Not just a hot summer

At Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben puts the hot summer into perspective:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

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Idiot Astronomy

Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku must be a fairly smart guy in some respects. After all, he is a Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York. What he had to say yesterday on CNN was idiotic, however, and to the extent that he demeaned the scientific method , he should be ashamed for making all scientists look like buffoons. I just happened to see a CNN "news" show as I was preparing lunch yesterday at my workplace kitchen (there is a TV hanging on the wall). At the end of one news segment, it was announced that we should stay tuned because there is new evidence of an ancient galaxy indicating that there are advanced civilizations living on other worlds.  What??? This announcement immediately sent up red flags.  I asked co-workers, "Who is the crackpot who is going to make these claims?" After the commercial ended, we met the crackpot: Michio Kaku. [More . . . ]

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Hello Kitty AR-15 assault rifle

This fellow thinks that legislators are needlessly worked up over assault rifles like the AR-15 recently used in the Denver movie theater massacre. To give emphasis to his point, he painted his AR-15 in a Hello Kitty motif.

So called "Assault Weapons Bans" such as the now expired 1994 Clinton ban and the one still in place in states such as California seek to ban rifles that our misguided legislators feel have no purpose in civilian hands.

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