Day: March 14, 2017

Still evading the issues: Daily Bullshit, March 8-14, 2017

benfell

Updates

  1. March 10, 12:44 pm:
    • California’s drought is probably over, but Jerry Brown is waiting to end the associated state of emergency.[1] (California Drought)
  2. March 12, 01:13 am:
  3. March 12, 10:11 am:
  4. March 12, 2:02 pm:
    • The Hill reports on the struggle to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.[4]
  5. March 13, 1:53 am:
    • Chris Hedges believes The End of Civilization may well soon be at hand.[5]
    • “Sen. John McCain suggested Sunday ‘there’s a lot of shoes to drop’ once more information is known about President Donald Trump and his associates’ ties to Russia.”[6] (Golden Showers)
  6. March 13, 2017, 6:21 pm:
    • Scotland’s First Minister will be seeking a new referendum on independence from the United Kingdom.[7] (Scottish Independence)
  7. March 14, 4:23 am:
    • Nate Silver argues that “there really was a liberal media bubble.”[8] (2016 Horse Race)
    • The Congressional Budget Office has ‘scored’ the Republican bill to ‘repeal and replace’ Obamacare.[9] (Obamacare)
    • Zack Beauchamp points out that right-wing (probably authoritarian) populism is strongest in social democracies and among well-off but older and non-college educated people.[10] (Dumbocrats)
  8. March 14, 10:10 am:
    • I finally remembered where I’d seen a map of what regions of the U.S. are predominantly settled by which ethnic groups[11] and fixed my footnoting for the analysis in Dumbocrats accordingly.
  9. March 14, 12:36 pm:
    • The Guardian keeps Zack Beauchamp’s view on left-wing economics in perspective.[12] (Dumbocrats)
  10. March 14, 1:39 pm:
    • Added a cartoon by Mr. Fish to the analysis in Dumbocrats
    • More footnote fixes. Sigh….
  11. March 14, 6:13 pm:
    • The Republican effort to ‘repeal and replace’ Obamacare still isn’t going well.[13] (Obamacare)
  12. March 14, 11:57 pm:
    • The White House backed down on its claims that Barack Obama wiretapped Donald Trump.[14] (Golden Showers)

Nevada

Matthew C. Klein, “Will Nevada ever recover from the housing bust?” Financial Times, March 6, 2017, https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/03/06/2185515/will-nevada-ever-recover-from-the-housing-bust/

Basic Income

Paul Basken, “Universal Basic Income: An Idea Whose Scholarly Time Has Come?” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2017, http://www.chronicle.com/article/Universal-Basic-Income-An/239438

Uber

Laura Bliss, “Is Uber Over?” CityLab, March 9, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/commute/2017/03/is-uber-over/518727/

Muslim Ban

Reid Wilson, “Four states suing to block Trump’s new travel ban,” Hill, March 9, 2017, http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/323226-four-states-sue-to-stop-trumps-new-travel-ban

Golden Showers

Whether Donald Trump’s team had or did not have connections to Russia is one issue. Whether Russia interfered in the U.S. election is another. The issues might be related, but we don’t even know if either allegation is true, let alone what relationship may exist between the two. I’ve already rejected the evidence available so far for the latter,[15] and nothing has appeared since to change my view.[16] As to the former, apparently, “former and current US officials have stated that there is not (at least not yet) evidence of collusion between Trump’s circle and Russia.”[17] Are you fucking kidding me? But I guess we’re going to keep yammering about this bullshit anyway, as if repeating unverifiable claims offers some sort of verification. Anything, after all, to avoid dealing with the real issues in last year’s campaign.

Look, I understand that the Left has issues with trusting Trump. He has done little to deserve anyone’s trust and Sean Spicer’s performance in backpedalling on Trump’s claim that Obama wiretapped him[18] is one more example why. But the real reason that Hillary Clinton lost was that the Left has, for the most part and for decades, decided to piss on the poor and on working people. Republicans may indeed be exploiting resentment,[19] but at least they acknowledged some of that resentment, which the Left still refuses to do.[20]

Also, one more point: Let’s stipulate that Trump and his team lie a lot. Indeed, and specifically relevant to the matter at hand, “despite the Trump team’s denials, Russian officials acknowledged that they had repeated contacts with the Trump campaign.”[21] I am disturbed that I even have to say this, but that only means we cannot trust anything Trump or his administration says. It does not make the opposite of everything they say true, let alone either of the claims at issue here.

Ryan Goodman, “A Supplement to Nicholas Kristof’s Ten Dots Connecting Trump to Russia,” Just Security, March 9, 2017, https://www.justsecurity.org/38632/supplement-nicholas-kristofs-ten-dots-connecting-trump-russia/

Nicholas Kristof, “Connecting Trump’s Dots to Russia,” New York Times, March 9, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/opinion/connecting-trumps-dots-to-russia.html

Nolan D. McCaskill, “McCain on Trump-Russia probes: ‘Lot of shoes to drop from this centipede,'” Politico, March 12, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/mccain-russia-trump-235966

Ted Mann, “White House Back-Pedals on Claim Obama Wiretapped Trump’s Phones,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-back-pedals-on-claim-obama-wiretapped-trumps-phones-1489439784

California Drought

Adam Nagourney, “When Is a Drought Over? A Wet California Wants to Know,” New York Times, March 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/us/california-drought-snowpack.html

Gender Conformity and Sexual Orientation

Suffice it to say, this study’s results were unexpected.[22] I would expect an especially vigorous response from queer theorists. (Yes, there really is something called ‘queer theory’ in academia. I do not completely buy into it, meaning I accept that sex and gender are not synonymous, but I’m just not ready to accept a complete divorce between the two, with gender cast exclusively as a social construction. That said, our differences are not about scholarly integrity, the theory is real, and there’s been a lot of real work done in this realm over a period of decades.) For now at least, I’ll probably mostly leave it to them.

* * *

Having slept on this, I do want to pose a question in response to a question. In the final paragraph, Patrick Ryan Grzanka asks “why we’re so invested in this purported link [between gender conformity and sexuality] in the first place.”[23] That would be the link this study supports. In the article’s paraphrase, he points out that “[t]he authors appear to regard gender nonconformity as the primary marker of gayness,” and yeah, as he continues (still in paraphrase), this “doesn’t align with current research suggesting that your individual preferences for either stereotypically male or female behaviors and traits has little to do with your sexual orientation.”[24]

I think Grzanka is headed in the right direction. But gender roles have apparently existed since prehistoric times with men mostly being the ones going on hunts[25] and women (providing the bulk of food) mostly gathering plant-based foods.[26] I’m trying to avoid a hasty generalization, but though cultural understandings of gender vary, I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a society where gender roles do not exist. According to Scott Sernau,

As a rule, hunter-gatherers have gender-divided societies: The men hunt and the women gather. With their longer legs, men have an advantage in sprinting after game, and their longer arms allow them to throw spears father. Young women are also likely to have young children, and it’s very difficult to chase down your dinner with a 2-year-old in one arm![27]

This passage is actually a bit problematic, but it, too, points toward a biological connection between gender and sex—a link that queer theorists dispute. An immediate question is why the role of carrying a toddler, especially one beyond breast-feeding age, seems to be women’s work. But the second question is why gender roles persist today: If they are, as folks on the Left are inclined to believe (and I think correctly), superfluous, then why haven’t they disappeared along with any number of other customs that have gone by the wayside?

It’s easy enough to point to problems with gender role specialization. One of Riane Eisler’s very important points is that, in modern society, we devalue what we assign principally as women’s work, especially caring work. How, for example, can we claim to think children’s education is important when we pay teachers so poorly? Even more fundamentally, how can we claim to value our children when we barely pay child care workers minimum wage? Why are housewives unpaid?[28] In light of these questions, gender role specialization appears to enable a devaluation of over half of our species. I don’t see how that’s a good thing.

And that’s my point. If gender role specialization is bad, then why does it continue to exist at all? What advantages, if any, does it offer?

On the other hand, if gender in fact has a biological basis, it’s a lot less mysterious that toddlers might act on gender roles innately. If sexual orientation also has a biological basis (which also seems to be the direction of current research), it’s a lot less mysterious that there might be the correlation between the two that this study reports.

But even this really begs the question. Let’s say that, indeed, there is a biological basis for gender. Why did the biology evolve the way it did? How is it an advantage, in so many species, that females assume primary responsibility for rearing the young?

It just really isn’t enough here to to say women get pregnant and lactate. In species where males and females are born in roughly equal numbers, there’s no advantage I see to freeing males to impregnate other females—in the crudest light, they’ll already have been impregnated by other males.

I think I’m missing some clue.

Michael Price, “Toddler play may give clues to sexual orientation,” Science, March 10, 2017, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/toddler-play-may-give-clues-sexual-orientation

Passwords

I’ve been arguing for some time that excessively complex password rules essentially force the ordinary user to write their password on a scrap of paper to be stuffed into their top desk drawer. Which is usually left unlocked. Which is the first place an attacker with physical access will look. Jeff Atwood makes a similar point in arguing that such rules penalize über-geeks, and a bunch of other good points, some of which I’ve seen before (among these, he reproduces an old XKCD cartoon on the topic of entropy), besides.[29]

Yes, I am quite well aware that this is not the conventional wisdom. I’ve also had bad luck with password generators that actually integrate properly with browsers (How about when Atwood’s über-geek tries to run his password manager and it flatly fails to start due to some stupid—and there are lots of these—upgrade issue?)

But this is also an issue I ran into when I was a programmer in the late 1970s and early 1980s (on the DEC systems I worked with, password length was limited to six radix-50—an extremely limited character set that I doubt is still in use anywhere—characters). It has not gone away or been properly addressed in all. that. time. Which, by itself, is another reason to call these rules bullshit (Atwood’s preferred designation[30]).

Jeff Atwood, “Password Rules Are Bullshit,” Coding Horror, March 10, 2017, https://blog.codinghorror.com/password-rules-are-bullshit/

Obamacare

The Republicans are finally having to govern. But more fundamentally, as a society, we need to agree on whether health care is a right. If it is, then it is an entitlement and needs to be treated as such. Which is not the way Barack Obama treated it, as payback for his pharmaceutical and health insurance industry benefactors,[31] but rather in the form of single-payer or “Medicare for all.”

Peter Sullivan, “Power struggle over ObamaCare repeal,” Hill, March 11, 2017, http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/323491-power-struggle-over-obamacare-repeal

Lindsey McPherson, “CBO: Lower Deficit, More Uninsured Under House Health Plan,” Congressional Quarterly Roll Call, March 13, 2017, http://www.rollcall.com/news/cbo-lower-deficit-more-uninsured-under-house-health-plan

Kelsey Snell, Sean Sullivan, and Mike DeBonis, “White House tries to salvage GOP health-care proposal as criticism mounts,” Washington Post, March 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/conservative-lawmakers-continue-to-push-back-on-obamacare-plan/2017/03/14/f7331e70-08aa-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html

The End of Civilization

I basically agree with Chris Hedges on the self-destruction of the U.S. as having dire consequences for the rest of the world. Unfortunately, his writing on this is more poetic than precise. More seriously, he takes history as an analogy for the present, which may prove to be a misuse of history, since while his historical precedents are likely instructive, in no previous case might collapse have been global. “No longer can any individual nation collapse,” Hedges writes. “World civilization will disintegrate as a whole.”[32]

But, as I said, I basically agree with Hedges. Many of the threats, especially those involving nuclear war and climate change, facing humanity are global threats.[33] To me, it seems eminently reasonable that conflagrations such as the Pentagon warns of from climate change[34] in the interconnected, globalized world that neoliberals celebrate could easily become firestorms.

I might be wrong about human extinction. That is, if the outcome of the ecosystem change we’re only beginning to experience permits humans to continue to exist.[35] But I’d have to say I’m having a hard time imagining that Hedges is wrong about civilization.

Chris Hedges, “The Dance of Death,” Truthdig, March 12, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dance_of_death_20170312

Scottish Independence

Suffice it to say, the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Theresa May does not agree,[36] which makes it hard to see how this can go anywhere, but the counterargument seems to be that the onus will now be on the U.K. parliament to deny Scots their right to self-determination, which yeah, looks pretty ugly.[37] (My own skepticism[38] might rely too heavily on the dim prospects for secession movements in the U.S.)

And it is disingenuous for anyone to claim, as Theresa May does, that “politics is not a game.”[39] That’s all it is, with terribly deadly consequences.

Andrew Learmonth, “Nicola Sturgeon to seek second referendum on Scottish independence,” National Scot, March 13, 2017, http://www.thenational.scot/news/15152259.Scotland_to_have_second_referendum_on_independence/

Tom McTague and Charlie Cooper, “Scotland pushes for independence post Brexit,” Politico, March 13, 2017, http://www.politico.eu/article/nicola-sturgeon-calls-for-second-scottish-independence-referendum/

Reuters, “‘Politics is not a game,’ says May after Scottish referendum call,” March 13, 2017, http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-scotland-game-idUKKBN16K1XW

Alastair Sloan, “If Scotland leaves, England will lose the Brexit game,” Al Jazeera, March, 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/03/england-big-loser-brexit-170312092648577.html

2016 Horse Race

Nate Silver, “There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble,” FiveThirtyEight, March 10, 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/

Dumbocrats

Zack Beauchamp’s analysis[40] is useful and I encourage you to read it. But Beauchamp misses a couple things.

The first is that to act on Beauchamp’s advice would be to appeal to racist voters or possibly to divide the country in the way that paleoconservatives recommend—along racial and ethnic lines,[41] which probably wouldn’t work.[42] This would be, yet again, to do what the Democrats have been doing for the last several decades, moving ever further to the right, trying in vain to beat the Republicans at their own game.

In more practical terms, you don’t expect to win every vote, you just seek a majority of all votes. And what that might mean is that while you don’t get every working class vote with a left-wing economic program, you hope to win enough of them to win an overall majority.

Mr. Fish, Truthdig, March 12, 2017, fair use.
Second, Beauchamp really doesn’t address this:

In places like Battle Creek, you see and hear a lot of despair. The good jobs, ones that could be turned into careers, have been replaced with an economic version of the Hunger Games. Magnifying it is the sense that “higher-ups” – the collection of distant political, economic and thought leaders – don’t see the anguish, don’t care about it and are partly responsible for it. It has made many nostalgic for a better past.[43]

Unlike in many fundamentalist movements, that better past really did exist once upon a time, largely in the 1950s and 1960s. And now that it’s gone, the people are still there, and they still need jobs. But journalists mostly just look at economic statistics that discount the long-term unemployed and ignore them. And then they wonder why so many people turned out for Trump. Now Beauchamp ignores[44] that many of them had voted for Barack Obama before, undermining any sweeping generalization that Trump voters are all racists.[45]

And I have to think there are a lot more Blacks saying things like this:

Most of the men I know didn’t vote. Nobody had the spirit this time. Trump or Hillary? Doesn’t make much difference. Things out here gonna stay the same. We had high hopes for Obama. But nothing changed. Blacks here didn’t end up being helped by him. I mean, he might have tried, but his hands were tied by both parties. Lots of us are just so frustrated. Nobody had the spirit.[46]

Here’s a hint: If you’re going to bank on the non-white vote, you’d better actually deliver for non-whites. But Barack Obama really didn’t deliver for anyone but Wall Street. (And before you trot out Obamacare, see my comment on that above.) Now, a bunch of folks don’t have jobs, the economists don’t count them, and Democrats expected us to vote for his annointed successor, Hillary Clinton, who would have delivered more of the same unemployment and the same lack of acknowledgment.

Mr. Fish, “Mourning Glory,” Truthdig, March 12, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/mourning_glory_20170312

Zack Beauchamp, “No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism,” Vox, March 13, 2017, http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/13/14698812/bernie-trump-corbyn-left-wing-populism

Chris Arnade, “Nostalgia: the yearning that will continue to carry the Trump message forward,” Guardian, March 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/14/trump-voters-michigan-iowa-jobs-economy

  1. [1]Adam Nagourney, “When Is a Drought Over? A Wet California Wants to Know,” New York Times, March 10, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/10/us/california-drought-snowpack.html↩
  2. [2]Michael Price, “Toddler play may give clues to sexual orientation,” Science, March 10, 2017, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/toddler-play-may-give-clues-sexual-orientation↩
  3. [3]Jeff Atwood, “Password Rules Are Bullshit,” Coding Horror, March 10, 2017, https://blog.codinghorror.com/password-rules-are-bullshit/↩
  4. [4]Peter Sullivan, “Power struggle over ObamaCare repeal,” Hill, March 11, 2017, http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/323491-power-struggle-over-obamacare-repeal↩
  5. [5]Chris Hedges, “The Dance of Death,” Truthdig, March 12, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dance_of_death_20170312↩
  6. [6]Nolan D. McCaskill, “McCain on Trump-Russia probes: ‘Lot of shoes to drop from this centipede,'” Politico, March 12, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/mccain-russia-trump-235966↩
  7. [7]Andrew Learmonth, “Nicola Sturgeon to seek second referendum on Scottish independence,” National Scot, March 13, 2017, http://www.thenational.scot/news/15152259.Scotland_to_have_second_referendum_on_independence/; Tom McTague and Charlie Cooper, “Scotland pushes for independence post Brexit,” Politico, March 13, 2017, http://www.politico.eu/article/nicola-sturgeon-calls-for-second-scottish-independence-referendum/; Reuters, “‘Politics is not a game,’ says May after Scottish referendum call,” March 13, 2017, http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-scotland-game-idUKKBN16K1XW; Alastair Sloan, “If Scotland leaves, England will lose the Brexit game,” Al Jazeera, March, 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/03/england-big-loser-brexit-170312092648577.html↩
  8. [8]Nate Silver, “There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble,” FiveThirtyEight, March 10, 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/↩
  9. [9]Lindsey McPherson, “CBO: Lower Deficit, More Uninsured Under House Health Plan,” Congressional Quarterly Roll Call, March 13, 2017, http://www.rollcall.com/news/cbo-lower-deficit-more-uninsured-under-house-health-plan↩
  10. [10]Zack Beauchamp, “No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism,” Vox, March 13, 2017, http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/13/14698812/bernie-trump-corbyn-left-wing-populism↩
  11. [11]Max Fisher, “3 maps that explain America,” Vox, July 4, 2014, http://www.vox.com/2014/7/4/5868921/three-maps-that-explain-america↩
  12. [12]Chris Arnade, “Nostalgia: the yearning that will continue to carry the Trump message forward,” Guardian, March 14, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/mar/14/trump-voters-michigan-iowa-jobs-economy↩
  13. [13]Kelsey Snell, Sean Sullivan, and Mike DeBonis, “White House tries to salvage GOP health-care proposal as criticism mounts,” Washington Post, March 14, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/conservative-lawmakers-continue-to-push-back-on-obamacare-plan/2017/03/14/f7331e70-08aa-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html↩
  14. [14]Ted Mann, “White House Back-Pedals on Claim Obama Wiretapped Trump’s Phones,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-back-pedals-on-claim-obama-wiretapped-trumps-phones-1489439784↩
  15. [15]David Benfell, “Blaming the Russians,” Not Housebroken, December 15, 2016, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=9151↩
  16. [16]David Benfell, “Donald Trump must supply evidence to support wiretapping claims,” (Supposedly) Daily Bullshit, March 7, 2017, https://parts-unknown.org/reading/2017/03/07/donald-trump-must-supply-evidence-to-support-wiretapping-claims-daily-bullshit-march-5-2017/↩
  17. [17]Ryan Goodman, “A Supplement to Nicholas Kristof’s Ten Dots Connecting Trump to Russia,” Just Security, March 9, 2017, https://www.justsecurity.org/38632/supplement-nicholas-kristofs-ten-dots-connecting-trump-russia/↩
  18. [18]Ted Mann, “White House Back-Pedals on Claim Obama Wiretapped Trump’s Phones,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-back-pedals-on-claim-obama-wiretapped-trumps-phones-1489439784↩
  19. [19]Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).↩
  20. [20]Chris Hedges, “Donald Trump’s Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites,” Truthdig, March 5, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/donald_trumps_greatest_allies_are_the_liberal_elites_20170305↩
  21. [21]Ryan Goodman, “A Supplement to Nicholas Kristof’s Ten Dots Connecting Trump to Russia,” Just Security, March 9, 2017, https://www.justsecurity.org/38632/supplement-nicholas-kristofs-ten-dots-connecting-trump-russia/↩
  22. [22]Michael Price, “Toddler play may give clues to sexual orientation,” Science, March 10, 2017, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/toddler-play-may-give-clues-sexual-orientation↩
  23. [23]Patrick Ryan Grzanka, quoted in Michael Price, “Toddler play may give clues to sexual orientation,” Science, March 10, 2017, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/toddler-play-may-give-clues-sexual-orientation↩
  24. [24]Michael Price, “Toddler play may give clues to sexual orientation,” Science, March 10, 2017, http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/toddler-play-may-give-clues-sexual-orientation↩
  25. [25]Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt, 1997).↩
  26. [26]Scott Sernau, Worlds Apart: Social Inequalities in a Global Economy, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2006).↩
  27. [27]Scott Sernau, Worlds Apart: Social Inequalities in a Global Economy, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge, 2006), 72.↩
  28. [28]Riane Eisler, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics (San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler, 2007).↩
  29. [29]Jeff Atwood, “Password Rules Are Bullshit,” Coding Horror, March 10, 2017, https://blog.codinghorror.com/password-rules-are-bullshit/↩
  30. [30]Jeff Atwood, “Password Rules Are Bullshit,” Coding Horror, March 10, 2017, https://blog.codinghorror.com/password-rules-are-bullshit/↩
  31. [31]David Benfell, “Obamacare, the neoliberal consensus, and a kid fighting cancer,” Not Housebroken, May 11, 2016, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=8911↩
  32. [32]Chris Hedges, “The Dance of Death,” Truthdig, March 12, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_dance_of_death_20170312↩
  33. [33]Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “It is now two and a half minutes to midnight,” January 26, 2017, http://thebulletin.org/press-release/it-now-two-and-half-minutes-midnight10432; Edward “Rocky” Kolb et al., “Three minutes and counting,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 19, 2015, http://thebulletin.org/three-minutes-and-counting7938; Robert Socolow et al., “An open letter to President Obama: The time on the Doomsday Clock is five minutes to midnight,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 14, 2013, http://thebulletin.org/open-letter-president-obama-time-doomsday-clock-five-minutes-midnight↩
  34. [34]Laura Barron-Lopez, “Pentagon: Climate change a national security threat,” Hill, October 13, 2014, http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/220575-pentagon-unveils-plan-to-fight-climate-change↩
  35. [35]David Benfell, “On the possibility of human extinction,” Not Housebroken, July 23, 2016, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=9218; David Benfell, “We have failed the test,” Not Housebroken, February 9, 2016, https://disunitedstates.org/?p=9145↩
  36. [36]Andrew Learmonth, “Nicola Sturgeon to seek second referendum on Scottish independence,” National Scot, March 13, 2017, http://www.thenational.scot/news/15152259.Scotland_to_have_second_referendum_on_independence/; Tom McTague and Charlie Cooper, “Scotland pushes for independence post Brexit,” Politico, March 13, 2017, http://www.politico.eu/article/nicola-sturgeon-calls-for-second-scottish-independence-referendum/; Reuters, “‘Politics is not a game,’ says May after Scottish referendum call,” March 13, 2017, http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-scotland-game-idUKKBN16K1XW↩
  37. [37]Tom McTague and Charlie Cooper, “Scotland pushes for independence post Brexit,” Politico, March 13, 2017, http://www.politico.eu/article/nicola-sturgeon-calls-for-second-scottish-independence-referendum/; Alastair Sloan, “If Scotland leaves, England will lose the Brexit game,” Al Jazeera, March, 2017, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/03/england-big-loser-brexit-170312092648577.html↩
  38. [38]David Benfell, “Scottish parliament to vote on Brexit,” (Supposedly) Daily Bullshit, February 10, 2017, https://parts-unknown.org/reading/2017/02/10/scotland-parliament-to-vote-on-brexit-daily-bullshit-february-7-2017/; David Benfell, “Probably not a possible way forward for Scotland,” (Supposedly) Daily Bullshit, March 4, 2017, https://parts-unknown.org/reading/2017/03/04/probably-not-a-possible-way-forward-for-scotland-daily-bullshit-march-4-2017/↩
  39. [39]Reuters, “‘Politics is not a game,’ says May after Scottish referendum call,” March 13, 2017, http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-scotland-game-idUKKBN16K1XW↩
  40. [40]Zack Beauchamp, “No easy answers: why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism,” Vox, March 13, 2017, http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/13/14698812/bernie-trump-corbyn-left-wing-populism↩
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