Another Instagram find; this is Celeste Decaesstecker, who indicates on her Instagram page that she's a fashion model.
I tend to think that's accurate.
She's from Belgium. And that's just about all I need to know.
This is a really good article from Scientific American.
Hey, if you're a Republican, and you don't believe that human activity is changing the Earth's climate ...
or, if you have a loved one that didn't get vaccinated against COVID-19, and, well, died ...
or, if you don't think the Earth is billions of years old ... (sorry if that causes a religious problem) ...
this is one reason why. A very BIG reason.
The Reason Some Republicans Mistrust Science: Their Leaders Tell Them To
"Fair enough, but why do so many Republicans distrust government, including government science, and think scientists are “always getting it wrong”? A large part of the answer is that this is what the party's spokespeople have been saying for 40 years, from the early days of acid rain to our ongoing debates about climate change. It was [pollster Frank] Luntz himself who, more than 20 years ago, designed the Republican party's strategy to fight climate change by insisting there was no scientific consensus on the issue. It has mostly been Republican governors resisting mask mandates, even when science showed they slowed the spread of COVID-19. And it was, by and large, Republican governors lifting those mandates in the spring, even while Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, begged them not to."
My take, and my recommendation: trust the scientists -- they know what they're talking about. At least most of the time. But if a Republican in a position of power (like a governor, or a Congressperson, or a Senator) tells you that the scientists are wrong, they are the ones that very likely in error.
This is a documentary about the changing state of Greenland.
I didn't want to lose it.
Greenland - An Icy and Magical World
Candice Swanepoel may have moved on from her Victoria's Secret angel days. And she's also given birth to two sons, so obviously she doesn't have to try to keep herself in tip-top model shape.
But clearly she still does.
Gun advocates say that guns kept in the house or carried on their person are for self-defense; protection against random burglars and house invaders. (Or armed insurrectionists, if you don't like them.)
And then something like this happens. Is it worth it?
"Prosecutors say the young boy had climbed into his dad's pickup truck through an open door, where he found the loaded Smith & Wesson .40-caliber handgun in the front seat. He then started to play with the weapon, and accidentally shot himself in the head."
I'm totally confident that his father did not want this to happen.
But it did.
Guns kill innocent people.
Though sadly Mitch McConnell is probably still the minority leader (happy that it's still the minority, said that he's still the leader), Kevin McCarthy's leadership fate is still unclear.
Congressional Republicans panic as they watch their lead dwindle
But this is really about Senator Josh Hawley. It comes at the end of this article.
"In an interview published Friday, Hawley told RealClearPolitics, “I’m not going to support the current leadership in the party,” citing gun control and climate-change legislation. “We surrendered when we should’ve fought.”
I've got one word to describe that quote, and him in general.
Ass.
I guess I'm not the only one to think so, especially after the speed he demonstrated when actually threatened by gun-toting Republicans on January 6th, 2021.
In case you missed it, I didn't -- the long-ongoing renovation of Big Ben, the big clock next to the Parliament building, is finally done. So the gong show can ring out again.
Big Ben bongs again five years and $95 million later
Of course, if they ever decide to start over from the foundations, they could do this:
Cassandra, if you don't know, was a prophet of doom that no one believed. (It was basically because the god Apollo wanted her for a sexual conquest, but she turned him down.) So now if someone is called a Cassandra, that means that they're prophesying doom but not getting much traction with the general populace.
This NY Times article is a bit Cassandrish.
We Need to Rethink How to Adapt to the Climate Crisis
"This propensity to rebuild in ways we know are not safe must change. What if Fort Myers Beach had prepared not just for today’s climate threats — preparation that clearly was inadequate for a hurricane like Ian — but also for threats decades ahead, when seas will be higher, rainfall more torrential and storms rapidly intensifying in unpredictable ways? That’s the question scientists and innovative leaders should be training their sights on, in Florida and elsewhere."
So, is anyone who needs to listen to this hearing it? Is anybody that matters paying attention.
I fear that no one is. Especially in Florida.
Cassandra tried to warn her father (the king) and the rest of the Trojans that there were Greeks in that horse. But nobody listened to her.
As I write this, there have been several mass shootings since the one that this post is about. And somehow in this mass shooting only two people were killed other than the 19-year old who carried it out.
But he could have killed a lot more. He had over 600 rounds of ammunition.
How does someone get that much ammunition -- especially a 19-year old kid?
Something is definitely wrong in this country.
 |
| Really? |
There are many, many reasons to advocate for addressing climate change/global warming, which I do. At the top of the list is the endangerment of cold-climate organisms and ecosystems.
And at the top of that list is penguins. Antarctica may seem resistant to the warming climate, but it really isn't, and the lifestyle of those accustomed to its harshness can actually be threatened if the climate becomes less harsh.
Climate change threatens emperor penguins with extinction, officials say"While sea ice around Antarctica has proved more durable than ice near the North Pole, nearly all emperor penguin colonies in the southern continent would be pushed to the brink of extinction by the end of the century without dramatic cuts to global greenhouse gas emissions, scientists projected last year."
"1822 (twice heightened). Active; focal plane 83 m (272 ft); white flash every 3 s. 32 m (105 ft) round tower, lower half concrete-clad (stone?) with a gallery at the top, upper half a tapered 2-stage steel tower with lantern and two more galleries. Lower half of tower is unpainted, upper half painted red. ...
This unusual lighthouse was actually built in three stages. The original tower, now clad in concrete, was about 18 m (60 ft) tall. In 1910, when trees had grown tall enough to obscure the light, a 5 m (17 ft) conical steel tower was added atop the old tower, raising the height to 24 m (79 ft). ...
In 1978, when even more height was required, the tower was extended a second time with a cylindrical steel section. The lighthouse marks Cape Rozewie, the northernmost point of Poland and the western entrance to the Gulf of Gdańsk. The lower section of the lighthouse houses a lighthouse museum with exhibits on all the Polish lighthouses; among the exhibits are the Fresnel lens from Stilo and the lantern from the former German lightship Adlergrund."
This extended post is in reply to a young woman named Amala Ekpunobi, who is associated with Prager University, a very conservative organization. In my efforts to stay informed in how ideological opponents think, I get email messages from a couple of different conservative orgs. Some of them drive me absolutely nuts; I've got some stored up posts that I wanted to reply to, but haven't had the chance. Some are bit outdated now.
But this one caught my eye a few nights ago, and I composed some very rapid replies to her points. So here's the whole thing.
First, the video.
There seems to be a basic declining trend in bugs of all kinds around the world. And one of the indicators of this disturbing trend, which has ecosystemic implications, is less bugs on automobile windshields.
Wait, why are there so few dead bugs on my windshield these days?
This article has text and figures. Here's some text:
"Bugs are also just harder to measure than more widely tracked animals. Their numbers swing wildly year to year, season to season, even sometimes day to day. And while the overall trend leads inexorably downward, it’s not uncommon for individual studies to show a local insect population rising."
One other factor; people drive less on rural roads where there are larger insect populations. So we aren't driving as much where the bugs are. Decades ago on family vacations, before the interstates were finished, our drives on the highways would result in a plethora of bug guts on the windshield.
So things have changed, in more ways than one. It's not all about less bugs, though with less wetlands (especially less swamps, bogs, and eutrophic ponds), there are probably less bugs.
Victoria Justice has always been a bit of an enigma. She starred in Victorious (Nickelodeon) about a decade ago, and looking at her IMDb history, she's been working regularly ever since, but not really catching fire (though she was the lead woman's role in the remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where she also snagged a boyfriend that lasted a couple of years).
She's very, very pretty, but her looks don't have that significant otherness that makes her noticeable and memorable. Nonetheless, she's very, very pretty.
And this Daily Mail article demonstrates that.
And she's very, very pretty (I may have said that already).
Another in an occasional series of posts on the glorious girls of Instagram. This one is dedicated to Liydya (perhaps with a last name of Benjamin), and I don't know much else.
Other than the basic facts of gorgeousness and hotness. And living in Australia. And might be in the real estate market.
https://www.instagram.com/_llyds/
When the asteroid that contributed mightily to the end of the Age of Dinosaurs crashed into what we now know as the Yucatan Peninsula, it made a big crater, which was found millions of years later by seismology and hydrology (because the cenotes define part of the rim). That means that thousands of tons of Earth material got immediately excavated and thrown skyward.
And, now it turns out, it also made a really, really, really big splash. Which makes sense, but science has to definitively determine that these things happened.
I'm linking below to both a public release article about it and the actual paper.
First global tsunami simulation of the Chicxulub Asteroid Impact 66 million years ago (this is from NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, because one of their scientists was a co-author)
"The study authors calculated that the initial energy in the tsunami was up to 30,000 times larger than the energy in the December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake tsunami, which killed more than 230,000 people and is one of the largest tsunamis in the modern record.
“Our study is the first estimate of the global impact of the tsunami generated by the Chicxulub asteroid,” said Vasily Titov, co-author of the study [the scientist from PMEL]. ”The models estimate that virtually all world coastlines experienced catastrophic flooding from that tsunami.”
The Chicxulub Impact Produced a Powerful Global Tsunami (the actual paper)
 |
| "Surf's up, dude." |
A couple of weeks ago, archaeologists found the place where Saint Nicolas, who over the centuries morphed into Santa Claus, was actually buried.
Most of his mortal remains aren't there, because in 1087 some enterprising churchpeople absconded with them and took them to Italy.
But where he was buried is in a church that is under a more modern church, in Turkey.
Here's the article about that:
Exact burial spot of St. Nicholas, inspiration for Santa Claus, discovered in Turkish church
It's in Demre, Turkey, which is here. I actually located the site of the church for my readers.
There are numerous Google Streetview images available; here's one of the grounds including a statue of St. Nic. Other images are both outside and inside.
You've heard of Carthage, right? The place that the warrior and conqueror and rock-breaker Hannibal came from?
Well, presently, Carthage is on the Tunisian coast, officially east of Tunisia and west of Sicily. And that's where the Sidi Bou Saïd lighthouse is located.
See where that is here; zoom out to get the full coastal setting.
When I found this lighthouse, I found out it's the oldest lighthouse in Tunisia. That came from, where else, the Lighthouse Directory. And that's where I also acquired the following information:
"1840. Active; focal plane 146 m (479 ft); white flash every 4 s. 12 m (39 ft) round cylindrical tower with lantern and gallery. Tower painted white with a black band at the top; lantern and gallery painted black. ... This lighthouse, Tunisia's oldest, stands atop a high hill at the northern entrance to the Bay of Carthage (now the Bay of Tunis). The hill is called Jebel el-Manar, "Fire Mountain," because fires were built here as long ago as Phoenician times to guide sailors into the bay."
There aren't a lot of pictures of this one in the online world; here's three.
Wernigerode Castle in Gernany, which I recently became acquainted with, doesn't have the full Sleeping Beauty effect that Neuschwanstein possesses, but it's still a very good looking castle.
Learn some history and see many more pictures of it here:
Wernigerode Castle in the Harz Mountains of Germany
The news: the return of the Teletubbies.
The vastness of the oceans is still hard to comprehend when numbers like those in this article are considered.
And it's pretty important to the future of the oceans to figure out where they went.
"Fishermen across the Pacific northwest face financial ruin after the Alaska Department of Fish and Game canceled the state's lucrative snow crab fishing season in the Bering Sea.I had to check on the difference between King Crab and Snow Crab. This picture helped.
The news will also have a huge bearing on the restaurant industry as price increases and shortages become inevitable. Alaska provides 60 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States.
The decision came after an ADF+G study found that billions of snow crabs had disappeared from the region.
Experts are divided on the cause of the disappearance. Some scientists believe the disappearance is related to migration or starvation, both of which would be connected to climate change."
One of the downsides of the democratic process is that it rarely produces the type of leaders that people think of when they think of a LEADER. For example, this guy is a LEADER:
And leadership isn't exclusively male, of course. The woman below is also clearly a LEADER.
Clearly, being mounted on a horse with a sword helps that leadership perception. But moving forward into modern times, why is it that leaders don't emerge readily from the democratic process?
The simplest answer is that to get into a leadership office in politics, it's hard to be bold, because boldness can offend those who don't agree with where a leader is attempting to boldly go. So politics is the art of compromise, negotiation, deal-making, appealing to ideological opponents, and generally not being offensive. Leadership makes you a target of the opposition, and even your friends if you don't keep them on your good side. (Just ask Julius Caesar.)
This article discusses the problem.
Leaders of democracies increasingly echo Putin in authoritarian tilt
" “The trend we are seeing reflects a disillusionment around the world that the democratic process fails to produce effective, charismatic leaders,” said Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College. “In country after country, the idea spreads that we need strong leaders who get things done."
So, as we await the final results of the election held two days ago, we might wonder if any LEADERS were selected, and who they are. Because the USA needs leaders, not autocrats. Where have all our leaders gone?
(By the way, the top statue is El Cid, and the bottom one is Joan of Arc.)
This is by Gabrielle Canon, from a newsletter. And it deserves wider readership, so that's what I'm trying to give it.
Extreme weather disasters are on the rise – and it’s no coincidence
In a historic and deadly storm surge, the system known as Hurricane Ian wreaked havoc in Cuba
and along the south-east coast of the United States last week, as strong winds and rising waters
turned communities into piles of debris.
Across the US, large bathtub rings encircling major reservoirs still tell the story of the
American west’s catastrophic drought, believed by scientists to be the worst in more than
1,000 years. Elsewhere, across millions of acres, spiny skeleton trees pierce ashen air over
once-lush mountainsides, the aftermath of ferocious wildfires that left little in their wake.
Disasters are on the rise – and it’s no coincidence. They are connected, oftentimes caused by
two sides of the same hydrological coin. Compounding extreme events are testing humanity’s
resilience and capacity to respond and adapt, layering both chaos and catastrophe. Climate
scientists have cautioned that this is just a taste of what’s to come as the world warms.
My name is Gabrielle Canon and I am the Guardian’s new extreme weather correspondent. Based
in California, I focus on the American west, telling stories that highlight the human and
environmental toll of the climate crisis that is already unfolding. Extreme weather events
here are nothing new, but they are growing more intense, more frequent, and more disastrous,
fuelled by the rising global temperature.
An escalation in events like forest fires, drought, and last week's storm are "all extremely
consistent with our baseline well-understood expectations of climate change”, Dr Karen McKinnon,
a climate scientist and professor at University of California, Los Angeles tells me. As the
atmosphere warms, she explains, it holds on to more moisture. It sucks the moisture out of dry
landscapes and sets the stage for stronger storms. The drought spurs more disastrous wildfires
and, when and where the coin flips, the floods begin.
“The most basic influence of us putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is temperatures
warming,” McKinnon says. “We can pretty confidently say going forward that these types of events
are just going to be more likely because temperatures keep going up and up.”
Steve Ostoja, director of the USDA California Climate Hub, puts it more starkly: “It’s just kind
of like the analogy of the frog in the slow-to-boil pot of water.”
Scientists are also learning about how the events can influence one another, escalating the
intensity. Even if we put our thirsty atmosphere aside, heat bakes more moisture out of environments
just as people, animals and ecosystems require more to adjust to the conditions. But drought, too,
increases heat: water cools, and with less of it, landscapes cook. Parched plants are then primed
to burn – and when these conditions align, ignitions are more likely to turn into infernos.
Compounding catastrophes, or the layering of disasters like drought, floods and fires that
overlap, are already testing the capacity of the United States’s resilience and straining
resources. As they become more likely, agencies are struggling to keep pace.
“The field of emergency management is at a pivotal moment in its history,” Federal Emergency
Management Agency (Fema) administrator Deanne Criswell said during a hearing of the House of
Representatives’s homeland security subcommittee on emergency preparedness, response and
recovery. The agency is managing more than triple the amount of disasters this year as it
did a decade ago.
Last year, the US spent an alarming $145bn on natural disasters – the third highest amount
on record – and grappled with 20 extreme events that cost more than $1bn each, close to
triple the average since 1980. Fema is already bracing for an escalation in need this year
and for the ones that follow, requesting $19.7bn for its 2023 disaster relief fund.
Yet, still, the weather whiplash that causes extreme events is only going to increase
as the world warms.
“It is going to continue to get hotter,” said Andrew Hoell, a meteorologist for the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s physical sciences laboratory, noting
that rising temperatures are unequivocally linked to human activities. “That is going to
be a gamechanger in terms of how we live.”
New York's Taughannock Falls, in the autumn. I've been there in the summer, but never in the glory of the fall colors. Admittedly, these may be enhanced a bit by photographic effects (maybe/maybe not), but it's still quite amazing.
The sad litany of tragicness repeats and repeats and repeats and repeats and ...
Not sure how they got the gun, but if guns were banned from being carried by individuals under the age of 21, that would have potentially influenced the course of events.
I must also mention; the football player that was shot and killed was almost impossibly good-looking; male model level. So that's another loss caused by gun violence.
I've featured a couple of Colombian lighthouses before, but not a lot of them, so this post returns to northern South America. The lighthouse this week is picturesquely situated on a prominent rock off the coast named Isla del Morro, adjacent to the city of Santa Marta, so this lighthouse can also be found as the "Santa Marta lighthouse". But Isla del Morro is where it's at.
A bit of history; Santa Marta is the first Spanish settlement in Colombia. It's up (east) on the Caribbean Sea coast from Cartagena and Barranquilla. There's a nice beach nearby called the Playa Blanca, looking like a much smaller version of the Rio de Janeiro beaches.
So, about the lighthouse:
"1971 (station established 1870). Active; focal plane 82 m (269 ft); three white flashes every 15 s. 23 m (75 ft) hexagonal tower on a 2-story square base; the lighthouse is built of cement blocks with a frame of reinforced concrete. Lighthouse painted gray with white trim; the lantern has red and white vertical striping." (Excerpted from the Lighthouse Directory.)
Apparently the red and white striping was a recent paint job, because you can see a picture without that the color scheme below, too.
Climate change and its effects are, well, global. This event occurred in Venezuela in October.
Landslides Leave at Least 35 Dead, and Dozens Missing in Venezuela
"The rains began late Saturday afternoon, and intensified throughout the night. Overflowing streams carried away trees and electricity poles, and damaged homes and businesses. Cellphone service, already spotty in the region, was almost wiped out by the storm.
This is ordinarily Venezuela’s rainy season, but it has been especially bad this year.
“The effects of the climate crisis are causing this tragedy,” Ms. Rodríguez said.
This happened a couple of weeks ago, but it's worth noting. The USA might not have world-record-setting (or holding) women's marathon runners, but they're good.
Emily Sisson smashes American marathon record by 43 seconds in Chicago
"Conditions on the Chicago Marathon’s relatively flat course were ideal Sunday [October 9], with Sisson — who won the 10,000 at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials last summer — finishing second to Ruth Chepng’etich. The Kenyan repeated as the Chicago champion with a time of 2:14:18, 14 seconds off the world record set by Kenya’s Brigid Kosgei in the 2019 Chicago Marathon.
Sisson finished in 2:18:29, taking 43 seconds off the American record set by Keira D’Amato in January in Houston."
Lasers are very commonplace. Even though the era of the CD is ending, lasers made and read them. Lasers scan bar codes at the grocery store. Lasers are used to mark straight lines on walls, instead of a string infused with chalk. Lasers are in little pointers that can be used for lectures, and also to endanger aircraft when directed at airplane cockpits (not a recommended use). Lasers are used for surgery, especially eye surgery. Lasers might be the key to nuclear fusion power. They're used for cutting and welding and drilling. Lasers are used to measure distance from a satellite to the ground, or ocean, or ice surface. Lasers are used to measure the speed of chemical reactions. Lasers are used to measure precise distances.
So yes, lasers are commonplace, so commonplace that we take them for granted in our daily lives.
Once (and in my lifetime), it wasn't that way. They were new, exciting, "dangerous", and incredible inventions, when very few of the applications described above were even envisioned.
This article describes when and how they were invented.
I don't know if you've seen it or not, but if there's a misspelling in a quote or excerpt that's used in another piece, editing practice is to put "sic" after it.
Example:
"They decided to take a chance and trust to lick [sic]"
There are very few places where "lick" would be correct.
So what does it mean? The simple definition is "thus", but the real long-worded meaning is "intentionally so written".
More about that here:
I have a considerable backlog of photo contest articles in my archives. I may, eventually, or perhaps not, go back and pull some of them out of the files and post them here. I am usually alerted to the results via the Daily Mail, and this is one of those cases.
Here is the actual site from which the pictures in the article were acquired:
The Nature Conservancy 2022 Photo Contest
There are a lot of good pictures, because this one from Iceland by Ivan Pedretti was only an Honorable Mention in the Landscape category.
It's great that they're committed and eager. I just wish they were more influential.
These ‘nuclear bros’ say they know how to solve climate change"Armond Cohen, the co-founder and president of the environmental group Clean Air Task Force, says he was once opposed to nuclear. But now, he says, “We’re just staggered by the size of the energy system and the pace at which we have to replace fossil fuels.” Nuclear, he argues, has three benefits: Its power doesn’t fluctuate, like solar and wind; it has a small land footprint; and it can be scaled up dramatically over a period of decades. Many modeling studies find that the world’s electricity could be powered by around 70 to 80 percent renewable energy, like solar and wind, but that nuclear could help support the grid [and] fill the remaining gaps after that."
If this hasn't been seen before, it's possible to think that it's not unusual. When ice freezes on a lake or the ocean, there's water underneath it, right?
Usually. But this is different. It's on Mars, and the water appears to be under the ice that is frozen on both poles. For a long time it was thought that the ice was solid, because Mars is cold. The new research indicates that there might be some liquid water down there, too.
Don't get too excited, it's probably not drinkable. But having water there is significant, because it adds more data to the pretty-much-proven concept that Mars had a lot more water once, on the surface, and that might have made the place hospitable to life. A long time ago.
New evidence for liquid water beneath the south polar ice cap of Mars
" “The combination of the new topographic evidence, our computer model results, and the radar data make it much more likely that at least one area of subglacial liquid water exists on Mars today, and that Mars must still be geothermally active in order to keep the water beneath the ice cap liquid,” said Professor Neil Arnold from Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute, who led the research."
So, continuing and catching up, this is the second Michigan lighthouse, which gets back on the right week of the calendar.
This is definitely a non-traditional lighthouse, and as you can deduce from the name, it's also a memorial. It's located in Detroit, on Belle Isle in the Detroit River. This time, strangely enough, instead of like the previous lighthouse where Canada was located to the north, in this case, Canada is actually to the south.
Now let's find out more about this one, again from the Lighthouse Directory.
"1930 (Gaza Moroti). Active; focal plane 58 ft (17.5 m); white light occulting every 4 s, day and night. 50 ft (15 m) square fluted white marble tower, unpainted, with black lantern but no gallery. ... The only marble lighthouse in the U.S., this tower was built with private funds as a memorial to William Livingstone, president of the Lakes Carriers Association from 1902 until his death in 1925. Although it is not officially a leading light this light is aligned with the entrance to the Detroit River for southbound ships."
Lighthouse Friends page on the Livingstone Memorial Lighthouse
A short video:
And pictures:
If you're looking at this post and noticing that it fell into the November blog post listing, you're right, I've fallen a bit behind. I'm going to remedy that right now with two back-to-back Lighthouse of the Week posts, and then I'm going to do some catching up because my busy October put me behind my one post a day schedule, which makes me proud. Not all my posts are masterpieces (or even artistic), but I try to keep abreast of current events, as well as top notch bosoms. As anybody perusing this blog could determine for themselves.
I'm also going to feature two lighthouses from the state of Michigan. This first one stands fairly close to Canada, near the Straits of Mackinac. If you're not sure where that is, click right on this line.
Because it's way off the coast of anywhere, I don't expect that there's a lot of pictures of it (I'm making this up as I write), so we'll find out.
But first, let the Lighthouse Directory tell us some facts about it.
"1874 (O.M. Poe). Active; focal plane 86 ft (26 m); red flash every 5 s. 93 ft (28.5 m) round limestone tower with lantern and gallery, incorporating keeper's house, mounted on a square limestone crib and attached to 1-story limestone fog signal building; solar-powered lens. Tower unpainted; lantern roof painted red. The original 2nd order Fresnel lens, removed in 1982, is on display at the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio."
The rest of the history involves who bought and sold it after it was put up for auction.
But this How Stuff Works page tells some more history, and discusses how dangerous the reef that the lighthouse marks was considered.
And here's a page just about this one lighthouse: Spectacle Reef Light Station
And I'm providing an extended video about preserving it:
So, let's see what pictures can be found. I added a historical one from 1891.
Not unexpected, but unfortunate. You'd think that Republicans would learn not to lie to their constituents.
They haven't yet.
Note that the source of this story is the conservative rag, er, newspaper, the Washington Examiner.
Republicans had higher death rate than Democrats during pandemic: Study
"For much of the early phase of the pandemic, voters from the two parties endured a somewhat comparable excess death rate, with Republicans sustaining about 22% higher excess deaths. However, when the pandemic shifted into the vaccine phase, a much more drastic dichotomy between the two parties emerged, with Republicans sustaining 76% more excess deaths than Democrats, the study found.
"Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats," the study said. "The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available."
Based on this, I wouldn't wish death on anyone. But there are a few in my circle of acquaintances that I wish had felt its brush.
One of the lesser-publicized dangers of global warming in northern climes:
Thin ice.
Don't crack: Deteriorating safety on frozen lakes in a warming world"The conclusion of the study is straightforward, namely that global warming will make lake ice much less safe. This is likely to affect indigenous communities in the Arctic as well as regional economies, where people rely on ice roads as a means for fast and comparatively cheap transportation and supply during winter. Thinning future ice-conditions also threatens unique lake ecosystems that have adapted to recurring frozen lake conditions over tens of thousands of years.
"Our results demonstrate that the duration of safe ice over the next 80 years will shorten by 2-3 weeks depending on the future warming level. In regions where lakes are used as ice roads to transport heavy goods and supplies, the number of days with safe ice conditions will decline by more than 90%, even for a moderate warming of 1.5°C above early 20th Century conditions," says Dr. Lei Huang, corresponding author of the study and former postdoctoral researcher at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP), in Busan, South Korea."
