Welcome to your weekend open thread. It’s looks like it’s going to be a beautiful weekend. I’m going to spend part of my weekend canvassing. I’ve resolved to do at least one GOTV activity per week.
This ad by David Vitter has to win the award for most racist video of the campaign season:
Holy sh… Melancon should just show commercials of a man in diapers being spanked by a prostitute. Seriously, what does he have to lose now?
Climate Progess broke a story about a new Smithsonian exhibit funded by the Koch brothers that suggests that climate change is a good thing.
It also builds off a joint effort by TP and Climate Progress to investigate David Koch’s funding of a dreadful Smithsonian Institute exhibit (see “Must-see video: Polluter-funded Smithsonian exhibit whitewashes danger of human-caused climate change: Koch money and dubious displays put credibility of entire museum and science staff on the line”).
Mayer interview me and the fact checker followed up. Indeed, this piece is doubly devastating because the New Yorker remains one of the few major magazines that still fact checks line by line. The whole piece is worth reading. The end focuses on the Smithsonian story:
The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum. The accompanying text says, “During the period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.” An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”
Such ideas uncannily echo the Koch message. The company’s January newsletter to employees, for instance, argues that “fluctuations in the earth’s climate predate humanity,” and concludes, “Since we can’t control Mother Nature, let’s figure out how to get along with her changes.” Joseph Romm, a physicist who runs the Web site ClimateProgress.org, is infuriated by the Smithsonian’s presentation. “The whole exhibit whitewashes the modern climate issue,” he said. “I think the Kochs wanted to be seen as some sort of high-minded company, associated with the greatest natural-history and science museum in the country. But the truth is, the exhibit is underwritten by big-time polluters, who are underground funders of action to stop efforts to deal with this threat to humanity. I think the Smithsonian should have drawn the line.”
So the upside of climate change is that there will be so much pressure on human populations that we’ll evolve? Is that what they call turning lemons into lemonade? Our tranformation into a corporatocracy is almost complete.