http://www.amnh.org/learn/climate/Resource10
Seminars on Science
Drivers of 20th Century Climate Change
Seminars on Science
Drivers of 20th Century Climate Change
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Monday, March 4, 2013
Southern Baptists recently complained that 'liberals' were ostracizing homophobes the way they ostracized the KKK - as if disapproval of the KKK were a BAD thing
The Ryan / Romney failed free market capitalism health care policy
Ryan and his proposals, his Ayns-Rand-driven economics, his selfish un-Christian version of Catholicism that he would impose on the nation are ABJECT, UTTER FAILURES.
The Party that CLAIMS to be all about personal accountbility is NOTORIOUS for blaming others, but NOT taking responsibility themselves:
If there were anything you could do to make us regard you with more disdain and contempt and dislike than your campaign, it would be this attempt to blame others for your failure. It is the measure of your lack of character and your badly misplaced sense of entitlement.
You, Mitts-on-R-Money and his sidekick, the Lyin' Ryan, proposed doubling down on failed economic policies; you and those anti-American / pro-1% policies were rejected.
You and Mitt and Lyin' Ryan proposed cutting the social safety net; you and that policy, and every policy of conservatism that relates to it, were massively rejected.
You all, and your policy advisers and your party platform were hatefully, ignorantly racist, misogynist, and bigoted, they were abhorrent. You and your policies and platform of homophobia were also definitively rejected. That includes your 'notebooks' of women, and your support of the culture wars on women, ranging from reproductive choice (including abortion legislation) to trying to make it legal for women to be discriminated against in compensation, to supporting the opposition to passage of the VAMA as you courted the votes of the dominionist religious right. That includes your position on the LGBT community regarding same sex marriage equality and gay adoption. YOU FAILED, YOUR IDEAS AND BELIEFS ARE FAILURES.
Your self-deportation for immigrants? It was reminiscent of the attempts by Germany AND other countries in Europe, including historically England, that over CENTURIES tried to purge groups of people, like the Jews, but not only the Jews, from their borders, by making life a living hell for them. It is and was a thoroughly hateful and ugly policy you were behind, one that would result in the fracturing of families.
You and your neo-con militancy, you and your foreign policy failures, like not knowing what countries border other countries were a huge failure. Your multiple gaffes while traveling overseas as a candidate were failures of foreign policy BY YOU. We don't want four more years of a George Dubya Bush clone; we reject, emphatically, with all our might, those mistakes AND YOU WITH THEM.
We figured out who the 'real you' is, not just the "I'll say anything to get elected' you, and we don't like you, don't trust you, don't respect you.......and most of all we don't want you.
That is not because of the media, it is because of who you are and what you stand for; you are INCAPABLE of governing or representing this country, and you will never EVER set foot in the White House except - maybe - as a guest or as a tourist.
Got that? So stop being just another whiny conservative who fails to take responsibility. You are a failure, your political ideology is a complete and UTTER failure, and until you change, we don't want you or your politics.
Elections have consequences; your philosophy of 'if you can't beat 'em, cheat 'em' strategy to win is offensive. It FAILED. It definitively, unmistakeably FAILED. YOU FAILED.
Get your overprivileged spoiled behind on your dressage horse, and ride on into the sunset; I don't give a hearty god damn if you go away mad or disappointed, just go away. Take your wealthy election-buying donors with you.
We don't hate you, but we do not like you, and we do not trust you. We DO hate your ideas, politics, business ethics (or more properly lack of them), and beliefs about people and this nation.
You own a lot of other things; like it or not, you own the failure, too.
Sunday, March 3, 2013
An open letter to Representative Gruenhagen
Dear Representative Gruenhagen, You are an idiot who knows nothing about DNA, chromosomes, genetics, or human sexuality. Your statements about the homosexual community are wrong, they are inaccurate,and they are ignorant.
You are demonstrating the classic extreme conservative's typical ignorance in your pseudo-scientific statements about homosexuality. The reality is that mapping the genome only identifies what genes tend to do what things - like create gender and sexual identity. It is how a gene's action is turned on and off that controls how it works in individual practice. There are over 1,500 species besides human animals that have been identified as engaging in same sex behavior - and some of those, like dogs, have also been genome-mapped. There is no 'gay' gene, OR 'straight' gene, either; there are however genes which control our gender and sexuality that are affected by influences in utero that we are only beginning to understand, that masculinize and feminize, and shape our sexual orientation. Human beings and other species no more choose to be homosexual than you chose to be heterosexual.
You are no doubt one of those ignorant anti-science right wing nuts who believes that when animals are cloned, creating identical offspring to the single parent, that they will look exactly like that genetically identical parent.
Not so. As just one example, cloned kittens and puppies can be genetically identical to their parent, but have different colored and patterned fur, depending on when the genes for coat color and coat pattern turned on and off during their development.
In the case of humans with same sex orientation, there are also numerous physical differences which argue that your assumptions about same sex oriented individuals is wrong, and which indicate a pattern of changes in the embryonic and fetal stages of development.
You've made stupid statements before, Mr. Gruenhagen, statements which displayed your ignorance, and in the process embarrassed the entire state for having such a stupid right wing nut serving in elected office.
So, please, in future, shut the fuck up when you don't know what you are talking about; because you are annoying the rest of us who are better educated and better informed, you ignorant homophobic bigot.
It's bad enough that Michele Bachmann has made public ignorance her career. We don't want it from her; we don't need or want it from you.
Saturday, March 2, 2013
What you might call "Eisenhower Socialism"
This is appropriate guilt by association
The right keeps trying to deny that a significant segment of their party is racist, and that the rest of the party tolerates racism. They pretend surprise at the accusation, they feign outrage. There is shared guilt when there is shared acceptance and tolerance for racism.
This is the Right Wing Racist reality:
This is the Right Wing Racist reality:
Montana county's GOP chairwoman proves her tea party bona fides with racist watermelon trap post
Before she was Yellowstone County, Montana, Republican County chairwoman, oil-drilling consultant Jennifer Olsen co-founded "Montana Shrugged: Tea Party Patriots." It promotes the usual tea party agenda and sent an email last year urging everyone on its list to sign a White House petition seeking permission to secede from the United States. The petition failed to reach the signature threshhold requiring a response from the administration.
But, apparently to prove to fellow tea partiers that she has a ... uh ... sense of humor that goes beyond making moronic policy forays, she recently posted a photo on her Facebook page that caught the eye of the Montanafesto Blog.
It speaks volumes that the head honcho of the GOP in Montana's most populous county and home of its largest city would think the Obama-trap photo is a big ha-ha. But then as has become obvious over the past four years, it's not just in Big Sky country that modern Republicans, and not all of them tea partiers, have chosen to treat the president like some uppity darkie who has no business entering the White House other than through the deliveries door.
As Montanafesto notes, Olsen is known for her divisive tactics and other shenanigans, and she, like the tea party in general, displays a twisted, selective approach when it comes to states' rights and federal supremacy. That, however, did not stop the Billings Gazette from featuring her this month as one of its "40 Under Forty" up-and-comers.
Olsen has shut down her Facebook page, as if that would somehow obliterate what she did. But the screenshot lives forever.
A Republican Party with a heart and a brain and a sense of honor would have immediately booted Olsen out of her county post and offered Montanans and the president an apology. But then a Republican Party with a heart and a brain and a sense of honor wouldn't be the Republican Party.
Blowed up real good
The Sequester position of John Boehner and the rest of the right is going to blow up on the Republicans and Tea Partiers.
For the right wing theocrats and dominionists who opposed the vAWA
Conservatives, like Phyllis "women who are sexually harassed in the work place deserve it" Schlaffley, like Michele Bachmann, like every male Republican in the Senate, believe that women should be submissive and subordinate to men. They believe that if men can't beat women to a pulp, that if they can't terrorize them with a gun, marriages will break up and families will fall apart. If women would just shut up and do everything they were told, not make decisions for themselves, including let themselves be raped by husbands and boy friends who won't take no for an answer, everything would be just fine.
They blame everyone, EXCEPT the abuser.
Seriously.
There is of course absolutely NO evidence that the solutions of the right wing dominionist nut jobs work; and there is considerable evidence that the ONLY solution is to protect women and children. But when reality doesn't conform to ideology, the right wingers reject reality - like teaching abstinence only sex-ed with factually inaccurate medical information results in a high rate of unwanted teen pregnancies and more sexually transmitted disease.
Right wing ideology is disastrous for women, for children, for families, for marriages, for communities, or for the nation.
What is called Christian on the right is not Christian.
Friday, March 1, 2013
Gun Huggers.......bwaaaahaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
In this case the individual's surname is uniquely apt, because he is a total ass, and is so routinely, chronically the case, factually inaccurate with paranoid sprinkles, crazy whipped cream, and a tin foil hat in place of the cherry on top:
Should we ban ballistic armor for private use?
Bluster, blubber and bullshit from gun-huggers
We need to ban this tactical gear, this bullet-proof body armor, from private civilian use to protect ourselves, and to protect law enforcement from mass shooters and other criminals.
From CNN:
Police said the shooter entered the sold-out movie theater dressed in black, wearing a ballistic helmet, a tactical ballistic vest, ballistic leggings, protectors over his throat and his groin, a gas mask and black tactical gloves.And as reported by the Denver Post:
James Eagan Holmes, 24, bought a ticket to the show, "The Dark Knight Rises," then left theater 9, propping the emergency exit open for his return, investigators said. About 15 minutes into the film, he appeared beside the screen with three guns, dressed in black and wearing a ballistic helmet, gas mask and body shields.And from the Daily Best, reporting on law enforcement testimony in court earlier this year (2013):
Police say Holmes, with his hair dyed red as a creepy homage to Batman’s Joker, was dressed in combat gear and armed with an assault rifle, a Glock pistol, a shotgun, and two canisters of what sources say was tear gas.We see it in the photos, we have been told the information repeatedly by law enforcement, and we have documented the purchase of the equipment from the source. There are bogus sources on the internet that try to deny this, but the authoritative sources are clear beyond any question. James Holmes was completely protected, in a way that most of the law enforcement responding was not. In fact, when surrendering to law enforcement, James Holmes was at first MISTAKEN for a SWAT team officer.
The problem is, like assault style weapons and expanded capacity magazines, and certain kinds of especially damaging ammunition, these are not appropriate to private use. But we need to do so in a way that allows our armed forces members to add to the equipment supplied by the military which is apparently less effective. The solution would appear to be to let distributors like the one who sold James Holmes the ballistic protective armor he was wearing sell this stuff ONLY through military outlets like the stores available to military personnel on bases, and then only to those deployed or who have received orders to deploy at a future time, for use exclusively in combat zones.
From CBS news and the AP:
James Holmes built up Aurora arsenal of bullets, ballistic gear through unregulated online market
(CBS/AP) DENVER - In a world where Amazon can track your next book purchase and you must show ID to buy some allergy medicine, James Holmes spent months stockpiling thousands of bullets and head-to-toe ballistic gear without raising any red flags with authorities.
The suspect in the mass theater shooting availed himself of an unregulated online marketplace that allows consumers to acquire some of the tools of modern warfare as if they were pieces of a new wardrobe. The Internet is awash in sites ranging from BulkAmmo.com, which this weekend listed a sale on a thousand rifle rounds for $335, to eBay, where bidding on one armored special forces helmet has risen to $799....
Chad Weinman runs TacticalGear.com, which caters to police officers looking to augment their equipment, members of the military who don't want to wait on permission from the bureaucracy for new combat gear, and hobbyists like survivalists and paintballers. The site receives "thousands" of orders daily, sometimes from entire platoons that are about to deploy to war zones.
On July 2, Holmes placed a $306 order with the site for a combat vest, magazine holders and a knife, paying extra for expedited two-day shipping to his Aurora apartment. The order, Weinman said, didn't stand out.
"There's a whole range of consumers who have an appetite for these products, and 99.9 percent of them are law-abiding citizens," Weinman said. But he said that "it makes me sick" that Holmes bought material from him. He added that he doesn't sell guns or ammunition and that he was "shocked" at the amount of bullets that Holmes allegedly bought online.U.S. News goes on to expand on the problem with military grade body armor as it relates to mass shootings; but it has also been a problem with shooters who are engaging in murder, or murder/suicides, and other crimes. We've seen it used in crimes like bank robbery.:
The Other Loophole: Bulletproof Armor
 |
| State Police on scene following a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Dec. 14, 2012. |
Both the Newtown and Aurora shooters wore armor that stops police bullets
December 20, 2012 RSS Feed Print
Adam Lanza wore a utility vest as he opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last Friday, killing 26 people—20 of them children under the age of 10. James Holmes, the alleged perpetrator of the Aurora, Col., theater massacre in July, wore an armor vest and a ballistic helmet.
"The people intent on committing these atrocities outfit themselves with the macabre tools of their trade ... and the defensive gear to ensure they do the most damage," says Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center. a D.C.-based gun control research organization.
Though body armor is typically worn by law enforcement or military, it is not difficult for people like Lanza or Holmes to obtain.
Multiple body armor companies refused to comment on record for this story, citing sensitivity to the Newtown shooting. But bulletproof vests, stab-proof vests and ballistic helmets can be easily found and bought online from companies like Safeguardclothing.com, or through local dealers of companies like Armor Express. Available products include both soft body armor, which is made out of woven fibers and can stop a bullet from a typical police handgun, as well as hard body armor plates, which is made of metal or ceramic and can stop rounds from a more powerful weapon like an AK-47.
Gun control advocacy groups like Sugarmann's say the body armor worn by the shooters in Newtown and Aurora undermines the argument made by gun advocates that shootings can be stopped by someone with a handgun. (my emphasis added - DG)Slate did a couple of articles on the use of body armor by criminals, including other mass shooters, who have used ballistic armor to protect themselves from effective action by law enforcement, which effectively puts law enforcement at greater risk, confuses who is and who is not a criminal, and results in an effective arms race with criminals buying this gear privately..
Fifteen years ago, two bank robbers equipped with AK-47s, armor-piercing bullets, and 100-round clips fought off dozens of cops in North Hollywood, Calif. Both men wore Kevlar. One had a steel plate under his vest. The other had leg armor. Thirty-two officers returned fire. One later described hitting the robbers nine times without much effect. Eleven cops and six civilians were wounded in the 45-minute battle. After 27 shots to his limbs, buttocks, and neck, one robber finally went down. The other, after taking his 10th hit, killed himself. Bullets were later retrieved from their vests.
Three years ago, Jiverly Wong, an unemployed man angry at police, put on a ballistic vest, walked into an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y., and shot 14 people to death. Then he took his own life, sparing police a firefight. The next day, Richard Poplawski, another cop-hater, girded himself in a vest—he called it his “suit for battle”—and ambushed police in Pittsburgh, Pa. The first cop at the scene died from a shot to the head. A second cop shot Poplawski in the chest but hit the vest, leaving only a bruise. That cost the officer his life. Poplawski gunned down him down, then blew away a third cop. Eventually, a sniper shot Poplawski’s assault rifle out of his hands. Again, a bullet was recovered from the vest.As another Slate article further noted:
Armored and Dangerous
The scariest innovation in the Aurora mass shooting isn’t guns or ammo. It’s SWAT gear.
What distinguished Holmes wasn’t his offense. It was his defense. ...Holmes’ outfit blew these jokers away. He wore a ballistic helmet, a ballistic vest, ballistic leggings, a throat protector, a groin protector, and tactical gloves. He was so well equipped that if anyone in that theater had tried what the National Rifle Association recommends—drawing a firearm to stop the carnage—that person would have been dead meat. Holmes didn’t just kill a dozen people. He killed the NRA’s answer to gun violence.
That’s what Holmes figured out. Defense, not offense, is the next stage of the gun-violence arms race. Equipping citizens with concealed weapons doesn’t stop bad guys. It just pushes them to the next level. The next level is body armor. And unlike missile defense, which has proved to be complicated and disappointing, body armor is relatively simple.
What’s your answer to this technology? Armor-piercing bullets? Sorry. The NRA, in defense of these bullets, noted 12 years ago that “no law enforcement officer has ever been killed or even injured because an armor piercing bullet penetrated a bullet-resistant vest.” A well-prepared killer just needs the right vest. The key, according to the Justice Department’s site, is to buy “Type IV flexible armor,” which is certified to stop .30-caliber armor-piercing bullets fired at a velocity of 878 meters per second. The site offers contact information for 24 suppliers of Type IV armor and includes URLs for nine of them. I found the options somewhat overwhelming, so I went to Amazon.com, where it took me less than two minutes to find a Type IV plate for $200 and add it to my cart.
Do you want to restrict the sale of body armor? Good luck. In a country that won’t even maintain a ban on assault weapons, what are your chances of blocking access to products that save lives? With guns, as with nukes, it’s a lot harder to make a case against defensive technology than against offensive technology. That’s why not a single state prohibits the purchase of body armor, unless you’re a convicted felon. The toughest law I could find is in Connecticut, where you have to show up in person to complete the sale.Except that is changing now, called the Connecticut effect; NOW people are willing to start restricting, banning, and documenting so as to stop these unreasonable products, to stop the violent abuses.
The only defense left the NRA and the gun-huggers is the three Bs: bluster, blubber, and bullshit. The power is on the side of the people who support gun control, ammo control, magazine control, and armor control.
The tipping point has been reached, the pendulum is swinging the other way on gun violence and the failed gun culture.
It is NOT going away
The NRA wants this to go away. Members of Congress who are paid
by the NRA and ALEC want this to go away.
It isn't going away.
It is changing who we are and what we will accept.
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