Call me Nardo

idk about you but i haven't seen enough attention on this. it's certainly not to minimize other issues, but it should at the very least be equally upsetting. you don't have to read this whole thing, but PLEASE read as much as you can then skip to the video.

president-elect donald trump has selected myron ebell to lead the epa transition. who is myron ebell? no one good. not only is he a climate change denier, he is the director of the competitive enterprise institute. let me take you on a tour of this despicable think tank.

the competitive enterprise institute showed up on the environmentalist scene criticizing Rachel Carson’s book silent spring, which raised awareness on the environmental dangers of ddt. They hosted the website rachelwaswrong.org, which, on a page titled “victims,” features photos of 50 children who have died from malaria with the description “many of these lives might have been saved had policymakers not abandoned ddt for malaria control in response to Carson’s silent spring,” thus labeling her a murderer. this page has already been modified since the election but still features the same thing.

as it turns out, Rachel was not wrong, and the dangers of ddt are recognized by the epa, the world health organization, and various other health and environment organizations. additionally, ddt was not banned indoors in areas affected by malaria, and many insect populations actually started to show resistance to it. this hasn’t stopped the defamation.

while leading the "cooler heads coalition", devoted to denying catastrophic climate change, it has received numerous donations from the american petroleum Institute, the charles g. koch charitable foundation, exxon-mobil, and the earhart foundation, which donates to other climate change denial groups such as the george c. marshall institute (which itself was owned by another dangerous person, frederick seitz, a great scientist turned big-tobacco proponent and climate change denier).

but perhaps—AND PLEASE WATCH THIS—what says the most the quickest, is this actual ad in 2006: https://youtu.be/R5D_WeWXioU proof that it's real.

after seeing the media incorrectly portraying these miracles of nature hundreds of times, i’ve decided to speak out.

this:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Holes_-_Monsters_in_Space.jpg

is not a black hole. black? yes. hole? sure. black hole? not even close.

“but nardo” i hear you say, “isn’t that picture used in every article about black holes, including wikipedia?”

yes. yes it is. speaking of wikipedia, here’s what it says right next to this same picture:

“Artists' impressions such as the accompanying representation of a black hole with corona commonly depict the black hole as if it were a flat-space material body hiding the part of the disc just behind it, but detailed mathematical modelling shows that the image of the disc would actually be distorted by the bending of light that originated behind the black hole in such a way that the upper side of the disc would be entirely visible, while there would be a partially visible secondary image of the underside of the disk.”

in other words, they used it as an example of what a black hole doesn’t look like. they don’t just block objects like boring planets, they move their image somewhere else. in this case, the disk would (appear to) bend around the black hole instead of going behind it. the upper side would appear above, and the lower side below. what would this distorted disk look like?

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-interstellar-technology-black-holes.html

take that, physics.

“but does it really matter nardo?”

yes. it matters. it’s important to realize that black holes aren’t just magical vacuum cleaners but solutions to the Einstein field equations that effectively break known physics. they’re not big black balls of stuff, they’re areas of space and time that physically don’t exist anymore. the least we can do is draw them correctly.