GOP senators react to Trump’s Charlottesville comments: “Mr. President – we must call evil by its name.”

Vox

GOP senators react to Trump’s Charlottesville comments: “Mr. President – we must call evil by its name.”

Updated by Tara Golshan August 12, 2017

Sen. Cory Gardner Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

It was perfectly clear what President Donald Trump was avoiding in his comments about the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia Saturday. He condemned the hate and bigotry “on many sides.” He didn’t call out white nationalists or supremacists by name.

His words did not go unnoticed — prompting top GOP senators, like Sens. Chuck Grassley (IA), Orrin Hatch (UT), John McCain (AZ), Rob Portman (OH), Cory Gardner (CO) and Marco Rubio (FL), to call out the president for sidestepping the force of evil at play.

Cory Gardner @SenCory Gardner Mr. President – we must call evil by its name. These were white supremacists and this was domestic terrorism

Rubio followed suit, pressing the need for Trump to acknowledge the events that transpired.

Marco Rubio @marcorubio Very important for the nation to hear @potus describe events in #Charlottesville for what they are, a terror attack by #whitesupremacists

For context, keep in mind that these are not back-bench Republicans. They’re well-known and influential players in Republican politics. They’re also not reflexive critics. They’ve defended Trump in the past. From this perspective, it’s a big deal to see senators buck their party leader so forcefully.

Still, their obvious statements against neo-Nazis shouldn’t normally look like an act of political courage. They are telling Trump that he needs to call today’s events for what they are: an act of domestic terrorism by white supremacists and white nationalists.

Chuck Grassley @ChuckGrassley What “WhiteNationalist” are doing in Charlottesville is homegrown terrorism that can’t be tolerated anymore that what Any extremist does.

Senator Hatch Office @senorrinhatch Their tiki torches may be fueled by citronella but their ideas are fueled by hate, & have no place in civil society.

Senator Hatch Office @senorrinhatch We should call evil by its name. My brother didn’t give his life fighting Hitler for Nazi ideas to go unchallenged here at home. -OGH

Rob Portman @senrobportman The tragedy in Charlottesville this afternoon was domestic terrorism. We must all condemn hatred and white nationalism.

On Saturday, crowds of white Americans donned confederate flags and swastikas to march in the name of bigotry and hate leaving one counter-protester dead and injuring more than a dozen others. A rally goer purposefully drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters — an act that Trump has found it easy to call terrorism in the past.

In a statement, McCain said the event put the ideals fought for in the Civil War at stake:

Our Founders fought a revolution for the idea that all men are created equal. The heirs of that revolution fought a Civil War to save our nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to that revolutionary proposition.

Nothing less is at stake on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, where a violent attack has taken at least one American life and injured many others in a confrontation between our better angels and our worst demons.

White supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals that define us as a people and make our nation special.

As we mourn the tragedy that has occurred in Charlottesville, American patriots of all colors and creeds must come together to defy those who raise the flag of hatred and bigotry.

As many have pointed out through the day, condemning these actions is among the lowest bars to pass — but it is one that Trump decidedly chose not to cross. He ignored questions from reporters asking if he condemns white supremacy.

Instead, as Vox’s Dara Lind wrote, the president ended up “signaling to the white supremacists that he is on their side.”

Neo-Nazis are rallying in Virginia today. Here’s how to think about the alt-right.

VOX

Neo-Nazis are rallying in Virginia today. Here’s how to think about the alt-right.

“They believe social taboos are bullshit and want to poke holes in all of it.” —Angela Nagle

Updated by Sean Illing August 12, 2017

Members of the “alt-right” gather on the University of Virginia campus on Friday night. (Evelyn Hockstein/For The Washington Post via Getty)

On Saturday, members of the so-called “alt-right” will converge on Charlottesville, VA for the “Unite the Right” rally. The rally is taking place just a few hours after a group of torch-wielding white nationalists marched through the University of Virginia campus on Friday night.

The alt-right protesters were shouting chants like “You will not replace us” and “Blood and soil” — the latter a direct reference to Nazi ideology.

A new book by Angela Nagle, an Irish academic and writer, offers a timely exploration of the alt-right as a cultural and political force. The book is called Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. It’s a taxonomy of the alt-right — a reactionary political movement whose adherents include white nationalists like Richard Spencer and more influential people like Steve Bannon and Steven Miller, both of whom serve as key advisers for President Trump — and a survey of the subculture that spawned it.

I reached out to Nagle to talk about the book and what she learned while writing it. She sees the alt-right as a product of a cynical age, one defined by skepticism and alienation. On the right, she argues, young men have latched onto a burgeoning counterculture that rejects social taboos around race and gender. On the left, intellectual culture has become increasingly insular, creating space for reactionaries on the right.

The result, she says, “is a complete absence of any kind of hopeful inspiring vision of the future.” This is the broader sickness, she told me, and “the alt-right is just a symptom of it.”

You can read our full conversation below.

Origins of the alt-right

Sean Illing: How did this book come about?

Angela Nagle: I started studying online anti-feminist movements seven or eight years ago. At the time, what was interesting to me about them was their countercultural style, and it didn’t resemble traditional anti-feminist movements. One of the big themes of the book, really, is the fact that the same ideas can be translated through very different political and aesthetic styles. It’s very hard to describe online politics because it doesn’t take the same formation as traditional politics, and that was interesting to me. So I started studying it and just naturally found my way into this world.

Sean Illing: Is there a “Big Bang” moment for the alt-right, a cultural event that helped explode it into being?

Angela Nagle: Trump was the big explosive moment. Obviously there have been reactionary online for many years before Trump, but Trump’s campaign was the moment where it all went completely mainstream. Gamergate was very significant in bringing together a whole cross section of people who were anti–political correctness, but a lot of these people weren’t necessarily right-wing. They were cultural libertarians or free speech enthusiasts, but there wasn’t a lot of political organizing. That changed with Trump. All the anti-PC stuff, the anti-immigration politics, the trolling campaigns — Trump boosted all of that into the mainstream.

Sean Illing: When someone identifies themselves as alt-right, what are they trying to signal? Or maybe a better way to put it is what are they defining themselves against?

Angela Nagle: If they’re using the term in the strict sense, it says they’re against the idea that problems in society are socially constructed or even that most of our experiences are socially constructed. So they would say that gender is not socially constructed but a biological category. They say the same thing about race. They reject the idea that America is founded on abstract principles and instead believe it’s a product of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and that it could be no other way.

Sean Illing: I always wonder when it comes to stuff like this if it’s more about a mischievous contrarianism or if they actually believe what they’re propounding.

Angela Nagle: I think a lot of them start off by trolling and doing the anti-PC thing and resisting what they feel is dogma being shoved down their throats by liberal professors and parents, but where do you go from there? Do you reject all of these principles? There’s not much else there in the way of new ideas to replace them, so it’s very easy to end up going very far to the right at that point.

Sean Illing: Half the time, I can’t tell if they’re waging a civilizational battle or a heroic trolling campaign.

Angela Nagle: At this stage, anyone who thinks they’re doing it for LOLs is either deluding themselves or hiding behind that ironic style in order to avoid being interpreted, because at this point the stakes are actually quite high, and Trump is in the White House, and this movement has spread far beyond the confines of a few obscure message boards.

Sean Illing: For a long while, I saw the alt-right as this weird quasi-nihilistic subculture that latched onto politics purely as a tool of disruption and not necessarily as a means to some actual political outcome. But either I was wrong or at some point this movement shape-shifted into something much more serious than that.

Angela Nagle: Yeah, I think definitely the latter. But there are different components that make up the alt-right; it’s only recently that they’ve melted together. Some of the younger people who got into in the last couple of years just started out trolling and saying outrageous things for its own sake. It was almost like performance art, a kind of game.

Now I would say that it has changed, especially as more extreme and organized elements of the far right have latched onto this movement and, in some ways, helped to legitimize it. I see a rightward drift because the people who thinks it’s all funny and transgressive and ironic are bringing people in but then they have no ideas to keep them there because they don’t know what they believe in. But the extreme right groups, led by people like Richard Spencer, do know what they believe in and they do have solutions for the problems they identify.

“It’s basically a belief that the various societal norms and taboos — around race or culture or gender — are bullshit and that they’re poking holes in all of it. It’s a kind of postmodern questioning of everything.”

The psychology of the alt-right

Sean Illing: Can you give me a typical psychological profile of the kind of person drawn into the alt-right movement?

Angela Nagle: I think it’s slightly different depending on where you get drawn in. There are all kinds of characters in this movement that appeal to different people for different reasons. But I suppose the main things that they have in common, and this is why they use the term “red pill” so much, is that they feel they have stumbled upon this dark truth and that nobody is willing to reckon with or to think about what they have discovered.

Sean Illing: And what’s that dark truth?

Angela Nagle: It’s basically a belief that the various societal norms and taboos — around race or culture or gender — are bullshit and that they’re poking holes in all of it. It’s a kind of postmodern questioning of everything.

Sean Illing: The people you describe in the book, especially the younger, more online-oriented people, seem to be struggling with a contradiction: They want to be relevant in a culture they claim to hate. Or maybe they just read too much Nietzsche.

Angela Nagle: Yeah, definitely with those guys, I think they are both participants in and very disgusted by what they consider a degenerate culture. Which is why I think it’s so interesting that a political ideology that is so disgusted by modern libertinism and gender-bending sexuality and porn and everything would find a home in 4chan of all places, because these are people who spent years watching the most horrific and dehumanizing porn you can find on the web, and they all suddenly went right-wing reactionary.

Sean Illing: What does that suggest to you about the psychology of the alt-right?

Angela Nagle: I think it says that their sense of the world gone to hell was actually influenced by their own immersion in the forms of culture that they eventually saw as degenerate and ruined. But if they spent more time in the mainstream culture and in society in general, perhaps they wouldn’t have this sense that everything is degenerate and Western civilization is in ruins.

Members of the alt-right march through the University of Virginia campus. Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

The new left

Sean Illing: You use the phrase “Tumblr left” to describe the part of the online left that has made a religion of demonstrating its “wokeness.” What’s your criticism of this corner of the web?

Angela Nagle: I think that you cannot take the left out of the picture and make any sense of what’s going on, because particularly in these very online younger forms of politics, there was a battle of the subcultures going on online and then it spilled over into campus stuff as that generation of teenagers went to college.

People on the left were annoyed with me because they thought I portrayed a very small subculture on the left as representative of the left in general, but I don’t think that’s the case. I had to describe the online left accurately as I saw it, and the right was in an absolute state of panic about the fact that they were seeing all of these things happening on college campuses: speakers being shut down, platforms being denied, large groups of people ganging up on dissident voices.

Sean Illing: What have your critics on the left got wrong?

Angela Nagle: I think parts of the left have conflated my attempt to criticize this identity-based internet subculture with all of identity politics, and that’s simply not true. Identity politics gave us the women’s rights movement, the gay rights movement, the civil rights movement, and so on. It would be absurd to conflate that entire radical history with this small internet subculture.

What I criticized wasn’t identity politics in general but a specific version of identity politics that was about performative wokeness, and in particular the reason I didn’t like it was because it was very inclined to censor and it was very inclined to gang up on people. I hate that, and I think it deserves to be criticized.

Sean Illing: You touch on an argument to which I’m increasingly sympathetic, which is that the intellectual culture on the left has become narrow and reactionary in its own way.

Angela Nagle: I think you’re right, and you can see this in the free speech debate. People who are very emotionally heightened about this cannot see why you would want to invite a bad person like Milo Yiannopoulos onto a college campus, because they think why would you bring in someone who’s going to say hateful things and make minorities feel intimidated and so on.

But in shutting down its political enemies, the left has also shut down its own internal dissenters, who have always made the left intellectually vibrant. These are the people who keep the ideology from becoming fossilized because they force everyone to constantly rethink things, and these are the very voices that have been shut down. No one on the left wants to discuss taboo subjects anymore. Everyone is shut down for the tiniest of transgressions and anyone who is off message is attacked, and that’s a climate in which ideas die.

“The crisis of liberalism is that it became so cocky about the hegemony of its own ideas that it lost the ability to make the case for itself”

The future of the alt-right

Sean Illing: We seem to have reached something like peak alt-right, but in the book you suggest that the movement may not have staying power. Why?

Angela Nagle: Subcultures come and go, and the thing we now call the alt-right probably will go away. Scandals will come up. The movement will splinter into various groups. There will be infighting. But the central ideas they have put on the table will have to be dealt with, and it is very difficult to deal with them when you have such an intellectually stifling culture.

Whatever we call the alt-right now may go away, but something with a different style and the same central ideas will reemerge in its place.

Sean Illing: To be perfectly honest, I’m not confident our current political culture is capable of challenging these ideas as forcefully as we need them to be challenged.

Angela Nagle: The crisis of liberalism is that it became so cocky about the hegemony of its own ideas that it lost the ability to make the case for itself. There’s this assumption that our ideas are brilliant and beyond question and anyone who questions them can be dismissed as sexist or racist or whatever. Well, that’s not good enough, and the taboos have been broken.

It’s not enough to say what you are against. We have to specifically say what we are for and defend it. We’re in an age of enormous cynicism, and there’s a complete absence of any kind of hopeful, inspiring vision of the future. This is the real problem, and the alt-right is just a symptom of it.

Why income inequality is so much worse in the U.S. than in other rich countries

Washington Post Opinion-Rampage

Why income inequality is so much worse in the U.S. than in other rich countries

By Catherine Rampell August 11, 2017

My column Friday was about why the $15-minimum-wage-obsessed grass-roots left should get more fired up about expanding other kinds of tools to help poor people. Particularly ones that don’t make the poor more expensive to hire, such as the earned-income tax credit, food stamps, housing vouchers, etc.

These kinds of anti-poverty tools are sometimes referred to as “post-tax” policies. They’re mostly paid for by the government (i.e., taxpayers) rather than by employers or workers. The column mentioned that the United States relies far less on them than other developed countries. Here’s some more detail on that point.

Below is a chart, from University of Oxford economist Max Roser, showing a measure of income inequality called a Gini coefficient. Gini coefficients can run anywhere from zero to one. A value of zero would mean that income was distributed perfectly evenly among everyone in society; a value of one would mean that a single person has all the income and everyone else gets nothing. In other words, the higher the measure, the more unequal the income distribution.

The orange points show Gini coefficients for market income — that is, what people earn before the tax and transfer system comes into play.

The United States doesn’t exactly rank here as the most egalitarian advanced country on Earth, but we don’t totally embarrass ourselves. On pre-tax-and-transfer income inequality, we do about as well as France.

Now look at the blue points, which show Gini coefficients after considering tax and transfer spending, i.e., redistribution.

The United States does much, much worse. The only developed country with more unequal income distribution is Mexico. (Chile also is more unequal, though it’s not usually categorized as an advanced/developed economy.)

As I’ve said before, I favor using both pre-tax and post-tax policies to reduce inequality and help the poor. These data suggest there’s a whole lot more room for improvement on post-tax redistribution especially.

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.

Transforming the world’s least sustainable city

Cities Rising: Transforming the world’s least sustainable city

Katie Couric, Cities Rising August 9, 2017

https://www.yahoo.com/katiecouric/transforming-worlds-least-sustainable-city-221217694.html

By Alexandra Zaslow

Phoenix is throwing away the reputation it once had as the world’s least sustainable city and making great strides to become more resourceful.

It has launched a Reimagine Phoenix Initiative with a goal to increase the city’s waste diversion rate to 40 percent by 2020 — and it doesn’t stop there.

“We’re going straight to zero waste by the year 2050,” said Ginger Spencer, the city’s public works director.

With 1 million tons of waste being sent to the landfill annually, Phoenix began to devise ways to become a more sustainable city.

The Resource Innovation Campus was created to “redefine” trash for Phoenix’s residents and businesses.

“Ironically, one of our most innovative departments is the [one] that most people would think was the most kind of old-school, traditional department,” Mayor Greg Stanton said. “We’re turning it on its head and saying that needs to be the most innovative place in the entire city of Phoenix.”

On the Resource Innovation Campus sits a 27-acre transfer station for compost and recycling, as well as 50 acres of land for businesses. In partnership with the city, the Resource Innovation and Solutions Network Incubator, located on the campus, works with entrepreneurs and small businesses to turn the city’s trash into resources.

“What we’re throwing away and things that we’re recycling actually have a tremendous amount of value,” said Alicia Marseille, director of the incubator.

Sustainability isn’t just happening on that campus: The entire city of Phoenix is working to become more resourceful.

Across the city, streetlights are switching over to LEDs and roofs of city buildings and facilities are switching to solar.

“Phoenix is leading the way,” Stanton said. “That’s what we owe future generations.”

A photographer captured these dismal photos of life in North Korea on his phone

Business Insider

A photographer captured these dismal photos of life in North Korea on his phone

Melia Robinson August 10, 2017

Children walk to school in Tumangang, North Korea, in August 2015.Xiaolu Chu/Getty

As North Korea continues its saber-rattling about nuclear strikes, we still know very little about the country.

The North Korean government is notoriously secretive. Upon entering the country, visitors are instructed on what they can and cannot take pictures of. Customs agents inspect your cellphone and other digital devices, including cameras, tablets, and storage cards, for banned content.

These restrictions prompted Getty photographer Xiaolu Chu to travel by train through the country in August 2015, documenting everyday life through his phone lens. He told Business Insider it was too risky to use a high-end camera because locals would report him to the police.

While some images were deleted during run-ins with the police, Chu shared some snapshots with us. Take a look at life inside North Korea.

View As: One Page Slides

Chu took the long way around during his visit to North Korea.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Most Chinese tourists enter by train through Sinuiju or by plane through Pyongyang. He instead traveled to Russia so he could access the northern port at Tumangang.

Google Maps

The train ride from Tumangang to Pyongyang — the capital of North Korea — lasts a day. It was canceled because of a dispute between North Korea and South Korea.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

“Fortunately, we had a whole day to go out and take some pictures in the village,” Chu said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

He saw scores of people living in abject poverty. Many begged for money.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

“There are nearly no fat people in North Korea, everyone looks very thin,” Chu said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Many of the residential buildings looked run down and in need of repair.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

When he later returned to the train station, he noticed portraits of the country’s former leaders and the words “long live” hanging overhead.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

At night, these shrines were the only lit structures in the village. Other buildings sat in darkness.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

The next day, he boarded a train for the nation’s capital.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

A customs agent on board checked his tablet to make sure it wasn’t GPS-enabled. The government also jams signals as a security measure.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

The customs agent also checked his laptop and DSLR camera. Chu said the agent had no trouble operating the devices, with the exception of the MacBook.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

The train chugged along, giving Chu glimpses of everyday life. This boy collected corn cobs beside the tracks.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Many people rode bicycles to get around.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Some scenes were quaint. Children took an afternoon dip in a river.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Anytime the train pulled into a station, there were painful reminders of the country’s poor living conditions. This little boy begged for money at a station in Hamhung.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Korean People’s Army soldiers rested on the tracks.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Whenever he hopped out, Chu shot photos on his phone. “DSLR is too obvious to take pictures in that condition as people in the village were extremely vigilant,” he said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Several locals reported him to the police. “A policeman and a solider stopped us and checked our cellphone. I hid most of the pictures, [but a] few pictures were deleted,” he said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

The tourism bureau encourages visitors to take photos of student-exercise groups. These kids rehearsed for a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Photography of anti-American protests is also welcomed. These students were marching against South Korea and the US.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

Eventually, Chu reached the railway station in Pyongyang.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

We asked Chu if he was scared of retribution for publishing the photos from his trip.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

“No, absolutely not,” he said.

Xiaolu Chu/Getty

David Brooks, Famed Conservative-Politics Writer Is Burned Out By Trump, Leaving Politics For Good

Daily Kos

David Brooks, Famed Conservative-Politics Writer Is Burned Out By Trump, Leaving Politics For Good

By ursulafaw August 9, 2017

What will we ever do without David Brooks and his moral compass?

David Brooks doesn’t love us any more and has informed the New York Times that he will no longer be writing about politics in their pages. More specifically, David Brooks doesn’t love the Republicans any more, after seeing the lengths to which they were and are willing to go to maintain power. Brooks particularly doesn’t love Donald Trump any more, saying about Trump, There’s nothing more to be learned about Trump’s mixture of ignorance, insecurity and narcissism. Every second spent on his bluster is more degrading than informative. That sounds about right. Crooks & Liars:

Future historians who want to get a good bead on what things were like during the inmates-running-the-asylum madhouse of American politics in the Year of our Lord 2017 could do worse than study Mr. David Brooks’ column in The New York Times today in some detail.

It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Brooks spent every hour of his professional career boosting Republicans and Conservatism, mocking Democrats and Liberals, and relentlessly positioning himself as America’s Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual. And yet, in 2017 during the Republican Party’s Year of Jubilee — the year when Mr. Brooks’ Republican Party owned every branch of the federal government and Mr. Brooks’ Conservative Movement had effectively conquered the media both through direct propaganda efforts (Fox News/Hate Radio/etc.) and by bludgeoning the “mainstream media” into a state of meek complicity — Mr. Brooks announced that he was suddenly sick and tired writing about Conservatism or politics.

Which means that, other than the brief “Jewels of Nuance” period during the Age of Bush when Mr. Brooks (and every other Conservative writer) felt it was finally safe to let their inner Sean Hannity completely out and use their public platforms to heap unalloyed contempt and slander on the Dirty Libtards, Mr. Brooks has spent most of his career assiduously avoiding any actual, honest reportage on the state of Conservative politics and culture.

David Brooks, whether he would ever admit it or not, is responsible for this “false equivalence” insanity which has overtaken the media, “both sides do it,” ad nausem.

Instead, Mr. Brooks has been in the business of delighting his employers and media colleagues by spinning elaborate fairy tales about how cool the GOP used to be, or how terrific the GOP was going to be in the near future, or how awesome it would be if we had a third party because both the Republicans and the Democrats sucked so hard. It didn’t really matter to his employers and colleagues in what order Mr. Brooks told his three basic lies, and it didn’t really matter how quickly reality would overtake them and smash them to bits every single time. All that mattered was that, whatever five-alarm sh*tfire the Republican Party was dancing nekkid around today shrieking about Kenyan Death Panels and Emails and Benghaaazi…Mr. Brooks’ could be counted on to deliver 800 words of tapioca explaining that, somehow, Both Sides were always to blame.

Brooks is partly responsible for this Frankenstein’s monster being in the White House, but he won’t cop to it.

But of all of those who profited personally, politically and professionally from debasing our media and corroding our politics, the worst of them were those who knew better. Those like Mr. David Brooks, who made a whole career out of building a monster, and then frantically scuttled away and blamed everyone but themselves when the monster they made kicked the laboratory door off its hinges and then ran amok, nearly destroying the country.

These are his final words to us:

“One way or another I’m gonna wash that man [Trump] right outta what’s left of my hair.”

Thanks, David. Don’t worry about anything, we’ll clean up the mess. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.

New York Times Opinion Pages

Getting Trump Out of My Brain

David Brooks, Op-Ed Columnist August 8, 2017

President Trump salutes a soldier on his way to Marine One at the White House this month. Credit Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Last week The Washington Post published transcripts of Donald Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders. A dear friend sent me an email suggesting I read them because they reveal how Trump’s mind works. But as I tried to click the link a Bartleby-like voice in my head said, “I would prefer not to.” I tried to click again and the voice said: “No thanks. I’m full.”

For the past two years Trump has taken up an amazing amount of my brain space. My brain has apparently decided that it’s not interested in devoting more neurons to that guy. There’s nothing more to be learned about Trump’s mixture of ignorance, insecurity and narcissism. Every second spent on his bluster is more degrading than informative.

Now a lot of people are clearly still addicted to Trump. My Twitter feed is all him. Some people treat the Trump White House as the “Breaking Bad” serial drama they’ve been binge watching for six months. For some of us, Trump-bashing has become educated-class meth. We derive endless satisfaction from feeling morally superior to him — and as Leon Wieseltier put it, affirmation is the new sex.

But I thought I might try to listen to my brain for a change. That would mean trying, probably unsuccessfully, to spend less time thinking about Trump the soap opera and more time on questions that surround the Trump phenomena and this moment of history.

How much permanent damage is he doing to our global alliances? Have Americans really decided they no longer want to be a universal nation with a special mission to spread freedom around the world? Is populism now the lingua franca of politics so the Democrats’ only hope is to match Trump’s populism with their own?

These sorts of questions revolve around one big question: What lessons are people drawing from this debacle and how will those lessons shape what comes next?

It’s clear that Trump is not just a parenthesis. After he leaves things will not just snap back to “normal.” Instead, he represents the farcical culmination of a lot of dying old orders — demographic, political, even moral — and what comes after will be a reaction against rather than a continuing from.

For example, let’s look at our moral culture. For most of American history mainline Protestants — the Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians and so on — set the dominant cultural tone. Most of the big social movements, like abolitionism, the suffragist movement and the civil rights movement, came out of the mainline churches.

As Joseph Bottum wrote in “An Anxious Age,” mainline Protestants created a kind of unifying culture that bound people of different political views. You could be Catholic, Jewish, Muslim or atheist, but still you were influenced by certain mainline ideas — the Protestant work ethic, the WASP definition of a gentleman. Leaders from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama hewed to a similar mainline standard for what is decent in public life and what is beyond the pale.

Over the last several decades mainline Protestantism has withered. The country became more diverse. The WASPs lost their perch atop society. The mainline denominations lost their vitality.

For a time, we lived off the moral capital of the past. But the election of Trump shows just how desiccated the mainline code has become. A nation guided by that ethic would not have elected a guy who is a daily affront to it, a guy who nakedly loves money, who boasts, who objectifies women, who is incapable of hypocrisy because he acknowledges no standard of propriety other than that which he feels like doing at any given moment.

Donald Trump has smashed through the behavior standards that once governed public life. His election demonstrates that as the unifying glue of the mainline culture receded, the country divided into at least three blocks: white evangelical Protestantism that at least in its public face seems to care more about eros than caritas; secular progressivism that is spiritually formed by feminism, environmentalism and the quest for individual rights; and realist nationalism that gets its manners from reality TV and its spiritual succor from in-group/out-group solidarity.

If Trump falls in disgrace or defeat, and people’s partisan pride is no longer at stake, I hope that even his supporters will have enough moral memory to acknowledge that character really does matter. A guy can promise change, but if he is dishonest, disloyal and selfish, the change he delivers is not going to be effective or good.

But where are people going to go for a new standard of decency? They’re not going to go back to the old WASP ideal. That’s dead. Trump revealed the vacuum, but who is going to fill it and with what?

I could describe a similar vacuum when it comes to domestic policy thinking, to American identity, to America’s role in the world. Trump exposes the void but doesn’t fill it. That’s why the reaction against Trump is now more important than the man himself.

One way or another I’m gonna wash that man right outta what’s left of my hair.

450 scientists present stunning rebuke of Trump’s climate science denial

ThinkProgress-

450 scientists present stunning rebuke of Trump’s climate science denial

NOAA-led report tells the truth about the science behind the warmest year on record

Joe Romm August 10, 2017

Global average CO2 each month since 1980. CREDIT: NOAA.

A massive new report by more than 450 scientists, confirms that the Earth warmed to a new record in 2016, driven by a record increase in carbon dioxide levels.

The 27th annual “State of the Climate” report, led by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), stands as the first comprehensive rebuke by the nation’s and world’s climate scientists to the presidency of Donald Trump. Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and reaffirmed last week that he intends to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, which remains the best hope for America and the world to avert catastrophic impacts.

“Surface temperature and carbon dioxide concentration, two of the more publicly recognized indicators of global-scale climate change, set new highs during 2016,” the report explains, “as did several surface and near-surface indicators and essential climate variables.”

NOAA’s news release explains that 2016 set several major new climate records — all of which topped records previously set the year before:

Greenhouse gases were the highest on record.
Global surface temperature was the highest on record.
Average sea surface temperature was the highest on record.
Global sea level was the highest on record.

There were other records, too. For instance, 2016 saw record Arctic land temperatures, record temperatures for lakes around the world, record levels of serious drought globally, and “a record low value” for the “mass of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has the capacity to contribute ~7 m [23 feet] to sea level rise.”

The report leaves no doubt as to the cause of the warming temperatures and other indicators of climate change: human-caused carbon pollution. Indeed, the report opens by explaining that “the dominant greenhouse gases released into Earth’s atmosphere — carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide — all continued to increase and reach new record high abundances.”

In particular, “the 3.5 ± 0.1 ppm [parts per million] rise in global annual mean carbon dioxide from 2015 to 2016 was the largest annual increase ever observed in the 58-year measurement record.” This remarkable surge brought global CO2 levels to their new record level, 402.9 ppm, “surpassing 400 ppm for the first time in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years.”

The Earth just reached a CO2 level not seen in 3 million years

Levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide hit record concentrations.

While none of this will come as a surprise to anyone who follows either the news or climate science, all of these findings undercut the statements and actions made by President Donald Trump and the climate science deniers with whom he has surrounded himself.

Significantly, the report underscores a crucial reason why climate inaction is so dangerous: The rate of warming is accelerating. The authors explain that “the global sea surface temperature trend for the 21st century to-date of +0.162°C decade is much higher than the longer term 1950–2016 trend of +0.100°C decade.” And it is roughly double the trend of surface temperature warning since 1901.

Not only is warming speeding up, but it is happening even faster up North. “Arctic air temperatures continue to increase at double the rate of the global temperature increase, and this increase can be linked directly to changes in the Arctic environmental system,” the report found. According to the researchers, “the average Arctic land surface temperature was 3.6°F (2.0°C) above the 1981–2010 average, breaking the previous record of 2007, 2011, and 2015 by 1.4°F (0.8°C), representing a 6.3°F (3.5°C) increase since records began in 1900.”

To repeat, the Arctic is already a full 6.3°F warmer than it was in 1900. So we should all take serious the projection from the final draft of the National Climate Assessment we’ve been reporting on this week, which warns that continued inaction could lead to upwards of 18°F warming by century’s end.

Rapid Arctic ice melt sets the stage for economic disaster under Trump

The great ice sheets are unstable, ice melt is speeding up, and deniers will soon be in charge. What could go wrong?

Warming in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. It drives Arctic sea ice loss and extreme weather here in America as well as disintegration of the Greenland ice sheet and the carbon-rich permafrost.

Similarly, climate-destroying policies made in Washington do not stay in Washington. They threaten all Americans and all homo sapiens now and for centuries to come.

The unvarnished truth about climate change

Tampa Bay Times

Editorial: The unvarnished truth about climate change

Tampa Bay Times Editorial August 9, 2017

Crews battle a wildfire near Mariposa, Calif., on July 18. Officials say the record rain and snowfall that ended California’s five-year drought has turned into a challenge for firefighters battling flames feeding on dense vegetation. Associated Press

The latest federal report on the Earth’s warming climate doesn’t mince words about the disturbing trends, man’s contributions or the dangers that millions across the globe already face, especially in low-lying coastal areas in Florida and elsewhere. It is yet another call to action for federal, state and local officials — and they all have a role to play in curbing emissions of heat-trapping gases, shoring up infrastructure, improving flood control and finding more efficient ways for societies to grow and manage their populations.

Drafted by scientists at 13 federal agencies, the report cited the warming trend as “global, long term and unambiguous.” Global temperatures have increased by about 1.6 degrees over the past 150 years, the study found, and thousands of studies have created “many lines of evidence” to conclude that human activity is primarily behind the changing climate. The authors found it “extremely likely” that most of the warming since 1951 was caused by humans, and that even if emissions were to cease, existing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would cause temperatures to increase at least a half-degree Fahrenheit over this century.

The report, by 30 lead authors representing agencies such as NASA, federal laboratories, the private sector and universities, is part of the National Climate Assessment. That is a congressionally mandated analysis that seeks to build on the existing science and provide a snapshot of the current state of climate change. It found an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, and warming in the Arctic at twice the rate of the global average — a phenomenon that could impact sea levels, the weather and other patterns in the lower 48 states. One-third of the sea level rise since 1880 has occurred since 1990, and coastal communities from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic are at increasing risk of routine flooding, saltwater intrusion into the drinking water supply and the collapse of roads, utilities and other vital infrastructure. That puts Florida’s east and west coastlines at risk, yet Gov. Rick Scott’s administration has been less aggressive than local governments in South Florida and Tampa Bay in addressing the challenges.

The findings contradict the talking points of the Trump administration, which has openly questioned the science behind climate change and the degree that humans contribute to it, and which has moved to reverse the clean-air initiatives of the Obama White House. The unpublished analysis was made available to the New York Times days before Sunday’s deadline for the 13 federal agencies to approve the report. Making the report public at least forces the Trump administration to explain why it does or does not stand behind the science.

This national assessment lays a foundation for securing federal funding and regulatory direction on climate policy, and it offers state and local governments the technical assistance they need to incorporate the impact of climate change into their planning for infrastructure, land use and other long-term issues. States and cities, though, cannot cede all responsibility to the federal government. Studies show Florida, for example, has invested trillions of dollars in infrastructure with virtually no consideration given to rising sea levels. Rising seas could swell Tampa Bay up to 19 inches over the next quarter-century, putting tens of thousands of residents at risk. The federal study is another wake-up call about a threat that is real, here and more pressing by the day.

America’s wind energy industry passed a major milestone

ThinkProgress

America’s wind energy industry passed a major milestone

Economic challenges facing wind energy are nothing new, industry says.

Mark Hand August 9, 2017

The Dry Lake Wind Power Project in Arizona. CREDIT: Department of Energy

The wind energy industry reached an important milestone in 2016 when it passed the generating capacity of hydroelectric power for the first time to become the nation’s top renewable generating source. Wind energy’s growth — at least in the next few years — is showing few signs of slowing down, with 142,000 megawatts of new and proposed wind capacity lined up to connect to the nation’s electric power grid, according to new data released by the Department of Energy.

The total amount of wind capacity in the queue represents 34 percent of all generating capacity waiting to connect to the grid, higher than all other generating sources, DOE said. The wind energy industry added more than 8,200 megawatts of capacity in 2016, representing 27 percent of all energy capacity additions for that year.

That annual growth lifted the nation’s wind capacity to 81,312 megawatts at the end of December 2016, slightly above hydroelectric’s 79,985 megawatts of capacity, according to DOE. Wind supplied about 6 percent of U.S. electricity, and 14 states now get more than 10 percent of their electricity from wind.

DOE released three wind market reports on Tuesday, covering wind technology, offshore wind, and distributed wind. The primary authors of the wind technology report were employees at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The offshore wind report was prepared by employees at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Employees at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory prepared the distributed wind report.

“The wind industry continues to install significant amounts of new capacity, and supplied about 6 percent of total U.S. electricity in 2016,” Daniel Simmons, DOE acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said in a statement. “As our reports explain, a combination of federal subsidies, state mandates, and technological advancements continue to help drive new wind capacity additions.”

Prior to joining DOE, Simmons worked at the Koch-funded Institute for Energy Research as vice president for policy and also held a top position at the Koch-funded American Energy Alliance, which advocated for the office he now oversees at DOE — the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy — to be eliminated.

Wind turbine prices remained well below levels seen a decade ago, DOE said. After hitting a low of roughly $800 per kilowatt from 2000 to 2002, average turbine prices increased to roughly $1,600 per kilowatt by the end of 2008. Over the past decade, though, wind turbine prices have dropped substantially.

Technological innovations are helping wind turbines optimize their performance by reaching stronger, steadier winds, according to the American Wind Energy Association, the primary trade association for the wind power industry. Longer blades have helped to boost new wind turbine performance, with wind projects built in 2014 and 2015 reporting a 42.5 percent average capacity factor in 2016, compared to a 32.1 percent capacity factor for projects built between 2004 and 2011, AWEA said in press release Wednesday.

In the offshore report, DOE noted that more than 20 offshore wind projects totaling 24,135 megawatts of potential installed capacity are in the works. The report highlighted that last December, Deepwater Wind completed the commissioning of the Block Island Wind Farm, marking a milestone as the first commercial offshore wind project in the United States.

The first major offshore wind project in the U.S. is now powering an island

Renewable energy continues its march forward.

From 2003 through 2016, a total of 992 megawatts in capacity from more than 77,000 wind turbines was deployed in distributed applications across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam, DOE said.

DOE said its recent and projected near-term growth in wind energy is supported by the federal production tax credit and state-level policies. Wind additions have also been driven by improvements in the cost and performance of wind power technologies, producing low power prices for consumers.

The prospects for wind energy growth beyond the current PTC cycle remain uncertain, given declining federal tax support, expectations for low natural gas prices, and modest electricity demand growth, DOE said. At the end of 2015, Congress agreed to extend the production tax credit. Since then, wind developers have been building projects before the tax credit expires completely in 2020.

The DOE report lists many positive factors, including the potential for continued technological advancements and cost reductions to enhance the prospects for longer-term growth, Hannah Hunt, a research analyst at AWEA, said in a blog post on Tuesday.

“Some have focused on the report’s discussion of potential economic challenges for the industry, including competition from natural gas and solar,” Hunt wrote. “However, it should be noted that those challenges are nothing new and have in fact been listed in every version of the report this decade. Thanks to the innovation and productivity of American workers, the wind industry has been able overcome those challenges by greatly exceeding cost reduction expectations, and we expect that successful track record to continue.”

Interactive Map Shows Every Wind Farm in America

EcoWatch

Interactive Map Shows Every Wind Farm in America

By American Wind Energy Association August 10, 2017

Using a new map tool released Thursday, anyone can now easily view the location of every utility-scale wind project and wind-related manufacturing facility in the U.S. With the very first American Wind Week in full swing, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) released the map to help people visualize the growth of America’s largest source of renewable energy capacity.

“Wind Power has become a vital part of the U.S. economy, drawing billions of dollars in capital investment to rural communities each year and supporting over 100,000 U.S. jobs across all 50 states,” said John Hensley, deputy director of industry data and analysis for AWEA. “I’m pleased this new map tool helps Americans visualize how world-class U.S. wind resources are being put to work in all parts of the county.”

A time-lapse feature built into the map shows the progress of wind power development across the country. Starting from 1981 in the passes of California where the first modern wind energy projects were completed, users can see the story of American wind power unfold across heartland states like Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas, and eventually to the first U.S. offshore wind project completed off Rhode Island in 2016.

The map also features markers for the more than 500 wind-related manufacturing facilities in the U.S. today. These factories support 25,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs across 41 states.

AWEA’s new map utilizes only a small percentage of the full wind project and manufacturing data available to AWEA members through Market Database Pro, a comprehensive, interactive database of all online, under construction and advanced development wind projects, and all active wind-related manufacturing facilities. More than 50 data points are provided at both the project and turbine level, with advanced interactive mapping services including filtered search capabilities, summary maps and political boundaries.

This week is the inaugural #AmericanWindWeek, dedicated to U.S. leadership in wind power. Wind is the largest source of American renewable energy capacity, supporting more than 100,000 U.S. jobs across all 50 states, with nearly 85,000 MW of installed capacity at the end of the second quarter of 2017.