Climate & Climate Politics
- Planet Nutshell | Explain it in a Nutshell: climate
- Rabett Run: The indelible dumbness of physicists
Eli has always been impressed by Myanna Lahsen’s take on physicists
they think they know everything, because they’re smart. What they don’t understand is that yes, it is true, actually meteorology is a branch of physics. And so you take a physicist, like me, and you can sit him down, and in 2 or 3 years, they could learn meteorology. But physicists confuse being smart and having the ability to learn everything with actually knowing stuff!
and by way Watts, excerpted by Tallbloke, via a comment at Open Mind, comes another example, one Robert Brown, PhD, at Duke who offers up a BOE to showcase another argument from personal incredulity.
- Rick Santorum-Environmentalism is “a Religion that’s being pushed on the American Public” | Use Celsias.com – reduce global °Celsius
- Breaking: Climate Science Denier Wins Iowa Caucuses | ThinkProgress — Oh yeah, I wasn’t thinking,… all the Republican candidates for President except for one are science deniers.
The Media
- Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News In The 2011 Ratings via Poor Fox News | Blue Collar Atheist
- A careful listener to NPR would notice a…
Politics
- Electing “Ministers of God” | Religion Dispatches
American Family Association radio host Bryan Fischer believes that “we are in fact choosing a minister when we select a president.”
In a recent column, Fischer uses Romans 13 as his prooftext for this assertion. Paul, writing to the Romans before his visit there, admonishes his readers to “be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God.”
Fischer uses this passage, along with verse 6, to prove that “One who holds public office is serving in a divinely ordained role, just as much as a pastor in the pulpit. The role of a statesman is every bit as sacred as that of a clergyman.”
- Which Republican Does God Love Most Today? | Friendly Atheist
- How Republicans Can Reach African-Americans | The Nation
There’s an easy answer for why Santorum singled out African-Americans as opposed to whites—the widespread perception that blacks are the main beneficaries of federal assistance, despite the fact that whites make up the bulk of Americans who receive income assistance. Of course, Santorum isn’t the only Republican in the race who has a problem with racism. Ron Paul has his widely discussed newsletters, Newt Gingrich has his comments on low-income children and Rick Perry has the “niggerhead” ranch.
In other words, if Republicans want a shot at winning a non-trivial share of the “black vote,” then they should shy away from presidential candidates who casually express racism on the campaign trail or elsewhere.
- Lawrence O’Donnell: Political News Media Lives ‘In Denial’ (VIDEO) (the emphasis is mine)
MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell tore into the political news media on his show Monday night for what he referred to as “living in denial” during presidential campaign seasons.
O’Donnell played a clip of GOP candidate Newt Gingrich, who he referred to as “one brave truth-teller,” who told the press that, as President of the United States, it was “constitutionally impossible to govern without Congress.” Gingrich was responding to a recent report that President Obama was planning a “go-it-alone approach” in response to a difficult relationship with Congress.
O’Donnell said that presidential candidates never mention having to work with Congress while campaigning, and usually spew simple, declarative sentences about what they would to do in office “as though they are running for king or queen.” O’Donnell said that the press repeatedly allows candidates to “get away” with living in this “fantasy land of governing.”
- –
Politics — Newt Gingrich
- Newt Gingrich Tells Voter He ‘Wouldn’t Make Exceptions’ For Abortion In Cases Of Rape Or Incest
- Gingrich: Mitt Romney is a liar – CBS News
Politics — Ron Paul
- Ron Paul’s Personal Responsibility | FrumForum via Brad DeLong: David Frum on the Personal Irresponsibility of Ron Paul
Economics
- The Mendacity of Dopes – NYTimes.com
So Alex Tabarrok thinks I treat everyone who disagrees with me as mendacious idiots, and Tyler Cowen says that I always demonize my opponents.
I plead innocent. I only treat people as mendacious idiots if they aremendacious idiots.
Seriously: I have some big disagreements with Ken Rogoff, but if you use the little search box up there on the upper right and enter “Rogoff” I think you’ll find that I have always treated him with respect. On the other hand, enter “Heritage” and you’ll find me pretty scornful — but with very good reason! And I always document what I’m saying.
- Jared Bernstein: Trickle-Up Economics
- The Policy Backdrop of Inequality and Its Implications for “Class Warfare” | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
Science
- Apocalypse Not Now: 2012 Doomsday Predictions Debunked by NASA | End of the World & 2012 Theories | Nibiru, Doomsday Theories Debunked | LiveScience
- Krauss finds something in nothing – Lawrence Krauss – asu news – RichardDawkins.net
Krauss finds something in nothing from ASU News on Vimeo. 
Coming January 10, 2012: A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss- 3quarksdaily: Richard Dawkins’s Afterword in Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe From Nothing–
From Dawkins’s website (pdf here):
Nothing expands the mind like the expanding universe. The music of the spheres is a nursery rhyme, a jingle to set against the majestic chords of the Symphonie Galactica. Changing the metaphor and the dimension, the dusts of centuries, the mists of what we presume to call “ancient” history, are soon blown off by the steady, eroding winds of geological ages. Even the age of the universe, accurate—so Lawrence Krauss assures us—to the fourth signi!cant !gure at 13.72 billion years, is dwarfed by the trillennia that are to come.
But Krauss’s vision of the cosmology of the remote future is paradoxical and frightening. Scienti!c progress is likely to go into reverse. We naturally think that, if there are cosmologists in the year 2 trillion “#, their vision of the universe will be expanded over ours. Not so—and this is one of the many shattering conclusions I take away on closing this book. Give or take a few billion years, ours is a very propitious time to be a cosmologist. Two trillion years hence, the universe will have expanded so far that all galaxies but the cosmologist’s own (whichever one it happens to be) will have receded behind an Einsteinian horizon so absolute, so inviolable, that they are not only invisible but beyond all possibility of leaving a trace, however indirect. They might as well never have existed. Every trace of the Big Bang will most likely have gone, forever and beyond recovery. The cosmologists of the future will be cut off from their past, and from their situation, in a way that we are not.
via 3quarksdaily: Richard Dawkins’s Afterword in Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe From Nothing