On today's BradCast: Several hours after we got off air from yesterday's program, our first-in-the-nation scoop on the pretty hilarious results of the Cyber Ninjas' Arizona "audit" was confirmed by the national media, including New York Times, Washington Post and CNN, not to mention the Arizona Republic and other local outlets. [Audio link to full show is posted below this summary.]
The main part of our exclusive news yesterday was that Trump's sore-loser, publicly financed, privately purchased and secretly carried out 2020 "audit" in Maricopa County found that the hand-count of 2.1 million hand-marked paper ballots cast there, as tallied by Dominion Voting Systems' tabulators prior to certification, were, in fact, tallied almost entirely accurately. The evidence-free lie that there had been some nefarious conspiracy to hack the Dominion systems on Joe Biden's behalf by communists in China, Cuba, Venezuela, along with George Soros, the "deep state" and "antifa", proved to be the bullshit most of the not-brainwashed Americans had presumed.
In fact, according to the Ninjas' own hand-count, Joe Biden picked up 99 votes over the state certified totals while Donald Trump lost 261, widening Biden's slim margin of more than 10,000 votes in Arizona by another 360. The "audit" hand-count of the state's U.S. Senate race also found a larger margin for the Democratic candidate than certified, though both candidates lost some votes in the Ninjas' count. Republican Martha McSally lost 541 votes, while Democrat Mark Kelly lost just 60, for an overall increase of 481 votes for Kelly, the certified winner.
We were a bit more general and circumspect during Thursday's show than we usually like to be, in our description of those findings while breaking the news in order to protect sourcing. But with the Ninjas three volume report now full released you can download it yourself for inspection. The numbers in the Presidential and Senate race are, however, buried way back in the report's third volume [PDF] for some odd reason. That's another reason we felt it important to break the news before the Ninjas put their purposefully diverting spin on things.
As Phoenix' NPR station KJZZ reported last night, even Randy Pullen, a spokesman for the state Senate and major proponent of the "audit" was forced to concede: "Was there massive fraud or anything? It doesn't look like it."
Today, Arizona's GOP state Senate held a forum to allow the Ninjas and friends to present their findings, though the Senate's feed crapped out about an hour into it (and long before Ninja CEO Doug Logan ever conceded that his hand-count confirmed the previously certified Democratic victories, if he ever offered such a concession. You can watch a replay of the three-hour forum now here.), We'll almost certainly pick up any newsworthy information or legitimate concerns from the hearing and/or the report in the not too distant future, if warranted.
All of this nonsense, of course, is a perfect way to disguise and distract from the fact that the GOP is now a broken political party with absolute no actual legislative agenda. But it comes at a time when when humanity itself is hanging in the balance, unfortunately, and when a legitimate opposition party to the Democrats might be very useful.
Earlier this month, NASA climate scientist and author DR. PETER KALMUS responded to recent calls from President Biden and nations around the world, to reach "net zero" greenhouse gas emissions "by 2050", by citing "two fatal flaws" in that plan: "One is 'net zero,'" he wrote at The Guardian, "the other is 'by 2050'."
Kalmus' argument comes as climate disasters around the world are now happening much sooner, more broadly and more fiercely than long predicted by climate scientists, and as new U.N. reports argue that even if the nations of the world meet their current pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, we will still see catastrophic, humanity-threatening disaster by century's end. That, as a handful of so-called "moderate" Democrats in the House and Senate this week hold up efforts to at least begin facing this challenge, as designed in the Clean Energy Performance Program (or CEPP, offering financial incentives for utility companies to move to renewable energy production) built into the heart of President Biden's proposed $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act.
"In my opinion, and I think many of my colleagues would agree, the climate science community is pretty surprised by how fast climate breakdown is progressing, in terms of extreme heat, which kicks off the fires, along with the extreme drought in the Western part of the US, the extreme flooding that we've been seeing in the Eastern part of the U.S. All of this is coming a lot faster than we thought as a community," Kalmus tells me, explaining why he is calling for "climate emergency mode" in which "a lot of things in society would have to change pretty drastically and quickly."
When there's an emergency," he argues, "you don't typically just keep doing what you were doing." He notes that most calls for net zero by 2050 assume some sort of negative emissions or carbon capture technology which either doesn't yet exist or, where it does, is not nearly robust enough to remove anywhere near the amount of greenhouse gas that must be removed from the atmosphere to even make a dent in our quickly worsening climate crisis.
He is calling for much more drastic measures --- such as the nationalization of the fossil fuel industry --- than most of the climate scientists and experts we've interviewed on the program, or who are usually allowed to speak in the national media.
While Kalmus concedes many of his arguments "might sound a little too radical" for many now, he believes that with each successive disaster, people will begin to understand more and more the consequences of failing to take appropriate action to meet the moment. He argues that while carbon capture technologies will not save us, neither will kicking the can down to 2050 to reach net zero. That, Kalmus explains, needs to happen more like by 2035 and, he believes, it is actually doable.
His case "might sound a little too radical to some of your listeners," the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist (who notes he's speaking on his own behalf) concedes, but "my response to them would be that they haven't fully understood just what an emergency we're in, or just how irreversible the damage that we're doing and leaving for future generations is going to be."
Kalmus, whose research at the nation's space agency employs satellite data and models to study our rapidly changing Earth, warns: "I see what is coming in the future years, and I'm just trying to get people to respond now to what I know is coming. And that's really hard. I take a lot of criticism for that. But I know I'm right. So I keep trying."
"Ten years ago when I was saying similar things, but it wasn't so immediate to people, no one was listening," he says, adding: "Recent years have started to shift that balance. It's just basic physics and it's continuing as we continue to emit these greenhouse gases. So I can say with complete confidence that in the coming years, what I'm saying now that sounds radical to people will not seem radical anymore. I just wish that people would listen now."
(Snail mail support to "Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028" always welcome too!)
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