Saturday, June 08, 2019

SATURDAY NIGHT NIK KERSHAW, RADIOHEAD.

Nik Kershaw with The Riddle. From the 1984 album of the same name.





Just prior to posting this, Mr Kershaw called. He apologizes profusely for the atrocious 80s hairdo.



Radiohead with No Surprises. Album OK Computer (1997).





Some kind of a concept album. Although Yorke denied that. Anyway, prolly their best. Radiohead ruled in the mid and late nineties.


Gute Nacht.


MFBB.

Friday, June 07, 2019

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK OFFICIALS QUIETLY REMOVED "GLACIERS GONE BY 2020 SIGNS".

Uh-oh.

Via Wattsupwiththat:



"GLACIERS APPEAR TO BE GROWING, NOT MELTING IN RECENT YEARS

By Roger I. Roots, J.D., Ph.D.,

Founder, Lysander Spooner University

May 30, 2019. St. Mary, Montana. Officials at Glacier National Park (GNP) have begun quietly removing and altering signs and government literature which told visitors that the Park’s glaciers were all expected to disappear by either 2020 or 2030.
In recent years the National Park Service prominently featured brochures, signs and films which boldly proclaimed that all glaciers at GNP were melting away rapidly. But now officials at GNP seem to be scrambling to hide or replace their previous hysterical claims while avoiding any notice to the public that the claims were inaccurate. Teams from Lysander Spooner University visiting the Park each September have noted that GNP’s most famous glaciers such as the Grinnell Glacier and the Jackson Glacier appear to have been growing—not shrinking—since about 2010. (The Jackson Glacier—easily seen from the Going-To-The-Sun Highway—may have grown as much as 25% or more over the past decade.)

The centerpiece of the visitor center at St. Mary near the east boundary is a large three-dimensional diorama showing lights going out as the glaciers disappear. Visitors press a button to see the diorama lit up like a Christmas tree in 1850, then showing fewer and fewer lights until the diorama goes completely dark. As recently as September 2018 the diorama displayed a sign saying GNP’s glaciers were expected to disappear completely by 2020.





But at some point during this past winter (as the visitor center was closed to the public), workers replaced the diorama’s ‘gone by 2020’ engraving with a new sign indicating the glaciers will disappear in “future generations.”

Almost everywhere, the Park’s specific claims of impending glacier disappearance have been replaced with more nuanced messaging indicating that everyone agrees that the glaciers are melting. Some signs indicate that glacial melt is “accelerating.”
A common trick used by the National Park Service at GNP is to display old black-and-white photos of glaciers from bygone years (say, “1922”) next to photos of the same glaciers taken in more recent years showing the glaciers much diminished (say, “2006”). Anyone familiar with glaciers in the northern Rockies knows that glaciers tend to grow for nine months each winter and melt for three months each summer. Thus, such photo displays without precise calendar dates may be highly deceptive.

Last year the Park Service quietly removed its two large steel trash cans at the Many Glacier Hotel which depicted “before and after” engravings of the Grinnell Glacier in 1910 and 2009. The steel carvings indicated that the Glacier had shrunk significantly between the two dates. But a viral video published on Wattsupwiththat.com showed that the Grinnell Glacier appears to be slightly larger than in 2009.

The ‘gone by 2020’ claims were repeated in the New York Times, National Geographic, and other international news sources. But no mainstream news outlet has done any meaningful reporting regarding the apparent stabilization and recovery of the glaciers in GNP over the past decade. Even local Montana news sources such as The Missoulian, Billings Gazette and Bozeman Daily Chronicle have remained utterly silent regarding this story."



Hat tip CDR Salamander.



MFBB.

LEST WE FORGET...

"Able Company riding the tide in seven Higgins boats is still five thousand yards from the beach when first taken under artillery fire. The shells fall short. At one thousand yards, Boat No. 5 is hit dead on and foundered. Six men drown before help arrives. Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and twenty others paddle around until picked up by naval craft, thereby missing the fight at the shore line. It's their lucky day. The other six boats ride unscathed to within one hundred yards of the shore, where a shell into Boat No. 3 kills two men. Another dozen drown, taking to the water as the boat sinks. That leaves five boats.

Lieutenant Edward Tidrick in Boat No. 2 cries out: "My God, we're coming in at the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Nothing!"

His men are at the sides of the boat, straining for a view of the target. They stare but say nothing. At exactly 6:36 A.M. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man's head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach.

Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.







Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine-gun fire.

Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless. At Boat No. 2, Lieutenant Tidrick takes a bullet through the throat as he jumps from the ramp into the water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Private First Class Leo J. Nash. Nash sees the blood spurting and hears the strangled words gasped by Tidrick: "Advance with the wire cutters!" It's futile; Nash has no cutters. To give the order, Tidrick has raised himself up on his hands and made himself a target for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the sand, sees machine gun bullets rip Tidrick from crown to pelvis. From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top.

Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They had loaded with a section of thirty men in Boat No. 6 (Landing Craft, Assault, No. 1015). But exactly what happened to this boat and its human cargo was never to be known. No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea.

Along the beach, only one Able Company officer still lives—Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who is hit in the heel as he quits the boat and hit in the belly by a second bullet as he makes the sand. By the end of ten minutes, every sergeant is either dead or wounded. To the eyes of such men as Private Howard I. Grosser and Private First Class Gilbert G. Murdock, this clean sweep suggests that the Germans on the high ground have spotted all leaders and concentrated fire their way. Among the men who are still moving in with the tide, rifles, packs, and helmets have already been cast away in the interests of survival.

To the right of where Tidrick's boat is drifting with the tide, its coxswain lying dead next to the shell-shattered wheel, the seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and sixteen men, noses toward the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand.

By the end of fifteen minutes, Able Company has still not fired a weapon. No orders are being given by anyone. No words are spoken. The few able-bodied survivors move or not as they see fit. Merely to stay alive is a full-time job. The fight has become a rescue operation in which nothing counts but the force of a strong example.

Above all others stands out the first-aid man, Thomas Breedin. Reaching the sands, he strips off pack, blouse, helmet, and boots. For a moment he stands there so that others on the strand will see him and get the same idea. Then he crawls into the water to pull in wounded men about to be overlapped by the tide. The deeper water is still spotted with tide walkers advancing at the same pace as the rising water. But now, owing to Breedin's example, the strongest among them become more conspicuous targets. Coming along, they pick up wounded comrades and float them to the shore raftwise. Machine-gun fire still rakes the water. Burst after burst spoils the rescue act, shooting the floating man from the hands of the walker or killing both together. But Breedin for this hour leads a charmed life and stays with his work indomitably...."



Via The Atlantic, NOV 1960 issue.

Hat tip NEC338x over at CDR Salamander.



MFBB.

Thursday, June 06, 2019

Sunday, June 02, 2019

WELCOME TO THE GREAT SOCIALIST STATE OF CALIFORNIA!!!

First the appetizer. This is America, more precisely democrat-run CA:





Fox News' Tammy Bruce reports:


"One glance at the formerly Golden State is a frightening embarrassment. The latest indictment of liberal leadership is the trash heap of Los Angeles. Literally. Despite the emergence of louse-borne typhus, Los Angeles can’t seem to get its act together.

Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times reported a week ago on the obscene condition of downtown Los Angeles, “A mountain of rotting, oozing, stinking trash … stretching a good 20 yards along a skid row alley. Rats popped their heads out of the debris like they were in a game of Whac-A-Mole, then scampered for cover as a tractor with a scoop lurched toward them. … The trash problem is not confined to any one street, but this particular location on the 800 block of Ceres Avenue is surrounded by food distribution companies that sell to shoppers, vendors, stores and restaurants. I counted seven within a block, so you have to wonder — given the colonies of football-size rats — about the potential contamination of the food supply chain and the spread of disease.”

What does the city say when confronted about the slow, or nonexistent, pace of cleanup?



A “spokeswoman for the city Department of Public Works said the backlog on service calls for trash pickup around homeless encampments sits at just under 8,400 currently. … ‘If it’s a homeless encampment, it’s a lengthier process because humans are involved and we have to meet certain protocols,’ she said, including a survey of who’s there, an inventory of personal property and notice of a cleanup,” the Times reported.



That’s right. Their concern for the people who are at ground zero for emerging deadly viruses is to follow protocols involving surveys and inventories. So don’t you worry — big government is keeping itself busy, as it behaves as though it’s normal to have more than 2,000 people sleeping on trash heaps, as potential epidemics lurk.

This is the idiotic disaster brought to you by unrestrained liberal leadership as it creates problems, then births a bureaucracy that will never deal with it.

One glance at the formerly Golden State is a frightening embarrassment. The latest indictment of liberal leadership is the trash heap of Los Angeles. Literally.

In San Francisco alone, as The New York Times reported, one of every 11,600 residents is a billionaire. The state actually has a budget surplus, but as we see, money can’t cure stupid.


Video courtesy Lew Rockwell.


Which brings us to Gov. Gavin Newsom and his plan. He’s outraged, just outraged at the “national disgrace” of California’s homelessness.

The Ventura County Star reported, “Gov. Gavin Newsom called growing homelessness in California a national disgrace as he announced Tuesday that he is launching a task force to find solutions amid a housing crisis in the most populous state.”

Like Los Angeles, instead of dealing with the reality of the problem, Newsom announced the creation of a task force, the members of which will travel around the state and make recommendations. There’s only one recommendation, and they won’t like it, that will change the state’s fate: a plea to all California voters to stop electing Democrats.

Yes, there’s nothing finer in a leader than the effort to blame everyone else for the scourge of homelessness your fellow Democrats have created over the years. California’s disaster isn’t a national disgrace, it’s not even California’s disgrace; it’s the disgrace of every liberal politician in the state who has led that state into medieval crisis.

Speaking of medieval crises, Dr. Drew Pinsky, the addiction medicine specialist, told Brian Kilmeade of Fox News that a deadly epidemic could emerge in Los Angeles during the summer months.



"I live in the great state of California, the utopia that is California, which is a nightmare,’ Pinsky said. ‘I want to give you a prediction here. There will be a major infectious disease epidemic this summer in Los Angeles.’ He continued, ‘We have tens and tens of thousands of people living in tents. Horrible conditions. Sanitation. Rats have taken over the city. We’re the only city in the country, Los Angeles, without a rodent control program. We have multiple rodent-borne, flea-borne illnesses, plague, typhus. We’re gonna have louse-borne illness. If measles breaks into that population, we have tuberculosis exploding. Literally, our politicians are like Nero. It’s worse than Nero,’ Pinsky said,” Fox News reported.



But it’s different now. Every Nero has a task force.

It’s so bad in California, even The New York Times deigned to allow an opinion piece decrying the growing instability of the state..."






Downtown LA under the effective stewardship of our friends the Democrats.



The return of a medieval disease... in California! Via DailyWire:


"The city, with a population topping four million and a broader metropolitan area with many millions more, is awash in massive problems — overcrowding, lack of housing, and high demand for free services among them. But other far more serious problems are lurking, Dr. Drew Pinksy said on Thursday.


“We have a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now,” Pinsky told Fox New host Laura Ingraham. “We have the three prongs of airborne disease, tuberculosis is exploding, rodent-borne. We are one of the only cities in the country that doesn’t have a rodent control program, and sanitation has broken down.”

Pinsky said bubonic plague — also known as the “Black Death,” a pandemic that killed off millions in the 14th century — is “likely” already present in Los Angeles. The plague is spread by infected fleas and exposure to bodily fluids from a dead plague-infected animal, with the bacteria entering through the skin and traveling to lymph nodes.


Typhus, which broke out in the city last year, will likely return, Pinsky said. Already, a Los Angeles police officer has contracted typhoid fever, which infects fewer than 350 Americans each year. The various types of typhus are caused by a bacterial infection and spread by body lice, chiggers or fleas. In the 1600s, the disease decimated Germany.

“This is unbelievable. I can’t believe I live in a city where this is not Third World. This is medieval,” Pinsky said, according to Fox News. “Third World countries are insulted if they are accused of being like this. No city on Earth tolerates this. The entire population is at risk.”

Pinsky said the city simply can't handle the demand for services, noting that many homeless are mentally ill and don't want to accept housing.



“[T]he government is somehow insisting that housing is the problem when in fact we have chronic mental illness, we have addiction, we have people who don’t want to leave the streets,” Pinsky said. “They literally won’t take the housing if we give it to them. And that’s the population that’s vulnerable, and is going to get so ill this summer. It scares me for their well-being.”



The famed doctor also said California cities are suffering after allowing thousands of illegal aliens to flow in. He said the liberal politicians running most cities are “disgustingly negligent.”

Homelessness is also exploding in San Francisco — the home district of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat.

“A federal count shows the number of homeless people increased by double-digit percentages in three San Francisco Bay Area counties over two years as the region struggled to tackle the growing problem, including 17% in San Francisco and 43% in the county that includes Oakland,” the Associated Press reported."





Nancy Pelosi's vision for America. Now excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor.



MFBB.