Honey, you didn't build that

[jane]

http://remnantculture.com/?p=4583

[Nickname unavailable]

On Sep 10, 10:45 am, jane <jane.pla...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://remnantculture.com/?p=4583

a republican comes clean/conservatives are sociopaths:As I came to
recognize that poverty is not earned/chosen/deserved/that our use of
force is far less precise than I had believed:I realized with a shock
that I had effectively viewed whole swaths of the country/the world as
second-class people.
"THE CONSERVATIVES" live in a counter-factual universe, the product
of the hermetically sealed "CONSERVATIVE" subculture. Trying to see
the world through the lens of "THE CONSERVATIVE", is like looking at a
fun-house mirror; everything’s backwards and distorted




he gained empathy and remorse. he was lucky. most conservatives are
al bundy, archie bunker, or homer simpson types who lack empathy,
remorse, pity, morals, ethics, or have a conscience. but their very
limited or nonexistent logic skills leave them selling shoes, and they
will not amount to much.
but a few are high functioning, clever, cunning, manipulative, and
quite dangerous. they must be kept out of power at all costs.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremiah-goulka/ex-republican_b_1870534.html




Jeremiah Goulka
Writer


Joining the Reality-Based Community
Posted: 09/10/2012 10:45 am

Or How I Learned to Stop Loving the Bombs and Start Worrying
Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
I used to be a serious Republican, moderate and business-oriented, who
planned for a public-service career in Republican politics.  But I am
a Republican no longer.
There’s an old joke we Republicans used to tell that goes something
like this: “If you’re young and not a Democrat, you’re heartless. If
you grow up and you’re not a Republican, you’re stupid.” These days,
my old friends and associates no doubt consider me the butt of that
joke. But I look on my “stupidity” somewhat differently.  After all,
my real education only began when I was 30 years old.
This is the story of how in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and
later in Iraq, I discovered that what I believed to be the full
spectrum of reality was just a small slice of it and how that
discovery knocked down my Republican worldview.
I always imagined that I was full of heart, but it turned out that I
was oblivious.  Like so many Republicans, I had assumed that society’s
“losers” had somehow earned their desserts.  As I came to recognize
that poverty is not earned or chosen or deserved, and that our use of
force is far less precise than I had believed, I realized with a shock
that I had effectively viewed whole swaths of the country and the
world as second-class people.
No longer oblivious, I couldn’t remain in today’s Republican Party,
not unless I embraced an individualism that was even more heartless
than the one I had previously accepted.  The more I learned about
reality, the more I started to care about people as people, and my
values shifted.  Had I always known what I know today, it would have
been clear that there hasn’t been a place for me in the Republican
Party since the Free Soil days of Abe Lincoln.
Where I Came From
I grew up in a rich, white suburb north of Chicago populated by
moderate, business-oriented Republicans.  Once upon a time, we would
have been called Rockefeller Republicans.  Today we would be called
liberal Republicans or slurred by the Right as “Republicans In Name
Only” (RINOs).
We believed in competition and the free market, in bootstraps and
personal responsibility, in equality of opportunity, not outcomes.  We
were financial conservatives who wanted less government. We believed
in noblesse oblige, for we saw ourselves as part of a natural
aristocracy, even if we hadn’t been born into it.  We sided with
management over labor and saw unions as a scourge.  We hated racism
and loved Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., particularly his dream that his
children would “live in a nation where they will not be judged by the
color of their skin but by the content of their character.”  We
worried about the rise of the Religious Right and its social-
conservative litmus tests. We were tough on crime, tough on national
enemies. We believed in business, full stop.
I intended to run for office on just such a platform someday.  In the
meantime, I founded the Republican club at my high school, knocked on
doors and collected signatures with my father, volunteered on
campaigns, socialized at fundraisers, and interned for Senator John
McCain and Congressman Denny Hastert when he was House Majority Whip
Tom DeLay's chief deputy.
We went to mainstream colleges -- the more elite the better -- but
lamented their domination by liberal professors, and I did my best to
tune out their liberal views.  I joined the Republican clubs and the
Federalist Society, and I read the Wall Street Journal and the
Economist rather the New York Times.  George Will was a voice in the
wilderness, Rush Limbaugh an occasional (sometimes guilty) pleasure.
Left Behind By the Party
In January 2001, I was one of thousands of Americans who braved the
cold rain to attend and cheer George W. Bush’s inauguration.  After
eight years hating “Slick Willie,” it felt good to have a Republican
back in the White House.  But I knew that he wasn’t one of our guys.
 We had been McCain fans, and even if we liked the compassionate bit
of Bush’s conservatism, we didn’t care for his religiosity or his
social politics.
Bush won a lot of us over with his hawkish response to 9/11, but he
lost me with the Iraq War.  Weren’t we still busy in Afghanistan?  I
didn’t see the urgency.
By then, I was at the Justice Department, working in an office that
handled litigation related to what was officially called the Global
War on Terror (or GWOT).  My office was tasked with opposing petitions
for habeas corpus brought by Guantánamo detainees who claimed that
they were being held indefinitely without charge.  The government’s
position struck me as an abdication of a core Republican value:
protecting the “procedural” rights found in the Bill of Rights.  Sure,
habeas corpus had been waived in wartime before, but it seemed to me
that waiving it here reduced us to the terrorists’ level.  Besides,
since acts of terrorism were crimes, why not prosecute them?  I
refused to work on those cases.
With the Abu Ghraib pictures, my disappointment turned to rage.  The
America I believed in didn’t torture people.
I couldn’t avoid GWOT work.  I was forced to read reams of allegations
of torture, sexual abuse, and cover-ups in our war zones to give the
White House a heads-up in case any of made it into the news cycle.
I was so mad that I voted for Kerry out of spite.
How I Learned to Start Worrying
I might still have stuck it out as a frustrated liberal Republican,
knowing that the wealthy business core of the party still pulled a few
strings and people like Richard Lugar and Olympia Snowe remained in
the Senate -- if only because the idea of voting for Democrats by
choice made me feel uncomfortable.  (It would have been so… gauche.) 
Then came Hurricane Katrina.  In New Orleans, I learned that it wasn’t
just the Bush administration that was flawed but my worldview itself.
I had fallen in love with New Orleans during a post-law-school year
spent in Louisiana clerking for a federal judge, and the Bush
administration’s callous (non-)response to the storm broke my heart. 
I wanted to help out, but I didn’t fly helicopters or know how to do
anything useful in a disaster, so just I sat glued to the coverage and
fumed -- until FEMA asked federal employees to volunteer to help.  I
jumped at the chance.
Soon, I was involved with a task force trying to rebuild (and reform)
the city’s criminal justice system.  Growing up hating racism, I was
appalled but not very surprised to find overt racism and the obvious
use of racist code words by officials in the Deep South.

Then something tiny happened that pried open my eyes to the less
obvious forms of racism and the hurdles the poor face when they try to
climb the economic ladder.  It happened on an official visit to a
school in a suburb of New Orleans that served kids who had gotten
kicked out of every other school around.  I was investigating what
types of services were available to the young people who were showing
up in juvenile hall and seemed to be headed toward the proverbial life
of crime.
My tour guide mentioned that parents were required to participate in
some school programs.  One of these was a field trip to a sit-down
restaurant.
This stopped me in my tracks.  I thought: What kind of a lame field
trip is that?
It turned out that none of the families had ever been to a sit-down
restaurant before.  The teachers had to instruct parents and students
alike how to order off a menu, how to calculate the tip.
I was stunned.
Starting To See
That night, I told my roommates about the crazy thing I had heard that
day.  Apparently there were people out there who had never been to
something as basic as a real restaurant.  Who knew?
One of my roommates wasn’t surprised.  He worked at a local bank
branch that required two forms of ID to open an account.  Lots of
people came in who had only one or none at all.
I was flooded with questions: There are adults who have no ID?  And no
bank accounts?  Who are these people?  How do they vote?  How do they
live?  Is there an entire off-the-grid alternate universe out there?
From then on, I started to notice a lot more reality.  I noticed that
the criminal justice system treats minorities differently in subtle as
well as not-so-subtle ways, and that many of the people who were
getting swept up by the system came from this underclass that I knew
so little about.  Lingering for months in lock-up for misdemeanors,
getting pressed against the hood and frisked during routine traffic
stops, being pulled over in white neighborhoods for “driving while
black”: these are things that never happen to people in my world.  Not
having experienced it, I had always assumed that government force was
only used against guilty people.  (Maybe that’s why we middle-class
white people collectively freak out at TSA airport pat-downs.)
I dove into the research literature to try to figure out what was
going on.  It turned out that everything I was “discovering” had been
hiding in plain sight and had been named: aversive racism,
institutional racism, disparate impact and disparate treatment,
structural poverty, neighborhood redlining, the “trial tax,” the
“poverty tax,” and on and on.  Having grown up obsessed with race
(welfare and affirmative action were our bêtes noirs), I wondered why
I had never heard of any of these concepts.
Was it to protect our Republican version of “individual
responsibility”?  That notion is fundamental to the liberal Republican
worldview. “Bootstrapping” and “equality of opportunity, not outcomes”
make perfect sense if you assume, as I did, that people who hadn’t
risen into my world simply hadn’t worked hard enough, or wanted it
badly enough, or had simply failed.  But I had assumed that
bootstrapping required about as much as it took to get yourself
promoted from junior varsity to varsity.  It turns out that it’s more
like pulling yourself up from tee-ball to the World Series.  Sure,
some people do it, but they’re the exceptions, the outliers, the
Olympians.
The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly
sink in.  Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the
normal.  For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken
eggs rather than making omelets.  Up until then, I hadn’t really seen
most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping,
loving, dreaming, hurting people.  My values shifted -- from an
individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the
world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest
in people as people.
How I Learned to Stop Loving the Bombs
In order to learn more -- and to secure my membership in what Karl
Rove sneeringly called the “reality-based community” -- I joined a
social science research institute.  There I was slowly disabused of
layer after layer of myth and received wisdom, and it hurt.  Perhaps
nothing hurt more than to see just how far my patriotic, Republican
conception of U.S. martial power -- what it’s for, how it’s used --
diverged from the reality of our wars.
Lots of Republicans grow up hawks.  I certainly did.  My sense of what
it meant to be an American was linked to my belief that from 1776 to
WWII, and even from the 1991 Gulf War to Kosovo and Afghanistan, the
American military had been dedicated to birthing freedom and democracy
in the world, while dispensing a tough and precise global justice.
To me, military service represented the perfect combination of public
service, honor, heroism, glory, promotion, meaning, and coolness.  As
a child, I couldn’t get enough of the military: toys and models,
movies and cartoons, fat books with technical pictures of manly
fighter planes and ships and submarines.  We went to air shows
whenever we could, and with the advent of cable, I begged my parents
to sign up so that the Discovery Channel could bring those shows right
into our den.  Just after we got it, the first Gulf War kicked off,
and CNN provided my afterschool entertainment for weeks.
As I got older, I studied Civil War military history and memory.  (I
would eventually edit a book of letters by Union Gen. Joshua Lawrence
Chamberlain.)  I thought I knew a lot about war; even if Sherman was
right that “war is hell,” it was frequently necessary, we did it well,
and -- whatever those misinformed peaceniks said -- we made the world
a better place.
But then I went to a war zone.
I was deployed to Baghdad as part of a team of RAND Corporation
researchers to help the detainee operations command figure out several
thorny policy issues.  My task was to figure out why we were sort-of-
protecting and sort-of-detaining an Iranian dissident group on
Washington’s terrorist list.
It got ugly fast.  Just after my first meal on base, there was a
rumble of explosions, and an alarm started screaming INCOMING!
INCOMING! INCOMING!  Two people were killed and dozens injured, right
outside the chow hall where I had been standing minutes earlier.
This was the “surge” period in 2007 when, I was told, insurgent
attacks came less frequently than before, but the sounds of war seemed
constant to me.  The rat-tat-tat of small arms fire just across the
“wire.”  Controlled detonations of insurgent duds.  Dual patrolling
Blackhawks overhead. And every few mornings, a fresh rain of insurgent
rockets and mortars.
Always alert, always nervous, I was only in Iraq for three and a half
weeks, and never close to actual combat; and yet the experience gave
me many of the symptoms of PTSD.  It turns out that it doesn’t take
much.
That made me wonder how the Iraqis took it.  From overhead I saw that
the once teeming city of Baghdad was now a desert of desolate
neighborhoods and empty shopping streets, bomb craters in the middle
of soccer fields and in the roofs of schools.  Millions displaced.
Our nation-building efforts reeked of post-Katrina organizational
incompetence.  People were assigned the wrong roles -- “Why am I
building a radio station?  This isn’t what I do.  I blow things up…”
-- and given no advance training or guidance.  Outgoing leaders didn’t
overlap with their successors, so what they had learned would be lost,
leaving each wheel to be partially reinvented again.  Precious few
contracts went to Iraqis.  It was driving people out of our military.
This incompetence had profound human costs.  Of the 26,000 people we
were detaining in Iraq, as many as two-thirds were innocent -- wrong
place, wrong time -- or, poor and desperate, had worked with insurgent
groups for cash, not out of an ideological commitment.  Aware of this,
the military wanted to release thousands of them, but they didn't know
who was who; they only knew that being detained and interrogated made
even the innocents dangerously angry.  That anger trickled down to
family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances.  It was about as good
an in-kind donation as the U.S. could have made to insurgent
recruitment -- aside from invading in the first place.
So much for surgical precision and winning hearts and minds.  I had
grown up believing that we were more careful in our use of force, that
we only punished those who deserved punishment.  But in just a few
weeks in Iraq, it became apparent that what we were doing to the
Iraqis, as well as to our own people, was inexcusable.
Today, I wonder if Mitt Romney drones on about not apologizing for
America because he, like the former version of me, simply isn’t aware
of the U.S. ever doing anything that might demand an apology.  Then
again, no one wants to feel like a bad person, and there's no need to
apologize if you are oblivious to the harms done in your name --
calling the occasional ones you notice collateral damage (“stuff
happens”) -- or if you believe that American force is always applied
righteously in a world that is justly divided into winners and losers.
A Painful Transition
An old saw has it that no one profits from talking about politics or
religion.  I think I finally understand what it means.  We see
different realities, different worlds.  If you and I take in different
slices of reality, chances are that we aren’t talking about the same
things.  I think this explains much of modern American political
dialogue.
My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a
small and particularly rosy sliver of reality.  To preserve that
worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their
“just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried
to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way.  I think
this shows why Republicans put so much effort into “creat[ing] our own
reality,” into fostering distrust of liberals, experts, scientists,
and academics, and why they won’t let a campaign “be dictated by fact-
checkers” (as a Romney pollster put it).  It explains why study after
study shows -- examples here, here, and here -- that avid consumers of
Republican-oriented media are more poorly informed than people who use
other news sources or don’t bother to follow the news at all.
Waking up to a fuller spectrum of reality has proved long and
painful.  I had to question all my assumptions, unlearn so much of
what I had learned.  I came to understand why we Republicans thought
people on the Left always seemed to be screeching angrily (because we
refused to open our eyes to the damage we caused or blamed the
victims) and why they never seemed to have any solutions to offer
(because those weren’t mentioned in the media we read or watched).
My transition has significantly strained my relationships with family,
friends, and former colleagues.  It is deeply upsetting to walk on
thin ice where there used to be solid, common ground.  I wish they,
too, would come to see a fuller spectrum of reality, but I know from
experience how hard that can be when your worldview won’t let you.
No one wants to feel like a dupe.  It is embarrassing to come out in
public and admit that I was so miseducated when so much reality is out
there in plain sight in neighborhoods I avoided, in journals I hadn’t
heard of, in books by authors I had refused to read.  (So I take
courage from the people who have done so before me like Andrew
Bacevich.)
Many people see the wider spectrum of reality because they grew up on
the receiving end.  As a retired African-American general in the
Marine Corps said to me after I told him my story, “No one has to
explain institutional racism to a black man.”
Others do because they grew up in families that simply got it.  I
married a woman who grew up in such a family, for whom all of my hard-
earned, painful “discoveries” are old news.  Each time I pull another
layer of wool off my eyes and feel another surge of anger, she gives
me a predictable series of looks.  The first one more or less says,
“Duh, obviously.”  The second is sympathetic, a recognition of the
pain that comes with dismantling my flawed worldview.  The third is
concerned: “Do people actually think that?”
Yes, they do.
Jeremiah Goulka writes about American politics and culture.  His most
recent work has been published in the American Prospect and Salon.  He
was formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, a recovery worker in
New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, and an attorney at the U.S.
Department of Justice.  He lives in Washington, D.C. You can follow
him on Twitter @jeremiahgoulka or contact him at
jere...@jeremiahgoulka.com.  His website is jeremiahgoulka.com. To
listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which
Goulka discusses his political journey, click here or download it to
your iPod here.

[wy]

On Sep 10, 11:45 am, jane <jane.pla...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://remnantculture.com/?p=4583

Stupid article that only a Repugnant could suck in as some kind of
intellectual manna from right wingnut heaven.

[Eddie Haskell]

"wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message
news:7c20b740-cca8-4ad5...@x3g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...

Wouldn't it be better to just STFU than to chime in and show what an idiot
you are?

-Eddie Haskell

[wy]

This coming from someone who can't STFU by chiming in and showing what
an idiot he is?

[Eddie Haskell]

"wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message

news:713f50ba-5475-4f08...@p22g2000vby.googlegroups.com...

If you are going to try and refute something an "is not either" will no more
suffice than your fascist lies, Sambo.

-Eddie Haskell

[wy]

On Sep 10, 8:40 pm, "Eddie Haskell" <gdgd...@apapap.com> wrote:
> "wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message
>
> news:713f50ba-5475-4f08...@p22g2000vby.googlegroups.com...
> On Sep 10, 5:38 pm, "Eddie Haskell" <gdgd...@apapap.com> wrote:
>
> > "wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message
>
> >news:7c20b740-cca8-4ad5...@x3g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...
> > On Sep 10, 11:45 am, jane <jane.pla...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >http://remnantculture.com/?p=4583
> > > Stupid article that only a Repugnant could suck in as some kind of
> > > intellectual manna from right wingnut heaven.
>
> > Wouldn't it be better to just STFU than to chime in and show what an idiot
> > you are?
> > This coming from someone who can't STFU by chiming in and showing what
> > an idiot he is?
>
> If you are going to try and refute something an "is not either" will no more
> suffice than your fascist lies, Sambo.

Boy, you're stupid, Eddie. And there's no "is not either" about it.


>
> -Eddie Haskell

[Eddie Haskell]

"wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message

news:999128c6-20e6-4676...@c4g2000vbe.googlegroups.com...

Oh, look. Now he's reduced to claiming that he "did not either" claim "is
not either."

Hahahahaha!

Man, will he ever learn not to challenge a white man?

Bah hahahaha!!!

-Eddie Haskell

[Nickname unavailable]

conservatives are sociopaths:outspoken scientists of human-caused
climate change in the U. S. endure torrents of freedom of information
requests/hate mail/even death threats from skeptics:their counterparts
abroad have been free to do their work without fear




http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-10/climate-scientists-face-organized-harassment-in-u-s-.html


Climate Scientists Face Organized Harassment in U.S.

By Katherine Bagley Sep 10, 2012 11:10 AM CT

InsideClimateNews.org -- The harassment faced by U.S.-based climate
scientists has been well documented in the media—but not the
harassment of scientists in Europe, Canada or the rest of the world.
That's because there hasn't been much to report.
While outspoken scientists of human-caused climate change in the
United States endure torrents of freedom of information requests, hate
mail and even death threats from skeptics, their counterparts abroad
have been free to do their work without fear.
Jochem Marotzke, managing director of the Max Planck Institute for
Meteorology in Hamburg, said there is "no systematic attempt by a
political camp" to target climate scientists in Germany. "I get the
odd critical email from a skeptic, but would not classify anything as
personally aggressive," said Marotzke. "Very different from the U.S.
scene."
"I feel for my American colleagues and what they've had to deal with,"
said Tim Lenton, an earth system scientist who specializes in climate
tipping points at the University of Exeter in the UK. Lenton said he
has never had to fend off skeptic attacks against his work or his
integrity. "British scientists aren't immune to attacks, but it is a
very different level than compared to what is happening in the U.S."
InsideClimate News contacted scientists working on climate change in
Europe, Canada and Japan and learned that virtually everyone believes
that the harassment is specific to the United States. They said that
it could have long-term consequences for public understanding of
global warming.
"The harassment has an intimidating effect—especially on young
scientists," said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at
the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Rahmstorf said that watching colleagues be harassed often deters them
from speaking to media or the public about their research, which skews
the debate.
Already, there is evidence of the U.S. public being swayed, said Tony
Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change
Communication.
Climategate, for instance, the 2009 hacking of emails from the
University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit in the UK, "had a
significant impact" on public opinion, he said. During that scandal,
U.S. skeptics pounced mainly on emails written by Michael Mann,
director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University,
as evidence that he and others were overstating the human influence on
global warming. In a yet-to-be-published Yale study, nearly 13 percent
of on-the-fence Americans in 2010 said climategate reduced their trust
in climate science and in scientists, Leiserowitz said.
Since then, Mann was cleared of any wrongdoing, and the scientific
consensus has strengthened—virtually all working U.S. climate
researchers believe human activity is causing the climate to warm.
But the polls have barely budged.
The most recent global poll from 2011 found that only 48 percent of
Americans believe climate change is occurring from either human
activity or a mix of human and natural causes, the lowest among
developed countries. Eighty-three percent of people in Asia expressed
this opinion, which was shared by 72 percent in Canada, 69 percent in
Europe and 65 percent in Latin in America.
Why Harassment Here and Not There?
U.S. skeptics ramped up efforts a few years ago when momentum built in
Washington in both political parties for national climate policies,
following the seminal 2007 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, which concluded that Earth is warming mainly from
fossil fuel emissions.
Their campaigns coincided with the rise of the Tea Party movement,
whose members are far more dubious about the science of global warming
than the public at large, adding to the growing chorus of skepticism.
There are two main types of harassment in the United States—by
individual skeptics, or by campaigns led by conservative groups, often
bankrolled by fossil fuel industries, that seek to sow confusion on
the climate issue and undermine support for carbon regulations.
Their tactics have included filing onerous Freedom of Information
requests that can overwhelm a scientist's workload and force them put
their research on hold; barraging scientists with hate mail; and
filling online comment boards with claims that researchers manipulated
their results.
The foreign scientists interviewed for this story expressed concern
about the intimidation and about the state of America's climate
debate. They have their own opinions about why this country—and not
their own—has become fertile ground for skeptics.
Weak Political Leadership
Lenton, the scientist from the University of Exeter, said he believes
it comes down to political leadership, which helps to increase public
confidence in the science, and to deter skeptics.
"Governments here [in the UK and Europe] have largely accepted ...
that we've got to massively cut our carbon emissions and change our
whole way of doing things by 2050," Lenton said. When climate
scientists talk to politicians or to the public on climate dangers
"one ends up preaching to the converted," he said of Europe.
The UK has pledged to cut emissions by at least 34 percent by 2020,
and 80 percent by 2050. The government has funded climate science
education at home and has even extended those efforts abroad. The
Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) gave about $20,000 to the U.S.-
based Environmental Defense Fund to help fund a project to counter
climate skepticism in the Texas State Legislature, the Guardian
reported earlier this year.
The European Union, home to the world's largest carbon market, has
promised a 20 percent reduction of emissions by 2020, and says it
would increase that to 30 percent by 2020 if other major emitters
agree to the same. Germany is undergoing an energy transformation on a
massive scale to replace its retiring nuclear fleet with renewable
power.
In contrast to Europe, climate policies in the United States are dead
for the foreseeable future, and climate skepticism has become a tenet
of Republican politics. GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney has
reversed his earlier position that human activities cause global
warming. Even Barack Obama has steered clear of climate change,
despite research showing that he would benefit from addressing it.
Lack of political leadership alone, however, doesn't explain the
harassment in the United States.
Stephen Harper's Conservative government in Canada has pulled the
country out of the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 global treaty to reduce
greenhouse emissions, and has appointed several climate skeptics to
crucial federal scientific bodies, including the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council and the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Yet Canadians still have some of the world's strongest belief that
global warming is happening—and harassment of scientists is not on the
scale of its southern neighbor.
"We are generally left alone to do our work," said Bruno Tremblay, a
climatologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Tremblay said
that unlike many conservative Americans, Canadians generally don't
harness suspicions about the government overstepping its powers by
trying to control carbon emissions and conserve energy, and in fact
they encourage it. So the skeptics' message doesn't mesh with them, he
said.
Abuse of Free Speech
Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, the world's largest scientific society,
said he sees the attacks on scientists in the United States as "very
disconcerting." Last year, AAAS released a statement condemning the
harassment.
"The incidents reflect two unfortunate things," Leshner said in an
interview, "we live in a society where ideologies trump our
willingness to hear what science says, and in a country where free
speech is so widely valued, people are being attacked."
The foreign scientists interviewed for this story generally agreed
that religion and ideology play a bigger role in U.S. politics than
they do in their own countries. "This inevitably means things are more
about belief than about evidence in the U.S.," said Lenton of the
University of Exeter.
According to a 2012 poll by Yale and George Mason Universities,
Americans' climate change beliefs divide along party and ideological
lines. Among those who said they were "alarmed" or "concerned" about
global warming, more than two-thirds identified themselves as
Democrat, Independent, or moderate or liberal. In contrast, less than
15 percent of Republicans or conservatives described themselves as
alarmed or concerned.
Generally, the more conservative the Republican, the more likely they
are to flat-out deny the existence of climate change. Former
presidential candidate Rick Santorum, for instance, referred to the
acceptance of global warming as a "pseudo-religion" in a column
earlier this year for Red State.
Australia Steps Up Climate Efforts Amid Harassment
After the United States, the country with the most harassment by
skeptics is Australia. Most speculate that's because the country is
the largest exporter of coal in the world. Coal industry groups in
Australia have sought to cast doubt on climate science and have
lobbied against carbon emission limits. But political will for climate
action has been strong enough to counter their opposition.
Last month Australia joined the EU and New Zealand in putting a price
on carbon dioxide emissions, and will launch a carbon trading scheme
in 2015.
German climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a scientific advisor
to Chancellor Angela Merkel, was reportedly threatened in Melbourne
last year during a guest lecture, when a member of the audience stood
up and brandished a noose at the scientist.
The incident led Schellnhuber to declare in an interview earlier this
year that it was only a matter of time before deniers kill a climate
scientist. Last year, several researchers at the Australian National
University in Canberra, located in the southeastern part of the
country, had to be relocated to a secure facility after they received
a deluge of threats from skeptics.
Beyond the safety of the scientists, "the worrying thing is the
message that is sent to the public," said Tremblay of McGill—that the
science isn't settled when it is. "[The harassment] just serves to
polarize the debate even further. People need to start speaking about
this issue for what it is, and leave political and other agendas on
the side."
Republished with permission of InsideClimate News, a non-profit, non-
partisan news organization that covers energy and climate change—plus
the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are
shaped.
On Sept. 12, Join us for the Carbon Disclosure Project's online Global
Climate Change Forum. Click here for details.
Visit www.bloomberg.com/sustainability for the latest from Bloomberg
News about energy, natural resources and global business.

[wy]

On Sep 10, 9:01 pm, "Eddie Haskell" <gdgd...@apapap.com> wrote:
> "wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message
>
> news:999128c6-20e6-4676...@c4g2000vbe.googlegroups.com...
> On Sep 10, 8:40 pm, "Eddie Haskell" <gdgd...@apapap.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > "wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message
>
> >news:713f50ba-5475-4f08...@p22g2000vby.googlegroups.com...
> > On Sep 10, 5:38 pm, "Eddie Haskell" <gdgd...@apapap.com> wrote:
>
> > > "wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message
>
> > >news:7c20b740-cca8-4ad5...@x3g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...
> > > On Sep 10, 11:45 am, jane <jane.pla...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > >http://remnantculture.com/?p=4583
> > > > Stupid article that only a Repugnant could suck in as some kind of
> > > > intellectual manna from right wingnut heaven.
>
> > > Wouldn't it be better to just STFU than to chime in and show what an
> > > idiot
> > > you are?
> > > This coming from someone who can't STFU by chiming in and showing what
> > > an idiot he is?
>
> > If you are going to try and refute something an "is not either" will no
> > more
> > suffice than your fascist lies, Sambo.
> > Boy, you're stupid, Eddie.  And there's no "is not either" about it.
>
> Oh, look. Now he's reduced to claiming that he "did not either" claim "is
> not either."

Can you be coherent? No, because boy, Eddie is stupid.

[Eddie Haskell]

"wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message

news:9b3309e1-5841-448e...@cf4g2000vbb.googlegroups.com...

Imagine, his argument is that he did not either say "is not either."

Bah hahahahahaha!!!

-Eddie Haskell

[AlleyCat]

In article <7c20b740-cca8-4ad5-a9a7-c61d2dc18c90
@x3g2000vbn.googlegroups.com>, w...@myself.com says...

Sucked your dumb ass in, didn't it?

[AlleyCat]

In article <713f50ba-5475-4f08-8a54-743fccd3adf7
@p22g2000vby.googlegroups.com>, w...@myself.com says...

Oh, that's original. What a mommy's backup fuck you've turned out to be.
Daddy would be proud, if he hadn't left her fat ass.

[wy]

Hey, look, another one who can't STFU by chiming in and showing what
an idiot he is! What are you and Eddie, twin idiots?

[wy]

Do you even make sense? No. Boy, you're stupid.

[Nickname unavailable]

On Sep 10, 7:40 pm, "Eddie Haskell" <gdgd...@apapap.com> wrote:
> "wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message
>
> news:713f50ba-5475-4f08...@p22g2000vby.googlegroups.com...
> On Sep 10, 5:38 pm, "Eddie Haskell" <gdgd...@apapap.com> wrote:
>
> > "wy" <w...@myself.com> wrote in message
>
> >news:7c20b740-cca8-4ad5...@x3g2000vbn.googlegroups.com...
> > On Sep 10, 11:45 am, jane <jane.pla...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > >http://remnantculture.com/?p=4583
> > > Stupid article that only a Repugnant could suck in as some kind of
> > > intellectual manna from right wingnut heaven.
>
> > Wouldn't it be better to just STFU than to chime in and show what an idiot
> > you are?
> > This coming from someone who can't STFU by chiming in and showing what
> > an idiot he is?
>
> If you are going to try and refute something an "is not either" will no more
> suffice than your fascist lies, Sambo.
>
> -Eddie Haskell

yes the majority of the founders were american liberals, and yes
conservatism is un-american.


"CONSERVATIVES" always on the wrong side of history:
My friends over at Americans Against the Tea Party put it best when
they said, “What does it say about a movement whose brightest “stars”
are the dimmest bulbs:Conservatives opposed the American
Revolution:Conservatives vehemently warned us that it was unnatural to
rebel against our Sovereign Lord, King George III, and that doing so
would plunge the colonies into disorder.






http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/05/11/conservatives-always-on-the-wrong-side-of-history/



Conservatives: Always On The Wrong Side Of History
May 11, 2012
By Guest Writer

Cross posted with permission from Republican Dirty Tricks - Written by
Taradacktyl
My friends over at Americans Against the Tea Party put it best when
they said, “What does it say about a movement whose brightest “stars”
are the dimmest bulbs?” It says, laugh at them, pity them, but if you
want to live in a modern nation of laws which evolves with the rest of
the globe, for Heaven’s sake, DON’T look to them for ideas on how to
operate a functioning society, since the only thing conservatives have
been successful at is proving that everything they stand for is wrong.
Let’s imagine this scenario: You have an uncle…a loud, opinionated,
uncle who’s thinly veiled racism and misogyny is only superseded by
his not-so-thinly veiled hatred of gays. He says he’s a Christian, but
never misses the opportunity to cheer for war and bloviate proudly
about how merciless he is. He fights anything that has a hint of
challenging his perceived position in the straight/white/male catbird
seat, even if that seat came from the fact that the Liberals he hates
fought for the Social Security, Medicare, etc. that allows him to live
in dignity. He regales you with factually incorrect tales of American
history, despite having never read a book in his life. He disdains
“intellectuals,” and perceives science as a “liberal plot.” For as far
back as you remember – and as far back as the family tree goes – he
has been wrong about everything.

You must tolerate him because, after all, he’s family. But you
certainly don’t follow his advice, and you certainly don’t look to him
to shape government policy.
But in the United States today, as normal people (non-conservatives)
try to undo the damage from conservative destruction and try to create
a society that works for all, we are continuously met with the same
old stories of the impending doom that awaits if we dare stop
following CONS to hell. This opposition at every turn weaves the old,
familiar tales of the American landscape being littered with gulags
and mass graves from government death panels if we…say…dare offer
health care as a right like the rest of the civilized world. We hear
Paul Ryan tickle the oversized-amygdala (fear center) in the
conservative brain, as he paints a picture of millions of lazy bums
swinging in the cushy hammock of our social safety net which isn’t so
cushy. We’re warned that rich people will stop trickling all those
fabulous jobs on us if they are forced to contribute to the society
that gave them so much.
These are nothing but bald-faced lies from bald-faced liars who have
ALWAYS been on the wrong side of history.
Here’s a list to remind us that we shouldn’t be pandering to an
ideology that is defined by its opposition to progress.
CONSERVATIVES: ALWAYS ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY:
1) Conservatives opposed the American Revolution
Conservatives vehemently warned us that it was unnatural to rebel
against our Sovereign Lord, King George III, and that doing so would
plunge the colonies into disorder. They assured us, as the father of
conservatism, Edmund Burke echoed, that social stability would only
come from the small group of wealthy aristocrats ruling over the poor
majority. Conservatives reiterated that it was the duty of the poor to
obey their “betters.” Their rewards, after all, will come in Heaven.
2) Conservatives opposed freeing the slaves
I know, I know. Here’s where the sophomoric CONS, lacking the ability
for complex thought, will whine that Lincoln, a Republican, freed the
slaves. But as Southern historian Al Benson, Jr. wrote in his article,
“The Republican Party, There are NO conservative roots there,”
“It is interesting to note that, in 1860, the Democrats were the real
conservatives, while the Republicans were the left-leaning radicals.”
The Republican Party of the 1860’s, as evidenced by their platform,
was a progressive party that rose in opposition to the entrenched
power structure. It called for protective tariffs, Besides
emancipating the slaves, Lincoln was in favor of progressive taxation.
The Revenue Act of 1862 levied a 3% tax on people making between $600
and $10,000 a year, and a 5% for those making over $10,000.
As Andrew Belonsky wrote for Death and Taxes,
“Lincoln believed that rich Americans should pay more than their less
wealthy friends and neighbors.”
But, because they are CONS and want to rig the system in their favor,
they only considered slaves “people” for purposes of counting them in
order to increase the slave-state representation in Congress.
Conservatives warned that freeing the slaves, believe it or not, was
an affront to liberty – as well as an evil government plot to force
hardworking business owners to release their property. After all, as
the Bible tells us, and as Rush Limbaugh later reminded us, “some
people are just born to be slaves.”
3) Conservatives opposed women’s suffrage
Conservatives warned us that women just didn’t have the mind, much
less the disposition, for politics. They would, of course, get all
hysterical – and if they’re having their periods! Well, look out, men!
As Limbaugh cautioned again, uppity women might put testicles in a
lock box and upset the “natural” hierarchy.
Even today, in 2012, CONS (such as, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, tea party
activist, Fox News contributor, and founder of an organization where
Sean Hannity serves as an advisory board member) lament that the worst
thing that ever happened to America was that women were given the
right to vote.
4) Conservatives opposed minimum wage and child labor laws, the 8-hour
work day, weekends, sick leave… etc.
Conservatives warned us that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,
which established a national minimum wage, guaranteed ‘time-and-a-
half’ for overtime in certain jobs and banned child labor, was going
to collapse the economy. But President Franklin Roosevelt countered at
the time, “Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of
$1,000 a day, …tell you…that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a
disastrous effect on all American industry.” What a surprise! He was
right and conservatives were wrong.
70 years later, CONS are still trying to undo the minimum wage and get
those kids out of the classroom and back into the factories of
Republican campaign contributors.
5) Conservatives opposed humane treatment of animals
Since Conservatives are too stupid to know how to make a buck unless
they can leave filth, pain and destruction in their wake, they
consistently oppose any regulation that not only keeps our food supply
free of the filth they love to spread, but treats the creatures giving
their lives for human sustenance with a level of dignity and humanity.
As a matter of fact, CONS are such insipid fascists that, rather than
address and rectify the abuses at factory farms, they are currently
working to make it illegal for whistleblowers to film the abuse. They
have been successful in Iowa at this endeavor. After all, if a pig’s
infected pustules are viciously sliced off sans painkillers, and no
one is there to document the pig’s screams, did it ever really happen?
And, as for the filthy conditions in the farms feeding the good old U-
S-A – U-S-A – U-S-A that the conservatives pretend to love, who cares
if a few dozen Serfs eat chicken feces and die of E. coli when a
Republican campaign contributor needs more profit?!
We all remember when John Boehner’s district in Ohio was experiencing
an E. coli outbreak at the same time he was trying to gut more food
industry regulations. The bottom line is, Republicans don’t care if
their constituents get sick and die from the filth that Republican
(and DINO) campaign contributors are feeding them. To Republicans,
that means there’s one less person they have to disenfranchise out of
voting.
But if the survivors try to seek justice or recourse and TRY and sue
the corporation who killed their child, their pappy, or spouse…they
won’t get too far since the John Robert’s Supreme Court had something
to say about it.
6) Conservatives opposed the Social Security Act
The Social Security Act established a system that provided old-age
pensions for workers, survivors benefits for victims of work-related
accidents, aid for orphans and widows, benefits for the blind and
physically disabled, and unemployment insurance. Conservatives were
apoplectic about this. They warned freedom-lovers everywhere that
America’s next stop would be a government concentration camp.
Never mind that “a necessitous man is not a free man,” as FDR famously
quoted. Conservatives were inciting their ignorant followers to, once
again, oppose their own best interests for the sake of enabling the
rich to keep treating them like hosts from which to suck profit.
As author Nancy J. Altman wrote in the LA Times,
“opponents claimed that Social Security would result in massive
government control. A Republican congressman from New York, for
example, charged: “The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25
million free American citizens will for the first time submit
themselves to a fingerprint test.”
Another New York congressman put it this way: “The bill opens the door
and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast,
so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to
pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our
descendants.” A Republican senator from Delaware claimed that Social
Security would “end the progress of a great country and bring its
people to the level of the average European.”
As we expected, the concentration camps have yet to come to fruition,
and conservatives, ironically, scramble to position themselves as
defenders of Social Security – still with a mind to destroy it.
These same arguments were retread decades later to oppose the
Affordable Care Act. Being generally devoid of ideas, conservatives
just keep replaying the same old tired tunes…confident their fear-
based followers will continue to dance on cue.
7) Conservatives oppose clean air and water
Once upon a time, conservatives, although still fear-based, greed-
centered, and inherently racist, weren’t completely bat-shit, off-the-
rails, crazy. There were some who even believed that the land and
environment we shared should be protected, and shouldn’t be a utilized
as a toilet for psychopathic corporations to evacuate their waste.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen…it was Nixon who proposed the Environmental
Protection Agency, which was ratified by Congress and began operation
in December 1970.
But since then, a chain of events unfolded where powerful interests
were able to reclaim the ground they were forced to concede to the
greater good.
In a nutshell… After the defeat of Barry Goldwater, conservatives
began to follow Lewis Powell’s memo to the Chamber of Commerce – a
plan that laid out step-by-step how CONS, and thus, corporations,
would take over America.
Reagan was elected and began his assault on the New Deal. The American
working class was transformed into the working poor.
You see, one ironic tragedy of FDR’s New Deal was that it created
economically stable middle classes who, with the aid of these
incessant right-wing misinformation machines, were convinced their
interests and the interests of billionaires were one in the same.
One aspect of the Reich-wing takeover of America laid out in the
Powell Memo was the suggestion that the judiciary be stacked with
extreme Reich-wing ideologues. Slowly, but surely, these judges
loosened regulations and undid campaign finance laws and removed what
little barriers existed that were meant to deter the rich from using
their money to corrupt government. With their cushy jobs on the line,
politicians began to dance solely to the tunes of their wealthy
benefactors who wanted “big government” off their backs so their
corporations could, among other offences, pollute the land they
pretended to love. So here we are – at a point in history where
Republicans (and some phony DINOS) don’t get out of bed in the morning
unless they can attack the EPA, and any organization that We the
People bring into being that dare try to regulate businesses from
ravaging America like a third world nation.
Faced with the prospect of having to actually operate their businesses
like members of a community rather than sociopathic children,
conservatives whine that environmental regulations are “job killers.”
As usual, this simply isn’t true. In fact, environmental regulations
actually create jobs. ThinkProgress reported,
“According to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute,
however, the “job-killing” part of the phrase “job-killing regulation”
is built largely on myth. Last year, EPI released a report that found
that several of the EPA’s proposed environmental regulations would
actually create jobs. Now that the EPA has finalized a rule regulating
toxic waste, EPI has used that rule to analyze whether such
regulations are, indeed, job-killers. Once again, it found the
opposite to be true, and said the new rule will actually create more
jobs than it previously estimated…”
8) Conservatives opposed the Civil Right’s Act
Here, again, conservatives use conflation and count on the stupidity
of their followers not to understand that “Democrat” didn’t (and
doesn’t) always mean “liberal” and “Republican” doesn’t always mean,
“conservative.”
You see, much like the Republicans of the 1860’s were the
progressives, the Southern Democrats of Johnson’s era were the
CONSERVATIVES who opposed the Civil Right’s Act.
Matthew Yglesias wrote for ThinkProgress,
“Bruce Bartlett has become so damn reasonable that he clearly needs to
bolster his conservative bona fides somehow, and his favored path
seems to be things like this post drawn from his book Wrong on Race:
The Democratic Party’s Buried Past. Bartlett’s point in the post is
that most of the opponents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were
Democrats.
This is very true. But it simply highlights the fact that politics in
1964 were not ideologically aligned. The main block of support for
white supremacy was a group of Southern Democrats, most of whom were
very conservative on all issues, and all of whom were very
conservative on the issue of race. They were joined in their support
for white supremacy by a smaller block of non-southern conservative
Republicans. Conservative movement organs like The National Review
supported white supremacy, as did Barry Goldwater who was the leading
conservative politician of the time. It’s a very interesting
historical fact about the United States of America that for most of
the twentieth century conservative southerners generally belonged to
the Democratic Party. But it’s also true that if you think of American
politics in terms of the history of ideological struggle, civil rights
is clearly an issue on which the liberals were right and over time
conservatives came around to that view.”
But, as Rand Paul’s recent criticism of the Civil Right’s Act reminds
us… not ALL conservatives have “come around.”
9) Conservatives opposed Medicare
Unless it is bombing unarmed civilians for 10,000 feet, putting
someone to death or invading a woman’s private medical decisions,
conservatives have always hated anything to do with government. They
tell their easily led followers that this has to do with “freedom,”
and “big government” interference with the “rugged individual”
conservatives fantasize they are. It’s the nice story the “average
Joe” CON likes to tell himself on the way to cash his Social Security
check, but it isn’t true. The real reason the conservative leadership
opposes government is because government is the only organization
large enough to tell the rich to pay their fair share, or regulate an
oligarch’s corporations into “playing nice with the plebs.” Hence, the
conservative hatred of anything that government does to promote the
General Welfare.
Conservatives opposed Medicare for the same reason they opposed Social
Security. It cuts into the potential profit of the 1%. It also affords
the average citizen the ability to live in dignity. To the “Masters of
the Universe,” an economically secure serf is an uppity serf. They
like – and need – the people nice and economically desperate and
easily exploitable. But they told their ignorant followers, “First you
get Social Security – but next stop, it’s the gulag!”
Their soon-to-be-patron-saint, and reason the American middle class is
currently on life-support, Ronald Reagan actually cut an LP called
“Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” in which he
warned the perpetually dumb that American “freedom” was in danger. He
said, “pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he
will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the
government to tell him.”
But again, the REAL reason the CON leadership opposed Medicare was
because they feared it would take America one step closer to offering
health care as a right of citizenship – like the rest of the civilized
world – and the gravy train would end for those conservative donors
who got rich denying people health care.
10) Conservatives oppose Equal Protection Under the Law
There’s only one thing conservatives hate more than a brown person
with the right to vote – and that’s an openly gay person.
You see, conservatives are scientifically-verified, fear-based cowards…
and true Republican homophobes loathe the LGBT community for the
simple fact that they possess what CONS can only envy…namely, the
COURAGE to live an authentic life.
Just this week, conservatives in North Carolina voted to prevent two
people of the same-sex from forming a legal marriage contract. This is
because living in a free society takes a level of maturity
conservatives simply don’t possess. They lack the intelligence to live
up to the responsibilities of freedom – which includes ensuring that
each citizen is afforded equal protection under the law – even if you
don’t like them.
Yes. It is exhausting to live among whiny children sporting “Made in
China” American flag lapel pins, working incessantly to devolve this
nation into the antithesis of a free society – simply because they
can’t handle the “freedom” they pretend to love.
So, as the President himself joins the rest of the civilized world and
“evolves” to the notion that all people deserve the freedom to build a
life and contract with the partner of their choosing, the
conservatives dig their heals in deeper, once again on the wrong side
of history.
We all must continue to evolve – without them.