Attacks on Aussie data provoke responses, many responses. And Climategate provokes death threats and responses.
Category Archives: Politics
Sexted To Death
Necessary caveat: sending nude pictures of yourself — at any age — is dumb. Still, this story, and the MSM reaction, is infuriating.
Thursday Linkorama
Sometimes, They Make Me Happy
The GOP, including Tom Coburn of all people, has come out aggressively against the Uganda law that would potentially execute gays. Bravo, guys. If only the President spoke against it that forcefully.
London Linkorama
The Return of Linkorama
The Conscience of a Conservative
Sully has a great post on why he left the right. I’m afraid I have to agree. The conservative alliance was always an uneasy one. I was never completely happy with sharing the party with the Religious Right and the neocons. Now that they have completely taken over the party and abandoned even the pretense of being a small government party, what have they got to offer me? Not being Democrats? That’s not enough anymore.
A similar post from Charles Johnson details how he went from being a climate skeptic to a climate “believer”. Again, it mirrors my own journey. The last IPCC report shook my disbelief in AGW. And the continual barrage of talking points from the skeptics has pushed me even further. I don’t support cap and trade. But I do support action.
Voice In the Wilderness
Charles Krauthammer, one of the smarter neocons, takes a defensible conservative position on global warming. We need more of this.
Obama in China
I’d get flayed for putting this on the other blog, so I’ll put it here. James Fallows has an interesting analysis of Obama’s trip to China. Far from being an embarrassment, some genuine progress was made.
The difference is that where Bush went in with useless bluster — bluster being the only thing that the Right Wing Echosphere cares about — Obama went in with quiet negotiation. Foreign policy should be like an iceberg — 90% of it being invisible to the public. I have no idea if any of it is going to work in the end (and nothing, it seems, can fix Israel). And I suspect that, as always, I won’t like some of what Obama does. But I like the long-term approach.
Honestly, it sometimes seems like the punditshere learned everything the know about foreign relations by playing Civilization.
Friday Linkorama
Update: This is the sort of thing I deal with whenever I argue that climate change might be real.
Friday Linkorama
Latest on GW
Why do I sometimes use the word “denial” for a certain class of global warming skeptics? Because of shit like this, in which hacked e-mails are quoted out of context to “prove” — in an extraordinarily weak way — that global warming is a hoax. As a scientist, the e-mails don’t sound unusual or conspiratorial to me. It sounds like what it is — private and sometimes flippant communication between people trying to unravel a very complex and difficult scientific question.
Update: Just read the comment stream over at Hot Air. I defy anyone to read it and not think “denial” is an appropriate word for the conspiracy theory that is thrown around anytime the subject of global warming comes up. The usual discredited talking points — global cooling, 1934, supposed falling temperatures, Mars temperatures, etc. — are all out in full force. And any attempt to dispute their absolute certainty that global warming is not just wrong, but a massive hoax, is shouted down and mocked. I put up a comment or too and was quickly labelled an idiot, a hysteric and asked if my screen was covered with spittle from a quite reasonable post.
This is not skepticism; this is sticking fingers in ears and yelling. This is not science; this is religion.
One question they never seem to have an answer for: what’s their big theory? What do they think the CO2 is doing? Nothing?
The Acorn Canard
52% of Republicans think ACORN stole the last election. That is, an organization that got outwitted by a dim-bulb film-maker and a skinny actress managed to pull off one of the greatest political conspiracies of all time.
Even if ACORN did manufacture votes — and bogus registrations of the Easter Bunny proves nothing — it is highly doubtful this made a difference.
1) ACORN would have been stealing votes primarily in parts of the country Obama was going to win anyway.
2) Barack Obama won by ten million votes. This would require vote-stealing on a scale that makes Richard Daley look honest.
3) That is assuming, of course, that all Republican political organization are as pure as wind-driven snow, which I somehow doubt.
None of this matter to conspiracy theorists, of course. Whether it is the JFK assassination or the moon landing, they are interested in confirming their preconceived notions, not analyzing objective fact.
In this case, however, there are parties with a very strong interest in promulgating this lie. They don’t want to believe that the country — a conservative country — rejected their eight years of fiscal recklessness, foreign policy buffoonery and Constitutional malfeasance.
The wreckage of the GOP is desperate to make the last eight years a triumph instead of a tragedy. They’re already attacking Reagan’s legacy, since many of his policies were one hundred eighty degrees from those animating the GOP’s corpse. Now they’re trying to rewrite the narrative of the past decade.
Me? I believe that up is up, down is down, black is black and white is white. My memory of the past eight years is clear and fierce. I’m not about to let some political shills engage in Soviet-style historical revisionism and tell me that everything was going swell until the evil liberals and media demeaned Bush, bashed Palin and stole the election. Too much has been lost for that.