People Are Stupid – Millions of Bees Die
Aerial spraying of potent pesticide at the wrong time.
So while states do stupid things to stop Zika, the Republican controlled
Congress does nothing.
“There was no need for
a bee suit Monday morning to go down there, because there was no activity. It
was silent,” Ms. Stanley said on Thursday. “Honestly, I just fell to the
ground. I was crying, and I couldn’t quit crying, and I was throwing up.”
For Ms. Stanley and
her business, the death toll easily exceeds two million bees, and Dorchester
County officials are still tabulating how many more might have been killed when
a day of aerial spraying, scheduled to combat mosquitoes that could be carrying
viruses like Zika, went awry.
Dr. Dennis
vanEngelsdorp, a bee researcher at the University of Maryland, said the deaths
of the bees in South Carolina were unnecessary, and that there were ways to
guard against mosquitoes without simultaneously killing valuable pollinators.
Peer Pressure – Among Dogs
How do you get a dog to stay motionless in an MRI for eight minutes?
Treats don’t work, but peer pressure does.
…scientists analyzed scans of dogs’ brain activity when hearing words. And to get those scans, they
needed their subjects — 13 family pets — to lie completely motionless in an
fMRI scanner for eight whole minutes while wearing earphones and a
radiofrequency coil on their heads.
[Successfully trained
dogs], you can see in their eyes when a drop of water falls on their noses and
they know, ‘I cannot lick it.’ It’s really … I don’t know what to say. They are
not forced. They are asked. You can’t imagine how happy they are at the end.
They bounce to the others like, ‘Okay, I did it! I did it!’ We are really
seeing that they are proud.
Despair Is Appropriate
The Republican War on science has resulted in this. Of
course they had lots of help from the extraction industry and the right wing
media.
Since 2001 polling
company Gallup has been asking US voters for their views on aspects of climate
change, such as if they think it’s happening, if it’s caused by humans and if
they are concerned about it.
In 2001, 53 percent of
Republican voters agreed that global warming was caused by humans, compared
with 70 percent of Democrats — a gap of 17 percentage points. But by 2016, this
gap had blown out to 41 percentage points, with only 43 percent of Republican
voters accepting climate change is human-caused.
These “partisan gaps”
had widened across all areas since 2008, except when voters were asked if they
thought global warming had already started, where the gap remained at 34
percentage points.
“I fear polarization
will be difficult to overcome because Republican reluctance to accept the
reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change is in a self-reinforcing
loop.
There are top-down
cues from Republican political elites and their supporters from conservative
think tanks to conservative media — especially the Murdoch media— that
influence voters, as well as bottom-up pressure from party activists such as
Tea Party supporters who act as ‘enforcers’ of party principles, especially in
primary elections to select Republican candidates.
The result is that
global warming has joined God, guns, gays, and abortion as core elements of
Republican identity, and this will be hard to change.”
No comments:
Post a Comment