Tag Archives: earth

Climate Hawks Are Not Impressed by Obama’s Methane Plan

by Myrna Posted on January 20, 2015

Environmental groups say the new emissions rules don’t go far enough. LonnyG/Thinkstock You would expect environmentalists to offer effusive praise as President Obama releases the final major component of his Climate Action Plan: a proposal to clamp down on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector. And at first glance, they did. “This announcement once again demonstrates the President’s strong commitment to tackling the climate crisis,” said League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski. A number of other environmental groups echoed that sentiment. If you didn’t read between the lines, you might think Obama had given them all they wanted. He did not. Not even close. Environmental leaders, while praising the Obama administration’s intentions, warned that it will have to do much more than it pledged to on Wednesday if it is to meet its own stated goal for cutting methane emissions. Read the rest at Grist. Taken from: Climate Hawks Are Not Impressed by Obama’s Methane Plan

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Climate Hawks Are Not Impressed by Obama’s Methane Plan

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Hateful Little Cannibal Squirrels Could Help California Drought

by Myrna Posted on January 20, 2015

Farmers hate Belding’s ground squirrels. But they may be an essential piece of the state’s ecosystems. Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife/Wikimedia Commons Among alfalfa farmers in Northern California, Public Enemy No. 1 is a promiscuous, photogenic fur ball that weighs only half a pound and spends most of its life asleep. But with the critter helping the state weather its worst drought in 1,200 years, that perception may soon be a thing of the past. The diminutive Belding’s ground squirrel, an important link in the food chain for coyotes, bobcats, foxes, weasels, and raptors, has a long and troubled history as a major agricultural pest. Blame the squirrel’s voracious appetite for alfalfa. Blame its fleas, which can carry plague. Above all, blame the complex network of burrows it digs, which trip up livestock and damage farm machinery. All told, there are few animals in greater need of an image makeover than the rodent known to biologists as Urocitellus beldingi, and to detractors as pot gut, sage rat, and picket pin. But now, courtesy of climate change and California’s record-setting drought, Belding’s ground squirrels may be on the brink of a reversal of fortune. The same rodents responsible for millions of dollars’ worth of lost crops and damaged equipment might just turn out to be highly valuable ecosystem engineers, a designation reserved for organisms that modify their habitats, improving ecosystem stability and health. Read the rest at Grist. Link: Hateful Little Cannibal Squirrels Could Help California Drought

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Hateful Little Cannibal Squirrels Could Help California Drought

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5 Charts That Explain 2014′s Record-Smashing Heat

by Myrna Posted on January 16, 2015

The Earth keeps getting warmer, and we’re to blame. 2014 was the hottest year since record-keeping began way back in the nineteenth century, according to reports released Friday by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. According to NASA, the Earth has now warmed roughly 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, and most of that increase is the result of greenhouse gases released by humans. Nine of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 2000. NASA and NOAA both conducted their own, independent analyses of the data. But as you can see in the chart below, their results were nearly identical (all images below are from NASA and NOAA’s joint presentation): NASA/NOAA The record warmth wasn’t spread evenly across the globe. Europe, parts of Asia, Alaska, and the Arctic were extremely warm. At the same time, the US Midwest and East Coast were unusually cold, according to NASA’s analysis: NASA/NOAA Here’s another version of that map, from the NOAA analysis. This one shows that vast swaths of the oceans experienced record warm temperatures in 2014. Land temperatures in 2014 were actually the fourth warmest on record. But the oceans were so warm that the Earth as a whole was the hottest it has ever been since we started measuring: NASA/NOAA All that warmth has led to a significant loss of sea ice in the Arctic. In 2014, Arctic sea ice reached its sixth lowest extent on record. It was a different story at the South Pole, however. Antarctica saw its highest extent of sea ice on record. According to NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, the factors affecting sea ice in Antarctica—changes in wind patterns, for example—seem to be “more complicated” than in the Arctic, where temperatures and ice extent correlate strongly: NASA/NOAA So what’s causing this dramatic warming trend? In short, we are. Check out these charts, which show that if we weren’t pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the planet would actually be cooling right now: NASA/NOAA See original article here –  5 Charts That Explain 2014′s Record-Smashing Heat ; ; ;

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5 Charts That Explain 2014′s Record-Smashing Heat

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West Virginia Wanted to Teach Students Anti-Science Nonsense. Teachers Fought Back—and Won.

by Torri9025sicg Posted on January 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For a little while there, it looked like West Virginia was getting ready to teach its students to doubt the overwhelming majority of scientists who say climate change is a real thing. Now, maybe not. Yesterday, after an outcry from science education advocates, the state school board reversed course.

To start from the beginning: The state’s school board voted in December to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards, a framework that 26 states, including West Virginia, helped develop for nationwide use. The standards require students to look at and analyze evidence that humans are causing global warming. But one climate skeptic on the board feels this aspect of the curriculum is misleading; it “presupposes that global temperatures have risen over the past century, and, of course, there’s debate about that,” he told The Charleston Gazette. Hmm.

So, at his urging, the school board revised the standards to sow doubt about whether things are getting warmer (there is no scientific debate about this—they are) and whether humans are causing it (there is almost no scientific debate about this either—we almost certainly are). Students were to learn about Milankovitch cycles—changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun, one explanation for global warming popular among the mostly non-scientist community that doesn’t believe humans are responsible. (In fact, instead of explaining warming, Milankovitch cycles actually suggest that the earth’s temperatures should, at the moment, be stable or cooling.)

When the news broke that the standards had been quietly altered, it was met with a general outcry from educators inside and outside of the state, as well as parents. West Virginia University’s faculty senate voted unanimously to request that the school board reverse the changes. Many of those who spoke up were particularly upset that the public, including the teachers who would be discussing climate change in their classrooms, didn’t have a chance to weigh in.

“The West Virginia School Board made these final changes unilaterally,” said Elizabeth Strong, the president of the West Virginia Science Teachers Association. “The science was compromised by these modifications to the standards, specifically by casting doubt on the credibility of the evidence-based climate models and misrepresentation of trends in science when analyzing graphs dealing with temperature changes over time.”

National education groups were also not impressed. “They are taking the standards, they are calling it the next-generation science standards, and they are changing the composition of the science to match their own personal views,” Minda Berbeco of the National Center for Science Education told The New York Times. “That defeats the purpose of having standards developed by scientific advisory boards.”

The outcry, apparently, had the desired effect. After a public comment period on Wednesday, the school board reversed course and went back to the original, unaltered standards. Ryan Quinn, who has great coverage of the whole saga at The Charleston Gazette, reports that the state school board president “said she didn’t want to go against the work that West Virginia teachers did in vetting the standards and called the controversy a learning opportunity.”

Now the standards will be opened up for a 30-day public comment period and the board will take a final vote on the matter in March. Whatever the board settles on will go into effect during the 2016-2017 school year—and right now, signs indicate that they’ll stick with this latest decision to not muddy science in the science classroom.

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West Virginia Wanted to Teach Students Anti-Science Nonsense. Teachers Fought Back—and Won.

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Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

by KlaraGuzm Posted on January 8, 2015

Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

By on 8 Jan 2015commentsShare

Well, shoot. Looks like the Department of Agriculture’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans won’t mention anything about the environment, after all.

USDA nutritionist Eve Essery Stoody told Vice News that the federal food recommendations will be, as always, based on how diet affects human health, not the health of the planet.

In case you haven’t been following: The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the group charged with writing new eating instructions for the U.S. every five years, wanted to acknowledge that yes, food is produced on Earth and what we choose to eat plays a role in determining what food is produced and how. A few months back, Tufts University professor Miriam Nelson, a member of the committee, said to her colleagues, “In general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods and lower in animal-based foods is more health-promoting and is associated with less environmental impact.” That language was included in the draft report that the DGAC voted to submit at its Dec. 15 meeting. 

Predictably, Big Meat wasn’t cool with mixing advice on what’s good for eaters with facts about what’s good for ecosystems, since large quantities of animal products are unhealthy for both. So the meat industry’s lobbyists saw to it that congressmembers attached some directives to a spending bill imploring that the new guidelines make clear that food has nothing (nothing!) to do with that thing out there called the environment.

Earlier this week, though, it still seemed possible that the USDA might include some remarks on our food choices’ impact beyond personal nutrition. John Light, who wrote for Grist about how the new guidelines might tell Americans to eat less beef for the sake of the environment, points out that taking earthly issues into account would go against the corporate-influenced history of the federal guidelines:

The beef industry has long held sway over the guidelines the USDA puts out, with unfortunate results for the environment — University of Michigan researchers found last year that if all Americans followed the USDA dietary guidelines, we’d see a 12 percent increase in dietary-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Once again, the ag department appears to have caved under intense political pressure. Now no Americans will ever know that what’s salubrious for them is also generally unhealthy for the climate, since everyone gets all their dietary advice from the government food pyramid!

Maybe they’ll sneak some green talk in the guidelines next time around, in 2020. Unless by then our laboratory-made food really is effectively disconnected from the biosphere.

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Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

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Michael Green: A Superhero for the Earth

by ColinEllzey Posted on December 27, 2014

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Michael Green: A Superhero for the Earth

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Soundtrack for a Police-Brutality Protest

by RustyT72yrrwnd Posted on December 22, 2014

Mother Jones

The sun was setting as the Millions March began to disperse in downtown Oakland, California. Thousands of people had taken to the streets throughout the day to show solidarity and outrage over the slew of high-profile killings of unarmed African Americans by police. With coordinated marches held around the country, it had been a day of signs and banners, impassioned speeches, and pointed but peaceful demonstrations.

As evening fell, a second march was about to begin. A young man in a black hoodie, his face hidden behind a red bandana, shouted “Fuck the police!” through a megaphone as hundreds filed into the intersection behind him—the tone of this march was markedly darker.

In Oakland, anger over racism in the criminal justice system is always simmering beneath the surface. But the grand jury decisions to not indict the officers responsible for the deaths of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, had fueled continuing protests around the Bay Area. Graffiti scrawled across street signs and boarded-up businesses reflected the shouted sentiments that could be heard over sirens and helicopters, echoing through the streets each night.

But something made this march stand apart. Among the marchers was a cart stacked with two PA speakers, an amplifier, an inverter, and a couple of deep-cycle batteries to power the setup. With nearly $4,000 worth of equipment, the music cart added a dimension missing from the previous protests. At dusk, people followed the sound to join the march, pausing to circle around the cart and dance to the rhythm booming through the speakers.

Brian, the cart’s owner, who asked that I not publish his last name, told me he started bringing his sound system to demonstrations as part of Occupy Oakland back in 2011*. A student who works part time in sound production and theater design, Brian was happy to step up when march organizers asked him to. “I think music helps crowds stay together and it helps people feel more empowered. It’s hard to describe,” he said, with a pause. “You go on a march without music—there’s a difference.”

Brian’s selections, some of which were penned on these very streets, reflected the sentiments of the marchers. “I think in a lot of ways music enables protests to be something that is fun and joyous while still matching the angry mood,” he told me. “That is balance that you have to strike.” He emphasized that his role was strictly one of support. “I think it is super-important, as a white person in this movement, that I take a backseat. I am trying to be very careful not to lead the march with the sound system, and it is very important to play music that people are enjoying in the crowd.”

Police presence was felt throughout the night, but around 6:30 pm, following scattered acts of vandalism, an Oakland Police intercom boomed instructions to disperse, warning the hundreds of marchers that their assembly was unlawful. Anyone there, regardless of purpose, was subject to arrest, which could “result in personal injury,” the police warned. The march continued even after police ran at the crowd, causing some protesters to scatter momentarily. But the music kept playing and people kept marching.

Some volunteered to help push the cumbersome equipment—nearly 200 pounds of it—over grassy knolls, through stopped traffic, and away from police who attempted to corral protesters into kettles, a common crowd-control tactic. Others gave Brian song requests.

He tried his best to match their moods, switching from heavier, more strident songs to upbeat classics like the Commodores’ “Brick House” and Michael Jackson hits to calm the crowd during police confrontations. “At that point we had broken out of those kettles,” he said, “and it is a little bit of a scary moment—a moment in which we won, which is great, but I think people were a little on edge.” The music seemed to do the trick; marchers could be seen dancing past a growing number police vans and squad cars.

The victory wouldn’t last long, though. Around eight o’clock, the group around the sound system danced right into a police kettle and was quickly surrounded. The police silenced and confiscated Brian’s gear and began arresting people. Officers from 11 different agencies made 45 arrests that night in Oakland, and Brian was among them. He was released quickly though, and he says people can expect to see him and his sound system out on the streets again soon.

Here’s a sampling of songs he played last week:

“Lovelle Mixon”—Mistah F.A.B. feat. Magnolia Chop:

“Fuck Tha Police”—Lil Boosie:

“We Ain’t Listenin’ (Remix)”—Beeda Weeda, J Stalin:

“N.E.W. Oakland”—Mistah F.A.B.:

“Hyphy”—Federation feat E-40:

“Don’t Snitch”—Mac Dre:

“G Code”—Geto Boys:

“California Love”—2Pac feat. Dr. Dre:

“Fuck Tha Police”—N.W.A.:

“Rock With You” – Michael Jackson:

“September”—Earth, Wind, and Fire:

Correction: The original version of this article misidentified the year the Occupy Oakland protests began.

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Soundtrack for a Police-Brutality Protest

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We Should Respond to North Korea. But What If We Can’t?

by LinwoodConforti Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over at the all-new New Republic, Yishai Schwartz sounds the usual old-school New Republic war drums toward North Korea. “The only way to prevent future attacks,” he says, “is for foreign governments to know that attacks against U.S. targets—cyber or kinetic—will bring fierce, yet proportionally appropriate, responses.” And time is already running out. We should be doing this now now now.

Right. So what’s the deal, Obama? Why all the dithering in the face of this attack? Are you just—oh wait. Maybe there’s more to this. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Responding presents its own set of challenges, with options that people familiar with the discussions say are either implausible or ineffective. North Korea’s only connections to the Internet run through China, and some former officials say the U.S. should urge Beijing to get its neighbor to cut it out…But the U.S. already is in a standoff with China over accusations of bilateral hacking, making any aid in this crisis unlikely, the intelligence official said.

Engaging in a counter-hack could also backfire, U.S. cyberpolicy experts said, in part because the U.S. is able to spy on North Korea by maintaining a foothold on some of its computer systems. A retaliatory cyberstrike could wind up damaging Washington’s ability to spy on Pyongyang, a former intelligence official said. Another former U.S. official said policy makers remain squeamish about deploying cyberweapons against foreign targets.

…North Korea is already an isolated nation, so there isn’t much more economic pressure the U.S. can bring to bear on them either, these people said. Even publicly naming them as the suspected culprit presents diplomatic challenges, potentially causing problems for Japan, where Sony is based.

I’d like to do something to stomp on North Korea too. Hell, 20 million North Koreans would be better off if we just invaded the damn place and put them all under NATO military rule. It’s one of the few places on Earth you can say that about. However, I’m sensible enough to realize that things aren’t that easy, and there’s not much point in demanding “action” just because the situation is so hellish and frustrating.

Ditto in this case. A US response would certainly be appropriate. And honestly, it’s not as if there’s really anyone taking the other side of that argument. But given the nature of the DPRK, a meaningful response would also be really hard. America just doesn’t have a whole lot of leverage against a place like that. What’s more, if we do respond, it’s at least even odds that it will be done in some way that will never be made public.

So let’s cool our jets. Armchair posturing might make us feel better, but this isn’t a partisan chew toy, and it’s not a matter of the current administration being insufficiently hawkish. It’s a matter of figuring out if there’s even a way to respond effectively. Like it or not, it might turn out that there isn’t.

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We Should Respond to North Korea. But What If We Can’t?

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NASA is headed for Mars. What, is there something wrong with Earth?

by AlfredoLovett Posted on December 3, 2014

NASA is headed for Mars. What, is there something wrong with Earth?

By on 3 Dec 2014commentsShare

Maybe you’re skeptical of whether or not the U.N. Climate Summit in Lima will actually do anything. That’s OK! In terms of humans actually moving to turn around carbon emissions and take a last stab at saving the planet, things look a bit dicey. From The New York Times, earlier this week:

While a breach of the 3.6 degree threshold appears inevitable, scientists say that United Nations negotiators should not give up on their efforts to cut emissions. At stake now, they say, is the difference between a newly unpleasant world and an uninhabitable one.

“Newly unpleasant world” sure does sound rough, not least for its ominous vagueness. What form will that unpleasantness take, exactly? Will herds of small shih-tzus bite your ankles every time you leave your house, until you slowly hemorrhage to death in the street? Will all sandwich options be reduced to watercress and cucumber? Will every new radio single just be Pitbull yelling “DALE” on repeat for three and a half minutes, over a background track of screaming infants?

Ha! No — it will likely take the form of unprecedented natural disasters, sweltering heat, and food shortages. (I mean, those other things could happen too — who’s to say!) One could say, if one were particularly forward-thinking in the most pessimistic way and also were named Christopher Jonathan James Nolan, that we might be in the market for another planet.

Which is why we can all delight in the fact that NASA is taking the next step in sending humans to Mars! Tomorrow morning*, if all goes as planned, NASA will send its new capsule, Orion, into an orbit that extends 3,600 miles from the Earth’s surface. At the conclusion of that orbit, Orion will plop peacefully into the Pacific Ocean and then get trucked back to Florida for testing — a grisly fate, indeed. The journey, which will test Orion’s safety features in deep-space conditions, should take four and a half hours and cost about $375 million.

Does that seem like a very, very brief trip for that amount of money? Screw you — space is spendy! Furthermore, there are two more trips planned (albeit for still more money): Another unmanned test in 2018, and one with real live astronauts in 2021. No word yet on when the actual Mars mission begins.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, professional one-upper and CEO of SpaceX, has been designing his own Mars-exploration capsule — which he claims costs less than Orion to develop. Again from The New York Times:

After the first unmanned Dragon test flight in 2010, Mr. Musk said he hoped NASA would at least consider the possibility. “Dragon has arguably more capability than Orion,” he said then. “Basically, anything Orion can do, Dragon can do.”

You tell ‘em, Elon! But more importantly: Which one would Matthew McConaughey pilot? I will only go to space in an aircraft that Matthew McConaughey is flying. But I will also probably be dead before this whole “newly unpleasant world” thing comes about, so who cares what I think!

*UPDATE: The Orion test launch has been rescheduled for Friday morning.

Source:
NASA Sees Capsule Test as a Step Toward Mars

, The New York Times.

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This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

by ReneeQuisenberr Posted on November 11, 2014

Mother Jones

Like Disney and the WWF, the game show Jeopardy! has its villains—or at least one, in the form of Arthur Chu, the 30-year-old Cleveland native who took home nearly $300,000 after winning an 11-game streak and seemingly pissing off half of America. How? His sins ranged from “pounding the bejesus out of his buzzer” to skipping wildly around the board in search of Daily Doubles, setting longtime viewers’ heads on fire. The “Jeopardy! bad boy” has continued courting controversy since his February appearance with a number of provocative essays on race and gender issues. He’s recently had a lot to say about Gamergate, a fierce debate going on in the world of video games over issues of diversity and harassment of women. I talked to Chu right before his Jeopardy! return in this week’s Tournament of Champions.

Mother Jones: So how does one study for Jeopardy?

Arthur Chu: A lot of flashcards. There’s a whole online community where people archive clues from the past. Since I talked about using that, I think they’ve started writing the show to make it harder.

People say Jeopardy! is getting “dumbed down” because there are more pop culture questions. I think it’s the opposite. There’s only so many classic operas you can study. For pop culture, you have to actually watch the shows. There’s one every week! It’s much harder.

MJ: What’s your buzzer strategy?

AC: The thing about being a lifelong gamer is that my eye-to-hand reaction time is faster than average. I actually went on a website that tests your reaction time and verified this to my satisfaction.

I knew Ken Jennings loved to buzz in and then start to try to figure out the answer after buzzing. Ken’s very smart, but that’s a little too dangerous for me. Jeopardy! is won partially by keeping your mouth shut when you aren’t sure, so you don’t lose points by getting something wrong.

Really, when you practice watching the show, you should practice reading ahead of Alex’s talking so that by the instant he’s done talking, you’ve digested the question and decided whether you know it or not.

MJ: The times you’ve played, were there any categories you just dreaded, and prayed they wouldn’t come up?

AC: Sports was a huge handicap for me in my original run. And what’s worse, it’s known that it was a huge handicap for me because everyone reported on that famous Daily Double where I bet $5 and blew off the clue. So I felt like I had to shore that up, and studied a ton of sports.

MJ: Switching topics to another kind of gaming, the Gamergate debate is clearly on some level a backlash to demands for better diversity in video games. But a lot of gamers say the lack of female lead characters in games—or brown characters, queer characters, and so on—simply isn’t a problem that needs fixing.

AC: You hear a lot of this. “Why are you dragging real-life politics into cyberspace? I go to gaming to get away from real-life issues.” For a lot of geeks, gaming is all about stripping who you are completely and entering this imaginary space, this world that’s made for you, where winning and losing have nothing to do with real life. They try to argue that representation in games has not been an issue because nobody is really themselves in a game; it’s all just avatars. They’re not seeing the many ways in which that’s not true.

This is a conversation that we’ve needed to have for a long time. And now it’s being dragged into the open.

MJ: So why are we having this conversation now?

AC: From the beginning, the internet has been dominated by white men. So if you wanted to be a part of the internet and you weren’t a white man, you had to adapt yourself to their world. It became normal for women on the internet to adopt gender-neutral or male screen names. If you’re not white, you didn’t talk about your background. It became normal to subsume yourself into a generalized American identity.

We’ve sort of reached a tipping point where people are tired of that. People are saying, “Look, I’m gay”—for instance—”and being gay is important to me and I’m going to talk about it and I’m not going to just sit here and pretend that the many little ways you take a crap on my identity don’t matter.”

MJ: I’ve noticed that the vast majority of people supporting Gamergate online are using anonymous avatars, while a lot of the people they’re piling on to are writing under their real names.

AC: It’s part of the whole idea that the internet is just “for lulz,” that the internet’s not real. Look at 4chan culture, which is the ultimate version of shedding your IRL in real life identity—you don’t even keep a consistent screen name from thread to thread. That’s very important to them, this belief in the possibility that what I do online is completely separate from who I really am.

MJ: Do you have any empathy with the young men who are the bulk of this movement, who, whether they realize it or not, are pretty clearly grappling with some gnarly issues of identity and change?

AC: Oh yeah, I do. I think I’ve tried to be open about the fact that I’ve changed a lot. As an early adopter of the internet, I’ve changed as the internet has changed, and I regret a lot of the things that I used to believe or used to do.

MJ: Like what?

AC: For example, in college I was known as Mister Reasonable Neutrality, always trying to find the middle, to be “rational.” And now that’s almost a cliché—that annoying guy on the internet who insists on playing devil’s advocate, on having a “rational debate,” insisting that emotions are always wrong or biased.

It took me a while to realize that it doesn’t help anyone to have these rational debates. A rational debate is never going to lead to an objectively rational conclusion. It’s never going to pull people out of where they are.

MJ: I feel like anyone who’s spent any time on Reddit has met That Guy.

AC: The joke when I was a teenager was, “Someday you’ll all be working for me.” Being a nerd meant being good with computers, book knowledge, and data, and being bad with people. So the idea was that if you got really good at working with things and manipulating objects, you’d reach a point in life where you wouldn’t need people to like you. You’d win purely by merit. There’s nowhere on Earth where this is actually true, but there’s people who believe that.

That’s why so much of nerd culture involves these power fantasies full of magic—literally reshaping the world through thinking about it—and superheroes with super abilities. It’s also why a lot of the people in geeky subcultures gravitate towards libertarianism. There’s a strong ideological belief in wiping out “politics,” because politics means having to interact with people, and negotiating with people who have different interests.

MJ: So you know a bit about being on the receiving end of a lot of online hate. Most of us will never experience anything like this. What was it like?

AC: I’m glad it happened the way it did. I became a C-list celeb for being controversial. I’m the guy everybody hates. I’m the villain. I thought, I can embrace that.

Every time I write an article, it’s like, I’ve already been the “most hated man in America” for this really dumb thing. How could it get any worse if it were for something I actually believe? I’ve got the money already from being on this stupid game show. The limelight is an unexpected bonus. If I use the limelight to make people like me for a fake image of me, abandon these things I was so passionate about back when it was just me writing to a bunch of my friends on Facebook, then what kind of a person am I?

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This Jeopardy Champ and Proud Geek Gives Swirlies to Gamergaters in His Spare Time

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