#its only ever about this years august being the hottest in recorded history... year after year after year

[anniebass]

sometimes when I'm writing I google specific phrases in english in quotation marks (only time I use them hurr hurr), to check if I haven't made that shit up somehow, if it's been used in books or articles before

and uh

I googled "this year's august was"

and ho-ho-hooooooly climate change, the results were not..... not what I was looking for. Jesus fucking christ almighty we are COOKED.

[jedi-anakin]

2020 – what happened so far

(it’s impossible to include all, but I try my best)

January

January 1 – Palau became the first country to ban sun creams containing ingredients that are harmful to coral and marine life.

January 2 – The government of New South Wales, Australia, declares a state of emergency whilst the government of Victoria, Australia declares a state of disaster amid large bushfires that have killed as many as 500 million animals.

January 3 – A US drone strike at Baghdad International Airport kills Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi paramilitary leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

January 5 – Iran pulls out of the 2015 nuclear deal, will not limit its uranium enrichment.

January 7 – 56 people are reported killed and over 200 injured in a crush at the funeral of general Qasem Soleimani in the city of Kerman, Iran.

January 7 – A 6.4 magnitude earthquake in Puerto Rico, island's largest in a century, kill 1 person and destroy 800 homes.

January 8 – Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 is shot down by Iran's armed forces shortly after takeoff from Tehran Imam Khomeini Airport, killing all 176 people on board.

January 8 – Duke and Duchess of Sussex announce they are stepping back as "senior" royals, will work towards becoming financially independent.

January 16 – The impeachment trial of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, begins in the US Senate.

January 26 – Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna Bryant dies in a helicopter crash.

January 30 – The World Health Organization (WHO) declares the outbreak of the disease as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.

January 31 – The United Kingdom and Gibraltar formally withdraw from the European Union at 11PM (GMT), beginning an 11-month transition period.

January 2020 was the hottest January in recorded history according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

February

February 3 – Cruise ship Diamond Princess with 3711 passengers quarantined in Yokohama port, Japan after cases of coronavirus found on board.

February 5 – The US Senate acquits US president Donald Trump on articles of impeachment.

February 8 – 20 people dies in a mall shooting in Thailand.

February 9 – Deaths from the Coronavirus overtake those of Sars (2003) with 813 deaths worldwide.

February 10 – More than 30 bushfires put out by heaviest rainfall for 30 years in New South Wales, Australia, helping end one of the worst bushfire seasons ever, 46 million acres burnt, over 1 billion animals killed, 34 people dead.

February 11 – Snow falls in Baghdad, Iraq, for only the second time in a century.

February 23 – First major coronavirus outbreak in Europe in Italy with 152 cases and three deaths, prompting emergency measures, locking down 10 towns in Lombardy.

February 23 – China's Supreme Leader Xi Jinping describes the country's coronavirus outbreak as the China's largest health emergency since 1949.

February 24 – Former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein found guilty of rape and a criminal sexual act.

February 29 – Luxembourg becomes the first country in the world to make all public transport in the country (buses, trams, and trains) free to use.

February 29 – A conditional peace agreement is signed between the United States and the Taliban in Doha, Qatar. The U.S. begins gradually withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.

March

March 8 – Italy places 16 million people in quarantine, more than a quarter of its population, in a bid to stop the spread of COVID-19. A day later, the quarantine is expanded to cover the entire country, becoming the first country to apply this measure nationwide.

March 9 – International share prices fall sharply in response to a Russo-Saudi oil price war and the impact of COVID-19. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) plunges more than 2,000 points, the largest fall in its history up to that point. Oil prices also plunge by as much as 30% in early trading, the biggest fall since 1991.

March 11 – The World Health Organization declares the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic with 121,564 cases worldwide and 4,373 deaths.

March 11 – Harvey Weinstein is sentenced to 23 years in prison for a criminal sex act and rape in New York.

March 12 – Global stock markets crash. The Dow Jones Industrial Average goes into free fall, closing at over −2,300 points, the worst losses for the index since 1987.

March 13 – The government of Nepal announces that Mount Everest will be closed to climbers and the public for the rest of the season due to concerns from the COVID-19 pandemic in Asia.

March 14 – Spain goes into lockdown after COVID-19 cases in the country surge.

March 16 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls by 2,997, the single largest point drop in history and the second-largest percentage drop ever at 12.93 percent, an even greater crash than Black Monday (1929).

March 17 – European leaders close the EU's external and Schengen borders for at least 30 days in an effort to curb the COVID-19 pandemic.

March 17 – The island of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines, is placed under the enhanced community quarantine due to the coronavirus pandemic in the country.

March 18 – The European Broadcasting Union announces that the Eurovision Song Contest 2020 will be cancelled due to COVID-19 in Europe, the first cancellation in the contest's 64-year history.

March 20 – The worldwide death toll from COVID-19 surpasses 10,000 as the total number of cases reaches a quarter of a million.

March 20 – Smoke from Australian bushfires killed more people than the fires - 417 vs 33 according to new study published in "Medical Journal of Australia."

March 22 – A prison riot in Colombia, which was sparked by coronavirus fears, left 23 inmates dead and another 83 injured.

March 24 – Indian PM Narendra Modi orders a 21 day lockdown for world's second most populous country of 1.3 billion people.

March 26 – Global COVID-19 cases reach 500,000, with nearly 23,000 deaths confirmed. American cases exceed all other countries, with 81,578 cases and 1,180 deaths.

March 28 – North Korea launched an unidentified projectile off the coast of Japan. This is the sixth launch in the last month.

March 30 – The price of Brent Crude Oil falls 9% to $23 per barrel, the lowest level since November 2002.

March 30 – The International Olympic Committee and Japan suspend the 2020 Summer Olympics and are rescheduled for July 23 to August 8, 2021.

April

April 2 – The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 passes 1 million worldwide.

April 5 – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson admitted to hospital suffering from coronavirus COVID-19.

April 7 – Japan declares a state of emergency in response to COVID-19, and finalises a stimulus package worth 108 trillion yen (US$990 billion), equal to 20% of the country's GDP.

April 10 – The death toll from COVID-19 exceeds 100,000 globally.

April 14 – The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it expects the world economy to shrink 3%, the worst contraction since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

April 14 – US President Donald Trump freezes funding for the World Health Organization pending a review, for mistakes in handling the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and for being "China-centric", prompting international criticism.

April 15 – The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 passes 2 million worldwide.

April 16 – 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in 4 weeks (5.2 million in the last week), wiping out 9 1/2 years of job gains.

April 20 – Oil prices reach a record low.

April 25 – The global death toll from COVID-19 exceeds 200,000.

April 27 – The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 passes 3 million worldwide.

April 28 – US Department of Defense releases three declassified videos of possible UFOs from 2004 and 2015.

April 30 – British Captain Tom Moore, who raised more £30 million for the National Health Service walking in his garden, turns 100 and made an honorary colonel by the Queen.

May

May 5 – The UK death toll from COVID-19 becomes the highest in Europe.

May 6 – Irish organisation repays a 170 year old favor, raising over $2 million (to date) for US Navajo Nation and Hopi Reservation badly affected by coronavirus. In 1840s Choctaw Nation sent $170 to aid Irish potato famine.

May 6 – Hungary has become the first EU member state to lose their democractic status according to the NGO Freedom House.

May 10 – The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 passes 4 million worldwide.

May 12 – Gunmen storm a maternity hospital and kill 24 people, including two newborn babies, in Dashte Barchi, a majority-Shia neighborhood of Kabul, Afghanistan.

May 13 – Every African country now has cases of coronavirus COVID-19.

May 14 – The UN warns of a global mental health crisis caused by isolation, fear, uncertainty and economic turmoil.

May 16 – 118-year old American department store JC Penney files for bankruptcy.

May 19 – Greenhouse gas emissions dropped 17% worldwide in April 2020 when world was in lockdown, in study published in "Nature Climate Change."

May 19 – Two dams on Tittabawassee River in central Michigan breached by floodwaters, forcing evacuation of thousands of residents.

May 21 – Cyclone Amphan makes landfall in eastern India and Bangladesh, killing over 100 people and forcing the evacuation of more than 4 million others. It causes over US$13 billion in damage, making it the costliest cyclone ever recorded in the North Indian Ocean.

May 26 – George Floyd, an African-American man dies after he was handcuffed and lying face down on a city street during an arrest, Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer kept his knee on Floyd's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds despite he was pleading for breath.

May 26 – Costa Rica becomes the first Central American country to legalise same-sex marriage.

May 26 – Twitter adds warning labels to warn about inaccuracies in US President Donald Trump's tweets for the first time.

May 26 – After a recording by a bystander about the arrest of George Floyd went viral the four officers who were present were fired. The same day a demonstrations and protests took place in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area.

May 27 – The Chinese National People's Congress votes in favour of national security legislation that prevents subversion, terrorism, separatism and foreign interference in Hong Kong.

May 27 – Spain begins 10 days of mourning for victims of COVID-19.

May 28 – The United States Department of Justice released a joint statement with the FBI, saying they had made the investigation into George Floyd's death "a top priority".

May 29 – Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged him with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter, becoming the first white officer in Minnesota to be charged for the death of a black civilian.

May 30 – The first crewed flight of the Dragon 2 is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the first manned spacecraft to take off from U.S. soil since 2011. The next day the spacecraft successfully reached the International Space Station (ISS).

May 31 – Since May 26 over a 100 city in all 50 states in the US was held supporting those seeking justice for George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, and speaking out against police brutality.

May 31 – The hacktivist group Anonymous released a video after remaining silent for 3 years demanding justice for George Floyd.

May 31 – The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 passes 6 million worldwide.

[valencing]

July 2019 is likely to be the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, provisional data indicates.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said “July 2019 will be on par with, and possibly marginally warmer” than the previous warmest month ever, July 2016.

The figures, fed to the WMO by the Copernicus Climate ChangeProgramme, run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, are based on the first 29 days of July and show that global temperatures in July have been about 1.2C above pre-industrial levels.

Official data for the whole month of July will be published on Monday 5 August.

Even equalling the July 2016 record would be significant, experts say, because July 2016 saw global temperatures rise for an exceptionally strong El Niño phenomenon, which sees a rise of water temperature in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific – while it hasn’t been strong in 2019.

The exceptionally hot July came after June 2019 also broke temperature records around the world, becoming the hottest June ever recorded. All of the months of 2019 so far ranking among the four warmest for their time of year. 

“We are on track for the period from 2015 to 2019 to be the five hottest years on record,” said the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, calling the battle against climate change the “race of our lives, and for our lives”.

“This year alone, we have seen temperature records shattered from New Delhi to Anchorage, from Paris to Santiago, from Adelaide and to the Arctic Circle.

“If we do not take action on climate change now, these extreme weather events are just the tip of the iceberg.”

The recent heatwaves caused significant damage to the environment around the world, said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

“The extraordinary heat was accompanied by dramatic ice melt in Greenland, in the Arctic and on European glaciers.

”Unprecedented wildfires raged in the Arctic for the second consecutive month, devastating once pristine forests.

“This is not science fiction. It is the reality of climate change. It is happening now and it will worsen in the future without urgent climate action.”

July has rewritten climate maps and history around the world.

France has seen its previous record-highs shattered in July, when temperatures reached 42.6C on 25 July – a temperature of a typical July day in Baghdad. The northern city of Lille saw 41.6C, which broke its previous by 4C, while the rest of northern France also experienced devastating wildfires – normally a rarity in the region.

The recent heatwaves caused significant damage to the environment around the world, said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

“The extraordinary heat was accompanied by dramatic ice melt in Greenland, in the Arctic and on European glaciers.

”Unprecedented wildfires raged in the Arctic for the second consecutive month, devastating once pristine forests.

“This is not science fiction. It is the reality of climate change. It is happening now and it will worsen in the future without urgent climate action.”

Temperatures broke a 75-year-old record in the Netherlands (Gilve Rijen, 40.7C), while Germany (Lingen, 42.6C), the UK (Cambridge, 38.7C) and Belgium (41.8C) also set new national records. Even in Helsinki, Finland, the mercury rose to a record 33.2C, while parts of the US also suffered record-breaking hot conditions.

The high temperatures enhanced ice melting in Greenland, which had already seen an extraordinary melting event between 11 and 20 July this year. Polar scientists believe that 2019 could set new records for ice loss in Greenland.

In the Arctic and Greenland, the heat sparked massive wildfires, producing CO2 emissions equal to those of all of Colombia in 2017.

Hundreds of wildfires, some of which could be clearly seen from space, ravaged Siberia, affecting over three million hectares of land.

Experts say the heatwaves are linked to human activity, which has more than doubled their probability in some locations.

“Such intense and widespread heatwaves carry the signature of man-made climate change,” said Johannes Cullmann, Director of WMO’s Climate and Water Department.

Prof Dann Mitchell, associate professor of Atmosphere Science at the University of Bristol, said: “The warming trend is clear and the scientific evidence robustly points to this being caused by human-induced climate change.”

A report published today by the World Weather Attribution said that hot spells such as the ones that hit the UK and Germany this year would only occur every 50 to 100 years if humans had not had an impact on the climate.

The report also found that the record-breaking July heatwave would have been up to 3C cooler if the climate was not changing.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that global warming of 1.5C could pose climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth.

Tens of thousands of people can die prematurely in heatwaves and such incidents were projected to get significantly worse in the future, so “fundamental infrastructure changes” are needed to adapt to climate change.

In September, the WMO will submit a report about the state of the climate between 2015 and 2019 to the UN Climate Action Summit.

[mumofadaofficial-blog]

Sometimes life really is a fairy tale.

I knew I wanted children, hell, I thought I wanted a football team of them! Nathan on the other hand, didn’t think he would ever have a girlfriend, didn’t think he would ever fall in love, didn’t think he would ever move away from home (let alone to Norfolk), and definitely hadn’t even thought about kids. 

Me and Nathan met in Australia, one of my favourite places with the best memories! I was at a stage in my life where I didn’t want a boyfriend, I was happy with myself and content to be just me. Then BOOM, like a sack of shit, Nathan comes along (not that he’s a sack of shit but you know what I mean).

My first opinion of Nathan on a night out was ‘what a wanker!’ ‘Look at him, so arrogant’ Then I found myself outside with no one to speak to but him, instantly I thought ‘wow, you bitch, he’s actually nice!’ ‘That arrogant look is just his face!’ (Soz Nath) We got on like a house on fire, laughed and chatted most of the night  and then it came to the point that left me speechless…a hard task if you know me. He said mid conversation ‘I’ve got to stop talking to you else I’m gonna fall in love with you’ And that was it, he was gone! LIKE WTF!!!! Thinking about it now, how many girls you used that line on Nath? haha 

Now I was a bit unlucky in love previously and my dad said to me once ‘When you find the right one, you’ll know’. I thought that was bullshit and that Robbie P was living in some sort of fairy tale world. 

I woke up and couldn’t stop thinking that I had to to speak to him and see him again, problem was, I only knew his name was Nathan and that he lived in a house down the road. Should I just rock up there? Absolutely fucking not. So what did I do…trusty old Tinder! There was probably only about 40 people live in the area so it couldn’t be that hard to find him. I set the location to the lowest possible and got to work (yes I am a nutter!!) But I found him, swiped right and it was a match, slid into his DMs and the rest was history. With in about 2 weeks he had moved in and we started our relationship on that little banana farm in the middle of nowhere. We became best friends, I was due to come home to England but decided I had to give this a go, I went back to Oz and started my 2nd year visa, best decision I’ve ever made. We travelled some more together, made some amazing memories and decided it was time to come home to England and work towards our future.

 I remember asking him once if he wanted kids…he told me he’d never thought about it, maybe one day but maybe not. I think we were probably about 6 months into our relationship at this point, why he didn’t run a mile at my physco questions then I will never know! 🔪Maybe he knew I was the one….maybe he’s just too laid back to care! At that point I told him I could see us together for the rest of our lives, and if it was out of the question then that was going to be a big problem for me. I think he called me a nutter and maybe a few other words, but we’re still together so he must of seen something for us - even if he’s not very good with words!

Once we moved home I always did the big hint drops of babies and engagement and he would just say ‘Maybe one day’ then he told me the more times I spoke about marriage the longer it would take him to ask me…it did the trick and I stopped asking, well, stopped asking as much anyway.

So I found myself, 25 years old and in a seriously happy relationship with my best friend. It seemed like everyone around me was getting pregnant or getting engaged. I was jealous! As selfish as that sounds I really wanted that to be me, I’m sure I’m not alone in this and I reckon a lot of people must feel like this at some point in their life. Id been on the pill since 16/17 and had all the thoughts of ‘how long will it take for this to come out of my system?’ and ‘Can I even get pregnant’. 

Id got to that stage of GIMME A BABY!! 

So in true me style, I had a melt down, cried a little bit and told Nath how I felt. Then in true Nathan style he simply said ‘Well, your not gonna get pregnant if you don’t stop taking your pill are you!’ 

That was it, we were officially trying for a fricken baby and I felt like I was going to combust with excitement! Now before trying for a baby me and Nath simply thought, if your not using any contraception and your having sex, your just gonna get pregnant, right? Little did we know about that fertile window. After month one of trying and not getting pregnant (very impatient I know), I got myself a handy little app and turned into some sort of crazy sex planner. If that app was green, we were doing it, and if it wasn’t, well maybe we should just incase. Poor Nath didn’t know what had hit him! I was recording periods, when we had sex, my moods, the lot! I think I must of done about 10 pregnancy tests in this time, I’m so impatient I just had to keep checking. Turns out it happened pretty quickly! We started trying at the end of August and by October I was preggers! I just had a ‘feeling’ now I’m not sure if everyone feels this when they are pregnant but I knew I was, I was convinced. We bought a test and I was itching to get home and do it. 

*Weeing commenced* It was one of those digital clear blue ones, I just sat there watching this little egg timer on the screen and it was too much, it was taking forever, I couldn’t cope sitting there so walked away and left it to develop. As I came back and bent down to pick it up, it pinged up on the screen ‘PREGNANT’ I could not fucking believe it! Naturally, I burst into tear, ran down stairs with my hand over my mouth and threw the test at Nathan. I think the actual words to come out of his mouth were ‘your fucking joking me’. He then started nervous laughing and reminded me how I told him it would probably take us a while to get pregnant because id been on the pill for so long, Opps. 2-3 weeks pregnant, I wanted to wait until our 12 week scan to tell anybody so now we had to try and keep it a secret! Hardest thing ever!! I remember us going to my mum and dads for tea one night before my scan and I asked Nathan if we could tell them, I thought they would suss it out If not as I’d been feeling a bit sick and faint. So I’m sat at the tea table and said ‘You know how your both really really good parents…’ Dad then chirps up ‘OH WHAT DO YOU WANT NOW!’ (Thanks dad, really killed my flow) I then started crying and think I just about managed to get the words out ‘How do you feel about being grandparents again?’ I think we all had a little cry and then the excitement began! To tell Nathans mum and dad we wanted to wait until we were face to face so we couldn’t tell them until nearly Christmas time, after my scan. We got a card that was a Christmas card for grandparents and then put a scan picture inside. Nathans mum had completely bypassed the front of the card, then saw the scan picture and was gobsmacked! More tears - theres been a lot.

Finally we could tell the world - Best Christmas Ever!!

Robbie P was right, I’d got my fairytale after all and all my dreams had come true. 

Pregnancy was pretty kind to me with a small amount of sickness. For probably the first time ever I was happy with my body and the amazing thing it was doing. It always blows my mind what a womans body is capable of doing and how it can grow a tiny human. The summer however, was not so kind! Hottest summer ever and I’m waddling around like a bloody whale. Being heavily pregnant I imagine is not very comfortable at the best of times, but its a nightmare in the summer when nothing fits. Thats actually something I have noticed that winter maternity clothes are great, summer, crap! Just an FYI for people, and I’m sure I’m speaking on behalf of any woman thats been pregnant or is currently. Do not say to them, I repeat, do not say ‘WOAH, your huge!’ ‘Your massive’ ‘Look at the size of you’ thats the point where every woman just smiles sweetly and mutters under their breath to themselves. Definitely not what you want to hear when your walking round feeling like a flump squashed into clothes. 

When I’d got just 6 weeks left until due date I think Nath decided he’d try and put me into early labour to put me out of my sweaty misery. I got a call at work from my mum to say that Nathan had been in an accident and was at the hospital. I can’t explain the turmoil that goes through your mind. I just remember crying and asking if he was ok, mum didn’t say too much other than that he was going for a scan and that he was ok. I was told to drive to the hospital sensibly and not to panic…..of corse you do nothing but panic! I think I actually had a go at him when I got to the hospital, so kind and caring! Typical me. Him and mum had been arguing since late morning about who was going to ring me and tell me as neither of them wanted to do it, not like I was gonna have a breakdown or anything 😬

He’d rolled his fully loaded cement truck down a bank, completely squashed it and managed to pull himself out. To look at the photographs and from what the ambulance service had said, he was lucky to be alive, you can’t actually tell how a body could of been in the cab of the lorry, let alone got out of it. Nath had broke his back, now that sounds quite extreme but from looking at the photos I was happy that was his only problem. One good thing about it, he had to wear a back brace which people were more interested in staring at than my big bump - cheers Nath, always looking out for me.

Now after that and what happened with Ada I’m still trying to work out whether we are the luckiest or the unluckiest people in the world? Hopefully that was our bad year and we can have a break from shit for a while now please 🙏🏼 It has definitely tested us and I can't even begin to describe my stress levels throughout everything, but, It made me know 100% that if I was going to have to go through that much shit with anyone, I couldn't of picked a better person to tinder stalk. So this is kind of an appreciation post, thanks Nath for being my person, my bestie and super dad to the coolest kid out - you da bestest 🖤

[newstfionline]

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Census shows US is diversifying (AP) The U.S. became more diverse and more urban over the past decade, and the non-Hispanic white population dropped for the first time on record, the Census Bureau said Thursday as it released a trove of demographic data that will be used to redraw the nation’s political maps. The figures show continued migration to the South and West at the expense of counties in the Midwest and Northeast. The share of the non-Hispanic white population fell from 63.7% in 2010 to 57.8% in 2020, the lowest on record. White people continue to be the most prevalent racial or ethnic group, though that changed in California, where Hispanics became the largest racial or ethnic group, growing to 39.4% from 37.6% over the decade, while the share of white people dropped from 40.1% to 34.7%. “The U.S. population is much more multiracial and much more racially and ethnically diverse than what we have measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, a Census Bureau official. The share of children in the U.S. declined because of falling birth rates, while the share of adults grew, driven by aging baby boomers. Adults over age 18 made up more than three-quarters of the population in 2020, or 258.3 million people, an increase of more than 10% from 2010.

Migrants find themselves stranded abroad by new US policy (AP) Shortly after crossing the border in south Texas with her 5-year-old daughter, Karla Leiva of Honduras found herself on a chartered U.S. government flight, learning midair that she was headed to the provincial capital of Villahermosa in southern Mexico. Authorities there put her on a bus to Mexico’s southern border and on Thursday she sat on the patio of a migrant shelter in a remote Guatemalan border town. Her swift expulsion through three countries was part of a highly unusual partnership between the governments of the United States and Mexico that the Biden administration hopes will deter migrants from returning to the U.S. border. The U.S. government has intermittently flown Mexicans deep into Mexico for years to discourage repeat attempts, but flights that began last week from Brownsville, Texas, to Villahermosa and Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border, appear to be the first time that Central Americans have been flown to Mexico.

Britain’s first mass shooting in more than a decade leaves 5 dead, plus suspected gunman (Washington Post) A 22-year-old gunman who posted YouTube videos filled with despair and self-loathing is suspected of killing five people, including his mother and a 3-year-old girl, in the first mass shooting in Britain in more than a decade, police said. Thursday night’s shooting rampage in the seaside city of Plymouth, in southwest England, stunned the country, which has some of the toughest gun laws in the world. Police confirmed that the suspect, identified as Jake Davison, held a license for the gun used. There was no immediate, clear motive, police said.

Italy may have seen Europe’s hottest day ever (NBC News) Europe may just have seen its hottest day ever. A temperature of almost 120 degrees Fahrenheit was reported in Sicily on Wednesday and, if verified, would be a record for the continent. The 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.84 Fahrenheit) temperature was recorded by Sicily’s agriculture-meteorological information service, SIAS, at the Syracuse station on the island’s southeast. The hottest verified temperature on the continent is 48 degrees Celsius, or 118.4 degrees Fahrenheit, in Greece on July 10, 1977. The high temperature reading came as a heatwave is baking parts of the Mediterranean and contributing to massive wildfires that have killed dozens of people.

Turkey combats Black Sea floods, death toll rises to 27 (Reuters) Emergency workers battled to relieve flood-hit areas of Turkey’s Black Sea region on Friday, as the death toll rose to 27 in the second natural disaster to strike the country this month. The floods, among the worst Turkey has experienced, brought chaos to northern provinces just as authorities were declaring wildfires that raged through southern coastal regions for two weeks had been brought under control. Torrents of water tossed dozens of cars and heaps of debris along streets, with bridges destroyed, roads closed and electricity cut to hundreds of villages.

Troops Rush In (Independent UK, CNN, ABC News) U.S. troops in Afghanistan kept the Taliban at bay for two decades. It was America’s longest war. In the 1990s, the Taliban captured Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, after claiming the country as an Islamic state. They were forced out when U.S. troops invaded in 2001. On Thursday, Taliban fighters again took back that strategic southern city. Kandahar is the birthplace of their fundamentalist Islamic movement, and the 12th provincial capital out of the country’s 34 that the militants have seized in their week-long campaign. The initial U.S. projection for when the country’s capital of Kabul might fall under Taliban control was six to twelve months. A recent military analysis said Kabul could be isolated and captured in 30 to 90 days, but that timeline appears to be accelerating. There are also credible reports that the militants are executing Afghan troops who’ve surrendered. Taliban leaders have denied the accusations, but last month CNN obtained a video showing 22 unarmed members of an Afghan Special Forces unit being executed while trying to surrender. The Taliban now controls two-thirds of the country. The rapidly deteriorating security situation prompted a decision to send 3,000 troops back in to help evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. The Pentagon said one Army and two Marine infantry battalions will enter Afghanistan within the next two days to assist at the Kabul airport with the partial evacuation. The embassy has a staff of 4,000, including 1,400 Americans. Great Britain will also send 600 troops into the country to help support British nationals as they leave. As Western powers line up to leave, it’s difficult to overstate the tragedy of a situation where thousands have been killed, millions have become refugees, and trillions of dollars in resources have been burned only for Afghanistan to end up where it started 20 years ago.

Afghanistan’s rapid collapse is part of a long, slow U.S. defeat (Washington Post) The collapse seems so sudden. In the space of a few blistering summer months, Taliban forces have swept across much of Afghanistan. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time. As my colleague Craig Whitlock has revealed with his award-winning reporting on a cache of internal U.S. government documents scrutinizing the failures of the American war-making and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, successive U.S. administrations recognized that the Taliban were not going to be easily vanquished, that the Afghan state was weak and riddled with corruption, and that muddling through without a coherent strategy was still preferable to admitting defeat. “The interviews and documents, many of them previously unpublished, show how the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump hid the truth for two decades,” Whitlock explained. “They were slowly losing a war that Americans once overwhelmingly supported. Instead, political and military leaders chose to bury their mistakes and let the war drift.”      “The turning point came at the end of 2005, beginning of 2006 when we finally woke up to the fact that there was an insurgency that could actually make us fail,” one administration official later told government interviewers. “Everything was turning the wrong way at the end of 2005.” Almost a decade later, at the end of 2014, Obama attempted to hail the end of the American military mission in the country after years of counterinsurgency, declaring in a statement that “the longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.” But U.S. officials knew that there was little end in sight and the Obama administration, Whitlock reported, “conjured up an illusion.” Then came Trump, who loudly called for an end to costly U.S. military entanglements abroad. But he authorized an intensification of aerial bombing campaigns against Islamist militant targets that, according to one study, saw Afghan civilian casualties increase by about 330 percent. Biden, a veteran of the Obama years, now owns his own moment in Afghanistan’s tumultuous history, a tragedy many years in the making.

Australia capital’s lockdown until no more virus (AP) Australia’s capital Canberra will remain locked down until there are no more COVID-19 infections in the city, a government leader said on Friday. The Australian Capital Territory, which comprises Canberra and two villages, locked down for a week after a man tested positive on Thursday.

Processed foods (Food Dive) A new study published in JAMA found that 67 percent of U.S. children and teens’ diets come from ultra-processed foods, up 5.6 percentage points compared to the levels seen in 1999. Most of the increase came from ready-to-eat meals, which rose from 2.2 percent of daily calories to 11.2 percent of calories. Interestingly, consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages like soda actually took a pretty considerable dip, falling from 10.8 percent of calories in 1999 to 5.3 percent in 2018.

A stranger helped a Jamaican athlete get to his Olympic race. He won gold. (Washington Post) As a star hurdler, Jamaica’s Hansle Parchment is familiar with overcoming barriers. But he was unprepared for a different kind of obstacle: getting lost in Tokyo on the day of his Olympic race, and rapidly running out of time to get there. The 31-year-old athlete posted a video this weekend on Instagram explaining how panic turned to hope after he met a “good Samaritan,” a volunteer working at the Games, who ultimately gave him money to take a taxi to the correct venue—where he won a gold medal in the men’s 110-meter hurdles on Aug. 5. Parchment, with gold medal in hand, went to find the stranger who had gone out of her way to help him—to thank her for helping him when he needed it the most. Parchment found Trijana Stojkovic, who was volunteering at the Olympics, telling her, “You were instrumental in me getting to the final that day.” He showed her his gold medal. “Really, you got this?!” she replied. Jamaica’s Ministry of Tourism has since invited Stojkovic to the island. Jamaican officials branded Stojkovic a good Samaritan and said an “official invitation” from the minister of tourism had been extended for her to visit.

[activistnewsnetwork]

Alaska’s Sea Ice Completely Melted for First Time in Recorded History

“Even if we can’t escape its consequences, it is not too late to escape the mindset that brought us here.” —Alice O’Keeffe, reviewing This Is Not a Drill

Alaska, the largest US state, with a coastline almost as large as the rest of the continental united states itself, has reached a new low of zero percent sea ice for the first time in recorded history. But the indigenous people, are not alone in their grief.

The country of Iceland has held a funeral for its first glacier lost to the climate crisis. The once massive Okjökull glacier, now completely gone, has been commemorated with a plaque that reads: “A letter to the future. Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

This reality is reverberating across the globe, far beyond Iceland. Even when no literal funeral is being held, we are, in a sense, witnessing an ongoing funeral for the world we once knew.

July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth since record keeping began in 1880. Nine out of the 10 hottest Julys ever recorded have occurred since 2005, and July was the 43rd consecutive July in a row, to register temperatures above the 20th century average.

In Greenland, scientists were stunned by how rapidly the ice sheet is melting, as it was revealed the ice there was not expected to melt like this until 2070. The melt rate has been called “unprecedented,” as the all-time single-day melt record was broken in August as the ice sheet lost a mind-bending 12.5 billion tons of water in one day. It is worth remembering that the Greenland ice sheet contains enough ice to increase global sea levels by 20 feet, and it is now predicted that it will lose more ice this year than ever before. The massive amount of freshwater mixing with the warmer salt water has be so vast, this it has started to disrupt the north atlantic current.  And because this current also affects the winds, because of it’s size. This seems to be one of the key contributing factors to the ‘heat dome‘ events that have been plaguing Europe for the past 2 summers.  These heat domes can become a massive driver of extreme weather events, because they create larger differences in temperature, which is the engine of extreme weather systems. Scientists have yet to confirm this possible feedback loop which is the direct result of melting glaciers, which have seen unprecedented acceleration.  

Also for the first time in recorded history, Alaska’s sea ice has melted completely away. That means there was no sea ice whatsoever within 150 miles of its shores, according to the National Weather Service, as the northernmost state cooked under record-breaking heat through the summer.

Earth

A recent UN report estimates 2 billion people are already facing moderate to severe food insecurity, due largely to the warming planet. The other contributing factors are conflict and economic stagnation, Extreme weather events and shifting weather patterns are a large and growing contributor to this crisis, which is sure to escalate over time.

Another recent study, titled “Adaptive responses of animals to climate change are most likely insufficient,” showed that many animals are no longer able to adjust quickly enough to the climate crisis. While birds are laying their eggs earlier as temperatures and conditions change, and are doing what they can to coax their chicks to hatch sooner, it is still not enough to keep apace with the dramatically shifting climate. Many more extinctions are on the horizon.

Speaking of, Beluga whales in the Arctic are now clearly in a downward spiral toward their demise, due largely to climate crisis impacts, according to another study. Warming waters, lack of food, and pollution are taking their toll on the embattled whales. Over the past 20 years, their growth rates have been declining, which means their ability to forage for food is now also compromised.

It is interesting to see even mainstream outlets like People Magazine now reporting on climate grief, which the medical community has already been doing for quite some time, and expects to see a dramatic ramping up of climate-disruption-related mental health issues in the future.

In Greenland, residents are already traumatized by climate impacts, as they are coping with the reality that their traditional ways of life are clearly on the way out. Courtney Howard, board president of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, told The Guardian that she believes the climate crisis is causing worsening states of mental and physical health around the world, and says these issues will become some of the most important of our time. “Temperature change is magnified in circumpolar regions,” she told The Guardian. “There is no question Arctic people are now showing symptoms of anxiety, ‘ecological grief’ and even post-traumatic stress related to the effects of climate change.”

In the financial realms, a leading economic historian warned recently that the climate crisis could very well become the trigger for the next global financial crisis by way of causing instability and massive disruptions in markets.

Distressingly, a recently published study warned that a new super bug which erupted at the same time on three continents may well have been brought about from warming temperatures. The study pointed out how a drug-resistant fungal disease has now been made more prevalent by existing on a warming planet.

A recent report from Canada warned that British Columbia could see “catastrophic” consequences from climate disruption-related events in the next three decades. These include more severe wildfire seasons, increasingly intense and longer heat waves, water shortages, and storm surges across the province. Along with already experiencing disruptions

Speaking of Canada, that country’s Pediatric Society recently warned that children’s health is expected to be increasingly negatively affected by climate-disruption impacts, including things like air pollution and heat stress.

Water

Drought-induced blackouts are now besetting the people of Zimbabwe, where some places are seeing 18 hours per day without electricity. Imagine that in the summer heat. Dams providing hydro power lack water. Power blackouts are spreading.

In Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital city, the taps have run dry, affecting more than 2 million people, who have been trying to cope with not having access to municipal drinking water.

In India, a stunning 1 million people were displaced and at least 270 killed by severe flooding from heavier than usual monsoon rains.

Not all the news is bad though, China has actually seen an increase in rainfall, amazingly just in the areas with large farmlands. Well, not so amazingly, this unilateral geoengineering has had some, lets say interesting side effects. While also being the primary driver of Chinese development of Xinjiang because the home of this weather modification system mostly spans the Tibetan platue, from where their chosen leader, the Dalai Lama, still lives in exile in India.  And has led to the human rights violations of some 1 million ugihur. But hey, that is just the cost of doing business, as is the results of such massive amounts of sodium iodide changing the composition of the atmosphere, and in doing so, the remnants of this climate modification system are seen in the record breaking downpours that have become the norm across the entire equator, following mostly the path of the Subtropical jet steam, which just happens to pass right over the Chinese weather modification system.  This has lead to, a more or less yearly season of extreme weather, but because cheesiness state capitalism is successful at externalizing these costs, which actually enable them to extend their infrastructure footprint. Kind of like the “hero” firefighter who is a pyromaniac for the glory.  Truly a win-win. But WAIT! there’s more!

There is a theory going around that at least 2 earthquakes, occurring on 7-Sep-2017 and 19-Sep-2017which occurred after record setting rainfall in Texas from hurricanes Hurricanes Harvey Aug 2017 and Irma in Sep 2017.

A similar occurrence happened in Japan after Typhoon Jebi in Aug 26 – sept 9 2018, the Hokkaido Eastern Iburi earthquake was on Sept 5th 2018. My conjecture is that the trillions of gallons of water was enough weight to slightly depress the earths crust, causing the slippage between tectonic plates, which triggered the earthquakes.

Back in the US., New York City’s summer has served as a preview of things to come, as an extreme heat wave coupled with flash flooding beset the iconic city.  So cheesiness unilateral geoengineering has in many ways, turned the atmosphere into a sponge, and since they are not themselves contributing as much to the water evaporation, that water has to come from somewhere, and so, dumroll please 

On the other end of the water spectrum, a recent study published in Science Advances warned that mega droughts will likely beset the U.S. Southwest within decades. The study stated that the mega droughts are “almost assured,” and will be on a scale not seen since medieval times. 

And nothing is better for the new normal of year round fire season. See, externalizing costs is fine.

At the same time, by 2050, another report warned that “snow droughts” will become far more common across the western U.S. This is critical, in that it compounds the aforementioned impending drought crisis, as mountain snow-pack is vital to providing water into the spring and summer.

A recent and critically important study showed that one quarter of the total global population across 17 countries is already affected by extreme water stress. Lebanon, Qatar and Israel/Palestine top a list of places with the worst water shortages, as the growing climate crisis threatens more “day zeroes” — days where major cities will literally run out of water.

Meanwhile, sea levels continue their inevitable and accelerating rise. In the U.S., a recent report showed how 21 beach towns, including Miami Beach, Galveston, Atlantic City and Key West, will soon be underwater.

Speaking of Galveston, the state of Texas is looking toward Dutch expertise for assistance in how to construct what would be the nation’s most expensive and most ambitious coastal barrier for protection against intensifying hurricanes. The Netherlands has been devising ways to protect massive parts of its low-lying country against the ocean for centuries. Now the skills it has cultivated are, increasingly relevant worldwide.

Meanwhile, the oceans continue to warm as they absorb the brunt of the heat human activity is adding to the atmosphere, and the warming waters are literally pushing Pacific salmon to the brink of their ability to survive, according to another report.

Distressingly, a recently published study showed that unexpected marine heat waves are now becoming the norm rather than the exception. Which seems bad for the fish, however, these coral reefs are also home to many of the algae which produce 50% of the oxygen that we breath. They are quickly out competed by Toxic algea which thrive in higher acidity. That almost feels like a metaphor for current state of journalism. 

Alpine mountaineering routes are disintegrating as glaciers and ice fields melt in the Alps. The ice-reliant climbing routes in the mountains are tumbling down and melting away faster than anyone expected. Along with parts of siberia and canada as well, which has been leading to vast releases of methane. Which is a canary in the coal mine for the Calthrate gun Hypothisis.

Greenland experienced a record heat wave in the middle of this summer, which dramatically accelerated the melting of the ice sheet, meaning its contributions to sea level rise are in the process of accelerating as well.

Meanwhile, scientists have expressed alarm and shock about the fact that the permafrost across the Canadian Arctic is thawing out 70 years sooner than previously predicted.

Things are so dire in the icy realms of Earth that the country of Iceland is now preparing for how it will cope without any more ice … something that country relies upon for its identity, businesses, government and very existence.

Fire

These stunning satellite photos show an Arctic burning up in front of our eyes. In Alaska alone, at the time of this writing, at least 1.6 million acres have burned from at least 100 wildfires this summer. Wildfires in Siberia could well burn into October when the first snows fall, as at least 6.7 million acres have burned across Russia.

Another report showed that, due to climate disruption, wildfires in California have already become 500 percent larger than they were since the 1970s.

Canadian media are reporting that forests that have been scorched in the Pacific Northwest are not growing back as expected. This brings into question numerous species of trees’ ability to regenerate as the fires get increasingly hot, burn longer, and scorch longer areas.

At the same time, another report reaffirmed the fact that even the rainy Northwest is now facing the inevitable increased risk of wildfires due to higher temperatures, increasing drought and lower humidity.

Air

By 2050, Florida will have more days that feel like 100 degrees Fahrenheit (100°F) than any other state in the U.S., according to a recent study. Washington D.C. currently averages one week per year of 100-degree days, while by 2050 that could rise to two months. The same study warned that climate disruption will expose millions of people across the U.S. to “off-the-charts” extreme heat.

Meanwhile, Europe sizzled under a record-breaking heat wave this summer, as heat from the Sahara baked the continent and temperature records toppled en mass. There are far too many records to name from that heatwave, but notable was the fact that Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands recorded their highest temperatures ever during Europe’s second major summer heatwave.

In Canada, the far northern community of Nunavut saw warmer temperatures than the city of Victoria, far to its south. According to CBC News, “the source of the Arctic beach weather is a large current of air that somehow found its way north from the U.S. southeast” — a much more common occurrence as warming intensifies.

Denial and Reality

Ever busy denying the crisis, in the last month the Trump administration buried a large climate disruption response plan, as revealed by Politico. The outlet revealed how the Agriculture Department prevented the release of an already completed and sweeping plan about how the government should best respond to the climate crisis.

Meanwhile, in what could have been a slip of the tongue, Trump’s Energy Secretary Rick Perry said during a recent nationally televised interview, “The climate is changing. Are we part of the reason? Yeah, it is. I’ll let people debate on who’s the bigger problem here.”

It’s not just the Trump administration that’s fueling denial. It was also revealed how DNC Chair Tom Perez introduced a resolution in an attempt to kill a climate debate among the Democratic presidential candidates.

Nevertheless, reality has a way of not going away, despite human efforts at denial.

A recent report showed that the climate crisis is already well along in causing childhood deaths and the stunting of growth in Australia and across the Pacific. Other impacts on kids include lowered cognitive capacity and higher susceptibility to the spread of diseases.

And, to keep all of this in perspective, as a final reality check, the burning of fossil fuels reached an all-time record last year, according to oil giant BP.

For perspective on the rate of acceleration now baked into the system, half of all fossil fuels used by humans have been burned since just 1990. Many more consequences are lurking just around the corner: It takes at least 10 years before we begin to see the impacts of the CO2 once the fuels are burned. But on the plus side, at least there are short term sources which can be stopped with military force if nessicary. And that is how I learned to stop worrying and love the AI.

This article was primarily authored by By Madeline Fitzgerald

and origially appeared on Time magazine.

  from WordPress https://ift.tt/2UG4QEB via IFTTT

[moniaceblog]

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to my blog! I blog about my traveling adventures starting with my NAU travel abroad experiences through the ASNAU GO scholarship. This post will be a little longer than usual because the NAU in Mexico program meant a lot to me. More about me:

My name is Monique Acedo, I am a senior at Northern Arizona University and I major in Spanish, Graphic Design, and I have a minor in art history. My dream is to travel the world, which thanks to NAU and their scholarship opportunities (and maybe a couple of loans, but who’s counting?), has started to become true.

Why Mexico?

“Monique, you’ve already studied abroad in Costa Rica twice!! Why did you decide to go abroad again?” Well, I was not planning on studying abroad again since I had already gone twice, but once I heard the Mexico program was restarting in Mérida, I just knew I had to go. My family is Mexican and a question I get a lot when people find out that I’m Mexican is, “when did your family cross the border?” Well, my friend, my family did not cross the border, the border crossed us. Technically we did have to cross back over the border, but we had the right to do so as my great grandfather was an American citizen who was illegally deported during the mass deportations of the 1930’s. My family fought hard to be here and travelled through a lot of the southwest. My grandfather (I call him Papá) was around five years old when our family returned to the United States. He went to 17 different schools across the southwest by the time he reached high school. After meeting my grandmother, or my Nana, who is Mexican and Spaniard, my grandparents became high school sweethearts. After high school, they got married and started a family. Unfortunately, as they had more and more kids, their passing down of Spanish was lessened and lessened. My mom, being the second to youngest of four, says she can understand some Spanish, but she has no idea how to speak it. My mom and her sisters being the third generation after the US border crossed us, had already been “Americanized.”

For me, growing up in Arizona and not knowing Spanish, made me somewhat of an outcast. My extended family from my Nana’s side was the most annoying experience I would have regarding the fact that I couldn’t speak Spanish. Anytime there was a birthday party or barbecue, I would hear, “Mija, why don’t you speak Spanish?” “What a shame you don’t know Spanish.” I would get really upset. It wasn’t my fault I didn’t know Spanish. I would come to find out that this would prepare me on how to react when I was older, because to this day, I still hear questions like that from other latino people who should mind their own business. They would tell me that I’m not Mexican enough or assume that because I only spoke English, my family didn’t partake in Mexican traditions. I guess you can’t really stop people who don’t even know you from telling you how to live your life. Just for the record, Spanish and English are both colonizer languages and no one should be put to shame for not knowing these languages.

My friends growing up were really nice about me not knowing Spanish, they didn’t think anything of it and were willing to teach me words here and there. Never once did I think they were talking about me, I just wanted to speak a language everyone else did and feel included. Unfortunately, I moved schools halfway through elementary school from my predominantly latino school to a predominantly white school. I went to two different elementary schools after the move where I experienced racism for the first time. I also started feeling insecure about my body because I had darker hair on my arms and on my upper lip and my classmates who looked different than me weren’t afraid to point it out. I know for a fact that I wasn’t the only brown girl told this at my school. In middle school, I found friends who were like me. Latino, but also couldn’t speak Spanish. I finally knew I wasn’t the only one.

There’s this saying about Mexicans in the United states that says “No soy de aquí, no soy de allí,” which means, “I’m not from here, I’m not from there.” It was a saying I hadn’t heard of until I was in college and I instantly related to it. From being too Mexican for American people and being not Mexican enough for Mexican people, I always felt like I wasn’t good enough. Not being enough in two different societies is hard and can be discouraging at times. One day, I want to be able to confidently say “Soy de aquí, soy de allí.” I don’t have to live up to everyone’s expectation on what being a true “American” or a true “Mexican” is. I am American and I am Mexican, and that’s what makes me Mexican American. I decided to learn Spanish in the first place, not to become more “Mexican,” but to connect with my family’s past and try to revive something that was once a part of our culture.

When I heard about this program opening up, I knew I had to do it. Here I was, Mexican and had never been to Mexico. I wanted to feel more connected because even though I was learning Spanish, I wanted to be immersed into the culture of my ancestors that hadn’t been Americanized. What was it like to live amongst my people in a place that hadn’t been touched by the United States?

Preparing for Mexico

What to Pack

Mérida is a city that resides about forty minutes to an hour away from the ocean. That being said, during the summer months like June, July, and August, it is at its hottest. Not only is it hot, but it is also pretty humid (which makes it feel even hotter). Here is the list of things I brought for the three weeks I spent in Mexico:

Sunscreen – the sun is almost always shining

Aloe vera – I don’t think anyone on the trip ended up needing it, but you can never be too careful

Bug spray – there’s always mosquitos

Clothes – bathing suits, jeans, T shirts, shorts, work out shorts, a dress or two, and a couple of blouses; shoes: chacos, hiking shoes, and vans (I also ended up buying heels for nights out)

My essentials: Shampoo, conditioner, shaving cream, razor, face wash, face lotion, lotion, make up, make up remover, feminine products, etc.

US cash to change at the airport for pesos (I kept some American dollars to keep myself from spending too much money too fast, and a lot of places accepted US dollars as well)

School supplies – laptop, paper, pencils, etc.

Phone Plan

I use T Mobile, so I was fortunate enough to get service while I was there. Although it should be unlimited roaming data, it’s still good to use wifi as much as possible as sometimes the data coverage there is not great. (That being said, I had a way better signal in Mexico than I ever do in Flagstaff.)

Expectations?

I wasn’t really sure what to expect while being on this trip. I was excited and nervous to start another adventure in the same year. I couldn’t wait to learn the history of the nation where my ancestors were from. I was more responsible and packed for the trip a few days before, so I had no reason to stay up late the night before my trip. I stayed up anyways, it’s my pre-travelling ritual you could say.

[ultragamerz]

Ethereum, The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Blockchain | ETH Made EOS, VeChain, Tron, Binance and many more 

New Post has been published on https://www.ultragamerz.com/ethereum-the-best-thing-that-ever-happened-to-blockchain-eth-made-eos-vechain-tron-binance-and-many-more/

Ethereum, The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Blockchain | ETH Made EOS, VeChain, Tron, Binance and many more 

Ethereum, The Best Thing That Ever Happened To Blockchain | ETH Made EOS, VeChain, Tron, Binance and many more

Ethereum made many of the coins now out there a possibility, Digital currencies like Tron,  Binance Coin, OmiseGo, Ox, BAT, REP, Expance, EOS, VeChain Thor And many more.

In the blockchain technology world of the past 3 years scaling debates are pretty much the hottest issues to overcome and it has been the center of attention in all coins out there. For ETH tt is a solution that works on a micro-level, between sharding and the switch to proof-of-stake, there have been countless solutions provided and suggested, and Vitalik Buterin seems to think his hard work is about to pay off. After all the end goal of ETH is to build a giant, decentralized network of computers that are both able to record transactions and produce smart contracts. ETh is struggling only because developing takes time. After updates for scaling and applying the casper in full, ETH will possibly be the dominant Blockchain and currency. 

Now what is the problem with ETH?

The technological barriers become more important once you process the fact you are dealing with other people’s money. Companies like Golem, which saw the release of its token delayed 3 years, are finding there to be some difficulties integrating with Ethereum. Most of these issues stem from current scaling problems, as was evidenced when Cryptokitties (a popular game building on top of Ethereum) created massive congestion within the system. All that being said, Golem’s CEO, Julian Zawistowski is still a believes that Ethereum is “by far the most promising blockchain platform”.

Ethereum network development timeline based on the eth history and horizons by Jun Hasegawa:

2017 : Speculation (ICOs)

2018 : PoC / Ecosystem bui;d / Scaling solutions ( L2 #Plasma #OmiseGO/ L1 #Sharding #Casper ) / Interchain protocols

2019 : Real business adoption / UIUX focus tools / More Dapps

2019 to 2020 : Ethereum massively scale and used by gov. We will see huge difference between real adoptable protocol and toxic speculation project.”

The same way that WordPress has made it unnecessary for every company to learn how to code their own website on a deep level, Ethereum hopes to do this for all blockchain companies. Its ability to enable the development of DApps makes it a unique player in the space, and the fact that scaling issues are beginning to be solved (as is evidenced by ERC-20 problems being solved and projects like Golem finally being released) is a great sign for its future.

Ethereum, the Java of Blockchain

Bitcoin is displayed most prominently, along with other popular cryptocurrencies like Litecoin, Tether, Ripple’s XRP, Ethereum’s Ether, and many, many more.

Ether is also built on top of blockchain, but Ethereum is essentially a middleware layer for people to build their own blockchain-based apps, but without doing it from the scratch. Without a platform like Ethereum, building a blockchain app might require building your own blockchain platform, So, much the same way Java was positioned initially as the leading platform for building Web apps, Ethereum is the same thing, but for blockchain apps. With a close proximity to the way Bitcoin works, Ethereum is often perceived as a programmable version of Bitcoin. So now, why are companies building on Ethereum? Well because they want their applications to inherit some of the key benefits of blockchain, such as decentralization and data immutability, while relying on Ethereum’s APIs to give them a head start. Companies that were built on Ethereum include KYC-Chain (an identity management service), Axiom Zen’s Cryptokitties (a blockchain-based game that raised $30 million from venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz), and WeiFund (crowdfunding). (Reported by programmableweb)

In 2018, can you actually spend ETH on anywhere/website/store?

TapJets for example, the Largest Private Jet Instant Booking Platform, has started to accept Ethereum from its customers. Users can now instantly complete their transaction using Ethereum cryptocurrency in addition to traditional credit card and bank wire payments. here is a list of other websites: QHoster.com, Snel.com, cryptopet.com, finnatravel.com, flokinet.is, torguard.net, Key4co.in

ETH, Why the price decline?

The ETH/USD pair broke the $295 and $300 resistance levels and formed a high at $302.64. Later, buyers failed to keep the price above the $300 level, resulting in a downside correction. It declined below the 23.6% Fib retracement level of the last leg from the $276 low to $302 high.

One of the reasons behind this general trend of ETH price going down is the unclear future of the currency network in next couple of months. Next updates are some controversial ones that may even lead to hard forks in ETH network.

The next step, What is agreed for now?

Ethereum developers have decided to delay the “Difficulty Bomb” by agreeing to include the code for such a change into Metropolis’ hard fork—Constantinople. The core developers decided on a video call, streamed live on YouTube on August 31, 2018, to accept the EIP-1234 scenario for the “Difficulty Bomb’s” impact on block rewards. EIP 1234 will reduce block rewards from 3 ETH per block to 2 ETH per block and delay the “Difficulty Bomb” for 12 months.

The next updates may be a possible hard-fork for ETH

By definition, such system-wide upgrades require every software user to upgrade to new rules and new code continues to operate as designed. Still, in a upcoming October upgrade named Constantinople, ethereum is faced with a perhaps huge challenge.

besides the Constantinople, there’s a hard deadline for the next upgrade, currently set for October. Predicted sometime in early 2019, a piece of code known as the difficulty bomb is scheduled enact, thereby making ethereum’s blocks steadily less time efficient to mine. Then the difficulty bomb will push ethereum into what is known as the “ice age,” a period wherein the difficulty is so high that transactions can no longer be processed, making the blockchain unusable. (The bomb was originally included in the code to encourage the platform to quickly adopt new technology).

There could be difficulty ahead of October. If a certain proportion of ethereum nodes chose to run different software, it could lead to a split in the network (not unlike what occurred when ethereum classic emerged following a disagreement on technical direction in 2016).

According to a Github post, the updated version of EIP 1234 will reduce block rewards from 3 ETH per block to 2 ETH per block and delay the “Difficulty Bomb” for 12 months. The developers at the meeting, also agreed to release another hard fork eight months from the Constantinople upgrade. Since the current protocol is not finished, a hard-fork might be required to complete the implementation. For companies, switching to the new network—which uses a PoS consensus—shouldn’t be a problem. Not so for miners, who might need time to adjust to a new system of earning rewards based on coin ownership.

Jun Hasegawa and ETH future

As Jun Hasegawa emphasized earlier, in next two years, throughout 2019 and 2020, Ethereum is likely to see real business adoption, more large-scale decentralized applications (dApp), massive scaling, and adoption by the governments, all based on estimating the development of scaling technologies in 2018. He also mentioned:

“2017 : Speculation (ICOs) 2018 : PoC / Ecosystem bui;d / Scaling solutions ( L2 #Plasma #OmiseGO/ L1 #Sharding #Casper ) / Interchain protocols 2019 : Real business adoption / UIUX focus tools / More Dapps 2019 to 2020 : thereum massively scale and used by gov. We will see huge difference between real adoptable protocol and toxic speculation project.”

Tags: Technology, crypto, cryptocurrency, eth, ethereum, ETH future, hard-fork for ETH, spend ETH on anywhere, Ethereum Blockchain, Vitalik Buterin, cryptocurrencies , Constantinople,  Constantinople  ethereum, ethereum difficulty bomb, ethereum ice age, ETH price decline, Ethereum, ,Blockchain, ETH , EOS, VeChain, Tron, Binance

[theconservativebrief]

When it comes to music, the summer is ending with a bang.

Though Drake’s “In My Feelings,” which was released at the end of June ahead of his hotly anticipated album Scorpion, has been crowned song of the summer by Billboard, August has blessed us with a wealth of musical riches. The last days of the summer have seen the release of several highly anticipated albums from some of the biggest names in pop and some of the buzziest up-and-comers alike.

With a much-hyped new album debuting just about every week this month, you’d be forgiven for missing one or two along the way, or glossing over a record that perhaps deserves deeper consideration than a first listen affords. With that in mind, we’ve compiled this month’s highest-profile album releases, and how they’ve been received, to help you catch up with this whirlwind music month.

So here are the biggest album releases of August 2018, what critics are saying about them, and which tracks to listen for.

As is only fitting for an artist who has stirred up so much controversy over the course of her career, the discussion around Nicki Minaj’s latest album has been a whirlwind, best exemplified by Craig Jenkins’s review for Vulture, which provides an overview of the “low grade hysteria online” inspired by the album’s “rocky rollout.”

That rollout has somewhat eclipsed the reception of the album itself, which has been muted compared to the coverage of Minaj’s antics, but still generally positive. “Queen is out, and it’s perfectly fine,” Jenkins writes. “Like the last three Nicki Minaj albums, there are moments where it’s brilliant, moments where it’s a little corny and cloying, moments where it’s touching, and moments where it makes you want to drop whatever idiot has been mistreating you all year.”

That balance is where the critical consensus lies: whether or not the album works as a whole, Queen isn’t a presumptuous title, as Minaj is still undeniably, to quote Billboard, “rap royalty.”

Metacritic score: 70

Must-listen track: “Barbie Dreams,” a flip on Biggie’s “Just Playing (Dreams)” that serves as a rap history lesson, an evisceration of her male contemporaries, and a claiming of power.

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According to the New York Times, this is Ariana Grande’s “big moment.” Part of that is to do with her level of celebrity right now — her recent engagement to Saturday Night Live’s Pete Davidson has been the center of a media storm (and helped spawn a meme), especially given that one of the tracks on Sweetener is named after him — but more importantly, Sweetener is a bona fide delight.

Hailed by Pitchfork as an “exemplary pop album,” it’s the kind of pop success that most of her fellows haven’t been able to replicate. Per Billboard, “while her peers and predecessors find themselves victim to changing tastes and trends within the pop landscape, Ariana continues to rise untouched above them.”

Metacritic score: 81

Must-listen: “No Tears Left to Cry.” Though it might seem like the obvious choice, it’s the lead single on the album for a reason.

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Troye Sivan has had a big breakout year, kicking off 2018 with “My My My!” a song that “cement[ed] his image as a gay pop icon, according to NPR, and then following it up with the May release of “Bloom,” a breakout single that Pitchfork called “one of the few mainstream pop songs to imagine queer sex as not just a good time, but as something natural, pure, and innocent.” In between, he performed on Saturday Night Live, collaborated with Ariana Grande, and was a guest performer on Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour — all before releasing his sophomore album, Bloom, this month.

In an interview with NME earlier this month, Sivan said, “I don’t want people to be a fan of me from one song. I want them to be a fan of my sensibility.” And that desire is audible in Bloom. “All the songs have a bunch of different writers,” notes the Stereogum review, “and yet all of these people seem united in their vision and purpose.” Add to that the fact that Sivan is “a new kind of pop star” and you get one of the hottest albums of the summer.

Metacritic score: 90

Must-listen: “Dance to This,” Sivan’s collaboration with Ariana Grande, which delivers on the impulse its title suggests.

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Two decades after the release of their debut album, Death Cab for Cutie are still going strong. On their ninth album, the band still sounds just as earnest as ever, even with the introduction of more pop sounds that would seem to contradict their status as one of the preeminent alt-rock bands. The Entertainment Weekly review calls the album a “midlife crisis record,” but if anything, that’s a badge of honor.

“It’s all but irresistible, like slipping into delicious self-pity,” writes Michael Hann at the Guardian. “The melodies are gorgeous, never overdone but always foregrounded: you would get almost nothing from the individual elements, from the bass, the guitar, the keyboards and the voice, but they add up to much more than the sum of their parts.”

Metacritic score: 69

Must-listen: “60 & Punk” is perhaps the best example of the sense of longing that suffuses the album. “It’s nothing righteous being 60 and a punk,” sings Ben Gibbard. “But when you’re looking in the mirror, do you see that kid that you used to be?”

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We’ve saved the best for last. Earlier this year, Iggy Pop called Mitski “probably the most advanced American songwriter that I know,” adding that “she can do whatever she wants.”

The proof is in Be the Cowboy, Mitski’s fifth album.

“On this album, even more than she has before, Mitski makes the music her partner,” reads the New York Times review. “Indie rock was just a detour for Mitski. On Be the Cowboy, her fifth album, she embraces the possibilities of full-scale pop — not to formularize her emotions, but to give them an even larger canvas. It’s exactly the right choice.”

Earning raves from Pitchfork, the Guardian, Vulture, and Rolling Stone, it’s a powerhouse of an album, and easily one of the best albums of the month — indeed, of the year.

Metacritic score: 87

Must-listen: “Pink in the Night” might not be the flashiest track on Be the Cowboy, but the way it stretches and yearns exemplifies the potent emotions caught up in the album.

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Original Source -> From midlife crises to cowboy dreams: August’s biggest new albums

via The Conservative Brief

[lopezdorothy70-blog]

Why We Should Be Worried about the 2018 Heat Wave

It is time to acknowledge that climate change is for real and start healing our planet.

The entire Northern Hemisphere has been in the grips of an unprecedented heat wave this year. Asia, Europe, Africa and North America saw several countries reeling under record-breaking temperatures. In 1977, Athens recorded the highest ever temperature in continental Europe at 48°C. That record may very well be broken by the extraordinary heat wave��currently sweeping the Iberian Peninsula.

In Japan, the deadly heat wave has killed 96 people in July alone - a number that is likely to increase 170% by 2080. Kumagaya, near Tokyo, has seen temperatures rise above 41°C (106°F) for the first time in the country's history, with more than 22,000 people, predominantly elderly, seeking medical attention across Japan. Heat stroke from sustained high temperatures has claimed the lives of 29 people in South Korea, where temperatures reached the highest point in 111 years in the capital Seoul.

In Quebec province alone more than 34 people have lost their lives on account of the heat wave, with an estimated 70 deaths attributed to the scorching temperature and high humidity across Canada. The United States celebrated its Independence Day with blistering temperatures across the Northeast and 80 million people in 14 states under a heat advisory warning. The Death Valley in the Mojave Desert in California holds the record for the highest ever temperature measured on planet Earth at 56.7°C (134°F). While that record set in 1913 still holds, Death Valley has seen the hottest July to date, with the monthly average temperatures above 42°C (107°F), with the mercury topping 52.7°C (127°F) four days in a row.

What is a heat wave?

This is not the first heat wave the world has seen. However, what ought to be concerning everyone is the increased frequency and deadliness of these occurrences. Europe saw its worst heat wave in 500 years in 2003, which claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people. In just 15 years, Europe is reeling from another heat wave with record-setting temperatures. Even Russia, known for its frigid temperatures, saw one of a kind heat wave in 2010 that covered an exceptionally large area of 400,000 square miles. In Asia, barely 13 years after over 1,000 people died from extreme heat in 2002, India saw another killer heat wave in 2015. Since the US Environmental Protection Agency started recording heat waves, America has seen several instances, with the deadliest ones occurring in 1896, 1934, 1936, 1954, 1980, 1988, 1995, 2006, 2012, 2017 and 2018.

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) defines a heat wave as a “marked unusual hot weather (Max, Min and daily average) over a region persisting at least two consecutive days during the hot period of the year based on local climatological conditions, with thermal conditions recorded above given thresholds.” There are currently 34 countries that have a formal definition for a heat wave. Interestingly, the official definition of what constitutes a heat wave varies from country to country, though not differing in principle from WMO's definition. Exceeding 25°C would be considered a heat wave in countries that usually enjoy mild weather, whereas the threshold is much higher in tropical countries. This is why WMO's definition is broad allowing individual countries adopt it to their local climatological conditions.

Satellite images show just how parched North West Europe has become during its recent heatwave. (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018) processed by ESA) pic.twitter.com/kGZvt7E51Y

- Quite Interesting (@qikipedia) August 1, 2018

Denmark defines a heat wave as a period of three consecutive days where the average maximum temperature across 50% of the country exceeds 28°C (82.4°F). Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands share the definition of a heat wave as five consecutive days where the temperature exceeds 25°C (77°F), including three where the temperature tops 30°C (86°F). India, which consistently sees heat waves year after year, defines it as one when the temperature exceeds 40°C (104°F) in the plains and 30°C (86°F) in the mountainous regions. When the temperature reaches 46°C (114.8 °F), the Indian Meteorological Department classifies the event as an extreme heat wave.

Scientific studies have found that man-made climate change has raised the probability of natural disasters like hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires. Analyzing the data from seven stations in Europe, researchers have determined that the probability of heat waves occurring across the continent as a consequence of human activity has increased twofold.

“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), adding that “the ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.” NCAR's research and analysis shows that since the turn of the century, the number of record hot days have outpaced record cold days by two to one. If humankind does not curb greenhouse gas emissions, NCAR's model predicts 20 record hot days for each record cold day by middle of this century.

Human activity since mid-20th century has resulted in unprecedented amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Indisputable evidence of climate change can be seen in the steady increase of sea levels, warming oceans, shrinking ice sheets, extreme hurricanes and other weather events including a global rise in temperature. A group of 1,300 independent scientific experts has concluded that human activity in the last five decades has warmed our planet, with devastating effects. The consensus from 18 reputed scientific associations is unambiguous: Our planet it warming as a direct consequence of human activity.

It's time to heal our planet

In December 2015, 195 nations came together in Paris to sign an accord to combat climate change. They agreed to keep the temperature rise this century well below 2°C from pre-industrial levels in an effort to save humanity from the devastating effects of global warming. The historic accord signed by almost all the nations of the world is a crucial first step in arresting the harsh effects of climate change, including the likes of the current heat wave.

Sadly, defying scientific consensus, an incompetent and short-sighted Trump administration pulled America out of the Paris Climate Agreement - an act this author views as a crime against humanity. However, this was before the heat wave of 2018 affected the entire Northern Hemisphere, including America. In a survey conducted by University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College in May 2018, 73% of Americans accept the evidence of global warming, with 60% of them also accepting that human activity plays a part.

The world needs America's full participation in the fight against climate change. As the largest consumer of world's resources and second largest greenhouse gas emitter, America has a responsibility to humankind to do more than its fair share in combatting climate change.

The earth cannot survive sustained increase in temperatures of more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Studies show that we are at serious risk of reaching a threshold that would cause an irreversible chain reaction resulting in our planet becoming a hothouse if we do not stick to the decisions outlined in Paris. For all the climate change skeptics out there, one can only hope that the 2018 heat wave becomes a tipping point and puts an end to their denial.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

Photo Credit:y Andrey Myagkov / Shutterstock.com

The post Why We Should Be Worried about the 2018 Heat Wave appeared first on Fair Observer.

[daveywankenobie]

It’s next to impossible to not be carried away with the peaceful and easy feeling that the current spell of warm weather has brought to the UK.

Recently Scotland recorded the hottest day in its history (link) which was measured at a scorching 33.2C degrees in Motherwell, North Lanarkshire, and the forecast for Warwickshire is similarly toasty for the next week or so ahead.

To use a well trodden phrase I’m ‘making hay while the sun shines’ and getting the most I possibly can of my usual twalking companions’ willingness to get out and about and my own desire to enjoy the outdoors and (when necessary) de-stress.

Usually I count my walking weeks (and work to my 70 mile objective) from Saturday to Friday – and already I have enough in the bank to take my foot off the gas a bit, but so far I don’t feel the need, because I’m just loving life.

Every day currently just seems to come pre-loaded with a reason to bounce out of bed – and most days have seen me begin a little early and take a longer route than I actually need to so that I can make the most of the world while it looks so beautiful.

A reader asked me recently some practical questions about walking to work (in an attempt I assume to replicate my behaviour) and queried what I do about sweating, ‘beetroot face’ and the need to shower after doing so much exercise.

Truthfully this used to be a big consideration – and in the job I had before this current one (when I was a little heavier) this was a daily concern. I’d already lost a lot of weight and in August 2017 I was had started walking to to work (two miles each way in that case) for the first time (link).

I remember being quite paranoid about how i’d look when I arrived in the office and was wearing a white tee-shirt under all of my shirts to soak up any sweat if it happened. At that point I was four stone heavier than I am now (12th August 2017 – 18st 8lbs) but still pretty proud of where I’d managed to get to in terms of fitness and put some before and after photos in my blog.

In the full length shots the comparison is from 7th Jan 2017 (25st 2lbs) and the portrait shows me at 34st in April 2016.

‘Beetroot face’ is something that stopped happening (I don’t remember exactly when) but from memory thais wasn’t something directly related to weight – but increased fitness.

I guess in answer to the reader’s query I should say ‘if you need to take spare clothes and shower and/or change at work then do it. If you’re worried about looking hot and sweaty then just remember the embarrassment is in your mind – not other people’s.

I know only too well that random passers by can be spontaneously and surprisingly cruel (link) (more links) but when it comes to the people that know you all they’ll see is someone trying to better themselves and they’ll be supportive and encouraging.

If not then you work with assholes and it’s time to find a new job.

It’s as simple as that.

Your goal (as difficult as this can be) is to have a better life and to be healthy and happy. To reach that point you don’t need to look good or impress people with how effortless it is because it’s not.

It’s flipping hard and I take my hat off to anyone trying to convert sedentary fat into muscular fitness because it’s not an easy path to take.

It is however the right one  and over time it gets easier – so keep going.

If you do then everything opens up – and in my case the flower that blossoms is literal as well as metaphorical. While you’re out and about you get to see not only yourself but the world around you growing.

Yesterday evening I was finally able once again to do a full circuit  (around 3.5 miles) of the golf course at Leek Wootton with my friend.

Regular readers may remember my companion as a lady with a poorly paw. Not so long ago this regular partner in crime of mine took a tumble whilst we were twalking in the Hickey Hills back in March (link).

For a few weeks now (since she got the OK from her doctor) we’ve been taking baby steps on flat surfaces in order to try and build up her capabilities again. Now I’m glad to report that she’s getting to the point where uneven surfaces and some gentler gradients are once again possible.

There’s been a lot of frustration on her part associated with the length of time that the injury has taken to heal – but honestly I’m amazed that it’s done as well as it has, given that ‘a ligament tear’ actually turned out to be ‘a ligament that pulled a chunk of bone away with it too when it tore’.

Ouch.

But now we’re out and about again – and what a time it is to be doing it!

Yesterday everywhere seemed to be heavily populated with butterflies and moths. No matter where you walked the hedgerows were thick with the Red Admiral and Cabbage White varieties.

Even before I’d started the twalk, sitting on my recycling bin when I returned home was this little guy.

I’m seeing a few varieties this year that I’ve never noticed before – and the milder weather may well be the cause – because while I was looking this up (it’s a Scarlet Tiger – link) I realised it’s predominantly found in the southern parts of the UK.

It’s almost as pretty as the Cinnabar (link) I found near work a few weeks ago – but not quite…

Hopefully I’ll find more as the weeks go on – because I’m just loving blundering into these little guys!

Who knew moths could be so vibrant and colourful? I’ve only ever noticed the irritating little brown ones fixated on lightbulbs before and these couldn’t be further apart if they tried!

Anyway – I better get on internet. I have another busy day ahead of me.

Whatever you’re trying to do to improve yourself – keep doing it – and to anyone reading that feels like they’re approaching the deep end – just keep swimming!

Davey

Making hay It's next to impossible to not be carried away with the peaceful and easy feeling that the current spell of warm weather has brought to the UK.

[usnewsaggregator-blog]

The Most Dangerous Man On Earth

New Post has been published on https://usnewsaggregator.com/u-s/the-most-dangerous-man-on-earth/

The Most Dangerous Man On Earth

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.com

Let’s start with the universe and work our way in. Who cares? Not them because as far as we know they aren’t there. As far as we know, no one exists in our galaxy or perhaps anywhere else but us (and the other creatures on this all-too-modest planet of ours). So don’t count on any aliens out there caring what happens to humanity. They won’t.

As for it ― Earth ― the planet itself can’t, of course, care, no matter what we do to it.  And I’m sure it won’t be news to you that, when it comes to him ― and I mean, of course, President Donald J. Trump, who reputedly has a void where the normal quotient of human empathy might be ― don’t give it a second’s thought.  Beyond himself, his businesses, and possibly (just possibly) his family, he clearly couldn’t give less of a damn about us or, for that matter, what happens to anyone after he departs this planet.

As for us, the rest of us here in the United States at least, we already know something about the nature of our caring.  A Yale study released last March indicated that 70% of us ― a surprising but still less than overwhelming number (given the by-now-well-established apocalyptic dangers involved) ― believe that global warming is actually occurring.  Less than half of us, however, expect to be personally harmed by it.  So, to quote the eminently quotable Alfred E. Newman, “What, me worry?”

Tell that, by the way, to the inhabitants of Ojai and other southern California hotspots ― infernos, actually ― being reduced to cinders this December, a month that not so long ago wasn’t significant when it came to fires in that state.  But such blazes should have been no surprise, thanks to the way fire seasons are lengthening on this warming planet.  A burning December is simply part of what the governor of California, on surveying the fire damage recently, dubbed “the new normal” ― just as ever more powerful Atlantic hurricanes, growing increasingly fierce as they pass over the warming waters of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico on their way to batter the United States, are likely to be another new normal of our American world.

In the wake of the hottest year on record, we all now live on a new-normal planet, which means a significantly more extreme one.  Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the political version of that new normal involves a wildly overheated, overbearing, over-hyped, over-tweeted president (even if only 60-odd percent of us believe that he could truly harm us).  He’s a man who, as the New York Times reported recently, begins to boil with doubt and disturbance if he doesn’t find himself in the headlines, the focus of cable everything, for even a day or two.  He’s a man who seems to thrive only when the pot is boiling and when he’s the center of the universe.  And what a world we’ve prepared for such an incendiary figure!  (More on that later.)

We’re all now immersed in an evolving Trumpocalypse.  In a sense, we were there even before The Donald entered the Oval Office.  Just consider what it meant to elect a visibly disturbed human being to the highest office of the most powerful, potentially destructive nation on Earth.  What does that tell you?  One possibility: given the near majority of American voters who sent him to the White House, by campaign 2016 we were already living in a deeply disturbed country.  And considering the coming of 1% elections, the growth of plutocracy, the blooming of a new Gilded Age whose wealth disparities must already be competitive with its nineteenth-century predecessor, the rise of the national security state, our endless wars (now turning “generational”), the increasing militarization of this country, and the demobilization of its people, to mention only a few twenty-first-century American developments, that should hardly be surprising.

Could Donald Trump Be the End of Evolutionary History?

Recently, as I was mulling over the extremity of this Trumpian moment, a depiction of evolution from my youth popped into my head.  Sometimes back then, such illustrations, as I remember them, began with a fish-like creature flippering its way out of the water to be transformed into a reptile, but this one, known as the “March of Progress,” started with a hunched over ape-like creature.  What followed were a series of figures that, left to right, grew ever more Homo-sapiens-like and ever more upright to the last guy, a muscular-looking fellow walking oh-so-erectly.

He, of course, was a proud specimen of us and we ― it went without saying at the time ― were the proud end of the line on this planet.  We were it, progress personified!  Even in my youth, however, we were also in the process of updating that evolutionary end point.  At the height of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the fear of another kind of end, one that might truly be the end of everything, had become a nightmarish commonplace in our lives.

One night almost 60 years ago, for instance, I can still vividly remember myself on my hands and knees crawling through the rubble of an atomically devastated city.  It was just a nightmare, of course, but of a sort that was anything but uncommon for those of us growing up then.  And there were times ― especially during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 ― when those nuclear nightmares left the world of dreams and pop culture for everyday life.  And even before that, if you were a child, you regularly experienced the fear of obliteration, as the air raid sirens wailed outside your classroom window, the radio on your teacher’s desk broadcast warnings from Conelrad, and you “ducked and covered” under your flimsy desk.

With the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, such fears receded, though they shouldn’t have, since by then, in a world of spreading nuclear states, we already knew about “nuclear winter.” What that meant should have been terrifying.  A perfectly imaginable nuclear war, not between superpowers but regional powers like India and Pakistan, could put so much smoke, so many particulates, into the atmosphere as to absorb sunlight for years, radically cooling the planet and possibly starving out most of humanity.

Only in our moment, however, have such nuclear fears returned in a significant way.  Under the circumstances, more than half a century after that March of Progress imagery became popular, if we were to provisionally update it, we might have to add a singularly recognizable figure to the far right side of that diorama (appropriately enough): a large but slightly stooped man with a jut-chin, a flaming face, and a distinctive orange comb-over. 

Which brings us to a straightforward enough question: Could Donald Trump prove to be the end of evolutionary history? The answer, however provisionally, is that he could. At a minimum, right now he qualifies as the most dangerous man on the planet. He might indeed be the final stopping spot (or at least the person who pointed the way toward it) for human history, for everything that led to this moment, to us.

What Rough Beast, Its Hour Come Round at Last…?

Whatever you do, however, don’t just blame Donald Trump for this.  He was simply the particularly unsettling version of Homo sapiens ushered into the White House on a backlash vote of dissatisfaction in 2016.  When he got there, he unexpectedly found powers beyond compare awaiting him like so many loaded guns.  As was true with the two presidents who preceded him, he automatically became not just the commander-in-chief of this country but its assassin-in-chief; that is, he found himself in personal control of an armada of drone aircraft that could be sent just about anywhere on Earth at his command to kill just about anyone of his choosing.  At his beck and call, he also had the equivalent of what historian Chalmers Johnson once called the president’s own private army (now, armies): both the CIA irregulars Johnson was familiar with and the U.S. military’s vast, secretive Special Operations forces.  Above all, however, he found himself in charge of the planet’s largest nuclear arsenal, weaponry that he and he alone could order into use.

In short, like this country’s other presidents since August 1945, he was fully weaponized and capable of singlehandedly turning this planet, or significant parts of it, into an instant inferno, a wasteland of ― in his incendiary phrase in relation to North Korea ― “fire and fury.”  On January 20, 2017, in other words, he became the personification of a duck-and-cover planet (even though, as had been true since the 1950s, there was really nowhere to hide).  It made no difference that he himself was woefully ignorant about the nature and power of such weaponry.

And speaking of planetary infernos, he also found himself weaponized when it came to a second set of instruments of ultimate destruction about which he was no less ignorant and to which he was even more in thrall.  He brought to the Oval Office ― Make America Great Again! ― a nostalgia for his fossil-fuelized childhood world of the 1950s.  Weaponized by Big Energy, he arrived prepared to ensure that the wealthiest and most powerful country on the planet would clear the way for yet more pipelines, fracking, offshore drilling, and just about every other imaginable form of exploitation of oil, natural gas, and coal (but notalternative energy). All of this was intended to create, as he proclaimed, a new “golden age,” not just of American energy independence but of “energy dominance” on a planetary scale. And here’s what that really means: through his executive orders and the decisions of the stunning range of climate deniers and Big Oil enthusiasts he appointed to key posts in his administration, he can indeed ensure that ever more greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels will enter the atmosphere in the years to come, creating the basis for another kind of apocalypse.

On the promotion of global warming in his first year in office, it’s reasonable to say, with a certain Trumpian pride, that the president has once again made the United States the planet’s truly “exceptional” nation. In November, only five months after President Trump announcedthat the U.S. would withdraw as soon as possible from the Paris climate agreement to fight global warming, Syria (of all countries) finally signed onto it, the last nation on Earth to do so.  That meant this country was truly… well, you can’t say left out in the “cold,” not on this planet anymore, but quite literally exceptional in its single-minded efforts to ensure the destruction of the very environment that had for so long ensured humanity’s well-being and made the creation of those illustrations of evolutionary progress possible.

Still, you can’t just blame President Trump for this either.  He’s not responsible for the ingenuity, that gift of evolution, that led us, wittingly in the case of nuclear weapons and (initially) unwittingly in the case of climate change, to take powers once relegated to the gods and place them in our own hands ― as of January 20, 2017, in fact, in the hands of Donald J. Trump.  Don’t blame him alone for the fact that the most apocalyptic moment in our history might come not via an asteroid from outer space, but from Trump Tower.

So here we are, living with a man whose ultimate urge seems to be to bring the world to a boil around himself.  It’s possible that he might indeed be the first president since Harry Truman in 1945 to order the use of nuclear weapons.  As Nobel Prize winner Beatrice Fihn, director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, recently commented, the world might be only “a tiny tantrum” away from nuclear war in Asia.  At the very least, he may already be helping to launch a new global nuclear arms race in which countries from South Korea and Japan to Iran and Saudi Arabia could find themselves with world-ending arsenals, leaving nuclear winter in the hands of… well, don’t even think about it.

Now, imagine that amended evolutionary chart again or perhaps ― in honor of The Donald’s recent announcement that the U.S. was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital ― call to mind poet William Butler Yeats’s words about a world in which “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” while some “rough beast, its hour come round at last” is slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born.”  Think then of what a genuine horror it is that so much world-ending power is in the hands of any single human being, no less such a disturbed and disturbing one. 

Of course, while Donald Trump might represent the end of the line that began in some African valley so many millennia ago, nothing on this planet is graven in stone, not when it comes to us.  We still have the potential freedom to choose otherwise, to do otherwise.  We have the capacity for wonders as well as horrors.  We have the ability to create as well as to destroy.

In the phrase of Jonathan Schell, the fate of the Earth remains not just in his hands, but in ours.  If they, those nonexistent aliens, don’t care and the planet can’t care and the alien in the White House doesn’t give a damn, then it’s up to us to care.  It’s up to us to protest, resist, and change, to communicate and convince, to fight for life rather than its destruction. If you’re of a certain age, all you have to do is look at your children or grandchildren (or those of your friends and neighbors) and you know that no one, Donald Trump included, should have the right to consign them to the flames. What did they ever do to end up in a hell on Earth?

2018 is on the horizon.  Let’s make it a better time, not the end of time. 

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

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[vinylbay777]

Ten New York Music Festivals to Get Excited About in 2017

It may still be spring for another month, but it is never too early to think about the upcoming summer music festival season that will soon be upon us.

The selection of summer music festivals in New York have only been getting better over the last few years. Between the Panorama and The Meadows, which are returning after their debuts last year, to the tried and true favorites like Governor’s Ball and Central Park Summerstage, music will be flowing through all parts of New York all summer long.

Vinyl Bay 777, Long Island’s music outlet, wants to help you get excited for festival season. Here are 10 music festivals happening around New York and Long Island that are sure to be a great time.

1.       Governor’s Ball (June 2-June 4): Governor’s Ball has been bringing the hottest artists to New York’s Randall’s Island for seven years now. The first of the big three-day festivals (both time-wise and history-wise) in the area, it has become a top seller considering its indie roots. Headliners for this year’s three-day festival include of the moment rappers Chance The Rapper and Childish Gambino, pop darling Lorde, “newer” rock bands Phoenix and Cage The Elephant and veteran artists Tool and Wu-Tang Clan.

2.       Central Park Summerstage (June-October): Sponsored by the City Parks Foundation, Summerstage brings an eclectic mix of live music to parks all over the city (though most of them are in Central Park) throughout the summer. There are a lot of big names that come through as part of the festival, including Mavis Staples (June 3), George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic (June 11), Elvis Costello (June 15), KRS-One(June 25), Ginuwine (June 30), Yo La Tengo (July 17), PJ Harvey (July 19), Regina Spektor (July 27), All Time Low (July 31), Dashboard Confessional and All-American Rejects (August 3), Jadakiss (August 6), Young The Giant (September 13), and The War On Drugs (September 22) and many more. Though many of these are ticketed shows, a lot of them are free, which is even better.

3.       Celebrate Brooklyn (June-August): Similar to Summerstage, Celebrate Brooklyn takes over Prospect Park’s bandshell all summer, bring out some of the best music and culture the borough has to offer. Highlights this year include The Shins (June 15), Yeasayer (June 22), Musiq Soulchild (July 7), Robert Randolph & the Family Band (July 13), Conor Oberst (July 20), Andrew Bird and Esperanza Spalding (July 28), Fleet Foxes (August 1&2) and many more. Like Summerstage, a lot of these shows are free, so you won’t want to miss out.

4.   ��   River to River (June 14-June 25): River To River brings a much needed helping of culture to the financial district every summer. This week-long event is more than just music, but encompasses performance art and dance as well. All performances are free.

5.       Make Music NYC (June 21): Every summer solstice (first day of summer), Make Music New York sponsors an event that brings music to every square inch of New York city’s streets and parks. Specific events include Porch Stomp (Americana, bluegrass), Punk Island (although that will happen three days earlier on June 18), The Gauntlet (a large choral performance) and more. The full schedule of events won’t be out until later this month, so stay tuned.

6.       Warped Tour (July  8 at Jones Beach): This is a national tour, but I still like to think it counts. The all-day festival that has been providing a place for outstanding up-and-coming punk and hardcore bands to be discovered and allowing established bands to promote their latest work is back for a 22nd year. This year’s line-up includes Gwar, Hatebreed, Anti-Flag, American Authors, The Ataris, Big D and the Kids Table, Emmure, Dance Gavin Dance, Hawthorne Heights, Silverstein and more.

7.       Great South Bay Music Festival (July 13-July 16): The annual four-day Long Island festival returns this July with one of its best line-ups ever. Artists playing this year include Taking Back Sunday, New Found Glory and Saves The Day on the 13th, 311 and The Wailers on the 14th, Gov’t Mule on the 15th and Zombies and Eddie Money on July 16.

8.       Panorama (July 28-July 30): Created by Goldenvoice, the same people behind the wildly successful Coachella Festival, Panorama will be back for a second year at Randall’s Island. Like Governor’s Ball, this festival brings new and established artists together for three days of non-stop music. This year’s headliners include Frank Ocean, Solange, Tame Impala, Alt-J, Nine Inch Nails and A Tribe Called Quest.

9.       Afropunk (August 26 and 27): The Afropunk festival is not just about punk. It’s about celebrating the music of many cultures in all forms. Big name artists playing this year include guitarist Gary Clark, Jr., rapper Sampha and soul singer Macy Gray.

10.   The Meadows (September 15-September 17): The Meadows will also be returning for a second year this September. Taking place at Citi Field, the line-up is arguably even bigger than Governor’s Ball or Panorama. This year’s festival includes Gorillaz’s only announced New York appearance, as well as sets from Jay-Z, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Future, Nas, Weezer, Run The Jewels, and many more top-name artists. And because this is being done in September, the weather will be starting to cool down, even though it is still technically summer.

With all of these top notch festivals happening in New York in the coming months, there is a lot to look forward to this summer. From massive multi-genre weekend festivals to more curated months-long affairs, there will surely be no shortage of great outdoor live music.

                                                          ---

Get ready for summer festival season by picking up music from many of the bands coming through New York this summer at Vinyl Bay 777 and vinylbay777.com. Long Island’s top new independent record shop has a wide selection of new and used vinyl records, CDs, cassettes, music DVDs and memorabilia to choose from. Browse thousands of titles in store and online. With more titles being added all the time, there is always something new to discover at Vinyl Bay 777.

[auburnfamilynews]

  For 60 divine minutes, we had an answer. (90, if you count the first half in Starkville.) The question, of course, had hung in the Auburn air since at least the 2010 Arkansas barnburner, and maybe since Chris Todd was slinging darts in the rain against West Virginia: How good could a Gus Malzahn team be if he developed a top-tier, Tuberville-caliber defense to pair with a peak-performance offense of his own? 

Against Arkansas this past October, we found out. Kamryn Pettway and the offensive line ground the Hog defense to dust; Carl Lawson, Montravius Adams and the rest of Kevin Steele’s defense permitted the Hog offense less than nothing. The final tally of rushing yardage was Auburn 544, Arkansas 25. The final scoreboard read Auburn 56, Arkansas 3. Not even Cam’s national champions, not even the 2013 team in its white-hottest moments registered anything like the kind of scorched-earth obliteration of a bowl-bound SEC rival the 2016 team registered against the Razorbacks.

Which is why, when I took my seat in Jordan-Hare’s north end zone bleachers two weeks later for the Vanderbilt game, I fervently believed Auburn had a puncher’s chance to defeat Alabama, win the SEC, and possibly — it wasn’t totally crazy — get another national title shot. The defense hadn’t been as superb against Ole Miss, but Chad Kelly had made Alabama look silly for stretches, too, and they’d been due for an off-game, and the rushing game had been murderous anyway, and the freshman wideouts were coming along, and Steele would be more comfortable against pro-style offenses anyway, and, and, and, and. The ceiling was that high. This team had shown us. There was no reason it couldn’t keep on showing us.

Then, I don’t remember if it was just before kickoff or just after, my phone told me Sean White wasn’t starting.

I do remember watching John Franklin III take the field and thinking Uh-oh. And at no point for the remaining two months of the season was the status of Auburn football anything other than Uh-oh. That ceiling we’d waited six, seven years for our Tigers to touch? When poor White dropped back in the Sugar Bowl and uncorked the duckiest duck that’s ever ducked, man, that ceiling felt as far away as the moon.

It’s not a scientific assessment, but I’d judge Auburn fans as a whole to be more unhappy at the close of the 2016 season than 2015’s, an assessment that if accurate doesn’t make a damn lick of logical sense. Instead of going 2-6 in the SEC and finishing last in the West, Auburn went 5-3 and finished second. Instead of going 6-6 overall and playing the Birmingham Bowl, Auburn went 8-4 and played the Sugar. Instead of finishing 35th in S&P+ and 29th in Sagarin, Auburn finished 13th and 14th, respectively. And Auburn accomplished that improvement while breaking in its third defensive coordinator in three seasons, adding an eventual playoff finalist to the nonleague schedule and suffering the aforementioned crippling injury to its starting quarterback. By any rational measure, the future looks far brighter than it did a year ago.

So why do I feel like Auburn’s glass is half-empty, even when it’s clearly half-full? Why do I empathize with the criticism avalanche aimed at Malzahn even when I disagree with the overwhelming bulk of it? Why did a season that was so much better than the one before it leave us feeling collectively just as bad, if not worse?

The simplest answer is that the one thing we could expect 2016 to provide us was clarity. Was Gus the coach that in the space of one season brought a 3-9 team to within seconds of a national championship? Or the coach who without the security blanket of a JUCO superstar under center was incapable of even breaking .500? By year’s end, we’d know … except that, whoops, it turns out Gus can be both those coaches not only in the span of a single season, but over the span of a single month. (Auburn fans, you thought you got emotional whiplash going from 2010’s triumphs to 2012’s misery? For our team’s next trick, it’ll go from the Arkansas win to the Georgia loss in all of four weeks.) If you believed coming into this season Gus was the long-term answer, you got plenty of evidence to back you up. If you believed Auburn was better off moving on, you got plenty of evidence to back you up. 2016’s high points were high enough that the team unquestionably moved forward. But the low points were low enough that — much as it hurts to admit — there’s legitimate reasons to doubt how far forward it can keep moving under Gus’s leadership, too.

They’re not all legitimate, of course. There’s things it makes sense to be angry about. There’s things it doesn’t. In the interest of unpacking exactly how we came to be collectively unsatisfied by what should have been a satisfying season, here’s my list of those things, piece-by-piece.

I AM MAD ABOUT: LOSING THE GODFORSAKEN GEORGIA GAME. The Iron Bowl is the game I most want to win. But given the unfortunate state of Crimson Tide affairs these days, the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry is the game I least want to lose. And that went double entering this year’s edition, what with the Dawgs a mediocre mess that narrowly escaped Nicholls State, lost to Vandy, couldn’t even compete with Ole Miss or Florida, still ranks 58 places lower than Auburn in S&P, etc. And that went quadruple, octuple, hexadecouple when the defense went into Athens and stuffed the Dawg offense in a sack.

I can’t make myself care about how injured White may or may not have been. Can’t about what he may or may not have told the coaches. Can’t about why or why not Franklin or Johnson never saw the field. If all you need from your offense to win the Georgia game is to score more than a net of zero points, for the love of everything holy find a way to score more than a net of zero points. Backup quarterbacks. All-Wildcat offense. Triple-reverse flea flickers. Just please, please, please don’t waste that defensive performance, in this game of all games.

I believe that if Gus’s team cobbles together enough offense not to, no one really much minds losing to Alabama or Oklahoma. But waste it they did. And I’m still angrier about it than any loss since Tony Franklin hit his nadir against Vanderbilt.

I AM NOT MAD ABOUT: GUS GOING 1-3 AGAINST ALABAMA. Quit saying “Malzahn is 2-6 vs. Georgia and Alabama, and almost lost in 2013, too.” The Tide’s rank entering the four Iron Bowls Gus has coached: 1, 1, 2,  and 1, and that No. 2 team won the national title. Gus won the greatest game in college football history in 2013, rolled up 630 yards in Bryant-Denny in 2014, and stayed kinda-sorta competitive in 2015 and 2016 despite starting Jeremy Johnson in both. Gus’s track record against Georgia is a major issue. His against the Tide just isn’t.

I AM NOT MAD ABOUT: “NOT BEATING ANYBODY.” Among the anti-Gus brigade, the most frequent method of dismissing Auburn’s post-Texas A&M, pre-White injury run seems to be dismissing the level of competition faced during said run. There’s a number of problems with that approach, first and foremost that ignoring a statistically dominant win over LSU — which is LSU, and which also wound up the SEC’s second- or third-best team, and a good deal better than that according to some — is the opposite of fair. Second, as has been noted already, it’s not as if 53-point home wins or 24-point road wins in SEC play have been commonplace even for the very best teams in Auburn’s recent history. Lastly, those margins-of-victory matter. No, they don’t change the win-loss record, and yes, LSU aside, the teams faced between A&M and Georgia weren’t the cream of the SEC’s less-than-bumper 2016 crop. But pretending a 56-3 win over Arkansas doesn’t tell us anything more about how good Auburn is than a 16-3 win over Arkansas hasn’t been in fashion since before Phil Steele first started tracking close-game records and yardage margins. In the early days of 2017, it’s straight-up willful ignorance.

How much credit to give Gus for a single month is (ahem) debatable, but don’t pretend that for that single month Auburn was anything less than a force.

I AM NOT MAD ABOUT: LOSING THE SUGAR BOWL WHEN SEAN WHITE BREAKS HIS ARM ON THE FIRST SERIES OF THE GAME. The moment White threw that “pass” — you know the one I’m talking about — the only question was how many points by which Oklahoma would win, and if Musberger could talk himself out of a job before the fourth quarter.

I AM MAD ABOUT: NOT HAVING A VIABLE BACKUP PLAN IN THE EVENT OF A SEAN WHITE INJURY. An incomplete list of people and/or creatures and/or objects that expressed concern over White’s durability this past offseason:

Auburn fans

Detroit Pistons fans

The ghost of Harriet Tubman

Squirrels

Atlas moth caterpillars

An asteroid circling the sun at a distance of 600 million miles from Earth

“White showed enough last year that Auburn might be OK with him as their starter,” a sapient paper clip told me last August, “but health-wise, I gotta see him last the year before I believe it. JF3 had better be ready.”

I’m assuming that, being football coaches and thus a good deal more knowledgable than most sapient paper clips, Auburn’s staff shared the same concerns. But in the end, did it make any difference if they did? Their efforts to address them amounted to “sign Franklin,” a decision that proved so successful Franklin 1. remained on the bench even as White’s arm transmogrified into pudding before our eyes in Athens 2. watched Johnson get the nod in the Iron Bowl, a move even the non-sapient paper clips could tell you gave Auburn the odds of winning I have of assembling my own Volkswagen.

Maybe that’s because Franklin proved incapable of running the offense. Maybe that’s because Auburn’s staff was incapable of teaching the offense*. Either way: Gus went into this past offseason knowing an injury to White had ruined a promising end to the season. And he still failed to prevent an injury to White from ruining an even-more-promising end to this season.

*The “Gus can’t develop quarterbacks” line you’ll hear trotted out in relation to this — or to express skepticism that Jarrett Stidham will alter Auburn’s fortunes at the position — is bunk. Tulsa’s quarterbacks got better under Malzahn. Chris Todd got better. Title game weirdness aside, Cam got better. Once-and-future defensive back Nick Marshall threw for 456 yards at Alabama. White’s gotten better every healthy game he’s started, to the point he was the most efficient passer in the SEC when he got hurt. If Gus couldn’t develop Johnson or Franklin into workable starting options, the evidence-to-date suggests that’s more a Johnson or Franklin issue than a Gus one.

I AM NOT MAD ABOUT: LOSING THE CLEMSON GAME. Those guys are pretty good, it turns out. Can’t wait to play them again in Clemson next year!

I AM MAD ABOUT: THE WAY IN WHICH THE CLEMSON GAME WAS LOST. Perhaps I should have let go of my anger over Gus’s Carousel of “Progress” by now. I haven’t. Not because it’s that much of an opportunity lost, really — if Auburn wins that game*, a 9-3 mark with a win over the eventual ACC champs vaults them all the way into … the Sugar Bowl — but because the remainder of the season made trotting out Franklin and Johnson alongside White as three-headed quarterbacking equals look stupid beyond all previously accepted measures of stupid. Could the gulf between White and his backups really be that obvious on the playing field and that obscure on the practice field? Is it too much to ask that if every fan knows this is Sean White’s offense to operate by Week 3, that Auburn’s offensive braintrust know the same before Week 1?

The charitable view is that Malzahn entered this season desperate, and desperate people sometimes do dumb things they wouldn’t otherwise do. The uncharitable view is that if the carousel itself was a one-time mistake, the A&M, Georgia and Oklahoma performances proved the resulting offensive implosion more feature than bug. And ultimately, that’s what makes me maddest of all. Let’s be clear:

I AM NOT MAD ABOUT: WHERE THIS PROGRAM STANDS GOING INTO 2017. Marlon Davidson and Derrick Brown are set to become the new Carl Lawson and Montravius Adams. Carlton Davis and Javaris Davis share as much All-SEC cornerback potential as they do a last name. If losing Alex Kozan and the dreadfully underrated Robert Leff will hurt, returning Austin Golson, Braden Smith and Darius James — oh, and Herb Hand — will heal. The freshman wide receiving crew won’t be the freshman wide receiving crew any more. Kamryn Pettway and Kerryon Johnson will continue to only make the other that much better. Kevin Steele knows what he’s doing, it turns out.

Then there’s Jarrett Stidham, likely the highest-ceilinged Auburn quarterback prospect since Cam, whose arrival means Gus now has — it’s worth repeating — the SEC’s highest-rated quarterback at midseason as his fallback option. Woody Barrett may not keep quiet, either. Auburn’s biggest problem for two years running has been its depth at quarterback. Its depth at quarterback now appears to be one of its biggest strengths. This alone should be cause for unalloyed optimism, even before discussing the positives from the paragraph preceding this one.

That even I can’t summon too much of that logically justified optimism speaks to how much of a toll the past two seasons have taken on our collective faith in Gus’s offensive acumen. Maybe there’s sound reasons for what we saw against Clemson, A&M, and Georgia, sound reasons to believe we won’t see the same things again at the worst possible times. But I can’t shake the feeling that the Gus of the Chizik era would have had his offensive identity on firmer footing before breaking out the Chandler Cox wildcat gadgetry, would have wizarded up something to salvage that trip to Athens, certainly would not have punted on fourth-and-damn-inches with a reeling defense in the second half of the Sugar Bowl. If the past two seasons haven’t felt anything like the Malzahn salad days in the win column, they’ve felt even less like it in terms of creativity, of chutzpah, of the damn-the-huddle-up-torpedoes mentality Gus brought with him from Tulsa. There wasn’t any shortage of spread gurus even in 2009, but as recently as 2014, all the evidence suggested Gus was cut from a unique — and uniquely talented — cloth, even among his HUNH peers. Far too often in 2016, it felt like Auburn was just another middle-of-the-road SEC team, like Gus has become Dan Mullen with better players.

There’s far worse things to be, of course. Mullen took Mississippi State to No. 1 and the Orange Bowl two seasons ago. If Gus giving up a portion of his old bravado was somehow necessary to put together the kind of defense we saw in 2016, it’s probably worth it. No one, myself included, gives a crap about how fast Auburn snaps the ball or how often it goes on fourth-and-short when it’s beating Arkansas 56-3.

I’m not mad Gus will get the chance to prove that performance is what the future of his Auburn tenure will look like. I’m happy 2016 gave us reasons to believe it will. I’m glad to enter 2017 with hope. But 2016 was supposed to take us past belief, past hope, to the point where we know — for better or worse — where Auburn stands with its head coach. I’m mad that it didn’t. And until that point is reached, it’s going to be hard to look back at this season and feel any other way.

Photo credit: @OUDailySports

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