Posts Tagged ‘NASA’

Socialism is Alive in the GOP

Posted: March 4, 2019 in climate change, Health and wellness, Life, News and politics, science
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Let’s start with a few facts. There are no true socialist countries in the world, never have been. There are countries that spout socialist ideas and like the Soviet Union, as it was called during the cold war era, mixed socialism and communism ideologies together, but was neither. It was a dictatorship or a monarchy take your pick! The communist party owned everything, controlled everything, and gave the populace enough to sustain the workforce, not much else!

So Trump wants you to believe, and why you would not just automatically assume anything he said was a lie with his record, that the Democratic Party wants us to become a socialist country! That liberals want to destroy capitalism using climate change as its driving force! That his wall and his rule are necessary to keep our country from being overrun and decimated by non-white criminals, and by any green initiatives, again an attack on capitalism, according to Trump! That he is a religious icon and that Christianity is under attack and the Christian Bible should rule our education and our government. In that vein, he states that the Constitution is too restrictive and the rules need to be rewritten! His words, not mine!

So now, let’s look at a few things from a world point of view. If climate change is not happening, and we are not accelerating it (humankind) then why is it that we are the only country, the only one, on the entire planet not to actively engage in the fight to combat it! Or why, on the world stage, are we the only industrial nation not to provide universal health care to its citizens, even though we spend way more than they do on healthcare, have less positive outcomes, a lower life expectancy than all to them! Again, the only one! When everyone else on the planet says one thing, and you are the lone holdout, does that not suggest you may be on the wrong side of a said issue? Especially since our own Pentagon has told us that climate change is the #1 most dangerous threat to our national security! That prestigious organizations across the globe like NASA and our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have said that climate change is real, it is caused in large part by our industry and lack of restraint. And that it will be devastating to our economy, safety, and quality of life. Yes even under the Trump admin they still say the same thing!

Now let us dwell on the title of this article for just a moment. Trump only cares about power, money, and adulation, as do a majority of his fellow Republicans, they just do not take it the edge of lunacy, but they protect their President because he is their scapegoat. Get it while you can and screw the rest mentality exists in our political representatives, and if you are honest, more prolific as a GOP trait. In that pursuit, they have given out corporate welfare by the trillions, including huge perks to the most wealthy among us. At the same time write-offs that policeman, firefighters, and teachers used to get were abolished, in favor of the rich being able to write off the maintenance and storage costs of their private jets! If you block any attempt to barter for the best prices for drugs, what possible moral road have you just gone down, or are we protecting oligarchs and their bottom line? Of course, we are! They never replaced the Affordable Care Act with the big beautiful and so much better plan Trump promised! They, Republicans, are not even trying to create one, they never intended to! The ACA messed with the oligarch’s profit margins and that could not be allowed to happen. And since money now has as much standing as our citizenry, it just stood up and bought what it wanted, or those that have it did, anyway!

I do not know if you are aware, but the countries that inhabit the planet earth do not consider us a capitalist country, but an oligarchy! They no longer trust us, and think we are a threat to the health of the planet and its safety! And no matter what Trump says, he is not respected, but rather he is feared among our allies for his ignorance, his innate fascination with dictators, any so-called strong man, and people who have absolute power over their respective populations. This is power he admires and wants! This is why countries that used to be our allies are looking elsewhere because we are now thought of as a bullying nation, not a bastion of peace or safety for the globe, not any longer!

So Trump, our Liar in Chief, has already started on his campaign of misinformation and outright lies to make the American people think that he is at war and that he is our savior! Just fact check the CPAC speech, there was no truth in anything he said! It was all misdirection, obfuscation, and prevarication! If you cannot bear to vote democratic, at least try and elect someone who has some integrity, some moral values! I am sure there must be a Republican candidate that has not been accused of sexual misconduct, is not under investigation, convicted, or confessed to multiple crimes out there somewhere, find he or she and get rid of the orange menace!

Climate Change Critics (The real Facts)

Posted: January 2, 2019 in climate change, News and politics, science
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Climate Change Critics

(The Real Facts)

The Trump administration released its first major climate report, the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) on November 23, 2018. The two-part report by the United States Global Change Research Program(USGCRP) was the result of two years of work by a team from 13 federal agencies with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as the lead administrator. The first volume released in October 2017, [39]

A 2018 CRS cited

The first volume, entitled “Climate Science Special Report” (CSSR) released on October 2017 said that, “Detection and attribution studies, climate models, observations, paleoclimate data, and physical understanding lead to high confidence (extremely likely) that more than half of the observed global mean warming since 1951 was caused by humans!

The U.S. Global Change Research Program reported in June 2009[41] that:

Observations show that warming of the climate is unequivocal. The global warming observed over the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. These emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), with important contributions from the clearing of forests, agricultural practices, and other activities.

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment[edit]

In 2004, the intergovernmental Arctic Council and the non-governmental International Arctic Science Committee released the synthesis report of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment:[42]

Climate conditions in the past provide evidence that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are associated with rising global temperatures. Human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), and secondarily the clearing of land, have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping (“greenhouse”) gases in the atmosphere…There is an international scientific consensus that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.[43]

Academies of science (general science)[edit]

Since 2001, 34 national science academies, three regional academies, and both the international InterAcademy Council and International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences have made formal declarations confirming human-induced global warming and urging nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The 34 national science academy statements include 33 who have signed joint science academy statements and one individual declaration by the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2007.

A consensus, based on current evidence, now exists within the global scientific community that human activities are the main source of climate change and that the burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible for driving this change. The IPCC should be congratulated for the contribution it has made to public understanding of the nexus that exists between energy, climate, and sustainability.

American Geophysical Union states that human activities are changing Earth’s climate. At the global level, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases have increased sharply since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel burning dominates this increase. Human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are responsible for most of the observed global average surface warming of roughly 0.8 °C (1.5 °F) over the past 140 years.Because natural processes cannot quickly remove some of these gases (notably carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere, our past, present, and future emissions will influence the climate system for millennia.

European Federation of Geologists

The EFG recognizes the work of the IPCC and other organizations, and subscribes to the major findings that climate change is happening, is predominantly caused by anthropogenic emissions of CO2, and poses a significant threat to human civilization.

European Geosciences Union

Asserts that the IPCC represents the state-of-the-art of climate science supported by the major science academies around the world and by the vast majority of science researchers and investigators as documented by the peer-reviewed scientific literature.[83]

National Association of Geoscience Teachers

Adopted a position statement on climate change in which they assert that “Earth’s climate is changing [and] “that present warming trends are largely the result of human activities“:

The American Meteorological Society

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers, and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of warming since the 1950s is human activities. This scientific finding is based on a large and persuasive body of research.

The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Global climate change and global warming are real and observable … It is highly likely that those human activities that have increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been largely responsible for the observed warming since 1950. 

World Meteorological Organization

The WMO concurs that “scientific assessments have increasingly reaffirmed that human activities are indeed changing the composition of the atmosphere, in particular through the burning of fossil fuels for energy production and transportation.” The WMO concurs that “the present atmospheric concentration of CO2 was never exceeded over the past 420,000 years;” and that the IPCC “assessments provide the most authoritative, up-to-date scientific advice.” 

I could go on for pages and pages, one scientific organization after another worldwide that support that climate change is here and that human activity is responsible for most of it! I am just pointing out to all you climate change deniers that finding one or two individuals that do not support climate change and our role in it is just that, one or two individuals. The real scientific communities around the globe agree that it is real, that we, the human equation along with our love of fossil fuels is responsible!

You can find links to all of these organizations and more by just accessing Wikipedia and Climate Change. You do not have to take any Wikipedia author’s claim, as I said, the links to every one of my examples are there, and you can check them all out yourself. Every time one of you anti-science idiots decides to go out and find someone pissed off they are not getting enough attention as proof there is no climate change, or that it is not human interaction accelerating it, I am going to clobber you with this blog! The evidence is glaring, the facts easily available. Quit letting an oligarch, bent on selling you his fossil fuel wares convince you atmospheric contamination is false and there is no climate change, as a result, be your example!

 

 

Does College Make you Liberal

Posted: October 4, 2018 in News and politics
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There are several reasons that the answer is highly educated may make you liberal, not the college experience per say! The conservative mantra that colleges are nothing more than evil liberal training grounds is a political move. It gives their base someone to hate for their plight, along with immigrants and people of color being the reason for all of the ills in life confronting them!

One of the reasons is, as you get more educated, you are introduced to a wider variety of cultures that you might have been afforded living in a microcosm before college. Your parent’s friends would tend to only be people who mirrored themselves! They would also tend to live in communities that also mirrored their belief system if possible. It is also true that high school students who are liberal tend to also go to college in much greater numbers! Hence a more liberal college population results! It has nothing to do with the college experience itself in that case.

Another possibility might be the growing numbers of women getting college degrees. Women, in general, tend to vote with the Democratic Party more than men. So as the population of highly educated people grew more female, that may have swung it left.

Third, the mainstream population that is conservative tends to be less educated! They do not tend to trend towards the highly educated or attend college, 31 percent of people with post-grad educations are consistently liberal, compared to 5 percent of those with high school educations or less according to the poll I saw! My own research tends to tell me this is factual even if the figures are not exact! Take that as you will, but it was not meant as any kind of detrimental slight! I myself have no college degree. I have gone to college a lot off and on, been to and graduated from several trade schools, let the military educate me to work on computer warfare aircraft in avionics, but basically, I am self-educated. I am liberal in case there was some doubt, but I have no formal college degree!

Yes, rich kids tend to be conservative also, and yes they tend to get educated, but they also tend to stay away from science-related pursuits! They tend to favor education that will help guarantee them a lifetime of successful avenues to get money and to keep it. Ok, not a sin, but you take a look at your GOP Senators, for example. A lot of lawyers, business majors, etc., you find not many scientists among them, no evolutionary biologists, no paleontologists, no teachers, you see where I am going. So you tend to only get a House or Senate with people of one mindset in that party. The other side of the aisle has a tendency to also come from that same background I freely admit that! You will find in the Democratic Party, however, more than a few with degrees in education, or science degrees, way more than you will in the GOP.

Also, if you are religious, especially those influenced by evangelicals, you will, even though highly educated, shy away from any form of study that makes you uncomfortable with what your Bible teaches! So we tend to have a lot of politicians who have absolutely no background in science as it makes them uncomfortable. It also makes them dangerous when it comes to being put in charge of entities whose whole being is based on science. NASA and the EPA are prime examples. You can talk about big government and over-regulation all you want, but big government is what you have right now under the current administration, and getting bigger and narrower in its scope and understanding every day!

These are a few ideas that have come out of this administration. Radiation is good for you, just like sunlight as long as it is moderate! Asbestos, one of our biggest killers, is safe! Dumping into streams and rivers is ok again! The clean air initiative is too extreme, so just get rid of it altogether. Oh, and let’s sue any state that still wants to make clean air a priority! Some GOP states have actually made mentioning climate change illegal; one has stated that you cannot connect rising sea level data to any study of climate change, even though their coastlines are in extreme danger! The white house has actually instructed that anything to do with climate change should just be ignored!
Is this really what you want? Sure the government is full of red tape and it is cumbersome and that does need to be fixed. But these cuts in protections all have one thing in common, a greater profit margin for big business and no concern for health issues. That cannot be the standard!

So, my point is, getting educated in itself tends to make you liberal, it is not that colleges are some kind of evil cabal indoctrinating our youth, they are just thinking for themselves, which has never been good for conservatives. Red states tend to be less educated with a poorer population on average! They also tend to be in need of more welfare than blue states, so why would they want to leave control in their state to the GOP whose leadership is responsible for the condition they find themselves in! Well, in this case, I say they are the ones being indoctrinated, why else would they vote against their own well-being!

I will not go into any moral issues I have with the President and the GOP, as they are more numerous than snowflakes in a blizzard! I just have to believe we will come to our senses at some point!

The Facts, Nothing But The Facts!

Posted: October 12, 2017 in Health and wellness, Life, News and politics, science
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This is in response to a post about how Democrats were originally for slavery and were opposed to civil rights! Well I had to respond, actually a friend asked for my opinion, and she got a little more than she bargained for, I am sure! So here goes! 

If you look at history and the platforms of both parties they have completely switched ideologies since the days of Lincoln. So what used to be the democrats is actually represented by republicans, and vice-versa. It of course is not as simple as just switching names, but the Democratic Party of old does not exist as such anymore, has not probably in our lifetime! So what is claimed is accurate, just not accurate to ascribe those attributes to the current party. The democrats have lots of problems which they need to solve, but if you look at what Republicans are trying to do right now, for example getting rid of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, trying to completely shut down the education and environmental agencies in total, trying to open up open pit mining in the heart of the last remaining natural Salmon fishery, closing down or vastly reducing our park systems and opening them up to mining and oil interests, I cannot see this as in our interest. The premise of the Republican Party is a solid one, but Republicans now in power are not abiding by or even resembling such a premise. I used to be a staunch Republican, but when they became bought and paid for, I had to leave. Not saying there are not bought and paid for Democrats, but way less in my opinion. If you dig into social security, it is income deduction based, does not affect the debt, and would be solvent if left alone and not the Fed piggy bank. But employers, especially large ones, have to match the Soc. Sec. contribution. Now they figure all that in when deciding how much salary to pay an individual, along with 401k matching, health care, vacation time, etc. But that is the driving force to the GOP hatred of this particular program, and in other forms of imagined attacks on their bottom line tend to foment hatred for all healthcare programs! Why after seven or eight years did the Republicans not build their own healthcare bill instead of trying to shove a hastily thrown together bill down our throats in secret to try and fool us into thinking they had our interest at heart! Because they never intended to offer a healthcare plan. They thought we would let them  get rid of the ACA and then they would just ignore cries for a new program until it faded away!  Big business, pharmaceuticals, petroleum companies, and others, all make billions, even trillions in profit, and they need to keep increasing profit or their stockholders get nasty! So that is what is being legislated, not our needs or wants or desires. Politicians get their money for re-election from these sources so you and I do not figure into their machinations in congress anymore. We have always been a socialist democracy. Otherwise there would be no fire, police, emergency response teams, paramedics, interstate highways, and the list goes on. So you have to decide if backing a person who acts like a bully in a grade school sandbox, who lies every single day, tells you exactly what you want to hear but has no intention of actually doing any of it, who changes horses midstream on policy weekly, and who cannot let any slight go no matter how insignificant it is! So he undermines his own secretary, his cabinet members flee in disgust, almost all of his appointments are still empty, he has no takers, despite his blaming democrats or Obama for everything. Tillerson almost left this summer! The buck stops at the Presidents desk, but he does not know that! Sorry for going postal here, but I have a lot of pent up rage at what is going on. I spend long hours reading bills, studying history, and looking at foreign news, even Russian outlets along with British, Irish, etc., to try and get the real picture of our world and our place in it. We are not the jewel of the earth anymore, we are more like a cancer! Education and science are scoffed at right now, and we are going to be sorry for letting those two slip our grasp. We need to start paying attention to science and education again or we are going to fail as a country! Our esteem in the world by our peers has diminished by leaps and bounds. This is not my opinion, it is a fact! You cannot replace a scientist with multiple degrees with a used car salesmen in an agency based on science and expect him to make the right choices for our well being. I am talking about the Environmental Protection Agency, oh and NASA as well! Anyway, I will shut up now, but I was asked!

 

Nasa found that the Moon had an Atmosphere 3 to 4 Billion yrs. Ago!

Posted: October 9, 2017 in science
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A new study at NASA has found that our moon had a more prominent atmosphere than it does today – around 3 to 4 billion years ago – which formed as a result of intense volcanic eruptions that spewed giant cloud of gas above the surface faster than they could escape to space. The surface…

via Study Shows Our Moon Once Had An Atmosphere — Sparkonit