Happy President's Day

Image credit: CBSMiami

Happy President's Day!

Good news for the planet, bad news for Democrats

image credit: earthtimes

If you’ve been following climate “change” at the Watts Up With That website, you’ll recognize the name of Henrick Svensmark, the Danish scientist. American Thinker has the report on his most recent experiment:

CERN, the world’s top particle physics laboratory, just found that our big, abrupt climate changes are produced by variations in the sun’s activity.  That’s the same sun the modelers had dismissed as “unchanging.”  CERN says the sun’s variations interact with cosmic rays to create more or fewer of earth’s heat-shielding clouds.  The IPCC had long admitted it couldn’t model clouds--and now the CERN experiment says the clouds are the earth’s thermostats!

The entire article is here. A good development, and let us hope it gets some media attention. 

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Democrats and radicals

Photo credit: legalinsurrection

This is not the Democrat party you or your parents knew in the 1950s. Karen McQuillan at American Thinker reports:

After 8 years of exploiting and enflaming the grievances of identity politics, the Democratic Party is being eaten by the monster they rode to power.

Radicals don’t need to be a majority – they never are.  They dominate through mob violence, media manipulation and threats.  They are now dominating Democrat politicians, not allowing them to “normalize.” 

This is not a recent development, IMO. I would say it’s been coming to this for a very long time. 

Read the rest here.

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Friday night eclipse, full moon, comet, Stargazer’s Alert!

image credit: The Telegraph

A Stargazer's Triple Header: Eclipse, comet, full moon

Friday night will be quite a show: an eclipse (7:43 Eastern Time), a full moon, and a comet (10:30 pm) to light up the night sky. From the report at the Independent:

Friday night will in fact see that comet – a green, shining light followed by a purple trail, known as 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdušáková – joined by a bright, shining full "snow moon" and a lunar eclipse, all at the same time.

Starting early Friday evening, a penumbral lunar eclipse will begin. That means that the sun, moon and earth all line up and cast a strange effect on the moon.

But the forecast in northern Ohio is cloudy, so here is the astronomy website that all the online reports are linking to if you’d like to watch a live stream (the eclipse and later, the comet):

http://live.slooh.com/stadium/live/the-full-snow-moon-eclipse

And if access to the link is slow, it’s probably because the website is overloaded. Over the weekend, I’ll update this with a YouTube link (if there is one), or just try the link after the fact, when the traffic is lighter.

UPDATE Feb-11-17: These potentially spectacular celestial phenomena may have been over-hyped duds. On the link posted above, one had to stick with it for a long time to see . . . not much of anything. The best shot of the elusive comet that I found was at the Bold Corsican Flame website here. If any readers found a better set of video or photos, please post in the Comments. 

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The next phase for Tea Party people

image credit: The American Mirror

As reported by Breitbart News:

The Spirit of America: Conservative Grassroots Leaders Plan Massive Pro-Trump Demonstrations Nationwide

Conservative grassroots leaders are planning a series of massive pro-President Donald Trump rallies nationwide, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.

On Feb. 27 and March 4, the rallies—dubbed the Spirit of America Rallies—will spring up nationwide in cities and towns across America.

“These rallies are inclusive, non-partisan, and open to anyone supporting President Trump in his efforts to bring back manufacturing jobs to America, put the security of our nation ahead of political correctness, improve our infrastructure, revitalize the inner cities and secure our nation’s borders,” Debbie Dooley, a national co-founder of the Tea Party movement and a key organizer of the Spirit of America rallies, says in a press release obtained by Breitbart News ahead of its public release.

Since President Trump’s election, during his time as president-elect and since his inauguration on Jan. 20, hardcore progressive leftists have been repeatedly protesting him in a sometimes violent manner. These rallies, organizers say, are meant to be a peaceful show of force from the “silent majority” that delivered Trump a landslide electoral college victory over failed Democratic president Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Dooley told Breitbart News that since the anti-Trump women’s march in D.C. after the president’s inauguration, she has received so many calls from Trump supporters–including many, many women Trump supporters–urging her to organize a show of force among the silent majority nationwide in response–that she had to turn off her cell phone so she could get work done. The Spirit of America rallies are not Tea Party rallies, she adds, and she hopes that Democrat groups backing Trump–there were many of them nationwide, forming a collective called the “Trumpocrats”–will get involved and step up to help the president, too. She also notes that the selection of Feb. 27 as the kickoff date of these pro-Trump rallies is significant, since that was the first day of the Tea Party movement back in 2009.

“I am proud to lead the charge here in Louisiana to get supporters of President Trump to show their support of his policy agenda through these Spirit of America rallies,” Col. Rob Maness, a retired Air Force colonel, founder of GatorPAC and two-time conservative Senate candidate in Louisiana who’s also involved in helping the rallies in his home state, added in the release. “Average citizens from across the political spectrum and all walks of life elected Mr. Trump and we at GatorPAC are especially pleased to help him with his national effort to Make America Great Again and #DrainTheSwamp priorities in Washington D.C.”

Ralph King, an elector for President Trump from Ohio and the co-founder of Main Street Patriots, added that he believes “the American electorate spoke loud and clear this past November.”

“These Spirit of America Rallies are a continuation of the collective voice of Americans that embrace President Trump’s policies to put the American workers and citizens first once again,” King said.

Rallies are in the works in states as far-flung as Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, New Jersey, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington state—as well as other states, organizers say. More information is available on the Spirit of America rallies website.

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Heather MacDonald on the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood on display at Berkeley

“UC Berkeley’s descent from place of learning to victimology hothouse” 

Image credit: A Voice For Men

Heather MacDonald is always a voice of sanity, especially on her frequent topics (racial profiling, cops, homelessness). At the LA Times yesterday, she had an op-ed on political correctness and the violent “protests” on the Berkeley Campus. Here are a few extracts:

Controversy and unrest has followed Milo Yiannopoulos' speaking tour at U.S. colleges. 

Even before its students rioted in the streets, distressed that right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos would dare to open his mouth in their presence, UC Berkeley presented a visual illustration of the academy’s decline from a place of learning to a victimology hothouse. Within walking distance on the Berkeley campus are emblems of both a vanished academic world and the diversity-industrial complex that ousted it.

Emblem 1: In Bauhaus-era typography, a quotation from Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo adorns the law school’s otherwise brutalist facade.

“You will study the wisdom of the past, for in a wilderness of conflicting counsels, a trail has there been blazed. You will study the life of mankind, for this is the life you must order, and, to order with wisdom, must know. You will study the precepts of justice . . .”

. . .

No law school today, if erecting itself from scratch, would think of parading such sentiments, first uttered in 1925, on its exterior. Cardozo’s invocation of “mankind” is alone cause for removal, but equally transgressive is his belief that there is wisdom in the past and not just discrimination. He presents learning as a heroic enterprise focused not on the self but on the vast world beyond, both past and present. Education is the search for objective knowledge that takes the learner into a grander universe of thought and achievement.

. . .

Emblem 2: UC Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion has placed vertical banners across the main campus reminding students of the contemporary university’s paramount mission: assigning guilt and innocence within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood. Each banner shows a photo of a student or a member of the student-services bureaucracy, beside a purported quotation from that student or bureaucrat. No rolling cadences here, no exhortations to intellectual conquest. Instead, just whining or penitential snippets from the academic lexicon of identity politics.

. . .

Berkeley funds the Division of Equity and Inclusion with a cool $20 million annually and staffs it with 150 full-time functionaries: It takes that much money and personnel to drum into students’ heads how horribly Berkeley treats its “othered” students.

. . .

What this seemingly gratuitous admonition really means is: “Do not violate any politically correct taboo.”

Cardozo invited students to the life of the mind. The diversocrats who have commandeered the American university invite students to a cultural reeducation camp where they can confess their political sins or perfect their sense of victimhood.

Read the rest here.

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Putin hacked the Super Bowl

image credit: ThePeoplesCube.com and Real Climate Science (h/t Flopping Aces)

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