SATURDAY NIGHT SLADE, THE PRETENDERS.

Gonna be Xmas now real soon - unbelievable, our summer holiday in Tuscany seems like it was only last week and yet...

... so I thought we might as well get in the mood:


Here's Slade with Merry Xmas Everybody. Released as a single in 1973.





Iconic English glam rock band from Wolverhampton, West Midlands. Formed in 1966, STILL AROUND despite a few hiccups along the way. But Don Powell (drummer), Noddy Holder (vocals, guitarist) and Dave Hill (lead guitarist) were there already back when the Saturn IB was first launched and a B-film actor by the name of Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of CA. How about THAT?



Ten years later The Pretenders released their Xmas song, 2,000 miles, as a single. It appeared on the album Learning to Crawl in 1984.





Well okay, this is actually rather an homage to James Honeyman-Scott, first lead guitarist (an co-founder) of The Pretenders, who died of a cocaine overdose the year before. But it will do.



Good night.



MFBB.

THANK ALLAH IT'S FRIDAY!!!

Ever heard about the July 30, 1916 Black Tom Island Explosion? It is ranked among the largest 'anthropogenic' non-nuclear explosions the planet has ever known. It was actually two explosions, of which the first one was the most devastating. An ammo dump destined to be shipped to Russia on an artifical island in New York Harbor blew up, resulting in the destruction of $20,000,000 worth of military goods. The Statue of Liberty was damaged, and as far away as Maryland and Philadelphia people thought there was an earthquake.

For a long time I thought it was an accident.

However, yesterday I learned it was actually an act of sabotage by German agents. Vox's Coleman and Phil explain:





Hat tip OutlawDaughter.



MFBB.

STILL BELIEVE IN THAT "97 PER CENT CONSENSUS" AMONG CLIMATE SCIENTISTS RE MMGW? CHANGE YOUR MIND.

First a quick recap from 2016, a Prager U video featuring Professor Richard Lindzen:





Now check this out:

"Within the last few years, over 50 papers have been added to our compilation of scientific studies that find the climate’s sensitivity to doubled CO2 (280 ppm to 560 ppm) ranges from <0 to 1°C. When no quantification is provided, words like “negligible” are used to describe CO2’s effect on the climate. The list has now reached 106 scientific papers."

This is indeed true, and has been documented in, a.o., Climate Change: The Facts (editor Alan Moran).


There is some arguing as to the exact number of scientific studies re climate sensitivity in particular, but that the number is rising is a fact.

Nobody is contesting the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. And global mean temperatures may have risen by 1 degree over the past 150 years. And we cannot even rule out that anthropogenic CO2 has, indeed, played a role in that phenomenon. Although, given that natural CO2 emissions far outweigh man-made ones, and because the uncertainties re the size of the (sinks of the) natural emissions are so huge, any policy proclaiming that global temperature can be kept under this or that treshold if only we spend this or that insane amount of money had to be regarded with the utmost scepticism.


The growing number of publications like these ones are therefore a welcome antidote to the ever more frantic efforts of an almost tyrannical EU that wants to spend 11,500 billion EUR (!) to 'fight climate change' in the course of the following years. If it is not kept in check, its horrendously costly anti climate change antics risk to plunge Europe in a man made socio-economic crisis not seen since WWII. The biggest charlatan in this regard is the EU's new 'Climate Pope', the Dutch socialist Frans Timmermans. More on this odious charachter later.



MFBB.

SUNDAY NIGHT ART SNACK: ETTORE DE MARIA BERGLER (1850-1938).

Ettore De Maria Bergler (born Naples 25 december 1850, died Palermo 28 February 1938), was an Italian Art Nouveau painter with strong links to Sicily.



The ruins of the Temple of Jupiter at Syracuse



Taormina
Taormina is a popular tourist destination on Sicily's East Coast, quite close to the Etna volcano. Although Goethe was an early visitor, it was only in the second half of the 19th century that it began to attract considerable numbers of artists, intellectuals and writers, quite a few of them gay (Oscar Wilde, and in later times Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote), so that by the turn of the century it had gained quite a reputation in this regard. Curiously, Friedrich Nietzsche also settled down here to write Also Sprach Zarathustra.


Nite.


MFBB.