Climate Change Is This Generation’s Vietnam War

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Every year, the world’s elite gather like the Illuminati in the Swiss chalet town of Davos for the World Economic Forum, where they discuss how to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. Often that results in comically out-of-touch conversations, such as the idea, put forth at this year’s summit, that digital “upskilling” can solve economic inequality. But sometimes it provides a platform for someone like the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, who appeared before these elites like the prophet Cassandra.

“Either we prevent 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming or we don’t,” she said at the summit in January. “Either we avoid setting off that irreversible chain reaction beyond human control or we don’t. Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don’t. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.”

Thunberg’s bluntness is warranted: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last October that humanity has roughly twelve years left to prevent a rise in world temperatures that would make civilization unsustainable in its current form by the century’s end. Virtually all of the Davos attendees will be dead by the time that happens. Thunberg and the rest of her generation are now desperately trying to get them and other world leaders to act before climate change becomes irreversible.

Widespread student protests are largely unheard of in the United States, but there are notable exceptions. The marches and sit-ins against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s come to mind, as do last year’s walkouts against gun violence. In each case, young people were angry about a mortal threat to their lives: dying in a futile overseas conflict, or being murdered in one’s classroom by a heavily armed gunman. This year, another student movement is taking shape, this time to stop an existential threat to humanity itself. In February, thousands of students walked out of schools across Europe to call for stronger international action. Another student strike is planned for Friday in the United States and more than 70 other countries.

The anti-war left ultimately succeeded in pressuring Washington to abandon the conflict in Vietnam, but it took around a decade for small campus protests to grow into a mass movement, and their tactics sparked a conservative backlash that helped elect (and reelect) a Republican president. Millennials hoping to force leaders to act on climate change can learn something from their success—and even more from their failures.

The ruling gerontocracy won’t make it easy for younger Americans to translate their political energy into policy. HuffPost’s Michael Hobbs argued earlier this month that age may be the defining split in our democracy. Older Americans, he noted, are more likely to vote in elections and three times as likely to donate to political campaigns. They also tend to live in smaller rural states, giving them disproportionate influence in the Electoral College and the Senate. “Without a dramatic increase in immigration or a sudden doubling of the birth rate, this is likely to be a permanent shift,” Hobbs wrote.

These forces helped elevate Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016. His campaign was built around a weaponized nostalgia of sorts—the “again” in “Make America Great Again”—that appealed to older white voters who resisted cultural changes that shaped the Obama era. He also broke with GOP orthodoxy on the campaign trail by refusing to cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. His strategy worked. According to exit polls, the majority of Americans over 40 sided with Trump, including 62 percent of white Americans between 40 and 64 years old and 58 percent of those older than 65.

Trump loves to appropriate old political slogans. “Let’s make America great again” was Reagan’s theme during the 1980 election. “America first” was the rallying cry of isolationists before World War II. Most apt of all was his occasional reference to his base as the “silent majority,” a phrase first popularized by Richard Nixon in 1969. Nixon used it to describe what he saw as a clear division in those turbulent years. It implied that civil rights and anti-war activists—and the urban intellectuals who favored them—were a noisy minority, and that most Americans were working-class people who opposed social change.

Nixon’s theory was somewhat vindicated after he won re-election in 1972 in a 49-state landslide (though of course an electoral majority is far from an actual majority of the population). While Trump appeals to a similar demographic, they are neither silent nor a majority, electoral or otherwise. He lost the popular vote in 2016 by roughly three million votes and only won thanks to the flawed Electoral College. A similar bias toward smaller states kept the Senate in Republican hands. Thanks to a decade of partisan gerrymandering, Democrats had to win a wave election in the 2018 midterms just to secure a workable majority in the House of Representatives.

Trump regularly denies that climate change is real, once tweeting that it was “created by and for the Chinese” to make America less economically competitive. Since taking office, he’s withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate agreement, championed the U.S. coal mining industry over renewable energy, and placed dogmatic deregulators in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency. Trump once reportedly told aides that he wasn’t worried about the national debt because “I won’t be here.” That attitude also sums up his, and most Republicans’, approach to climate change.

But their nonchalance is at odds with public opinion on the issue. A Yale/George Mason University poll in February found that fewer than 60 percent of Americans worried about climate change before Trump’s election; that number is now approaching 70 percent. The Obama administration had signed international climate accords and pushed the Clean Power Plan to rein in carbon emissions, giving the appearance of progress on the issue. By shattering those relatively modest efforts, Trump and his allies may inadvertently have convinced more Americans to support climate action.

Americans, like other animals, occasionally devour their young. The last two decades of policy have not been kind to millennials. Thanks to the Great Recession, they earn less money than boomers and Generation X did at their age. They’re buying fewer homes, paying off their student debts more slowly, and putting less money into their savings. Millennials enjoy far less economic and social stability than their parents did, and it’s taking a psychic toll. Oh, and the world is ending.

There’s a cottage industry, especially within conservative circles, that tries to blame young Americans for their own problems. Millennials are cast as lazy, coddled, and censorious, thus the supposed proliferation of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” on college campuses and the push for better labor conditions in the workplace. Fox News, whose average viewer is 65 years old, is particularly fond of describing young Americans as naive and out of touch. This backlash is nothing new: A Gallup poll after the Kent State shootings in 1970 found that 58 percent of Americans blamed the students after National Guard fired into a crowd of protesters, killing four students.

Americans’ views on climate change vary significantly by age. A January survey by Data for Progress found that a majority of millennials and Generation X support the Green New Deal, while a majority of boomers and the Silent Generation oppose it. The generational divide is even apparent among conservatives. In a May 2018 Pew survey, only 44 percent of Republican millennials said they wanted to expand offshore oil and gas drilling compared to 71 percent of Republican boomers. A similar gap—43 percent of young Republicans versus 73 percent of older ones—emerged on support for expanded coal mining. What explains this stark age gap? Older Americans tend to be more conservative in general, and they would bear the highest costs for combating climate change while seeing the least benefit from them.

Like the Vietnam protesters of the ’60s and ’70s, millennials have shown a knack for mass organizing. Students at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, led nationwide protests against gun violence after 17 of their classmates were massacred last year. The March for Our Lives last year became one of the largest national demonstrations in U.S. history, drawing almost 200,000 people in Washington, D.C., alone. Thunberg, the 16-year-old activist who spoke at Davos, cited their work as an inspiration for the student strikes.

What’s more, young also seem to have avoided some of the pitfalls that anti-war protesters fell into almost 50 years ago. Young people also seem to understand that they need to wield political power through the governing process, not just outside of it. Trump’s presidency prompted hundreds of Democratic millennials to run for elected office, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and the Green New Deal’s highest-profile champion.

Millennials also seem to have rejected violence as a political tactic. Though the anti-war movement as a whole wasn’t violent, parts of, notably the Weather Underground, committed domestic terrorism. It was also a remarkably violent era in general: The FBI tabulated more than 2,700 bombings in the U.S. in an 18-month span between 1971 and 1972. That helped fuel an electoral backlash from moderates and conservatives, aiding Nixon’s election bids in 1968 and 1972. The anti-war movement ultimately succeeded in shifting public opinion against the war, and Nixon—fresh off his reelection rout of George McGovern, who had advocated for immediate withdrawal—wound down America’s involvement in Vietnam. But the cost was a generational shift toward conservatism.

The Vietnam War was a clear mortal threat to young people, tens of millions of whom were eligible to be drafted; nearly 60,000 Americans were killed in the conflict. Climate change presents a different sort of threat to millennials. It’s less immediate than an ongoing war, less visceral than being shot at. But ultimately it will prove more catastrophic. Even if drastic action is taken over the next decade, the impact of rising global temperatures on civilization will dwarf the Vietnam War’s bloodshed. The World Health Organization has projected that come 2030, climate change will cause an additional 250,000 deaths per year.

Combatting climate change will take much more effort than ending the Vietnam War, and much longer. It will require a mass movement unlike any America, or even the world, has ever seen. It will also require millennials to succeed where the anti-war left failed a half-century ago: at the ballot box. There can’t be meaningful action as long as climate deniers and slow-walkers are in charge in Washington. The challenge will be to convince enough older voters that global warming is every bit as frightening to millennials as the Vietnam War was to boomers.

“Adults keep saying, ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope,’” Thunberg, who was nominated Wednesday for the Nobel Peace Prize, said in January. “But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

Bed-Stuy Vs. Felicia The Degenerate

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Laurie Miller, 58, a black woman from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, was just minding her business, living alone in the same row house she moved into as a child in 1974, when she got a new next-door neighbor: Charlotte Taillor, a white queer feminist who works as a dominatrix and BDSM instructor. When she saw all the weird men coming and going from the house, Miller raised hell. Taillor doesn’t live there, but runs her dominatrix training academy out of it. The New York Times went to a recent community meeting about the controversy. Excerpt:

One of Ms. Taillor’s supporters said critics just objected to the nature of her work and wouldn’t care if she were teaching knitting.

Ms. Miller said afterward that neighbors were able to hear “things like whips and chains and moans and stuff like that.”

“These brownstones are old and hollow,” she said.

Another block neighbor, Mary Patrick, said at one point about Ms. Taillor: “She should leave. She should take that to 42nd Street.”

Ms. Taillor told her critics in the room: “You don’t have to kink-shame or say that people are creepy because of what they enjoy doing.”

She added that her hope when she moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant was “to have a nice relationship with a nice community of woke people.”

“Oh, ‘woke’!” Ms. Miller fired back. “Bye, Felicia!”

Ha! (If you don’t get the joke, look here for the explanation.)

Read the whole thing. Even though Taillor finally agreed to clear out, you’ve got to read the story to find out what Laurie Miller is doing now. She is not letting up! I’m guessing that’s her yelling on the street in this recent local TV news report about the controversy, in which the dominatrix complains that her angry neighbors are hurting her feelings. Shouldn’t she be thanking them for that? I’m so confused.

Here’s what I’m not confused about: Laurie Miller is the hero America needs! It might be Weimar America elsewhere, but not on her block of Bed-Stuy.

JOE A GO!

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Exclusive: Biden to run for White House, says Dem lawmaker

Former Vice President Joe BidenJoseph (Joe) Robinette BidenFeehery: Dems’ embrace of socialism makes a Trump reelection look inevitable Press: Which way do Dems go in 2020? GOP pollster says Biden, Sanders are polling low for how well-known they are MORE will run for president in 2020, a senior Democratic lawmaker told The Hill on Tuesday, a move that will shake up the crowded Democratic primary field and make him the clear front-runner for his party’s nomination against President TrumpDonald John TrumpTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Stone’s defense denies using court to generate publicity for his book release Ocasio-Cortez: Trump sets tone of ‘misogyny, racism, conspiracy theory-ism’ MORE.

“I’m giving it a shot,” Biden said matter-of-factly during a phone call with a House Democratic lawmaker within the past week — a conversation the congressman recounted to The Hill and interpreted as a sure sign that Biden will run in 2020.

In the brief phone call, the former vice president asked if he could bounce some campaign strategy ideas off the lawmaker and invited the lawmaker to sit down with him in person in the near future. Biden also said he hoped to have the lawmaker’s support, something the lawmaker did not commit to.

Biden responded that there was no harm if they keep talking, according to the lawmaker who spoke to The Hill on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the phone conversation.

Biden did not share any details about when or where he planned to make his formal presidential announcement, the lawmaker said. Biden and his wife, Jill, just returned from vacation in St. Croix in the Caribbean, where they reportedly discussed potential pitfalls and began finalizing their plans, The Associated Press reported.

Biden spokesman Bill Russo refuted the idea that the former vice president is absolutely running: “He has not made a final decision. No change.”

But at an event with firefighters Tuesday morning, Biden teased a 2020 presidential run as the crowd chanted, “Run, Joe, run!”

“I appreciate the energy you all showed when I got up here,” Biden told an energetic crowd at the International Association of Fire Fighters’ annual conference in Washington, D.C. “Save it a little longer, I may need it in a few weeks. Be careful what you wish for.”

His entry into the race has been largely expected. In recent weeks, the 76-year-old Biden has been laying the groundwork for what would be his third and final presidential bid, seeking support from Democratic donors, lawmakers and others in his political circle.

Biden, who served as President Obama’s vice president for two terms, also has a team of campaign aides already assembled for the moment he decides to launch a White House bid, which is expected in early April.

Senate and House sources said Biden has been reaching out to allies on Capitol Hill with increasing frequency in recent weeks, having conversations about what his potential candidacy would look like. Biden, Democrats said, has talked about how he could win in the primary, making the case that a growing Democratic field would work in his favor and that, because of things like his blue-collar appeal, he would be the strongest candidate to beat Trump in a general election.

Rep. Cedric RichmondCedric Levon RichmondCPAC attendees say Biden poses greatest threat to Trump The Hill’s Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill’s Morning Report – What to watch for as Mueller’s probe winds down MORE (D-La.), the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, has been speaking to Biden regularly and urging him to jump in the race. Richmond said he believes that Biden is “95 percent” committed to running and has been coordinating calls between Biden and other members of Congress. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie ThompsonBennie Gordon ThompsonNielsen testifies: Five things you need to know Dem to Trump official: ‘White babies would not be treated the way these babies of color are being treated’ Pence uses NY Times, Washington Post headlines to defend Trump’s claim of border crisis MORE (D-Miss.) said he has been informed that he’s on a “call list” and Biden should be reaching out soon.

One source familiar with Biden’s thinking says it’s all part of the former vice president’s mission “to check all boxes” before he officially announces he’s running.

“He’s basically in. He’s just running the traps, as he says,” the source said.

In a Monday interview with CBS, Democratic Sen. Christopher CoonsChristopher (Chris) Andrew CoonsSixteen years later, let’s finally heed the call of the 9/11 Commission  Senate Dems introduce bill demanding report on Khashoggi killing Trump got in Dem’s face over abortion at private meeting: report MORE, who now holds the Delaware Senate seat Biden held for 36 years, said he was “confident” that Biden would run.

“If he gets in, he’s the front-runner,” conceded a second House Democratic lawmaker, who has already endorsed another candidate for president. “He’s the standard that others will have to measure up to in terms of policy knowledge, in terms of his ability to run a presidential campaign, and folks who are close to him in the polls will have to compare themselves to Biden’s strengths.”

Rep. Gerry ConnollyGerald (Gerry) Edward ConnollyDems struggle to turn page on Omar controversy Questions mount over Cohen pardon claims Progressives come to Omar’s defense MORE (D-Va.), a former Biden staffer during the 1980s, hasn’t spoken to Biden recently but said there is nothing stopping his former boss from running again.

“At this stage in life, he doesn’t have a lot to lose and has a lot to gain. And he has a lot to offer the country,” Connolly told The Hill outside of the Capitol. “He offers the prospect of some desperately needed healing in this country after this scourge.”

A new Monmouth University poll had Biden leading the pack, with 28 percent of likely Democratic voters saying they support him in the primary. Sen. Bernie SandersBernard (Bernie) SandersTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Trump tries to win votes in Senate fight Hillicon Valley: US threatens to hold intel from Germany over Huawei | GOP senator targets FTC over privacy | Bipartisan bill would beef up ‘internet of things’ security | Privacy groups seize on suspended NSA program | Tesla makes U-turn MORE (I-Vt.) was a close second, with 25 percent, followed by Sens. Kamala HarrisKamala Devi HarrisTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Feehery: Dems’ embrace of socialism makes a Trump reelection look inevitable Press: Which way do Dems go in 2020? MORE (D-Calif.), with 10 percent, and Elizabeth WarrenElizabeth Ann WarrenTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Facebook restores Warren ads removed for criticizing the platform Feehery: Dems’ embrace of socialism makes a Trump reelection look inevitable MORE (D-Mass.), with 8 percent.

But it won’t be smooth sailing for Biden. There is a concern among Democrats that while he would make a strong general election candidate, he would have a tough time in a primary because the party and many of his potential presidential rivals have tacked increasingly to the left.

The former vice president will also face decades-worth of opposition research — including his comments on the crime bill and his vote on the Iraq War — which portrays Biden as out of touch with the Democratic Party. And in the era of “Me Too,” he will face criticism for his treatment of Anita Hill when he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee during Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings.

One Democratic lawmaker who spoke with Biden last week and has been encouraging him to run said the former vice president is very close to announcing his White House bid, barring some unforeseen complication.

“He’s 95 percent there, but he’s not 100 percent,” the Democratic lawmaker said. “He wants to make sure the due diligence is done, but it’s no secret he wants to go.”

Despite the swarm of senators already in the race — Sanders, Harris and Warren, as well as Cory BookerCory Anthony BookerPress: Which way do Dems go in 2020? GOP pollster says Biden, Sanders are polling low for how well-known they are O’Rourke weighing possible Iowa trip ahead of 2020 announcement: report MORE (D-N.J.), Kirsten GillibrandKirsten Elizabeth GillibrandPress: Which way do Dems go in 2020? The Hill’s 12:30 Report: Trump unveils budget wish list with domestic cuts, defense hikes Tax Foundation: Bill to restore full SALT deduction would benefit high earners MORE (D-N.Y.) and Amy KlobucharAmy Jean KlobucharTrump: Socialism ‘easy to campaign on but tough to govern on’ Press: Which way do Dems go in 2020? Americans’ complaints over big tech haven’t hurt business, says GOP pollster MORE (D-Minn.) — one Democratic senator is hoping Biden joins the group.

“I love him,” the senator told The Hill, “and think he’s got a unique ability to connect with Americans in the Rust Belt who feel left behind by government.”

Terror watchlist shared with animal shelters…

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Rights group: terror watchlist shared with animal shelters

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A Muslim civil-rights group says the FBI is letting animal shelters, private investigators and even a Midwestern megachurch have access to its watchlist of suspected terrorists.

In court documents unsealed after a court hearing Friday, lawyers for the Council on American-Islamic Relations expressed concern that the watchlist is disseminated much more broadly than the government is willing to acknowledge.

“Defendants share their list with anyone or anything that asks,” CAIR’s lawyers wrote in one of their legal briefs.

Government lawyers, meanwhile, say CAIR is being alarmist and misrepresenting some of the entities on the list.

CAIR’s assertions about the broad dissemination of the terror watchlist are “so rife with misleading statements and outright falsehood that it is hard to know where to begin,” government lawyer Amy Powell wrote in an email attached to a court filing.

Issues over the dissemination of the terrorist watchlist to private entities have come in a lawsuit CAIR filed challenging the watchlist’s constitutionality. CAIR says the watchlist is riddled with errors and innocent Muslims are placed on the list by mistake and suffer numerous consequences as a result.

Those consequences are exacerbated, according to CAIR, by the government’s willingness to share the watchlist so broadly, including granting access to hundreds of private entities.

The government last month admitted in court papers that hundreds of private entities can access the watchlist, after years of denying the list was shared in that manner. But government officials maintain that private entities accessing the list are connected to law enforcement, like police forces for universities or railroads.

A judge recently ordered the government to let CAIR’s lawyers see which private entities had access to the watchlist, but they were forbidden from making copies or taking notes. CAIR’s lawyers say those restrictions leave them hamstrung in their ability to research concerns about specific entities.

Some of the disputes about how broadly the list is disseminated seem to stem from how broadly one defines “law enforcement.”

Animal shelters are a case in point. The government says those animal shelters on the list are simply animal welfare organizations that have been granted police powers under state law and therefore have law-enforcement responsibility.

The megachurch, government lawyers say, is actually the police department of a religious university.

CAIR’s lawyers have long suspected that the list is disseminated much more widely than the government has acknowledged. The broad terror watchlist contains hundreds of thousands of names; the much smaller no-fly list is culled from the watchlist.

At Friday’s hearing, Magistrate Judge John Anderson mulled making the list of private entities available to the public at large. He said that since private entities receiving the list are free to disclose the fact they can access the list, he didn’t see why the full list shouldn’t be part of the public record in the case.

But Justice Department Lawyer Antonia Konkoly said a wholesale disclosure of private entities would be a serious security breach, and could give terrorist groups a “roadmap” to understanding how the government monitors and combats them.

Ultimately, Anderson decided to leave in place rules that restrict CAIR’s lawyers from having their own copy of the private-entities list or making that list a publicly filed document.

Rare 10-mile-long lake forms in Death Valley…

On March 17, 2019 By admin

• Breaking News

Rare 10-mile-long lake forms in Death Valley after heavy rains and flooding

After a wet winter storm swept Death Valley National Park, a lake formed near Salt Creek. LA-based photographer Elliot McGucken captured photos of the water on March 7, 2019.

After a wet winter storm swept Death Valley National Park, a lake formed near Salt Creek. LA-based photographer Elliot McGucken captured photos of the water on March 7, 2019.

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After a wet winter storm swept Death Valley National Park, a lake formed near Salt Creek. LA-based photographer Elliot McGucken captured photos of the water on March 7, 2019.

After a wet winter storm swept Death Valley National Park, a lake formed near Salt Creek. LA-based photographer Elliot McGucken captured photos of the water on March 7, 2019.

It’s not a sight you expect to see in the driest spot in the country.

A massive lake formed in Death Valley National Park near Salt Creek last week after a storm packed with tropical moisture drenched Southern California, triggering flooding on several park roads.

Photographer Elliott McGucken was in Death Valley to photograph the storm and its aftermath; on March 7, he took images of the temporary, nameless lake.

McGucken was hoping to photograph Badwater Basin where he thought water might have also collected, but he couldn’t access the area due to flooding and stumbled upon the lake.

“It’s a surreal feeling seeing so much water in the world’s driest place,” said McGucken, who also writes books on physics. “There’s an irony even though I couldn’t get down to Badwater Basin. Overall, I think these shots are probably more unique.”

McGucken said Death Valley is usually windy, and when he first arrived at the lake, blustery conditions were creating ripples on the water. “Then, the wind died down and it got really calm,” he said.

The result was a collection of images with the rugged Panamint Range, its tallest Telescope Peak frosted in snow, reflected in glassy waters.

“Nature presents this ephemeral beauty, and I think a lot of what photography is about is searching for it and then capturing it,” he said.

The exact length of the lake is unknown, but the park emailed a statement to McGucken estimating it’s about 10 miles long: “I believe we would need aerial photos to accurately determine the size. From the road, it looks like it stretched from approximately Harmony Borax Works to Salt Creek right after the rain, which is a little less than 10 road miles. But, the road does curve a bit, so it’s not an entirely accurate guess.”

ALSO: Death Valley flooded by drenching rains: ‘It’s like putting water on concrete’

In a typical March, the Furnace Creek rain gauge in Death Valley records 0.3 inches of rainfall. In a 24-hour span running from last Tuesday to Wednesday, the same gauge measured 0.84 inches. In the surrounding mountains, the National Weather Service estimates 1 to 1.5 inches fell.

This might not sound like a lot of rain, but NWS meteorologist Todd Lericos explains the desert landscape doesn’t easily absorb water. Rain in the mountains rushes down to the valley floor.

“The desert soils are dry and compact,” said Lericos, who works in the NWS Las Vegas office. “It’s like putting water on concrete.”