If you have “…been part of anti-semitic groups since the 1970s,.. go to Neo-Nazi rallies, … were part of the White People’s Party, … dress in Nazi garb,..celebrate Hitler’s birthday…” talk about the “Jews media”…and the “two party, jew party, queer party system”….and you say that “the holocaust” is “poppycock, an extortion racket”.
…you maybe, just might be, .. a Nazi.
But for sure, you are the Republican Candidate for Congress in Illinois Third Congressional District.
Jones is a remarkable specimen of modern American life. He no longer calls himself a Nazi, yet he spends his time screaming about how Jews are to blame for everything and calling the Holocaust “an extortion racket.” What else, exactly, does being a Nazi involve, besides the moral disasters that await if these views go unchallenged in the public square?
The Republican Party refuses to put a stop to his candidacy. Where is their opponent for Jones in the Republican primary—you know, someone who’s not at least a de factoNazi? The essential moral cowardice of today’s Republican leadership is breathtaking. It’s no longer enough for the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells to stand idly by as the president stomps on our democratic norms and makes a mockery of this nation’s founding principles from the Oval Office. It’s not enough for them to let Roy Moore happen. Now they may allow Arthur Jones to get dangerously close to the United States Congress, all because they’re afraid of their own base. Continue reading “When a Holocaust Denier Runs for Congress, He Chooses the Party of Denial”
A state-wide poll of conservative Ohio voters finds that 85 percent would pay something extra in their monthly bills for power generated by renewable technologies such as wind and solar. Nearly half of those polled said they would be willing to pay between $10 and $20 extra every month for green power. The release of the polling results by the Ohio Conservative Energy Forum comes as state lawmakers begin hearings on legislation mandating renewable energy, minimum property setback rules for wind turbines, as well as new subsidies for old coal and nuclear power plants.
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Key points in the survey results include:
Conservative voters generally support an “all of the above” position on how electricity is generated, not wanting to limit the newer technologies.
About a quarter of those surveyed think at least half of the power sold in Ohio should come from renewable sources, while four in 10 think 51 percent to 100 percent should be generated by renewable technologies.
Two-thirds of the voters who were asked how they felt about monthly surcharges to keep old coal power plants running said they opposed such charges. Surcharges for FirstEnergy’s nuclear fleet were rejected by a larger margin, 69 percent.
A significant plurality, 43 percent, believe that increasing wind and solar installations in Ohio will create jobs. Amazon and Facebook have repeatedly stressed that they want to power their facilities with renewable energy.
Conservatives are willing to pay higher monthly bills for green power, with 27 percent saying they would pay $10 a month extra and another 14 percent willing to pay $20 a month extra.
The willingness to support green energy with higher monthly bills is evident across all income levels, with nine out of 10 voters earning less than $40,000 annually saying they would be willing to pay more.
Nearly eight out of 10 conservative voters indicated they would be willing to tell Republican candidates to support energy efficiency policies and the growth of wind and solar in the state.
Overall, 82 percent said they would support energy efficiency programs, 60 percent said they would support rules requiring more green energy in the state, 87 percent net metering rules that require utilities to pay customers with solar arrays for extra power they generate, and 76 percent said they support increasing research and development into better battery storage systems.
The poll is pretty much consistent with results that have been seen around the country in recent years – naturally, Koch Brothers “conservatives” don’t like it .
More scary news about Permafrost.
Important to remember that what I am hearing over and over again about the permafrost feedback – is that, far-and-away, the biggest element of uncertainty about how much will melt – is still what Human beings decide to do with greenhouse gases.
We already knew that thawing Arcticpermafrost would release powerful greenhouse gases. On Monday, scientists revealed it could also release massive amounts of mercury — a potent neurotoxin and serious threat to human health.
Permafrost, the Arctic’s frozen soil, acts as a massive ice trap that keeps carbon stuck in the ground and out of the atmosphere — where, if released as carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas would drive global warming. But as humans warm the climate, they risk thawing that permafrost and releasing that carbon, with microbial organisms becoming more active and breaking down the ancient plant life that had previously been preserved in the frozen earth. That would further worsen global warming, further thawing the Arctic — and so on.
That cycle would be scary enough, but U.S. government scientists on Monday revealed that the permafrost also contains large volumes of mercury, a toxic element humans have already been pumping into the air by burning coal.
There are 32 million gallons worth of mercury, or the equivalent of 50 Olympic swimming pools, trapped in the permafrost, the scientists wrote in a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. For context, that’s “twice as much mercury as the rest of all soils, the atmosphere, and ocean combined,” they wrote.
“As permafrost thaws in the future, some portion of this mercury will get released into the environment, with unknown impact to people and our food supplies,” said Kevin Schaefer, a scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., and a co-author of the study. The research was led by Paul Schuster, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and was co-authored by 16 other federal, university-based and independent researchers.
The scientists performed the research by taking cores from permafrost across Alaska. They measured mercury levels and then extrapolated to calculate how much mercury there is in permafrost across the globe, where it covers large portions of Canada, Russia and other northern countries.
“We figure that this represents the buildup of mercury during and since the last Ice Age,” Schaefer said.
Mercury, a naturally occurring element, binds with living matter across the planet — but the Arctic is special. Normally, as plants die and decay, they decompose and mercury is released back to the atmosphere. But in the Arctic, plants often do not fully decompose. Instead, their roots are frozen and then become buried by layers of soil. This suspends mercury within the plants, where it can be remobilized again if permafrost thaws. Continue reading “Permafrost: Now with Added Mercury”
Save the video above (17 minutes) for later, once you get thru the post below.
If you’ve been watching the staggering mountain of debt being built up by the “conservatives” in the current congress, you may have wondered where all the fiscal austerity, pay-as-you-go Tea Party nut bags are now….
Don’t wonder. They were always the racist tools you thought they were. It goes deeper than you think.
Republicans used to profess to be extremely worried about the budget deficit. Many of us suspected at the time that they were full of it. And one big thing we’ve learned this week is that they were, indeed, full of it.
Not just in the narrow sense that they both went on to enthusiastically endorse a $1.5 trillion tax cut late last year. Nor even in the somewhat broader sense that the real cost of that tax cut is much higher than $1.5 trillion when you consider the various accounting gimmicks and bad-faith phaseouts that were used to squeeze it under that figure.
Even under the weird linguistic conventions of American conservative politics where deficits caused by tax cuts don’t count as real deficits, today’s budget deal — a big, multi-billion dollar increase in military spending “offset” by a nearly-as-large increase in non-military spending — gives up the game entirely. They don’t care, on any level, about the size of the federal budget deficit.
The anti-science movement is rooted in the decades old realization among conservative corporate and political entities, that the findings of science were not always compatible with the economic interests of the wealthy and powerful. (read this post first for background. If you still have 17 minutes, the video above is worth your time)
The publication of an exhaustive investigation into the origins of a tobacco funded anti-science movement got headlines last week, as clear lines can now be drawn between corporate pirates like David Koch, the Tobacco barons, and “grassroots” movements like the Tea Party, all of which are prominent in the climate denial movement. (for example, we have at least one prominent Tea Party member who regularly posts his climate denialist views in comment threads here)
The study, which appears on Feb. 8 in the journal Tobacco Control, shows that rhetoric and imagery evoking the 1773 Boston Tea Party were used by tobacco industry representatives as early as the 1980s as part of an industry-created “smokers’ rights’’ public relations campaign opposing increased cigarette taxes and other anti-smoking initiatives.
From previously secret tobacco industry documents available at the UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, IRS filings and other publicly available documents, the study authors traced a decades-long chain of personal, corporate and financial relationships between tobacco companies, tobacco industry lobbying and public relations firms and nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party.
A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene.
Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving climate disruption.
The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party’s anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke.
“Nonprofit organizations associated with the Tea Party have longstanding ties to tobacco companies, and continue to advocate on behalf of the tobacco industry’s anti-tax, anti-regulation agenda.”
The two main organizations identified in the UCSF Quarterback study are Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. Both groups are now “supporting the tobacco companies’ political agenda by mobilizing local Tea Party opposition to tobacco taxes and smoke-free laws.” Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity were once a single organization called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). CSE was founded in 1984 by the infamous Koch Brothers, David and Charles Koch, and received over $5.3 million from tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, between 1991 and 2004.
In 1990, Tim Hyde, RJR Tobacco’s head of national field operations, in an eerily similar description of the Tea Party today, explained why groups like CSE were important to the tobacco industry’s fight against government regulation. Hyde wrote:
“… coalition building should proceed along two tracks: a) a grassroots organizational and largely local track,; b) and a national, intellectual track within the DC-New York corridor. Ultimately, we are talking about a “movement,” a national effort to change the way people think about government’s (and big business) role in our lives. Any such effort requires an intellectual foundation – a set of theoretical and ideological arguments on its behalf.”
The common public understanding of the origins of the Tea Party is that it is a popular grassroots uprising that began with anti-tax protests in 2009.
However, the Quarterback study reveals that in 2002, the Kochs and tobacco-backed CSE designed and made public the first Tea Party Movement website under the web address www.usteaparty.com. Here’s a screenshot of the archived U.S. Tea Party site, as it appeared online on Sept. 13, 2002:
On Wednesday, lawmakers in Idaho voted to adopt new science standards for the state, but chose to remove key references to climate science.
The vote came just days after public testimony from students and teachers overwhelmingly supported including climate science in the public school standards.
“At what point do we trust our teachers?” Rep. Sally Toone, a Democrat who voted against removing the climate references, said during a House Education Committee hearing. “We have great teachers and they have spent thousands of hours on this document.”
The document, known as the Idaho Content Standards, includes key metrics for students from kindergarten through high school. Lawmakers voted to remove all supporting science content included in the standards, which often went into more detail about human-caused climate change. The lawmakers also voted to remove one paragraph from the state’s performance standards that asked students to be able to “describe that energy and fuels are derived from natural resources and their uses affect the environment.” Examples of how fuels affect the environment included “air pollution from burning of fossil fuels.”
Rep. Scott Syme, a Republican who proposed eliminating the performance standard as well as all supporting content, argued that the standard forced students to come to a particular conclusion rather than draw their own conclusions based on evidence.
Note to Flat Earthers, Idaho Legislators hold out hope.
Rep. Scott Syme, a Republican who proposed eliminating the performance standard as well as all supporting content, argued that the standard forced students to come to a particular conclusion rather than draw their own conclusions based on evidence.
Previously, Syme had said that he didn’t care “if the students come up with a conclusion that the earth is flat – as long as it’s their conclusion, not something that’s told to them.”
While SpaceX managed to launch a giant Falcon Heavy rocket this week, using primitive “math” and “physics” – the science denial community was not to be outdone.
Ok, outdone this time, but they are determined, and they know they’re right.
Over the weekend, flat-Earther and DIY rocketeer Mike Hughes tried again to launch himself into space. Unfortunately, he failed. As a result, his belief that the Earth isn’t round stands. The Washington Post has been following Hughes’s misadventures:
All critics would be silenced, Hughes promised then, when he finally launched on private property outside the town of Amboy, Calif., on Saturday….
“I pulled the plunger five different times,” Hughes said. “I considered beating on the rocket nozzle from the underneath side. But you can’t get anyone under there. It’ll kill you. It’ll scald you to death. It’ll blow the skin and muscle off your bones.”..
Hughes’s plans are unclear now. He said he’d take apart the rocket to see what went wrong, but he has commitments to think of besides science. He was supposed to be in court on Tuesday, he told the crowd, because he was suing the governor of California for unspecified reasons. He was also trying to claim the legal right to Charles Manson’s guitar. He is a man of many ambitions…
“Guys, I’m sorry,” Hughes said. “What can you do?”
Watching the Falcon Heavy take off put me in mind of a classic science fiction movie of the 50s.
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off on its maiden flight from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It is the world's biggest rocket. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk even stored a red Tesla Roadster in the payload.
Misinformation can have significant societal consequences. For example, misinformation about climate change has confused the public and stalled support for mitigation policies. When people lack the expertise and skill to evaluate the science behind a claim, they typically rely on heuristics such as substituting judgment about something complex (i.e. climate science) with judgment about something simple (i.e. the character of people who speak about climate science) and are therefore vulnerable to misleading information. Inoculation theory offers one approach to effectively neutralize the influence of misinformation. Typically, inoculations convey resistance by providing people with information that counters misinformation.
In contrast, we propose inoculating against misinformation by explaining the fallacious reasoning within misleading denialist claims. We offer a strategy based on critical thinking methods to analyse and detect poor reasoning within denialist claims. This strategy includes detailing argument structure, determining the truth of the premises, and checking for validity, hidden premises, or ambiguous language. Focusing on argument structure also facilitates the identification of reasoning fallacies by locating them in the reasoning process.
Because this reason-based form of inoculation is based on general critical thinking methods, it offers the distinct advantage of being accessible to those who lack expertise in climate science. We applied this approach to 42 common denialist claims and find that they all demonstrate fallacious reasoning and fail to refute the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic global warming. This comprehensive deconstruction and refutation of the most common denialist claims about climate change is designed to act as a resource for communicators and educators who teach climate science and/or critical thinking.
Climate myths are often contradictory – it’s not warming, though it’s warming because of the sun, and really it’s all just an ocean cycle – but they all seem to share one thing in common: logical fallacies and reasoning errors.
John Cook, Peter Ellerton, and David Kinkead have just published a paper in Environmental Research Letters in which they examined 42 common climate myths and found that every single one demonstrates fallacious reasoning. For example, the authors made a video breaking down the logical flaws in the myth ‘climate changed naturally in the past so current climate change is natural.’
