More Anti-Science from Trump: Climate Denier to Head NASA

This is absolutely incredible. It really is like something from dystopian Science Fiction, but unfortunately it’s true. In this clip from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian and his co-hosts, Ron Placone and Steffi Zamorano comment on a report from Democracy Now! that Trump has decide to appoint Jim Bridenstine as the new head of NASA. Bridenstine has no scientific credentials, and doesn’t believe in climate change. In fact, in 2013 he stood on the floor of the senate and demanded that Barak Obama apologise for promoting it.

The trio begin the clip by remarking on the evidence from the hurricanes to hit America that climate change is real. Before storm Harvey, only three magnitude 5 storms had hit America. They then show how ludicrous the decision is by stating that as Trump has appointed someone, who doesn’t believe in a scientific fact to head a scientific agency, then Richard Dawkins should be appointed to head the national prayer breakfast. Dore jokes that there hasn’t been a government this anti-science since Galileo. And the Pope has apologized for him. The papacy also acknowledges climate change. Which means the world’s most religious Roman Catholic is more progressive than Trump and his minions.

There’s no way this is anything other than an attempt by the Republicans and their paymasters, the Koch brothers, and the other big polluting industries, to hobble and silence research into climate change in America. One of the functions satellites carry out is weather and climate monitoring. Space research generally has also led to greater understanding of weather systems on Earth. For example, the massive storms that rage across Jupiter are driven by the same laws and forces as those, which generate similar storm systems on Earth. Countries like India have invested in their space industry for the promise it offers of monitoring the weather and the progress of crop diseases, which can be disastrous for a developing nation, much of whose population are subsistence farmers.

Dore’s wrong about the Pope’s treatment of Galileo, however. Yes, it was scandalous, but at the time Galileo’s own research was actually undersupported. And he didn’t help himself in his book, the Dialogue of the Two World Systems. He knew the pope was an Aristotelian, but deliberately made the Aristotelian speaker in the book appear as stupid as possible. Even so, the Church was not uniformly against him. He did have supporters within the church and amongst the cardinals. See James Hannan’s God’s Philosophers: Science in the Middle Ages.

But this is like something from Science Fiction. Stephen Baxter’s Titan is an alternative history, in which a rabidly anti-science senator becomes president of the US and closes down NASA. It’s because he’s a Creationist, and doesn’t believe in the Copernican heliocentric system, or the discoveries revealed by Galileo. What isn’t shut down, is given to the USAF and given over to defence instead, while the agency’s museum is shut, except for its museum. This is then altered to stress the religious experiences many of the astronauts had when exploring space.

This isn’t quite fair on the Creationists. Those I knew did not reject Galileo and they didn’t reject heliocentrism, although I’ve since come across people, who do on the Net. But there are still clear parallels between Baxter’s book and Trump and those who back him.

Yesterday I found an interview with the veteran comics creator, Pat Mills on YouTube. I’m going to have to write a piece about it, because Mills is very left-wing and a fierce critic of capitalism and Britain’s class system. In the video, he states that when he started writing for 2000 AD, he and the others were told to create futures, which people would live in. And now we are. He pointed out that there really were robots, which looked like Robusters, and we also now had Donald Trump, who was very much like something from 2000 AD’s often bleak view of the future.

And he’s right. Trump’s appointment of a scientific ignoramus like Bridenstine is almost exactly like something from Science Fiction. And Mills compared Trump himself to Judge Cal, the deranged Chief Judge of Mega City 1, who behaved like Caligula. He appointed his pet fish as judge, and had one of the other judges pickled. Oh yes, and he called in the alien Kleggs to keep the human population of Mega City 1 under control. Trump hasn’t made contact with an evil alien life forms yet, but the nepotism and corruption is all there. Even if he hasn’t made his goldfish senator. But given the fictional parallel drawn by Mills, Bannon, Kelly-Anne Conway and the others he’s got rid of should be glad he just had them sacked. The real trouble’s going to start when he starts ordering human-sized pickled jars.

Action Figures of the Real Villains of Our Time

I found this series of spoof action figures over at the Tomorrow and Beyond site on Tumblr. It’s for a fictional range of action figures entitled ’21st Century Bastards’, and comprise this gallery of horrors.

Foreign Bastards include Putin.

There are also two further British Bastards along with Piers Morgan. Both are previous Tory Prime Ministers.

And, of course, the woman whose reign with Reagan started the long decline of the West and the disappearance of everything good and decent from the body politic.

Obviously, this is the kind of satire that will send staunch Republicans and Tories absolutely ballistic with rage. Like bullies, they can’t stand it when people stand up to them and pour all the bile, vilification and scorn back at them.

I think this was published a few months ago, so unfortunately there isn’t one of Theresa May. Neither is there one of Jacob ‘Slenderman’ Rees-Mogg. Which could be a mercy, as those might be too much for some nervous souls to bear. As they say on Crimewatch, ‘Don’t have nightmares!’

Tories Accuses German Newspaper of Spreading ‘Alternative News’ over Brexit

The Tories are busy trying to build up Theresa May as ‘strong and stable’ in her negotiations with the EU. But the Europeans themselves have quite a different perspective. The I today has a story about May attacking the EU for leaking news in order to undermine her position. And yesterday, one of the papers – it was either the I or the Metro – reported that the German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine, was publishing ‘alternative news’ leaked from the EU, which contradicted the claims May herself was making.

‘Alternative news’ sounds to me very much like ‘alternative facts’, which was the phrase Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s spokespeople, gave to the clearly bogus rubbish she was spouting on behalf of her master.

In the case of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, this is really rubbish. I used to buy it occasionally when I was at school doing German in order to improve my grasp of the language. I don’t think it helped, as much of it was waaay beyond my schoolboy abilities. It’s one of the German papers of record. It is, or it was, a broadsheet at the level of the Times and Telegraph, and like them it has a centre-right bias. This should be somewhat qualified, as I gather that, like the majority of other continental newspapers, it is not as barkingly right-wing as our press. I have a feeling it was a former reporter for the Allgemeine, who turned up a little while ago on one of the alternative news channels to talk about the nefarious antics of the American intelligence services in making the international situation much worse.

It is as far away from ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative facts’ as you can get.

It also has a very good grasp of events over this side of the Nord See. I can remember being impressed by its coverage of the Tory party’s coup against Thatcher way back in the 1990s.

So if there’s an alternative between the facts as reported by the Frankfurter Allegemeine, and May’s ‘facts’, in my opinion you’re better off believing the German newspaper. It’s far more reliable.

As opposed to May and the Tories, who have a very long history of lying going back decades.

Scientists and Hackers Back Up Climate Data to Prevent Trump Deleting It

Here’s another act of resistance against the Trump regime. In this very short video, Farron Cousins from The Ring of Fire explains how, during Trump’s inauguration, a group of 60 climate scientists and hackers got together to go through the US government’s website to back up all the data on climate change. This information is now stored on servers in Europe. The scientists, technicians and hackers did so to prevent the information from being deliberately purged by Trump. The group intends to compare this with future releases of information on climate by Trump and his cronies in order to prevent him from falsifying evidence against climate change.

Cousins makes very short work of Kelly-Anne Conway’s statements that Trump believes in climate change. Conway is Trump’s spokeswoman, and she’s claimed that he believes in it, as he’s talked about it in the past. Well, no, he hasn’t actually. The only time the Permatanned Duce talked about it, he declared that it was ‘a Chinese hoax’.

Cousins shows how the Republicans not only do not believe in climate change, but they confuse it with weather. Conway apparently says that Trump’s aware that climate change is occurring, because the weather also changes. Cousins shows that while the weather does change from day to day, the climate is rather different. But as he says, the Republicans don’t believe climate change is real, because it still snows, so this obviously disproves global warming.

This is excellent news, as Trump has already shown his determination to expunge and falsify information on climate change through imposing gagging orders preventing officials working for the Environmental Protection Agency from publishing data that does not match the Trump-approved party line.

Other scientists are planning to organise a march on Washington as a protest against Trump’s and the Republicans’ attacks on climate science, evolution and renewable energy.

It’s great that so much is being done to defend climate science from attacks from Trump and the Republicans. And this is just one facet of a general movement by millions of people throughout the world against Trump and his policies.