Tuesday, December 06, 2016

Who is it that's supposed to be 'anti-science', again?

Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank's climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: "I think it's fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538."
The only acceptable narrative for the activists over at the Center for American Progress is that climate is making the weather worse resulting in ever more property damage and anyone questioning the politically correct story must be drummed out of polite society.

So what did wikileaks reveal? Among other things, an email from ThinkProgress chief editor Judd Legum to major Democratic donor (and climate warrior) Tom Steyer bragging about how he had successfully trolled FiveThirtyEight statistical analysis website proprietor Nate Silver into getting rid of Pielke. Why go after Pielke? Because he had published an article at 538 based on his research daring to point out that so far climate change had not boosted "normalized" property damage. Normalized basically means taking into account the fact that as a result of economic and population growth there is more property and lives at risk from bad weather.


Oh, gee, whatever could go wrong with this?
Web giants YouTube , Facebook , Twitter and Microsoft will step up efforts to remove extremist content from their websites by creating a common database.

The companies will share 'hashes' - unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos - of extremist content they have removed from their websites to enable their peers to identify the same content on their platforms.

"We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online," the companies said in a statement on Tuesday.
Standard question: who defines 'extremist'?  Based on what criteria?  If the idea of Zuckerbitch and his minions, and their fellow travelers, doing it makes your skin crawl, join the club.


And now I shall brave the cold and wind, as there are supplies I'm short on.

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