Daily Links #119: SC cops shoot at man 57 times over $100 pot sale

Julian Betton

• South Carolina cops shot at a man ^[pictured] 57 times, hitting him nine times and paralyzing him, during a drug raid over a $100 pot sale. They claimed they’d announced themselves and that he fired at them first, and an “oversight” agency claimed the shooting was justified; his surveillance camera proved they lied about everything. The shooters and prosecutors have now given him a $2.75 million settlement.
  

• Slate exposes the junk science and blatant lies behind Trump’s trans military ban, including the fact that Defense Secretary Mattis was overruled by Mike Pence who, aided by fellow bigots like Tony Perkins, helped sway Trump to ignore the testimony from actual experts who say the ban accomplishes nothing good.
  (via @fark)

• Trump’s EPA continues to attack and lie about science at every turn.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• You know someone has a bad case of Christian persecution complex when they complain that Sweet Jesus ice cream shop’s name is “offensive”.

• Finally, coal baron Bob Murray apparently thought it would be a good idea to send a complaint letter to the judge who dismissed his bogus defamation suit against John Oliver. The ACLU is amused. The judge is not.
  (via @adamsteinbaugh; retweet by @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links #113: Abstinence advocate controls family planning funding

Valerie Huber

• The perils of having Republicans in power: Almost $300 million in family planning funding is now controlled by an anti-abortion abstinence advocate. ^[pictured]

• Appeals court throws out a man’s conviction after a trial judge ordered him to be electrocuted three times to silence him. That judge needs to be fired yesterday.
  (via @washingtonpost; retweet by @Popehat)

• The Arctic just had its warmest winter on record.

• Oregon becomes the latest state to pass its own law protecting net neutrality.

• Finally, here’s everything you need to know about Jehovah’s Witnesses in five minutes:
  (via Friendly Atheist)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

When the North Pole isn’t freezing cold anymore

Nothing to see here. Just one of two places on the planet synonymous with year-long freezing cold thawing out in the middle of winter.

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The sun won’t rise at the North Pole until March 20, and it’s normally close to the coldest time of year, but an extraordinary and possibly historic thaw swelled over the tip of the planet this weekend. Analyses show that the temperature warmed to the melting point as an enormous storm pumped an intense pulse of heat through the Greenland Sea.

Temperatures may have soared as high as 35 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) at the pole, according to the U.S. Global Forecast System model. While there are no direct measurements of temperature there, Zack Labe, a climate scientist working on his PhD at the University of California at Irvine, confirmed that several independent analyses showed “it was very close to freezing,” which is more than 50 degrees (30 degrees Celsius) above normal.

The warm intrusion penetrated right through the heart of the Central Arctic, Labe said. The temperature averaged for the entire region north of 80 degrees latitude spiked to its highest level ever recorded in February.

Always relevant:

(via @adamconover)

New study shows sea levels are rising faster due to polar melting

Just another day on a planet that isn’t warming at all, no sir.

At the current rate, the world’s oceans on average will be at least 2 feet (61 centimeters) higher by the end of the century compared to today, according to researchers who published in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

Sea level rise is caused by warming of the ocean and melting from glaciers and ice sheets. The research, based on 25 years of satellite data, shows that pace has quickened, mainly from the melting of massive ice sheets. It confirms scientists’ computer simulations and is in line with predictions from the United Nations, which releases regular climate change reports.

[…]

Two feet of sea level rise by the end of the century “would have big effects on places like Miami and New Orleans, but I don’t still view that as catastrophic” because those cities can survive — at great expense — that amount of rising seas under normal situations, [lead author Steve] Nerem said.

But when a storm hits like 2012′s Superstorm Sandy, sea level rise on top of storm surge can lead to record-setting damages, researchers said.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Pruitt says a warming climate is not “necessarily a bad thing”

Scott Pruitt

EPA administrator Scott Pruitt is another in the long line of Trump appointees who seem to have been put in office solely to undermine their own agencies. He’s a well-known climate-science denier who couldn’t have his head any further up the fossil fuel industry’s backside if he used a hydraulic ram. And in a recent interview, he said something that takes a kernel of of truth and tosses it into a septic tank of mendacity:

Even if climate change is occurring, as the vast majority of scientists say it is, a warmer atmosphere might not be so awful for humans, according to Pruitt.

“We know humans have most flourished during times of what, warming trends,” Pruitt said Tuesday during an interview on KSNV, an NBC affiliate in Las Vegas. “So I think there’s assumptions made that because the climate is warming, that that necessarily is a bad thing. Do we really know what the ideal surface temperature should be in the year 2100, in the year 2018? That’s fairly arrogant for us to think that we know exactly what it should be in 2100.”

He implies that humankind can live through warmer periods, and that’s true – nothing about global warming or climate change puts the very survival of humanity as a species at risk. Humans have indeed lived through various upswings and downturns in the overall climate throughout their approximate 200,000-year history. That said, it’s important to note that for the vast majority of that time, they were nomadic hunter-gatherers whose homes consisted of roving camps made of animal skins and the occasional cave. They didn’t lose anything by packing up what few possessions they had and roaming halfway across a continent when food became scarce.

It shouldn’t be necessary to point this out, but that’s not how modern civilization works. We have established cities now, and those aren’t easy to move around, which will be a problem once they’re flooded due to rising sea levels. A changing climate will also bring extreme variations in weather of all types, so if you thought 2017 was extraordinary with its endless hurricanes, widespread forest fires and record-setting heat waves, imagine all that as being part of the new normal, or even tame compared to what’s to come. More than that, our society will be threatened on a much more fundamental level once our food supply, the vast majority of which comes from agriculture that’s dependent on a stable and predictable climate, starts drying up. And that’s not even considering what this roller-coaster of uncertainty will do to the global economy as things get progressively more severe.

Humanity can absolutely survive a shifting climate. Humanity’s current way of life absolutely cannot. You’d expect anyone in a position of power, especially in what’s supposed to be one of the richest and most educated countries on the planet, would be aware of the difference. But with Pruitt, as with all of Trump’s entourage, it’s hard to tell whether his incompetence stems from sheer ignorance, or whether it’s deliberate. Neither scenario bodes well.

(via @BadAstronomer)

Trump admin. wants 72% budget slash for clean energy research

You know any politician is going to cater to their donors’ interests to a point, and that includes the president. But never before has a White House been so plainly bought and paid for to the extent that we can practically see its receipt sticking out:

The Trump administration is poised to ask Congress for deep budget cuts to the Energy Department’s renewable energy and energy efficiency programs, slashing them by 72 percent overall in fiscal 2019, according to draft budget documents obtained by The Washington Post.

Many of the sharp cuts would likely be restored by Congress, but President Trump’s budget due out in February will mark a starting point for negotiations and offer a statement of intent and policy priorities.

The document underscores the administration’s continued focus on the exploitation of fossil fuel resources — or as Trump put it in his State of the Union address, “beautiful clean coal” — over newer renewable technologies seen as a central solution to the problem of climate change.

As usual with Trump, it’s hard to tell how much of this stems from his desire to please his rich industry friends versus his apparent contempt for anything that’s remotely good for the country. Absolutely no-one gains from this except for oil executives; as I’ve noted before, studies are making it clear that clean and renewable energy is already the better option financially, as it costs less to operate (and is more productive) than fossil fuel plants. And that’s not even mentioning the vast environmental benefits, which matter to people who are fans of air that doesn’t give them black lung.

But Trump doesn’t give a damn about any of that, if he’s even aware of it. He’s got rich pals to please.

(via @BadAstronomer)

Daily Links: 12/27/17 – Trump admin. proposes axing offshore oil drilling safety regulations

• In which the Trump administration presumably looked at the Deepwater Horizon oil spill ^[pictured] and figured there’s really no need for any of the safety regulations implemented since then.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• FBI celebrates taking down a “terrorist” who told undercover agents he couldn’t go through with the attack they’d helped him prepare.

• A Minnesota prosecutor is the latest to think destroying a teenager’s life with child porn charges will somehow protect her from the evils of sexting.

• Arizona Republican lawmaker wants to force independent local officials to run with party labels in order to keep sneaky liberal sanitation workers and pothole-fixers out of office.
  (via @fark)

• Bangladeshi atheist blogger faces up to 14 years in prison because he “hurt religious feelings” by mocking Islam.

• Finally: Indonesian baker refuses to make a cake that would violate his religious beliefs. Clincher: Not for the usual reason.

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 11/27/17 – CBO: Trump tax plan worse than believed

• Congressional Budget Office concludes the Trump/Republican tax plan would hurt the poor even more than was originally believed.
  (via @fark)

• New landmark study finds it’s now become cheaper to build and operate new renewable-energy plants than to continue running fossil fuel facilities.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• Few people deserve to be fired as hard as these nine NYPD thugs who ambushed a teenager in the hospital to try and badger her out of pressing charges against two detectives who (allegedly) raped her.
  (via @davidminpdx; RT: @radleybalko)

• Also in need of firing: The officials who thought it fair to charge this mother with a felony for slipping a digital recorder into her daughter’s backpack to try and prove the school wasn’t doing anything to address bullying.
  (via @NonWhiteHat; RT: @Popehat)

• I’d also push for the firing of incompetent muckraker James O’Keefe and his gang of journalistic rejects at Project Veritas, but I’m not entirely certain they have jobs to be fired from. See also: A history of O’Keefe & co.’s self-owns.
  (via @ggreenwald)

• Finally: Step aside, antivaccination lunacy, 9/11 Trutherism and lizard people: The most popular conspiracy theory on the Internet may be chemtrails.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 11/21/17 – The battle for net neutrality begins

• FCC Chairman Ajit Pai formally reveals plans to kill net neutrality. Raise holy hell, people, or the free and open Internet you know is going to disappear.

• Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe abruptly resigns two days after declaring he’d never do so following a military coup.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is very offended by the factual statement that the latest Trump/Republican tax plan would pay for tax cuts for the rich by gouging everyone else.
  (via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)

• I just don’t understand why environmentalists keep protesting oil pipelines.
  (via @BadAstronomer)

• Meanwhile, the Keystone XL pipeline, presumed dead under President Obama, is now going through – just as protests become increasingly criminalized.

• What is it with courts that think they can decide what people in other countries can or cannot say?
  (via @jacobgershman; RT: @Popehat)

• In local news, a Québec judge refuses to dismiss charges against a cop whose reckless speeding caused a crash that killed a five-year-old boy in 2014. This story is the go-to example for everyone around here when they explain why they distrust the police.

• Finally, a Long Island high school teacher gets suspended after bragging on Facebook about flunking students who sat during the Pledge of Allegiance, needs to lose his fucking job immediately.
  (via @GregortheMendel; RT: @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

Daily Links: 11/13/17 – Moore’s hypocritical Evangelical defenders

Roy Moore

Tomorrow comes Firefox 57, which kills support for non-WebExtension add-ons. So if half your add-ons stop working overnight, that’s why. (Losing URL Alias will hurt a ton. Been using it for years.)

• 37% of Alabama Evangelical Christians say they’re more likely to vote for Christian-fascist Senate candidate Roy Moore ^[pictured] after multiple allegations that he undressed and groped 14-to-16-year-old girls. In case you weren’t certain yet about being an atheist.

• Meanwhile, more than 50 pastors and clergy have signed a letter defending Moore. But, y’know, something something moral authority, think about the children, so on.

• A lengthy, non-exhaustive list of men accused of sexual misconduct since Harvey Weinstein. I’m somewhat amazed they’ve all faced consequences.
  (via @rkylesmith; RT: @Popehat)

• The President’s nominee for top environmental advisor doesn’t understand grade-school-level science. There was a time this might have been shocking.

• Also not shocking: Trump’s nominee for new HHS Secretary, who Trump tweets “will be a star for […] lower drug prices!”, is a former pharma executive whose company routinely raised drug prices. Because words mean nothing anymore.

• Finally, Shiva Ayyadurai, who likes to threaten and sue anyone who debunks his claim that he “invented email”, now threatens to sue Boston’s mayor over free speech.
  (via @adamsteinbaugh; RT: @Popehat)

If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.

In climate change news, atmospheric CO2 surged in 2016

With growing awareness of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change and the efforts people are putting into curbing its effects, it’s tempting to think we may be putting a dent in it at least. But then along comes science with a sobering reality check:

Concentrations of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere surged to a record high in 2016, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

Last year's increase was 50% higher than the average of the past 10 years.

Researchers say a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather phenomenon drove CO2 to a level not seen in 800,000 years.

Scientists say this risks making global temperature targets largely unattainable.

[…]

Emissions from human sources have slowed down in the last couple of years according to research, but according to Dr Tarasova, it is the cumulative total in the atmosphere that really matters as CO2 stays aloft and active for centuries.

I don’t see that line changing course and going back down anytime soon, least of all with one of the most politically and economically powerful nations in the world currently under leadership that sees the environment as entirely expendable.

Trump EPA head kills Obama-era clean coal program

Scott Pruitt

Hey, look! It’s a good thing that President Obama tried to do! Better undo it, even though it’ll only slightly benefit a tiny handful of people in a dying industry at the expense of destroying everyone else’s environment:

The head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday that he will sign a new rule overriding the Clean Power Plan, an Obama-era effort to limit carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants.

"The war on coal is over," EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt declared in the coal mining state of Kentucky. He said no federal agency "should ever use its authority" to "declare war on any sector of our economy."

For Pruitt, getting rid of the Clean Power Plan will mark the culmination of a long fight he began as the elected attorney general of Oklahoma. Pruitt was among about two dozen attorneys general who sued to stop President Barack Obama's push to limit carbon emissions, stymieing the limits from ever taking effect.

As you can expect, this is wrong-minded on every level:

Despite the rhetoric about saving coal, government statistics show that coal mines currently employ only about 52,000 workers nationally — a modest four per cent uptick since Trump became president. Those numbers are dwarfed by the jobs created by building such clean-power infrastructure as wind turbines and solar arrays.

Clean energy jobs cost less, pollute less, employ more people, are safer for their workers, generate more revenue, and are generally more energy-productive. So of course it’s the antiquated, hazardous, polluting jobs that help only a tiny sliver of the workforce that Trump and his EPA lapdog want to focus on. Because this administration has a pathological need to be on the wrong side of absolutely everything.

The “war on coal” never was, but the very real war on science progresses apace. And unlike the former, this will hurt everyone in the long run.