global warming Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Sept. rambling: Suicide prevention

Way Less Sad

NAMI: Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. “It’s Okay to Talk About Suicide”

Food insecurity soared roughly 9% last year for Americans

The LMNOPs of Caring for the Nursing Workforce: Healthcare systems can do more to prevent staff burnout

A Guide on Racism, Inequality, and Health Care for African Americans.

Household COVID-19 risk and in-person schooling

Fines Double for Refusing to Wear a Mask on a Plane

‘I’m learning firsthand how difficult it is to be shunned by people you love’: The vaccine wars are getting personal

Once-in-a-Century Weather Events Every Week

Why ‘I’ Hurricane Names Are Most Likely to Be Retired

What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind, -Grief, conspiracy theories, and one family’s search for meaning in the two decades since 9/11

How can America wake up from its post-9/11 nightmare?

Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy (Erik Prince, 2010)

A Dozen Observations about Abortion, Texas, and the Supreme Court

Power Move: Charles Blow wants Black people to reverse the Great Migration and form majorities in the Southern states.

Journey with Jesus: Richard Rothstein on “The Color of Law”

Is it Better Not To Know?

‘SNL’ Alum Norm Macdonald Dead At 61

Sporting News

every_data_table — **https://xkcd.com/2502/ Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.**

Pittsburgh Pirates lineup from Sept. 1, 1971, the first time an AL or NL team had fielded an all-Black and Latino starting lineup.

60+ Key Stats About the Olympic and Paralympics

The Woman Who Invented Stuffed Animals

John Green: My Two Favorite Jokes. From the comments: “I went into the library and asked the librarian for a book on turtles. ‘Hard back?’ ‘Yeah, with little heads.'”

How Much of the World’s Bourbon Is Actually Made in Kentucky?

Surf the Vintage Internet

ZOOM: Celebrating 10 Years of Zoom: “Some of you have only known Zoom since early 2020.” Including me.

What Is a Squinting Modifier?

A 13,654 stick bomb

Now I Know: The Friend on the Bench and The Man Who Gets People Out of the Hospital and The Magical Place Where Everyone Can Play

MUSIC

Elegy by Mark Camphouse

I heard this song called Way Less Sad by AJR this week for the first time last week. It came out in February 2021. For the life of me, I recognized but could not immediately place the horn riff. No, not Chicago or Blood, Sweat and Tears or Earth, Wind and Fire. Finally, it came to me, without looking it up: the way too sad My Little Town by Simon and Garfunkel! Paul Simon even gets a writing credit for Way Less Sad.

Times Will Be Better – Elena Romanova

I Bought Myself A Politician – MonaLisa Twins

Flivver Ten Million by Frederick Shepherd Converse, played by the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by JoAnn Falletta

Michelle – Julian Neel

Arlington from John Williams’s score to JFK

17 Quotes on the Transformative Power of Music

The Call of Wisdom (Proverbs 1)

Big Lies

At my church yesterday, the liturgical Old Testament lesson was Proverbs 1:20-33. It describes a personified Wisdom, and, not so incidentally, as a woman.

The New Revised Stand Version (NRSV) reads, in part:

Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares, she raises her voice.
At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?”

But there is a Bible translation called The Message, by Peterson. It was the preferred translation by my late friend Keith Barber.

This take is far more pointed:

Lady Wisdom goes out in the street and shouts. At the town center, she makes her speech. In the middle of the traffic, she takes her stand. At the busiest corner she calls out:

“Simpletons! How long will you wallow in ignorance? Cynics! How long will you feed your cynicism? Idiots! How long will you refuse to learn?”

The birth of the Big Lie

And it feels like she’s addressing, oh EVERYTHING that is happening. Mark Evanier pointed to an essay by Lucian K. Truscott IV, and quotes this section:

“The legacy 9/11 has left us is that there is no common set of facts we can agree on about anything: Not about the COVID pandemic and masks and vaccines; not about the climate change that has killed hundreds and left town after town burned to the ground or underwater and destroyed by tornadoes and hurricanes.

“We cannot agree that votes counted amount to elections won or lost. We cannot even agree on the common good of vaccines that will save us, that science is worth studying, that learned experts are worth listening to.”

As a librarian who tries to find facts for people, this blatant disregard for truth has continually made me, at first, angry, but ultimately very, very sad. And I don’t know what to do about it.

Proverbs 1 (Peterson):

What if catastrophe strikes and there’s nothing to show for your life but rubble and ashes? You’ll need me then. You’ll call for me, but don’t expect an answer. No matter how hard you look, you won’t find me…

Don’t you see what happens, you simpletons, you idiots? Carelessness kills; complacency is murder. First, pay attention to me, and then relax. Now you can take it easy-you’re in good hands.

July rambling: Sp Bad at Typign

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

no_the_other_one — NO, the OTHER one From https://xkcd.com/2480/

Inside Exxon’s playbook: How America’s biggest oil company continues to oppose action on climate change and climate change is here and This is
Why We Should Stop Calling it Climate Change

#Film4Climate 1st Prize Short Film Winner – Three Seconds

A New American Manifesto

Erik Prince, the failson face of privatized war

“Good Guy with a Gun” killed by the cops he was trying to save

Lincoln was the best. Buchanan was the worst. What about the others?
C-SPAN rounds up historians to rank the Presidents. Trump is 41st

How Woodrow Wilson betrayed China and helped give rise to the Chinese Communist Party

Oops: The Trump Organization Kept Literal Spreadsheets of Its Crimes

Inside William Barr’s Breakup With Trump

“I’d rather die living”

COVID Data Tracker

Boston Globe: The United States has yet to fully abolish slavery

The IRS is holding millions of tax returns, delaying refunds, including, it appears, ours

Over 42,000 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents in 2020, up 8% from 2019.

Upstate New York faces a plague of caterpillars

Words and things

From Wordsmith: The shorter the word, the more meanings it has. The Oxford English Dictionary lists more than 500 senses of the 3-letter word set. The 45-letter long pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, on the other hand, has one meaning and will forever have that one meaning.

Zaila Avant-garde breezes to National Spelling Bee win

A horse race

Mapping global happiness levels.

I just found out the guy who invented auto-correct died. His funnel is tomato…

The Internet Is Rotting. Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.

Geography: Seasons of a Finger Lakes Winery

‘They said I don’t exist. But I am here’ – one woman’s battle to prove she
isn’t dead

Richard Donner, 1930-2021

This Year’s Bill Finger Awards for comic book writing, posthumous

Midnight on Olin chair — Midnight, sitting in the antique Olin chair almost as soon as it entered the premises

Pine Hills Review: F*ck 2020

Why Am I Sp Bad At Typign?

‘Give Black people credit’: Black TikTok stars strike, demand credit for their work

2021 fireworks

Now I Know: The Balloon Shields and The Problem With Jam and The Secret of the Swiss Cheese and Getting the Horse’s Goat and Pigging Out on Video Games and The Pink Gun Surprise

This Wedding RSVP Card Is Going Viral

My Life as a Meme: ‘I Can’t Believe You’ve Done This’ Revisited

A tortoise eating a strawberry

MUSIC

Kaintuck by William Grant Still

Min Kwon: America/Beautiful

Central Park in the Dark by Charles Ives

Coverville 1362: The Killers Cover Story and
1363: Summer Covers and 1364: Mini-Album Covers for Escape, Heavy Metal and 4

VOCES8

Home from The Wiz, vocalist is Landi Oshinowo

Beautiful Girl Montage from Singin’ in the Rain.

The Most COMPLEX Pop Song of All Time

May #2: Philosophy of the world

Why Is Everyone Running for President?

Waiting for the But — xkcd -licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

What I Lost (and Can Never Get Back) When My Father Was in Guantanamo North

How Poor Oversight and Fraud in Generic Drug Industry Threatens Patients’ Health

Why Is Everyone Running for President? It’s a Billion-Dollar Industry

‘We’ve created a civilisation hell bent on destroying itself – I’m terrified’, writes Earth scientist

What Changed My Mind About Climate Change? Risk management is not a binary choice

Last Week with John Oliver: Green New Deal and Death Investigations

Last American slave ship discovered in Alabama

What Reparations for Slavery Might Look Like in 2019

Largest ever class of black women graduating from West Point – 32!

Hilde Lysiak of the Orange Street News gives commencement address at Reed School of Media at West Virginia University

‘We must be in this together. Relentlessly.’ Deborah Lipstadt, MA ’72, PhD ’76, delivered the keynote address at Brandeis University’s 68th Commencement

Arthur’s Unexpected reboot

Understanding the divine sense of humor

Why certain words are left out of our English-language Bibles

Kindness Can Be Taught. Here’s How

Casting announced for The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, Joy Gregory and Gunnar Madsen’s acclaimed Off-Broadway hit, at the Bridge Street Theatre in Catskill, NY July 11-14, 18-21

Portrait of Steve Martin and Martin Short on 60 Minutes Australia

The Bob Emergency: a study of athletes named Bob- Part I and Part 2

The Secret Behind the Success of Avengers Endgame – not that much of a secret

Blogging revelation and reflection

How to Be an Ethical Influencer and I’m A Supposed Influencer and An Open Letter to Professional YouTubers

Now I Know: What do you do when someone you don’t like is wearing your clothes? and The Second Life of Crayons and Pigcasso

Does This Dress Make Me Look Guilty?

Why do people love coffee and beer

Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln was one of the most remarkable adventurers, scoundrels and fraudsters of the 20th century

To keep his daughter from getting bored on a family trip a dad had her Irish Step Dance in every location they stopped in at Ireland

8 Things Your Credit Card Can’t Buy

The Worst Product Ever

MUSIC

Rolling Stone – Annie & the Hedonists

Someone You Loved– Lewis Capaldi.

And The Waltz Goes On – André Rieu, composed by Anthony Hopkins

Symphonic suite for the Hayao Miyazaki film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind by Joe Hisaishi

Coverville: 1262: This Day in Covers – 1989 and 1263: The Smiths Cover Story

Arctic permafrost no longer permanent

It’s easy to think planting a tree, bringing your reusable bags to the grocery store, or forgoing a plastic straw is meaningless.

arctic When a new study shows “the Arctic has entered an ‘unprecedented state’ that threatens the entire planet” and it’s “a massive conglomeration of nearly 50 years of research,” it’s difficult to feel optimistic.

Nearly 50 years. The first Earth Day will be a half century ago come next year. I expected that things would be better, way better, on the planet, certainly not appreciably worse. “Because the Arctic atmosphere is warming faster than the rest of the world, weather patterns across Europe, North America and Asia are becoming more persistent, leading to extreme weather conditions.”

It’s easy to think planting a tree, bringing your reusable bags to the grocery store, or forgoing a plastic straw is meaningless. Yet my family does it anyway. Maybe (probably) it’s a certain arrogance but we are trying for the destruction of the planet to be less “on us.” So we have our hybrid car. We compost. We reuse.

But even as the Midwest US braced for a major, long-lasting blizzard called a “bomb cyclone” AGAIN this month, the regime was signing executive orders designed to further roll back energy and environmental regulations and promote the fossil fuel industry, apparently to meet his goal of making global warming worse.

Andrew Wheeler, the the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has said that human-caused climate change is not his top priority.

This despite a new study by EPA scientists “published in the journal Nature Climate Change. The paper urges action on climate change, declaring the urgency of the issue and pushing for strategies to address the potential effects.”

Earlier this year, EPA scientists priced out the cost of climate change. “By the end of the century, the manifold consequences… will cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

“Those costs will come in multiple forms, including water shortages [Wheeler’s purported top priority], crippled infrastructure and polluted air that shortens lives, according to the study… No part of the country will be untouched, the EPA researchers warned.”

Happy Earth Day. This is probably NOT the only mention of the topic this week.