Wideleft

Bernie Madoff, Jeff Epstein and Peter Nygaard also made tons of money - "achievers" in your mind, I guess. As long as you're an achiever, it's all good! What you call his greatest contribution is actually the beginning of a fact-free/post-truth world where the right-wing base has given up any effort to critically think in favour of owning the libs to their own detriment. Rush , Hannity, Carlson are all modern-day snake-oil salesmen who still haven't realized they could make all their money tax-free if they just started their own churches. The same ignorant, slobbering , bible-thumping hicks would still tune in and as a bonus - send them a portion of their opiod-addiction settlement. If you find ignorance, lies, racism, misogyny, intolerance and anger as positive, I guess Rush really is your kind of guy.

So you can not tell the difference between someone's opinion and an outright lie. Maher's commentary was an opinion. Rush's lesbian farmer conspiracy was a lie.

The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election. Story by McKay Coppins Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET on February 10, 2020. One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers. ........ The story that unfurled in my Facebook feed over the next several weeks was, at times, disorienting. There were days when I would watch, live on TV, an impeachment hearing filled with damning testimony about the president’s conduct, only to look at my phone later and find a slickly edited video—served up by the Trump campaign—that used out-of-context clips to recast the same testimony as an exoneration. Wait, I caught myself wondering more than once, is that what happened today? ......... What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise. ........... The campaign is run from the 14th floor of a gleaming, modern office tower in Rosslyn, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. Glass-walled conference rooms look out on the Potomac River. Rows of sleek monitors line the main office space. Unlike the bootstrap operation that first got Trump elected—with its motley band of B-teamers toiling in an unfinished space in Trump Tower—his 2020 enterprise is heavily funded, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with dozens of experienced operatives. One Republican strategist referred to it, admiringly, as “the Death Star.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/

First of all, it looks like you are quoting a completely different article to defend the graph you posted. Not sure if that's intentional, but it's misleading just the same. Now lets see what one of the researchers (John Turner) actually said about the study you are quoting here: "In the second half of the 20th century, “the place that’s warmed the most was the Antarctic Peninsula,” said John Turner, a researcher with the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s a real hotspot of warming across the Earth.” Now, however, Turner and a team of fellow scientists with the survey are out with a rather unexpected new finding in the journal Nature — one likely to be seized on by climate change skeptics, doubters and deniers. Since about 1998, the research finds, the Antarctic Peninsula has reversed this famous trend and cooled down again, and done so fairly significantly. Yet Turner stresses this doesn’t mean climate change isn’t happening — only that natural variability in the region is quite large, and has recently kicked into gear for rather complex reasons. “This switch from a very very marked warming to a modest cooling is purely a local factor, and not saying anything like ‘global warming has stopped,’ ” Turner said. Indeed, the Antarctic Peninsula has still warmed in the long run, said Eric Steig, an Antarctic researcher at the University of Washington, Seattle — whose comment on the study accompanies its publication in Nature on Wednesday. Two decades of reversal aren’t enough to change that. So it’s important to keep a sense of perspective. “It hasn’t cooled nearly as much as it had warmed before,” Steig said." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/07/20/the-antarctic-peninsula-is-cooling-but-climate-skeptics-shouldnt-get-too-excited/

Getting really frustrated that none of my browsers show embedded tweets today.

He supports this fraud. Secret Service has paid rates as high as $650 a night for rooms at Trump’s properties By David A. Fahrenthold, Jonathan O'Connell, Carol D. Leonnig and Josh Dawsey Feb. 7, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. CST President Trump’s company charges the Secret Service for the rooms agents use while protecting him at his luxury properties — billing U.S. taxpayers at rates as high as $650 per night, according to federal records and people who have seen receipts. Those charges, compiled here for the first time, show that Trump has an unprecedented — and largely hidden — business relationship with his own government. When Trump visits his clubs in Palm Beach, Fla., and Bedminster, N.J., the service needs space to post guards and store equipment. Trump’s company says it charges only minimal fees. But Secret Service records do not show that. At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, the Secret Service was charged the $650 rate dozens of times in 2017, and a different rate, $396.15, dozens more times in 2018, according to documents from Trump’s visits. And at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, the Secret Service was charged $17,000 a month to use a three-bedroom cottage on the property, an unusually high rent for homes in that area, according to receipts from 2017. Trump’s company billed the government even for days when Trump wasn’t there. These payments appear to contradict the Trump Organization’s own statements about what it charges members of his government entourage. “If my father travels, they stay at our properties for free — meaning, like, cost for housekeeping,” Trump’s son Eric said in a Yahoo Finance interview last year. The full extent of the Secret Service’s payments to Trump’s company is not known. The Secret Service has not listed them in public databases of federal spending, as is usually required for payments over $10,000. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-has-paid-rates-as-high-as-650-a-night-for-rooms-at-trumps-properties/2020/02/06/7f27a7c6-3ec5-11ea-8872-5df698785a4e_story.html

Sorry. Posting a graph generated by an anonymous twitter user claiming to use NASA data doesn't cut it. Especially when she has NoTrickZones right in her banner.

Records by definition are one-time extremes.

Antarctica just hit 65 degrees, its warmest temperature ever recorded It comes days after earth’s warmest January on record. By Matthew Cappucci February 7 at 10:56 AM Just days after the earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 65 degrees was taken at Esperanza Base along Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula on Thursday, making it the ordinarily frigid continent’s highest measured temperature in history. The Argentine research base is on the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula. Randy Cerveny, who tracks extremes for the World Meteorological Organization, calls Thursday’s reading a “likely record,” although the mark will still have to be officially reviewed and certified. The balmy reading beats out the previous record of 63.5 degrees, which occurred on March 24, 2015. The Antarctic peninsula, on which Thursday’s anomaly was recorded, is one of the fastest-warming regions in the world. In just the past 50 years, temperatures have surged a staggering 5 degrees in response to earth’s swiftly-warming climate. Around 87 percent of glaciers along the peninsula’s west coast have retreated in that time, the majority doing so at an accelerated pace since 2008. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/02/07/antarctica-just-hit-65-degrees-its-warmest-temperature-ever-recorded/?itid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_antarctica-1040am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans

Another bright light from Alberta speaks and predictably, it's offensive: Conservative MP forced to apologize after asking NDP MP if she ever ‘considered’ sex work https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/other/conservative-mp-forced-to-apologize-after-asking-ndp-mp-if-she-ever-e2-80-98considered-e2-80-99-sex-work/ar-BBZEaia

Or Colin Kaepernick!

And we ask ourselves in the year 2020 how anyone can still be named "Hogan Gidley". It's not like he's 130 years old, or anything.

Or a starter goes down on the 2nd play of the season and he cashes in (if ready to go).

Dershowitz is the lawyer that all nasty jokes about lawyers are referring to.

He "quit" being a rock musician because he enjoyed the banter so much it left little time for playing songs. Also wrote this book (it's decent):

Narrator: We didn't like his answer.

Was lucky enough to see and meet this guy last summer in a very small venue. The Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Theme is his work as well.

Beat me to the punch

Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly tells Sarasota crowd ‘I believe John Bolton’ "Asked if Bolton - Trump’s former national security adviser - should testify at Trump’s impeachment trial, Kelly said he supports calling witnesses. President Donald Trump is denying that he told former National Security Advisor John Bolton he wanted to withhold military aid from Ukraine until the country launched investigations into Joe Biden and his son, allegations that Bolton levies in his new book, according to news reports. But one of Trump’s former top aides told a Sarasota audience Monday evening that if the reporting on what Bolton wrote is accurate, he believes Bolton. “If John Bolton says that in the book, I believe John Bolton,” said retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff for 18 months." https://www.heraldtribune.com/news/20200128/former-trump-chief-of-staff-john-kelly-tells-sarasota-crowd-rsquoi-believe-john-boltonrsquo

From 2016: "First a heatwave hit Siberia. Then came the anthrax. Temperatures have soared in western Russia’s Yamal tundra this summer. Across Siberia, some provinces warmed an additional 10 degrees Fahrenheit beyond normal. In the fields, large bubbles of vegetation appeared above the melting permafrost — strange pockets of methane or, more likely, water. Record fires blazed through dry Russian grassland. In one of the more unusual symptoms of unseasonable warmth, long-dormant bacteria appear to be active. For the first time since 1941, anthrax struck western Siberia. Thirteen Yamal nomads were hospitalized, including four children, the Siberian Times reported. The bacteria took an even worse toll on wildlife, claiming some 1,500 reindeer since Sunday. According to NBC News, the outbreak is thought to stem from a reindeer carcass that died in the plague 75 years ago. As the old flesh thawed, the bacteria once again became active. The disease tore through the reindeer herds, prompting the relocation of dozens of the indigenous Nenet community. Herders face a quarantine that may last until September." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/07/28/anthrax-sickens-13-in-western-siberia-and-a-thawed-out-reindeer-corpse-may-be-to-blame/

There are and will be more negative effects from climate change than we can imagine. "(KATITIKA, Kenya) — The hum of millions of locusts on the move is broken by the screams of farmers and the clanging of pots and pans. But their noise-making does little to stop the voracious insects from feasting on their crops in this rural community. "The worst outbreak of desert locusts in Kenya in 70 years has seen hundreds of millions of the bugs swarm into the East African nation from Somalia and Ethiopia. Those two countries have not had an infestation like this in a quarter-century, destroying farmland and threatening an already vulnerable region with devastating hunger." "A single swarm can contain up to 150 million locusts per square kilometer of farmland, an area the size of almost 250 football fields, regional authorities say." "A changing climate has contributed to “exceptional” breeding conditions, said Nairobi-based climate scientist Abubakr Salih Babiker. Migrating with the wind, the locusts can cover up to 150 kilometers (93 miles) in a single day. They look like tiny aircraft lazily crisscrossing the sky. They are now heading toward Uganda and fragile South Sudan, where almost half the country faces hunger as it emerges from civil war. Uganda has not had such an outbreak since the 1960s and is already on alert." https://time.com/5771621/locust-swarms-africa/

Not going to get into a who is better argument, but Whitehead's life history has shown that he's a guy who's shown perseverance over some pretty crazy circumstances. There seems to be zero evidence that he's a guy who just won't show up.

2019 capped off the world’s hottest decade in recorded history "The past decade was the hottest ever recorded on the planet, driven by an acceleration of temperature increases in the past five years, according to new data released Wednesday by the U.S. government. The findings, released jointly by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), detail a troubling trajectory: 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, trailing only 2016. The past five years each rank among the five hottest since record-keeping began. And 19 of the hottest 20 years have occurred during the past two decades. The warming trend also bears the unmistakable fingerprint of humans, who continue to emit tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, scientists say. “No individual hot year — or hot day or hot season, for that matter — is by itself evidence for climate change. But this hot year is just one of many hot years in this decade,” said Kate Marvel, a research scientist at NASA and Columbia University. “The planet is statistically, detectably warmer than before the Industrial Revolution. We know why. We know what it means. And we can do something about it.”" https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/01/15/2010s-hottest-decade-world/?arc404=true

I guess the free house, free food, free car and partially tax-free 6-figure income were not enough to make ends meet... https://t.co/BXQ4ph5Lb3 #Cdnpoli #ScheerResigns — Stephen Lautens (@stephenlautens) December 12, 2019