As I've written, the demise of newsmedia can't be blamed on tech -- rather, it was the combination of technology and deregulated, neoliberal capitalism, which saw media companies merged and acquired, vertically and horizontally integrated, with quality lowered, staff outsourced and assets stripped, leaving them vulnerable to technological shocks, after all their in-house experts were turned into contractors who drifted away, their physical plant sold and leased back, their war-chests drained by vulture capitalists who loaded them up with debt that acted like a millstone around their necks as they strove to maneuver their way out of their economic conundrum.
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Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate and rich guy, called Trump a fraud, then asked him for a job, and is now outraged by his racism.
Testify that there is no conceivable comparison or moral equivalency between the Nazis--who brutally murdered millions of Jews and who hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to defeat--and the counter-protestors who were outraged to see fools parading the Nazi flag
Good stuff. Alas, he's still stuck on saying what "the president should" do. Hanging on the hope of a better Trump was always foolish. Now it's a kind of political fart that trumpets the Republican establishment's ongoing complicity. In any case, the majority of Republican voters are just fine with Trump's support of white supremacists, so this is really just another epitaph for Mittens. Read the rest
This morning Mitt Romney spoke at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. He said "Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.”
Romney's right, of course. The problem is, Rubio and Cruz (and Clinton, to a large degree) are also phonies and frauds. But Rubio, Cruz, and Clinton are attached to choke chains under control of the power elite, making them much more desirable to Romney and his ilk.
ABC News: Mitt Romney Slams Donald Trump's 'Absurd 3rd-Grade Theatrics'
Trump reacted by saying, "Mitt Romney was a failed candidate; should have beaten Barack Obama easily." Read the rest
Mother Jones today published a second part of the video secretly recorded at a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Boca Raton. The first bombshell will forever be known as "47 percent," but the portion getting attention today focuses on a response the Republican presidential candidate gave to a question about the Israel/Palestine peace process. The tl;dr there: he doesn't believe it'll happen, and intends to "kick the ball down the road" and let the next administration deal with it, or something like that.
But here's a derpworthy moment in the video that may be of interest to science fans, and people who have actually done some reporting on how so-called "dirty bombs" work.
Here's a transcript for the relevant portion of the video:
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I'm not entirely sure what to say about this excerpt from a Washington Examiner interview other than, "*headdesk*".
Mitt Romney: I do believe in basic science. I believe in participating in space. I believe in analysis of new sources of energy. I believe in laboratories, looking at ways to conduct electricity with -- with cold fusion, if we can come up with it. It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it.
I'm putting the entire quote after the jump, so you can get the full context of where this came from. It is worth noting that Romney seems to be referring to the 1989 experiments done by Stanley Pons (who worked for the University of Utah) and Martin Fleischmann. If you've ever dug into that particular bit of history, you'll find it sounds a lot like the arsenic life story from 2010—scientists announce huge news by press conference (in the case of Fleischmann and Pons the press conference happened before the research had even been through peer review); media goes apeshit; other scientists try to replicate the results and the vast majority fail miserably; finally, it eventually becomes clear that the researchers made some big errors in their data analysis and the original conclusions turn out to be incorrect.
Wikipedia has a pretty good breakdown of this history. Another good place to read about Fleischmann and Pons is in Charles Seife's book Sun in a Bottle, which details the history behind why fusion, in general, has long been more hype than happening. Read the rest
Science Debate is a group that's working to get political candidates in the United States actually talking publicly about issues of science and technology policy. In 2008, they tried (and failed) to get Barak Obama and John McCain to agree to a live, televised science debate. But they did get both candidates to send in written answers to 14 key questions.
This election cycle, Science Debate sent out a new set of 14 questions—all chosen from a crowdsourced list. Today, they announced that they'd gotten answers back from both Obama and Mitt Romney. You can compare the candidates side-by-side at the Science Debate website. I have to say that, while I disagree with a lot of Romney's conclusions, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of thought and time his staff clearly put into writing some very long and detailed responses.
Perhaps most surprising was his response to a question about climate change. Instead of attempting to flatly deny the evidence, Mitt Romney has apparently moved on to acknowledging that climate change is happening—while simultaneously overplaying the uncertainty surrounding specific risks, and claiming that even if climate change is a big problem there's nothing we can really do about it anyway ... because China.
Personally, I think that's pretty interesting. Climate scientists, and the journalists who write about them, have been talking, anecdotally, about seeing this exact rhetorical shift happening in conservative circles. It seems that the Republican presidential nominee is now one of the people who acknowledge climate change exists, but would still rather not take any decisive steps to deal with it. Read the rest
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Today, Gawker (specifically, John Cook) publishes a Wikileaks-style data dump: The Bain Files: Inside Mitt Romney's Tax-Dodging Cayman Schemes. As Dylan Byers at Politico points out, not all of the info is new and "will require a great deal of vetting, but early signs indicate that there are some new, and potentially controversial, details -- starting with that bit at the end about a retirement package investment that was made almost a decade after Romney retired." BusinessInsider is not impressed. Read the rest
Rolling Stone reports that the band DEVO "are set to release a track later this month entitled "Don't Roof Rack Me, Bro! (Remember Seamus)." It is inspired by Mitt Romney's notorious road trip from Massachusetts to Ontario, during which he transported the family dog, Seamus, in a kennel strapped to the roof of his station wagon." More at THR. (thanks, GEF) Read the rest
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A powerful piece at The Rumpusby Steve Almond about reports that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was a cruel homophobic bully in high school. "It’s just bullshit, total fucking sociopathic bullshit. And it makes me sad that such an episode comes to light and all Romney can do—a guy who wants to be elected to our highest office—is nervously lie and make excuses, as if this were political problem. It’s not a political problem. It’s a moral problem. It’s a sin he committed for which any believer would seek atonement." [* contains a graphic description of a sexual assault.]
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