There’s some mildly off-color material here (only on the late-night broadcast television level, but I try to caution sensitive readers), but some of it is pretty funny. Basically, actors come on Jimmy Kimmel to read nasty Tweets about themselves:
An earlier collection of mean tweets can be found here, and there are plenty more if you click on the link above.
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At something over 17 minutes, the clip below is longer than I normally post here, but it really is worth seeing, and it gets better as it goes along.
The best parts have to do with a charming, smiling 16-year-old Syrian girl named Noujain Mustaffa, who taught herself to speak fluent English by watching her favorite soap opera, Days of Our Lives. If for some reason you don’t have time to watch the whole piece, then please at least watch the two segments she’s in, from 3:35 to 4:45 and from 12:00 to the end.
As Oliver suggests in passing, the situation is more complex than can be fully explored in 17 minutes. There are good arguments in favor of admitting refugees, out of enlightened self-interest as well as human decency, but at the same time, not all opposition is founded only in ignorance and bigotry. And most of the refugees themselves would probably prefer to stay in their homes if they could.
We should be careful to avoid mentally putting ourselves only in the place of one of the parties. If your first impulse is, like mine, to look at things from the European viewpoint, also imagine what it would be like to risk your life to flee your country for another, giving up everything you own except for what you can carry, and facing a risk of dying on the way because the danger to yourself and your family is even greater staying behind.
Earlier posts on the same subject:
by I’m not a fan of awards shows, but one that might be worth seeing is the American Humane Association’s Hero Dog Awards, to be broadcast one month from tonight, on October 30, 2015, at 9 pm Eastern on The Hallmark Channel. Human presenters are scheduled to include Pauley Perrette (NCIS), Lea Thompson (Back to the Future), Bruce Boxleitner (TRON among a lot of other things) and the under-appreciated Alicia Witt (a former child prodigy who played the hero’s little sister in Dune and later appeared in a bunch of other things, such as Friday Night Lights).
There’s more here:
Incidentally, the American Humane Association, the Humane Society of the United States, and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) are distinct organizations, though they are sometimes confused with one another.
by You will occasionally run into people who think that climate scientists are lying about climate change in order to get grant money. This reflects a misunderstanding of the grant process, not to mention overlooking the fact that fossil fuel interests are eager to fund scientists willing to produce studies questioning global warming.
So it’s useful to note that non-climate scientists also overwhelmingly accept the reality of human caused global warming as well, as witness a September 27 article from the Time magazine website titled “Study: Most Non-Climate Scientists Agree on Global Warming Too.” (The paper itself can be found here.)
The survey involved nearly 700 scientists in biology, chemistry, and physics at universities in the Big 10 Conference. This is a sample size comparable to political opinion surveys. About 92 percent agreed that human activities are causing global warming. An additional couple of percent accepted the evidence for warming but disputed or were not sure about human involvement.
by On Sunday’s edition of the CBS news program Face the Nation (transcript), Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) was asked about Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and the Speaker said, “I’ll refer you to my remark at a fund-raiser I made in August in Steamboat Springs, Colorado.” When moderator John Dickerson said, “I believe the word you used was jackass,” Boehner replied: “I’m referring to that same remark.”
Boehner isn’t the only member of Congress who feels that way. John McCain famously referred to Cruz as one of a number of “wacko birds” on the left and right who are far outside the mainstream, and even those who agree with him tend to find him offensive.
He also has a habit of saying things that he finds politically convenient but simply aren’t true. Take this example from an early August donors’ conference in Dana Park, California sponsored by the Koch Brothers: According to a report on the website of the conservative National Review, Cruz declared that Republicans will not pay a political price in 2016 for attacking the reality of global warming.
He went on to recall the 1970s panic over global cooling and a coming ice age. “The solution they proposed was massive government control of the economy, the energy sector, and our lives. Then the data disproved it,” he said. “Then it became global warming. Interestingly enough, the solution was identical: massive government control over the economy, the energy sector, and our lives. Then the data didn’t support it, so they entered theory number three, climate change. Now, to any power-greedy politician, this is the perfect theory, it can never, ever, ever, be disproven, if it gets hotter, if it gets colder, if it gets wetter, if it gets drier.”
At this point it’s depressing that anyone still believes this nonsense, but some do, and it’s worth spelling out why it’s wrong.
To take the last claim first, the terms “climate change” and “global warming” have both been used for over half a century or more in reference to the same general topic. For example, a scientific paper on global warming titled “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change” was published in 1956. The underlying problem is human-caused global warming, and the consequences extend beyond warmer temperatures to other climate changes as well. For more, see this short history of the terminology.
Second, no one is calling for a massive government takeover of the economy or our lives. We do need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels to the tune of nearly 60 billion dollars a year and spend some of that developing and promoting cleaner energy and greater efficiency, things we’d be better off doing anyway.
Third, the data certainly do support the reality of global warming (as even Ted Cruz ought to know despite his not having a background in science). I’ve already posted some things about the supporting evidence on this blog, but there’s much more from these credible sources:
Finally, there was no “1970s panic over global cooling and a coming ice age.” I first learned about global warming when I was an undergraduate in physics at the start of the 1970s, and it was by that time mainstream science. There were indeed some papers published in the 1970s on the cooling effects of particulate air pollution. As the results of large volcanic eruptions have shown, fine particles in the atmosphere can directly (and possibly indirectly, by nucleating cloud formation) increase the Earth’s albedo, i.e., the percentage of sunlight reflected back into space, with a resultant cooling effect. The question was whether this would be enough to offset increased greenhouse warming. A minority of climate scientists thought it might, but in the end it had only a mitigating effect for a few decades.
As a separate matter, there were earlier suggestions that we might be due to start a new glacial period (or “ice age” in the popular sense) as a result of natural climate cycles. Since then, however, we’ve gained additional knowledge suggesting that even without human-caused global warming, we probably wouldn’t start another glacial period for thousands of years.
by A few days ago I posted a four-minute video from John Green talking about the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, an ambitious proposal from the year 2000 to address a number of major world problems in just 15 years. You might have predicted the goals would not be met, and you would have been right. But the remarkable thing is (as Green pointed out in that video) how far we came. For more visit http://www.unmillenniumproject.org.
There’s now a new set of goals you can read about at http://www.globalgoals.org. Here’s a video created to promote them:
What’s sad, predictably enough, are some of the comments. Evidently there are a remarkable number of creatures with access to computers who think that striving to make the world better constitutes “Communism,” and who are hence opposed to doing that.
Update 2015 October 1: Since we don’t get enough good news, you might enjoy this 2013 piece from Rob Wile at Business Insider on 31 positive trends. I mentioned it along with some related points in a previous blog post here.
by A week ago I posted a video from John Green about the current refugee crisis in Europe, much of which is the result of the ongoing civil war in Syria. Here John’s brother Hank (who possibly drinks nothing but espresso) on the subject of the war itself. He crams a remarkable amount of information into five and a half minutes. Once again I learned a fair amount that was new to me.
I should mention that there is hardly any overlap between this video about the war and the one from John (or the one I posted Wednesday) on the refugee crisis provoked by the war. As Hank points out, the situation is so bad that it’s hard to see what can be done about it. (Even doing nothing doesn’t seem like a great option.)
One annoyance: The subtitles go by so fast you can’t really read them, certainly not while listening to Hank’s Warp 12 monolog at the same time. So get ready to pause the video. In the meantime, here’s the gist of what the subtitles have to say along with a little additional information:
Alawites (also called Alawis) are members of a branch of Islam that is considered heretical by many other Muslims, including Syria’s Sunni majority. Many Alawite beliefs are kept secret. According to scholars who have studied Alawism, they appear to believe in a sort of trinity, that is, three aspects of God, but a trinity quite different from that of mainstream Christianity, and all three aspects have taken human form. In addition, as one of Hank Green’s subtitles mentions, Alawites celebrate Christmas.
Though only about 1/8 of the population of Syria are Alawites, Alawites control the Syrian government and enjoy many special privileges. Syria’s dictator, President Assad, is an Alawite and a member of the Ba’ath Party. The Ba’ath Party is in theory Socialist and was founded to call for the creation of a unified Arab state. In practice it couldn’t even keep itself a unified party, splitting between its Syrian and Iraqi branches.
The head of Iraq’s Ba’ath Party was Saddam Hussein. After the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration disbanded the Iraqi Ba’ath Party and threw its members out of the government. That must have seemed like a sensible move at the time, but it proved to be a major mistake. Many people had joined the Ba’ath Party simply because they needed to in order to get a good job or a promotion to a management position. Hence getting rid of Ba’athists in effect meant firing a lot of managers who weren’t particularly political but who did a competent job of keeping power plants and water utilities working. Meanwhile the Iraqi armed forces and its Ba’athist officer corps were disbanded. Many of the best and most experienced officers wound up fighting for the self-declared Islamic State (better known as ISIL/ISIS), which helps explain their military successes.
One quibble: Hank Green apparently buys into the notion that it was a total accident that Secretary of State Kerry was able to persuade Vladimir Putin to pressure Assad to give up his chemical weapons. Yeah, well, maybe that’s what happened, but it seems a stretch to treat it as established fact.
by There’s more than one Scots accent, and some of them, especially in southern central Scotland for some reason, are incredibly opaque at least to my American ears. This clip features a Scottish couple who are not at all happy with one another on a daytime talk show:
Which leads to the obvious question: What if these folks were on Star Trek:
(The above is from the BBC Scotland show Chewin’ the Fat. “Ken” means to know, so appending “ken?” to the end of a sentence is equivalent to adding “you know?” “Malky” or “Malkie” is short for the name Malcolm, and in context allegedly refers to Malcolm Frazer rhyming slang for “razor.” In lowland Scots usage (especially around Glasgow), “malkie” variously refers to slashing someone’s face with a razor, head-butting someone, or severely beating someone. I won’t try to explain the other slang, mainly because most of it I can’t.)
The Scots in the following video speak a dialect I find much easier to understand, except that the fellow on camera for some reason, possibly involving alcohol, has trouble saying the phrase “purple burglar alarm” (though he had no problems pronouncing obscenities):
Finally, the following Robin Williams routine on Scottish language and golf is one of his best. (Sensitive viewers should note that there are a fair number of naughty words, or at least one naughty word said quite a lot.)
by Benedict Cumberbatch may be the most popular British actor of the moment, with success in everything from a Sherlock Holmes television series and the Hobbit movies (curiously playing opposite the same costar in both) to Hamlet on stage. So it’s reassuring to us lesser mortals that he once narrated a documentary repeatedly mispronouncing the word “penguin,” as he explained on The Graham Norton Show last year:
(On the other hand, he does do a very creditable Jar-Jar Binks.)
by The latest from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day:
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website: http://apod.nasa.gov
Permanent link to today’s page: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150925.html
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