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celestriakle · 2 years ago

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I posted 2,331 times in 2022

That's 230 more posts than 2021!

16 posts created (1%)

2,315 posts reblogged (99%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@hellonorik

@roach-works

@becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

@teaboot

@elodieunderglass

I tagged 2,053 of my posts in 2022

Only 12% of my posts had no tags

#bugsnax - 138 posts

#deltarune - 59 posts

#tumblr - 55 posts

#undertale - 52 posts

#snorts - 52 posts

#pretty art - 45 posts

#angelic apparitions - 39 posts

#goncharov - 36 posts

#cool ocs - 35 posts

#animal vid - 34 posts

Longest Tag: 110 characters

#i’ve lived in what america considers a walkable city vs what europe does and they’re not even remitely similar

My Top Posts in 2022:

✨ 💸 🤔 ⚠️ 🛠 📉 ✨

- the good wizard

1 note - Posted April 1, 2022

Every night you dream that you talk to a genie, when you wake up you can't remember what you wished for. One morning you wake up with a giant crab pincer replacing your right arm. What do you do?

I recognize carcinization has begun and look forward to evolving to my true form.

2 notes - Posted September 7, 2022

Farewell Sweet Crabs 👋 🦀

When I remember my crab friends I'll think of:

the turning of the tides

2 notes - Posted July 24, 2022

hi! just a quick question, have you listened to limetown? seeing the podcasts you liked in your pinned post, i think you might enjoy it! you have awesome taste in podcasts btw!

Thank you!!

Not yet! It's been on my to-listen list pretty much since I started listening to podcasts though. I've been really moseying to getting around to it since there was the long hiatus+I heard the ending wasn't great. Idk if that's true though, so I'm still planning on giving it a shot!

3 notes - Posted June 28, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Hi! I found your at from a zine modding advice compilation doc. I am planning to make a zine, but I have no experience modding. I was wondering if I could get your advice on how to make realistic/fulfillable plans as a newbie?

Hi there! I'm in a zine mod advice doc? 0: I had no idea, could you send me a link? I'm curious!

So, I ran my zine solo and it was my first time running any sort of project like this. It was saddlestitched 30-40 pages (I don't remember exactly; this was several years ago) and we did merch: an enamel pin, a sticker sheet, a die-cut sticker, and two holographic prints. In the end, we made enough money to cover our costs and pay out $6 (approximately) to each contributor, but did not raise enough money to offer complimentary copies of the physical zine/merch. I was aiming to have enough for complimentary copies, which is why I'd call the project a semi-success.

This got long! But here's pretty much all the advice I got:

Know your audience. Is it a fandom zine? How big is the fandom? Original content zines will struggle more to gain interest. How big is YOUR platform, specifically? As lead, the onus is on you to get the word out at the start to attract contributors and potential buyers. Try to gauge how many copies you might sell from this. Lean conservative on your estimate and base your plan on that. (This is where interest checks come in!)

Pick your vendors. Familiarize yourself with the terminology they use. Compare and contrast prices and services using the sales estimate you devised in the last step. How long does shipping take? What is the policy if products come out defective? There are always going to be some defective products when producing en masse. Check reviews. Have you bought zines yourself? Contact the creators of zines you like and ask them which vendors they're using for their assorted products. (I had a great experience with mixam.) Don't forget to look into acquiring packaging and shipping costs (domestic and international)!

Decide how you're going to sell the zine. Kickstarter's great if you're using a vendor that has a set MOQ (minimum order quantity) or if you want to guarantee to be able to provide a certain level of compensation for your contributors, but it also takes a fee and means that, if you don't get enough orders, you have to start the campaign all over again. Bigcartel has more flexibility in terms of sales windows and such, but it's difficult to customize like kickstarter. Also, if you're using bigcartel and don't sell enough, you're on the hook for either refunding or fulfilling all the preorders you do get. You'll also need a stripe and paypal business account.

Make a budget. So you have an estimate of how many you think you'll sell. You know how much your vendors cost. You've accounted for your incidentals (kickstarter fee, packaging, gas to get to the post office, etc). Refer to other zines for what typical prices for your products are and set your prices based on that. (Analyzing what other zines are doing is generally a good idea.) What's the absolute minimum number of sales you need to cover costs? (Fewer orders usually increases production cost.) How many sales do you need to make to compensate your contributors? What will you do if there's excess money? What if it's not enough to split it among your contributors evenly? ($40 is a lot for one person, but it's basically nothing split 30 ways.) Are you going to make stretch goals?

Make a timeline. Interest check, contributor apps, concept submissions (you'll want to know what people are doing before they start working), periodic WIP checks to make sure everyone's on task (there will always be a few people who need to drop out), preorder period, manufacture time, shipping timeline. People will want to know what to expect, especially contributors. Ensure the contributors have plenty of time to work, since, chances are, they're effectively donating their time and effort. Keep in mind major holidays and school schedules; people will need more time if those are happening. Give yourself plenty of pillow space for unforseen issues, so you can stick to this timeline as much as possible throughout the process.

Have the full plan written out for your contributors before they arrive. Be clear and concise. Timeline, expectations in terms of content and behavior, instructions, how you're going to fulfill the zine, expected compensation. Not everyone knows how to prepare an image for print, so include that in your instructions. You're gonna want a discord for this. I also used google forms to manage check-ins and other such things.

Be involved, and COMMUNICATE. Talk to your contributors outside of check-ins. You're their hypeman! Hype them up! Make sure your passion's there for all to see! Nothing, and I mean nothing, kills a project faster than a disinterested/aloof leader. You'll also want to communicate any issues to contributors and buyers asap. It's not embarrassing; people will be patient (mostly) as long as they have communication. Silence is upsetting.

Consider marketing. I've written this as if you're going solo, but these next few bullets is why people usually run zines as a team. Once the contributor team is assembled, that's when you need to hit the bricks. There's a lot of waiting time and you need to gain a potential audience and keep them interested. Marketing is a weak point of mine, so I don't have much advice, but it's critical for the success of a zine. Contributors can advertise a little, but the bulk of that's on you. You'll want an account dedicated to the zine, I can say that much.

Is graphic design your passion? Even if a contributor is designing the cover, what will be on the inner page? The back cover? Do you have any writers contributing fic? That will need formatting. (Do you know how many words fit on a page? It's different depending on the size of the book.) You'll need to make some sort of credits page, or will you put credit information on the same page as each contribution? Quality graphic design can make or break marketing attempts.

Double check your contributors' work. There are going to make mistakes. Most people aren't used to preparing things for print. Having room for bleed (edges of an image that may be cut off during the printing process, or hidden when bound into a book) was a particular issue in my zine. Even if all this is written in your instructions, you'll get files with not enough bleed room, or in RBG (files must be in CMYK for print), or in too low a resolution (300 dpi minimum). Any issues need to be caught, corrected, and all the files compiled for submission to the printer.

Don't forget postage. I mentioned this briefly earlier, but don't forget to account for packaging and shipping in your budget and time. Things like pins can make a slim package too thick and change the postage class. You'll need room in your house to hold the product. You'll want to pack things to ensure nothing's dented or bent. I highly recommend against having a shipping mod, unless it's someone you know and trust very much. I've seen too many projects fall apart because a shipping mod ghosted or stole all the materials or similar issues.

Have a backup plan. What will you do if you only get five people wanting to be contributors? What if you don't sell enough to cover your costs? What if you get bad product? What if you don't hit the MOQ of your chosen vendor, or if they announce a spontaneous price change before you get your order in? Have answers!

Be confident. If you're not used to leadership, it can be weird to have everyone looking to you, but if you've prepared, then there's no reason to be nervous. The people you work with will respond to your energy, so put out those good vibes.

I enjoyed making my zine very much, but also, it was still very much work! I discovered I hate marketing and graphic design, and love the technical bits of arranging the vendors and budgeting and handling the materials. I probably wouldn't go solo again, but I'm glad I did it at least once because it taught me the ins and outs of every aspect. A lot of people, for their first zine, do digital only because, needless to say, physical product is complicated!

If you made it this far, congratulations. xD It felt nice laying out everything I learned; I hope it's just as useful for you to read.

Feel free to ask if you have any further questions!

82 notes - Posted July 13, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #celest rambles #2022

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mariacallous · 2 years ago

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Around 10 cabinet ministers including Jacob Rees-Mogg, Thérèse Coffey, Jeremy Hunt and Simon Clarke would lose their seats in a general election, according to a poll for the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which also shows voters are opposed to the removal of workers’ rights.

The poll by Opinium, using the MRP method to estimate constituency-level results, projected a 1997-style landslide for Labour, with the party winning 411 seats. It suggested the Conservatives would lose 219 seats to end up on 137, with the Liberal Democrats on 39 seats and SNP on 37. It projected vote share for Labour of 43%, Conservatives 28%, the Lib Dems 13%, Green 7%, SNP 4%.

The survey was carried out with more than 10,000 adults on 26 to 30 September – two weeks before Liz Truss scrapped large parts of her mini-budget and sacked her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng. Multiple polls have worsened further for the government since then.

Among those whose seats were projected to be lost by the Tories were Hunt, the new chancellor, Clarke, the levelling up secretary, Rees-Mogg, the business secretary, Coffey, the health secretary and deputy prime minister, Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the transport secretary, Chloe Smith, the work and pensions secretary, Alok Sharma, the Cop26 president, Jake Berry, the Tory party chair, and Robert Buckland, the Wales secretary.

The poll showed the previously safe Surrey seat of Kwasi Kwarteng, who was sacked as chancellor on Friday, was on a knife-edge, with 37% support for the Conservatives compared with 36% for Labour.

Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, is also on course to lose his seat, according to the poll, and the Conservatives would lose all 45 out of 45 so-called red wall seats in the north of England.

The poll also asked voters about their support for EU-derived workers’ rights, such as paid leave and limits on working times, which are under threat from the Conservatives’ legislation scrapping laws and regulations that originated in Brussels.

Overall, 71% of voters support retaining EU-derived workers’ rights such as holiday pay, safe limits on working times and rest breaks. They received overwhelming backing even in the seats of Rees-Mogg, with 72% backing, and Liz Truss, with 63% backing.

The business secretary had presented a plan to abolish laws including the 48-hour working time directive but this was sent back to the drawing board by Truss over fears it went too far, and the policy is currently being reconsidered.

The TUC, which commissioned the poll before its annual congress, warned the government it would face a significant voter backlash if it followed through on plans to rip up key workplace protections which originated from EU law.

The retained EU law bill, soon due for second reading in the Commons, will automatically scrap a swathe of worker protections at the end of 2023, unless ministers choose to retain them. Before its congress this week, which was moved from September because of the death of the Queen, the TUC said the Conservatives had shown they were “firmly on the side of bad bosses” and were “the P&O party” – a reference to the ferry company that sacked its workers without notice or consultation. Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the organisation covering 48 trade unions representing 5.5 million workers, said: “Vital workplace protections – like holiday pay, safe limits on working hours and equal pay for women – are all at risk. “Not content with throwing the economy into turmoil, ministers now seem determined to turn the clock back on rights in the workplace. This polling is a clear repudiation of Tory attacks on workers’ rights and their slash-and-burn economics … Voters will punish [Truss] if she proceeds with these reckless plans – she must stop the chaos and ditch this damaging bill.”

Chris Curtis, the head of political polling at Opinium, said Truss had seen a backlash from voters that was more like a “nightmare than a honeymoon”.

“But elections aren’t just about national polls so our model, built on interviews with over 10,000 voters, analyses how this would play out in each of Great Britain’s 632 constituencies. The results are stark, showing that, if there were an election any time soon, a 1997-sized Labour landslide would be the most likely outcome,” he said.

“One of the main causes of the Tory poll flop is that the mini-budget is convincing voters that the party is on the side of the wealthy rather than working people. If the government want any chance of avoiding a once-in-a-generation wipeout at the next election then they need to turn this reputation around.”

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shadowspellchecker · 3 years ago

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Just some thoughts on distances in Enola Holmes: Vehicles

[[Vehicles]]　☼　 [[Menu]]　☼　 [[Next]]

In Enola Holmes (2020), we see the following modes of transportation featured:

Rail transport

Automotive

Cycling

Horse-drawn wagon

Walking

Each of these, of course, has different speeds and considerations. Since maximum speed can be used to calculate maximum applicable distance, I thought might be helpful to create a reference for each mode of transportation for use when estimating distances.

This is just a collection of notes, really. But why invent the wheel? So I thought I'd share.

Railways

Apparently the speed of the engine is not the only factor when estimating travel time by rail: infrastructure plays a role, and track materials. [🚂]

Strap rail: 10-12 mph (16-19kph) [🚂][🚂]

Cast iron rails: >20mph[🚂]

Wrought iron rails: 30 mph[🚂]

Steel rail: >60mph[🚂]

In Britain, railway infrastructure was ahead of the United States, so train speeds reached 30mph in 1830, 78mph by 1850.[🚂]

But these are limits how fast a train could run, not how fast the journey was made. Let's move on. The British Library provides us with two different numbers:

Now, an express train could reach speeds of 80 miles an hour.

Some people feared that fast trains might cause physical harm to the passengers. Queen Victoria asked the driver to go more slowly than his average speed of 40 miles an hour, on her journey from Slough to London, finding the experience terrifying. [🚂]

The 40 mph average is also given in Taylor & You, and by some reasoned answers on Quora. [🚂] [🚂]

Leunig gives a more conservative estimate of 28.4 mph in 1870 and 32.8 in 1887 based on timetables of the period, but goes into more detail, differentiating between more important routes and less important routes. The paper also gives us a way to reckon "as the crow flies" speeds.

We calculate miles per hour by dividing the “crow flies” mileage between the two towns by the time taken. We use “crow flies” rather than “track” or “road” miles because this is what matters to travelers. This also has the useful property that the construction of a shorter line, on which trains travel at the same speed, counts as an increase in speed.39 As a rule of thumb, track mile speeds exceed crow flies speeds by around 15 percent.

In some cases, it is easier to use "As the crow flies" mileage-- just take a ruler, draw a straight line across the map-- then work out the twists and turns. So, some might find it useful to have a way to compensate for that.

The Magazine of Western History (1886) gives a counter to their assessment, however. In his assessment of achieving a sustained speed of 35 mph, the writer, William Barrows, says "no man conversant with the history and progress of mechanics will presume to say that the highest limit of train speed has been reached." If that is contemporary opinion, 30 mph may be too conservative for an express train.

It is also worth considering that trains often stopped for dinner during the 1800s, but likely unnecessary to the train ride we see in the movie-- an express train that started around 9:15 in the morning.[🚂]

tldr;

40 mph is probably a good bet for 1880s rail journeys, but under some circumstances, it is believable a train might have been able to reach 60mph on a straight line.

If using "as the crow flies" measurements , add at least 15% to the actual distance before calculating time.

It is safe to assume that trains will move faster on straight tracks to make up for time lost on the turns.

Automotives

Apparently, the average speed of one motorcar from the period was about 26 mph (41 kph) at the time.... [1] But that's not accounting for road conditions, terrain, etc. If we do... well, I don't know how to account for that. 15% losses (which would mean going at ~22 mph) seems too low in the age before road surfaces were designed for automotive transport. Frankly, I'd be surprised if they actually made it past 10 mph (16kph). (About that of a horse and buggy at a trot.) [2] But perhaps I've been sold by that 10 mph is Google Maps' estimated speed for bikes! [3])

BUT-- get this -- in my haste to find estimates, I forgot to check the specs of the vehicle!

And it turns out, Miss Harrison must have had an advance order, because her car is the Benz 1885! (Well, actually, it's a reproduction, but close enough.)

[Source]

The Benz Patent-Motorwagon had a speed of 6 mph (10 km/h) or 10 mph (16 kph) [🚗][🚗], a 4.5 liter (1.1 gallon) tank, and a fuel consumption rate of 2 gallons to 62 miles (10 liters per 100 km).

This gives us one highly technical insight: Assuming that the tank was full, the car could go only as far as about 50 km, or 30 miles-- and track miles at that. Any further, they need to refuel.

Speed may not be the only factor to consider when judging distances covered by this car, so I did a bit more research.

The Benz runs on gasoline, but Bertha Benz that longer trips could be achieved. They would need to stop at an apothecary, though, and I don't know if Enola would know ligorin is an adequate substitute. They would probably have had to stop and wait for the engine to cool down, and push up hills that are too steep. [🚗] [🚗][🚗] Still, it is worth noting that Bertha's journey, one-way, was conservatively 110 mi (180 km) long, and probably took around 14 hours. Which would her an overall speed of 7 mph (13 kph) or, based on Wikipedia's less conservative estimate, 9mph (14kph) -- both of which are well within our speed estimate for the vehicle. [🚗]

But given Enola and Tewkesbury left in the morning, and arrive late at night.... yes, they would have needed to refuel, which would have lessened the distance they could have covered in that time just as the vehicle would have allowed them to cover a greater distance. Something to note, going forward.

Car: 6-10 mph or 10-16 kph.

Cycling

We only see it used in Ferndell and in London, so it doesn't really help in working out the major distances seen in the movie.

Horsepower

In the film, we see a horse-drawn cart. Being heavier for their size, carts and wagons need different considerations from carriages, which are designed to be light and travel faster. A horse-drawn wagon goes, at a walk, about 2-4 mph (3-6kph). [🐎] A horse-drawn wagon can go 10 to 30 miles in a day depending on terrain and conditions. [🐎] And given the presence of livestock, walkers, and a load, it seems safe to assume that the horses pulling that wagon would have remained at a slow walk. [🐎]

Horse-cart: 2 mph (3kph)

Buggies are also featured, but until I have a better sense of the time interval between Lestrade apprehending Enola and when she arrives at the school I don't have enough info to work with.

Walking

The average human walking speed roughly varies between 2 and 4 mph. Urban planners generally estimate between those two figures, but that is assuming an environment optimized for human traffic. Still, Ramblers.org also suggests an average of 3mph, or 2.5 mph (4kph). Leunig follows the latter suggestion, but suggests, given the nuance is that it only applies to adults who are walking on level or downhill routes, and that it is calculated by miles on route, that 2mph might be more accurate for estimation. Even with healthy young adults, the hills would slow movement, and it seems unlikely they would be able to stay on a truly straight line They will, at the very least, need to find a ford or bridge to cross the river, for instance. Since plotting an exact route would be unlikely for most purposes, it might be wise to apply 15% losses to 2.5 mph... which is 2.125, so basically 2mph. So that checks out.

2.125mph (3.4kph) for two teenagers walking overland.

Summary:

40 mph is probably a good bet for 1880s rail journeys, but under some circumstances, it is believable a train might have been able to reach 60mph on a straight line.

If using "as the crow flies" measurements , add at least 15% to the actual distance before calculating time.

It is safe to assume that trains will move faster on straight tracks to make up for time lost on the turns.

Car: 6-10 mph or 10-16 kph.

Car: Needs to be refueled every 30 miles or so.

Biking: unhelpful for my purposes

Horse-cart: 2 mph (3kph)

Buggy: insufficient data to be of use. Skip.

2.125mph (3kph) for two teenagers walking overland. Lowball: 2mph.

With these established, I hope to start narrowing down some of the fictional places in the movie!

#enola holmes #resources #fanfic research #except no fic here just research #victorian era #1880s #historical cars #historical trains #rough estimates #notes #tewkesbury #geography #horsepower #1800s #19th century

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newstfionline · 3 years ago

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Wednesday, September 22, 2021

Trudeau’s Liberals win Canada election, but miss majority (AP) Canadians gave Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party a victory in Monday’s parliamentary elections, but his gamble to win a majority of seats failed and nearly mirrored the result of two years ago. Trudeau’s Liberals were leading or elected in 156 seats—one less than they won 2019, and 14 short of the 170 needed for a majority in the House of Commons. The Conservatives were leading or elected in 121 seats, the same number they won in 2019. The leftist New Democrats were leading or elected in 27, a gain of three seats, while the Quebec-based Bloc Québécois remained unchanged with 32 seats and the Greens were down to two. “Trudeau lost his gamble to get a majority so I would say this is a bittersweet victory for him,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal. “Basically we are back to square one, as the new minority parliament will look like the previous one. Trudeau and the Liberals saved their skin and will stay in power, but many Canadians who didn’t want this late summer, pandemic election are probably not amused about the whole situation,” he said.

COVID has killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 flu (AP) COVID-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic did—approximately 675,000. And like the worldwide scourge of a century ago, the coronavirus may never entirely disappear from our midst. Instead, scientists hope the virus that causes COVID-19 becomes a mild seasonal bug as human immunity strengthens through vaccination and repeated infection. That would take time. “We hope it will be like getting a cold, but there’s no guarantee,” said Emory University biologist Rustom Antia, who suggests an optimistic scenario in which this could happen over a few years. For now, the pandemic still has the United States and other parts of the world firmly in its jaws.

Why Louisiana’s Electric Grid Failed in Hurricane Ida (NYT) Just weeks before Hurricane Ida knocked out power to much of Louisiana, leaving its residents exposed to extreme heat and humidity, the chief executive of Entergy, the state’s biggest utility company, told Wall Street that it had been upgrading power lines and equipment to withstand big storms. That statement would soon be tested. On the last Sunday in August, Hurricane Ida made landfall in Louisiana and dealt a catastrophic blow to Entergy’s power lines, towers and poles, many of which were built decades ago to withstand much weaker hurricanes. The storm damaged eight high-voltage transmission lines that supply power to New Orleans along with scores of the company’s towers throughout the state. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses were without power for days. Ida damaged or destroyed 31,000 poles that carry lower-voltage distribution lines in neighborhoods, nearly twice as many as Hurricane Katrina, according to Entergy. Lawmakers and regulators require utilities to ensure safe, reliable service at an affordable cost. The grid failure after Ida is the latest display of how power companies are struggling to fulfill those obligations as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather. In California, electricity providers have been forced to shut off power to tens of thousands of customers in recent years to prevent their equipment from setting off wildfires and to reduce energy demand during heat waves. In February, the grid in most of Texas failed during a winter storm, leaving millions of people without power and heat for days.

White House faces bipartisan backlash on Haitian migrants (AP) The White House is facing sharp condemnation from Democrats for its handling of the influx of Haitian migrants at the U.S. southern border, after images of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback using aggressive tactics went viral this week. Striking video of agents maneuvering their horses to forcibly block and move migrants attempting to cross the border has sparked resounding criticism from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who are calling on the Biden administration to end its use of a pandemic-era authority to deport migrants without giving them an opportunity to seek asylum in the United States. At the same time, the administration continues to face attacks from Republicans, who say Biden isn’t doing enough to deal with what they call a “crisis” at the border. Immigration is a complex issue, one no administration has been able to fix in decades. And Biden is trapped between conflicting interests of broadcasting compassion while dealing with throngs of migrants coming to the country—illegally—seeking a better life.

Haitian journey to Texas border starts in South America (AP) Robins Exile downed a traditional meal of plantains and chicken at a restaurant run by Haitian immigrants, just a short walk from the walled border with the United States. He arrived the night before and went there seeking advice: Should he try to get to the U.S., or was it better to settle in Mexico? Discussion Monday at the Tijuana restaurant offered a snapshot of Haitians’ diaspora in the Western Hemisphere that picked up steam in 2016 and has shown little sign of easing, demonstrated most recently by the more than 14,000 mostly Haitian migrants assembled around a bridge in Del Rio, a town of only 35,000 people. Of the roughly 1.8 million Haitians living outside their homeland, the United States is home to the largest Haitian immigrant population in the world, numbering 705,000 people from the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country. Significant numbers also live in Latin American countries like Chile, which is home to an estimated 69,000 Haitians. Nearly all Haitians reach the U.S. border on a well-worn route: Fly to Brazil, Chile or elsewhere in South America. If jobs dry up, slowly move through Central America and Mexico by bus and on foot to wait—perhaps years—in northern border cities like Tijuana for the right time to enter the United States and claim asylum.

‘We were them:’ Vietnamese Americans help Afghan refugees (AP) In the faces of Afghans desperate to leave their country after U.S. forces withdrew, Thuy Do sees her own family, decades earlier and thousands of miles away. A 39-year-old doctor in Seattle, Washington, Do remembers hearing how her parents sought to leave Saigon after Vietnam fell to communist rule in 1975 and the American military airlifted out allies in the final hours. It took years for her family to finally get out of the country, after several failed attempts, and make their way to the United States, carrying two sets of clothes a piece and a combined $300. When they finally arrived, she was 9 years old. These stories and early memories drove Do and her husband Jesse Robbins to reach out to assist Afghans fleeing their country now. The couple has a vacant rental home and decided to offer it up to refugee resettlement groups, which furnished it for newly arriving Afghans in need of a place to stay. “We were them 40 years ago,” Do said. “With the fall of Saigon in 1975, this was us.” The crisis in Afghanistan has spurred many Vietnamese Americans to donate money to refugee resettlement groups and raise their hands to help by providing housing, furniture and legal assistance to newly arriving Afghans.

‘Crisis of trust’: France bristles at US submarine deal (AP) France’s top diplomat declared Monday that there is a “crisis of trust” in the United States after a Pacific defense deal stung France and left Europe wondering about its longtime ally across the Atlantic. France canceled meetings with British and Australian officials and worked to rally EU allies behind its push for more European sovereignty after being humiliated by a major Pacific defense pact orchestrated by the U.S. Speaking to reporters in New York, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said European countries won’t let Washington leave them behind when shaping its foreign policy. Le Drian reiterated complaints that his country was sandbagged by the submarine deal between the U.S., Britain and Australia, which led to France losing a contract to sell subs to Australia. Washington, London and Canberra say the deal bolsters their commitment to the Indo-Pacific region, and it has widely been seen as an effort to counter an increasingly assertive China. But Le Drian, who is in New York to represent France at the U.N. General Assembly, said it was a “brutal, unexpected and unexplained breach” of a contract—and a relationship.

Pedestrians take to the streets of Paris to celebrate the city’s seventh annual ‘day without cars’ (Business Insider) On Sunday, Paris turned over its streets to pedestrians so that citizens and visitors could enjoy its seventh annual “day without cars.” Announced by socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo in 2015, the city received enthusiastic support from both ordinary Parisians and unlikely parties including the head of a French drivers’ association, USA Today reported. From 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., cars, motorcycles, and scooters are banned throughout Paris, and any offenders face a fine of 135 euros, according to the Paris Without A Car website. Certain vehicles like buses, emergency vehicles, taxis, and private drivers are allowed to circulate, although their speed is limited to 20-30 kilometers per hour (12-19 miles per hour) in certain areas. Events at this year’s “day without cars” included a techno parade, picnic, bicycle fair, rollerblading marathon, and street art exhibitions, according to the event website.

More evacuations as lava gushes from Canaries volcano (Reuters) Lava gushing from the Canary Islands’ first volcanic eruption on land in 50 years has forced authorities to evacuate another part of El Paso municipality on the island of La Palma and to urge sightseers attracted by the phenomenon to stay away. About 6,000 of the 80,000 people living on the island have been forced to leave their homes to escape the eruption so far, TVE said. The volcano started erupting on Sunday after La Palma, the most northwestern island in the Canaries archipelago, had been rocked by thousands of quakes in the prior days. It has shot lava hundreds of metres into the air, engulfed forests and sent molten rock towards the ocean over a sparsely populated area of La Palma. Experts say that if and when the lava reaches the sea, it could trigger more explosions and clouds of toxic gases.

Magnitude 6.0 earthquake strikes near Melbourne (Reuters) An earthquake with a 6.0 magnitude struck near Melbourne in Australia on Wednesday, Geoscience Australia said, causing damage to buildings in the country’s second largest city and sending tremors throughout neighbouring states. The quake’s epicentre was near the rural town of Mansfield in the state of Victoria, about 200 km (124 miles) northeast of Melbourne, and was at a depth of 10 km (six miles). The quake was felt as far away as city of Adelaide, 800 km (500 miles) to the west in the state of South Australia, and Sydney, 900 km (600 miles) to the north in New South Wales state, although there were no reports of damage outside Melbourne and no reports of injuries.

‘An iron curtain’: Australia’s covid rules are stranding people at state borders (Washington Post) The four figures huddled in the shade on the side of the highway, eight miles from a border they had hardly noticed until it slammed shut behind them. As flies buzzed and crows circled and their supplies ran low, they waited for emails that would allow them to leave New South Wales and return to their home state of South Australia. Teresa Young and her husband had been stuck at the rest stop—little more than a toilet in the middle of the Outback—for 10 days. “All of a sudden, Australia has been cut up like pieces of a cake,” the 75-year-old said on a recent day. Welcome to covid-era Australia, where state border closures designed to keep the coronavirus from spreading have turned retired office workers into roadside nomads. When the pandemic began, many Australians found that the leaders of the country’s six states and two territories, rather than the federal government, suddenly controlled the most vital things in people’s lives, including who could go to work and where they could travel. The closures have upended domestic travel and stranded scores of Australians internally, even as a vaccination ramp-up means some states—and international airports—will soon open up. People in Sydney could find it easier to fly to Singapore or Los Angeles than to Adelaide.

Sudan’s coup attempt (Foreign Policy) Sudanese state media reported a “failed coup attempt” early Tuesday morning. The coup reportedly involved an attempt to take control of the state radio services. If confirmed, the attempted power grab would be the fourth putsch attempt the African continent has seen this year, following military takeovers in Guinea and Chad and an unsuccessful coup in Niger.

#headlines #news

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robertreich · 5 years ago

Video

youtube

How Corporate Welfare Hurts You

You often hear Trump and Republicans in Congress railing against so-called “welfare programs” -- by which they mean programs that provide health care or safety nets to ordinary Americans.

But you almost never hear them complaining about another form of welfare that lines the pockets of wealthy corporations. We must end corporate welfare. Now.

There are several ways corporations get rich on the taxpayer’s dime. The most obvious comes through subsidies or tax breaks for certain businesses or industries.

Consider the fossil fuel industry, one of the most profitable and privileged sectors of the economy. Every year, oil companies get to deduct millions of dollars from their tax bills for the cost of new wells, oil exploration, and other drilling and mining expenses.

It’s been estimated that repealing these special tax breaks would save taxpayers $39 billion over 10 years.

Other examples of corporate welfare include billions in government subsidies for agricultural conglomerates, pharmaceutical makers, tech giants and defense contractors.

Other industries don’t get these benefits. Meanwhile, most families don’t even benefit from tax credits and deductions for childcare.

State and local governments are also handing out corporate welfare, often with no strings attached. In 2013, for example, the state of Washington approved a record $8.7 billion handout to Boeing in order “to maintain and grow its workforce within the state." What did Boeing do? In the following years, it laid off more than 12,000 workers in the state.

State and local tax breaks for corporations are estimated to cost local schools almost $2 billion a year in lost tax revenue.

It’s argued they create jobs, yet nationwide, not a single new job is created. At most, the jobs are merely moved from state to state.

How do corporations get this corporate welfare? Follow the money. They spend hundreds of millions on lobbying and campaign contributions.

An even more insidious example of corporate welfare occurs when corporations don’t pay their workers a living wage. As a result, those workers often have to rely on programs like Medicaid, public housing, food stamps and other safety nets.

Which means you and I and other taxpayers end up subsidizing these low wages so those corporations can enjoy even higher profits for their executives and wealthy investors.

For example, every year, Americans spend an estimated $153 billion in taxes and on programs to subsidize McDonald’s and Walmart’s low-wage workers.

Here’s the bottom-line: When corporations get special handouts from the government, it costs the rest of us. We have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden tax breaks, subsidies, and loopholes. In turn, there’s less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense, and everything else we need.

So the next time you hear conservatives railing against welfare handouts for the poor, remind them that we should really be cutting corporate welfare -- unnecessary and unwarranted aid for dependent corporations.

#video #videos

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transhumanitynet · 6 years ago

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Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (METI) – A Local Search

Abstract: This paper examines the feasibility of an amateur approach to METI using cheaply available lasers and optics. We suggest a novel variation in the search methodology, concentrating on contacting any interstellar extraterrestrial probes that may be present in the solar system. Specifically, the Lunar poles and Lagrange points L4 and L5. It is assumed that such a probe incorporates advanced artificial intelligence (AI) at or beyond human level. Additionally, that it is able to communicate in all major languages and common communications protocols. The paper is written in non-technical language with sufficient information to act as a “how to” source for technically knowledgeable people.

Note: Any portion of this may be reproduced and used in any manner provided attributions “Dirk Bruere” and the organization “Zero State” are included. Other more technical versions of this are available.

[ DOWNLOAD PDF ]

Historical Introduction

On 16 November 1974 The radio telescope at Arecibo sent a brief message to the M13 star cluster some 25,000 light years distant. It comprised some 210 bytes of data sent at a bitrate of 10 bits per second and a power of around one megawatt. The (colored) pictorial representation is shown here. It is probably the best known attempt at contacting extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), even though it was not serious, was not the first and by no means the last.

The first was a Morse code message sent from the USSR to Venus in 1962 which was even shorter. It is known in Russian as the Radio Message “MIR, LENIN, SSSR”.

Latterly, in 2016 on 10 October 2016, at 20:00 UTC the Cebreros (DSA2) deep-space tracking station of the European Space Agency sent a radio signal towards Polaris, the Pole Star, which is approximately 434 light years from Earth. The message consisted of a single 27,653,733 byte, 866 second transmission. Again, it was not a serious contact attempt, and was rather more a work of performance art by Paul Quast.

A few, more serious, attempts have been made in the intervening years i, targeted at more plausible planetary systems but none for any sustained period of time.

So, enter METI ii or “Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence” who aim to start a serious and comprehensive program of signaling various star systems some time in 2018 if they can raise the estimated $1million per year needed to run the program. For once, judging by their website, they intend to do it properly with a great deal of effort going into the communications protocols of the messages themselves.

Laser Communication

And that is where we were until June 2017 and a paper iii written by Michael Hippke examining the possible role of using the gravitational lensing effect of our sun to amplify laser signals across interstellar distances. The surprising conclusion was that using optical wavelength lasers and mirrors of only one-meter diameter, data could potentially be transferred at a megabit per second rates using around one Watt of power over 4 light years. This, to put it mildly, is spectacular especially since the receiving technology is potentially within our ability, assuming we could locate a telescope some 600 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. Unfortunately, our most distant spacecraft is Voyager 1 at about 140AU. He also showed in a previous paper that the data rate drops to bits per second per watt using a 39-meter receiving telescope and no lensing.

However, if we turn that around and assume that ETI has superior technology to us and can implement suitable receivers, then to contact them we need only very modest laser transmitters. Ones that are well within the budget of hobbyists and amateur astronomers. The advantage of using lasers is more apparent, especially for amateurs, when we consider beam divergence. Lasers can quite easily achieve divergences of less than one milli-radian (mrad) which corresponds to one meter per kilometer. To achieve that with microwaves at (say) 6GHz would necessitate a transmitter dish of approximately 65 meters diameter. A very expensive piece of radio astronomy kit. This also means that power levels can be significantly less than would be needed for radio communication. Nevertheless, there are serious caveats. These mostly concern the location and type of transmitter. For example, to limit beam spread Hippke assumes a one-meter diameter mirror and a beam spread of considerably less than a milliradian, so we are going to assume a rather larger receiver at the ETI end in order to minimize beam requirements at our end.

A much more serious problem is that the mirrors have to be aligned with each other. Specifically, the transmitter should be relatively stationary in space, and not on a rotating planet which is in turn circling its sun. If the latter is the case, the receiver will probably only align at fixed intervals lasting no more than a few tens of milliseconds unless very precise aiming technology is used.

However, there is a more interesting search regime far better suited to low budget than attempting interstellar communications.

Exploratory Scenario

This is a METI search that will be primarily focused on contact with self-replicating Von Neumann (VN) style interstellar probes iv. There are strong arguments that over a time scale of the order of thousands to a few million years, these are the best way of exploring the galaxy by any intelligent technology-oriented species. Once one of these devices arrives in a solar system it sets about creating sufficient infrastructure to both report back to its home system (as well as possible siblings) and create a replica of itself for onward launch to multiple other stars. Reasonably conservative capabilities are as follows:

They are very likely to outlive the species that sent them

They would almost certainly embody an artificial intelligence (AI) at or beyond Human level capability

They would be self-repairing and possibly have a lifetime in the tens of millions of years, barring accidents

They could exist around just about every star in the galaxy within ten million years

Using the kind of technology we might reasonably expect to appear sometime in the next century or two, such as placing observatories at the gravitational focal point of our sun, some 600AU out, we could view details on nearby extra-solar planets. And anyone out there could do the same to us. As a consequence, Earth has likely been an interesting place to view for the past 300 million years or so with its oxygen atmosphere and vegetation. And vastly more interesting in the past 10,000 years since rectangular shapes started appearing in the form of cities and fields. Rectangles generally do not occur naturally. Then in the past 300 years, the atmosphere started to show signs of industrial pollution followed 200 years later by radio and TV signals, intense radar pulses and the unmistakable sign of nuclear bombs whose output peaked at around 1% of the total output power of our sun.

If ETI exists, or has existed, within a few thousand light years there is a strong possibility that their probes are already here, and have been for a considerable length of time. This leads to a number of massively simplifying assumptions, again quite reasonable given the scenario above. These are:

Since we are now searching within our solar system power levels can be vastly reduced.

Message transit times, in both directions, are no more than a few hours maximum and possible only seconds.

Any intelligent VN probe that has been examining Earth will have been monitoring our technological development and radio/TV output. As a consequence, it will almost certainly understand all the major languages both written and spoken as well as our communications protocols.

We need to consider beaming our messages at likely locations within our own solar systems. For example, where would we place intelligent probes to wait out the ages and watch developments on Earth? Among strong possibilities are the Lunar poles, Lunar caverns which we now know exist v and the Lagrange points vi associated with Earth’s orbit, particularly L4 and L5, where position can be held with little expenditure of energy. We intend to beam laser messages to these points as part of the Zero State program.

But what messages? People have given much thought to creating a communications system that can be decoded by ETI, as mentioned above with METI. However, we contend that the answer is simple – we use English, and code in simple ASCII.

What has been lacking from Earth is a specific invitation to communicate or visit. It is this that forms the core of our project.

How Far Can We Be Seen?

Suppose we want to do the crudest communication system possible – a laser doing Morse Code. To the unaided Human eye, how far away could we see the beam? This depends on several factors:

Beam Divergence

Beam power

Wavelength

Eye sensitivity

Taking these in turn…

The power we will assume to be one Watt since this level of power is quite economical, and the wavelength to be either 532nm or 520nm, the latter being a pure diode output, not frequency doubled.

It is also the approximate wavelength where the eye peaks in sensitivity, and in our project is partly chosen for this reason. We could have gone for high power infrared in the tens of watts, or maybe towards the blue/violent end of the spectrum. However, green is not only easier and safer to work with, being highly visible, but is quite photogenic. From a safety point of view you seriously do not want an invisible beam of blinding intensity sweeping about. That would also be more difficult to aim and focus.

So we have an intensity of approximately one Watt per square meter at a distance of one kilometer, with the intensity dropping off as the square of the distance. At 2 km we have 0.25W per square meter, and so on.

Finally, what is the maximum sensitivity of the dark adapted Human eye? It appears to be about 100 photons per secondvii, but for the sake of argument we shall assume a level ten times lower, or 1000 photons per second in a dark adapted eye whose aperture is 100 square millimeters. That gives us a minimum intensity requirement of 10^7 photons per square meter per second. With each green photon carrying an energy of approximately 3.5e-19 Joules we get a required power density of 3.5e-12 Watts.

So, how far can our 1W green laser with a divergence of 1 mRad travel before we hit that value? The answer is a little over 500,000km – further than the Earth-Moon separation. By the time the beam gets there it will be illuminating a circle some 500km in diameter. If we are looking back from the Moon via a modest telescope such a beam would appear as a bright flickering point of monochromatic light. Even a 100mm diameter telescope would improve visibility by more than 100 times.

If we wish to improve the numbers there are certain things we can do. If we increase the power, it scales linearly in intensity at a given distance. If we increase the collimation to (say) 0.5mRad the intensity quadruples, but the illuminated area decreases 75% as the spot size halves.

Proof of Principle Equipment – Stage 1

The setup described below is an absolute minimum and has been put together simply to illustrate how easy it can be, and how cheap.

WARNING! – The lasers described should be treated like a loaded firearms with the safety off. Anyone around it should have eye protection goggles when it is operating or being worked on. If it sweeps across your eyes it will cause instant permanent blindness. It can also start fires. These are Class 4viii. You should also assume they will cause eye damage out to 1km if the beam is not expanded.

The basic equipment list is relatively straightforward – example sources are UK but may be obtained cheaply elsewhere:

• A computer with a USB interface • A terminal emulator program such as Realtermix or similar • A USB to TTL converter cable x • A battery based stabilized power supply for the laser module • High power laser module 1 Watt or greater xi • A telescopic rifle sight (scope) • A GOTO telescope • Various Weaver rail fittings and adapters • A low power sighting laser • Laser safety goggles

Less straightforward is any metalwork or optical interfacing of the laser module, however, the use of a scope with integral Weaver rails simplifies things considerably. The scope needs an attachment to the GOTO telescope, and the rest of the equipment attaches to the scope.

The next problem is that of holding the telescopic sight on target, which is where a motorized equatorial mount, or GOTO mount is required. Both will compensate for the rotation of the Earth and hold on a previously acquired target with accuracy much better than the assumed mrad (for scale, the diameter of the full moon in the sky is about 9 mrad) A GOTO telescope is fully computerized and will automatically move to designated targets either by name or celestial coordinates.

The first step is to securely attach the laser module co-axially to the telescopic sight so that you can see through the scope where the beam strikes. To do this you need a deserted area where you can aim the beam at a target some 100 meters distant and adjust optics and mechanical attachment so that the beam is aligned and parallel to the cross-hairs.

At this point you can examine the beam quality. With modules such as the above it will not be around spot. More likely it will be an image of the emission diode structure. Not ideal, but good enough for now.

The pictures below show the scope, sighting laser and Class 4 laser complete with a DIN rail that is used to attach all this to the telescope. In this instance, it is mounted on a camera tripod for alignment work.

Illustration 1: Left Side of the Lasers and Optics

Illustration 2: Right Side of the Lasers and Optics

Illustration 3: Front view of the Lasers and Optics

Proof of Principle Equipment – Stage 2

So, how do we improve upon this? Well, the answer is obvious. Rather than relying on the beam straight from the laser passing through the supplied focusing lens we use custom optics to expand and collimate the beam. This at once gives us better control over the divergence and by expanding the beam makes it somewhat safer by reducing areal power density.

Next, we add a receiver to the telescope eyepiece.

This consists of a bandpass optical filter centered at the wavelength of the laser transmitter. Again, this assumes that any VN probe is quite capable of transmitting on the received wavelength at a power level comparable to, or greater than, our own. The necessary electronics, including a high sensitivity photodiode, is not prohibitively expensive.

Final equipment and Message Format

The above describes a minimal setup both from a cost and capability point of view. A more suitable laser system would be one using a far higher power, and a receiving telescope with a mirror at least 200mm diameter (8” reflector).

The choice of lasers is wide, but if we limit the choice to minimize atmospheric absorption and costly optics that leaves visible and near infrared (NIR).

One possibility stands out. That is a Q-switched Nd:YAG laserxii, with around a 200W continuous,

1MW pulsed, output at 1064nm normally used as an industrial cutter. The output can if necessary be frequency doubled to 532nm green but with loss of power.

This should be able to communicate with its equivalent to a distance beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

Such systems typically cost under $15k, although the optics, beam guides and alignment equipment will add significantly to this price. Needless to say, such a beam in free space is spectacularly dangerous if mishandled.

Additional requirements will include an electric generator or power source in the kilowatt region, water cooling and a trailer if the equipment has to be moved to an open air site before use.

All together we intend to budget around $30,000 for the hardware. Location is as yet undecided, although a strong possibility is Provo, Utah in the USA given its clear skies and weather. Britain is a poor second in this respect. Plus, we may locate it at the TransHumanist Housexiii available to Zero State House Adar. However, much depends on location and local laws.

The message format with Q-switched pulses would be somewhat different from the existing setup. The coding would be provided by the timing between the pulses, or by the timing between successive pulse trains. Again, data rate would be low because we are not attempting to communicate anything complex. Just attract attention.

Zero State seeks collaboration from like-minded engineers and scientists, and sponsorship for this project, which after initial hardware costs are met should incur very low running costs.

Ethical Considerations

On 13 February 2015, scientists (including Geoffrey Marcy, Seth Shostak, Frank Drake, Elon Musk and David Brin) at a convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, discussed Active SETI and whether transmitting a message to possible intelligent extraterrestrials in the Cosmos was a good idea; one result was a statement, (which was not signed by Seth Shostak or Frank Drake), that a “worldwide scientific, political and humanitarian discussion must occur before any message is sent” xiv . We believe that this is not, and should not be the case for local METI. We should issue the invitation to communicate now. It is beyond reasonable doubt that if any ETI capable of receiving these messages lies within our solar system or a few tens of light years, then they already know of our existence.

References:

i https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_radio_messages ii http://meti.org/mission iii https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.05570 iv Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol.33, pp. 251-264 1980 v https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube vi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point vii S. Hecht, S. Schlaer and M.H. Pirenne, “Energy, Quanta and vision.” Journal of the Optical Society of America, 38, 196-208 (1942) viii http://www.lasersafetyfacts.com/4/ ix https://sourceforge.net/projects/realterm/ x https://www.maplin.co.uk/p/usb-to-ttl-serial-cable-cable-n74de xi http://odicforce.com/epages/05c54fb6-7778-4d36-adc0-0098b2af7c4e.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/05c54fb6- 7778-4d36-adc0-0098b2af7c4e/Products/OFL365-5-TTL xii https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nd:YAG_laser xiii https://hpluspedia.org/wiki/Transhuman_House xiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_radio_messages

Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (METI) – A Local Search was originally published on transhumanity.net

#arecibo #download #ETI #Lenin #MIR #pdf #research #SETI #SSSR #USSR #ZeroState #zs #ZS Houses #crosspost #transhuman #transhumanitynet #transhumanism #transhumanist #thetranshumanity

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The Beto O’Rourke brand is a strong one right now.

Until a few months ago, no one outside of Texas really knew much about the Democratic congressman from El Paso. But recently his answer to a question about whether NFL players should kneel during the national anthem went viral. He’s gone on Ellen and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and has been compared to a Kennedy an embarrassing number of times in profiles touting his Senate bid against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz in Texas. He goes on early-morning running town halls and wants you to know he doesn’t take any money from PACs. He trumpets the fact that he’s visited all 254 counties in Texas — he’s not the kind of Democrat who will write off folks who live in the country.

A candidate can only make one first impression, and we’re in the midst of that self-mythologizing, magical moment for O’Rourke. GOP attacks against him for his 1998 DWI arrest, his tendency to swear and his youthful embrace of the punk aesthetic have backfired among a younger, online set. Twitter users cooed that O’Rourke looked hot in his mugshot and that the floral dress he was ironically(?) rocking in a band photo suited him. In a defense of O’Rourke, Colbert pointed out that during Cruz’s teenage years, the senator once played Adam in a mimed version of the biblical creation story. It feels a little like the high school cool kid is running against the Latin Club’s uber nerd for U.S. Senate in Texas.

O’Rourke’s clever image-honing has brought him within striking distance of Cruz — FiveThirtyEight gives O’Rourke about a 1-in-3 chance of winning,1 roughly the same chance Democrats have of taking the Senate as a whole. If O’Rourke pulls it off, how he sells himself — an empath who can speak to independents and minority communities alike with the wokeness of a man half his age — will have been a key factor. O’Rourke’s star is rising nationally in part because the party’s base sees a best version of themselves in him, someone able to communicate their increasingly progressive values to Americans outside the liberal milieu. Too bad for them he’ll probably lose.

O’Rourke has an opportunity to introduce himself as a vigorous, toothy new face. Cruz, meanwhile, is still the guy about whom a Republican colleague once said, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” Pretty much everyone in Texas knows who Cruz is, and he isn’t particularly beloved. A recent Emerson College poll found that 44 percent of Texas voters had an unfavorable opinion of him. (This is in a state where he got 57 percent of the vote in 2012.) Meanwhile, the same poll found that only 25 percent felt the same about O’Rourke, while 11 percent of people had never heard of him and 27 percent were neutral (only 18 percent were neutral on Cruz).

O’Rourke is a pretty good candidate in a race that was supposed to be a slam dunk for Republicans. He’s raised more than any other Democratic candidate for Senate this cycle — $23 million — and has packaged his progressive identity into something that (he hopes) is accepted just as readily by the Democratic base as it is by independent voters who still haven’t made up their minds. GOP attack ads have tried to paint the Democrat as outside the mainstream, despite the fact that the 2018 iteration of O’Rourke is more suburban dad than anything else, the type whose most countercultural tendency is probably owning a monthly pass to a rock-climbing gym.

Recent surveys seem to indicate that independents will help determine the close race. A Dixie Strategies poll from early September showed Cruz and O’Rourke nearly tied among independents, with 20 percent of them yet to make up their minds. That poll and others have showed Cruz struggling with independent voters (only 2 percent didn’t have an opinion of him), while O’Rourke’s numbers with independents showed there’s room for him to make a good impression (a full 23 percent were undecided on how they felt about him). A Rasmussen/Pulse Opinion Research poll from early September showed O’Rourke winning independents 46 percent to Cruz’s 39 percent, and even found that 15 percent of Republicans said they’d vote for O’Rourke. A more recent poll that showed Cruz leading overall also showed O’Rourke ahead among independents.

O’Rourke is going out of his way not to bust up his hopes with Texas’s independent voters, who, in that red state, might tend toward the more conservative end of the political spectrum (52 percent of the state’s independent voters chose Trump in the 2016 election). His rhetoric of togetherness seems clearly aimed at this demographic. “You cannot be too much of a Republican, you can’t be too blue of a Democrat, too much of an independent. You can’t be in prison for too many years, you can’t be too undocumented to be worth fighting for. It is for everyone,” O’Rourke said of his campaign in a speech this summer. His earnest varnish is polished to its highest shine. When baited with questions that could easily lead to Trump-bashing, O’Rourke instead talks about the importance of having “unguarded moments with one another.” The across-the-aisle-guy label is important to his brand — O’Rourke had his first viral moment back in 2017 when he took a cross-country road trip with another Texas congressman, a Republican.

The trick with branding, of course, is that it changes with the times. O’Rourke hasn’t always been allergic to PAC money. He won his first congressional election by defeating an eight-term Democratic incumbent. In that campaign, O’Rourke used money from a super PAC bent on prying longtime representatives from their seats. O’Rourke’s father-in-law, a wealthy real estate developer, gave the PAC $18,750 after maxing out his personal donation to the campaign.

One of O’Rourke’s political assets is his ability to trumpet progressive ideas and a bipartisan spirit at a time when political tribalism and racial tensions are rife. That is in part because he is white and America — and the Democratic Party — seems to have a soft spot for young white men running for office. O’Rourke looks like generations of white male politicians, but he’s advocating for societal changes meant to benefit minorities and disenfranchised immigrants. He’s called for single-payer health care and the expansion of Medicaid, he wrote a book on the drug war, he has made legalizing marijuana a campaign issue, and he wants citizenship for immigrants who brought to the country illegally as children.

O’Rourke’s embrace of Latino culture has stood out during the campaign. Much has been made of that fact that he goes by his childhood nickname, Beto, which is a Spanish diminutive for “Roberto.” Robert Francis O’Rourke is Irish-American, but he grew up in the heavily Latino border town of El Paso and became Beto early on. Cruz (full name Rafael Edward Cruz) has tried to use O’Rourke’s nickname against the congressman as a way to prove he’s pandering to the state’s skyrocketing Latino population. Texas is 39 percent Latino and a harbinger of America’s demographic future. Population projections estimate that the state’s Latino population could surpass the state’s white population as early as 2020 or 2022, while it’s estimated that the U.S. as a whole will become majority-minority by 2045.

Note, though, what O’Rourke’s nickname says about the ways that assimilation has changed in America. Joe Kennedy made sure that his children went to boarding school and college among America’s high WASP set so they’d be taken seriously. It worked — one became president. Beto is a nickname he comes by honestly, but it’s also a boon for O’Rourke to be comfortable with a community whose political clout will only increase in Texas.

The forecasted demographic change portends political shifts, which is why Democrats have long dreamt of turning Texas blue. But the state’s Democrats remain at a political disadvantage if they rely solely on the Latino vote as their near-term path to change. According to 2016 numbers from Pew, 79 percent of the state’s white population is eligible to vote, but only 46 percent of the Latino population is, and in the 2016 election, 69 percent of the Texas’s white voters cast a ballot for President Trump. And there are still a decent number of Latinos who lean Republican in the state — 34 percent voted for Trump in 2016, while 44 percent voted for Republican Governor Greg Abbott in 2014.

But if O’Rourke wants to win this year, he’s got to woo those in the state who are likely to vote and who say they haven’t made up their minds. Even with increased turnout from an enthusiastic Democratic base, he’ll probably need an extra push to get over the hump. That means the popularity contest continues for the next two months. O’Rourke seems ready for the grip-and-grin grind.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Do Republicans Believe In Climate Change

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/do-republicans-believe-in-climate-change/

Do Republicans Believe In Climate Change

Bipartisan Backing For Carbon Capture Tax Credits Extensive Tree

Why Do Republicans Deny Climate Change Science?

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand how Americans view climate, energy and environmental issues. We surveyed 10,957 U.S. adults from April 29 to May 5, 2020.

Everyone who took part is a member of Pew Research Centers American Trends Panel , an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATPs methodology.

See here to read more about the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology.

A majority of Americans continue to say they see the effects of climate change in their own communities and believe that the federal government falls short in its efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change.

At a time when partisanship colors most views of policy, broad majorities of the public including more than half of Republicans and overwhelming shares of Democrats say they would favor a range of initiatives to reduce the impacts of climate change, including large-scale tree planting efforts, tax credits for businesses that capture carbon emissions and tougher fuel efficiency standards for vehicles, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

Figure 9 Party Breakdown Of Opinions On Mitigation Policies On Which The Majorities Of Democrats And Of Republicans Disagree

On the other policies included in the survey, majorities of Democrats and of Republicans do not agree. Minorities of Republicans and majorities of Democrats favor carbon pricing policies and increased gasoline taxes. In general, majorities of Democrats and minorities of Republicans believe that federal stimulus packages should include provisions to invest in the development of new technologies and in maintenance to reduce future emissions.

Overlap With Other Forms Of Denial

Ultimately, the findings of this analysis show thatdespite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contraryclimate denial remains alive and well in the United States Congress, and its impacts are already costing lives. Furthermore, dangerous denial within Congress is not limited to climate change alone. By this analysis, 82 members of the U.S. House of Representatives and six U.S. senators are both climate deniers and members of the sedition caucusthose who denied the certified results of the 2020 general election and therefore supported President Trumps violent attempt to overturn these democratic results.*** There is also significant overlap between elected officials who deny climate science and elected officials who deny the reality of the pandemic that has sickened millions and claimed the lives of more than half a million Americans in the past year. In fact, as this analysis was being written, one congressman-elect and another congressman who had both cast doubt on the science around climate change died from COVID-19.

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Capitalizing On Consensus Fighting Misperceptions

Even in a state as conservative as Indiana, belief that climate change is occurring and support for action to curb it are now mainstream.

Our survey did not ask more controversial questions, such as whether humans had a role in causing climate change or how to reduce emissions. While I expect that many in the state remain divided on these issues, I still find my results encouraging.

Perhaps one sign of quietly changing attitudes in Indiana is South Bend Mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigiegs rise in national polls, due in part to his climate change agenda, which Buttigieg has linked to broader action to revive rural America.

Addressing climate change will require major societal changes, which in turn will require overcoming barriers that discourage or prevent collective action. Hoosiers underestimation of local consensus on climate change is likely one such barrier in Indiana.

Our respondents are not alone in misperceiving how many of their peers hold supportive attitudes. Many people nationwide underestimate consensus on this issue. One way to overcome this tendency may be to focus on communicating the commonness or the growing belief in climate change.

Grist Is The Only Nonprofit Newsroom Focused On Exploring Solutions At The Intersection Of Climate And Justice

Our team of journalists remains dedicated to telling stories of climate, justice, and solutions. We aim to inspire more people to talk about climate change and to believe that meaningful change is not only possible but happening right now.;Our in-depth approach to solutions-based journalism takes time and proactive planning, which is why Grist depends on reader support.;Consider becoming a Grist member today by making a monthly contribution to ensure this important work continues and thrives.

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The Fossil Fuel Industrys Funding Of Denial

CAPs analysis of data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that these 139 climate science deniers have accepted more than $61 million in lifetime direct contributions from the oil, gas, and coal industries, which comes out to an average of $442,293 per elected official of Congress that denies climate change. This figure includes all contributions above the Federal Election Commissions mandated reporting threshold of $200 from management, employees, and political action committees in the fossil fuel industries. Not included in this data are the many other avenues available to fossil fuel interests to influence campaigns and elected officials. For example, oil, gas, and coal companies spent heavily during the 2020 election cycle to keep the Senate under the control of former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a known climate denierwith major oil companies like Valero, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips contributing more than $1 million each to the conservative Senate Leadership Fund.

This analysis only shows direct, publicly disclosed contributions to federal candidates. The fossil fuel industry regularly spends millions of dollars of dark money advertising to the public; shaping corporate decisions; lobbying members of Congress; and otherwise funding the infrastructure that makes climate denial politically feasible and even profitable.

‘light Years Ahead’ Of Their Elders Young Republicans Push Gop On Climate Change

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Benji Backer, president of the American Conservation Coalition, testifies about climate change during a U.S. House hearing in 2019.hide caption

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Benji Backer, president of the American Conservation Coalition, testifies about climate change during a U.S. House hearing in 2019.

Think “climate change activist” and a young, liberal student may come to mind.

A recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showed climate change is the top issue for Democratic voters. For Republicans, it barely registers overall, but there is a growing generational divide.

A recent Pew Research Center survey shows Republicans 18 to 39 years old are more concerned about the climate than their elders. By a nearly two-to-one margin they are more likely to agree that “human activity contributes a great deal to climate change,” and “the federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change.”

Some of these young conservatives are starting environmental groups and becoming climate activists. And now they’re pushing their party to do more.

Benji Backer started the American Conservation Coalition in 2017, after his freshman year in college, and says his love of nature comes in part from his family.

“They were Audubon members, Nature Conservancy members. But they were conservative, and I grew up not thinking that the environment should be political at all,” says Backer.

So, how will he vote in November?

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Majorities Of Us Adults Say Federal Government Is Not Doing Enough On The Environment

Majorities of Americans continue to say the federal government is doing too little to protect key aspects of the environment. About two-thirds of Americans say the federal government is doing too little to protect water quality of rivers, lakes and streams , protect air quality and reduce the effects of climate change . About six-in-ten think the federal government is doing too little to protect animals and their habitats , and a slightly smaller majority say the federal government is doing too little to protect open lands in national parks .

These findings come amid a changing federal regulatory landscape. The Trump administration is reversing or seeking to change more than 100 rules and regulations related to carbon dioxide emissions, clean air, water or toxic chemicals.

Public views on how much the federal government is doing to protect key aspects of the environment are virtually unchanged in the last two years. In Pew Research Center surveys in both 2018 and 2019, about two-thirds of Americans said the federal government was doing too little to protect air or water quality or reduce the effects of climate change.

Over the past several years, Americans have become significantly more likely to say protecting the environment and addressing climate change should be top priorities for the president and Congress, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey.

Among Democrats, there are hardly any gaps in views on these questions by generation or gender. .

Climate Change In The American Mind Survey Question Wording

Meet the Conservatives Lobbying Lawmakers to Act on Climate Change

Model estimates in the maps were derived from public responses to the following survey questions. The response categories for many questions were collapsed into a single variable for mapping. For example, for the question measuring how worried respondents are about global warming, very worried and somewhat worried were combined into a single measure of worried. Likewise Not very worried and Not at all worried were combined into a single measure of not worried. The responses below are color coded to indicate how they were grouped into the variables shown on the maps. Individuals who responded Dont know or who did not answer the question were not modeled separately and appear as gray segments within the bar charts.

BELIEFS

Global warming is happening;Recently, you may have noticed that;global warming;has been getting some attention in the news. Global warming refers to the idea that the worlds average temperature has been increasing over the past 150 years, may be increasing more in the future, and that the worlds climate may change as a result. What do you think: Do you think that global warming is happening?

Yes

Dont know

Global warming is caused mostly by human activities;Assuming global warming is happening, do you think it is ?

Caused mostly by human activities

Caused mostly by natural changes in the environment

Other

None of the above because global warming isnt happening

Strongly agree

POLICY SUPPORT

Strongly support

Also Check: How Many Republicans Are Currently In The House

% Of Scientists Agree That Humans Are Causing Global Warming Yet Belief In Climate Change Continues To Depend On Political Beliefs Above All Else

It is no secret that belief in climate change in America is strongly divided along party lines, a fact we were reminded of in last weeks Republican leadership debates. The relationship was assessed in an experiment by Dan Kahan published in Advances in Political Psychology earlier this year, which demonstrated that there exists an extremely bizarre paradox that is as mind bending as it is troubling. Believe it or not, the more Republicans know about science, the less likely they are to believe in climate change.;

The Ordinary Science Intelligence measure which runs across the bottom of the graphs above measures how likely someone is to answer tests of scientific knowledge and reasoning correctly. For example, someone with an average Ordinary Science Intelligence score has a 70% chance of giving the correct answer to the simple scientific question “electrons are smaller than atoms – true or false”. Someone would have to be a full standard deviation below average to be more likely than not to get this question wrong.

As the graph above shows, a Democrat with an average level of scientific understanding has an 80% chance of believing in global warming, while the equivalent Republican has only a 20% chance. Astonishingly, this number falls even further as Republicans’ scientific literacy increases.

Follow Simon Oxenham on;,;,;,;RSS,;or join the;mailing list;to get each week’s post straight to your inbox. Image Credit: ;FREDERIC J. BROWN/Getty

Nearly Nine In 10 Foresee Global Warming Effects Eventually Occurring

In addition to the 59% of Americans who believe the effects of global warming have already begun, another 10% predict they will start happening within a few years or in their own lifetime. A further 19% foresee the effects affecting future generations, bringing the total who believe global warming will eventually affect humans to 88%. Most Americans across all demographic groups expect this, including large majorities of Republicans and independents , and nearly all Democrats .

Still, there is variation across groups in the belief that the effects of global warming have already begun, a view that may be more relevant to the propensity for people to be politically active or factor it into their voting. Democrats , adults aged 18 to 34 , college graduates , non-White Americans and women are significantly more likely than their counterparts to say the effects have begun.

Already begun

Percentage with no opinion not shown Gallup, March 1-15, 2021

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Americans See Local Impacts From Climate Change But That View Is Colored More By Politics Than Place

A majority of Americans say that climate change is affecting their local community a great deal or some. Fewer say climate change is impacting their own community not too much or not at all. The share who see at least some local impact from climate change is about the same as it was last fall .

Views of the local impact of climate change are largely similar among Americans who live in different regions of the county. In fact, an identical 64% of those who live in the Northeast, South and West say climate change is affecting their community a great deal or some. Those who live in the Midwest are slightly less likely to say this .

Partisanship is a far larger factor in views of the local impact of climate change. A large majority of Democrats say climate change is affecting their local community a great deal or some. By contrast, far fewer Republicans believe climate change is affecting their local community at least some; most Republicans say climate change is impacting their local community not too much or at all.

Among Republicans and Republican leaners, moderates and liberals are much more likely than conservatives to say climate change is impacting their community a great deal or some. Among Democrats and Democratic leaners, large shares of both liberals and conservative and moderates see local impacts from climate change.

Young Republicans See Shift In Gop: ‘from Outright Denial To Climate Caucus’

Twenty-four-year-old Republican Danielle Butcher is watching with anticipation as GOP leaders move from outright denial to now having a climate caucus a move she sees as the first step in integrating climate action into formal party policy.

Butcher, the executive vice president of the American Conservation Coalition , spoke to The Hills Equilibrium on Tuesday, just a week after Rep. John Curtis ;launched the Conservative Climate Caucus and the same day that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy

The partys progress is huge, when you apply the context, Butcher said.; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;

This is an excellent first step, she continued. The first thing you have to do in achieving climate action is start talking about these problems.

To Butcher, integrating climate action into Republican politics speaks to her partys historic conservation core the GOP with a deep-seated, rural heritage, was responsible for creation of the National Park Service and the Environmental Protection Agency under former Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon.

I also see this as us reclaiming our heritage, she said.

But with two-thirds of Americans indicating that the government should do more on climate change a stance that Butcher observed is especially true among young people” she said Republicans need to be talking about these issues and involving the younger generation in the discussions.

The GOP has notoriously struggled with young people, she added.

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Figure 20 Proportion Of Each Group Who Believed The Worlds Temperature Will Probably Go Up Over The Next 100 Years

Future warming. Since 1997, majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents have believed that the earth will probably be warmer in a century if nothing is done to prevent it. In 2020, 94% of Democrats, 72% of Independents, and 56% of Republicans believe that warming will probably continue in the future. No notable growth has occurred in the partisan gap since 2011.

5°F warmer would be bad. Majorities of Democrats and of Independents have consistently believed that 5°F of global warming would be bad, but the proportion of Republicans expressing that belief has hovered around the midline, peaking at 59% in 1997 and dipping to its lowest points of 47% in 2010 and 2015. The partisan gap in 2020 is the biggest observed since 1997 at 34 percentage points.

What Has Trump Done On Climate Change

The Climate Deregulation Tracker, run by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, has documented more than 130 steps the Trump administration has taken to scale back measures to fight climate change.

High-profile rollbacks include:

Replacing President Barack Obamas Clean Power Plan, which would have limited carbon emissions from coal and gas-fired power plants, with the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which had weaker regulations

Attempting to freeze the fuel efficiency standards imposed on new vehicles, and prevent California from setting its own emissions rules

Hes completely halted and reversed the momentum that was built up during the Obama administration in fighting climate change, Prof Gerrard says.

While withdrawing from the Paris Agreement was terrible symbolically, the agreement had virtually no specifics on what the US had to do, so other rollbacks, especially the attempt to limit fuel economic standards of cars, were more damaging, he adds.

Dan Costa worked at the Environmental Protection Agency for more than 30 years, including as the National Director of the Air, Climate & Energy Research Program.

He said he noticed an anti-science stance once the Trump administrations team took over.

One of the folks who came as part of the transition team said if climate change is such a bad thing, why are so many people moving to Arizona? Anyway, you can turn up the air conditioning.’

Also Check: Is Economy Better Under Democrats Or Republicans

1 note · View note

vinylpipes · 3 years ago

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Rust is a slow poison

“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” – Benjamin Franklin

The worldwide Water Well Drilling is a $85 Billion Industry,escalating call for water wells across the globe has been fuelling the growth of the market. The same has worsened on account of the increasing use of water well water in agriculture and construction.

The year + of the pandemic has brought home the truth, for every country to be self-reliant for water and food, lending an impetus to the demand for water wells across the globe. Ringing warning bells among the environmentalists as recent studies show that water extraction outweighs replenishment, making it mandatory for all to consider ways to conserve water.

However, one of the biggest challenges the industry faces is RUST. Rust corrodes, through the years, it has been a serious contributor to groundwater pollution. It threatens not only the safety and pocketbook but also the daily quality of life.

Worried? You should be!

Rusting is a characteristic oxidative phenomenon, a second-leading reason for pipe damage in cast iron, copper, and galvanised steel pipes. When rusting occurs, a large number of issues follow. Rusting weakens the iron pipes over time, it prompts a spillage in the piping framework. Which, in turn, causes a breakdown in the borewells. Another serious issue is the contamination of the soil through which the rusted water streams. Water gets discoloured, develops a metallic odour and gets contaminated with rust flakes, making it unusable.

In the water well environment, there are two fundamental kinds of corrosion: electrochemical and mechanical.

Electrochemical corrosion is based on a chemical reaction occurring at the metal surface with the transference of electrons between atoms. Electrochemical corrosion comes in many forms such as galvanic, microbial influenced, crevice, pitting, etc.

Mechanical corrosion is a physical process where the body degradation of the metal happens due to interaction with solids present in the water, such as in sand pumping well. The water well environment, which exposes various metallic components to very capable electrolytes (soil and water) with dynamic chemical properties, is especially conducive to this scenario.

An assessment reveals that about 85% of water dispersion pipes used are cast iron and steel. Their long-term service and exposure to an aggressive environment in soil, maturing and weakening of metal lines have brought about a high rate of failures. For instance, the failure rate of cast iron pipes can be just about as high as 39* bursts for every 100 km per year in Canada; the failure rate of water mains in Australia is 20** bursts for each 100 km each year. Overall the outcome of pipe failures can be socially, economically, and ecologically disastrous, bringing about a huge disturbance in everyday life, substantial financial misfortune, widespread flooding, natural contamination and even casualties and so forth.

Corrosion is so prevalent and takes so many forms that one cannot eliminate its occurrence. However, it has been estimated optimum corrosion management practices could help save 25%-30%*** of annual corrosion costs in the United States.

In response to the extreme costs brought on by problems associated with corrosion, many products and technologies have been developed to help protect against, or at least slowdown, the various corrosion processes which threaten water well systems.

Perhaps the most effective preventive measure one can take to help prevent corrosion is to select the proper materials, to begin with. Whether it’s in the design phase or replacement during maintenance operations, choosing the right materials to withstand the corrosion forces present, is critical in extending the lifespan of a water well system.

Of course, several factors need consideration when selecting materials, including cost, design features, physical properties required, and compliance with regulations.

So, what is the alternative?

A cost-effective and durable alternative lies in uPVC pipes. They do not rust, support an almost frictionless surface that needs lesser energy to pump out water, cost-effective and have a long life.

Vinyl Pipes, manufacturer of the largest range of borewell pipes, has introduced lockable riser pipes designed to allow for perfect alignment of pipes. A rubber seal is provided with thread to ensure a 100% leak proof joint at high pressure. Square threads are so designed, to hold high loads the threads do not corrode rust or deteriorate up to 50+years of use

Couples are fitted with pipes and sealing with the patented power lock system to ensure that during installation and removal of pumps, the coupler does not come out & avoid slippage of the column. The special High Friction Thread developed by Vinyl removes the need for a Metal pin, thus, providing a Metal-Free Leak-Proof Column Pipe. To strengthen the pipes and make them suitable for all terrains, extreme temperatures & earthquake-prone areas, the pipes are put through a special Annealing process.

uPVC Pipes being light require lesser labour to install and are safer. Being recyclable, they offer value even at the end of their lifecycle of 50+ years. Lower maintenance cost lack of pollution makes them the submersible pumps’ best friend.

Incredibly impervious to corrosive forces, are bacteria-free, free of any harmful metals, resistant to acidic attack, they are a durable and safe option that promises quality water over the years.

The low friction surface of uPVC pipes drives pumps lesser for pumping out water, thus, saving both energy and adding years to the life of the pump.

The optimistic perspective holds the view that future generations will find undeniably more remarkable advancements and assets to utilize and oversee groundwater better than today. Even then, after all, is said and done, it is ethically incumbent on us all to deal with the current accessible water ideally and optimally so that we leave behind healthy aquifers.

At the time when water, the source once considered imperishable, is deteriorating at the speed of light, it’s critical to conserve it by hook or by crook.

#vinylpipes uPVCpipes casingpipes columnpipes rustfreepipes waterwell waterwelldrillingindustry

0 notes

josephbinningyoumatter · 3 years ago

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HOW TO LIVE AN AUTHENTIC LIFE, ON PURPOSE

We live in a fast-paced, ever developing, and ever-changing world. Full of Tweets, Likes, and shares. In an instant someone’s life can change. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. All by hitting send. We decide based on them. What we wear. What we buy. Where we go. How we act and yes, how we show up in life. We decide if we like someone, something, or someplace based on popularity. It is part of our culture now and has become the new social norm, so we all accept it. But are we being authentic? Are we being true to ourselves, or just being marketed and tricked into thinking this is how we should be, act, or show up? You are one decision away from an original life. Only you can decide which way it will turn out. Merriam-Webster defines Authentic as: not false or Imitation: REAL, ACTUAL, and true to one’s personality, spirit, or character. Moving your life in the direction that is not false or Imitation: REAL, ACTUAL, and true to one’s personality, spirit, or character aligns you with the things in life you want and desire and will prevent you from living in fear of thinking “what will happen if I say no?”. Using any method to attain something will NOT work if you do not know what you want as the outcome. The mistake we all make is we focus on the person, place, or thing we think will save us and we focus on something way too big. This creates an enormous gap between where you are verses where you want to be that you think will rescue you from your miserable life right now. That gap can be the thing that can make you feel lost in figuring out what you want, and discovering what your passion or direction is, or should be. Those in life who are genuinely happy in life understand the power of, and vehemently stick to, being their authentic selves. EXAMPLES OF A NON-AUTHENTIC LIFE EXAMPLE 1 Your friends' lives may look more exciting than yours on Facebook, but recent research reveals that is because they might be faking it. A recent survey has found around two-thirds of people on social media post images to their profiles to make their lives seem more adventurous. And over three quarters of those asked said they judged their peers based on what they saw on their Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook profiles. A published British survey, by smartphone maker HTC, found that, to make our own pages and lives appear more exciting, six percent also said they had borrowed items to include in the images to pass them off as their own. More than half of those surveyed said they posted images of items and places purely to cause jealousy among friends and family. 76 percent of those asked also said seeing items on social media influences them to buy them, with men more likely to take style advice and buy what they see. EXAMPLE 2 Over 5,000 people have taken the free online test “Does Your Job Require High or Low Emotional Intelligence?” And after analyzing the data, they made a scary discovery. It was discovered that 51% of people said that they Always or Frequently have to ‘act’ or ‘put on a show’ at work. But they made an even bigger discovery; 51% who must ‘put on a show at work’ are 32% less likely to love their job. Or put another way, if you do not have to fake your emotions at work, you are 32% more likely to love your job. And not only will you be more likely to love your job, you are also much less likely to have negative feelings about your job. People that do not have to put on a show are 59% less likely to dislike or hate their job. This data also suggests that many people would probably enjoy taking a deep look at their own emotional intelligence, particularly to discover whether they must do lots of acting on the job. The more they are forced to act like they have the right attitude, the less happy they will ultimately be. EXAMPLE 3 Another related construct is the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. Sociologist Robert K. Merton coined the term to describe a phenomenon that dates to Ancient Greece. Basically, a prediction about the outcome of a situation can invoke a new behavior that leads to the prediction coming true. For example, if I believed that I would fail an exam, that belief may have led me to alter the strategies I used for preparation and taking the test, and I would probably fail it. While I may have had an excellent chance to pass, my belief hindered my performance, and I made this belief become a reality. Psychological research shows that the self-fulfilling prophecy works for both negative and positive predictions, showing again that the beliefs you hold impact what happens to you. EXAMPLE 4 In a yearlong study it was found that those ringing the alarm bells the loudest about climate change are the least likely to change their own behavior. They just want everyone else to. The study divided 600 adults who reported on their climate-change beliefs into three groups: "skeptical," "cautiously worried" and "highly concerned." Then the researchers — from the University of Michigan and Cornell University — tracked how often they reported doing things like recycling, using public transportation, buying environmentally friendly consumer products, and reusing shopping bags. And they asked about support for government mandates like CO2 emission reduction, gasoline taxes and renewable energy subsidies. The Journal of Environmental Psychology published the findings. What they found was very illuminating. The researchers found that the "highly concerned" group was the least likely to take individual action, but they were the most insistent on government action. The "skeptical" group, in contrast, was the most likely to recycle, use public transportation and do other environmentally sound things all on their own. Skeptics were least likely to endorse costly government regulations and mandates. "Belief in climate change," the researchers explained, "predicted support for government policies, but rarely translated to individual-level, self-reported pro-environmental behavior." In plain English: The position of climate-change genuine believers is: Do as I say, not as I do. This study supports a YouGov poll reported on recently, which found that most of those who believe in catastrophic global warming are not doing anything on their own to combat it. More than half said they are not cutting back on their use of fossil fuels or changing their recycling or composting habits. Another study found that "conservation scientists," have carbon footprints that do not differ from those of anyone else. The study found that these scientists "still flew frequently — an average of nine flights a year — ate meat or fish approximately five times a week and rarely purchased carbon offsets for their own emissions." EXAMPLE 5 A study by Deloitte found that 61% of millennial's who rarely or never volunteer still consider a company’s commitment to the community when deciding on a potential job even though 60% of hiring managers see the act of volunteerism as a valuable asset when making recruitment decisions according to a study performed by Career Builder. 92% of human resource executives agree that volunteering can improve an employee’s leadership skills. Only 4% of college graduates, 25 years or older, volunteer each year. Millennial's ages 18 to 30 are more likely to have gone to a protest since the election than any other age group, according to a HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted from Feb. 1 to Feb. 3. Millennial's are also more likely than older groups to think protesting is an effective form of political action. In recent days America has seem mass protests and unrest which has in every corner of the country left charred and shattered landscapes in dozens of American cities over the death of George Floyd. They estimate that the damages left behind will total in the billions. Cities who encountered the most loss and damages include: Minneapolis, Minn. Los Angeles California New York, NY Philadelphia, PA Nashville Tenn. San Francisco, CA. Detroit, Mich. Portland, Ore. Chicago, Ill. Atlanta, Ga. Washington, D.C. In a national survey reported by the National Service Knowledge Network of Volunteer Rates by State they ranked the followings states in this order. Minneapolis, Minn. Minnesota #1 with a 43.23% volunteer rate statewide. Portland, Ore. Oregon #13 with a 31.42% volunteer rate statewide. Washington, D.C. District of Columbia #14 with a 31.07% volunteer rate statewide. Philadelphia, PA Pennsylvania #22 with a 28.03% volunteer rate statewide. Detroit, Mich. Michigan #26 with a 26.64% volunteer rate statewide. Chicago, Ill. Illinois #31 with a 24.85% volunteer rate statewide. Nashville Tenn. Tennessee #33 with a 24.12% volunteer rate statewide. Los Angeles CA California #34 with a 23.89% volunteer rate statewide. Atlanta, Ga. Georgia #39 with a 23.00% volunteer rate statewide. New York, NY New York #49 with a 19.61% volunteer rate statewide. This survey points out that except for Minnesota, the cities who had the most people who marched to support the problem, volunteered, and supported in the community the least.They estimate that over one million people will attend a George Floyd protest, yet most have never volunteered in the neighborhoods who need the help the most. Some officials estimate that most still will not. How to Live an Authentic Life, On Purpose Most of us struggle with the need to be seen, heard, respected, and yes, Loved. We all want to stay true to ourselves, but we also want to fit in. Therein lies the dilemma. How do we stay true to ourselves, yet still stay in our Tribe? We were born and created Tribal, a community, a family, and not meant to do this alone. Our Tribe is who we associate with, trust, and allow to influence us. They are that powerful group who are our biggest support system and cheerleaders. They become a family and we can sometimes know them all our lives. They make you feel relevant, seen, heard, important, and valued. But are they the right tribe for you? Are they really your family, or just your influence? Living an Authentic Life will prevent you from joining the wrong tribe and surround yourself with only those who will make you better by being honest with you. Calling you out when you mess up. Praising you on the victories, and yes, walking next to you in the dark valley’s that life will always throw at you. When you do not know WHO you are, someone else will decide it for you and it might or might not be the person you want to be. So how do we do it? How do we keep the passion, yet still be authentic? How do we be REAL, NOT FAKE? Here are some suggestions. - Start with the person in the mirror first. Too many times people seek approval first, and acceptance second. Stop it! Look in the mirror at the person you see and accept them, warts, and all. You are not perfect and need not be, but you are perfect for you. Accept that! - Own your life, do not borrow one. Successful and Happy people need not prove anything to anyone, and they do not need other’s approval. The beautiful thing about life is if you dislike yours, you can always change it. When the haters hate, and they will, let them. And forget them. When you make a mistake, and you will own it 100%, then move on. It's in our mistakes we learn what will and will not work. - Be honest, do not live a lie. Do not pretend to be something or someone you are not, for someone else’s sake. If people do not accept you, as you are, where you are, for WHO you are they should not be in your life, let alone influence you. - Be ALL IN. A living example, more than words, will create action. If you believe in a movement, LIVE the movement 100%. If you believe in a cause, LIVE the cause 100%. Show me how you want me to see you and I will see you. Tell me and it will get lost in the noise. Give 100% every day to everything, especially yourself. Just be All In! - Forgive easily, and often. Successful and Happy people do not hold a grudge, they cannot. It impedes progress. It holds them back. It makes you bitter. Give others the same break you give yourself and forgive yourself, often. Others, and you, will be glad you did. - Put your own oxygen mask on first. We have all heard the warnings on airplanes, “if they deploy the oxygen masks, puts yours on first, then those who are with you next”. Make a habit of taking care of yourself, first. Self-care is the most important care you will ever receive. Make it a regular occurrence and do it often. - Live your life in Service to Humanity. Countless studies have shown that those who put other's needs above their own live longer, happier, more fulfilling lives. Care. Genuinely care. About others, about issues, about people. Then serve them. Do not save them, rescue them, or bail them out. Serve them by allowing your help to be about them, and not you. Do it with no expectations. If you need to be thanked, you did it for the wrong person. - If you have a choice between being right verses being kind, be kind. Successful and happy people can “give others a break”. They do not always need to be right. It is not a reflection on them. Sometimes it is better to lose the battle and win the war. - Pay everything forward. We deserve nothing in life. Life is not fair; it is designed that way. When you receive anything, it is a gift, be thankful, and share it. If you clutch on to life with a clenched fist so nothing can escape, nothing can enter either. Be generous, and life will be generous back. Volunteer, donate, serve, contribute, take part, mentor, and ask nothing in return. Remember, if you need to be thanked, it is a bribe, not a gift. - Life rewards the brave, so be brave. Take a chance, be vulnerable, be approachable, be teachable, take the first step, start the conversation, listen intending to listen and without thinking of what you will say next. Step outside of your comfort zone. That is where you will grow the most. A plant, transplanted from a pot to the ground will grow bigger and stronger, naturally. - Be more understanding. We are a divided world today. Friends lose friends over politics. People are against someone, someplace, or something without ever attempting to understand things from the other people's point of view. Take the time to ask why they believe what they believe, then shut up, do not interrupt, or interject, and just listen. Ask questions, with the desire to learn something and let them believe it even if you do not. People do not care what you know until they know you care. - Be more accepting of others Allow others to coexist around you as they are, not how you think they should be. Successful and Happy people are not threatened by what they do not understand. They attempt to understand it and accept that whatever it might be is the right choice for the other person even though it might not be the right choice for them and is no reflection on them. Accepting others as they are, where they are, for who they are, just as they are is one of the greatest ways to understand others and have a meaningful conversation with them. Do so intending to understand them, not to prove them wrong. If you have enjoyed this article please visit me at www.JosephBinning.com for more helpful tips and articles. You can also get more helpful information in my book You Matter, even if you don’t think so which you can purchase on Amazon here Amazon You Matter, even if you don't think so For my free report Happiness Is A Choice click here: Happiness Is A Choice Free Report Remember: Happiness is a choice, so choose to be happy. Read the full article

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newstfionline · 4 years ago

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Thursday, March 11, 2021

Traffic (Washington Post) In 2019, the average commuter spent 99 hours in traffic congestion, according to traffic analytics firm Inrix. In 2020, that crashed to just 26 hours, about a fourth of the time. All told, traffic delays across the country fell 50 percent, with the aggregate time wasted costing Americans an estimated $39 billion, down from $88 billion in 2019. The biggest beneficiary was Washington D.C., which saw traffic delays drop 77 percent in 2020. New York, where commuters still lost 100 hours last year, remains the greatest city in the country [when it comes to the amount of human life squandered to traffic congestion].

Hawaii declares emergency due to floods, orders evacuations (Reuters) Hawaii Governor David Ige declared an emergency in the U.S. state after heavy rains brought floods, landslides and fear of dam failures, and authorities ordered the evacuation of several thousand people from communities threatened by rising waters. The move came after a dam overflowed on the island of Maui, forcing evacuations and destroying homes, with the dam’s “unsatisfactory” condition leading to it being scheduled for removal this year, the land department has said. Poor weather was expected to run until Friday.

Southwest drought (WSJ) The American Southwest is locked in drought again, prompting cutbacks to farms and ranches and putting renewed pressure on urban supplies. Extreme to exceptional drought is afflicting between 57% and 90% of the land in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Arizona and is shriveling a snowpack that supplies water to 40 million people from Denver to Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. The team of government and academic agencies that produces the monitor defines a drought as a period of unusually dry weather that causes problems such as crop losses and water shortages. The current drought, which began last year, is already shaping up as one of the most severe on record in the Southwest.

Wave of retirements signals battles ahead for Republicans (AP) Missouri’s Roy Blunt on Monday became the fifth Republican senator to announce he will not seek reelection, a retirement wave that portends an ugly campaign season next year and gives Democrats fresh hope in preserving their razor-thin Senate majority. “Any time you lose an incumbent, it’s bad news,” said Republican strategist Rick Tyler, who briefly worked for failed Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin nearly a decade ago. “Missouri’s not necessarily a safe state for Republicans. Democrats have won there.” The 71-year-old Blunt’s exit is a reminder of how the nation’s politics have shifted since the rise of Donald Trump. Blunt and his retiring GOP colleagues from Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Alabama represent an old guard who fought for conservative policies but sometimes resisted the deeply personal attacks and uneven governance that dominated the Trump era. Their departures will leave a void likely to be filled by a new generation of Republicans more willing to embrace Trumpism—or by Democrats.

Covid-19 relief bill clears final hurdle (Bloomberg) U.S. President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill cleared its last hurdle Wednesday, with the House passing the final version. Biden plans to sign the legislation, his first major victory, on Friday. Included in the package: $160 billion for vaccine and testing programs, $360 billion in state aid, $25 billion to help restaurants, $170 billion to reopen schools, and yes, $1,400 checks for eligible Americans. A study from the Tax Policy Center found incomes of the lowest fifth of earners will jump 20%, the highest among income groups. While it’s a political victory for Biden and the razor-thin Democratic majority in Congress, the partisan vitriol over the bill foreshadows difficulty enacting the multi-trillion dollar, longer-term economic program Biden wants next. Not one Republican in Congress voted in favor of the Covid rescue bill, having attacked it as too expensive. Democrats were happy to point out the $1.5 trillion tax overhaul Republicans passed in 2017 that largely benefitted corporations and the rich.

Palace Breaks Silence on Meghan and Harry Interview, Saying ‘Whole Family Is Saddened’ (NYT) Buckingham Palace broke nearly 48 hours of silence Tuesday about a bombshell interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, saying “the whole royal family is saddened” and expressing concern about the issue of racism the couple had raised. Assertions that a member of the royal family had raised concerns about the skin color of the couple’s son, Archie, and that a desperate Meghan had contemplated suicide dominated national discussion in Britain, where the interview with Oprah Winfrey was broadcast Monday evening. In a brief statement, Buckingham Palace said that the issues raised by the couple, “particularly that of race,” were concerning. It didn’t deny the allegations, and said that “while some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.” In saying that the allegations would be addressed privately, it indicated that the family would deal with the aftermath of the interview, and the bruised relationship that Meghan and Harry exposed, behind closed doors.

COVID-19 and the European Union (Les Echos/France) COVID-19 will eventually be defeated. But before it goes down, it could take a collateral victim with it: the European project. The virus is attacking the Union in two ways: by exposing the lack of solidarity between its members, on the one hand, and on the other by highlighting its cumbersome red tape. Faced with “the Union’s slowness,” Denmark and Austria are turning to Israel to produce vaccines together. The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary are ordering large quantities of Russian and Chinese vaccines, even though they don’t yet have EU authorization. And many other European countries, including Germany, say they are ready to resort to the Russian vaccine, Sputnik V—undoubtedly a victory for Moscow in terms of public image. Faced with the scale of the pandemic, scientists (China’s ambiguity and other exceptions aside) have been forced to unite and share information very quickly in an increasingly global and interdependent universe. In contrast, politicians have chosen the opposite path, sometimes yielding to the temptation of “vaccine nationalism.” Citizens are the ones who are paying the price. We must hope that access to vaccines will no longer be a problem in the coming weeks or months. If not, European citizens—faced with an existential question, literally—will feel abandoned, if not betrayed by the EU.

Myanmar police raid housing of striking railway workers (AP) Myanmar security forces early Wednesday raided a neighborhood in the country’s largest city that is home to state railway workers who have gone on strike to protest last month’s military coup. Police sealed off the Mingalar Taung Nyunt neighborhood in Yangon where the Ma Hlwa Kone train station and housing for railway workers are located. Photos and video on social media showed officers blocking streets and what was said to be people escaping. The raid comes just days after several Myanmar unions, including the Myanmar Railway Worker’s Union Federation, issued a joint call for a nationwide work stoppage. The statement said the strike would be part of a broader effort for “the full, extended shutdown of the Myanmar economy.” State railway workers were among the earliest organized supporters of the protest movement and their strike began soon after the coup. Police last month made an effort at intimidating railway workers in Mandalay, the country’s second-biggest city, by roaming through their housing area one night, shouting and randomly firing guns.

Myanmar coup: The shadowy business empire funding the Tatmadaw (BBC) Myanmar’s military—the leaders of its recent coup—are funded by a huge chunk of the national budget. But the armed forces also draw a vast and secretive income from sprawling business interests. At Yangon’s popular Indoor Skydiving Centre, visitors can experience the thrill of jumping out of a plane from the safety of a vertical wind tunnel. But few people spiralling through this high-flying attraction may realise that it is part of a huge, military-run business empire—one completely woven into the fabric of national life. Critics argue that this lucrative network has made Myanmar’s coup possible and put the military’s accountability into free fall. Civilian businesses talk of an environment like “Sicily under the Mafia”, while activists say that democratic reforms can only be possible only when “the military [is] back to barracks”. A UN report in 2019, spurred by Myanmar’s crackdown on Rohingya communities, concluded that business revenues enhanced the military’s ability to carry out human rights abuses with impunity. Through a network of conglomerate-owned businesses and affiliates, the UN said the Tatmadaw had been able to “insulate itself from accountability and oversight”.

Westerners are increasingly scared of traveling to China as threat of detention rises (CNN) Jeff Wasserstrom is a self-proclaimed China specialist who is seriously considering never returning to China—at least, he says, not while President Xi Jinping is in power. The American professor, who for decades made multiple trips a year to China and was last there in 2018, hasn’t focused his career on Tibet or Taiwan—lightning-rod issues which attract Beijing’s ire at lightning-quick speed—but he has written about cultural diversity and student protests in mainland China, and appeared on panels with people he says the Communist Party is “clearly upset with.” That makes him consider whether crossing the border risks his indefinite arbitrary detention. The chance of that outcome, Wasserstrom says, might be “pretty minimal,” but the consequences are so grave—those detained can be locked up for years without contact with their families or a trial date—he is not willing to gamble. And he is not alone. More than a dozen academics, NGO workers and media professionals CNN spoke to, who in pre-Covid times regularly traveled to China, said they were unwilling to do this once the pandemic restrictions lifted, over fears for their personal safety. Several in the international business community said they would significantly modify their behavior while outside China to avoid attracting the ire of authorities in the country, where they need to do business.

Communist Party seeking China’s ‘rejuvenation’ (AP) The catchword “rejuvenation” has been tucked into the major speeches at China’s biggest political event of the year, the meeting of its 3,000-member legislature. It encapsulates the ruling Communist Party’s overriding long-term objective: To build the nation into a truly global power, one that commands respect from the rest of the world. That goal is intertwined with another one: retaining a hold on power. The party keeps a tight grip by censoring the digital space, controlling the news media and locking up those who publicly challenge its line. But it also tries to woo the public by stoking national pride in the country’s growing global clout to justify its continued rule after more than 70 years at the helm. “By enabling the Chinese nation to make another giant stride toward rejuvenation, the (Communist Party) Central Committee has delivered impressive results that our people are happy with and that will go down in history,” Li Zhanshu, the party’s No. 3 official, told lawmakers this week. Rejuvenation is repeated like a mantra, even woven into a sprawling exhibit at the national art museum marking the Year of the Ox in the Chinese zodiac. The exhibit’s introduction invokes the diligent ox and credits party leader and head-of-state Xi Jinping for deepening “the understanding of the great striving of the Chinese nation.”

Researchers Reveal France’s Devastating Nuclear Effects (The Guardian) From 1966 to 1996, France conducted 193 nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in French Polynesia. The tests included 41 atmospheric tests until 1974 that exposed the local population, site workers, and French soldiers to high levels of radiation. Now groundbreaking new research shows that France has consistently underestimated the devastating impact of its nuclear tests and that more than 100,000 people may be able to claim compensation. Fallout from the tests was far greater than officially acknowledged. “The state has tried hard to bury the toxic heritage of these tests,” said one of the researchers. “This is the first truly independent scientific attempt to measure the scale of the damage and to acknowledge the thousands of victims of France’s nuclear experiment in the Pacific.”

South Africa’s economy shrank by most in a century last year (Bloomberg) South Africa’s economy contracted the most in a century in 2020 as restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic ravaged output and disrupted trade. Gross domestic product shrank 7%, compared with a 0.2% expansion in 2019, according to a report released by Statistics South Africa Tuesday in the capital, Pretoria. That’s the biggest decline since 1920. The economy may only return to where it was at the end of 2019 by 2024, due to longstanding constraints such as electricity shortages, a slow reform agenda and repeated waves of Covid-19 infections, according to Mpho Molopyane, an economist at FirstRand Group Ltd.’s Rand Merchant Bank.

Miami janitor quietly feeds thousands, and love’s the reason (AP) Doramise Moreau toils long past midnight in her tiny kitchen every Friday—boiling lemon peels, crushing fragrant garlic and onion into a spice blend she rubs onto chicken and turkey, cooking the dried beans that accompany the yellow rice she’ll deliver to a Miami church. She’s singlehandedly cooked 1,000 meals a week since the pandemic’s start—a an act of love she’s content to perform with little compensation. Moreau, a 60-year-old widow who lives with her children, nephew and three grandchildren, cooks in the kitchen of a home built by Habitat for Humanity in 2017. Her days are arduous. She works part-time as a janitor at a technical school, walking or taking the bus. But the work of her heart, the reason she rises each morning, is feeding the hungry. She borrows the church truck to buy groceries on Thursday and Friday and cooks into the wee hours of the night for Saturday’s feedings. “She takes care of everybody from A to Z,” said Reginald Jean-Mary, pastor at the church. “She’s a true servant. She goes beyond the scope of work to be a presence of hope and compassion for others.” With her janitorial job and all her work at the church, people often ask Moreau if she’s exhausted. But she says she is fueled by her faith. “I can keep all the money for myself and never give anyone a penny,” she said. “But if you give from your heart and never think about yourself, God will provide for you every day. The refrigerator will never be without food.”

#headlines #news

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ekedolphin · 4 years ago

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39 Days to Go

San Francisco, CA Monday, December 14, 2009 11:30 a.m. PDT

When “The Lion” John Grant had woken up this morning—just like he’d done every previous morning since making his tape—he’d immediately logged into his computer and checked his e-mail. He’d created a new e-mail account for wrestling business only, kept separate from the e-mail address where friends keep in touch with him, professors send him assignments, and various corporations hawk the miracles of their penis-enlargement pills and easy ways to make $100,000 for working four hours a week.

The last few days, he’d received nothing, but he’d expected that. He’d only approved the final cut of his introduction tape on Wednesday, after all; and video editor Harry Jaffee had done the rest—making seventeen copies of the master disc and overnighting them via FedEx to the organizations John had specified. John certainly hadn’t anticipated that any of them would get back to him on the same day they received his video.

But today when he’d logged in, he’d gotten a reply from one of the administrators of the World Wrestling Alliance, saying not only that they’d received his video, but that they were offering him a pre-show tryout match on their January 22 edition of WWA: Underground, live from The Arena in Philadelphia, PA. Taking a look at the WWA’s schedule, since he knew the company was relaunching on the 15th, he replied with an e-mail saying that not only would he be there in the best shape of his life, but with the company’s permission he’d be happy to sit backstage during the Hammerstein Ballroom show on the 15th as well, to meet some of his future co-workers, build relationships, and learn what he could from them.

Barring that, he didn’t mention in the e-mail, he’d simply buy a ticket to the inaugural event himself and sit in the crowd. He didn’t even need to sit in the front row and announce his presence or anything. He may be trying out for the company, and he may be the son of a wrestling legend, but he didn’t feel any desire to call undue attention to himself on a show in which he wasn’t even wrestling. He wanted the crowd’s focus to be where it should be: on the performers inside the ring.

As for John, at this moment he was exercising on the ringside mat in the Inferno Wrestling Academy, jumping rope, dressed in white workout clothes. The unusually cold weather San Francisco was experiencing had not let up from two days ago, but John had jogged two miles here from home just like he had every day for the past month. And when it was time for class, he usually arrived there via public transit; he really only used his car for other, out-of-the-way activities like going out on dates, participating in wrestling events, and that sort of thing.

After spending half an hour jumping rope, John works on the treadmill for an hour, and then lifts weights, completing his workout by getting some time in with a kickboxing bag while trainer Joe Ernest holds it for him. By the time he’d done that for twenty minutes, the Academy was bustling with activity, from camera crews setting up to record guys cutting promos, to guys working on the various exercise equipment, to other people merely standing around and chatting.

“Hey, John,” says a familiar voice from behind him, and John turns around with a start, having been so focused on what he was doing that he hadn’t even realized how many people were in here. Let alone that his uncle, “The Tiger” Brian Grant, had arrived.

“Uncle Brian,” John says, clasping his hand and sharing a manly one-armed hug with him. At 5’10”, Brian was a head shorter than his 6’3” nephew, who in turn was overshadowed (both physically and in terms of reputation) by his 6’9” father Steve, the “Blue Inferno”, who’d won more championships than John had ever [i]heard[/i] of. But John didn’t have nearly the brute strength that his father had had during his wrestling career, which was one of many reasons that the 18-year-old had emulated his uncle Brian’s style far more than Steve’s. Brian had practically no brute force whatsoever in his approach to wrestling; he was very much a high-flying light-heavyweight, through and through.

As John greets his uncle, he notices that Brian was accompanied by someone else. And how could he [i]not[/i] notice it? The man in question, standing easily seven feet tall and weighing, by a conservative estimate, 285 pounds, was a bald, black, wall of muscle, clearly a current or former bodybuilder. And he’s looking at John with the cool, yet intense confidence of someone who believed in his ability to beat the living hell out of anyone he came across. John wouldn’t doubt that in a moment.

“John,” Brian says by way of introduction, “this gentleman here is Jamal Richards.”

“Jamal,” John says in acknowledgement, extending his hand for a handshake. After a brief moment, Jamal accepts the handshake. Firm grip; no surprise there.

“He’s 32 years old, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, a four-year All-American linebacker at Florida State University and member of their 1999 National Championship team as a senior; and he played three years in the NFL as a member of the Dallas Cowboys. He graduated from the Inferno Wrestling Academy in ‘05, and competes in the heavyweight division of the National Wrestling Organization of Japan, where he currently holds their Television Championship.

“I brought him here today as your opponent.”

John looks at Jamal, his expression becoming more and more incredulous as Brian runs down the resumé of this impressive specimen. Finally, John says, “You can’t be serious.” And immediately he curses himself for saying that; he knew Brian would jump all over him for that.

If anything, John’s reaction made Jamal look even more smug than he already was. And Brian did, indeed, take John to task for saying that.

“I’ve been accused of a number of things, John, but I’m pretty sure ‘being a comedian’ isn’t one of them. You’ve sparred with myself, your father, Nick, Barry, and Antonio long enough. You’re starting to get used to it. But now you’ve been accepted by the World Wrestling Alliance; you’re gonna face all kinds of different opponents. You think Steve didn’t face guys of all shapes and sizes on his way to five NEW World Heavyweight Championships?”

“Unless you want to prove that your graduating this Academy was a joke, and your father went easy on you,” Jamal adds.

[i]That[/i] did it. “Hey, I’ll take on [i]any[/i]body, [i]any[/i]time,” John says, staring up at Jamal as his face begins to match the intensity of his much larger, far more accomplished opponent.

“Sounds good to me,” Brian says. “As it so happens, I’m wearing my referee hat today, so Jamal, get stretched up, and let’s get this show on the road.”

“I’m ready right now,” Jamal replies, glaring down at John. Brian simply shrugs, and John adjusts his wristbands, preparing himself for the fight of his life.

“Oh, and by the way—just so I can see what both of you are [i]really[/i] made of—this match will be a no-disqualifications match,” Brian adds. “So this is no time to be lacking confidence, John.”

Gazing once more at the chiseled physique of his opponent, who seemed to be smiling even wider than when John had first expressed his doubts, the young man simply says, “You’ve got [i]that[/i] right.”

[b]Twenty minutes later…[/b]

If someone had spoken to John twenty-five minutes ago, he wouldn’t have believed that person when told that twenty-five minutes later, he’d actually be in a position to win this match. In fact, the first seven minutes of the match had gone extremely badly for John, as he’d taken power move after power move from Jamal, everything from a three powerbombs to a spinebuster to a gorilla press sidewalk slam.

But when Jamal had made the mistake of going to the outside to grab a metal folding chair and lifting John to his feet with the intention of whipping him off the ropes and hitting a drop toe-hold onto the chair, John had flown back off the ropes with a flying forearm, taking Jamal down to his back. Quickly grabbing the chair, John had waited until Jamal got to his feet, and then practically fused the chair into the former Navy SEAL’s skull, not even bothering to fold the chair back up before doing so. The satisfying sound of metal striking bone had sent an “OOOOOH!” throughout all of those watching at the Academy.

The match had gone much better for John after that. Focusing his attacks on the right knee of the larger man, beating him down with punches, kicks and chair shots, he’d been able to keep Jamal from putting too much weight on it for the rest of the contest. Throw in a figure-four leglock, an STF, and even—thanks to a sudden burst of strength—a Fisherman suplex—and Jamal’s knee was pretty thoroughly savaged.

Just a moment ago, John had hit a Russian legsweep, bringing Jamal down again, in the center of the ring. Now he stood perched up on the top turnbuckle, where—showing his respect to a legend of yore by flashing the “I Love You” sign—he jumps off and connects with a Superfly Splash. He didn’t get quite the same elevation on it as he had in his recent match against Antonio Mason, but when Brian’s hand went down for the three-count, and Jamal wasn’t able to kick out, “The Lion” John Grant had won the contest.

A great cheer came up from the assembled wrestlers and technicians as Brian raises John’s hand in victory, and a chant of “JOHNNY! JOHNNY! JOHNNY!” started—which John noticed had actually been started by fellow ’09 Academy graduate Barry Andrews. When they’d started out in the Academy together, the 25-year-old former hockey player had called John “Spoon Boy” after the alleged silver spoon John had been born with in his mouth, but just like with Violet, as they’d persevered together, they’d become close friends.

Well…

Barry wasn’t exactly as close a friend to John as Violet was.

Speaking of his girlfriend, John didn’t see her in the crowd today, much to his disappointment. At least he knew that the match, just like the one with Antonio, had been thoroughly and professionally taped by the Academy’s camera crew.

As Jamal lifts himself to his feet, politely shrugging off John’s offer of assistance, he can see the grudging admiration in the eyes of his defeated opponent. After a moment, Jamal offers his hand, and John cautiously takes it.

“Great match,” Jamal says, and John nods in agreement. “Game for a rematch sometime?”

“You bet,” John replies, and the two of them share a manly hug.

[b]Ten minutes later…[/b]

John stood ringside with the Academy’s resident interviewer, Alex Yost, who’d been one of the many people in attendance during the impromptu match. Actually, he’d shown up right as the contest was about to get underway, which had made John wonder if Alex had some kind of sixth sense for these sorts of things. He wasn’t dressed in his usual suit, however—he wore a black T-shirt and blue jeans.

“John Grant, a word with you, please. Going into this match fellow former Academy graduate Jamal Richards, you were most definitely the underdog. Given no preparation time beforehand, how did you triumph today against the current Television Champion of the National Wrestling Organization of Japan?”

Shaking his head slightly in disbelief, John says, “Well, to be honest with you, Alex—early on, I thought I was pretty thoroughly screwed. Richards clearly had me very well-scouted, and it seemed I couldn’t do anything right for the first seven, eight minutes of the match. But he got a little cocky going for that chair; he couldn’t leave well enough alone, and that was pretty obviously the turning point of the match.”

“We just got word today that you have earned a tryout match in the World Wrestling Alliance for their second WWA: Underground show on January 22. On the pre-show, you’ll take on Kid Cool and Willy Murdoch in a triangle match. Do you have anything to say to your upcoming opponents?”

“Yeah, I do,” John says, giving a half-smile before continuing. “This is my one and only try-out match for the WWA, and I intend to make the most out of it. Kid Cool, Willy Murdoch, I’ve got 39 days until it’s time to step into a WWA ring, and start making a name for myself as one of the hottest up-and-coming young superstars in the business. And if you think I’m going to spend those 39 days relaxing at the beach and playing video games, you obviously don’t know who you’re dealing with.

“I’m gonna train hard, I’m gonna study videotape, and I’m gonna battle the best that the Academy can throw at me. I will continue developing my style, learning what works and improving upon—or discarding—what doesn’t work. And when the time comes for me to step through that curtain, you’d better understand that I’ve got nothing to lose by going all-out and bringing the fight right to you. It may be a match on the pre-show, but I’m gonna treat it like a pay-per-view main event, and I’ll be out there to put on one hell of a show for the fans, and to come away with a resounding victory that’ll make the WWA establishment come tripping over themselves to sign me.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, Alex, I’ve got more work to do. The match’ll be here before you know it.”

As John walks off-camera, Alex says, “Of course. ‘The Lion’ John Grant, everyone. He made a statement tonight with his outstanding match and victory over Jamal Richards; and in 39 days he’ll compete in a three-way match for a chance to earn a WWA contract.”

#johngrant #rp #oc rp #e-wrestling

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theliberaltony · 6 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

America is a young punk country with a knack for reinvention — political traditions don’t stick to our ribs. In case you needed any proof, look to California. Not 30 years ago, it helped elect George H.W. Bush, part of a 20-year streak of voting for Republican presidential candidates, including two of its own native sons, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Arianna Huffington was a prominent California Republican many, many naps ago, and Joan Didion was an unabashed Goldwater Girl who once wrote that if Barry Goldwater had “remained the same age and continued running, I would have voted for him in every election.”

But times have changed. “California,” especially for those of us who come from “not California” — that gray, dreary expanse that extends for 2,500 miles east and north of the state — has become shorthand for “liberal.” A sanctuary state powered by Moonjuice and tech money, it has become a defiant Democratic anchor in the Trump era, ironic for a place that rests on inherently shaky ground. Hillary Clinton won it with 61.5 percent of the vote in 2016, turning even Republican enclaves like Orange County blue.

Throughout more than two decades of shifts, Sen. Dianne Feinstein has remained a California constant. But as Feinstein campaigns this year for a sixth term, the state’s unabashed liberalism has given her a rough go of it. Progressives have deemed her to be insufficiently left-leaning — she was booed at a 2017 town hall for saying she wasn’t for single-payer health care — and now she’s facing a more serious primary challenger than she’s seen in many years: Kevin de León, a progressive state senator from Los Angeles. Thanks to the state’s “jungle primary” on Tuesday, in which the top two vote getters regardless of party move on to the general election, de León could well remain a thorn in Feinstein’s side all the way through November.

De León’s progressive politics and origin story as the son of a single immigrant mother are in line with the left-leaning tilt of present-day California. He’s for single-payer health care, has criticized Feinstein for taking too centrist a stance on immigration in a heavily Latino state, and has made environmental issues front and center in his campaign, winning the endorsement of billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer. Feinstein, on the other hand, seems somewhat out of step with the state grass roots, though she’s been tacking left during the primary election; she didn’t secure the Democratic Party’s endorsement at a state convention in February, and she lost endorsements from the Service Employees International Union and the California Nurses Association to de León. Given the advantage of her incumbency and fundraising, those moves were largely symbolic — but powerfully so. They cast Feinstein as a California politician of another era, one that favored moderates rather than excoriated them.

But it’s unlikely that this is the year something changes. Feinstein is heavily favored to win — recent polls put her as much as 24 points ahead of de León.

So why hasn’t California, blue as blue can be, moved past its moderate senator? The state’s population shifts have moved it steadily into the safely Democratic column, but that doesn’t mean that its electorate is progressive enough — or angry enough at the Democratic establishment status quo — to rock the boat.

The Consummate Moderate

When Dianne Feinstein won her first Senate race in 1992, 47 percent of the state electorate was Democratic, and 40 percent was Republican. Two years later, she faced a close re-election battle against Republican Michael Huffington and won by only 2 points.

Her ideological leanings at the time reflected the relatively competitive political environment. In her first Congress, Feinstein was considered a moderate Democrat based on her DW-Nominate score, which rates members on a scale from -1 (most liberal) to +1 (most conservative). Feinstein had a -0.302 DW-Nominate score; for comparison, her fellow senator from California, Barbara Boxer, had a score of -0.439, which was on the liberal end of things for that Congress.

Present-day California looks much different than it did when Feinstein became a senator: 45 percent of the electorate are now registered as Democrats, and 25 percent as Republicans. Feinstein won her last election by 23 points.

Yet Feinstein’s current DW-Nominate score (-0.267) is more moderate than the one she started with. Her fellow California senator, Kamala Harris, has a -0.706 score, which is nearly as left as liberals go in the highly polarized 115th Congress. Feinstein has voted with President Trump 26.4 percent of the time, though based on Trump’s 2016 vote margin in California, she would have been expected to support him on just 19.5 percent of votes. By contrast, Harris would have been expected to vote with Trump 19.3 percent of the time, but her Trump score is only 15.1 percent.1 Feinstein was booed at a speaking engagement last summer for saying that she hoped Trump would become a good president.

Longtime Feinstein adviser Bill Carrick called the accusations from California progressives that she isn’t liberal enough for the state “ridiculous.”

“She voted against every single serious, substantive issue that has come on the floor against Trump — she has a long history of being out there on progressive issues like choice and the environment and economic fairness, civil rights,” he said. “Just because someone has a narrative doesn’t mean it’s true.”

Feinstein has always been viewed somewhat skeptically by the most left-wing factions of the Democratic Party, according to progressive columnist and longtime California political watcher Harold Meyerson, former editor at LA Weekly. The first time he remembered seeing Feinstein was at the 1990 Democratic state convention, when she was running for governor against Republican Pete Wilson and looking to prove her moderate bona fides. “She said something to deliberately get the delegates to boo her by asserting her support for the death penalty,” Meyerson said. “I remember sitting there with folks in the press section saying, ‘Damn, she said that and she’s going to get an ad out of that.’”2 The problem with Feinstein, Meyerson said, “is that she’s still living in that California which no longer exists.”

The booing, it would appear, is a career-long trend.

California changed

Feinstein’s tenure has overlapped with two major demographic changes in California: an ever more diverse racial makeup and ever-shifting patterns of economic migration.

In 1992, when Feinstein was first elected, California was home to nearly 30 million people, 57 percent of whom were non-Hispanic white, 26 percent Latino and 10 percent Asian. Now the white population has fallen to 38 percent, while Latinos have risen to 39 percent and Asians to 14 percent of the state’s population of nearly 39 million. The implications of that are easy enough to ascertain: The growth of these Democratic-leaning populations has only served to strengthen the party’s foothold in the state.

Just as important, though, has been the state’s economic migration since the end of the Cold War.

The recession of the early 1990s hit California hard. During the Cold War, the state was a magnet for aerospace and defense dollars, but as the decades-old international tensions wound down, so did spending in the military-industrial complex that had served as a tent pole of the state economy. The effects of federal defense spending cuts were percussive. According to a 1995 report from the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, there were 337,000 California aerospace jobs in 1990 but only 191,000 by 1994. A 1998 report estimated that the state lost 720,000 total jobs during the downturn.

Residents began to leave California in droves. According to a 2000 report from the Public Policy Institute of California, the state saw a net loss of 2 million people from 1990 to 1999. Washington, Texas and Arizona were the top destinations for California expats, 71 percent of whom were white. Most who left were in families with children, and just under half of adults leaving the state had a high school education or less. About 700,000 were “poor or near poor.” The economic opportunity in the state had dried up for those used to the state’s Cold War paradigm — largely middle-class and lower-middle-class Californians.

While white, middle-class residents were leaving, wealthy, well-educated whites from states like Illinois and New York arrived as the state’s tech sector grew. Between 2007 and 2016, California had a net loss of residents but saw migration gains among those who made at least $110,000 after they moved to the state, according to an analysis by Brian Uhler and Justin Garosi of the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

“There’s two big factors driving domestic migration in California,” Uhler said. “California is more likely to have net out-migration than in-migration just because it’s more expensive to live here. But there’s a counterweight, at least in certain parts of the economic cycle, of higher income and job growth in California than the rest of the country, especially in the Bay Area.”

Eric McGhee, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, said that many of California’s well-educated white migrants were operating in a new sector with new norms and practices, and that had the effect of changing political attitudes in the state. “It was socially liberal, and economically, it was reasonably conservative but not super conservative,” he said of the new Silicon Valley culture, a stark contrast from the old-economy jobs that had once dominated the state. “Just a different kind of person fills these kind of jobs.”

California’s economic transition helped make the state’s white population more primed to vote Democratic. In 2016, California’s white electorate favored Clinton over Trump by 5 points, bucking the national trend for the white vote. This might also be because of the high education level of white people in California compared with white people nationwide: 42 percent of non-Hispanic whites in California have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with the white national average of 31 percent, and Americans with higher educational attainment favored Clinton over Trump.

There were signs prior to 2016 that California’s white population was more likely to buck the demographic’s nationwide trend of voting Republican. Whites in California flip-flopped between Republicans and Democrats, voting for Bush, Obama and Romney. White women in California voted Democratic since the 2004 Kerry/Bush election.

“Everyone talks about the diversity part,” McGhee said, referring to California’s growing Latino and Asian cohort, “but if you look at the demographic complexion of Texas, it’s actually very similar [to California], and yet Texas is much more Republican. And it’s not because the Latino population in Texas votes Republican. It’s because the white population votes Republican. It’s a combination of these two things that has pushed California way heavily into the Democratic camp.”

Yet Feinstein is still the favorite

So if the state is getting bluer, why Feinstein and not de León?

First, it helps to be an incumbent. Feinstein’s campaign cash reserves top $10 million compared with less than $700,000 for de León, and she has received endorsements from the likes of former President Obama along with numerous state officials and newspapers. “If this were an open seat in a different political environment with a different president, de León would be a strong contender,” the Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote. “But Feinstein’s experience and influence are too important to pass up.”

And there are cultural forces at play, too. California went from tilting blue to becoming the undeniable fortress of the Resistance in the span of a couple of decades. But just because there are more Democratic-leaning voters in the state doesn’t mean that there are enough lefties to swing the balance toward a less “establishment” candidate like de León.

California’s white population, which tilts slightly more conservative than the rest of the state, holds outsized sway in its open primaries and the state’s general elections. According to a 2017 analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California, 61 percent of the state’s likely general election voters are white, though non-Hispanic whites only account for 43 percent of the adult population; Latinos are 18 percent of likely voters but 34 percent of the adult population. Homeowners are also more likely to cast ballots in California than its many renters facing sky-high housing costs: Sixty-four percent of likely voters were homeowners, while 66 percent of unregistered adults were renters.

The state’s primary electorate is similarly skewed. In a 2014 analysis of 11 election cycles, McGhee showed that the state’s primary electorate tends to be much less diverse, with fewer young voters. The 2012 fall general election, for example, had a 7-point higher share of Latino voters than the primary.

California voters are also more ideologically split than what the state’s reputation might project. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, whites in California identify about evenly as liberal (36 percent) and conservative (39 percent), with 25 percent saying they are “middle of the road” politically. Latinos identify more as liberal (38 percent), with 29 percent calling themselves “middle of the road” and 33 percent identifying as conservative. Black and Asian voters, smaller portions of the state electorate, identify much more solidly liberal.

The Senate primary, like so many other inter-Democratic battles since the 2016 election, has debated the virtues of vocal systemic change versus the power of establishment influence in uncertain times. California voters might not be as radical as their reputation makes them out to be. Many appear comfortable with the status quo or are prospering in the new California. Garosi pointed out that many of the state’s debates are over traditionally nonpartisan issues. “One of the interesting things about California is that a lot of our political conflicts aren’t so much left vs. right as pro-development vs. anti-development,” he said.

Now that California is so deeply Democratic, how its future politics will shake out is an open question. What is sure is that the electorate will look very different in the future. McGhee said California is going through what he calls an “eligibility revolution,” with Latino and Asian residents becoming eligible to vote faster than the same populations in other states. “All the growth in the Latino community is the children of Latino immigrants who are citizens,” he said.

“There’s a lot change going on, and there’s nothing you can do to stop that. You can crush the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring — that’s just inexorable change.”

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Clare Malone

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sciencespies · 4 years ago

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Southwest Bird Die-off Caused by Long-Term Starvation

https://sciencespies.com/news/southwest-bird-die-off-caused-by-long-term-starvation/

Southwest Bird Die-off Caused by Long-Term Starvation

In early fall, thousands of migratory birds turned up dead across the southwestern United States, and now researchers say they’ve figured out why, reports Theresa Davis for the Albuquerque Journal.

A new report based on necropsies conducted by the USGS’s National Wildlife Health Center in Wisconsin suggests that the die-off was caused by long-term starvation and was likely exacerbated by a spate of freakishly cold weather, reports Phoebe Weston for the Guardian. Estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of birds may have died and nearly 10,000 dead birds were reported to a wildlife mortality database by citizen scientists, per the Guardian.

Scientists arrived at starvation as the most likely cause of death in the majority of the birds they examined based on depleted fat deposits, empty stomachs, small amounts of blood, kidney failure and shrunken flying muscles, reports the Associated Press. Many birds also had irritated lung tissues.

While the findings didn’t identify a single, direct cause of death, they ruled out poisoning, disease and parasites as potential culprits, reports Kevin Johnson for Audubon.

“It looks like the immediate cause of death in these birds was emaciation as a result of starvation,” Jonathan Sleeman, director of the USGS National Wildlife Health Center where the necropsies were conducted, tells the Guardian. “It’s really hard to attribute direct causation, but given the close correlation of the weather event with the death of these birds, we think that either the weather event forced these birds to migrate prior to being ready, or maybe impacted their access to food sources during their migration.”

Martha Desmond, an ecologist at New Mexico State University, tells Algernon D’Ammassa of the Las Cruces Sun News that she expects similar findings to emerge from a second analysis being conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which she says “should be released soon.”

Migrating birds arrived in New Mexico in “poor body condition” with some birds already beginning to starve, according to a statement from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. “The unusual winter storm exacerbated conditions, likely causing birds to become disoriented and fly into objects and buildings,” the statement continues. “Some were struck by vehicles and many landed on the ground where cold temperatures, ice, snow and predators killed them.”

Desmond tells Audubon that the birds may have arrived in the southwestern U.S. already starving in part because of severe drought afflicting the region.

“It’s been extremely dry here this year, so seed production is low and insect numbers are low,” says Desmond, who helped organize research efforts to study the die-off. With less food, the birds would have lacked the stores of energy needed to complete their grueling migrations.

Though the first reports of dead birds started coming in on August 20, an unseasonably cold storm blew in around Labor Day and coincided with the largest number of observed deaths, per the Guardian. Beginning on September 9, temperatures in Albuquerque plummeted from a high of 97 degrees to lows of 39 degrees, wrote John C. Mittermeier in an October blog post for the American Bird Conservancy. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the cold snap broke a 105-year-old record for the lowest temperatures seen at that time of year and was accompanied by high winds that toppled power lines in the area.

The frigid conditions and high winds sent large numbers of birds flying lower in search of some respite, according to Audubon. Some may have become disoriented, leading to deadly collisions with buildings and cars, but most were simply forced to land. “A lot of birds in that kind of weather can’t do anything except land on the ground,” Kerry Mower, a scientist with New Mexico Game and Fish, tells Audubon. “Many birds got caught in the snow and ice storm, and probably froze to death right there on the ground.”

According to the Guardian, researchers and members of the public raised concerns over the last few months speculating that the fires in California might have re-routed birds through the Chihuahuan desert and contributed to the die-off. However, the report did not find any signs of smoke damage in the lungs of the examined birds.

Jon Hayes, executive director of Audubon Southwest, tells Audubon he thinks the birds may have re-routed before incurring serious lung damage.

Ultimately, Hayes and Desmond say drought and the bout of unseasonal, extreme weather point to one ultimate cause of the die-off: climate change.

#News

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jezfletcher · 4 years ago

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1000 Albums, 2020: Top Tracks #50-26

Hey folks! After the fun and excitement of counting down my top albums of 2020, I'm launching straight into my top tracks. Today, we're counting down numbers 50-26, which will leave the Top 25 as a Christmas present from me to you tomorrow. I don't know exactly how many tracks I've listened to this year, but I conservatively estimate more than 12,000, which puts these tracks in the top 0.4% of all the music I've heard this year. YouTube versions of the songs are included where possible. I belatedly discovered that I can also embed Bandcamp links as well, which is probably a better option, from a "supporting artists" perspective. If you stumble upon something you like, go buy it on Bandcamp. Apologies if the video clips for any of these are wildly offensive—I have not at all vetted them before embedding them. Enjoy!

50. L.E.J. - Pas Peur (French chamber folk)

youtube

I’m starting off this write-up with this excellent bit of folk—a sultry chanson, backed with low strings that develop into a full little chamber ensemble. I’m perhaps demoting this down to a fairly low position because I heard this track as a single, and was thrilling in excitement for the release of their album, which consisted of this song, and a whole bunch of songs that sounded nothing like this song. So it’s a standout, but it’s not necessarily a sign that L.E.J. is an artist I want to follow in general.

49. Avec Sans - Altitude (vapor pop)

youtube

When I first heard this track, I loved it a lot, especially the contrast between the restrained, almost plinky verses, and the smash of drums and synths which mark the start of the chorus. The rolls of the hihat and the fuzzy synth bass are overt and intense and I love it. Overall, it ended up not quite being of the same depth and character as many of the tracks above it though.

48. Trixie Mattel - Malibu (pop rock)

youtube

Trixie Mattel is such a fascinating artist, and she’s a genuinely great songwriter too—far outstripping most (all?) of her RuPaul’s Drag Race cohort. This is a great bit of pop rock, the kind of thing I absolutely groove along to and sing at the top of my lungs (at least until we get to the falsetto swoop in the chorus). I will absolutely keep following Trixie Mattel’s career as long as she’s producing music.

47. Beans on Toast - Logic Bomb (jazz folk)

youtube

The top track from Beans on Toast this year is this jazzy number, performed with his new full band, and filled with pessimistic predictions about the fall of the world through the computers we depend on. I’m far more sanguine about the world he describes, so I’m left to enjoy the groove and the gentle horn riff which launches each new doomsaying verse.

46. Nelson Kempf - Family Dollar (art folk)

youtube

A long, slightly meandering adventure in avant-garde folk, with Kempf’s conversational lyrics, found sound recordings like announcements at an airport, and the persistent presence of gently struck marimba or xylophone. It’s a great piece of music, although it’s also one which is hard to think about as a catchy tune—it’s certainly not something that gets in my head all that much, which is probably why it’s languishing a bit in the 40s. But every time I’m reminded of it, and listen to it, I do enjoy going through it again.

45. Marcelyn - Guilloteens (experimental folk rock)

youtube

I switched from Google Play Music (shutting down, of course) to Spotify about half way through this year, and as a result, my Spotify end-of-year list was jank, missing anything from the first half of the year, and lacking much of my revision listening. I say all of this because of all the songs I’d heard since switching, this was apparently my most listened-to on Spotify. It’s certainly not a bad song, and it’s a song which won Track of the Week the week it came out—but it’s also languishing in the mid-40s on my end of the year list, so it’s not genuinely a standout. But it is very solid, especially the shifting vocal harmonies from an evocative chorus. It’s certainly a song which makes me keep an eye on Marcelyn in the future.

44. Little Big - Hypnodancer (funeral rave)

youtube

It’s one of the great tragedies of 2020 (you know, along with all the sickness and dying) that there was no 2020 Eurovision Song Contest, because Little Big, progenitors of the hardstyle analog “funeral rave” were going to represent Russia. Which possibly would have been one of the only times I would have been cheering for that country come voting time. Anyway, the song they were taking to the competition was not this one, but another called UNO. But this is better, capturing the pop aesthetic into a hard 90s underground techno beat. Maybe we’ll get to see them again in 2021.

43. Walk Off The Earth feat. Harm & Ease - Toxic (eclectic pop cover)

youtube

Prolific indie pop coverers Walk Off The Earth have seemingly come up with a neverending stream of singles this year, none of which seem to be obviously pointing to a new album—especially given that their last album (my #2 album of 2019) was released towards the end of last year. But I keep listening to and enjoying their fun cover versions. This one, done with philosophical stablemates Harm & Ease builds into a great, raucous singalong version of one of the millennium’s pop classics.

42. Stormzy feat. Aitch - Pop Boy (grime)

youtube

I’m very conscious of the general lack of hip hop on my end of year list. It’s a genre that I think is ill-served by its most prominent examples currently. Kanye, Lil Uzi Vert, Drake—all have an extremely thin production quality and a drawly delivery that lacks the rhythm that really helps the style. But grime (and UK rap more generally) seems to get the point of what makes the style worthwhile. With a kicking beat, rhythmic delivery that lands its rhymes beautifully, Pop Boy is probably the best bit of grime this year. Stormzy and Aitch trading flows is genuinely fun to watch. I’m also glad that I have a new grime favourite after its Godfather outed himself as a raging anti-Semite earlier in the year. Stormzy seems pretty chill by comparison.

41. The Fratellis - Six Days in June (pop rock)

youtube

The Fratellis are a band who are absolutely rocking the late era of their career. Their 2018 album In Your Own Sweet Time was an absolutely cracking set of music, and if this lead single is anything to go by, their 2021 album is going to be similar. Swinging in 6/8, and with a horn section to add something of an orchestral sound to their accessible pop rock, this is a great track.

40. MOBS - Big World (80s pastiche pop)

youtube

These guys did an amazingly fun album this year, taking a broad kind of funky electropop and embracing all of the biggest 80s tropes. This one leans on the synth horns, and some working synths that you just know have the black and white keys reversed. It’s a jumpy, poppy, danceable track—one of the ones this year that’s most likely to get me grooving.

39. The Lemon Twigs - The One (alt rock)

youtube

A great piece of music (albeit one from an even better album), this is almost a kind of throwback alt rock—it has elements of the 80s to it, more poppy than the Cure, but maybe containing a similar kind of theatricality to it. It’s very happy to swing between high tenor vocals and squealing guitars for its drama. But on top of everything, it’s just a great bit of pop rock.

38. The Cuckoos - Weekend Lover (glam rock)

There’s something that you’ll likely see over and over again in this list, especially if you listen to the tracks and look for similarities. And it’s a driving, perhaps slightly repetitive riff in a pop rock song. This has a great one, incorporating bass and synths, and working in counterpoint to the straight up percussion line. It’s something of a formula that works really well for me, and you’ll see it a number of times on this list.

37. MisterWives - It’s My Turn (indie pop)

youtube

MisterWives are absolute stars of the music project. In 2017, the last time they really released much music, they had my #1 song of the year for Machine, and also took out #3 on my albums list. This year’s album didn’t do quite as well, but it’s hard to deny there are some pop bangers on it, like this one, their top entry this year. It’s a lot of fun, with manic, colourful energy. Sure, it’s not a #1 track of the year this time around, but I defy you not to have some fun with it.

36. Sammy Brue - Pendulum Thieves (alt country)

youtube

A fabulous piece of country rock, about stealing a bit of time back—maybe you want an extra minute with a lover in a perfect moment, or maybe you want to take back a fight. It’s nicely done with an anthemic chorus and some harmonic slide guitar in the background. Great piece of music.

35. TheFatRat feat. Laura Brehm - We’ll Meet Again (pop EDM)

youtube

Just a great piece of dance music. It has a great riff that evokes other classic dance numbers from the past 10 years like Clean Bandit’s Rather Be, throwing in a bit of grunty wobble bass for good measure. It’s short and sweet and catchy, and I like it for that.

34. Starbenders - Holy Mother (glam rock)

youtube

A track that came out of nowhere the week it was released, because I didn’t overly love the album. But this is just a full-throated bit of stomping glam rock that I couldn’t go past it for song of the week. Incidentally, Sam liked the album a whole bunch more than me and we ended up both giving this particular song a nod. It’s just a raucous, fun bit of music with a singalong chorus I often find myself headbanging along with.

33. Minh Beta - Let’s Fight COVID! (Vietnamese coronavirus pop)

youtube

Absolutely one of my iconic songs of 2020, this is a straight up pop banger released as a PSA by Minh Beta about the best ways to stop the spread of COVID-19 in his home country of Vietnam. It also has an excellent video clip[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSiK7U46PfA] with anthropomorphised superhero versions of things like “Wear a Mask”, “Don’t spread Facebook conspiracy theories” and “Don’t share your ice cream cone with your mates”. It’s apparently a re-skin of Minh Beta’s previous track “Viet Nam Oi!”, but we’ll forgive it for being a timely readjustment for a good reason (personally, I credit about 90% of the success that Vietnam has had containing Covid to this song). And also, it just absolutely slaps.

32. Kiesza feat. Lick Drop, Cocanina & Shan Vincent De Paul - Dance With Your Best Friend (pop)

youtube

You know this might be the highest track of pure unadulterated pop. There’s nothing subversive or quirky about this—this is just a catchy pop track. It’s helped along its path by some great rapping from Cocanina, and a bit of that laddish vocal quality from Shan Vincent De Paul with the London accent of Rat Boy and Yungblud. Just a fun bit of music.

31. Ultrahappyalarm - Messy Gyaru (happy hardcore)

CRITICAL DAYDREAM by ULTRA HAPPY ALARM

It has been so many years since I’ve heard a true bit of happy hardcore like this. It has all the things I loved about the style in the 90s, but it brings with it a complexity to the production which ensures that you can’t just immediately pick apart the tracks. This was the standout on a great set of variegated techno in Ultrahappyalarm’s EP Critical Daydream. More happy hardcore for 2021, please.

30. Saint Saviour - Taurus (chamber folk)

youtube

Instrumentally, this is such a beautiful combination of piano and strings, with cello dominant, and a set of beautifully blending folk voices over the top. Later, it brings in some soft percussion to bring it home. Hauntingly though, the repeated piano ostinato is layered with a counterpoint of vocals in the final section. It gives me chills.

29. Kate Rusby - Love of the Common People (indie folk cover)

youtube

I clearly love this song, originally a standard, but most famously recorded by Paul Young, because there were two separate covers this year which reached my end-of-the-week list of best tracks. This, however, is the better of the two. It has a soft kind of electronic folk quality to it, and Rusby’s sweet, unaffected vocals perfectly fit into the mix. I’ll admit that much of the credit for this being so high has to go to the original songwriters—the team that also wrote “Son of a Preacher Man”. TIL.

28. Seazoo - Honey Bee (indie pop rock)

youtube

A lovely bit of pop rock, clearly a genre I like, especially when it has a catchy, slightly unusual riff to it. In this case, it’s a repeated rhythmic guitar stab that plays against the snare backbeat, creating this persistent sense of rocking back and forward. The rest of the song is solid enough to keep it moving, and a late guitar solo kicks it into another geat.

27. City Mouth - Sanity For Summer (indie pop rock)

youtube

A fantastic bit of upbeat pop rock. It starts with a melodic theme, then absolutely blasts out a manic piano riff which becomes the energetic motor of the track. Mostly, it’s just catchy, energetic music that makes you want to get up and dance. We need tracks like that this year.

26. Cory Wong & Chris Thile - Bluebird (jazz-bluegrass crossover)

youtube

Cory Wong has had a really strong year this year, releasing a full album, a live album, and two paired EPs. This comes from Dawn, the lighter, brighter of the EPs, and pairs his excellent guitar work with the sublime mandolin of every one’s favourite mandolinist. This is just exceptionally virtuosic work from both of these guys, and the combination just ratchets up the quality.

#1000albums #best of the year #albums #songs

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