The Rose Garden and White House happenings: Listening to voters’ concerns
how about a lighthearted trip down memory? Back in 1988 or so, I left a job at a newspaper and, as a parting gift, the social editor penned a poem for me.
The other day I read the poem again for the first time in at least a decade.
I was stunned to read a stanza I had totally forgotten!!
It is flattering, but I felt it worth sharing just for the giggle.
Sorry for the view
You were clearly loved and made a profound contribution. Congratulations. Sincerely.
This also seems to explain the willingness to excuse Trump.
Another slight thread drift probably due to flu: Ig Nobel tickets are on sale again! I love this year's theme 
Tickets for the 27th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony go on sale July 20 — at NOON (US eastern time), exclusively from the Harvard Box Office.
TICKETS: <https://is.gd/FgfmO4>
This year's theme: UNCERTAINTY.
This year' ceremony will include a new mini-opera, "The Incompetence Opera". It celebrates the Dunning-Kruger Effect and the Peter Principle.
DETAILS: <http://www.improbable.com/ig/2017>
mstierney - I think you kind of gave away your identity. Thank you for your service to our community in the past.I do think you are one smart lady.
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
July 19, 2017
Statement from President Donald J. Trump
Senator John McCain has always been a fighter. Melania and I send our thoughts and prayers to Senator McCain, Cindy, and their entire family. Get well soon.
Agreed.
He's an example, for the president, of someone who knew how to put "the big boy pants on," to borrow your expression.
prayers for an American hero...
"WASHINGTON — Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned on Friday morning, telling President Trump he vehemently disagreed with the appointment of New York financier Anthony Scaramucci as communications director."
What will SNL do?
mtierney said:
"WASHINGTON — Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned on Friday morning, telling President Trump he vehemently disagreed with the appointment of New York financier Anthony Scaramucci as communications director."
What will SNL do?
I guess they'll have to settle for satirizing the other 10,000 idiotic or insane things that come out of the Trump Administration and Trump family over the next 3.5 years.
Drain the swamp and fill it with bankers.
Drain the swamp and fill it with bankers.
Drain the swamp and fill it with bankers.
Drain the swamp and fill it with bankers.
Drain the swamp and fill it with bankers.
mtierney said:
"WASHINGTON — Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, resigned on Friday morning, telling President Trump he vehemently disagreed with the appointment of New York financier Anthony Scaramucci as communications director."
What will SNL do?
I think Joe Piscopo would do a great Scaramucci.
Is it about guns, police training?
Why did the victim leave her home and go out into the alley?
Have the police found prompted the 911 call?
Why did the officers have their body cameras turned off?
What prompted the officer to shoot across his partner and through the driver's side window, striking the victim?
Will we ever know the answers?
Or will this horrible event turn into a political battle and blame game?
We know that Justine was concerned enough to phone the police twice, to report the disturbance and to ensure that they knew her address.
We know that they were on their way, and when they arrived.
We know that when they arrived they reported all was fine and that they couldn't see anything; all they heard was a loud distant noise the radio operators confirmed they also heard back at base station itself (not on the air), as aerial fireworks.
We know that the inexperienced police officer driving the car spoke for 4 hours with the investigators, and that his also inexperienced fellow officer is refusing to speak - this latter person has been at the centre of several other civilian shootings this year. We know he panicked and leant across his mate to shoot Justine through the window as she approached in her pjs. Her summer pjs. Pls let that sink in. Knowing they were called out by a woman to her home in a good suburb, they're sufficiently scared by a near-naked woman in a calm situation to shoot to kill.
We know that only 2 minutes after arriving at the scene and saying everything was clear and calm, these two officers frantically called for every possible service to come and back them up - not an ambulance, not more police, they yelled for 'everything' as if they were in the middle of a full riot, read the transcripts. At this point, it was still just them and Justine, dying, on the ground.
I don't know how you're trained to meet emergency services; here, we're trained to meet them on the street close to easy access to the scene of 'situation' so the attending officers know where to go quickly. It's one of the first steps we're taught in First Aid, and often what we're directed by our Triple-0 operators ('please have someone waiting in the street to direct our officers so you can direct them to the alley location or update them').
well, that answers one question -- why she left her home. I believe, here, that the caution is to stay on the phone with the emergency line to help direct the location and to avoid being in the mix.
mtierney said:
Save to read on a rainy day....
https://msu.edu/course/lbs/332...
Like an idiot I clicked on it. Luckily, it's a 3 page essay in pdf format by Michael Crichton attached as Appendix 1 to his 2004 novel State of Fear, which is often cited by Climate Change Deniers as "required reading". The problem with calling for a removal of politics when discussing science is that it's attached to a novel which is entirely political and distorts the real-life actual scientific findings it references.
Here's a sample review of the book from Popular Science.
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/...
Crichton asserts in his closing essay that to keep their jobs and funding, mainstream climate scientists lie: "Any scientist who has doubts [about global warming] understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression." This might be the oddest assertion in the book. Seems to me that
climate science isn´t much of a get-rich scheme. It´s the naysayers--like Danish statistician Bjrn Lomborg, whose best-seller The Skeptical Environmentalist argues against global warming--who appear to be cleaning up.
And just to clarify, it's not idiotic to click on a link from mtierney. It is idiotic to click on a link with no description which instantly downloads a file to your computer. So I just wanted to make sure that anyone thinking of clicking on it had an idea of what it was they were downloading.
gee, Ridski, just because it was in a novel doesn't mean it is not without a grain of truth 
BTW, awhile back, I told a fib. I feel better now.
mtierney said:
gee, Ridski, just because it was in a novel doesn't mean it is not without a grain of truth
BTW, awhile back, I told a fib. I feel better now.
I think Ridski did a pretty good jib of explaining why it was BS beyond the fact that it appeared in a novel.
I think browsers should have built in pdf warnings.
ridski said:
...
And just to clarify, it's not idiotic to click on a link from mtierney. It is idiotic to click on a link with no description which instantly downloads a file to your computer. So I just wanted to make sure that anyone thinking of clicking on it had an idea of what it was they were downloading.
aha, the joys of being a Luddite! I have no idea why PDFs are dreaded. Do they gum up the works?
I've noticed that, recently, MOL links no longer show the full web address. Instead just the first piece followed by "...". @Jamie, why is this? If the whole url was showing, we could tell if it is a pdf or html or whatever and exercise associated caution.
mtierney said:
aha, the joys of being a Luddite! I have no idea why PDFs are dreaded. Do they gum up the works?
Not specifically, but as sac just mentioned, Jamie made a change to shorten links so we can't see what type of file we're clicking on. When I clicked on your link, it instantly downloaded it to my machine, which is a big no-no in my house especially when all I have is the vaguest description of what I'm downloading. You need to mention if it's a pdf or a gif or something that isn't a straight web page if you're going to post that kind of stuff.
As to this:
mtierney said:
gee, Ridski, just because it was in a novel doesn't mean it is not without a grain of truth
BTW, awhile back, I told a fib. I feel better now.
It's not the fact that it's an appendix in a novel that's the issue with me. It's that the novel itself was written with a political agenda and used real scientific studies to back up its story and then mis-represented those studies. Every scientist referenced in the book said that their work was misconstrued to fit in with the plot of the book. Once more, this isn't a terrible thing necessarily, authors -- especially Crichton -- do it all the time. But this novel is being held up in congress as factual during real-life debates, and it just isn't. The essay is asking us not to "politicize science" at the end of book which does nothing but politicize science.
So that's my beef with the link you posted.
but, aren't the global warming folks politicizing science as well? If I had downloaded a PDF alluding to that belief, would you have been so piqued?
mtierney said:
but, aren't the global warming folks politicizing science as well? If I had downloaded a PDF alluding to that belief, would you have been so piqued?
The facts are the facts. If you argue for a policy based on the facts (or a policy based on ignoring the facts) that is political.
That said, if a guy discovers that his house is on fire, he is probably going to be an advocate for fire fighting. Climate scientists have the clearest idea of what we are facing. To have knowledge of an impending catastrophe and to do nothing would, to the minds of many people, be the height of irresponsibility.
mtierney, what do you think of the 7,000 nuns signing a letter asking the Senate not to repeal Obamacare?
Climate scientists are in it for the money, so let's listen to the fossil fuel industry and their lobbyists on the topic.
I love that one
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A dear friend.