I have 3 articles for you this morning!

First, a brief history on how we got today’s conservatives:

It’s Worse than Scott Walker and Ted Cruz: Secrets of Conservatives’ Decades-Long War on Truth

Make no mistake: the attack is deliberate.

The Enlightenment blossomed in the wake of the religiously-inspired Thirty Years War of the seventeenth century, when thinkers horrified by the war’s carnage set out to break the fetters of superstition and tradition that had prompted the strife. Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Jefferson and other thinkers advanced the idea that if people could listen to reasoned arguments, weigh them against evidence and choose the soundest ones, progress would follow. The Enlightenment revolutionized science, culture and politics, and gave rise to the modern world.

Enlightenment ideals prompted America’s founding and reigned for generations as Americans searched for the best ways to manage the economy, changing demographics and international conflict. But in the 1950s, the idea of progress through reason presented a problem for wealthy businessmen. They hated New Deal legislation because it regulated business and protected workers. The boom years of the 1920s had been good ones for them, and they believed that the continued success of their enterprises depended on their complete control over their businesses and the workers they employed. They believed that government meddling in their affairs would disrupt natural economic laws. And with their downfall would come the downfall of the entire American economy, and with it, the nation.

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Well, this morning I have 4 – yes, 4 – articles for ya!

First up, if you are the working poor as I am, you’ve definitely dealt with some of these:

12 THINGS THAT ONLY THE WORKING POOR TRULY UNDERSTAND

Republicans LOVE to hate the poor. They see them as inferior, lazy moochers who just bask in their poorness and enjoy all of the happiness being poor brings them. They tell America that poor people could stop being poor if they just work hard enough.

What they forget to mention when they paint this fictional portrait of happy poor people are the struggles the roughly 50 million Americans who live below the poverty line face. Normal, everyday things that cause someone with little or no money to weep in frustration.

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I’m going mostly light this Monday morning cuz, let’s be honest, who wants to think too hard on a Monday morning?

First, now you can find out whether you’ve been spied on:

Find Out if You’ve Been Spied on-and Join the Fight for Privacy

Because of the ruling, there is an opportunity for people to try to find out if their communications were among those shared by NSA with GCHQ. Intelligence agencies use information like ip addresses and email addresses as “selectors” when sifting through the massive quantities of data they collect. GCHQ will comply with the IPT’s ruling by searching “selectors” it received from the NSA prior to December 2014.

But this won’t happen automatically. People need to actually file requests with the IPT. To help people do so, PI is collecting people’s names, numbers, and emails in order to assist them in asserting their rights and finding out whether those selectors were subject to unlawful sharing. If they were, PI will help individuals seek a declaration that that person’s privacy rights have been violated under Article 8 and Article 10 of the UK Human Rights Act, the law that codified the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law. Once the IPT issues a declaration for an individual, that individual can also request that their records be deleted. There’s no need to be a UK citizen-anyone can participate.

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I have 3 articles – 2 longer ones – but all 3 good reads.

First, a great piece on ACC and the Pentagon:

The Pentagon & Climate Change: How Deniers Put National Security at Risk

Rear Adm. Jonathan White, the Navy’s chief oceanographer and head of its climate-change task force, is one of the most knowledgeable people in the military about what’s actually happening on our rapidly heating planet. Whenever another officer or a congressperson corners White and presses him about why he spends so much time thinking about climate change, he doesn’t even try to explain thermal expansion of the oceans or ice dynamics in the Arctic. “I just take them down to Norfolk,” White says. “When you see what’s going on down there, it gives you a sense of what climate change means to the Navy – and to America. And you can see why we’re concerned.”

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I have 3 articles for you this Lundi Gras morning!

First, some dire climate news:

NASA: The US Faces a “Mega-Drought” Not Seen in 1,000 Years

Scientists have bad news for West Coasters in the grips of the worst drought in decades: The worst is yet to come.

The record-shattering drought currently gripping California is a light crudité compared to the “mega-drought” that’s expected to envelop the Southwest and Great Plains over the next 35 years, NASA revealed Thursday. The full study, ominously named “Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains,” was published in Science Advances.

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I have a couple articles for your perusal this morning.

First, an interesting take on the reasons behind what Saudi Arabia is currently doing regarding their oil:

Saudi Arabia Sees End Of Oil Age On The Horizon

In 2000, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, former oil minister of Saudi Arabia, gave an interview in which he said:

“Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil – and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil.”

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I have 3 things for your perusal this morning.

First, on the big oil worker strike going on right now:

First Nationwide Oil Worker Strike In Decades Grows Even Bigger

In January there were at least four major mishaps at a U.S. pipelines that resulted in costly explosions or spills. In 2013, Texas led the country in oil and gas sector fatalities with 106. Overall, oil and gas workers are six times more likely to die on the job than average Americans. With the recent growth of the industry due to the proliferation of new drilling techniques such as fracking, safety measures can suffer. In North Dakota, which has been at the forefront of the oil boom, the fatality rate for industry workers was three times the national average in 2013.

On Friday, the local Toledo union posted on its Facebook page that the “strike is NOT about money, this is about addressing safety issues that have been ignored for way too long … 138 workers were killed on the job while extracting, producing, or supporting oil and gas in 2012 … the number was more than double that of 2009.”

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I feel the need to write about the Pope tonight. I’ve been in a couple of debates lately about him and I want to expand on how I see him.

First, let me say I have big differences with Pope Francis. I don’t like that he is still against marriage, civil unions, and adoption for my LGBT friends. I don’t like the free speech quip he gave in the wake of Charlie Hebdo, though with that, I think he was meaning we should be careful of our speech, but that’s neither here nor there; he could’ve meant we shouldn’t have it. I don’t like that he is still against any contraception save for the rhythm method. I don’t like that he didn’t do an en masse opening of files to hold all priests accountable that were in the child molestation scandal. I don’t like that he is not quite warm to considering women for priesthood. And I don’t like that he is not fully on board with the Nuns on the Bus. There are other things too, I just can’t think of them off the top of my head.

I’m a liberal, a big leftie left leftist, to be honest, so really I didn’t expect to like the Pope much, if at all. In my lifetime, we’ve never had a Pope that was even close to saying much of anything that in my opinion could help the people of the world. I was raised Catholic, and the Popes have always been hardline dogmatists, and what with my heretical beliefs, what they said never held much water with me. And like me, there are a ton of us liberals (at least post John XXIII) who’ve never really liked a Pope, and who aren’t likely to like this one, save for a Pope who effects wholesale change of most or all of the faults of Church dogma.

To many of my fellow lefties’ chagrin, I look at this particular Pope a little differently. It’s definitely not that I forgive him for those things that I don’t like about him; forgiveness of that would require forgiveness of also the Church, and unless things change in the dogma, that isn’t going to happen. And yes, I know we are supposed to strive to forgive, but I am not close to that point yet; I am only – and very – human. This brings me to the point about how I feel about this Pope.

I have 3 articles for your amusement disgust perusal this morning:

First up, apparently some US Generals are not happy with Boehner and Bibi:

Netanyahu’s Congress invitation raises eyebrows among some US generals

The uniformed leaders of the U.S. military have had a testy relationship with President Barack Obama since he took office in 2009, with a number of relatively public spats revealing discord over how his administration has approached the use of military force. So it might be assumed that when a politician confronts Obama, portraying his policies on threats overseas as naive, many in the senior uniformed ranks would nod in silent affirmation. But that’s not what has happened since House Speaker John Boehner invited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Obama’s Iran policy in Congress. Instead the speech, planned for next month, has rallied senior military figures behind the president, with some warning that there’s a limit to what U.S. military officers consider acceptable criticism of the commander in chief.

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Serving uniformed officers are loath to comment on an inflammatory political question – “You’re inviting me to end my career,” one senior Pentagon officer told me when asked to comment on Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu, “but, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not.” But a senior Joint Chiefs of Staff officer who regularly briefs the U.S. high command was willing to speak bluntly in exchange for anonymity. “There’s always been a lot of support for Israel in the military,” the officer said, “but that’s significantly eroded over the last few years. This caps it. It’s one thing for Americans to criticize their president and another entirely for a foreign leader to do it. Netanyahu doesn’t get it. We’re not going to side with him against the commander in chief. Not ever.”

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I have 3 articles for your perusal this morning.

First, now this is a guy they should have made the movie about:

I was an American sniper, and Chris Kyle’s war was not my war

During my combat tour I never saw the Iraqis as “savages.” They were a friendly culture who believed in hospitality, and were sometimes positive to a fault. The people are proud of their history, education system and national identity. I have listened to children share old-soul wisdom, and I have watched adults laugh and play with the naiveté of schoolboys. I met some incredible Iraqis during and after my deployment, and it is shameful to know that the movie has furthered ignorance that might put them in danger.

Unlike Chris Kyle, who claimed his PTSD came from the inability to save more service members, most of the damage to my mental health was what I call “moral injury,” which is becoming a popular term in many veteran circles.

As a sniper I was not usually the victim of a traumatic event, but the perpetrator of violence and death. My actions in combat would have been more acceptable to me if I could cloak myself in the belief that the whole mission was for a greater good. Instead, I watched as the purpose of the mission slowly unraveled.

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