnic hotheadedness seemingly carried none of the accepted, value-added ethnic hotheadedness of Antonin Scalia.”

Rosen’s unsubstantiated characterizations of Sotomayor rapidly spread to mainstream media outlets. Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo:

[T]he meme couldn't be contained. It resurfaced less than a week later in two Washington Post articles and has colored today's coverage of the nomination, and of all cable news coverage of the SCOTUS stakes for the past month.

It’s definitely showing up in the post-nomination right-wing blogs, too. “Conservatives rejoice,” writes Erick Erickson at RedState. “Of all the picks Obama could have picked, he picked the most intellectually shallow.” At National Review’s The Corner blog, Ramesh Ponnuru deems Sotomayor “Obama’s Harriet Miers.”

Adam Serwer dismantles this ridiculous comparison in an excellent post at The American Prospect:

Sotomayor's resume doesn't just look good compared to Harriet Miers. Sotomayor has more than 10 years on the appeals court—by contrast, the current chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, had two years as a judge on the D.C. Circuit before being nominated. As a white man, however, his credentials and intelligence are beyond reproach.

A case against Sotomayor based on her "credentials" or "intelligence" is false on its face—this is a kind of Southern Strategy all over again. By stoking white resentment over the rise of allegedly unqualified minorities getting prominent positions, the GOP is hoping to derail her nomination. It probably won't work, but it's another sign of how little the GOP learned from last year's election.

Sources: SCOTUSblog, Time, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly, The New Republic, Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, RedState, National Review, The American Prospect 

Artist and activist (and visionary!) Favianna Rodriguez collaborated with eco-chef Bryant Terry to design these beautiful posters addressing food justice:

The posters debuted a few weeks ago, at the release party for Terry's phenomenal new cookbook Vegan Soul Kitchen (out last month on Da Capo), and just in time to join a host of alt-press stories on food activism. Mother Jones recently published "Smart Growth," a fantastic special report on the subject, and the new issue of YES! profiles Will Allen, whose urban farming operation Growing Power produces a staggering 159 varieties of food—tomatoes, honey, chickens (and their free-range eggs), goats, you name it—in the middle of a Milwaukee "food desert," an area that's home to zero full-service grocery stores. 

(Thanks, RaceWire.)

Sources: Vegan Soul Kitchen, Mother Jones, YES!, RaceWire 

Images courtesy of Favianna Rodriguez.

Have you heard? In 2007 a record-breaking number of U.S. babies—nearly 40 percent—were born to single mothers. But the stat that’s not making headlines, writes Julia Whitty for Mother Jones, is the one we ought to heed: 2007 also holds the title for most babies born annually in the United States ever, period. That’s 4,317,119 bundles of joy.

According to a study published in Global Environmental Change, which Whitty cites, every American baby “costs” six times a parent’s own carbon emissions. “The bottom line is that absolutely nothing else you can do—driving a more fuel efficient car, driving less, installing energy-efficient windows, replacing lightbulbs, replacing refrigerators, recycling—comes even close to simply not having that child,” she writes.

Assuming perpetuation of the standard U.S. lifestyle, true indeed. But Whitty mitigates her argument with a final stat: “In comparison, under current Bangladeshi conditions, each child adds 56 metric tons of CO2 to the carbon legacy of the average female.”

And in a snap, we’re back where we began. Our spiraling global population is part of the climate equation, no doubt. But sitting heavy on the scales is a disparity in consumption so vast that a single U.S. newborn can be charged with 169 times the environmental havoc as a Bangladeshi infant. So much for the innocence of youth.

Plainly speaking, there’s got to be a way to combine consideration for how many people with how much each individual consumes—before nudging the door open to preposterous scenarios where the childfree American can consume with impunity, or carbon-light countries encourage their populations to boom without concern.

As Utne Reader’s publisher Bryan Welch writes in our Jan.-Feb. 2009 issue: “Conservation alone cannot save us from ourselves. With the right combination of imagination and common sense, though, we can begin to address a hard reality: that although the world can always get better, it’s not going to get any bigger.”

Sources: Mother Jones, Global Environmental Change

Image by normanack, licensed under Creative Commons.

International adoption, like any business, is driven by market forces.  In this month’s Mother Jones, Jim Carney tells the story of a boy adopted from India into an American family who is later revealed to have been kidnapped rather than relinquished.  After the news is broken to both families, the boy’s Indian parents wish to have contact with their American counterparts, who choose instead to cease all communication.  The article is accompanied by a podcast interview with Carney, who elaborates on what happened after the story was published, as well as his own views on how the supply and demand of international adoption contribute to its corruption. 

“American families don’t want children who have lived in orphanages for too long,” he explains, noting the vulnerability of institutionalized children toward diseases, neurological problems, and general lack of care. “They aren’t very saleable.” 

So, corrupt adoption brokers look for healthy children of “better stock”, i.e. from loving families, abduct them, and then concoct back stories that label the children as willingly relinquished. Thus, the receiving families, predominantly from the global west, get what they want, and the brokers get paid.  

Systemic corruption in international adoption is not limited to India, either, with similar reports common from other sending countries. 

For further examination of international adoption’s supply chain, check out E.J. Graff’s op-ed in The Washington Post, “The Orphan Manufacturing Chain,” which breaks down the system. 

Beneath the traditional rhetoric of international adoption as save-the-children altruism lies the undeniable influence of basic economics. Framing international adoption in economic terms allows us to deconstruct the various forces that drive it and contribute to its corruption. 

Sources: Mother Jones, The Washington Post

There’s a lot of conflicting information available on how to live lighter on the earth: Washing dishes by hand uses more water than a dish washer, but it also uses less energy.  Paper bags from the grocery store produce a lot of greenhouse gases, but plastic bags aren’t nearly as biodegradable. What’s an eco-conscious person to do? The new issue of Mother Jones tries to solve these questions and 18 other “Econundrums” with simple, straightforward answers.

American politics crept its way into Paris Fashion Week, where models lankier than Obama himself strutted down runways in attire inspired by the presidential contender. Designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac debuted a loud yellow, black, and white dress with a headshot of Obama printed on the front and Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous words, “I have a dream today,” on the back. The model sporting the dress wore fingerless gloves reading “yes” on one hand and “no” on the other. Obama also captured the creative imaginations of Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters behind Rodarte, who sent a simple knit dress with “Obama” written boldly across the chest down the runway as part of a tribute show to Sonia Rykiel.

But the Democrat isn’t the only one making a mark on the design and retail worlds. Mother Jones reports the release of the Sarah-Cuda, a pink camouflage crossbow named after Sarah Palin and touted by the retailer as a “tribute to women like Sarah Palin who bear the responsibility of family and work while strengthening the moral fiber of society.”

Christians are trying a new tactic to pack pews: magic. That's right, pick-a-card, nothing-up-my-sleeve magic. Writing for Mother Jones, Catherine Price explores the world of Christian illusionists, entertainers who use tricks to connect audiences with Christian concepts. For example, “[a] mind-reading trick may illustrate God's omniscience; an escape-artist routine reminds audiences that they can break free of sin; an illusion in which three black rings explode into color is a metaphor for what it's like to suddenly see the light.”

Critics point out that the Bible expressly forbids any type of witchcraft or sorcery (a problem that comes up frequently, most recently in a controversy over Harry Potter), but these entertainers insist that the ban is not an issue. They’re careful not to equate their illusions with the miracles found in the Bible, and claim Jesus’ stories and parables as the inspiration for their craft. In other words, they’re following Jesus’ teaching examples, only with silk scarves and coin tricks rather than walks on water. Replacing fire and brimstone with smoke and mirrors may be effective at drawing crowds, but Price writes that entertainers must not “derive too much pleasure from performing, lest they divert glory from God. Given that most successful magicians (not to mention preachers) are born scene-stealers, this can be tough.”

Ahh, prepackaged conventions. What’s the media to do? How about rehash the primaries? Hence, we have the Hillary Clinton narrative that just won’t die: The party’s divided, delegates are going to spoil the convention, chaos will reign (cross your fingers).

The Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk smacked down the tired media meme last week. Choice moment:

[T]he angry-women-will-sink-Obama myth is yet another example of the media confusing activist opinion with public opinion in general. And public opinion generally defies such a simple—if dramatic—storyline.

But the media’s not the only one dumping gasoline on a dying fire. There’s also the McCain camp, which just released this ad:

Kevin Drum, newly blogging for Mother Jones, surmises that “the folks running McCain’s war room are getting cabin fever or something.” But that could be a good thing:

Maybe an attack ad this transparent will be just the thing to finally get all those ex-Hillary supporters fully on board with Obama.

Drum points to some savvy analysis by Jonathan Cohn at the New Republic, who notes that despite all the hand-wringing about party unity, the Democrats are remarkably in step with each other:

[F]or all the talk of disunity, the really remarkable story about the Democrats right now is the absence of meaningful dissent on the party's agenda. When it comes to substance, the Democrats are arguably more united than they have been since the early 1960s. Yes, you can find divisions on both domestic and foreign policy, on everything from the relative priority of deficit reduction to America's response to Darfur. But these debates don't match the kind we've seen in the past.

For her part, Hillary had this to say about McCain’s ad blasts this morning at a breakfast for the New York delegation: “I’m Hillary Clinton, and I do not approve that message.”

For more of Utne.com’s ongoing coverage of the Democratic National Convention, click here.

Last week, Vin Crosbie, an outspoken critic of the so-called “digital revolution,” predicted that more than half of the nearly 1,500 daily newspapers in the United States “won't exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of the next decade.”

As blogs take over print columns and advertisers study up on their HTML, the bricks and mortar of the physical newsroom are left in awkward limbo. Office work takes up less space than it did even 10 years ago, with computers that can slide through cracks in the sidewalk and rolodexes that amount to nothing more than pixels. Those lucky small-publications writers who haven’t yet been laid off are increasingly working from home, leaving behind decorated cubicles and monthly office birthday parties.

The Mother Jones website features graphic designer Martin Gee’s glimpse at one such dying newsroom, the San Jose Mercury News. Gee's photographs document a fluorescently lit ghost town, from its ever-blinking voicemail alerts to a graveyard of unplugged monitors. He captured the detritus of a shrinking staff from April to June 2008, when he was caught in a round of layoffs and left the paper. (View his entire "Reduction in Force" collection here.)

One must wonder how much hollow air our skyscrapers contain behind their mirrored windows, and if, in our age of continuous development, we might look toward existing space to get the job done.

Images courtesy of Martin Gee.

We all have different definitions of financial security and wealth, but some are more realistic than others. When asked to define a “rich” income level at the Saddleback Forum this past weekend, the responses from Barack Obama and John McCain were revealing. Obama said $150,000, while McCain posited, “How about $5 million?” He was ostensibly joking, but his response is the perfect example of sincerity cloaked in fatuousness, and completely in line with his party’s economic philosophy.

Ezra Klein, at the American Prospect, made a chart to contextualize the candidates’ definitions of wealth:

Klein concludes that McCain’s “profoundly out of touch” answer, facetious or not, is frustrating but inevitable: He's been richer, for longer, than Obama and most of his fellow Americans. “Nothing weird or malign: Just the naturally skewed perspective of someone who lives on a particular extreme, in this case, the extreme edge of the wealth distribution.” Obama is, by his own definition, undeniably wealthy, but Klein argues that because his family’s acquisition of wealth is relatively recent, Obama’s outlook is more realistic.

McCain and his companions in the richest slice of America’s population have no concept of what it is to barely get by on a middle-class income, much less at or below the unrealistically low poverty line. While statistically unsurprising, this warped economic outlook will have dire consequences for the middle and lower classes if McCain becomes president, all but ensuring an extension of the Bush Administration’s apparent mandate that the rich get richer at the expense of pretty much everyone else.

Chart courtesy of Ezra Klein.

Gary Brecher is the War Nerd—a pseudonymous columnist for the English-language Moscow-based publication, the eXile. (The print-edition eXile was shutdown this spring, but the feisty periodical has found a new home online.) Soft Skull recently published a compilation of Brecher’s columns, which we reviewed in our July-August 2008 issue.

Brecher’s eponymous War Nerd is a curious, in-your-face book, as Utne associate editor Hannah Lobel points out in her review, calling the tome a “raucous, offensive, and sometimes amusing CliffsNotes compilation of wars both well-known and ignored.” Lately, the man who produced such a volume has attracted some curiosity himself.

War Nerd netted a review in Mother Jones that expresses skepticism regarding Brecher’s authority, given that he makes “continual narrative detours,” many about how he “is overweight, underpaid, and has a hard time getting a date.” Brecher offered explanation for those digressions on the public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge. The nerd moniker was a “defensive move,” Brecher says. “Look, I understand that you can do all kinds of psychoanalysis about why I like war, so let me say up front, ‘Yeah, I’m a fat loser and I flunked puberty.’ And you can link that up with me liking war all you want, but I’m the statistical norm, and there are a lot of me out there.”

Far from shooting himself in the foot—a little war metaphor for you there—Brecher demonstrates his knack for the “surprising analysis” of which Lobel wrote.

You can listen to the seven-minute segment here:

(Thanks, Richard Eoin Nash.)

The phone sex world thrives on anonymity, on the ability of strangers to confess their innermost desires to a person both real and of their own creation. Phillip Toledano’s Phonesex project, featured in Mother Jones, lifts the veil on this interior world with a series of elegant, respectful portraits paired with text written by the subjects themselves.  

The phone sex operators’ stories are quirky, amusing, insightful, and disturbing, but all of them reveal the complex personalities that are obscured by ads of airbrushed beauties entreating us to dash off into the bedroom and pick up the phone. They also reveal a great deal about their customers on the other end of the line and about the repressive cultural mores that make this industry so successful. 

Toledano’s book is due out in September from Twin Palms. You can find more portraits on the project’s website, along with the full subjects’ complete writings.

Image courtesy of Phillip Toledano.

There’s nothing like frightening news to ruin a good night’s sleep, especially if the news in question concerns the chemical components used in mattress production. You can’t count sheep if they’ve been vaporized in a cloud of carcinogenic fumes. And carcinogens, such as formaldehyde, are just one of the lovely chemicals that make up the beds we lie down in, according to a recent piece in Mother Jones (subscription required).

While long-term data about the general health risks of mattresses is lacking and difficult to acquire, a few particular brands seem notably questionable. For instance, Walter Bader, author of the book Toxic Bedrooms, had an Atlanta lab test a memory-foam mattress, which conforms to your resting position, and the results sniffed out 61 chemical emissions, including the “carcinogens benzene and naphthalene,” according to MoJo. Moreover, the chemicals, such as antimony oxide and, again, formaldehyde, used to ensure that mattresses are flame-retardant—federal regulations (pdf) require that mattresses resist catching fire from an open flame for 30 minutes—may pose, beyond cancer risks, allergic discomfort to those sensitive to chemicals.

Given the void of data, we should take this news with a measured acceptance. Still, some reliably harmless alternatives, produced with natural latex, organic cotton batting, and organic wool, exist for those seeking a safe mattress. If only beds could be made with the incredibly soft, imaginary wool from the sheep who lull you to sleep. But then the question becomes: Could you fall asleep to shorn sheep? That’d be weird. Forget I brought it up.

—Michael Rowe

Over the course of several months, “citizen contributor” Patrick Corcoran steadfastly plugged his favorite Democratic congressional candidate, Mark Pera, on the Chicago Tribune’s user-generated, local reporting site, Triblocal.com. Corcoran wrote more than a dozen articles in support of Pera, and the Pera campaign happily linked to his stories on their site, reports Michael Miner of the Chicago Reader.

The doting stories didn’t raise an alarm online, but they did once they hit newsprint. Every week, a round up of the site’s best stories, Trib Local, is shipped with the Chicago Tribune. The January 10 print supplement’s leading headline—“Democrat Mark Pera picks up support”—caught the eye of the parents of a staffer for Pera’s rival campaign and Corcoran’s hand finally tipped: The “citizen contributor” was also the Pera campaign’s media spokesperson. Whoops.

Citizen journalism is a much-lauded fruit of internet democracy, as Adam Weinstein notes in Mother Jones, but the stories produced by these self-selected reporters are seldom vetted by editors or otherwise quality-controlled, spawning a briar patch of new media ethics questions. “The Triblocal.com kind of citizen journalism has at least one conspicuous defect,” writes Miner, “nothing gets written about unless somebody feels like doing the writing.”

—Jason Ericson

Image by  djloche , licensed under  Creative Commons .

For those who find the authority of Jim Cramer’s Mad Money insufficiently Biblical, the Jan.-Feb. issue of Mother Jones provides a financial narrative that hinges more squarely on the Good Book. Mariah Blake reports on apocalypse-minded evangelicals defrauded by Ness Energy International, a company claiming access to untapped Israeli oil fields. Faithful investors believed the tall tales of unknown reserves because of Biblical hints that the discovery of Israeli oil signals Armageddon. The prophesized oil was never found, and many investors were swindled out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Still, some continue to display a strange optimism. James Cojanis, an early investor who lost over $100,000 and may invest $100,000 more, emphasizes his sunny outlook:

“I’m glad the stock price is in the tank,” he says. “When they hit oil and the stock goes sky-high, that means Armageddon is around the corner.”

 —Michael Rowe

Holiday music hounds us at this time of year, especially if we happen to be supermarket employees, whose days are overrun with the plinking and sighing of electronic, instrumental remixes of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” But it doesn’t stop there.

Writing on Mother Jones’ blog, The Riff, Gary Moskowitz brings our attention to other musical offenses of the holiday season, in particular the Monster Ballads Xmas CD. The record features stalwarts of the ’80s hair-metal scene, such as Cinderella and Dokken, performing classic holiday tunes. You can hear some of these delightful aural baubles on the album’s MySpace page.

If you’ve been drubbed into a stupor by “Comfort and Joy,” thereby nullifying the song’s upbeat message, you’re likely to feel only further drubbing at the hands of Monster Ballads Xmas. Nevertheless, the video for Dokken’s “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” also featured on the MySpace page, deserves a chuckle, as does Moskowitz’s important question: “When Tom Keifer of Cinderella sings ‘Blue Christmas,’ all I can think is, who the hell is Tom Keifer?” God bless, Gary, and amen. —Michael Rowe