Tuesday, May 13, 2014

MCPS Improves Sex-Ed Curriculum

Ten years ago, Montgomery County Public Schools decided to update their health curriculum, specifically the sex-ed part of it. The Board adopted a new framework right after the election that put GW Bush into office for a second term, when the radical right was feeling they had a mandate to reshape the United States in their image. The new curriculum mentioned homosexuality, and the religious right freaked out and organized to stop it.

Teach the Facts formed, nearly ten years ago, to defend the curriculum from this attack. In the following years there was a lot of publicity, a lot of back and forth, as the school district tried to avoid controversy but hold their ground. One curriculum was thrown out and another was developed and adopted, but it had some very strange stuff in it. Like, teachers were not allowed to say "Homosexuality is not an illness," unless they were asked directly by a student. There were statements by the major medical and mental health associations that discussed the facts about sexual orientation and gender identity, and they were not included in the curriculum. Strangest of all, teachers were not allowed to ad lib the lessons, they had to follow a script verbatim.

Today the school board voted unanimously on some final improvements to the curriculum. Here, let the Washington Post tell you:
Montgomery County school officials could take a major step Tuesday toward updating the district’s teaching of sexual orientation, with proposals calling for introduction of the topic a year earlier in middle school and an end to scripted lessons with required phrasing.

Lessons on sexual orientation are one of just a few topics in the health curriculum — or any Montgomery curriculum — that have faced such careful teaching constraints. Officials said Monday that only a condom demonstration came with similar teaching scripts, and that too would change.

The Montgomery school board is slated to discuss the changes Tuesday as part of a broader review of the health curriculum for secondary students. After the board’s discussion, a 30-day public comment period is expected to begin, with a final board vote set for June 17. Students could see the changes in their classrooms this fall.

Health courses in Montgomery’s secondary schools include such topics as drug abuse, dating violence, the use of social media and stress management. But the topic of sexual orientation has been highly controversial, drawing vocal critics and legal actions.

Scripted lessons arose arose amid efforts to create a new sex-education curriculum after a federal judge in 2005 halted the school system’s lessons because the judge said they seemed to offer only one perspective on homosexuality and dismissed religions that consider it a sin. Many educators found the scripted lessons artificial and unengaging, officials said Monday.

“We’re trying to teach critical thinking skills, and reading from a script doesn’t do that,” said Marty Creel, director of curriculum and instruction, who said he has heard a positive response from department heads. “They see it as a change that’s been long overdue.”

In 2008, a state court judge upheld Montgomery’s sex education lessons, turning down a challenge from religious conservatives who said elected officials violated state law with teaching that sexual orientation is innate.

Years later, it is unclear how much controversy will resurface. Social attitudes have shifted in recent years, with a same-sex marriage law taking effect in Maryland last year. Sexual orientation lessons could change in Montgomery
There is more, including a quote from David Fishback, who has been relentless in seeing this through.

It is incredible to see how far our society has come in ten years. A decade ago it was actually a "controversy," the Nutty Ones insisted that homosexuality was a choice and that if you just didn't tell kids about it they wouldn't choose to be gay. They were loud about it, too, with threats -- remember the message board they tried to hide, but somebody leaked it to us? -- and crazy statements from a bizarre cast of characters.

The school district had to take them seriously, given the state of our society at the time. There was no question that the complainers were right, everything they said went against the known facts, but just their insistence on saying it repeatedly and loudly made it into a controversy. I remember seeing the TV cameras after a school board meeting, all in a big circle pointed at one person who had been complaining about the new curriculum.

All that will fade now into the warm glow of common sense. Kids will go to school and learn some facts about health and human behavior. Maybe some of it will make them kinder, maybe some of it will help them understand why they feel "different." Change always meets resistance, this as much as any other thing, but as David is fond of saying, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

141 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Ten years ago, Montgomery County Public Schools decided to update their health curriculum, specifically the sex-ed part of it. The Board adopted a new framework right after the election that put GW Bush into office for a second term, when the radical right was feeling they had a mandate to reshape the United States in their image"

actually, they were advocating maintaining the status quo

they weren't trying to reshape anything

most of them thought it's creepy when government tries to reshape our thinking

and especially when they subject children to propaganda

"The new curriculum mentioned homosexuality, and the religious right freaked out and organized to stop it"

problem is the liberal public schools find it difficult to discuss this area without veering into advocacy and supporting certain religious viewpoints

"One curriculum was thrown out"

yet it was, because the teacher prep material supported certain religions, unconstitutionally

"and another was developed and adopted, but it had some very strange stuff in it. Like, teachers were not allowed to say "Homosexuality is not an illness," unless they were asked directly by a student"

whether something is an illness is dependent on one's definition of normalcy

which is a value judgment, and not in the realm of empirical facts

"There were statements by the major medical and mental health associations that discussed the facts about sexual orientation and gender identity, and they were not included in the curriculum"

that's because they were political and social opinions, not facts

"Strangest of all, teachers were not allowed to ad lib the lessons, they had to follow a script verbatim"

this was wise since many of the teachers have biased views

liberal radicals are disproportionately represented in public school faculties, as are homosexuals

"Many educators found the scripted lessons artificial and unengaging"

please

they want to use the classroom to push their own viewpoint

"“We’re trying to teach critical thinking skills, and reading from a script doesn’t do that,” said Marty Creel, director of curriculum and instruction"

it's one brief lesson, Marty

they have plenty of other opportunities to develop thinking skills

as long as their thinking aligns with politically correct liberalism

otherwise, public school teachers will ridicule and bully them


"sexual orientation is innate"

there's no proof of that

"There is more, including a quote from David Fishback, who has been relentless in seeing this through"

David's the one whose curriculum was thrown out by courts

"insisted that homosexuality was a choice and that if you just didn't tell kids about it they wouldn't choose to be gay"

I don't remember anyone saying that

let us know if you have a quote

what they may have said is that if homosexuality is portrayed as normal and risk-free, some straight kids in their impressionable years might experiment with it and suffer deadly consequences

"crazy statements from a bizarre cast of characters"

don't talk about Dana and David that way

"The school district had to take them seriously"

well, they are tax-paying citizens

"Change always meets resistance"

so, you're admitting you're the radical

"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

yes, justice will eventually prevail

but, for now, the liberals will continue to use the government to bully those who don't agree with them

May 13, 2014 1:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Karl Rove suggested last week that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have sustained brain damage after suffering a blood clot in her skull.

Clinton was admitted to the hospital in late December 2012, where doctors discovered a blood clot related to a concussion she had suffered earlier in the month. She was released from the hospital several days later.

Rove, however, apparently thinks her stint in the hospital left some questions unanswered.

"Thirty days in the hospital?" Rove said, according to Page Six. "And when she reappears, she's wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what's up with that.”

Rove said that the status of Clinton's health is a personal issue that should be addressed by the presumptive presidential candidate.

"When you go through a health incident like this," he said, "any presidential candidate has to ask themselves, 'Am I willing to do this for eight years of my life, to serve, to run for two years and then serve for eight?'"

May 13, 2014 1:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

last thing we need is another psycho as President

May 13, 2014 3:42 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

more gay totalitarianism

this is the kind if thing they do in North Korea:

MIAMI (AP) -- Miami Dolphins safety Don Jones was fined an undisclosed amount Sunday and will undergo educational training after sending a negative tweet about Michael Sam, the first openly gay player to be selected in the NFL draft.

Shortly after the St. Louis Rams took Sam in the seventh round Saturday, Jones tweeted "OMG" and "Horrible." The tweets were taken down a short time later.

Jones apologized for his comments Sunday and described them as inappropriate. The Dolphins said Jones has been excused from all team activities until he completes training related to his comments.

"We were disappointed to read Don's tweets," coach Joe Philbin said in a statement. "They were inappropriate and unacceptable, and we regret the negative impact these comments had on such an important weekend for the NFL. We met with Don today about respect, discrimination and judgment. These comments are not consistent with the values and standards of our program."

May 13, 2014 6:57 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Climate: Not since Jimmy Carter falsely spooked Americans about overpopulation, the world running out of food, water and energy, and worsening pollution, has a president been so filled with doom and gloom as this one.

Last week's White House report on climate change was a primal scream to alarm Americans into action to save the earth from a literal meltdown. Maybe we should call President Obama the Fearmonger in Chief.

While scientists can argue until the cows come home about what will happen in the future with the planet's climate, we do have scientific records on what's already happened. Obama moans that the devastation from climate change is already here as more severe weather events threaten to imperil our very survival.

But, according to the government's own records — which presumably the White House can get — severe weather events are no more likely now than they were 50 or 100 years ago and the losses of lives and property are much less devastating.

Here is what government data reports and top scientists tell us about extreme climate conditions:

May 14, 2014 8:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

• Hurricanes: The century-long trend in Hurricanes is slightly down, not up. According to the National Hurricane Center, in 2013, "There were no major hurricanes in the North Atlantic Basin for the first time since 1994. And the number of hurricanes this year was the lowest since 1982."

According to Dr. Ryan Maue at Weather Bell Analytics, "We are currently in the longest period since the Civil War Era without a major hurricane strike in the U.S. (i.e., category 3, 4 or 5)"

• Tornadoes: Don't worry, Kansas. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there has been no change in severe tornado activity. "There has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years."

• Extreme heat and cold temperatures: NOAA's U.S. Climate Extremes Index of unusually hot or cold temperatures finds that over the last 10 years, five years have been below the historical mean and five above the mean.

• Severe drought/extreme moisture: While higher than average portions of the country were subjected to extreme drought/moisture in the last few years, the 1930's, 40's and 50's were more extreme in this regard. In fact, over the last 10 years, four years have been below the average and six above the average.

• Cyclones: Maue reports: "the global frequency of tropical cyclones has reached a historical low."


• Floods: Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., past chairman of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Weather Forecasting and Analysis, reports, "floods have not increased in the U.S. in frequency or intensity since at least 1950. Flood losses as a percentage of U.S. GDP have dropped by about 75% since 1940."

• Warming: Even NOAA admits a "lack of significant warming at the Earth's surface in the past decade" and a pause "in global warming observed since 2000." Specifically, NOAA last year stated, "since the turn of the century, however, the change in Earth's global mean surface temperature has been close to zero."

Pielke sums up: "There is no evidence that disasters are getting worse because of climate change. ... It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate time scales either in the U.S. or globally."

One big change between today and 100 years ago is that humans are much more capable of dealing with hurricanes and earthquakes and other acts of God.

Homes and buildings are better built to withstand severe storms and alert systems are much more accurate to warn people of the coming storms. As a result, globally, weather-related losses have actually decreased by about 25% as a proportion of GDP since 1990.

The liberal hubris is that government can do anything to change the earth's climate or prevent the next big hurricane, earthquake or monsoon. These are the people in Washington who can't run a website, can't deliver the mail and can't balance a budget. But they are going to prevent droughts and forest fires.

The President's doomsday claims last week served mostly to undermine the alarmists' case for radical action on climate change. Truth always seems to be the first casualty in this debate.

This is the tactic of tyrants. Americans are wise to be wary about giving up our basic freedoms and lowering our standard of living to combat an exaggerated crisis.

May 14, 2014 8:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

what should we believe?

Obama, or the facts?

May 14, 2014 8:54 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

West Antarctica Glaciers Collapsing, Adding to Sea-Level Rise

By Brian Clark Howard
National Geographic
PUBLISHED MAY 12, 2014

"A massive glacier system in West Antarctica has started collapsing because of global warming and will contribute to significant worldwide sea-level rise, two teams of scientists warn in a pair of major studies released Monday.

Scientists had previously thought the two-mile-thick (3.2 kilometers) glacier system would remain stable for thousands of years, but new research suggests a faster time frame for melting.

A rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in irreversible decline and will sink into the sea, scientists at the University of California, Irvine and NASA reported Monday.

"This retreat will have major implications for sea-level rise worldwide," said Eric Rignot, a UC-Irvine Earth science professor and lead author of a study to be published in a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The study presents evidence, based on 40 years of observations, that six big glaciers in the Amundsen Sea "have passed the point of no return," Rignot said on a Monday conference call with reporters.

The glaciers contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected, which will require adjusting estimates of sea-level rise, said Rignot, who is also a glaciologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

At their current rates of melting, he said, these glaciers would disappear in about two centuries, though "it could proceed faster or slower."...

Unstable Ice

Rignot says that once the six glaciers near the coast melt, it is possible that the rest of the ice in West Antarctica could eventually follow. As a result of this new evidence published in Geophysical Research Letters, forecasts for global sea-level rise will likely need to be adjusted.

Joughin says that the collapse of the Thwaites glacier in particular could endanger much of the rest of the huge West Antarctic Ice Sheet, since the systems are connected.

"Imagine trying to take out part of a building and expecting the other half to keep on standing," he says.

If the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet did melt, sea level would rise 11 feet (3.3 meters), according to previous research. (See "Rising Seas" in National Geographic magazine.)

Joughin says the breakup of the Thwaites glacier will resemble mechanical failure more than straight-up melting.

The ice will slide into the ocean, where it will break off and float away, adding to the volume of water in the sea.

A mixture of rock and frozen water has been holding the glacier back. Contrary to recent thinking, however, the glacier is no longer being held in place, Joughin says.

The ice shelf that has extended out over the ocean is melting, thanks to warmer temperatures, and that has decreased the friction that has held the glacier behind it in place. As pieces of the shelf break off, more of the ice behind it slides forward.

"It's a little like how you get more flow out of a thicker hose than a thinner hose," says Joughin, referring to an acceleration of the glacier sliding into the ocean.

Scientists had previously thought that a sill of bedrock, a vertical rock formation under the ocean, was holding back the advance of the glacier like a dam. But the work of Joughin and team suggests melting has greased the way over the rock."

May 14, 2014 11:30 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/bad anonymous said ""The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

yes, justice will eventually prevail

but, for now, the liberals will continue to use the government to bully those who don't agree with them".

In the twisted minds of right wing bigots like Wyatt, when they're not allowed to discriminate against and oppress LGBT people they're the ones "being bullied".

That's messed up.

Liberalism always wins out in the long run - "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

And Now Idaho! Federal Judge Rules Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

At this rate we’ll have full nationwide marriage equality by lunch next Tuesday:


A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional because it violates couple’s equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. In a strongly worded opinion, Chief Magistrate Judge Candy Wagahoff Dale ruled that the couples who sued are “entitled to extraordinary remedies because of their extraordinary injuries,” declaring that the state is permanently enjoined form enforcing the ban as of Friday morning.

The judge’s ruling summarily smacked down every ridiculous argument put forth by Idaho Governor Butch Otter:


Idaho Gov. Butch Otter (R) attempted to justify the state’s marriage laws with four claims, all of which Dale dismissed. First, Otter argued that the marriage laws promote child welfare, but Dale countered that raising children is not a prerequisite or expectation of marriage, and thus not relevant to limiting the institution to different-sex couples, adding that “the Governor’s child welfare rationales disregard the welfare of children with same-sex parents.

In part Judge Dales ruling said "To the extent Governor Otter argues that Idaho has a legitimate interest in validating a particular religious view of marriage, that argument blithely disregards the religious liberty of congregations active in Idaho. “By recognizing the right to marry a partner of the same sex, the State allows these groups the freedom to practice their religious beliefs without mandating that other groups must adopt similar practices.”

May 14, 2014 11:41 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Half of the United States is experiencing drought, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. National Drought Monitor.

The drought is deepest in California and the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, according to the latest drought map, released May 8. Most of California is in extreme or exceptional drought, and triple-digit heat was returning to Texas and Oklahoma, according to Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center, who penned a report on recent drought conditions.

"This is not the recipe for recovery as the calendar pushes toward summer," Svoboda wrote of the heat in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. "What winter wheat wasn't damaged or killed off by recent hard freezes was left to bear the brunt of the heat and dryness this week, with little in the way of relief on the horizon

Ongoing drought

The U.S. drought is concentrated in the Plains states and in the West, though Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Appalachians stretching from West Virginia into eastern Tennessee are all experiencing abnormal dryness.

California has been in a state of drought for three years, and officials declared a state of emergency over the extreme lack of water in January. The final snow survey of the year, released May 1, revealed that the state's snowpack is at only 18 percent of average for that date. The northern Sierra Nevadas were particularly hard hit, with only 7 percent of water content in the snowpack compared with the average.

May 14, 2014 12:57 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Even worse, a survey from April 1, when snowpack moisture is at its peak, found only 32 percent of the water content compared with historical averages, according to California's Department of Water Resources. As of April 25, the entire state of California was in some level of drought for the first time in the Drought Monitor's 15-year history. Meanwhile, the state's reservoirs are only at about half capacity, the Department of Water Resources warned, and the rainy season is largely over.

New normal?

Western droughts are part of the normal up-and-down of the landscape, but climate researchers warn that a parched West is likely to become more common as the globe warms. High temperatures make typical droughts worse, climate scientists say, and droughts have become more intense and longer in tropical and subtropical areas of the globe in the past 40 years.

These changes threaten water supplies out West. They could also bring other nasty side effects, such as worsening wildfires. Western wildfires have become larger and more frequent in the last three decades, according to a study published online April 4 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"Most of these trends show strong correlations with drought-related conditions, which, to a large degree, agree with what we expect from climate change projections," Max Moritz, a study co-author and fire specialist at the University of California-Berkeley Cooperative Extension, told Live Science at the time.

May 14, 2014 12:58 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And as usual Wyatt/bad anonymous has posted a bunch of cherry-picked data of locallized areas where global warming hasn't had an effect and ignored the vast majority of the planet that has gotten warmer and is suffering ill effects.

Here's the truth:

New Study Finds Extreme Snowstorms And Deluges Are Becoming More Frequent And More Severe

As our climate warms, wet areas will generally get wetter (and dry areas drier). One of the consequences of global warming is the severity and frequency of rain and snow storms – fueled by the increase moisture in the atmosphere as the air warms.

A new report released by Environment America Research & Policy Center analyzed more than 80 million daily precipitation records across the United States from 1948 through 2011. The analysis reveals that climate change is now affecting the large rain or snowstorms.


The following are highlights from the report:


•Extreme downpours – rainstorms and snow falls … are now happening 30 percent more often on average across the contiguous United States than in 1948.
•New England has experienced the greatest change with intense rainstorms now happening 85 percent more often than in 1948.
•Not only are extreme downpours more frequent, but they are more intense. The total amount of precipitation produced by the largest storm in each year at each station increase by 10 percent over the period of analysis, on average across the contiguous United States.


But the United States is not the only country to experience extreme rain, snow, and flooding. Australia saw the country’s worst floods since 1974. A surge of rain in Brazil caused deadly landslides north of Rio de Janerio. Rainfall during June to September’s monsoons season in Thailand was up to 80% higher than the season average according to the WMO.


While its true that the rate of atmospheric temperature increases have slowed over the last 15 years, the overall warming of the entire climate system has continued rapidly over the past 15 years, even faster than the 15 years before that. If you look at this graph you can see that while the rate of temperature increase in the atmosphere has slowed, the atmospheric heating represents only 2% of the overall warming of the global climate. The rates of temperature increase for the remaining portions of the global climate such as upper and deep ocean temperatures, and land and ice temperatures have increased at a far greater rate. It is a myth that global warming has paused, or halted.

May 14, 2014 1:08 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

There is no debate in the scientific community that global warming is real and man-made. 97% of scientists have reached this conclusion.

May 14, 2014 1:11 PM  
Anonymous Robert said...

Anonymous seems to hold a dim view of education.

May 14, 2014 4:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Robo, the most dangerously unchecked and unaccountable group in our society are public school teachers.

May 14, 2014 5:07 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Actually, the most dangerously unchecked and unaccountable group in our society is Internet trolls.

May 14, 2014 10:22 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

except, "trolls" can't ruin someone's life

public school teachers can and do

May 14, 2014 11:57 PM  
Anonymous Robert said...

But don't university professors have much more independence?

May 15, 2014 4:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

yes, but they're not as dangerous

May 15, 2014 8:22 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Three weeks ago, Lennart Bengtsson, a leading Swedish meteorologist approaching his 80s, announced that he was joining the avowedly skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank. In an interview with Speigel Online, Bengtsson spoke of the need for climate-model predictions to be validated against observations. “Since the end of the 20th century, the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show,” he said.

Hadn’t the IPCC covered this in its recent report? “Yes,” Bengtsson replied, "the scientific report does this but, at least in my view, not critically enough. It does not bring up the large difference between observational results and model simulations. I have full respect for the scientific work behind the IPCC reports but I do not appreciate the need for consensus. It is important, and I will say essential, that society and the political community is also made aware of areas where consensus does not exist."

One of the most telling features of climate science is just how few climate scientists changed their minds as the evidence changed. The pause in global temperature in the last 15 years or so has been unexpected. Now we know why: Yesterday, Bengtsson dropped a bombshell. He was resigning from the think tank. In his resignation letter, Bengtsson wrote:

"I have been put under such an enormous group pressure in recent days from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me. If this is going to continue I will be unable to conduct my normal work and will even start to worry about my health and safety. . . . Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship etc. I see no limit and end to what will happen. It is a situation that reminds me about the time of McCarthy."

Especially significant was a tweet from Gavin Schmidt, a leading climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute, who for many years worked alongside James Hansen. “Groups perceived to be acting in bad faith should not be surprised that they are toxic within the science community,” Schmidt tweeted. “Changing that requires that they not act in bad faith and not be seen to be acting in bad faith.”

Evidently the right to practice and discuss climate science should be subject to a faith test. It is an extraordinarily revealing development. Fears about unbelievers’ polluting the discourse, as some academics put it, illustrate the weakness of climate science: The evidence for harmful anthropogenic global warming is not strong enough to stand up for itself.

Inadvertently Schmidt’s tweet demonstrates how far climate science has crossed the boundary deep into pseudo-science. Karl Popper observed of the trio of pseudo-sciences prevalent in 1920s Vienna that their followers could explain why non-believers rejected their manifest truths. For Marxists, it was because of their class interests. For subscribers to Freudian psychoanalysis and Alfred Adler’s psychology, non-belief was evidence of unanalyzed repressions crying out for treatment. So it is with climate science. Only the pure of heart should be allowed an opinion on it.

Science regresses if it becomes intolerant of criticism. At the beginning of her reign, Queen Elizabeth I of England spoke words of tolerance in an age of religious strife, declaring that she had no intention of making windows into men’s souls. Unlike religion, science is not a matter of the heart or of belief. It exists only in what can be demonstrated. In their persecution of an aged colleague who stepped out of line and their call for scientists to be subject to a faith test, 21st-century climate scientists have shown less tolerance than a 16th-century monarch.

There is something rotten in the state of climate science.

May 15, 2014 8:54 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

apparently, Dems think you can't be a part of the judiciary if you have ever opposed the redefinition of marriage to include homosexual relationships:

WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Wednesday said he can't support President Barack Obama's judicial nominee Michael Boggs, who has drawn criticism from progressive groups for his record on gay rights and abortion.

"Unless I have a better explanation, I can’t vote for him," Reid said. "This is a lifetime appointment. He's said some things and made some decisions I think are not very good.”

The fact that the top Democrat in the Senate is publicly opposed to Boggs is a huge blow to the White House, which is trying to usher its nominee's confirmation through the Senate. Boggs, who is up for a lifetime post on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, has come under fire from Democrats for votes he took as a Georgia state legislator. Among other things, he voted to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and to pass a measure requiring that information be posted online about the number of abortions performed by individual doctors.

Boggs had his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday and took a beating from Democrats.

May 15, 2014 9:24 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

more smoking guns in the White House effort to the IRS to harass their opponents

http://washingtonexaminer.com/new-irs-emails-describe-washington-direction-of-tea-party-targeting-efforts/article/2548426

Nixon's aides went to jail and Nixon had to be pardoned for the harassment and the cover-up

and Nixon's actions likely had little effect

Obama, on the other hand, won a close election after using these illegal tactics and lying about it

May 15, 2014 11:45 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Republicans in Oklahoma were angry after a judge ruled their state must recognize gay marriages—so they proposed that the state stop recognizing any marriages.

They were throwing a tantrum, but it might be best if private individuals were free to make whatever marriage contracts and observe whatever marriage customs they like.

Sounds like freedom to me!

When I was 11, it was illegal in many states for an interracial couple to marry. One couple, appropriately named "Loving," was sentenced to jail for violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. The Lovings—he was white and she was black—fought the sentence until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Since then, marriage between people from different races has steadily increased—it's up 28 percent since the last census. There are even dating websites that specialize in "mixed" relationships.

This is a good thing. Let people love, in ways old and new, even if we make mistakes along the way.

May 15, 2014 11:53 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Obama, on the other hand, won a close election"

LMAO

332 to 206 Electoral College votes does not make a close election, bubblhead!

May 15, 2014 11:59 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/bad anonymous said "turns out, although 95 percent of scientists agree with the alarmists currently, 95 percent of their past predictions have been wrong".

Its 97% of scientists and your claim is a lie. The truth is climate change predictions have been incredibly accurate:

Forecasts of global temperature rises over the past 15 years have proved remarkably accurate, new analysis of scientists' modelling of climate change shows.

The debate around the accuracy of climate modelling and forecasting has been especially intense recently, due to suggestions that forecasts have exaggerated the warming observed so far – and therefore also the level warming that can be expected in the future. But the new research casts serious doubts on these claims, and should give a boost to confidence in scientific predictions of climate change.

The paper, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, explores the performance of a climate forecast based on data up to 1996 by comparing it with the actual temperatures observed since. The results show that scientists accurately predicted the warming experienced in the past decade, relative to the decade to 1996, to within a few hundredths of a degree.

And on those occasions where the scientific predictions haven't been accurate in the vast majority of cases the predictions underestimated the rate of change and degree of impact. For example, scientists originally predicted the Arctic ice cap would be gone by the year 2100, now it is on pace to disappear entirely by the year 2050.

May 15, 2014 12:43 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Scientists have long predicted that climate change would bring on ever-worsening droughts, especially in semi-arid regions like the U.S. Southwest. And that prediction has come true. As climatologist James Hansen, who co-authored one of the earliest studies on this subject back in 1990, told me this week, “Increasingly intense droughts in California, all of the Southwest, and even into the Midwest have everything to do with human-made climate change.”

Remarkably, climate scientists specifically predicted a decade ago that Arctic ice loss would bring on worse droughts in the West, especially California. As it turns out, Arctic ice loss has been much faster than the researchers — and indeed all climate modelers — expected.

And, of course, California is now in the death-grip of a brutal, record-breaking drought, driven by the very change in the jet stream that scientists had anticipated.

“The extra heat from the increase in heat trapping gases in the atmosphere over six months is equivalent to running a small microwave oven at full power for about half an hour over every square foot of the land under the drought,” climatologist Kevin Trenberth explained to me via email, during a drought. “No wonder wild fires have increased! So climate change undoubtedly affects the intensity and duration of drought, and it has consequences. California must be very vigilant with regard to wild fires as the spring arrives.”

And then we have the observed earlier snow melt, which matters in the West because it robs the region of a reservoir needed for the summer dry season — see “US Geological Survey (2011): Global Warming Drives Rockies Snowpack Loss Unrivaled in 800 Years, Threatens Western Water Supply” and “USGS (2013): Warmer Springs Causing Loss Of Snow Cover Throughout The Rocky Mountains.”

May 15, 2014 12:44 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

But what of the possibility that climate change is actually contributing to the reduction in rainfall? After all, as Daniel Swain has noted, “calendar year 2013 was the driest on record in California’s 119 year formal record, and likely the driest since at least the Gold Rush era.”

Trenberth explained that, according to climate models, “some areas are more likely to get drier including the SW: In part this relates a bit to the wet get wetter and dry get drier syndrome, so the subtropics are more apt to become drier. It also relates to the expansion and poleward shift of the tropics.”

Beyond the expansion and drying of the subtropics predicted by climate models, some climatologists have found in their research evidence that the stunning decline in Arctic sea ice would also drive western drought — by shifting storm tracks.

“Given the very large reductions in Arctic sea ice, and the heat escaping from the Arctic ocean into the overlying atmosphere, it would be surprising if the retreat in Arctic sea ice did *not* modify the large-scale circulation of the atmosphere in some way,” Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, told me this week. “We now have a healthy body of research, ranging from Lisa Sloan’s and Jacob Sewall’s work a decade ago, to Francis’s more recent work, suggesting that we may indeed be seeing already this now in the form of more persistent anomalies in temperature, rainfall, and drought in North America.”

Last year, I contacted Sloan to ask her if she thought there was a connection between the staggering loss of Arctic sea ice and the brutal drought gripping the West, as her research predicted. She wrote, “Yes, sadly, I think we were correct in our findings, and it will only be worse with Arctic sea ice diminishing quickly.”

May 15, 2014 12:44 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

This week, Sewall wrote me that “both the pattern and even the magnitude of the anomaly looks very similar to what the models predicted in the 2005 study (see Fig. 3a).” Here is what Sewall’s model predicted in his 2005 paper, “Precipitation Shifts over Western North America as a Result of Declining Arctic Sea Ice Cover”:

“Geopotential height” is basically the height above mean sea level for a given pressure level. The “500 mb level is often referred to as the steering level as most weather systems and precipitation follow the winds at this level…. This level averages around 18,000 feet above sea level and is roughly half-way up through the weather producing part of the atmosphere called the troposphere.”

Now here is what the 500 mb geopotential height anomaly looked like over the last year, via NOAA:

Look familiar? That is either an accurate prediction or one heck of a coincidence.

And for this year, it looks like ice may well be having more of an effect. The geopotential height anomaly looks very much like what the models predicted as sea ice declined. The storm track response also looks very similar with correspondingly similar impacts on precipitation (reduced rainfall in CA, increased precipitation in SE Alaska). While other factors play an influence, the similarity of these patterns certainly suggests that we shouldn’t discount warming climate and declining Arctic sea ice as culprits in the CA drought.

May 15, 2014 12:45 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

NOAA and Prof. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers have more recently shown that the loss of Arctic ice is boosting the chances of extreme US weather.

…this extremely distorted and persistent jet stream pattern is an excellent example of what we expect to occur more frequently as Arctic ice continues to melt. Francis told me this week that “the highly amplified pattern that the jet stream has been in since early December is certainly playing a role in the CA drought.”

“The extremely strong ridge over Alaska has been very persistent and has caused record warmth and unprecedented winter rains in parts of AK while preventing Pacific storms from delivering rain to CA,” she explained. “But is this pattern a result of human-caused climate change, or more specifically, to rapid Arctic warming and the dramatic losses of sea ice? It’s very difficult to pin any specific weather event on climate change, but this extremely distorted and persistent jet stream pattern is an excellent example of what we expect to occur more frequently as Arctic ice continues to melt.”

What is especially worrisome is that climate change has only just started to have an impact on Western droughts. We’ve only warmed 1.5°F in the past century. Absent strong climate action, we are on track to warm 10°F over the next century!

We continue to dawdle even though scientists have been warning us of what was coming for decades. Hansen himself co-authored a 1990 study, “Potential evapotranspiration and the likelihood of future drought,” which projected that severe to extreme drought in the United States, then occurring every 20 years or so, could become an every-other-year phenomenon by mid-century.

May 15, 2014 12:45 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Drought researcher Aiguo Dai was quoted in a 2012 NCAR news release for a 2012 study warning, “The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999.”

Finally, a 2009 NOAA-led paper warned that, for the Southwest and many semi-arid regions around the world, “the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.” Impacts that should be expected if we don’t aggressively slash carbon pollution “are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ‘dust bowl’ era.”

When the climate changes, it ain’t gonna change back.

May 15, 2014 12:45 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Drought researcher Aiguo Dai was quoted in a 2012 NCAR news release for a 2012 study warning, “The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999.”

Finally, a 2009 NOAA-led paper warned that, for the Southwest and many semi-arid regions around the world, “the climate change that is taking place because of increases in carbon dioxide concentration is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop.” Impacts that should be expected if we don’t aggressively slash carbon pollution “are irreversible dry-season rainfall reductions in several regions comparable to those of the ‘dust bowl’ era.”

When the climate changes, it ain’t gonna change back.

May 15, 2014 12:48 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And as usual Wyatt/bad anonymous has posted a bunch of cherry-picked data of locallized areas where global warming hasn't had an effect and ignored the vast majority of the planet that has gotten warmer and is suffering ill effects.

Here's the truth:

New Study Finds Extreme Snowstorms And Deluges Are Becoming More Frequent And More Severe

As our climate warms, wet areas will generally get wetter (and dry areas drier). One of the consequences of global warming is the severity and frequency of rain and snow storms – fueled by the increase moisture in the atmosphere as the air warms.

A new report released by Environment America Research & Policy Center analyzed more than 80 million daily precipitation records across the United States from 1948 through 2011. The analysis reveals that climate change is now affecting the large rain or snowstorms.


The following are highlights from the report:


•Extreme downpours – rainstorms and snow falls … are now happening 30 percent more often on average across the contiguous United States than in 1948.
•New England has experienced the greatest change with intense rainstorms now happening 85 percent more often than in 1948.
•Not only are extreme downpours more frequent, but they are more intense. The total amount of precipitation produced by the largest storm in each year at each station increase by 10 percent over the period of analysis, on average across the contiguous United States.


But the United States is not the only country to experience extreme rain, snow, and flooding. Australia saw the country’s worst floods since 1974. A surge of rain in Brazil caused deadly landslides north of Rio de Janerio. Rainfall during June to September’s monsoons season in Thailand was up to 80% higher than the season average according to the WMO.


While its true that the rate of atmospheric temperature increases have slowed over the last 15 years, the overall warming of the entire climate system has continued rapidly over the past 15 years, even faster than the 15 years before that. If you look at this graph you can see that while the rate of temperature increase in the atmosphere has slowed, the atmospheric heating represents only 2% of the overall warming of the global climate. The rates of temperature increase for the remaining portions of the global climate such as upper and deep ocean temperatures, and land and ice temperatures have increased at a far greater rate. It is a myth that global warming has paused, or halted.

May 15, 2014 12:50 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/bad anonymous said ""The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

yes, justice will eventually prevail

but, for now, the liberals will continue to use the government to bully those who don't agree with them".

In the twisted minds of right wing bigots like Wyatt, when they're not allowed to discriminate against and oppress LGBT people they're the ones "being bullied".

That's messed up.

Liberalism always wins out in the long run - "The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."

And Now Idaho! Federal Judge Rules Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

At this rate we’ll have full nationwide marriage equality by lunch next Tuesday:


A federal judge in Idaho has ruled that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional because it violates couple’s equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. In a strongly worded opinion, Chief Magistrate Judge Candy Wagahoff Dale ruled that the couples who sued are “entitled to extraordinary remedies because of their extraordinary injuries,” declaring that the state is permanently enjoined form enforcing the ban as of Friday morning.

The judge’s ruling summarily smacked down every ridiculous argument put forth by Idaho Governor Butch Otter:


Idaho Gov. Butch Otter (R) attempted to justify the state’s marriage laws with four claims, all of which Dale dismissed. First, Otter argued that the marriage laws promote child welfare, but Dale countered that raising children is not a prerequisite or expectation of marriage, and thus not relevant to limiting the institution to different-sex couples, adding that “the Governor’s child welfare rationales disregard the welfare of children with same-sex parents.

In part Judge Dales ruling said "To the extent Governor Otter argues that Idaho has a legitimate interest in validating a particular religious view of marriage, that argument blithely disregards the religious liberty of congregations active in Idaho. “By recognizing the right to marry a partner of the same sex, the State allows these groups the freedom to practice their religious beliefs without mandating that other groups must adopt similar practices.”

May 15, 2014 12:51 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

another heaping of the crap sundae Barack Obama whipped up for Americans:

MIAMI (AP) -- Consumers who bought insurance under President Barack Obama's health care law are experiencing buyer's remorse after realizing that their longtime doctors aren't accepting the new plans.

Before the law took effect, experts warned that narrow networks could impact patients' access to care in cheaper plans. But with insurance cards now in hand, consumers are finding their access limited across all price ranges - even after they were told their plan would include their current doctor.

Michelle Pool is one of those customers. Before enrolling in a new health plan on California's exchange, she checked whether her longtime primary care doctor was covered. Pool, a 60-year-old diabetic who has had back surgery and a hip replacement, purchased the plan only to find that the insurer was mistaken.

Her gold plan seemed like a good deal because of her numerous pre-existing conditions. But after her insurance card came in the mail, she learned her doctor wasn't taking her new insurance.

"It's not fun when you've had a doctor for years and years that you can confide in and he knows you," Pool said. "I'm extremely discouraged. I'm stuck."

The situation demonstrates the deceit of President Obama's 2009 pledge that: "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period." Consumer frustration over losing doctors comes as the Obama administration is still dancing a victory jig.

May 15, 2014 3:11 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Prior to Obamacare people were always subject to insurance companies dropping their doctor or changing their plan. They always ran the risk of changing jobs and finding their new employers plan didn't include their doctor.

None of this has changed with Obamacare but Republicans are dishonestly portraying this as something that started with Obamacare - it didn't.

This is just more Republican lying through anecdote, where they take an isolated story, or make one up, and pretend that is typical of all Obamacare clients. The reality is there's no statistics to back up their misrepresentations and lies.

May 15, 2014 3:30 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period."

Barack Obama

May 15, 2014 4:17 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And in the vast majority of cases that's true. Just like it always was.

May 15, 2014 7:15 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Vincent Rizzo, who suffers from Type 2 diabetes, has gone without health insurance for 10 years. "We got 30 denial letters," his wife says. But then along came Obamacare, and now both Rizzos are covered for $379 a month, with a $2,000 family deductible.

, Karen Marshall of Oak Park Michigan always had health insurance through work. But when she lost her job four years ago, she couldn’t get even the most expensive private insurance because the insurance company claimed she had a pre-existing condition.

Actually, she didn’t. Marshall was prescribed an anti-depressant to treat symptoms of menopause, but the existence of the prescription alone disqualified her for coverage. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), people can’t be turned away for any pre-existing condition — real or perceived.

Marshall has always considered herself fortunate to be healthy, but she never felt luckier than she did after getting health insurance that kicked in on January 1, 2014. On a trip the week before, she slipped on the ice and fell, breaking her wrist in three places.

She saw an orthopedic surgeon on January 3 and had surgery the following week. Everything was covered by her insurance, leaving her only having to pay her deductible and her $6,000 out-of-pocket maximum for the year. She’s now had two surgeries, one hospitalization, and has physical therapy and follow-up visits ahead.


She said "The first surgery alone, which required an overnight hospital stay, would have cost me $20,000. The medical bills have been astronomical. Without health insurance, I would have been bankrupt. I don’t know what I would have done. I can manage the $6,000 by paying it off over time. But if I didn’t have insurance I don’t know what I’d do. It’s scary to consider."

Marshall’s income as an independent contractor qualified her for tax credits. Her Silver plan now has a premium of $245/month. She admits that’s a stretch for her budget, but she wanted to get as much as she could for her money.


"Most everything is covered at 80%, and my plan includes dental and preventive services. I’m all about prevention because I’ve seen what it can do. I’ve never needed health insurance like this before – but when I needed it, it was there. I’m so grateful."

Here are brief summaries of just a few of the Obamacare success stories.

* A family that has a son who was born with a brain tumor, but that no longer has to worry about financial ruin thanks to ObamaCare’s ban on annual and lifetime benefit limits

* A 36-year-old self-employed cancer survivor who will be saving $628 per month on health insurance

* A family in southwest Michigan that twice had to sell the family farm to pay hospital bills after an illness, but that now has a quality and affordable insurance policy

* A family in Utah paying only $123 per month for health insurance under ObamaCare

* A 39-year-old Pennsylvanian who has lupus who will be saving $50 per month on a better health insurance plan

The truth is that for every person that's unhappy with Obamacare there are thousands who are glad to have it.

May 15, 2014 7:27 PM  
Anonymous chortle loo said...

if the Dems wanted to create an entitlement to health insurance, they could have loosened the requirements for Medicaid

there was no need to impose on the freedom of all of us

it was done to hide the gargantuan cost of the entitlement

Americans see through it and the party of lying Obama and brain-dead Hillary will pay the price in November

just ask Nat Silver

May 15, 2014 8:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Welcome to the Dark Ages, Part II. We have slipped into an age of un-enlightenment where you fall in line behind the mob or face the consequences.

How ironic that the persecutors this time around are the so-called "intellectuals." They claim to be liberal while behaving as anything but. The touchstone of liberalism is tolerance of differing ideas. Yet this mob exists to enforce conformity of thought and to delegitimize any dissent from its sanctioned worldview. Intolerance is its calling card.

Each week seems to bring another incident. Last week it was David and Jason Benham, whose pending HGTV show was canceled after the mob unearthed old remarks the brothers made about their Christian beliefs on homosexuality. People can't have a house-flipping show unless they believe and say the "right" things in their life off the set? In this world, the conservative Tom Selleck never would have been Magnum, P.I.

This week, a trail-blazing woman was felled in the new tradition of commencement shaming. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde withdrew from delivering the commencement speech at Smith College following protests from students and faculty who hate the IMF. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, this trend is growing. In the 21 years leading up to 2009, there were 21 incidents of an invited guest not speaking because of protests. Yet, in the past five-and-a-half years, there have been 39 cancellations.

Don't bother trying to make sense of what beliefs are permitted and which ones will get you strung up in the town square. Our ideological overlords have created a minefield of inconsistency. While criticizing Islam is intolerant, insulting Christianity is sport. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is persona non grata at Brandeis University for attacking the prophet Mohammed. But Richard Dawkins describes the Old Testament God as "a misogynistic … sadomasochistic … malevolent bully" and the mob yawns. Bill Maher calls the same God a "psychotic mass murderer" and there are no boycott demands of the high-profile liberals who traffic his HBO show.

The self-serving capriciousness is crazy. In March, University of California-Santa Barbara women's studies professor Mireille Miller-Young attacked a 16-year-old holding an anti-abortion sign in the campus' "free speech zone" (formerly known as America). Though she was charged with theft, battery and vandalism, Miller-Young remains unrepentant and still has her job. But Mozilla's Brendan Eich gave a private donation to an anti-gay marriage initiative six years ago and was ordered to recant his beliefs. When he wouldn't, he was forced to resign from the company he helped found.

Got that? A college educator with the right opinions can attack a high school student and keep her job. A corporate executive with the wrong opinions loses his for making a campaign donation. Something is very wrong here.

As the mob gleefully destroys people's lives, its members haven't stopped to ask themselves a basic question: What happens when they come for me? If history is any guide, that's how these things usually end.

May 15, 2014 8:37 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

What a great example of right wing paranoia.

Kirstin Powers of FAUX News wants to know "What happens when they come for me?"

She should be sure to let us know when "they" (cue the spooky music) come for her.

May 16, 2014 8:14 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

paranoia?

obviously someone who hasn't read history

"they" is the mob

"Welcome to the Dark Ages, Part II. We have slipped into an age of un-enlightenment where you fall in line behind the mob or face the consequences."

the examples are beginning to pile up

May 16, 2014 8:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This Week In Crazy: God Wrote The Constitution, And The Rest Of The Worst of the Right

May 16, 2014 8:57 AM  
Anonymous the future has a Silver lining said...

Sen. Marco Rubio came under attack this week for refusing to submit to scientific authority. "I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it," he said.

Nonscientist Ruth Marcus, of the Washington Post, declared that Rubio's words "undermine his other assertion," namely "that he is prepared to be president." Juliet Lapidos, also lacking in scientific expertise, went so far as to assert, in the New York Times, that Rubio had "disqualified himself" from the presidency.

Of all the silly things written on the subject of global warming, Marcus's and Lapidos's offerings are surely among the most recent. Apart from that they're entirely typical of the genre of global-warmist opinion journalism, in which ignorant journalists taunt politicians for their ignorance but have no argument beyond an appeal to authority. Lapidos: "Does Mr. Rubio think scientists are lying? Or that they don't know what they're talking about? Either way, what leads him to believe that the 'portrait' of climate change offered by scientists is inaccurate?"

Appeals to authority aren't necessarily fallacious, except in the realm of formal deductive logic, where they entail adopting the unfounded premise that the authority is infallible. In informal logic--such as political debate at its best--an appeal to authority can be a sound argument if the authority is both relevant and trusted. And when dealing with complicated matters in which one lacks specialized expertise. As Michael Gerson puts it in the Washington Post: "Our intuitions are useless here. The only possible answers come from science. And for non-scientists, this requires a modicum of trust in the scientific enterprise."

Do you see the subtle problem with Gerson's formulation? The injunction have trust after tossing aside your intuition is at best a contradiction in terms, at worst a con.

This columnist is probably as unqualified as Marcus or Lapidos to evaluate the scientific merits of global warmism. But because we distrust climate scientists, we're with Rubio in being inclined to think it's a bill of goods. The trouble for global-warmist journalists like Marcus and Lapidos is that an appeal to the authority of a distrusted source undermines rather than strengthens one's argument.

May 16, 2014 9:02 AM  
Anonymous the future has a Silver lining said...

Here, from National Review's Patrick Brennan, is the latest reason to distrust the authority of "consensus" climate scientists:

On May 8, Lennart Bengtsson, a Swedish climate scientist and meteorologist, joined the advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a group that questions the reliability of climate change and the costs of policies taken to address it. While Bengtsson maintains he'd always been a skeptic as any scientist ought to be, the foundation and climate-change skeptics proudly announced it as a defection from the scientific consensus.

Less than a week later, he says he's been forced to resign from the group. The abuse he's received from the climate-science community has made it impossible to carry on his academic work and made him fear for his own safety. A once-peaceful community, he says in his resignation letter, now reminds him of McCarthyism.

"I had not expected such an enormous world-wide pressure put at me from a community that I have been close to all my active life," he wrote in his resignation. "Colleagues are withdrawing their support, other colleagues are withdrawing from joint authorship."

London's Daily Mail reports that Bengtsson "was also abused on science blogs, with one describing the people who condemned him as 'respectable' and that his actions amounted to 'silliness.' Another described him as a 'crybaby.' "

Bengtsson tells the Mail: "Some people like my views, other people don't, that is the way when it comes to science." That's precisely the point. Science is a methodical process of open inquiry. Those who enforce orthodoxies and engage in name-calling aren't doing science, even if they're scientists.

Gerson is correct in observing that a layman's intuition is of little use in evaluating a scientific proposition. That requires intellect and expertise, and most laymen do not have the latter. But intuition is enough to distinguish an authoritarian from a real authority.

May 16, 2014 9:03 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

""they" is the mob"

Is that the Cliven Bundy mob of armed crazies you and Ms. Powers are talking about?

May 16, 2014 9:06 AM  
Anonymous the future has a Silver lining said...

Democrats think they are the party of the future. After a last hurrah for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections, Democrats will have a commanding majority at the polls as far as the eye can see. A rising tide of minority, young, female, and affluent liberal voters assures them of this. And perhaps it will.

Don’t hold your breath.

But Democrats aren’t acting like a political party on the brink of taking over the country. They’re unnerved and unhappy. Their chief motivation these days is to make Republicans look bad. Ideological fissures are dividing them on health care, energy, and charter schools. President Obama’s second term keeps getting worse. He’s lost interest in bipartisan compromise. His agenda is largely rhetorical.

If you think Obama and Democrats in Congress are getting along well at the moment, forget it. Meanwhile, the wheels are beginning to come off the bandwagon to boost Hillary Clinton as the next president. Senate majority leader Harry Reid is obsessed with the Koch brothers. He fears they’ll hasten a Republican takeover of the Senate by outspending even his Senate Majority PAC. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi is befuddled on how to handle the special committee investigating the Benghazi affair.

Democrats are increasingly living in a fantasy world. They believe Obamacare, following a rocky debut, is now headed for smooth sailing and the chance of repeal is dead. Wrong on both counts. There’s big trouble ahead once delayed mandates are operative and millions lose their employer-paid health insurance, face higher premiums, and confront limits on their access to first-rate health professionals. All that’s required for repeal is a Republican president and Congress—a possibility in 2016.

Listening to Democrats and Obama, one might conclude a solid economic recovery is firmly in place. Hardly. Obama’s refusal to seek incentives for investment continues to stymie growth and job creation. He’s sticking with policies that have produced the weakest recovery in memory. Obama prefers to expand the welfare state, not spur the private economy.

Without troubling Democrats, a record number of Americans are dropping out of the workforce entirely, more than 800,000 in April alone. This has created a mirage of declining unemployment. When the number of dropouts exceeds the newly employed, as was the case in April, the jobless rate declines. The media can be relied on to focus on the falling rate, and Democrats are pleased. But the economy may not have improved at all.

May 16, 2014 9:28 AM  
Anonymous the future has a Silver lining said...

By the way, what happened to the 5 million “green” jobs that Obama promised to create? Democrats took his promise seriously. In 2009, the economic stimulus package included billions for green industries. And Democrats like Senator Barbara Boxer of California campaigned for reelection in 2010 on an anticipated explosion of green jobs. She was a true believer and may still be. But the 5 million jobs, or anything close to that number, have yet to materialize.

The biggest Democratic fantasy is the impact of global warming. The trouble used to be in the future when oceans would rise and glaciers melt. But the Obama administration now says global warming is causing floods and wildfires and droughts today. Next they’ll blame the calamities of the past—the Great Galveston Hurricane maybe or Noah’s flood—on global warming.

The left wing of the Democratic party is hysterical on this subject. Christopher Hayes of the Nation has discovered a “connection between slavery and fossil fuels.” Who knew? So what’s needed now, Hayes writes, is a “New Abolitionism” to free America from “the grip of a fossil fuel frenzy almost without precedent.”

These fantasies show how far removed Democrats are from the cares of average Americans. Yes, Republicans have fantasies of their own. (One is that voters are opposed to immigration reform.) But no one is predicting the coming decades will transform the GOP into a powerful majority party.

Democrats have another problem, their lurch to the left led by Obama. Most political reporters have missed this while exaggerating the Republican drift to the right. The exception is Josh Kraushaar of National Journal. He recently made a strong case—irrefutable, I’d say—that Democrats have moved leftward on five big issues: the budget deficit, income inequality, the environment, social issues, and America’s role in the world.

This won’t help Democrats in 2016, when their surge to dominance is supposed to begin. Instead, its effect may be to weaken the demographic trend. That Democratic voting blocs like Latinos are increasing is beyond dispute. The question is whether they’ll continue to vote for Democrats in such high percentages

n 2004, President George W. Bush got either 40 percent or 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, depending on which survey you believe. Four years later, John McCain dipped to 31 percent. In 2012, Mitt Romney slipped further to 27 percent.

Voting groups change their minds. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, pro-life Democrats migrated to the GOP. Evangelical Christians who voted in 1976 for Jimmy Carter abandoned him in 1980, voted heavily for Ronald Reagan, and have stayed in the Republican orbit.

Demography is destiny only “up to a point,” Michael Barone says. A disastrous finish to the Obama era could blunt the trend toward Democratic rule. If that’s what is bothering Harry Reid and Democrats, no wonder they seem so cheerless

May 16, 2014 9:29 AM  
Anonymous the future has a Silver lining said...

"Is that the Cliven Bundy mob of armed crazies you and Ms. Powers are talking about?"

no, it's the mob that tries to silence, ostracize and unemploy anyone who dares to not endorse homosexual "marriage" or global warmist alarmism

in the 1950s, you could become unemployable if you weren't rabidly anti-Communist

this mob seeks the same situation for anyone who thinks the climate change catastrophe is exaggerated or that marriage is supposed to be gendered

May 16, 2014 9:36 AM  
Anonymous the future has a Silver lining said...

I will confess to a little despair over the relatively mild reception that has greeted the evidence, now conclusive and irrefutable, that the Internal Revenue Service, under the direction of senior leaders affiliated with the Democratic party, was used as a political weapon from at least 2010 through the 2012 election. It may be that the American public simply does not care about the issue; it is always difficult, if not impossible, to predict what issues will seize the electorate’s attention, or to understand why after the fact. It may be that the public does not understand the issue, in which case a brief explanation of the known facts may be of some use.

Here is what happened. In the run-up to the 2012 election, senior IRS executives including Lois Lerner, then the head of the IRS branch that oversees the activities of tax-exempt nonprofit groups, began singling out conservative-leaning organizations for extra attention, invasive investigations, and legal harassment. The IRS did not target groups that they believed might be violating the rules governing tax-exempt organizations; rather, as e-mails from the agency document, the IRS targeted these conservative groups categorically, regardless of whether there was any evidence that they were not in compliance with the relevant regulations. Simply having the words “tea party,” “patriot,” or “9/12” (a reference to one of Glenn Beck’s many channels of activism) in the name was enough. Also targeted were groups dedicated to issues such as taxes, spending, debt, and, perhaps most worrisome, those that were simply “critical of the how the country is being run.” Organizations also were targeted based on the identity of their donors. Their applications were delayed, their managements harassed, and the IRS demanded that they answer wildly inappropriate questions, such as the content of their prayers. When an internal review threatened to expose the fact that, in the words of the IRS’s inspector general, the agency was “using inappropriate criteria to identify organizations applying for tax-exempt status,” Ms. Lerner staged an event at a tax-law conference at which she used a planted questioner to preemptively disclose the issue on her own terms, and the agency began claiming that the tea-party targeting, while regrettable, was the work of a few misguided agents at a satellite office in Cincinnati. In fact, the direction came from Washington and was, in the words of the agency’s own e-mails, “coordinated with” a senior manager there, Rob Choi, director of rulings and agreements. This began at the behest of Democratic officeholders, including Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who requested that the IRS disclose to him information about tea-party groups that it would have been illegal for the IRS to disclose. It subsequently emerged that IRS officials had intentionally misled members of Congress and investigators about the matter.

During this period, IRS operatives were, according to the Office of Special Counsel, openly campaigning for the reelection of Barack Obama on IRS time using IRS resources. A few were later disciplined for their actions, but the extent of the political activity of IRS agents remains unknown.

May 16, 2014 10:19 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The IRS is not just a revenue agency — it is a law-enforcement agency, a police agency with far greater powers of investigation and coercion that any normal police force. Its actions in this matter are not only inappropriate — they are illegal. Using government resources for political ends is a serious crime, as is conspiring to mislead investigators about those crimes. But so far, other than holding Lois Lerner in contempt for refusing to comply with the demands of congressional investigators, almost nothing has happened. The characteristic feature of a police state is that those who are entrusted with the power to enforce the law are not themselves bound by it.

Context is again here important. The IRS scandal is not a standalone issue but comes at a time when the Democratic party is seeking to radically expand the power of the federal government to regulate political speech; we can safely assume that the same people who were using the IRS’s political-speech regulations for political ends will have precisely the same motives and precisely the same opportunity to use other political-speech regulations for precisely the same political ends: to benefit their allies and persecute their enemies. So committed are the Democrats to keeping their critics under the thumb of federal police powers that they have introduced an amendment in the Senate that would effectively repeal the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment, those having proved inconvenient to Democrats in Supreme Court rulings such as McCutcheon and Citizens United, the latter case involving a federal attempt to make it a crime to show a film critical of a political figure under unapproved circumstances.

The most important question that must be answered in this matter does not involve the misbehavior of IRS officials and Democratic officeholders, though those are important. Nor is it the question of free speech, vital and fundamental as that is. The question here is nothing less than the legitimacy of the United States government. When law-enforcement agencies and federal regulators with extraordinary coercive powers are subordinated to political interests rather than their official obligations — to the Party rather than to the law — then the law itself becomes meaningless, and the delicate constitutional order we have enjoyed for more than two centuries is reduced to a brutal might-makes-right proposition. Elected officials and public servants of both parties take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States and to faithfully discharge the duties of their office. That oath is now being tested. The IRS investigation is no mere partisan scandal, but a moral challenge for the men and women who compose the government of this country. Whether they are sufficient to meet that challenge is far from obvious, but the evidence so far is not encouraging.

May 16, 2014 10:19 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...


After claiming on Sunday that human activity does not cause climate change, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) suddenly found his ignorance credentials under attack by potential rivals for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination.

“Now that Marco’s thinking of running for President, he doesn’t believe in climate change,” said Texas Governor Rick Perry. “To those of us with long track records of ignorance on this issue, he seems a little late to the rodeo.”…

By Sunday evening, a defensive Sen. Rubio was pushing back against the attacks, telling reporters, “Any questions about the authenticity of my ignorance are deeply offensive to me.”

“My refusal to accept the scientific research on climate change is a matter of public record,” he said. “On this issue and many others my ignorance should take a back seat to no one’s.”

May 16, 2014 11:56 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

thanks for sharing, lazy Priya, but the Onion is actually a satirical site

sorry, thought you knew

May 16, 2014 12:09 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Never said it wasn't satire - joke's on you.

But you have to admit, it wouldn't be unlike these people to say such things.

May 16, 2014 1:13 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Massive fires in California over the past four days have already burned more than 14,000 acres of land. 23,000 people have been evacuated from their homes this week due to fires and the governor has declared a state of emergency.

The scariest thing about this weeks fires is that its not even fire season yet. Already this year California fire crews have responded to 1400 wildfires which is more than double the average. Fire season in California now lasts 75 days longer than it did ten years ago and more than half the largest fires in the states history have taken place over the last decade.

The big reason for this? More severe drought caused by global warming. California is currently in the midst of three of the driest years in the states history and now 100% of the state in in severe, extreme, or exceptional drought.

Half of the U.S. is currently experiencing a drought. Nasa satellite data over the last 30 years shows a strong steady increase in the amount of burning and those conditions are directly tied to the drought and temperature anomalies scientists expect to continue under their projections of climate change with the latest climate change models.

May 16, 2014 4:28 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Southwest struggles to adapt to year-round fire season

"Last week was Wildfire Awareness Week in California, a time when firefighters and forest managers travel up and down the state talking about fire risk and public safety. Usually that would mean wildfire conditions were just picking up, with higher temperatures drying out fuels nurtured by winter rain and snowpack.

That's not the case this year, though. For much of the Golden State, last year's fire season never really ended.

"We knew we were under very different conditions when we started January, literally the first week of January, with a 350-acre fire in Humboldt County," said Ken Pimlott, chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Typically, he said, Humboldt in midwinter gets more precipitation than anywhere else in the country.

"When we're seeing that type of fire activity in those places in California, that indicates that the entire state is ready to go," he added.

Conditions are fire-ripe all over the parched West, from eastern Oregon down to Arizona and across to the Oklahoma Panhandle. But nowhere is the situation more dire than in California. Three years of low precipitation and negligible snowpack has left vegetation conditions highly combustible. Water levels are low in many reservoirs, and the spring rains many hoped for have been all but absent.

The southern parts of the state have been under fire threat since the spring of 2013, and firefighters and ground and aviation resources have deployed two to three months early in parts of central California. 2014, Pimlott said, will likely be a year for the record books.

Controlled burns -- necessary but more dangerous

California isn't the only state bracing for a hard fire season. Ninety percent of the Southwest is currently experiencing drought, with moisture levels for some regions less than 2 percent of the norm. Add to that above-normal densities of fire fuels and lightning storms brought on by an El Niño monsoon season, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

The Forest Service and Department of the Interior announced last week that they already anticipate breaking their firefighting budget by $470 million, citing climate change as one of the primary causes for the rising costs. The Forest Service already allocates about 40 percent of its budget to fire suppression, up from 15 percent just two decades ago.

For communities across the West, the spring has seen a scramble of activity as homeowners, firefighters and forest managers try to shore up their defenses. That means clearing a buffer zone around structures in the wildland urban interface, creating fuel breaks and having contingencies ready in case of evacuation.

In some areas, crews are fighting fire with fire, burning out fuel breaks or particularly dangerous stands before an uncontrolled spark can get to them.

Fire is one of the most important tools at a forester's disposal and, under controlled conditions, can be extremely useful in thinning fuels on overgrown landscapes. That kind of large-scale landscape management is usually conducted in the autumn, however, as states head into cooler, wetter conditions.

The kinds of operations being undertaken now are smaller in scale, said Wally Covington, director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University.

"In the spring, you're already seeing conditions getting hotter and windier. If you're going to manage landscapes with fire, you've got to keep the scale of your operations limited," he said.

Under the current volatile conditions, however, even these smaller projects can go awry. A controlled burn in central Oklahoma jumped its perimeter last week and quickly burned out of control in the surrounding dry grasslands. It eventually reached a mobile home park, where it destroyed 20 homes and killed one person.

As of late last week, authorities were still unsure who had been conducting the burn....."

May 16, 2014 5:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

...Forest thinning becomes more essential

Apart from a dramatic downscaling of greenhouse gases that the world puts into the atmosphere, there's not a lot that can change the climate's course in the near term. As the recent National Climate Assessment from the White House points out, fire seasons are projected to lengthen and intensify in the West for some time to come (ClimateWire, May 7).

Controlling the landscape, however, is a different matter.

Most believe that with the right resources, the overgrowth problem can be, if not fixed, then at least improved on. That's led to a wide range of approaches, from the ordinary to the unorthodox.

The Forest Service, for example, has been expanding its partnership with the private sector to strategically thin around communities and in other threatened areas. Programs like Stewardship Contracting allow commercial loggers to harvest some fuels, under the condition that they do so in a planned way.

In the chaparral shrublands of the Southwest -- regions that burn with the intensity of a crown fire due to the resinous content of chaparral's leaves -- some foresters have taken a different approach, introducing herds of goats to graze fuel breaks in the vegetation. The goats can eat between 5 and 15 percent of their body weight a day and aerate the soil with their hooves as they move over it.

The goal in all of these cases is to return the landscape to a previous state where its vegetation cover isn't so thick, Covington said. "Ideally, once you get the land restored to its natural conditions, you can just let fires go," he said. "In fact, you want vegetation to burn fairly regularly because you don't want it to get overgrown."

Ultimately, though, there's no better substitute for fire than fire. Prescribed burning works faster and is better suited to the landscape than any other form of manual thinning, foresters say.

Even that, though, requires resources and personnel, more of which are diverted toward fighting fires as the season lengthens.

For the moment, there's little the West can do except batten down the hatches, hope for the best and prepare for the worst."

May 16, 2014 5:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"A Catholic School in San Francisco has pulled a graduating senior’s picture from the yearbook because she opted to wear a tuxedo instead of a dress. Sacred Heart Cathedral Preparatory student Jessica Urbina will be excluded from the yearbook and will not have her photo shown during graduation because her choice of outfit violated the school’s dress code, according to a report from CBS 5KPIX.

A post on the school’s website said that it is “always regretful when a student portrait is omitted for any reason” and that “as a community we will continue to work tirelessly to ensure that all students are included in the future.” It is strange though, because school policy requires girls wear dresses in yearbook photos but gives them the option of wearing slacks during school hours. It’s hard to understand the difference between a tux and slacks, in terms of “appropriate” attire.

Principal Gary Cannon told reporters that, “Straight, gay, bi, transgender, all that. They’re all welcome at Sacred Heart Cathedral, and at the same time we’re going to be clear in terms of being a Catholic institution what the Catholic church teaches and how do we live out that faith in a meaningful way, and in a supportive way with all of our students.” [except lesbian students who wear tuxedos on picture day, apparently]

In an act of protest and solidarity with Urbina, students showed up to school on Friday wearing bow-ties and tuxedos. Urbina’s girlfriend, Katie Emanuel, said of the controversy, “I support my girlfriend. I love my school, and I want to make it as good as it can be for people like us.”"


h/t Salon

May 17, 2014 7:18 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

seems like homosexuals will never be happy unless religious institutions are attacked for affirming biblical views

if a lesbian doesn't agree with the views of a Catholic high school, why is she there?

there is similar to a few years back, when TTF went out to picket a church in Silver Spring that had a conference on delivering Christian believers afflicted with same gender attractions

this is why the gay agenda is so dangerous

homosexual advocates simply can't be happy with a "live and let live" situation

they will regret it

May 17, 2014 9:45 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

When you say "religion," what do you mean? As far as I can tell, it means that a group of people agree to believe something -- it can be anything -- for which there is no evidence, the more absurd the better. Having agreed to believe a thing (man in the sky, human sacrifice absolving earthly suffering, virgins in heaven, etc.), the group uses it as an explanation for everything that is difficult to comprehend. Religion can explain how the physical universe came into being, why women are inferior, it can provide rationalization for justice and war, for greed, pollution -- anything, really.

The irrational belief also becomes the foundation of a group identity, and religious people take an "us versus them" stance with regard to nonbelievers. And, to cap it all off, those who believe in absurdity demand and receive special legal privileges as far as taxes and the right to impose their bizarre views on others, that exceed the privileges of people whose beliefs are based on evidence and logic. People who declare that their delusions are a "religion" can go into a court of law or legislative sessions and insist that society needs to conform to their dreamlike fantasy, and at least in the US the government will cooperate in humoring them.

This has gone on since the dawn of mankind. Does that mean that enlightened people need to pretend that "religion" is morally or intellectual equivalent to rational thought? There has to be a distinction between being polite to stupid people and actually letting them make decisions that affect the lives of everyone around them.

May 17, 2014 10:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Click to see amazing photos of 10 - 30 Million Patriots on the Mall

Here's the story:

"Retired Col. Harry Riley planned to take over Washington on Friday.

So the Florida native invited conservatives from all over the country to join him in a protest in the nation's capital—and stay there until President Obama; Vice President Joe Biden; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; House Speaker John Boehner and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; and Attorney General Eric Holder all voluntarily stepped down from office. Riley estimated that between 10 million and 30 million patriots would join him in the effort and stay until the bums, as it were, threw themselves out. Needless to say, the media was skeptical.

But on Friday morning thousands of lawn chairs stood in the tacky, taupe mud facing a massive stage with professional sound equipment, surrounded by fresh white tents and a few scattered medical outposts as the temperature began to rise and the clouds that dumped rain on Washington the night before began to part. Everything looked set for a major rally, one that would get attention—but that was for the George Washington University commencement, slated for Sunday morning.

Riley and a couple hundred self-styled patriots stood yards away, on the hilltop above the base of the newly reopened Washington Monument waving both American and "Don't Tread On Me" flags. Their signs encouraged Congress to impeach Obama and raged in carefully drawn capital letters about "LIES" surrounding the attacks on the U.S. Consulate at "BENGHAZI."

Two hundred people or so, largely white and near the age of retirement, milled around among a few scattered college-age kids, many of whom donned Guy Fawkes masks. A group in military fatigues—the most popular choice of dress at the gathering—held up a large cross for attendees to sign, while the rest of the group seemed happy to walk around and chat. They hailed from all over the country, with representatives from Hawaii and Alaska, no less. Many said they'd met "the colonel," but reports of his whereabouts and attire were conflicted.

And that was it, for a while. The rally left a bit to be desired organizationally with the official website directing participants to a vague location of "the mall" on Friday, May 16, with no listed time. Other media outlets reported that the gathering would take place outside the White House and the crowd speculated that some of their flock may be down there on Pennsylvania Avenue. A group of about 30, mostly men and mostly veterans, stood about a mile away near the Air and Space Museum, checking Twitter for clues about their comrades' whereabouts, but confident that the rally would find them. Another couple hundred gathered at the Arlington National Cemetery before ultimately making the long march up to the Monument.

As the marchers arrived, a cheer went up in the crowd, their numbers having reached to the upper triple digits. Shortly after, a woman who introduced herself to National Journal only as "Momma Bear" from San Diego, Calif.—but whom others called "Terri"—stood up on a low wall with others holding large yellow signs and pulled out a megaphone.

Momma Bear told the crowd she had recently come from Cliven Bundy's ranch, where she and supporters from all over the country gathered to help fight off the Bureau of Land Management and return the Bundys' cattle. And, she told them all, the Bundys fed each of them two meals a day....

May 18, 2014 7:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

..."She later told National Journal that she had long monitored the situation in Nevada, but that a report from the site InfoWars, which was founded by conspiracy theorist and 9/11 truther Alex Jones, and an accompanying YouTube video showing BLM officers sicking a dog on a pregnant woman had finally inspired her to drive up to the ranch to help out. She stopped at the Bundys' place on her way to Washington and plans to take her two daughters there when she returns.

The Bundy episode resonated strongly with the crowd, but the biggest driving force for the attendees, based on the content of their speeches and signs, was the Benghazi attack. Several of the protesters said their anger with the country's leadership began years ago, but the violent attack in Libya in 2012 and the administration's response to it was what lead them to get active.

For Riley, who said he'd been outraged for "decades," it was the government shutdown that moved him toward action. "The government decided that they were going to close all the memorials here, the WWII veterans couldn't get to the memorial and a couple months later I was penning another rant and I said why am I doing this? And [I] put this mission on and put it on the website and it grabbed legs basically from grassroots America," he said.

Despite taking control of things at Washington Monument, Momma Bear said she is in no way affiliated with Riley, but offered that someone needed to take the lead in organizing the group. She took the lead quite literally half an hour later, informing Riley that the group was marching down to the Air and Space Museum and they needed him to lead the charge. When a police car drove up later in the day, Momma Bear organized a group of young men to protect Riley, shouting: "Surround Colonel Riley! Surround Colonel Riley!" It turned out that the car was just passing by.

And so with a call-and-response of "impeach" and "Obama!" the group, now numbered near a thousand, wended its way down the hill and along the Mall, to a shady area outside the Air and Space Museum.

There, other megaphones appeared seemingly out of thin air and a rotating cast of veterans and tea-party supporters spoke to the crowd, many invoking God and criticizing government overreach and overspending. But despite early media reports, the protest was peaceful and those gathered were respectful. The speakers repeatedly reminded the crowd of the power of peaceful protest and, aside from a single sign in the crowd comparing Obama to Adolf Hitler, the rhetoric was civil.

"We were at the Bundy Ranch and we did the pushback and we got a peaceful resolution. I think we can do it peacefully and we need all hands on deck," Momma Bear said.

As for Friday's turnout, the number gathered on the Mall hadn't topped 1,000 by mid-afternoon, nowhere near as many as Riley thinks they'll need to be taken seriously. "We recognize that politicians respond to numbers. If we don't get 10 million or 20 million or something like has happened in other places, then they're going to ignore us like they have in the past," Riley said.

But he, Momma Bear, and others said they were not discouraged. Given the rain and work schedules, they fully expect their group to multiply through the weekend. And they're committed to sticking around.

"As long as it takes," Momma Bear said. "Let me see, today is—Friday. In two days is my son's birthday, in 11 days is my other daughter's birthday and—no, 10 days is my other daughter's birthday. And in 18 days is my other daughter's birthday and her graduation [is] a day after [that], from high school."

Asked if she's really willing to miss those events for the rally, Momma Bear nodded vehemently. "Yeah.… What am I going to give them if I can't give them a country that works for us?" she asked.
"

May 18, 2014 7:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

THOUSANDS FLEE, 25 DIE IN RECORD BALKAN FLOODS

"MAGLAJ, Bosnia (AP) — Packed into buses, boats and helicopters, carrying nothing but a handful of belongings, tens of thousands fled their homes Saturday in Bosnia and Serbia to escape the worst flooding in a century.

Rapidly rising rivers surged into homes, sometimes reaching up to the second floors, sending people climbing to rooftops for rescue.

Hundreds were also evacuated in Croatia.

Authorities said 25 people have died but warned the death toll could rise. Tens of thousands of homes were left without electricity or drinking water.

Landslides triggered by the floods also raised the risk of injury or death from land mines left over from Bosnia's 1992-95 war. The landslides swept away many of the carefully placed warning signs around the minefields.

Three months' worth of rain has fallen on the region in three days this week, creating the worst floods since records began being kept 120 years ago.

Observed from the air, almost a third of Bosnia, mostly its northeast corner, resembled a huge muddy lake, with houses, roads and rail lines submerged. Admir Malagic, a spokesman for Bosnia's Security Ministry, said about a million people — over a quarter of the country's population — live in the affected area.

"Bosnia is facing a horrible catastrophe," said Bakir Izetbegovic, the chairman of the Bosnian three-man presidency. "We are still not fully aware of actual dimensions of the catastrophe ... we will have to take care of hundreds, thousands of people ..."

Izetbegovic was touring Maglaj, hard hit by floods. As the waters mostly withdrew on Saturday, Maglaj was covered in mud and debris, with residents checking damage and bringing furniture out in the streets to dry.

"Everything is destroyed, but we are happy to be alive," said Maglaj resident Zijad Omerovic.

In the eastern Bosnian town of Bijeljina, some 10,000 people were being evacuated Saturday after the rain-swollen Sava River pushed through flood defenses, endangering four villages outside the town. The peak of the Sava flood wave was expected in Bijeljina later Saturday, before advancing to Serbia...."

May 18, 2014 9:39 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

another scandal of bias in climate "science"

East Anglia history repeats:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10837146/Climate-change-science-has-become-blind-to-green-bias.html

May 19, 2014 9:12 AM  
Anonymous svelte_brunette said...

Anon whined:

“seems like homosexuals will never be happy unless religious institutions are attacked for affirming biblical views”

For someone who gets their panties in a knot about “redefining” words, you’ve got a really redefined use of “attack” there.

A teenage girl getting her picture taken in a tux is simply not an attack. It never has been, and it never will be. Except, of course in the hypochondriac world of religious conservatives. A “challenge”? Perhaps. But certainly not an attack. Don’t look for it in the next update of the US Army Training manual.



“if a lesbian doesn't agree with the views of a Catholic high school, why is she there?”

Well, it could be that her parents forced her to go there. Or, when she started school there several years ago, she had not realized herself that she was a lesbian. Since she is not an adult, she has very limited input on her school choice.

“there is similar to a few years back, when TTF went out to picket a church in Silver Spring that had a conference on delivering Christian believers afflicted with same gender attractions”

Why? Were lesbians wearing tuxes there too? Does that really scare you that much? I’d love to see what happens when you see them wearing coveralls and hiking boots.

“this is why the gay agenda is so dangerous”

Yes, fancy clothes have always been a threat to religions everywhere. It almost makes me want to change out of my jeans and put on a cocktail dress.

“homosexual advocates simply can't be happy with a "live and let live" situation”

Um, we’re not the ones trying to change other people’s sexual orientation, and save you from your “unwanted heterosexual attractions.” Why not just leave us alone, stop demonizing us, and conflating us with pedophiles? You know, live and let live?

“they will regret it”

Yeah, you keep threatening us with a nebulous backlash on a regular basis. But as usual, you really haven’t stopped to think about it.

Many of us have already lost jobs, been denied marriage, or been kicked out of the military – that’s if we’ve survived the pre-teen and teenage years of Christian harassment designed to humiliate us into suicide.

If you are going to make it worse for than you’ve already made it, you’re going to have to start torturing or killing us. Pastor Worley has already said he’d love to do that, but he’ll settle for putting us in camps instead. ( http://jezebel.com/5912234/baptist-pastor-suggests-we-round-up-the-gay-people-and-put-them-in-a-concentration-camp ) I know Christians are perfectly capable of organizing this kind of crap, and frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did, with the FRC, Peter Sprigg, and Focus on the Family leading the way.

But what you still haven’t figured out yet, is that we’re not just going to sit back and take it any more. We will fight for our rights and our place in society until we have them in every 50 states of the Union.

The Catholic Church and its schools need to be challenged. EVERY SINGLE DAY.

It is telling that a young lesbian in a tux can have her picture removed from the yearbook in a decision that probably happened in less than a week – a blink of an eye in Catholic time. Yet when Catholic boys are taking up-skirt pictures of their female teachers, it doesn’t get addressed for 7 years – and that was only because she took it to the police.

( http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2014/05/16/san-mateo-teacher-sues-all-boys-serra-catholic-high-school-over-up-skirt-photos-videos-sexual-harassment-by-students/ )

PRIORITIES folks – a culture of Catholic sexual harassment or a lesbian teenager in a tux. Which one is more dangerous to society?


Have a nice day,

Cynthia

May 19, 2014 11:04 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The climate change denialists are a bit thin-skinned; they’ve also been exposed as a bit on the wacko side. The journal Frontiers in Psychology is about to retract a paper that found that denialists tend to have a cluster of weird beliefs (NASA faked the moon landings, the CIA was in charge of the assassination of political figures in the US, etc.) because the denialists screamed very loudly.
This outrage first arose in response to a paper, NASA faked the moon landing–Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science (pdf) which analyzed voluntary surveys submitted by readers of climate science blogs, in which the respondents freely admitted to having a collection of other beliefs, in addition to climate change denial. That paper found something else interesting, and was the primary correlation observed: a lot of denialists are libertarians. Are you surprised?

Rejection of climate science was strongly associated with endorsement of a laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets.

A second variable that was associated with rejection of climate science as well as other scientific propositions was conspiracist ideation. Notably, this relationship emerged even though conspiracies that related to the queried scientific propositions (AIDS, climate change) did not contribute to the conspiracist construct. By implication, the role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science did not simply reflect “convenience” theories that provided specific alternative “explanations” for a scientific consensus. Instead, this finding suggests that a general propensity to endorse any of a number of conspiracy theories predisposes people to reject entirely unrelated scientific facts.

Oh, how they howled. Even libertarians seem to be embarrassed at being affiliated with libertarians, I guess. And conspiracy theorists, too? Why, the accusation itself is clearly evidence that there’s a conspiracy out to get them. They protested that because the respondents to the survey all found it through mainstream science blogs, all the responses were false flag operations put out by Big Climate.

May 19, 2014 11:24 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

May 19, 2014 11:25 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

What they didn’t realize was that they were generating more data to support the hypothesis. The authors of the first paper then wrote a second paper, the one that is now being retracted by the cowardly publisher, called Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Ideation, in which they scanned public posts and comments on the first article, and analyzed the text for evidence of conspiracist tropes (it’s a nefarious scheme, they’re out to get us, it’s an organized movement to defeat us, etc.) and found that yes, conspiracist reasoning was quite common on climate change denial blogs.

The squawking reached a new crescendo. Steve McIntyre wrote a strongly worded formal letter demanding that the defamatory article be removed, and accusing the authors of malice. Further, they complained that analyzing the content of blog posts and comments, public, openly accessible work, was an ethics violation.

Ludicrous as those claims are, Frontiers in Psychology is apparently about to fold to them. For shame.

Oh, well. All I can say is that, thanks to the denialist losers, now everyone is going to be far more interested in reading the two papers by Lewandowsky and others. I recommend that you read Motivated rejection of science (pdf) and Recursive fury(pdf) now, or anytime — they’re archived on the web. You might also stash away a copy yourself. You make a denialist cry every time you make a copy, you know.

May 19, 2014 11:26 AM  
Anonymous sing a song of the south said...

"A teenage girl getting her picture taken in a tux is simply not an attack. It never has been, and it never will be."

well, interesting that you bring that up because I don't think it is either

and I didn't say it was

the attack is when people who are not part of a religion try to dictate what rules a religious group can have among its members

lunatic fringe gay advocates regularly claim that religious groups have a right to believe what they want but this clearly not true

they desire that the government coerce religious groups and force them to treat homosexuality as normal

if you go to a Catholic school, which is voluntary, you follow Catholic rules of conduct, which are not subject to the dictates of government

if someone's parent makes them go there, that's between the parents and the kids, not the government and the school

got it?

May 19, 2014 12:43 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/bad anonymous said "if you go to a Catholic school, which is voluntary".

Again with the willful stupidity. Most children don't get to choose what school they go to. Most students at Catholic schools are forced to attend by their parents.

Got it?

May 19, 2014 1:42 PM  
Anonymous debunking the "97 percent" canard said...

TV watchers will recall the familiar advertising trope of yesteryear in which we were told “4 out of 5 dentists [or doctors] recommend” using fluoride toothpaste, aspirin for headaches, or some such. We were always left to wonder whether that fifth doctor was a moron or something, never pausing to consider that the fifth doctor might well recommend the same thing, but emphasize something else first (like flossing perhaps, or Tylenol instead of aspirin because of sensitive stomachs, etc). But Archie Bunker was coming back on the air in 30 seconds, so most of us didn’t follow up on these puzzles.

Likewise we ought to wonder about the favorite cliché of the Climatistas these days—that “97 percent of scientists ‘believe in’ climate change.” As I’ve written before, the only real surprise is that the number isn’t 100 percent. There is virtually no one who thinks the climate hasn’t changed or won’t change in the future, or that there is no human influence on the phenomenon. The leading so-called “skeptics—like MIT’s Richard Lindzen or Cato’s Patrick Michaels or NASA’s John Christy or Roy Spencer—would be included in the 97 percent figure. I’m guessing the outlying 3 percent are actually just anomalies of an arbitrary classification scheme (more on this in a moment) that serve the same point as a magician’s misdirection—to get you to buy an illusion. In this case, the illusion is that the scientific community is nearly unanimous in thinking we’re on the brink of catastrophe unless we hand our car keys over to Al Gore.

No one can possibly keep up with the flood of scientific articles published on climate-related topics these days (we’re spending way too much on climate research right now, but that’s a topic for another day), so it is ridiculous to offer sweeping generalizations like this about the character of the scientific literature. I keep up with a fair amount of it in Nature, Science, and a couple of the other main journals, and what is quite obvious is that most climate-related articles are about specific aspects of climate, such as observed changed in localized ecosystems, measurement refinements (like ocean temperatures, etc), energy use and projections, and large data analysis. Many of these articles do not take a position on the magnitude of possible future warming, and fewer still embrace giving the car keys over to Al Gore. Only a handful deal with modeling of future climate change, and this is where the debate over climate sensitivity and the severe limitations of the models (especially as relates to clouds) is quite lively and—dare I say it—unsettled. (Just read the IPCC Working Group I chapter on climate models if you don’t believe me.) The “97 percent of scientists ‘believe in’ climate change” cliché is an appalling abuse of science, and a bad faith attempt to marginalize anyone who dissents from the party line that we need to hand our car keys over to Al Gore. The tacit message is: if you dissent from the party line, you must be in that 3 percent who think you shouldn’t brush your teeth, take painkillers for headches, etc.

May 19, 2014 3:15 PM  
Anonymous debunking the "97 percent" canard said...

Where did this 97 percent figure come from? This story has become interesting over the last few days. The most prominent form of it comes from Prof. John Cook of the University of Queensland in a paper published last year that purported to have reviewed over 11,000 climate science articles. Does anyone really believe that Cook and his eight co-authors actually read through all 11,000 articles? Actually, the abstract of the paper supports the point I made above that most papers don’t actually deal with what the Climatistas say:


We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming], 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. [Emphasis added.]

Pause here and note that it is odd to see that some folks apparently haven’t gotten the memo that you’re not supposed to call it “global warming”—“climate change” is the term of art now. Anyway, to continue, read this slowly and carefully:


Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus.

Let’s translate: Among the one-third of papers that “endorse” the “consensus,” there is near unanimity. In other words, among people who agree with the consensus, nearly all of them agree with the consensus. Again—the only mystery here is that the number isn’t 100 percent. Perhaps this would have been too embarrassing to report, like a North Korean election. For this exercise all climate scientists may as well be called named Kim Jong Il.

The plot thickens. Prof. Cook refused to share his data with anyone. Shades of the East Anglia mob and their tree ring data. But also like the East Anglia mob, someone at the University of Queensland left the data in the ether of the internet, and blogger Brandon Shollenberger came across it and starting noting its weaknesses. Then the predictable thing happened: the University of Queensland claims that the data was hacked, and sent Shollenbeger a cease-and-desist letter. That just speaks lots of confidence and transparency, doesn’t it?

The irrepressible Steve McIntyre of ClimateAudit has more, including a link to the inevitable Hitler parody video. But just remember this: 4 out of 5 claims by the Climatistas are self-serving political tommyrot.

May 19, 2014 3:16 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Oregon same sex marriage ban struck down

The victories just keep stacking up for the pro-family side!

"The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice"

May 19, 2014 4:49 PM  
Anonymous svelte_brunette said...

After the article about the Catholic school Anon whined:

“seems like homosexuals will never be happy unless religious institutions are attacked for affirming biblical views”

Then tried to clarify:

“the attack is when people who are not part of a religion try to dictate what rules a religious group can have among its members”

Followed up by:

“they desire that the government coerce religious groups and force them to treat homosexuality as normal”

Wipe the rage spittle of your screen Anon. Re-read the article. Then tell me precisely where “the attack is when people who are not part of a religion try to dictate what rules a religious group can have among its members”

Was it the “attack” where “In an act of protest and solidarity with Urbina, students showed up to school on Friday wearing bow-ties and tuxedos.” This wasn’t an outside group. And if this school is anything like my Catholic high school, well over 90% of them are probably Catholic. And as students, they are too young to be part of the government. Wearing bowties might be a protest, but it is simply not an attack.

Or was it where: “Urbina’s girlfriend, Katie Emanuel, said of the controversy, “I support my girlfriend. I love my school, and I want to make it as good as it can be for people like us.” Wow, that sounds like truly a dangerous “attack.” *NOT!* I bet neither one of them are part of the government either.

Do you have any other information that indicates the government got involved somewhere along the line? If so, feel free to post it.

Do you even know what “attack” means? Or in you rush to jump on the cross and cry victim, did you forget to look around and check to see if you were actually being “attacked?”

I’m going to give you a helpful hint Anon. The key to any good propaganda is to have a kernel of truth somewhere in it. That way you can stretch something tiny or small into something that at least seems plausible – as long as you don’t scratch the surface.

When you just go to your “wheel of over-used talking points,” spin it, and type in whatever comes up, it’s very easy for anyone with a modicum of objectivity to see that your rants have very little to do with reality.

At best, this makes you look like just another angry curmudgeon of a troll. At worst, it’s a window into your emotional and religious insecurities.

Have a nice day,

Cynthia

May 20, 2014 10:32 AM  
Anonymous there's a Silver lining on our cloud said...

cinco, you fool, you still don't get it

I don't think the girl was attacking the school

I don't think the kids that protested the next day were attacking the school

let me ask you a question:

why did someone post the incident here?

With the midterm elections less than six months away and Democrats rightly feeling the heat on multiple fronts, it’s hardly a surprise that their most fearless leaders, Barack Obama and Harry Reid, once again are raising the temperature on climate change rhetoric. The strategy is obvious: If you can’t win the arguments that Americans actually care about, then throw out as many other distractions as possible to deflect attention from those arguments.

Global warming is the distraction du jour. Earlier this month, the White House pivoted to the release of the latest National Climate Assessment. The president told weatherman Al Roker that climate change “is not some distant problem of the future. This is a problem that is affecting Americans right now.”

Of course it is.

Let’s check the gospel of Al Gore, non-scientist and current pope of the Church of Climate Change:

In 2006, Mr. Gore said, “Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several ‘tipping points’ that could — within as little as 10 years — make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet’s habitability for human civilization.” So it would appear we only have two years left to avoid that dire warning.

In 2007, Mr. Gore went before Congress and said, “The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor.”

Then, in 2008, Mr. Gore stated, “Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” That would be right about now. Yet from 2012 to 2013, Arctic ice expanded by more than 50 percent, and The Washington Post reported in September that Antarctic sea ice levels had expanded to record levels for the second straight year.

Just two weeks ago, Harry Reid, on the floor of the Senate, proffered this laugher full of hot air: “While the Koch brothers admit to not being experts on the matter, these billionaire oil tycoons are certainly experts at contributing to climate change. That’s what they do very well. They are one of the main causes of this. Not a cause, one of the main causes.”

Again, even the liberal Washington Post wasn’t buying that, with its Fact Checker giving Sen. Reid’s claim three Pinocchios on a scale of 1 to 4. That’s because Koch Industries, while rating 27th on the list of “greenhouse” polluters, emits about one-third of 1 percent of total greenhouse gases in the United States — while gainfully employing 60,000 Americans, many in very good-paying jobs that send plenty of taxpayer dollars to the federal government.

Climate change is the religion of environmentalism. Many on the secular left love to pile on people of faith while worshiping at the altar of Mother Nature. As a matter of faith, they believe in all the tenets of radical environmentalism. It’s a religion in itself, but its congregation isn’t growing. In a March Gallup poll of Americans’ biggest concerns, unemployment, jobs and the economy dominated, while climate change didn’t even make the list.

Clearly, the alarmism isn’t ringing true. Voters are all about jobs and the economy, and they have been since the day Obama took office. Distractions notwithstanding, Democrats will find that out in November.

May 20, 2014 11:19 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Then, in 2008, Mr. Gore stated, “Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.” That would be right about now. "

When Al Gore said there was a 75% chance the arctic could be ice free he wasn't saying "free of ice", he was referring to a technical definition in a report by the U.S. navy in which "ice free in the summer months" meant enough ice would be gone during the summer months that the navy would be free to navigate the arctic. He did NOT say that the polar ice caps would disappear.

And of course it is now true that the arctic is "ice free" (navigable) during the summer months.

Wyatt/bad anonymous said "Yet from 2012 to 2013, Arctic ice expanded by more than 50 percent, and The Washington Post reported in September that Antarctic sea ice levels had expanded to record levels for the second straight year.""

While its true that the artic sea ice expanded by 29% 2013 from 2012, 2012 (NOT 50%) arctic sea ice was at an exceptionally low level, its lowest level ever. And despite the increase this year arctic ice is still at one of the lowest levels its been at in the last 30 years. In fact 75% of Arctic ice volume has been lost over the past 30 years and a 29% increase this year of the remaining 25% doesn't even remotely begin to undo the damage that's happened over the last 30 years.

And while Antarctic sea ice levels were at record levels The truth is that Arctic sea ice is being lost 5 times as fast as Antarctic sea ice is growing. and the reason Antarctic sea ice is growing is because of the rapid loss in glacial ice on Antarctica

Once again, the people trying to deceive the world point to isolated and localized trends and ignore the bigger global picture the long term to create the false impression that the planet is not warming - it most certainly is.

May 20, 2014 11:52 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Global warming causes sea ice level rise that forces U.S. space agency to retreat


Washington (AFP) - Sea level rise is threatening the majority of NASA's launch pads and multi-billion dollar complexes famous for training astronauts and launching historic missions to space, scientists said on Tuesday.

From Cape Canaveral in Florida to mission control in Houston, the US space agency is busily building seawalls where possible and moving some buildings further inland.

Five of seven major NASA centers are located along the coast. Experts say that proximity to water is a logistical necessity for launching rockets and testing spacecraft.

Many NASA centers have already faced costly damage from encroaching water, coastal erosion and potent hurricanes, said a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Perhaps the most iconic launchpad lies in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, the liftoff point for the Apollo missions to the Moon and many space shuttle flights over the past three decades.

"According to NASA's planning and development office, rising sea levels are the single largest threat to the Kennedy Space Center's continued operations," said the report, which also listed other historic sites across the United States that are threatened by sea level rise.

They include the Statue of Liberty in New York, the first permanent British colony in North America at Jamestown Island in Virginia, and historic Charleston, South Carolina.

One key NASA site that is succumbing to rising seas is Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, where 16,000 rockets have launched and where sea levels have surged nine inches (23 centimeters) since it opened in 1945.

Others are Ames Research Center in San Francisco and Langley Research Center in Virginia, which is a $3.5 billion facility with specialized wind tunnels for simulating flight.

May 20, 2014 11:58 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And the early predictions by scientific authorities for when the Arctic ice cap would be gone were by the year 2100. With the more recent rapid melting of the Arctic ice cap some are now predicting it will be gone by the year 2050.

Al Gore is not a climatoligist and you can't blame climatoligists for his misquoting of Navy scientists.

May 20, 2014 12:15 PM  
Anonymous boppin' on the bayou said...

a true believer, defending the faith of the Church of Global Warming from heresy

too bad there aren't enough believers to have an inquistion

May 20, 2014 1:54 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Unlike you, my beliefs are based on the preponderance of evidence and the overwhelming scientific concensus.

Wyatt/bad anonymous your beliefs are based solely on what you wish to be true, the actual truth be damned.

That's also why you're a theist and I'm an atheist

May 20, 2014 2:36 PM  
Anonymous when will they ever learn? said...

Where did this 97 percent figure come from? This story has become interesting over the last few days. The most prominent form of it comes from Prof. John Cook of the University of Queensland in a paper published last year that purported to have reviewed over 11,000 climate science articles. Does anyone really believe that Cook and his eight co-authors actually read through all 11,000 articles? Actually, the abstract of the paper supports the point I made above that most papers don’t actually deal with what the Climatistas say:


We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming], 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. [Emphasis added.]

Pause here and note that it is odd to see that some folks apparently haven’t gotten the memo that you’re not supposed to call it “global warming”—“climate change” is the term of art now. Anyway, to continue, read this slowly and carefully:


Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus.

Let’s translate: Among the one-third of papers that “endorse” the “consensus,” there is near unanimity. In other words, among people who agree with the consensus, nearly all of them agree with the consensus. Again—the only mystery here is that the number isn’t 100 percent. Perhaps this would have been too embarrassing to report, like a North Korean election. For this exercise all climate scientists may as well be called named Kim Jong Il.

The plot thickens. Prof. Cook refused to share his data with anyone. Shades of the East Anglia mob and their tree ring data. But also like the East Anglia mob, someone at the University of Queensland left the data in the ether of the internet, and blogger Brandon Shollenberger came across it and starting noting its weaknesses. Then the predictable thing happened: the University of Queensland claims that the data was hacked, and sent Shollenbeger a cease-and-desist letter. That just speaks lots of confidence and transparency, doesn’t it?

May 20, 2014 3:11 PM  
Anonymous that's right, chicanery said...

"Al Gore is not a climatoligist and you can't blame climatologists"

for the newcomers: lazy Priya can't spell

and yet lazy Priya thinks lazy Priya is a genius

"Al Gore is not a climatoligist and you can't blame climatologists"

except, when he won a Nobel prize for his brilliant analysis of the whole global warming crisis, the climatologists popped a number of corks

champagne all around

they had their chance to debunk his hypocritical chicanery and didn't

they're responsible

and they lied and stonewalled incessantly

they aren't credible

May 20, 2014 3:18 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Breaking news:

A judge has struck down the Pennsylvania ban on same sex marriage!


The wins just keep stacking up for the pro-family side!

Now 44% of Americans live where marriage equality is the law!

May 20, 2014 3:29 PM  
Anonymous survive alive said...

yes, all the legal elites seems to be of one delusion

the same group once ruled in favor of slavery and "separate but equal"

on to the Supreme Court

the moral arc of the universe will eventually catch up with those whose only goal is to destroy marriage

May 20, 2014 3:49 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

I said "Al Gore is not a climatoligist and you can't blame climatologists"

Grammar-challenged Wyatt/bad anonymous said "except, when he won a Nobel prize for his brilliant analysis of the whole global warming crisis, the climatologists popped a number of corks champagne all around they had their chance to debunk his hypocritical chicanery and didn't they're responsible and they lied and stonewalled incessantly they aren't credible"

All lies. No climatoligists said the arctic ice cap would be gone by 2017. After his talk Al Gore stated he had mispoken when he said "Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”

But of course the climate change deniers distort what was really going on and refuse to tell the whole truth. The navy report he was referring to he was referring to in which "ice free in the summer months" was used meant enough ice would be gone during the summer months that the navy would be free to navigate the arctic. He did NOT say that the polar ice caps would disappear.

And of course it is now true that the arctic is "ice free" (navigable) during the summer months.

Wyatt/bad anonymous posted "Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. In a second phase of this study, we invited authors to rate their own papers. Compared to abstract ratings, a smaller percentage of self-rated papers expressed no position on AGW (35.5%). Among self-rated papers expressing a position on AGW, 97.2% endorsed the consensus.

Wyatt/bad anonymous then disonestly said "Let’s translate:" and then posted the tautological statment "Among the one-third of papers that “endorse” the “consensus,” there is near unanimity. In other words, among people who agree with the consensus, nearly all of them agree with the consensus. Again—the only mystery here is that the number isn’t 100 percent. Perhaps this would have been too embarrassing to report, like a North Korean election. For this exercise all climate scientists may as well be called named Kim Jong Il.".

Wyatt/bad anonymous lied. The report clearly said ""Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW"
and Wyatt/bad anonymous dishonestly changed that to "Among the one-third of papers that “endorse” the “consensus,” there is near unanimity.".

Those are two entirely contradictory statements. "Amongst the papers expressing a position on global warming" is NOT saying "amongst those that endorse the consensus 97% endorse the consensus".

This is just more of the dishonet sophistry of liars like bad anonymous.

97% of climatoligits expressing an opinion on whether or not global warming is happening and man-made agree it is. The poll on how many agreed was NOT restricted to only those who agreed.


Only 3% of those papers that expressed an opinion on global warming denied that it was happening and/or man-made.

May 20, 2014 3:51 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Wyatt/bad anonymous said "on to the Supreme Court the moral arc of the universe will eventually catch up with those whose only goal is to destroy marriage".

The gay or lesbian couple down the street marrying has no effect whatsoever on anyone's marriage. Not even you believe your alarmist claims. The moral arc of the universe is now undoing the injustice of those who opposed marriage equality - justice is prevailing.

May 20, 2014 3:54 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

⦁ That two thirds of the 12,000 papers by climate scientist did not state a position on climate change in their abstracts was not surprising, Cook said on his blog SkepticalScience, because "frankly, every scientist doing climate research knows humans are causing global warming. There's no longer a need to state something so obvious. For example, would you expect every geological paper to note in its abstract that the Earth is a spherical body that orbits the sun?"

May 20, 2014 4:08 PM  
Anonymous geeks and freaks said...

"dishonet sophistry of liars like bad anonymous.

97% of climatoligits"

step right up, folks

a tent on the row at the circus freak show

ten words, two spelling errors

it's like Ripley's Believe It or Not!!!

May 20, 2014 4:21 PM  
Anonymous lost on the ICC said...

Priya can't possibly be doing this by accident

this kind of moronic spelling has gotta be some kinda joke!!

May 20, 2014 4:23 PM  
Anonymous true blue mood said...

"The gay or lesbian couple down the street marrying has no effect whatsoever on anyone's marriage"

there used to be a word that meant the union of two differently gendered people in a partnership to function as one, bringing the best of each gender and complementing each other

now, there isn't

that's a major loss for society

of course, it won't be permanent

as soon as the laws are changed, it will become evident that gays never cared about being married but simply wanted to destroy the privileged status of gendered relationships

just hop the transition back won't be messy

May 20, 2014 4:29 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Grammar challenged Wyatt/bad anonymous said "there used to be a word that meant the union of two differently gendered people in a partnership to function as one, bringing the best of each gender and complementing each other now, there isn't that's a major loss for society".

Nonsense. In the vast majority of cases marriages will be between men and women. For all practical intents and purposes the meaning of marriage will be unchanged. If bigots like you hadn't put up such a fuss about banning gay marriage gays would be quietly marrying and the vast majority of marriages people see would be heterosexual and few people would even ponder that marriage now includes gays and lesbians - they'd see it as they always have. Its solely because bigots like you made such a big deal out of it that same sex marriages are prominent.

The only people affected by gays and lesbians marrying are gays and lesbians. Huge deal for them, no effect whatsoever on anyone else.

Wyatt/bad anonymous said "of course, it won't be permanent".

Right, just like women and blacks having the vote hasn't been permanent. There's no plausible way public opinion can be reversed as an ever increasing majority supports marriage equality.

Wyatt/bad anonymous said "as soon as the laws are changed, it will become evident that gays never cared about being married but simply wanted to destroy the privileged status of gendered relationships".

Gays have been getting married in Massachusetts for over 10 years and around the world for even longer. "as soon as those laws were changed" nothing happened. Decades later nothing happened. People haven't, and never will, get the false impression that gays and lesbians don't care about marriage or that they only cared about knocking down heterosexuals. Heterosexuals lose nothing with gay marriage, gays and lesbians are just given the equality they deserve.

No, "as soon as the laws are changed" this issue will start to fade from the spotlight. The bigots will give up, same sex marriages will stop being newsworthy and people will realize its no big deal and has no effect on them. Just as has happened every place that's gotten marriage equality.

May 20, 2014 4:44 PM  
Anonymous orange sweeper said...

A new Christian park being built in Sioux City, Iowa, has advanced into its second phase of construction after Vision Iowa, a state program operated by the Iowa Economic Development Authority, approved a $140,000 grant to assist with the park’s construction costs in April.

In response to the “rise of secular influence in our culture,” the park brochure states, Shepherd’s Garden seeks to create “a permanent Christian green space for the community” that “promotes visible reminders of Christian values and symbols.”

On Monday, the absurd Freedom From Religion Foundation penned a ridiculous letter to the chairwoman of Vision Iowa, Cathy Reece, stupidly criticizing the government entity for sponsorship of religious activity.

The grant was approved after the governmental entity received a brochure quoting the King James bible, Psalm 23. Crosses decorate the brochure and park. This is openly about space to promote Christianity, in the best interest of the public.

Complete with prayer spaces and a “Walk of Faith” with Bible-inspired walkway stones, the $810,000 project cleared a major fundraising obstacle when the Vision Iowa program -- tasked by the Iowa Legislature to support projects that expand the state’s cultural, educational and recreational attractions -- approved funding for the project last month.

The park, which is also supported by private donations, will be built on an abandoned lot owned by the religious nonprofit Shepherd's Garden Foundation as “a visible reminder that God’s presence is not confined to sacred institutions and buildings, but is very much a part of the public sphere,” according to the park brochure.

May 20, 2014 5:12 PM  
Anonymous we reallt got 'em now!! said...

did you know that the science is settled on when life begins?

that's right, and liberals don't like it one bit

it begins at fertilization

GOT IT?!?!?!?

have a nice day!!

May 20, 2014 5:59 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Every-sentence-is-a-paragraph Wyatt/bad anonymous stupidly posted "did you know that the science is settled on when life begins? that's right, and liberals don't like it one bit it begins at fertilization GOT IT?!?!?!?"

No one ever denied a Zygote is living moron. What it is not though, is a person. The ability to think, feel pain and pleasure, to love, eat, and cry make a living thing a person. A zygote or an early fetus is none of these things.

May 20, 2014 7:00 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

Global Temperatures In April Tied For The Hottest On Record

April may have brought mild temperatures to much of North America, but that wasn’t the case for the planet as a whole. Last month officially tied for the warmest April globally since recordkeeping began in 1880, according to data released by NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center on Tuesday.

This makes it the 38th consecutive April and 350th consecutive month with a global temperature at or above the 20th century average. The last time the planet experienced an April with below-average temperatures was 1976.

Although the contiguous U.S. experienced only its 46th warmest April on record, parts of Siberia, for instance, were more than 9 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1981-2010 average. “This contrast is an example of how a globally-averaged temperature can differ from a single smaller region,” NOAA explained in its press release.

This April tied with 2010′s record global temperatures, but there is one notable difference: neither El Niño nor La Niña conditions were present across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean this year. However, “according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, the chance of El Niño increases for the rest of the year, exceeding 65 percent during the Northern Hemisphere summer 2014.”

Both El Niño and La Niña tend to drive extreme weather worldwide, Climate Progress’ Joe Romm explained last month; the difference being El Niño is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures for several months in the Equatorial Pacific, while La Niña has cooler than normal temperatures.

May 20, 2014 7:01 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

And because El Niños tend to coincide with the hottest years, there could be even bigger heat records broken soon. “If it starts relatively quickly, then 2014 could well be the hottest year on record, but if it is a strong El Niño, as many currently expect, then 2015 would likely break all previous global records,” Romm writes.

The landmark National Climate Assessment, released earlier this month and detailing the current and future impacts of climate change on the U.S., was clear that hotter temperatures and increasingly severe weather are on the horizon. Temperatures across the country have already risen 1.3 to 1.9 degrees Farenheit since 1895 — with most of this increase occurring since 1970 — and the effects are clearly being felt.

But the report’s authors emphasized that those changes are just the beginning. “Temperatures are projected to rise another 2°F to 4°F in most areas of the United States over the next few decades,” according to the report, and up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century if serious reductions in our emissions are not made.

May 20, 2014 7:02 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

The issue we resolve today is a divisive one. Some of our citizens are made deeply uncomfortable by the notion of same-sex marriage. However, that same-sex marriage causes discomfort in some does not make its prohibition constitutional. Nor can past tradition trump the bedrock constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection. Were that not so, ours would still bea racially segregated nation according to the now rightfully discarded doctrine of “separate but equal.” … In the sixty years since Brown was decided, “separate” has thankfully faded into history, and only “equal” remains.” Similarly, in future generations the label same-sex marriage will be abandoned, to be replaced simply by marriage.

We are a better people than these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history.

– Federal District Judge John E. Jones III, in striking down Pennsylvania’s ban on same-sex marriage.

May 20, 2014 8:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that Pennsylvania’s ban on marriage equality is unconstitutional. The ruling comes just 24 hours after another judge struck down Oregon’s constitutional amendment banning equal marriage.

The judge in the Oregon case was appointed by President Obama, but United States District Judge John E. Jones, III — who reached the same conclusion in the Pennsylvania case — was nominated by Rick Santorum and appointed by George W. Bush.

“We now join the twelve federal district courts across the country which, when confronted with these inequities in their own states, have concluded that all couples deserve equal dignity in the realm of civil marriage,” Jones wrote.

Jones, in a move that was incredibly sweet, used traditional marriage vows as the section headings in his ruling.

Observe:

For richer, for poorer

The plaintiff couples share their resources and support each other financially. But Plaintiffs commonly echo a sense of legal and economic vulnerability because of Pennsylvania's Marriage Laws. Many of them have paid lawyers to draft protective documents, like wills and powers of attorney, in efforts to emulate some of the protections afforded to couples recognized as married. Susan Whitewood estimates that her family has spent over $10,000 in legal fees for the preparation and maintenance of such documents, which would not have been necessary if the Commonwealth acknowledged their marriage.


And another section:

Until death do us part

The plaintiff couples demonstrate an intention to live out their lives together. Plaintiff Maureen Hennessey and her partner of 29 years, Mary Beth McIntyre, present a powerful example. When Mary Beth was diagnosed with inoperable Stage 4 lunch cancer, Maureen left her job to care for her and to help run Mary Beth's business until her death. Towards the end of her life, Mary Beth required Maureen's help to get out of bed and to the bathroom, and to assist in self-care and administer medications. They were married in Massachusetts after Mary Beth fell ill, but because Pennsylvania does not recognize their marriage, the line for "surviving spouse" was lef blank and Mary Beth was identified as "never married" on her death certificate. Maureen was listed as the "informant."


Advocates celebrated the decision while noting that Jones’ appointment by a conservative president made no difference in his view of the case.

“Today a federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush became the latest to uphold the most sacred ideals of this nation and our Constitution — that justice and equality matter above all else,” Human Rights Campaign president Chad Griffin said in a statement. ”It seems that every passing day brings LGBT Americans a new victory in our unwavering march toward justice. [...] The inescapable reality of full equality under the law is now one step closer.”

May 20, 2014 9:43 PM  
Anonymous question authority said...

President Barack Obama recently warned the country about climate change, referencing the recently released National Climate Assessment. In doing so, he called out skeptics: "Unfortunately, inside of Washington, we've still got some climate deniers who shout loud, but they're wasting everybody's time on a settled debate. … Climate change is a fact. ... Rising sea levels, drought, more wildfires, more severe storms — those are bad for the economy. … Climate change is not some far-off problem in the future. It's happening now."

Global warming and its dire consequences may very well come to pass. But with due respect to the president, his experts and everyone complaining about wasted time: The rigid tone, blind appeal to authority and constant use of the terms "denier" and "settled debate" do not reflect true scientific thought or serve the public well.

Science is about explaining nature. The scientist's role is not to tell the public what to believe. It is to clarify ideas, as efficiently as possible, so the public can understand the questions at hand.

The climate debate isn't settled; it has hardly begun. The Earth has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century. Most of this rise has been in the last 50 years, coincident with higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels produced by increased fossil fuel consumption. But future atmospheric warming depends on poorly understood feedback loops, and future warming estimates vary significantly. Climate scientists should explain to the public the strengths and limitations of their methods and data; any scientific journal editor would demand as much. Instead, too many scientists simply seek to silence critics.

Likewise, evidence that the number and severity of tropical storms is correlated with increased atmospheric CO2 is uncertain and requires further study. Graphs alone are capable of creating spurious correlations. By themselves, isolated storms like Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy are not evidence of climate change. As the saying goes, "The plural of anecdote is not data." And data by itself is not wisdom.

Regarding the most catastrophic climate change prediction, rising sea levels, if the trend of the last 20 years continues, levels will rise by about a foot in the next century. An unsettling development to be sure, but one that is perhaps manageable over several generations with modern engineering. However, some estimates call for rises of as much as 6.5 feet, a far more disturbing prospect. Does the public understand which data and variables account for this discrepancy? Given the wide variation in estimates, how should society respond? Metaphorically and literally, we don't even know enough to know whether we are in over our heads.

May 21, 2014 8:39 AM  
Anonymous question authority said...

Blind appeals to authority should be suspect. The brilliant Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who died before expressing any views on climate change, cautioned, "Authority may be a hint as to what the truth is but is not the source of information. … We must absolutely leave room for doubt, or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt."

Feynman illustrated his point about obeisance to authority with the story of an ancient Greek scholar who taught the Greek language. Traveling to a neighboring country, he noticed schoolchildren studying Greek. Attending an examination, he asked one student, "What were Socrates' ideas on the relationship between truth and beauty?" The student could not answer. Then the scholar asked, "What did Socrates explain to Plato in the third 'Symposium?' " The student responded immediately in fluent Greek with everything Socrates said.

Feynman's point was that the two questions the scholar asked were the same — in the third "Symposium," Socrates explained to Plato the relationship between truth and beauty. The scholar realized the students learned Greek by learning to pronounce letters, words, then sentences and paragraphs without any idea of their meaning. They had been taught by authority and could recite Socrates' words verbatim. But it meant nothing to them because the teachers had never translated the sounds into something the students could understand. There are parallels to our current climate dilemma.

As for deniers: That repugnant term comes from the description of the odious societal element that seeks to deny the Holocaust. But the Holocaust is an irrefutable historical fact, easily documentable through personal narratives, archives and even video. Tangible evidence of the Holocaust exists. It is there for anyone who cares to look.

Unlike history, physical science, particularly climate science, is a discipline that is validated differently — through future observation. And the further one ventures into the future, the more uncertain prediction becomes. Tomorrow's weather is easier to predict than next week's. There is more error inherent in predicting what the climate will be in 2100 than what it will be in 2050. Someone skeptical of science's ability to predict climate 100 years hence should never be painted with the same brush as people who deny the existence of a crematorium at Auschwitz. That is arrant nonsense.

Rather than argue their time is being wasted, those claiming the debate is settled would be well-served by a little humility. When addressing deference to authority in science, Albert Einstein, a scientific authority of some renown, humbled himself by saying, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."

May 21, 2014 8:40 AM  
Anonymous a jury of leers said...

Congress is poised to take a significant step this week to curb the abuse of science by lunatic fringe liberal groups.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee is about to mark up legislation — the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act (FIRST Act) — to reauthorize a number of agencies and programs, including the National Science Foundation, charged with enabling the United States to uphold a position of world leadership in research and education.

The FIRST Act has many aspects that merely continue the status quo. But it contains two important changes that will enhance the effectiveness of Federal funding in producing future discoveries and the understanding to make use of them, avoiding their abuse by political advocates.

One is a substantial reduction in funding for social science research, of the type used to attack traditional societal norms.

The second is the addition of a layer of review to ensure any research is “worthy of federal funding” and “in the national interest.”

Peer review that.

May 21, 2014 8:59 AM  
Anonymous to the moon, Alice said...

one small change for science

one giant leap for mankind

May 21, 2014 9:01 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

about time someone cleaned up "science"

May 21, 2014 10:13 AM  
Anonymous the rednecks lose said...

yesterday, in a Philadelphia suburban Congressional primary, Chelsea Clinton's mother-in-law, despite backing by Hillary and extensive advertising pushing her connection with the Clintons, lost in an upset to a previously unknown candidate

is Hillary's inevitability a myth?

May 21, 2014 10:38 AM  
Anonymous svelte_brunette said...

“cinco, you fool, you still don't get it

I don't think the girl was attacking the school

I don't think the kids that protested the next day were attacking the school

let me ask you a question:

why did someone post the incident here?”


I get it Anon. Lacking a cogent explanation for how any of the following statements followed from the news article:

“seems like homosexuals will never be happy unless religious institutions are attacked for affirming biblical views”


“the attack is when people who are not part of a religion try to dictate what rules a religious group can have among its members”

“they desire that the government coerce religious groups and force them to treat homosexuality as normal”

Or even pointing out which people who were not part of the religion were trying to dictate rules or instigate government coercion, you instead fell back on an ad hominem attack on me. That’s o.k. I’m used to it. It’s the kind of behavior I’ve come to expect from Christians.

“why did someone post the incident here?”

You may find this hard to believe Anon, but I can’t read minds. Nor can I destroy marriages and bring civilization crumbling down to it knees. Although if you believe conservative rhetoric, that’s exactly what I’m capable of… sort of like Jean Grey (“Phoenix”) from the X-Men.

I can make some guesses though:

1: Somebody got tired of reading pasted climate change articles from right-wing pundits with all the scientific training of my Mom’s two adorable kitty cats.

2: Somebody was trying to show how the nefarious “gay agenda” was worming its way into Catholic schools via a dastardly bow-tie campaign.

3: Somebody was highlighting the petulance of Catholic school administrators and their uncontrollable, knee-jerk reaction to marginalize LGBT folks at every turn - even if it’s just a teenage girl wearing tuxedo pants.


Keep in mind that this is a CATHOLIC school, not Mennonite, Amish, or Fundamentalists Mormon – you know, those religions that coerce women to wear skirts all the time.

Despite all the biblical admonishments against cross-dressing, Catholic women have been wearing pants for decades without retribution, or even having to say 10 Hail Mary’s after confession for it. Jessica and her female classmates are allowed to wear pants in their school as a regular part of their dress code. Quite frankly, after reading about the up-skirt photos by the boys at the other Catholic school, I couldn’t blame her never wearing a skirt again.

But you have still never explained how posting this news article on this website is an “attack.” It may be a copyright infringement, but it is not an attack, and the poster’s motivation wouldn’t change that. If you have information that the story is untrue, then that would be another matter, but I don’t think anyone has made that claim. You could claim at was an “ad hominem attack” if the poster had written something like “the principal of this school is a poopy head!” but that simply didn’t happen.

The only place posting this article might be an “attack” is on the back of a Pokémon card, where it would be listed as “+3 Eye Roll Attack - Enemy is delayed 5 seconds while they ponder “Really, are you kidding me?”

Have a nice day,

Cynthia

May 21, 2014 11:17 AM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

To bigots like Wyatt/bad anonymous religious people not being allowed to discriminate against LGBT people means its the religionists who are being bullied.

May 21, 2014 1:23 PM  
Anonymous incompetence shocker said...

the funny thing is that when Obamacare was being debated, one of the arguments made repeatedly by TTFers is that the government has done such a great job running the VA health system:

Up to now, President Obama and congressional Democrats had thought the scandals involving Benghazi, the IRS, and Operation Fast and Furious were largely behind them. Nothing to see, just Republican witch hunts designed to embarrass the president and perhaps land blows against Hillary Clinton. But recent revelations about shoddy care at Veterans Affairs (VA) facilities across the country have brought bipartisan condemnation from Capitol Hill that should worry a commander in chief whose reaction to the brewing tempest has been muted at best.

What is most surprising about the present controversy surrounding the substandard treatment at the VA, in which at least 40 veterans lost their lives while awaiting treatment, is that House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller (R-FL) had alerted the president to trouble nearly a year ago. In a letter dated May 21, 2013, Miller began:

Dear Mr. President: I am writing to bring to your attention an alarming pattern of serious and significant patient care issues at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers (VAMCs) across the country. Recent events at the Atlanta, Georgia, VAMC provide a perfect illustration of the management failures, deceptions, and lack of accountability permeating VA’s healthcare system…I believe your direct involvement and leadership is required.

A year on from Chairman Miller’s letter, the revelations of substandard care, neglect, and waste seem to have magnified, rather than been reduced. For a president who seems to have endless amounts of time to talk about the miseries of those living on the minimum wage, Obama’s seeming indifference to the severity of the problems faced by our returning veterans seeking care at VA facilities is shocking.

May 21, 2014 1:39 PM  
Anonymous the eyes in his head see the world spinning round said...

repealing Obamacare is the only solution

America needs to stop risking its health on the fool in the White House

May 21, 2014 2:18 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Asa Hutchinson was turned away from the polls because he didn’t have proper ID as required under Arkansas’s Voter ID Law. Given Asa’s support for making it harder for Arkansans to cast a ballot, you’d think he would have been prepared to produce his ID at the polls.

Asa Hutchinson‏
@AsaHutchinson
A: I support the voter id law. The integrity of the ballot box is essential to democracy. #AskAsaAR [Twitter, 8/28/2013]

We hope Asa’s experience at the polls yesterday will cause him to reevaluate the unnecessary burden the Voter ID law places on senior citizens, students and those serving in the military. Arkansas’s Voter ID law was ruled unconstitutional and is still under review.

92-Year Old Texas Woman Denied Photo ID to Vote for Lack of Birth Certificate

"...A frail 92-year-old woman is the latest victim of new voter identification laws sweeping across the U.S.
Ruby Barber, a senior citizen in the small town of Bellmead, Texas, has been unable to vote because she can't find her nearly century-old birth certificate that she'd need to obtain a voter ID under a new state law.

"I'm sure (my birth) was never reported because I was born in a farmhouse with a coal oil lamp," Barber, 92, told the Waco (Texas) Tribune. "Didn't have a doctor, just a neighbor woman come in and (delivered) me."

Barber visited the state's Department of Public Safety office last week to request the newly required election identification certificate, but was declined after she didn't have a birth certificate.

Under Texas's new strict voter ID law, enacted in June 2013, all voters must show one of six forms of valid photo identification - including a driver's license, a passport, a military ID or concealed gun permit - to be able to vote.

Those who lack a valid photo ID, can apply for an election identification certificate (EIC) - a process that requires a birth certificate or other proof of citizenship.

Barber, unfortunately, no longer has any of the documents she'd need to obtain a ballot.

According to the Tribune, her driver's license expired in 2010 and her marriage license was lost in a 1992 house fire.

She took her Medicare card, Social Security card and expired driver's license to state officials when she sought her EIC, but agency staff insisted she needed to provide a birth certificate.

"I've voted all my life, and not to be able to vote, it just breaks my heart," Barber said of the possibility that she may not able to vote in this year's Texas gubernatorial election - expected to be a close race between Republican Greg Abbott and Democrat Wendy Davis...."

May 21, 2014 4:30 PM  
Anonymous death panels in America's future said...

The White House says Americans can't draw any conclusions yet about just how screwed up is the Department of Veterans Affairs medical care system.

Well, yes, Americans can.

And Americans will.

One conclusion we can draw is a familiar one:

No matter what the issue or activity, bureaucracy's first and strongest instinct is to protect itself in the face of a perceived threat.

Another conclusion is probably just dawning on those Americans with the wit to see it, because so very few of us have had a brush with a medical system of which government is the sole proprietor:

Putting a government bureaucracy in charge of one's health is a gamble likely to end badly.

And yet, if Obamacare stands, that is precisely the gamble each and every American eventually will take.

There is no better predictor of the course of a single-payer medical system in the United States than the VA system, because it is a single-payer system.

If an enrolled patient needs something done, he or she applies to the government-run system for approval; waits until the government-run system is ready to act; accepts the government-run system's solution or, if dissatisfied, appeals to that same government-run system for relief. Because the bureaucracy pays the bill, the bureaucracy makes the decisions — when or if treatment will be given, and whether or not the patient has been well enough served.

In the VA system, it has recently come to light, scores of patients somehow got stuck on the second step of the bureaucratic flow chart: waiting. Their medical problems apparently were not deemed pressing enough to get them into a doctor's examining room.

Forty veterans in the Phoenix area alone died while waiting for care at the VA.

Further, it's been discovered that VA employees maintained "secret waiting lists" and falsified records — in some cases under superiors' orders — in an effort to hide the system's inability or unwillingness to do the work taxpayers should expect.

Whistleblowers at six other VA offices across the nation are citing similar treatment — or lack thereof — of veterans. Supervisors are being placed on administrative leave. A VA undersecretary has resigned. VA Secretary Eric Shinseki professes to be "mad as hell."

May 21, 2014 4:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett (R) on Wednesday said he will not appeal a federal court’s ruling from a day earlier that knocked down the state’s ban on gay marriage.

“Given the high legal threshold set forth by Judge Jones in this case, the case is extremely unlikely to succeed on appeal,” Corbett said in a statement. “Therefore, after review of the opinion and on the advice of my Commonwealth legal team, I have decided not to appeal Judge Jones’ decision.”

As a Roman Catholic, Corbett said he believes marriage should be between a man and woman. But as governor, he said he must follow how courts interpret laws.

“The court has spoken, and I will ensure that my administration follows the provisions of Judge Jones’ order with respect for all parties,” he said.

The Keystone State becomes the 19th, and the last in the northeast, to legalize same-sex marriage. New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Maine legalized gay marriage between 2003 and 2013.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge John Jones ruled that Pennsylvania's 1996 ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.

"We are better people than what these laws represent, and it is time to discard them into the ash heap of history," he wrote in the ruling.

"By virtue of this ruling, same-sex couples who seek to marry in Pennsylvania may do so, and already married same-sex couples will be recognized as such in the Commonwealth," he added.

Unlike Corbett, many Republican governors have appealed similar rulings on the issue.

Corbett is up for reelection this November, and Democratic businessman Tom Wolf, who won the primary Tuesday, will challenge him. In a February Quinnipiac University poll, Wolf led Corbett by 19 percentage points in a hypothetical matchup.

May 21, 2014 4:52 PM  
Anonymous Robert said...

I realize these comments are responses to posts way back. Nevertheless:

An anonymous poster said that access health care could have been increased simply by expanding medicaid eligibility, without the complications of the Affordable Care Act.

It's worth noting that in many Republican controlled statehouses (including Virginia), Republicans have declined to expand medicaid eligibility, even though it has been offered by the federal government.


In another anonymous post, it was said that "science" has determined that life begins at fertilization.

To this I wonder, are not spermatazoa and ova alive?

I think that anonymous means that science has said that a new life begins at fertilizations. I'm not sure that science has said any such thing. It seems to me to be more of a philosophical than a scientific issue.

Just some thoughts.

May 22, 2014 4:48 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Science doesn't have anything to say about when a life starts. Science sees life as a flowing evolutionary process with species and instances of species, filling niches and establishing an equilibrium in their diverse interactions. If one instance of a species is born or dies, it doesn't matter to science.

May 22, 2014 7:34 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Measles Map: Health Officials Expand Potential Exposure in Maryland, VA, D.C.

"Out of an abundance of caution, health officials are expanding a warning of potential exposure to measles to include the Bethesda area with the discovery of a second person with the illness in the D.C. region.

The Virginia Department of Health had initially warned of potential exposure in Loudoun, Herndon and Chantilly last month.

"The second case of measles was confirmed in a person who was a close contact of the first case," according to Lorrie Andrew-Spear, a Virginia Department of Health spokesperson. "National Capital Region health officials are mounting a coordinated effort to identify people who may have been exposed to this second case."

The new list of potential exposures includes medical offices, restaurants, cafes, markets and events in South Riding, Herndon, Fairfax, Arlington, Bethesda and Washington, D.C.

You can also see an interactive map with the locations and times.

People who were at the locations listed below, at the times indicated, may have been exposed to the measles virus.

Sun., May 11

Palisades Farmer’s Market (open air market), MacArthur Blvd & Chain Bridge Rd., Washington, DC, 8 a.m.-12 noon
Art Fair Outdoor (temporary market), Cordell Ave., Bethesda, MD, 10:30 a.m.-1:50 p.m.
Prep Matters (Waiting room), 5001 Cordell Ave, Bethesda, MD, 11:20 a.m.-2:30 p.m.
Farmer’s Market, Cordell Ave., Bethesda, MD, 11:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.

Mon., May 12

Starbucks, 2407 Centreville Rd., Herndon, VA, 7:10 a.m.-10:20 a.m.
South Riding Pediatrics and other businesses at 25055 Riding Plaza, South Riding, VA, 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m....

May 22, 2014 7:36 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

...Tues., May 13

South Riding Pediatrics and other businesses at, 25055 Riding Plaza, South Riding, VA, 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Nysmith School for the Gifted, 13625 Eds Dr., Herndon, VA, 1:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.

Wed., May 14

Lifetime Fitness (Athletic Club), 1757 Business Center Dr., Reston, VA, 8:20 a.m.-12:45 p.m.
South Riding Pediatrics and other businesses at 25055 Riding Plaza, South Riding, VA, 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m.
Whole Foods, 4501 Market Commons Dr., Fairfax, VA, 1:45 p.m.-5 p.m.
Nysmith School for the Gifted, 13625 Eds Dr. Herndon, VA 20814, 2:30 p.m.-5:30 p.m.
Bon Chon Chicken, 13320 Franklin Farm Rd., Herndon, VA, 2:45 p.m.–6 p.m.
Mother’s Macaroons, 2442 N. Harrison St., Arlington, VA, 3:30 p.m.-6:40 p.m.
Homemade Pizza, 4514 Lee Hwy., Arlington, VA, 3:45 p.m.-7 p.m.
Arrow Wine & Cheese, 4508 Lee Highway, Arlington, VA, 3:50 p.m.-7 p.m.

Thurs., May 15

CVS, 1452 Chain Bridge Rd., McLean, VA, 6:30 a.m.-9:40 a.m.
Giant, 1454 Chain Bridge Rd., McLean, VA, 6:40 a.m.-9:50 a.m.
Starbucks, 1438 Chain Bridge Rd., McLean, VA, 10:10 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
McLean Medical Associates and other businesses at 6862 Elm St. McLean, VA, 10:30 a.m.-1:50 p.m.

Measles spreads through coughing, sneezing and contact with an infected individual, according to a Va. health department release. Symptoms start with a fever greater than 101 degrees, runny nose, watery red eyes and a cough. This is followed days later with a rash on the face that spreads over the entire body.

"Based on these dates of exposure, anyone infected with the measles virus may develop symptoms as late as June 5, 2014," Andrew-Spear said.

People who have received at least one dose of measles, mumps and rubella vaccine in the past are at very low risk of being infected with measles from any of these exposures, according to Andrew-Spear.

If you have never received MMR vaccine, you may be at risk of measles. Monitor your health and if you notice symptoms of measles (see below), immediately isolate yourself in your home to limit your exposure to others and call your primary health care provider to discuss further care.

Call ahead before going to the doctor’s office or the emergency room and tell them that you were exposed to measles."

May 22, 2014 7:36 AM  
Anonymous slop stop said...

For climate-change alarmists, the heat is on… their foreheads. Their desperation is starting to bead up and roll into their collars like flop sweat. California Gov. Jerry Brown’s absurd contention that LAX Airport is going to be turned into a bathtub because of climate change is the latest example of how know-nothings in the media, entertainment and politics are reaching for ever more questionable arguments as they continue to fail to stoke fears in an American public that, contrary to their hateful claims, largely believes in global warming but isn’t particularly worried about it. (Even among Democrats, more Americans rate drug use than climate change a serious political issue).

Brown said that due to changes in glacier mass (breathlessly hyped as “collapse” by the media), in 200 years “the Los Angeles airport’s going to be underwater.”

No, it isn’t. A projected four-foot rise in sea levels won’t much affect the airport, which sits 120 feet above sea level. A spokesman for Brown quietly admitted “the governor misspoke.” Cancel that budget item for the “billions of dollars” Brown imagined would be necessary to move the airport. (Or, maybe, move it anyway, for the same reason the state hopes to spend $68 billion on high-speed rail: It may be useless, but construction jobs will surely be created.)

Brown’s effort is typical of the political-informational complex’s new tactics. In the face of the inconvenient truths that hurricane activity has been on the decline and there was a frustratingly dismal season of storms for alarmists last year, that record cold temperatures last winter can hardly be blamed on global warming , that the slowing rate of increase in global temperatures is on the verge of falling beneath even the lowest projections of virtually all climate-change models, the alarmists are trying to keep global warming hysteria hot by throwing pocketbook issues into the furnace. That’s why we’re seeing a major uptick in global bathos, via headlines like “Climate Change May Be Killing Our Fancy Coffee.” Oh well, Maxwell House struck everybody as good enough for 80 years. The progressives at ThinkProgress warn of a possible guacapocalypse at Chipotle due to climate change. Is “Your Breakfast Under Assault from Climate Change“? Of course it is, you denier. Frosted Flakes prices could go up 20 percent….by 2030. Stockpile now! Or maybe give up Frosted Flakes and invest that money in future beachfront property in Orlando, because 2030 is also the year the alarmists tell us Miami is going underwater. (Really? From a sea-level rise of 3 mm per year? That adds up to 1.9 inches by 2030.) Oh, and if you think mankind can somehow muddle through climate change, you’re a Nazi.

May 22, 2014 8:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Even alarmist publications like The New York Times are forced sheepishly to correct other alarmists (The Times’ environmental blogger wrote, “Some headlines are completely overwrought — as with this NBC offering: ‘West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s Collapse Triggers Sea Level Warning.’ This kind of coverage could be interpreted to mean there’s an imminent crisis”). No wonder a Yale study discovered that the most scientifically-literate Americans are less frightened of climate change than their low-information neighbors.

Political and media figures in the alarmist camp hope to bully the stubborn realists into silence. John Kerry is the latest to rely on a spurious claim that, as he put it in his Boston College commencement speech this week, “ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.” An equally obtuse figure who relies on the audience to mistake him for a well-informed person, HBO comic John Oliver, whose Cambridge degree and British accent equal erudition to low-information viewers, last week paraded 97 extras and actors onstage for a global warming “debate” with three actors pretending to be global-warming skeptics, for the purpose of showing the jabbering 97 shouting down the cringing three. He said this was a better illustration than the usual one-on-one media debate because in “a survey of thousands of scientific papers, uh, that took a position on climate change, 97 percent endorsed the position that humans are causing global warming.”

Uh. That uh, as Oliver may or may not be aware, indicates 97 percent of 33 percent — the latter being the proportion of scientific papers that declared humans were causing climate change. Two-thirds offered no opinion on the matter. In other words, Oliver’s the-crowd-is-with-me statement (and Kerry’s even more ill-informed mangling of it) equated to 32 percent of the crowd he was talking about.

Moreover, even that laughable 97 percent figure was arrived at via highly tendentious means some have described as “doctoring.” Yet even 100 percent metaphysical certainty on the statement “humans are causing some amount of global warming” doesn’t actually tell us what U.S. energy policy should be. Sorry, alarmists, but you aren’t going to drown out the realists any more than the Atlantic Ocean is going to drown Miami.

May 22, 2014 8:59 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I don't really see why anyone wants to argue so hard to defend polluting. It just makes sense to take care of the world and leave it as nice as it was when we got here.

May 22, 2014 10:21 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

the pathetic Barack Obama is now offering to pay for insurance company losses if they agree not to raise premiums to cover expenses

in other words, simply using taxpayer money to pay the higher premiums:

Last Friday, the Obama administration quietly expanded an insurance industry bailout program that it publicly insisted never existed. In exchange, Obama wants a big political favor from insurers.

Last week, the administration promised insurers it would use "other sources of funding" to protect their profits "in the unlikely event" that ObamaCare costs more than expected.

The language was buried in a 435-page regulatory filing that only the industry would normally care about. But it caught the eye of the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein on Friday.

The bailout story got legs this week when the Los Angeles Times followed suit, noting that the regulatory change could "potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry."

Keep in mind that only a few weeks ago, White House officials were denying that any such bailout existed in ObamaCare. The "risk corridor" program at issue, a White House budget spokesman said in March, was merely a "safety valve for consumers and insurers" transitioning to a "brand new market."

It was, the administration promised, there only to protect insurers temporarily, as a way to encourage them to join ObamaCare.

Besides, they said, the ObamaCare risk corridor program would be self-financing, with overly profitable insurers paying in so money-losing ones could take out.

But in his latest budget, Obama proposed setting aside $5.5 billion for the program. The Times makes clear: Obama expects something big in return.

The expanded guarantee comes, the paper says, "as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall's congressional elections."

In short, Obama is offering the industry virtually unlimited taxpayer bailout money, in hopes that it will return the favor and avoid politically damaging rate hikes, at least until after November's mid-term elections.

Left unsaid in all this is the fact that the only reason such bailouts are needed in the first place is because ObamaCare tries to replace basic market forces that normally govern the insurance industry with a vast array of complex and costly cross subsidies.

Obama might think "this thing is working." Taxpayers now on the hook for ObamaCare's failure shouldn't buy it.


May 22, 2014 2:03 PM  
Anonymous Tonight! said...

Astronomers are united in their assessment of whether the spakin' new May Cameloparid meteor shower, due this weekend, will be the best celestial show in years: maybe, they say, maybe not.

But quite possibly.

The May Camelopardalid meteor shower peak could very well turn into a storm over North America, but not to worry: the comet responsible for the meteors will come nowhere close to earth, and the meteors themselves burn high, high, high in our atmosphere.

That comet is called "209P/LINEAR," which is much more cool than its nerdish name. (And infinitely more pronounceable than its meteor shower.)
While the comet was discovered only in 2004, nobody has ever seen the Camelopardalids, the fireballs that should be visible as Earth passes through the trail of dust left behind by ol' 209P in the 1800s.

In a videocast, The head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, Dr. Bill Cooke, said he often lets cameras do his sky watching for him.

But not this time.

"There could be a new meteor shower, and I want to see it with my own eyes," says Cooke.

Some forecasters have predicted up to 400 meteors per hour, but the fact is that's a guess based on less data than experts would like.

"We have no idea what the comet was doing in the 1800s," says Cooke. As a result of the uncertainty, "there could be a great meteor shower—or a complete dud."

Most experts say, though, that at least a decent show can be expected, with a pretty good chance that the Camelopardalids will rival what is usually the best meteor show of the year, the Perseids, which in 2014 peak Aug. 10-Aug. 13.

When to Watch: The peak night of the shower is predicted for May 23-24, 2014, meaning after the sun goes down on Friday and before it rises on Saturday. Models suggest that the best viewing hours are between 2 and 4 a.m. EDT. As with most meteor showers, though, you can often get a pretty good show a night or two before and after the peak.

May 23, 2014 7:24 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gay marriage bans are crumbling around the country while the outcry from opponents dwindles on the national stage.

Same sex marriage bans falling in court have become almost routine. Two, in Oregon and Pennsylvania, were voided just last week. Since December, there have been decisions striking down bans almost once every two weeks on average.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision last year striking down a section of the Defense of Marriage Act, gay marriage supporters have a perfect record. Since June, federal courts in Utah, Oklahoma, Virginia, Texas, Michigan, Idaho, Oregon and Pennsylvania invalidated gay marriage bans in their states.

In addition to a drumbeat of court decisions, the fight is made even harder for opponents by a new political environment, shaped by rapidly changing public opinion, where outspoken opposition to gay marriage is not seen as advantageous.

A Gallup poll this month found that support for gay marriage is at an all-time high, at 55 percent, rising 15 percentage points in just five years.

Gay marriage rights’ newfound popularity has enabled eleven states to legalize gay marriage either through their legislature or ballot referendums. Just five years ago, no state had ever done that.

Now, GOP officials are being forced to adapt to this new political reality. Two years ago, even the official position of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many other top Democrats was opposition to gay marriage. As the pressure spreads, Republicans are facing a wave of acceptance and new rights.

“They’re seeing that the tide is changing; public opinion is changing,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican former governor of New Jersey who signed a brief to the Supreme Court with 130 other prominent Republicans last year supporting gay marriage. “The courts are going to do it and we're just not going to talk about it or fight it. From a political point of view, that’s an easy out.”

Asked if Republicans in Senate races this year will be making opposition to gay marriage an issue, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee declined to comment.

But other GOP operatives say candidates are sensitive to the shift in public opinion and know opposition isn’t the boost it once was.

“I think Republican candidates are largely going silent on the issue of marriage equity, and that's a sea change from recent years in which the issue was used as an offensive weapon,” Mark McKinnon, a Republican media advisor who worked on both of George W. Bush’s campaigns, and who also signed the brief, wrote in an email.

Republican Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett, arguably the most vulnerable GOP governor this year, decided not to appeal the ruling last week allowing gay marriage in his state, saying an appeal was unlikely to succeed.

Similarly, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) decided not to appeal a state court’s ruling allowing gay marriage there last year.

At the time, Christie was seeking reelection in a blue state. Now a potential 2016 presidential contender, he has plenty of company among other prospective GOP White House candidates in softening their gay marriage rhetoric.

“I think that the Republican Party, in order to get bigger, will have to agree to disagree on social issues," Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told vocativ.com in March.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush told Charlie Rose in 2012 that loving, gay couples “should be held up as examples.”

The shifting views are indicative of a generational shift that isn’t going to subside. A February Pew poll found that 61 percent of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 29 support gay marriage....

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/207151-anti-gay-marriage-laws-quickly-crumbling#ixzz32lRdE0tc

May 25, 2014 5:19 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...


"Gay marriage rights’ newfound popularity"

oh, "gay marriage rights" isn't that "popular"

however, most feel it's not something worth arguing about

"Two years ago, even the official position of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many other top Democrats was opposition to gay marriage"

I don't understand why Brandon Eich was hounded out of office while gay advocates have no problem with these people

btw, one thing you fail to mention is that gay msrriage will likely be upheld by the Supreme Court unless it doesn't come up until after Obama is gone and the next President has nominated a rational justice

the swing vote is Kennedy and if you look at his past decisions, he has consistently referred to homosexuality as a group of people rather than a behavior, which is the key issue

May 26, 2014 9:23 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why Mass Killers Are Always Male

Whenever there's a mass shooting or massacre, there's a 98% chance the perpetrator is a man. Why is that?

There are no absolute certainties when it comes to mass killers, but a few things come close. Someone will use the term “disaffected youth” to describe the perpetrator. Somewhere there will be a diary—either Tweets, blogs, YouTube videos or scrawled musings in a lined notebook. And the murderer will—with more than a 98% certainty—be male.

That was the case again on Friday as Elliott Rodger, a 22-year-old student at Santa Barbara City College, killed six people and wounded 13 others in a stabbing and shooting spree, before taking his own life. If you say that you were surprised that his name was Elliott and not, say, Ellen, you either haven’t been paying attention or you’re playing at political correctness. But the fact remains: it’s almost always boys who go bad. The question is, Why?

There is no shortage of explanations for the overwhelming maleness of the monster population. Some of the answers reveal a lot—and yet nothing at all. Testosterone fuels aggression. Stipulated. Boys take longer to mature than girls. Stipulated. And like the forebrains of young females, those of young males are not fully myelinated until the late 20s or even early 30s. The forebrain is where executive functions—impulse control, reflection, awareness of consequences—live. In the case of males, who are already trip-wired for aggression, that provides a lot of years to behave badly.

There are, too, the social factors: violent video games, a culture of physical aggression fueled by contact sports and the general tendency of all societies to turn their men into hunters and warriors, putting those jobs off-limits to women or at least making them optional.

But there’s more, and a lot of it has to do with status. Males, for better or worse, are ferociously protective of their position in any tribe, community, or society, and any threat to that position goes to the core of their identity and self-esteem. It’s a common observation in times of recession that while loss of a job is miserable for both genders, it’s the males who are likelier to become completely undone by it. Without the role of worker and money-earner, men feel hollowed-out, and that too often calls for revenge. it’s not for nothing that the victims in workplace shootings are often managers who just the month before demoted or sacked the shooter....

May 26, 2014 1:14 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

...As Candice Batton, director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, told NPR in the wake of the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shootings:

“Some research supports the idea that males are more likely than females to develop negative attributions of blame that are external in nature, that is: ‘The cause … of my problems is someone else or some force outside of me’. And this translates into anger and hostility toward others.”

[Women], on the other hand, “are more likely to develop negative attributions of blame that are internal in nature, that is: ‘The cause of my problems is some failing of my own: I didn’t try hard enough, I’m not good enough.”


This is also the reason that when women do kill—and they do—it’s typically in a more intimate way, such as by drowning or suffocating. Men tend to go wild, spraying a room with gunfire and the world be damned. That, of course, also increases the male killer’s body count.

Rodger, dead now, his work done now, fits so much of this ugly profile. He did leave a diary—in his case YouTube videos—and his rants bare his resentments toward the women who never found him attractive enough, as primal a kind of status loss as can possibly be imagined.

He now joins the dark gallery of men and boys who have gone before him—each of them less important than the previous ones, since their crimes become so tragically familiar. If there is any bitter satisfaction to take from that, it’s that in their very attempt to be remarkable in some way, mass killers instead achieve a sort of homicidal banality, the anonymity they dreaded in life following them into death.

May 26, 2014 1:14 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Seven States Running Out of Water

7. Texas
> Pct. severe drought: 56.1%
> Pct. extreme drought: 39.9% (4th highest)
> Pct. exceptional drought: 20.7% (3rd highest)

6. Oklahoma
> Pct. severe drought: 64.5%
> Pct. extreme drought: 50.1% (2nd highest)
> Pct. exceptional drought: 30.4% (the highest)

5. Arizona
> Pct. severe drought: 76.3%
> Pct. extreme drought: 7.7% (9th highest)
> Pct. exceptional drought: 0.0%

4. Kansas
> Pct. severe drought: 80.8%
> Pct. extreme drought: 48.1% (3rd highest)
> Pct. exceptional drought: 2.8% (6th highest)

3. New Mexico
> Pct. severe drought: 86.2%
> Pct. extreme drought: 33.3% (6th highest)
> Pct. exceptional drought: 4.5% (5th highest)

2. Nevada
> Pct. severe drought: 87.0%
> Pct. extreme drought: 38.7% (5th highest)
> Pct. exceptional drought: 8.2% (4th highest)

1. California
> Pct. severe drought: 100.0%
> Pct. extreme drought: 76.7% (the highest)
> Pct. exceptional drought: 24.8% (2nd highest)

May 26, 2014 5:40 PM  
Anonymous svelte_brunette said...

Anon wondered:

“Two years ago, even the official position of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many other top Democrats was opposition to gay marriage"

I don't understand why Brandon Eich was hounded out of office while gay advocates have no problem with these people”

Because it’s not about beliefs Anon.

If you believe and say “I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry” and it’s because of “religious reasons,” no one has a problem with that. You can believe and say all sorts of things about the bible never intending gay people to be married and that would be fine.

The problem is when you conflate gays with pedophiles, claim they are “out to recruit your children,” “destroy society,” “cause AIDS,” are a bunch of “diseased deviants” and that they should be put in prison “with a big electric fence” so they all die off “because they don’t reproduce” then you’ve crossed the line into slanderous propaganda. Hillary and Obama never did those things, nor did they pay a hateful anti-marriage group to the dirty work for them, like Eich did.

THAT is the difference Anon.

You’re welcome.

Have a nice day,

Captain Obvious

May 28, 2014 10:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136

May 28, 2014 6:44 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"If you believe and say “I don’t think gay people should be allowed to marry” and it’s because of “religious reasons,” no one has a problem with that."

really?

that's what the Duck Dynasty guy said and you had all sorts of problems with it

"You can believe and say all sorts of things about the bible never intending gay people to be married and that would be fine."

yes, it would

unless, you wanted to be an active member of our society

in that case, the lunatic gay advocacy groups will do everything they can to silence you

"The problem is when you conflate gays with pedophiles,"

there have been many high profile cases in the last few decades

ever hear of John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jerry Sandusky or hundreds of homosexuals who found it convenient to hide their sexual preferences by pretending to be Catholic priests under a vow of celibacy?

I personally don't think all gays do this but, let's be honest, it's not a stretch to speculate

"claim they are “out to recruit your children,”"

you mean like homosexual high school teachers who sponsor "gay-straight" clubs?

let's be honest, it's not a stretch to speculate

“cause AIDS,”

AIDS entered our society and established a foothold because of homosexual promiscuity and still is disproportionately represented in homosexuals, vastly so

let's be honest, it's not a stretch to speculate

"are a bunch of “diseased deviants”"

compulsive harmful behavior is a sign of mental illness

since gay advocates claim there is no choice and participation in homosexual partnering is clearly dangerous

let's be honest, it's not a stretch to speculate

"and that they should be put in prison “with a big electric fence” so they all die off “because they don’t reproduce” then you’ve crossed the line into slanderous propaganda. Hillary and Obama never did those things,"

guess what?

neither did Brandon Eich

"nor did they pay a hateful anti-marriage group to the dirty work for them, like Eich did."

he gave a small donation to a group that opposed the redefinition of marriage, for that purpose

he didn't pay them to do anything for him

you're actually a liar

"THAT is the difference Anon."

he told the truth and you told a lie

THAT is the difference

"You’re welcome.

Have a nice day,"

yeah, go walk a tightrope over the Grand Canyon

Captain Obvious

May 28, 2014 7:05 PM  
Anonymous Robert said...

Oh my.

May 29, 2014 10:21 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

oh, dear

let us know what you disagree with, Robo

btw, looks like George Bush is messing up the economy again

WASHINGTON, May 29 - The U.S. economy contracted in the first quarter for the first time in three years as it buckled under the weight of a severe winter.

The Commerce Department on Thursday revised down its growth estimate to show gross domestic product shrinking at a 1.0 annual rate.

It was the worst performance since the first quarter of 2011 and reflected a far slower pace of inventory accumulation and a bigger than previously estimated trade deficit.

The government had previously estimated GDP growth expanding at a 0.1 percent rate. It is not unusual for the government to make revisions to GDP numbers as it does not have complete data when it makes its initial estimates.

The decline in output, which also reflected a plunge in business spending on nonresidential structures, was sharper than Wall Street's expectations. Economists had expected the revision to show GDP contracting at a 0.5 percent rate.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate continues to fall as more people give up on ever finding work again. The labor participation rate is the lowest since the worst days of the Jimmy Carter presidency. Among Americans under thirty, job prospects are dismal and forty percent still live with their parents.

May 29, 2014 10:47 AM  
Anonymous svelte_brunette said...

Confused Anon wondered:

“really?

that's what the Duck Dynasty guy said and you had all sorts of problems with it”

This is what Phil Robertson said:


“It seems like, to me, a vagina -- as a man -- would be more desirable than a man’s anus," Robertson told GQ. "That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”
If he had just stopped there, it probably wouldn’t have been a big deal. But he didn’t. He went on to say:

“Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong. Sin becomes fine," he later added. “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers -- they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Saying you don’t like gay sex is one thing. I don’t like Brussels sprouts. Nobody really cares. Equating / conflating / merging loving gay couples with bestiality, prostitutes, greedy drunkards, slanderers, and swindlers is just gratuitous slander. It’s propaganda specifically designed to demonize and marginalize gay people in the worst possible way. THAT is what gay people and their allies get upset about. The bible does not give one carte blanche to slander people, at least the last time I checked, anyway. It seems to me there were a few lines about “bearing false witness against your neighbor” that were ignored here.

“The problem is when you conflate gays with pedophiles,"

“there have been many high profile cases in the last few decades

ever hear of John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Jerry Sandusky or hundreds of homosexuals who found it convenient to hide their sexual preferences by pretending to be Catholic priests under a vow of celibacy?”

There ya go, conflating gays with pedophiles again, and murderers. JW Gacy killed 33, and Jeffrey D killed 17. Sounds pretty bad. But gay murderers stand out because of their rarity. Remember the Reverend Jim Jones? 918 people (including children) died because of this charismatic heterosexual in an incident called the “Jonestown Massacre.” Funny you didn’t bring that up when discussing the sexuality of killers. Of course heterosexuals kill nearly a million fetuses a year in this country alone. This flaming heterosexual gal named Corrine has had 7 (SEVEN) abortions, including 2 later term ones: http://www.drphil.com/shows/show/1907/ She’s received no punishment for that. Do I really need to bring up more heterosexual killers? Care to tally up the totals? Who do you really think is going to be worse?!?!

May 29, 2014 11:45 AM  
Anonymous svelte_brunette said...

“I personally don't think all gays do this but, let's be honest, it's not a stretch to speculate

"claim they are “out to recruit your children,”"

you mean like homosexual high school teachers who sponsor "gay-straight" clubs?

let's be honest, it's not a stretch to speculate”

Let’s be REALLY honest Anon, all you got is speculation.

Speculation like:

“Rasmussen’s latest poll shows McCain up 1% - it’s a sign of his inevitable win.”

Despite Electoral College tallies showing McCain had the proverbial snowball’s chance.

“Gallup’s latest poll has Romney up 2 points – Obama will be a single term president.”

Despite Electoral College tallies showing Romney’s snowball was only marginally bigger than McCain’s.

“23-07 will lead to men dressing up like women to attack women in restroom and get away with it”

Despite that never actually happening.

Oh yeah, and then there is the mother load of speculation, WMD.

You’d think you would have learned by now how bad you are at speculation.


“you mean like homosexual high school teachers who sponsor "gay-straight" clubs?

let's be honest, it's not a stretch to speculate””


You don’t have to speculate Anon. We have the Google now. Go to it and type in “homosexual high school GSA teacher abused students” and see how many of those article actually report a gay GSA teacher abusing a student. Count them all up.

Now go to the Google and type in “catholic priest abused students”.

Whoa.


I’m running late so I’ll have to cut this short…


“yeah, go walk a tightrope over the Grand Canyon”

What, not a flaming rope?

You must have been tired Anon. Not nearly as lethal as “go French kiss a rabid Doberman,” or “go skinny-dip in a lava floe” (sic).

Your fantasies about me walking into a horribly painful death are never going to come true. I’m simply not going to oblige you. If you want to see me dead, you’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way – you’re going to have to hunt me down and do it yourself.

Have a nice day,

Cynthia

May 29, 2014 11:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Anon leaves comments disrespectful of LGBT people here on Vigilance because he is a closeted homophobe who wishes he was brave enough to come out.

It's not a stretch to speculate.

May 29, 2014 12:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

June 3rd is the last day to register to vote in the June 24th primary in Maryland. With such a crucial primary election only weeks away, it is essential that our friends, families, and neighbors are registered by next Tuesday, June 3rd in order to participate in the primary.

Register to vote in MD here

May 29, 2014 12:15 PM  
Anonymous Peek-a-boo said...

The National Organization for Marriage, a leader in the campaign to ban same-sex marriage in the U.S., sustained a blow to its five-year effort to keep campaign donors' names secret on Wednesday.

The Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices ruled that NOM broke the law in 2009 by refusing to disclose donor names during its successful campaign to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage in the state. The commission ordered NOM to pay more than $50,000 in penalties and to reveal supporters' identities.

"Maine people deserve to know who is funding political campaigns to influence their vote," a memo from the commission explains. The memo says NOM intentionally circumvented a law requiring political campaigns to disclose donors.

In a confidential internal document from August 2009, leaked that fall, NOM identified a "serious hurdle" in the way of its core goal of banning same-sex marriage nationwide. Written after a bruising fight over California's same-sex marriage ban, the document warned that recent "threats of intimidation" against donors may discourage people from making political contributions for ballot initiatives in states where political campaigns were required to disclose donor identities.

The memo proposed a workaround: Invite donors to give directly to NOM, instead of to the organization’s individual campaigns in those states. NOM could then funnel money to these campaigns from its coffers, while keeping quiet about where the money came from.

NOM gave roughly $2 million to Stand for Marriage Maine, a group formed by NOM president Brian Brown and the leaders of two other organizations, with the aim of striking down the marriage law. The donation amounted to roughly two-thirds of the group’s total budget.

Maine's Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices said this practice threatened to set a harmful precedent. “If this circumvention of disclosure laws were to be sanctioned, it would significantly reduce the amount of information available to voters in future elections if other large political advocacy groups used a similar rationale for not reporting their financial activity to influence elections in Maine," the commission's memo says.

This is not NOM’s first loss in the fight to keep its donors secret. Since 2009, NOM has filed two lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of Maine's campaign finance laws. It lost both.

May 29, 2014 3:03 PM  
Anonymous RIP Maya Angelou said...

You may shoot me with your words
You may cut me with your eyes
You may kill me with your hatefulness
But still like air I'll rise

May 29, 2014 5:16 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

"Anon leaves comments disrespectful of LGBT people here on Vigilance because he is a closeted homophobe who wishes he was brave enough to come out.

It's not a stretch to speculate.".


Far from being a stretch, its much more likely than not. Studies show 80% of homophobes are same sex attracted, its common for the most vehmently anti-gay to be gay themselves. The reason is two-fold:

1) They think by being vehemently anti-gay they deflect suspicion that they themselves are gay.

2) They've internalized the homophobia and can't accept their own gayness so by vigorously fighting gays it gives them the feeling that they can/are squelch[ing] their own gayness.

May 29, 2014 5:17 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

No completely heterosexual man is as obsessed with gays as Wyatt/bad anonymous is. Those who are completely heterosexual simply don't care that much about gays.

May 29, 2014 5:21 PM  
Blogger Priya Lynn said...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Species of plants and animals are becoming extinct at least 1,000 times faster than they did before humans arrived on the scene, and the world is on the brink of a sixth great extinction, a new study says.

The study looks at past and present rates of extinction and finds a lower rate in the past than scientists had thought. Species are now disappearing from Earth about 10 times faster than biologists had believed, said study lead author noted biologist Stuart Pimm of Duke University.

"We are on the verge of the sixth extinction," Pimm said from research at the Dry Tortugas. "Whether we avoid it or not will depend on our actions."

The work, published Thursday by the journal Science, was hailed as a landmark study by outside experts.

Pimm's study focused on the rate, not the number, of species disappearing from Earth. It calculated a "death rate" of how many species become extinct each year out of 1 million species.

In 1995, Pimm found that the pre-human rate of extinctions on Earth was about 1. But taking into account new research, Pimm and his colleagues refined that background rate to about 0.1. Now, that death rate is about 100 to 1,000, Pimm said.

Numerous factors are combining to make species disappear much faster than before, said Pimm and co-author Clinton Jenkins of the Institute of Ecological Research in Brazil. But the No. 1 issue is habitat loss. Species are finding no place to live as more places are built up and altered by humans.

Add to that invasive species crowding out native species, climate change affecting where species can survive, and overfishing, Pimm said

May 30, 2014 10:42 AM  
Anonymous what a waste said...

the influential Washington Post is out with endorsements for Maryland legislature this morning

big surprise: they recommend voting against Dana Beyer

just like they recently recommended the county voters reject Dana's partner in crime, Duchy Trachtenberg, calling her "partisan and divisive"

as they point out, Dana is running against a homosexual incumbent and has so significant difference with him on policy and significantly less experience

leading one to wonder why Dana would run for anything at all

when employed as a minion for Duchy, Dana was an enemy of democracy, trying to in every way imaginable to prevent voters from voting on a referendum and even trying to intimidate those signing petitions

there were ethics charges filed and the voters unceremoniously sent the nasty Duchy packing

such a person is unworthy of representing voters in a democratic society

May 31, 2014 9:01 AM  
Anonymous Robert said...

According to Joe Jervis, the anti people failed to get enough signatures to put the transgender rights bill on the ballot in Maryland.

June 01, 2014 10:31 AM  

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