And between Trump and Obama, who is/was tougher on Russia? Hey, he did want to pass the message on to Vlad that after the election, he’d be “more flexible.”
This idiotic sort of thing is what my current project, to make the international legal environment more friendly to space development and settlement, partially about.
San Mateo County claimed in its complaint to be “particularly vulnerable to sea level rise” with a 93 percent the county will experience a “devastating” flood before 2050. Imperial Beach and Marin County also claimed in their separate complaints to be vulnerable to devastating floods because of climate change.
“If sea levels were to raise that high, it most certainly would be catastrophic,” Epstein said.
However, bond offerings in the last few years by those counties and cities weren’t so forthcoming about those predictions, Exxon said in a verified petition filed last month with the District Court in Tarrant County, Texas.
San Mateo’s 2014 and 2016 bond offerings told would-be investors that the county “is unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur,” Exxon’s petition said.
Imperial Beach and Marin County never disclosed the same information to perspective bond investors that was detailed in their complaints against the energy companies, Exxon’s petition said.
Making those claims in their lawsuits against energy companies – but not in their bond offerings – smacks of hypocrisy, Exxon is arguing.
Even if the mainstream media goes dark, there’s social media. Our exhibitionist culture may encourage disturbed people to perform acts of retribution that guarantee them maximum publicity; think of the mass shooter as taking a kind of mass selfie of rage. But that genie can’t be put back in the bottle, either, at least not without a massive campaign against freedom of expression.
As always, human beings are the real weapons of mass destruction, and the tools they choose are not the causes of violence. If we want to weed out people who might commit violent acts in the future, we need to scale back due process protections and incarcerate more people on less evidence. Although that too is a trade-off many of us would find it hard to make, we could plausibly target privacy laws that make it difficult to compile records on people with a history of threatening behavior.
Some don’t want to accept that freedom comes with a cost. Or they don’t care about freedom.
Some thoughts on Michael Mann, the lawsuits, and the sad state of climate science, from Judith Curry.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Terrible: By awarding Mann as super-communicator, the AAAS is telling us that engaging in hyper-partisan gutter politics, targeted against Republicans and colleagues you disagree with, using unethical tactics is great.https://t.co/zA2HJF0tB3
I agree that we have the tech to do this affordably, but I strenuously disagree with this:
The activities at this moon base would be focusing on science, as is the case in the Antarctic. It could provide an official U.S. government presence on the moon, and its motivation would be rooted in U.S. national policy—again as are the U.S. Antarctic bases.
To the degree that the focus should be on “science,” it should be about better learning how to live on the moon, and Antarctica is a terrible precedent, in that we aren’t allowed to exploit it for its resources. That’s also why the Outer Space Treaty itself, which was modeled on the Antarctic Treaty, is a problem.
I continue to await Horowitz’s report. I suspect it will be a bombshell.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Trump and Clinton scandals are claiming a lot of bodies, at the Justice Department. I suspect that there will be some going down at Foggy Bottom, too.