Conservative Blindness

[BeaverFever]

2 hours ago, CdnFox said:

you were the one who didn't know the correct term earlie

That’s a lie.  Like most people I prefer to call it trickle down to expose the idiocy of it all. You were the one who previously thought it was Keynesian 

 

2 hours ago, CdnFox said:

Because you already know i'm right.  You already admitted it. Soooo - yea, sorry kiddo. It's too late to ask for a source AFTER you've conceded the point

Ha you’re busted again. You’re just another internet dumbass who makes up blatantly false claims. Typical MAGA. You don’t have single credible non-partisan link for your BS because there are none. 

 

2 hours ago, CdnFox said:

Well then you're still being an illiterate dolt. in all those years there was 2 or 3 significant riots or thereabouts - since then there have been far far more. And bigger and more damaging

Look it up.

See? Told you i'm educational   LOLOL!

 The race wars we have today and for the last decade or more are a product of the left. Sorry to rain on your echo-chamber.

There weren’t many 2009-2014 either. Sorry you’re just another internet dumbass

[Hodad]

47 minutes ago, impartialobserver said:

Well, its not like there is some central database and all I do is write a query such as 

select * from dbo.schools where crt = 'Yes'

There are 668 schools in NV and I can only vouch for the 5 schools that either my wife has taught at or my kids have attended. I know state education policy and there is no mention of CRT in it. Could someone in Las Vegas be teaching it? Maybe.  However, my experience is that it is not taught in NV at the public school level. However, that does not stop folks from construing every mention of race as CRT. Martin Luther King Jr. was black.. oh but that is CRT, right?

Yep, CRT is not "taught" in any schools until college, at a minimum, and it's typically graduate-level work. Rather, exactly as you describe, any mention of the historical oppression of Black Americans is categorized by the ignorant as CRT.

CRT has been an academic subject for decades, but three years ago the conservative culture warriors decided to market it as enemy #1  and now the Fox News crowd is up in arms. But if you offered most of them $100 on the spot to define it they wouldn't be able to come close. 

[CdnFox]

1 hour ago, impartialobserver said:

There is a possibility but if you want to be philosophical.. there is a possibility of anything.

You're doing an awful lot of dancing here. This isn't like we're talking about the chances of being a boltzmann brain or the like.

There's been claims - there is in fact not just a theoretical possibility but a probability and you stated that you were sure it wasn't being taught and subsequently have had to admit you don't know, and you're now trying to downplay the chances of it.

What's the deal?  I know it's taught in Canadian schools because they do come out and say so and it seems entirely reasonable to believe that elements of it have made it into US schools - what's making you so eager to say it's not when it's not clear?

28 minutes ago, Hodad said:

Yep, CRT is not "taught" in any schools until college, at a minimum, and it's typically graduate-level work. Rather, exactly as you describe, any mention of the historical oppression of Black Americans is categorized by the ignorant as CRT.

CRT has been an academic subject for decades, but three years ago the conservative culture warriors decided to market it as enemy #1  and now the Fox News crowd is up in arms. But if you offered most of them $100 on the spot to define it they wouldn't be able to come close. 

That's already been shown to be wrong.  But thanks for coming out and representing the radical left for us today  

Edited June 9, 2023 by CdnFox

[impartialobserver]

7 minutes ago, CdnFox said:

You're doing an awful lot of dancing here. This isn't like we're talking about the chances of being a boltzmann brain or the like.

There's been claims - there is in fact not just a theoretical possibility but a probability and you stated that you were sure it wasn't being taught and subsequently have had to admit you don't know, and you're now trying to downplay the chances of it.

What's the deal?  I know it's taught in Canadian schools because they do come out and say so and it seems entirely reasonable to believe that elements of it have made it into US schools - what's making you so eager to say it's not when it's not clear?

That's already been shown to be wrong.  But thanks for coming out and representing the radical left for us today  

Its called extrapolating. From a small sample size, you infer the characteristics of the greater population. If this practice was widespread... It would come out and there would be some evidence. 

If you have not noticed... I do not buy into paranoia. I tire of folks reading article about random place in Arkansas (or wherever)  and then assuming that because it happens in one place.. it must be happening in every single place. And when you ask why it is not happening in some place that is not Arkansas, they never have an answer. just the usual name-calling and saying that you are stupid/ignorant, etc. 

[Rebound]

4 hours ago, Perspektiv said:

How so?

Also, is risking being offensive reason enough not to question something? 

Am not denying its existence.

However, to decry it like it were an epidemic, would be incredibly inaccurate.

Also, if a black male or any male is shot by a police officer, anyone with common sense will want to know what happened. People using to advance ideology will want to ensure this is withheld, unless it meets a certain criteria.

The innocent, minding their own business type of black male getting shot to death by police "epidemic", just does not exist. Did it happen in history at any point anywhere?

Of course, but to say (or insinuate that) current laws are racist, as well as police who enforce them, are a sweeping statement that hold zero levels of accuracy to them.

George Floyd did happen. However, statistically speaking, this murderous level of police brutality just doesn't occur at the rate the media seems to want to make you believe that it does.

I can only speak personally, but as a black male, I am not afraid of the police but could easily understand why a black male would feel intimidated by them. 

Being aware brutality does happen, doesn't make it an epidemic.

I grew up in the hood. All knives and guns I have had pulled on me, were by people who shared my skin color. The B&E attempts. Theft. The police haven't threatened me remotely close to what my peers have.

I have been stopped by police for no reason before, was compliant, and off I went. Of course some cops abuse of their power, but numbers don't add up again that this is force wide or epidemic.

There is truth to some of what you say, but in no way shape or form are the police force as a whole, racist or are black law abiding people as a whole under any major level of threat.

Tupac Shakur once mulled about his childhood teachings, telling him to hate white men. 

But he later realized in life, that those who had shot, stabbed or taken from him, shared his skin color. 

Am sorry my telling the truth is offending you, but that is not the intent.

I had a weapon in such a neighborhood and always felt unsafe, and became paranoid. It wasn't to protect me from cops. 

How is it offensive?

Because there has been one documented case after another of unarmed black people shot to death by police officers.  Since you’re obviously ignorant of this and you decided to make up nonsense, I gave you the example of Oscar Grant. But there are many more, such as George Floyd, who was unarmed.  Instead, you lied and said these people were attacking the police. They were not.  
 

Black people in America have been victimized by the police since 1865 and earlier. Now cell phones capture these episodes, and too often, Justice still doesn’t come. 
 

[WestCanMan]

On 6/8/2023 at 7:46 AM, Rebound said:

Consider the issues that Conservatives tout today:

• Woke!  OMG! Woke! Woke!
• CRT! It’s the most important thing to stop!
• Books! We have got to take books away from children!
• Drag Shows! They will destroy our children! 
   

Do you notice what these issues all have in common? They 

I thought for a second that you were going to finish off there by admitting that they're all over your head.

TBH you should have said that because it would have been honest, and everyone here already knew that anyways. 

[Michael Hardner]

2 hours ago, impartialobserver said:

1. The 447... wow. I may never encounter another person outside of the locals who knows that stretch. 

2. Wine country starts at 90 minutes west, 4 hours to San Francisco, 5 hours to the Redwoods, 4 hours to Yosemite, Tahoe is 45 minutes, and then if you travel east (as you know) is the big wide open nothing. 

 

 

1. There is something deeply affecting about the desert, and it's various forms.

2. And you're not even talking about the great things to do in town. The shows, the gold and silver for breakfast, Ethiopian restaurants, art museums. Do they still have that Kmart in sparks? I used to love that store.  Hippie stores like prism clothing. Music stores with great deals.  There's a music store in Sparks that sells guitars and guns, and there's a parrot in there that imitates every guitar riff you've ever heard..

Last time I went to the Denny's on peach lane, they asked us smoking or not smoking? We couldn't stop laughing.

Also the best Vietnamese restaurant I've ever eaten at, gold and flower is it?  It's like somebody put an urban downtown and a suburbs in a blender

 

[Perspektiv]

44 minutes ago, Rebound said:

Because there has been one documented case after another of unarmed black people shot to death by police officers.

You're making this a racial issue.

It isn't. Cops aren't using black people as target practice. Statistics prove this.

The vast majority of police encounters are both non violent and non deadly.

You're free to present data, to prove otherwise

Because a few cops have no business being police officers, doesn't prove that cops are racist, or that they are killing unarmed black men at an alarming rate.

Am not ignorant to some officers abusing of their badges, as have experienced this as a black male.

But to say that this is a police issue, eluding to it being a problem across the board, is false.

[CdnFox]

3 minutes ago, impartialobserver said:

Its called extrapolating. From a small sample size, you infer the characteristics of the greater population. If this practice was widespread... It would come out and there would be some evidence.

In what way would it come out? As you say you aren't able to check if CRT or elements of it are being taught under different names.

Quote

If you have not noticed... I do not buy into paranoia. I tire of folks reading article about random place in Arkansas (or wherever)  and then assuming that because it happens in one place.. it must be happening in every single place. And when you ask why it is not happening in some place that is not Arkansas, they never have an answer. just the usual name-calling and saying that you are stupid/ignorant, etc. 

That sounds a lot like you're choosing to believe it doesn't happen and are simply reacting out of frustration rather than any actual data.

I see online relatively credible sounding evidence that it is taught or that elements of it are in most parts of the US. Including your area.

I think the best you can say is you don't know. Anything else is just another kind of paranoia at this point.

[robosmith]

13 hours ago, Perspektiv said:

No. They "bat an eyelid" when black unarmed people are shot by white cops. It matters little that in many of these cases, the black men were either armed and threatening the cop, fighting with them, or even worse, attempting to grab a cop's weapon. This causes outrage, so is perfect.

Point being made is it has nothing to do with batting an eyelid. It has everything to do with using anger go push their ideology forward. They are opportunists that couldn't care less about the black community.

BLM has been present how many times when children were hit by stray bullets? Speaking out against gun violence within the black community, which is the actual threat. Not cops?

So armed robberies don't occur in the hood? B&E's? 

You clearly have never lived in such an environment if you feel that people don't get killed over nothing, on a daily basis there.

Where's the outrage?

Never said they don't occur. I said MOST are gang bangers fighting over turf.

Why break into hood home when there's little to steal there? Turf OTOH, is highly profitable.

[robosmith]

6 hours ago, Perspektiv said:

How so?

Also, is risking being offensive reason enough not to question something? 

Am not denying its existence.

However, to decry it like it were an epidemic, would be incredibly inaccurate.

Also, if a black male or any male is shot by a police officer, anyone with common sense will want to know what happened. People using to advance ideology will want to ensure this is withheld, unless it meets a certain criteria.

The innocent, minding their own business type of black male getting shot to death by police "epidemic", just does not exist. Did it happen in history at any point anywhere?

Of course, but to say (or insinuate that) current laws are racist, as well as police who enforce them, are a sweeping statement that hold zero levels of accuracy to them.

George Floyd did happen. However, statistically speaking, this murderous level of police brutality just doesn't occur at the rate the media seems to want to make you believe that it does.

I can only speak personally, but as a black male, I am not afraid of the police but could easily understand why a black male would feel intimidated by them. 

Being aware brutality does happen, doesn't make it an epidemic.

I grew up in the hood. All knives and guns I have had pulled on me, were by people who shared my skin color. The B&E attempts. Theft. The police haven't threatened me remotely close to what my peers have.

I have been stopped by police for no reason before, was compliant, and off I went. Of course some cops abuse of their power, but numbers don't add up again that this is force wide or epidemic.

There is truth to some of what you say, but in no way shape or form are the police force as a whole, racist or are black law abiding people as a whole under any major level of threat.

Tupac Shakur once mulled about his childhood teachings, telling him to hate white men. 

But he later realized in life, that those who had shot, stabbed or taken from him, shared his skin color. 

Am sorry my telling the truth is offending you, but that is not the intent.

I had a weapon in such a neighborhood and always felt unsafe, and became paranoid. It wasn't to protect me from cops. 

Not all cops are racist, but the vast majority COVER for those who ARE.

LaQuan McDonald was shot 20+ times while walking away from cops and all the cops present filed FALSE reports about what happened.

[robosmith]

5 hours ago, BeaverFever said:

More of your Fake news.  You amd I have discussed this topic many times and you’re the one who keeps getting in it wrong. You once thought it was called Keynesian economics FFS.  You don’t know sh1t. 
 

You continue to spread blatant falsehoods. Why don’t you post a non-partisan link to back up your BS?

 

What incidents are you talking about?  Riots?   If so I dispute the timeline  

Not coincidentally there were no major recessions during that period. The early 90s recession under Republican George Bush Sr was the worst since the Great Depression, then there was widespread economic boom and property during the 8 Clinton years followed by 2 recessions under the next Republican George Bush Jr., the last one being a major catastrophic collapse of the financial sector and the new title holder of “worst since the Great Depression”  
 

Keep in mind, economically Clinton followed conservative economic policies:  privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for businesses and the rich, service cuts for everyone else, and mass incarceration for the growing number of people forced into society’s margins as a result. The economic boom that occurred during his 2 terms was simply a bump due to the end of the cold war, the rise of the internet and e-commerce “tech bubble” and rock bottom interest rates that allowed people to affordably finance their lifestyle or make ends meet with an endless supply of cheap debt. The working class has been in a continuous downward slide since the 80s  because of Trickle-down policies and theories, which were first implemented under Reagan 

 

In reality, deregulation signed by Clinton paved the way for the financial collapse that occurred under Bush.

Of course Bush did NOTHING to correct that in 8 years.

[robosmith]

5 hours ago, impartialobserver said:

My wife is a teacher and has been since 2004 so some of these issues listed in the OP are pertinent. At least in NV.. there is no CRT taught in the public school system. Or at least not explicitly. Yes, you are free to construe anything as CRT.. it happens. It is not all that different from someone claiming that you are indoctrinating them when all you did was mention the word, Bible. 

Being "free" to misrepresent things does not make it HONEST nor TRUE.

[impartialobserver]

1 hour ago, Michael Hardner said:

1. There is something deeply affecting about the desert, and it's various forms.

2. And you're not even talking about the great things to do in town. The shows, the gold and silver for breakfast, Ethiopian restaurants, art museums. Do they still have that Kmart in sparks? I used to love that store.  Hippie stores like prism clothing. Music stores with great deals.  There's a music store in Sparks that sells guitars and guns, and there's a parrot in there that imitates every guitar riff you've ever heard..

Last time I went to the Denny's on peach lane, they asked us smoking or not smoking? We couldn't stop laughing.

Also the best Vietnamese restaurant I've ever eaten at, gold and flower is it?  It's like somebody put an urban downtown and a suburbs in a blender

 

the Kmart in sparks closed sadly. I live about 2 miles from it. 

Bizaare guns and Bizaare guitars (seems like two stores but is only one)... is an interesting place for sure. I did not know about the parrot but have only been there once so maybe he took a day off. 

Golden flower is the vietnamese restaurant. Have been there once and it is good. I will say that I think that Reno's restaurant scene is rock solid. It has the right mix of charming, old school (Gold and Silver Inn) and innovative. Asian, BBQ, Korean, Ethiopian, Microbreweries, Fine dining, Thai, Japanese, Greek, Vietnamese, and now Estonian. 

Have lived in a desert climate for the most part since birth so I guess I am just used to it. Boise, my hometown, gets about 3 more inches of precipitation per year on average but is still pretty arid and desert like. However, there is something moving about the wide open spaces of the desert. No one around for miles, quiet except for the wind, sun shining, and you can do whatever what you want knowing that there is virtually no chance that you will encounter anyone for hours if at all.

long story but my brother-in-law and I rode all bikes (no motors) from Boise to ellensburg. A lot of desert along that trek. 

 

[Hodad]

10 minutes ago, impartialobserver said:

the Kmart in sparks closed sadly. I live about 2 miles from it. 

Bizaare guns and Bizaare guitars (seems like two stores but is only one)... is an interesting place for sure. I did not know about the parrot but have only been there once so maybe he took a day off. 

Golden flower is the vietnamese restaurant. Have been there once and it is good. I will say that I think that Reno's restaurant scene is rock solid. It has the right mix of charming, old school (Gold and Silver Inn) and innovative. Asian, BBQ, Korean, Ethiopian, Microbreweries, Fine dining, Thai, Japanese, Greek, Vietnamese, and now Estonian. 

Have lived in a desert climate for the most part since birth so I guess I am just used to it. Boise, my hometown, gets about 3 more inches of precipitation per year on average but is still pretty arid and desert like. However, there is something moving about the wide open spaces of the desert. No one around for miles, quiet except for the wind, sun shining, and you can do whatever what you want knowing that there is virtually no chance that you will encounter anyone for hours if at all.

long story but my brother-in-law and I rode all bikes (no motors) from Boise to ellensburg. A lot of desert along that trek. 

 

Rather than cuisine and shopping, Ellensburg is most notable for the pervasive smell of cow shit. Lol

[Rebound]

2 hours ago, Perspektiv said:

You're making this a racial issue.

It isn't. Cops aren't using black people as target practice. Statistics prove this.

The vast majority of police encounters are both non violent and non deadly.

You're free to present data, to prove otherwise

Because a few cops have no business being police officers, doesn't prove that cops are racist, or that they are killing unarmed black men at an alarming rate.

Am not ignorant to some officers abusing of their badges, as have experienced this as a black male.

But to say that this is a police issue, eluding to it being a problem across the board, is false.

I did not say any of those things.  Of course most police officers are honest and good people.  But there has been institutionalized protection of police officers who brutalized people of color.

[BeaverFever]

3 hours ago, robosmith said:

In reality, deregulation signed by Clinton paved the way for the financial collapse that occurred under Bush.

Of course Bush did NOTHING to correct that in 8 years.

Yep Bill Clinton was basically a neocon which definitely reflected on Hillary’s run. 

Edited June 10, 2023 by BeaverFever

[CdnFox]

3 hours ago, robosmith said:

Not all cops are racist, but the vast majority COVER for those who ARE..

THis OPINION is useless without PROOF or FACTS

[Perspektiv]

8 hours ago, Rebound said:

But there has been institutionalized protection of police officers who brutalized people of color.

Police brutality isn't presently a racial issue.

There has been protections of police officers for brutality to all races.

It is not a racial issue. Its a police issue, but even then is microscopic in considering the sheer volume of police encounters that are done professionally.

You would have to demonstrate how this is a racial issue if this is what you're implying.

Black people "batting an eyelid" for something that is nowhere close to the numbers of white people that get shot to death, has more to do with media sensationalism for clicks, than an actual problem of epidemic levels.

In contrast, shootings within these communities are glossed over, as the way it is just like you did.

Again. Where's the outrage?

[BeaverFever]

The Next Big Emissions Fight Is an Old One: Why Some Conservatives Oppose Clean Air

As wildfire smoke hit the East Coast, Fox News claimed it was “perfectly healthy” to breathe.
 

Steve Milloy, a longtime lobbyist for polluting industries from tobacco to coal to oil and gas, is back in the news thanks to the wildfire smoke that recently blanketed the U.S. East Coast. Milloy appeared on Fox News to tell people that there are “no negative health impacts” from breathing in wildfire smoke. It’s the latest salvo in a war he’s been waging against air pollution regulation since the 1980s.

For industry operatives like Milloy, air pollution, especially the regulation of particulate matter, has long been a greater concern than climate policy. Regulations on PM2.5 —fine inhalable particles generally smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter — would require many of the same reductions in the combustion of fossil fuels that climate policy would, but without any of the politicization that has obstructed climate action for decades. It’s never been easy for politicians to publicly fight against clean air and water, and it’s doubly hard when the country’s largest city is wrapped in smoke. So Milloy took to the conservative airways to dismiss concerns about wildfire smoke, which peer-reviewed public health research has linked to higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and emergency respiratory and immune responses.

That research means little to Milloy, who claims that the peer-review process is biased against corporate interests. Although he has a degree in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins, Milloy is not, even by his own account, a medical expert. Nor is he an epidemiologist. But while it might be easy to dismiss him, Milloy has a knack for accessing power and attention. His recent media tour is a good predictor of where we’re likely to see conservatives headed should they regain control of the government in 2024. Spoiler alert: He’d like to see the Environmental Protection Agency go away.

In early 2020, Milloy was basking in the glory of multiple wins under President Donald Trump, posting pictures with his pals inside the EPA and bragging about “eating the greens’ lunch.”

Most Read 

Trump’s EPA declined to tighten air pollution standards, rolled back mercury regulations, and disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, or as Milloy put it: “blowing out that particulate matter sub-panel, another huge win.” Plus he finally got to introduce an idea he’d been tryingto get into the EPA regulatory framework since the 1990s: the so-called secret science proposal. It would lend more weight to studies that make data available to the government and other researchers, which sounds good but would have the effect of discrediting most epidemiological studies because they include human test subjects and are subject to privacy laws. “I’ve got huge wins under my belt,” Milloy told me in a 2020 interview. “It’s been tremendously satisfying for me.”

That’s a lot of policy shifts coming from someone whose ideas have often been considered fringe by his fellow conservatives. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Milloy called public health officials “COVID creeps” and likened quarantine to communism. He criticizes oil companies for pandering to climate activists, whom he calls “bedwetters” or “watermelons”: green on the outside but “red” on the inside. In a 2017 presentation at the annual Heartland Institute climate conference, he compared the EPA to Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

 

Related 

Republicans Are Using Big Tobacco’s Secret Science Playbook to Gut Health Rules

But the Trump EPA normalized a lot of previously fringe ideas, and Milloy was an adviser on the transition team. “I was the only person on the team with a background in EPA science, so I was brought on to write the science part of the transition plan,” he said. That meant he had real influence on environmental policy. And that influence is likely to grow if Republicans retake control of the government. In the meantime, Milloy works for Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a nonprofit law firm leading the charge against renewable energy projects and regulation of fossil fuels. Ultimately, the secret science proposal didn’t make it through the final approval process before Trump left office. When I asked Milloy if he thought a Republican-led EPA would take up the proposal again, he replied, “That is on my agenda.”

Also on the agenda: defunding the EPA and handing environmental regulation over to the states. But most of all, reclaiming his Trump-era wins on air pollution, particularly stalling or rolling back regulations on PM2.5. Those regulations are all the more critical to the climate fight today given the legal attack on the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Particulate matter and greenhouse gas emissions are mostly generated by the same activity — the combustion of fossil fuels — so if the agency can’t regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, it can accomplish similar goals by tightening restrictions on particulate matter, something Milloy has been pointing out to conservatives for decades.

After Trump left office, the EPA’s disbanded Particulate Matter Review Panel went ahead and published their work in the New England Journal of Medicine. “We unequivocally and unanimously concluded that the current PM2.5 standards do not adequately protect public health,” they wrote. Under President Joe Biden, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee agreed, and the EPA is in the process of strengthening the standards.

“It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed.”

Milloy is hoping a lawsuit before the D.C. District Court will roll those efforts back. His latest battle against air pollution regulations is happening amid not only an endless respiratory health pandemic, but also a steady stream of studies pointing to the millions of people around the world still dying early thanks to air pollution. According to Milloy, it’s all fraud.

“What I think the right wing has done is try to saw the legs off the infrastructure that holds up environmental decision-making,” Eric Schaeffer, an EPA employee-turned-whistleblower and executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, said. “It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed. … We’re seeing right now the impacts of a decades-long campaign to undermine science.”
 

From Tobacco to Wildfire Smoke

Like many of the folks who went on to battle climate regulation, Milloy got his start working for the tobacco industry in the 1990s, particularly dealing with the issue of secondhand smoke. He ran the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, a front group for Philip Morris that worked to counteract efforts to regulate air pollution. Memos outlining the creation of TASCC could pass as mission statements for Milloy’s enterprise today.

TASCC operated under the principle that if an economic argument can’t keep regulation at bay, the next best move is to undermine the science that regulation is based on. Almost as soon as he started working on air pollution, Milloy had new science to contend with: a 1993 epidemiological study that looked at 8,000 people across six American cities and found that exposure to fine particulate matter — PM2.5, or soot — was correlated to reduced life expectancy. Not what you want to hear when the companies you work for sell the products that produce PM2.5: cigarettes, cars, coal, oil.

Milloy started by picking apart the methodology: The subject group was too small, researchers hadn’t controlled for other factors, and epidemiology’s reliance on observational data made it suspect. He manufactured controversy around the researchers keeping their data private, producing a paper that would become the basis for the secret science proposal. And he targeted the scientists themselves, particularly lead researcher Steven Dockery and one of the statisticians involved, C. Arden Pope.

But it’s hard to discredit scientists who are cautious about the implications of their own findings. “It was a bit bigger than we expected, and we were a bit concerned about it,” Pope said of the correlation between exposure to PM2.5 and premature death. That led the scientists to ask the American Cancer Society to rerun the analysis with an independently collected cohort of subjects. The cancer society got similar results, as did the Health Effects Institute, an organization half-funded by the EPA and half-funded by the automotive industry. Milloy kept fighting, but nothing worked. In 1997, the EPA passed its first regulation on particulate matter. It tightened those regulations every eight years or so right up until Scott Pruitt became administrator of the agency under Trump. Milloy said he put the old secret science paper “in the transition plan and talked with Pruitt about it.”

It wasn’t new science or a new strategy that handed Milloy a win after 25 years; it was just access. Being on Trump’s EPA transition team enabled him to smuggle in all sorts of ideas from his pals, including James Enstrom, a tobacco industry-funded scientist who published one of the few studies contradicting the Six Cities data. While Milloy points to Enstrom’s study as proof that Pope et al. are peddlers of “junk science,” Pope points to the 25 years’ worth of additional studies that have consistently replicated the Six Cities result.

The obscure journal that put out Enstrom’s paper in 2017 is published by another friend of Milloy’s, toxicologist Ed Calabrese, whose research focuses on the idea that a little bit of pollution and radiation are actually good for you. When Pruitt announced in 2018 that the EPA would not strengthen the regulations on particulate matter, he cited Enstrom’s study as evidence that the science on PM2.5 was “too uncertain” to act upon.
 

Regulating Air Pollution

Almost as soon as the U.S. government began to mandate quarantine in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Milloy took to Twitter to take aim at one of his favorite scientific targets, epidemiology, and warnthat Covid lockdown would lead to climate lockdown. Aside from political ideology, there’s also a PM2.5 connection with Covid. Studies have found that both chronic exposure to particulate matter and short-term exposure are Covid-19 risk factors.

Milloy’s wins on PM2.5 under Trump illustrate just how much of the U.S. regulatory apparatus the administration was able to dismantle in a short amount of time, but they’re an indicator of something else too: a willingness to go further than conservatives ever have in the battle against environmental regulation, to actually attack clean air and water. Why? In a word, climate. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, the EPA’s hands are somewhat tied when it comes to regulating the emissions of power plants. One of the few remaining ways the agency can target CO2 is by regulating particulate matter, since both are emitted via fossil fuel combustion. As Milloy put it to me recently: “PM2.5 is the most important backdoor science scheme for regulating fossil fuel emissions.”

As New York and D.C. residents choked on wildfire smoke from Canada, many saw in the apocalyptic landscape a window into a climate-changed future. The link between climate change and wildfire is nuanced: Climate change doesn’t “cause” wildfires, but it does create the low-moisture, high-heat conditions that make fires more likely and keeps them burning longer. Irregular plant growth driven by climate change can also result in excess fuel for those fires, but forest management and building development choices matter too. The data is unclear on which of these factors played the largest role in Canada’s fires, but it is very clear that climate change will bring bigger fires more frequently in the future.

For Milloy, though, no matter what the data says, there can be no lines drawn between climate change and fire or smoke and respiratory illness. Such a connection would make his clients liable for tens of millions of dollars in health costs, and then they couldn’t afford to fund him anymore.

https://theintercept.com/2023/06/11/wildfire-smoke-air-pollution-steve-milloy/

[BeaverFever]

1 minute ago, BeaverFever said:

The Next Big Emissions Fight Is an Old One: Why Some Conservatives Oppose Clean Air

As wildfire smoke hit the East Coast, Fox News claimed it was “perfectly healthy” to breathe.
 

Steve Milloy, a longtime lobbyist for polluting industries from tobacco to coal to oil and gas, is back in the news thanks to the wildfire smoke that recently blanketed the U.S. East Coast. Milloy appeared on Fox News to tell people that there are “no negative health impacts” from breathing in wildfire smoke. It’s the latest salvo in a war he’s been waging against air pollution regulation since the 1980s.

For industry operatives like Milloy, air pollution, especially the regulation of particulate matter, has long been a greater concern than climate policy. Regulations on PM2.5 —fine inhalable particles generally smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter — would require many of the same reductions in the combustion of fossil fuels that climate policy would, but without any of the politicization that has obstructed climate action for decades. It’s never been easy for politicians to publicly fight against clean air and water, and it’s doubly hard when the country’s largest city is wrapped in smoke. So Milloy took to the conservative airways to dismiss concerns about wildfire smoke, which peer-reviewed public health research has linked to higher rates of heart attacks, strokes, and emergency respiratory and immune responses.

That research means little to Milloy, who claims that the peer-review process is biased against corporate interests. Although he has a degree in biostatistics from Johns Hopkins, Milloy is not, even by his own account, a medical expert. Nor is he an epidemiologist. But while it might be easy to dismiss him, Milloy has a knack for accessing power and attention. His recent media tour is a good predictor of where we’re likely to see conservatives headed should they regain control of the government in 2024. Spoiler alert: He’d like to see the Environmental Protection Agency go away.

In early 2020, Milloy was basking in the glory of multiple wins under President Donald Trump, posting pictures with his pals inside the EPA and bragging about “eating the greens’ lunch.”

Most Read 

Trump’s EPA declined to tighten air pollution standards, rolled back mercury regulations, and disbanded the Particulate Matter Review Panel, or as Milloy put it: “blowing out that particulate matter sub-panel, another huge win.” Plus he finally got to introduce an idea he’d been tryingto get into the EPA regulatory framework since the 1990s: the so-called secret science proposal. It would lend more weight to studies that make data available to the government and other researchers, which sounds good but would have the effect of discrediting most epidemiological studies because they include human test subjects and are subject to privacy laws. “I’ve got huge wins under my belt,” Milloy told me in a 2020 interview. “It’s been tremendously satisfying for me.”

That’s a lot of policy shifts coming from someone whose ideas have often been considered fringe by his fellow conservatives. As the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Milloy called public health officials “COVID creeps” and likened quarantine to communism. He criticizes oil companies for pandering to climate activists, whom he calls “bedwetters” or “watermelons”: green on the outside but “red” on the inside. In a 2017 presentation at the annual Heartland Institute climate conference, he compared the EPA to Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

 

Related 

Republicans Are Using Big Tobacco’s Secret Science Playbook to Gut Health Rules

But the Trump EPA normalized a lot of previously fringe ideas, and Milloy was an adviser on the transition team. “I was the only person on the team with a background in EPA science, so I was brought on to write the science part of the transition plan,” he said. That meant he had real influence on environmental policy. And that influence is likely to grow if Republicans retake control of the government. In the meantime, Milloy works for Energy & Environment Legal Institute, a nonprofit law firm leading the charge against renewable energy projects and regulation of fossil fuels. Ultimately, the secret science proposal didn’t make it through the final approval process before Trump left office. When I asked Milloy if he thought a Republican-led EPA would take up the proposal again, he replied, “That is on my agenda.”

Also on the agenda: defunding the EPA and handing environmental regulation over to the states. But most of all, reclaiming his Trump-era wins on air pollution, particularly stalling or rolling back regulations on PM2.5. Those regulations are all the more critical to the climate fight today given the legal attack on the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Particulate matter and greenhouse gas emissions are mostly generated by the same activity — the combustion of fossil fuels — so if the agency can’t regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act, it can accomplish similar goals by tightening restrictions on particulate matter, something Milloy has been pointing out to conservatives for decades.

After Trump left office, the EPA’s disbanded Particulate Matter Review Panel went ahead and published their work in the New England Journal of Medicine. “We unequivocally and unanimously concluded that the current PM2.5 standards do not adequately protect public health,” they wrote. Under President Joe Biden, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee agreed, and the EPA is in the process of strengthening the standards.

“It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed.”

Milloy is hoping a lawsuit before the D.C. District Court will roll those efforts back. His latest battle against air pollution regulations is happening amid not only an endless respiratory health pandemic, but also a steady stream of studies pointing to the millions of people around the world still dying early thanks to air pollution. According to Milloy, it’s all fraud.

“What I think the right wing has done is try to saw the legs off the infrastructure that holds up environmental decision-making,” Eric Schaeffer, an EPA employee-turned-whistleblower and executive director of the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, said. “It’s hard to attack clean air and clean water, they don’t want to do that, so they suggest the science is flawed. … We’re seeing right now the impacts of a decades-long campaign to undermine science.”
 

From Tobacco to Wildfire Smoke

Like many of the folks who went on to battle climate regulation, Milloy got his start working for the tobacco industry in the 1990s, particularly dealing with the issue of secondhand smoke. He ran the Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, or TASSC, a front group for Philip Morris that worked to counteract efforts to regulate air pollution. Memos outlining the creation of TASCC could pass as mission statements for Milloy’s enterprise today.

TASCC operated under the principle that if an economic argument can’t keep regulation at bay, the next best move is to undermine the science that regulation is based on. Almost as soon as he started working on air pollution, Milloy had new science to contend with: a 1993 epidemiological study that looked at 8,000 people across six American cities and found that exposure to fine particulate matter — PM2.5, or soot — was correlated to reduced life expectancy. Not what you want to hear when the companies you work for sell the products that produce PM2.5: cigarettes, cars, coal, oil.

Milloy started by picking apart the methodology: The subject group was too small, researchers hadn’t controlled for other factors, and epidemiology’s reliance on observational data made it suspect. He manufactured controversy around the researchers keeping their data private, producing a paper that would become the basis for the secret science proposal. And he targeted the scientists themselves, particularly lead researcher Steven Dockery and one of the statisticians involved, C. Arden Pope.

But it’s hard to discredit scientists who are cautious about the implications of their own findings. “It was a bit bigger than we expected, and we were a bit concerned about it,” Pope said of the correlation between exposure to PM2.5 and premature death. That led the scientists to ask the American Cancer Society to rerun the analysis with an independently collected cohort of subjects. The cancer society got similar results, as did the Health Effects Institute, an organization half-funded by the EPA and half-funded by the automotive industry. Milloy kept fighting, but nothing worked. In 1997, the EPA passed its first regulation on particulate matter. It tightened those regulations every eight years or so right up until Scott Pruitt became administrator of the agency under Trump. Milloy said he put the old secret science paper “in the transition plan and talked with Pruitt about it.”

It wasn’t new science or a new strategy that handed Milloy a win after 25 years; it was just access. Being on Trump’s EPA transition team enabled him to smuggle in all sorts of ideas from his pals, including James Enstrom, a tobacco industry-funded scientist who published one of the few studies contradicting the Six Cities data. While Milloy points to Enstrom’s study as proof that Pope et al. are peddlers of “junk science,” Pope points to the 25 years’ worth of additional studies that have consistently replicated the Six Cities result.

The obscure journal that put out Enstrom’s paper in 2017 is published by another friend of Milloy’s, toxicologist Ed Calabrese, whose research focuses on the idea that a little bit of pollution and radiation are actually good for you. When Pruitt announced in 2018 that the EPA would not strengthen the regulations on particulate matter, he cited Enstrom’s study as evidence that the science on PM2.5 was “too uncertain” to act upon.
 

Regulating Air Pollution

Almost as soon as the U.S. government began to mandate quarantine in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Milloy took to Twitter to take aim at one of his favorite scientific targets, epidemiology, and warnthat Covid lockdown would lead to climate lockdown. Aside from political ideology, there’s also a PM2.5 connection with Covid. Studies have found that both chronic exposure to particulate matter and short-term exposure are Covid-19 risk factors.

Milloy’s wins on PM2.5 under Trump illustrate just how much of the U.S. regulatory apparatus the administration was able to dismantle in a short amount of time, but they’re an indicator of something else too: a willingness to go further than conservatives ever have in the battle against environmental regulation, to actually attack clean air and water. Why? In a word, climate. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, the EPA’s hands are somewhat tied when it comes to regulating the emissions of power plants. One of the few remaining ways the agency can target CO2 is by regulating particulate matter, since both are emitted via fossil fuel combustion. As Milloy put it to me recently: “PM2.5 is the most important backdoor science scheme for regulating fossil fuel emissions.”

As New York and D.C. residents choked on wildfire smoke from Canada, many saw in the apocalyptic landscape a window into a climate-changed future. The link between climate change and wildfire is nuanced: Climate change doesn’t “cause” wildfires, but it does create the low-moisture, high-heat conditions that make fires more likely and keeps them burning longer. Irregular plant growth driven by climate change can also result in excess fuel for those fires, but forest management and building development choices matter too. The data is unclear on which of these factors played the largest role in Canada’s fires, but it is very clear that climate change will bring bigger fires more frequently in the future.

For Milloy, though, no matter what the data says, there can be no lines drawn between climate change and fire or smoke and respiratory illness. Such a connection would make his clients liable for tens of millions of dollars in health costs, and then they couldn’t afford to fund him anymore.

https://theintercept.com/2023/06/11/wildfire-smoke-air-pollution-steve-milloy/

Republicans’ decades-long crusade against EPA and any and all environmental protections proves that they are the party of corporate interests not people.  There are just about ZERO people of any social class class who complain that their air and water is too clean, or who are indifferent to increased pollution and contamination, yet this has been a central piece of the Republican agenda for more than a generation 

[CdnFox]

20 minutes ago, BeaverFever said:

Fox News claimed it was “perfectly healthy” to breathe.

Wait - are you saying the left DOESN"T think it's healthy to breathe?

Great - sin tax on oxygen in 3...2,,,1.....

[Michael Hardner]

23 minutes ago, BeaverFever said:

Republicans’ decades-long crusade against EPA and any and all environmental protections proves that they are the party of corporate interests not people.   

And yet they founded it.  Also mounted the first complex, multi-lateral, international environmental response to threats against the ozone layer in the 1990s.

 

Instead of leading, they now go to the lowest denominator swing vote and reinforce their prejudices strongly, flatter the ignorant, in order to gain their vote and hold on to power. It's an existential threat to democracy actually.

[reason10]

23 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

And yet they founded it.  Also mounted the first complex, multi-lateral, international environmental response to threats against the ozone layer in the 1990s.

 

Instead of leading, they now go to the lowest denominator swing vote and reinforce their prejudices strongly, flatter the ignorant, in order to gain their vote and hold on to power. It's an existential threat to democracy actually.

Republicans against the EPA? A Republican president (Nixon) signed it into law.

As far as the ozone hoax, here is probably the first REAL science you'll ever read in your entire life.

http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/environment/ozonefreon_fraud.htm

Our upper atmosphere does contain Ozone (O3) (a compound made up of three oxygen atoms) as claimed by government and new age people. The atmosphere also contains a large amount of natural oxygen (O2) (made up of two oxygen atoms) in its natural state. About twenty per cent of the air we breath is Natural Oxygen (O2). Ozone is formed in the atmosphere by a break up on natural oxygen molecules (O2). This break up occurs in the atmosphere when certain ultraviolet sun rays strike Oxygen molecules and split them in half. The split single Oxygen atoms (O1) are very unstable, and quickly attach themselves to other natural occurring Oxygen molecules (O2) with two Oxygen atoms to form Ozone (O3). At any given time, there are several tons of Ozone produced every second in the atmosphere five to twenty five miles above the earth. As long as there is natural Oxygen molecules (O2) and sun light, there will be Ozone (O3), a natural law of basic science.

Ozone, itself, is very unstable chemically. When formed, it quickly attaches itself to other substances in the air. The upper air contains a number of impurities such as chlorine monoxide, an unstable substance reported by several government agencies. These same government agencies claim this chloride substance is chemically derived from Freon® and other similar man made substances.

However, as already reported by Dr. Ray and others, Freon® cannot rise into the atmosphere because it is heavier than air by a minimum of a four-to-one ratio. Freon® cannot defy the laws of physics or gravity. So, what is the source of atmospheric chlorine? Most of it comes form the natural evaporation of sea water which contains salt, a compound containing chlorides. The other major source of chlorides is from volcanic eruptions, which are not controlled by man. Dr. Ray’s data shows that the upper atmosphere at any given time contains 50 to 60 times as much chloride as is produced annually by all processes in use by man. Sea water evaporation alone produces 600 million tons of chlorides per year as compared to 750,000 tons per year of Freon® type production. This alone is a ratio of 800 to 1. The sea water evaporation and volcanic eruptions have been going on since God created the earth.

Now we come to the much discussed "Ozone Hole" in the Antarctic (South Pole) area. Studies by a number of sources show that, each year, at the end of the dark, cold (-80F) Antarctic winter an Ozone Hole (thin area) appears, lasts for three to five weeks, and then disappears. Let us now recall that Ozone forms when sun light strikes Oxygen molecules. Very few rays from the sun reach the Antarctic during Antarctic winters. When there is no sun light, Ozone will not be formed in the upper air.

Unfortunately, the current Ozone Hole Theory is being pushed by an ignorant, arrogant group of ENVIRONMENTAL ELITISTS working daily to promote a socialist plan of PEOPLE CONTROL. They are supported by radical environmental groups with no interest in the welfare of American citizens and who are atheistic in their outlook. These ELITISTS draw support from the news media, tax free foundations, and many special interests.

[impartialobserver]

On 6/9/2023 at 5:58 PM, Hodad said:

Rather than cuisine and shopping, Ellensburg is most notable for the pervasive smell of cow shit. Lol

Ellensburg ended up being the end destination because my brother-in-law was having foot problems and so bowed out. the original destination was Seattle. However, with foot problems and a major incline (Snoqualmie) coming up.. probably best to bow out. We had already endured quite the climb coming up from the south to Baker City, OR. An elevation gain of 3,000 feet over 18 miles at 95 degrees and no shade whatsoever is exhausting.