Author Archives: EllaBlocker

This Is What Happens When You Cross Donald Trump

by EllaBlocker Posted on July 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump sure doesn’t take well to criticism. Each time a politician or commentator takes issue with a Trump-ism—and there seems to be no slight too petty for the billionaire to respond to—Trump blasts back with a tweet that ratchets up the rhetoric. This weekend, when he found himself in hot water for disparaging John McCain’s war record, rather than back off his remarks, he doubled down on his critique of the Arizona senator on Twitter.

It’s something the tycoon has done more than a few times since declaring his run for the GOP presidential nomination last month. Below is a compilation of the digs that have gotten under Trump’s skin, and the tweetstorms he’s unleashed in response.

6/16/15: Fox News’ Juan Williams says Trump’s ego is “just on fire” (among other comments that may have irritated Trump).

6/25/15: Univision cuts ties with Trump after his infamous remarks about Mexican immigrants.

6/30/15: After NBCUniversal ends its business relationship with Trump over the GOP candidate’s Mexico remarks, Trump revives an earlier Twitter diatribe against Meet the Press host Chuck Todd.

7/1/15: Macy’s severs ties with Trump after the Mexican immigrant comments. Trump promptly calls for a boycott of the department store.

7/2/15: Rick Perry says Trump’s controversial remarks “offended” him, on ABC News’ This Week.

7/4/15: Jeb Bush joins the ever-expanding list of people to criticize Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants, calling them “extraordinarily ugly” and “way out of the mainstream of what Republicans think.”

7/15/15: Karl Rove goes on Fox News and downplays Trump’s recent surge in the polls.

7/16/15: John McCain tells The New Yorker that Trump “fired up the crazies.”

7/16/15: The magician Penn Jillette calls Trump a man “without filters” and says he’s wrong about everything, on MSNBC.

7/19/15: The Wall Street Journal reports on the McCain controversy and runs an opinion piece asking how long politicos on the right will “keep pretending he’s a serious candidate.”

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This Is What Happens When You Cross Donald Trump

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The Best Oscar of Last Night Was the Screenplay Award for "Her"

by EllaBlocker Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today presents a blogging problem: The news cycle is devoted almost entirely to events in Ukraine—as it should be—and I’ve already probably said more about this than I should. I don’t have any special expertise in the area, and I really hate the phenomenon of instant expertise that takes hold of pundits everywhere whenever something like this happens. I’m keenly aware of all the big underlying issues—Russia’s long cultural ties to Ukraine; the eastward spread of NATO and the EU; anti-Russian sentiment in Kiev; the weakness of Russia’s military; Putin’s one-note thuggishness; Ukraine’s endemic corruption and its internal fights over who gets to profit from the Russian gas trade; etc. etc.—and also keenly aware that a bare knowledge of all this stuff doesn’t really make me worth reading on the subject. For what it’s worth, I’ve already made a prediction that Putin will stop at Crimea because (a) the Russian army doesn’t have the strength to do much more, and (b) Putin isn’t willing to pay the price both in military and diplomatic terms for a broader intervention in eastern Ukraine. But I could be wildly wrong. Who knows?

So then, what should I write about today? I’m not sure, though I imagine that I’ll end up writing more about Ukraine despite everything I just said.

In the meantime, how about a nice Oscars thread? No? Oh come on. I’ll toss out a provocation to get everyone started: the best award of the night was the Best Original Screenplay win for Her. Not because it was my favorite movie of the year or anything, but because it was the first screenplay in ages that genuinely surprised me. Not in the sense of a last-minute twist that comes out of nowhere—that’s common enough—but in the sense of a narrative that shifted directions smoothly and naturally into something much more interesting than I thought it would be. The art of Hollywood screenwriting has deteriorated so badly that this doesn’t happen very often anymore. I won’t say more in case you haven’t seen the movie and still plan to, but feel free to discuss in comments.

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The Best Oscar of Last Night Was the Screenplay Award for "Her"

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Is Putin Making a First Move to De-Escalate?

by EllaBlocker Posted on March 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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From the LA Times:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to a German proposal for international observers to review the tense standoff in Ukraine’s Crimea area, a Kremlin news service dispatch indicated Monday.

The proposal for a “contact group” of mediating foreign diplomats and an observer delegation to assess Moscow’s claims that ethnic Russians are threatened with violence under Ukraine’s new leadership was made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a late Sunday phone call to Putin, her spokesman told journalists in Berlin on Monday.

Is this for real, or is it just a stalling tactic? There’s no telling, of course. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s at least semi-real, since it could provide a convenient excuse to call a halt to things. And that’s something Putin probably wants. I don’t know what his long-term plans in Crimea are, but I doubt that he has any appetite for a military incursion into the rest of Ukraine. That’s not because he’s voluntarily showing a sense of restraint. It’s because Russia just doesn’t have the military to pull it off. A few thousand troops in South Ossetia or Crimea is one thing, but even a minimal military presence in eastern Ukraine would be orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive. Unless Putin has truly gone around the bend and is willing to risk another Afghanistan or another Chechnya, that’s just not in the cards.

A lot of American pundits are pretty cavalier about Russia’s military capabilities, assuming they can do anything they want simply because Putin is such a tough guy. But it’s just not so. The Russian military might be up to an intervention in eastern Ukraine, but it would take pretty much everything they have. This is not the Red Army of old.

It’s also the case that although Putin may put on a brave show, he’s well aware that intervention in Ukraine would unite the West against him in no uncertain terms. Those same pundits who are so cavalier about Russian military strength are also far too willing to take Putin’s bravado at face value. That’s a mistake. He doesn’t want Russia cut off from the West, and neither do his oligarch buddies. He may be willing to pay a price for his incursion into Crimea, but he’s not willing to keep paying forever. As long as Western pressure continues to ratchet up, at some point he’ll start looking for a way out.

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Is Putin Making a First Move to De-Escalate?

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Ani DiFranco Wanted to Party at a Slave Plantation. Guess What Happened?

by EllaBlocker Posted on December 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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In a banner year for non-apology apologies, singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco non-apologized this weekend for renting out an old Louisiana slave plantation to host a songwriting workshop. The event, now canceled, was billed as a “Righteous Retreat” and charged attendees $1,000 to sleep in a tent for four nights and learn about “developing one’s singular creativity” while DiFranco and her friends led jam sessions. The “captivating setting” was to be Nottoway Plantation and Resort in White Castle, Louisiana, a 64-room, 53,000-square-foot antebellum mansion and sugar plantation whose website has this to say about the plantation master:

“Considering his slaves to be valuable tools in the operation of his business, John Randolph provided the necessary care to keep them in good health. He understood the importance of hygiene in controlling the spread of illnesses and disease, so he provided a bathhouse where slaves could bathe daily if they wished…Ever the astute businessman, Randolph knew that in order to maintain a willing workforce, it was necessary to provide not only for his slaves’ basic needs for housing, food and medicine, but to also offer additional compensation and rewards when their work was especially productive… It is difficult to accurately assess the treatment of Randolph’s slaves; however, various records indicate that they were probably well treated for the time.”

The website also notes that Randolph’s “willing workforce” was comprised of 155 slaves quartered in 42 slave houses in 1860, making Nottoway “one of the largest plantations in the South, at a time when most owners possessed fewer than 20 slaves.”

On Saturday, a group of black feminists on Twitter took notice, and the hashtag #AniDiFrancoRetreatIdeas was born:

The event’s Facebook page filled up with outraged comments, some noting that the building’s current owner is a right-wing Australian billionaire who gave hundreds of thousands to help elect a prime minister who considers abortion “the easy way out,” homelessness a choice, and doesn’t want his daughters vaccinated against cervical cancer.

Yesterday, DiFranco posted an announcement to her label’s blog canceling the event, and apologizing largely by way of excusing herself from blame, chiding those who’d gotten upset, and lamenting lost opportunities for “healing the wounds of history:”

“when i agreed to do a retreat…i did not know the exact location it was to be held. when i found out it was to be held at a resort on a former plantation, I thought to myself, “whoa”, but i did not imagine or understand that the setting of a plantation would trigger such collective outrage or result in so much high velocity bitterness…i know that pain is stored in places where great social ills have occurred. i believe that people must go to those places with awareness and with compassionate energy and meditate on what has happened and absorb some of the reverberating pain with their attention and their awareness. i believe that compassionate energy is transformative and necessary for healing the wounds of history…if nottoway is simply not an acceptable place for me to go and try to do my work in the eyes of many, then let me just concede before more divisive words are spilled.”

I spent many a dorm room night with Ani on full blast on the stereo (at Bryn Mawr, the DiFranco discography was practically a major) and she’s nowhere near the likes of Richard Cohen and Paula Deen when it comes to obliviousness over history’s injustices. But is it really such a huge step from “whoa” to “no” when a brochure for Nottoway Plantation and Resort lands on your desk?

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Ani DiFranco Wanted to Party at a Slave Plantation. Guess What Happened?

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NOAA: November was “record warm”

by EllaBlocker Posted on December 18, 2013

NOAA: November was “record warm”

By

Shutterstock

It may be difficult to grasp as holiday chills and snowy weather set in across North America, but last month was the globe’s hottest November on record. It was the 37th consecutive November of above-average temperatures.

Which is remarkable, not only because records date back to 1880, but because previous record-breaking Novembers came during El Niño years, when the Pacific Ocean heats up. There currently is no El Niño.

Earth’s combined average land and ocean temperature in November was 1.4 degrees warmer than the 20th century average of 55.2 degrees.

“Most of the world’s land areas experienced warmer-than-average monthly temperatures, including much of Eurasia, coastal Africa, Central America, and central South America,” NOAA reported on its website. “Much of southern Russia, north west Kazakhstan, south India, and southern Madagascar were record warm. Meanwhile, northern Australia, parts of North America, south west Greenland, and parts of the Southern Ocean near South America were cooler than average.”

Things were really crazy in Moldova, a small Eastern European country where temperatures last month were between 7 and 9 degrees above average. In case you were wondering, most Moldovans speak the same language as their neighbors in Romania, where the expression for “global warming” is ”încălzirea globală.”

Al naibii de!

(And that means “damn.”)

NOAA

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Source
Global Analysis – November 2013, NOAA National Climate Data Center

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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NOAA: November was “record warm”

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