Archive of entries posted on 13th December 2019

Is This Weirdo Working for the Republicans Now?

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Al Gore Says Democrats Should Run on the Green New Deal
The Hill | 12-13-2019 | Rafael Frazin

Former Vice President Al Gore has said that Democratic presidential candidates should run on the Green New Deal.

{chortle}

Oh, please do. Pretty please.

Gore told Politico that the concept of a Green New Deal is a “broad brushstroke, bold proclamation, the details of which are designed to be filled in later.”

Not if you want voters to know what they’re voting for!

He also said he had met with candidates, but declined to name them.

!

Profiles in Courage!

The Democrat and environmentalist, who ran for president himself in 2000, told the news outlet that “the prospects are excellent” that a Democratic president would prioritize climate change.

He added that he thinks health care and climate change are the top two issues in the primary contest.

And his expert political acumen has, in the past, resulted in what?

“Conventional wisdom on this point is correct in my experience — you have to pick two or three priorities and emphasize them when the mandate from the election is fresh and push as hard as you can as quickly as you can,” Gore said.

Gore was in Madrid this week for the United Nations climate conference.

Huh.

No freezing weather in Spain resulted?

Democratic presidential race front-runners Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg have all expressed support for a Green New Deal.

Gore has been a longtime advocate of environmental issues and narrowly lost his presidential race to George W. Bush.

And is this the first time The Hill has conceded this?

IMAO Time Machine – A Washington DC Christmas Carol – Part 2

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Lactose the Intolerant posted this in 2013. — The Editors

(The clock strikes 1 PM and a ghostly apparition appears before Barack)

Barack: JFK?  Is that you?  It is you. I can’t believe it is you. You are supposed to be my hero.

JFK: I know.  I know.  Wait….Supposed to be?

Barack: Well, yeah.  So I’ve heard.  Once I was born, all other heroes just naturally faded into the background, but I heard people liked you and stuff. I never saw the movie myself, so….well, I heard you were good in it.

JFK: Ok, ok, let’s just move this along, then.  I can’t believe I have to sit through another Christmas Carol ripoff.  Get some imagination people.  Where’s the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald when you need him?  Ok, follow me.  It’s this way.  Just back and to the left.  That’s right, back and to the left.  Back and to the left.  No, your other left.  Just follow me!

(They are suddenly whisked away and appear back at the White House Christmas party)

JFK: No one can see you, of course.  You are just here to observe and see what you can learn about the true meaning of Christmas.

Barack: Dude, this is so wrong.  I can’t even grab the champagne or nothing. I’m not sure I can endure this sober.

JFK: Just pay attention for once.  I’m not thrilled about this either.  There, why don’t you check in on Joe?

(Drifts over to where Joe is speaking to Nancy)

Joe (drunkenly): And you can’t say I’m not doin’ nothin’ anymore, neither. Barack just put me in charge of plannin’ for the War on Christmas.  Yeshh, it’s true.  It is. And I have plans.  Lots of plans.  I’m gonna start this off with coordinated drone attacks on all of the mall Santas.  I mean, they can’t all be body doubles, right.  We’ll nail the real one eventually.  And I’m gonna idle my car all the time.  Melt that North Pole right out from under him.  Drown him with all the polar bears.  Collateral damage.  Acceptable losses. That’s what the armies call it.  Acceptable losses.  And I know how to fund it too.  Been goin’ to the pounds and scooping up all of the golden retrievers.  You know with the price of gold bein’ what it is, once they retrieve it all, we’ll be rich, I tell ya.  But there’s more.  There’s more.  I was smart.  Always thinkin’.  Bought all the munitions during the Black Friday sales.  Went shoppin’ with Paula Deen.  Though she didn’t call it Black Friday.  I can’t tell you what she called it, but it wasn’t Black Friday.  And that’s not all.  Not all.  Not all at all. I’m in charge of all holiday related, uh, stuff and stuff.  Like Halloween fightin’.  Like the zombie apocalypse.  Preparing for that, too.  First thing I gots to do is dig up all the corpses and tie their shoelaces together. Gives us a better chance of runnin’ away from them, cause they’ll all be trippin’ and stuff. And I’d tell you about the upcoming Valentine’s Day massacre, but, shhhhhhhhhhh,  it’s a secret. You’ll have to be a part of the massacre so you can know what is in it, so kind of right up your alley.  You want to be part of the massacre?

JFK: Please tell me that you are planning on changing the Constitution so that isn’t your successor

Barack: Sad thing is, he’s more lucid when he’s drunk. You should hear what he says when he is sober.  Take me somewhere else.  Please.  There’s Kerry and Bill over there.

Kerry: What’s up with that umbrella?  Is it really working?

Bill (holding an umbrella over his head made entirely of mistletoe): Oh this.  Oh, no.  I don’t need this to get a kiss. But it keeps Hill away.  It’s like Hillary repellent XXS or something. Gives me my space.

Kerry: It’s luring me in, though.  Pucker up, I’m coming in.

Bill: You can’t kiss me with those lips.  They’re still stuck to the Ayatollah’s ass.  But did I tell you? I recently moved in with my girlfriend.  Don’t tell her.  She doesn’t know.  And neither does her husband.  I tell you, there is nothing like the feeling of waking up next to the woman you love, even if she doesn’t know that you love her or that you are even in her house.  But anyway, when I would creep into her room and watch her change, I kept noticing these bruises on her and stuff. So what is my first thought?  Domestic abuse, right?  Am I right?  Of course I’m right.  So I sit her down and say, I know this is a touchy subject and it may not be any of my business, but I think you really need to try and be less obnoxious. I mean, really.  You can be very annoying.  A lot of the time I want to smack you around too.  But really, I can feel your pain.  I can feel your pain.

Kerry: You know, they say that women have a higher threshold for pain than men.

Bill: But what good is that if their threshold for complaining about it is so much lower?  You know what I mean?  But anyway, you read that Fifty Shades of Grey yet?

Kerry: No, but did you hear that Al said it was a ripoff of his and Tipper’s love life?

Bill: No way.  But the scary thing I heard was that they did a study and found that every copy of that book in the world had traces of cocaine and herpes on it.  Every copy.  True story.

Kerry: And you know that 70% of people who catch herpes get it from someone with no visible signs of an outbreak.  Sibelius told me that one. So I know it is true.  But the really scary thing is that means the 30% of people who contract herpes get it from someone with visible signs.  That’s just frightening.

Bill: And that, my friend, is why you always keep the lights on.  And it is why foreplay is so important.  If you are getting it on, and it feels like you are reading The Audacity of Hope in braille, run for the door.  Run for the door and don’t look back.

Obama: I’m so confused, dude. What exactly was I supposed to learn from this?  This is the same stuff I see from them every day.

JFK: I haven’t got a clue. The Powers That Be really didn’t think this one through at all it seems.  No planning or follow up from the chief executive, apparently.  I guess everyone just assumed the Dickensian template just always worked on its own.  Major foul up here. Which God do you worship again?

Obama: Myself, of course. Duh, dude.  Who else is worthy of my reverence?

JFK: Ah, no wonder this was such a monumental cluster.  You were ultimately in charge of this whole thing.  Did you have any meetings about this at all?

Obama: Cha!  I’m too smart to deal with details.  That’s what the serfs are for.  It’s not like I’m going to show up to a meeting about something called Obamacarol.  That just sounds downright racist to me.  Especially when it was such a monumental failure.  I don’t want my fingerprints all over that train wreck.  Maybe we should call it the Awful Christmas Act or something else less racist.

JFK: You’re hopeless.  There is apparently no hope that you will ever change. This is absurd. I’m not wasting my time anymore.  Enjoy your next visit.  See you in a few months. (fades away)

Obama:  Hey, wait a minute.  You have time for a quick selfie?  Wait, what? A few months?  Wait? What? That means you’re coming back, right?

(To be continued, maybe, if I feel like it)

Sadly, Lactose the Intolerant never got around to making Part 3. However he did … well, that’s for another day. If I feel like it. — The Editors

The Sun Has Set on the British Umpire

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‘Not My Prime Minister’, Protesters March in London Against Johnson
12/13/19

LONDON (Reuters) – Several hundred noisy protesters marched through central London on Friday to protest against Britain’s election result, chanting “Boris Johnson: Not My Prime Minister” and “Boris, Boris, Boris: Out, Out, Out”.

The protesters, brandishing signs that read “Defy Tory (Conservative) Rule” and “Refugees Welcome”, walked at speed from outside Johnson’s Downing Street residence to Trafalgar Square and on to the theatre district, blocking traffic and drawing a heavy police presence.

The British: Years ahead of the US culturally, years behind the US counter-culturally.

And militarily. And in walking on the moon.
And in dentistry.
Oh, and in conservation of “u”s.

Not Entirely Sure How I Feel About This. On Second Thought, I Am.

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Artificial Intelligence Will Be Used To Complete Composer’s Unfinished Tenth Symphony
Daily Mail | 13 December 2019 | James Mills

A few notes scribbled in his notebook are all the German composer left of his symphony before his death in 1827.

Now, a team of musicologists and programmers is racing to complete a version of the piece using sophisticated computer software to predict what Beethoven had planned.

Beethoven began working on the Tenth Symphony alongside his Ninth, which includes the world-famous ‘Ode To Joy’.

But he quickly gave up on the Tenth, leaving only a few notes and drafts by the time he died aged 57.

In the project, machine-learning software has been fed all of Beethoven’s work and is now composing possible continuations of the symphony in the composer’s style.

Barry Cooper, a British composer and musicologist who himself wrote a hypothetical first movement for the Tenth Symphony in 1988, was more doubtful.

‘I listened to a short excerpt that has been created. It did not sound remotely like a convincing reconstruction of what Beethoven intended,’ said Cooper, a professor at the University of Manchester and the author of several works on Beethoven.

A project earlier this year to complete Schubert’s Eighth Symphony was seen by some reviewers as being closer to an American film soundtrack than the Austrian composer’s work.

AIAO: Amateur In, Amateur Out.

Do They Not Teach Causality at Dartmouth?

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Research Confirms Timing of Tropical Glacier Melt at the End of the Last Ice Age
Phys.org / December 11, 2019

Tropical glaciers in Africa and South America began their retreat simultaneously at the end of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, according to a Dartmouth study.

The finding of synchrony in ice retreat across the global tropics clarifies how the low latitudes transformed during one of Earth’s most extreme climate change events and can help current-day predictions of our own climate future.

The study, published in Science Advances, supports the overwhelming scientific consensus on the role of carbon dioxide in causing global climate change, but adds additional levels of complexity to the understanding of Earth’s climate system and how ice ages rapidly end. The result also adds to the understanding of the sequencing of glacial retreat between the tropics and the polar regions at the time

“Carbon dioxide is what caused the Earth to come out of the last ice age,” said Meredith Kelly, an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth, and senior researcher on the study.

… just before contradicting herself:

“But there are also processes that began before carbon dioxide increased that are important to the overall story of how the period ended, and that’s what we wanted to understand.”

According to the Dartmouth study, glaciers in tropical Africa and South America reached their maximum extents about 29,000-21,000 years ago and then began to melt. This retreat is earlier than the significant rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded at about 18,200 years ago.

So the coming-out-of-the-ice-age preceded, by many thousands of years, the rise in carbon dioxide that is said to have “caused” it. Got it.

The findings demonstrate a trend of increasing tropical temperatures across the planet and suggest that the warming may have been caused by a reduction in the temperature differences between the Earth’s polar regions and the tropics.

At the end of the last ice age in the Arctic, small changes in Earth’s orbit resulted in more solar radiation and warmer temperatures, and caused a retreat of the northern ice sheets. In Antarctica, the change of the planet’s angle to the sun created longer summers. The reduction in the temperature gradient between the poles and the tropics slowed the movement of heat out of the low latitudes to the extreme north and south, making the tropics warmer and resulting in faster loss of glaciers in the region.

… And, having described the astronomical causes of warmer temperatures, they return to the obligatory “but it was the later increase in carbon that really did it.”

But if carbon did not exist at all, what would the glaciers have done under the effects of the planet’s changed orbit and angle to the sun, which resulted in more radiation and warmer tempertatures?

Once changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns and the upsurge in carbon dioxide took over, the planet was left in an overwhelming warming spiral

. . . which self-corrected at some point?

Or does it continue today?

In either scenario, SUVs seem to be exonerated.

that melted ice sheets near the poles and all but eliminated glaciers in the tropics.

“Just a couple of thousand years could make all the difference in our understanding of past and present climate change events,” said Margaret Jackson, who served as the lead author of the study while a Ph.D. student at Dartmouth. “This study shows that glaciers were responding to warming even before the deglacial rise in carbon dioxide pushed the planet over the edge to end the last ice age.”

Something tells me they’re going to tell Margaret to couch her statements, in the future, with wording that better disguises this plain truth.

Kid Pro Quo

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I heard Robert (middle name “Hunter”) Biden got various high-paying jobs and gifts solely due to the fact that his father was a vice (heh!) president.

Are the press even aware of this?

‘Cause I heard the NY Times alone had like twenty or thirty reporters investigating Donald Trump when he was a candidate.

Satellite

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How much do you use communications satellites for? Just about everything, I think.

GPS uses satellites. My car radio uses satellites. In the next few years, our Internet will be using satellites.

So, the first active communications satellite — not the passive Echo type — named Relay 1 was launched on December 13, 1962. It was the first of many, and the beginning of what we now take for granted.

I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. I think it might be. I use satellites only for good.

Well, mostly.