Rush Limbaugh is so indisputably noxious on a daily basis that one hardly needs to take anything he says out of context. Yet Christopher Mims at Grist has managed to do just that in this post, when he writes: Rush Limbaugh is laughing at Japan’s earthquake refugees. Actually, Limbaugh started out mocking a Diane Sawyer…Continue Reading…
That’s essentially what Michael Levi is saying in this smart post. His lament is that energy and related environmental issues are not viewed through a wider lens: Until we can think about security, economics, and environmental risk at the same time, we’re going to have a lot of trouble developing an energy policy that makes sense….Continue Reading…
Perhaps we should call this initiative by the U.S. military asymetric sockpuppet warfare? As reported by the Guardian, the new software being developed could allow US service personnel, working around the clock in one location, to respond to emerging online conversations with a host of co-ordinated blogposts, tweets, retweets, chatroom posts and other interventions. Now…Continue Reading…
A commenter sums up the media’s schizophrenic coverage of Japan’s nuclear disaster (as communicated via expert opinion) : “It’s horrible!” “It’s no big deal” “Worst thing Evah” “No, it’s minor and under control” “Run for your lives!” “You’re fine.” You can actually see the frustration on the journalists faces. “Science” says everyone’s dead and everyone’s…Continue Reading…
George Monbiot makes his case: Even when nuclear power plants go horribly wrong, they do less damage to the planet and its people than coal-burning stations operating normally. This should be fun. George, time to crank up one of the classics:
Over at Foreign Policy, Steve LeVine puts the Japanese cataclysms in a larger context and concludes that what we’re seeing is a global energy system under severe stress. Over the last several months, we’ve learned the hard way in incredibly coincidental events that we are in firm control of almost none of our major sources…Continue Reading…
Why is your pet hamster thought of differently than a pig in the factory farm? This thought provoking NYT column by Mark Bittman examines the contradictory values we have when it comes to killing animals.
Some of the dead-enders in the climate change & communication debate don’t seem capable of recognizing their own bunk, even after it’s pointed out to them ad nauseum. So here we go again: we are looking at a bunk tsunami, and the press seems absolutely obsessed with finding little bugs on the other side (a…Continue Reading…
Among the putatively Republican interest groups that would seem to have the least pull with the GOP, I would include the Log Cabin Republicans and the Republicans for Environmental Protection. As Andy Revkin notes in his interview with the leader of the latter, This group, while holding to traditional conservative values, has positions on energy and…Continue Reading…
The news out of Japan keeps getting worse, and the images are heartrending. The situation with the nuclear reactors continue to unfold in an alarming manner. For those trying to grasp the technical side of that story, I found this write-up in Nature quite helpful. Most of the news media coverage right now is understandably…Continue Reading…