P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

<>The launch was particulary successful in Albuquerque,. Former New Mexico governor Garrey Carruthers, now TASSC's honorary chairman, was keynote speaker at the American Farm Bureau Federation state convention in New Mexico... Well...he was an idiot....but shame on us, New Mexico.

<>The was the Bad Science strategy in a nutshell; plant complaints in op-ed pieces, in letters to the editor and in articles in mainstream journals to whom you'd supplied the "facts," and then quote them as if they really were facts. Quote, in fact, yourself. A perfect rhetorical circle. A mass media echo chamber of your own construction. A right-wing circle jerk.

<>Bad, bad science. You can practically see the fingers wagging. Scientists had been bad boys; it was time for them to behave themselves. The tobacco industry would be the daddy who made sure they did. It wasn't just money at stake; it was individual liberty. Today, smoking, tomorrow...who knew? By protecting smoking, we protected freedom.
LOL. So...freedom is the right to piss in everyone else's water?

<>5. Like many studies before it, EPA's recent report concerning environmental tobacco smoke allow political objectives to guide scientific research. Snort. This quote coming from a science-denying pro-smoking advocate. Classic right-wing tactic. Project your flaws onto your opponent.

<>[Tobacco] Industry disinformation campaigns now took new and creative forms. Sylvester Stallone was paid $500,000 to UIs Brown and Williamson products in no fewer than five feature films to link smoking with power and strength, rather than sickness and death.

<>If environmental regulation should be based on science, then ozone is a success story, It took time to work out the complex science, but scientists, with support from the U.S,. government and international scientific organizations, did it.

<>...once agian, scientific claims were being published in scientific journals, where only scientists could read them, but unscientific claims were being published in the mass media. The public was left with the impression that the ozone layer was fine, and the "alarmists" had got it wrong.

<>Only next time around, they would not merely deny the gravity of the problem; they would deny that there was any problem at all. In the future, they wouldn't just tamper with the peer review process; they would reject the science itself.

I like this. LOL. Don't look so shocked.

Sometimes I actually like something. It's not scary, but the whole The Ring vibe is creepy.

What's that smell? Oh, yeah, it's the stench of pretentious writing and a likely DNF. Thank Dog It Was Free.

"I been thinkin' we might skin her, see," suggested Grandma Gravy. "Her hide might fetch a tidy sum, aye? We could turn her into a nice rug, or some scatter cushions." LOL. Once again, the throwaway, secondary characters are so much better than the protagonists!

Tom put a hand to his chest, to the wound that Pennyroyal's bullet had made. He didn't want to go and have breakfast with the man who had shot him. And yet Pennyroyal had behaved decently enough aboard Kom Ombo....

Oh, for fucks sake, Tom, you're the textbook definition of Too-Stupid-to-Live! And Wren isn't much smarter.

2003, the EPA reported to Congress that the overall cost of air pollution control during the previous ten years was between $8 billion and $9 billion, while the benefits were estimated from $101 billion to $119 billion--more than ten times as great.

Conflict, it is sometimes said, makes good copy, and when a lonely scientist took up the right-wing charge that acid rain might not be a serious problem, the press were quick to pic up his claims. Because crack-pots are good for ratings, clicks, etc.

Likens tried to set the record straight[...]. But in a pattern that was becoming familiar, the scientific facts were published in a place where few ordinary people would see them, whereas the unscientific claims--that acid rain was not a problem, that it would cost hundreds of billions to fix--were published in mass circulation outlets. It was not a level plain field.

He imagined what it must have been like to be Noah, surrounded by "complacent compatriots," saying, "'Don't worry about the rising waters, Noah; our advanced technology will surely discover a substitute for breathing.' If it was wisdom that enabled Noah to believe in the 'never-yet-happened,' we could use some of that wisdom no," Singer concluded. Pity...he would then lose his mind and turn against science.

Singer cited the famous essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," in which biologist Garrett Hardin argued that individual acting in their rational self interest may undermine the common good, adn warned against assuming that technology would save us from ourselves.

Things were changing, though, and within a few years, Ronald Reagan would begin to shift the Republican Party away from both environmental preservation and environmental regulation, a position that would separate the party from its historic environmentalism, and put it on a collision course with science.

Richard Nixon, a president not generally recalled as a visionary environmentalist, created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed into law several signature pieces of environmental legislation: the Clean Air Act Extension, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

For decades, preservationist environmentalism remained bipartisan. When the Wilderness Act of 1964 designated over nine million acres of American lands as "areas where man himself is a visitor and does not remain," it passed the U.S. Senate by a vote of 73-12, and the House of Representative by a vote of 373-1.

Working scientists were finding more and more evidence that industrial emissions were causing widespread damage to human and ecosystem health. The free market was causing problems--unintended consequences--that the free market did not know how to solve.

Four books later, and Tom Natsworthy is still insufferably naive and trusting.

Sigh. The more things change, the more they stay the same....

Barak's political opponents would criticize him for taking me to New York to see a show. The Republican Party would put out a press release before we'd even gotten home, saying that our date had been extravagant and costly to taxpayers. Meanwhile the Fat-Orange-Pestilence in the White House regularly flies to Florida for golf with nary a peep from Republicans. Hypocrisy much?

Maybe it's the victim of the chaos before art studio tour, but this book's fractured narrative and unreliable narrators are just not doing it for me.

Old crap on my Kindle. Picked this up in a moment of boredom. For NA, it's not awful; the conflicts are realistic; but I'm annoyed by the protagonist's suck-ass parents and her willingness to piss away her life in order to be her little sister's baby sitter. Meh.

I don't know what that--fire in the seedy district--was all about or what it had to do with her father. I haz confuzzlement.

Jacin's a jerk, but with the exception of Thorne, he's the only male with a personality. Because I'm soooo bored, I'm 'shipping him with Cinder who deserves better than the Prince of Dim.