Category: Uncategorized

SEND THIS FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY STOOGE BACK TO OKLAHOMA AND PRAY FOR OKLAHOMA.

To have Scott Pruitt heading the EPA is not so much a matter of hiring a fox to guard the henhouse as it is to hire a demolition crew to bulldoze the henhouse and crush the detritus to a pulp. 

At least the damage Jess Sessions will inflict as Attorney General may potentially be reversed.  But the damage Scott Pruitt can do to the environment as head of the EPA—to include pretty much dismantling the organization itself, as he has already attempted to do as Oklahoma Attorney General—can cascade down for decades.  Toxins such as mercury, lead, cadmium, and arsenic released by coal burning are natural elements that can poison air and water for eons to come. Not quite as permanent is atmospheric carbon dioxide (it is a compound, after all, not an element), but it naturally persists for centuries, plural.*

I’ve thrown in some links below ⇓ to pump up your level of outrage and hope you’ll ask your Senators to send Pruitt back to the fracking-riddled, earthquake-rattled state of Oklahoma whence he came.**

Continue reading “Scott Pruitt: No, No, No, and No”

If you are like me, recently you were willing to be persuaded that there was a 5-year “Pause” in Global Warming early in this century.  Not that the world was not getting hotter, but that the rate of getting hotter (the 2nd derivative)  had dropped.

T’aint so. Science (for what it’s worth these days) says so. I got this out of The Guardian, so it might have missed the mainstream U.S. media.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jan/04/new-study-confirms-noaa-finding-of-faster-global-warming

Didn’t the “pause” seem plausible? Thank the fossil fuel industry for that major disinformation campaign (a “hoax” in right wing parlance)—and I fell for it. Now I know better. Satan was subtle, and so are those folks.

I’m linking you to a post on a blog I write on the Road Race Management website, dealing with Nike’s program to help a man run a 2 hour. marathon. I poke a little fun at Nike, but also make a serious argument that. . .

Breaking2 – Beyond Human Limitations?

Anyone who has caught themselves wondering, why the hell am I putting so much time into online chatter? will like this.

Those who have not caught themselves may not like it so much.

There follows a link to spots from an ad campaign by Nike—a company which I usually deprecate for its efforts to totally dominate the sports clothing and footwear market—here humorously prodding us into some needed self-awareness. Some readers commented they cannot stop watching these spots. . . hmm.

Some sharp jabs from Nike

A partial victory! An appeals court gave a go-ahead to climate scientist Michael Mann’s defamation case against his poisonous critics—it will go to trial by jury. The defendants are the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Mark Steyn writing for the National Review.

Check out: Appeals Court Favors Mann

Speaking of the National Review, I picked up a copy while in the library yesterday in the interest of listening  to The Other Side (i.e., the not-so- parallel universe where pompous conservatives ply their lofty intellectual trade.).

Believe me, I tried to read with an open mind—I really did.  But I didn’t get very far.  I think what most got to me was the smug, dismissive tone (in two different articles and an editorial)—the casting of liberals as near-hysterical alarmists who every day go into a panic about a new patch of the Sky Falling.

Do we liberals do that (I mean, do we belittle the opposition with such self-satisfaction, not that we go into panics)? Maybe I do, although I like to think I try to address those folks on a level playing field. Being sarcastic, sure, but without sounding like I view them as rodents scuttling about in the basement. For example, I don’t speak of climate change deniers as ignoramuses. Is my reference to a parallel universe an unfair, belittling metaphor?

Something to think about when supposing oneself objective.

 

 

Harassment, threats, bad-mouthing, exposure of private matters, and other forms of bullying are rife on the internet. You can get your tragic fill of stories of suicides from bullying here: six deadly cases.

Cyberbullying is a scourge that seems to have no cure, as long as free speech is a cornerstone of democracy. Measures have been taken by Facebook and Twitter to minimize abuse—as private enterprises, they are not bound by the same rules as governments—yet there’s no way to stamp it out entirely.

So? We’ve always had bullying. Although bullying in general may be on the rise, what’s so special about online bullying?

There are three characteristics that make online bullying especially pernicious:  (1) the cloak of anonymity available to abusers; (2) the immediacy with which information (or lies) can be broadcast to the world; (3) the size of the audience—potentially, everyone on the planet with a computer or cell phone, except for censored networks such as in China and North Korea.

OK, so much is obvious—but these factors are synergistic: they amplify each other. What’s more, they set an example that encourages any troll who may once have been reluctant, to try their own hand. Even without anonymity, on account of speed, size of audience, and imitation, online abuse can quickly metastasize into a psychological, if not physical, atrocity. Young people can be scarred for life, and even many adults—such as the women who are deleting their blogs following deluges of hate—will never be able to ban these cruelties from their heads.

Most of the targets of this abuse are women, the perpetrators men. If this sounds like things going on in the “real” world, then we have to see the Internet acting as an extension of misogyny and hate.  We are like civilians living in a digital war zone.