gregladen | April 28, 2017Right in the middle, between the Trump-inspired March for Science, and the Trump-inspired People's Climate March, the New York times managed to come down firmly on the side of climate and science denial, in its editorial pages.
This week sees the first NYT installment by the ex Wall Street Journal columnist and author Bret Stephens (also former editor of the The Jerusalem Post). He is a professional contrarian, well known for his denial of the importance and reality of climate change, as well as other right wing positions. I assume the New York Times added Stephens to their stable of…
gregladen | April 28, 2017The Lese people practice swidden horticulture in the Ituri Forest, Congo (formerly Zaire). Living in the same area are the Efe people, sometimes known as Pygmies (but that may be an inappropriate term). The Efe and Lese share a culture, in a sense, but are distinct entities within that culture, as distinct as any people living integrated by side by side ever are. The Efe are hunter-gatherers, but the gathering of wild food part of that is largely supplanted by a traditional system of tacit exchange between Efe women and Lese farmers, whereby the Efe provide labor and the farmers provide…
gregladen | April 27, 2017The New York Times
Elizabeth Spayed, Public Editor
Dear Elizabeth,
I am writing to express my concern for the addition of Bret Stephens to the NYT team as a columnist.
I don't expect a columnist who seemingly writes about everything to be wrong about nothing. But the Gray Lady should, at the very least, expect a columnist to know something about something.
Stephens doesn't simply express opinions that are not popular in certain, many, circles. He attempts to support his opinions with what we now seem to be calling alt-facts.
For example, his opinion about the importance of climate change is…
gregladen | April 27, 2017I've been meaning to write a letter to the New York Times I just wrote this letter to the New York Times about their very wrong decision to add a climate science denier to their editorial staff. When they were recently challenged about this idea, the response was, paraphrasing, "millions of people believe this man that climate change is not for real."
Coming from the New York Times I find that deeply disturbing and overwhelmingly offensive.
Anyway, I haven't written my letter yet, but my friend and colleague Stefan Rahmstorf, climate scientist, did, and he says it is OK to post it. So, here…
gregladen | April 27, 2017The Republican line is this: Bring back coal, shut down development, subsidies, any encouragement at all, for solar and wind energy.
There is absolutely no logic to this policy, but it is in fact the policy. The reason for it is generally thought to be that the big rich corporations and individuals that control coal and petroleum resources, and that are fully engaged in delivery of those energy sources (and other materials, such as plastic bags made of petroleum) pay off the politicians to support their businesses. And that is true, they do this. But that does not explain why regular…
gregladen | April 26, 2017The Washington Post:
What we are reporting here isn't fake news. But it doesn't feel exactly like real news, either. It's in that foggy realm of Trump news in which everything is slightly ambiguous and wobbly and internally inconsistent and almost certainly improvisational and not actually grounded in what you could call “government policy.”
LOL
On being told that a reasonably ambitious plan for going to Mars would get humans there in the 2030s, Trump directed NASA to speed it up and make sure it happens between 4 and 8 years from now.
gregladen | April 26, 2017Learn to Program with Small Basic: An Introduction to Programming with Games, Art, Science, and Math is yet another addition to the growing list of programming books for people interesting in learning programming.
Basic is an under-appreciated language. I wish I had a good basic compiler handy, and I'd love to see a basic scripting version that worked like bash. Can you see the value of that?
Anyway, Small Basic is an updated modernish basic that runs only on Windows, so while I can't use it, you might, and this book looks like a good intro. From the publisher:
Small Basic is a free,…
gregladen | April 25, 2017In a current poll, 61% of Americans want to retain Obamacare, and improve this already implemented and existing program. A mere 37% want to "repeal and replace" it.
About 69% of American want the Republicans, including the Republican President, to to do some combination of working with Congressional Democrats or a combination of Democrats and Republicans to improve the plan. The preference for having the Democrats do this as opposed to a combination is about 2:1. People have apparently observed that the Republicans are not capable of coming up with a usable plan.
The Republicans, including…
gregladen | April 24, 2017Lennox Yearwood Jr was on his way to speak at the March for Science in DC, when something bad happened. He tells us:
...at the March For Science in Washington DC on Earth Day, I was assaulted, roughed up, and detained by police in the shadow of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture. It was not part of an action or planned civil disobedience. It was sadly a much more regular event - an interaction between police and a person of color gone very wrong.
He continues:
I was walking in the rain and carrying an umbrella down Constitution Ave. from the National Archives…
gregladen | April 22, 2017Just a little video and some pictures from today's March for Science, Minnesota.
This one from the march route on the way to the capitol. Skip ahead to about 1:12 go get the best chant:
Another video, this one from The Hedge:
You don't see this sign at many protests:
Mammals were welcome at the march:
And, now, Here is my extraordinarily well timed Facebook Live post
gregladen | April 21, 2017We just had an execution by lethal injection. Everything went fine. If, by "fine," we mean a guy died as a bunch of people watched emotionlessly.
The execution was carried out so late in the process that only a few minutes passed between the pronouncement of death and and the expiration of the court order to kill.
What if the execution had taken twice as long? With the order expired, would it be stopped during the final minutes? Would someone dial 911, get EMTs in there, try to save the guy's life?
I'm against the death penalty. I think it is time we recognized that this is the 21st…
gregladen | April 20, 2017I'll never forget my first lion.
A colleague and I had just arrived in the Semliki Valley, in the Congo, to a part of that valley then known as the most predator-rich region of Africa, with loads of lions and heaps of hyenas. Lots of leopards too. We arrived at the main base camp for a large expedition that I was to join a year later (this was a brief visit) and were told to find the satellite camp, out in the bush.
"Ten clicks that way, then a left on their road. Good luck finding the road."
Good luck indeed. Took us forever. And, at one point, after night fell, we had the brilliant idea…
gregladen | April 20, 2017This is alarming and sobering. I was already alarmed and sober, but in case you were not, take heed.
gregladen | April 20, 2017On September 11th, 1640, a Dutch armada preparing to attack the New World Spanish settlements was lost to a storm, thus changing the course of Dutch, Spanish, and New World history.
On January 2nd, 1678, an entire fleet of French naval ships was lost off the Venezuelan coat, changing forever the history of France. And Venezuela. *
On or about April 19th, 2017, the United States lost the battle group running with the USS Carl Vinson, somewhere in the Pacific. This altered forever the credibility of the American Military around the world.
gregladen | April 19, 2017I remember like it was yesterday, the anti Hillary rhetoric flying around during those final weeks of the election. People were making statements that seemed to be based on actual sources, though the sources themselves were not crossing my path. The attitude of those repeating the stories was very similar across the board. Breathless, gut-punch angry, visceral, mean. They were talking almost as though Hillary Clinton had stepped on their baby's heads. That kind of thing.
And it turns out that this was the Russians. The people doing this were not the Russians. Rather, the Russians, either…
gregladen | April 18, 2017In which I interview Geoffrey Rojas, an organizer for Minnesota March for Science:
Books mentioned in the interview:
The War on Science: Who's Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto.
The Meetup Information for the Atheists Bus is here. The bus is currently full!
The Minnesota March for Science facebook page is here.
I think the wether is going to be perfect marching weather.
On a related topic: Evidence for Democracy - Katie Gibbs on Science Resisting
gregladen | April 14, 2017Behold the following letter from Representative Donald S. Beyer in reference to the recent House Science, Space, and Technology hearing "Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy, Implications, and Scientific Method" held last month (Warning Big File):
Beyer Fact Check - Submitted April 11
Here is a smaller, much abbreviated and much less fun version of the letter, sans the extensive appendix:
Letter Only
gregladen | April 14, 2017The latest data from NASA GISS has come out, showing a surprise result for the month of March.
Hat tip to Jeff Masters of Wunderground for sending this info. He'll probably be blogging on it soon.
The surprise is that March, while expected to be warm due to human caused greenhouse gas pollution, turned out to be very warm globally. This is a surprise because the Earth supposedly just experienced a minor cooling La Niña event that ended in January. March 2017, it turns out, is the fourth warmest month since 1880 expressed as an anomaly from a 1951-1980 baseline (that's a bit tricky, more on…
gregladen | April 14, 2017A lot of people are offering free advice to the Democratic Party these days. This is natural in the wake of a resounding defeat, especially a defeat that was snatched so clumsily from the jaws of victory.
I gave some advice a while back (see: Why Trump Won And How To Fix That For Future Elections). Since then, I've spent a lot of time with a lot of those folks who appeared on the scene, often as members of Indivisible groups, after the election. I see a lot of frustration with the Democratic Party (and our local DFL, which is what we call the Democratic Party in Minnesota). Here are my…