Global Warming: Why don't we treat climate change with the rigor we give to terror attacks?

 If climate change doesn’t impact our immediate reality, it’s harder to prioritize how crucial fixing it is. Photograph: Dale Gerhard/AP

Extreme weather, water shortages and the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like Zika are all having very real effects on everyday realities globally, and they are all linked to a fast-heating earth system. Yet we still don’t treat climate change with the reverence we reserve for something like a terrorist attack.

Maybe the blame goes deeper, into our very natures: evolution did not design our bodies to treat climate change with urgency.

Evolutionary responses favor real-time threats, not those that take place on an extended time scale. Shrinking Arctic ice cover, erratic changes in winter snow cover or rapid shifts in heat and cold don’t provide the same sense of threat as our fear of terrorist attacks or other bodily harm.

The challenge in moving more forcefully to stop the flow of greenhouse gases is that if you have to stop and think about whether a specific action or activity is threatening, that very process engages very different parts of the human brain, and not the ones that impel us to action.

The hormones that flood through our bodies to provide increased strength and speed in anticipation of fighting or running won’t kick in when the threat is one that can only be understood through research and thought. If you want to worry whether climate change will eventually make it more difficult for humans to feed themselves, for example, you need to break out the books and study science, statistics and a lot of other disciplines. Even after you study, it is hard to share that thought with your fellow humans in a way that elevates this to an Isis-like threat.

One result: we only pay attention to climate change from time to time, and usually when it hits us in the face – Hurricane Sandy or drought if you are a farmer in California. But disaster rarely hits all humanity at the exact same time. And life goes on – our memories of tragedy fade, a survival mechanism also bequeathed us by evolution.

One time when more of us paid attention was when the countries of the world met in Paris in December to map out the next steps in the battle to contain the dangerous greenhouse gas emissions that are trapped in the atmosphere and increasing planetary heating. Daily, for a few weeks, we heard stories, opinions, data and analysis. There was a “hook” – a small, international drama taking place in France.

Now that the moment has passed, we are back to our own devices, and most of us don’t consciously connect whether gradual warming might double back to cripple human life. What if the changes make it difficult for critters and insects that play roles in food production to survive and perform their jobs? The cereal aisle in western supermarkets still offers dozens of choices. What if we don’t sense in a personal way how these changes might make us more vulnerable to opportunistic illness? We can avoid the issue unless the boss directs us to travel to Brazil and we are forced to worry about Zika.

Our difficulty looking longer-term encourages the thought that someone, somewhere is taking care of this problem for us, that there is really nothing the rest of us need do. We sit back and leave it to the experts.

The US supreme court’s recent insistence on looking through the lens of legal process – justices voted to stay Barack Obama’s carbon emissions regulations pending a challenge to them – neatly captures the fatal time factor. The court’s decision to cease implementation of the Clean Power Plan until the case is argued and decided isn’t fatal if the rule survives legal challenge. Then states will get back to work and ways will be found to reduce emissions. But the time lost in climate terms cannot be made up.

Climate change is relentless; human habit, Daniel Kahneman tells us, is oblivious. Bridging those two extremes is the central challenge of our times.

The Right needs to wake up - climate change is real, and we're causing it

There is nothing conservative about ignoring the facts. It's far past time that those on the Right, however admirable their instincts, stopped ignoring the scientific consensus

Whenever I head to the north Norfolk coast and see the wind farm offshore, visible from the Cromer pier, my heart sinks. The blinking red lights at night and the white spinning blades during the day spoil the historic view of the channel from the Victorian seafront. It was a view witnessed by a holidaying Winston Churchill at a place recommended by Austen; the clunking towers have written it off. I have not learned to love or to even silently accept the wind farms, and I cannot understand those claim that they are beautiful or elegant.

But I am persuaded that we need them. On the day that the Met Office has recognized that 2014, the warmest year on record, is attributable to man-made climate change, it’s time to put these eyesores into perspective. The results are in, and everyone from NASA to the UN agrees that there is an urgent need to change the way we behave, to prevent widespread destruction of our environment. From melting ice to strawberry crops in November, we are starting to see the early stages of a chain of events which - if not addressed adequately - will drastically alter the planet and the lives of generations to come.
There are enclaves of scientific denial on the Right, like tiny pacific islands on which old Japanese men still believe they are engaged in World War Two. The odd bloody scalp, the odd skirmish does not prove that the war is ongoing. Nick Griffin, who called man made global warming ‘a hoax’ has expressed his support for UKIP, a party which has vowed to bin the Climate Change Act, and which clearly wants to attract those who think that the war is still to be fought.
Yet you don’t have to be a pro-EU fixie-cycling ethical barista of no fixed gender identity with a piercing through your nose to wake up and smell the coffee. Indeed, you should enjoy the smell of coffee whilst you can, since climate change is having a dramatic impact on the bean crop yields. Bemoaning the ban on filament light-bulbs needs to be seen in the context of widespread food shortages and significant loss of landmass. The cost of renewables to the UK needs to be set against the likely cost of famine, drought, and the expense of keeping an overpopulating planet even remotely peaceful as its food and its land diminish. It will not improve the views from the East Anglian coastline if the coastline itself is eroded.
The deniers argue that any globally coordinated response to this problem will involve ‘socialism’ and EU control, calling many exponents of green policies ‘watermelons’ for being green on the outside and red on the inside. Yet the same people will often argue that unilateral action on climate change would be an expensive waste of time whilst China is still building coal power plants. We can’t work together because it will interfere with freedom – but we can’t act alone because it’s pointless. Even more confusingly, there are too many on the Right who then have a go at private companies for getting into renewable energy. When the socialist-finder generals aren’t calling people watermelons, they are calling out the corporate greed of making a profit from involvement in green energy solutions. Governments are bashed for taking a statist approach to climate change, and corporations for a capitalist one.
There are many dreadful side effects to man-made climate change, though most of them will only be apparent – experts warn – once it is too late to counter them. In trying to act to prevent the worst of it, we are having to tear up parts of our countryside and even get our heads around splitting our rubbish into different forms of recycling. But one of the most irritating and immediate consequences has been from the deniers, particularly on the Right, who, while understandably mistrustful of ideology and consensus, have abandoned the core conservative principle of doing what works and looking at the available evidence. The same populist movements which would abolish the ‘elites’ in politics have decided that an international scientific consensus about complex, long-term changes is no match for their lived experience of yesterday's weather. Despite the best efforts of our Prime Minister in opposition, many on the right are abandoning a commitment to environmentalism as a costly and unproven expenditure.
It’s time for the doubters to surrender, and accept that there is nothing Right-wing about denying the global consensus of a scientific community. At this point too many of us on the Right echo the farcical warning of Stephen Colbert that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” After all, it isn’t Blofeld’s SPECTRE warning us about climate change - it’s the British boffins in our own Met Office.

By Rupert Myers4:33PM GMT 04 Dec 2014

Melissa Harris-Perry Walks Out on MSNBC Show: “I am not a Token, Mammy, or Little Brown Bobble Head”

 By Yvette Carnell

For well over a year (see here and here), I have been predicting the end of a group of black pundits who I derisively refer to as the Negro Whisperers.

MSNBC‘s Rev. Al Sharpton has been relegated to weekends, Joy-Ann Reid’s gone, as well as Goldie Taylor, Touré and now–Melissa Harris-Perry. The chattering class of Democratic apologists are dropping like flies.

According to the New York Times, Harris-Perry is frustrated with pre-emptions at her show and confirmed she will not be returning:

In a phone interview, Ms. Harris-Perry confirmed she would not appear on the show this weekend. She said she had received no word about whether her show, which runs from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays and Sundays, had been canceled, but said she was frustrated that her time slot had faced pre-emptions for coverage of the presidential election. She said she had not appeared on the network at all “for weeks” and that she was mostly sidelined during recent election coverage in South Carolina and New Hampshire. (She was asked to return this weekend.)

In her email, Ms. Harris-Perry wrote that she was not sure if the NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, or Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, were involved in the way her show was handled recently, but she directed blame toward both.

“I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote. “I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.”
“After this election is over, Negroes and all their social and political relevance will be completely purged from mainstream media. These Corporate financed websites will shut down as well. The need for Negro opinion will end when Obama walks out the door,” said Black Agenda Report‘s Pascal Robert when asked about Harris-Perry’s departure.

Jamil Smith published with permission Harris-Perry’s email to her #nerdland staff:

Dearest Nerds,

As you know by now, my name appears on the weekend schedule for MSNBC programming from South Carolina this Saturday and Sunday. I appreciate that many of you responded to this development with relief and enthusiasm. To know that you have missed working with me even a fraction of how much I’ve missed working with all of you is deeply moving. However, as of this morning, I do not have any intention of hosting this weekend. Because this is a decision that affects all of you, I wanted to take a moment to explain my reasoning.

Some unknown decision-maker, presumably Andy Lack or Phil Griffin, has added my name to this spreadsheet, but nothing has changed in the posture of the MSNBC leadership team toward me or toward our show. Putting me on air seems to be a decision being made solely to save face because there is a growing chorus of questions from our viewers about my notable absence from MSNBC coverage. Social media has noted the dramatic change in editorial tone and racial composition of MSNBC’s on-air coverage. In addition, Dylan Byers of CNN has made repeated inquiries with MSNBC’s leadership and with me about the show and what appears to be its cancellation. I have not responded to reporters or social media inquiries. However, I am not willing to appear on air in order to quell concerns about the disappearance of our show and our voice.

Here is the reality: our show was taken?—?without comment or discussion or notice?—?in the midst of an election season. After four years of building an audience, developing a brand, and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced. Now, MSNBC would like me to appear for four inconsequential hours to read news that they deem relevant without returning to our team any of the editorial control and authority that makes MHP Show distinctive.

The purpose of this decision seems to be to provide cover for MSNBC, not to provide voice for MHP Show. I will not be used as a tool for their purposes. I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin, or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back. I have wept more tears than I can count and I find this deeply painful, but I don’t want back on air at any cost. I am only willing to return when that return happens under certain terms.

Undoubtedly, television nurtures the egos of those of us who find ourselves in front of bright lights and big cameras. I am sure ego is informing my own pain in this moment, but there is a level of professional decency, respect, and communication that has been denied this show for years. And the utter insulting absurdity of the past few weeks exceeds anything I can countenance.

I have stayed in the same hotels where MSNBC has been broadcasting in Iowa, in New Hampshire, and in South Carolina, yet I have been shut out from coverage. I have a PhD in political science and have taught American voting and elections at some of the nation’s top universities for nearly two decades, yet I have been deemed less worthy to weigh in than relative novices and certified liars. I have hosted a weekly program on this network for four years and contributed to election coverage on this network for nearly eight years, but no one on the third floor has even returned an email, called me, or initiated or responded to any communication of any kind from me for nearly a month. It is profoundly hurtful to realize that I work for people who find my considerable expertise and editorial judgment valueless to the coverage they are creating.

While MSNBC may believe that I am worthless, I know better. I know who I am. I know why MHP Show is unique and valuable. I will not sell short myself or this show. I am not hungry for empty airtime. I care only about substantive, meaningful, and autonomous work. When we can do that, I will return?—?not a moment earlier. I am deeply sorry for the ways that this decision makes life harder for all of you. You mean more to me than you can imagine.

Yours always,

Melissa

Melissa Harris-Perry Walks Off Her MSNBC Show After Pre-emptions

By JOHN KOBLINFEB. 26, 2016
In an unusually public flare-up, one of MSNBC’s television personalities clashed with the network on Friday in a dispute about airtime and editorial freedom and said she was refusing to host the show that bears her name this weekend.

The host, Melissa Harris-Perry, wrote in an email to co-workers this week that her show had effectively been taken away from her and that she felt “worthless” in the eyes of NBC News executives, who are restructuring MSNBC.

“Here is the reality: Our show was taken — without comment or discussion or notice — in the midst of an election season,” she wrote in the email, which became public on Friday. “After four years of building an audience, developing a brand and developing trust with our viewers, we were effectively and utterly silenced.”

In a phone interview, Ms. Harris-Perry confirmed she would not appear on the show this weekend. She said she had received no word about whether her show, which runs from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays and Sundays, had been canceled, but said she was frustrated that her time slot had faced pre-emptions for coverage of the presidential election. She said she had not appeared on the network at all “for weeks” and that she was mostly sidelined during recent election coverage in South Carolina and New Hampshire. (She was asked to return this weekend.)

In her email, Ms. Harris-Perry wrote that she was not sure if the NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, or Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, were involved in the way her show was handled recently, but she directed blame toward both.

“I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote. “I am not a token, mammy or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.”

Ms. Harris-Perry is black, and Mr. Lack and Mr. Griffin are white. In the phone interview on Friday, Ms. Harris-Perry clarified her remarks and said she did not think race played a role in her recent absence from the air.

“I don’t know if there is a personal racial component,” she said. “I don’t think anyone is doing something mean to me because I’m a black person.”

An NBC News spokesman said in a statement, “In this exciting and unpredictable presidential primary season, many of our daytime programs have been temporarily upended by breaking political coverage, including M.H.P. This reaction is really surprising, confusing and disappointing.”

For MSNBC, this is unwelcome news during a heated election. Last year, after its scandal involving Brian Williams, Mr. Lack, the former head of NBC News, was brought back to run the news division, and one of his chief missions was to fix the ailing MSNBC, which significantly trails Fox News and CNN in viewership. In the last few months, Mr. Lack has steered MSNBC away from its liberal identity and moved it toward harder news in the daytime hours. Since January, the network has had round-the-clock election coverage (including the reintroduction of Mr. Williams as co-anchor on primary nights), and notched strong ratings gains year-over-year in the mornings and afternoon.

Ms. Harris-Perry, who is also a professor at Wake Forest University, has hosted her MSNBC show since 2012. She has used the show to explore issues like social justice and racism, and diversity has been the centerpiece of the show since its start.

“I care only about substantive, meaningful and autonomous work,” she wrote in her email. “When we can do that, I will return — not a moment earlier.”

She said that last month the onscreen branding for her show was replaced by MSNBC’s slogan, “The Place for Politics.” With the election heating up, her show was pre-empted each of the last two weeks and for the most recent edition, on Super Bowl Sunday, she was told to talk mostly about the presidential race.

She still did speak about other topics, including Beyoncé’s new video for her song “Formation” and how it addressed race. But perhaps in a sign of the network’s shifting priorities, as she and her guests engaged in a lengthy discussion about the video, live video of rallies for Jeb Bush and Chris Christie in New Hampshire played in a box on the screen as well.

Ms. Harris-Perry, who is under contract, said that she was told that pre-emptions and election coverage were going to play out for the “foreseeable future.” Joy Reid will take over her time slot on Saturday, just as she has for the last couple of weeks.


Ms. Harris-Perry said not being able to talk to her viewers felt like a “betrayal.”

“It is perfectly fine, 100 percent reasonable and perfectly acceptable for MSNBC to decide they no longer want the M.H.P. show,” she said. “But they should say that. They should cancel the show; they should stand up. And maybe it would be rewarded with huge ratings, but they shouldn’t kill us by attrition and take us off the air without telling anybody, including us. That for me is what’s painful and difficult.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 27, 2016, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Host Says MSNBC Silenced Her Show.

Fast food hamburgers: what are we really eating?

Exactly What is Fast Food Hamburger Meat Made of? Pathological Analysis...

at 10/17/2013 / Posted by Fauquier ENT

I freely admit that in my youth, I loved eating burgers from fast food joints like McDonald's. But after getting married and being encouraged to eat healthier by my wife who felt fast food burgers were unhealthy (disgusting) because they weren't actually made of meat, I've always wondered what hamburger meat was truly made of...

Well... a group of pathologists actually performed a pathologic analysis on 8 different fast food hamburger meat. No... they did not identify the fast food chain where they got the meat.

What they found was both reassuring as well as alarming. Here are the key interesting findings:

• Actual meat content in a typical burger is only 12% (range: 2.1%-14.8%). The meat itself did appear normal which is reassuring. Most of the burger is actually made of water comprising 49% of the weight (range: 37%-62%)
• No brain tissue was seen in any samples (especially important when considering mad-cow disease is localized in brain tissue and can be transmitted to humans who eat contaminated tissue causing fatal Crutzfeldt-Jakob disease).
• Besides meat, other tissue types were seen including connective tissue, blood vessels, nerves, and fat (all expected in meat/muscle).
• However, cartilage and bone was also found in some samples, perhaps accrued during the butchering and processing of the meat.
• Plant material was also unexpectedly found which may have been added as a way to add bulk to the meat.
• Intracellular parasites (Sarcocystis) was also seen in a few samples which is why meat should always be cooked prior to eating (whether burger or restaurant grade A meat).

So there you have it... fast food hamburger meat actually does contain meat, though it only makes a small part of it.

Fast food hamburgers: what are we really eating?

US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health

Ann Diagn Pathol.
 2008 Dec;12(6):406-9. doi: 10.1016/j.anndiagpath.2008.06.002. Epub 2008 Jul 26.
Prayson B1, McMahon JT, Prayson RA.

Americans consume about 5 billion hamburgers a year. It is presumed that most hamburgers are composed primarily of meat. The purpose of this study is to assess the content of 8 fast food hamburger brands using histologic methods. Eight different brands of hamburgers were evaluated for water content by weight and microscopically for recognizable tissue types. Glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) staining was used to evaluate for brain tissue. Water content by weight ranged from 37.7% to 62.4% (mean, 49%). Meat content in the hamburgers ranged from 2.1% to 14.8% (median, 12.1%). The cost per gram of hamburger ranged from $0.02 to $0.16 (median, $0.03) and did not correlate with meat content. Electron microscopy showed relatively preserved skeletal muscle. A variety of tissue types besides skeletal muscle were observed including connective tissue (n = 8), blood vessels (n = 8), peripheral nerve (n = 8), adipose tissue (n = 7), plant material (n = 4), cartilage (n = 3), and bone (n = 2). In 2 hamburgers, intracellular parasites (Sarcocystis) were identified. The GFAP immunostaining was not observed in any of the hamburgers. Lipid content on oil-red-O staining was graded as 1+ (moderate) in 6 burgers and 2+ (marked) in 2 burgers. Fast food hamburgers are comprised of little meat (median, 12.1%). Approximately half of their weight is made up of water. Unexpected tissue types found in some hamburgers included bone, cartilage, and plant material; no brain tissue was present. Sarcocystis parasites were discovered in 2 hamburgers.

'THE GODFATHER' That Unfinished Oscar Speech

March 30, 1973

'THE GODFATHER'

That Unfinished Oscar Speech

By MARLON BRANDO
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- For 200 years we have said to the Indian people who are fighting for their land, their life, their families and their right to be free: ''Lay down your arms, my friends, and then we will remain together. Only if you lay down your arms, my friends, can we then talk of peace and come to an agreement which will be good for you.''

When they laid down their arms, we murdered them. We lied to them. We cheated them out of their lands. We starved them into signing fraudulent agreements that we called treaties which we never kept. We turned them into beggars on a continent that gave life for as long as life can remember. And by any interpretation of history, however twisted, we did not do right. We were not lawful nor were we just in what we did. For them, we do not have to restore these people, we do not have to live up to some agreements, because it is given to us by virtue of our power to attack the rights of others, to take their property, to take their lives when they are trying to defend their land and liberty, and to make their virtues a crime and our own vices virtues.

But there is one thing which is beyond the reach of this perversity and that is the tremendous verdict of history. And history will surely judge us. But do we care? What kind of moral schizophrenia is it that allows us to shout at the top of our national voice for all the world to hear that we live up to our commitment when every page of history and when all the thirsty, starving, humiliating days and nights of the last 100 years in the lives of the American Indian contradict that voice?

It would seem that the respect for principle and the love of one's neighbor have become dysfunctional in this country of ours, and that all we have done, all that we have succeeded in accomplishing with our power is simply annihilating the hopes of the newborn countries in this world, as well as friends and enemies alike, that we're not humane, and that we do not live up to our agreements.

Perhaps at this moment you are saying to yourself what the hell has all this got to do with the Academy Awards? Why is this woman standing up here, ruining our evening, invading our lives with things that don't concern us, and that we don't care about? Wasting our time and money and intruding in our homes.

I think the answer to those unspoken questions is that the motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It's hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.

Recently there have been a few faltering steps to correct this situation, but too faltering and too few, so I, as a member in this profession, do not feel that I can as a citizen of the United States accept an award here tonight. I think awards in this country at this time are inappropriate to be received or given until the condition of the American Indian is drastically altered. If we are not our brother's keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.

I would have been here tonight to speak to you directly, but I felt that perhaps I could be of better use if I went to Wounded Knee to help forestall in whatever way I can the establishment of a peace which would be dishonorable as long as the rivers shall run and the grass shall grow.

I would hope that those who are listening would not look upon this as a rude intrusion, but as an earnest effort to focus attention on an issue that might very well determine whether or not this country has the right to say from this point forward we believe in the inalienable rights of all people to remain free and independent on lands that have supported their life beyond living memory.

Thank you for your kindness and your courtesy to Miss Littlefeather. Thank you and good night.

This statement was written by Marlon Brando for delivery at the Academy Awards ceremony where Mr. Brando refused an Oscar. The speaker, who read only a part of it, was Shasheen Littlefeather

FLINT: How Can You Help The People of Flint?

Many of you have contacted me wanting to know how you can help the people of Flint with the two-year long tragedy of drinking water contaminated by the radical decisions made by the Governor of Michigan. The offer is much appreciated by those who are suffering through this and who have not drank a glass of unpoisoned water since April of 2014.
Unfortunately, the honest answer to your offer of help is, sadly, you can’t.
You can’t help.
The reason you can’t help is that you cannot reverse the irreversible brain damage that has been inflicted upon every single child in Flint. The damage is permanent. There is no medicine you can send, no doctor or scientist who has any way to undo the harm done to thousands of babies, toddlers and children (not to mention their parents). They are ruined for life, and someone needs to tell you the truth about that. They will, forever, suffer from various neurological impediments, their IQs will be lowered by at least 20 points, they will not do as well in school and, by the time they reach adolescence, they will exhibit various behavioral problems that will land a number of them in trouble, and some of them in jail.
That is what we know about the history of lead poisoning when you inflict it upon a child. It is a life sentence. In Flint, they’ve already ingested it for these two years, and the toll has already been taken on their developing brains. No check you write, no truckloads of Fiji Water or Poland Spring, will bring their innocence or their health back to normal. It’s done. And it was done knowingly, enacted by a political decision from a Governor and a political party charged by the majority of Michigan’s citizens who elected them to cut taxes for the rich, take over majority-black cities by replacing the elected mayors and city councils, cut costs, cut services, cut more taxes for the rich, increase taxes on retired teachers and public employees and, ultimately, try to decimate their one line of defense against all this, this thing we used to call a union.
The amount of generosity since the national media finally started to cover this story has been tremendous. Pearl Jam sent 100,000 bottles of water. The next day the Detroit Lions showed up with a truck and 100,000 bottles of water. Yesterday, Puff Daddy and Mark Wahlberg donated 1,000,000 bottles of water! Unbelievably amazing. They acknowledged it’s a very short-term fix, and that it is. Flint has 102,000 residents, each in need of an average of 50 gallons of water a day for cooking, bathing, washing clothes, doing the dishes, and drinking (I’m not counting toilet flushes, watering plants or washing the car). But 100,000 bottles of water is enough for just one bottle per person – in other words, just enough to cover brushing one’s teeth for one day. You would have to send 200 bottles a day, per person, to cover what the average American (we are Americans in Flint) needs each day. That’s 102,000 citizens times 200 bottles of water – which equals 20.4 million 16oz. bottles of water per day, every day, for the next year or two until this problem is fixed (oh, and we’ll need to find a landfill in Flint big enough for all those hundreds of millions of plastic water bottles, thus degrading the local environment even further). Anybody want to pony up for that? Because THAT is the reality.
This is a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. There is not a terrorist organization on Earth that has yet to figure out how to poison 100,000 people every day for two years – and get away with it. That took a Governor who subscribes to an American political ideology hell-bent on widening the income inequality gap and conducting various versions of voter and electoral suppression against people of color and the poor. It was those actions that led Michigan’s Republican Governor to try out his economic and racial experiment in Flint (and please don’t tell me this has nothing to do with race or class; he has removed the mayors of a number of black cities. This, and the water crisis in Flint, never would have been visited upon the residents of Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe — and everyone here knows that). We have now seen the ultimate disastrous consequences of late-20th century, neo-conservative, trickle down public policy. That word “trickle,” a water-based metaphor, was used to justify this economic theory — well, it’s no longer a metaphor, is it? Because now we’re talking about how actual water has been used to institute these twisted economic beliefs in destroying the lives of the black and the poor in Flint, Michigan.
So, do you still want to help? Really help? Because what we need in Flint – and across the country – right now, tonight, is a nonviolent army of people who are willing to stand up for this nation, and go to bat for the forgotten of Flint.
Here’s what you and I need to do:
1)Demand the removal and arrest of Rick Snyder, the Governor of Michigan. When the police have an “active shooter” situation in a building, they must first stop the shooter before they can bring aid to the victims. The perp who allowed the poisoning to continue once he knew something was wrong — and his minions who cooked the evidence so the public and the feds wouldn’t find out – must be removed from office ASAP. Whether it’s via resignation, recall or prosecution, this must happen now because he is still refusing to take the aggressive and immediate action needed. His office, as recently as this past Thursday, was claiming the EPA had no legal authority to tell him what to do. You know the EPA — that federal agency every Republican politician wants eliminated? Governor Snyder is not going to obey the law. He has covered up the crime, and I submit he has committed an act of voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. Last month I posted a meme of me holding a pair of handcuffs with the hashtag #ArrestGovSnyder:
 It went viral, so I posted a petition (link) to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to arrest the Governor – and asking President Obama to send help to Flint immediately. As each day brought a new revelation of the Governor’s corruption or incompetence, and with Rachel Maddow on a nightly tear, the momentum built. MoveOn.org and Democracy For America joined me in circulating our petition. We are now on our way to having a half-million signatures! Then Bernie Sanders became the first candidate to call for the Governor’s removal. That same day, President Obama issued his first emergency order for Flint. The next night, Hillary Clinton fiercely called out the racist actions of the Governor.
You want to help? Sign the petition – and get everyone you know to sign it. Now. Another half-million signatures could become the tipping point we need. All eyes are on Flint.
2)Make the State of Michigan pay for the disaster that the State of Michigan created. The Governor wants the President to declare Flint a federal disaster zone and have him send federal money to fix the problem. Not so fast. All relief aid for Flint currently coming from the federal government to Michigan is going through the Governor’s office to disburse. That is literally paying the fox to fix the chicken coop he destroyed. As a Michigan resident and voter, I think that the people who elected Governor Snyder must show some of that personal responsibility they’re always lecturing about to the poor. The majority of my fellow Michiganders wanted this kind of government (they elected him twice), so now they should have to pay for it. This year the state treasury posted nearly a $600 million surplus. There is also another $600 million in the state’s “rainy day fund”. That’s $1.2 billion – just about what Flint’s congressman, Dan Kildee, estimates it will cost to replace the water infrastructure and care for the thousands of poisoned children throughout their growing years.
And before there is any talk of federal tax dollars being used (and, yes, they will be needed), the state legislature must remove the billion-dollars’ worth of tax cuts the Snyder administration gave the wealthy when he took office. That will go a long way to helping not just Flint but Michigan’s other destitute cities and school districts.
3)The Federal Government must then be placed in charge. The State government cannot be trusted to get this right. So, instead of declaring a federal disaster zone, President Obama must declare the same version of martial law that Governor Snyder declared over the cities of Flint and Detroit. He must step in and appoint a federal emergency manager in the state capitol to direct the resources of both the state and federal government in saving Flint. This means immediately sending in FEMA in full force. It means sending in the CDC to determine the true extent of not just the lead poisoning in the water, but also the latest outbreak that has been discovered in Flint – a tenfold increase in the number of Flint people who’ve contracted Legionnaires Disease. There have now been 87 cases since the switch to the Flint River water, and ten people have died. The local hospital has also noted sharp increases in a half-dozen other toxins found in people’s bodies. We need the CDC. The EPA must take over the testing of the water, and the Army Corps of Engineers must be sent in to begin replacing the underground pipes. Like the levees in New Orleans, this will be a massive undertaking. If it is turned over to for-profit businesses, it will take a decade and cost billions. This needs to happen right now and Obama must be in charge.
4)Evacuate any and all Flint residents who want to leave now. They’ve suffered long enough and, until the water is truly safe, no one should have to stay there who doesn’t want to. The state and FEMA should move people into nearby white townships that are still hooked up to Lake Huron water.
5)For those who choose to stay in Flint, FEMA must create a temporary water system in each home. One idea that has been suggested is to deliver two 55-gallon drums to every home in Flint. Each day water trucks will arrive to fill them with fresh clean glacial water from Lake Huron. The drums will have taps attached to them. People can’t be expected to carry jugs of water from buildings that are miles away.
In the end, we will need to create a new economy and bring new employment to this town that created the middle class, that elected the first black mayor, and that believed in and created the American Dream. They deserved more than to be poisoned by their own Governor — a Governor who thought that, because the people in the town were politically weak, he could get away with this unnoticed and without a fight. He figured wrong.
A crime against humanity has been committed against the people of Flint, making them refugees in their own homes. Tell me honestly: if you were living in Flint right now, and you learned that your children had been drinking lead-filled water for two years, and then you discovered that the Governor knew this and the state lied about it – tell me, just how fast would your head be spinning? With your children now poisoned, and with the poisoning continuing… is the word “nonviolence” dominating your thoughts right now? Are you absolutely, stunningly amazed how peaceful the people in Flint have remained? Are you curious how much longer that can last? I hope it does. If you want to help Flint, sign the petition, demand that the federal government take action, and then get involved yourself, wherever you live, so that this doesn’t happen to you – and so that the people we elect know they can no longer break the law as they rule by fiat or indifference. We deserve much better than this.

For a better world,
Michael Moore

Sign the petition. #ArrestGovSnyder

520,951

520,951

SIGNED THE PETITION

Dear President Obama and Attorney General Lynch:
We, the undersigned, call upon you to investigate and, if warranted, arrest and prosecute the Governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, for violating the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations in cutting off clean drinking water to the city of Flint and making the citizens, instead, drink polluted water from the Flint River; for fraud and political corruption; and for covering up the criminal actions of his administration. The children of Flint, already amongst the poorest in the U.S., will now have to endure a life of pain, irreversible brain damage and lower IQ’s because of Governor Snyder’s actions. There is no way to totally reverse the effects of lead in a child’s blood stream. At the very least, justice must be served — and other elected officials must be put on notice, by the actions you will take against the Governor, that people’s lives are more important than balancing a budget.
We ask that you, President Obama, come to Flint and see first-hand the tragedy that has taken place — and then send in the CDC, the EPA, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers to repair the damage the Governor of Michigan has done to Flint.

Your information is private. It will not be available to the public.

Bill Cosby: Court Finds Accuser Lied About Assault

Bill Cosby won’t be charged in two cases investigated by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, the DA announced Wednesday.

According to a charge evaluation sheet, prosecutors think neither of the two allegations could have resulted in charges within the statute of limitations.

The accusers, listed as Jane Does No. 1 and No. 2, had accused Cosby of sexual assault.

Want an in depth biography of Bill Cosby? Buy it here.

“We are satisfied that the Los Angeles DA’s office fully and fairly evaluated all the facts and evidence, and came to the right conclusion,” said Chris Tayback, a lawyer for Cosby.

“We recognize that the bar for criminal prosecution, which is proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, is extremely high,” he said. “We nonetheless commend the efforts of the LAPD and the District Attorney’s Office with respect to their criminal investigation.”

Investigators learned Cosby was in New York the weekend of the event at which the woman said Cosby assaulted her. He attended only one party at the Playboy Mansion that year and it was in February, the charge evaluation sheet said.

Seems that at least one of the Cosby accusers lied. How many more jumped on the “let’s accuse Bill Cosby” bandwagon? This is why people are found innocent or guilty in a court of law, not the court of public opinion.

And yet now a Congressman has now advocated that, without Cosby having yet had his day in court, that the highest award the comedian has ever received should be stripped from him…


Arizona congressman Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) will introduce legislation to revoke embattled comedian Bill Cosby’s Presidential Medal of Freedom this week. Why not wait until he’s been tried. And NOT just by the media…

The legislation would revoke Bill Cosby’s Medal of Freedom as a result of Cosby’s  admissions in 2005 about an alleged sexual assault that took place more than ten years ago.

Central Park Five: Teacher Jeena Lee-Walker Fired Over Lesson Plans On Administrator Fears Of Inciting 'Riots'

Raymond Santana, right, Kevin Richardson, and Yusef Salaam, left, react to supporters Thursday, Jan. 17, 2013, in New York. The three men who were exonerated in the 1989 Central Park Jogger case.

Teacher Says She Was Fired For Teaching Students About The Central Park Five

BY CASEY QUINLAN JAN 8, 2016 11:37 AM

A New York City high school teacher says she was fired after teaching her class about the Central Park Five — a case involving five black and Hispanic men who were accused of raping a jogger as teenagers but later exonerated after spending between six to 13 years in prison — because administrators were worried the lesson would “rile up” students of color.

Central Park Five members defend teacher who claims she was fired for teaching the case



The English teacher, Jeena Lee-Walker (pictured below), told the New York Daily News that administrators at her former high school critiqued the 2013 lesson, saying it should have been more “balanced.” Court papers show administrators said they feared the lesson would cause “riots.” And according to Lee-Walker, administrators were afraid the lesson would “rile up” the black students in her class.


In her interview with the Daily News, Lee-Walker said she thought “students in general, and black students in particular, should be riled up” about the case, which is often held up as an example of how the criminal justice system unfairly targets young men of color. But she subsequently received bad performance reviews and eventually received a dismissal.

Lee-Walker has since filed suit against the Department of Education and school administrators for failing to give her 60 days notice about her termination, which violates the teacher’s union contract.

The story has attracted a lot of attention from educators — and especially from teachers who are concerned about teacher diversity and who say this type of action from administrators may hobble teachers of color professionally. Jose Vilson, a middle school math educator in the Inwood/Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City and the author of This Is Not A Test: A New Narrative on Race, Class, and the Future of Education, sent several tweets criticizing the administrators for their comments.

UWS High School Teacher Claims She Was Fired For "Central Park Five" Lessons

BY BEN YAKAS IN NEWS ON JAN 8, 2016 5:30 PM

English teacher Jeena Lee-Walker screenshot via Daily News

An English teacher at an Upper West Side high school claims that she was fired because of a lesson on the Central Park Five which administrators warned her would "rile up" black students.
Jeena Lee-Walker, 37, is suing the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry after she was fired for insubordination and poor evaluations, all of which she believes was the result of her pushing back on topics like the Central Park Five.
Lee-Walker tells the Daily News that her problems with administrators started almost immediately after she started working at the school in 2013. She says she was shocked when she was told to be more "balanced" covering the case of the Central Park Five in November 2013: "I was stunned,” she told the News. "I was kind of like, the facts are the facts. This is what happened. These boys went to jail and lost 14, 18 years of their lives. How can you say that in a more balanced way?"
Although she agreed to change her approach, she felt that students had good reason to be "riled up," telling the News, "I kind of wanted to hook them in, engage them, win them over. I thought that this material was not only engaging but important...They were really moved by the documentary and rightly so. They really identified with the teenagers."
Lee-Walker argues in her lawsuit that retaliation against her "violated her First Amendment right to discuss the Central Park Five case, and that the firing violated the city’s contract with the teacher’s union because she was not given a required 60 days notice."
The Central Park Five, who were wrongfully jailed for the 1989 rape of a Central Park jogger, have received a $42 million settlement from the city in recent years. In 2014, they sued the state seeking $52 million in damages for the emotional trauma of being incarcerated for years for a crime they were coerced into confessing to.

Teacher Fired for Heroic Incompetence

 by ADAM LAATS on JANUARY 10, 2016

http://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/

I’m no cynic. But anyone who’s paying attention knows that schools serve a range of purposes. We see depressing evidence today that one of their primary functions is to contain and control young people. How do we know? Because a teacher in New York City was fired, according to her, for talking about structural racism in a way that would “rile up” her African American students. Yikes.

The story is grim. Jeena Lee-Walker has sued New York schools for her termination. Beginning in 2012, school administrators asked her to tone down her teaching about the Central Park Five case. As all New Yorkers remember, a group of young men were falsely convicted of raping a woman. They were eventually freed, but only after spending long years in prison.

Lee-Walker taught her students about the case. Many of them, she thought, “should be riled up” about the deep injustice done, as well as about continuing injustices in American society.

Her administrators thought differently. They gave her several bad evaluations and eventually fired her for “insubordination.”

Let me be crystal clear here: I think all teachers should be like Ms. Lee-Walker. All teachers should “rile up” their students about injustices in our society.

But we need to recognize two complicating factors. Though I’m a big fan of his, I think Curmudgucrat Peter Greene misses the boat here when he says Lee-Walker was “fired for competence.”

She was fired for two other reasons, reasons central to the successful functioning of any school. Even as we praise Ms. Lee-Walker’s bravery and integrity, we need to be a little more clearheaded about what was really going on. In short, Ms. Lee-Walker’s unwillingness to go along with the school system really DID make her incompetent as a teacher. Heroic, yes, but not willing to do the job.

That might sound odd, so let me offer two long-winded explanations.

First, teachers are not simply private citizens. Ms. Lee-Walker will not have luck protesting that her First Amendment rights have been breached. And, by and large, none of us want to cede to teachers such rights. Consider, for example, what we might think if she had been accused of promoting political or religious agendas with which we don’t agree. What if she “riled up” students by denouncing abortion? Or by denouncing evolution?

In principle, then, we need to acknowledge that teachers are bound to stick within curricular guidelines established by the school and community. I’ll repeat: in this case I think those guidelines are utterly bogus. I think we should encourage all New York City high schools to emulate Ms. Lee-Walker’s decision to teach the Central Park Five case. It is the truth and young people deserve to learn about it.

But if and when a heroic teacher decides to go against her superiors, she should be prepared to be kicked out. That is equally true whether we agree or disagree with the teacher’s ideas. I’m going to say this again, just because I think it could be misinterpreted: In this case, I side wholly with Ms. Lee-Walker. Her protest, however, should not be taken as a simple case of good teaching vs. evil administrating. Rather, this is a heroic attempt to push the curriculum in New York City schools toward this sort of teaching. Ms. Lee-Walker should have expected to get fired—even WANTED to get fired—because that was her only chance to take her appeal to a wider stage.


We don’t have to like it, but I think we need to be clear about our terms. In this sort of case, the closest analogy is that of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses. To some, she was a hero, to others a poorly coiffed villain. In the end, however, she was a government bureaucrat who refused to do her job. Whatever we think of her politics or religion, no institution can function if it doesn’t purge such folks.

That brings us to our second point. This story drives home the depressing custodial role schools and teachers play in our society. We tend to think of schools as educational institutions—and they are—but they are also holding pens of varying levels of pleasantness.

As a result, a big part of the job of school administrators is to keep the students relatively calm. With a dizzyingly high student-to-teacher ratio, most schools rely on passive and compliant students. When and if students choose to throw off schools’ restraints, there is not much administrators can physically do to coerce them into submission.

In some schools, this results at worst in hijinx such as food fights. In other schools, we get a prison-like atmosphere in which students are continually monitored and physically controlled.

Is that a good thing? Not at all. But if we want to make sense of this case and the many other cases like this, we need to understand the many things that schools do in our society. Teachers are not merely Socratic wisdom-peddlers in the agora. They are street-level bureaucrats who help process large numbers of young people in educational containment systems.


The point of Ms. Lee-Walker’s actions—if she was acting intentionally—was not merely to teach children something true. The point was to make a public spectacle of the fact that New York City schools do not regularly include that sort of teaching. She was not “fired for competence,” but for her stubborn insistence on principled incompetence, her brave unwillingness to go along with a system that fails students so miserably.

Raymond Santana (c.), one of the members of the Central Park Five, came to the defense of a Manhattan teacher who says she was fired for teaching the case in her classroom.

Central Park Five members defend teacher who claims she was fired for teaching the case

BY VICTORIA BEKIEMPIS, STEPHEN REX BROWN, RICH SCHAPIRO  NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Friday, January 8, 2016, 2:57 PM

(From l.) Korey Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana and Yusef Salaam spent several years in prison after they were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger in 1989.

Two members of the Central Park Five came to the defense Friday of an Upper West Side teacher who claims she was fired for building a curriculum around the notorious case.

“We're with her 100% to fight this injustice," Raymond Santana, 41, told the Daily News.

“We would love to be down at the federal courthouse when she goes in" and give “any other support that is needed.”

“I absolutely appreciate her and absolutely commend her," he said. "Anything (she and her lawyer) need, we will be here — and be ready."

Santana and Salaam spoke out a day after the Daily News revealed Lee-Walker’s claims that she was canned for teaching her students at the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry about the racially charged case.


Yusef Salaam, 41, offered a similar vow to stand behind axed teacher Jeena Lee-Walker.

Walker’s Central Park Five program explored the travails of the five black and Latino teens who spent several years in prison after they were wrongfully convicted of raping a female jogger in 1989.

Lee-Walker, 37, was fired in May after school administrators told her to tone down the curriculum because they feared the lessons would “rile up” black students and trigger mini “riots,” according to a federal lawsuit filed by the axed teacher.


Lee-Walker says she was accused of insubordination and given poor evaluations after she pushed back against the administrators’ demands.

Lee-Walker, who graduated from Barnard and has post-grad degrees from Harvard and Fordham, did not specify damages in her suit.

Santana, who spent seven years behind bars for the crime, said he was “troubled” by the suit’s description of the administrators’ claiming the lessons might incite a riot.


"It takes us back to 1989, where the media put these labels on us — that we were animals," he said.

"A person working in the school system shouldn't view our kids like that."

Salaam said the news of Lee-Walker’s treatment has triggered painful memories.

“For us, in terms of the Central Park Five, it’s like we're being tried and prosecuted all over again,” said Salaam who was also imprisoned for seven years.


"There are lots of people out there who truly feel like we are guilty of something.” 

Donald Trump and the Central Park Five

BY AMY DAVIDSON JUNE 23, 2014

Kharey Wise as he looked when he was arraigned, in 1989, in the Central Park jogger case. Photograph by John Pedin/NY Daily News Archive/Getty.

Donald Trump is angry about the settlement the city reached, this weekend, with the Central Park Five—the men who had, as teen-age boys, been wrongly convicted in the “Central Park jogger” rape case and been called animals by just about every institution in this city. The rape had been committed between 9 or 10 P.M., on an April evening in 1989; someone had beaten the jogger so badly and so brutally that by the time she was found, hours later, stripped and covered with mud, she had lost three quarters of her blood. The police detective on the scene told reporters that her body had already turned cold; she wouldn’t have survived much longer. The woman, as she later let the world know in a book, was Trisha Meili, then an investment banker at Salomon Brothers; she had been bashed in the head and remembered nothing. The rest of New York, though, was sure of what had happened to her, and who was to blame. Here was the headline in the Daily News, on April 21, 1989:

WOLF PACK’S PREY
Female jogger near death after savage attack by roving gang


And the headline from the next day:

Park marauders call it
‘WILDING’
…and it’s street slang for going berserk
The Times, that same week, reported, “The youths who raped and savagely beat a young investment banker as she jogged in Central Park Wednesday night were part of a loosely organized gang of 32 schoolboys whose random, motiveless assaults terrorized at least eight other people over nearly two hours, senior police investigators said yesterday.” And: “she was raped by at least 4 of the 12 boys, Chief Colangelo said.” The five schoolboys who were eventually tried—Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Kharey Wise—were all black or Hispanic.

And, in early May, 1989, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in the Daily News to say what he thought he knew about the case. Trump was on the front page of the papers often enough that season; the Post’s “SPLIT!” headline marking the end of his marriage would help fill the tabloid space between the teen-agers’ arrest and their conviction, as did “MARLA BOASTS TO HER PALS ABOUT DONALD: ‘BEST SEX I’VE EVER HAD,’ ” which quoted his then-mistress and second wife; soon, there was also coverage of his baroque business failures. Perhaps he thought it gave him gravitas, that spring, to weigh in on the character of the teen-agers in the park: “How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!” And his headline suggested what ought to be done with them:

BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.
BRING BACK OUR POLICE!
The “park marauders,” the “roving gang,” the “crazed misfits” were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old. The confessions they gave, as children, had been false, spun out under the pressure of hours of police interrogations. (They were, had anyone been ready to acknowledge it at the time, also inconsistent; they also had parents whom they weren’t able to see before their questioning.) The boys were sent to prison. One of them, Kharey Wise, who at sixteen was the oldest and sentenced as an adult, was still there when, eleven years after the rape in the park, he happened to cross paths with a prisoner named Matias Reyes. It occurred to Reyes that it was his fault that Wise was there. He confessed that he, and he alone, had raped and beaten Meili, as he had raped other women over the years. He described to police how he had tied her with her clothes; it had been part of his M.O. in other cases, something that gave credibility to his confession. It moved beyond a doubt when a DNA test matched Reyes to the semen found on Meili’s body. The DNA hadn’t matched any of the teen-agers—one of the many details that got blinked over in the trial. They were exonerated twelve years ago, and the charges were formally dropped.

Since then, talks about some form of restitution for the young men dragged on even as a movie, “The Central Park Five,” gave a wider perspective on the real injustice in the case—the failure of the police, the courts, the press, of the word on the street, of any engine of public doubt. Everything that should have struck one as odd—the cartoonish way that the boys, in their confessions, talked about the rape itself—was taken as proof of the boys’ perversity. Their guilt had been a given; the only question that people seemed interested in, at the time, was what their supposed wildness said about our society, about the boys’ ”culture,” or lack of it. A real-estate developer could take out an ad that contemplated executing children, and only be considered disreputable because of the decor of his buildings.

The Daily News reprinted that ad on Saturday, next to Trump’s new op-ed. Perhaps he feels that he got a good deal, having the ad run again for free; there is no contrition in what he has to say now. The settlement, which Mayor Bill de Blasio had said, in his campaign, he wanted to get done, gives each man about a million dollars for each year he spent in jail. (Together, that was forty years.) Trump wrote on Saturday that this was “a disgrace”; he said that he’d talked to a detective who called it “the heist of the century.” How much would Donald Trump pay to not spend a single year in jail? He doesn’t mention Reyes; he talks about police “blunders” as if they were all in the teen-agers’ favor—“The recipients must be laughing out loud at the stupidity of the city.” Does he imagine that it must be obvious to them, as it is to him, that the decades of their lives weren’t worth much anyway? He wrote, “These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.” At fourteen years old, one doesn’t have much of a past to speak of; what one might have is a future. Or is an angel, for Trump, someone who stays in a hotel with a lot of gold paint on the wall?

It’s simple, in some ways, to see the Central Park jogger case as an artifact of a feverish moment in late-eighties New York—of a piece with its joyous and awful kinetics, the crack epidemic, the painted-over subways, the fear of AIDS, the absurdity of Ivana’s ski-slope confrontation with Marla. But some fevers never seem to subside. The tendency to write off teen-age boys because of distrust of their neighborhoods or the color of their skin, to assume that jail is the place for them, has not gone away. Neither, somehow, has Donald Trump.