2018-12-29

The Tragedy of Cultural Relativism - YouTube

The rate of global warming

Since 1880, which is the measure most people use, on average the CO2 level has gone up less than 1 part per million per year and the temperature has gone up less than 1/100th of a degree celsius per year. You could argue that since about 1970 things have accelerated a little, but a little less than double. The temperature went up on average of 0.016 degrees celsius pear year. It is going take a very long time to reach the five degrees needed to melt the polar ice caps, which are according to every source going to take 5,000 years to melt. Meanwhile we will be out of most fossil fuels by the year 2100 and coal will be gone by the 2150. The only thing that will save us from running out of energy will be nuclear fusion, which fortunately is not that far off.

Three years ago I wrote this:

The amount of carbon on planet Earth by definition remains pretty much the same. Man has been burning fossil fuels, which puts carbon into the atmosphere. Where did the carbon in the fossil fuels come from? It mostly came from plants and bacteria that got buried underground due to geological processes. Over millions of years natural processes turned the plants and bacteria into fossil fuels. Where did the plants and bacteria get their carbon from? They got it from the atmosphere. The carbon that we are now putting into the atmosphere originally came from the atmosphere.

To better understand this, we have to understand the complete history of atmospheric carbon dioxide on planet Earth. The original earth atmosphere was an amazing 43% carbon dioxide compared with the roughly .04% that we have now. That original atmosphere had so much pressure that it could crush a man flat. About 2.5 billion years ago, cyanobacteria began using photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide into free oxygen, which lead to the creation of our oxygen rich "third atmosphere" 2.3 billion years ago. At that time the carbon dioxide levels were about 7,000 parts per million, but it went into a somewhat steady but uneven decline because geological processes would sequester carbon underground. The decline was uneven because as part of the "carbon dioxide cycle", sometimes geological processes like volcanoes would cause massive amounts of carbon dioxide to be released back into the atmosphere.

Thirty million years ago during the Oligocene Epoch, the average temperature of the earth was about 7 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. There was no ice on the poles, but the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was in rapid decline during this epoch. About 23 million years ago, at the beginning of the Neogene period, ice began to form on the poles. About ten million years ago, a series of intermittent ice ages began that continue to this day. I found one source that said that we are still technically in an ice age because we still have ice at the poles.

These ice ages helped create human evolution. The ice ages caused Africa to dry up which lead to some deforestation. This forced some arboreal (tree dwelling) apes to venture onto land. About 7 million years ago, the first apes that could comfortably walk upright appeared. They had evolved a new type of pelvis that allowed upright locomotion, which is about three times more efficient when trying to cross land.

The first tool making ape that resembled modern humans, Homo habilis, arose 2.5 million years ago. It would be soon followed by Homo erectus, and then about 200,000 years ago, modern humans, Homo sapiens would arise. However, Homo sapiens almost died out. About 50,000 years ago an ice age in Europe had caused Africa to almost completely dry up. The total human population had dropped to 7,000 individuals living on the southern coast of Africa. During this period humans learned how to fish, make new tools, and create permanent dwellings. When the ice age abated, these humans with their new tools spread out to rest of the world at a pace of about a mile per year. This was the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic (Late Stone Age) period.

More ice ages would follow, and during each ice age human population would decline. It is no coincidence that all of human civilization (i.e. agriculture, use of metals) would arise during a "brief" warm period between two ice ages starting about 10,000 years ago. I have heard that no matter what we do, we will enter a new ice age in about 10,000 years from now, but I have also heard speculation that the next ice age will be delayed by global warming. This actually should be our goal, since humans have always declined during the ice ages and always prospered during the intermittent warm periods.

During the geological time period of the earth, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been on an uneven decline and mostly disappeared. Atmospheric carbon dioxide is necessary for plant growth, and I have read that we were running dangerously low on atmospheric carbon dioxide, about 00.02%, before mankind at least temporarily reversed the trend. I just read a wikipedia article that said that atmospheric carbon dioxide will eventually get so low that all plants and animals will die off. What mankind has done is put carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere that was previously there, thus possibly delaying the next ice age. Currently the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 00.04%.

Carbon dioxide by itself cannot cause significant global warming. There are diminished returns. Carbon dioxide has to double again to produce the same effect as the last doubling. The effect is not linear but logarithmic. What the alarmists are worried about, and they could be correct, is positive feedback. The warming of the earth causes more water vapor to enter the atmosphere, and water vapor is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, thus causing more warming. If this were true, however, the last warming period around the year 2000 should caused a continuous positive feedback, a runaway greenhouse, which didn't happen. Instead temperatures went into a major decline and hit a really big low point in the year 2007.

The skeptics believe that increased cloud cover reflects sunlight back into space thus causing a negative feedback. The skeptics are not "global warming deniers", which is a pejorative phrase used by global warming theorists to make the skeptics sound like holocaust deniers. These skeptics actually believe in global warming. At least, the legitimate skeptical scientists do. They just think that global warming is happening at a rate slower than predicted by the theorists. I can point you to an article that shows that the positive feedback models have been contradicted by the actual temperature data, which in reality has been closer to the negative feedback models.

The worst case scenario is that the polar ice caps will melt. If that happens we will lose some coastlines and all of Florida due to sea level rise. However, according to what I just read, it will take 5,000 years for the polar ice caps to melt. In other words, these are processes that take a very long time to happen. In this century we are only looking at modest temperature increases. In the meantime, humans are very adaptable. We are only five to ten years away from creating the first workable prototypes of nuclear fusion. It might take 25 years for this to be practical, but at that point if we wanted to get rid of fossil fuels altogether, we could. I think that we will also see advances in solar power, which is already happening, and battery technology to store the energy created by solar. In other words, we have it within our means to avoid any possible disasters that might be coming.

--

2018-12-13

Mueller’s Collusion Hoax Collapses

When that phantasmagorically impossible mission failed, without missing a newscast the president's enemies opened fire with the new theory. This is that a confessed criminal and accused liar could prove that the president committed crimes when he paid his legal bills, including, with or without his specific knowledge, inducements to two women not to violate agreements to keep private their own contested recollections of innocuous sexual encounters with the president ten years before the election.

The theory further holds that these supposedly criminal violations of election financing laws could cause a two-thirds majority of the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate to remove the president from office, or at the least, that a prosecutor who patiently waited until the president left office could then send him to prison for this conduct.

I was even astounded at the reaction of the Trump-haters who had been citing the Steele dossier as incontrovertible evidence of his "treason" (Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, and many others), when they had to deal with the fact that it was a smear-job commissioned and paid for and shopped to the media by the Clinton campaign. Without breaking their strides, they called this inconvenient fact "a talking point" (Washington Post), and altered the dossier's status to "campaign information," (Hillary Clinton).

This latest display of sangfroid is even more remarkable and ethically disturbing. All of them knew that the Russian collusion claim was defamatory fiction, and no one with an IQ in double figures or higher could believe that the election finance crime theory generated by putting the screws to a low-life like Cohen could seriously inconvenience the president. 

Carol of the Bells

Payoff Politics | The Ben Shapiro Show - YouTube

2018-12-06

iPhone 6s+ processor speed

Way back when I had an iPhone 4, I tried running the chess program Stockfish on it in analysis mode, and it was examining around 250,000 nodes per second, which at the time seemed to me to be pretty good for a handheld device.  This was not as good as my desktop, but still a good substitute for it.  Two years later when I got the iPhone 5, the speed had improved to around half a million nodes per second.  Two years after that with iPhone 6+ I was impressed to reach a million nodes per second.  However, I have just upgraded to the  iPhone 6s+, which is a three year old phone, and the same Stockfish program on this phone is examining an amazing two million nodes per second.

Compare this to my late 2009 iMac with a quad core 2.8 ghz core-i7 processor.  For its day it was a top of the line desktop computer, but today it is about average.   Using one core, the Stockfish program examines around 450,000 nodes per second.  If I use all 4 cores then the program sees about 1.5 million nodes per second.  The iPhone 6s+ only has two cores, but it is outperforming my desktop computer by a good margin.  

Since the iPhone 6s+ came out, Apple has released the iPhones 7, 8, 10, and 10s, all of which are faster than the previous generation.  (The 8 and 10 are part of the same generation.)  The 10s is only slightly faster than the 10, because we are reaching a point where the laws of physics won't allow them to make the circuits smaller, therefor faster.  I personally wanted an iPhone 10 or an iPhone 8, because I knew that the processor on those phones kicked ass, but I didn't want to spend a fortune for a phone, so I settled for the good enough iPhone 6s+, which I got on a Black Friday sale for $300.

Speaking of kicking ass, Apple has been doing that with their processor development.  No other mobile phone manufacturer comes close.  Apple is using a 7 nanometer process with their latest phones and tablets.  Compare that to Intel, the world's largest microprocessor manufacturer, who recently backed off of their 10 nanometer chips because of problems and instead released 14 nanometer chips.  AMD, who is already kicking Intel's butt, is scheduled to release 7 nanometer chips early next year, with a whole new line of processors that undercut Intel on price.

This is an exciting time because of how much progress has been made in computer processing power.  It is also impressive how much power Apple has been able to put in mobile devices.  The latest iPad Pro's, which use the same processors as their latest phones, outperform many desktop computers.

--

2018-12-02

AT&T "You Will" Commercials (high quality)

These commercials go back to 1993, and everything they predicted has come true, although the company that brought it to you might be Apple, among others.

2018-10-17

Re: Forced back to catch and release

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials – faced with a lack of housing space, an agreement that limits how long they can detain families and a massive increase in the number of border crossers – are having to resort to releasing illegal immigrants and asylum seekers "out of the front door" in Arizona.



2018-10-14

The future

Beginning around 5 billion years from now, the Sun will expand, becoming a swollen star called a red giant. By 7.5 billion years in the future, its surface will be past where the Earth's orbit is now, consuming the Earth.

In 500 million years the tectonic plate movement and geological activity on planet Earth will have stopped, causing it to have a similar fate to Mars. The planet will be dry, lifeless and very cold.

Within half a million years it is extremely likely that the Yellowstone supervolcano will erupt, wiping out life in several nearby states and causing an environmental catastrophe worldwide. However, we are already due for an eruption, and the underground volcano has shown increased activity over the last 30 years. This is a disaster of enormous scale waiting to happen; we just don't know when it will happen. Fortunately people are looking for ways to relieve some of the pressure that is building up beneath the National Park.

Within 100 years we will be almost completely out of fossil fuels, so we will have to rely on other energy sources. The last remaining fossil fuel will be coal, which is estimated to be gone by the year 2150.

Within 50 years machine intelligence will surpass that of all humans combined. This event has been dubbed "the singularity", and it will forever change our fate. From that moment on machines will make most of the technological advances, and possibly at an ever accelerating rate. Over time humans will become more integrated with technology, and we will no longer be purely biological.

What Happens When Liberals Run Your State?

I recommend giving this video 20 minutes.

2018-10-10

The paradox of choice | Barry Schwartz

Funny.  I don't necessarily agree with his final conclusion about redistributing wealth, but the video is thought provoking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM

Fwd: Award winning teacher Kerstin Westcott's resignation speech in Green Bay...

This is from my friend Al:

This is one of the saddest teacher testimonies I've seen on YouTube. What's sadder is the general public's complete ignorance of how bad our public school systems have become. Keep in mind, this teacher is speaking about the school system in Green Bay, Wisconsin. If it's that bad there, imagine how bad it is in New York, LA, Chicago, etc.

https://youtu.be/-SRCY8FqoyQ


2018-10-09

The $1,000,000,000 North Korean Bank Heist

Why Japan's Great Pyramid of Giza Can't be Built Until 2110

Fwd: France violent protests across country

The marches on Tuesday, October 9 are the first since June and are taking place in cities across France including Nice, Marseilles, Tours, Rennes and Bayonne.

Students, employees and pensioners have all been protesting against what they believe is the "destruction of the social model".

Images have emerged of French armed police officers tackling protesters, severely injured people and police even using tear gas to control the demonstrators. 

Unions including The General Confederation of Labour and Workers' Force unions are holding protests in Paris against "ideological policies" and reforms.

One protester held a banner which read "Macron, assassin of the social system".

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1028966/france-protests-emmanuel-macron-nantes-latest


Genius Bar caught ripping customer off ON CAMERA

2018-10-05

Origin of birds

The present scientific consensus is that birds are a group of theropod dinosaurs that originated during the Mesozoic Era. A close relationship between birds and dinosaurs was first proposed in the nineteenth century after the discovery of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx in Germany.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds

I keep hearing that dinosaurs are not extinct, but still exist in the form of birds.

I do not think that birds are dinosaurs in the way that the vast majority of people would think of dinosaurs, which is as very large reptiles, with maybe a few smaller versions. Instead, they are evolved from dinosaurs.

However, theropods are one type of dinosaur that is now thought to have more resemble birds in both their morphology and behavior, with many of them having feathers, including the mighty T-Rex. Birds are also theropods.

Some people are trying to activate dormant genes in chickens to see if they if they can produce some dinosaur characteristics. For example, with a little fiddling they produced a chicken with teeth.

Authoritarianism & Another Insane EU Directive

2018-09-30

Still Not Convinced You Need a Flu Shot? First, It’s Not All About You - The New York Times

In a good year, we might see as few as 114,000 people hospitalized with flu-associated illnesses. In a bad year, that number rises to more than 700,000.

In 2014, more than 57,000 people died of influenza/pneumonia. It was the eighth-most common cause of death, behind diabetes (just under 80,000 deaths). It's also the only cause of death in the top 10 that could be significantly reduced by a vaccine. Lowering risks of heart disease, cancer or Alzheimer's are much, much harder to do.

In 1995, the worst year of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, fewer than 51,000 people died of it. In 2014, just over 6,700 deaths were attributable directly to H.I.V. Yet it is H.I.V., not the flu, that people dread far more.

Because the flu is so common, we tend to minimize its importance. Consider the contrast with how the United States responded to Ebola a few years ago. We had a handful of infections, almost none of them contracted here. One person died. Yet some states considered travel bans, and others started quarantining people.

Worldwide, just over 10,000 people died in the 2014-15 West African outbreak of Ebola: a relatively new, frighteningly contagious illness that people feared could become a global pandemic. It's not surprising that it got a lot of attention. Yet the tens of thousands who died of influenza in the United States the same year barely made the news.

2018-09-12

iPhone prices

I guess all those rumors that Apple was going to cut prices turned out not to be true.  Anybody want to spend $1300 on a smartphone?

https://youtu.be/vjxvrG_t-Rs

Apple's new ad is cool.


That's what it looks like when you spend 5 billion dollars on a building.

Association of dairy intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 21 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study - The Lancet

Higher intake of total dairy (>2 servings per day compared with no intake) was associated with a lower risk of the composite outcome, total mortality , non-cardiovascular mortality, cardiovascular mortality, major cardiovascular disease, and stroke. No significant association with myocardial infarction was observed. Higher intake (>1 serving vs no intake) of milk and yogurt was associated with lower risk of the composite outcome, whereas cheese intake was not significantly associated with the composite outcome. Butter intake was low and was not significantly associated with clinical outcomes.

2018-08-29

Battery advancement

Chemists have successfully resolved two of the most challenging issues surrounding lithium-oxygen batteries, and in the process created a working battery with near 100 per cent coulombic efficiency. The new work demonstrates that four-electron conversion for lithium-oxygen electrochemistry is highly reversible. The team is the first to achieve four-electron conversion, which doubles the electron storage of lithium-oxygen, also known as lithium-air, batteries


2018-08-20

On the Vital Necessity of Free Speech

Wow. This is the best Jordan Peterson speech I have heard.  Too often he tends to meander and get into technical jargon that confuses the audience and makes both his points and his motives fuzzy.  But here he is focused like a laser.

2018-08-14

The Bangladesh Student Protests

The Bangladesh Student Protests over buses have turned extremely violent.

My concern is that student protests everywhere have become more violent. I get a sense that people are descending into chaos. There is pent up rage, much of which is out of proportion to reality.

https://youtu.be/mpbNbGZriIA

MoviePass is Un-Unsubscribing customers w/o telling them - YouTube

2018-07-20

Korea


With some 2.6 million forced laborers, North Korea is world's leading villain in modern day slavery, according to estimates in a new report.

One in 10 people live under modern slavery in the secretive nation, with the "vast majority being forced to work by the state,"


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-news-north-korea-modern-day-slavery-20180719-story.html




Why Doesn't the Queen of England Need a Passport?

Fwd: ISIS inspired Berkeley graduate plotted to kill 10,000 in San Francisco

A graduate of Berkeley High School in California, who reportedly told authorities he wanted to help ISIS kill 10,000 people in the San Francisco Bay Area, pleaded guilty to federal charges Wednesday, 

Amer Sinan Alhaggagi, 23, of Oakland, pleaded guilty to trying to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, possession of device-making equipment and identity theft, said officials of the state's Department of Justice.

Alhaggagi allegedly opened several Twitter and Facebook accounts in 2016 for ISIS supporters. He then allegedly told an undercover FBI agent that he wanted to kill 10,000 people in the Bay Area with bombs and rat-poison-laced cocaine, 

He met with the undercover agent, pointed out locations for terrorist attacks and brought three backpacks to be used in a future attack to a storage locker, 



Top 10 Greatest Space Missions to Other Planets

Fwd: Liver disease deaths spike among young Americans

the study -- published Wednesday in the BMJ -- found that deaths in the United States due to cirrhosis rose 65% and deaths from liver cancer doubled from 1999 to 2016. In that period, cirrhosis-related deaths increased for every ethnic group and for both men and women.

From 2009 to 2016, the greatest increase in death rate from cirrhosis was among people 25 to 34

Tapper cited a rise in binge-drinking among young people to account for the increase in cirrhosis-related mortality




2018-07-11

Voyager: The Farthest in Space.

I watched this documentary on Netflix streaming.  I really enjoyed it.  Maybe it airs on PBS occasionally.

2018-07-03

Why does time pass?

Asking "Why does time pass?" seems like circular reasoning. The word "pass" inherently refers to time.

Time is just there and events happen in sequence. "Space time" is believed to be proven, but it is just a mathematical model that accurately describes what we experience in the physical world. I refer to the expression that says, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." It is possible that there could be a different model, but we choose this one because it tells us everything we need to know, so why choose a different model that would produce the same results? Still, this reasoning might prevent us from discovering something different, which would only happen if the "Space time" model would fail in some way.

Although "Space time" might be 100% accurate, I have logical problems with it, because it says that time is just another physical dimension. That causes people to ask why we can't travel in time, say backwards? Logically this seems like a problem. For example, I have heard physicists say that time is
​an ​
illusion, that all events past, present and future happen simultaneously, but we think that there is time because we can only experience the here and now. On the surface this seems like utter nonsense.



​P.S. When I am playing speed chess, time can be both my enemy and my friend.

2018-07-01

The Sound of Silence

Heard this young artist in another video, so I made an attempt to find the original. She has a fantastic voice, and this is a pretty interesting interpretation of "The Sound of Silence."

In China, 'Free Trade' Means Steal What You Want

China's been fighting dirty against American business for years. China steals something between $225 billion to $600 billion worth of fashion designs, pharmaceutical formulas and new technologies from U.S. companies every year, according to the Commission on Theft of American Intellectual Property. Previous U.S. presidents did nothing but negotiate. That's like watching a burglar strip your house and asking him, "Can we talk?" At last, an American president picked up a weapon -- tariffs -- to fight back.

Not a minute too soon. The stealing is getting worse. Politicians naively said admitting China to the World Trade Organization in 2001 would push it toward a free market economy observing the rule of law. Magical thinking.

From the start, China violated WTO rules, knocking off American products and selling them as the real deal. A staggering 88 percent of counterfeit goods seized are from China and Hong Kong, according to Homeland Security. It's like the Chinese thought "free market" meant steal what you want.

Steal it or extort it. American companies doing business in China are pressured to transfer proprietary technology to a local partner. China promised to stop that arm-twisting but broke its word.

Now China is abandoning any pretense of respecting intellectual property. President Xi Jinping's official economic policy, called Made in China 2025, elevates technology theft to official status. The government politely calls it "the assimilation and absorption of imported technology." China plans to steal its way to economic dominance and end dependence on foreign suppliers.

American companies can't thrive under this threat. Our advantage in world markets isn't cheap labor or cheap materials. It's ideas

American Superconductor Corporation was almost put out of business, its stock value driven down 96 percent, when a Chinese wind turbine maker stole its technology and flooded the Chinese market with copies.

But if Beijing's plan proceeds, these U.S. companies will be shut out of China in a decade, and will have to compete in the rest of the world against Chinese companies that stole their technology and enjoy low-cost financing from Chinese state banks

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/20/in_china_free_trade_means_steal_what_you_want_137322.html


Liberal says build the wall...

The Democrats need to accept that they lost the last presidential election for a reason, and that their opponent's main campaign pledge was to tackle illegal immigration, with a wall at the southern border as the centerpiece. Completely resisting a legitimate agenda based on a clear campaign promise — well, it reminds me of the Republicans with Obamacare.

And there is clearly an adamant, persistent segment of the public that sees the crisis of illegal immigration as a vital one. They're not alone. Cast an eye at Brexit Britain, newly populist Italy, Macron's France, and even Merkel's Germany as it heaves in response to mass immigration from the developing world. This is a huge force in Western politics in every country. It may be the primary one. Millions of people are on the move right now, fleeing war and poverty and persecution. The vast migration from south to north, from poverty and chaos to opportunity and order in the West may be just beginning. Climate change will surely only make it worse. Finding the right balance between reason and compassion is essential if we are not going to further tear this country apart, or witness ever more humanitarian catastrophes, or see what's left of the West go under

So give him his fucking wall. He won the election. He is owed this. It may never be completed; it may not work, as hoped. But it is now the only way to reassure a critical mass of Americans that mass immigration is under control, and the only way to make any progress under this president. And until the white working and middle classes are reassured, we will get nowhere. Don't give it to him for nothing, of course

If all this sounds like appeasing a bigot, I understand. But better to see it, I think, as a way to address the legitimate concerns, fears, and worries of a large number of Americans who feel like strangers in their own land.

And equally, the Democrats who are currently posturing are playing a good card badly. They give off the appearance, as Hillary Clinton did, of making no distinction between legal and illegal immigration, favoring de facto open borders, and calling anyone who disagrees with them a white supremacist. Until they recognize that illegal immigration is a huge and legitimate problem, and until they propose a set of actual policy proposals to end it humanely and efficiently, they run the risk of another 2016 in 2020.

And this is what Miller and Bannon want. They want to turn the fall elections and the next presidential contest into a polarizing, fearmongering referendum on illegal immigration

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/to-end-the-border-crisis-for-good-give-trump-his-wall.html


Fwd: Isis zealot killed 8 on nyc bike path

A man charged with murdering eight people on a New York City bike path invoked "Allah" and defended the Islamic State group in court Friday, reports said.

Sayfullo Saipov, 30, raised his hand to speak out immediately after U.S. District Judge Vernon S. Broderick set an Oct. 7, 2019, date for the Uzbek immigrant's trial.

He said he cared about "Allah" and the holy war being waged by the Islamic State group

"So the Islamic State is not fighting for land, like some say, or like some say, for oil. They have one purpose, and they're fighting to impose Sharia (Islamic law) on Earth," he 

​said.​
 

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/06/22/suspect-in-nyc-bike-path-killings-invokes-allah-defends-isis-in-court.html


Fwd: Political hatred

TMZ reported that she was kicked out of the restaurant -- The Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia -- on "moral grounds" and cited a waiter who said that Sanders was served "for a total of two minutes before my owner kicked her out along with seven of her other family members."

Sanders confirmed the events on Twitter, saying she was told to leave by the owner because she worked for the president.

"Her actions say far more about her than about me," she said. "I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/23/sarah-sanders-says-was-thrown-out-virginia-restaurant-because-works-for-trump.html


Fwd: Active Antarctic Volcano

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet lies atop a major volcanic rift system, but there had been no evidence of current magmatic activity, the URI scientist said. The last such activity was 2,200 years ago, Loose said. And while volcanic heat can be traced to dormant volcanoes, what the scientists found at Pine Island was new.

"You can't directly measure normal indicators of volcanism — heat and smoke —  because the volcanic rift is below many kilometers of ice," Loose said

But as the team conducted its research, it found high quantities of an isotope of helium, which comes almost exclusively from mantle, Loose said.

"When you find helium-3, it's like a fingerprint for volcanism. We found that it is relatively abundant  in the seawater at the Pine Island shelf.

"The volcanic heat sources were found beneath the fastest moving and the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica, the Pine Island Glacier," Loose said. "It is losing mass the fastest."

He said the amount of ice sliding into the ocean is measured in gigatons. A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tons.

https://today.uri.edu/news/researchers-discover-volcanic-heat-source-under-major-antarctic-glacier/


Fwd: Restarsumt owner effects sarah sanders and extended family

She first spoke with her employees, who disagreed with Sanders' defense of Trump's discriminatory ban on transgender Americans who want to serve in the military and her recent defense of Trump's un-American family separation policy.

In response, she then asked Sanders to step outside to the patio and "explained that the restaurant has certain standards that I feel it has to uphold, such as honesty, and compassion, and cooperation." Clearly, Sanders doesn't comply with that standard

As a progressive, I feel that denying service to a person is instinctively troubling. For many, it may conjure up laws that banned blacks from being served at restaurants before the Civil Rights Act and the current campaign by some on the right to turn away same-sex couples who want professional services for their weddings. Or even a gun range owner who declared that no Muslims were allowed on the premises.

But the situations with Sanders and even Nielsen are not even in the same universe as these discriminatory examples. No one is targeting them for their race, religion or sexual orientation.

From a legal point of view, a person can be asked to leave a privately owned establishment because of their political views. For example, In April, a judge in New York City dismissed a lawsuit by a Trump supporter who wore a "Make American Great Again" hat to a bar and was asked to leave.
But applying this to the average American divides us even more as a nation and makes it less likely that we can ever return to being the United States of America.

No border enforcement

The over-the-top rhetoric and avalanche of grossly inappropriate analogies to the Holocaust have served Trump critics well. But there is a cost to feeding the overall impression that any effort to stop illegal immigration — no matter how careful it is to avoid cruelty — is inhumane. If every person entering the U.S. without permission — whether they come for economic opportunity or are fleeing violence in Central America — is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust victim seeking refuge and those seeking to stop them are all hatemongers or monsters violating human rights, then we've arrived at a point when the law and policy arguments about how best to enforce it have become irrelevant

In such a debate, there is no more middle ground. No matter what your opinion about how much immigration the United States should allow or whether illegal immigrants already here should be given a break, the firestorm over the children at the border has made this discussion impossible. This is not just a rerun of the argument Americans have been conducting about what to do about the estimated 11 million-plus illegal immigrants who were already here during the Obama administration and whether they deserved some form of amnesty up to and including a path to citizenship. Now the appeal for not merely mercy and compassion but for amnesty applies to those crossing the border, with or without children.

former actress Cynthia Nixon, who is mounting a vocal and well-funded challenge to Andrew Cuomo's effort to be reelected governor of New York...
she is now demanding — to the applause of the hosts and the audience on The View, where she appeared — that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency be abolished altogether and not replaced by any other body to perform the function of apprehending illegals.


2018-06-30

Fwd: Brutal bronx stabbing

Surveillance footage published by the Post showed Lesandro "Junior" Guzman-Feliz, who dreamed of being a police officer, being dragged from the store by his attackers, who were seen stabbing the teen repeatedly with a machete.

The New York Post, citing police sources, identified one of the suspects as Kevin J. Alvarez, 19. He was charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter, gang assault and assault, the paper reported.

The attack stemmed from a case of "mistaken identity," the paper reported.

The New York Times reported that social media users believed that the victim may have been mistaken for another teen seen in a sex video with one of the suspect's relatives.

Members of the Trinitarios street gangs reportedly apologized to Guzman-Feliz's family and said, "It wasn't supposed to be him."

NYPD Chief Terence Monahan described Guzman-Feliz's murder as "among the most brutal crimes I've seen in my 36yr career."

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/06/25/nypd-ids-1-5-suspects-in-mistaken-identity-machete-killing.html




Fwd: Saturn's moon

Fwd: Civil war upon us


Just ask all the families of police officers in America who have been executed over the past four or five years by militants inspired by the so-called "Black Lives Matter" movement.

This would be the same movement that Democratic leaders are terrified of standing up to. When their last standard bearer — Hillary Clinton — made the grave error of declaring that "all lives matter," she later issued an apology and a correction.

Yes, this civil war is upon us.

Or ask all the American families who have suffered murder, dismemberment and terror at the hands of MS-13 gang members who streamed across the broken border. A border that the Democratic Party — back when it was still a serious outfit — agreed should exist.

A little more than a decade ago, Democratic leaders such as Mrs. Clinton, her husband, and former President Barack Obama all supported, argued for and voted for a physical barrier along the border to keep illegal aliens — especially violent gang members — from sneaking into the country.

This, along with the increasingly heated rhetoric comparing ICE and Border Patrol agents to Nazis (yes, these kids are totally illiterate and never learned one minute of history), suggests this civil war is going to only get worse.

Or just listen to the loudmouth leaders of the Democratic Party today, actually arguing that the president of the United States somehow does not have the authority — let alone constitutional responsibility by oath — to make sure America's enemies do not infiltrate our country so that they can wage some barbaric jihad against American citizens.

Yes, this civil war is upon us.

Ask House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who is still recovering from an assassination attempt by a disaffected Bernie Sanders supporter who plotted to kill dozens of members of Congress for being Republican.

Yes, this civil war is upon us.

And when you look around at Democratic leaders applauding and encouraging the open harassment of political opponents out in public, you know things are only going to get worse.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/27/new-civil-war-already-upon-us/