Watching the Deniers lose the election over Climate Change is Grim : Ryan Grim, the blogger who brought them down

KOCH BROS suffer a GRIM fate

Out here in rural Nova Scotia, people have a particularly vivid way of saying their chances are toast : they are "screwed : screwed and bored". That is what the feckless Democrats and Obama would have been, if not for a relatively obscure blogger named Ryan Grim.

Blogosphere brings down the GOP with just one post 

His brief blog post - recollecting Romney a year earlier vowed to kill FEMA, stalled the Mitten's "BIG MO"  - nixed, at the stroke of a computer keyboard, all the billions the reality-deniers spent in dark money, trying to steal the American election.

Sandy-the-storm could have gone either way, in terms of any incumbent president's popularity .

This is because no true storm of the century can ever be cleaned up in a week or so - leaving a whole lot of cold, hungry, tired people ready to blame anyone and everybody - particularly the person at the top.

But a less than miracle-working but still highly efficient federal rescue effort is a hell and a half better than no federal rescue effort at all - such as Romney had proposed to provide if he was elected.

FEMA suddenly became the fastest and simplest way to tell Dems and GOP election promises apart - and many people suddenly recalled that Obama's much hated support for big government could look pretty good ,whenever big storms come calling.

And with climate change promising more and more bigger and bigger storms, maybe Obama and the Democrats had a point, after all.......

99% of the world tacitly agrees with Italian "earthquake" court : no such thing as a natural disaster, only human negligence...

MODERNITY sentences scientists

It should be, by far, the biggest news story this year - in fact, one I feel sure historians will be referencing two centuries from now, when they try to assist citizens of the future to understand the 'spirit of the age' of this still very modernist early 21st century.

But in fact, almost unnoticed by most of the world's largest media, an Italian court has sent a half dozen scientists to jail for 6 years, for failing to warn citizens that an earthquake was going to happen.

Actually they had  publicly warned that a major earthquake might or might not happen fairly soon in this earthquake-prone part of the world : which is as vague or as precise as scientists can ever get about earthquakes' timing, severity and location.

The judge found them guilty and tacitly, so did the rest of the world by their approving silence.

In 99% of the educated world's eyes, unpredictable random natural disasters (Acts of God) do not and can not exist in a "just world" : only preventable human irrationality.

The ballot question on modernity versus post modernity (cum global commensality)

In a nutshell, as concise a statement of what it means to be Modernist as one can ever hope to find.

By contrast, I am a post-modernist and I believe that much of Nature and Reality will always be veiled from human understanding, controlling and predicting : natural disasters can and do happen and they are not the fault of an conspiracy of willfully negligent humans.

It is truly a ballot question as we Canadian political scientists are wont to say: the crux of every election that turns complicated voting decisions into a simple plebiscite choice.

November 6th 2012 : *FEMA : kill it (Romney) or keep it (Obama) ?

Anytime : NATURAL DISASTERS : real or result of human failure ?

Pick one or the other and then pull the lever......

*Romney promises to kill FEMA and hand its job over to for-profit corporations, if he was prez when another SANDY hits....