PRODUCTION scientists pro Romney and Denial ; IMPACT scientists pro Obama and climate change reality ?

undergrad scientists DENY climate change, vote Romney

The latest Washington Post/ABC TV poll has a few figures you probably hadn't seen in this polled-to-death election season : the difference in GOP/DEMOCRAT support between people with undergraduate and post graduate degrees : undergrads pro Romney, post-grads pro Obama.


I believe it explains the push back on climate change reality in one easy sentence:

Undergraduates with degrees in science tend to go to work in factories producing things (and pollution) ; while scientists with post graduate degrees tend to work in universities and government assessing the impact of that pollution upon the wider world and society.

Allan Schnaiberg's election

Canadian sociologist Allan Schnaiberg - dead for years - could probably explain the current American election (the one that has both sides refusing to mention climate change)   better than anyone alive ---- thanks to his theory of the primal conflict between production science and impact science.

The pushback on climate change reality is coming from people with undergraduate degrees in science - enough to be minimally credible to speak on science matters , but not really involved in current world class basic research.

Typically, the lead climate deniers are TV weathermen in their seventies, with an undergraduate science degree from a fourth rate university that they obtained in the early 1960s, based on mediocre teachers whose own science education was last seriously updated in the late 1940s.

State of the art climate science today is simply quite different than it was 65 years ago and this is fuelling the conflict between two sides , both sides sincerely convinced that their science is the state of the art....

Watching the Deniers lose the election over Climate Change is Grim : Ryan Grim, the blogger who brought them down

KOCH BROS suffer a GRIM fate

Out here in rural Nova Scotia, people have a particularly vivid way of saying their chances are toast : they are "screwed : screwed and bored". That is what the feckless Democrats and Obama would have been, if not for a relatively obscure blogger named Ryan Grim.

Blogosphere brings down the GOP with just one post 

His brief blog post - recollecting Romney a year earlier vowed to kill FEMA, stalled the Mitten's "BIG MO"  - nixed, at the stroke of a computer keyboard, all the billions the reality-deniers spent in dark money, trying to steal the American election.

Sandy-the-storm could have gone either way, in terms of any incumbent president's popularity .

This is because no true storm of the century can ever be cleaned up in a week or so - leaving a whole lot of cold, hungry, tired people ready to blame anyone and everybody - particularly the person at the top.

But a less than miracle-working but still highly efficient federal rescue effort is a hell and a half better than no federal rescue effort at all - such as Romney had proposed to provide if he was elected.

FEMA suddenly became the fastest and simplest way to tell Dems and GOP election promises apart - and many people suddenly recalled that Obama's much hated support for big government could look pretty good ,whenever big storms come calling.

And with climate change promising more and more bigger and bigger storms, maybe Obama and the Democrats had a point, after all.......

99% of the world tacitly agrees with Italian "earthquake" court : no such thing as a natural disaster, only human negligence...

MODERNITY sentences scientists

It should be, by far, the biggest news story this year - in fact, one I feel sure historians will be referencing two centuries from now, when they try to assist citizens of the future to understand the 'spirit of the age' of this still very modernist early 21st century.

But in fact, almost unnoticed by most of the world's largest media, an Italian court has sent a half dozen scientists to jail for 6 years, for failing to warn citizens that an earthquake was going to happen.

Actually they had  publicly warned that a major earthquake might or might not happen fairly soon in this earthquake-prone part of the world : which is as vague or as precise as scientists can ever get about earthquakes' timing, severity and location.

The judge found them guilty and tacitly, so did the rest of the world by their approving silence.

In 99% of the educated world's eyes, unpredictable random natural disasters (Acts of God) do not and can not exist in a "just world" : only preventable human irrationality.

The ballot question on modernity versus post modernity (cum global commensality)

In a nutshell, as concise a statement of what it means to be Modernist as one can ever hope to find.

By contrast, I am a post-modernist and I believe that much of Nature and Reality will always be veiled from human understanding, controlling and predicting : natural disasters can and do happen and they are not the fault of an conspiracy of willfully negligent humans.

It is truly a ballot question as we Canadian political scientists are wont to say: the crux of every election that turns complicated voting decisions into a simple plebiscite choice.

November 6th 2012 : *FEMA : kill it (Romney) or keep it (Obama) ?

Anytime : NATURAL DISASTERS : real or result of human failure ?

Pick one or the other and then pull the lever......

*Romney promises to kill FEMA and hand its job over to for-profit corporations, if he was prez when another SANDY hits....

Romney, calling little children "takers not makers" and "part of the 47% , says NO to Nickelodeon

Kids are "TAKERS, not makers"

Taking an axe to Big Bird on live nationwide TV, saying no to the traditional presidential candidate visit to Nickelodeon TV's "Kids Pick the President" special ---- Mitt Romney sure knows how to erase that huge, crucial, gender deficit he has with young "waitress moms" and their children doesn't he ?

Picking on little kids - its a male Mormon thing, right ?

Are all Mormons this screwed up on women and children or is it just the LDS/LSD types with five wives in Kenya and Indonesia ?

Yes all little children - newborns especially - are "takers not makers" (even part of the 47%) - giving back nothing useful to society, unless you count the smiles on the faces of parents, grandparents and total strangers.

But Mitt treats kids like he does his dogs - strapping them to the hood of his election campaign bus and driving off madly in all directions.

Why doesn't he stop beating up the kids and starts into fleshing out more information on just exactly what tax loopholes he pledges to cut to get rid of the 16 trillion dollar deficit .......

Calling his voyages "out-sourcing to India", Romney and Ryan veto any more government money to 47%er Christopher Columbus

Columbus also never paid federal taxes

For the first 15 years, (1492-1507), Columbus was thought to have merely discovered a new route to India, not the entire New World.


For first 15 years, (1928-1943), Alexander Fleming was also thought to have merely discovered another useless systemic drug, not the best known, best loved, most priceless medication ever.

Penicillin and the Americas : who would have ever thought that they shared a common fate : discovered to be one (relatively useless) thing by one person, only to re-evaluated by another person as something far more marvellous altogether ?

Well that is the danger of voting and thinking like a Republican ; thinking that the world is a static place and that everything is either always useful ("makers") and or always useless ("takers").

If Ryan and Romney were sitting on the throne in Spain in the late 1490s, they would have tossed off Columbus and his requests for more government aid for sea voyages as just another waster from the useless 47% set.

When did Columbus ever pay federal income taxes ?

But if the King of Spain had taken that modern, social darwinistic,  attitude there'd be no historical  Columbus , no America , no Romney, no Ryan and no Republican party.

And won't that be a great loss to humanity .......

DRUGS and Romney's 47% : AZT, Penicillin and Sulfa once didn't pay federal income tax either

AZT once part of the 47%

In a dynamic - Democratic - world, one minute you're down, not paying any federal tax, the next minute you're paying millions. But in a static - Republican - world : when you are down, you're out - for all time.

Roughly 47% of all of our most famous, best-loved, life-saving drugs were written off as "useless" when first discovered.

In the lexicon of Ryan, Romney and Republicans everywhere : they were part of the "unfit" 47% - well past caring about.

So Sulfa, penicillin and AZT were labelled as "useless" for 30 , 15 and 20 years respectively.

But then some kindly souls picked them up out of the medical gutter and gave them second chance, a second chance to do good and save lives.

AZT, Penicillin, Sulfa later saved the lives of those who earlier wrote them off as "useless" : poetic justice

But revealing once again that God has an infinite sense of irony, He - in his spirit of forgiveness - later permitted those "unfit" miracle-inducing medications to be used to save the lives of Romney, Ryan and all the rest of those church-going Republicans.

 All the people who had earlier failed so demonstratively to obey God's command to show mercy to the "unfit" : there is a lesson here - maybe even a sermon (!) : something about how the weak and the useless are sent to humble the mighty and the wise, maybe ...

What Romney forgets about the resourceful "r-selected" 47%

r-selected SURVIVORS

The best article, by far,  on Romney's "47%" remarks - and I have read over one hundred of them - is by Ezra Klein,  in gulfnews.com , working off a riff first developed by poverty researchers, Banerjee and Duflo, in their book, Poor Economics.

This article - once filtered through the language of my blog (ie once converted in SVEse) - says that the poor instinctively use cautious "grounded" science to survive, while the rich delude themselves by thinking "blue sky" science really makes sense.

The rich do not take responsibility for their basic daily lives  - instead they pay other people to look after them - but the poor do make many decisions and do take responsibility for their daily lives.

In fact, the poor must make so many tough decisions every hour of every day that they wind up so "cognitively exhausted" that they can't begin to think of future plans --- an area where the cocooned rich excel.

"My child is sick and we both work at low paying jobs - one of us stay home and lose pay to look after child - but then how to get the extra money to buy the antibiotics the child really needs to get better, when we will actually have less take-home pay this week ?"

"Money on fertilizer to improve my soil for a better crop in the Fall or spend it on food now so I can have the strength to plow what quality of soil I have now ?"

Being poor makes you resourceful and flexible, just to survive - makes you r-selected in practise.

It also makes you r-selected in philosophy : you see Reality as constantly presenting you with unexpected surprises, most of them unpleasant, so it is best to travel light and stay flexible as to what you'll must do to survive.

By contrast, the upper middle class white protestant male of the 1840s and the 1940s (and probably the 2040s as well) was totally cocooned in a support system.

The efforts of his wife and servants meet his basic physical needs .

His parents' wealth and connections along with his expensive professional education all came together with his ethnicity, religion and gender to ensure his formal and informal privileged status when it came to his chances of entering  the"gated occupational communities" like Med School or the Military Academy that were the stepping stones to success.

His take on Reality is likely to be K-selected : I am totally fit to totally fill Nature's biggest single niche : Planet Earth. The world is Man's oyster, it is my oyster : Reality is, underneath its false surface complexity, basically simple, repetitive, stable and above all, ultimately controllable by Man.

Romney told the now infamous Florida audience exactly the same Big Self-Lie that Charles Darwin told himself in his unpublished autobiography : I inherited nothing ( says son of  automobile industry CEO and governor of the world's leading automotive industry state) - anything I have, I earned it the old fashioned way.

By contrast, Darwin's most exhaustive biographer, Janet Browne, details how Darwin's doting father lavished microscopes on his child, just as toys, each which cost far more than the annual income of a working class family.

Family wealth made Darwin the excellent amateur scientist he became.

It gave him lots of time and energy for his hobby because he already had a secure daily living without work. Wealth gave him plenty of  space and equipment for his experiments as well as giving him an excellent scientific education with the scientifically powerful.

Above all, it gave him the means to control his scientific image - worldwide - from his rural sick bed ,via the new postal service system.

Again Darwin could afford to spend, just on stamps, more than what a family full of industrial workers earned all year ,working themselves to exhaustion from dawn to dusk.

The ungrateful Charles Darwin - a really nasty piece of goods - dissed his doting father in his autobiography and claimed his success all came from his own efforts.

I don't like Darwin and I don't think I like Romney - I simply don't like those who are so selfish and so self-centered that they have no insight into how they got to where they are.

Yes, both men are clever and are hard working - but their rise to the very top was also engineered by their standing on the shoulders of giants --- their parents......

In Andrea Saul's pliant hands , Romney denies climate like, er, an EXXON flack

DENIER-IN-CHIEF

Perhaps as a condition for seeing bribe-sized donations go to his fellow-travelling Super PACS, Willard-the-Wimp has had to accept Andrea Saul , former EXXON flack-in-charge-of-denial ,  as his new press-liaison-thingy.

And so Willard has changed his tune yet again on denying the need for any serious action on human-caused runaway global warming.

Perhaps his day's position on climate denial is pinned by Ms Saul* to the Wimp's underwear, because like his underwear, it does seem to be changed daily.

Better idea, Andrea, is to attach it to one of them there new-fangled wind powered windmills, and then let it change with the wind. if we have alternative energy, why not alternative policy positions too ?

EXXON meets in convention in Tampa at end of August to pick the new President

Ooops ! No more windmill, bosses' orders : Willard has been told, firmly, (as firmly as jello can be told anything) to tell everybody that under his government, wind subsidies are out and subsidies to Exxon, er, Oil are in.

After November, America will be headed by a two person government : Romney will be Denier-in-chief and Andrea will be the de-facto Commander-in-Chief.....

* And a big tip of the hat to DeSmogBlog for spreading the word on Damascus-bound Ms Saul.