Overcast this early Wednesday on California’s north coast, and the NWS claims right now we’re just a few degrees above freezing — before sun up, clear and cold, which morphed into the current cloudy and cold.
Early riser I am, but that’s a sleep habit, nothing to do with the actual outside temperature — idiot!
Speaking of who, yesterday after President Obama vetoed the Keystone XL pipeline Congressional bill (via CNBC):
‘House Speaker John Boehner called the veto “a national embarrassment” in a Tuesday release, accusing the president of being “too close to environmental extremists to stand up for America’s workers.”‘
Details of the pipeline bullshit at Climate Central, including this key note:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that that the energy required to process tar sands oil is so great that oil piped through the Keystone XL will emit 1.3 billion more tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the pipeline’s 50-year lifespan than if it were carrying conventional crude oil.
Just to be on the safe side — yesterday from science writer Bob Henson at WunderBlog, indicating our climate could start changing even more rapidly:
The slowdown was preceded by almost 20 years of dramatic global temperature rise, and with 2014 having set a new global record high, there are signs that another decade-plus period of intensified atmospheric warming may be at our doorstep.
Meanwhile, just to increase idiot-stress for the likes of above-mentioned Speaker ‘The Boner‘ Boeher, the CPAC convention starts today and in the glare of pure lunacy, a display of clueless vulgarity, a horrible, horrible actual threat to mankind.
Nutshell via Newsweek:
It’s an industry trade show like Comic-Con, but also a feel-good festival à la Burning Man.
It’s got Super Bowlesque hoopla, and for activists on the right, the annual meeting is the get-together in Washington.
Thousands of conservatives will gather Wednesday for the weeklong Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), where presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and others will try to woo their base in the lead-up to 2016.
Reality of this grab-ass, nutcase event is best summarized by Bill in Portland Maine:
‘What you’ll see: anger, rage, crazy, tried-and-failed ideas, madness, pretzel-twisted logic, xenophobia, homophobia, immigrant-o-phobia, Islamophobia, isolationism, birtherism, secession and denial, denial, denial.’
If the world wasn’t in such a weird-warped sort of place, these clowns would be deadpan hilarious, funny in a sort of “Best in Show” kind of way — yet ‘denial’ can be way-far-reaching.
Quote of the day maybe from earlier this morning — caught my eye with an odd reflection, and really, maybe spoke of our current era of dangerously, violent odd. The words came from one of the survivors in an odd, strange collision on Tuesday down in Oxnard, in southern California, between a commuter train and a pick-up truck apparently parked on the tracks.
Passenger Joel Bingham, a railroad aficionado, who rides the train a lot (via the Guardian):
“It seemed like an eternity while we were flying around the train. Everything was flying,” Bingham said.
“A brush of death definitely came over me.”
Bingham said the lights went out when the train fell over.
He was banged up from head to toe but managed to find an escape for himself and others.
“I was just shaking,” he said.
“I opened the window and told everybody, ‘Come to my voice.’”
And from one brainiac to another: ‘“A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?”‘
(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Harlequin Head,’ found here).