Author: Mark J. Heinicke

Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse. . .

Science Takes Another Hit from Trump Administration

In case you didn’t catch this, Trump has appointed, for assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS  a woman who believes that abortion can cause breast cancer.  When challenged by the New York Times, instead of citing studies, Charmaine Yoest argued that scientists are “under the control of the abortion lobby.”

There may be more than one reason for opposing abortion, but making claims about a connection unknown to scientists at the CDC is a long leap into the Alternative Facts Universe (AFU).  Forgive me for playing another of my hunches as to the AFU mindset, but I imagine that Yoest’s claim is based on the fact that some women who have had abortions later get breast cancer.  Undoubtedly. I’m sure Charmaine Yoest has heard of more than one. The question then to ask is, how many women who never had an abortion also get breast cancer? That is, does the rate of women getting breast cancer after an abortion exceed the background breast cancer rate?

Continue reading “Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse. . .”

The Denialist Penitentiary

Republicans Who Know Climate Truth Are in Lockdown.

A convert to climate activism describes the dilemma of ambivalent Republicans as being in a “denialist penitentiary”—whose unforgiving  jailers are the Tea Party.

An interview of onetime denier Jerry Taylor by Sharon Lerner in The Intercept explains the path by which he became converted. As a conservative, he frames his case to “conservative elites” in terms of gambling.  In the face of dangerous uncertainty, the smart money hedges its bets. “We don’t know exactly what will happen. Given that fact, shouldn’t we hedge?” He emphasizes speaking in a “dispassionate” way to get his points across, and eschews talk about needing fundamental economic change—”to most conservatives, that’s just nails on a chalkboard.”

For interview of Taylor see How Jerry Taylor reversed course on climate

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“Very powerful”. . . a Trumpian Epiphany

The Errant Armada

Sorry, it’s almost impossible to get through a day without some shard of Trump-inspired government wreckage getting lodged in your throat, to be expelled by laughter over folly so ridiculous that future generations will have to conclude that someone made it up.  They would be viewing it through the cracked lens of Fake-News-Making that has become the paradigm for information dissemination in the Age of Social Media.

The ridiculous part was Donald Trump’s announcement of an “Armada” en route to the shores of North Korea, when it was at the moment actually headed in the other direction for a training exercise in the Indian Ocean. (Hapless White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was once again thrust into Alternative Facts Limbo, suspended between his clueless boss on one side, and on the other side a Press Corp hungry for the truth.)

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Civility on the Chopping Block: Why Democrats Lose

What Mitch McConnell’s Total War Tells Us

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had no qualms about squashing the Democrat Party’s attempt to filibuster the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court, any more than he had qualms about refusing to allow Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland even to be heard in committee a year ago.  The Garland episode was abundantly unfair. Certainly Mitch McConnell in his heart of hearts knew that to be so.

But Mitch McConnell doesn’t care about fairness. Just as with his categorically obstructionist policy regarding all things Obamain, fairness was the farthest thing from his mind.  All’s fair in love and war is the axiom by which he and his fellow Republicans operate. Whatever we may think about McConnell’s ugly enough racial and personal biases against the former President, the key deciding factor that animated his obstructionism was the challenge to Business as Usual represented by the upstart senator Obama. . . and it had to be crushed at all costs.

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Some Sort-of Good News on Endangered Species

Amid the deluge of sickening environmental news in the U.S., there are a few somewhat bright spots from abroad

On Tigers: Cautious Optimism in Thailand: Tigers here

China’s Move toward Shutting Down Ivory Trade:  Chinese crackdown on ivory trade

Environmental Impacts of Chinese Looting of Resources Worldwide

China Resource Grabs

More “charismatic” animals such as elephants could slow Chinese resource exploitation around the world.  The sad and not-so-sad reality is that elephants are easy to love, and their killers easy to hate. Most of the endangered species on Earth do not have an equivalent “poster child” to represent them, and they are quietly being crushed under the bulldozer of economic “progress.”  In a world where celebrity tweets get more of our attention than trees and rivers, there’s little standing in the way.

 

Get the Cold Shoulder: Speak Out Against Climate Change Denial

Cautionary Advice on Opposing Climate Change Denial

Confronting climate change denial carries a social cost. That’s the finding of a study done by University of Exeter, as reported by Adam Corner in The Guardian:  Social Cost of Speaking Out

Just think of the social cost in the 19th Century for speaking out against slavery, or against denying women the vote. Or, in 1938 Germany, speaking out against oppression of Jews?  From the findings of this survey, you can be pretty sure the cost was high.  Adam Corner speaks of the importance of “potential collateral damage caused by challenging climate denial. . . ” He warns against losing the climate opinion war by engaging in battles that may degrade your social acceptability and thus your influence. “Being right,” he maintains, “is not the same thing as being persuasive.”

At What Cost Speaking Your Mind?

I’m not sure whether Adam Corner’s mindset reflects a British bias toward politeness, or a pragmatism that could prove useful in changing public opinion. If the latter, then just how his prescription for “emphasizing positive social norms” could be carried out is pretty vague. You also have to take into account Corner’s using the outworn metaphor, “collateral damage,” to refer to a psychological condition.  If “positive social norms” sounds jargony, and the use of “collateral damage” sounds tone-deaf, then you have to wonder about Corner’s analytic edge.

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The Consolation of Big Numbers: The Long View

[Let’s back away a few trillion steps from our world’s tragedies, comedies, inspirations, follies, triumphs, losses, meaningless accidents and meaningful enterprises, to muse upon the otherworldly. It gives me some tranquility at a time when tranquility is hard to come by. To do so, I will have to venture far into Nerdland.  If big numbers leave you cold, stop right here.]

Zillions of Planets Akin to Ours?

While here on our own planet things are lurching from bad to worse, I was comforted to hear the news of nonzero odds for the habitability of  several planets in the “nearby” solar system TRAPPIST-1.  Located a mere 40 light years from us, these planets are rocky, not too big and not too small, not too heavy, not too light, and at a distance from their sun that liquid water could exist on them, and harbor Earthlike life forms. Their distance from their sun is smaller than the orbit of Mercury around ours, but the star is so cool—an “ultra cool dwarf”—that three of them are evidently situated in the “Goldilocks Zone” amenable, with the presence of water, to life as we know it.

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THEY did it! The Signature Theme of the Trump Presidency

It Was the Other Guys Who Screwed Up – the Guiding Principle of Trump Governance

Confronted by a reporter with actual indisputable facts contravening Donald Trump’s boast about his massive electoral college victory, Trump replied “I was given this information.” Sure, and two months after the election he still had not bothered to confirm that which he had been “given“—which was no more complicated than comparing three or four numbers.

Whether this kind of prevarication is a deliberate lie, or evidence of Trump’s lack of curiosity as to facts, is not exactly clear. But whichever it is, the man’s instinct is immediately to shrug off responsibility. Something goes wrong, it is someone else’s fault.

Likewise, concerning the death of Ryan Owens in the botched raid in Yemen, he assigned the responsibility for Owens’s death to the  generals: “They lost Ryan.”  Moreover, he made a point that the operation had been planned during the “totally disastrous”  Obama presidency—no matter that Obama had rejected carrying it out, it had to be something Trump was not responsible for. Two times over.

Of course, his attribution of the loss of the popular vote in the election to fraud on an unprecedented scale—for which not a shred of proof has been adduced—belongs to the same pattern.

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Rogue Republicans for Presidential Transparency

Apparently there are more than one Republican speaking out for release of Trump’s tax returns (see below).  Nevertheless, while Iowan Republican congressman David Young says it’s a “no-brainer,” the same guy refused to sign a letter from other Republicans requesting it.  Such is the climate of political fear in the Republican Party.

Intimidation is Trump’s time-tested tactic, whether it’s over Democrats, the press, the judiciary, minorities of various ethnic, racial, religious, cultural, physically or mentally handicapped, or various political stripes (nothing to do with ideology, only whether they comply with any Trumpian whim. Also members of his own party about whom he has no compunction in attacking with a tweet. He’s used to bullying and insulting people in his own business and making it work for him; it seems not yet to have occurred to him that it doesn’t work to bully everyone. (The example of Paul Ryan notwithstanding. I don’t believe Ryan fears Trump; rather he thinks he can use Trump. Good luck, )

Republicans call for release of tax returns

It seems that an increasing number of people are coming around to ther recollection that “The only thing for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing,” said by Edmund Burke in the 18th Century( if he were alive today, I think he would have included women as well).  It appears that the Republicans who are doing nothing must have something else on their minds, such as the next primary.

 

How to Slow Global Warming, for Real

Failure and More Failure: Time to Get Real

If you are a typical reader of this blog, much of what you’ll see below is not news . But my hope is to frame questions about climate change and its remedies in a coherent way. . . and also to make the argument that. . . you’ll see.

As much as climate change believers have attempted to rein in the combustion of fossil fuels to reduce CO2 emissions, they have largely failed. It doesn’t matter what accord or protocol we’re talking about—Paris, Copenhagen, Kyoto—economic considerations (especially in India and China), and the slow development of zero carbon technologies are preventing us from meeting the goals.

That’s even without the worsening of U.S. emissions we can expect for the next four years—at least.

The good news is that CO2 emissions worldwide have ceased growing—we may be at a plateau with some promise of  reduction.

Slowing CO2 Emissions

Continue reading “How to Slow Global Warming, for Real”