So... I'm feeling a little unambitious so I'm going to fall back on the old "expand on a comment you made on another blog" gambit. This time, it's a comment I made at Vixen Strangely's blog. VS, who is not to be confused with VS (can't have enough VS's in your blogroll), posted on Romney's flip-flop on the coal industry. Recently, Mitt, in rather asinine fashion, accused President Obama of (wait for it... wait for it) waging a "War on Coal". Shya, how can Obama wage a War on Christmas if he doesn't wage a war on the very coal which will be placed in the stockings of naughty children?
First off, coal production is up in Ohio, so Obama is not hampering the coal industry in any way. More importantly, Obama should be waging a war on coal. Coal extraction is destructive to the environment and dangerous to workers. The burning of coal releases toxins into the environment and contributes to climate change. As Gene Wolfe put it in a passage I've quoted here before:
"That's coal smoke, the technology of the Nineteenth Century brought into the Twenty-First and hard at work. They could have conquered the solar system and harnessed the sun, but they did this instead, because there was no fun involved. Their great-grandfathers had done it, and they knew it would work."
Fossil fuels should be regarded as energy start-up capital, the basic pool of relatively easily obtained energy sources which can allow us to make the transition to renewable energy resources, such as wind, solar, tidal, biomass, biofuels, hydroelectric, and geothermal. Once again, Gene Wolfe is the go-to guy here, referring to our inaction on the environment as the do nothing future, the one in which humanity clings to its old home, the continents of Earth, and waits for the money to run out.
We've known that reliance on fossil fuels was a problem since the 1970's but Carter was ridiculed for asking people to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater and Reagan ripped the solar panels from the White House roof. We've had an ass-backwards energy policy for the past thirty-odd years and still fucking idiots are wasting time and resources making sure that nothing is done.
Mitt Romney's energy policy is basically the Bain Capital model of energy policy- use up all the resources you have until you've extracted all the value out of your "investment" at the expense of its long-term prospects... the one hitch is that, when you've burned through (literally) all of your fossil fuel "startup capital", there's no possibility of a bailout.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query coal. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query coal. Sort by date Show all posts
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Why Did He Have to Use an AEI Approved Term?
I hate to sound a sour note after a generally rousing Democratic Convention, but there's something that really stuck out and stuck in my craw in President Obama's otherwise inspiring speech:
You can choose the path where we control more of our own energy. After thirty years of inaction, we raised fuel standards so that by the middle of the next decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas.
We’ve doubled our use of renewable energy, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines and long-lasting batteries. In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by one million barrels a day – more than any administration in recent history. And today, the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in nearly two decades.
Now you have a choice – between a strategy that reverses this progress, or one that builds on it. We’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we’ll open more. But unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country’s energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers.
We’re offering a better path – a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal; where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks; where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy; where we develop a hundred year supply of natural gas that’s right beneath our feet. If you choose this path, we can cut our oil imports in half by 2020 and support more than 600,000 new jobs in natural gas alone.
Why, why, why did the president have to use American Enterprise Institute weasel words in his nomination speech? There is no such thing as clean coal, "clean coal" is a corporatist right-wing term that is as false as "job creators" and as cynical as "entitlement reform". Coal extraction is dangerous to workers and the environment, the burning of coal adds carbon and mercury to the atmosphere, and coal ash contains a variety of toxins (as if that's not bad enough ash disposal protocols are shoddy at best). To put it in vulgar terms, clean coal is as imaginary as petroleum-pissing unicorns and nuclear-powered rainbows.
This isn't the first time that President Obama pissed me off with the use of this term. The fossil fuel industry will always support his opponents, so why does he use their P.R.B.S. (insert Reince Priebus joke) terms?
Now, for the typical B.B.B.B. fossil fuel rant... Fossil fuels should be considered "startup capital" or "seed corn"- they are the energy source that allowed the wide-scale industrialization necessary for the development of alternative energy sources. Over thirty years ago, President Jimmy Carter warned the citizens of the U.S. of our profligate energy use, and the need to develop alternatives:
Tragically, nothing substantial was done in the intervening decades... we're blowing through the startup capital, eating the seed corn. As Gene Wolfe (whose Seven American Nights is a beautiful, baffling, unsettling depiction of American decline) might put it, we're "doing nothing, sitting around waiting for the money to run out". In his short story The Adopted Father (written in 1980 and included in his collection Castle of Days,) Wolfe wrote a depressingly prescient paragraph:
"That's coal smoke, the technology of the Nineteenth Century brought into the Twenty-First and hard at work. They could have conquered the solar system and harnessed the sun, but they did this instead, because there was no fun involved. Their great-grandfathers had done it, and they knew it would work."
Hearing the president mentioning this "bridge to the 19th century" as a beneficial policy marred an otherwise decent speech. Sure, I'll be voting for the guy because the alternative is unthinkable, but I really wish he wouldn't participate in moving the Overton Window further to the right.
In the interests of thoroughness, I'd also like to mention my second "beef" with the speech- would it have hurt the president to stress the importance of the down-ticket races? He devoted some time to pretending that bipartisanship would be possible, when he should have been lambasting the no-good, obstructionist GOP congresscritters. While Bill Clinton did a good job of making this point in his barn-burner of a speech, President Obama should have continued the tirade.
Cross-posted at Rumproast.
You can choose the path where we control more of our own energy. After thirty years of inaction, we raised fuel standards so that by the middle of the next decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas.
We’ve doubled our use of renewable energy, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines and long-lasting batteries. In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by one million barrels a day – more than any administration in recent history. And today, the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in nearly two decades.
Now you have a choice – between a strategy that reverses this progress, or one that builds on it. We’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we’ll open more. But unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country’s energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers.
We’re offering a better path – a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal; where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks; where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy; where we develop a hundred year supply of natural gas that’s right beneath our feet. If you choose this path, we can cut our oil imports in half by 2020 and support more than 600,000 new jobs in natural gas alone.
Why, why, why did the president have to use American Enterprise Institute weasel words in his nomination speech? There is no such thing as clean coal, "clean coal" is a corporatist right-wing term that is as false as "job creators" and as cynical as "entitlement reform". Coal extraction is dangerous to workers and the environment, the burning of coal adds carbon and mercury to the atmosphere, and coal ash contains a variety of toxins (as if that's not bad enough ash disposal protocols are shoddy at best). To put it in vulgar terms, clean coal is as imaginary as petroleum-pissing unicorns and nuclear-powered rainbows.
This isn't the first time that President Obama pissed me off with the use of this term. The fossil fuel industry will always support his opponents, so why does he use their P.R.B.S. (insert Reince Priebus joke) terms?
Now, for the typical B.B.B.B. fossil fuel rant... Fossil fuels should be considered "startup capital" or "seed corn"- they are the energy source that allowed the wide-scale industrialization necessary for the development of alternative energy sources. Over thirty years ago, President Jimmy Carter warned the citizens of the U.S. of our profligate energy use, and the need to develop alternatives:
Tragically, nothing substantial was done in the intervening decades... we're blowing through the startup capital, eating the seed corn. As Gene Wolfe (whose Seven American Nights is a beautiful, baffling, unsettling depiction of American decline) might put it, we're "doing nothing, sitting around waiting for the money to run out". In his short story The Adopted Father (written in 1980 and included in his collection Castle of Days,) Wolfe wrote a depressingly prescient paragraph:
"That's coal smoke, the technology of the Nineteenth Century brought into the Twenty-First and hard at work. They could have conquered the solar system and harnessed the sun, but they did this instead, because there was no fun involved. Their great-grandfathers had done it, and they knew it would work."
Hearing the president mentioning this "bridge to the 19th century" as a beneficial policy marred an otherwise decent speech. Sure, I'll be voting for the guy because the alternative is unthinkable, but I really wish he wouldn't participate in moving the Overton Window further to the right.
In the interests of thoroughness, I'd also like to mention my second "beef" with the speech- would it have hurt the president to stress the importance of the down-ticket races? He devoted some time to pretending that bipartisanship would be possible, when he should have been lambasting the no-good, obstructionist GOP congresscritters. While Bill Clinton did a good job of making this point in his barn-burner of a speech, President Obama should have continued the tirade.
Cross-posted at Rumproast.
Friday, March 31, 2017
Environment? What Kind of Tree-Hugger Needs a Clean Environment?
Trump's executive order eliminating the Obama Administration's actions on climate change has got to be the worst action of any US president since the invasion of Iraq, courtesy of the Bush Maladministration. The Trump administration is loosening environmental regulations as the melting of Antarctica's ice sheets grows apace. This is the worst time for a coterie of stupid, corrupt, and venal persons to be running the world's most powerful government, and eliminating rules on the most deleterious of industries.
The idea that this executive order will help to stop the 'Heartland' from hemorrhaging jobs is ludicrous. Low natural gas prices have undercut the value of coal, and with mountaintop removal mining being industry standard, fewer miners are required for coal extraction. Loosening regulations will only increase the profits of coal barons who will employ a skeleton workforce. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of coal country will be further immiserated by the contamination of their water sources by the dumping of coal waste.
I have blogged about coal before, specifically how it should have been seen as 'startup capital' used to allow the development of a mature energy technology based on renewable resources. With the prospect of cheap, printed solar cells looking more feasible, the fact that our leaders wish to emphasize the use of coal to generate electricity is unforgivable. Never has a policy benefited so few while imperiling so many. As I've noted before, our profligate fossil fuel use is the equivalent of blowing our seed money on hookers and blow, and with the dangers of fossil fuel use being so manifold, those hookers all have STD's and the blow is adulterated with ground glass and PCP... maybe that's why Donald Trump sees the appeal of coal.
The idea that this executive order will help to stop the 'Heartland' from hemorrhaging jobs is ludicrous. Low natural gas prices have undercut the value of coal, and with mountaintop removal mining being industry standard, fewer miners are required for coal extraction. Loosening regulations will only increase the profits of coal barons who will employ a skeleton workforce. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of coal country will be further immiserated by the contamination of their water sources by the dumping of coal waste.
I have blogged about coal before, specifically how it should have been seen as 'startup capital' used to allow the development of a mature energy technology based on renewable resources. With the prospect of cheap, printed solar cells looking more feasible, the fact that our leaders wish to emphasize the use of coal to generate electricity is unforgivable. Never has a policy benefited so few while imperiling so many. As I've noted before, our profligate fossil fuel use is the equivalent of blowing our seed money on hookers and blow, and with the dangers of fossil fuel use being so manifold, those hookers all have STD's and the blow is adulterated with ground glass and PCP... maybe that's why Donald Trump sees the appeal of coal.
Monday, February 1, 2010
My One Major Beef with the SotU Speech
I had mentioned posting about my one major beef with the State of the Union speech, but I held off for the weekend because I was still savoring the President's smackdown of the Republican Caucus during their retreat (how appropos...). Well, my one big beef (VPR?) is his use of Competitive Enterprise Institute/Club for Growth/Republican Party propaganda term clean coal. His support for offshore drilling and nuclear power were bad enough, but clean coal? Honestly, coal is not clean. Back in 1980, in his short story The Adopted Father, collected in the compilation Castle of Days, Gene Wolfe wrote:
John Parker crossed to the window and stared at the dark sky beyond the glass. "That's coal smoke, the technology of the Nineteenth Century brought into the Twenty-First and hard at work. They could have conquered the solar system and harnessed the sun, but they did this instead, because there was no fun involved. Their great-grandfathers had done it, and they knew it would work."
This was written in 1980, after a decade marked with energy crises. Thirty years later, what has been accomplished in updating our energy policies? Precious little, as we loony lefties all know. It's been decades of tax policies encouraging the purchase of gas guzzlers, "Nuke their ass, take their gas", and missed opportunities for promoting conservation.
Also in 1980, Gene Wolfe wrote the essay Helioscope as a companion to the first volume of his haunting, masterful Book of the New Sun. Uh... **SPOILERS** follow here, so anybody unfamiliar with BotNS, go out, purchase, read it, become totally addicted to the work, and come back in a couple of months, armed to the teeth with in-jokes about "alzabos" and "cacogens". The essay was included in the book Castle of the Otter, which was then reprinted as part of the aforementioned Castle of Days volume. In Helioscope, Wolfe describes the genesis of The Book of the New Sun, which is set in a "medieval" society on a far-future Earth:
The challenge to science fiction today is not to describe a slightly hyped-up present, but a real future- a time radically unlike the present, that is. Clearly , there are more than one of these futures, there is the future in which mankind returns to the sea for new sources of food and raw materials. There is the future of extermination. I decided that the future most in keeping with the dark figure I had planned and his journey toward war was what I call the do nothing future, the one in which humanity clings to its old home, the continents of Earth, and waits for the money to run out(emphasis mine).
As Thom Hartmann so poetically put it in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, fossil fuels capture millions of years of carbon produced through photosynthesis- a "bank account" that we continue to squander, when we should be using it as "start-up capital" for the production of renewable energy sources. The President had a real opportunity to eschew the talking points of the do nothing crowd, and issue a genuine call to action, but he blew it. I think I'll leave it at that, before I spin out a rambling rant about how algae is going to save the world.
John Parker crossed to the window and stared at the dark sky beyond the glass. "That's coal smoke, the technology of the Nineteenth Century brought into the Twenty-First and hard at work. They could have conquered the solar system and harnessed the sun, but they did this instead, because there was no fun involved. Their great-grandfathers had done it, and they knew it would work."
This was written in 1980, after a decade marked with energy crises. Thirty years later, what has been accomplished in updating our energy policies? Precious little, as we loony lefties all know. It's been decades of tax policies encouraging the purchase of gas guzzlers, "Nuke their ass, take their gas", and missed opportunities for promoting conservation.
Also in 1980, Gene Wolfe wrote the essay Helioscope as a companion to the first volume of his haunting, masterful Book of the New Sun. Uh... **SPOILERS** follow here, so anybody unfamiliar with BotNS, go out, purchase, read it, become totally addicted to the work, and come back in a couple of months, armed to the teeth with in-jokes about "alzabos" and "cacogens". The essay was included in the book Castle of the Otter, which was then reprinted as part of the aforementioned Castle of Days volume. In Helioscope, Wolfe describes the genesis of The Book of the New Sun, which is set in a "medieval" society on a far-future Earth:
The challenge to science fiction today is not to describe a slightly hyped-up present, but a real future- a time radically unlike the present, that is. Clearly , there are more than one of these futures, there is the future in which mankind returns to the sea for new sources of food and raw materials. There is the future of extermination. I decided that the future most in keeping with the dark figure I had planned and his journey toward war was what I call the do nothing future, the one in which humanity clings to its old home, the continents of Earth, and waits for the money to run out(emphasis mine).
As Thom Hartmann so poetically put it in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, fossil fuels capture millions of years of carbon produced through photosynthesis- a "bank account" that we continue to squander, when we should be using it as "start-up capital" for the production of renewable energy sources. The President had a real opportunity to eschew the talking points of the do nothing crowd, and issue a genuine call to action, but he blew it. I think I'll leave it at that, before I spin out a rambling rant about how algae is going to save the world.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Short Observations
The usual suspects are prattling on about how President Obama's nuclear arms reduction proposal is going to make the United States less safe. All I have to say about this is that it's a relief that one does not talk of the Bush "Family Atomics" anymore.
In light of the latest in a string of coal mining disasters, coal is a pretty damn bad base upon which to build an energy policy, but it does make for a damn fine pizza (Thunder's gonna be jealous). How about a sane energy policy, and a non-predatory jobs program for Appalachia, so coal mining can become a safely run "boutique" industry to support a handful of pizzerias?
For the second day in a row, it's pushing 80F in April... where are all the people who were "Dur hur"-ing about the snow a month ago?
In light of the latest in a string of coal mining disasters, coal is a pretty damn bad base upon which to build an energy policy, but it does make for a damn fine pizza (Thunder's gonna be jealous). How about a sane energy policy, and a non-predatory jobs program for Appalachia, so coal mining can become a safely run "boutique" industry to support a handful of pizzerias?
For the second day in a row, it's pushing 80F in April... where are all the people who were "Dur hur"-ing about the snow a month ago?
Friday, September 14, 2018
Florence and the Rain Machine
I've been periodically checking in on the progress of Hurricane Florence, and I am reminded of 2011's Hurricane Irene and 2012's Superstorm Sandy. Florence, like Irene, is a slow moving rain machine- while 'only' a category one hurricane at landfall, the main damage will be due to storm surge, largely an effect of the storm's 500 mile (800 kilometer) diameter, and the flooding rainfall. Here in the Northeast, Superstorm Sandy's destructive effects were due to storm surge while Irene wreaked havoc in New England due to its slow pace and heavy rains. Florence looks like it'll hit the Carolinas with a combination of both.
The real 'elephant in the room' is the development of the Outer Banks, the barrier islands along the North Carolina coast, which are being inundated, and other low-lying coastal areas. Even under the best conditions, barrier islands are ephemeral- they go, move, shift with the currents. I'm not a big Bible reader, but there's something to be said about not building a house on a foundation of sand.
To compound the dangers of flooding, North Carolina is infamous for its pig manure lagoons which, if flooding causes them to overtop their 'banks', will contaminate rivers and groundwater before the fecal flood pollutes the coastal waters, possibly causing algal blooms and sea life die-off. Even worse than the pigshit is the coal ash from power plants, which contains heavy metals, which are even worse than fecal coliforms. I'm of the opinion that a 'war on coal' is a good thing, but I'm one of those 'nanny state' regulation junkies.
One concern that I have is that the coastal devastation in the wake of Florence will result in an orgy of Disaster Capitalism. One particularly vulnerable population is the Gullah Geechee community of the low country and offshore islands, who have largely preserved their African heritage through the centuries. The Gullah Geechee are already beleaguered by global warming and predatory developers, and a destructive storm might be the factor which pushes them over the edge.
At any rate, I have a suspicion that Florence will be another unmitigated disaster, partly due to Trumpian incompetence, partly due to rapacious disaster capitalism.
Post title taken from one of contemporary pop music's most dramatic performers...
The real 'elephant in the room' is the development of the Outer Banks, the barrier islands along the North Carolina coast, which are being inundated, and other low-lying coastal areas. Even under the best conditions, barrier islands are ephemeral- they go, move, shift with the currents. I'm not a big Bible reader, but there's something to be said about not building a house on a foundation of sand.
To compound the dangers of flooding, North Carolina is infamous for its pig manure lagoons which, if flooding causes them to overtop their 'banks', will contaminate rivers and groundwater before the fecal flood pollutes the coastal waters, possibly causing algal blooms and sea life die-off. Even worse than the pigshit is the coal ash from power plants, which contains heavy metals, which are even worse than fecal coliforms. I'm of the opinion that a 'war on coal' is a good thing, but I'm one of those 'nanny state' regulation junkies.
One concern that I have is that the coastal devastation in the wake of Florence will result in an orgy of Disaster Capitalism. One particularly vulnerable population is the Gullah Geechee community of the low country and offshore islands, who have largely preserved their African heritage through the centuries. The Gullah Geechee are already beleaguered by global warming and predatory developers, and a destructive storm might be the factor which pushes them over the edge.
At any rate, I have a suspicion that Florence will be another unmitigated disaster, partly due to Trumpian incompetence, partly due to rapacious disaster capitalism.
Post title taken from one of contemporary pop music's most dramatic performers...
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
We'll Always Have Paris?
Being both interested in science and an outdoorsy person, I write about climate change quite a bit. Put succinctly, I am convinced that it is real, it is anthropogenic, and it is dangerous. With Vulgarmort expected to pull out of the Paris climate accord, I am pig-biting mad. Even most large U.S. corporations currently support the Paris accord.
Worldwide, the prices of renewable energy resources are lowering- in India, the price of solar generation is now undercutting the price of fossil-fuel generation. The prospect of lowering humanity's carbon footprint is becoming more and more likely with technological innovations. Meanwhile, Tweety Amin has made the renewal of the coal industry in the US a plank in his platform, even though that will never happen given the low price of natural gas (which, while better than coal, should be phased out as well).
Now is not the time to double down on propping up the fossil fuel industry- we need a 21st Century energy policy, not a 19th Century one... By pulling out of the Paris accord, the United States will cede political, technological, economic, and even moral power to other powers, be they the European Union or China. The only beneficiaries of such a policy change would be the fossil fuel oligarchs and their pet politicians.
In Switzerland, the first commercial atmospheric carbon capture plant just opened. There is an entire family of industries that can be developed to mitigate the climate change conundrum- it just requires political will and proper funding priorities to make it happen... and I don't think that the United States will be at the forefront of this revolution. The plane won't leave the ground, because we won't always have Paris:
The irony here is that even the oligarchs would benefit in the long-term by dropping their short-sightedness and reactionary politics.
UPDATE: Tengrain's take is that Trump wants to pull out of the Paris climate agreement in order to help Russia's petrochemical industry- I guess Moscow grifting Trump's Paris activism.
Worldwide, the prices of renewable energy resources are lowering- in India, the price of solar generation is now undercutting the price of fossil-fuel generation. The prospect of lowering humanity's carbon footprint is becoming more and more likely with technological innovations. Meanwhile, Tweety Amin has made the renewal of the coal industry in the US a plank in his platform, even though that will never happen given the low price of natural gas (which, while better than coal, should be phased out as well).
Now is not the time to double down on propping up the fossil fuel industry- we need a 21st Century energy policy, not a 19th Century one... By pulling out of the Paris accord, the United States will cede political, technological, economic, and even moral power to other powers, be they the European Union or China. The only beneficiaries of such a policy change would be the fossil fuel oligarchs and their pet politicians.
In Switzerland, the first commercial atmospheric carbon capture plant just opened. There is an entire family of industries that can be developed to mitigate the climate change conundrum- it just requires political will and proper funding priorities to make it happen... and I don't think that the United States will be at the forefront of this revolution. The plane won't leave the ground, because we won't always have Paris:
The irony here is that even the oligarchs would benefit in the long-term by dropping their short-sightedness and reactionary politics.
UPDATE: Tengrain's take is that Trump wants to pull out of the Paris climate agreement in order to help Russia's petrochemical industry- I guess Moscow grifting Trump's Paris activism.
Thursday, June 27, 2013
CliMEHt Action
I finally got around to listening to President Obama's speech on climate change, a most appropriate activity when there's a tornado watch in one's neighboring state. All-in-all, it was an okay speech, but, like a lot of Obama's proposals, my reaction to it is one big "MEH". There is some evidence that the president's position, like his position on same-sex marriage, has evolved- he's no longer talking about clean coal, except in rare cases:
Today, I'm calling for an end of public financing for new coal plants overseas -- unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies, or there's no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity. And I urge other countries to join this effort.
My big problem with the speech is that the president lends too much credence to the notion that natural gas is a viable "medium term" solution to our energy needs:
Now, even as we’re producing more domestic oil, we’re also producing more cleaner-burning natural gas than any other country on Earth. And, again, sometimes there are disputes about natural gas, but let me say this: We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions.
Federally supported technology has helped our businesses drill more effectively and extract more gas. And now, we'll keep working with the industry to make drilling safer and cleaner, to make sure that we're not seeing methane emissions, and to put people to work modernizing our natural gas infrastructure so that we can power more homes and businesses with cleaner energy.
Of course, natural gas extraction is extremely hazardous to groundwater supplies, a fact that even the mainstream press is beginning to report. At least the president merely views natural gas as a "transition" fuel, though my opinion is that it is a dangerous distraction from the development of real alternatives such as wind and solar power:
The bottom line is natural gas is creating jobs. It's lowering many families' heat and power bills. And it's the transition fuel that can power our economy with less carbon pollution even as our businesses work to develop and then deploy more of the technology required for the even cleaner energy economy of the future.
At least the president's stated devotion to wind and solar power is admirable:
And that brings me to the second way that we're going to reduce carbon pollution -- by using more clean energy. Over the past four years, we've doubled the electricity that we generate from zero-carbon wind and solar power. And that means jobs -- jobs manufacturing the wind turbines that now generate enough electricity to power nearly 15 million homes; jobs installing the solar panels that now generate more than four times the power at less cost than just a few years ago.
I know some Republicans in Washington dismiss these jobs, but those who do need to call home -- because 75 percent of all wind energy in this country is generated in Republican districts. And that may explain why last year, Republican governors in Kansas and Oklahoma and Iowa -- Iowa, by the way, a state that harnesses almost 25 percent of its electricity from the wind -- helped us in the fight to extend tax credits for wind energy manufacturers and producers. Tens of thousands good jobs were on the line, and those jobs were worth the fight.
As is his commitment to providing clean energy solutions to developing nations:
Though all America's carbon pollution fell last year, global carbon pollution rose to a record high. That’s a problem. Developing countries are using more and more energy, and tens of millions of people entering a global middle class naturally want to buy cars and air-conditioners of their own, just like us. Can't blame them for that. And when you have conversations with poor countries, they'll say, well, you went through these stages of development -- why can't we?
But what we also have to recognize is these same countries are also more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than we are. They don’t just have as much to lose, they probably have more to lose.
Developing nations with some of the fastest-rising levels of carbon pollution are going to have to take action to meet this challenge alongside us. They're watching what we do, but we've got to make sure that they're stepping up to the plate as well. We compete for business with them, but we also share a planet. And we have to all shoulder the responsibility for keeping the planet habitable, or we're going to suffer the consequences -- together.
So to help more countries transitioning to cleaner sources of energy and to help them do it faster, we're going to partner with our private sector to apply private sector technological know-how in countries that transition to natural gas. We’ve mobilized billions of dollars in private capital for clean energy projects around the world.
Of course, the president's proposal to use executive orders to reduce carbon emissions is a good thing, and it pisses off Republicans. All-in-all, it was a pretty good speech, but I just can't get overly excited by it- the president's approval of natural gas as a stop-gap solution rankles, and I'm not the only one to be less-than-satisfied. The president's plan, like his healthcare plan, seems just a little too close to a plan proposed by a right-winger who stands to gain millions from its implementation. Just once, I'd love to see President Obama play the socialist firebrand his opponents portray him to be.
Oh, well, I knew power plants fueled by sparkly unicorn poop were too good to be true.
Cross-posted at Rumproast.
Today, I'm calling for an end of public financing for new coal plants overseas -- unless they deploy carbon-capture technologies, or there's no other viable way for the poorest countries to generate electricity. And I urge other countries to join this effort.
My big problem with the speech is that the president lends too much credence to the notion that natural gas is a viable "medium term" solution to our energy needs:
Now, even as we’re producing more domestic oil, we’re also producing more cleaner-burning natural gas than any other country on Earth. And, again, sometimes there are disputes about natural gas, but let me say this: We should strengthen our position as the top natural gas producer because, in the medium term at least, it not only can provide safe, cheap power, but it can also help reduce our carbon emissions.
Federally supported technology has helped our businesses drill more effectively and extract more gas. And now, we'll keep working with the industry to make drilling safer and cleaner, to make sure that we're not seeing methane emissions, and to put people to work modernizing our natural gas infrastructure so that we can power more homes and businesses with cleaner energy.
Of course, natural gas extraction is extremely hazardous to groundwater supplies, a fact that even the mainstream press is beginning to report. At least the president merely views natural gas as a "transition" fuel, though my opinion is that it is a dangerous distraction from the development of real alternatives such as wind and solar power:
The bottom line is natural gas is creating jobs. It's lowering many families' heat and power bills. And it's the transition fuel that can power our economy with less carbon pollution even as our businesses work to develop and then deploy more of the technology required for the even cleaner energy economy of the future.
At least the president's stated devotion to wind and solar power is admirable:
And that brings me to the second way that we're going to reduce carbon pollution -- by using more clean energy. Over the past four years, we've doubled the electricity that we generate from zero-carbon wind and solar power. And that means jobs -- jobs manufacturing the wind turbines that now generate enough electricity to power nearly 15 million homes; jobs installing the solar panels that now generate more than four times the power at less cost than just a few years ago.
I know some Republicans in Washington dismiss these jobs, but those who do need to call home -- because 75 percent of all wind energy in this country is generated in Republican districts. And that may explain why last year, Republican governors in Kansas and Oklahoma and Iowa -- Iowa, by the way, a state that harnesses almost 25 percent of its electricity from the wind -- helped us in the fight to extend tax credits for wind energy manufacturers and producers. Tens of thousands good jobs were on the line, and those jobs were worth the fight.
As is his commitment to providing clean energy solutions to developing nations:
Though all America's carbon pollution fell last year, global carbon pollution rose to a record high. That’s a problem. Developing countries are using more and more energy, and tens of millions of people entering a global middle class naturally want to buy cars and air-conditioners of their own, just like us. Can't blame them for that. And when you have conversations with poor countries, they'll say, well, you went through these stages of development -- why can't we?
But what we also have to recognize is these same countries are also more vulnerable to the effects of climate change than we are. They don’t just have as much to lose, they probably have more to lose.
Developing nations with some of the fastest-rising levels of carbon pollution are going to have to take action to meet this challenge alongside us. They're watching what we do, but we've got to make sure that they're stepping up to the plate as well. We compete for business with them, but we also share a planet. And we have to all shoulder the responsibility for keeping the planet habitable, or we're going to suffer the consequences -- together.
So to help more countries transitioning to cleaner sources of energy and to help them do it faster, we're going to partner with our private sector to apply private sector technological know-how in countries that transition to natural gas. We’ve mobilized billions of dollars in private capital for clean energy projects around the world.
Of course, the president's proposal to use executive orders to reduce carbon emissions is a good thing, and it pisses off Republicans. All-in-all, it was a pretty good speech, but I just can't get overly excited by it- the president's approval of natural gas as a stop-gap solution rankles, and I'm not the only one to be less-than-satisfied. The president's plan, like his healthcare plan, seems just a little too close to a plan proposed by a right-winger who stands to gain millions from its implementation. Just once, I'd love to see President Obama play the socialist firebrand his opponents portray him to be.
Oh, well, I knew power plants fueled by sparkly unicorn poop were too good to be true.
Cross-posted at Rumproast.
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Short Shoveling
It's warmed up considerably this week, so I decided to put on a pair of gym shorts and go out to break up some of the larger piles of snow that have accumulated on the local streets. By breaking up the piles and exposing more of the pavement, I'm decreasing the albedo effect, creating better conditions for further melting. I've had enough of cruising around the neighborhood at 4:30AM looking for a parking spot, or parking on the street by the local school and getting up after two and a half hours of sleep in order to move the car before the 8AM no parking hours.
I typically use a coal shovel for this work (I keep one in the car throughout the winter, you never know when you're going to have to hit someone with a shovel), it is better at chopping ice than a snow shovel. Besides, I don't have anything to prove, so I prefer a "less weight, more reps" approach to shoveling. I also have a snow shovel handy so I can slide the piles of snow around the pavement to speed up melting.
Like I did in yesterday's post, I'm going to crib another of Thunder's categories, specifically "My Left Foot", which I suspect he cribbed from Christy Brown:
In the background, you can see my trusty coal shovel, used as an improvised hanger for my trusty plaid shirt, which I took off because it was warm enough to do without. In the course of my shoveling I cleared out two parking spots, which is important because my mom is coming up to visit for a week or so!!!!!
I typically use a coal shovel for this work (I keep one in the car throughout the winter, you never know when you're going to have to hit someone with a shovel), it is better at chopping ice than a snow shovel. Besides, I don't have anything to prove, so I prefer a "less weight, more reps" approach to shoveling. I also have a snow shovel handy so I can slide the piles of snow around the pavement to speed up melting.
Like I did in yesterday's post, I'm going to crib another of Thunder's categories, specifically "My Left Foot", which I suspect he cribbed from Christy Brown:
In the background, you can see my trusty coal shovel, used as an improvised hanger for my trusty plaid shirt, which I took off because it was warm enough to do without. In the course of my shoveling I cleared out two parking spots, which is important because my mom is coming up to visit for a week or so!!!!!
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Requesting a Mulligan
So, the recall efforts that are sweeping Wisconsin are now being proposed in Ohio and Michigan. Even if these efforts are successful, there have been months of lost opportunity- jobs that could have been created, infrastructure improvements that could have been made, thousands of hours of human effort and hundreds of thousands of dollars directed toward rectifying the mistakes made in November. A "do-over" doesn't set back the clock, doesn't make up for the fact that the second decade of the 21st Century is shaping up to be just like the "Noughts"- more lost opportunities at a time when the human species really needs to get its act together to prevent a mitigate the coming multi-generational shitstorm.
I laud the recall efforts, but where the hell was everybody back in November? I don't want to beat up on Midwesterners (hell, John Hall was defeated by a GOPer a couple of districts north of mine), but it's long past due that the decent white working folks of the Heartland realize that blacks and Hispanics are the canaries in the societal coal mine- when they are being systematically beaten down, the average working stiff will soon be receiving the same treatment. Please, Heartlanders, don't get fooled again.
UPDATE: Substituted one infinitive to reflect a morepessimistic realistic view of the situation.
SECOND UPDATE: This post may make me come across as dickish, and a holier-than-thou East Coast Elitist, but I'll own the dickishness, and chalk it up to a real sense of frustration. I genuinely hope that the recall efforts succeed, and I sincerely hope that this is a wake-up call for everybody who's not a millionaire or a religious fundamentalist, everywhere in the country.
THIRD UPDATE: Speaking of mulligans, I wish I had written "peevish and peen-ish" instead of "dickish" in my second update.
I laud the recall efforts, but where the hell was everybody back in November? I don't want to beat up on Midwesterners (hell, John Hall was defeated by a GOPer a couple of districts north of mine), but it's long past due that the decent white working folks of the Heartland realize that blacks and Hispanics are the canaries in the societal coal mine- when they are being systematically beaten down, the average working stiff will soon be receiving the same treatment. Please, Heartlanders, don't get fooled again.
UPDATE: Substituted one infinitive to reflect a more
SECOND UPDATE: This post may make me come across as dickish, and a holier-than-thou East Coast Elitist, but I'll own the dickishness, and chalk it up to a real sense of frustration. I genuinely hope that the recall efforts succeed, and I sincerely hope that this is a wake-up call for everybody who's not a millionaire or a religious fundamentalist, everywhere in the country.
THIRD UPDATE: Speaking of mulligans, I wish I had written "peevish and peen-ish" instead of "dickish" in my second update.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Decades of Lies and Obfuscation
Finally, evidence of something that all of us knew- Exxon executives knew that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas since the early 80s. Think of all of the progress in alternative and renewable energy sources that could have been made in three decades, using the money that Exxon and the other fossil fuel businesses used to fund climate change denialism, not to mention all of the money and (more importantly) lives thrown away in order to secure or steal fossil fuel sources.
Three decades of lost ground, lost momentum, and lost lives... let that sink in for a brief moment. Three decades of knowingly committing Gaiacide. I have often likened fossil fuels to "startup capital" to be used to kick off a mature energy economy based on a variety of safer renewable energy sources, but the short-term profits of the fossil fuel companies have long trumped the prospects of long-term human survival.
It's obvious that the oil and coal companies knew that continued burning of fossil fuels would be a problem, just like it's obvious that the tobacco companies knew that smoking caused lung cancer, it's pretty appalling to finally see one of the "smoking guns" exposed.
Three decades of lost ground, lost momentum, and lost lives... let that sink in for a brief moment. Three decades of knowingly committing Gaiacide. I have often likened fossil fuels to "startup capital" to be used to kick off a mature energy economy based on a variety of safer renewable energy sources, but the short-term profits of the fossil fuel companies have long trumped the prospects of long-term human survival.
It's obvious that the oil and coal companies knew that continued burning of fossil fuels would be a problem, just like it's obvious that the tobacco companies knew that smoking caused lung cancer, it's pretty appalling to finally see one of the "smoking guns" exposed.
Friday, February 3, 2017
Two Weeks In
Two weeks into the Trump/GOP maladministration, and quite a lot has been accomplished... an unconstitutional ban on travelers that has caused the revocation of tens of thousands of visas, nan 'unpresidented' hostility between the U.S. and Australia, a European Union that considers the POTUS a threat, the obliteration of rules meant to prevent the dumping of coal waste into streams, and got rid of rules which were meant to keep firearms out of the hands of certain mentally ill persons. He also gutted reductions in mortgage premiums and is in the process of deregulating the financial industry, including the axing of rules that would force financial institutions to act in their clients' interest.
I can feel the greatness returning to America!
I can feel the greatness returning to America!
Sunday, July 2, 2017
Mars Needs Women Sanity
Wow, there are a couple of 'cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs' stories regarding the Red Planet lately- the first is that the main purveyor of lunatic fringe right wing buffoonery has featured a guest who claims that there is a pedophile ring on Mars, claims the resulted in a response from NASA to the contrary. For the record, the purveyors of this lunacy received White House press credentials from Vulgarmort. I know I've posted the Dead Milkmen song Stuart on numerous occasions, but this 1988 release perfectly encapsulates the lunatic-right worldview:
It's appalling to see how 'normalized' this sort of idiocy has become... far from a small operation based from a P.O. Box in Pueblo, Colorado, this shit is now big business.
The other whacko story is the President stating that he wants to land a human on Mars within his first term, probably using a coal-powered spacecraft. This stated goal doesn't mesh with Trump's general attitude toward science and education.
If Trump does decide to land humans on Mars, I suggest that he starts by sending a corps of right-wing conspiracy theorists to investigate the Martian pedophile ring- these people did such a bang-up job at Comet Ping Pong.
The post-title riffs off of this piece of glorious Sci-Fi cheese, which starred the dear, departed Yvonne Craig:
The movie inspired a gloriously cheesy 1980s song of the same title by Peter Wolf:
The movie also inspired the Hoodoo Gurus' song Mars Needs Guitars, a personal Bastard favorite:
Anyway, I wouldn't mind seeing Trump sending an 'Ark B' to Mars... it's not like anybody needs a telephone sanitizer anymore.
It's appalling to see how 'normalized' this sort of idiocy has become... far from a small operation based from a P.O. Box in Pueblo, Colorado, this shit is now big business.
The other whacko story is the President stating that he wants to land a human on Mars within his first term, probably using a coal-powered spacecraft. This stated goal doesn't mesh with Trump's general attitude toward science and education.
If Trump does decide to land humans on Mars, I suggest that he starts by sending a corps of right-wing conspiracy theorists to investigate the Martian pedophile ring- these people did such a bang-up job at Comet Ping Pong.
The post-title riffs off of this piece of glorious Sci-Fi cheese, which starred the dear, departed Yvonne Craig:
The movie inspired a gloriously cheesy 1980s song of the same title by Peter Wolf:
The movie also inspired the Hoodoo Gurus' song Mars Needs Guitars, a personal Bastard favorite:
Anyway, I wouldn't mind seeing Trump sending an 'Ark B' to Mars... it's not like anybody needs a telephone sanitizer anymore.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Yet Again!
Once again, it's snowing here in the NY Metro area. We're expected to get anywhere from one to six inches of snow, dependent on one's proximity to the coast. Already, the accumulated snow is knee high. At least the fresh snow is covering up the gray, sooty piles of snow by the sides of the roads. As always, the workplace looks gorgeous:
With all of the thawing and freezing, there are some large icicles onsite- this one is almost two feet long:
The snow on site has accumulated to knee-depth in general, with higher drifts:
Of course, some of my coworkers aren't very keen on the snow, much preferring a perch atop a radiator cover:
Some are even desperate enough to squeeze into a tight spot between a radiator cover and a counter:
I'll probably cool my heels at my workplace until the rush hour traffic subsides, having an aversion to driving among knuckleheads who don't clean their cars off thoroughly and don't know how to drive properly in adverse conditions. My new car handles really well in the snow- I haven't even had problems getting into and out of parking spots. There is quite an accumulation of snow in my typical parking spot, but stick shift makes parking easy- I get up a nice "head of steam" while the car is in second gear, and "hop" atop the snow pile. On a couple of occasions, I've had to do some digging in order to exit my spot... I always keep a small coal shovel in the back of the car for this purpose. It's a lot easier to dig with a nice steel shovel than with a big plastic thing that's meant to push the snow around like a miniature snowplow.
With all of the thawing and freezing, there are some large icicles onsite- this one is almost two feet long:
The snow on site has accumulated to knee-depth in general, with higher drifts:
Of course, some of my coworkers aren't very keen on the snow, much preferring a perch atop a radiator cover:
Some are even desperate enough to squeeze into a tight spot between a radiator cover and a counter:
I'll probably cool my heels at my workplace until the rush hour traffic subsides, having an aversion to driving among knuckleheads who don't clean their cars off thoroughly and don't know how to drive properly in adverse conditions. My new car handles really well in the snow- I haven't even had problems getting into and out of parking spots. There is quite an accumulation of snow in my typical parking spot, but stick shift makes parking easy- I get up a nice "head of steam" while the car is in second gear, and "hop" atop the snow pile. On a couple of occasions, I've had to do some digging in order to exit my spot... I always keep a small coal shovel in the back of the car for this purpose. It's a lot easier to dig with a nice steel shovel than with a big plastic thing that's meant to push the snow around like a miniature snowplow.
Monday, December 21, 2020
Not a Christmas Present Anybody Would Want
Via Tengrain, we have the disconcerting tale of Christmas travel during this plague year. It's possible that the recent spike in COVID-19 cases resulted from Thanksgiving travel, so an uptick in travel mere weeks before a major vaccine rollout seems ill-advised. In speaking with my mother, I put it this way, "Hold out for Easter." Giving the 'rona as a Christmas present just when there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel seems ghoulish, a wicked twist out of a 'Twilight Zone' episode, albeit a stupid one.
Tengrain, being a snarky fellow, put it in snarky terms, the only appropriate terms for this tragifarcical age we live in: Gonna make “Grandma Got Run-Over By A Reindeer” look like a matinee as the nation’s MeMaws all keel over dead by new years eve.
The appropriate response is, you got it, snarky:
Grandma got infected by the 'rona,
At the family dinner Christmas Eve
Cousin Rudy don't believe in masking,
And wipes his goddamn boogers on his sleeve.
These people really deserve to get coal in their stockings. Can't they defer their gratification by a mere three or four months?
Wednesday, August 29, 2018
Secret Science Club Post-Lecture Recap: Vampire Hell Ants of the Cretaceous
Last night, I headed down to the beautiful Bell House, in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn, for this month's Secret Science Club lecture featuring paleontologist and entomologist Dr Phillip Barden of the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the American Museum of Natural History. Dr Barden specializes in the study of fossils of social insects such as termites and ants.
Dr Barden began his lecture with a short definition of paleontology. Paleontologists ask two main questions: What is the history of life on Earth? How does evolution work? Paleontologists study finite events, such as the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Life on Earth is 3.7 billion years old, with humans occupying a miniscule span of time. Most life is extinct, almost everything that has ever lived is now dead. Dr Barden asked the audience to picture a fossil, immediately following this up with the admonition that not every fossil is dinosaur remains. Some of the most famous non-dinosaur fossils are trilobite and ammonite fossils. There are also environmental remains of organisms, such as footprints. His concentration is the study of fossil insects.
Eighty percent of animal species are insects, While dinosaurs, being charismatic megafauna, attract most of the public's attention, there are spectacular insect fossils, such as that of Meganeura, a dragonfly-esque creature with a wingspan attaining over two feet which hunted in the Carboniferous skies, which had a higher oxygen content than our modern atmosphere- insects breath through treachea, so the surface area of these tubes limit body size. Dr Barden also displayed a fossil of a Jurassic Era lacewing which resembled a butterfly.
The best-preserved insect fossils are encased in amber, fossilized tree resin (NOT SAP!). Resin is secreted when a tree is injured, forming 'scabs' in which organisms can be trapped. When subjected to heat and pressure through geological processes, it becomes polymerized- Dr Barden joked that amber is 'OG Plastic'. Amber, known to the ancient Greeks as 'elektros', produces electric sparks when rubbed. Insects trapped in amber are preserved in three dimensions. Dr Barden accompanied this portion of the lecture with gorgeous photographs of amber-trapped insects, such as two ants trapped in amber while fighting (evidence of a social structure).
Amber is distributed worldwide, with particularly nice Cretaceous amber being found in New Jersey. Dr Barden showed us photos of various amber sources, such as an amber deposit in a Gujarati lignite mine (the remains of a forest compacted and rendered into coal), excavated amber mines in the Dominican Republic, and Baltic amber which is typically found on beaches or 'fished' from the sea. Amber is often fashioned into jewelry, sometimes including fossilized animal remains.
Dr Barden then showed us the 'Mr DNA' clip (though not the Mr DNA you were thinking of) from Jurassic Park, noting that the stand-in for the giant prehistoric mosquito in the amber walkingstick ornament is actually a crane fly and chiding anyone who killed a harmless crane fly as a 'giant mosquito'):
Dr Barden noted that the book Jurassic Park was released in 1990, and that in 1992, it was reported that DNA was extracted from an Oligo-Miocene termite, but that this study posed a problem of reproducibility. DNA from bones has a half-life of 521 years and that new techniques for DNA extraction are constantly sought.
Dr Barden continued to display images of amber encased animal remains, such as a thumb-sized, feathered dinosaur tail found in Myanmar, a tick attached to a dinosaur feather, and an ant queen (the wings identify it as such) transporting a symbiotic mealybug in her mandibles- mealybugs excrete honeydew, which ants consume. Another fossil was that of a lacewing larva with spines for collecting camouflaging detritus. Dr Barden noted that there are about as many ant fossils as there are dinosaur fossils, but that only he and a French paleontologists are studying them- he joked that his job prospects are good. Among these fossil ants was one the size of a hummingbird.
Dr Barden stated that the oldest ants were not like was expected- early ants were thought to be wasplike, having similar body plans. The oldest ants discovered were more like basal Hymenoptera than wasps, with the similarities in body resulting from adaptive radiation.
Dr Barden conducted 3D imaging of ant fossils at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, fluorescing specimens while rotating them to provide the three-dimensional images. He joked that he was the guy putting bugs in the machine. As a comedic aside, he displayed a stupid tweet by a Kardashian: Do ants have dicks? He then displayed a photo of a drone ant fossilized in amber, then zoomed in, showing us a dick pic of a 20 million year old ant.
The topic of the lecture then shifted to the vampire hell ants of the post title. Haidomyrmex scimitarus was a Cretaceous Era ant found in an amber deposit in Myanmar. A detailed reconstruction using animations based off CT scans of this ant suggested that it used its mandibles to impale other insects, and grooves in the mouthparts hint that these ants consumed the hemolymph of the impaled. Dibs on "Hemolymph of the Impaled" for the name of my Doom Metal band. The queen ant was found outside of the nest, and lacked fat storage, indicating that the queen had to forage like a common worker. The generic name Haidomyrmex is a combination of 'Hades' and the Greek term for 'ant', so Dr Barden decided to make 'Hell Ant' the popular term for these insects- he asked the audience members to 'hashtag' #hellant. Another similar 'hell ant', Ceratomyrmex had a horn as well as the impaling jaws. Then, a scan of an ant dubbed Linguamyrmex vladi revealed that the horn was so dense as to suggest that the horn contained sequestered metal, leading to such lurid headlines as: 'Meet the vampire ant from hell with huge jaws and a metal horn.' Dr Braden then displayed a succession of increasingly lurid and 'clickbaity' headlines about this ant. The good doctor then displayed an articulated model of this ant's head, about the size of an American football.
The hell ants thrived for about twenty-million years, during the Cretaceous Era. It is not known what happened to this diverse clade of ants. The earliest ants were social, there is evidence of different specialized castes among early ants. About fifty million years ago, ants became more abundant, ants now currently compose 50-80% of insects in tropical tree communities. The hell ants don't seem to have been all that ecologically impactful. There are many Cretaceous ant fossils. There is a gap in the fossil record until the Eocene, a sort of 'black box' from which only modern ants emerge, while having diverse behaviors, extant ants have similar body forms. Divergent forms, such as the hell ants, disappeared. Dr Braden likened this emergence from a 'black box' to the K-T extinction event, from which one lineage of dinosaurs, the birds, emerged.
Dr Barden posed a question: Does extinction mean failure? He displayed a picture of the thylacine, a wolf-shaped marsupial that was killed off by humans (as an aside, I am obliged to plug SSC goddess Margaret Mittelbach's Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger, co-written with SSC alum Michael Crewdson- it's a great book by good friends, a funny, sad, and informative read). Dr Barden offered his three measures of evolutionary success: Diversity of species (beetles, with over 350,000 species, are very successful), Ecological Impact (South African harvester ant foraging territories can be seen in satellite images, such is their ability to reshape their environment), and Longevity (Neandertals were around for 430,000 years while modern Homo sapiens has been around for about 300,000 years). Certain taxons were extremely successful- about twenty thousand trilobite species are known, which indicates that there were probably many more. The impact of the dinosaurs on other evolutionary lineages is difficult to understate. The hell ants were around for about twenty-one million years, great apes a mere eight million. We only see about .01, much of the evolutionary legacy is hidden.
The lecture was followed by a Q&A session, as always. The first question regarded the phenotype of the hell ants- the 'archtecture' of the hell ant lineage has been lost, no traces last into modern ant lineages. The next question was, why did the hell ants go extinct? While this is unknown, it could be that their social structure was outcompeted by the social structure of modern ants which supplanted them. Perhaps the hell ants were 'painted into a corner' evolutionarily. Another question regarded evidence of the large structures which ants and termites build- fossil remains of these structures have been found, and Dr Barden likened this evidence to an 'extended phenotype' which provides clues to the behavior of the insects themselves. Regarding the gaps in the fossil record, new amber deposits have been found in Alaska and compression fossils have been found in Alberta- gradually, the 'black box' is being filled in. Regarding the half life of DNA, while DNA sequences degrade, partial genomes provide information valuable to researchers. Some Bastard in the audience asked about molecular evidence from insects trapped in amber- can inferences be made about pigmentation or the composition of venoms? Dr Barden noted that coloration is often preserved in amber, and stingers are often present in fossil insects, but no molecular structures for pigments or poisons have been found. Regarding prey items of hell ants, they have been found in association with a larva of an insect and a cockroach like insect. The musculature of an insect, useful in computer modelling, can be inferred from bulges in the interior of the exoskeleton, to which muscles, inside the skeleton, are attached. Regarding the caste system of social insects, insects from the same species have the same genome but different gene expression- while a worker has a lifespan of 1-3 years, a queen may live as long as twenty years- transcriptomes play a role in this sort of development. The earliest known modern style ant dates back to the Cretaceous, about ninety-two million years ago, and was found in New Jersey- the lineage probably split off from other ant lineages about 120 million years ago. Finally, asked about his application of the species concept, Dr Barden indicated that, due to the nature of his work, he applied the paleontological species concept, largely working off whether specimens look similar or different.
Once again, the Secret Science Club delivered a fantastic lecture. I make no bones about loving the life sciences the most, so this lecture was right up my alley, or allele... Dr Barden hit what I call the 'Secret Science Sweet Spot'- the lecture was specific, extremely informative about recent discoveries, accompanied by gorgeous images of fossils, and leavened with humor. I call it a grand slam. Kudos to Dr Barden, the staff of the Beautiful Bell House, and Margaret and Dorian for another great monthly event. It was also great to see both the NJIT 'swarm lab' crowd with Dr Garnier and the AMNH crowd, represented by Dr Hekkala and her husband, in attendance. High fives to everyone!
Poking around the t00bz, I found a fun video of Dr Barden giving a tour of the AMNH insect collections to a budding young entomologist:
I only have one quibble, and that's because bugs suck. The video, however, is great. Pour yourself a nice beverage, and watch two cool young dudes talk about SCIENCE!
Dr Barden began his lecture with a short definition of paleontology. Paleontologists ask two main questions: What is the history of life on Earth? How does evolution work? Paleontologists study finite events, such as the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Life on Earth is 3.7 billion years old, with humans occupying a miniscule span of time. Most life is extinct, almost everything that has ever lived is now dead. Dr Barden asked the audience to picture a fossil, immediately following this up with the admonition that not every fossil is dinosaur remains. Some of the most famous non-dinosaur fossils are trilobite and ammonite fossils. There are also environmental remains of organisms, such as footprints. His concentration is the study of fossil insects.
Eighty percent of animal species are insects, While dinosaurs, being charismatic megafauna, attract most of the public's attention, there are spectacular insect fossils, such as that of Meganeura, a dragonfly-esque creature with a wingspan attaining over two feet which hunted in the Carboniferous skies, which had a higher oxygen content than our modern atmosphere- insects breath through treachea, so the surface area of these tubes limit body size. Dr Barden also displayed a fossil of a Jurassic Era lacewing which resembled a butterfly.
The best-preserved insect fossils are encased in amber, fossilized tree resin (NOT SAP!). Resin is secreted when a tree is injured, forming 'scabs' in which organisms can be trapped. When subjected to heat and pressure through geological processes, it becomes polymerized- Dr Barden joked that amber is 'OG Plastic'. Amber, known to the ancient Greeks as 'elektros', produces electric sparks when rubbed. Insects trapped in amber are preserved in three dimensions. Dr Barden accompanied this portion of the lecture with gorgeous photographs of amber-trapped insects, such as two ants trapped in amber while fighting (evidence of a social structure).
Amber is distributed worldwide, with particularly nice Cretaceous amber being found in New Jersey. Dr Barden showed us photos of various amber sources, such as an amber deposit in a Gujarati lignite mine (the remains of a forest compacted and rendered into coal), excavated amber mines in the Dominican Republic, and Baltic amber which is typically found on beaches or 'fished' from the sea. Amber is often fashioned into jewelry, sometimes including fossilized animal remains.
Dr Barden then showed us the 'Mr DNA' clip (though not the Mr DNA you were thinking of) from Jurassic Park, noting that the stand-in for the giant prehistoric mosquito in the amber walkingstick ornament is actually a crane fly and chiding anyone who killed a harmless crane fly as a 'giant mosquito'):
Dr Barden noted that the book Jurassic Park was released in 1990, and that in 1992, it was reported that DNA was extracted from an Oligo-Miocene termite, but that this study posed a problem of reproducibility. DNA from bones has a half-life of 521 years and that new techniques for DNA extraction are constantly sought.
Dr Barden continued to display images of amber encased animal remains, such as a thumb-sized, feathered dinosaur tail found in Myanmar, a tick attached to a dinosaur feather, and an ant queen (the wings identify it as such) transporting a symbiotic mealybug in her mandibles- mealybugs excrete honeydew, which ants consume. Another fossil was that of a lacewing larva with spines for collecting camouflaging detritus. Dr Barden noted that there are about as many ant fossils as there are dinosaur fossils, but that only he and a French paleontologists are studying them- he joked that his job prospects are good. Among these fossil ants was one the size of a hummingbird.
Dr Barden stated that the oldest ants were not like was expected- early ants were thought to be wasplike, having similar body plans. The oldest ants discovered were more like basal Hymenoptera than wasps, with the similarities in body resulting from adaptive radiation.
Dr Barden conducted 3D imaging of ant fossils at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, fluorescing specimens while rotating them to provide the three-dimensional images. He joked that he was the guy putting bugs in the machine. As a comedic aside, he displayed a stupid tweet by a Kardashian: Do ants have dicks? He then displayed a photo of a drone ant fossilized in amber, then zoomed in, showing us a dick pic of a 20 million year old ant.
The topic of the lecture then shifted to the vampire hell ants of the post title. Haidomyrmex scimitarus was a Cretaceous Era ant found in an amber deposit in Myanmar. A detailed reconstruction using animations based off CT scans of this ant suggested that it used its mandibles to impale other insects, and grooves in the mouthparts hint that these ants consumed the hemolymph of the impaled. Dibs on "Hemolymph of the Impaled" for the name of my Doom Metal band. The queen ant was found outside of the nest, and lacked fat storage, indicating that the queen had to forage like a common worker. The generic name Haidomyrmex is a combination of 'Hades' and the Greek term for 'ant', so Dr Barden decided to make 'Hell Ant' the popular term for these insects- he asked the audience members to 'hashtag' #hellant. Another similar 'hell ant', Ceratomyrmex had a horn as well as the impaling jaws. Then, a scan of an ant dubbed Linguamyrmex vladi revealed that the horn was so dense as to suggest that the horn contained sequestered metal, leading to such lurid headlines as: 'Meet the vampire ant from hell with huge jaws and a metal horn.' Dr Braden then displayed a succession of increasingly lurid and 'clickbaity' headlines about this ant. The good doctor then displayed an articulated model of this ant's head, about the size of an American football.
The hell ants thrived for about twenty-million years, during the Cretaceous Era. It is not known what happened to this diverse clade of ants. The earliest ants were social, there is evidence of different specialized castes among early ants. About fifty million years ago, ants became more abundant, ants now currently compose 50-80% of insects in tropical tree communities. The hell ants don't seem to have been all that ecologically impactful. There are many Cretaceous ant fossils. There is a gap in the fossil record until the Eocene, a sort of 'black box' from which only modern ants emerge, while having diverse behaviors, extant ants have similar body forms. Divergent forms, such as the hell ants, disappeared. Dr Braden likened this emergence from a 'black box' to the K-T extinction event, from which one lineage of dinosaurs, the birds, emerged.
Dr Barden posed a question: Does extinction mean failure? He displayed a picture of the thylacine, a wolf-shaped marsupial that was killed off by humans (as an aside, I am obliged to plug SSC goddess Margaret Mittelbach's Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger, co-written with SSC alum Michael Crewdson- it's a great book by good friends, a funny, sad, and informative read). Dr Barden offered his three measures of evolutionary success: Diversity of species (beetles, with over 350,000 species, are very successful), Ecological Impact (South African harvester ant foraging territories can be seen in satellite images, such is their ability to reshape their environment), and Longevity (Neandertals were around for 430,000 years while modern Homo sapiens has been around for about 300,000 years). Certain taxons were extremely successful- about twenty thousand trilobite species are known, which indicates that there were probably many more. The impact of the dinosaurs on other evolutionary lineages is difficult to understate. The hell ants were around for about twenty-one million years, great apes a mere eight million. We only see about .01, much of the evolutionary legacy is hidden.
The lecture was followed by a Q&A session, as always. The first question regarded the phenotype of the hell ants- the 'archtecture' of the hell ant lineage has been lost, no traces last into modern ant lineages. The next question was, why did the hell ants go extinct? While this is unknown, it could be that their social structure was outcompeted by the social structure of modern ants which supplanted them. Perhaps the hell ants were 'painted into a corner' evolutionarily. Another question regarded evidence of the large structures which ants and termites build- fossil remains of these structures have been found, and Dr Barden likened this evidence to an 'extended phenotype' which provides clues to the behavior of the insects themselves. Regarding the gaps in the fossil record, new amber deposits have been found in Alaska and compression fossils have been found in Alberta- gradually, the 'black box' is being filled in. Regarding the half life of DNA, while DNA sequences degrade, partial genomes provide information valuable to researchers. Some Bastard in the audience asked about molecular evidence from insects trapped in amber- can inferences be made about pigmentation or the composition of venoms? Dr Barden noted that coloration is often preserved in amber, and stingers are often present in fossil insects, but no molecular structures for pigments or poisons have been found. Regarding prey items of hell ants, they have been found in association with a larva of an insect and a cockroach like insect. The musculature of an insect, useful in computer modelling, can be inferred from bulges in the interior of the exoskeleton, to which muscles, inside the skeleton, are attached. Regarding the caste system of social insects, insects from the same species have the same genome but different gene expression- while a worker has a lifespan of 1-3 years, a queen may live as long as twenty years- transcriptomes play a role in this sort of development. The earliest known modern style ant dates back to the Cretaceous, about ninety-two million years ago, and was found in New Jersey- the lineage probably split off from other ant lineages about 120 million years ago. Finally, asked about his application of the species concept, Dr Barden indicated that, due to the nature of his work, he applied the paleontological species concept, largely working off whether specimens look similar or different.
Once again, the Secret Science Club delivered a fantastic lecture. I make no bones about loving the life sciences the most, so this lecture was right up my alley, or allele... Dr Barden hit what I call the 'Secret Science Sweet Spot'- the lecture was specific, extremely informative about recent discoveries, accompanied by gorgeous images of fossils, and leavened with humor. I call it a grand slam. Kudos to Dr Barden, the staff of the Beautiful Bell House, and Margaret and Dorian for another great monthly event. It was also great to see both the NJIT 'swarm lab' crowd with Dr Garnier and the AMNH crowd, represented by Dr Hekkala and her husband, in attendance. High fives to everyone!
Poking around the t00bz, I found a fun video of Dr Barden giving a tour of the AMNH insect collections to a budding young entomologist:
I only have one quibble, and that's because bugs suck. The video, however, is great. Pour yourself a nice beverage, and watch two cool young dudes talk about SCIENCE!
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Pack of White Lies
Vixen Strangely and her Rumproast cohorts have been doing a good job with skewering Mitt Romney's speech at the NAACP convention. While much attention has been focused on the moment when Romney was booed, I want to focus on another portion of the speech. I'll be annotating the portion that I've excerpted.
As you may have heard from my opponent, I am also a believer in the free-enterprise system. I believe it can bring change where so many well-meaning government programs have failed. I’ve never heard anyone look around an impoverished neighborhood and say, “You know, there’s too much free enterprise around here. Too many shops, too many jobs, too many people putting money in the bank.”
Of course, contrary to the muddle-headed thinking of Libertarians, the free market historically didn't work for African-Americans. Additionally, while noone's looked around an impoverished neighborhood and claimed that there was too much free enterprise, too many shops, too many jobs, hostile whites have looked around thriving black neighborhoods and have done just that, with fatal results. It seems that Mitt's ignorance of his personal history is merely a reflection of his ignorance of world history.
What you hear, of course, is how do we bring in jobs? How do we make good, honest employers want to move in and stay? And with the shape this economy is in, we’re asking that more than ever.
Free enterprise is still the greatest force for upward mobility, economic security, and the expansion of the middle class. We have seen in recent years what it’s like to have less free enterprise. As President, I will show the good things that can happen when we have more – more business activity, more jobs, more opportunity, more paychecks, more savings accounts.
Of course, Mitt is asking how we bring in jobs when no matter what weasel word he uses, Romney was responsible for sending high-paying jobs overseas, while any jobs that he created in the U.S. were low wage service industry jobs. Also, Romney's assertion that "free enterprise is still the greatest force for upward mobility, economic security, and the expansion of the middle class" ignores the black experience... the reality is that , since the 1940s many blacks found work in the public center, which was less hostile to them than the private sector. Of course, public sector workers have been under attack by GOP governors, who have slashed government jobs.
Romney continues with his five point economic plan, which is pretty much GOP boilerplate bullshit:
On Day One, I will begin turning this economy around with a plan for the middle class. And I don’t mean just those who are middle class now – I also mean those who have waited so long for their chance to join the middle class.
I know what it will take to put people back to work, to bring more jobs and better wages. My jobs plan is based on 25 years of success in business. It has five key steps.
First, I will take full advantage of our energy resources, and I will approve the Keystone pipeline from Canada. Low cost, plentiful coal, natural gas, oil, and renewables will bring over a million manufacturing jobs back to the United States.
Second, I will open up new markets for American products. We are the most productive major economy in the world, so trade means good jobs for Americans. But trade must be free and fair, so I’ll clamp down on cheaters like China and make sure that they finally play by the rules.
Third, I will reduce government spending. Our high level of debt slows GDP growth and that means fewer jobs. If our goal is jobs, we must, must stop spending over a trillion dollars more than we earn. To do this, I will eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare, and I will work to reform and save Medicare and Social Security, in part by means-testing their benefits.
Fourth, I will focus on nurturing and developing the skilled workers our economy so desperately needs and the future demands. This is the human capital with which tomorrow’s bright future will be built. Too many homes and too many schools are failing to provide our children with the skills and education that are essential for anything other than a minimum-wage job.
I'm going to address the final paragraph of his jobs plan, because I think it's the biggest bullshit of the lot:
And finally and perhaps most importantly, I will restore economic freedom. This nation’s economy runs on freedom, on opportunity, on entrepreneurs, on dreamers who innovate and build businesses. These entrepreneurs are being crushed by high taxation, burdensome regulation, hostile regulators, excessive healthcare costs, and destructive labor policies. I will work to make America the best place in the world for innovators and entrepreneurs and businesses small and large.
Here's Mitt, standing in front of a black audience, and singing the praises of deregulation when such regulatory bodies as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have been instrumental in curtailing the abusive and discriminatory policies of the largely white male "employer class". By "destructive labor policies", he's probably alluding to unions, which have been instrumental in allowing a black middle class to emerge in postwar America. Mitt is pretty much telling a crowd that has traditionally been at the bottom of the economic heap that a further race to the bottom is a good thing. Meanwhile, in the real world, just about at the time Romney was speaking one of the biggest banks in the U.S. was settling a lawsuit stemming from its policy of unfair lending practices towards minorities... this asshole really believes that decreased regulation would help African-Americans?
Of course, Romney's actions after his speech were even more odious than the speech itself... Mitt stated that he expected to be booed during his speech, which pretty much means that he was just trolling the NAACP. Even worse, Mitt then appeared in front of a bunch of his donors and said:
"Remind them of this: if they want more stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy -- more free stuff. But don't forget, nothing is really free."
Factually, if applied to the healthcare reform act, this is false- Romney himself was the father of "mandated" healthcare coverage, so he knows that there is a penalty paid by uninsured persons. On a more visceral level, Romney's repeating the racist calumny that African-Americans are a bunch of freeloaders- it is his "welfare queen" moment. Romney's awful statement, like the movie Birth of a Nation, was meant to slander and vilify a race. Beneath his blandly handsome Ken-doll looks, Mitt Romney is a nasty piece of work. Forget his soft, manicured hands, he's as much of a brute as the nastiest Southern sheriff out of Central Casting.
Vixen Strangely has been on fire all week with posts about Mitt, and she'll soon have to drop the word "slackerish" from her tagline.
In a comment at Roy's place, mortimer knocks it out of the park with an observation about a desired effect of Romney's speech:
The goal of conservatives is to frame the PPACA as something to "make blah people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money." The more white suburbanites think that Obamacare is yet more welfare for those people the more they will oppose it and Obama, despite knowing almost nothing about the law or how it works -- Democrats and the "liberal" media to blame for the latter, IMO. Romney's mission wasn't just to get an NAACP audience to boo him, it was to directly tie Obamacare around the necks of black people -- metaphor chosen deliberately. Mission accomplished.
Finally, Matt Taibbi's piece on Willard's white lies is another must read.
I know Mitt's got new problems now, but I've been working on this post for a few days, and I really needed to write it to express how much I despise this nasty, duplicitious d-bag.
As you may have heard from my opponent, I am also a believer in the free-enterprise system. I believe it can bring change where so many well-meaning government programs have failed. I’ve never heard anyone look around an impoverished neighborhood and say, “You know, there’s too much free enterprise around here. Too many shops, too many jobs, too many people putting money in the bank.”
Of course, contrary to the muddle-headed thinking of Libertarians, the free market historically didn't work for African-Americans. Additionally, while noone's looked around an impoverished neighborhood and claimed that there was too much free enterprise, too many shops, too many jobs, hostile whites have looked around thriving black neighborhoods and have done just that, with fatal results. It seems that Mitt's ignorance of his personal history is merely a reflection of his ignorance of world history.
What you hear, of course, is how do we bring in jobs? How do we make good, honest employers want to move in and stay? And with the shape this economy is in, we’re asking that more than ever.
Free enterprise is still the greatest force for upward mobility, economic security, and the expansion of the middle class. We have seen in recent years what it’s like to have less free enterprise. As President, I will show the good things that can happen when we have more – more business activity, more jobs, more opportunity, more paychecks, more savings accounts.
Of course, Mitt is asking how we bring in jobs when no matter what weasel word he uses, Romney was responsible for sending high-paying jobs overseas, while any jobs that he created in the U.S. were low wage service industry jobs. Also, Romney's assertion that "free enterprise is still the greatest force for upward mobility, economic security, and the expansion of the middle class" ignores the black experience... the reality is that , since the 1940s many blacks found work in the public center, which was less hostile to them than the private sector. Of course, public sector workers have been under attack by GOP governors, who have slashed government jobs.
Romney continues with his five point economic plan, which is pretty much GOP boilerplate bullshit:
On Day One, I will begin turning this economy around with a plan for the middle class. And I don’t mean just those who are middle class now – I also mean those who have waited so long for their chance to join the middle class.
I know what it will take to put people back to work, to bring more jobs and better wages. My jobs plan is based on 25 years of success in business. It has five key steps.
First, I will take full advantage of our energy resources, and I will approve the Keystone pipeline from Canada. Low cost, plentiful coal, natural gas, oil, and renewables will bring over a million manufacturing jobs back to the United States.
Second, I will open up new markets for American products. We are the most productive major economy in the world, so trade means good jobs for Americans. But trade must be free and fair, so I’ll clamp down on cheaters like China and make sure that they finally play by the rules.
Third, I will reduce government spending. Our high level of debt slows GDP growth and that means fewer jobs. If our goal is jobs, we must, must stop spending over a trillion dollars more than we earn. To do this, I will eliminate expensive non-essential programs like Obamacare, and I will work to reform and save Medicare and Social Security, in part by means-testing their benefits.
Fourth, I will focus on nurturing and developing the skilled workers our economy so desperately needs and the future demands. This is the human capital with which tomorrow’s bright future will be built. Too many homes and too many schools are failing to provide our children with the skills and education that are essential for anything other than a minimum-wage job.
I'm going to address the final paragraph of his jobs plan, because I think it's the biggest bullshit of the lot:
And finally and perhaps most importantly, I will restore economic freedom. This nation’s economy runs on freedom, on opportunity, on entrepreneurs, on dreamers who innovate and build businesses. These entrepreneurs are being crushed by high taxation, burdensome regulation, hostile regulators, excessive healthcare costs, and destructive labor policies. I will work to make America the best place in the world for innovators and entrepreneurs and businesses small and large.
Here's Mitt, standing in front of a black audience, and singing the praises of deregulation when such regulatory bodies as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have been instrumental in curtailing the abusive and discriminatory policies of the largely white male "employer class". By "destructive labor policies", he's probably alluding to unions, which have been instrumental in allowing a black middle class to emerge in postwar America. Mitt is pretty much telling a crowd that has traditionally been at the bottom of the economic heap that a further race to the bottom is a good thing. Meanwhile, in the real world, just about at the time Romney was speaking one of the biggest banks in the U.S. was settling a lawsuit stemming from its policy of unfair lending practices towards minorities... this asshole really believes that decreased regulation would help African-Americans?
Of course, Romney's actions after his speech were even more odious than the speech itself... Mitt stated that he expected to be booed during his speech, which pretty much means that he was just trolling the NAACP. Even worse, Mitt then appeared in front of a bunch of his donors and said:
"Remind them of this: if they want more stuff from government, tell them to go vote for the other guy -- more free stuff. But don't forget, nothing is really free."
Factually, if applied to the healthcare reform act, this is false- Romney himself was the father of "mandated" healthcare coverage, so he knows that there is a penalty paid by uninsured persons. On a more visceral level, Romney's repeating the racist calumny that African-Americans are a bunch of freeloaders- it is his "welfare queen" moment. Romney's awful statement, like the movie Birth of a Nation, was meant to slander and vilify a race. Beneath his blandly handsome Ken-doll looks, Mitt Romney is a nasty piece of work. Forget his soft, manicured hands, he's as much of a brute as the nastiest Southern sheriff out of Central Casting.
Vixen Strangely has been on fire all week with posts about Mitt, and she'll soon have to drop the word "slackerish" from her tagline.
In a comment at Roy's place, mortimer knocks it out of the park with an observation about a desired effect of Romney's speech:
The goal of conservatives is to frame the PPACA as something to "make blah people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money." The more white suburbanites think that Obamacare is yet more welfare for those people the more they will oppose it and Obama, despite knowing almost nothing about the law or how it works -- Democrats and the "liberal" media to blame for the latter, IMO. Romney's mission wasn't just to get an NAACP audience to boo him, it was to directly tie Obamacare around the necks of black people -- metaphor chosen deliberately. Mission accomplished.
Finally, Matt Taibbi's piece on Willard's white lies is another must read.
I know Mitt's got new problems now, but I've been working on this post for a few days, and I really needed to write it to express how much I despise this nasty, duplicitious d-bag.
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Make America Sick, Dumb, Hungry, and Dirty Again
Egads, the Trump Budget Plan is a true horrorshow, not хорошо at all. This particular bit struck me as especially troublesome:
Trump’s first budget proposal, which he named “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” would increase defense spending by $54 billion and then offset that by stripping money from more than 18 other agencies. Some would be hit particularly hard, with reductions of more than 20 percent at the Agriculture, Labor and State departments and of more than 30 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency.
This means a whole lot of deregulation, a wholesale degradation of environmental and labor standards... this is particularly a victory for extractive industries which are particularly dangerous to workers and the environment. The simultaneous increase in defense spending and decrease in State Department spending seems to put the lie to the whole 'Hillary Clinton is a warmonger so vote for Trump' trope pushed during the election last year. I have long been a proponent of the use of soft power in America's dealings with the rest of the world, but it looks like the only tool in the Trump Maladministration toolkit is a hammer, by which I mean high-explosive ordnance. At least we didn't elect a warmonger... not one in a pantsuit, at any rate.
Trump also wants to wage the culture war by using the power of the purse:
It would also propose eliminating future federal support for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Within EPA alone, 50 programs and 3,200 positions would be eliminated.
Besides the fact that eliminating these positions works counter to Trump's stated goal of creating jobs (maybe those EPA inspectors can be sent down into the coal mines to dig, rather than regulate), these cuts will further impoverish the culture- I work for a not-for-profit, and we receive NEH grants for some of our programs... this time, it's personal.
Not surprisingly, the budget also cuts programs that help the poor: home heating fuel subsidies and community block grants which are often used to combat homelessness. One real puzzler is the proposal to privatize the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control- wealthy people fly more often than poor people, and I can't imagine a privatized FAA, concerned with cost-containment, making air travel safer.
Perhaps the worst feature of the budget is the gutting of funds earmarked for research into clean, renewable energy and climate change mitigation:
The proposed budget extensively targets Obama programs and investments focused on climate change, seeking to eliminate payments to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund — one key component of the U.S. commitment to the Paris climate agreement — and to slash research funding for climate, ocean and earth science programs at agencies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. At the same time, clean-energy research, heavily privileged by the Obama administration, would suffer greatly under the budget with the elimination of the ARPA-E program (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) at the Energy Department and an unspecified cut to the agency’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Yep, at the worst possible time, we have a government which is putting the pedal to the medal in the race along the road to, well, The Road. It's here where I reiterate my line that we aren't destroying the world, we are destroying our world... best of luck to our hardy Coleopterous planetary heirs.
Meanwhile, the budget funnels money to charter schools and private schools... gotta pay for school-wide bear defense.
Then, of course, there's the Wall:
And he requested $1.7 billion in new funding this year and an additional $2.6 billion in new funding in 2018 to begin construction of a wall along the border with Mexico. Trump proposed creating this wall during his campaign and had said Mexico would pay for it. A number of congressional Republicans appear to be cooling on the idea.
By the time Trump guts everything which makes this country liveable, there won't need to be a wall on the southern border... maybe the Canadians will start building one of their own, they'll need it.
Trump’s first budget proposal, which he named “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” would increase defense spending by $54 billion and then offset that by stripping money from more than 18 other agencies. Some would be hit particularly hard, with reductions of more than 20 percent at the Agriculture, Labor and State departments and of more than 30 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency.
This means a whole lot of deregulation, a wholesale degradation of environmental and labor standards... this is particularly a victory for extractive industries which are particularly dangerous to workers and the environment. The simultaneous increase in defense spending and decrease in State Department spending seems to put the lie to the whole 'Hillary Clinton is a warmonger so vote for Trump' trope pushed during the election last year. I have long been a proponent of the use of soft power in America's dealings with the rest of the world, but it looks like the only tool in the Trump Maladministration toolkit is a hammer, by which I mean high-explosive ordnance. At least we didn't elect a warmonger... not one in a pantsuit, at any rate.
Trump also wants to wage the culture war by using the power of the purse:
It would also propose eliminating future federal support for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Within EPA alone, 50 programs and 3,200 positions would be eliminated.
Besides the fact that eliminating these positions works counter to Trump's stated goal of creating jobs (maybe those EPA inspectors can be sent down into the coal mines to dig, rather than regulate), these cuts will further impoverish the culture- I work for a not-for-profit, and we receive NEH grants for some of our programs... this time, it's personal.
Not surprisingly, the budget also cuts programs that help the poor: home heating fuel subsidies and community block grants which are often used to combat homelessness. One real puzzler is the proposal to privatize the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control- wealthy people fly more often than poor people, and I can't imagine a privatized FAA, concerned with cost-containment, making air travel safer.
Perhaps the worst feature of the budget is the gutting of funds earmarked for research into clean, renewable energy and climate change mitigation:
The proposed budget extensively targets Obama programs and investments focused on climate change, seeking to eliminate payments to the United Nations’ Green Climate Fund — one key component of the U.S. commitment to the Paris climate agreement — and to slash research funding for climate, ocean and earth science programs at agencies such as NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. At the same time, clean-energy research, heavily privileged by the Obama administration, would suffer greatly under the budget with the elimination of the ARPA-E program (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) at the Energy Department and an unspecified cut to the agency’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
Yep, at the worst possible time, we have a government which is putting the pedal to the medal in the race along the road to, well, The Road. It's here where I reiterate my line that we aren't destroying the world, we are destroying our world... best of luck to our hardy Coleopterous planetary heirs.
Meanwhile, the budget funnels money to charter schools and private schools... gotta pay for school-wide bear defense.
Then, of course, there's the Wall:
And he requested $1.7 billion in new funding this year and an additional $2.6 billion in new funding in 2018 to begin construction of a wall along the border with Mexico. Trump proposed creating this wall during his campaign and had said Mexico would pay for it. A number of congressional Republicans appear to be cooling on the idea.
By the time Trump guts everything which makes this country liveable, there won't need to be a wall on the southern border... maybe the Canadians will start building one of their own, they'll need it.
Friday, December 23, 2011
49 Million Living in Poverty
Here's a little something guaranteed to give you some Christmas cheer- by some criteria, the poverty rate in the U.S. is 16%. To put it in starker terms, just about one out of every six Americans is poor, for the under-eighteen set, it's even more horrific- about one-in-five children under 18 is poor. Even more appallingly, the six heirs to the Wal*Mart fortune have as much wealth as the bottom 30% of America's population. Let it be said that they've made their fortunes by killing well-paying manufacturing jobs, while relying on government assistance programs to subsidize their poorly-paid employees.
Yeah, I can't believe it, we're in the Third World. I'm doing okay, but I really want to see everybody doing well... I just don't see why the hell anybody would want to see a large portion of the populace in poverty (well, there is sociopathy, and a Calvinistic equation of wealth with piety). I'm reminded of an anecdote which Thom Hartmann often recounts, in which a German executive accepts his high tax rate, saying "I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country."
On the Christmas front, those poor kids should be pleased to receive a lump of coal in their stockings, because Congress wanted to cut home heating assistance to low income families. The whole thing is appalling... how about a Christmas song, albeit a topical one?
The Kinks' Father Christmas is another of those "not really a novelty song", much like Androgynous by The Replacements. Crank it, but make sure you remember those kids who've got nothing, while you're drinking down your wine.
Yeah, I can't believe it, we're in the Third World. I'm doing okay, but I really want to see everybody doing well... I just don't see why the hell anybody would want to see a large portion of the populace in poverty (well, there is sociopathy, and a Calvinistic equation of wealth with piety). I'm reminded of an anecdote which Thom Hartmann often recounts, in which a German executive accepts his high tax rate, saying "I don't want to be a rich man in a poor country."
On the Christmas front, those poor kids should be pleased to receive a lump of coal in their stockings, because Congress wanted to cut home heating assistance to low income families. The whole thing is appalling... how about a Christmas song, albeit a topical one?
The Kinks' Father Christmas is another of those "not really a novelty song", much like Androgynous by The Replacements. Crank it, but make sure you remember those kids who've got nothing, while you're drinking down your wine.
Friday, October 23, 2020
So NOW They're Into Science?
The GOP has now come out in favor of science, sort of... never mind that these projects aren't feasible without the renewable energy that Trump denigrate (coal fired rockets aren't a thing). More importantly, the general thrust of scientific resources should be directed at ending the pandemic, not this:
We'll have time for that after we stop the mass casualty event that's ongoing. I firmly believe that humanity needs to pursue an extraterrestrial destiny, but dire earthly concerns should be current priorities. I'm going to riff on my favorite Gil Scott-Heron poem now...Pres. Trump is fighting for YOU! Here are some of his priorities for a 2nd term:
— GOP (@GOP) October 23, 2020
*Establish Permanent Manned Presence on The Moon
*Send the 1st Manned Mission to Mars
*Build World’s Greatest Infrastructure System
*Establish National High-Speed Wireless Internet Network
Coronavirus killed my friend,
But Trumpy's on the Moon.
This goddamn plague will never end,
But Trumpy's on the Moon.
Sounds like a science-fiction dream,
Trumpy on the Moon,
But I suspect a kickbacks scheme,
With Trumpy on the Moon.
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