Month: May 2015

Hey, they don’t put dates on those things

by digby

Numbers don’t mean nuthin’:

Canadian Edgar Nernberg isn’t into the whole evolution thing. In fact, he’s on the board of directors of Big Valley’s Creation Science Museum, a place meant to rival local scientific institutions. Adhering to the most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits “prove” that the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

Unfortunately, Nernberg just dug up a 60-million-year-old fish.

Local outlets report that the man is far from shaken by the bony fish, which he found while excavating a basement in Calgary.

Because here’s the thing: He just doesn’t believe they’re that old. And he’s quite the fossil lover.

“No, it hasn’t changed my mind. We all have the same evidence, and it’s just a matter of how you interpret it,” Nernberg told the Calgary Sun. “There’s no dates stamped on these things.”

No sir, no dates. Just, you know, isotopic dating, basic geology, really shoddy stuff like that. To be fair, I’m not any more capable of figuring out when a particular fossil is from than Nernberg is. I’d be one sorry paleontologist, given the opportunity. I’ve never even found a fossil, so he’s got me there. But the science of dating fossils is not shaky — at least not on the order of tens of millions of years of error — so this fossil and the rocks around it really do give new earth creationism the boot.s. Adhering to the most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits “prove” that the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

This piece by Chris Mooney explains that recent studies have proved that religion also plays a substantial role in whether one believes in climate change:

Biblical literalism also, needless to say, is tied to conflicts with the theory of evolution. (We’ve all seen that movie.)

Moreover, these results persisted even after the researchers controlled for other major variables that influence views on the environment, including gender, level of educational attainment, and most of all, ideology and party affiliation (which have the biggest influence of all on environmental views). Despite these controls, faith remained an important factor in shaping environmental stances. “What we find is that the effects of these denominational affiliations is on par with some sort of typical demographic variables,” said Konisky, like gender or level of education.

In other words, while faith doesn’t have as much of an influence on environmental views as outright politics does, it still has a meaningful one.

And so in some cases does religiosity, or, how intensely a faith is practiced through factors, such as prayer and church attendance. For Catholics and Evangelical Protestants, the study found, more religiosity was also linked to less climate concern.
[…]
The new study does not probe why evangelicals seem more inclined to reject climate concerns, but a recent blog post by Christian author Scott Rodin, entitled “As a Conservative, Evangelical Republican, Why Climate Change Can’t be True (Even Though It Is),” provides an intriguing hint.

Much of the animus in what he calls the “conservative evangelical” community, Rodin suggests, is about viewing environmentalists negatively, as a sort of “other” who don’t share the same worldview and values. Thus, Rodin writes that he had been “conditioned” to think that “People who care about the environment are left-wing, socialist, former hippies who have no job and hate those who do” and that “People who care about the environment are atheists who worship nature, hate Christians and believe humans are intruders on the earth.”

That sounds right. And the same holds true of right wing politics, obviously.

I think liberals do the same thing to some degree, but it doesn’t carry over to whether they believe in science. If they reject conventional scientific consensus it’s based on a distrust of corporations not because Tea Partyers believe it.

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Robert Taft’s ghost is nowhere to be found

by digby

Via Steve Benen

I get that many Dems (and Indies for that matter) backed that horrible war at the time. We all remember the battle that went on within the party. But the Republicans have never reconsidered their position that attacking a country that had not attacked us was a righteous thing to do. The modern GOP is a war party and has been for decades. I wish I could understand why so many people persist in the belief that because Rand Paul and three libertarians in the House are isolationist that means the GOP is changing. No, it just means that libertarians care more about taxes than they do about war.

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The NRA has won the day

by digby

The NRA honchos must cheer every time they see an article like this:

A surge in New York City murders — including four people slain in just five bloody hours as the weekend began — has grieving family members begging Mayor de Blasio to bring back the NYPD’s right to search for guns.

“We need stop-and-frisk,” Stacey Calhoun, the devastated uncle of one of the four fatalities, said Saturday afternoon, tears filling his eyes over the nephew he had just lost.

“Somebody has to put their foot down,” the anguished uncle said.

“A lot of people would agree with stop-and-frisk if it’s for the safety among us,” he said.
“They used to fight with their hands, he said. “It seems like all these kids have guns these days.”

I understand why people think this. Because the proliferation of guns on our streets is an act of God and there’s nothing we can do about that, in order to be safer we must focus on keeping those whom police see as most likely to have them under constant surveillance, regardless of whether they have them or not.

There were some people in the article who sense the problematic trade-off:

“It’s scary how many guns are out here now,” said a resident of the Brownsville project, who gave her name as Ann and her age as 72.

“They shouldn’t just stop and frisk any of our young black men — but they need to do something about these guns,” she said.

As another woman at the Marcus Garvey Houses said of stop-and-frisk, “They need to target it. With all these shootings, people getting killed, do it, but stop and frisk the guys you know from experience might have a gun, and not some kid who’s trying to better his life and get out of here.”

Easier said than done, obviously.

Whenever I read these stories, I feel the need to reprise this post:

British doctor John Snow couldn’t convince other doctors and scientists that cholera, a deadly disease, was spread when people drank contaminated water until a mother washed her baby’s diaper in a town well in 1854 and touched off an epidemic that killed 616 people.
[…]
Dr. Snow believed sewage dumped into the river or into cesspools near town wells could contaminate the water supply, leading to a rapid spread of disease.

In August of 1854 Soho, a suburb of London, was hit hard by a terrible outbreak of cholera. Dr. Snows himself lived near Soho, and immediately went to work to prove his theory that contaminated water was the cause of the outbreak.

“Within 250 yards of the spot where Cambridge Street joins Broad Street there were upwards of 500 fatal attacks of cholera in 10 days,” Dr. Snow wrote “As soon as I became acquainted with the situation and extent of this irruption (sic) of cholera, I suspected some contamination of the water of the much-frequented street-pump in Broad Street.”

Dr. Snow worked around the clock to track down information from hospital and public records on when the outbreak began and whether the victims drank water from the Broad Street pump. Snow suspected that those who lived or worked near the pump were the most likely to use the pump and thus, contract cholera. His pioneering medical research paid off. By using a geographical grid to chart deaths from the outbreak and investigating each case to determine access to the pump water, Snow developed what he considered positive proof the pump was the source of the epidemic… Snow was able to prove that the cholera was not a problem in Soho except among people who were in the habit of drinking water from the Broad Street pump. He also studied samples of water from the pump and found white flecks floating in it, which he believed were the source of contamination.

On 7 September 1854, Snow took his research to the town officials and convinced them to take the handle off the pump, making it impossible to draw water. The officials were reluctant to believe him, but took the handle off as a trial only to find the outbreak of cholera almost immediately trickled to a stop. Little by little, people who had left their homes and businesses in the Broad Street area out of fear of getting cholera began to return.

It took many more years before it was widely accepted that cholera came from the water. (In fact, it took a priest trying to prove that it was God’s will to finally do it!)

But here’s the relevant takeaway: they didn’t need to cure the disease to end the epidemic. What ended it was shutting down the pump.

Here’s another story for you to think about today:

From 1984 to 1996, multiple killings aroused public concern. The 1984 Milperra massacre was a major incident in a series of conflicts between various ‘outlaw motorcycle gangs’. In 1987, the Hoddle Street massacre and the Queen Street massacre took place in Melbourne. In response, several states required the registration of all guns, and restricted the availability of self-loading rifles and shotguns. In the Strathfield massacre in New South Wales, 1991, two were killed with a knife, and five more with a firearm. Tasmania passed a law in 1991 for firearm purchasers to obtain a licence, though enforcement was light. Firearm laws in Tasmania and Queensland remained relatively relaxed for longarms. In 1995, Tasmania had the second lowest rate of homicides per head of population.

The Port Arthur massacre in 1996 transformed gun control legislation in Australia. Thirty five people were killed and 21 wounded when a man with a history of violent and erratic behaviour beginning in early childhood opened fire on shop owners and tourists with two military style semi-automatic rifles. Six weeks after the Dunblane massacre in Scotland, this mass killing at the notorious former convict prison at Port Arthur horrified the Australian public and had powerful political consequences. 

The Port Arthur perpetrator said he bought his firearms from a gun dealer without holding the required firearms licence.

Prime Minister John Howard, then newly elected, immediately took the gun law proposals developed from the report of the 1988 National Committee on Violence and forced the states to adopt them under a National Firearms Agreement. This was necessary because the Australian Constitution does not give the Commonwealth power to enact gun laws. The proposals included a ban on all semi-automatic rifles and all semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, and a tightly restrictive system of licensing and ownership controls.

Some discussion of measures to allow owners to undertake modifications to reduce the capacity of magazine-fed shotguns (“crimping”) occurred, but the government refused to permit this.

Surveys showed up to 85% of Australians supported gun control,but some farmers and sporting shooters strongly opposed the new laws.

This did not solve the problem of mental illness or end the primitive capacity of human beings to commit murder and mayhem. Those are huge problems that their society, like all societies, is still grappling with every day. But it did end the epidemic of mass shootings. They have not had even one since then. 

The lesson is this: End the epidemic and then we can — and must — talk about root causes and mental health facilities and our violent culture. But first things first — shut down the damned pump.

Zombie Blue Dogs

by digby

Unfortunately, they still roam the land searching for brains:

Rejecting a trade agreement with Asia, expanding entitlement programs that crowd out other priorities and a desire to relitigate the financial crisis are becoming dominant positions among Democrats. Although these subjects may make for good partisan talking points, they do not provide the building blocks for a positive and bold agenda to create jobs and improve the lives of Americans. …

[W]e need a philosophical shift in the Democratic Party, a new willingness to support programs that create pathways for nongovernmental and philanthropic innovation and investment to help solve the problems of society. We should embrace approaches, such as social impact bonds, that combine private-sector capital and expertise with public-interest goals to produce better government services. Such changes will require Democrats to leave our ideological comfort zone and move away from the idea that government, and government alone, is the answer to our problems. But instead of being used to voice an agenda that can bring the country together, the party microphone has been hijacked by people more interested in scoring points than in solving problems. They propose expanding Social Security rather than prioritizing serious efforts to preserve the program– even though it will be unable to provide full benefits as soon as 2032, the Congressional Budget Office has made clear. The only way a large-scale expansion could work is by allocating new revenue away from needed investments in the next generation or by shifting the financial burden to workers or our children.

Zzzzzz.

Howie explains who this fine fellow is:

John Delaney spent $2,370,556 in 2012 to buy himself a seat, the third most– after Suzan DelBene and Scott Peters– among the wealthy Democratic freshmen (all of whom immediately joined the extremely corrupt, pro-business/anti-family New Dems). Now a Maryland congressman in a safe blue seat, Delaney is often a fount of Republican ideas– like forbidding the EPA from protecting clean drinking water in streams and lakes and raising the retirement age for the working poor and forcing chained CPI down the throats of Social Security recipients. He was at it again yesterday– another op-ed in the Washington Post, this one to go on a deranged attack against the values and principles of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt that made the Democratic Party great.

Delaney is the perfect Democrat for Fox, always eager to blame progressives for everything, always eager to equate progressives with the extremists, Confederates and fascists that dominate the Republican Party. He’s an advocate of the “both sides are equally wrong” simplemindedness. “Washington,” he wrote, “is paralyzed by extreme political rhetoric that creates powerful sound bites but poor policy… With Washington already broken, the last thing we need is a left-wing version of the tea party. But I am worried about where some of the loudest voices in the room could take the Democratic Party.” Delaney is worried. Why doesn’t he hop the fence and join the GOP?

If any of you leftwing extremists happen to live in his district maybe you should think about running against him in a primary. If there were as many left wing extremists agitating to give undeserving senior citizens a few extra bucks so they don’t have to eat cat food as this guy thinks there are, there would already be one.  This is a safe Democratic district.  There’s no excuse for this.

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Much too young

by digby

I think most of us assumed that we’d see Beau Biden in higher office some day.  He died much too young. Some families are over burdened with tragedy and the Bidens are one of them. It’s always inspirational to see people like Joe Biden be able to maintain their humanity and their optimism in spite of it.

I remember watching this speech at the DNC and seeing Joe mouth the words to his wife “wasn’t Bowie great?” It was a sweet moment.

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Sunday funnies

by digby

Round up the unusual suspects

When the IRS’ chief of criminal investigation this week uttered the phrase “World Cup of fraud,” for a moment I thought he meant criminal indictments were finally being issued for Wall Street bankers over the criminal practices that precipitated (and followed) the 2008 financial crisis. How naive.

“If you touch our shores with your corrupt enterprise, whether that is through meetings or through using our world class financial system, you will be held accountable for that corruption,” FBI Director James Comey said of the charges leveled this week against officials of FIFA, international soccer’s governing body.

Not being a big team sports guy myself – as the Monkees’ Davy Jones said, “It’s ’cause I’m short, I know.” – I had to Google FIFA. This explainer from Vox helps:

The BBC wonders what the U.S. is doing policing international sports, finding, “To prosecute cases that involve foreign nationals, US authorities need only prove a minor connection to the United States.” So, the U.S. Department of Justice finds the time and the authority to investigate an international sports organization that “falls into a netherworld of governance,” to indict and arrest its officials in foreign countries for paying bribes through U.S. banks, yet cannot seem to show the same courtesy to top bank officials in this country for bringing the world economy to its knees, for hurting two-thirds of American families and continuing to hurt states years later.

Just so we’re clear.

Again, the usual suspects are implicated:

CitiBank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, HSBC Holdings PLC and Bank of America Corp. are deeply involved in the bribes, kickbacks and laundering money schemes of some top FIFA officials and sports executives that have been indicted by the US law enforcement. According to a 164-page indictment released by the US Department of Justice, the banks participated in illegal payment schemes and wire transfers in the amount of millions of US dollars.

On Wednesday, US authorities charged nine officials of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and five sports executives, alleging they were part of a scheme in which more than $150m in bribes were paid in exchange for the commercial rights to football tournaments.

The scheme involves top global financial institutions such as JPMorgan and HSBC, both of which have recently paid billions of dollars in fines for illegal trading and manipulation of foreign exchange markets.

Yet it is the unusual suspects who got rounded up while Wall Street’s Ugartes wring their hands over FIFA’s “poor devils.”

15% of bad apples spoil the whole bunch

by digby

Read this piece by an African-American ex-cop talking about his experiences in the profession, He says that 15% of cops are abusers, 15% would never abuse and 70% could go either way depending on the leadership and the culture. And whether the cop is black, white, female, hispanic whatever makes no difference:

The effect of institutional racism is such that no matter what color the officer abusing the citizen is, in the vast majority of those cases of abuse that citizen will be black or brown. That is what is allowed.

He relates some stories that will make your hair stand on end. Here’s one:

As a new officer with the St. Louis in the mid-1990s, I responded to a call for an “officer in need of aid.” I was partnered that day with a white female officer. When we got to the scene, it turned out that the officer was fine, and the aid call was canceled. He’d been in a foot pursuit chasing a suspect in an armed robbery and lost him.

The officer I was with asked him if he’d seen where the suspect went. The officer picked a house on the block we were on, and we went to it and knocked on the door. A young man about 18 years old answered the door, partially opening it and peering out at my partner and me. He was standing on crutches. My partner accused him of harboring a suspect. He denied it. He said that this was his family’s home and he was home alone.

My partner then forced the door the rest of the way open, grabbed him by his throat, and snatched him out of the house onto the front porch. She took him to the ledge of the porch and, still holding him by the throat, punched him hard in the face and then in the groin. My partner that day snatched an 18-year-old kid off crutches and assaulted him, simply for stating the fact that he was home alone.

I got the officer off of him. But because an aid call had gone out, several other officers had arrived on the scene. One of those officers, who was black, ascended the stairs and asked what was going on. My partner pointed to the young man, still lying on the porch, and said, “That son of a bitch just assaulted me.” The black officer then went up to the young man and told him to “get the fuck up, I’m taking you in for assaulting an officer.” The young man looked up at the officer and said, “Man … you see I can’t go.” His crutches lay not far from him.

The officer picked him up, cuffed him, and slammed him into the house, where he was able to prop himself up by leaning against it. The officer then told him again to get moving to the police car on the street because he was under arrest. The young man told him one last time, in a pleading tone that was somehow angry at the same time, “You see I can’t go!” The officer reached down and grabbed both the young man’s ankles and yanked up. This caused the young man to strike his head on the porch. The officer then dragged him to the police car. We then searched the house. No one was in it.

This makes my blood boil. Read the whole thing. It’s quite interesting and he makes a good case for body cameras being an important change.

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Santorum on ISIS

by digby

I think he represents the Republican argument quite well:

I don’t see how he’s not calling for another invasion. And a crackdown in the US. This is what they’re running on.  And it unfortunately leaves a whole lot of room for Clinton to be far more hawkish than is necessary if she wants to be. Anything short of full scale war is more reasonable by comparison to what they’re saying.

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