Climate Change Real • Fukushima Dangers Were Hidden • Republicans Lie • How Our Wars Help Al Qaeda • Racist Voter ID laws • STUDY: Pot 20 Times More Harmful than Cigarettes • Swine Flu FAR Deadlier than Reported • USA Doesn't Believe in Evolution •

- Japanese Gov't Hid Radiation Information from Public

The information, showing residents in an area northwest of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear plant were being exposed to their annual permissible dose of radiation within only eight hours, was not made public, and those residents were not evacuated.

- What Is Wrong With Our Education System? Almost Half the Population Doesn't Accept Evolution

Rejecting evolution expresses more than an inability to think critically; it relies on a fundamentally paranoid worldview. --- Do you know what the worst thing about the recent Gallup poll on evolution is? It isn’t that 46 percent of respondents are creationists (“God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years or so”). Or that 32 percent believe in “theistic evolution” (“Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process”). Or that only 15 percent said humans evolved and “God had no part in this process.” It isn’t even that the percentage of Americans with creationist views has barely budged since 1982, when it was 44 percent, with a small rise in the no-God vote (up from 9 percent) coming at the expense of the divine-help position (down from 38 percent). Or that 58 percent of Republicans are creationists, although that does explain a lot.It’s that the proportion of college graduates who are creationists is exactly the same as for the general public. That’s right: 46 percent of Americans with sixteen long years of education under their belt believe the story of Adam and Eve is literally true.

- Korean scientists hit back at creationist textbook campaign

A group of 30 South Korean evolutionary scientists and palaeontologists has released a statement condemning a successful campaign by the creationist group Society for Textbook Reform (STR) to remove some examples of evolution from high-school biology textbooks

- Fox Marks UN Earth Summit By Denying Global Warming

As world leaders gather for the UN's Rio+20 Earth Summit this week in Brazil, Fox is taking the opportunity to once again deny the threat of climate change

- The Evil of Our Interventionist Wars

Nearly all states in the Middle East have appalling human rights records, some of them with even fewer redeeming features than Gadaffi’s Libya or Assad’s Syria. But then those states, such as Saudi Arabia, are close allies of the West. Only the terminally naïve or dishonest argue that the states targeted by the West have been selected for the benefit of their long-suffering citizens. Rather, they have been chosen because they are seen as implacably opposed to American and Israeli interests in the region.

- Statement of Ralph Nader on Supreme Court Pro-Corporate Decision

In reversing the judgment of the [Republican dominated] Supreme Court of Montana that found corporate independent expenditures in elections to be corrupting, the usual “gang of five” majority on the Supreme Court continued its judicial drive to change the meaning of the preamble to our Constitution from “we the people” to “we the corporations.”

- 2009 swine flu outbreak was 15 times deadlier: study

The swine flu pandemic of 2009 killed an estimated 284,500 people, some 15 times the number confirmed by laboratory tests at the time, according to a new study by an international group of scientists.

- Eat Less Meat, Save The World

If you believe that earth’s natural resources are limitless, which maybe was excusable 100 years ago but is the height of ignorance now,  or that “technology will fix it” or that we can simply go mine them in outer space with Newt Gingrich, I guess none of this worries you. But if you believe in reality, and you’d like that to be a place that your kids get to enjoy, this is a big deal.

- How Drones Help Al Qaeda

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants; they are not driven by ideology but rather by a sense of revenge and despair. Robert Grenier, the former head of the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center, has warned that the American drone program in Yemen risks turning the country into a safe haven for Al Qaeda like the tribal areas of Pakistan — “the Arabian equivalent of Waziristan.”

- The Danger of Endless War video

The United States is engaged in a seemingly endless war against a nebulous enemy. Nation Editor Katrina vanden Heuvel, appearing on Current's Viewpoint with Eliot Spitzer, explains that by using drones and employing the indefinite detention of enemy combatants, the United States is undermining its own democracy and diminishing its stature abroad.

- Study Finds Media Overwhelmingly Repeat GOP "Job Killer" Allegations With No Verification?

Media have overwhelmingly repeated claims by Republican politicians and corporations that government policies are "job killers" without citing any evidence for this claim according to a new study.

- Americans saw wealth plummet 40 percent from 2007 to 2010, Federal Reserve says

The recent recession wiped out nearly two decades of Americans’ wealth, according to government data released Monday, with ­middle-class families bearing the brunt of the decline.

- Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Places Expiration Date on Democracy

Back in April, Pennsylvania Secretary of State Carol Aichele visited the editorial board of the Erie Times-News newspaper to speak with them about the new photo voter ID bill Gov. Tom Corbett had just signed into law. The bill is supposed to fight or prevent voter fraud, but like with every other state that has passed voter ID laws, this fraud is mostly a boogeyman that seems to only haunt Republicans in their dreams (Check this Rolling Stone slideshow for an excellent ride through voter fraud myth debunkment). .... The stakes are high for Pennsylvania, which is a perennial battleground state, and which has a long history of disenfranchising voters, particularly black students.

- Colorado Wildfire: Our Scorching Future?

Hayhoe, along with an international team of scientists, discovered that climate change will disrupt fire patterns across over 80 percent of the globe by the end of the century. “Scientists found compelling agreement in long term models that more fires would occur at mid-to-high latitude areas like North America

- U.S. completes warmest 12-month period again, smashes spring record

The period from June 2011 to May 2012 was the warmest 12-months since records began (in 1895) in the continental United States. This unprecedented stretch of warmth bests the previous 12-month record, established just one month ago.

- In North Carolina, a Political Storm over Rising Seas

Years of coastal flooding seem to argue for climate adaptation, but [Republican] state lawmakers may ban such policies

- Virginia [Republican] Lawmaker Says ‘Sea Level Rise’ Is A ‘Left Wing Term,’ Excises It From State Report On Coastal Flooding

Virginia’s legislature commissioned a $50,000 study to determine the impacts of climate change on the state’s shores. To greenlight the project, they omitted words like “climate change” and “sea level rise” from the study’s description itself. According to the [Republican] House of Delegates sponsor of the study, these are “liberal code words,” even though they are noncontroversial in the climate science community.

- Thank You Sisters

Nuns On the Bus, an activist group of nuns on a nine-state tour, stopped in  Republican Representative Paul Ryan's hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin to speak out gently but firmly against his budget cuts, and offer their own faithful budget. Beautiful.

- Is marijuana unhealthier than people think?

As medical and recreational use of marijuana continues to grow, a dangerous lack of awareness about its health risks could be putting millions of lives at risk. This is the conclusion reached by the British Lung Foundation (BLF), a leading charity that is worried about the "alarming disconnect" between the public perception of the drug as being relatively safe, and mounting evidence indicating that it dramatically increases a person's chance of developing cancer.According to a report issued by the BLF, nearly 9 in 10 people believe that smoking cigarettes is worse than marijuana — but the risk of developing lung cancer is as much as 20 times greater from a cannabis joint than a tobacco cigarette. Researchers contend that smoking one marijuana joint is equivalent to smoking an entire pack of cigarettes.

Climate change deniers blinded by political ideology
By Michael E. Mann
Published Vancouver June 8, 2012 in The Vancouver Sun

A recent commentary by Frank Hilliard of the Individual Rights Party of B.C. that appeared in The Vancouver Sun June 4 misinformed readers when it comes to the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change. Further, Hilliard's tirade was riddled with fabrications and dishonest personal attacks against me and other climate scientists.

Hilliard demonstrates that he does not understand the so-called "Hockey Stick" graph that my co-authors and I published more than a decade ago, which demonstrated that the nature of recent warming is unprecedented. Our temperature reconstruction was based on hundreds of climate "proxy" records around the world, including tree-ring data from every continent as well as ice cores from polar regions, coral records from the tropical oceans, and other sources of information. Yet, Hillard claims they were based only on "one set of observations of tree rings in Russia." That is simply a blatant fabrication.

Hilliard compounds the problem by citing attacks against our work by two Canadian climate change deniers (Fraser Institute-funded economist Ross McKitrick and energy industry consultant Stephen McIntyre) with-out noting that several independent studies have established fatal flaws in their claims.

Dozens of independent studies have reproduced our original findings and the highest scientific authority in the U.S., the National Academy of Sciences, has reaffirmed our conclusions (see e.g. Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate, New York Times, June 22, 2006), confirming that modern temperatures are likely higher than they've been in more than a thousand years.

But all of this is a diversion anyway, as our work is not the central pillar of evidence for human-caused climate change that our detractors would like you to think it is.

Numerous independent lines of evidence, some of it based on basic physical principles that have been known for nearly two centuries, indicate that humans are warming the planet and changing our climate by burning coal and other fossil fuels.

The fact that such falsehoods and fabrications like those put forward by Hilliard could readily appear on the editorial pages of a respected paper like The Vancouver Sun is a perfect example of just how divorced our public discourse about climate change has become from scientific reality.
Indeed, it is the poisoning of the public discourse over climate change that prompted me to write my recent book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, where I describe the circumstances that led to my becoming and accidental and reluctant public figure.

I describe the crescendo of attacks that I have endured as climate change deniers have engaged in a cynical campaign to try to discredit me in the hope that by so doing they might discredit the case for human-caused climate change. I describe how U.S. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), among the largest recipients of fossil fuel money in the Congress, have both launched partisan investigations into my work; as has Attorney-General Ken Cuc-cinelli of Virginia, another recipient of oil company largesse.

Thankfully, the scientific community is doing more to stand up for researchers who find themselves targeted by politicians and ideological groups that don't like our findings.

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, for instance, is soliciting donations from the general public to help cover legal expenses scientists are incurring. This is an incredible help for scientists, who often lack the resources to defend themselves and face attacks from deep-pocketed groups funded by the fossil fuel industry.

It's unfortunate that people who are ideologically opposed to dealing with climate change feel entitled to not only attack scientists like me for doing our jobs, but to attack us again and again when we try to set the record straight.

We have as much right to speak out as any citizen. But as scientists, we have a special duty to make distinctions between our scientific judgment and our opinions as citizens.

Unfortunately, the people who choose to attack us are often so blinded by their ideology, they can't tell the difference between science and political opinion.

The truth is that regardless of one's ideological position on whether or not we should reduce the emissions that drive climate change, we should be able to base decisions about how to protect ourselves from a changing climate on established science.

When I think of my role as a citizen and a parent, I feel strongly we must also confront the ethical choice we face: Choosing not to reduce emissions is choosing to leave our children the legacy of a planet that will be degraded relative to the one we inherited from our parents.
It's time for us to have a grown-up debate about climate change in this country. And attacks on scientists by political operatives like Hilliard should have no place in it.

Michael E. Mann is a member of the Pennsylvania State University faculty, holding joint positions in the departments of meteorology and geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with other scientists who participated in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Sean

Millennial and Republican Racism • Mad Cow in USA • Nuns Reprimanded for Doing Good • US Military Killing Civilians • Climate Scientists Threatened • FBI Ignores White Supremacists & Targets Occupy Movement • Mitt Romney's Cruel Homophobia • Rats Display Kindness • more

- Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control

Medea Benjamin: Drones kill innocent civilians and antagonize whole populations

- U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

- Climate Scientists Receive Abusive Emails and Threats from Right-wing Climate Change Deniers

“My message to the scientists is to not be silenced. It is important that they get their message out there. I hope scientists continue to put the line carefully and ethically and seriously and that any alternative views can be debated by those that know what they are talking about.”

- Witnessing a glacier's race to the sea

A seven-year photographic record of the Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound on Alaska’s south central Pacific coast has been made into a striking time-lapse video that documents the glacier's rapid ice discharge, and is helping researchers to understand how tidewater glaciers contribute to sea-level rise.

- Money Buys Power

If this election season so far has taught us anything, it’s that money counts. And for the top one percent of the one percent (that’s the top .01 percent), donations buy an incredible amount of influence with elected officials. Just how much influence do they have? Check out our handy infographic

- Why is the FBI Manufacturing Reasons to Arrest Occupy Protesters While Ignoring White Supremacist Violence?

Writing in Rolling Stone this week, Rick Perlstein looks at how the FBI regularly entraps and creates “terrorists” out of anarchists and activists, while comparatively ignoring violent white supremacist groups.

- The Legacy of Chernobyl

Twenty-six years after the meltdown at Chernobyl, the legacy of the 1986 explosion lives on."It is a disaster that left a 30-kilometre uninhabitable exclusion zone, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and still threatens the lives of tens of thousands," writes Greenpeace today.

- U.S. Nuns Face Vatican Rebuke for "Radical Feminism" in Stances on Church Teachings, Social Justice

The Vatican has reprimanded the largest group of Catholic nuns in the United States, saying they have focused too heavily on issues of social justice, while failing to speak out enough on "issues of crucial importance," such as abortion and same-sex marriage. [my reply: "FUCK YOU, Vatiacan!"]

- Facebook Lobbies Washington to “Like” Spying on Users

But Facebook – which opposed the cyber-security bills last year – has decided to support CISPA. The proposed law “would make it easier for Facebook and other companies to receive critical threat data from the U.S. government,” Facebook’s Washington DC office posted on its blog.  It would “impose no new obligations on us to share data with anyone –- and ensures that if we do share data about specific cyber threats, we are able to continue to safeguard our users’ private information, just as we do today.”Well, many Facebook users would testify that the company actually does a very poor job of protecting user’s private information.

- Mad Cow Case Found in California, Says USDA

Yesterday, the US Department of Agriculture held a press conference to announce the discovery of the fourth case of mad cow disease found domestically since 2003.

- Sugar can make you dumb, US scientists warn

Eating too much sugar can eat away at your brain power, according to US scientists who published a study showing how a steady diet of high-fructose corn syrup sapped lab rats' memories.

- Chinese Athletes Going Veg Before Olympics

Many Chinese athletes are giving up meat in preparation for the Olympics, concerned that the drugs used to raise animals may compromise the results of their mandatory drug tests.

- Rats Display Altruism

Calling someone a rat may be complimentary. According to a study published in the December 9, 2011, issue of Science, rats can be surprisingly selfless.

- Zoo Chimp Makes Elaborate Plots to Attack Humans

At first Santino was famous for throwing rocks and other projectiles at visitors who annoyed him. Now he has improved his technique, which requires spontaneous innovation for future deception. Researcher Mathias Osvath, lead author of a paper about Santino in PLoS ONE, explained what the clever chimp did:

- Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney's Former Classmate Describes Romney as ‘Bullying Supreme’ – A ‘Pack of Dogs’ Who Targeted ‘Different’ Boy

A high school classmate of presidential candidate Mitt Romney told ABC News today that he considers a particular prank the two pulled at Michigan’s Cranbrook School to be “assault and battery” and that he witnessed Romney hold the scissors to cut the hair of a student who was being physically pinned to the ground by several others. [Many other witnesses have  since corroborated the incident]

- Father of Ex-Gay Movement Apologizes to Gay Community for Making It All Up

Dr. Robert Spitzer’s watershed 2001 study on reparative therapy is widely credited as having given birth to the modern Ex-Gay movement, and the evangelical belief that sexual orientation can be changed through prayer and therapy, earning Spitzer the ire of the worldwide LGBT community.A decade later, Spitzer has written a public apology admitting that he essentially made the whole thing up.

- War On Words: NYC Dept. Of Education Wants 50 ‘Forbidden’ Words Banned From Standardized Tests

Right-wing Republican pressure forces weak New York City Department of Education to ban certain words from standardized tests so as not to offend people who don't believe in evolution, etc.

- Five Tax Fallacies Invented by the 1%

We hear these claims often, even though they're entirely false. An analysis of the facts should make that clear.

- Torture: The Jose Rodriguez lesson

Jose Rodriguez, the high-ranking CIA official who ordered the destruction of 92 videos showing the agency’s interrogation of Terrorist suspects, was interviewed on Sunday night about his new pro-torture book by 60 Minutes (that show’s network, CBS, and the publisher of Rodriguez’s new book, Simon & Schuster, are both owned by the CBS Corp., now synergistically profiting off of torture advocacy). There is an important lesson to be learned from this interview.As many commenters correctly noted, the torture-defending Rodriguez is clearly a crazed sociopath...

- Fox News Bigotry: Fox Says If You Want "Us To Be Nice To Muslims In This Country," "Stop Killing Our People" In Nigeria

Crazy Fox News guy says that bigotry is justified.

- CHART: Fox Spent More Time On "Crucify" Comments Than 3 Major Oil & Gas Risks

In less than a week, Fox News has devoted 34 segments totaling more than two hours of airtime expressing outrage about the word choice of an EPA official who spoke two years ago about punishing oil companies who violate the law. That's 10 times more coverage than Fox gave to 3 major stories related to the risks of oil and gas development, combined.

- Social Security is not going broke

[The Right Wing narrative that Social Security is going broke] has become the conventional wisdom because it is easily reduced to a headline or sound bite. The facts, which require more nuance and detail, show that, with a few fixes, Social Security can be safe for as long as we want.

Race, Millennials and Reverse Discrimination
By Jamelle Bouie
Published Apr. 26 2012 in The Nation

The most commonly said thing about the “Millennial” generation [those born in the 1980s and later] is that it’s more diverse and more tolerant than its predecessors. Millennials are more likely to be persons of color, more likely to show acceptance of same-sex relationships and more likely to have diverse social connections. With that said, none of this means that we’re somehow immune to problems of racism, prejudice and privilege.

Indeed, you don’t have to look far for examples of young people acting with an eye toward ignorance. There’s the “ironic racism” of Girls writer Leslie Arfin, the incredible outpouring of hate toward African-American actors in The Hunger Games and the annual stories of kids who throw blackface parties or complain about Asian students for existing.

All of this is lead in for a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, which polled adults aged 18 to 24 on everything from religion and morality to economic issues and the 2012 election. They also posed questions on race and ethnicity: Does government pay too much attention to the problems of blacks and other minorities? Is “reverse discrimination” a problem in today’s society? Is demographic change a good thing for American society?

The results weren’t heartening. Overall, 46 percent of Millennials agree that the government pays too much attention to the problems of minorities, with 49 percent who disagree. 48 percent also agree that discrimination against whites is a genuine problem. When you disaggregate by race and count only white Millennials, the picture is much worse.

A solid majority of white Millennials, 56 percent, say that government has paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and other minorities. An even larger majority, 58 percent, say that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”

The pollsters at PRRI don’t try to tease out what this actually means, and honestly—as an African-American myself—it’s hard to figure out. Discrimination against minorities takes many forms, and most are easy to identify. There’s the overt bigotry of day-to-day life, the subtle discrimination of laws and institutions (the arrest rate for black men, the predatory lending aimed at minority communities) and the miasma of racist ideas that flow through our culture and sit in our subconscious, ready to act.

These things might hinder white Americans in a spiritual sense, but it’s absurd to say that they have a material effect on the prospects of white people. If you are white in the United States, almost everyone in a position of power or influence looks like you. You won’t be questioned if you find yourself in a nice part of town, you won’t be the picture of criminality, and few people will ever question your right to take government help. Cops won’t give you a hard time as a matter of course, and no one will ask you to speak for white people as a whole. Sports fans won’t go apoplectic and shower you with racial slurs because you scored a goal. The list goes on.

A quick note for those of you who will say that all of these things have happened to you. I’m not saying that individual white people are immune to being hassled by the cops, or being followed in a store. What I am saying, however, is that none of that will happen on the basis of your skin color. Being white doesn’t carry a host of negative assumptions. It’s considered neutral. Being black (or Latino) does, and that’s the difference.

With all of that in mind, I don’t quote understand how anyone could plausibly say that discrimination against white people is a problem in the same way that it is for minorities. But if I had to hazard a guess as to why a majority of young white people believe it, here is what I would say:
Because many young people are either in college or preparing to go to college, affirmative action is a salient issue, and there’s a widespread perception that minority students have an easier time of getting into school. Of course, this isn’t true at all; affirmative action adds racial (and ethnic, and gender, and religious) disadvantage to the collection of things that colleges examine when determining an applicant. There are no quotas and it doesn’t guarantee entry; a bad candidate is a bad candidate, regardless of their race. But if a Latino student and a white student are equally matched, the university might lean towards always choosing the former.

(Another note: just because the white student didn’t get in doesn’t mean that someone took “their” spot. Colleges don’t owe spots to students, and if you don’t get in to the school of your choice, the college took nothing away from you. With or without affirmative action, the odds of getting into a selective college are low).

What's more, we live in a culture where honest conversation about race is rare, especially among white people, where it’s surrounded by fear and anxiety. For many white kids, if not most, racial conversations are limited to a few units in elementary and middle school. Otherwise, they’re left to fend for themselves, which either leads to a sense of privileged obliviousness—i.e., you live and act as if this were a “colorblind” world, despite the fact that color matters for many people—or confusion and resentment.

Indeed, at the end of the day, Americans do a terrible job of teaching our history, and an even worse job of teaching our awful racial history. By and large, slavery is treated with appropriate horror, but everything after that is passed over and ignored. In my experience, students—white or otherwise—are ignorant of the violence and economic oppression that characterized much of the black experience for the better part of a century. Racism is morphed into a personal force—represented by Bull Connor or George Wallace—and there’s no attempt to show the economic and social effects of Jim Crow and segregation.

For a lot of young white people, I think, racism has become completely untethered from history. They’ve been taught “colorblindness” sans a sense of what it means to grow up in a country where white supremacy was once the ruling ideology. “Reverse discrimination,” then, is a catch-all for frustration at rules they don’t understand (white people can’t say the “N-word”), and double standards that seem unfair (e.g., “Why can’t we have White History Month and a White Entertainment Channel?). It’s understandable, but also a little depressing.

Sean

Why Republicans Deny Proven Science • Climate Change • War • Big Oil/Coal/Gas Want the USA to be 3rd World State • DOGS! • Racism and the Trayvon Martin Murder

- Why Rush Limbaugh and the right turned on Trayvon Martin

A national tragedy became another awful political shouting match, thanks to vile [Republican] pundits and talk-radio hosts

- Accusing Others Of Playing "The Race Card" Does Nothing To Advance Dialogue

More than a month after the shooting, the facts about the shooting remain unclear. What is clear, however, is that the right-wing media's modus operandi when it comes to racial issues hasn't changed. Now that prominent black Americans are singling out race as a reason the 17-year-old is dead, conservative media figures are out in full force with what can only be described as ferocious backlash against those they deride as "professional race baiters."

- The Value of Bringing Your Dog to Work

...a new study has come out that says employees should bring their dogs to work. Not only will having man's best friend around help you get through the day, it will also help others around you.

- Welcome to the New Third World of Energy, the United States

How Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State

- Act, or face world food shortage: report

A MAJOR new report on global food security has warned international leaders, farmers and food companies that urgent action is needed to avoid irrevocably unsustainable and inadequate agricultural production by 2050. Consumers may also be encouraged to shift their diets away from red meat and livestock-based foods such as dairy products to “more resource-efficient and healthier” vegetable-rich diets.

- Data Mining You

the New American Foundation estimates, based on news reports, that 17 percent of the Pakistanis killed in U.S. drone strikes between 2004 and 2011 were civilians; in 2011 the figure was 11 percent. The Air Force does not release statistics on the subject but the science board’s report cited an internal estimate that suggested U.S. drone strikes accounted for 8 percent of all civilian casualties in the Afghan theater (compared to 66 percent caused by the Taliban).

- Boredom, terror, deadly mistakes: Secrets of the new drone war

In the new world of the National Security Complex, no one can be trusted—except the officials working within it, who in their eternal bureaucratic vigilance clearly consider themselves above any law. The system that they are constructing (or that, perhaps, is constructing them) has no more to do with democracy or an American republic or the Constitution than it does with a Soviet-style state. Think of it as a phenomenon for which we have no name. Like the yottabyte, it’s something new under the sun, still awaiting its own strange and ugly moniker.

- How Coral Bleaching Could Lead to Famine

The effects of climate change, such as coral bleaching, become slow-motion disasters, with knock-on effects for years

Why the GOP [Republicans] distrusts science
It's not just evolution and climate change -- conservatives' trust in science is plummeting across the board
by Chris Mooney Published 4/2/12 on Salon.com

For a long time, those of us who monitor the troubled relationship between science and the American public had at least one thing we could feel good about. And that was knowing that while we might argue endlessly over global warming or the teaching of evolution, at the end of the day Americans in general still expressed strong confidence — strong trust — in the institution of science and its leaders. Spats over a handful of divisive issues didn’t seem to have soured them on science across the board.

The evidence for this came in the form of polling data from the General Social Survey, which for decades has asked people to rate their level of confidence in the leaders of a variety of institutions. Even at a time of declining trust in institutions in general, science always seemed to fare pretty well by this metric. “In 2008, more Americans expressed a ‘great deal’ of confidence in scientific leaders than in the leaders of any other institution except the military,” noted the National Science Foundation’s 2010 “Science and Engineering Indicators” report, which serves as a clearinghouse for these sorts of public opinion findings.

Last week, however, such claims seemed to all but fall apart.

In a new study published in the American Sociological Review, Gordon Gauchat of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill analyzed responses to this “confidence in institutions” question — which  has been asked since 1974 — based on the political ideology of the respondents. And in doing so, he found that confidence in the scientific community had declined quite dramatically among self-described U.S. political conservatives. This downward trend in the data, says Gauchat, had previously been hidden by “not breaking out the political part of it” — by treating all Americans as a uniform group.

And not only did Gauchat find that, from 1974 to 2010, conservatives marched away from the scientific community. He also found, quite disturbingly, that this had a surprising and paradoxical relationship with their levels of education. It turns out that it was the educated conservatives who became the most distrusting of science over time — a phenomenon that I have called the “smart idiot” effect, and that likely reflects their higher level of political knowledge and engagement. Liberals, in contrast, remained relatively uniform in their trust in science over the period.

In one sense, I suppose I should be gratified by these results: Gauchat explicitly set out to test the thesis of my 2005 book “The Republican War on Science,” and writes that his results provide “strong evidence” in my favor. (Not that this is the sort of thing that you want to be right about.) But how do we explain this occurrence — this big move, by conservatives, away from science?

Just as I did in “Republican War,” Gauchat points the finger at the rise of the “New Right” as a political movement in the 1960s and 1970s. He underscores how upstart conservatives generated their own alternative sources of expertise — in other words, created their own version of reality, scientific and otherwise — at think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. The goal was to hit back against liberal academia, as well as the intellectuals and scientists who worked there.

At the same time, conservatives also forged an alternative media universe — centered on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show — where scientists often fell under attack on a key set of politicized issues like global warming, evolution, embryonic stem cell research, and many others.

The idea, then, is that conservatives came to define the worlds of science and academia as a liberal domain that was biased against them — one they had to actively combat by generating their own sources of “counter-expertise.” And naturally, this led to decreased trust in scientists and their institutions, especially among the most politically attuned conservatives, who were most familiar with the nature of these battles, and tracked them most closely.
Sounds plausible enough — but is that the full story?

There’s no doubt it’s partly true; but in recent years, I’ve come to question whether it is a complete account. In particular, in my new book, “The Republican Brain,” I emphasize that beyond such surface-level political and sociological explanations, we also have to examine the powerful sub-surface psychological determinants of political behavior. Really, you need both types of explanations, combined, before you can understand many political phenomena.

In a psychological sense, there are many reasons to think that self-described political conservatives today are just different people than they were in 1974 — more rigid, more closed-minded. Consider, for instance, the work of political scientists Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt and Jonathan Weiler, also of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. In their 2009 book “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” Hetherington and Weiler show that the U.S. became not only more politically divided, but also more psychologically divided, during the time period in question.

The chief catalyst for this development was Nixon’s infamous “Southern Strategy” and the rise of an array of “culture war” issues during the 1960s and 1970s. As a result of these forces, Hetherington and Weiler explain, a group of people called “authoritarians” — a generally conservative personality type characterized by cognitive rigidity, viewing the world in black-and-white terms, and holding fixed beliefs, often fundamentalist Christian ones — became much more strongly clustered in the Republican Party, and the conservative movement, than they had been previously.

In other words, the “conservatives” analyzed in Gauchat’s study seem to have changed psychological identities over time.  According to Weiler, “those self-identifying as conservative have been increasingly likely to be authoritarians over the past generation.”

This occurred for a number of reasons, Weiler explains. Concerted attacks on “liberalism” pushed working-class whites — once supportive of the New Deal — away from embracing that label; instead, the term came to be more associated with the civil rights struggle, and later, with women’s rights and gay rights. At the same time, the political mobilization of conservative Christians — many of them authoritarians — helped draw a much stronger linkage between calling oneself a “conservative” and embracing religious fundamentalism. “As liberalism and conservatism came to be redefined,” explains Weiler, “authoritarians had reason to gravitate much more readily toward one ideological camp, and one political party.”

So under this theory, it’s not just that movement conservatives built think tanks that allowed for an end-run around scientific expertise. And it’s not just that they constantly attacked academia, where liberals and scientists were clustered. It’s also that people inclined to view the world in black and white terms increasingly came to call themselves “conservative” in the first place.

How does psychological authoritarianism set the stage for a distrust of science? If you see the world in an authoritarian way, then you’re more likely to dismiss your ideological opponents (scientists or otherwise) without compromise — to define them as an out-group, an “other.” At the same time, you’re also less likely to appreciate the nuanced, measured style of thinking and writing that is so typical of scientists (and for that matter, liberals). It just won’t feel right to you. Authoritarians are known for their intolerance of uncertainty; yet uncertainty is the lifeblood of science.

And indeed, if you look at the Tea Party today — a highly authoritarian group of people, according to Hetherington and Weiler — this is exactly what you see. Take the issue of global warming. Not only do Tea Partyers dismiss the overwhelming body of science showing that humans are causing it; polling data also show they’re confident they don’t need any more information about the issue. They’re not just wrong, then; it’s considerably worse than that. They’re wrong and also sure of themselves.

It is important to acknowledge that authoritarianism refers to a psychological trait or disposition, not an explicit ideology. At least theoretically, it’s content neutral. So it’s conceivable that in a very different political context, authoritarians might well have lined up behind science, rather than against it. That would be an odd political case, though; especially in a democracy, it’s not very likely that authoritarianism and science will get along very well together, any more than that authoritarianism and liberalism will go together. They’re just such deeply opposed ways of thinking — and being. You could argue that the clash between science and authoritarianism dates all the way back to the time of Galileo, if not farther.

Gauchat’s findings are the farthest thing from heartening — especially when combined with Hetherington and Weiler’s. But together, they do give us an opportunity to examine the root causes of the ideological war on science now being prosecuted by political conservatives in the U.S. You can’t begin to address a problem until you find its source. And in this case — as in so many others — that source appears to lie in both politics and also psychology, combined.

Sean

The Lie of American Exceptionalism • Climate Change Caused by Mankind • Water Wars? • Fukushima Leaking Radioactive Water into Ocean • Fox Says Muppets are Communists • Dogs and PTSD • Republicans Trying to Kill Post Office • Occupy Art • more

- Coming to a Theater Near You: The Greatest Water Crisis in the History of Civilization

And here’s the bad news in a nutshell: if you live in the Southwest or just about anywhere in the American West, you or your children and grandchildren could soon enough be facing the Age of Thirst, which may also prove to be the greatest water crisis in the history of civilization.  No kidding.

Jonathan Overpeck, a climate scientist at the University of Arizona who played a major role in the Nobel-Prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, tells me that the prospect of 130° F days in Phoenix worries him far less than the prospect of decades of acute dryness. “If anything is scary, the scariest is that we could trip across a transition into a megadrought.” He adds, “You can probably bet your house that, unless we do something about these greenhouse gas emissions, the megadroughts of the future are going to be a lot hotter than the ones of the past.”

- Extreme Weather

Given the expected weather pattern shifts due to La Nina, is there cause to bring climate change into the extreme weather debate? The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) believes so. The Nobel prize winning group released a report on November 18 focusing on extreme weather events, linking their increase in frequency to climate change.

- It's Official, Climate Change Caused by Man: Three-quarters of climate change is man-made

Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, reports a pair of Swiss climate modellers in a paper published online today. Most of the observed warming — at least 74 % — is almost certainly due to human activity, they write in Nature Geoscience.

- From Cairo to the Cape, climate change begins to take hold of Africa

The world's poorest communities have begun to experience extreme weather outside the natural variability of African climate. Without a rapid reduction in emissions, the continent faces calamitous temperature rises within this century

- Health ‘first casualty’ of climate change

The World Health Organisation predicts that changing climate conditions will lead to increases in malaria, cholera and dengue fever, as well as losses of life due to extreme weather events

- Horn of Africa Crisis: Drought Zone

As millions in Kenya suffer from extreme hunger, is the US addressing the causes of the crisis or just its syptoms?

- Fukushima Plant Leaks Radioactive Water

Large quantities of highly radioactive water have leaked through a crack in the wall of a treatment facility at the Fukushima power plant, and some may have founds its way into the sea, the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco], said.

- Fox Business' Follow The Money Unmasks The Muppets' Liberal Agenda: "Brainwashing" Your Kids!

This attempt at right-wing media criticism brought to you by the letter "S"... for stupid.

- NPR’s domestic drone commercial

But listeners of NPR would know about virtually none of that. On its All Things Considered program yesterday, NPR broadcast a five-minute report (audio below) from Brian Naylor that purported to be a news story on the domestic use of drones but was, in fact, much more akin to a commercial for the drone industry.

- The Postal Service Plots Its Own Demise

There are many appropriate targets for Occupy Wall Street protests. But the OWS protesters hit a bull’s-eye when they invaded a National Press Club briefing where Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe—who likes to make like a corporate executive and refer to himself as “Chief Operating Officer of the US Postal Service”—was giving a speech about the need to close local post offices, layoff workers and, though this was unspoken, take the steps that will lead to the privatization of the one of the country’s greatest public assets.[republicans want to kill the US postal service because it's a well functioning public branch of government and unionized. Republicans hate unions and hate any part of government that works well]

- Arizona Outraged At Right Wing Racist Sheriff Arpaio Fiasco, Calls For Resignation

Less than two weeks after Citizens for a Better Arizona announced their intent to form the nation's first ever "Citizens Posse" to hold infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio accountable for gross abuses of power and civil rights violations, an alarming new investigation just released by the Associated Press has found that hundreds of reported sex crimes, including child molestation, have fallen through the cracks of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.

- After Duty, Dogs Suffer Like Soldiers

If anyone needed evidence of the frontline role played by dogs in war these days, here is the latest: the four-legged, wet-nosed troops used to sniff out mines, track down enemy fighters and clear buildings are struggling with the mental strains of combat nearly as much as their human counterparts.

- BEST CAPTION AT THE ONION ALL WEEK: Rumors Of Extramarital Affair End Campaign Of Presidential Candidate Who Didn't Know China Has Nuclear Weapons

Republicans are so dumb they reject Cain for extra-marital affairs, but not for being utterly uninformed about the world. And then ironically throw their support behind serial-philanderer Newt Gingrich.

- Occupy Art

Poster artwork inspired by the Occupy movement.

The American century: That was then
The next time you hear a politician insist that America is exceptional, think of it as a secret confession that we aren't.
By Tom Engelhardt
Published December 2, 2011 in the L.A. Times

Tea party activists attend Glenn Beck's 2010 rally in Washington. President Obama and his would-be GOP presidential opponents have touted American exceptionalism in recent speeches. (Jim Lo Scalzo / European Pressphoto Agency)

If you want a gauge of an America on the downward slope, you could look at the recent poll commissioned by the newspaper the Hill, in which a startling 69% of respondents said they considered the country to be in decline. Or you could just consider the soaring language of this season's presidential candidates. Mitt Romney, in a recent Republican debate on foreign policy, was typical, insisting that "this century must be an American century" in which "America leads the free world and the free world leads the entire world."

President Obama too is prone to the overheated language of American exceptionalism, announcing frequently his intention to ensure that the 21st century is "another American century."

As a 67-year-old, I grew up in a post-World War II era that, by any measure, was the height of the first American century. As much of the rest of the developed world struggled to rebuild devastated cities, the United States couldn't have been more exceptional, a one-of-a-kind country in producing the big-ticket items both of peace and of war, often from the same corporations.

Back then, there was no need for presidents or presidential candidates to get up and repetitively reassure the American people of just how exceptional we were. It was too obvious to state. After all, when you've really got it, you don't have to flaunt it.

So, the next time you hear any politician insisting that this country is American century-style exceptional, think of it as a kind of secret confession that we aren't. These days, you can feel the uncomfortably defensive snarl (or whine) that lurks in the insistence that our country isn't just another powerful nation in political gridlock and economic trouble.

Think here, if you will, of Rambo's muscles, which were in their own way as much a confession of insecurity as Romney's talk of exceptionalism. Back in the day, the screen western or war hero — Gary Cooper or John Wayne — might be strong and silent, but brute physique was the least of his attributes. He wasn't overmuscled or cartoonishly outsized. As a man of that true American century moment, he didn't have to go out of his way to emphasize his hero-hood and his physical power.

Rambo arrived on-screen in the post-Vietnam War years as a creature of American defeat. It was a time when strong and silent wasn't convincing enough anymore, when a literal arms race seemed necessary, when the pecs of American power needed to be overblown to be overshown.

Romney and crew are, verbally speaking, the Rambos of this 21st century American moment. And their version of nonstop exceptionalism fits well with another strange repetitive feature of the present landscape: the exaltation of the American soldier as a hero of heroes, an exemplar for the nation.

Much of this would have rung weirdly indeed to the ears of Americans in my childhood. They had their own set of outsized fears, but they still lived in a country with a citizen army that a draft ensured just about everyone took part in. Like mine, most families then had at least one WW II vet. And yet no one talked about greatest generations or American heroes or, like President Obama and George W. Bush before him, "the finest fighting force in the world" (or "that the world has ever known"). The soldier was simply an American.

Now, in the world of the all-volunteer Army, with the U.S. permanently, if remarkably unsuccessfully, at war around the world, the military largely exists in a separate sphere, with many Americans having no direct link to the wars being fought in their name and the soldiers who are fighting them.

Yet today, supporting the troops (or "America's warriors," as they are now often called) has become a near-religious duty. This recurrent insistence on their need for support should, like Romney's exceptionalism, be viewed as another kind of secret admission.

After all, the greatest mistake of our era was undoubtedly this: When the Soviet Union suddenly disappeared in 1991, our leaders imagined that they had achieved a kind of American victory never before seen. Where, for centuries, there had been two or more great-power rivals, there was now only the sole superpower (or even hyperpower) of planet Earth, with no significant threat anywhere.

To some, it looked as if this were, by definition, a second post-WW II moment of American exceptionalism. Mistaking military might for global power, they didn't notice that the mightier superpower of the Cold War was also heading slowly downhill in a cloud of self-congratulation. The rest of this grim story we are now living.

Long gone is that American moment and the "century" that went with it. Decline is upon us, and every assurance that it isn't only serves, however subliminally, to reinforce that reality. At whatever pace, our "warriors" and "heroes" are coming home to a distinctly unhappy, unheroic and insecure country, lacking in jobs. In the meantime, our leaders doth protest too much.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, "The United States of Fear," is just out.

Sean

Support for Torture Strong with Christians; US Soldiers told to "Hunt People for Jesus" (posted 05/05/09)

- Survey: Support for Torture Strong with Church-going Christians "The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey... White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it"


- Obama Returns to Bush Era on Guantánamo "Both admissions indicate that when it comes to Guantánamo, it is beginning to appear that the much-vaunted change promised by Barack Obama on the campaign trail has actually involved nothing more than imposing a closing date on Guantánamo while maintaining the Bush administration's approach to the men still held there."

- The 'Best and the Brightest'? Spare Me "According to Richard Haass, the former Bush administration official who now heads the Council on Foreign Relations, prosecuting former Bush administration lawyers who argued that torture was legal under domestic and international law would deter talented Americans from careers in public service". [The same argument has been applied to the banking industry, that has destroyed countless families across the US and world after the recent financial meltdown. In other words, in order to run the USA, you need to break the laws and harm people, and if you face consequences for these crimes then the US can't operate.]

- Advisor: 'US Needs to Call off Drone Strikes in Pak "The top adviser to the US army chief in Afghanistan, David Kilcullen, has observed that the US drone strikes in Pakistan are creating more enemies than eliminating them, and hence, needed to be called off."



US Soldiers in Afghanistan Told to "Hunt People for Jesus... So We Get Them into The Kingdom"
Military officials at Bagram are caught on tape urging US soldiers to evangelize in the Muslim country.
by Jeremy Scahill
Published on Monday, May 4, 2009 by RebelReports


New video evidence has surfaced showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military's top chaplain in the country to "hunt people for Jesus" as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population. Soldiers also have imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, the two dominant languages of Afghanistan. What's more, the center of this evangelical operation is at the huge US base at Bagram, one of the main sites used by the US military to torture and indefinitely detain prisoners.

In a video obtained by Al Jazeera and broadcast Monday, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility "to be witnesses for him."
"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down," he says.

"Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

The translated Bibles appear to be the New Testament. According to Al Jazeera, US soldiers "had them specially printed and shipped to Afghanistan." On the tape, one soldier describes how his church in the US helped raise money for the bibles. Al Jazeera reports that "What these soldiers have been doing may well be in direct violation of the US Constitution, their professional codes and the regulations in place for all forces in Afghanistan." The US military officially forbids "proselytising of any religion, faith or practice." But, as Al Jazeera reports:

[T]he chaplains appear to have found a way around the regulation known as General Order Number One.
"Do we know what it means to proselytise?" Captain Emmit Furner, a military chaplain, says to the gathering.
"It is General Order Number One," an unidentified soldier replies.
But Watt says "you can't proselytise but you can give gifts."

Trying to convert Muslims to any other faith is a crime in Afghanistan. The fact that the video footage is being broadcast on Al Jazeera guarantees that it will be seen throughout the Muslim world. It is likely to add more credence to the perception that the US is engaging in a war on Islam with neo-crusader forces invading Muslim lands.

Former Afghan prime minister Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai told Al Jazeera there must be a "serious investigation," saying, "This is very damaging for diplomatic relations between the two counties." Sayed Aalam Uddin Asser, of the Islamic Front for Peace and Understanding in Kabul, told the network: "It's a national security issue ... our constitution says nothing can take place in Afghanistan against Islam. If people come and propaganda other religions which have no followers in Afghanistan [then] it creates problems for the people, for peace, for stability."

A US military spokesperson, Major Jennifer Willis, denied that the US military has allowed its soldiers to attempt to convert Afghans and said comments from sermons filmed at Bagram were taken out of context. She said the bibles were never distributed. "That specific case involved a soldier who brought in a donation of translated bibles that were sent to his personal address by his home church. He showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he cannot distribute them," she said. "The translated bibles were never distributed as far as we know, because the soldier understood that if he distributed them he would be in violation of general order 1, and he would be subject to punishment."

The video footage was shot about a year ago by documentary filmmaker Brian Hughes, who is also a former US soldier. "[US soldiers] weren't talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons," Hughes told Al Jazeera. "The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it ... documenting it would be important."

The broadcast of this video comes just days after a new poll of White Americans found that, in the US, church going Christians are more likely to support the use of torture than other segments of the population. The Pew Research Center poll found: "White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified - more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did."

This is certainly not the first scandal where US military forces or officials have been caught on tape promoting an evangelical Christian agenda. Perhaps the most high-profile case involved Lieut. Gen. William Boykin, who was a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Bush. Boykin was part of Donald Rumsfeld's inner circle at the Pentagon where he was placed in charge of hunting "high-value targets." Boykin was one of the key U.S. officials in establishing what critics alleged was death-squad-type activity in Iraq.
In October 2003, Boykin was revealed to have gone on several anti-Muslim rants, in public speeches, many of which he delivered in military uniform. Since January 2002, Boykin had spoken at twenty-three religious-oriented events, wearing his uniform at all but two.

Among Boykin's statements, he said he knew the U.S. would prevail over a Muslim adversary in Somalia because "I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol." Boykin also charged that Islamic radicals want to destroy America "because we're a Christian nation" that "will never abandon Israel." Our "spiritual enemy," Boykin declared, "will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus."

As for President Bush, Boykin said, "Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he's in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this." In another speech, Boykin said other countries "have lost their morals, lost their values. But America is still a Christian nation." He told a church group in Oregon that special operations forces were victorious in Iraq because of their faith in God. "Ladies and gentlemen, I want to impress upon you that the battle that we're in is a spiritual battle," he said. "Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army."
Watch Al Jazeera's report here

Sean