In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost
Robert Frost
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
Just wow: NYT
I read that early this morning and just about burst with pride and gratitude for that man and people like him who show such incredible selflessness. For all the ugliness in the world there is still a lot of beauty. It’s a beautiful world. Life is good.
It was nice to start the news day with that for a change, I must admit. Sometimes with all the ugliness out there, we forget to notice the good stuff.
but Wesley Autrey does it in real life. Holy crackers! Smudging his blue knit cap with grease!
today: AM NY
Now the MTA is urging people to eat something in the morning so the trains won’t be late. How messed up is that?
Leadership Academy for Under-privileged Girls: Oprah Winfrey builds school for poor South African girls, fulfilling a promise made to Mandela.
“Winfrey said that she hoped that by educating girls she would help “change the face of a nation.”
“If you are surrounded by beautiful things and wonderful teachers who inspire you, that beauty brings out the beauty in you” –
Al-Maliki wants out:
In an interview with WSJ, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has made clear he dislikes being the country’s leader and would prefer to leave the job before his term ends.
I’d want to quit that job too.
.
for George or Jeb in 2008!
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Just not of the United States.
He’ll most likely get his wish, sooner than later.
Odd that al-Maliki and Bush air in the same forum, WSJ; one longing to leave, the other getting ready to do it again – trying to ‘grab a win from the flames of failure.’
Rawstory has Bush’s Op-Ed in WSJ. Likely written by Snow. Not a glimmer of hope from this man.
Frustrated with those who won’t listen, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield ends his 34-year career to find a new platform for his message: Hurricane Katrina was nothing compared with the big one yet to come. Ten times the number of fatalities of Hurricane Katrina can be expected when a major storm eventually hits a major coastal city directly, he says.
Western U.S. wildfires are likely to increase in the coming decades, according to a new tree-ring study led by the University of Comahue in Argentina and involving the University of Colorado at Boulder that links episodic fire outbreaks in the past five centuries with periods of warming sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic.
The key to using trees to offset global warming is to expand tropical rainforests south of the equator, according to research released in the United States on Monday. “Our study shows that tropical forests are very beneficial to the climate because they take up carbon and increase cloudiness, which in turn helps cool the planet,” said Govindasamy Bala, lead author of the research.
Geologists have uncovered evidence in the oil fields of Oman that explains how Earth could suddenly have changed 540 million years ago to favor the evolution of the single-celled life forms to the multicellular forms we know today. The research yields new information about how past life has interacted with and evolved alongside the changing environment of Earth. Life on earth remained unicellular as long as the oceans did not circulate, with oxygenated water near the surface and stagnant, oxygen-depleted water beneath. Once ocean circulation began abd the whole ocean became oxygenated, multicellular life evolved rapidly (in geologic terms): in the space of 10 to 15 million years, all of the multicellular phyla that still exist today had evolved.
Researchers drilling for microfossils in the mid-Pacific Ocean, which are between 23 million to 34 million years-old, have found that the Earth’s climate and the formation and recession of glaciation events in the Earth’s history have corresponded with variations in the earth’s natural orbital patterns and carbon cycles. Models of the global carbon cycle, coupled to orbital controls of global temperature and biological activity, are able to reproduce the important changes observed after the world entered an “ice-house” state about 34 million years ago. In the early half of the 20th century, Serbian physicist Milutin Milankovitch first proposed that cyclical variations in the Earth-Sun geometry can alter the Earth’s climate and these changes can be discovered in the Earth’s geological archives, which is exactly what this research team, consisting of members from the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Canada, has done.
[The Milankovitch cycles were why some were predicting a new ice age 30 years ago. Of course, since then we’ve taken the climactic steering wheel from Mother Nature and decided to go on a hell of a ride…]
Japanese carmaker Honda believes it can mass-produce environmentally friendly fuel-cell cars by 2018, a press report said Friday. Honda Motor Co., Japan’s third biggest vehicle maker, plans to begin leasing a pricey new hydrogen-powered fuel-cell car in Japan and the United States in 2008.
Five “hotspots” of mercury contamination posing a risk to human health have been found in the eastern states of the US and eastern provinces of Canada. Average mercury concentrations in many of the region’s freshwater fish exceeded the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recommended level for safe consumption by up to 20 times. Mercury is a well known neurotoxin. The study raises concerns that current US laws to limit mercury emissions are falling short.
In a possible contradiction to common belief that a person’s body mass index, immune responses and stressful life events are factors that may cause narcolepsy, a comprehensive review published in the January 1st issue of the journal SLEEP finds that, as with other diseases characterized by selective cell loss, narcolepsy may be caused by environmental exposures before the age of onset in genetically susceptible individuals.
Soon we’ll have tropical rainforests north of the 45th.
Here in northern VT only a dusting of snow more like frost in early September, temp in mid 40sF.
At December 28th, Sweden ski hills were bare. My cousin in The Netherlands (Holland) said they were experiencing ‘tropical temperatures’ for this time of year, mid 50s F.
Tree rings, geologists, carbon dating..how very unscientific..my brother-in-law just informed me over christmas that of course Noah’s Flood created the Grand Canyon and that the earth is less than 6 thousand years old ..basing his deep thinking of course on that most holy and scientific of books, the Christian bible…so there and no he absolutely was not kidding.
.
The Tower of London has appointed a female Beefeater for the first time in its history. Beefeaters have been guarding the Tower since 1485 – for 522 years.
The Beefeater nickname of the Tower of London’s Yeoman Warders is thought to derive from the daily ration of meat they received. Their full title is Yeoman Warder of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and Members of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary.
For state occasions they wear the well-known ceremonial dress of red and gold with red stockings, a white ruff and black patent shoes.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."What the hell is going on in Penn. State?
They hold a majority and there is a Republican speaker??? WTF is in the drinking water there? And I thought Liberman made Dems look bad? lol