Doom, doom, doom, doom

It’s not a shot of cold water in the face…more like a blast of super-heated steam. Yeah, this article on our prospects for global climate change is the most terrifying thing I’ve read in ages.

The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research; the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate warming, and the history of the planet shows that temperature can shift as much as five degrees Celsius within thirteen years. The last time the planet was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in The Ends of the World, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.

It gets worse from there. Much worse.

Future generations — I mean, the current generation — will look back on this time and regard all those Republican climate change deniers as monsters committing crimes against humanity, and the rest of us as lazy good-for-nothings who couldn’t get off our butts to arrest the liars and frauds and greedy, corrupt short-term thinkers who are busily wrecking the planet for our species.

But wait, you say, didn’t Trump recently bring on a science advisor, at last? Isn’t he a scientist of some sort? Of some sort, sure — Kelvin Droegemeier is a weather man with no knowledge of climatology, but he has some credentials. If you think he’ll be a voice of reason in the White House, watch this and be disillusioned.

That was a truly masterful demonstration of cowardice and evasion — he’s got no spine at all. If he doesn’t die of natural causes first, our descendants are going to have his wobbly, worthless head on a pike, and he’ll deserve it.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross, the interviewer, is good and persistent, though, not letting him off the hook at all. I wish more journalists would do that.

American medicine has a problem

The CEO of GoFundMe did not anticipate that a third of the money raised on that platform is used to meet life-threatening medical needs, which should tell everyone that the system is broken.

The system is terrible. It needs to be rethought and retooled. Politicians are failing us. Health care companies are failing us. Those are realities. I don’t want to mince words here. We are facing a huge potential tragedy. We provide relief for a lot of people. But there are people who are not getting relief from us or from the institutions that are supposed to be there. We shouldn’t be the solution to a complex set of systemic problems. They should be solved by the government working properly, and by health care companies working with their constituents. We firmly believe that access to comprehensive health care is a right and things have to be fixed at the local, state and federal levels of government to make this a reality.

Hah, right, “government working properly”. We haven’t seen any of that since a mob of assholes got elected who think government is the problem. Thanks, Reagan, keep on putrefying, you slimeball.

I’m not worried about Ilhan Omar. I worry about the other guys.

There’s something rotten at the heart of US foreign policy, and this is just one small example.

questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable…christ. That’s what is unacceptable. Israel is a corrupt genocidal theocracy, and US policy ought to be directed at supporting Israel while reducing their criminal behavior, rather than treating them as an aspirational model.

And what horrible thing did Omar say? All the critics seem to weasel around it. Here it is, though:

Last week, Ilhan Omar said something insensitive about the Israel lobby. While explaining her frustration with the way allegations of anti-Semitism can be used to suppress “the broader debate of what is happening with Palestine,” the Democratic congresswoman said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

When I just said, “Israel is a corrupt genocidal theocracy”, I said something far stronger than Omar simply questioning the idea of slavish devotion to Israel, as exhibited by American politicians. The article I’m quoting from, while mostly favoring her views, also buys into this weird notion that she said something “insensitive”. If you wanted to call me “insensitive”, I wouldn’t argue with you; what Omar said was the cautious advance of a view contrary to dogma, and was pretty darned politically careful. If anything, the author of that article is saying that Omar was too cautious in her criticisms.

The problem isn’t Congress’s “allegiance to a foreign country,” but its complicity in Jewish supremacy in the West Bank, an inhuman blockade in Gaza, and discrimination against Arab-Israelis in Israel proper.

Imagine if Omar had said that! But as he points out, Congress, including Democratic leaders, have fully accepted the righteousness of genocidal theocratic reasoning.

Speaking at AIPAC’s conference last year, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer suggested that Israel did not need to end any of these practices — because the Arabs wouldn’t make peace with the Jewish State, even if it did:

Now, some say there are some who argue the settlements are the reason there’s not peace … some say it’s the borders … Now, let me tell you why — my view, why we don’t have peace. Because the fact of the matter is that too many Palestinians and too many Arabs do not want any Jewish state in the Middle East. The view of Palestinians is simple, the Europeans treated the Jews badly culminating in the Holocaust and they gave them our land as compensation.

Of course, we say it’s our land, the Torah says it, but they don’t believe in the Torah. So that’s the reason there is not peace. They invent other reasons, but they do not believe in a Jewish state and that is why we, in America, must stand strong with Israel through thick and thin.

When Schumer says that America “must stand strong with Israel,” he means that it must block any and all efforts to liberate Palestinians from race-based oppression. When the Obama administration declined to veto a unanimous U.N. resolution condemning Israel’s illegal settlements in 2016, Schumer decried the move as “frustrating, disappointing and confounding.”

I think it is Schumer’s view that is simple, and using the Torah as a justification is religious blithering…and that ought to be unacceptable in any evidence-based approach to policy. Meanwhile, Omar’s views are far more humanistic, and she gets accused of racism.

There are costs to selectively policing bigoted (or insensitive) speech. The Democratic Party’s decision to spotlight Omar’s moment of rhetorical insensitivity toward Zionists — while ignoring, or actively championing the oppression of Palestinians — distorts public understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The party’s actions have the effect of casting Omar as the face of “extremism” on the Israel-Palestine issue, even though her official position — that any peace agreement must “affirm the safety and rights of both Palestinians and Israelis” — is more consistent with America’s purported values than almost any other lawmaker’s. Never mind that Chuck Schumer proudly defends Israel’s right to permanently disenfranchise Palestinians, as a means of protecting its ethnostate from the “demographic threat” posed by other people’s babies. Since Omar’s remarks attract bipartisan condemnation — while Schumer’s do not — it is Ilhan Omar who gets branded as “the Steve King of the left.”

Interesting. While Steve King of the Right gets sympathy and support from his colleagues, who refuse to condemn him other than a little mild tut-tutting, the “Left” in Congress is far more concerned with policing reasonable ideas that question the unthinking support for Israel than they are with the flagrant racism of the Republicans in power.

See also:

Seriously? Omar is going to be rebuked?

Something about education everyone should know

A misconception I wish could be corrected: most Americans don’t realize state funding for education has declined.

Most Americans believe state spending for public universities and colleges has, in fact, increased or at least held steady over the last 10 years, according to a new survey by American Public Media.

They’re wrong. States have collectively scaled back their annual higher education funding by $9 billion during that time, when adjusted for inflation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, or CBPP, reports.

That’s right, we’re not rolling in the cash, Scrooge-McDuck-style, out here in the ivory tower. In fact, we’ve been whittling off bits of the tower and taking them down to the pawn shop to try and make ends meet. The painful decline in state support has been a major driver behind all the bad news that people hear about higher ed: the rising tuition costs, greater student debt, and and the increasing reliance on piece-work by adjuncts. State legislatures have felt secure in hacking apart allotments for education for years because they know their know-nothing electorate (especially in Republican districts) will approve, and because they know we’ll tighten our belts and keep working as hard as we can to keep the whole enterprise afloat.

The world will be a better place when Rupert Murdoch dies

Jane Mayer’s thorough article on the entanglement of Fox News with Trump is a depressing exposé, but not a surprising one. The airheads on Fox are shaping government policy.

Other former Fox News celebrities have practically become part of the Trump family. Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former co-host of “The Five,” left Fox in July; she is now working on Trump’s reëlection campaign and dating Donald Trump, Jr. (Guilfoyle left the network mid-contract, after a former Fox employee threatened to sue the network for harassment and accused Guilfoyle of sharing lewd images, among other misconduct; Fox and the former employee reached a multimillion-dollar settlement. A lawyer who represents Guilfoyle said that “any suggestion” that she “engaged in misconduct at Fox is patently false.”) Pete Hegseth and Lou Dobbs, hosts on Fox Business, have each been patched into Oval Office meetings, by speakerphone, to offer policy advice. Sean Hannity has told colleagues that he speaks to the President virtually every night, after his show ends, at 10 p.m. According to the Washington Post, White House advisers have taken to calling Hannity the Shadow Chief of Staff. A Republican political expert who has a paid contract with Fox News told me that Hannity has essentially become a “West Wing adviser,” attributing this development, in part, to the “utter breakdown of any normal decision-making in the White House.” The expert added, “The place has gone off the rails. There is no ordinary policy-development system.” As a result, he said, Fox’s on-air personalities “are filling the vacuum.”

Axios recently reported that sixty per cent of Trump’s day is spent in unstructured “executive time,” much of it filled by television. Charlie Black, a longtime Republican lobbyist in Washington, whose former firm, Black, Manafort & Stone, advised Trump in the eighties and nineties, told me, “Trump gets up and watches ‘Fox & Friends’ and thinks these are his friends. He thinks anything on Fox is friendly. But the problem is he gets unvetted ideas.” Trump has told confidants that he has ranked the loyalty of many reporters, on a scale of 1 to 10. Bret Baier, Fox News’ chief political anchor, is a 6; Hannity a solid 10. Steve Doocy, the co-host of “Fox & Friends,” is so adoring that Trump gives him a 12.

It’s all a big joke. These people at Fox are corrupt, incompetent, rat-fucking idiots. For example, look at how they do “research”.

To the astonishment of colleagues, the Fox co-host Kimberly Guilfoyle often prepared for “The Five” by relying on information provided to her by an avid fan: a viewer from Georgia named David Townsend, who had no affiliation either with Fox News or with journalism. She’d share the day’s planned topics with Townsend, and then he’d e-mail her suggested content. A former colleague of Guilfoyle’s says, “It was a joke among the production assistants—they were, like, ‘Wait till you hear this!’ She actually got research from him! It was the subject of hilarity.”

Townsend is a frequent contributor to the fringe social-media site Gab, which Wired has called a “haven for the far right.” (He has promoted the idea that “physically weak men” are “more likely to be socialists,” and has argued that it is not anti-Semitic to observe that “the most powerful political moneybags in American politics are Zionists.”) The server company that hosts Gab removed it from the Internet temporarily after it was revealed to have posted hate-filled rants by Robert Bowers, the gunman who killed eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, last October.

Remember the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine that regulated the media and required them to be honest and balanced, and that was thrown out by the Reagan administration? Bring it back. Its absence is what has allowed Fox to flourish.

Jeez, but Murdoch has been a malignant influence on the world. I’ll be partying when he kicks the bucket.

I’ve got to stop paying any attention to the news, for my health

This has been a week of despair, mostly.

And you all wonder why I’ve found enjoyment in studying the lives of spiders this year. There’s a reason: I’d rather immerse myself in the study of a species that isn’t full of stupid evil assholes.

Jacob Wohl: In the running for dumbest person on the internet

Fresh off his trip to make up lies about Minneapolis, Jacob Wohl crawled back under the rock he came from, but not before giving a big interview to USA Today. He gloated about the Minneapolis trip.

He flew to Minnesota last week to “investigate” the rumor that Somali-American Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother, a mission for which he tried to fund-raise $25,000 from his online followers. Wohl’s trip to the heartland devolved into bizarre tweets in which he suggested that Minneapolis was so overrun by Somali jihadists that he had to wear a bulletproof vest and travel with a team of “security professionals.”

That isn’t the big news, though. The important thing he did was to brag about creating multiple fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook in order to intentionally undermine the next presidential election with fake news.

No, really.

He bragged about his secret operation to corrupt a federal election to a widely read newspaper. There is stupid, and then there is Jacob Wohl stupid. The result was inevitable: he’s been permanently banned from Twitter.

Twitter banned notorious Trump supporter Jacob Wohl from its platform on Tuesday, alleging that Wohl broke the site’s rules against creating fake accounts.

Wohl’s ban came hours after he boasted in a USA Today interview about his plans to create fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook, which he said would be used to manipulate the 2020 election.

“The account was suspended for multiple violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically creating and operating fake accounts,” a Twitter spokesperson told The Daily Beast.

Wohl had already created several fake accounts before he was banned, according to a source familiar with Wohl’s activities on Twitter. Wohl told USA Today that he intended to use the accounts to help Trump in the 2020 election, pushing Democratic primary voters to back weaker candidates who would be easier for Trump to defeat in the general election.

He’s still on Instagram and Facebook — Facebook, because it is notoriously the worst social media site for enforcing even its ineffectual rules, worse than Twitter, if you can believe that. I suspect he doesn’t care about the ban anyway, because he was creating fake accounts…so he’ll just create more fake accounts. He’ll have his friends create fake accounts. There is no credible authentication on any of these sites. And so the manipulation will continue.

It’s possible he’s not the dumbest person on the internet, just one of the least ethical.

One more Wohlism

Do you know why Minnesota is overrun with jihadists? Do you? DO YOU?

Chevys with bumper stickers, that’s why. How dare individuals “value all families”, support girls sports, point out that “The media are only as liberal as the conservative businesses that own them”, and wish for peace on Earth. Radicals! Freaking extremists! We’re one small step away from sharia law, socialism, and guillotining small business owners at this rate.

One more example of the sterling inanity of Wohl and Loomer

The Chucklefuck Twins are on a legal mission here in Minnesota. Jacob Wohl explains:

Let’s just try to parse that, OK?

Laura Loomer and I just tried to serve Ilhan Omar

So they’re acting as process servers? Is there a lawsuit in the works?

with a sworn affidavit

I don’t get it. They’re serving her with a piece of paper that someone else signed? An affidavit? You don’t need to serve that. You could just mail it, it’s just providing information.

that says she never married her brother

Now we’re deeply in right-wing lunacy land. That makes no sense. They’re giving her a sworn affidavit that she never married her brother? I think most of us could recieve a piece of paper with someone’s signature on the bottom that says we hadn’t married a sibling, and without batting an eye, would calmly close the door and call local mental health services. Yeah? It’s true. I didn’t marry a relative. I don’t need you to inform me of that fact.

Apparently, though, this is part of a scurrilous rumor (spread by Minnesota’s own crank right wing conspiracy mill, the PowerlineBlog) that she married her brother in a cunning scheme to get him a green card. There is no evidence for any of it.

It’s also bizarre because a) any brother would have been naturalized by the same process that naturalized the Omar family, b) US citizenship laws make siblings as eligible as spouses, so there’d be no need for a marriage, and c) the “brother” she’s accused of marrying isn’t her brother.

I think this is more of a case of the Chucklefuck Twins showing up with an accusation and a demand that she deny it, and then hoping to use the fact that she wouldn’t dignify such an absurd claim with an answer and threw them out as evidence that she was guilty. Just like how the Immigration Law Center of Minnesota wouldn’t respect a pair of chucklefuck pseudojournalists in an armored car, therefore the ILCM hates Jews.

And then Omar isn’t dignifying them with her attention. How sad for them.