In the U.S., climate change is still being debated among many. Above is a vintage video from 2014 of Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn and Bill Nye debating climate change on NBC’s Meet The Press.
(Updated article)
Secular Talk
According to The New York Times, former Governor Jeb Bush talked about his mother-in-law’s affliction with Alzheimer’s disease last week. He also shed some light on what he thinks should be done to fight the illness.
“In an email exchange with Maria Shriver, the journalist, activist and author, Mr. Bush wrote that he has been getting a lot of feedback since revealing that his family has firsthand experience with the disease,” writes The Times.
Mr. Bush called for more research funding and a faster drug approval process to fight Alzheimer’s, which the CDC says afflicts some 5 million Americans, according to The NYT. “We need to increase funding to find a cure,” Mr. Bush said.
(Updated article)
http://crooksandliars.com/2015/05/republican-compassion-hey-affects-me
Re-blog from Time magazine.
Re-blog from gingerblokeblog.
(Updated)
Reproduced in part from the Guardian
The wonderful Priti Patel, now the employment minister, was in her past life part of a team of spin doctors paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to help a tobacco giant counter negative publicity, including that surrounding its joint venture with one of the world’s most brutal military regimes.
Documents unearthed by the Observer shine new light on Patel’s work for Shandwick, a lobbying and PR firm that worked for British American Tobacco (BAT) in the early years of this century.
The documents, released by BAT following a legal action, show that Patel was one of seven employees used by Shandwick on the account. One of her jobs was to lobby MEPs against the introduction of the EU tobacco control directive, which was introduced shortly after the new millennium. She was charged with ensuring that a letter from the BAT chairman at the time…
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High School is free. Could college also be free? Is college free in some European countries? How would you pay for it?
Recently, Vermont Senator and presidential contender Bernie Sanders talked to CNN about free, universal college education and how he would fund it.
What is the Wall Street Sales Tax?
According to againstausterity.org:
“…Wall Street speculators pay no tax on their share of a yearly turnover of over $5 quadrillion (5,000 trillion dollars) in stocks, bonds and derivatives. A 1% tax on this turnover, equally divided between the federal and state governments, largely solves the budget deficit at all levels of government. It also discourages the most dangerous forms of speculation, especially derivatives speculation, and helps to level the playing field between financial services – which are now in effect subsidized because they are not taxed – and the tangible, physical production of manufactured goods on which our economic survival depends.”
In the video, they say the word “troglodytic.” What does troglodytic mean?
Troglodytic means of, about, or relating to a troglodyte. A troglodyte was a prehistoric cave-dweller, or “a person of degraded, primitive, or brutal character,” according to dictionary.com.
(Updated article)
Re-blog. Double murder and suicide in Wellsville, Pennsylvania.
According to the Associated Press, former Governor of Maryland Martin O’Malley declared his candidacy for U.S. President today, May 30th. He will be running under the Democratic ticket and will face Hillary Clinton in the primaries.
Recently, NBC News wrote that former Maryland Governor is the strongest candidate to take on Hillary Clinton.
Throughout last year, O’Malley has been making appearances in Iowa and New Hampshire and giving speeches around the country to tout himself as a potential Democratic presidential candidate.
The former governor has been trying to cast himself as the alternative to Hillary Clinton for Democrats who either are tired of the Clinton family or prefer a more liberal candidate.
O’Malley is probably the strongest candidate in the Democratic field to take on Clinton, writes NBC News. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and ex-Virginia Senator Jim Webb are also seeking the nomination, and former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee is expected to jump in the race as well.
(Updated articfle)
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/30/politics/martin-omalley-2016-presidential-announcement/index.html
The women of Fox News’ Outnumbered are having difficulty understanding that some women’s magazines might be a little more favorable toward Hillary Clinton than Republican women running for the Presidency such as Carly Fiorina.
Is the amount of coverage Hillary is receiving in women’s magazines justified?
The Northern Ireland “Troubles” were primarily a political conflict from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The conflict also had ethnic and religious aspects.
A key issue was the status of Northern Ireland. Unionists/loyalists, who are mostly Protestants, generally want Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists/republicans, who are mostly Catholics, generally want it to leave the United Kingdom and join Ireland, according to Wikipedia.
According to the British newspaper The Guardian, Amnesty International has called for an investigation into claims that British agents inside Ulster loyalist and republican terror groups were able to kill and target victims with impunity during the Northern Ireland “Troubles.”
Did the British secret agents have a license to kill?
Lady Nuala O’Loan, a former police ombudsman in Northern Ireland, claimed that some informers who were allowed to commit crimes (including murder) while being paid by the British state were “serial killers”.
On Thursday, the BBC1 program Panorama said that in many instances, the security forces – RUC special branch, military intelligence and MI5 – helped cover up killings carried out by their agents, writes The Guardian newspaper.
O’Loan said the U.K. agents were allowed to kill. “They were running informants and they were using them.
“Their argument was that by so doing they were saving lives, but hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people died because those people were not brought to justice and weren’t stopped in their tracks,” O’Loan said. “Many of them were killers and some of them were serial killers.”
Is it “intellectually consistent” to have cold winters and still believe in global warming?
Global warming is all about averages. What if the average summer temperature goes up by one degree, but the average winter, spring, and fall temperatures stay the same? That means the average yearly temperature will still go up slightly (because the summer was hotter). But the winter temperature was still the same = still cold.
What if the area where you live has the same temperature every year, but the average temperature in the desert keeps going up? Or the average temperature of the oceans?
Do the current droughts and floods in the U.S. relate to global warming? One of California’s biggest sources of water – the mountain snowpack – is practically already gone for the rest of the summer.
Scientist Bill Nye sent out a tweet linking the flooding to global warming, with predictable results.
http://www.businessinsider.com/californias-snowpack-is-gone-2015-5
OK, Fine. 