Month: December 2015

You pays yer money and you takes yer choice
by Tom Sullivan

“The problem’s not solved because of this accord.” – President Barack Obama

Environmental issues are not my forte, but I followed live the release of the Paris agreement yesterday morning nonetheless. The president later gave this statement:

“I believe this moment can be a turning point for the world,” Obama concluded. “We’ve shown that the world has both the will and the ability to take on this challenge.”

D.R. Tucker at Political Animal wrote passionately about the Paris agreement:

I am fighting back tears as I write this. Do you know what this moment means? It means the most rapacious and destructive industry on the face of this warming Earth is on the downfall. It means that we will finally race towards the day where fossil fuels are kept in the ground where they belong, and children born today can have clean air, clean water and a stable future.

Do you know what this moment means? It means men and women of goodwill can succeed in the face of impossible odds.

Do you know what this moment means? It means that the deniers, the disinformers and the demagogues have been humiliated and humbled once and for all.

This is history’s golden moment. This is a moment where hope won in a blowout against cynicism. This is a day to be proud, damn proud, of being alive, of being compassionate, of being human.

Caring won. Hope won. Science won. The better angels of our nature won.

After the Paris attacks and the xenophobic contagion spreading across this country in their wake, we all needed that. To be sure, there will be plenty of details debated. But getting this many minds to meet and agree on something this critical suggests other immovable objects may yet yield when unstoppable forces come to bear. (I’m going somewhere with this.)

As environmental activists gathered in Paris to hammer out the climate change agreement, a dozen, lonely, tired attendees gathered at a bistro near the Bastille. They were in Paris to promote carbon-free nuclear power and a pro-nuke documentary, Pandora’s Promise. The film features “people who were passionate anti-nuke environmentalists until they realized that climate change was a bigger problem and the only practical solution might be the very thing they’d dedicated their lives to stopping.” It is still not a particularly easy sell for Myrto Tripathi who went from environmental NGOs to the nuclear industry:

Tripathi says it’s gotten so bad, that when she went to parties and said what she did for a living, people her age would say how nice she seemed for someone who was “working for the devil.” After a while, she started saying she was a florist.

The same thing happens in the States, Stone says. The big environmental lobbies are so anti-nuke that activists on the left are afraid to say anything positive about it. “It’s such a bitter irony,” he says. “Environmentalists are stopping progress on the greatest environmental crisis in history.”

It is the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, Tripathi observes. Bhopal alone killed an estimated 15,000 people. Yet the chemical industry does not draw the side eye and ire of nuclear power. France gets over 60 percent of its energy from nuclear.

The gist of the discussion is, with renewables unable to fill the gap, if you want to tackle global climate change and fight proven, carbon-free nuclear power at the same time, how serious about climate change are you really? You pays yer money and you takes yer choice.

I don’t raise the point to promote nuclear power, or to start a debate over the front-end and back-end economics. What caught my attention was people dogmatically committed to one view changing their thinking in the face of a larger, more imminent threat. In Paris, representatives of nearly 200 countries reached a similar turning point yesterday. Our children’s children will thank them for it.

What caught my attention was the promise that “in the face of impossible odds” public opinion could change on other intractable issues overdue for their turning points. For example, gun violence. Ask any U.S. politician, if you are serious about reducing gun violence yet refuse to address the easy availability of guns, how serious are you about reducing gun violence really?

A rare moment of agreement on climate. A start.

by digby

So the world came together today and agreed on something. How unusual. That it is an agreement to deal with climate change, the world’s most important problem, makes it something positive.

The critics on both the left and right are already weighing in and have many, many, many criticisms. The faith based are mad that anyone’s even talking about this “hoax” while the reality/scientifically based are terribly concerned it doesn’t go far enough to stop the impending doom. The reality/scientifically based are correct.

But that doesn’t mean it is something we should not celebrate. It’s very, very difficult to get the world to agree on anything these days. If we had a Republican in the White House the United States would have either laid out of the talks or refused to sign this. By giving the problem the international attention it needs and a commitment to solving it, however inadequate, we have in Naomi Klein’s words:

I agree with ActionAid: Paris deal “provides an important hook on which people can hang their demands.” https://t.co/isP50IZMWS #cop21

— Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) December 12, 2015

For a full look at the pact and what it means and what it doesn’t mean, read this from David Roberts.

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Enmptywheel on cancer and malaise


by digby

Marcy Wheeler, usually known for her dissection of dense bureaucratic documents and finding the real meaning behind them wrote a polemic today. And it’s really good:

The right wingers who insist on calling any attack by a Muslim “terrorism” — who insist on tying the San Bernardino attack to ISIS, even in the absence of evidence — do it to prioritize the fight against terrorists over all the other ills facing America: over other gun violence, over climate change, over the persistent economic struggles of most Americans. Theirs is a profoundly unpatriotic effort to put war over every other policy priority, even far more pressing ones. That stance has led to a disinvestment in America, with real consequences for everyone not getting rich off of arms sales. 

Last week, President Obama capitulated to these forces, giving a speech designed to give the attack in San Bernardino precedence over all the other mass killings of late, to give its 14 dead victims more importance over all the other dead victims. Most strikingly, Obama called attacks that aren’t, legally, terrorism, something his critics have long been demanding.

She critiques the speech line by line in Wheeler-esque fashion and then:

…why should we see our kids in the faces of the young people killed in Paris, rather than in the faces of the young people killed in the Umpqua Community College shooting or the over 60 people under the age of 25 shot in Chicago between the Paris attack and Obama’s speech? If we were to think of a cancer with no immediate cure, why wouldn’t we be thinking of the 20 6-year olds killed in Newtown?

We have a cancer, but it’s not terrorism. And it’s not just exhibited in all our shootings. It is equally exhibited in our growing addiction rates, in the increasing mortality in some groups. Obama gave the speech, surely, to quiet the calls who demand he address terrorism more aggressively than he address the underlying cancer.

She goes on to evoke an interesting parallel: Jimmy Carter’s famous malaise speech from 36 years ago noting that “just 12 days before Carter delivered what would be dubbed the malaise speech, he authorized covert support for what would become the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Our entanglement with the Saudis — and with it our refusal to ditch our oil addiction — has disastrously governed much of our foreign policy since, even while the dollar exchange delayed the recognition that our economy isn’t working anymore, not for average Americans.”

Read the whole thing. It’s a very interesting and, in my view, necessary, perspective.

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Your daily wingnut check-in

by digby

This is being passed around on Facebook today:

Maybe after viewing this video you will understand Barrack Hussein Obama agenda known as the Transformation of America, why they want your guns and what massive unregulated immigration and an open border policy is bringing you.

This is America’s future if Obama and his Socialist Democratic Party of Ineptocracy are not neutralized immediately. Immediate action on your behalf is required. We cannot wait until election 2016 for America’s worse nightmare Killary Klinton to occupy the Whitehouse for eight more years of dictatorial tyranny.

The question you should be asking yourself at this time is. Do you want to live or die? A full version of invasion is here and the reason for the flag and the meaning of the text on the flag can be run through the google translator.

They are working themselves up into a full fledged frenzy.

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The fan base #Trumpsgroupies

by digby

You’ve probably seen this crazy person’s rant by now but if not, take a look at your average Trump voter:

Here’s the really scary thing. This person is an elected representative.

Howie at Down With Tyranny:

Check out the Trumpf freak in the video above, Rochester, New Hampshire state Rep Susan DeLemus, a teabagger, crackpot birther and die-hard Trumpist who runs on pure, unadulterated vitriol. Also a Romney hater.

Hubby is Jerry DeLemus, one of the gunmen/insurrectionists at the Bundy Ranch in Nevada last year, is an aggressive Islamophobe and last year first backed Bachmann and then Santorum. He also ran for Sheriff of Strafford County last year, although he lost in a landslide, 20,436 to 12,443, to Democrat David Dubois. His campaign platform was all about Islamophobia and immigrants, very Trumpist.

I’m awfully glad these people are armed to the teeth.

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What could go wrong?

by digby

They are known as “Three Percenters,” followers of a movement that has rallied against gun control efforts nationwide, patrolled the U.S. border with Mexico and recently begun confronting Muslim Americans.

Followers describe themselves as armed “patriots.” But some of their leaders have been blamed for threats and vandalism against lawmakers, police and Muslims. One prominent member from Phoenix prompted an FBI alert in November after posting an expletive-filled Facebook video saying he was headed to upstate New York with guns to challenge a Muslim group. A Three Percenter in suburban Dallas led a mosque protest by armed, masked men that same month. 

Texas has been the scene of several other incidents this year that have raised anti-Muslim unease. Two Muslim gunmen in May were shot outside a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Garland. Police in Irving arrested a 14-year-old Muslim whose teachers thought his homemade clock was a bomb in September.

All this comes at a time when Texas has led a number of states trying to block the resettlement of Syrian refugees and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a “complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the U.S.

“We will interfere with every move they (Muslims) make towards taking over our country,” Dallas protest organizer David Wright said in response to questions the Associated Press sent to his personal Facebook page. “We are ready to fight back if they come at us violently.”

Meanwhile, all the GOP presidential candidates are saying more people need to be armed to “defend themselves” against terrorists (and anyone else who looks at them sideways.)

Oh and by the way, look what’s happening here and in Europe:

Of course, in Europe every perpetrator of a hate crime doesn’t have access to unlimited firepower so the body count is likely to be lower .

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One argument for the elimination of television
by Tom Sullivan

Jerry Mander (I know, the name is even more ironic today) warned us in 1978 when he published “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” that “television is a medium of summary or reductionism – it reduces everything to slogans.” The one-time advertising executive continued:

My own feeling is that that is true – that it’s very important to improve the program content – but that television has effects, very important effects, aside from the content, and they may be more important. They organize society in a certain way. They give power to a very small number of people to speak into the brains of everyone else in the system night after night after night with images that make people turn out in a certain kind of way. It affects the psychology of people who watch. It increases the passivity of people who watch. It changes family relationships. It changes understandings of nature. It flattens perception so that information, which you need a fair amount of complexity to understand it as you would get from reading, this information is flattened down to a very reduced form on television. And the medium has inherent qualities which cause it to be that way.

Matt Taibbi writes how Donald Trump turned out in a certain kind of way because he himself is a product of television:

Lots of people have remarked on the irony of this absurd caricature of a spoiled rich kid connecting so well with working-class America. But Trump does have something very much in common with everybody else. He watches TV. That’s his primary experience with reality, and just like most of his voters, he doesn’t realize that it’s a distorted picture.

If you got all of your information from TV and movies, you’d have some pretty dumb ideas. You’d be convinced blowing stuff up works, because it always does in our movies. You’d have no empathy for the poor, because there are no poor people in American movies or TV shows – they’re rarely even shown on the news, because advertisers consider them a bummer.

Politically, you’d have no ability to grasp nuance or complexity, since there is none in our mainstream political discussion. All problems, even the most complicated, are boiled down to a few minutes of TV content at most. That’s how issues like the last financial collapse completely flew by Middle America. The truth, with all the intricacies of all those arcane new mortgage-based financial instruments, was much harder to grasp than a story about lazy minorities buying houses they couldn’t afford, which is what Middle America still believes.

Trump isn’t just selling these easy answers. He’s also buying them. Trump is a TV believer. He’s so subsumed in all the crap he’s watched – and you can tell by the cropped syntax in his books and his speech, Trump is a watcher, not a reader – it’s all mixed up in his head.

Demonstrating that, Donald Trump told the New York Times that Americans love swagger more than politics and restraint. Just like in the movies:

“My favorite was Harrison Ford on the plane,” Mr. Trump said of “Air Force One.” “I love Harrison Ford — and not just because he rents my properties. He stood up for America.”

Harrison Ford, promoting Star Wars: The Force Awakens, shot back in blunt, Han Solo fashion:

We have raised several generations on television’s “schlock stereotypes and EZ solutions,” as Taibbi describes, rendering “everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality.” Just as Mander warned. And because informing the viewers is a bummer too, I suppose, what used to be network news – a public service not expected to be profitable – has become advertiser-driven infotainment. Now the GOP is set to nominate America’s first made-for-TV, reality-show candidate for president, a study in “ambitious stupidity” [timestamp 3:45] who is giving the audience just what it wants.

Havin’ a laugh

by digby

Happy Friday folks …

The psycho bully boy vote is bigger than we might hope

by doigby

Welp, that didn’t hurt him:

Trump has climbed pretty steadily now in a series of New Hampshire surveys conducted for WBUR by The MassINC Polling Group. And pollster Steve Koczela says Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. is not slowing the trend.

“The question that people have been asking this week is whether the comments that Donald Trump made earlier this week would hurt him,” Koczela said. “And what this poll shows is that in New Hampshire that certainly was not the case.”

Who;s climbing in that poll? Trump, Christie and Cruz. Feel the magic America.