From this piece in Bloomberg:
Dominion Voting Systems Inc. blasted former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell for telling a judge that her claims about a vast election-fraud conspiracy were merely opinions in order to dodge the company’s $1.3 billion defamation suit. (more…)
From Yale Climate Connections:
The Southwest is the only region experiencing a decrease in heavy precipitation events. But even there, the intensity of rainfall during the region’s monsoon season has increased since the 1960s, according to a study in the peer-reviewed journal Geophysical Research Letters. (more…)
As previously discussed, I find this argument at least partially valid. Most, if not all of these hateful morons honestly believed that the President of the United States asked them to “go down to the Capitol and fight like hell to take their country back.” They’re clearly guilty of one or more crimes, but it will be interesting to see if this has any effect on the judges’ sentencing.
Carl Sagan was best known in his time as a charismatic astronomer, but will probably be remembered as a deeply committed humanitarian.
What he said here about writing is just amazing.
Travel writer Pico Iyer added, “Writing is, in the end, that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.”
At left we read what Liz Cheney is going through, on behalf of the United States of America.
She’s the daughter of Dick Cheney, the man who was the chief architect of the Iraq War. By spreading the lie that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction, he talked the American people into approving the launch of an aggressive war, which, according to the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg following World War II, “Is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” (more…)
This size comparison between the Titanic and a modern day cruise ship may serve as a reminder that human impact on this planet is far larger than it’s ever been before, and the rate of growth continues to increase as the years pass.
In the early 1950s, the popular philosophers of the day were saying things like, “Man is as effective as he adapts the environment to himself,” meaning that Man was the master and the environment his slave.
That made sense at the time, 70 years ago, before it was obvious to more than a handful of people that this was heading in a very bad direction.
It’s hard to imagine anyone who wishes to be taken seriously saying that today.
This fellow thinks it’s folly to expect world leaders to do anything substantial about climate change. I’m not as pessimistic, though I admit that this is an extremely complicated situation. To begin with, solving the climate problem in such a way that leaves India and China free to burn all the coal they can get their hands on is not a solution at all. We either lower emissions on a planetary basis, or we’re cooked–literally. (more…)
Some of us really do seem to have a terrible time understanding that the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment starts with the words, “Congress shall make no law….”
One can argue, quite persuasively IMO, that corporations have too much power over our lives, but this has nothing whatsoever to do with the U.S. Constitution. And yes, don’t vote for people who can’t understand this.
Here’s a conversation on the meme here:Me: I believe what Steve is saying is that calls for help in nonviolent cases (naked lunatics in the street, school disciplinary actions, etc.) are routed to people best equipped to deal with them. These people are specially trained, and, importantly, unarmed. In the cases where the situation escalates and force is required, the police are called.
This has been tested in many places around the country and has proven extremely effective; fewer than 5% of cases require police intervention. This means that, in the 95% of cases that are de-escalated, no one gets shot.
The word “defund” is unfortunate, I’ll be the first to admit. If they had chosen “narrow the responsibilities of,” there would have been near-uniform agreement.
From CBS News: Just a quick glance at the new U.S. Climate Normals maps published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Tuesday is enough for most climate scientists to say, “I told you so.” And it’s not just because the maps show a warmer and wetter nation, as one would expect with global warming; it’s also the specific geographic pattern of those changes.
As senior energy analyst Glenn Doty points out, perhaps the most problematic aspect of climate change is that the nastiest effects, e.g., sea-level rise, will change continuously for centuries.
Thus we have questions like: Where should we rebuild New York City when Manhattan Island goes under water? There really is no good answer to that question, unless you want to put it next to Denver at 5000 feet above what is now sea level.
