Tag Archives: george

John Kerry says climate change is a weapon of mass destruction

by EzraQgnjoy Posted on February 17, 2014

John Kerry says climate change is a weapon of mass destruction

By

State Department

During his time as president, George W. Bush’s foreign policy was driven largely by fear of terrorists and WMDs. Obama’s State Department seems at least equally worried about climate change.

Secretary of State John Kerry gave a speech in climate-vulnerable Indonesia on Sunday during which he mocked climate deniers and compared the threat of global warming to terrorism and poverty. The speech came a day after Kerry visited China, where he worked out details of a U.S.-China climate agreement struck last year.

Here are some highlights from his speech in Jakarta:

Think about this: terrorism, epidemics, poverty, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction — all challenges that know no borders. The reality is that climate change ranks right up there with every single one of them. …

The science of climate change is leaping out at us like a scene from a 3D movie. It’s warning us; it’s compelling us to act. And let there be no doubt in anybody’s mind that the science is absolutely certain. It’s something that we understand with absolute assurance of the veracity of that science. …

This is not really a complicated equation. I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of science or physics can be tough — chemistry. But this is not tough. This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this. …

If we truly want to prevent the worst consequences of climate change from happening, we do not have time to have a debate about whose responsibility this is. The answer is pretty simple: It’s everyone’s responsibility. Now certainly some countries — and I will say this very clearly, some countries, including the United States, contribute more to the problem and therefore we have an obligation to contribute more to the solution. …

Think about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It doesn’t keep us safe if the United States secures its nuclear arsenal, while other countries fail to prevent theirs from falling into the hands of terrorists. …

The bottom line is this: it is the same thing with climate change. And in a sense, climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.

Kerry is clearly pushing the administration’s argument that rich and poor countries alike should be required to cut emissions under a new climate treaty to be hammered out next year.

Perhaps the U.S. could set a good example by ending its coal giveaways and exports, its oil-drilling binge, and its embrace of climate-toasting natural gas. 

Because, how does that saying go? Something like: Either you are with us, or you are with the climate terrorists.


Source
Remarks on Climate Change, State Department
U.S.-China Joint Statement on Climate Change, State Department

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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John Kerry says climate change is a weapon of mass destruction

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The Hillary Papers: Yet Another Conservative Bombshell That Strikes Out

by Amilianp2t Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jonah Goldberg watched the NBC Nightly News last night and was unhappy that they didn’t devote more time to Obama’s delay of the employer mandate. There’s a reason for that, of course: it’s not really very important and most people don’t care about it. Sure, all of us partisan junkies care about it, but that’s about it. To everyone else it’s a minor administrative rule change.

But he was also unhappy with another segment:

The highlight of the night was Andrea Mitchell’s “report” on the Washington Free Beacon’s big take-out on the “Hillary Papers.” Her discomfort was palpable. She assured viewers that the “inflammatory excerpts” weren’t necessarily in context (Mitchell the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC who spent much of the last year covering Sarah Palin is a great stickler for context and eschews anything inflammatory). Hillary Clinton, the front runner for her party’s presidential nomination was treated like the victim. Thank goodness she didn’t joke about putting traffic cones up on the George Washington bridge!

By chance, I happened to see that segment. What struck me was less Andrea Mitchell’s “discomfort” than the fact that this supposed bombshell seemed like a total nothingburger. When it was over, I sort of shrugged and wondered what the point was. Here’s a bit of the transcript from Mitchell’s report about the Diane Blair papers:

Tonight, the once-private papers of the woman Hillary Clinton has previously described as her closest friend are getting a lot of attention….Thanksgiving, 1996, Blair quotes Clinton saying “I’m a proud woman. I’m not stupid. I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I should pretend not to have any opinions, but I am just not going to. I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.”

….September 9, 1998, Bill Clinton had finally admitted his relationship with Lewinsky. Blair writes of Hillary, “she is not trying to excuse him; it was a huge personal lapse.” But she says to his credit, he tried to break it off, tried to pull away.” Blair did not survive to provide context for her diary. Now Republicans say her notes are fair game.

Um, OK. Is that supposed to be damaging? The entire Beacon story is here, and I guess there are some outtakes that can be spun as unflattering toward Hillary, but that’s about it. It’s a bit of tittle tattle about who Hillary was annoyed with at various points in time, and not much more. And even that depends for its power on just how accurately Blair represented Hillary’s views.

Maybe I’m demonstrating a lack of imagination here, but I’m having a hard time seeing this as especially damaging or bombshellish. For the most part, it strikes me as confirming that Hillary was pretty much who we thought she was: tough-minded, goal-oriented, sometimes defensive, and not always sure how to handle the tsunami of invective that beset the Clinton presidency. If you’re a Hillary hater, it will be yet more evidence that she’s Satan incarnate, but for the rest of us, I’m not sure what’s really new here.

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The Hillary Papers: Yet Another Conservative Bombshell That Strikes Out

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New Jersey’s Largest Paper on Christie Endorsement: "We Blew This One"

by 0df53x21 Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last fall, New Jersey’s largest paper, the Newark Star-Ledger, endorsed Gov. Chris Christie for reelection. Parts of its admittedly reluctant endorsement read more like a takedown. For instance:

The property tax burden has grown sharply on his watch. He is hostile to low-income families, raising their tax burden and sabotaging efforts to build affordable housing. He’s been a catastrophe on the environment….The governor’s claim to have fixed the state’s budget is fraudulent. New Jersey’s credit rating has dropped during his term, reflecting Wall Street’s judgment that he has dug the hole even deeper.

The peculiar statement left many people scratching their heads (including Rachel Maddow, who mocked it at length on her MSNBC show). Why, they wondered, would the paper endorse a candidate it held in such low esteem? Now, following the Christie administration’s George Washington Bridge scandal and other damning accusations, the paper is backing away from its choice. Editorial page editor Tom Moran and the editorial board admitted in Sunday’s Star-Ledger that they made a mistake by endorsing Christie. In their words:

An endorsement is not a love embrace. It is a choice between two flawed human beings. And the winner is often the less bad option.

But yes, we blew this one…We knew Christie was a bully. But we didn’t know his crew was crazy enough to put people’s lives at risk in Fort Lee as a means to pressure the mayor. We didn’t know he would use Hurricane Sandy aid as a political slush fund. And we certainly didn’t know that Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer was sitting on a credible charge of extortion by Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno.

Interestingly, despite his flaws, the authors won’t rule out endorsing him again one day.

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New Jersey’s Largest Paper on Christie Endorsement: "We Blew This One"

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Elizabeth Warren: We Need to Stop Packing the Courts With Corporate Judges

by GeorgettaPulido Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Thursday morning, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on President Barack Obama to nominate more judges to the federal bench who have backgrounds serving the public interest instead of corporate America.

Of Obama’s judicial nominations so far, just ten—fewer than four percent—have worked as lawyers at public interest organizations, according to a report released Thursday by the Alliance for Justice, a network of civil rights organizations. Only 10 nominees have had experience representing workers in labor disputes. Eighty-five percent have been either corporate attorneys or prosecutors. At an event Thursday sponsored by several civil rights organizations, including the Brennan Center for Justice and the Alliance for Justice, Warren called for more balance in the system.

“Power is becoming more and more concentrated on one side,” she said. “Well-financed corporate interests line up to fight for their own privileges and resist any change that would limit corporate excess… We have an opportunity to…fight for something that balances the playing field in the other direction.”

Warren noted that now is the perfect time to take up that fight. Obstruction by Senate Republicans has stalled the confirmation of many of the president’s judicial nominees over the years. More federal judgeships remained vacant during Obama’s first term than during President George W. Bush’s, and there are still more than 50 vacancies on the federal bench that need to be filled. “So it’s unsurprising that the president and a majority of the Senate gravitated to nominating corporate lawyers…that most conservative senators could not object to,” Warren said. In November, however, the Senate voted to put an end to GOP obstruction by ending the filibuster for judicial nominations. Now it only takes a simple majority of the Senate to confirm nominees to the federal bench. Theoretically, that means that Obama can nominate progressive candidates with experience representing the average American, and Democrats will be able to confirm those nominees without any Republican votes.

On Jan 16, the president nominated four lawyers with public interest backgrounds to fill district court vacancies in Illinois, Washington, Nevada, and Missouri. Two of those nominees have significant trial experience representing plaintiffs in corporate wrongdoing cases, one is a former public defender, and one comes from criminal defense.

But there are still roadblocks that may prevent the president from nominating progressive candidates. The GOP can still use something called the “blue-slip process” as a de facto filibuster on nominations. Here’s how: When the president is considering a potential judicial nomination, the senators from the state where the judge would serve are given a blue slip of paper. If both senators do not return their blue slips, the nominee is not allowed to move on to a vote in the Senate judiciary committee.

It is because of the blue-slip process, for example, that Obama recently nominated two candidates to serve on the federal bench in Georgia who raised the hackles of liberals: Georgia Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boggs and Atlanta attorney Mark Howard Cohen. Boggs voted to keep the Confederate battle emblem as a prominent part of Georgia’s state flag when he was a Georgia legislator in the early 2000s. Cohen helped defend Georgia’s voter ID law, which voting rights advocates say makes it harder for poor people and minorities to vote.

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Elizabeth Warren: We Need to Stop Packing the Courts With Corporate Judges

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Meet the Braaaains Behind AMC’s Hit Series "The Walking Dead"

by ChanelLittlefie Posted on February 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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You probably wouldn’t recognize Greg Nicotero on the street, but his work has made you cringe, recoil, and cover your eyes. The 50-year-old makeup and effects guru for AMC’s popular series The Walking Dead—13 million viewers per episode on first airing—got his start as an apprentice to “Godfather of Gore” Tom Savini on director George Romero’s 1985 zombie classic Day of the Dead. Three years later he and two partners founded KNB EFX Group, which has worked on hundreds of Hollywood films and TV shows, from James Bond and Indiana Jones to Deadwood and Breaking Bad.

Remember that scene in Misery where Kathy Bates smashes James Caan’s ankle with a sledgehammer? The bit in Casino where Joe Pesci squeezes the guy’s head in a vice? The gruesome ear-slicing sequence in Reservoir Dogs? The failed electrocution in The Green Mile? All Nicotero’s doing. His own hand even had a cameo as Bruce Campbell’s possessed, disembodied appendage in Evil Dead 2. I caught up with the zombie master shortly after filming wrapped up on the show’s new season (resuming February 9), for which his shop created an estimated 9,000 foul, decaying, flesh-chomping “walkers.”

Mother Jones: Was there anything in your childhood suggesting you might pursue such a career?

Greg Nicotero: I grew up really loving horror movies and genre movies. I was a big fan of Universal Monsters movies, read Famous Monsters magazine. I built monster models and creature effects, and I love to draw.

MJ: What were your favorites films and TV shows?

GN: Dawn of the Dead and Jaws were definitely my two favorite movies, and they still are. I watched Star Trek. I loved the cheesy, you know, Lost in Space and Land of the Giants and all that stuff. I was born right at the time where there was sort of wealth of genre material. Between the Ray Harryhausen movies and the Hammer Horror movies, and growing up in Pittsburgh with George Romero there and Night of the Living Dead, I was sort of at the right time in the right place.

The boss gets a zombie prosthetic. Gene Page/AMC

MJ: How’d you hook up with Romero?

GN: My uncle is an actor and was in The Crazies. That sort of provided an introduction. I ran into George, and I went over and said, “Heyyyy, my uncle…Sam Nicotero. That was my pick-up line! My family collected a lot of movies on beta and VHS, and when I was 15 or 16, I ended up making a bunch of copies for George because we were both movie fans. That was really how we got to be friends.

MJ: His effects guy, Tom Savini, also became a mentor to you.

GN: He was! I met Tom during the filming of Creepshow. In 1984, I went to have lunch with George downtown, and he said “We just got the greenlight to do Day of the Dead. Do you want a job?” I said, “Sounds great. Let me just talk to Savini because I want to be his assistant.” I was in pre-med and had to go break it to my parents that I was going to take off from school and work on a zombie movie!

A head-stomp gag. Gene Page/AMC

MJ: How’d they feel about that?

GN: They were really great! If they had given me resistance, my whole career could have gone a different direction.

MJ: What did you learn from Tom Savini?

GN: One of the most important things was misdirection. Tom approached every makeup effect like a magic trick. When the audience is looking at one thing, you hit them unsuspectingly. The more successful you are at pulling them in, the better the gag will play, because the audience believes it. In Misery, the way Rob Reiner shot that scene, you see James Caan in the bed, and you see a close-up of Kathy Bates as she lifts the sledgehammer. We use a real sledgehammer so you can see it takes her a bit of effort to hoist it. She swings, and you cut back wide to her swinging at a pair of fake legs. The audience is so intently looking at the sledgehammer, they would never imagine in a million years that we would replace the legs. And when she makes impact, it has the momentum of a real hammer.

MJ: It’s interesting that you call the gags, because a lot of horror is deliberately campy.

GN: Not The Walking Dead. One of the things about my company is that we try to make things look super realistic, so when people look at something, there is a weird part of their brain that registers, “Wait a second, it looks I saw tissue and sinew and bone and muscle all inside of that wound. How is that possible, because clearly they can’t do that on a real person?” What the anatomy looks like as a corpse decomposes is very important. We’ve perfected this custom mouth stain that gets rid of all the pink on the gums and the tongue, because when you look at a zombie, and it’s all rotted and brown and leathery looking, but then you see these nice, lively pink tongue and pink gums, it doesn’t work.

MJ: Besides doing makeup and special effects for The Walking Dead, you’ve written, produced, directed, and have even played several zombies on the show. What has been the most fun?

GN: I love all of them. But to be a makeup effects guy, you have to know how to direct your actors, you have to know how to light, you have to know staging. You have to understand all that stuff or else your effect won’t work. We’re not just standard crew people.

MJ: What’s the scariest movie ever made?

GN: The Exorcist and Night of the Living Dead might be tied for me.

MJ: What sorts of scenarios most terrify you? For me, it’s always the thing you can’t see.

GN: One of my favorite horror movies is The Changeling, with George C. Scott. Another is The Innocence, with Debra Kerr. They’re both ghost stories and they’re so terrifying. I remember getting goose bumps watching them because I just got so creeped out. I love the expression “makes your skin crawl,” because when you have that sensation while you’re watching something, it really does. It’s so unsettling. Night of the Living Dead scared the shit out of me, but it didn’t make my skin crawl.

MJ: How does knowing the tricks of the trade affect how you experience a film?

GN: I analyze everything! It’s really hard. So often I’ll see something that will just remind me, “Oh, those two guys are standing in front of a blue screen” or “That lighting doesn’t match from that shot to that shot.” It takes me out of the movie.

Applying makeup on set. Scott Garfield/AMC

MJ: What’s your all-time favorite zombie film?

GN: Dawn of the Dead.

MJ: Do you consider zombies your specialty?

GN: If I said no after working on The Walking Dead for four years, that would be the wrong answer.

MJ: Tell me about your zombie shop.

GN: We have 30 full-time sculptors and mold makers and painters, and myself plus four permanent makeup artists on location to execute the effects. This season, on average, we have seven artists executing the makeup for up to a 150 zombies per day. The first episode this season, in nine days of shooting, we did over 1,000 zombies.

MJ: More stats!

GN: I think we have 80 sets of zombie contact lenses. You can’t really reuse the dentures, so we’ve made hundreds of sets. We probably go through about 25 gallons of blood per episode. This season was our biggest in terms of number of zombies: I would guess about 9,000.

MJ: Wow! How many of them are extras?

GN: The majority. We also have stunt performers in makeup, and we use some animatronics and puppets for specialty moments. Like in the second episode, when the zombies are all pushed up against the fence and one zombie’s face kind of pushes through it like Play-Doh. That was a puppet head. And if a zombie comes at Daryl and he swings his crossbow and knocks it over and then stomps on the head, the head stomp is accomplished with puppet heads we fill with blood and gore.

MJ: You must go through a lot of heads!

GN: We do. The bodies we can reuse, but once the head is destroyed, you’ve got to throw it away.

MJ: Do you use much CGI?

Nicotero prepares for a zombie cameo. Gene Page/AMC

GN: CGI is involved when we get into some of the head hits and bullet wounds and things. In the first season, we built a bunch of rigs to simulate exit wounds and things like that. But when you have eight days to shoot a scene with three cameras of Rick running down the street with a gun, shooting walkers, you don’t have time to go in and clean up all the blood, re-rig the gag, refill the blood tubing. If it takes you 15 minutes to set up for Take 2, you’ll never make your day.

MJ: I assume you audition your zombies.

GN: Yeah. Every season I teach zombie school. The casting people in Georgia look for like 200 new recruits. They come in in groups of 20 and I audition them and grade them based on their look and their performance ability.

MJ: How much acting skill do you really need to stagger around and snarl?

GN: More than you would think. Three-quarters of the job is the prosthetics, but they have to bring it to life. If the actor points a fake gun and pulls the trigger, and you have to fall to your knees, you really do have to sell it. Otherwise, it takes the viewer out of the moment.

MJ: What was it like for you to play zombies yourself?

GN: I was a zombie in several of Romero’s movies as well, so I figured if I’m not a good zombie we’re in big trouble. There was a lot of pressure. It all started in the first season, when Emma Bell’s character, Amy, gets killed. We had very little time to shoot that sequence. We put an arm prosthetic and a neck prosthetic on her, and I figured it made more sense for me to put on the zombie makeup so that if somebody needs to bite her arm and bite her neck, we get it in one take.

MJ: Do a lot of people want to play zombies?

Fieldwork. Gene Page/AMC

GN: You would be amazed how many! I get email after email, and I get stopped on the street—which is sort of astounding, considering I’m not an on-camera guy. People will come up and go, “How do I get to be a zombie on The Walking Dead?” They don’t think about the fact that it’s 120 degrees outside, and you’re going to be sitting in a makeup chair for an hour and a half, and you’re going to be sticky and hot, and you’re going to work all day, and then at the end of the day we’ve got to use all the remover. It sounds more glamorous than it is. But there are people who really love it.

MJ: Are these rigors why we so rarely see child zombies on the show?

GN: They would be the first ones eaten! We discussed that quite a bit going back to the first season. They’re easy to catch and they’re small, so they’d just grab them and eat them. Laughs. That’s one of the reasons I don’t imagine that we’d see a lot of kids.

MJ: Or babies, for that matter.

GN: Yeah. I mean, we’ve sort of hinted at it—strollers, baby carriers, things like that. But we’ve never really seen that.

MJ: Do you think it would freak people out too much?

Nicotero is hungry. Gene Page/AMC

GN: Probably there would be people who would love it! Fans of the genre would be like, “Ooh, zombie babies! How cool would that be?” And other people would just be mortified.

MJ: From a plot perspective, what do you think keeps the zombies going season after season?

GN: We don’t really know. My feeling is that they don’t receive much nourishment from feeding. They just do it because that part of their brain has been turned back on.

Chatting with Daryl (actor Norman Reedus). Gene Page/AMC

MJ: Okay, so what’s the secret to making super-realistic fake blood?

GN: The trick is to use powdered food coloring and Karo syrup, and some detergent or dish soap so that it doesn’t stain as much. If you use liquid food coloring, everything stains and looks red, and it just doesn’t work.

MJ: What about brains and intestines and that sort of thing?

GN: All the feasting scenes, anytime someone’s eating guts, we use barbeque! We soak it in edible fake blood. Sometimes we’ll use cooked sausage. It just has to feel like real meat. As a matter of fact, we did a gag right at the end of the season where we had a zombie biting into raw steak to simulate flesh. I was standing on set going, “You know, guys, theoretically, we are all just uncooked steak! So to simulate what it would look like to have a big chunk of meat bitten out of somebody’s arm, we should just get a piece of raw steak.” I soaked it in fake blood, and it looked great. It was really disgusting.

Eat him again, Greg. Gene Page/AMC

MJ: Do you collect anything work-related?

GN: If you were able to see what I’m looking at right now! My office is filled with a Predator head and an Alien face-hugger, and a 2001: A Space Odyssey helmet, and all these things. At my house I have a full-size time machine that I’ve built over a couple of years, a replica of an alien from the first movie—all this weird, crazy stuff. I love looking at people’s faces when they walk into my office. They’re literally astounded.

MJ: You have a son and a daughter, right?

GN: I have an 11-year-old son and an 8-year-old daughter.

MJ: Did you shelter them from the scary stuff when they were little?

Horsing around with Michonne (actress Danai Gurira). Gene Page/AMC

GN: Actually, I didn’t. They would come to the shop and see werewolves and lions and creatures all the time. I would explain it like, “You know how on Halloween when you put a mask on? That’s what Daddy does.” So they were never really afraid. They watch The Walking Dead every week! But they know all the actors and they know everybody, so they’re able to really differentiate between the fantasy and the reality.

MJ: What’s the most skewed ratio of time spent preparing a walker to the amount of time it appears on screen?

Rehearsing a machete gag with Rick (actor Andrew Lincoln). Gene Page/AMC

GN: There was a zombie this season that we called the Moss Walker. It’s been crushed by a tree so its legs are pinned underneath and its stomach is hollowed out, and it’s been there for over a year, so it’s covered in moss and vines. It took two weeks of sculpting and molding to manufacture the pieces, and the makeup on set probably took two and a half to three hours, and I believe he’s in two shots. A lot of people were like, “He’s such a cool walker. Where is he?” But that was it.

MJ: Wait, people have their favorite walkers?

GN: Oh, without a doubt! I’ve had people come up to me with tattoos of zombies we’ve done on the show. Which is crazy! I’ve had a couple people come up and say, “Hey look! Here’s you as a walker on my arm.” Wow!

MJ: That’s maybe a little weird.

GN: It’s dedication.

End of the line for Nicotero’s walker. Gene Page/AMC

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Meet the Braaaains Behind AMC’s Hit Series "The Walking Dead"

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The Noose Tightens Yet Again Around Chris Christie

by Ludie69E Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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David Wildstein, the executive who was said to be Chris Christie’s “eyes and ears” at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is deeply implicated in last year’s scheme to close the Fort Lee lanes of the George Washington Bridge in order to conduct a “traffic study.” He has since resigned, and the Port Authority is refusing to pay his legal bills. Apparently this has pissed him off. Today he sent a letter asking them to change their mind, which included this lovely little nugget:

Even if it’s only a threat, Wildstein can hardly refuse to provide this evidence now that he’s publicly said it exists. That just can’t be good news for Christie.

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The Noose Tightens Yet Again Around Chris Christie

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The Other "Moby Dick": Melville’s "Benito Cereno" Is an Analogy for American Empire

by Arterisa Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

A captain ready to drive himself and all around him to ruin in the hunt for a white whale. It’s a well-known story, and over the years, mad Ahab in Herman Melville’s most famous novel, Moby-Dick, has been used as an exemplar of unhinged American power, most recently of George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq.

But what’s really frightening isn’t our Ahabs, the hawks who periodically want to bomb some poor country, be it Vietnam or Afghanistan, back to the Stone Age. The respectable types are the true “terror of our age,” as Noam Chomsky called them collectively nearly 50 years ago. The really scary characters are our soberest politicians, scholars, journalists, professionals, and managers, men and women (though mostly men) who imagine themselves as morally serious, and then enable the wars, devastate the planet, and rationalize the atrocities. They are a type that has been with us for a long time. More than a century and a half ago, Melville, who had a captain for every face of empire, found their perfect expression—for his moment and ours.

For the last six years, I’ve been researching the life of an American seal killer, a ship captain named Amasa Delano who, in the 1790s, was among the earliest New Englanders to sail into the South Pacific. Money was flush, seals were many, and Delano and his fellow ship captains established the first unofficial US colonies on islands off the coast of Chile. They operated under an informal council of captains, divvied up territory, enforced debt contracts, celebrated the Fourth of July, and set up ad hoc courts of law. When no bible was available, the collected works of William Shakespeare, found in the libraries of most ships, were used to swear oaths.

From his first expedition, Delano took hundreds of thousands of sealskins to China, where he traded them for spices, ceramics, and tea to bring back to Boston. During a second, failed voyage, however, an event took place that would make Amasa notorious—at least among the readers of the fiction of Herman Melville.

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The Other "Moby Dick": Melville’s "Benito Cereno" Is an Analogy for American Empire

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Black Lawmakers Turn Up the Heat On Obama Over Judicial Nominees Who Backed Voter ID Law, Confederate Flag

by YoungBurrows Posted on January 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)—a group of African-American lawmakers in the House that defends the interests of minorities and people with low incomes—are planning to publicly chastise President Barack Obama this week over two of his judicial nominees who have backed racially offensive and discriminatory policies, and what they see as a lack of diversity amongst his judicial picks, The Hill reported Sunday.

Obama has confirmed more African-Americans to the federal bench than any other president, but CBC lawmakers see an “appalling lack of African-American representation” amongst Obama’s judicial nominees in Southern states such as Georgia, Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) told The Hill. If Obama’s nominees to the federal bench in Georgia are confirmed, there will only be one African-American district court judge in a state where 31 percent of the population is black.

And some of Obama’s nominees have “views… that reflect the regressive policies of the past,” Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) pointed out in a letter to Senate judiciary chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) earlier this month. Georgia Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boggs, who Obama nominated to the US district court for the Northern district of Georgia in December, voted to keep the Confederate battle emblem as a central part of Georgia’s state flag when he was a Georgia legislator in the early 2000s. Atlanta attorney Mark Howard Cohen, who Obama nominated to the same court last month, helped defend Georgia’s voter ID law, which voting rights advocates say makes it harder for poor people and minorities to vote.

CBC lawmakers and civil rights leaders have been pressuring Obama for months to rethink these nominations, but to no avail. So CBC members are trying another tack. They will hold a press conference this week to bring attention to the issue, and they’re mulling an opposition strategy to block the nominees.

“We have very grave concerns with certain nominees given disparities that are particularly common in the South,” Norton told The Hill. As my colleague Nick Baumann reported last summer, research has shown that the South remains more racist than the North.

So why did the president pick these nominees, especially now that Republicans can no longer filibuster judicial nominees? It has to do with a procedural hurdle called the blue-slip process that functions as a de facto filibuster. Here’s how the process works: When the president is floating a potential judicial nomination, the senators from the state where the judge would serve are given a blue slip of paper. If both senators do not return their blue slips, the nominee will not be able to move forward to a vote in the Senate judiciary committee. This allows the GOP to exert significant control over nominees. Georgia’s Republican Sens. John Isakson and Saxby Chambliss have used the blue-slip process to delay some of Obama’s nominees to their state’s northern district court for years. To fill those spots, Obama worked out a deal with the GOP senators that resulted in the nominations of Boggs and Cohen.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Adam Serwer earlier this month, a White House official said Obama was not to blame for these nominations, as Republican senators are taking advantage of the blue-slip process. The White House has also pointed out that eighteen percent of confirmed judges under Obama have been black. That number was eight percent under President George W. Bush.

CBC lawmakers are not impressed. As Scott told The Hill: “Do you think a white president, a George W. Bush, a Republican president—any white president—would appoint these kinds of nominees with the confederate flag background? With the voter suppression background? That White House would have been maimed by people crying out.”

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Black Lawmakers Turn Up the Heat On Obama Over Judicial Nominees Who Backed Voter ID Law, Confederate Flag

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In Remarkable Turnaround, Republicans Officially Denounce NSA Phone Surveillance

by ESGMarie Posted on January 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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This is easily the most remarkable story of the year so far. As you read it, keep in mind that this is not about a resolution from some fringe libertarian group. It’s about a resolution from the Republican National Committee, the very embodiment of establishment conservatism:

In a jarring break from the George W. Bush era, the Republican National Committee voted Friday to adopt a resolution demanding an investigation into the National Security Agency’s spy programs.

According to the resolution, the NSA metadata program revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden is deemed “an invasion into the personal lives of American citizens that violates the right of free speech and association afforded by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.” In addition, “the mass collection and retention of personal data is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

….This is, to put it mildly, a new position for the Republican National Committee. When the New York Times revealed that the NSA had wiretapped American citizens without warrants in late 2005, the RNC used their 2006 winter meeting to strongly defend the program’s national security value.

….This time around, per Orrock’s resolution, the RNC is declaring that “unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society and this program represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy and goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act.”

I get that politics is politics, and the grass always looks browner when the other party occupies the Oval Office. And there are plenty of liberals who are less outraged by this program today than they were back when George Bush and Dick Cheney were in charge of it.

But holy cow! The RNC! Officially condemning a national security program that was designed by Republicans to fight terrorism! This is truly remarkable. We are indeed living in Bizarro world these days.

Taken from – 

In Remarkable Turnaround, Republicans Officially Denounce NSA Phone Surveillance

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Global Warming Denial Hits a 6-Year High

by Pauline80x Posted on January 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The latest data are out on the prevalence of global warming denial among the US public. And they aren’t pretty.

The new study, from the Yale and George Mason research teams on climate change communication, shows a 7-percentage-point increase in the proportion of Americans who say they do not believe that global warming is happening. And that’s just since the spring of 2013. The number is now 23 percent; back at the start of last year, it was 16 percent:

The increase in climate science disbelief. Yale and George Mason University teams on Climate Change Communication.

The percentage of Americans who believe global warming is human-caused has also declined, and now stands at 47 percent, a decrease of 7 percent since 2012.

At the same time, the survey also shows an apparent hardening of attitudes. Back in September 2012, only 43 percent of those who believed that global warming isn’t happening said they were either “very sure” or “extremely sure” about their views. By November of last year, that number had increased to 56 percent.

Overall, more Americans now say they have all the information they need to make up their minds about the climate issue, and fewer say they could easily change their minds:

Increasing righteousness about global warming, on both sides of the issue. Yale and George Mason teams on Climate Change Communication.

The obvious question is, what happened over the last year to produce more climate denial?

According to both Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale and Ed Maibach of George Mason, the leaders of the two research teams, the answer may well lie in the so-called global warming “pause”—the misleading idea that global warming has slowed down or stopped over the the past 15 years or so. This claim was used by climate skeptics, to great effect, in their quest to undermine the release of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report in September 2013—precisely during the time period that is in question in the latest study.

As we have reported before, the notion of a global warming “pause” is, at best, the result of statistical cherry-picking. It relies on starting with a very hot year (1998) and then examining a relatively short time period (say, 15 years), in order to suggest that global warming has slowed down or stopped during this particular stretch of time. But put these numbers back into a broader context and the overall warming trend remains clear. Moreover, following the IPCC report, new research emerged suggesting that the semblance of a “pause” may be the result of incomplete temperature data due to the lack of adequate weather stations in the Arctic, where the most dramatic global warming is occurring.

Nonetheless, widely publicized “pause” claims may well have shaped public opinion. “Beginning in September, and lasting several months, coincident with the release of the IPCC report, there was considerable media attention to the concept of the ‘global warming pause,'” observes Maibach. “It is possible that this simple—albeit erroneous—idea helped to convince many people who were previously undecided to conclude that the climate really isn’t changing.”

“Even more likely, however,” Maibach adds, “is that media coverage of the ‘pause’ reinforced the beliefs of people who had previously concluded that global warming is not happening, making them more certain of their beliefs.”

As Maibach’s colleague Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale adds, it isn’t as though those who were already convinced about global warming became less sure of themselves over the last year. Rather, the change of views “really seems to be happening among the ‘don’t knows,'” says Leiserowitz. “Those are the people who aren’t paying attention, and don’t know much about the issue. So they’re the most open-minded, and the most swayable based on recent events.”

Journalists take heed: Your coverage has consequences. All those media outlets who trumpeted the global warming “pause” may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans’ scientific understanding.

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Global Warming Denial Hits a 6-Year High

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