They're going to fight for their right to make you sick.
“Who does the EPA think they are to tell us what we can and can’t do with our vehicles?” Wedge said.The vast majority listen to Rush, I'd guess.
No reason the unintended consequences should always be negative:
if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.Treehuggers and bird-lovers - and public health advocates who cared that poor kids were being poisoned - saved the cities and hundreds of millions of IQ points by getting lead out of gasoline.
Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
[Rick] Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
The Tennessee General Assembly passes a delusionally paranoid, anti-UN resolution against Agenda 21. The fact that it's anti-environmental? Bonus!
WHEREAS, according to the United Nations Agenda 21 policy, social justice is described as the right and opportunity of all people to benefit equally from the resources afforded us by society and the environment which would be accomplished by socialist/communist redistribution of wealthThis sounds like the John Birch Society bullshit (h/t @Trace Sharp) I heard growing up in Tennessee 40 years ago, and sure enough it is. Don't any of them wonder how we're still free if fluoridation was a communist conspiracy to drug us all into sheep-like obedience?
[A]longside the ordinary tacking of American political preference between Democrats and Republicans, conservatism continues to thrive. That's because power begets power: Democrats can be counted on to compromise with conservative nuttiness, and the media can be counted on to normalize it. And it's because there will always be millions of Americans who are terrified of social progress and of dispossession from whatever slight purchase on psychological security they've been able to maintain in a frightening world. And because there will always be powerful economic actors for whom exploiting such fear, uncertainty and doubt pays (and pays, and pays).What we had until Ronald Reagan and talk radio brought them out of the darkness was a social norm that scoffed at the fever swamp of ultra-conservative imagination. Well, nationally, not in the South. We no longer have that moderating national norm, which is really depressing, and the continuing reason wingnuts are so sensitive to any norm that limits their various and sundry bigotries.
Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it's not going away, either. It's just getting more powerful. That's a fact that a reality-based liberal just has to accept – and, from it, draw strength for the fight.
After all, anything that contributes to stupidity is good for Republimerica.
Global warming is real and well-correlated with the dramatic increase in atmospheric CO2 caused by the Industrial Revolution.
It's wicked hot all across America. Massachusetts is having torrential rainstorms that would seem like monsoon even in Memphis, where they would at least be more familiar. There are enough goddamn moths here in New England to carry off a flock of sheep, and no more pecorino romano for us.
Fox has intentionally effaced the difference between weather and climate, but even Fox's viewers have to be starting to wonder if maybe there is something to this global warming shit after all. Call out the big guns! Gotta keep those dollars flowing into fossil fuels! Most of all, can't let those liberals with their smug reliance on facts win.
Fox brings on Joe Bastardi, chief meteorologist of AccuWeather. Oooh, impressive. He reassures viewers that, not only is global warming wrong, it's transparently, obviously wrong. Bastardi is airily confused how such a theory could possibly have achieved such popularity. He leaves it to the hosts to introduce (in-traduce) slanders against scientists, and they do. "Poll shows Americans think scientists lie, the dirty egg-headed SOBs." (O.K., not quite.)
What are Bastardi's arguments?
First, conservation of energy, which he dresses up in its tuxedo as the first law of thermodynamics to make it sound as complex and authoritative as possible for the great unlearned. Bastardi is claiming that greenhouse gases would have to create energy to warm the earth. This claim immediately proves that he deserves nothing more than total mocking disdain. By the same argument, a greenhouse couldn't work either. Maybe Thelma and Delbert, sitting on their barcaloungers suckling the bullshit teat of Rupert Murdoch, have never been in a greenhouse, or maybe they think the gas bills must be immense to keep one of them so warm with all that single-pane glass.
This thermodynamic argument is the anencephalic descendant of the second law argument against evolution. (Yeah, I'm sure that one's been advanced with a straight face on Fox, too.) Only god can violate thermodynamic laws! More complex organisms couldn't possibly occur naturally in a physical environment of never-decreasing disorder. As if there were no sources of energy available to overcome entropy. Hint to convinced Fox viewers and other ignoramuses: Don't look up when you go out during the day. Oh, and don't think even a first thought, much less a second one, what makes it daytime. You might have to change your mind.
The sun, implicated in both evolution and global warming! Fox-aholics can't even believe in the sun anymore. The sun can be the energy source of global warming and global warming's cause can still be human because gases we've put into our atmosphere in huge amounts retain more of the sun's heat, rather than allowing it to radiate back into space. Where it has no effect on climate. But where it still exists. This is the first most basic scientific explanation of the warming data. It's almost as if half the population is immune to learning.
Second, Bastardi claims that LeChatelier's Principle prohibits this kind of change. Oooh, another fancy name - did I pronounce it correctly? It must be good stuff! Of course, Bastardi makes a total and elementary misconstruction of the real science. Sure, any chemical reaction becomes less responsive to an increase in one reagent as that increase grows further.
But that doesn't mean there's some magic fairy keeping the addition of a reagent from changing the final chemical concentrations. (If you believe there is a magic fairy, what's its rate constant, dickhead?) You may have more trouble dissolving that sixth heaping tablespoon of sugar into your iced tea, but until you get the solution saturated, you're making your swee' tea sweeter. Or you could just eat it out of the bowl.
Somehow, more and more CO2 has dissolved into the atmosphere, and while there it continues to have all its expected effects.
Republicans want corporations to be free to pollute, exploit, rape, and pillage. You want clean water, air, food? Those corporations will be happy to sell you your birthright from their exploitation of the common weal. At inflated prices, like what they get for bottled water.
In exchange, you and I might get a few crummy jobs, but they don't care a whit whether we can live a middle class life on what they'll deign to pay us.
This is the same approach they've taken to taxation, whole bakeries of bread for the wealthy, a few moldy crumbs for rest of us.
It did work for them. Moronic teabaggers.
Cue the denialists: "I'm driving down the Turnpike again today, and I don't see any space or time dilation."
Always remember that Fox News exists to unbalance any factual discussion in favor of Fox's hard-right, anti-environment, pro-corporatist, pro-wealth politics:
Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data...Who said this?...we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.
That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.(Wasn't Godwin's Law repealed?)
Teabagger rejoinders to the science of global warming:
“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”God and Rush tell him what he wants to hear. They couldn't both be wrong.
“Carbon regulation, cap and trade, it’s all just a money-control avenue,” Ms. Khuri added. “Some people say I’m extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too.”No comment!
“They’re trying to use global warming against the people,” Ms. Deaton said. “It takes away our liberty.”Pesky facts take away her right to believe whatever the hell she wants to believe, no matter how little evidence she might have for her infantile denial.“Being a strong Christian,” she added, “I cannot help but believe the Lord placed a lot of minerals in our country and it’s not there to destroy us.”
This doesn't pass the giggle test:
Sam Wyly this year was also named one of the world’s 10 “greenest” billionaires by Forbes magazine.Forbes is judging environmentalism by billionaires. Can we load a truck up with that bullshit and compost the hell out of it? Edward Wyatt of the New York Times can't tell shit from shinola:
In 2000, Sam Wyly was a principal contributor to Republicans for Clean Air, a group that bought ads extolling then-Gov. George W. Bush’s environmental record and criticizing the record of Senator John McCain.Yup, a Texan environmentalist, as opposed to the real kind.
Unless you're savagely inconsiderate of a major multinational corporation's feelings, don't go to this page.
(h/t Essays and Effluvia)
