tingilinde

what is it about republicans in the trump administration and bigfoot?

ah yes - conspiracy theory people.

and Matthew Whitaker may be the nutjob .. the evil/scammy nutjob - to rule them allsnip

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● Asserted that “time travel” could be “possible, perhaps within the next decade” and tried to raise money using bitcoin for time-travel research by one of Whitaker’s fellow board members. 

● Announced, in the same media release heralding Whitaker’s appointment to the board, a patent application for an extra-deep “masculine toilet” for the well-endowed. Specifying the size of “average male genitalia,” the release said “this invention is designed for those of us who measure longer than that.”

Some think Whitaker’s association with the company (he did legal work for World Patent Marketing in addition to lending his name and hawking its wares) makes him patently unfit to serve. To the contrary, it is patently obvious he is the right man for this moment.

Only a man steeped in time travel and Bigfoot could successfully sell the notion that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry is a “hoax” that should be shut down. In tapping, as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, a man with experience with hucksterism and conspiracy theories, President Trump has embraced his inner crackpot.

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Time travel may be the best sales point to the right.

 

 

 

 

quantum accelerometers as a gps backup

a cake

for a dinosaur loving kid.  there is a sugary fossil under the ground they're digging.

how blue was the wave?

Perhaps bluer than you might think.  And, of course, orange is the new red,.

 

a tip of the hat to Jim

the psychology of trump supports

There will be a range, but this is interesting.

a tip of the hat to Julia

 

an office in a hanger

A Google office in the old Spruce Goose hanger.

 

the art of letterlocking

before envelopes

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

wow

The Art Institute of Chicago has put over 52,000 images of their collection online.

a tip of the hat to Jim

 

navigation skills

Bats v dolphins

of course there are a number of species of bats and with their own echo location variations.

 

 

rob pike's history of unix

 

 

on the beginnings of climate science

Dating back to the mid 1800s in the Hapsburg Empire.

snip

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Azaleas played a surprisingly large role in the new conception of climatology. In the late 1800s, Anton Kerner Ritter von Marilaun spent a not-insignificant amount of his time studying the plants. Specifically, Kerner, a botany professor at the University of Innsbruck, wished to understand their distribution: why the flowers he found growing along an Alpine riverbank could also be found farther afield and at lower elevations. The most immediate explanation was that their seeds had been washed away by springtime snowmelt or carried by mountain winds.

Yet Kerner gradually came to believe something more radical. Isolated pockets of azaleas, he argued, were indicators of a changing climate: As the valleys had warmed over thousands of years, certain populations of Alpine flora had, over generations, colonized the mountainside in search of cooler temperatures and greater moisture. The plants left behind at lower elevations, or foundlings, hinted at “the advance of a given species in one or another direction,” Kerner wrote, “the retreat and extinction of others in historical times.” In his hands, flowers were a tool for slipping along scales of space and time, stepping outside the human frame of things to imagine how climate had slowly changed in the past—and might again in the future.

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when religion isn't welcoming immigrants

Sexual predators and the Catholic Church in Los Angeles (audio and transcript from NPR)

snip

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"The Latino community has never really been able to come with grips with this," says Wall. "They were never informed of this."

There's a good reason Latino Catholics view this issue differently than the rest of the Church, says Cecilia González-Andrieu, who teaches theology at Loyola Marymount University.

"The Latino Church was already in a really painful spot and needed the Catholic Church with moral authority to continue to fight for our human rights," she says.

Immigrant Catholics depend on the Church to speak out on issues related to legal status, poverty and healthcare.

"With this scandal cropping up, that voice is now completely gone from the conversation," González-Andrieu says.

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it's not tribalism

It's racism  (via The Atlantic)

snip

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I am not arguing that the Democratic Party or its members are particularly virtuous. A little more than a century ago, it was the Republican Party that was reliant on a diverse coalition of voters, and the Democratic Party that rode white rage to power. Rather, I am saying that when a party’s viability is dependent on a diverse coalition of voters, that party will necessarily stand for pluralism and equal rights, because its survival depends on it. And when a party is not diverse, it will rely on demonizing those who are different, because no constituency exists within that party to prevent it from doing so, or to show its members that they have nothing to fear..

In the Trump era, America finds itself with two political parties: one that’s growing more reliant on the nation’s diversity, and one that sees its path to power in stoking fear and rage toward those who are different. America doesn’t have a “tribalism” problem. It has a racism problem. And the parties are not equally responsible.

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don't blame the young

Why young people don't vote. 

snip

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Our system has adopted universal suffrage, which points toward open and easy access to the ballot, but our heritage in political exclusivity—where voting was once a privilege reserved for property-owning white men—continues to influence our handling of elections. Voter identification laws are tied to a sordid history of discrimination and vote suppression, but even procedures as uncontroversial as voter registration contain assumptions about who should participate. (Indeed, voter registration was first developed as a method to keep recent immigrants and the poor from the ballot box in Northern cities and was used similarly against black Americans in the Jim Crow South.) Our voting system is tilted toward people with stable, conventional lives. And that, overwhelmingly, is who participates, producing a conservative bias in the status quo.

Our government is less representative than it could be because of our voter-unfriendly policies. So even if you disdain young people who can’t find the will or time to vote—even if you’re unsympathetic toward the uninspired or the uninterested—you should want to fix this problem.

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a tip of the hat to Helen

 

 

on the demise of the moderate republican

The New Yorker on a nearly extinct species.

snip

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The Tuesday Group is about the same size as the Freedom Caucus, but it is far less cohesive, which allows the Republican leadership to isolate each of its members. “People like me—you can pick us off one at a time,” Costello said. “We might all be centrists, but we’re centrists for different reasons. Some might be more pro-environment, some are more pro-labor.” The Freedom Caucus holds the real power in Congress. Voting discipline, once imposed by whips and committee chairmen, is now enforced by the most extreme conservatives in the House, and by the activist base and the right-wing media, which can intimidate members of Congress with primary challenges and orchestrated attacks. The deadliest threat of all comes from the President, who ended the career of Representative Mark Sanford, a critical-minded conservative from South Carolina, with a single contemptuous tweet a few hours before the polls closed on primary night in June: “Mark Sanford has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign to maga. He is mia and nothing but trouble.” I asked Dent why more Republican members of Congress hadn’t raised their voices against Trump. “I can answer in one word,” he said. “Fear.”

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