What's The Matter With Mark?
"More confirmation that the Republican party is a dumping ground for fools, idiots and puppets of the fossil fuel industry. When you click on this story, an article from the leading science-denying magazine, Forbes, will come up, containing more pseudo-scientific garbage about how the climate is not changing, even though we can all see it plainly happening right before our eyes. Of course, the planet doesn't care what right-wing dipshits believe; the climate is changing now and human beings are causing it. Unfortunately, those same dipshits are trying to prevent our doing anything about it." - Mark O
This is what I mean about “progressives,” or liberal “progressives,” as opposed to liberals. When I was a Democrat, we used to sport bumper stickers that read “Hate Is Not A Family Value.” “Progressives” have hijacked the Democrat party and turned it into an instrument of hate.
Some of you may know the commentator, Mark, especially if you are into Baltimore jazz. He’s actually rather intelligent. Unfortunately, he suffers the condition where he believes his opinions are instead bona fide facts.
He’s jumped on my case before for items I’ve posted on Facebook.
1) The first was about marijuana. Personally, I don’t care if people use it in the privacy of their homes, but as someone who was an addict and suffered a mental breakdown as a result, I’m opposed to the notion, spread by agenda driven groups like NORML, that there are no dangers.
To counter this notion, I began to post published research articles by groups like the National Institutes of Health, American Psychological Association, American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and other national and international organizations and research hospitals that warned of marijuana’s dangers.
What I got from Mark was the patronizing attitude of a “know-it-all,” which is what he is. Though an English professor by profession, he knows more then the professional doctors and scientists actually working in the field, or so he thinks. He’s completely oblivious to his overt “Intellectual dishonesty,” or that his opinions are nothing but a string of assumptions.
2) The second was my comment about the NRA defending Second Amendment rights. His platitudes included “Well meaning people like yourself” and similar patronizing remarks. His argument for the total ban of handguns was based on emotion, and devoid of fact.
What I’ve noticed about these arguments is that they relentlessly evade the gang and drug violence that plague our cities, like the 300+ murders in 2015 Baltimore.
What also doesn’t get mentioned are things like the Sunpapers story covering the bust of a gun ring that regularly transported firearms from Tennessee to Baltimore.
With the blame focused solely on white Republicans, one could argue that what we are seeing is in fact a form of de facto racism that deliberately ignore the plight of blacks in our cities.
After I attended the opening session of the 2013 Annapolis legislative year, I posted that I felt Governor O’Malley’s remarks about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable as being reasonable. In spite of that, I’ve been accused on Facebook as having “Ultra-Right Wing” views.
3) In regard to climate change, Mark is an example of the phrase “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
While humans are certainly impacting the planet, the “progressive” argument ignores our planet’s history of natural climate change. When mentioned, the usual response I hear is that natural change takes hundreds or thousands of years.
However, research has shown that during the time known as the “Younger Dryas,” at the close of the last ice age, climate vacillated between temperate and glacial in intervals less then ten years.
Closer to our time, during the 500 year interval between 1350 and 1850, our planet experienced the “Little Ice Age.” Impacting Europe the most, its effects were felt as far away as New Zealand. It occurred in three pulses. During the middle of the 16th century, advancing ice sheets in the Alps wiped out entire villages.
Our planet has been steadily warming since its ending some 160 years ago. Climatologists think we may be in an interglacial warming period, and that mile thick ice sheets will return.
One thing for sure, if you examine a climate change graph in detail, temperature is never static, and the lines are never straight. Things get warmer and cooler, sea levels rise and fall all the time. This has occurred hundreds of millions of years without humans being around.
While humans are certainly impacting the planet, to my knowledge there has not as of yet, been a scientific method developed to determine what percentage of climate change is natural, and what percentage is man made. If there is a method, I’d like to know.
As it stands, our climate policy is based on assumption.
Worse is that because of the inordinate focus on climate, we’ve ignored the fact that climate change is only one of a series of symptoms that center around human population growth, which include the disappearance of rain forests, resource depletion, and pollution.
In 2011, human numbers exceeded 7 billion. That year, National Geographic Magazine devoted every issue to the problem. It’s estimate that by 2030, India’s population will exceed that of China’s. That’s only 14 years from now.
The UN estimates that by 2050, numbers could range from 9 billion upwards to 12 billion.
Rather then this, “progressives” are focused instead on putting climate deniers in their place, which includes people like me, a four-year honors historical geology student, who worked as an educator for three years at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, who’s given a number of talks on the subject, including American Mensa, and who’s now involved with the Natural History Society of Maryland’s fossil collection.
This is what I mean about “progressives,” or liberal “progressives,” as opposed to liberals. When I was a Democrat, we used to sport bumper stickers that read “Hate Is Not A Family Value.” “Progressives” have hijacked the Democrat party and turned it into an instrument of hate.
Some of you may know the commentator, Mark, especially if you are into Baltimore jazz. He’s actually rather intelligent. Unfortunately, he suffers the condition where he believes his opinions are instead bona fide facts.
He’s jumped on my case before for items I’ve posted on Facebook.
1) The first was about marijuana. Personally, I don’t care if people use it in the privacy of their homes, but as someone who was an addict and suffered a mental breakdown as a result, I’m opposed to the notion, spread by agenda driven groups like NORML, that there are no dangers.
To counter this notion, I began to post published research articles by groups like the National Institutes of Health, American Psychological Association, American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, and other national and international organizations and research hospitals that warned of marijuana’s dangers.
What I got from Mark was the patronizing attitude of a “know-it-all,” which is what he is. Though an English professor by profession, he knows more then the professional doctors and scientists actually working in the field, or so he thinks. He’s completely oblivious to his overt “Intellectual dishonesty,” or that his opinions are nothing but a string of assumptions.
2) The second was my comment about the NRA defending Second Amendment rights. His platitudes included “Well meaning people like yourself” and similar patronizing remarks. His argument for the total ban of handguns was based on emotion, and devoid of fact.
What I’ve noticed about these arguments is that they relentlessly evade the gang and drug violence that plague our cities, like the 300+ murders in 2015 Baltimore.
What also doesn’t get mentioned are things like the Sunpapers story covering the bust of a gun ring that regularly transported firearms from Tennessee to Baltimore.
With the blame focused solely on white Republicans, one could argue that what we are seeing is in fact a form of de facto racism that deliberately ignore the plight of blacks in our cities.
After I attended the opening session of the 2013 Annapolis legislative year, I posted that I felt Governor O’Malley’s remarks about keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable as being reasonable. In spite of that, I’ve been accused on Facebook as having “Ultra-Right Wing” views.
3) In regard to climate change, Mark is an example of the phrase “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”
While humans are certainly impacting the planet, the “progressive” argument ignores our planet’s history of natural climate change. When mentioned, the usual response I hear is that natural change takes hundreds or thousands of years.
However, research has shown that during the time known as the “Younger Dryas,” at the close of the last ice age, climate vacillated between temperate and glacial in intervals less then ten years.
Closer to our time, during the 500 year interval between 1350 and 1850, our planet experienced the “Little Ice Age.” Impacting Europe the most, its effects were felt as far away as New Zealand. It occurred in three pulses. During the middle of the 16th century, advancing ice sheets in the Alps wiped out entire villages.
Our planet has been steadily warming since its ending some 160 years ago. Climatologists think we may be in an interglacial warming period, and that mile thick ice sheets will return.
One thing for sure, if you examine a climate change graph in detail, temperature is never static, and the lines are never straight. Things get warmer and cooler, sea levels rise and fall all the time. This has occurred hundreds of millions of years without humans being around.
While humans are certainly impacting the planet, to my knowledge there has not as of yet, been a scientific method developed to determine what percentage of climate change is natural, and what percentage is man made. If there is a method, I’d like to know.
As it stands, our climate policy is based on assumption.
Worse is that because of the inordinate focus on climate, we’ve ignored the fact that climate change is only one of a series of symptoms that center around human population growth, which include the disappearance of rain forests, resource depletion, and pollution.
In 2011, human numbers exceeded 7 billion. That year, National Geographic Magazine devoted every issue to the problem. It’s estimate that by 2030, India’s population will exceed that of China’s. That’s only 14 years from now.
The UN estimates that by 2050, numbers could range from 9 billion upwards to 12 billion.
Rather then this, “progressives” are focused instead on putting climate deniers in their place, which includes people like me, a four-year honors historical geology student, who worked as an educator for three years at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, who’s given a number of talks on the subject, including American Mensa, and who’s now involved with the Natural History Society of Maryland’s fossil collection.
I hope Mark sees this. In spite of all the references to published peer-reviewed scientific research and studies in an earlier post, Mark, an intellectual, mocked my concerns about the dangers of marijuana. He’s also called me and others who share the same views of gun ownership “stupid” and a bunch of “dip-shits” – not to our face off course. In spite of his assumed intellectual superiority, he doesn’t understand the nature of Facebook, that his friends have other friends and – well, you get the picture. Below is a photo from Pierce County, Washington. The shop sells both guns and marijuana. So Mark, is the shop owner an enlightened individual for selling marijuana, or are they a stupid dip-shit for selling guns? Moral: The more tangled the mind, the more tangled the web … 3/19/2016 |