This is great science writing. And if this happened today, unlike an excess of plant food in the atmosphere, it probably really would wipe out humanity, or at least a great portion of it.
We could be looking a lot harder for these things, and learning how to deflect them, but Congress would rather build a big monster rocket.
A long article on the reasons we’re not burning it in reactors, including a lot of comments from Kirk Sorensen.
We need one for the Russia collusion set up:
…the most powerful individuals, institutions and interests in America conspired to set up a presidential candidate, and later president-elect, and later still President. Their goal? To defeat him in 2016; should he be elected, to prevent his taking office; and should he take office, to have him removed. And yet it’s precisely these people who accused (and, in many cases, still accuse) Mr. Trump of ‘stealing’ and ‘rigging’ an election, of ‘subverting our democracy.”’This is projection on an unimaginable scale.
Indeed. It also has to dig into the Clinton “investigation,” and see how high the abuse of power and obstruction of justice went.
[Late-afternoon update]
Sorry, broken link is fixed.
When we went to San Diego County last week, we explored some parts of California where we’d never been, even though I’ve lived here for four decades, and it’s not that far. We took a road through the desert from Highway 78 east of Julian south to I-8 at Ocatillo, and we passed by an historical monument for the stage route that ran from St. Louis to San Francisco from 1858 to 1861. It was a 25-day trip, stopping only to change horses and drivers. The monument pointed out that some Mormons had hacked their way through rock to get through the mountains west of Yuma, and then the route had headed north from there to Chino Hills and Los Angeles, then up to San Francisco taking the route of what is now I-5. When we cut across from Perris to I-15 to see the flowers in Riverside County, we ran across more signs for the stage route. Interesting bit of history.
Hint: It wasn’t plants:
Early Americans settlers were “indifferent” farmers, according to many accounts. They were fairly lazy in their efforts at both animal husbandry and agriculture, with “the grain fields, the meadows, the forests, the cattle, etc, treated with equal carelessness,” as one 18th-century Swedish visitor described—and there was little point in farming since meat was so readily available.
Settlers recorded the extraordinary abundance of wild turkeys, ducks, grouse, pheasant, and more. Migrating flocks of birds would darken the skies for days. The tasty Eskimo curlew was apparently so fat that it would burst upon falling to the earth, covering the ground with a sort of fatty meat paste. (New Englanders called this now-extinct species the “doughbird.”)
In the woods, there were bears (prized for their fat), raccoons, bobolinks, opossums, hares, and virtual thickets of deer—so much that the colonists didn’t even bother hunting elk, moose, or bison, since hauling and conserving so much meat was considered too great an effort. A European traveler describing his visit to a Southern plantation noted that the food included beef, veal, mutton, venison, turkeys, and geese, but he does not mention a single vegetable.
Infants were fed beef even before their teeth had grown in. The English novelist Anthony Trollope reported, during a trip to the United States in 1861, that Americans ate twice as much beef as did Englishmen. Charles Dickens, when he visited, wrote that “no breakfast was breakfast” without a T-bone steak. Apparently, starting a day on puffed wheat and low-fat milk—our “Breakfast of Champions!”—would not have been considered adequate even for a servant.
Indeed, for the first 250 years of American history, even the poor in the United States could afford meat or fish for every meal. The fact that the workers had so much access to meat was precisely why observers regarded the diet of the New World to be superior to that of the Old.
Lobster used to be fed to prisoners, because it was considered inferior to other meats. The notion that we ate plants is all part of the junk science of nutrition.
…are furious at Democrats’ defense of Omar.
Meh. Let’s see what they actually do about it.
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
“Like Esther and Mordecai, Jews must not tolerate those who wish to destroy us.”:
I am not suggesting that every Jew should now vote Republican, although that is one of the choices. And this suggestion has nothing to do with and no bearing on supporting or not supporting President Trump. This is about the health of the Democratic Party.
I am suggesting that we should emulate the courage of Mordecai and Esther. Every Jewish Democrat must take a clear stand and withhold all support until the party returns to its traditional values regarding Israel and anti-Semitism. The Democrats are convinced that no matter how they abuse us, we will not turn away. But we must step away, both with votes and finances, until the party puts a stop to the outrageous behavior on the part of this trio. The Democrats need to realize that by accepting this anti-Semitism, they will lose all of their Jewish support.By embracing this concept of “Jexodus,” Jews can make a clear statement to Democratic leaders, and force them to re-evaluate their values and their obligations. The danger is clear: unless we stop these hate-filled anti-Semites from controlling the Democratic Party, we are all in a very real and present danger.
The money is more important than the votes.
[Bumped]
[Sunday-morning update]
When they come for the Jews, they won’t ask questions:
American Jewry is at a crossroads. The vast majority of American Jews will continue to cling to their familiar ancestral belief system; it’s all they know. To change now would be to deny everything their family members and they, themselves, have lived for. But before they bury their heads in the sand once again, they should at least hear these simple truths. When our enemies came for us during the Holocaust, they did not ask if we were Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or secular Jews. Neither were they interested in any past service we rendered for the state. We were Jews. That was all that mattered. If history repeats itself, when our enemies come for us once again, they will not ask if we are Israelis or Zionists. They will not care if we marched in Selma, Alabama; protested against apartheid in South Africa; supported equal rights for women; advocated for the LBGTQ community; and campaigned for Hillary or Bernie. It will matter that we are Jews.
Today’s anti-Semitism, unleashed by the Left and Islamists, is so visceral, virulent, vile, vicious, and vitriolic that it can no longer be justified under the guise of anti-Zionism. In form, content, and message, it is exactly what was seen and heard during the heyday of the Third Reich. It is what made the Holocaust possible. What begins with a parade float in Belgium inevitably ends in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. This is the fate our enemies want for us. This is why Tehran’s Ayatollah Khamenei rejoices that more Jews are moving to Israel — for one grand target.
[Bumped again]
Can Alcantara be salvaged?
This is not a good look. Looks like regulatory capture.
I’ve always thought it was a bad idea to let Boeing have a monopoly on American air transports, and this is probably one of the consequences.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Some aviation-safety experts have been predicting this sort of “automation surprise” for years.
I think part of the problem is that pilots don’t fly the planes any more; they manage them.
[Bumped]
I favored the removal of Saddam Hussein, but I thought that the Bush administration Charlie Foxtrotted the aftermath, particularly with regard to fecklessness with the mullahs. But I was also continually annoyed by the “Bush lied, people died” mantra (not to mention the “War for Oil” nonsense). The only reason WMD was even an issue is that Tony Blair demanded UN approval, which couldn’t be attained without it. Anyway, Ari Fleischer sets the record straight (again).
It was apparently much worse than we thought:
As Kennett noted in a recent article in The Current (a university press maintained by UCSB), the crater would have led to widespread destruction, characterized by biomass burning, megafaunal extinctions and global cooling. “It’s much more extreme than I ever thought when I started this work,” he said. “The more work that has been done, the more extreme it seems.”
The discovery was made possible by a Chilean group of scientists who were studying sediment layers at the well-know Quaternary paleontological and archaeological site, known as Pilauco Bajo. Years ago, these scientists recognized changes in the sediment record that were associated with the YDB impact event.These included a “black mat” layer that coincides with the disappearance of South American megafauna fossils and human artifacts dated to the Pleistocene (12,800 years ago), indicating a severe shift in the climate. This was a major find since the vast majority of evidence for the YDB Impact has been found in the northern hemisphere.
Imagine that happening today. And here we’re obsessing over two degrees Celsius.
Better get moving on that vital SLS, so we can protect ourselves. #NotReally