This is a “feel-good” story in all sorts of ways — a young woman excelling in science, transcending having been brought up in Florida, and possibly making a major contribution to the solution of creating clean bio-diesel energy — except for one way: the slimy feeling of the algae she has been studying. But that’s forgivable given the rest.
And, because only about 13% of you probably got the reference in the headline from the lyric reference alone, here you go — enjoy!
This is your Weekend Open Thread. Talk about that, or about anything else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of decorum and discretion.
Elbert Guillory: “Why I Am a Republican” – or, “Why I dumped the party of the plantation and slavery for the party of freedom.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=n_YQ8560E1w
Happy to see a female future scientist! Good for her! She EXACTLY why we need money for schools. And while we are on the subject of algae…it’s been around forever as a supplement for health. http://www.livestrong.com/article/340310-the-health-benefits-of-algae/
Drill in Alaska! Drill away!
Any reason that might not be a good idea? What are your beliefs about global warming?
Gimme a few hours. It’s early.
Nothing like a 16 year old to put us in our place…I know my science project was not nearly that exciting.
give her five yeas, she will sell the process to monsanto and move to an island in the south pacific
*She probably will get a job with Huntington Beach….working on the Desal program there!
“What are your beliefs about global warming?”
Isn’t global warming “settled science”? – just like “the next ice age is just around the corner” science in the ’70s.
How do you explain the fact that the earth has been cooling for the last 15 years?
Stick with “climate change” – you can go either way.
In one breath you mock science. In the next, you apparently want to use science (statistics, as far as we can tell because you offer no proof) to assert that the earth has been cooling for the last 15 years.
Don’t you see how idiotic that is?
As I recall it, the concern in the 1970s was the ozone layer. In the ’80s, we had concern over “nuclear winter,” but that regarded what would happen in the event of a nuclear war. (It’s still a possibility — although in the longer run it would also lead to worse warming. It’s not worth it as a policy option, before you suggest it.)
The “earth has been cooling” canard has been so discredited as misleading by now that I don’t even remember the rebuttal. Tell ya what — you explain your recollection (or hey, even look it up!) the basis for your “earth has been cooling” point and then I’ll refresh my memory about how it is absurd. For the record, my concern is the biosphere, not the earth’s core or whatever else you may have in mind — and primarily those parts of it inhabited by humans, as well as some of the wind and ocean patterns that regulate climate.
Ready? Go.
In an interview with the German news publication Der Spiegel, meteorologist Hans von Storch said that scientists are so puzzled by the 15-year standstill in global warming that if the trend continues their models could be “fundamentally wrong.”
“If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models,” Storch told Der Spiegel. “A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/21/climate-scientist-global-warming-models-could-be-fundamentally-wrong/#ixzz2X0rAxjpG
Oh, God. Please start reading something more credible than the Daily Caller.
Go google “hottest year on record” and let me know what you find.
If you look at temperature trends over the last 100 years, the trend is clearly up. But it goes up in a zig-zag pattern. Hotter for several years, then cooler for several years. But the warming is clearly winning. It’s like two steps up and one step back, two steps up and one step back.
Anyone who points to 5 or 10 year periods to make a point about global warming is, uh, missing the point.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201201-201212.png
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In what may be the most serious allegation ever made against the former Secretary of State, Fox News Channel reported today that Hillary Clinton was involved in the conspiracy to murder President Abraham Lincoln.
The latest charge against Mrs. Clinton was reported by Fox host Sean Hannity, who said that the evidence of her role in the Lincoln assassination came mainly in the form of e-mails.
According to Mr. Hannity, “If it’s true that Hillary Clinton killed Lincoln, this could have a major impact on her chances in 2016.”
The accusation against Mrs. Clinton drew a strong response from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R.—S. Carolina): “There’s been a concerted effort by Hillary Clinton to cover up her role in President Lincoln’s murder. She has said nothing about it. This is bigger than Watergate, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Second World War put together.”
Responding to the allegation, Mrs. Clinton issued a terse statement indicating that she could not have participated in Lincoln’s assassination because she was born in 1947.
“That’s what she wants us to believe,” Sen. Graham said.
This sounds like something for you to go whole hog with, Mike, for at least this week.
No … I don’t want to give you a moments respite from my righteous conservative harangues on issues of real import.
That reminds me… when did you manage to squeeze in writing school recently? Not to mention irony school?
Thanks Ryan C for refuting the Chamber of Commerce’s rep in the Anaheim’s Charter Review committee’s discussion:
http://www.voiceofoc.org/oc_north/article_8ec954ee-d9e7-11e2-8be5-0019bb2963f4.html
*Think Krakatoa! Remember that biggie in 1894….or there abouts? You will know that the climate has changed for good when one of three things happen: (1) We get hit by this huge comet and are instantly destroyed. (2) Volcanoes start going off around the world to the point that smoke and fire cover every portion of our sky. (3) Monsanto makes each one of us a GMO suitable for eating.
*Meanwhile, in 1947 there were a little over a million people living in Los Angeles. Today over 4 million. In 1947 there were a little of 600 million Chinese. There are not 1.4 Billion. CO2 better be good for us…..because the world is ingesting a whole bunch more of it. Trees trade Oxygen for the CO2….so naturally, that is why every toilet paper manufacturer in the world is burning down every forest in the world and building manufacturing and housing.
Undoubtedly…..”Climate change is all just a bunch of bunk…..perpetuated by out of work scientists”. Yeah……think mom will believe that?
this probably is more appropriate on the monsanto post, but i thought that i would share it here.
while i have tried to mock and ridicule those who want to protect us from gmo’s, i am fairly well versed on the topic given the fact that the wife and i have several good friends up in los angeles who are fanatical about the issue (granted they all live in either bel aire or pacific palisades and can afford to be fanatical/elitist in the same way gwenith paltrow is but that is a different conversation)
the point is that i was at costco yesterday and costco, and walmart and all these places are the reason those who want to bring our food production back to the good old days will never win. there are simply too many people for food to be grown and distributed in the manner proposed.
middle america, and lower middle america and especially working poor america does not care about what chemicals are in the food as long as it tastes good, is readily available and is relatively cheap. and that is not going to change. we know what are in twinkies and yet look at the outcry when hostess went belly up. look at the line on a friday afternoon at tommy’s over on magnolia and warner or the two hour wait to get into the cheese cake factory. do you think that those people are concerned about gmo’s. no, and nothing is going to change that.
for those fighting that fight, and the other noble causes discussed here, i sincerely applaud you for your integrity, determination and optimism. however, we will have soylant green in the local ralphs before they start stocking their shelves with gmo free products and monsanto will always have a warm place in my stock portfolio
“Soylent” green, willie. Made from soy and lentil. And other stuff.
You may be right — or other countries banning agricultural imports from the U.S. may eventually have its effect. (Putin has gotten most of the world rooting for him against Monsanto. Making Putin seem like a sympathetic white knight is quite the trick — but we’re managing it!)
Regardless, the issue actually being fought out recently is GMO labeling — and nothing in what you write undercuts the case for that. In fact, it would allow the market to work its magic rather than our imposing Inge as the food commissar, which you probably realize has been our secret plan all along. But now I have said too much.
Diamond – That “other stuff” is PEOPLE! – Soylent green is people!!
Well, so long as it isn’t GMO….
Proof that soylent green is people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Sp-VFBbjpE
Willie went to Costco the other day. Ha Ha !
Yeah, you and Mitt Romney were buying dress shirts again.
Costco does sell organic food, because people want it….
SPINACH, organic,fresh, 1 lb tub (around $3)
KALE, organic,fresh, 1.5 lb bag (around $4)
SPRING MIX LETTUCE, organic,fresh, 1 lb. tub (around $3)
APPLES, organic,fresh, by the box, 5.5 lbs. (around $7)
PEARS, organic, fresh, by the box, 6 lbs. (around $6)
STRAWBERRIES, organic,fresh, by the tub (around $4)
GRAPES, organic,fresh, by the tub (around $4)
CARROTS, organic,fresh, 5 lb. bag (around $4)
CARROTS, baby, organic, fresh, peeled, 5 lb. bag (around $4)
CAESAR KIT MIX, organic, fresh, 1 lb bag (around $ 4) – Dressing is not clean
CELERY, organic, fresh, 2 lb. bag (around $5.00)
RASPBERRIES, organic,fresh, 24 oz. package (around $3 when in season)
BLUEBERRIES, organic,fresh, 1 lb package (around $5 when in season)
BLUEBERRIES, organic,frozen, 1 lb. bag (around $10)
TRIPLE BERRY MIX, organic,frozen, 1 lb bag, Blueberries, raspberries and blackberries – Radar Farms brand (around $10)
Costco knows what the peeps want, and they like to be the ones selling it to them.
the fiji water is cheaper by the case at costco
Do you really check the receipts that the help brings back from Costco?
Do you count how many bottles of Fiji they drink a day….oh wait, you might just have them drinking the Kirkland. You should set up surprise auto inspections to see if they are robbing you blind, yet.
It’ll help you sleep better.
friend of mine’s father owned a couple of “entertainment” establishments in the midwest in the 60’s and 70’s. he would tell the story of “tony” who worked for his dad. his father knew that “tony” was taking five percent but he also knew that if “tony” was taking five percent, nobody else was taking a dime.
“mario” handles those business affairs for me. i sleep very well
I used to frequent a large pub on the west side of LA where they served Bass by the pint, and darts were the favorite pastime.
The owners knew that they were being taken advantage of by the employees, and made a big effort to tamp it down. They hired spotters to come in and sit at the bar to see if tabs weren’t being rung up, they watched the waitresses to see if they were giving away the store. They tried and tried to figure out who was behind it all. No luck.
The secret of the scam……everybody was in on it. There was a pecking order of course, and your share was commensurate with your importance. But every employee was on the take, even the dishwashers and hostesses, and every spotter that walked in didn’t have a chance of discovering any thing unusual.
To the best of my knowledge it’s still going on today.
Sounds like you’re out in front on this one willie.
in truth, i have nothing against gmo labeling. i would assume that, as with all other labels, fine print and warning tags on mattresses, the majority of people would ignore them. but it would give all those contingency loving personal injury loving attorneys another basis of suing our wonderful corporations.
as to your conspiracy of world domination, i can see where that is going as well, inge as food commissar, vern as minister of culture, you as chair of the department of information and curt pringle as director of all things good and wholesome
The Blunt Truth About The Communist Squatting In The White House
Yup. His daddy was a communist. His mommy was a communist. His mentor was a communist. He admitted in his book before running for the presidency that he himself was a Marxist. And that may be part of the misunderstanding and confusion. It may be that many people do not understand what a Marxist is. “Marxist” is just a fancy word for a communist. And Obama is a self-admitted, constitution-hating, spread-the-wealth-around Marxist/communist. And no one can deny that. It’s a self-evident, self-admitted fact.
by Jim Robinson (Head of FreeRepublc.com)
“Squatting in the white house.” Our duly twice-elected (black) commander in chief. And you and your crowd aren’t racist?
The rest of what you copied and pasted isn’t even worth vomiting on.
I must disagree with you, Vern. It is entirely worth vomiting on.
Who said this was about “race”? Oh yeah …. you.
Maybe you would have tried this same thing about Bill Clinton. But Clinton at least gave you some reason with his peccadillos. Obama has given you actual reason for complaint essentially when he has either continued Bush Administration policies or capitulated to those who favor them. So — yeah, it looks like race plays a role. More evidence is available, though.
Perfect example of why the GOP is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
Independents listened to rhetoric like this in the last election, weighed it against what they actually saw with their own two eyes and heard with their own two ears, and decided people like Jim Robinson (and Skallywag) are insane.
Keep the crazy comin’!
*We know…we know….we know……so why in the world is he still bailing out those Investor Banks on Wall Street? Why is he running interference for all the major Banks? Why is he supporting Small Business with all the Government Grants he can find? Why does he want to bring back manufacturing to this country? Hmmm….quite a commie! Sounds like Mitt Romney should have been more Commie Like?
The chi-coms are capitalists as well …… it’s all about control.
“Marxist” is not “just a fancy word for communist,” you mental dung heap.
“.. mental dung heap ..” . wow .. so personal … oh well … “forward” –
What Marx asks for are : “l) Abolition of property in land and application of all Rents on land to public purposes. 2) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3) Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4) Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5) Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6) Centralization of communication and transport in the hands of the state. 7) Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing in cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8) Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9) Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of population over the country. 10) Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its resent form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc., etc.”
From “Marx’s Vision of Communism” – http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/marxs_vision.php
That sounds like communism to me Diamond.
And Marx also supported many things that don’t look like communism, including the presidential policies of Abraham Lincoln, that don’t make it onto this sort of tendentious list. Socialism, social democracy, and liberalism also trace some of their best ideas back to a Marxist critique. My long-held position is that Marx was a brilliant sociologist, a good economist, and a lousy psychologist. Alternatively, brilliant diagnostician but not so good of a therapist.
(I like that the progressive income tax makes the list, though! Some people get so pissed about it!)
Let me see if you can guess some of the aspects of modern social and political life that we take for granted that also largely trace their theoretical justification back to the criticisms posed by Marx. Can you come up with ten?
No
while karl was a brilliant, though naive and implausible, political philosopher, i prefer the deep thoughts of his cousin, harpo
“.. transcending being brought up in Florida ..” What the hell does that mean?
bio-diesel is still diesel, what makes it clean? or is it just the color green?
Diamond said: “Marxist” is not “just a fancy word for communist,” you mental dung heap.”
I think that it is not inaccurate for the writer to say that – from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“Karl Marx is best known not as a philosopher but as a revolutionary communist, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century. Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, towards economics and politics.. Marx sees the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism.”
I am open to receiving and accepting your apology for calling me a “mental dung heap” which was apparently inspired by that writers Marx comment.
You’ll have to wait longer, Scheisskopf.
You’d do well to read more from Jonathan Wolff. Here’s a link to the full entry from the Stanford publication, which I would probably be willing to bet a lobe of my liver you have not read in full. Here’s Wolff’s home page, too. I like the first-listed bit of “current research”:
So, go back to the entry on Marx and read the whole thing. Here by the way, is the unredacted first paragraph — which you (or, who are we kidding?, whatever snotty polemicist you swiped it from) sadly forgot to mark with an ellipsis while taking out the portion that begins to explain why your interpretation is … lacking.
You missed the parts in bold. The part that I underlined is really pretty damned important when it comes to whether one can hang the likes of Stalinism or the Cambodian auto-genocide around the neck of Marx, which is about as unfair as hanging Torquemada’s endeavors around the neck of Jesus (and to make it clear enough not to confuse you, I consider that to be unfair.)
Here’s a nice summary of Marx’s often misunderstood (especially by those who can’t get past the title) early work, “On the Jewish Question,” in which he distinguishes political emancipation from the something greater that he promotes:
All that stuff that goes beyond liberal views of political rights? That’s fairly described as part of “Marxism.” It’s a big term, in a similar respect to the way that “Christianity” is a big term. It includes many social movements that are not in any way Stalinist (which is apparently you think “communism” must be) or Maoist or even Trotskyist or Bukharinist or whatever it is that so-called “communist” countries have now. It informs, for example, modern Scandinavian social democracies that only a gibbering idiot would describe as “communist.”
Go ahead, tell the Finns that they’re communists. Send a postcard and let us know how it goes.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. A little knowledge combined with internet access is a disaster waiting to happen — like spontaneous combustion in a dung heap.
So now you call me “shithead” along with “mental dung heap” – again an unprovoked personal attack. Are you having a rough go of it Diamond?
Karl Marx was a fuckin’ communist. Neither I or the writer compared him to Stalin or the Khmer Rouge. You, sir, are an arrogant rude asshole.
I was evoking Joseph Heller’s character Lt. (eventually Gen.) Scheisskopf, of whom you sometimes remind me. It does fit pretty well with “mental dung heap,” though, now that you mention it. Sort of literally, in fact.
You didn’t read a single word I said about that entry you cited, did you? See, that’s provoking.
I try to rise (or sometimes allow myself to fall) to the level of my competition.
“You didn’t read a single word I said about that entry you cited, did you?”
Yes I did – plently of it – the guy was a fucking communist and is thought of by most of the rational thinking world as a communist. He may not have been a dictatorial murdering tyrant of a communist – but he was a communist.
And you sir are still an arrogant rude asshole.
The problem is that it’s not clear what you mean by “he was a communist.” And regardless of what “he was,” the topic of discussion was not “Marx,” but “Marxism.” Marxism is not the basis for communism alone; the Marxism criticism of capitalism was an influential basis for lots of things that (unlike communism) we consider mainstream in our society, such as Social Security and Medicare. (Not so much Obamacare, though.)
You have no standing to call anyone else arrogant, rude, or an asshole. Without addressing the other two, I generally try not to be rude, but sometimes you pretty much beg for it.
Are you REALLY pissed at me because of a disagreement over Marx and the precise relationship of Marx to communism ….. really??
No, no, of course not. This is contempt.