Rebeca Watson lays into the clowns in charge of US science policy

Want to hear a joke? The US House Science, Space and Technology Committee. Specifically, the transparent shills and cartoonish buffoons that populate it.

Transcript:

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What’s the dumbest thing a Republican lawmaker can say about climate change? Is it Donald Trump saying that it’s a Chinese conspiracy theory? Is it Representative John Shimkus saying that it doesn’t matter because God already promised us after Noah’s Flood that he wouldn’t destroy the Earth? Or is it Senator James Inhofe telling Rachel Maddow that it can’t be true because combating it would be far too expensive?

Or is it the latest contender, Representative Mo Brooks telling an actual climate scientist that the global sea levels are rising because rocks are falling into the ocean?

Hold on, because it’s about to get so much worse. Brooks had the opportunity to say such a stupid thing because he is on the US House of Representatives Science Space and Technology Committee, which is like me being on a committee focused on NASCAR, Steven Universe fan-fiction and post-Keynesian economics. In other words, shit I know nothing about. (And I know, I know, I’ve been meaning to watch Steven Universe. I’ll get to it.)

The Committee was gathered to talk about how technology can be used to combat climate change, but instead of talking about that very important subject, it turned out to be a third-grade-level lecture for two hours, in which Dr. Philip Duffy of Woods Hole Research Center patiently explained to seventy-year-old men that no, rocks do not make the sea levels rise; and no, the chart that Lamar Smith brought along to prove that climate change was fake was not based on actual science just because it’s in a chart form; and no, Bill Posey, scientists in the 1970s did not think that humans were actually causing the Earth to cool; no that Time Magazine cover is a hoax.

Of all the dumb shit that was said during those two hours, obviously Mo Brooks wins for the dumbest. Here’s a direct quote from him as he attempted to really sell his idea that rocks falling into the ocean are what’s responsible for the sea levels rising:

Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up.

[-grown ass man on a god damn science committee]

Seriously. Mel Brooks is a 64-year-old man and he sounds like an actual child. That is something a child would say in a poorly researched report on what he thinks makes water go up and down. “Now you have less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up.” Jesus Christ.

This is why we’re all gonna die. Yes, the coming nuclear war with North Korea or whoever is not going to be pleasant, but some humans will survive. But no-one will survive the coming temperature increase, and it’s going to happen because the science wing of the government of one of the biggest superpowers in the world today can’t talk about technological solutions to the problem because the people running the committee can’t even get past the fact that it’s happening.

It’s as if our house is on fire and when the firefighters show up, they say, “I’m sorry, but we just don’t believe in fire.” And you’re like, “Wait, you what now?” And they say, “We don’t really have any evidence that fire is real. Like, what is it even? Is it a solid? And if so, then how does my hand pass through it? If it’s a gas, why can I see it? How does it grow if it’s not alive? I read a scientific article on 4chan once that says that fire is a Chinese conspiracy made up to frighten us into staying chilly all winter.” When you’re dealing with someone that willfully stupid, your house is just going to burn down, because by the time you answer all their stupid questions it’s going to be too late.

Remember this, please, as midterms approach: Please, for the sake of the next generation, and for my own sanity’s sake, please vote these man-children out of office before our house burns down.

My idea of the worst possible job is being tasked with distinguishing which Republicans act this way because they’re genuinely stupid from those who act this way because they’re dishonest and corrupt. And that’s not counting the overlap.

Is there one part of the US government that isn’t hopelessly broken?

(via Pharyngula)

Daily Links #125: Oklahoma bans same-sex adoption

• Oklahoma officially allows religious adoption agencies to discriminate against same-sex parents. It’s the Christian way.

• The fallout from SESTA/FOSTA continues: Cops realize it’s making their jobs harder, whilst sex traffickers are having a field day. It’s not like anyone predicted this would happen or anything …

• PZ Myers says all I have to say on the “Intellectual Dark Web” of regressives who whinge about how they can’t spout bigotry and play footsie with fascists without suffering social consequences.

• Andrew Shirvell, who rose to fame as the homophobic former Michigan Assistant Attorney General who obsessively harassed a gay college student, has been permanently disbarred.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: in Creativitas news, I’ve recently revised and updated three of my orchestral songs, “Inhuman Suite”, “Setting Out” and “Softer Dreams”. I plan to revisit some of my older songs – some of which I haven’t touched in the better part of a decade, back when I was just starting to write music – and give them the overhaul they deserve, so stay tuned.

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

Trump voters get screwed: Migrant labor edition

I like to think I’m an empathetic person, but there are some individuals I just can’t feel sorry for. And these people are first amongst them:

Small business owners who supported Donald Trump are complaining about troubles hiring foreign seasonal labor the Lexington Herald-Leader reports.

The newspaper interviewed multiple landscaping business owners who claim they are unable to hire Americans for the same wages.

Eddie Devine voted for Trump, but worries he may go out of business if he is unable to continue hiring 20 foreign workers a season though the H-2B visa program.

“I feel like I’ve been tricked by the devil,” Devine admitted. “I feel so stupid.”

They voted for a candidate who loudly made closing the borders his top priority, and now they’re shocked to find seasonal workers have a hard time getting into the country. And they own businesses that depend on seasonal workers.

“Stupid” may be a soft term.

Incidentally, file this away into that ever-growing archive for the next time you hear someone talk about foreigners “taking our jobs”:

“We live and die by these visas,” said Ken Monin, owner of Monin Construction. “Last year we about went bankrupt. The workers we were supposed to get in March didn’t show up until August because they couldn’t get visas.”

“Americans don’t want most of these jobs,” Monin claimed.

This is reminiscent of what happened in Georgia in 2012, when a harsh new anti-immigration law that kept undocumented migrants out resulted in $140 million in crops rotting in the fields because – and this will shock some people – Americans don’t want the sort of miserable, low-paying jobs that attracts seasonal workers. That’s atop all the other data that shows that immigrant workers, including undocumented ones, do not “steal” jobs. But no anti-immigration crusader would dare let facts get in the way of their xenophobic narrative.

(via @fark)

Trump withdraws from Iran nuclear deal

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Trump sees a major international policy that does inarguable good, which every other head of state strongly vouches for, whose terms are demonstrably being upheld and where ending it would cause catastrophic damage, both to the United States’ own interests and around the world – and promptly ends it, because it was established under Obama.

President Fuck-Up has reneged on the Iran nuclear deal.

Mr. Trump’s announcement, while long anticipated and widely telegraphed, plunges America’s relations with European allies into deep uncertainty. They have committed to staying in the deal, raising the prospect of a diplomatic and economic clash as the United States reimposes stringent sanctions on Iran.

It also raises the prospect of increasing tensions with Russia and China, which also are parties to the agreement.

In a joint statement, President Emmanuel Macron of France, Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany urged Iran to “continue to meet its own obligations under the deal,” despite the American withdrawal.

I have to admit, every time this administration does something moronic it still takes me a little by surprise. Given Trump’s volatility and impulsiveness, there’s always the feeble hope that this time he won’t do something colossally stupid. Of course, that hope is more often than not unfounded.

This is so monumentally idiotic and dangerous that words escape me. Nuclear watchdog groups both in the US and around the world have stated repeatedly that Iran is in full compliance with the terms of the deal, Trump’s ignorant blathering notwithstanding. Far from one-sided, the deal gave the US exactly what it wanted – hard limits on Iran’s nuclear program that effectively crippled the regime’s ability to develop nuclear weapons. Only a childish fool like Trump – and the hawks he’s surrounded himself with – could claim the US didn’t receive enough in exchange for relaxing its economic sanctions on Iran. Perhaps they think they can bully a rogue regime into giving the US everything it wants whilst receiving nothing in return? These people would be deemed childish even in a grade-school playground, and they’re at the helm international diplomacy for the most influential nation in the world.

The US’s decision to go back on the Iran deal will result in exactly two things: Iran will immediately jumpstart its nuclear program, undoing all the work and sacrifices made by every nation party to the arrangement; and no country will ever trust any agreement offered by the United States again, at least not as long as Trump is president. Quite the victory for the White House.

For all the disagreements I had with Obama – chief amongst them his warmongering overseas and his refusal to punish torture criminals at home – at no point was I worried the leader of the most powerful political and military force in history might heed the voices in his syphilitic brain and set the world on fire.

Franklin Graham: Trump’s adultery is “nobody’s business”

Franklin Graham

If you’re looking for a reliable source of pure chutzpah, don’t stray far from evangelical Christians. Here’s preacher Franklin Graham explaining that the country has too many problems to focus on Trump’s infidelity and sleeping with a porn star, which isn’t anyone’s business anyway:

I don't have concern, in a sense, because these things happened many years ago – and there's such bigger problems in front of us as a nation that we need to be dealing with than other things in his life a long time ago. I think some of these things – that's for him and his wife to deal with. I think when the country went after President Clinton, the Republicans, that was a great mistake that should never have happened. And I think this thing with Stormy Daniels and so forth is nobody's business. And we've got other business at hand that we need to deal with.

Let that sink in a moment. These are the people who try to legislate their way into everyone’s bedrooms, who campaign to prevent men and women from marrying whomever they love regardless of gender, who spend more time talking about gay sex than gay people do, who make every effort to strip away women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, and who heap scorn and sanctimony upon anyone who isn’t in a straight-laced, missionary-and-for-procreation-only marriage even as they continually throw their lot in with politicians with more ex-wives and male-prostitute scandals between them than ideological positions.

Yet suddenly, they’re so very concerned with all these people who criticize the president, the evangelicals’ golden calf, for lying nonstop to the country and possibly committing felonies. Really, they should all just get their noses out of Trump’s private life and mind their own business.

Being an evangelical Christian has all but become synonymous with couching naked bigotry and pathological blue-nosing in rank hypocrisy and slapping on a transparent veneer of piousness to deflect accusations about their total moral bankruptcy. And they didn’t even need atheists’ help to get that reputation; they’ve earned it all on their own.

(via Joe.My.God.)

Daily Links #124: #Resistance co-sponsor bill to let Trump imprison US citizens without trial

• New bipartisan bill would give the President the power to hold any US citizen in indefinite military detention without a trial. #RESIST!

• The bogus sex-trafficking stats used to push FOSTA/SESTA are, in fact, bogus.

• Welcome to Thetford Township, Michigan, home to a low crime rate, a total of two police officers, and over $1 million in military gear acquired through the Pentagon’s 1033 Program.

• Boy Scouts.
  (via Joe.My.God.)

• Finally: It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … a bird with a shark with a fish?
  (via @fark)

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

Oh no! Steve Shives bullies Sarah Huckabee Sanders too!

Steve Shives doesn’t mince words in his defense of Michelle Wolf’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders chooses to work for Donald Trump, to go on TV for Donald Trump, to lie to journalists for Donald Trump. She is a mouthpiece for this administration that panders to White supremacists; that vilifies immigrants and people of color; that seeks to deprive women of their reproductive rights; that has tried repeatedly to ban Muslims from entering this country; that has cut taxes for the wealthy while moving to slash public assistance programs for the poor; that has proudly made itself an enemy of LGBTQ Americans, Americans with disabilities, Americans with mental illnesses; that has lied to, undermined and attacked the free press like no administration in this country since Nixon.

Trump, Sanders, Pence, Sessions, Scott Pruitt, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller – every last rat-bastard motherfucker who works in that White House? You can’t be to mean too them!

He also clarifies that swinging as hard as you can is fine so long as it’s not actually aimed at anyone’s looks, or any other trait they aren’t responsible for. “Hit the ball hard, but hit the ball inside the foul lines.” The entire outrage around Wolf’s routine is manufactured, and that says everything you need to know about the people ginning it up.

Michelle Wolf speaks truth the DC media doesn’t want to hear

Michelle Wolf

Last night was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or as I prefer to think of it, the “saturnalia of incestuous ingratiation that does little to instill confidence in the public that the press isn’t ensorcelled by the powerful”. (Thank you, The Newsroom.) The only thing that ever came to mind when I heard the name was Stephen Colbert’s legendary shellacking of George W. Bush’s presidency and the mainstream media’s complicity, and how pricked that same media felt afterwards – comedians speaking truth to power is all fine and dandy, but how dare he do it to them?

Yesterday saw history repeat itself: Michelle Wolf, whom I know as an occasional correspondent on The Daily Show, took the stage and gave the Trump administration and its apologists, as well as the media that chose to elevate him rather than push back when it mattered in 2015–16, the talking-to they deserved. So naturally, the DC media is rounding on her, because the only comedy they apparently approve of is the kind that favors polite servility.

Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything is neither polite nor servile, and he takes to The New York Times to lay out some truth.

[I]n her performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night in Washington, Michelle Wolf did exactly what a great comic is supposed to do. She made the crowd of assembled journalists, politicians and guests laugh; she made them squirm; and she made them gasp in astonishment (and yes, a little delight) when a sharp sliver of the truth cut a little closer to the bone than they were expecting.

In other words, she killed.

Yet in return for her excellence, Ms. Wolf was criticized not just by partisan defenders of the president, but by members of the press, too. Journalists called Ms. Wolf’s set “offensive,” “deplorable” and “a debacle.” Margaret Talev, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who booked the comedian to perform, released a statement on Sunday night that said “unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit” of the group’s mission.

There is no president of the Comedians’ Association, and though Ms. Wolf and I know each other professionally, I’m not her spokesman. But at risk of speaking out of turn, I’d like to offer this official response from America’s comics: If you don’t want comedy, don’t hire us.

[…]

Contrary to what several prominent journalists said, the transcript shows that Michelle Wolf did not make a single joke at the expense of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s physical appearance. Rather, she did something much worse in the eyes of those assembled: She ridiculed the White House press secretary’s mendacity, hypocrisy and complicity. And in a searing, brutally funny segment, she criticized the willingness of the press to play along:

“You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. And if you’re gonna profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money because he doesn’t have any.”

No wonder the crowd seemed so uncomfortable.

It amuses me how another frequent criticism of Wolf and Colbert’s style of tell-it-to-their-faces humor is that it generates few laughs from those present. Wolf knew full well that the people worth impressing weren’t the stooges in the room, but the colossally larger audience watching at home. I didn’t even find her routine all that funny, but it was made all the more hilarious by the reactions she got from the stilted crowd, especially when she tore into Sarah Huckabee Sanders, noted professional liar for the (alleged) sexual-assaulter-in-chief.

Hi. Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies to the press on Donald Trump's behalf for a living. It's not theoretically possible to say something to or about her that is too mean. If Michelle Wolf never told a joke and just spent 20 minutes trying to make her cry, it would have been fine.

— Steve Shives (@steve_shives) April 30, 2018

When did it become okay to be more offended by what someone with no power says than by what someone with power does?

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 29, 2018

Watch Wolf’s full remarks below:

Louisiana GOP sacrifices bestiality law on altar of homophobia

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: The modern Republican Party.

In Louisiana, a proposal to strengthen the law against bestiality is facing unexpected opposition from conservative lawmakers who see it as an underhanded move to strike the state’s unconstitutional ban on sodomy.

[…]

“This bill was written because the far left wants to undermine our other laws that protect family and traditional values that the people of Louisiana hold dear,” said Sen. Ryan Gatti, a Republican who was one of 10 senators to vote against the bill.

Where to even begin …?

The thing is, they could have made the plausible argument that the state already has a bestiality ban on the books and that the party of Small Government and Fiscal Responsibility and whatnot is opposed to expanding a legal definition that’s already sufficient. They could even have argued – and I’d agree – that it’s a waste of the legislature’s time and taxpayer money to pass laws to cover problems that are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. It would still have been evident what their end goal is, but at least it might have let them save face.

But they just had to stick to their anti-gay guns, even at the cost of being publicly labeled as the party that prefers letting humans have sex with animals over allowing consenting adults of the same gender – and species – to get it on. Particularly given that the anti-sodomy law is blatantly unconstitutional and is one court challenge away from being stuck down anyway.

(via Joe.My.God.)

New EPA rule would limit science in policymaking

Scott Pruitt

Scott Pruitt is becoming one of the most dangerous and destructive members of Trump’s cabinet, and his latest move is right on par:

The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new regulation Tuesday that would restrict the kinds of scientific studies the agency can use when it develops policies, a move critics say will permanently weaken the agency’s ability to protect public health.

Under the measure, the E.P.A. will require that the underlying data for all scientific studies used by the agency to formulate air and water regulations be publicly available. That would sharply limit the number of studies available for consideration because much research relies on confidential health data from study subjects.

Scott Pruitt, the E.P.A. administrator, announced the proposed regulation this afternoon at agency headquarters, flanked by Republican lawmakers who sponsored legislation designed to achieve the same ends as the new regulation.

[…]

The new regulation means that some of the most important research of the past decades — for example, studies linking air pollution to premature deaths and measuring human exposure to pesticides — would not be available to policymakers if scientists were unwilling to break the confidentiality agreements they struck with study subjects in order to collect sensitive personal information.

Because if there’s one thing the US – or anyone – needs right now, it’s less science in policy-making. The government’s just been making too much sense these days; better curb that.

Is there a need to point out how there’s zero valid justification for this? Requiring that the agency only use studies built on publicly available data only makes sense if you believe confidential data is somehow unreliable – if all ’em researchers are part of a cabal funded by Big Science to falsify the numbers in order to sway legislators to vote for cleaner air and oceans under false pretenses. (Don’t expect climate conspiracists to make sense.)

Alternatively, it also makes sense if your goal is to discredit science and kneecap a federal agency that tries, with increasing futility, to control how much poison corporations can pump into our environment, all in an effort to make your rich CEO friends more money. But I’m sure that’s just crazy-talk.

(via @adamconover)

Daily Links #122: Utah police kill unarmed Black man

Elijah James Smith

• Whatever else Elijah James Smith ^[pictured] may have done, the fact remains that Utah police shot an unarmed Black man dead for obeying their order to remove his hands from his pockets.
  (via @radleybalko)

• Free speech advocates warned FOSTA/SESTA would stifle free speech online. Now that the bills are law, they’re … stifling free speech online.

• Meanwhile, the FCC’s repeal of net neutrality rules comes into effect today. Any changes will be gradual, and that’s if the multifaceted efforts to restore the old rules on state and federal levels don’t succeed first.

• Actual religious persecution: Russian government continues its crackdown on Jehovah’s Witnesses, forcing thousands to flee abroad or go into hiding.

• A Minnesota court just ruled that basically everyone on Twitter is now a stalker.
  (via @ScottGreenfield)

• Finally, James Comey’s new book is exactly what you expect from the memoir of the former director of the FBI. That’s not a compliment.
  (via @cjciaramella; retweet by @Popehat)

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

Daily Links #121: Trump’s trans military ban blocked yet again

Will you look at that: 500 posts. Do I win something?

• Trump’s trans military ban just keeps getting, er, banned by federal courts.
  (via @fark)

• The Supreme Court just made it a little harder for the Trump administration to deport immigrants.
  (via @Popehat)

• What white people can learn from the Starbucks arrests; or, the importance of recognizing, and fighting against, implicit bias.

• You’d think a professional defender of the Catholic Church’s handling of child-diddling priests would know better than to weigh in on the David Silverman affair. (Yes, of course it’s Bill Donohue.)

• Finally, Ed Brayton presents: Eight Rules for Understanding Our Teenage President.

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