Lazy me just googled and found the Envirothon organization. I love it! My thing for many years was judging HS, Regional, State and ISEF science fairs.
There are things that Envirothon, Robotic, Science competitions achieve that I rarely see mentioned. And I think they are equally and often more important than the learning here.
A. Achievement. The kids get something done! Win or not. This is lifelong achievement can never be taken away. They bank it.
B. Respect. Being reviewed thru discussion and presentation by respectful adults. An orbit out of their daily peer group pressures. A geek like me thrived with this. I think all the kids so treated it should be uplifting.
C. Challenge. Finding the path
D. Teamwork and collaboration. Not all but most competition today involves teams. Huge!
E. This is actually developing marketing and entrepreneur skills. Presenting your work. It's a business plan in many ways, without the investment ask (maybe Envirothon has a followon ask).
So. Extra kudos Cynthia. Now I understand the fabulous Envirothon.
This is the North Carolina site. We're one of only a few states that have middle school competition, starting at 5th grade.
Son F was 2nd out of 13 high students. (We have 15, but 2 weren't there and will take the test at home.) People underestimate him because he's a goober, but he totally knows his fact.
He was telling me it was my fault that he got one of the soil questions wrong (I wrote the test). "All soil is permeable to air and water, not just prime farmland!" "Yes, but all three of the other answers were clearly wrong. I can show you in the manual!"
Good morning all. It's a special day today - my mother just sent me a picture of a snowman she built. . .on her lawn. . .in Houston. 😳🤯🤣
Meanwhile, here in Seattle it's a chilly but respectable 36 degrees with a high in the low 40s coming soon. No snow unless I head to the mountains. (And no, God, that isn't a complaint).
Hey Doug! Good to "see" you again. Life has been upside-down crazy since late last year, hence my being absent more often than not, both here and at the Mothership (is it still called that?).
I'm hoping for clear skies so I can enjoy some good glimpses of the heavens. I hope you - and everyone else - has been doing well.
We're home from Envirothon. F did very well on the tests, and D did quite well. F will be on the A team for high schoolers, although we won't call it that. Not sure about D: there are some kids she wants to be on a team with, but I want to make sure they're the ones who are going to work hard AND push her to work hard. She'll underperform if she's with a team that isn't ambitious.
Update: Daughter D had the 4th highest score, so she gets on the A team of middle school. We have so many middle school students that it's bit of a project to put together our top 3 teams with a mix of boys and girls, and matching up who is strong in which subject.
An interesting career path... Pete Hegseth would probably be down with F, but as far as D goes, it's said he has a problem with females getting in on the action...
There was a lot of information packed into that TSAF. I wonder why they didn’t just call them “nidarians.” There were a fair amount of liberal tears on my social media feeds yesterday but nothing too dramatic. Move along, you’re going to be OK (except Lia Thomas and his ilk.)
My sister called me up to discuss the hat. The coat needed the hat but the whole ensemble was “get me out of here." So strict and unbecoming. She tries so hard to fill a role in which she is so miscast. I liked Ivanka,s hat but she looked displaced too. Whoever is advising them needs another job. Mrs. Vance looked lovely.
I went over to the Daily Mail to look at the clothes. I thought that was a good color for Jill Biden. There was just too much of it in one outfit. If it had been just a jacket, say, that would have been effective.
Good morning. I woke up to a couple inches of snow in Houston, which is so rare the city doesn’t have any snow removal equipment. So they (we) freak out. School and other closing announcements we made on Sunday!
Marine madness is where it's at. I am off to the coast today to get my mom's house ready for company for her service this Saturday. Five to 8 inches of snow forecast for tonight. (It was only 3 - 5 when I went to bed).
A snowstorm that would freak out Raleigh in a place where it rarely snows at all. What could go wrong?
I didn't pay any attention to the actual events, but as I skimmed the coverage this morning, one image stuck out. The hat. Has there ever been an outfit that said "Don't talk to me, I'm not even remotely interested in anything you think or have to say, and I do not care for any of you"....more than that outfit?
I listened to his speech after the fact and thought it was a pretty typical political speech. Lots of exaggeration and frankly ridiculous promises, but hey, that’s to be expected. I made the mistake of reading comments on TMD. It looked like The Resistance II is starting. Someone got excited because Musk gave a Nazi salute (!) somewhere, and someone else pointed out again the stupidity of Americans who will now get it good and hard. When will I learn to look away? I guess humans fascinate me, even the irrational ones.
I haven't been able to even see any comments, much less add my own. Somebody probably forgot to plug the goodlewhatsiz into the toggledongle or something.
As a Jew, I don't find Elon giving a Nazi salute amusing in the slightest. I did, however, find the attempt to justify or explain it hilarious. "Oh, he's just awkward." Right.
I found the ADL coming to his defense in light of all-things-Elon regarding his well-documented at the very least clear adjacency to antisemitism... really weird?
I can't say with absolute certainty what the guy's actual intent was concerning that gesture, but I sure don't buy raw enthusiasm or excitement for even a nano second. He may be autistic, but he's an ultra-high functioning autistic, a grown-up adult and a beneficiary of American freedoms and liberties to the absolute max. And the sob should know better and I'm sure he does.
Story. Grew up in 60s West Virginia. Had a half dozen good friends of the Jewish faith, and still friends. Went to nerd school in Cambridge. Learned much more.
One of my terrifying moments in my career occured about 45 years. I was a young manager at BigCorp. Arguably the best marketing team ever under Jack. He was global before that was a word.
He brought over for my business 2 gentleman who lived thru WW2. A German and an Austrian.
During our meeting, the Austrian started the fknngh Nazi salute! In the US.
I stepped forward and said to him stop. And a couple older Americans joined. My younger Jewish employee was appalled and I was ashamed this could happen in the early 80s.
It shocked me then. I'm not shocked now. And yes. Unequivocally, Musk gave a NAZI salute. It is so iconic and infamous, no one mistakes it.
Did he really do that? I assumed it was a few media idiots looking for clicks, and others using it to further their “See, we told you Trump is Hitler!” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t find it amusing at all but I’ve just seen too much false reporting and outrage when it comes to anything to do with Trump.
He really did that. WIRED has a good photo. I didn't check any other media outlets, but the Proud Boys, et al were all a-flutter apparently on social media with their approval.
I think if you talk to people who have known me from the beginnings of this substack, you will find that I'm no alarmist or fantasist. It was pretty clear to me.
Ditto, what would be the point of him doing that? Makes no sense. He's an awkward Aspie, I have one living in my house. He probably meant to do the pound pound peace which is a very common gesture but he forgot how to do it. Classic Aspie.
Arm straight out. Palm down. He could have stopped at touching his heart. My girlfriend's parents were Survivors. She knows, I know, there is no mistaking that action. We are just going to have to disagree here. We don't agree on a lot of things, BC, but this one is pretty unmistakable.
Spare a thought for them: They’re in for a rough 1460 days if they don’t pace themselves…
I probably like the incoming bunch less than the outgoing lot, but I’m not going to focus on their doings every day. No matter my feelings about it, it won’t make any difference to *them*. They’ll just go ahead and do whatever it is they were gonna do anyway.
The resistance. Everyone getting cranked by some 3rd grader antic and "resisting" isn't going anywhere. I'm naive enough to think people will be attracted to smart ideas. Trump is an idiot, but not so idiotic that he didn't see a couple good ideas, grabbed them, and made them his own. We'll see if he has the ability to enact them, but at least he saw what appealed to people and grabbed it.
Maurer, over at IMBW, is nonplussed because he can't figure how Trump stole the good ideas of free speech, border control, etc. from the Dems. It's not hard to figure out.
What was the 3rd grader antic? I didn't watch live but went back with uTube and saw what I wanted. I just now went to see 2 yr old Mirabel (thank you Biker Chic!) and she was pretty cute!
And I suppose part of that is whether or not you see America First as antisemitic. I think it's absurd to see Jews as out of mainstream America, or anti-immigration as antisemitic. This strikes me as the political opposition's not letting a red-meat opportunity go to waste. Given our current problems, I see it as far more likely that today's right likes Jews a whole lot better than it likes Muslims.
Trump sees ideas that motivate his base and takes them. Some are smart. Some, like his "External Revenue Service" (CBP and the Coast Guard already do this) are dumb. And some are either illegal or (like "abolishing birthright citizenship unconstitutional.
I almost think he's just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, Otherwise, I'm not sure how much he cares about any one of them (except the broad strokes of "fixing" immigration).
My sister called me up to discuss the hat. The coat needed the hat but the whole ensemble was “get me out of here." So strict and unbecoming. She tries so hard to fill a role in which she is so miscast. I liked Ivanka,s hat but she looked displaced too. Whoever is advising them needs another job. Mrs. Vance looked lovely.
I am normally fashion analysis averse; everyone gets to do whatever they want and I don't care. But, the harshness of that look really struck me. I didn't notice any of the other folks, it's all superfluous...but that hat, and the way the brim shadow obscured the eyes...imperious...uncaring...utterly distant....whew...
There were a few outfits, over the years, in which Michelle Obama looked really good. However, I thought she didn't have very good taste. On the other hand, she had no obligation to look glamorous.
One issue was that she seemed to like cotton, and cotton looks untidy unless it was ironed two minutes ago and you haven't moved.
Yeah. I'm a Chicago guy. I know a few stories. Melania is at least honest about it. She wore the costume. Michelle is a different type of Princess, the dishonest type.
Good morning. We are in weather alert, with temps at 2 degrees currently, getting no warmer than the teens, and subzero chills.
The big news yesterday was that the Ohio State Buckeyes beat Notre Dame for the national championship! However, other than a brief mention, the mothership dropped the ball on that story (no pun intended), instead covering Trump’s inauguration and the blizzard of executive orders on his first day back in office. The FP did likewise.
There was definitely plenty in that blizzard to be upset at, but the one item that I could NOT care less about was the "...and the revocation of the security clearances of 50 former intelligence officials." The linked Politico article did nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.
If you're not in office or employed by the government anymore you shouldn't get to keep the access (or potential to have that access) to classified info. In my mind it's no different than my EPIC credentials being erased to prevent me from accessing patient data when I leave the employment of a hospital.
Politico implied - or practically outright said really - this was "revenge" for the 2020 letter about the HB laptop being Russian dis-information. Which doesn't make the case they think it makes since the laptop was indeed NOT that.
I was even more unmoved by their last sentence: "Consultants such as Bolton — who rely on their access and connections to the government — may bear the biggest impact of this directive."
Oh nooooooes. People who used to need classified info for their job but don't anymore can't use that fact to get good paying gigs outside government. Cry me a river.
I’d walk the dogs in your ‘hood with those temperatures. It’s -14 with a “feels like” -24 here. It’s -24 at the cabin with a “feels like” -28. I think all the schools in WI are closed.
Good morning, everyone. Happy Trash Day! It's also Envirothon day; the students will have their mid-term exam, which will help us organize them into what we hope will be successful competition teams.
Was a cool and refreshing 2 or 3 below this AM on the way out to the barn at daybreak. But farther north, about 2/3 of the way up the Lower Peninsula, in West Branch I guess you could say the frost was finally on the pumpkin at -24*F.
From the album archives, it would appear there’s at least one TMBG special animal friend:
https://youtu.be/yiyZmQhuM4w?si=KUlvlLZffXfy0w8r
To sing along:
https://tmbw.net/wiki/Lyrics:Bee_Of_The_Bird_Of_The_Moth
Sometimes I wonder what these guys are smoking.
And all those sea critters are supposed to be weird?
I'm enjoying a TMBG interlude this afternoon.
31F. 40mph winds. About 13F
https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/html/windchillbody_txt.html
Lazy me just googled and found the Envirothon organization. I love it! My thing for many years was judging HS, Regional, State and ISEF science fairs.
There are things that Envirothon, Robotic, Science competitions achieve that I rarely see mentioned. And I think they are equally and often more important than the learning here.
A. Achievement. The kids get something done! Win or not. This is lifelong achievement can never be taken away. They bank it.
B. Respect. Being reviewed thru discussion and presentation by respectful adults. An orbit out of their daily peer group pressures. A geek like me thrived with this. I think all the kids so treated it should be uplifting.
C. Challenge. Finding the path
D. Teamwork and collaboration. Not all but most competition today involves teams. Huge!
E. This is actually developing marketing and entrepreneur skills. Presenting your work. It's a business plan in many ways, without the investment ask (maybe Envirothon has a followon ask).
So. Extra kudos Cynthia. Now I understand the fabulous Envirothon.
https://envirothon.org/
https://sites.google.com/site/envirothonnc/home
This is the North Carolina site. We're one of only a few states that have middle school competition, starting at 5th grade.
Son F was 2nd out of 13 high students. (We have 15, but 2 weren't there and will take the test at home.) People underestimate him because he's a goober, but he totally knows his fact.
He was telling me it was my fault that he got one of the soil questions wrong (I wrote the test). "All soil is permeable to air and water, not just prime farmland!" "Yes, but all three of the other answers were clearly wrong. I can show you in the manual!"
Good morning all. It's a special day today - my mother just sent me a picture of a snowman she built. . .on her lawn. . .in Houston. 😳🤯🤣
Meanwhile, here in Seattle it's a chilly but respectable 36 degrees with a high in the low 40s coming soon. No snow unless I head to the mountains. (And no, God, that isn't a complaint).
Hello! The latest guess is that we won't have snow in Charlotte, but they could guess wrong.
Hello Richard!!!!
How have you been?
Many planets out tonight. Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars!!
Cripes. Does that mean the arrival of more alien life forms here similar to, say, Elon Musk?
The Aliens, having been here, and being presented in Hollywood are ready for us!!
Transformers Arise!!
🐦🐦🐦🐦👋🐾🐾🤣🍺
Hey Doug! Good to "see" you again. Life has been upside-down crazy since late last year, hence my being absent more often than not, both here and at the Mothership (is it still called that?).
I'm hoping for clear skies so I can enjoy some good glimpses of the heavens. I hope you - and everyone else - has been doing well.
It's clear here -- and very cold, single digits.
I still call TMD (or TD) the mothership. I think the connection of others to our community's origin varies.
We're all good here. We've had some very nice views of the planets recently.
We're home from Envirothon. F did very well on the tests, and D did quite well. F will be on the A team for high schoolers, although we won't call it that. Not sure about D: there are some kids she wants to be on a team with, but I want to make sure they're the ones who are going to work hard AND push her to work hard. She'll underperform if she's with a team that isn't ambitious.
Update: Daughter D had the 4th highest score, so she gets on the A team of middle school. We have so many middle school students that it's bit of a project to put together our top 3 teams with a mix of boys and girls, and matching up who is strong in which subject.
An interesting career path... Pete Hegseth would probably be down with F, but as far as D goes, it's said he has a problem with females getting in on the action...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MVonyVSQoM
Congratulations to both are in order. 🎉🎊🍾👍
Congrats to D!
Thank you.
There was a lot of information packed into that TSAF. I wonder why they didn’t just call them “nidarians.” There were a fair amount of liberal tears on my social media feeds yesterday but nothing too dramatic. Move along, you’re going to be OK (except Lia Thomas and his ilk.)
"nid-" comes from the Latin root for "nest," while "cnid-" is something different.
Why not call them "nidarians"? Because -- language.
My sister called me up to discuss the hat. The coat needed the hat but the whole ensemble was “get me out of here." So strict and unbecoming. She tries so hard to fill a role in which she is so miscast. I liked Ivanka,s hat but she looked displaced too. Whoever is advising them needs another job. Mrs. Vance looked lovely.
Another take: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/news/melania-trumps-inauguration-style/
Ultra-violet is not Dr Jill's color. Hillary looked much better than usual. Kamala looked like she'd just swallowed a frog.
I went over to the Daily Mail to look at the clothes. I thought that was a good color for Jill Biden. There was just too much of it in one outfit. If it had been just a jacket, say, that would have been effective.
Definitely better with less. She seemed overwhelmed.
Good morning. I woke up to a couple inches of snow in Houston, which is so rare the city doesn’t have any snow removal equipment. So they (we) freak out. School and other closing announcements we made on Sunday!
Be thankful you close down rather than pour tons of salt on your roads.
Marine madness is where it's at. I am off to the coast today to get my mom's house ready for company for her service this Saturday. Five to 8 inches of snow forecast for tonight. (It was only 3 - 5 when I went to bed).
A snowstorm that would freak out Raleigh in a place where it rarely snows at all. What could go wrong?
Oh, and its really really cold.
Good luck and no disasters, I hope.
Hope all goes well.
Thanks. I'll get to see snow!
Lucy, am I misreading “service?" If you have lost your mother, I am so sorry.
Thanks. She had cancer and dementia and passed on Saturday before last. She is at rest.
I'm sorry, Lucy. I'll say a prayer for you and the family.
Thank you.
It takes time but the bad part goes away and memories reform until you are left with what you need. At least, that,s how it has been for me.
If it snows like that in Raleigh…wow! That’ll be a complete societal lockup and seizure.
But Raleigh is only getting 0.5" to 1.5". Hampstead north of Wilmington is in the 5 -8 range.
I didn't pay any attention to the actual events, but as I skimmed the coverage this morning, one image stuck out. The hat. Has there ever been an outfit that said "Don't talk to me, I'm not even remotely interested in anything you think or have to say, and I do not care for any of you"....more than that outfit?
I listened to his speech after the fact and thought it was a pretty typical political speech. Lots of exaggeration and frankly ridiculous promises, but hey, that’s to be expected. I made the mistake of reading comments on TMD. It looked like The Resistance II is starting. Someone got excited because Musk gave a Nazi salute (!) somewhere, and someone else pointed out again the stupidity of Americans who will now get it good and hard. When will I learn to look away? I guess humans fascinate me, even the irrational ones.
I haven't been able to even see any comments, much less add my own. Somebody probably forgot to plug the goodlewhatsiz into the toggledongle or something.
Think about cnidarians.
As a Jew, I don't find Elon giving a Nazi salute amusing in the slightest. I did, however, find the attempt to justify or explain it hilarious. "Oh, he's just awkward." Right.
I found the ADL coming to his defense in light of all-things-Elon regarding his well-documented at the very least clear adjacency to antisemitism... really weird?
I can't say with absolute certainty what the guy's actual intent was concerning that gesture, but I sure don't buy raw enthusiasm or excitement for even a nano second. He may be autistic, but he's an ultra-high functioning autistic, a grown-up adult and a beneficiary of American freedoms and liberties to the absolute max. And the sob should know better and I'm sure he does.
Story. Grew up in 60s West Virginia. Had a half dozen good friends of the Jewish faith, and still friends. Went to nerd school in Cambridge. Learned much more.
One of my terrifying moments in my career occured about 45 years. I was a young manager at BigCorp. Arguably the best marketing team ever under Jack. He was global before that was a word.
He brought over for my business 2 gentleman who lived thru WW2. A German and an Austrian.
During our meeting, the Austrian started the fknngh Nazi salute! In the US.
I stepped forward and said to him stop. And a couple older Americans joined. My younger Jewish employee was appalled and I was ashamed this could happen in the early 80s.
It shocked me then. I'm not shocked now. And yes. Unequivocally, Musk gave a NAZI salute. It is so iconic and infamous, no one mistakes it.
Really? He has been active in promoting the AfD party in Germany--and they are actively, proudly, neo-Nazi.
Before I get too excited, I'm going to stop for the day and come back here tomorrow. I don't want to say something I will later regret.
I thought you might be interested in this:
https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1187&context=urceu
Thanks.
Did he really do that? I assumed it was a few media idiots looking for clicks, and others using it to further their “See, we told you Trump is Hitler!” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t find it amusing at all but I’ve just seen too much false reporting and outrage when it comes to anything to do with Trump.
He really did that. WIRED has a good photo. I didn't check any other media outlets, but the Proud Boys, et al were all a-flutter apparently on social media with their approval.
https://www.wired.com/story/neo-nazis-love-elon-musk-nazi-like-salutes-trumps-inauguration/
Note “Nazi-like.” People see what they want to see.
I think if you talk to people who have known me from the beginnings of this substack, you will find that I'm no alarmist or fantasist. It was pretty clear to me.
It wouldn't be the first time that the Proud Boys didn't get the signals right.
Elon is one of the lizard men for sure but I find a Nazi salute very hard to believe (like impossible).
Ditto, what would be the point of him doing that? Makes no sense. He's an awkward Aspie, I have one living in my house. He probably meant to do the pound pound peace which is a very common gesture but he forgot how to do it. Classic Aspie.
C'mon.....that's a stretch....watch the video. He even says it "my heart goes out to you." https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy48v1x4dv4o
Arm straight out. Palm down. He could have stopped at touching his heart. My girlfriend's parents were Survivors. She knows, I know, there is no mistaking that action. We are just going to have to disagree here. We don't agree on a lot of things, BC, but this one is pretty unmistakable.
Spare a thought for them: They’re in for a rough 1460 days if they don’t pace themselves…
I probably like the incoming bunch less than the outgoing lot, but I’m not going to focus on their doings every day. No matter my feelings about it, it won’t make any difference to *them*. They’ll just go ahead and do whatever it is they were gonna do anyway.
The resistance. Everyone getting cranked by some 3rd grader antic and "resisting" isn't going anywhere. I'm naive enough to think people will be attracted to smart ideas. Trump is an idiot, but not so idiotic that he didn't see a couple good ideas, grabbed them, and made them his own. We'll see if he has the ability to enact them, but at least he saw what appealed to people and grabbed it.
Maurer, over at IMBW, is nonplussed because he can't figure how Trump stole the good ideas of free speech, border control, etc. from the Dems. It's not hard to figure out.
What was the 3rd grader antic? I didn't watch live but went back with uTube and saw what I wanted. I just now went to see 2 yr old Mirabel (thank you Biker Chic!) and she was pretty cute!
3rd grader antic = Elon's salute...Was it? Wasn't it?
IOW, all the angst about whether or not Elon's infantile activity was a fascist salute. Everyone gets to decide for themselves AFAIC.
And I suppose part of that is whether or not you see America First as antisemitic. I think it's absurd to see Jews as out of mainstream America, or anti-immigration as antisemitic. This strikes me as the political opposition's not letting a red-meat opportunity go to waste. Given our current problems, I see it as far more likely that today's right likes Jews a whole lot better than it likes Muslims.
I am pretty chic...you should see my fleece groutfit (grey outfit) I'm wearing to keep warm. ;-)
Trump sees ideas that motivate his base and takes them. Some are smart. Some, like his "External Revenue Service" (CBP and the Coast Guard already do this) are dumb. And some are either illegal or (like "abolishing birthright citizenship unconstitutional.
I almost think he's just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks, Otherwise, I'm not sure how much he cares about any one of them (except the broad strokes of "fixing" immigration).
Been through this. The only way to look away is to unsubscribe. The resistance was pretty easy to predict so I got out while the getting was good.
My sister called me up to discuss the hat. The coat needed the hat but the whole ensemble was “get me out of here." So strict and unbecoming. She tries so hard to fill a role in which she is so miscast. I liked Ivanka,s hat but she looked displaced too. Whoever is advising them needs another job. Mrs. Vance looked lovely.
I'm not a fashion expert. But Melania's hat was -- striking. I get the "keep your distance" vibe.
Usha and Mirabel were darling.
I am normally fashion analysis averse; everyone gets to do whatever they want and I don't care. But, the harshness of that look really struck me. I didn't notice any of the other folks, it's all superfluous...but that hat, and the way the brim shadow obscured the eyes...imperious...uncaring...utterly distant....whew...
Not as distant as Michelle Obama 😆
First time I have heard criticism of MIchelle Obama's style. Refreshing!
People of a certain political persuasion ooh and aah over Michelle. They are probably disappointed she didn't run for President.
But to my eye, Melania (a former model) is at least as fashion forward as Michelle, if not the sainted Jackie O.
There were a few outfits, over the years, in which Michelle Obama looked really good. However, I thought she didn't have very good taste. On the other hand, she had no obligation to look glamorous.
One issue was that she seemed to like cotton, and cotton looks untidy unless it was ironed two minutes ago and you haven't moved.
Couture vs "affordable fashion" from Banana Republic and J Crew.
Yeah. I'm a Chicago guy. I know a few stories. Melania is at least honest about it. She wore the costume. Michelle is a different type of Princess, the dishonest type.
Yeah. I know a guy who knows a guy who says he knows a guy....
Don't even have to know a guy. Stuff was in the Trib and other news, if you were paying attention.
This is a lot more like costuming than fashion.
Good point. I'm pretty dense when it comes to this stuff. It was a costume.
Lol - you read the message just fine
I definitely got the message.
That was fascinating. Sea pens. That part where different nodes have specific functions that all feed back into the main thingie...is amazing.
Good morning. We are in weather alert, with temps at 2 degrees currently, getting no warmer than the teens, and subzero chills.
The big news yesterday was that the Ohio State Buckeyes beat Notre Dame for the national championship! However, other than a brief mention, the mothership dropped the ball on that story (no pun intended), instead covering Trump’s inauguration and the blizzard of executive orders on his first day back in office. The FP did likewise.
There was definitely plenty in that blizzard to be upset at, but the one item that I could NOT care less about was the "...and the revocation of the security clearances of 50 former intelligence officials." The linked Politico article did nothing to dissuade me from that opinion.
If you're not in office or employed by the government anymore you shouldn't get to keep the access (or potential to have that access) to classified info. In my mind it's no different than my EPIC credentials being erased to prevent me from accessing patient data when I leave the employment of a hospital.
Politico implied - or practically outright said really - this was "revenge" for the 2020 letter about the HB laptop being Russian dis-information. Which doesn't make the case they think it makes since the laptop was indeed NOT that.
I was even more unmoved by their last sentence: "Consultants such as Bolton — who rely on their access and connections to the government — may bear the biggest impact of this directive."
Oh nooooooes. People who used to need classified info for their job but don't anymore can't use that fact to get good paying gigs outside government. Cry me a river.
Good observations, Richard.
I’d walk the dogs in your ‘hood with those temperatures. It’s -14 with a “feels like” -24 here. It’s -24 at the cabin with a “feels like” -28. I think all the schools in WI are closed.
Congrats to the Buckeyes. They looked dominant in the first half but ND made a game of it in the second.
Ohio State Buckeyes are National Champs. Righteous.
I'm pleased for your team and all its fans.
Coming from you, Madame "Sportball," that is very gracious!
Least I can do.
Good morning, everyone. Happy Trash Day! It's also Envirothon day; the students will have their mid-term exam, which will help us organize them into what we hope will be successful competition teams.
20Fs here, with a forecast high of 31.
Was a cool and refreshing 2 or 3 below this AM on the way out to the barn at daybreak. But farther north, about 2/3 of the way up the Lower Peninsula, in West Branch I guess you could say the frost was finally on the pumpkin at -24*F.
Right now, Charlotte NC sounds like a warm vacation spot, compared to much of the country!
Morning! Minus two here.
Seems like you could combine the two days and warm things up by studying waste incineration power plants. 🤔🤔🤔
We had waste incineration power plants last year. Also hog-waste bio-gas.
Never let a good hog go to waste, I always say.
Like so many "clean energy" initiatives, biogas is insanely uneconomical.