Month: November 2016

Surprisingly upbeat report from UN Meeting in Marakesh.

God I’m tired.

Across the political spectrum, observers are horrified by President elect Trump’s latest appointment to be his chief Advisor.

If Glenn Beck,  Amy Goodman, CNN, Seth Meyers, Samantha Bee, are horrified that your choice is a racist, anti-semitic, Putin loving, self-described “Leninist” bomb thrower, and the best conservatives at the National Review can say about it is, “..Steve Bannon is not Josef Goebbels” – you may have a problem.

National Review:

If ethnic and religious minorities are worried, it’s in part because Donald Trump and his intimates have spent the last several months winking at one of the ugliest political movements in America’s recent history.

Right Wing Watch:

On his television program last night, Glenn Beck sat down with some of his staff members to discuss the election results and Donald Trump’s transition into the White House. During the conversation, Beck once again issued a warning about Steve Bannon, the former head of the right-wing website Breitbart who has been tapped to serve as President Trump’s chief strategist and senior adviser, saying that if Americans accept Bannon’s elevation into the White House, “then we are racist.”

“If you know Steve Bannon’s agenda and his vision of America, it’s not pretty,” Beck said, falsely claiming that nobody in the media has been paying attention to the racist alt-right that Bannon has championed and insisting that is why the American people are not more alarmed by Bannon’s rise.

Beck said that Breitbart, under Bannon, was an arm of Trump’s presidential campaign from the very beginning and will now essentially become “state-run TV” that pushes the alt-right ideology on the nation.

“Nobody is looking into it. Nobody really cares,” Beck said. “When people really understand what the alt-right is, this neo-nationalist, neo-Nazi, white supremacy idea that Bannon is pushing hard; I hope they wake up because, if not, we are racist. If that’s what we accept and we know it, then we are racist. I contend people don’t know what the alt-right is yet.”

CNN:

Brad Griffin, a blogger who runs the white nationalist website Occidental Dissent using the pseudonym “Hunter Wallace,” said he thought Bannon’s hiring showed Trump would be held to his campaign promises.

“It makes sense to me,” he said. “Reince [Priebus] can certainly get more done on Capitol Hill. He will be an instrument of Trump’s will, not the other way around. Bannon is better suited as chief strategist and looking at the big picture. I think he will hold Trump to the promises he has already made during the campaign. We endorse many of those promises like building the wall, deportations, ending refugee resettlement, preserving the Second Amendment, etc. There’s a lot of stuff in there on which almost everyone on the right agrees.”

Griffin added, “We’re most excited though about the foreign policy implications of Bannon in the White House. We want to see our counterparts in Europe — starting in Austria and France — win their upcoming elections. We’re hearing reports that Breitbart is expanding its operations in continental Europe and that is where our focus will be in 2017.”

Jared Taylor, who runs the site American Renaissance, echoed those comments, saying Bannon would help hold Trump to his campaign rhetoric.

“There has been some waffling on some of candidate Trump’s signature positions: build the wall, deport illegals, end birth-right citizenship, take a hard look at Muslim immigrants, etc,” he said. “I suspect one of Steve Bannon’s important functions will be as an anti-waffler, who will encourage President Trump to keep his campaign promises.”

Chairman of the American Nazi Party, Rocky J. Suhayda, who wrote a post after Trump’s election night victory celebrating it as a call to action, said he was surprised at the pick of Bannon, but said it showed him Trump could follow through on his campaign promises.

“I must admit that I was a wee bit surprised that Mr. Trump finally chose Mr. Bannon, I thought that his stable of Washington insiders would have objected too vociferously,” Suhayda wrote in an email. “Perhaps The Donald IS for ‘REAL’ and is not going to be another controlled puppet directed by the usual ‘Wire Pullers,’ and does indeed intend to ROCK the BOAT? Time will tell.”

I’ve been (proudly) in Breitbart’s crosshairs, having been singled out for my video on satellite temperature data. Continue reading “Condition Orange: “White Nationalist” is PC Journo-Speak for Nazi.”

As dire as the Climate Crisis is, our immediate problem, and one of the greatest threats the planet has ever faced, is that our Governing apparatus is about to be turned over to straight up, loud and proud white nationalist fascists.

Key message: This is not Normal. This is not politics as usual. This is a 5 alarm fire for Democracy.

IN particular, the media’s overwhelming drive to normalize a Russian intervention in an American Election is the 5 million pound Gorilla in the Room, and anyone with any network or platform should make sure their contacts and networks keep this front and center.

Actions:

Stay calm

Begin conversations about this with people you know and agree with, as well as those who you do not know, but who need to be part of this.

Contribute to organizations that will defend constitutional rights,  ACLU etc, as well as environmental and civil organizations like Environmental Defense Fund,  Planned Parenthood, or other groups of your choice.

NBC News:

Steve Bannon, former president of the incendiary Breitbart News and more recently chief executive of Trump’s campaign, is taking on a role as “chief strategist and senior counselor.” Bannon’s ascension is the clearest sign yet that Trump will maintain his ties to the populist white nationalism that helped propel him to the White House against overwhelming opposition from party leaders and traditional media.

“The racist, fascist extreme right is represented footsteps from the Oval Office,” John Weaver, who advised Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 presidential campaign, tweeted in response to the news. “Be very vigilant America.” 

USAToday:

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, released a statement on Twitter congratulating Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus’ appointment to White House chief of staff, but also denouncing Bannons’ appointment.

“It is a sad day when a man who presided over the premiere website of the ‘alt right’ — a loose-knit group of white nationalists and unabashed anti-Semites and racists — is slated to be a senior staff member in the ‘people’s house,'” Greenblatt said in the statement. “We call on President-elect Trump to appoint and nominate Americans committed to the well-being of all our country’s people and who exemplify the values of pluralism and tolerance that make our country great.”

Other organizations, such as Jewish Voice for Peace and the Southern Poverty Law Center, made similar comments.

But on Monday Reince Priebus, who Trump announced would be his chief of staff Sunday, defended Bannon’s hire and called on people not to make judgements.

“I don’t know where [criticism is] coming from that’s not the Steve Bannon that I know,” Priebus said on ABC’s Good Morning America Monday.. “I find him not to be way that’ he’s being accused, I find him to be the opposite.”

“Don’t judge people based off what other people say,” he continued.

Continue reading “Condition Orange: Crisis in Democracy is Immediate Threat”

I was fortunate to interview Admiral David Titley on his recent visit to Central Michigan University.

Admiral Titley is one of the most well informed, measured, and credible spokespeople in the country for the issues of climate science.
More from this interview will be coming.

Financial Times:

China has warned Donald Trump that he will be defying the wishes of the entire planet if he acts on his vow to back away from the Paris climate agreement after he becomes US president next January.

In a sign of how far the world has shifted in recognising the need to tackle global warming, Beijing — once seen as an obstructive force in UN climate talks — is now leading the push for progress by responding to fears that Mr Trump would pull the US out of the landmark accord.

“It is global society’s will that all want to co-operate to combat climate change,” a senior Beijing negotiator said in Marrakesh on Friday, at the first round of UN talks since the Paris deal was sealed last December. The Chinese negotiators added that “any movement by the new US government” would not affect their transition towards becoming a greener economy.

India also joined in the warnings, saying Mr Trump’s appointment would force countries to reassess an accord hailed as an end to the fossil fuel era.

“Everyone will rethink how this whole process is going to unfold,” India’s chief negotiator, Ravi Prasad, told the Financial Times.

Recalling the way support for the earlier Kyoto protocol climate treaty crumbled after it was abandoned by another Republican president, George W Bush, Mr Prasad said he feared the Paris accord could suffer “a contagious disease that spreads” if the US withdrew.

Mr Trump’s sweeping victory on Tuesday has shaken what had appeared to be an unstoppable bout of global action to tackle climate change in the run-up to the two-week Marrakesh talks, which began on Monday.

Governments struck the first climate deal for aviation in October, just days before agreeing to phase out planet-warming hydrofluorocarbon chemicals used in air-conditioners.

The Moroccan hosts of this week’s talks had been planning a celebratory meeting to cap this unprecedented bout of activity. Instead, organisers awoke on Wednesday morning to find the world’s wealthiest country had a president-elect who has called global warming a hoax, pledged to “cancel” the Paris agreement and vowed to stop US funding of UN climate programmes entirely.

“They were in absolute shock,” said one person who saw Moroccan officials on Wednesday morning.

Adnan Amin, the director-general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, said “a sense of helplessness” had pervaded the Marrakesh talks, and “a certain amount of fear”.

Forbes:

And yet here is Trump, by his promises at least, insisting that coal mining is going to come back with all those glorious jobs. It just isn’t I’m afraid, economics is stronger than politics here. I’ve made this point before, back in May in fact:

The third reason is the killer: economics. Fracking has made natural gas cheaper than coal for power generation. Thus new generations of power plants are going to be gas ones, not coal. And refurbs and life extensions of coal plants aren’t going to happen for the same reason. There’s just not going to be anything like the same market for thermal coal in the future.

We’re not going to use as much coal in the future and the coal that we will use isn’t going to come from the Appalachian mines. Trump simply isn’t going to bring back all those mining jobs. They’re gone, gone forever. Just like those assembly line jobs in electronics. And pining for the lost blue collar jobs isn’t going to help in the slightest. The thing to do now is to work out what other task that same labor can do.

And the same point is being made today at Reuters:

Donald Trump’s election has thrown an apparent lifeline to beleaguered coal producers but he may not be able to do much to revive the fortunes of the industry.

The U.S. coal industry has been a victim of the shale revolution and the enormous quantities of cheap gas that have been unleashed by hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling.

There is not much a future Trump administration can do to protect coal producers, who have mostly been the victim of economic forces rather than politics and the Obama administration’s “war on coal”.

Kentucky.com:

In May, President-elect Donald Trump stood on the stage at the Charleston Civic Center in West Virginia, put on a miners helmet and pretended to shovel coal.

“If I win we’re going to bring those miners back,” Trump said at the rally. “…These ridiculous rules and regulations that make it impossible for you to compete … we’re going to take that all off the table, folks.”

With Trump’s election and Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, many in Kentucky are now waiting to cash in on the Republican promise of more coal jobs.

U.S. Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, though, wasn’t making any promises Friday.

“We are going to be presenting to the new president a variety of options that could end this assault,” McConnell said at the University of Louisville. “Whether that immediately brings business back is hard to tell because it’s a private sector activity.”

The interim president of the Kentucky Coal Association was more direct about the future of coal mining in Eastern Kentucky.

“I would not expect to see a lot of growth because of the Trump presidency,” Nick Carter said in an interview. “If there is any growth in Eastern Kentucky, it will be because of an improved economy for coal.”

Continue reading “Reality Check: Bringing Back Coal Not in the Cards”

Calling in to call them out.

Wired:

YESTERDAY, AMERICA ELECTED as president the apparently preferred candidate of Russia’s intelligence agencies. After a campaign season marred by the influence of hackers, including some widely believed to be on Vladimir Putin’s payroll, that outcome means more than a mandate for Trump and his coalition. For Russia, it will also be taken as a win for the chaos-injecting tactics of political hacks and leaks that the country’s operatives used to meddle in America’s election—and an incentive to try them elsewhere.

Following Donald Trump’s presidential win, and even in the weeks leading up to it, cybersecurity and foreign-policy watchers have warned that Russia’s government-sponsored hackers would be emboldened by the success of the recent string of intrusions and data dumps, including the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Security firms that analyzed the breaches, and US intelligence agencies, have both linked those attacks to the Kremlin. That Russia perceives those operations as successful, experts say, will only encourage similar hacks aimed at shifting elections and sowing distrust of political processes in Western democracies, particularly those in Europe. “What they’ll learn from this is, ‘We did it, we got away with it, we got the outcome we wanted,’” says James Lewis, a cybersecurity-focused fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This will only increase their desire to intervene.”

Continue reading “Russia’s Hack, Compliant Press, Climate Catastrophe”

Signature of the anti-science crowd.

Like greenhouse gases, hate is a long lived pollutant.

WFTV:

School leaders are investigating after two racist signs, one reading “colored” and one reading “whites only,” were posted above two water fountains at First Coast High School.

A picture of the signs was posted on social media and shared with Action News Jax on Thursday evening. We reached out to Duval County Public Schools to get more information.

DCPS spokesperson Laureen Ricks sent Action News Jax the following statement:

“School is investigating, but it appears to be a prank. Staff immediately removed the notes once it was brought to their attention.”

Harmless pranks continue.

https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/797051337326395392

Proving, once again, that there are stupid smart people.