EOMMATD

It's the return of the End of the Month Meme  and Toon Dump.

New Light

Song by John Mayer, considered one of the best "chill" tracks of 2018. Yes, there are many things more important than Donald Trump.

cult of Trump

Chris Hedges is worth listening to.

60 years

60 years of political attack ads, courtesy of Atlantic magazine.

Jesus & Mo

climate report

Typical. They release this rather bleak assessment of climate change on Black Friday, when not that many people are paying attention to the news. Living on an island, I am a bit concerned about this report.

From the New York Times

U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy

WASHINGTON — A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snapin the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”

But in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds.

“There is a bizarre contrast between this report, which is being released by this administration, and this administration’s own policies,” said Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center.

All told, the report says, climate change could slash up to a tenth of gross domestic product by 2100, more than double the losses of the Great Recession a decade ago.

Scientists who worked on the report said it did not appear that administration officials had tried to alter or suppress its findings. However, several noted that the timing of its release, at 2 p.m. the day after Thanksgiving, appeared designed to minimize its public impact.

Still, the report could become a powerful legal tool for opponents of Mr. Trump’s efforts to dismantle climate change policy, experts said.

“This report will weaken the Trump administration’s legal case for undoing climate change regulations, and it strengthens the hands of those who go to court to fight them,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton.

[Here’s a summary of what’s new in the report.]

More at the original.

Trump's gut

Now, where have we seen this kind of idiotic thinking before?

Elon Musk

Can't wait for Elon Musk to start launching rockets from Boca Chica, just a few miles south of where we live.

from Big Think

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Why Elon Musk is the most important tech giant of today

We love our tech heroes, the prophets of the latest and greatest machinery that transforms our lives faster and faster with each new invention. But who among the luminaries of our times that range from Apple's Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Microsoft's Bill Gates is the most important?

The renowned astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson answered this loaded question in an interview with CNBC. His pick - Elon Musk, the quintessential tech entrepreneur of our times, who founded Tesla Motors, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink among other game-changing companies.

This breadth of Musk's endeavors is what Tyson appreciates over other tech influencers - Tyson says that Elon is "trying to invent a future" and not just "the next app".

"As important as Steve Jobs was, no doubt about it — [and] you have to add him to Bill Gates, because they birthed the personal computing revolution kind of together — here's the difference: Elon Musk is trying to invent a future, not by providing the next app," said Tyson.

What's significant, points out the astrophysicist, is that Musk is not "simply giving us the next app that will be awesome on our smartphone" but is "thinking about society, culture, how we interact, what forces need to be in play to take civilization into the next century."

Indeed, Musk's efforts have taken him to re-imagining human travel both in space and on Earth, as well as how humans interact with their machines overall.

The fact that Musk, as the CEO of the revolutionary SpaceX, centers much of his effort on space colonization is the biggest selling point for Tyson. He thinks that space will provide "unlimited resources" and reduce our reliance on war as a method of distributing them. "A whole category of war has the potential of evaporating entirely with the exploitation of space resources, which includes the unlimited access to energy as well," he predicts.

This focus on space has the biggest potential to affect society, according to Tyson, who says Musk ""will transform civilization as we know it."

Even though Elon Musk certainly has his detractors, Tyson believes they'll be won over eventually by the sheer extent of the pot-smoking billionaire's accomplishments. "We're on the frontier of the future of civilization, and no I don't think he gets his full due from all sectors of society," says deGrasse Tyson, "but ultimately he will when the sectors that he is pioneering transform the lives of those who currently have no clue that their life is about to change."

Original.

draft dodgers

Donny Johnny comes from a long line of draft dodgers.

from TheStranger.com

Donald Trump's Grandfather Was Kicked Out of Germany for Draft-Dodging

When President Trump rails against immigrants, he likes to say that other countries are "not sending their best" people to the United States.

Well, this shouldn't come as any surprise given Trump's embrace of "immigration hypocrite" Stephen Miller and others like him, but newly unearthed documents show that Trump's grandfather, Friedrich Trump, was in fact banished from Germany for ditching out on military service. (Aka, failing to "be best" in the eyes of the German government.)

That banishment led to the Trump clan putting down firm roots in this country, where, more than a century later, Friedrich Trump's grandson is defending US border guards who recently fired tear gas at migrants from Central America who are fleeing difficult conditions in their home countries and looking to start anew in America.

This is all just one more indication that history and political hypocrisy don't matter much at this moment.

But it's also a good opportunity to try and recall, through the maelstrom of other Trump-related developments, that Donald Trump, just like his grandfather, ducked military service.

Rather than flee this country in the face of a draft, however, Donald Trump just told the US military that he couldn't serve in the Vietnam War because of bone spurs.

Original.

MIssissippi Goddamn

Nina Simone

Hallmark Christmas

It's already nauseating.

Texas blues

Corey Congilio wants you to play some Texas blues. This is the first of several videos to be found here.

from Truefire.com

witches!

I'll bet this really burns the butts of the religionistas. Bad enough that so many young people are rejecting Christianity (yea!!), but it seems they are turning instead to astrology (boo!) and witchcraft (eh!). Kinda strange.

from Newsweek

NUMBER OF WITCHES RISES DRAMATICALLY ACROSS U.S. AS MILLENNIALS REJECT CHRISTIANITY

Witchcraft and other pagan religious practices increased in the U.S. over the past few decades, with millennials turning to astrology and tarot cards as they turn away from Christianity and other traditionally dominant Abrahamic religions.

The number of witches and Americans practicing Wicca religious rituals increased dramatically since the 1990s, with several recent studies indicating there may be at least 1.5 million witches across the country. A Trinity College study conducted in 1990 estimated only about 8,000 Wiccans in the U.S., but the increase has been led by a rejection of mainstream Christianity among young Americans as well as a rise in occultism.

With 1.5 million potential practicing witches across the U.S., witchcraft has more followers than the 1.4 million mainline members of the Presbyterian church.

Data collected by the Pew Research Center and Trinity College in Connecticut show witchcraft and pre-Christian traditions have been revitalized by young adults, Quartz noted. Millennials are seeking more freedom in their spirituality and interest in astrology and tarot card readings have spiked in recent years. 

Millennials, celebrities, and even critics of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh have embraced the "witch aesthetic" over more repressive Christian beliefs, Quartz reported. 

"From 1990 to 2008, Trinity College in Connecticut ran three large, detailed religion surveys," said Quartz. "Those have shown that Wicca grew tremendously over this period. From an estimated 8,000 Wiccans in 1990, they found there were about 340,000 practitioners in 2008."

The Trinity College data also revealed there were about 340,000 Pagans in the country in 2008. The Pew Research Center, which has long pointed out the ongoing decline in U.S. Protestant and Catholic membership, released a June survey which found adults under 40 are far less likely to say religion is "very important" in their lives. 

"It makes sense that witchcraft and the occult would rise as society becomes increasingly postmodern. The rejection of Christianity has left a void that people, as inherently spiritual beings, will seek to fill," author Julie Roys said in comments emailed to The Christian Post last month.

"Plus, Wicca has effectively repackaged witchcraft for millennial consumption," Roys continued. "No longer is witchcraft and paganism satanic and demonic, it's a 'pre-Christian tradition' that promotes 'free thought' and 'understanding of earth and nature."

More at the original.

Selah

Saw this recently on National Geographic. A good story on conservation. 

Hi-res art

Art fan?

from Lifehacker

The Art Institute of Chicago recently revamped its website and released a searchable database of high-resolution art. Even better, a lot of the art is in the public domain, meaning you can legally use it however you want, even for commercial purposes. (Check the copyright notice on each artwork’s page.) You’ll notice that while you can zoom in on most of the artworks, only the public-domain art will include a full-resolution download link.

You’ll recognize artworks like “American Gothic,” Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist,” and Monet’s “Stacks of Wheat.” A lot of these, even the ones still under copyright, make for good desktop wallpapers.

For anything in the public domain, like the Monet, you can download the largest version, send it to a service like Framebridge, and have your own framed art print. Well, art print-out. But a classy one.

You could also, theoretically, use the public-domain art in an ad. Imagine the possibilities.

Original.

Dana Milbank

Sometimes Dana Milbank can be full of shit. Sometimes not.

This is what happens when a stable genius leads a stupid country

by Dana Milbank

President Trump is surrounded by fools.

There’s that fool William H. McRaven, Special Operations commander of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and the other fools in the U.S. military, who should have brought down bin Laden “a lot sooner,” because “everybody in Pakistan” — all 208 million of them — knew the terrorist leader was living in “a nice mansion.” Trump alone “predicted Osama bin Laden” in 2000 when “nobody really knew who he was.”(Were they waiting for Trump to give them bin Laden’s Zip code plus four?)

There are the fools in the CIA, who have concluded based on so-called evidence that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered last month’s killing of Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. But Trump alone understands that we’ll never know the truth, because the crown prince denied involvement “maybe five different times.”

There’s that fool Chris Wallace at Fox News, who didn’t understand why Trump skipped Arlington National Cemetery on the Monday after Veterans Day after skipping a visit to a U.S. military cemetery in France two days earlier. But Wallace, if he were wiser, would have known Trump was “extremely busy on calls for the country” as well as “doing other things.”

There are the foolish Finns who, after Trump claimed Finland avoided forest fires because “they spent a lot of time on raking,” are now mocking him by posing with garden tools in the woods. But Trump knows Finnish forest-raking is real because Finland’s president, Sauli Niinisto, told him about it just last week (even if Niinisto can’t remember this).

Worst of all are the fools in California — people who insist on calling the fire-destroyed town there “Paradise” instead of “Pleasure,” as Trump prefers to call it — who assert that the fires were caused by drought instead of their own mismanagement. As Trump well knows, “there is no drought” in California and there is “plenty of water.”

No one has suffered as many fools as Trump has. But this is to be expected when a “very stable genius”leads a “stupid country.”

Trump knows “more about courts than any human being.” He knows “more about steelworkers than anybody.” He knows “more about ISIS than the generals do,” and “more about offense and defense than they will ever understand.” He knows “more about wedges than any human being that’s ever lived.” He even knows more about medicine than his doctor, dictating a doctor’s letter predicting he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”

How does Trump know so much about so many things? Explaining his disagreement with scientists on climate change, Trump told the Associated Press: “My uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years. Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science.”

Given Trump’s natural scientific instinct, you don’t need a B.S. from Trump University to know how frustrating it must be to be contradicted repeatedly by “experts” — some in his own administration!

The intelligence community unanimously believes that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, but Trump’s instinct says there’s no reason to disbelieve Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denials.

Satellite imagery shows that North Korea has enhanced its ability to launch missiles, but Trump says, “I don’t believe that.”

The scientific consensus supports the theory of climate change, but Trump says “it could very well go back”to cooling.

Trump’s instinct has led him to a number of scientific discoveries over time:

“The worst hurricanes were 50 years ago.”

Vaccines cause autism in “many” healthy children.

The flu shot is “totally ineffective.”

Exercise is unhealthy.

Coal is “indestructible.”

Windmills are a “killing field” for birds and can make people who live near turbines “go crazy after a couple of years.”

It’s okay to look directly at the sun during a solar eclipse.

California is “shoving” water out to sea “to protect a certain kind of three-inch fish.”

With such a high level of technical expertise, Trump waited 19 months into his presidency to name a White House science adviser. More than 1,000 members of the National Academy of Sciences accuse Trump of the “denigration of scientific expertise and harassment of scientists.”

But they don’t understand. Trump knows more about science than the scientists do.

And this is the problem with being surrounded by fools: Though Trump gives his presidency an “A-plus,” most Americans — about 60 percent — do not appreciate his brilliance.

He deserves better — and he should demand it. He should walk away, withdraw his excellence, maybe get a place in Pleasure — and leave us to suffer our own foolish “scientists” and “experts” and “facts.” That would really show us.

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