Facts?! That just makes them devolve to No true Scotsman rhetoric. ;-)

Vance and the rest – including Trump himself – are suggesting that the attacks are because Democrats are demonizing Trump and Democrats need to tone down the vitriol, ignoring that Trump has said Democrats are destroying America and that we won’t have a country left if they get in office and all the rest. At least Vance is – after saying on TV with Dana Bash that they have confirmed reports from Springfield (in an interview about the pet eating thing) – that he, too, ought to tone down his rhetoric, but let’s see if he can stick with that for more than a day.

Here’s a story from July about the left/right spread in toxic language: https://theconversation.com/trump-shooting-is-a-warning-about-how-toxic-language-leads-to-violence-234637

Note the disparity on their graphic:

Ehn. The latest guy called Putin a terrorist on camera, which is something a Trumper would never say.

@aihorde@lemmy.dbzer0.com draw for me misprogrammed bots making surrealistic space for violence in America – now with kitties!

I pray whatever gods may be spare us from such a fate.

Exactly!

When Trump loses the coming election, a peaceful transfer of power should go from Biden to Harris, but Trump has worked to dismantle norms such that we must now expect that he will contest the results, tell his supporters he won, and worry about those angry supporters being goaded into attacks on poll workers, judges, Congress, and federal buildings.

Vance is already feigning ignorance of how he and Trump create violence.
Excerpt of Vance/Bash kerfuffle (page is not the full conversation):

… You accused me of causing a bomb threat. Doesn’t that mean I should shut up about the residents of Springfield? Don’t you realize you’re engaged in basic propaganda to silence the concerns of American citizens?

DANA BASH, CNN: I was quoting the actual mayor of Springfield, Ohio, who, after the bomb threats, was begging federal officials to stop putting negative attention on his city. I’m not talking about the policies…

They are making a peaceful transfer more difficult by telling lies, spurring on their most violent supporters, and then denying all culpability. Sadly, doing so may spread from their fanatics to a larger population as evinced by yet-another-gunman-incident.

The agent fired four to six rounds, a Secret Service official said. The suspect then fled. A witness who took a picture of the suspect’s vehicle and license plate number provided it to law enforcement officers.

Per CNN, Martin County Sheriff William D. Snyder says they arrested the guy in that vehicle:

Snyder said his agency “flooded” Interstate 95 and closed a large swatch of the highway before eventually safely stopping the suspect vehicle.

“I have a clear understanding from investigators that we actually do have the suspect that they’re looking for in Palm Beach County,” Snyder said.

Yes. The story here is straight from Associated Press, but I looked around and found a few more details in a Telegraph article:

But he woman’s doctor told police that the defendant had tested positive with a rapid test before telling him that she “certainly won’t let herself be locked up” after the result.

Instead she left her apartment and talked to people without a mask, ignoring her mandatory quarantine and positive test.

Note they say MANDATORY quarantine. At the end of the article they explain that Austria’s far right party, Freedom Party, is hyper-anti-vax, expected to win upcoming elections:

Its manifesto has promised a pardon for anyone convicted of breaching coronavirus rules and to repay any fines imposed during the pandemic.

The manifesto says coronavirus regulations were encroachments on fundamental rights “accompanied by unprecedented indoctrination and brainwashing.”

Not all Americans eat beef equally, data shows. Last year, Rose and his colleagues published a study looking at U.S. government data of the diets of more than 10,000 Americans. They found that on a given day, 12% of Americans account for half of all beef consumption. That 12% was disproportionately men.

I’m confused by this because I want it to mean the same 12% all the time, but I suspect they mean that it is a different 12% from one day to the next.

“Many men do reduce their meat consumption or are willing to,” says Joel Ginn, food and psychology researcher at Boston College, “but there are hurdles that they’ve had to overcome.”

Manly men advertising meat – and Joe Rogan??? I guess all kinds of guys what to be oh so manly, but when I think of macho men, he’s just not on that list.

Seeing someone in your close personal circle, or celebrities like athletes, make a behavior change can be an important piece of the puzzle, says Daniel Rosenfeld, psychology and food researcher at UCLA. “The way to get some people to eat less meat is to get other people to eat less meat,” he says.

Personally, both myself and my better half enjoy the newer fake meat burgers. They really are a satisfying way to get a ‘manly’ burger.

Refresher on McCabe from The Guardian:

McCabe was part of FBI leadership, briefly as acting director, during investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump and Moscow. Trump fired McCabe in March 2018, two days before he was due to retire. McCabe was then the subject of a criminal investigation, for allegedly lying about a media leak. The investigation was dropped in 2020. In October 2021, McCabe settled a lawsuit against the justice department.

I mention this because y’all know that Trumpers will immediately brush off McCabe’s comments as a known-bad-guy who was fired for being so awful and is now trying to get revenge.

Amazon offered up “Treatments for High Cholesterol” along with a link for an Amazon One Medical consultation as well as links to prescription medications.

That’s weird, because my doctor and my wife are the only people who know about my cholesterol numbers. They’re pretty good, too! But there are certainly data points, including my age, my food preferences, and my past purchases, maybe even news stories I’ve read elsewhere on the web, that might suggest I’d be a good candidate for a statin, the type of cholesterol-lowering medication Amazon recommended to me. And while I’m used to Amazon recommending books I might like or cleaning products I might want to buy again, it felt pretty creepy to push prescription drugs in my direction.

What did the author expect? Is anyone surprised that a big business is pushing people to buy more product?

HIPAA, the federal law that protects health privacy, is narrower than most people think. It only applies to health care providers, insurers, and companies that manage medical records. HIPAA requires those entities to protect your data as it moves between them, but it wouldn’t apply to your Amazon purchases, according to Suzanne Bernstein, a legal fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

HIPAA has always been a questionable law that does more for Pharma than for citizens. By signing a HIPAA form, patients basically allow their medical info to be distributed/sold to drug makers and other product/treatment vendors. I’m glad health information is legally considered private until you sign, but I’m not sure why the public is okay with signing away their privacy on every trip to a new doctor.

should my Amazon purchases be associated with Amazon’s health care services at all?

Well, Amazon isn’t going to restrict itself, so we – as the public – will have to make a fuss about it if we want anything to change.

Sorry, I was trying to add my support. You gave good evidence for a meat preference and I wanted to back it up with evidence of genetic aversion to the specific vegetable mentioned in the original article.

However, no one is born loving hot dogs or disliking broccoli

But we ARE! Doesn’t anyone remember the whole kerfuffle about the ‘bitter’ gene and PTC sensitivity?

Scratch that comment. Vote Harris! :-)

Wow, that’s a long read, and IMO, it misses a key point. Namely: similar to plastic industries spending tons of money to convince us that recycling is an individual problem and responsibility (despite the fact that most plastic can’t be effectively recycled), this article mostly frames Climate Change as an individual responsibility to stop eating meat and dairy. Thankfully, at the very end, it gets to a better solution, which is to stop spending our tax dollars on subsidies to harmful agro-businesses.

The start-point, however, is that Big Farming has co-opted natural conservation groups by giving them cash to join ‘mitigation’ groups that are “Greenwashing” the subject such that no one talks about real solutions (such as making meat more expensive). Have a bunch of quotes:

So the meat industry did what other industries have done under similar pressure in the past: demonstrate that it could change just enough to avoid being forced to change even more by the government.

In fact, that inaugural conference in 2010 was officially titled the World Wildlife Fund Global Conference on Sustainable Beef. (WWF has helped to found similar industry roundtables for poultry and soy — most of which is fed to farmed animals — and a certification program for seafood.)

For its collaboration, McDonald’s makes sure WWF is well compensated; from 2015 to 2022, the company donated $4.5 to $9 million to WWF-US.

WWF is hardly alone. Two of the other largest US environmental organizations — the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) — also closely collaborate with large meat and dairy companies, ranchers, and trade groups on a range of initiatives. But outside observers, along with some former and current employees at EDF and WWF, argue that those initiatives often do more to improve the companies’ image than the environment.

Last year, Tyson Foods — America’s largest meat processor — began selling beef marketed as “climate-friendly.” The company claims that by getting some of its suppliers to graze their cattle and grow the animals’ feed crops in a more sustainable manner, it’s reduced the carbon footprint of some of its beef by 10 percent.

But Tyson has repeatedly declined to share data with Vox and other news outlets that could prove its claim.

Beef is the worst food for the climate. Got it. Sadly, plant-based meat substitutes are losing market share (see graph p. 36 of Good Food Institute PDF). Personally, I like fake meat and it happens that tonight we’re having Beyond Burgers for dinner (sorry for the product plug, but they work for me – though I know some people prefer Impossible or other brands, and some people don’t like any of them).

Using global averages, beef’s carbon footprint per 100 grams of protein is about 7 times that of pork, 9 times that of poultry, 25 times that of tofu and plant-based meat, and more than 60 times that of beans and lentils.

I was interested in the benefits of regenerative farming being very questionable, and any stats should be viewed suspiciously unless/until we have a verifiable measuring standard AND see data over the span of years per given acreage – because any increase in carbon capture is likely to fall off over time.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made it clear that the world needs negative emissions technologies — approaches that can pull carbon out of the atmosphere, as regenerative agriculture supposedly does — to avoid catastrophic global warming. But the research doesn’t bear out the claims many of regenerative agriculture’s proponents make, as there’s still significant doubt and uncertainty around the potential for farmland to store a lot of carbon.

“The science is clear that, while some mitigation can be achieved by improving meat and dairy production, climate-neutral or zero-emissions meat and dairy is not a possibility in the foreseeable future,” said Hayek, the New York University environmental studies professor, speaking about net-zero claims in animal agriculture broadly, not the WWF report specifically.

EDF and the Nature Conservancy are also founding members of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance, a coalition of meat, dairy, and agricultural trade groups, many of which lobby aggressively to block environmental policy. But the alliance is a vehicle for their other goal on Capitol Hill: ramping up subsidies for regenerative agriculture and technological solutions. It’s similar to how the fossil fuel industry lobbies to both block climate regulations and subsidize carbon capture.

Money shuts up the World Wildlife Foundation, Sierra Club, and so on.

“If you can’t get the Sierra Club to [support a methane tax], how the fuck are you going to get anyone else in society to do that?”

Some politicians paint calls to stop pollution from factory farms and eat more plant-based meals as anti-farmer, a potent charge given both farming’s close association with America’s national mythos and the disproportionate political power that rural states hold.

If we can’t change ourselves in the environmental community, then how would we expect to change the general population?”

Many environmentalists have come to criticize individual action as ineffectual and naive. The burden to mitigate climate change and pollution falls on politicians and corporations, they argue, not the average person.

I agree with the last bit, but realize that at least a third of the U.S. will remove any politician painted as ‘anti-meat’. That is, a politician might try to argue that our tax dollars shouldn’t give hand-outs to Tyson or the like, but the attack ads against will say, “He wants you to stop eating meat, so he’s working to bankrupt our ranchers.”

The idea that environmentalists shouldn’t try to influence how people eat “is a win for industry … It’s their script,” said Jacquet, the University of Miami professor. Environmentalists who repeat this, she added, have “become sock puppets for industry, and they don’t even mean to be.”

Well, the public IS hearing that message from various places despite the fact that it’s a message too many people are unwilling to hear. I don’t require Environmental groups to be in-your-face about it. Let the data speak for itself.

A 2023 analysis published in the journal One Earth found that, from 2014 to 2020, the US meat industry received about 800 times more government funding than did meat and dairy alternatives.

A lot can be done to tip the scale in the other direction, and in ways unlikely to spur political backlash.

I didn’t find the examples they list to be very encouraging, but they do exist. They describe how Denmark is doing some neat stuff.

“It needs to be a political liability to choose false solutions over effective climate policies,” said Jennifer Molidor, a senior food campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity.

That’s the hard part! :-) Near the end there are some examples of where stuff is working and suggests a public awareness campaign would help. No more pictures of happy cows on green grass, but instead images of the barren land of holding pens stretching out in all directions. Show people the reality instead of the mythos and ask them to make it an issue with their local politicians.

Thank you for posting this! I was sad and frustrated to hear he was arrested, but I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. Maybe signing a petition isn’t much, but it is a start, and it feels probable that people with the means to do so might get organized to show up in person to offer support. If I was richer and younger, I’d love to take a pro-environmental vacation to Greenland.

Honestly, I would rather she flip on this issue than have her replace Lina Khan as the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

Why is Harris flipping? To pick up swing voters. Senator Fetterman (D-PA) did the same thing to get elected in that important swing state. I remember seeing his debate against a carpetbagging Dr. Oz and despite being barely coherent after his stroke, Fetterman made the point repeatedly that he supported fracking. And he won.

As of 2021, the last time a major poll was conducted, not only did a majority of Pennsylvanians want to see more regulation of the fracking industry, but a majority actually wanted to “end” fracking in the state (25 percent wanted it done “as soon as possible,” and 30 percent favored a gradual transition).

So why is Harris reversing her position on fracking if Pennsylvanians want it gone? One reason may be that many of the voters who oppose fracking (for example: the 79 percent of Democrats who want fracking to end) will vote for her either way. The people the party is anxious about winning, on the other hand, might be the ones who’d be turned off by a proposed ban. For example, 43 percent of independents in the 2021 poll said fracking should not end or be phased out.

I think there’s more to it than that. Republicans are going to run ads saying she’s against it so her team will want to say those ads are lies, so they can’t be trusted on anything. That is: flipping position on one issue lets her discount multi-vector attacks on many things.

More than that, she’s better be using this as a way to get money for her campaign. It would almost be a shame if she didn’t at least get support from Big Oil for flipping.

Why would this matter less than the FTC chair? Because Harris is getting monied pressure to replace Khan and Khan is doing an amazing job and getting actual change whereas it is unlikely that an anti-fracking stance would change anything. Given the current members of Congress, they are not going to ban or limit fracking right now, so Harris isn’t going to get that sort of law through. More importantly, the Supreme Court royally screwed us over last month by reversing the Chevron Doctrine so the EPA is hamstrung until/unless Chevron is restored OR congress writes new protection laws – and that’s not going to happen with this Congress, either. That means any Executive order on cleaning up fracking won’t work because the enforcement agencies are now toothless.

It sucks, but I understand the decision.

I would rather Beshear too, but mostly because I’m less worried about getting Kentucky having a Republican Govenor than I am about Arizona Senator Kelly getting replaced with a Republican Senator if Kelly becomes the VP pick.

Please someone stop Gerard Barron before he kills us all. From reuters:

“What are the alternatives if we don’t go to the ocean for these metals? The only alternative is more land mining and more pushing into sensitive ecosystems, including rainforests,” said Gerard Barron, CEO of Vancouver-based The Metals Co, the most-vocal deep-sea mining company and one of 31 companies to which the ISA has granted permits to explore for - but not yet commercially produce - deep-sea minerals.

Other companies with exploration permits include Russia’s JSC Yuzhmorgeologiya, Blue Minerals Jamaica, China Minmetals, and Kiribati’s Marawa Research and Exploration. Their potential future activities are seen as augmenting mining on land.

To give a better answer to his seemingly rhetorical question: The alternative is to ramp up salt-water battery tech, look for other tech and NOT deprive our biosphere of oxygen.

More on the mining stuff from wired and forbes (forbes link paywalls itself after a short while).