bb.king

Anyone watching Only Murders In The Building? Martin and Martin really are fabulous and a lot of the guest characters have been wonderful additions. Still can't quite figure out the "Whodunit" of it all, but I've at least got some theories and educated guesses......

Old Windsor Hotel downtown went up in smoke this morning.

Pure, solid, gold.

We need a separate thread for complaining about roster management rather than it being the same thing every week for this 9-2 team with the best offence and defence in the league. 

So you're good with a candidate who has argued that vaccines cause autism, antidepressants lead to school shootings, that chemicals in water sources led to transgendered identity? How about that wifi causes cancer? What about aids not being caused by HIV? 
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/13/1187272781/rfk-jr-kennedy-conspiracy-theories-social-media-presidential-campaign

I'm going to fill my Q Zone.  

We've come to the point that certain people from all walks of life are trying to to normalize wrapping half truths, lies, embellishments, completely made up stuff as issues and perspectives and expect this approach to be treated with civility and decorum.
I say something absurd or unsubstantiated or provide a false equivalency or half true or make stuff up to support my position, I'm appropriately called on it usually with some level of respect, I come back hot with hostility to respond to being called on it, I'm countered again to substantiate my claims this time with less respect and a lot more sarcasm, I then play the victim card that I'm just providing another side and this is nuts you people are all bully's and won't listen to this side so I won't waste my time with you.
Exhausting. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences from that speech. No one is limiting what you can or can not say but everyone, no matter who you are and what you believe in, need to pay the consequences, good, bad or indifferent, of the words that come out of their mouth. 
I myself over my lifetime have appropriately experienced that the hard way in the words I have spoken and written.

Oh, no, this one hurts a lot. I was just listening to The Last Waltz last night. 
I read Robbie's memoir a couple of years ago and have been a big fan of The Band for ages. 

Robbie could play, he could write, he could produce, he could arrange. He was a special, special, talent. 

Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink
By Sarah Kaplan   July 12, 2023 at 7:49 p.m. EDT The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.
The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding.
They’re shrilling from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and China, with a severe heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in coming days.
They’re burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels considered “beyond extreme.”
And they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that have sent plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.
  Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild. The only question, scientists say, is when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.
“This is not the new normal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College London. “We don’t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil fuels … and we’re nowhere near doing that.”
The arrival of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the return of the El Niño weather pattern, which tends to raise global temperatures, are contributing to this season of simultaneous extremes, Otto said. But the fact that these phenomena are unfolding against a backdrop of human-caused climate change is making these disasters worse than ever before.
What might have been a balmy day without climate change is now a deadly heat wave, she said. What was once a typical summer thunderstorm is now the cause of a catastrophic flood. And a day that is usually warm for the planet — July 4 — was this year the hottest ever recorded. Earth’s global average temperature of more than 17 degrees Celsius (62.6 Fahrenheit) may well have been the hottest it has gotten in the last 125,000 years.
Otto is the co-leader of the World Weather Attribution network — a coalition of scientists who conduct rapid analyses to determine how climate change influences extreme weather events. Since 2015, the group has identified dozens of heat waves, hurricanes, droughts and floods that were made more likely or more intense by human-caused warming. Several events, including the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave that killed more than 1,000 people, were found to be “virtually impossible” in a world untouched by human greenhouse gas emissions. At this point, researchers say, the links between climate change and weather disasters are abundantly clear. When the planet’s average temperature is higher, heat waves can reach previously unheard of extremes. This was the case during recent heat waves in southeast Asia, southern Europe and North Africa, World Weather Attribution researchers found. When temperatures soar past about 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), or when they are compounded by extreme humidity, it becomes more and more difficult for people’s bodies to keep cool through sweating. Kids and the elderly, as well as outdoor workers and people with preexisting medical conditions, are especially vulnerable.
This week, as more than 100 million people across the southern United States face exactly those conditions, climate researchers like Jennifer Francis fear the escalating heat may exact a deadly toll.
“We’re seeing temperatures exceed those that can support life,” said Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center. “Certain places are becoming uninhabitable.” “All of these records are being broken left and right, and my hope is people will start to put this together in their heads,” she continued. “These things shouldn’t be happening. It’s all connected to the fact that we’re warming the planet.”
The warmer the air, the more water it can hold — turning the atmosphere into a thirsty sponge that sucks moisture out of vegetation and soil. This exacerbates droughts and sets the stage for wildfires like those that have ravaged Canada this summer. Temperatures in the Northwest Territories spiked to 100 degrees over the weekend, intensifying fires that were already burning out of control.
The flip side of this phenomenon is that a warmer, wetter atmosphere also increases the amount of rain that can fall during a given storm. In Vermont and New York this week, about two months’ worth of precipitation fell in just two days — far more quickly than it could be absorbed by the region’s saturated ground and mountainous terrain.
The effects of extreme rainfall are even more disastrous in poorer countries, where people and governments have far fewer resources to cope. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a Cornell University sociologist who works with farming communities in Malawi, lost two close colleagues this spring when flash floods struck the north of the country.
Penjani Kanyimbo and Godfrey Mbizi drowned while conducting a surveys for a sustainable agriculture nonprofit, Soils, Food and Healthy Communities.
“It’s one of those bitter ironies,” Bezner Kerr said. “They were trying to work on a solution. … But these parts of the world that are contributing so little to the problem are facing many of the worst impacts.”
The severity of recent extremes on land has been matched only by the scorching conditions in the world’s oceans. Global average sea surface temperatures hit a record high this spring, and they remain nearly a degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) higher than the average for this part of summer.
  “In a way it’s more concerning” than the record-hot atmosphere, said Ted Scambos, a polar researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While the land — and the air above it — warm up and cool down fairly easily, the ocean conducts heat far more slowly. “This means we’re storing a lot of heat in the ocean,” Scambos said. “The longer we wait [to act on climate change], the longer it’s going to take to have the ocean heat return to whatever normal is.”
In the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, bathwater ocean temperatures will probably add fuel to this year’s hurricane season, making storms wetter and more intense.
And near the South Pole, where Scambos works, the record-hot oceans seem to have disrupted the current of cold water that typically surrounds Antarctica. This February, for the second year in a row, the extent of sea ice around the continent hit a record low. Now, even as Antarctica is immersed in the bitter cold of the months-long polar night, the ice has been distressingly slow to recover. That’s bad news for Antarctica’s glaciers, which need sea ice as a protective buffer from the jostling of ocean waves.
    “This is unlike any behavior we’ve seen in the past in the Antarctic sea ice world,” Scambos said.
He tried to find words to express how it felt to watch the planet careen into such uncharted territory. “It’s ... ” he started. “Ahh ... ”
He shook his head. “This is more or less the picture that we’ve been describing for decades,” he said. “And for as long as we can stand it, we’re in for this kind of climate and worse, until we address the problem.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which includes hundreds of the world’s top climate experts — has called for countries to roughly halve emissions by the end of the decade and eliminate planet-warming pollution by the middle of the century. Humans can unleash only about 500 more gigatons of carbon dioxide to have an even shot at keeping warming below a manageable threshold.
    But global carbon dioxide emissions hit a record high last year, and governments continue to approve new fossil fuel projects that would make it almost impossible for the world to meet its climate goals, scientists said.
Bezner Kerr recalled her dismay at seeing President Biden approve the Willow Project — an Alaska oil development projected to generate 239 million metric tons of carbon dioxide over its 30-year lifetime — shortly after the deaths of her Malawian colleagues.
“It was really like, what will it take for people to see that we are creating an unlivable planet?” she said. “I felt there was not the political will in this country to face the reality of what was happening.”
Then smoke from Canada’s wildfires descended on her hometown of Ithaca, N.Y., staining the skies orange, and Bezner Kerr’s friends and colleagues started asking her for help processing their fear.
Maybe, she thought, this would be a turning point. Maybe people are finally realizing: The alarm bells are ringing for us.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/12/climate-change-flooding-heat-wave-continue/
 

I have spent years discussing this- there is no debate, the consensus is there, so this is all deniers get from me at this point. 

Of course climate is always changing.  The Milankovitch cycles guarantee that. It has been hotter. It has been colder. But that doesn't mean that what we are in now is natural. The vast, vast percentage of scientists involved with anything to do with our climate agree that our reliance on carbon fuels is affecting our climate adversely. And it's the speed that it is happening and the fact that it is a global phenomenon that will be the ass kicker.  When there has been rapid climate change in the past the effect on local societies has been devastating. 
As far as changing shorelines don't forget alot of that is from erosion. But if you are talking changes over  thousands of years it's different .It allows time for societies to adapt. The isostatic rebound you see in Manitoba for instance  will eventually move Lake Winnipeg down to the city of Winnipeg . But the time line is about 10,000 years. What we are doing now world wide would be the equivalent of waiting till the Lake is flowing over the perimeter to react.
I'm  not a huge fan of the carbon tax at all but thats because I'm  not sure we are getting the best bang for our efforts .  But I suppose it's a start. I'd prefer to start with removing the up to 15 billion dollar subsidies Canada is giving to the oil industry. Pour that 15 billion directly into green initiatives.  I'd rather have seen the rail lines that are vastly more efficient have remained in place. I'd rather see an better effort to get cars off the roads in our cities. I'd rather see that money go into educating people on their personal responsibility for climate change.  

Your response is that "hey, non-climate scientists also agree the humans are causing climate change?" That's how you defend your view?
A better response would be to show how the majority of climate scientists (being specific with the science that they study) don't agree that humans are causing climate change. Obviously you didn't do that because you can't.
You could have also tried to express your own personal qualifications for why you think professional scientists are wrong.
If you want the take from climate-specific scientists - The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change | Science.
Not sure what you are saying that some science has nothing to gain from the results. Pretty much any industry that relies on fossil fuels benefits from any uncertainty related to climate science. These are huge corporations that have significant political power and a history of using it in nefarious ways. ExxonMobil has had accurate climate models for decades that have reliably predicted climate change from emissions and tried to spread uncertainty related to climate change to justify the billions of dollars that they rake in.
 

This guy nails it:
James Christian Parsons   @Dred_Tory   If you consider the sweep of "conservatism" in North America over the last 15 years--from Rob Ford's crack- & booze-addled misrule, to Trump's circus, to rock-throwing neo-Confederate "**** Trudeau" mobs, to Peterson's benzo-fueled meltdowns, to Romana Didulo's freakshow... ...it's hard not to conclude that "conservatism"--once a dignified political orientation with articulate exponents--is simply a burlesque pageant of human failure populated exclusively by the emotionally broken, socially maladaptive, and intellectually pauperised.  

Pat Robertson, the right-wing televangelist and former Republican presidential candidate who espoused racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, AIDSphobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic bigotry on air for decades, has died.

Being entitled to an opinion doesn't matter when it's backed by ignorance, fear, and apathy for other human beings. And such an opinion isn't worth entertaining.
Having an opinion should never come before being sufficiently informed. If your opinions aren't backed by factual data and evidence, then they aren't worth ****.
Intolerant opinions don't deserve to be tolerated.

For a light read, I read “Ballad of the Whiskey Robber” a few years ago. Highly recommend and a true story. It was hilarious, full of quirky characters, and gave a nice insight into life in a former eastern bloc country just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Here’s a description from Amazon.
 https://www.amazon.com/Ballad-Whiskey-Robber-Transylvanian-Moonlighting/dp/0316010731

That's such an old way of thinking that needs to change. I think it's more powerful to recognize a mistake and adjust accordingly. Many of the world's problems result from people backed into a corner and unable to reverse course on a decision.

I don't want a leader who will confidently March people in the wrong direction. I want people who will listen and can admit when they were mistaken. Changing your mind isn't weakness, it's being a rational person.

We've had vaccine mandates for a hundred years and they work. The science is definitive. 

This guy just wanted to crawl into the smallest hole
 

Comparing COVID to Cancer doesn't make any sense... Cancer is not transmissible.
As observed by JCon, the vaccine helps to reduce the effect of COVID... yes, you may still get it, but you are much less likely to end up in the hospital because of it.  The biggest reason for all of the measures and mandates was to not have everyone get sick at the same time to reduce the possible load on the health care system.  The fact that most people are vaccinated now helps to keep it that way, though the health care system is so broken that wait times are still awful.
I don't know about everyone else, but everyone in my family has all of their boosters, and we will continue to get them as they become available, no different than the annual flu shot that I get to help reduce the effects of getting that.

I wonder if the vaccine helps to reduce the outcomes of Covid. Hmmmm? 
 

Total vindication.
 

Comes in with nonsense and then complains. 
The ****ing worst.