Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Miscellaneous

Civilians fleeing toward rebel-held territory, Aleppo, by an anonymous AFP stringer, via Wired, and better you should read their searing article, tweets from the powerless at the front, than these, if you had to choose one.
I spent way too much time with the Twitter today to do a proper post, and more contemplating the horror of Aleppo being destroyed by mostly Syrian government and Russian forces and their enemies of the Nusra Front, whose new name I still can't make myself learn, and just nothing I can say at all, except this one faint ray of hopefulness from a pretty unexpected quarter:

In more trivial news, former George W. Bush spokesperson Dana Perino was upset by the bad attitude shown by climate scientists in response to a series of Trump moves that frankly sounded fairly scary to me:

In recent weeks, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated a growing list of Cabinet members who have questioned the overwhelming scientific consensus around global warming. His transition team at the Department of Energy has asked agency officials for names of employees and contractors who have participated in international climate talks and worked on the scientific basis for Obama administration-era regulations of carbon emissions. One Trump adviser suggested that NASA no longer should conduct climate research and instead should focus on space exploration.





It's even more serious with the global warming research, obviously, in the sense that the gun violence question is a debate only between firearms manufacturers and dealers and a few million people who want to stay alive for some reason, while climate studies pit an enormous worldwide industry of mass dirtiness against, in effect, all of human and other terran posterity. At least the name-taking activities have been quashed, for the present:


Don't know quite why, but the wingnuts got very excited with the idea that liberals, upset by Kanye's peculiar encounter with Trump today, had begun calling old Yeezy a "race traitor", a term that has an awfully antiquated and white-racist sound to me. But if you went and looked for the source, it wasn't really a liberal thing:

Actually there was another one, going by @lilmojo_miles, who has accumulated 220 tweets since he opened his account earlier this month, and he deleted his "race traitor" remark too. To my mind, though, the last word on the Kanye contretemps was like this:



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