Oldie but Goodie. Some long time viewers may remember how keynote speaker Pat Michaels nearly cleared out the room at the 2008 Heartland Climate Denial conference, when he suggested that in fact, the world is getting warmer, and humans have something to do with it, and that a favorite climate denial claim might in fact be, in his words, “a little unfair to the data”.
If you’re on a schedule, cut to Michael’s remarks about 2 minutes in.
Full disclosure – I grew up a full on fan of the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby era of Marvel comics. Although I have liked, really liked, some of the recent adaptations, I was sure, completely sure, – that this ensemble piece would be as disappointing and anti-climatic as the usual super bowl.
I was completely wrong.
I’ll make this short and I’m only going to say it once – if you think you are somehow above and beyond the childish medium of comic book inspired movies, and somehow miss seeing this in a theater – you are completely cheating yourself. This is a great movie that succeeds on every level, and even transcends its genre. (Trailer above is fun, but doesn’t come close to capturing what’s great about the film)
Mark Hughes in Forbes hit most of the high points without any spoilers.
..it’s true: Joss Whedon has defied all of the naysayers and skeptics who thought it couldn’t be done, he defied the hardline anti-Marvel fans who didn’t want it to be done, and he defied even those of us who had high expectations but who still didn’t anticipate what was really coming our way — The Avengers is the best superhero film ever made.
Drivers moving along Chicago’s inbound Eisenhower Expressway on Friday may have been surprised to see Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, staring at them from a massive billboard. “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” the billboard read in large maroon letters. Just below was the Web address www.heartland.org.
Hours later, the digital billboard was gone. It seems that the ad campaign, sponsored by the conservative Heartland Institute, had bombed.
“We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters, but we hope they understand what we were trying to do with this experiment,” the institute said late Friday afternoon said in a statement. “We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.”
The reason the signs came down is of course, that they were not having the desired effect. Instead of painting those who understand and trust science as lunatics, the signs reminded people of just how far into the looney tune realm the climate denial fringe has strayed. Heartland has now made Ted Kaczinsky as much their mascot as Joe Camel.
In explaining their poster campaign, Heartland generously allowed that “not all global warming alarmists are murderers or tyrants.” One wonders just what percentage of the National Academy of Science deniers believe ARE murderers and tyrants?
Probably what caused Heartland to panic was concern about their upcoming semiannual denialist freakshow, coming up in a few weeks. It appears there were signals that some of the few remaining high profile attendees willing to show up and be identified as supporters of the big oil/big tobacco agenda were getting ready to jump ship.
Now the Heartland Institute has suffered its first major defection in the way of GOP public officials: GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, a leading climate “skeptic,” will be pulling out of an upcoming conference sponsored by the group where he was supposed to speak, his spokesperson confirms to me.
The billboards, which were first reported by the UK Guardian, show the Unabomber or Manson saying: ”I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Future billboards may include Bin Laden, reported the Guardian, which referred to the billboards as “possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.”
The group has a conference set for later this month, and one of the featured speakers is Sensenbrenner. I asked Sensenbrenner’s spokesperson, Amanda Infield, if he’s still participating. She emails:
Congressman Sensenbrenner will not participate in the upcoming Climate Change Conference if the Heartland Institute decides to continue this ad campaign. We have contacted the Heartland Institute and voiced these same concerns to them.
Another day, another Tea Party tempest. I’m tired. More tomorrow.
What the hell. It’s Friday. I’ll play.
Heartland Institute, the purveyors of climate disinformation and fine tobacco promotions, has begun a billboard campaign using the images of mass murderers and psychopaths to represent science literate citizens who understand climate change.
Lovely, right?
I couldn’t help but create my own. Rather like shooting fish in a barrel.
Kind of like eating peanuts. I could do this all day, but more important tasks beckon.
Oil magnate T. Boone Pickens is not what you would call a liberal, or a tool of the democratic establishment. He is a conservative Texas Oil Baron. When he calls out Koch Industries for manipulating energy policy, its not like you’re hearing from Michael Moore. The video above is taken from a longer interview at Yahoo’s Daily Ticker.
The Kochs are, of course, among the richest people in the US, sons of a rabid right wing founding member of the John Birch Society.
Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch have been dominant financiers for conservative front groups and nonprofits for nearly three decades. Their money has flowed to organizations dedicated to lobbying for corporate and upper income tax cuts, as well as to groups responsible for mobilizing Tea Party rallies against President Obama. But the Koch family’s association with fringe right-wing groups began a generation earlier with Fred Koch, the patriarch of the clan.
–..the New American, the official mouthpiece of the John Birch Society, published a piece this morning celebrating Fred and the Koch family’s pivotal role in developing the group:
Koch warned that American institutions were honeycombed with communist subversives, from labor unions and tax-free foundations to universities and churches. Art and newsprint, radio and television — all these media had been transmuted into vehicles of communist propaganda. […] Fred Koch was no fly-by-night pamphleteer. He spent a generous portion of his later years using his wealth and influence to fight the communism he abhorred. He was an early member of the The John Birch Society’s National Council, an advisory group to JBS founder Robert Welch. Koch supported a variety of freedom-related causes, all the while continuing to build the company today known as Koch Industries.
The Bircher ode to Koch glosses over Fred’s record of bigotry. In a booklet he authored, Fred railed against civil rights leaders, and claimed the movement against racial segregation was a communist plot to use African Americans to destabilize the country. The Koch-funded Birchers held numerous rallies during the ’60s claiming integration would lead to a “mongrelization” of the races.
Continue reading “T. Boone Pickens: Koch Brothers Block Energy Policy”
The report above from last night’s PBS news hour starts out with good intentions, portraying the struggles of obviously passionate science teachers to convey the mainstream understanding of climate science.
The pernicious influence of Koch Foundation funding on PBS shows up in the inclusion of a spew of talking points from a non-scientist flack for the tobacco/oil funded Heartland Institute. An knowledgeable source emails me that more interview footage from leading scientists and science educators was left on the cutting room floor to make room for non-science “balance”.
More evidence that Climate denialists lead the way in the movement to create a nation of idiots.
The segment rightly links the movement to teach “creation science” in the classroom, with hostility toward climate education.
I was lucky that my one-time English teacher mom introduced me to Don Marquis’ “Archy and Mehitabel” essays early on. Sources not only of great humorous writing, but the fantastic illustrations of George (Krazy Kat) Herriman.
For the initiated, Archy is an intelligent cockroach, a reincarnated poet, who shares his thoughts by bumping his head off the keys of a typewriter. Mehitabel is a Cat. A savvy blogger recently jogged my memory on this prescient 1935 passage:
america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell
and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
and stole the rainfall from posterity
and it wont be long now
it wont be long
till everything is desert
from the alleghenies to the rockies
the deserts are coming
the deserts are spreading
the springs and streams are drying up
one day the mississippi itself
will be a bed of sand
ants and scorpions and centipedes
shall inherit the earth
men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn
rainfall passing off in flood and freshet
and carrying good soil with it
because there are no longer forests
to withhold the water in the
billion meticulations of the roots
it wont be long now It won’t be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone
dear boss i relay this information
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform
archy
Complete short poem, “what the ants are saying” – below:
Continue reading “Archy the Cockroach: Prescient on Climate Change in 1935”
The Muhammed Ali of the Music world – more popular and influential than ever, decades after his death.
Put hot liquids down. The Onion brings us more from Windbaggers on the threats from Big Wind power. And you thought they were just kidding.
Since posting my recent fortuitously timed video on wind power, I’ve been hearing the latest nonsense meme making the rounds of the usual BS vectors. “Global Warming is a Hoax, and Wind turbines are Causing it”.
The frenzy started after Liming Zhou, a scientist at the University of Albany, published a short studyin Nature Climate Change. Zhou’s team analyzed satellite data for a handful of large wind farms in west-central Texas. And he found that, between 2003 and 2011, the surface temperature in the immediate vicinity of Texas’ wind farms had heated up a fair bit, especially during the night hours, as the wind turbines pulled warmer air from the atmosphere down closer to the ground.
So, perfect fodder for the denial-o-sphere, big, bold, dumb, and wrong.
Conservative media outlets, including Fox Nation, Rush Limbaugh and Jim Hoft, are distorting the research to claim that wind farms “cause global warming” and Fox News’ morning show concluded “wind ain’t working.”
The long term solution is for journalists to be required to have taken physics 101. Failing that, we can always read what the actual scientists who performed the study tell us – that the effect is basically a local phenomenon, due to the mixing of higher, warmer air with lower, cooler air.
