Submersible vehicle of the type that is now missing
By now, many people know that a submersible vehicle that set out from St. John’s, Newfoundland on Sunday with five people aboard to explore the wreckage of the Titanic went missing after one hour and 45 minutes into its Atlantic Ocean dive. A search operation by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Air Force is underway, with France also sending a ship to assist. This operation is a race against the clock, as the occupants only have about 70 to 96 hours of emergency air supply. CNN is running a live feed on its website, with updates as they occur. [NOTE: given the potential for fast-changing events here, this blog post is also subject to updates, and therefore may not reflect the latest developments].
While this story is no doubt a human interest story that elicits empathy in many people (though some might scoff at the wealthy privileged occupants who paid $250,000 each for a close-up view of the Titanic), is it really a news story? Does it contain any wider implications for our lives?
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Trump White House official at work on government website
As a recent New York Times article (reprinted here at Yahoo! news) indicates, one of the many areas where President Joe Biden is trying to undo the extensive damage done by Donald Trump is the language used by our federal government. Obviously, Trump and his minions agreed with what we have written about here for more than 10 years, i.e. that “messaging matters” and, in particular, that Republicans are experts at framing issues in ways that favor their point of view. Part of this framing is the use of certain loaded words and phrases. While Trump was in the White House and not busy playing golf, he liked to use Nazi propaganda tactics such as the repetition of big lies, and he had his federal government employ loaded words, or prohibit the use of other words, to gain political advantage. The two areas where this seems most prevalent were, perhaps not surprisingly, the politically contentious subjects of immigration and the environment/climate change. Take a look after the jump to see what Trump did, and how Biden is trying to repair the damage:
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Leave a comment! Tags: BLM, China, climate change, Coronavirus, COVID, COVID-19, Donald Trump, environment, EPA, Florida, global warming, immigration, Joe Biden, Nazi, Rick Scott, Wuhan
They want to know what we’re doing about climate change
It’s winter time, so of course many parts of the country and the earth are cold, as expected. Sadly, however, other places are literally burning up. What we also expect this time of year, unfortunately, is for some conservatives in the northern hemisphere to step outside, pick up some snow or put on their winter coat, and say, “See? There is no climate change!” Thankfully, just in time for those family Christmas dinners, the Rainforest Alliance has released a half dozen talking points to counter these phony conservative climate change claims. Democrats, liberals and progressives, or just thinking people who have known for years that the earth is warming, due in part to human activity, and that we’re at a dangerous tipping point, can all benefit from absorbing and then using these talking points. Here is a sampling of some of the climate deniers’ arguments, and suggested responses by the Rainforest Alliance:
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“Burn Notice” TV program filming disrupted by Miami Beach flooding
There have been a spate of articles in recent months demonstrating that climate change is now hitting homeowners, business owners and local governments square in the pocketbooks. While Florida is the tip of the spear on climate change due to its low elevation and prevalence of water, folks in other states as disparate as Vermont are feeling it too. Americans have a track record that, when things affect us monetarily, it becomes a tipping point where people call for action. We are now reaching that tipping point.
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Flooding in Miami Beach, Florida
As many people feared, Donald Trump yesterday withdrew the United States from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement that was signed by 195 nations. Trump has added America to an extremely short list of outliers, including only Syria and Nicaragua. However, all is not doom and gloom as a result of Trump’s bad decision. First, plenty of state officials and companies will continue their commitment to fight climate change, for example, by deploying more clean energy such as solar and wind power. Second, there are many efforts each of us can make to bridge the climate change gap that Donald Trump is creating:
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Retreating Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska
Last Thursday, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) held a Google hangout video conference sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters. Also on hand for the video chat were Gene Karpinski, President of LCV, and LCV’s Senior Vice President for Government Affairs, Tiernan Sittenfeld. Senator Whitehouse is perhaps the leading Senator on climate change issues, and has given a “Time to Wake Up” environmental speech on the Senate floor every week for the past 100 weeks that the Senate has been in session, i.e., over the past three years. Whitehouse also took questions from the Google hangout audience, and worked with LCV to use the Twitter hashtags #TimeToWakeUp and #100Reasons to further the interaction with the audience. Here are some highlights from the video conference:
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Republican Presidential hopeful Scott Walker in London
If someone had told you that, in the months after the Republican Party’s historic 2014 Congressional election wins, Republicans would suffer one self-inflicted defeat and embarrassment after another, you might have told that person that he was nuts. But that is exactly what has happened to the Republican Party since last November’s elections. Here are some of the highlights, or more accurately, lowlights:
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2014 Election, 2016 Elections, Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Chris Christie, climate change, Congress, CPAC, Department of Homeland Security, Fox News, global warming, immigration, ISIS, John Boehner, Net Neutrality, Republican Party, Rudy Giuliani, Scott Walker
Solar installation on Walmart store, Mountain View, CA
Did you notice a lot more solar panels in 2014, on homes, schools, shopping malls, street lights, road signs, public lands and elsewhere? If so, you weren’t imagining things. Solar energy installations are taking off in the United States and elsewhere around the world, to the point where 2015 is shaping up to be the Year of Solar Power. Take a look at some of the recent growth in solar energy:
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Wake Up and Vote for Democrats poster
Mainstream Democratic and progressive voters don’t agree on everything, but they all seemed to agree on one thing after last Tuesday’s elections: the Democratic Party let them down. Democratic officeholders and candidates running for election ran away from President Obama and his agenda. One example was Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic challenger to U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Grimes not only refused to assert that she had voted for President Obama, she was reluctant to tout the stunning success of the Affordable Care Act in Kentucky (known as Kynect), and instead began most answers by naming problems with the ACA that need fixing.
Running away from the President’s record in 2014 made no sense for Democrats, as President Obama’s agenda literally was the Democrats’ agenda. Every law that President Obama signed, from the Stimulus to the Affordable Care Act, was something that a majority in Congress, and certainly a majority of Democrats in Congress, first had to pass. Perhaps some Democrats need to go back and read their Constitution, or watch Schoolhouse Rock.
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Leave a comment! Tags: 2014 Election, Affordable Care Act, climate change, Democratic Party, economy, energy, environment, global warming, healthcare, LGBT, Republican Party, War On Women
If you visit the Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington, D.C. (free admission courtesy of your tax dollars) and have your political antennae extended, you’ll find some possibly liberal facts, but some conservative-sounding editorializing too. Among them are:
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