Author Archives: News Sources

Eastern Ukraine: ‘Local’ protesters storm theater thinking it was Kharkiv City Hall

The Moscow Times reports: Pro-Russian demonstrators in eastern Ukraine mistook a theater for the city hall and stormed the wrong building, a local journalist said, citing the case as evidence that the protesters were not local.

Protesters who took over Kharkiv City Hall over the weekend first broke into the town’s opera and ballet theater, but left upon finding a concert hall inside, journalist Vyacheslav Mavrichev said on his Facebook page.

Ukraine’s Interior Minister Arsen Avakov has accused the Kremlin of orchestrating “separatist unrest” in Kharkiv and eastern cities Donetsk and Lugansk, while officials say that many pro-Russia protesters in east Ukraine may in fact be Russian.

The New York Times reports: As the government in Kiev moved to reassert control over pro-Russian protesters across eastern Ukraine, the United States and NATO issued stern warnings to Moscow about further intervention in the country’s affairs amid continuing fears of an eventual Russian incursion.

Secretary of State John Kerry accused the Kremlin of fomenting the unrest, calling the protests the work of saboteurs whose machinations were as “ham-handed as they are transparent.” Speaking to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he added: “No one should be fooled — and believe me, no one is fooled — by what could potentially be a contrived pretext for military intervention just as we saw in Crimea. It is clear that Russian special forces and agents have been the catalysts behind the chaos of the last 24 hours.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Ukraine’s Muslims don’t want to be part of Russia

Paul Goble writes: Muslims are quite comfortable living in Ukraine and have no interest in having the regions where they live be annexed to the Russian Federation where relations between Muslims and others are known to be far worse, according to a Daghestani native who has been living 35 years in Luhansk.

Seyfulla Rashidov, head of the Muslim community there and a professor at the Eastern Ukrainian University, told Vadma Byurchiyev of Kavpolit.com that he and his fellow Muslims are happy to be part of Ukraine and won’t support Moscow’s efforts to annex portions of their country.

Saying he would favor a tougher and more professional response by Ukrainian officials to pro-Russian demonstrators, Rashidov noted that he “had not seen a single acquaintance in the crowd of [pro-Moscow] demonstrators. I am certain that they came from other cities. I have no evidence that they are citizens of another state, but they clearly are not Luhansk people.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Among Ukraine’s Jews, the bigger worry is Putin, not pogroms

The New York Times reports: From his office atop the world’s biggest Jewish community center, Shmuel Kaminezki, the chief rabbi of this eastern Ukrainian city, has followed with dismay Russian claims that Ukraine is now in the hands of neo-Nazi extremists — and has struggled to calm his panicked 85-year-old mother in New York.

Raised in Russia and a regular viewer of Russian television, she “calls every day to ask, ‘Have the pogroms happened yet?’ ” Rabbi Kaminezki said. He tells his mother that they have not, and that she should stop watching Russian TV. “It is a total lie,” he said. “Jews are not in danger in Ukraine.”

Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, added his own voice to the scaremongering in a speech at the Kremlin on March 18, when he described the ouster of President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine as an armed coup executed by “nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites” who “continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.”

But instead of reeling in panic at any fascist resurgence, the Jewish community of Dnipropetrovsk, one of the largest in Ukraine, is celebrating the recent appointment of one of its own, a billionaire tycoon named Ihor Kolomoysky, as the region’s most powerful official.

“They made a Jew the governor. What kind of anti-Semitism is this?” asked Solomon Flaks, the 87-year-old chairman of the region’s Council of Jewish Veterans of the Great Patriotic War, a group of a rapidly shrinking number of World War II veterans. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

America’s huge appetite for conspiracy theories

“Conspiracy Theories and the Paranoid Style(s) of Mass Opinion,” a paper recently published in the American Journal of Political Science, finds that half of Americans consistently endorse at least one conspiracy theory.

Tom Jacobs writes: It’s easy to assume this represents widespread ignorance, but these findings suggest otherwise. Oliver and Wood report that, except for the Obama “birthers” and the 9/11 “truthers,” “respondents who endorse conspiracy theories are not less-informed about basic political facts than average citizens.”

So what does drive belief in these contrived explanations? The researchers argue the tendency to accept them is “derived from two innate psychological predispositions.”

The first, which has an evolutionary explanation, is an “unconscious cognitive bias to draw causal connections between seemingly related phenomena.” Jumping to conclusions based on weak evidence allows us to “project feelings of control in uncertain situations,” the researchers note.

The second is our “natural attraction towards melodramatic narratives as explanations for prominent events — particularly those that interpret history (in terms of) universal struggles between good and evil.”

Stories that fit that pattern “provide compelling explanations for otherwise confusing or ambiguous events, they write, noting that “many predominant beliefs systems … draw heavily upon the idea of unseen, intentional forces shaping contemporary events.”

“For many Americans, complicated or nuanced explanations for political events are both cognitively taxing and have limited appeal,” write Oliver and Wood. “A conspiracy narrative may provide a more accessible and convincing account of political events.”

That said, they add, “Even highly engaged or ideological segments of the population can be swayed by the power of these narratives, particularly when they coincide with their other political views.”

Facebooktwittermail

It is the second degree torture, when the torturer singles out someone else for abuse, that plays on your mind

shaker-aamerClive Stafford Smith writes: Two nights ago I watched The Railway Man at a local film festival. Afterwards, one of the writers, Andy Paterson, was being interviewed by Jon Ronson, the curator of the event. They discussed how Colin Firth’s character, Eric Lomax, had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of his torture by the Japanese during the second world war. Paterson had just returned from Tokyo, where it became clear to him that most Japanese people have not got to grips with what happened on the Thai-Burma railway.

I wonder how long it will take us to understand what we are continuing to do to Shaker Aamer in Guantánamo Bay?

I have represented Aamer unsuccessfully for a long time, and we have just received the first independent medical evaluation of him in 12 years. Dr Emily Keram, a respected psychiatrist, despairs for him as long as he remains in Guantánamo Bay. Her report makes for devastating and depressing reading.

Because of society’s eternal prejudices, I am loth to discuss Aamer’s mental health status, but ultimately I must. So let me preface it with an admission: I, too, suffer from PTSD, albeit on an inconsequential scale when compared with either Aamer or Lomax. My own flashbacks, black-and-white negatives of what I witnessed, stem from watching six of my clients die – two each in the electric chair, in the gas chamber and on the lethal injection gurney. The hardest was Nicholas Ingram. I was born in the same hospital as him, and he was electrocuted in a gratuitously grotesque manner.

For Aamer, yes there was all the physical abuse, from beatings, to strappado (dislocating the shoulders by hanging by the wrists), most of which happened to Lomax. But it was the second degree torture (originated by the Spanish Inquisition) that got to Aamer most – when the torturer singles out someone else for abuse and plays on your mind. The American interrogators assured him that they had his family, and they described what they were going to do to his daughter, then five years old: “They are going to screw her. She will be screaming, ‘Daddy! Daddy!'”

I have a five-year-old myself. No wonder Aamer told Keram he felt powerless, guilty that he had failed his kids, his mind imploding. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Edward Snowden: U.S. government spied on human rights workers

The Guardian reports: The US has spied on the staff of prominent human rights organisations, Edward Snowden has told the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Europe’s top human rights body.

Giving evidence via a videolink from Moscow, Snowden said the National Security Agency – for which he worked as a contractor – had deliberately snooped on bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

He told council members: “The NSA has specifically targeted either leaders or staff members in a number of civil and non-governmental organisations … including domestically within the borders of the United States.” Snowden did not reveal which groups the NSA had bugged.

The assembly asked Snowden if the US spied on the “highly sensitive and confidential communications” of major rights bodies such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, as well as on similar smaller regional and national groups. He replied: “The answer is, without question, yes. Absolutely.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Where is Hersh’s secret Turkish chemical weapons factory?

Dan Kaszeta writes: [O]f all Hersh’s claims, his biggest evidentiary pitfall is in the Turkish Sarin hypothesis. Somehow, Hersh would have us all believe that there is a large factory somewhere in Turkey, a member of NATO and signatory to the OPCW. A factory of the necessary size to make tons of short-shelf life binary Sarin would be huge, at least similar in scale to the UK’s pilot plant that once stood in Nancekuke, Cornwall. It would have many employees, a supply chain of controlled and prohibited chemicals, and a waste stream that would be noticed. Where is this factory? Let us have an OPCW challenge inspection.

More importantly, would Turkey risk the international opprobrium to produce a weapon that, after all, has only limited actual tactical use? Somehow, this Sarin was produced, using a secret hexamine acid reduction process hitherto unknown to the world, and only mastered by Syria’s chemical weapons program. It was put into rockets that are exact copies of Syrian ones, down to the paint and bolts. The Sarin-filled rockets were smuggled via the “rat line” into Syria to Damascus, without a single one being caught. And quickly, I should add, due to the short shelf life of binary Sarin. Then they were supposed to be fired onto rebel areas from government positions without the Syrian regime knowing about it? It defies belief.

Finally, we get to the biggest deficit of all. Seymour Hersh seems unencumbered by the fact that the Assad regime confessed to having a chemical weapons research, development, and production program. Which is the more likely scenario? The Turkish-produced Sarin tale, which relies on a very dubious “inside source” in Washington and no accompanying physical evidence? Or the idea that the Assad regime, using a chemical warfare agent made according to a formula they confessed to, used rockets in their own inventory to attack from their own positions against rebel-held territory? History will tell us, eventually. But one of these tales is sounding more probable than the other.

Facebooktwittermail

Was Hersh duped by a forged document?

Jeffrey Lewis writes: Well, there are plenty of reasons to doubt Sy Hersh’s recent reporting implying that the chemical weapons attack on Ghouta was some sort of Turko-Saudi-Al Nusra false front attack — I am rolling my eyes as I write it — and not a single one to buy any of it. Dan Kaszeta has explained all the technical problems with the scenario, while Aaron Stein provided a lot of the missing context here at ACW for things asserted about Turkey and Turkish foreign policy.

I don’t have much to add, the but the erstwhile Washingtonian in me noticed this passage:

“Asked about the DIA paper, a spokesperson for the director of national intelligence said: ‘No such paper was ever requested or produced by intelligence community analysts.’”

Normally, the response is to “no comment” specific reporting on intelligence matters. Does that mean it is a forgery? Because I love forgeries.

Well, I hate forgeries — but I find them fascinating. I find it hard to explain why, other than to say I am interested in public policy as a discipline that studies national security decisions. Understanding who made what decision and why requires working with historical materials. The notion that some of these materials might be forgeries — or that perhaps decisions were made on the basis of forgeries — has always struck me as interesting. Perhaps that is also because, as someone who prefers Cold War history to other eras, the role of intelligence agencies in controlling information as part of a broader ideological struggle has always seemed like a central part of the Cold War story that seldom finds its way on to center stage.

There are always incentives to feed bum information into the analytic process. This is sometimes called the ”paper mill” problem. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Call climate change what it is: violence

Rebecca Solnit writes: If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.

So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.

Or so I thought when I received a press release last week from a climate group announcing that “scientists say there is a direct link between changing climate and an increase in violence“. What the scientists actually said, in a not-so-newsworthy article in Nature two and a half years ago, is that there is higher conflict in the tropics in El Nino years, and that perhaps this will scale up to make our age of climate change also an era of civil and international conflict.

The message is that ordinary people will behave badly in an era of intensified climate change.

All this makes sense, unless you go back to the premise and note that climate change is itself violence. Extreme, horrific, longterm, widespread violence. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene

Kyle Dropp, Joshua D. Kertzer, Thomas Zeitzoff write: Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March, a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation. Although two-thirds of Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat closely,” most Americans actually know very little about events on the ground — or even where the ground is.

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene with military force. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

If technology is at the vanguard of culture, how come so many of its creators are culturally retarded?

Claire Cain Miller reports: Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged.

She was at a friend’s house last Sept. 8, watching the live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon on her laptop and iPhone. Entrepreneurs were showing off their products, and two young Australian men, David Boulton and Jethro Batts, stood behind the podium to give their presentation. “Titstare is an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits,” Mr. Boulton began, as photographs of women’s chests on a cellphone flashed on the screen behind him.

After some banter, Mr. Batts concluded, “This is the breast hack ever.”

The crowd — overwhelmingly young, white, hoodie-wearing men — guffawed. Something in Ms. Shevinsky’s mind clicked. If ever there was proof that the tech industry needed more women, she thought, this was it.

Ms. Shevinsky, 35, wasn’t the only one who was disgusted by the presentation. Twitter lit up with outrage. She joined in, writing a blog-post manifesto: “I thought that we didn’t need more women in tech. I was wrong.”

Then things got worse. The next day, Pax Dickinson, who was her business partner in a start-up called Glimpse Labs, as well as the chief technology officer of the news site Business Insider, took to Twitter to defend the Titstare pair against accusations of misogyny. “It is not misogyny to tell a sexist joke, or to fail to take a woman seriously, or to enjoy boobies,” he wrote.

Ms. Shevinsky felt pushed to the edge. Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. They love the work and want to fit in. But then something happens — a slight or a major offense — and they suddenly feel like outsiders. The question for newcomers to a field has always been when to play along and when to push back.

Today, even as so many barriers have fallen — whether at elite universities, where women outnumber men, or in running for the presidency, where polls show that fewer people think gender makes a difference — computer engineering, the most innovative sector of the economy, remains behind. Many women who want to be engineers encounter a field where they not only are significantly underrepresented but also feel pushed away.

Tech executives often fault schools, parents or society in general for failing to encourage girls to pursue computer science. But something else is at play in the industry: Among the women who join the field, 56 percent leave by midcareer, a startling attrition rate that is double that for men, according to research from the Harvard Business School.

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Assad: ‘The project of political Islam has failed’

AFP reports: The “project of political Islam has failed,” Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad said on Monday, calling for the separation of religion from politics, state television said.

Assad’s regime has been battling an uprising that has come to be dominated by Islamists, ranging from moderates to radicals, who want to see Syria run as an Islamic state.

“The project of political Islam has failed, and there should be no mixing between political and religious work,” he said in comments on the 67th anniversary of the founding of his Baath party.

These are the observations of a man whose life has been saved by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hezbollah. If Assad really opposes the mixing of political and religious work, how could two of the region’s preeminent proponents and practitioners of political Islam still be his chief allies?

Facebooktwittermail

U.N. has to cut Syria food rations for lack of donor funds

Reuters reports: The United Nations has been forced to cut the size of food parcels for those left hungry by Syria’s civil war by a fifth because of a shortage of funds from donors, a senior official said on Monday.

Nevertheless, the United Nations’ World Food Programme managed to get food to a record 4.1 million people inside Syria last month, WFP deputy executive director Amir Abdulla told a news conference, just short of its target of 4.2 million.

As the humanitarian crisis within Syria intensifies, its neighbors are also groaning under the strain of an exodus of refugees that now totals around 3 million, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said.

“We know that this tragedy, together with the tragedy of the people displaced inside the country, 6.5 million, now shows that almost half of the Syrian population is displaced.”

Donor countries pledged $2.3 billion for aid agencies helping Syria at a conference in Kuwait in January, but only $1.1 billion has been received so far, including $250 million handed over by Kuwait on Monday, U.N. officials said. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Long a survivor in Syria, a Dutch priest is slain

The New York Times reports: The Rev. Frans van der Lugt, a Dutch Jesuit priest who became a symbol of suffering and compassion in the war-ravaged Old City district of Homs, Syria, was shot to death Monday morning by a lone gunman, according to members of his order. The killing came amid growing disputes between Syrian insurgents blockaded in the Old City — those who want to accept an amnesty from the government in exchange for laying down their arms, and those who do not.

After Syrian government forces isolated and laid siege to the rebel-held Old City for more than a year, a truce in January allowed the evacuation of 1,500 people, both civilians and fighters. But Father Frans, as he was known, insisted on remaining in the monastery where he had lived for decades, offering refuge to Muslim and Christian families alike and sharing their deprivation and trauma.

The killer’s identity and motives were not known, but the attack carried a heavy symbolic importance. Though he was European, Father Frans, 72, had come to be considered part of Syrian society and was well known in and around Homs, including among local insurgents in the Old City. He survived there long after foreign fighters from the Islamic extremist group Nusra Front moved in and raised new fears for the few Christians who remained.

But now, something had changed, and he could no longer be protected. Fingers quickly pointed in all directions.

“The death of the priest is a scandal for the rebels,” said Mahmoud Taha, an antigovernment activist in Talbiseh, a village near Homs where the Jesuits run a center for the elderly. Mr. Taha speculated that the local Homs fighters had become radicalized. “They no longer accept anyone but those who are like them,” he said.

The Syrian exile opposition coalition said in a statement that Father Frans was protected by rebels, including a guard from the Free Syrian Army who was shot in the chest in the attack.

Amir Bader, an antigovernment activist in the Old City, said most of the fighters did not regard the priest as an enemy.

“Maybe some fanatic shot him,” Mr. Bader said, “or some regime associate did it, so the regime will show all the Christians: ‘Look what will happen to any of you if you support the revolution like Father Frans.’ ” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIL jihadists open new front in Baghdad push

AFP reports: A powerful jihadist group inspired by Al-Qaeda has opened a new battlefront with Iraqi security forces that could see it try to push into Baghdad, officials and analysts warn.

The latest clashes, just weeks before parliamentary elections, raise key questions over the capacity of the army and police to repel militant attacks.

Anti-government fighters currently hold all of Fallujah, a town that is just a short drive from Baghdad, and other pockets of territory.

The push by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) into the Abu Ghraib area, sparking clashes in nearby Zoba and Zaidan, as well as a failed assault on a military camp in Yusifiyah, illustrate the group’s ambition, even with Fallujah under military siege.

In perhaps the most worrying sign of ISIL’s capabilities, anti-government fighters paraded with dozens of vehicles last week in broad daylight in Abu Ghraib, just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the capital, according to witnesses and videos posted to YouTube. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Kerry places blame on Israel for crisis in peace talks

Haaretz reports: The United States intends on continuing its efforts to promote a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, but “it is the responsibility of the two sides to make decisions,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday.

Kerry placed most of the blame for the crisis in talks on Israel and described the Palestinian application to United Nations institutions as a response to Israeli moves. “Both sides – wound out in a position of unhelpful moves,” he said, and went on to explain how the current crisis was created. “The treaties were unhelpful – and we made that crystal clear to the Palestinians. The prisoners were not released by Israel on the day they were supposed to be released and then another day passed and another day – and then 700 units were approved in Jerusalem and then poof…”

Kerry noted that “there are limits to the amount time the president and myself can put into this considering the other challenges around the world, especially if the parties can’t commit to being there in a serious way.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Seymour Hersh’s Volcano problem

Eliot Higgins writes: Yesterday, the London Review of Books published a second piece by Seymour Hersh on the August 21st Sarin attack. In an earlier piece published in December 2013, Hersh had approached the attacks from two angles, that the White House had used dodgy intelligence in the build up to intervention in Syria, and that the evidence suggested the munition used were improvised, and therefore it was likely the opposition was responsible. While the first point is certainly worth exploring, especially in light of information gathered about the attacks since August 21st, the second point was extremely flawed, with there being clear evidence of the government using the type of munitions linked to August 21st going back to late 2012, which I detailed in my piece Sy Hersh’s Chemical Misfire.

In his latest piece on August 21st, Seymour Hersh presents a narrative where the Turkish intelligence services aided the Syrian opposition in carrying out a false flag attack on August 21st, using one “former intelligence” source in particular. EA Worldview has already put together an excellent response highlighting some of the major flaws in Hersh’s piece, in particular the use of one source for most of his accusations, and I’d like to focus on one particular aspect of the attacks that Hersh appears to be ignorant of, or has chosen to ignore.

In the aftermath of the Sarin attack on Eastern Ghouta on August 21st, the remains of munitions that were practically unknown where recorded at several impact sites (shown below)

After months of research it has been possible to gather a significant amount of information about these rockets. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Crimes against humanity: The genocidal campaign of the climate change contrarians

Robert L. Nadeau and Donald A. Brown write: When scientists make presentations at meetings or conferences on the existing and projected impacts of climate change, they describe in jargon laden language and in emotionally neutral terms what their research has revealed about these impacts. But during informal conversations over a few beers during the evening or late at night, these scientists no longer feel obliged to divorce their scientific heads from their human hearts. On these occasions, they use colorful and often profane language to express their disdain and contempt for the small number of scientists known as global warming skeptics who are well compensated by conservative think tanks for misinterpreting and abusing scientific knowledge.

The scientists involved in these conversations also vent their anger toward the oil and energy companies that sponsor massive disinformation campaigns on radio and television designed to convince Americans that their security, peace and economic well-being are utterly dependent on the consumption of increasing amounts of “clean and plentiful” fossil fuels. They say unkind things about the mangers of the American news media for running endless stories about the human suffering and financial losses caused by extreme weather events and saying nothing about the fact that climate change is contributing to the frequency and intensity of these events. But if the conversation goes on long enough and the hour is late, one or more of these scientists will say what the others firmly believe but are reluctant to admit—the fate of the Earth is sealed by the ignorance, lack of compassion, and inexhaustible greed of its human inhabitants and life on this planet for our children and grandchildren will be little more than a brutal struggle for survival.

The reasons why these empirically oriented rational thinkers have come to this dire conclusion are abundantly obvious in recent scientific research on the existing and projected impacts of climate change. This research has not only shown that massive reductions in worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases over the next two decades will be required to prevent the most disastrous impacts of climate change. It has also revealed that if we fail, as now seems likely, to accomplish this feat, there is a high probability that life on this planet for our children and grandchildren will be little more than a brutal struggle for survival. (Hansen et al. 2013) But as the scientists involved in the late night conversations know all too well, this research is largely ignored by the mainstream media, rarely discussed by political leaders and economic planners, and conspicuously missing in the rancorous public debate about climate change.

The usual explanation why this insane situation exists, as climate scientist Michael Mann put it in a recent article in the New York Times, is that there is a “violent strain of anti-science” in this country which “infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading newspapers and what we see on television.” (Mann, 2014) What Mann did not say in this article but knows very well is that the primary source of this infection is the well-financed, highly coordinated, and very effective campaign of the climate change contrarians.

This campaign began in the 1980s when some of the same scientists that had been paid by the tobacco industry to challenge the scientific evidence that smoking is harmful to human health were hired by oil and energy companies to challenge the scientific evidence about climate change. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail