Author Archives: UlrikeC65cfdksx

Watch John Oliver explain the Green New Deal like only he can

by UlrikeC65cfdksx Posted on May 13, 2019

In typical John Oliver rapidly-switching-between-serious-and-satirical style, Last Week Tonight’s latest episode discussed the Green New Deal. And by ‘discussed,’ what we really mean is: He considered riding a sled pulled by 400 hamsters, made Trump jokes, and explained why carbon taxing may be an important tool in the climate fight.

In the nearly 20-minute piece, Oliver covered a lot of ground. He first described the Green New Deal and the frenzy of media coverage from both sides that has followed.

“However bumpy its rollout was, to its eternal credit, the Green New Deal has succeeded in getting people talking,” Oliver said. “But that won’t mean anything unless that talk turns to actions, and putting a price on carbon could be one of them.”

He then dove into carbon pricing. Using science icon Bill Nye the Science Guy to explain the concept, Oliver tried to make the idea of introducing a new tax a little more feasible and innocuous.

“[A carbon tax] will not be enough on its own by a long shot,” Oliver said in one of his moments of gravity. “We’re going to need a lot of different policies working in tandem, and we have to take action right now!”

And then, with an angry flourish, Bill Nye took a torch to a model of Earth.

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Watch John Oliver explain the Green New Deal like only he can

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This Chart Tells You Everything You Need to Know About Jeb Bush’s Campaign

by UlrikeC65cfdksx Posted on February 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jeb Bush’s campaign started off with a bang, pulling in a huge haul donations during its first month. And then? Behold the decline of Jeb!

The one upside? At least his campaign’s fundraising didn’t crash as hard as his super-PAC’s did.

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This Chart Tells You Everything You Need to Know About Jeb Bush’s Campaign

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Is There a Hillary Doctrine?

by UlrikeC65cfdksx Posted on August 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jeffrey Goldberg’s interview with Hillary Clinton is being taken as an effort by Hillary to distance herself from President Obama. Here’s the most frequently quoted snippet:

HRC: Great nations need organizing principles, and “Don’t do stupid stuff” is not an organizing principle. It may be a necessary brake on the actions you might take in order to promote a vision.

….JG: What is your organizing principle, then?

HRC: Peace, progress, and prosperity. This worked for a very long time. Take prosperity. That’s a huge domestic challenge for us. If we don’t restore the American dream for Americans, then you can forget about any kind of continuing leadership in the world. Americans deserve to feel secure in their own lives, in their own middle-class aspirations, before you go to them and say, “We’re going to have to enforce navigable sea lanes in the South China Sea.”

I’ve seen the first part of this excerpt several times, and each time I’ve wondered, “So what’s your organizing principle.” When I finally got around to reading the interview, I discovered that this was Goldberg’s very next question. And guess what? Hillary doesn’t have one.

She’s basically hauling out an old chestnut: We need to be strong at home if we want to be strong overseas. And that’s fine as far as it goes. But it’s not an organizing principle for foreign policy. It’s not even close. At best, it’s a precursor to an organizing principle, and at worst it’s just a plain and simple evasion.

It so happens that I think “don’t do stupid stuff” is a pretty good approach to foreign policy at the moment. It’s underrated in most of life, in fact, while “doctrines” are mostly straitjackets that force you to fight the last war over and over and over. The fact that Hillary Clinton (a) brushes this off and (b) declines to say what her foreign policy would be based on—well, it frankly scares me. My read of all this is that Hillary is itching to outline a much more aggressive foreign policy but doesn’t think she can quite get away with it yet. She figures she needs to distance herself from Obama slowly, and she needs to wait for the American public to give her an opportunity. My guess is that any crisis will do that happens to pop up in 2015.

I don’t have any problems with Hillary’s domestic policy. I’ve never believed that she “understood” the Republican party better than Obama and therefore would have gotten more done if she’d won in 2008, but I don’t think she would have gotten any less done either. It’s close to a wash. But in foreign policy, I continually find myself wondering just where she stands. I suspect that she still chafes at being forced to repudiate her vote for the Iraq war—and largely losing to Obama because of it. I wouldn’t be surprised if she still believes that vote was the right thing to do, nor would I be surprised if her foreign policy turned out to be considerably more interventionist than either Bill’s or Obama’s.

But I don’t know for sure. And I probably never will unless she gets elected in 2016 and we get to find out.

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Is There a Hillary Doctrine?

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"Cosmos" Just Got Nominated for 12 Emmys

by UlrikeC65cfdksx Posted on July 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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It was a truly groundbreaking moment in television. Educationally driven science content was once anathema on primetime television, but earlier this year, Seth Macfarlane, Neil deGrasse Tyson and company set out to prove that wrong with Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a remake of the classic Carl Sagan-hosted show from 1980.

And if today’s Emmy nominations mean anything, the result is a major triumph. Cosmos has received 12 of them.

That’s not quite as good as the 19 for Game of Thrones, or 16 for Breaking Bad, but it’s a very significant number, and it includes nominations for “Outstanding Documentary Or Nonfiction Series,” “Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming” (for writers Ann Druyan and Steven Soter), “Outstanding Direction for Nonfiction Programming” (for director Brannon Braga).

In fact, that’s actually a tie with HBO’s True Detective, which also got 12 nominations.

Recently, I interviewed Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the face of the new show, who remarked on how to interpret its success. “You had entertainment writers putting The Walking Dead in the same sentence as Cosmos,” said Tyson. “Game of Thrones in the same sentence of Cosmos. ‘How’s Cosmos doing against Game of Thrones?’ That is an extraordinary fact, no matter what ratings it earned.”

The Emmy nominations will certainly give entertainment writers another such opportunity. In fact, it’s already happening. And when a science television show is celebrated by the deacons of popular culture, that can only be good news for the place of science in American society. (Note: the Showtime climate change documentary Years of Living Dangerously also received 2 Emmy nominations.)

The Cosmos nominations are for:

Outstanding Documentary Or Nonfiction Series

Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming

Outstanding Direction for Nonfiction Programming

Outstanding Art Direction for Variety, Nonfiction, Reality or Reality Competition Program

Outstanding Cinematography for Nonfiction Programming

Outstanding Picture Editing for Nonfiction Programming

Outstanding Main Title Design

Outstanding Musical Composition for a Series (Original Dramatic Score)

Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music

Outstanding Sound Editing for Nonfiction Programming (Single or Multi-Camera)

Outstanding Sound Mixing for Nonfiction Programming and

Outstanding Special and Visual Effects.

The full list of Emmy nominations can be found here.

To listen to our Inquiring Minds podcast interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson, you can stream below:

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"Cosmos" Just Got Nominated for 12 Emmys

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