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The 8 Biggest Moments of Tuesday’s Republican Presidential Debate

by Aaron Stone Posted on December 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The stakes in Las Vegas were high on Tuesday night, as the nine leading Republican presidential candidates met once again for the last Republican debate of 2015. The event took place at the Venetian, the hotel-casino owned by GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, who was sitting in the front row, and it aired on CNN. The conversation centered on terrorism in the wake of the attacks in Paris and the San Bernardino shooting—but the candidates took every opportunity to sneak in digs at their rivals on a wide range of subjects.

Though the simmering rivalry between Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio was expected to take center stage, it was just one of many disputes that broke out during the debate. Donald Trump and Jeb Bush butted heads several times: Trump attempted to dismiss Bush with a reference to his flagging campaign, while Bush tried to make the case that Trump is not a serious candidate. Rand Paul had a combative evening as well, taking the fight to Rubio over immigration and to the group as a whole over foreign policy.

Meanwhile, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, and Chris Christie tried to cut into the bickering by pointing out that they are the outsiders who will stop bickering and get things done.

Here are the highlights—and lowlights—from the fifth Republican presidential debate.

Rubio and Cruz take their long-simmering foreign policy conflict to the stage: Egged on by moderator Wolf Blitzer, Rubio launched an attack against Cruz’s record on defense. “Three times he voted against the Defense Authorization Act, which is a bill that funds the troops,” Rubio said. “And I have to assume that if you vote against it in the Senate, you would also veto it as president.”

“You can’t carpet bomb ISIS if you don’t have planes and bombs to attack them with,” Rubio continued.

Cruz responded by tying Rubio to President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, whom he claims destabilized the Middle East and opened the region to “radical Islamic terrorists.” But Cruz also used the moment to draw a distinction with Rubio over their foreign policy approaches. “We need to focus on killing the bad guys,” he said, “not getting stuck in Middle Eastern civil wars that don’t keep America safe.”

Paul goes after Rubio on his immigration bill—by talking about terrorism: Paul used the issue of terrorism to light into Rubio for his work on a comprehensive immigration bill—a key weakness for Rubio among Republican primary voters who are wary of immigration and oppose the maligned immigration bill Rubio helped craft in 2013. “To defend the country, you have to defend the border,” Paul said.

Trump defends targeting the families of ISIS fighters: Paul laid into Trump for proposing to go after the families of ISIS fighters. “If you are going to kill the families of terrorists, realize that there’s something called the Geneva Convention we’re going to have to pull out of,” Paul said. “It would defy every norm that is America. So when you ask yourself, whoever you are, that think you’re going to support Donald Trump, think, do you believe in the Constitution? Are you going to change the Constitution?”

Trump’s response? “So they can kill us but we can’t kill them? That’s what you’re saying?”

Trump would be willing to shut down parts of the internet to keep ISIS out: In his bid to claim his spot as the most anti-ISIS candidate, Trump has suggested that he’d keep the group off the internet. How exactly, Blitzer wondered, would Trump achieve this? Was he worried about the implications for freedom of speech?

Trump wasn’t worried. “You talk freedom of speech, you talk freedom of anything you want,” Trump said. “I don’t want them using our internet.” His explanation was short on details—”I wanted to get our brilliant people from Silicon Valley and other places and figure out a way that ISIS cannot do what they’re doing”—but rest assured, Trump would shut that all down. “I sure as hell don’t want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our internet,” he said.

Jeb finally pounces on Trump: “Donald, you’re not going to be able to insult your way to the presidency,” Bush said about 45 minutes into the debate, midway through a minor skirmish with Bush. The former Florida governor came into the debate clearly angling to diminish Trump’s standing as the front-runner. “This is another example of the lack of seriousness,” Bush said of Trump’s line about ISIS family members. “It’s just crazy. It makes no sense to suggest this.”

Bush had opened the night rebutting Trump’s proposal to ban all Muslim visitors from the country, saying it was not a serious proposal. “Donald is great at the one-liners,” Bush said, “but he is a chaos candidate, and he would be a chaos president.”

Trump hits back at Jeb: But Trump didn’t let Bush get the last laugh. Later in the debate, Trump steamrolled the former Florida governor. “This is a tough business, to run for president,” Bush said sternly in a back-and-forth with Trump. “Oh yeah,” Trump said sarcastically, almost rolling his eyes, “you’re a real tough guy Jeb, I know.”

“You’re never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the presidency,” Bush responded, perking up with life. But alas for Jeb, Trump was ready with a zinger. “I’m at 42 percent and you’re at 3,” Trump quipped. “So far I’m doing better, so far I’m doing better. You know you started off over here, Jeb”—Trump pointed next to himself at center stage—”you’re moving over further and further. Pretty soon you’re going to be off the end.”

Fiorina claims she aided government intelligence work after 9/11: “Let me tell you a story,” she said. “Soon after 9/11, I got a phone call from the NSA. They needed help. I gave them help. I stopped a truckload of equipment. I had it turned around. It was escorted by the NSA into headquarters.”

As recounted recently in a story by Yahoo News, as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina got a call from NSA chief Michael Hayden, who needed computer equipment for a secret new program. Fiorina chose to help and rerouted a shipment of computer servers headed to a retailer to the National Security Agency instead. Those servers were used in the secret, warrantless collection of data that was exposed in 2013 by Edward Snowden.

Paul calls Christie Dr. Strangelove: Christie was vehement: A no-fly zone meant no planes would be flying over Syria, even if that required attacking a Russian aircraft.

“Well, I think if you’re in favor of World War III, you have your candidate,” Paul said in response, pointing to Christie, who was standing right beside him. “Here’s the thing. My goodness, what we want in a leader is someone with judgment, not someone who is so reckless as to stand on the stage and say, ‘Yes, I’m jumping up and down, I’m going to shoot down Russian planes.'”

Paul didn’t leave it at that, slipping in a dig against Christie for the Bridgegate controversy that’s dragged down his presidential ambitions. “When we think about someone who might want World War III, we might think about someone who might shut down a bridge because they don’t like their friends, they want to get a Democrat.”

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The 8 Biggest Moments of Tuesday’s Republican Presidential Debate

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Bestselling Historian Explains US Foreign Policy: "Obama Is Prone to Submitting to Males Who Act Dominantly in His Presence"

by AdriannQCD Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here is Arthur Herman writing in National Review about geopolitical realities in the age of Obama:

If Vladimir Putin is the dominant alpha male in the new international pecking order, Barack Obama has emerged as his highly submissive partner.

There are various reasons why we are being subjected to the humiliating spectacle of an American president, so-called leader of the free world, rolling over on the mat at Putin’s feet.

Of course, there have been signs for years that Obama is prone to submitting to males who act dominantly in his presence. Who can forget his frozen performance with Mitt Romney in the first presidential debate in 2012….We’ve seen it in his interactions with China’s president Xi Jinping; his strange bowing and scraping with the Saudi king; and his various meetings with Putin, including the last at the United Nations on Monday where a tight-lipped Obama could barely bring himself to look at the Russian president while Putin looked cool and confident—as well as he should.

For every aggressive move Putin has made on the international stage, first in Crimea and Ukraine in Europe, and now in Syria, our president’s response has been largely verbal protestations followed by resolute inaction. Why should Putin not assume that when he orders the U.S. to stop its own air strikes against ISIS in Syria, and to leave the skies to the Russians, he won’t be obeyed?

But there’s more to Obama’s passivity than just pack behavior….

Seriously, what kind of adult talks like this? Or thinks like this? How can a historian, of all people, explain a moment in history as a serial dominance display between chimpanzees? I’m not even sure what the right word for this is. It’s not just childish or puerile, though it’s those things too. Disturbed? Compulsive? Unbalanced? I’m not sure. This is a job for William F. Buckley.

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Bestselling Historian Explains US Foreign Policy: "Obama Is Prone to Submitting to Males Who Act Dominantly in His Presence"

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Vladimir Putin Says He Wants to Join the Fight Against ISIS

by TorstenTipper Posted on September 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Russia is a longtime supporter of the Assad regime in Syria, but lately the flow of military aid from Russia to Syria has been on the rise. Apparently this has given rise to scuttlebutt that Vladimir Putin may be hoping to lure the US into a joint effort to fight ISIS:

Observers in Moscow say the Russian maneuvering could be part of a plan to send troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State group in the hope of fixing fractured ties with the West….By playing with the possibility of joining the anti-IS coalition, Putin may hope to win a few key concessions. His main goal: the lifting of Western sanctions and the normalization of relations with the United States and the European Union, which have sunk to their lowest point since the Cold War amid the Ukrainian crisis.

….Sergei Karaganov, the founder of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, a leading association of Russian political experts, said that Russia was considering the possibility of joining the anti-IS coalition, but the West so far has been unwelcoming. “They are reluctant to accept proposals from Putin, whom they want to contain,” he said.

Karaganov, who has good connections among the Russian officials, said he doesn’t expect Russia to opt for unilateral military action in Syria if it gets the cold shoulder from the U.S. and its allies. “It would involve enormous risks,” he said.

This sounds mighty weird. Even Putin can’t seriously imagine that the US and Iraq would join a Putin-Assad alliance, no matter what its goal is. I wonder what’s really going on here?

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Vladimir Putin Says He Wants to Join the Fight Against ISIS

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Scientists may have found a solution for space pollution

by ShaunLundie Posted on May 21, 2015

Scientists may have found a solution for space pollution

By on 21 May 2015commentsShare

When someone says, “This is where the laser cannon comes in,” that person is usually either joking or plotting to take over the world. But in a surprising turn of events, Discover Magazine editor Corey S. Powell wrote that on his blog yesterday and was neither joking nor (as far as we know) plotting to take over the world.

The laser in question is the brain child of a group of Japanese researchers, and it would basically be the world’s most badass trash collector. And by trash, I mean space junk, which, as Powell explains, is becoming a pretty big problem:

There are about 25,000 human-made objects larger than your fist flying around in orbit, and about half a million pieces bigger than a dime. If you include millimeter-scale shrapnel, the number of rogue bits reaches deep into the millions. Typical speeds in low-Earth orbit are about 30,000 kilometers per hour (18,000 miles per hour), ten times the velocity of a rifle bullet. You see the problem: A little impact can pack a big wallop.

And when all these dead satellites, rocket parts, etc. start to collide, they’ll break into more pieces, which means more collisions, which means more pieces, which means — you get the point. This phenomenon is known as the Kessler syndrome, named after the NASA scientist who brought attention to the runaway space junk problem back in 1978. Here’s more from Powell:

So far, there have not been any space-junk catastrophes remotely resembling the sensationalized events in the movie Gravity, but the reality is still disconcerting. In 2009, a $50 million Iridium communications satellite was destroyed by a collision with a defunct Russian satellite. Three years later, the Fermi space observatory had a near miss with another Soviet-era satellite. NASA had to clad the International Space Station in shielding to protect it from repeated small impacts, and the agency sometimes moves the whole station to dodge larger pieces of junk. Orbiting debris adds cost and risk to the space business.

If all this junk stays up there, it’ll eventually make its way into geosynchronous orbit, where it will circle the Earth roughly once every 24 hours for all of eternity, becoming not only a dangerous obstacle for future space missions, but ultimately, the ruins of a species that never did learn how to clean up after itself.

So you see, “this is where the laser cannon comes in.”

Scientists would use the laser in combination with a telescope that could track down debris just one centimeter in size. Once a piece of junk is identified, the laser would blast it out of orbit and into Earth’s atmosphere, where it would burn up and never hit the ground.

The idea sounds crazy, yes, but according to Powell, other proposals for dealing with space junk involve nets, lassos, magnets, slingshot satellites, and giant vacuums (just kidding — space is a giant vacuum!). So maybe a laser cannon isn’t such a long shot, after all?

The researchers behind the project announced in April that they plan to deploy a small-scale proof of concept on the International Space Station, and if that’s successful, they’ll build a bigger system that would be able to zap trash within a roughly 65-mile radius.

But ideally, Powell says, space junk wouldn’t exist at all:

In the long run, the best way to deal with space junk is never to create it in the first place. One of the most important principles here is what is called design for demise–that is, engineering satellites so that they will automatically de-orbit and remove themselves from the trash pile within, say, 25 years of the end of their mission.

One way to “design for demise” would be to build satellites that deploy solar sails to gently guide them to a fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere when they’re no longer needed — an idea that sounds both beautiful and like something that Bill Nye would totally approve of.

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Space Junk is a Problem. Is a Laser Cannon the Solution?

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Scientists Are Arguing About When, Exactly, Humans Started to Rule the Planet

by Ouida0066rq Posted on April 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Signs of human impact on the planet are everywhere. Sea levels are rising as ice at both poles melts; plastic waste clogs the ocean; urban sprawl paves over landscapes while industrial agricultural empties aquifers. Between climate change, urban development, and straight-up, old-school pollution, the Earth we inhabit now would be scarcely recognizable to our earliest ancestors 150,000 year ago.

In fact, these changes are so pronounced and their connection to human activity so obvious, that many scientists now believe we’ve already ventured well past a remarkable tipping point—Homo sapiens, they argue, have now surpassed nature as the dominant force shaping the Earth’s landscapes, atmosphere, and other living things. Units of deep geologic time often are defined by their dominant species: 400 million years ago fish owned the Devonian Period; 265 million years ago dinosaurs ruled the Mesozoic Era. Today, humans dominate the Anthropocene.

If defining what the Anthropocene represents is straight-forward, assigning it a commencement date has proved a monumental challenge. The term was first proposed by Russian geologist Aleksei Pavlov in 1922, and since then it has occupied off-and-on the attentions of the niche group of scientists whose job it is to decide how to slice our planet’s 4.5 billion-year history into manageable chunks. But in 2009, as climate change increasingly gained traction as a matter of public interest, the idea of actually making a formal designation started to appear in talks and papers. Today, if the scientific literature is any indication, the debate is fully ignited.

In fact, “it has been open season on the Anthropocene,” said Jan Zalasiewicz, a University of Leicester paleogeologist who is a leading voice in the debate. Within the last month a heap of new papers have come out with competing views on whether the Anthropocene is worthy of a formal designation, and if so, when exactly it began. The latest was published in Science today.

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"The Americans" Is One Of The Best Shows On Television—And It Just Got Renewed For Another Season.

by LuisaDumaresq Posted on March 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Do you watch The Americans? You should watch The Americans! Why don’t you watch The Americans? Do you not watch it because it’s about Soviet spies who love each other and also work together to bring down America by wearing wigs and having sexxxxxxx? Well, guess what? That’s only sort of what it’s about. It’s really about a marriage. Are you married? If you’re married, you’ll relate to this show a lot.

You’ll watch it and be like “God, my wife and I just had a very similar fight about how to raise our daughter.” Just replace spying for the Soviets with whatever you do for a living. They’re so cute together, The Americans! They love each other so much, but they’re torn in different directions by competing loyalties, and they don’t know what to do! Bonus: I recently found out that The Americans are dating in real life, which is so cute OMG.

I love The Americans. I’m not nuts about the dumb kids, and some of the storylines are dumb, but the show is really great. The one thing I don’t like about the show is that The Americans are not actually Americans, they’re Soviets and I don’t like rooting for people who are trying to bring down America. I keep hoping they’re going to defect.

But I think they probably won’t. They seem to like communism a lot. But at the same time they also like living in America and enjoying the fruits of capitalism. Their minds are all messed up! You can see what a complicated situation they’re in. A lot of D-R-A-M-A.

Anyway, it’s maybe the second best show on television (after The Good Wife).

The problem is, not that many people watch it. :(((.

The ratings for season 3 are in the hole. A cloud of pessimism and fear has overshadowed the last few episodes; I figured it was unlikely to get renewed by FX for a fourth season. But, guess what? Good news! It’s coming back!

So start watching it please oh dear god I beg you please watch it, please! We can be best friends if you watch it.

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"The Americans" Is One Of The Best Shows On Television—And It Just Got Renewed For Another Season.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

by MarianaTrujillo Posted on March 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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The excerpt, from a longer 1960 piece by Howard Zinn and a 2015 Paula Giddings article, are from the Nation magazine’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue on newsstands in April. They come to us from the TomDispatch website.

Finishing School for Pickets

By Howard Zinn (August 6, 1960)

One afternoon some weeks ago, with the dogwood on the Spelman College campus newly bloomed and the grass close-cropped and fragrant, an attractive, tawny-skinned girl crossed the lawn to her dormitory to put a notice on the bulletin board. It read: Young Ladies Who Can Picket Please Sign Below.

The notice revealed, in its own quaint language, that within the dramatic revolt of Negro college students in the South today another phenomenon has been developing. This is the upsurge of the young, educated Negro woman against the generations-old advice of her elders: be nice, be well-mannered and ladylike, don’t speak loudly, and don’t get into trouble. On the campus of the nation’s leading college for Negro young women—pious, sedate, encrusted with the traditions of gentility and moderation—these exhortations, for the first time, are being firmly rejected.

Spelman College girls are still “nice,” but not enough to keep them from walking up and down, carrying picket signs, in front of supermarkets in the heart of Atlanta. They are well-mannered, but this is somewhat tempered by a recent declaration that they will use every method short of violence to end segregation. As for staying out of trouble, they were doing fine until this spring, when fourteen of them were arrested and jailed by Atlanta police. The staid New England women missionaries who helped found Spelman College back in the 1880s would probably be distressed at this turn of events, and present-day conservatives in the administration and faculty are rather upset. But respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today.

“You can always tell a Spelman girl,” alumni and friends of the college have boasted for years. The “Spelman girl” walked gracefully, talked properly, went to church every Sunday, poured tea elegantly, and had all the attributes of the product of a fine finishing school. If intellect and talent and social consciousness happened to develop also, they were, to an alarming extent, byproducts.

This is changing. It would be an exaggeration to say: “You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.” But the statement has a measure of truth.

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) wrote for The Nation from 1960 to 2008. Those articles are collected in Some Truths Are Not Self-Evident: Essays in The Nation on Civil Rights, Vietnam and the “War on Terror.” (eBookNation, 2014).

Learning Insubordination

By Paula J. Giddings (March 2015)

In the current age of “lean-in” feminism at one end of the spectrum and an “anti-respectability” discourse at the other, the late Howard Zinn’s essay reminds us of an earlier meaning of women’s liberation.

Zinn was of Russian-Jewish heritage, an influential historian and, in 1960, a beloved professor at Spelman College, the historically black women’s institution in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. The attribution of “finishing school” in the title was well-earned: Spelman girls, whose acceptance letters included requests to bring white gloves and girdles with them to campus, were molded to honor the virtues of “true-womanhood”: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.

Nevertheless, by 1960, Zinn’s students had morphed from “nice, well-mannered and ladylike” paragons of politesse to determined demonstrators who picketed, organized sit-ins, and were sometimes arrested and jailed for their efforts. “Respectability is no longer respectable among young Negro women attending college today,” Zinn concluded.

These young girls were born in the 1940s, and whatever the background of their parents (who might be sharecroppers, teachers, or doctors), their generation was destined to belong to a new stratum of Americans: the “Black Bourgeoisie,” as the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called it. An economic class that was literally wedged in the “middle” between a small black elite and the black masses, this group emerged in no small part because of the unprecedented number of educated women who, historically excluded from pink-collar positions, now had access not only to the elite professions, but to mainstream administrative, clerical, and civil-service jobs.

For black women, burdened by stereotypes of hypersexuality, this development meant more than a triumph of simple social mobility. With education, more girls could now escape the domestic and personal service work that subjected them to the sexual exploitation of employers and others. To be able to avoid such a soul-killing future was the dream of generations of mothers for their daughters—one that I often heard from my own grandmother, who had migrated north so that my mother could be the first in the family to attain a college education. The stakes in taking advantage of these newer opportunities were indeed high and brimmed with profound meaning and emotion.

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From the Howard Zinn Archive: Fighting Respectability Politics at Spelman College

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

by EmilWUNhxbb Posted on February 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican hawks have insisted from the start that President Obama isn’t being tough enough in his approach to the Ukraine crisis. And perhaps he isn’t. It’s a point that’s arguable by reasonable people.

But what’s not arguable is that regardless of what Obama would do if he had a truly free hand, he pretty clearly doesn’t have a free hand. Ukraine is, first and foremost, a European problem, and the leadership of Europe just isn’t on board with a more aggressive strategy against Russia:

Through nine months of struggle to halt Russia’s military thrust into Ukraine, Western unity has been a foremost priority for American and European leaders. Now, with the crisis entering a dangerous new phase, that solid front is in danger of collapsing.

….A growing number of U.S. officials, and some in Europe, particularly in countries bordering Russia, believe that the only way to dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from continuing what they see as an invasion of Ukraine is to raise the military cost to Moscow. That means giving the Ukrainians better weapons, they say.

….But the Germans, French and many other European leaders are equally convinced that arming the Kiev government will not halt Putin, but will increase carnage in a war that already has killed about 5,300 people and risk an all-out East-West confrontation.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, speaking at a security conference in Munich, Germany, made clear that not only would Germany not contribute arms, but it also opposed allies doing so. “Military means will lead to more victims,” she said, arguing that the West should apply a patient containment approach toward Russia.

I’m skeptical about providing arms to the Ukrainians, but I remain open to arguments that it’s the only way to stop Vladimir Putin’s aggression. However, there’s just no way that this will work without European cooperation. End of story. The US can’t pretend that acting on its own has even the slightest chance of success.

So the hawks need to stop obsessing over Obama’s alleged weakness, and instead look overseas. The truth is that Obama has been one of the most aggressive of the Western leaders in the fight against Putin, while it’s Merkel and her colleagues who have insisted on a less confrontational approach. If John McCain and his buddies want to arm the Ukrainians, they need to figure out a way to persuade Merkel that it’s the right thing to do. That might be less congenial for their tea party buddies, whose interest in Ukraine is pretty much zero aside from its role as a way of painting Obama as a weak-kneed appeaser, but it’s the only way they might get what they say they want.

So that’s their choice. Continue bashing Obama, which feels good but will get them nowhere. Or start pressing our European allies, which is boring and difficult and pays no political dividends—but which might actually get them closer to what they claim is their goal. Which is it going to be, boys?

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Arming Ukraine? Sorry, but Europe Simply Isn’t On Board

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A Quick Note About the Future

by LannyCurtiss Posted on January 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jus a quick note before I move on to another subject this morning. A fair number of comments to my list of predictions yesterday suggested that it made for pretty depressing reading. But I suspect that might have been due to my tone more than the actual content of the predictions themselves. There’s a bit of fuzziness here, but here’s how I’d classify them:

Basically positive: 1, 2, 5, 9, 11, 13
Neutral-ish: 4, 8, 10, 14
Basically negative: 3, 6, 7, 12, 15, 16

Obviously there’s room for debate here. For example, I count the development of artificial intelligence (#1) as a positive development, but I do concede that it will either “transform or destroy” the world. (The case for destroying the world is here.) On the neutralish side, you might think that super social media (#8) sounds great, not neutral, and if you’re Russian or Chinese you won’t think much of #14. On the negative side, the stagnation of manned space travel (#12) might strike you as a yawn, and although any kind of biological attack is bad (#16), I pretty much think we’ll be able to contain this threat.

In any case, you can argue about my categories. Still, I think by any fair measure I ended up with a roughly an even mix of good and bad, and that’s just the way the world is. If you made a similar list for 1900-1950 but did it in hindsight, you’d get electrification, mass-produced cars, and penicillin, but you’d also get the Great Depression, two massive world wars, the start of the Cold War, and the invention of nuclear bombs. It was hardly all roses.

I suspect that for most of us alive today, our attitudes are skewed by growing up in the period from 1950-2000. But this is the anomaly: obviously there was some bad stuff during this era, but the good far outweighed it. On a broad scale, it was almost certainly the most progressive and innovative half-century in human history. After all, we might have been bristling with nuclear weapons, but we never ended up using them, did we? And we made massive material and social progress around the globe, but didn’t yet have any big worries about climate change or terrorism. In hindsight, most of our fears turned out to be modest, while our progress was unprecedented. It’s possible that the period from 2000-2050 will repeat that, but at the very least I think the dangers of the next few decades are both real and deserve consideration.

For what it’s worth, though, virtually everything hinges on two things: the development of benign artificial intelligence and the development of clean, abundant energy. If we manage those two things, the world will be bright indeed.

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A Quick Note About the Future

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Big Oil Can’t Wait For the New Republican Majority in Congress

by StefanFrank Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Pop the champagne corks in Washington! It’s party time for Big Energy. In the wake of the midterm elections, Republican energy hawks are ascendant, having taken the Senate and House by storm. They are preparing to put pressure on a president already presiding over a largely drill-baby-drill administration to take the last constraints off the development of North American fossil fuel reserves.

The new Republican majority is certain to push their agenda on a variety of key issues, including tax reform and immigration. None of their initiatives, however, will have as catastrophic an impact as their coming drive to ensure that fossil fuels will dominate the nation’s energy landscape into the distant future, long after climate change has wrecked the planet and ruined the lives of millions of Americans.

It’s already clear that the new Republican leadership in the Senate will make construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, intended to carry heavy oil (or “tar sands”) from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the US Gulf Coast, one of their top legislative priorities. If the lame-duck Congress fails to secure Keystone’s approval now with the help of pro-carbon Senate Democrats, it certainly will push the measure through when a Republican-dominated Senate arrives in January. (Editors’ Note: The Senate voted Tuesday night to reject the Keystone pipeline.) Approval of that pipeline, said soon-to-be Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, will be among the first measures “we’re very likely to be voting on.” But while the Keystone issue is going to command the Senate’s attention, it’s only one of many measures being promoted by the Republicans to speed the exploitation of the country’s oil, coal, and natural gas reserves. So devoted are their leaders to fossil fuel extraction that we should start thinking of them not as the Grand Old Party, but the Grand Oil Party.

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Big Oil Can’t Wait For the New Republican Majority in Congress

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