I usually won’t post like this…

…but I can get behind this campaign to turn off Fox News on public TVs. Here’s the email they have sent out:

Dear friends,

Many of us already know that Fox News is biased — but it’s actually much worse than that. For years they have used lies, distortions, and race-baiting to divide this country. Recently, it’s gotten downright dangerous. Earlier this summer, a heavily armed man got into a gun fight with police after he was pulled over on his way to kill people at two non-profit organizations[1] — and now, in an interview from jail, he’s said that Glenn Beck was a big part of his inspiration.[2]

Fox News is bad news for America — and it spreads, and is legitimized, partly through TVs in public places.

That’s why I’ve joined the TurnOffFox campaign — the first part of a larger campaign to diminish the influence of Fox. It’s about educating people about Fox and getting it turned off in stores, restaurants, and other public places.

Will you join me? It takes just a moment to declare your own household “Fox free”, and at the same time appeal to public establishments in your community to stop playing Fox.  Click here:

http://turnofffox.org/580/?id=1946-1403621&credo

No other news organization that’s considered legitimate consistently wages smear campaigns based on lies and race-baiting. But for years Fox News has done exactly that, and the pattern has only gotten worse since Barack Obama entered national politics.

Here are just a few examples:

– A frequent Fox guest, Jesse Lee Peterson, said that the majority of Black people have poor moral character, and cited “what they did to the dome” after Hurricane Katrina as evidence.[3] Peterson has also used his platform on Fox to claim that 90% of Black people are racists — against Whites.[4]

– In a case of naked race-baiting, Fox host Glenn Beck called President Obama a “racist” who had a “deep-seated hatred for White people or the White culture.”[5] Earlier that week, Beck claimed that the President’s health insurance reform proposals were a form of “reparations” designed to “settle old racial scores.”[6]

– Fox host John Stossel argued that the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act — which prevents businesses from discriminating based on race, sex, and other factors — should be repealed.[7]

– Fox News hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity were the first to air deceptively edited and incomplete video of Shirley Sherrod’s remarks to the NAACP.[8] The video made it seem like Sherrod was confessing to using her position at the USDA to discriminate against White farmers, when she was really talking about the importance of overcoming prejudice. Sherrod lost her job over this misrepresentation, which Fox enthusiastically repeated without seeking the facts. Fox has since tried to pretend it had nothing to do with this smear — but Fox is the number one reason these kinds of distortions and smears have any part in our national dialogue.

The examples above aren’t even a tenth of Fox’s vicious lies and smears, and over the years they’ve just gotten more brazen.

The goal of Turn Off Fox is to reduce the number of public TVs showing Fox News, while spreading the word about Fox’s poison (and how it works) to those who don’t know.

Signing up for the campaign is just the first step. We make it easy for you to tell us about businesses playing Fox. If you’re willing to talk with them, we’ll provide you with straightforward materials that explain why they shouldn’t be a party to what Fox is doing. And if there are businesses you know that want to tell the world they would never play Fox, you can help them declare themselves a “Fox-free zone.”

As businesses Turn off Fox and stand up as Fox Free, and as we encourage our friends and family to do the same, we’ll help make clear, to people across the country, what Fox is about. And we’ll reduce their ability to do harm.

Please join me in signing up for the TurnOffFox campaign:

http://turnofffox.org/580/?id=1946-1403621&credo

Thanks.

References

1. http://bit.ly/a5F7kW
2. http://mediamatters.org/research/201010110002
3. http://bit.ly/cRQ3NB
4. http://bit.ly/c060C0
5. http://bit.ly/bJXhDl
6. http://bit.ly/aggEeG
7. http://bit.ly/92A5qF
8. http://bit.ly/8YnKv5

Sign on to this, please!

–Gautam

Rockefellers urge action on climate change – Times Online

Rockefellers urge action on climate change – Times Online

One of America’s most powerful families will call tomorrow for a sweeping shake-up at the top of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest company.

A group of descendants of John D. Rockefeller, who founded Exxon’s predecessor Standard Oil in 1870, will begin a campaign to split the role of chief executive and chairman of the board at the oil and gas group, a role held by Rex Tillerson.

Last night the family group issued a statement saying that the company’s leadership was “failing to address the future of energy and related industry hurdles”.

It said that representatives would make an announcement in New York to explain “that a majority of the family is now so concerned about the direction of ExxonMobil Corporation that it is urging a major change”.

Exxon, which earned $40 billion (£20 billion) last year, when Mr Tillerson was paid $21.7 million, was the slowest of the big oil majors to acknowledge climate change. The family is calling for an independent chairman and a bigger leadership role for the directors. The campaign comes as big oil companies face mounting pressure to deal with public concern over global warming.

More than 100 Rockefeller descendants hold a significant stake in Exxon through a variety of trusts, but the exact percentage is unknown.

The campaign is being spearheaded by Neva Rockefeller Goodwin, an economist and great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, as well as Peter O’Neill, head of the Rockefeller family committee dealing with ExxonMobil. He is a great-great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller.

Exxon produces nearly 4.2 million barrels of oil a day and had revenues of $404.5 billion during the past fiscal year. Its market capitalisation is about $500 billion.

In 2006 Senator Jay Rockefeller wrote to Mr Tillerson urging the company to stop funding groups that denied the existence of climate change.

Economist’s View: War on the Cheap

Economist’s View: War on the Cheap

Wow, this is very pathetic. People being literally cheated out like that?

This is exactly the kind of shit that shouldn’t be happening. I wonder what all those people who’re out there chanting “support the troops even if you don’t support the war” are thinking.

I wonder why retarded policies are implemented in the first place.

–Gautam

The Great Global Warming Swindle

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9

HORSECRAP.

Notable bullshit:

“CO2 forms a very small part of the earth’s atmosphere. In fact we measure changes in the level of atmospheric CO2 in tens of parts per million. ‘If you take CO2 as a percentage of all the gases in the atmosphere – the oxygen, the nitrogen, the argon and so on – it’s 0.054%. It’s an incredibly small portion. And then of course you’ve got to take that portion that’s supposedly humans are adding which is the focus of all the concern. And it gets even smaller’ (That was Former Professor Tim Ball of the Univ. of Winnipeg. This guy is so old, that his views shouldn’t even matter anymore) [...] CO2 is a greenhouse gas and it does affect climate change like other greenhouse gases do, but it’s a very small greenhouse gas and greenhouse gases themselves only form a relatively small part of the earth’s climate system.”

Really? Don’t you fuckers know anything about ratios and math? First of all, I am pretty sure Tim Ball was smoking an unknown combination of potent weed and LSD when he said that the conc. of CO2 is 0.054%. According to the ORNL, the 2004 CO2 concentrations are about 377 ppm which is 0.038%. Where did that ~50% increase in conc. come from? Who knows. Furthermore, it is good to note that even a 0.001% increase in CO2 concentration, means that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by .001/0.038 = 2.63% and NOT 0.001 percent. So, a 0.01% increase in CO2 concentrations means a 26% increase in the amount of CO2. If you don’t agree with me on that, you deserve to sit thru elementary school once again, and learn about fractions, then learn about percentages in 6th grade.

But moving along:

“The number of people who argue that there is some kind of natural equilibrium in the earth’s climate, i mean it is one of the most absurd ideas propagated by a lot of people who really ought to know better.”

“When you are talking about temperature change in the past 150 years, you’re talking about a temperature change of just over half a degree celcius, in a very noisy record where the arrow bars are very considerable, so when you talk about temperature change in the past 20 years, you’re talking in terms of our knowledge of the climate history of the last thousand years a very tiny amount of change.”

Uhh, AFAIK, we have a lot more reliable data from the last 20 years than we have from the last 150 years. What the fuck does it means that the arrow bars are pointing everywhere? Data is data and as long as it points in a general direction, it tells us a lot.

“Personally I still think it’s legitimate to refer to the late 20th century just as the IPCC did.” (i.e. he justified the use of graphs and data that ends in the 1980s/1990s to justify his point, whereas the data clearly nd directly refutes all the claims he made.)

They should really be lynched for

a) Grossly misrepresenting data and manipulating it excessively to fit their claims, and
b) misleading the public with such bullshit.

BAH why I am I spending time watching all this? This is so embarrassing, that it doesn’t merit much criticism anyway.

Just be aware of bunk like this hmmkay?

–Gautam