Blue Jay, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Blue Jay, click for full size.
© C. Ford.
Raghad Saddam Hussein, daughter of the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. (photo credit:REUTERS).
Raghad, who blames the US for the chaos that unraveled in her country, hopes that President-elect Donald Trump will be different from his predecessors.“This man has just arrived to the leadership … But from what is apparent, this man has a high level of political sensibility, that is vastly different than the one who preceded him,” she told CNN. “He exposed the mistakes of the others, specifically in terms of Iraq, which means he is very aware of the mistakes made in Iraq and what happened to my father.”During his presidential campaign, Trump said he opposed the war on Iraq, however he was publicly supportive of the invasion in interviews before and after the war. And while saying that Saddam Hussein “was a bad guy,” Trump has praised the former Iraqi leader’s efficient killing of “terrorists”.
The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016
Trump, and his buddy Putin, are now happily chattering about nuclear weapons. The consensus? We need more of them! Oh good, we’re all gonna die.
The timing of Trump’s tweet is interesting because it came after Russia said this week that it was looking to strengthen its own nuclear capabilities to be able to penetrate missile defense shields.
Via Raw Story.
Donald Trump and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway celebrate during an election night rally. CREDIT: AP Photo/John Locher.
On Thursday morning, the Trump transition team announced that former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway will serve as counselor to the president. In that role she’ll be the highest ranking woman in the White House.
A statement released by the transition team announcing the move is boilerplate — “I am pleased that she will be part of my senior team in the West Wing,” Trump is quoted as saying — until it gets around to discussing Conway’s role in Trump’s victory, where it makes the claim that Trump “shattered the glass ceiling for women.”
President-elect Trump’s victory on November 8th also shattered the glass ceiling for women. Conway is the first female campaign manager of either major party to win a presidential general election.
Hear that, women? The glass ceiling hath been shattered, it is no more. From this point forward, there is nothing at all to prohibit women from the highest reaches of endeavor. Nope. I do have to wonder if it occurred to anyone that there’s a lingering stench of “hey, she rode there on my coattails, but still, it’s good” to the message.
While it’s true that Conway is the first woman campaign manager to preside over a presidential victory, the statement overlooks that Al Gore’s 2000 campaign was managed by Donna Brazile. Like Hillary Clinton, Gore won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, after the Supreme Court shutdown a Florida recount.
The statement also overlooks the obvious fact that Clinton this year became the first woman nominated as a major party’s presidential nominee and his victory denied her the chance to shatter the “highest, hardest glass ceiling.” Trump scolded her during the campaign for mentioning the historic nature of her candidacy, accusing her of playing the “women’s card.”
Oh, there’s that stench wafting by again. Yes, it’s fine if a man holds a woman up to tap that glass ceiling, but if a woman dares to do such herself, there’s that terrible woman card again. Silly women, right?
“I have to assess people based on what I see in totum,” Conway said. “And this is a man I’ve been alone with many times who’s never been anything but gracious and [a] gentleman and elevated me to the top level of his campaign, the way he’s elevated women in the Trump organization for decades, because he respects women.”
Yes, there you have it. Elevated. Trump elevates women, because they aren’t capable of doing that themselves. The above was part of Conway’s response to the revelations of Trump’s long line of sexual assaults. Sure, he respects women, he just thinks various parts of them belong to him, to be used and discarded at will. Elevator Pussy Grabber. Got it.
Before coming aboard the Trump campaign as a “data and messaging expert” in July, Conway helped conduct some of the flawed polling Trump has invoked to justify his proposed Muslim ban. In her role as counselor, she’ll be responsible for helping Trump “carry out his priorities and deliver his message from inside the White House,” the New York Times reports.
So, basically, a secretary. Oh, I meant counselor.
Full story at Think Progress.
By Martin Falbisoner – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.
Oh, the excuses for allowing Trump to violate the constitution keep coming in, each stupider than the last. The latest from Tom Cole (R-OK) is that George Washington kept his house while serving as president, so it’s all good, you betcha. Has anyone told Donny he has to give up his gold-plated apartment? No. Has anyone said Donny can’t manage his personal residences? No. The hypocrisy of republicans continues to float over everything, as their lies and excuses get weaker and weaker.
While ethics expertswarn not divesting will likely create an unconstitutional conflict, Congressional Republicans are apparently not concerned.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said on Wednesday that he does not think Trump needs to disentangle himself. “To be fair to him, he’s not a guy who made his money out of doing business with the government, particularly,” he observed.
Cole added that he thinks Trump’s team is “trying to be careful,” because “opponents will try to put the worst aspersions” on anything he does. “I don’t expect the family to get out of a family business, for goodness sake. I mean, you read much history, George Washington was still pretty active in managing Mount Vernon when he was president of the United States.”
Washington’s Virginia estate was hardly comparable to Trump’s self-proclaimed $10 billion portfolio.
The Ark is lit up with a big totally-not-gay rainbow.
Ken Ham has decorated the “ark” with xmas lights, in a bid to take back the rainbow from all those icky queer folk.
On his website this week, Ham announced that he would be lighting up the Ark in rainbow colours as a Christmas treat.
He wrote: “Our special Christmas event at the Ark Encounter started on Friday, December 16. We’ve decorated the whole Ark property with beautiful Christmas lights. And, for added ‘wow factor’, we’ve lit the whole Ark in beautiful rainbow colors. It’s gorgeous at night!”
Simply gorgeous, dahling.
However, he wants to make crystal clear that it’s not rainbow as in ‘gay’, but rainbow as in ‘God will bring death to sinners’.
Ham wrote: “In recent times the rainbow has come to represent… the LGBTQ movement.
“Indeed when the US Supreme Court legalized gay ‘marriage’ last year, the White House was lit up in rainbow colors.
“Sadly, people ignore what God intended the rainbow to represent and proudly wave rainbow-colored flags in defiance of God’s command and design for marriage.
“Because of this, many Christians shy away from using the rainbow colors. But the rainbow was a symbol of God’s promises before the LGBTQ movement—and will continue to be after that movement has ended.
“As Christians, we need to take the rainbow back and teach our young people its true meaning.”
Ham then prophesied a global catastrophe that will exterminate sinners like gay people.
He wrote: “Although God promised He would never judge the earth with a global Flood again, He is coming to judge sinful mankind a second time. This coming judgment won’t be with water but with fire.”
Right. So, you want to teach children that the rainbow is a symbol of El Shaddai’s promise he’s really, truly over his genocidal tantrums, but of course, that promise only applied to grisly deaths by water, and the fire is coming. Christianity, warped to the core.
Via Pink News.
Via Raw Story.
Swamp Thing, DC Comics.
Trump yakked a lot about lobbyists, and “draining the swamp”, all of it bullshit, of course. Trump’s a toxic Swamp Thing, and he’s going to have help in building and managing the swamp.
On Wednesday, however, two key Trump campaign advisers announced they would form a “full service government relations and political consulting firm” in Washington, “just a block from the White House” at 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW.
Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first campaign manager and was also paid by CNN to advocate for Trump on the air, will join with senior campaign adviser Barry Bennett to launch the firm. Their mission, Lewandowski revealed, would be supporting Trump’s agenda.
“After considering multiple opportunities within the administration,” Lewandowski wrote, he determined he can best help Trump “outside the formal structure of government.” He added that for Trump to succeed, it is “necessary to have strong, organized outside groups who can help ensure the President-elect’s agenda is achieved.”
But rather than launch a political advocacy non-profit, the two have opted to launch a “government relations firm.” The firm’s website makes clear that it plans to provide “client-tailored strategy and guidance carefully designed to help our clients navigate our government.” In other words, using their access to the new administration to make sure the President-elect’s agenda includes the priorities of their clients.
As Mother Jones noted, back in February Lewandowski denounced lobbyists as willing to say or do anything to preserve “backroom deals,” and vowed that if Trump won, “people who’ve made a very, very good living by controlling politicians through their donations and making sure they get the legislation done — or not done — in Washington, DC to best benefit their clients” would find their days of influence “coming to an end.”
Or not.
Looks like lobbying is just going to be re-branded. Swamping? Perhaps Trumping, as that would most likely serve the extreme narcissist the best. This is open corruption, and they don’t care even a little. Think Progress has the full story.
The conservation team around the Natural History Museum of London’s century-old sunfish, which was stuffed with all kinds of odd materials. All photos in this section courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London.
Conservators at the Natural History Museum of London knew for some time that the giant sunfish in the collection would need to be treated: The ten-foot-tall creature’s stitched-up body was bursting at the seams, exposing the wheat straw that had been stuffed inside over a century ago. The fish was collected in Sydney Harbour by the zoologist Edward Ramsay on December 12, 1882, brought to London in 1883 for the International Fisheries Exhibition, and donated afterward to the museum.
[…]
In addition to 25 trash bags’ worth of straw, Allington-Jones and his team extracted all kinds of odds and ends that had been weighing down the fish: iron bars, floorboards, a broken chair from 1883, and a scrap of newspaper from the Sydney Morning Herald, dated January 26 of that year. The newspaper was crumpled up, but being conservators, they humidified and flattened it out. One article seems to be about the first-ever Ashes cricket tournament between Australia and England: “We hope the match will be played throughout in a spirit of generous rivalry, and that the struggle for the much coveted laurel will be a close and exciting one,” reads the Herald.
There are two more wonderful conservator surprises at The Creators Project, and lots more photos!
You can read all about it at The Creators Project. See more of Mircea Goia’s work on his website.
“Winter sucks!” Blue Jay, click for full size. Posting is going to be sporadic for a while, because holidays. And I want to spend time with Mister C.
© C. Ford.
Today is the first day of winter. Someone must have opened our package early.
© C. Ford.
Credit: TU Eindhoven / Bart van Overbeeke.
This is wonderful, on the science and design fronts. A small artificial leaf, with very large potential.
Using sunlight to make chemical products has long been a dream of chemical engineers. The problem is that the available sunlight generates too little energy to kick off reactions. However, nature is able to do this. Antenna molecules in leaves capture energy from sunlight and collect it in the reaction centers of the leaf where enough solar energy is present for the chemical reactions of photosynthesis.
Light capture
The researchers used relatively new materials known as luminescent solar concentrators (LSC’s), which are able to capture sunlight in a similar way. Special light-sensitive molecules in these materials capture a large amount of the incoming light that they then convert into a specific color that is conducted to the edges via light conductivity. These LSCs are often used in combination with solar cells to boost the yield.
Thin channels
The researchers, led by Dr. Timothy Noël, incorporated very thin channels in a silicon rubber LSC through which a liquid can be pumped. In this way, they were able to bring the incoming sunlight into contact with the molecules in the liquid with high enough intensity to generate chemical reactions.
While the reaction they chose serves as an initial example, the results surpassed all their expectations, and not only in the lab. “Even an experiment on a cloudy day demonstrated that the chemical production was 40 percent higher than in a similar experiment without LSC material,” says research leader Noël. “We still see plenty of possibilities for improvement. We now have a powerful tool at our disposal that enables the sustainable, sunlight-based production of valuable chemical products like drugs or crop protection agents.”
You can read more at Phys.org.