Mother Jones
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Woman helps rob bank in elaborate scheme, then files workers comp claim for PTSD. She’s now facing charges of insurance fraud in addition to the nine years in a federal penitentiary she’s already earned. Welcome to California.
Continued here:
Bank Robber Adds New Dimension to Old Definition of Chutzpah
Mother Jones
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As the “ex-gay therapy” movement suffers major legal and legislative blows, one of its leading proponents has undergone a major rebranding effort.
On Wednesday, in a bizarre, décolletage-heavy, news-style video, the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH)—the professional organization for conversion therapists—reestablished itself as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI). In what it calls a “major expansion of our mission,” ATCSI claims it will continue “preserving the right of individuals to obtain the services of a therapist who honors their values, advocating for integrity and objectivity in social science research, and ensuring that competent licensed, professional assistance is available for persons who experience unwanted homosexual (same-sex) attractions.”
NARTH’s makeover, along with a similar rebranding effort by Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX), comes in response to growing national opposition to conversion therapy. ATCSI’s new website says the group has become “increasingly involved in legal and professional efforts to defend the rights of clients to pursue change-oriented psychological care as well as the rights of licensed mental health professionals.”
Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing (JONAH), another ex-gay therapy organization run by former NARTH Board Member (and convicted fraudster) Arthur Abba Goldberg, is currently being sued for a different kind of fraud—accepting money but failing to deliver on the conversion promised.
Meanwhile, California and New Jersey‘s bans on ex-gay therapy for minors have held up in court. Michigan may be next to pass a similar bill. Many conversion therapy groups have shut down in recent years, including Love in Action, Evergreen International, Love Won Out, and Exodus International; The latter’s president issued an apologetic open letter to the LGBT community last summer. In July, nine remorseful former leaders in the ex-gay therapy movement penned a joint letter condemning ex-gay therapy as an “ineffective and harmful” practice that “reinforces internalized homophobia, anxiety, guilt, and depression.”
Conversion therapy, which is discredited by the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, and the American Counseling Association, has been shown to increase risks of suicide, depression, drug abuse, and HIV/STDs. Its damaging effects have led to the creation of “ex-ex-gay” survivor groups.
Despite this growing tide of opposition, ex-gay therapy is not a thing of the past. Proposed youth bans similar to California’s and New Jersey’s have failed to pass in Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Washington, Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Hawaii and Rhode Island. The Republican Party of Texas even endorses the practice in its draft 2014 platform.
In a press release regarding NARTH’s makeover, LGBT activist nonprofit Truth Wins Out (TWO) warns “not to be fooled” by the “cynical branding effort,” calling the group’s literature “anti-gay hate speech wrapped in medical language.” TWO Executive Director Wayne Besen calls ATCSI “the same old swine peddling junk science to desperate and vulnerable people.”
TWO’s press release also points out some of NARTH’s stranger recommendations: The group has encouraged clients to increase their manliness by drinking Gatorade and calling their friends “dude.”
Read original article:
"Ex-Gay" Conversion Therapy Group Rebrands, Stresses "Rights of Clients"
Mother Jones
Emotional contagion is when people subconsciously take on the emotions of those around them. It’s when happy people are around sad people and then feel rather down themselves. Or when sad people are in happy crowds and suddenly just want to dance. Like so many things in real life, this happens on the internet as well. Your emotional state converges with the general feeling of your Twitter feed or your Facebook friends. This is how humans work, it’s how we’re wired, and it’s nothing to lose sleep over.
What may in fact be worth losing sleep over is that Facebook just admitted to intentionally manipulating people’s emotions by selectively choosing which type of their friends’ posts—positive or negative—appeared in their News Feed.
Take it away, Next Web:
The company has revealed in a research paper that it carried out a week-long experiment that affected nearly 700,000 users to test the effects of transferring emotion online.
The News Feeds belonging to 689,003 users of the English language version were altered to see “whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors,” Facebook says. There was one track for those receiving more positive posts, and another for those who were exposed to more emotionally negative content from their friends. Posts themselves were not affected and could still be viewed from friends’ profiles, the trial instead edited what the guinea pig users saw in their News Feed, which itself is governed by a selective algorithm, as brands frustrated by the system can attest to.
Facebook found that the emotion in posts is contagious. Those who saw positive content were, on average, more positive and less negative with their Facebook activity in the days that followed. The reverse was true for those who were tested with more negative postings in their News Feed.
Ok, let’s break some stuff down:
Can they do this?
Yes. You agree to let the company use its information about you for “data analysis, testing, research and service improvement” when you agree to without reading the terms of service. It’s the “research” bit that’s relevant.
Should they?
I don’t know! There are clearly some ethical questions about it. A lot of people are pretty outraged. Even the editor of the study thought it was a creepy.
Should I quit Facebook?
You’re not going to quit Facebook.
No, really. I might.
You’re not going to quit Facebook.
You don’t even know me. I really might quit. No joke. I have my finger on button. I saw an ad for a little house out in the country. No internet. No cell service. I could sell everything and go there and live a quite, deliberate life by a pond. I could be happy there in that stillness.
Cool, so, I personally am not going to quit Facebook. That seems to me to be an overreaction. But I do not presume to know you well enough to advise you on this matter.
(You’re not going to quit Facebook.)
Anything else?
Yes, actually!
Earlier this year there was a minor brouhaha over the news that USAID had introduced a fake Twitter into Cuba in an attempt to foment democracy. It didn’t work and they pulled the plug. Let’s dress up and play the game pretend: If Facebook has the power to make people arbitrarily happy or sad, it could be quite the force politically in countries where it has a high penetration rate. (Cuba isn’t actually one of those countries. According to Freedom House, only 5% of the population has access to the World Wide Web.)
Economic confidence is one of the biggest factors people consider when going to vote. What if for the week before the election your News Feed became filled with posts from your unemployed friends looking for work? Not that Mark Zuckerburg and co. would ever do that, but they could!
Have fun, conspiracy theorists!
Link:
Facebook Just Admitted It Tinkered With People’s News Feeds to Manipulate Their Emotions
Mother Jones
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I can’t remember exactly how we all ended up going to Gay Pride brunch together at my friend Marta’s house that Sunday morning, in June of 1988. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that I would bring along Saul Bromberger, a photographer at the East Bay newspaper where I was a reporter, and his then girlfriend and now wife, Sandra Hoover.
At the time, Saul and Sandy were already four years into a project that would last until 1990: documenting the San Francisco gay pride parade. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and anger at the world’s indifference to the disease was growing, generating radical groups like ACT Up (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). So Saul and Sandy came to our pride brunch with cameras in hand.
The pair started shooting the parades in 1984 because they believed they were witnessing history. “It was this kind of test I was giving myself: Can we document this movement that is also a parade?” Saul remembers. Unlike other photographers, he didn’t “just see people jumping around and dancing,” he says. He saw people “demanding change.”
Saul and Sandy wanted to capture the celebration, the love, and the rage, and in so doing, to capture the heart of a movement.
They purposely eschewed the long lenses favored by newspaper journalists, who seemed focused only on the spectacle. Instead, they got close to their subjects. They talked to them. They made friends. And the pictures they took were intimate and close.
But when Saul and Sandy asked to shoot the brunch (or maybe—I can’t remember to be honest—I invited them) they were putting me in a place I hated and loved at the same time.
A heads up: Some of these photos contain nudity.
Castro Street, 20th Anniversary of the San Francisco Pride Parade, 1989
Market St., 1984
Dykes on Bikes ride down Market St. during the SF Pride Parade, 1989
This was a time when the gay world often existed separately from the straight one, and before cameras were everywhere. They needed permission to be there. We trusted them.
I also knew they had to be there. I wanted them there. I felt honored. But I also felt scared and exposed. My experience back in 1987 was that if you didn’t purposefully and repeatedly out yourself, you were not out. There was no social media where you could simply declare yourself to be something other than straight and then watch the consequences unfold.
You had to tell people over and over again. You had to make yourself the story.
It seemed easier not to do it. Besides, I was a journalist, an outsider. I covered the stories. I didn’t make them. Like Saul and Sandy, I’m an observer by nature.
It felt strange to thrust myself into the spotlight. I could alienate people. What if my sources stopped talking to me? It wasn’t just an idle concern. It happened. But it was more than that: Like most humans, I didn’t want to put myself in a box. I didn’t want to be other.
Just a few years before, in my early 20s, I had concluded that something inside of me was broken. I had great boyfriends. I just couldn’t fall in love. I had resigned myself to a life without love, when on a balmy night in my senior year of college, my female roommate and I stepped out onto the sidewalk and fell into a passionate kiss. Yes, I kissed a girl and I didn’t just like it. It rocked my world. I got it. And in that moment, I realized I was not broken. I was just different.
Market St., 1986
Civic Center, 1987
Market St., 1987
Market St., 1984
Market St., 1989
Bonnie and Laura, Civic Center, 1985
It was an intensely personal, intensely private discovery. But I quickly understood that if I were to date people of my own gender, I would be taking a political stand, like it or not. I couldn’t remain a detached observer.
So when I went to the pride parade, it wasn’t just to party. I went because, like so many others, I needed it.
I needed to fuel up on all the pride, all the love, all the righteous anger, all the togetherness. It was an infusion on which I could draw during the year. When someone yelled “dyke” at me and my girlfriend in the street, or a friend suddenly shunned me, or a relative told me that they didn’t understand but still loved me even if I was wrong, I could tap into that reserve.
Market St., 1984
Civic Center, 1990
Market St., 1989
Market St., 1987
Recently, I was talking with Saul about those years. He seemed miffed at himself for not putting his work out there: Every year they’d go to the parade, take amazing photos, and develop them. They’d hand out these beautiful prints to their subjects. They’ve always been generous like that. My halls were lined with them.
But then they’d go in a box under the bed.
“There were a lot of pictures I took back then that I never submitted to the paper because I thought they were personal,” Saul says.
Surely they could have gotten them out before. Surely, they would have gained notoriety for capturing a movement in advance of everybody else. I’ve been thinking about that: Why didn’t they bring these pictures out?
I think I know. I think in a way they kept them in a box for us. To protect the community from a world that could be hostile and cruel.
Dykes on Bikes awaits the start of the parade on Market St., 1990
Civic Center, 1987
Dykes on Bikes before the start of the parade, 1989
Market St., 1988
Market St., 1988
Market St., 1988
These pictures show something soft and vulnerable. They show humanity. But they also show nudity. It would be easy to take them out of context.
And to bring them out into the glare of society where they could be ridiculed—maybe they didn’t belong there. Not yet.
When we recount history, inevitably we reshape it, sharpening memories with new revelations and forgetting other parts altogether.
But these pictures capture unflinching, static moments of a different time. There’s a picture of a bare-breasted woman carrying a whip. There’s a picture of a couple on a roof with their trusty dog. There’s a picture of five men in a window, three of whom I know for sure died of AIDS.
The past lives and breathes in these photos. And it’s important to remember history. It’s important to see ourselves from a distance, especially when the closet walls have fallen and here we are.
Market St., 1985
Market St., 1987
San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos and his family, Market St., 1988
Civic Center, 1989
The parade’s Grand Marshals, James Broughton and Holly Near, on Market St., 1988
Civic Center, 1985
Civic Center, 1987
Civic Center, 1988
Mia and Friends, Civic Center, 1987
Pierre, Market St., 1989
Civic Center, 1984
From left to right: Sandra Hoover, Janet Kornblum, Saul Bromberger, 1988
For more of Saul and Sandy’s SF pride pictures go to their site: PRIDE – The San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Freedom Day Parade: 1984 – 1990.
More:
Joy, Rage, and Love: ’80s-tastic Photos of San Francisco Pride
Mother Jones
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Hello. Good day.
How are you? Are you feeling alive? Are you feeling like life is worth living? Perhaps there is a bounce in your step? Optimism in your eye? Are you eager to embrace the world as it is today and forge an even better one in the smithy of tomorrow?
There’s a new app called Yo that does simply that: It sends your friends a “Yo” notification with a tiny little robotic voice.
It’s hard to take the app seriously, after all the app was created in only eight hours, but Yo already has 50,000 users who have sent approximately 4 million Yos.
The team has also already raised $1 million in funding.
In unrelated news, more than 1.5 million households in America live on $2.00 a day.
Have a nice day.
See original article here –
Mother Jones
A while back, I wrote about the US regulatory system’s strange attitude toward nanotechnology and food.
On the one hand, the Food and Drug Administration is on record stating that nanoparticles—which are microscopically tiny pieces of common materials like silver and clay—pose unique safety concerns. The particles, which measure in at a tiny fraction of the width of a human hair, “can have significantly altered bioavailability and may, therefore, raise new safety issues that have not been seen in their traditionally manufactured counterparts,” the FDA wrote in a 2012 draft proposal for regulating nanoparticles in food. On the other hand, its solution—that the food industry conduct safety testing that is “as rigorous as possible” and geared specifically to nano-materials before releasing nano-containing products onto the market—will be voluntary.
But what about packaging—the wrappers and bags and whatnot that hold food to keep it fresh? Nano-sized silver has powerful antimicrobial properties and can be embedded in plastic to keep food fresh longer; and nanoparticles of clay can help bottles and other packaging block out air and moisture from penetrating, preventing spoilage. Yet research has suggested (see here and here) that nanoparticles can migrate from packaging to food, potentially exposing consumers.
So how widely is nanotech used in the containers that contact our food? Back in 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency released a “State of the Science Literature Review” on nanosilver (PDF; warning: 221 pages). The report confirms that nano-materials, including silver, are being used in food packaging, but shows why it’s hard to get a grip on how just widely. “Current labeling regulations do not require that the nanomaterial be listed as an ingredient,” neither in food or in food packaging, the EPA report states. And “manufacture of nanosilver-containing products is shifting to the Far East, especially China, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam,” making it even harder to track nano-containing products that come in from abroad.
The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN)—a joint venture of Virginia Tech and the Wilson Center—keeps a running inventory of “nanotechnology-based consumer products introduced on the market.” A PEN spokesperson stressed to me that its list isn’t comprehensive—it by no means captures every nano-associated item, and some products on the list may no longer contain nanotech. That said, the database includes 20 products in the “food and beverage storage” category, including a couple of beer bottles, aluminum foil, sandwich bags, and even a salad bowl.
Meanwhile, environmental watchdog groups warn that nanotech-imbued packaging will soon become ubiquitous. “Major food companies are investing billions in nanofood and nanopackaging,” Friends of the Earth stated in a 2014 report. Tom Neltner, a food additives researcher with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me in an email that, “we believe nano-engineered particles are being extensively used in food packaging.”
When I asked Neltner for specifics, he sent me to Joseph Hotchkiss, director of the School of Packaging and Center for Packaging Innovation and Sustainability at Michigan State University, and a close watcher of the food-packaging industry. Hotchkiss told me that while nano-materials are quite attractive to the food industry as a way to cheaply prolong the shelf life of packaged foods, they currently “aren’t widely used” because “no one knows for sure what kinds of risks from ingesting exquisitely tiny amounts of nano-materials may or not represent.” As a result, the food industry is “waiting on the sidelines” until more safety research emerges.
Indeed, the above-noted EPA report reveals significant health concerns around nanoparticles. They “can pass through biological membranes,” the report states, including the blood-brain barrier. And they’re “small enough to penetrate even very small capillaries throughout the body.”
What harm nanoparticles cause when they move about our bodies remains murky, though. “There are very limited well controlled human studies on the potential toxicities of nanosilver,” the EPA states; but animal studies have shown potential toxicity for the liver, kidneys, and the immune system.
Back in March, the EPA moved to block a company called Pathway Investment from marketing plastic food storage containers laced with nano-silver to the public. But what ran the company afoul with the EPA wasn’t its use of nano-silver per se; rather, it was the claim that its product would kill microbiota in stored food. “Claims that mold, fungus or bacteria are controlled or destroyed by a particular product must be backed up with testing so that consumers know that the products do what the labels say,” the EPA’s press release states.
Meanwhile, no one seems to know for sure how widely nanotech is being used in packaging, or what the health consequences are. And that’s potentially a big problem stemming from some very small stuff.
Originally from –
Mother Jones
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Sarah Kliff points today to an interesting new Kaiser poll about Obamacare. The question is whether Obamacare has directly helped or hurt your family. It turns out that far more Democrats think it’s helped them than Republicans.
Now, there are some reasons to think this is objectively true. Obamacare exchanges have generally been more effective in blue states, signing up more people. Medicaid expansion has been almost entirely limited to blue states. And Obamacare is directed primarily at those with low incomes, who lean heavily Democratic. Put all this together, and you’d expect that a lot more Democrats have benefited from Obamacare than Republicans.
However, Kliff thinks this doesn’t explain the entire gap. A lot of it is just plain partisanship: “Democrats likely overestimate the health law’s reach, Republicans underestimate and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.” I suspect that’s true, and it’s the chart on the right that demonstrates it most clearly. Take a look at the question in the middle. A full 34 percent of Republicans say they personally know someone who lost their insurance thanks to Obamacare. Given the rather small number of people who actually fall into this category, it’s vanishingly unlikely that 34 percent of Republicans truly know someone who lost coverage. But since they don’t like Obamacare, I suppose they’re more likely to count friends of friends, or someone that Aunt Millie told them about, or someone they heard about at that party last Christmas. Democrats probably act the opposite.
On the other hand, the results of the question about gaining coverage actually seem fairly reasonable to me. I’d expect about a 2:1 difference between Republicans and Democrats, and that’s what we see. For some reason, I suspect that people are answering questions about gaining coverage fairly honestly. It’s only on the issue of losing coverage that partisan loyalties are skewing the results.
Source article:
Surprise! Democrats Benefit More From Obamacare Than Republicans.
Mother Jones
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Plus: Vintage Chast cartoons from the pages of Mother Jones.
You know a Roz Chast character when you see one: a person, often on a sofa, whose bemused, slightly off-kilter expression suggests some deeper angst or anger. The longtime New Yorker cartoonist’s new memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, introduces two real-life characters: her parents, George and Elizabeth, a sweet motormouth who “chain-worried the way others might chain-smoke” and an outspoken assistant principal known for her furious “blasts from Chast.” The book chronicles their reluctant slide into extreme old age, which left Chast, now 59, to sift through decades of emotional baggage and mountains of stuff—like their junk-crammed “Crazy Closet.” Her poignant, funny story will resonate with anyone who’s experienced the roller coaster of an elderly relative’s final years.
Mother Jones: As a child you felt your parents had their own thing going and you were kind of in the way. When did you come to that realization?
Roz Chast: Probably pretty young. I was an only child, and they worked. They’d been together for a very long time before I was born. They were very connected to each other. They were older—chronologically and in a lot of other ways—than my friends’ parents. I never saw my father wear any kind of pants except for, like, man pants, those gray slacks. Forget jeans. Not even corduroys or khakis. When we’d go to the beach, they’d be wearing their street clothes. They weren’t very casual.
A Roz Chast cartoon that appeared in Mother Jones in December 1984 Roz Chast/Mother Jones
MJ: How have your views on aging changed as a result of caring for them?
RC: It’s definitely made me think a lot more about it. Recently I was visiting my son and we went to this huge indoor flea market. At first it was like, This is great, this is wonderful. And then within a few minutes, I just looked around and felt like, I just threw away all this shit. This is all dead-people stuff, crap that people got rid of that was maybe in their old apartment or in their parents house or whatever. Do I want this cute little alarm clock from 1962? Not really. So I just have a different feeling about stuff. And as I get older, it’s not likely to completely go away. I could be wrong. I could decide to suddenly collect cute alarm clocks.
MJ: So you don’t have a Crazy Closet?
RC: Every drawer is like a mini-Crazy Closet. I’m just hoping it doesn’t get that bad. I didn’t go through the Depression like my parents did.
MJ: Were they unable to throw stuff away as a result?
RC: Oh yeah! You didn’t throw away jar lids or Band-Aid boxes. There was a drawer of those amber plastic vials, what pills come in—you might need them for, I don’t know, three cotton balls or something. It was borderline hoarding. They didn’t throw away old clothes. They just shoved things in the closet so everything was pressed. I think I must have been the only person who really understood why Joan Crawford was so upset about the wire hangers. It was just like, She’s right! She’s right!
MJ: Your mom was adamant that she and your dad were “going to 100” together. Do you share that determination?
RC: I really don’t. On the other hand, how would I know what it feels like to be that age any more than a person who’s 25 can understand what it feels like to be 50?
MJ: Your title refers to your parents’ reluctance to talk about aging or dying.
RC: I think it’s pretty representative of our world, our culture. We don’t really talk about it. You just take old people and you put them in a place, and I hope that doesn’t happen to me, but it’s not like I’m actively doing anything to prevent that—which is weird.
MJ: It’s hard to know what the alternatives are, though. You talk, tongue in cheek but also seriously, about how your final years could be made happier: Why not eat all the ice cream you want or take opium or even have hemlock as an option?
RC: I’d rather take opium than hemlock. I sometimes think, once you’re lying there, why not do something that might be fun?
A Roz Chast cartoon that appeared in Mother Jones in May 1988 Roz Chast/Mother Jones
MJ: At what age did you realize you wanted to be a cartoonist?
RC: I used to love to draw things that made me laugh or made friends laugh. When I was 13 or 14, I started thinking, This is what I like to do more than anything else.
MJ: Your work often has people sitting on living-room sofas. In your book, even Death sits on one. Do sofas hold some sort of significance for you?
RC: I just like drawing them.
MJ: The New Yorker is notorious for its weekly cartoon pitch process. What’s your hit-to-miss ratio?
RC: It goes in streaks. I could not sell for three weeks and then sell three weeks in a row and then not sell for two weeks and then sell for one. Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor, talked once about this experiment with rats and pellets. The rats that pushed down the lever and got a pellet every time would eventually get bored, and the rats that never got any pellets would eventually stop pushing. But where it was random, where they’d push down the lever and get three pellets, and then three pushes and no pellets, and then a push and two pellets—they’d keep on pushing forever. I think about that a lot. I think that cartoonists are the rats with the levers.
Link:
Mother Jones
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Isn’t it about time for all of our cranky old white folks to retire from public life and spend the rest of their golden years on the golf course or the shooting range or whatever floats their boat? I suppose we have to continue inviting them to Thanksgiving dinner, what with them being family and all, but that’s about it. Beyond that, they should stick to ranting to their friends about how hard it is to get good help these days and otherwise leave the rest of us alone.
As for all their slick young white enablers, surely you guys have less nauseating ways of rising in the world? Roger Ailes doesn’t pay that well, does he?
View original article:
Mother Jones
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Jumping from his niche cable show on Comedy Central to a plum CBS slot will roughly triple Stephen Colbert’s national television audience. So when he takes over David Letterman’s late night show next year, we at Climate Desk be tracking one thing in particular with great interest: Will he bring his astute political satire about global warming to an even bigger audience?
None of the current late night barons—Kimmel, Fallon, Ferguson among them—are especially notable for speaking out about climate change, though they occasionally work it into the odd monologue or guest appearance. Colbert is different. In his role as right-wing Satirist-in-Chief, Colbert has regularly skewered climate deniers by pretending to be one of them. One of my favorites is this takedown of Fox and Friends (a frequent target of the show), whose hosts had accused Nickelodeon of pushing a sinister warmist agenda…via SpongeBob Square Pants:
The Colbert Report
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Colbert Report on Facebook
And this year, he nailed Donald Trump:
The Colbert Report
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But Colbert has not just mercilessly parodied the attacks on climate science, he has also delved into some of the more complex aspects of climate adaptation, including geoengineering. During an interview last year, Harvard University environmental scientist David Keith presented the case for pouring out sulfuric acid into the atmosphere to temporarily ameliorate the effects of warming. “It would be a totally imperfect technical fix,” Keith said. “It would have risks. It wouldn’t get us out of the long-run need to stop polluting. But it might actually save people and be useful.”
But perhaps his best—most sobering, most blistering, most poignant—take on the subject was during this segment from January 2013, where he lampooned an emerging trend of commentators throwing up their hands in faux despair, and resigning themselves to the fate of a warming world. (In this case, he’s going after Erick Erickson, who worked for CNN at the time):
COLBERT: Sure, I know: America beat Tojo, we crushed Hitler, we put a man on the moon, but incrementally reducing CO2 emissions? That sounds like a lot of work. And how can fight an enemy we can’t see? I mean, get out of here, get, get out of here, carbon! Swats air. Did I hit it? I don’t know. So it’s high-time we stop trying to solve the problem and resign ourselves to each day getting worse. Because ladies and gentlemen, when Erick Erickson says “get used to it”, he means get used to city-swallowing storms, mass extinctions, deadly heat waves, crippling floods, and droughts that make a desert out of Oklahoma. And, that’s just how it is now. Our problems are just too big to cure. So join me and Erick. Give up. Crawl into bed with a cheesecake and wait for death. And now, sure, the only thing worse than global warming itself might be knowing you’re destroying the planet, and doing nothing, but if guys like me and Erick have our way, you’d better get used to it.
The Colbert Report
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Excerpt from:
Libros
