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**Uncle Sparky** · January 22, 2019, 01:46

Really? They aren't all loveable cartoon characters? You see students treating an elder like sh!t. You are right. They are good American boys. We need a wall... between Canada and the US.

**Berzerker** · January 22, 2019, 01:57

The 'elder' was treating him like ****...and now you are too.

**Proteus_MST** · January 22, 2019, 08:52

Well, it seems like the MAGA students were surrounding him when they taunted him ... so they actually blocked his way.

https://twitter.com/eugenegu/status/1087690235125714945

Don't Doubt What You Saw With Your Own Eyes

https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/dont-doubt-what-you-saw-with-your-own-eyes-1831931203

Two days ago, video was posted online that pretty much everyone who saw immediately recognized for what it was—footage of white teens taunting and harassing a Native American elder named Nathan Phillips on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. What was happening was clear and unmistakable, not just resonant but…

**ZEE** · January 22, 2019, 09:13

"WAAAAAAAAAAH THEY WERE AT FAULT!"

"NO THESE GUYS WERE IN THE WRONG FIRST! VOTE FOR OUR PARTY!"

sickening idiots.

**BeBMan** · January 22, 2019, 09:41

It seems to me both sides misread the situation, and the real prob is that the atmosphere of division that is now reality nobody is really able to communicate with the other side, so instead everyone (incl. now all sorts of media/commentators/twitter jockeys etc) trying to explain what the other side was "really" up to.

If both the kids and the drummer had no bad intentions (which I'd assume for now as it's kinda difficult to determine intentions) they should maybe just sit together and talk a bit.

Edit: I think the Hebrew guys were just Fake Hebrews.

**spambot** · January 22, 2019, 14:52

Greenland’s Melting Ice Nears a ‘Tipping Point,’ Scientists Say

Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a “tipping point,” and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.

The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and the new research adds to the evidence that the ice loss in Greenland, which lies mainly above the Arctic Circle, is speeding up as the warming increases. The authors found that ice loss in 2012, more than 400 billion tons per year, was nearly four times the rate in 2003. After a lull in 2013-14, losses have resumed.

The study is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative. Just a week ago, a separate study of ice loss in Antarctica found that the continent is contributing more to rising sea levels than previously thought.
Another new analysis suggested that the oceans are warming far faster than earlier estimates. Warming oceans are currently the leading cause of sea-level rise, since water expands as it warms.

Researchers said these findings underscored the need for action to curb emissions of planet-warming gases and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
[A record number of Americans are concerned about global warming, a new poll found.]

Rising sea levels are one of the clearest consequences of global warming; they are caused both by thermal expansion of the oceans and by the melting of ice sheets on land. Current projections say that if the planet warms by two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial times, average sea levels will rise by more than two feet, and 32 million to 80 million people will be exposed to coastal flooding.

Much of the previous research on Greenland’s ice has dealt with the southeast and northeast parts of the island, where large chunks of glacial ice calve into the sea. The new paper focuses on the ice-covered stretches of southwest Greenland, which has few large glaciers and was not generally considered as important a source of ice loss.
But as the earth warms, the paper concludes, the vast plains of southwestern ice will increasingly melt, with the meltwater flowing to the ocean. Within two decades, it says, the region “will become a major contributor to sea level rise.”

The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used satellite data and ground-based instruments to measure Greenland’s ice loss in the 21st century. It looked closely at what seemed to be a pause in the ice loss for about a year, beginning in 2013, that followed a stretch of greatly accelerated melting.

The researchers tied the pause in melting to a reversal of the cyclical weather phenomenon known as the North Atlantic Oscillation. Before the pause, the oscillation was in what is known as its negative phase, which is associated with warmer air hitting west Greenland, along with less snowfall and more sunlight, all of which contribute to ice loss. When the cycle shifted into a positive phase in 2013, an “abrupt slowdown” of melting occurred.

Yet, the slowdown was anything but good news, said Michael Bevis, the lead author of the paper and a professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.

The North Atlantic Oscillation has occurred throughout the historical record, he noted. But before 2000, overall average temperatures were cool enough that the N.A.O.’s positive and negative cycles did not have much of an effect on rates of melting in Greenland.

Now, the strong effect that the cooler cycle had on the rate of melting — even if it was helpful in stopping ice loss — is a reason for concern, Dr. Bevis said. If the warm cycles of the N.A.O. are associated with huge losses of ice, and the cool cycles only pause the melting, it suggests a threshold has been reached: As average temperatures rise further, melting will be more sustained, and the cooling cycles will have less of an effect in slowing the ice loss.
“
If a relatively minor cycle can cause massive melting,” he said, “it means you’ve reached a point of amazing sensitivity” to warmer temperatures, which could represent “the tipping point.”

And so, he said, “One degree of warming in the future will have way more impact than one degree of warming in the last century.”
The new research dovetails with other recent papers on the accelerating melting. Last month a team of researchers published a paper in Nature that used satellite observations, analysis of ice cores and models to show that losses from the Greenland ice sheet have reached their fastest rate in at least 350 years.

At the other end of the earth, the speed of Antarctica’s ice loss is also becoming clearer. A study published last week, also in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, surveyed four decades of data and found faster losses in some regions than scientists had previously estimated.

The continent has presented a mixed story in recent years, with researchers measuring substantial losses in some regions but stability and even gains in others. But the new paper found considerable losses of glacial ice in East Antarctica, previously considered to be relatively stable. As a whole, Antarctica lost about 40 billion tons of ice per year in the 1980s, but it has been losing roughly 250 billion tons per year in the past decade.

That new paper adds to a body of recent research showing that Antarctica’s ice loss is accelerating, including a study in June that found that the rate of ice loss had tripled since 2007. Scientists estimate the Antarctic melting will contribute six inches to sea-level rise by 2100.

Luke D. Trusel, a glaciologist at Rowan University and an author of last month’s Nature paper on Greenland, said the new research by Dr. Bevis and his colleagues “provides clear and further illustration of how sensitive Greenland now is” to global warming.
“What’s happening today is well beyond the range of what could be expected naturally,” he said. “The human fingerprint on Greenland melting today is unequivocal.”

Still, he said, most estimates of a tipping point for Greenland ice loss cite higher average temperatures than are currently occurring, more along the lines of 1.5 or two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Global average temperatures have already increased by about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

A co-author of the Nature paper, Sarah B. Das, a scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, agreed that Dr. Bevis’s study reinforced her own team’s conclusions and showed “how quickly Greenland is disappearing.” The common finding, she said, is that climate change has brought Greenland to a state in which “a little bit of a nudge is going to have an outsized impact,” causing enormous melting.

But, she said, “I take issue with using ‘tipping point’ to describe the accelerating mass loss Greenland is experiencing,” because “it makes it appear as if we have passed, or soon will pass, the point of no return.” She said she saw reasons for hope.

Dr. Trusel agreed that talk of tipping points could discount the humans’ ability to mitigate global warming. “We may be able to control how rapidly the ice sheet changes in the future,” he said.
“
By limiting greenhouse gas emissions we limit warming, and thus also limit how rapidly and intensely Greenland affects our livelihoods through sea-level rise,” he added. “That, it seems, is our call to make.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/c...nland-ice.html

There were 5 million Syrians seeking refuge abroad and people lost their **** over Syrian refugees, I can't wait for when 30+ million people are looking for new homes because their old homes got flooded!

**-Jrabbit** · January 22, 2019, 15:39

Here's another TL/DR for you - an excellent article on why Trump's wall won't work. I'm sure it will make Kid's blood boil...

What Happened When a Trump Supporter Challenged Me About the Wall

I explained exactly why a wall won’t work, using conservative sources to prove it
by Vicky Alvear Shecter

December 28, 2018
A conservative challenged liberal Facebook friends to “make a case, not based on emotion” against Trump’s wall. Conservative buddies flooded his post with snide remarks about how this would be impossible for “deluded libs.”
“Okay, I’ll play,” I responded. To avoid being accused of bias, I explained that I would use only conservative sources to make my point. My primary source was a policy paper by the Cato Institute—a conservative, libertarian think tank—along with other conservative voices (listed below).
Here’s why I’m against the wall, I wrote:
1. Walls don’t work. Illegal immigrants have tunneled underneath and/or erected ramps up and down walls and simply driven over them. People find a way. When East Germany erected its wall, it created a military zone, staffed by booted, machine-gun carrying guards ready to shoot to kill. Yet thousands managed to make it to West Germany anyway. More to the point, do we really want to model ourselves after communist East Germany?
2. Most illegal immigrants are “overstayers.” They come to the U.S. legally—for vacations, jobs, schools, etc.—and then stay long past their visas. By 2012, overstayers accounted for 58 percent (the majority) of all unauthorized immigrants. A wall is meaningless here.
3. Walls have little impact on drugs being brought in to the U.S. According to the DEA, almost all drugs come in through legal points of entry, hidden in secret containers and/or among legit goods in tractor-trailers. A wall will have little to no impact on the influx of drugs into our country.
4. It’s environmentally impractical. Walls have a hard time making it through extreme weather. For example, in 2011, a flood in Arizona washed away 40 feet of steel fencing. Torrential rains and raging waters do serious damage. Also, conservative sources generally do not address the environmental harm that walls create, but there is plenty of documentation showing the potential for irreparable damage to both plant and animal life.
5. A wall would force the U.S. government to take land from private citizens in eminent domain battles. Private citizens own much of the land slated for the wall. The costs of the government snatching private land—and the legal battles that would ensue—are incalculable.
6. Border patrol agents don’t like concrete or steel walls because they block surveillance capabilities. In other words, they can’t mobilize correctly to meet challenges. So, in many ways, a wall makes their job more difficult.
7. Border patrol agents say walls are “meaningless” without agents and technology to support them. Are we prepared to pour countless billions annually—well afterthe wall is built—to create a nearly 2,000-mile militarized, 24-hour-surveillance border operation? Because according to patrol agents, that’s the only way a wall would work. Again, are we really going to use East Germany, a brutal communist state, as our model here?

8. Where barriers were built, there was little impact on the number of border crossers. According to the Congressional Research Center cited in the Cato report, after San Diego rebuilt a fence making it more wall-like—taller and more opaque—the structure “did not have a discernible impact on the influx of unauthorized aliens coming across the border” in the area. They simply came in elsewhere, primarily where natural barriers such as water or mountainous regions preclude a wall.
9. A wall has unintended consequences on other industries: For example, it blocks farmworkers from exiting when their invaluable seasonal work is done. Farmers are against the wall because it makes getting cheap seasonal labor almost impossible, as few American citizens want those jobs. And if seasonal workers do get in, a wall makes it harder for them to leave. It traps migrant farm laborers in our country.
10. Trump’s $5 billion is a laughable drop in the bucket for what would actually be needed. For example, according to the Cato Institute: An estimate for a border wall area that only covered 700 miles was originally $1.2 billion. How much did it cost in reality? $7 billion. And that’s only for 700 miles. Whatever we think it’s going to cost, experience shows us we must multiply it by more than 500 percent.
11. According to MIT engineers, the wall would cost $31.2 billion. Homeland Security estimates it at $22 billion. Given the pattern of spending mentioned in number 10 (plus Murphy’s Law), we’re talking about pouring endless billions into something that doesn’t even work. Of course, we taxpayers will be footing the bill, not Mexico. Given all the drawbacks, is this really the best use of our taxes?
As the conservatives of the Cato Institute put it, “President Trump’s wall would be a mammoth expenditure that would have little impact on illegal immigration.” It would also create many “direct harms,” including “the spending, the taxes, the eminent domain abuse, and the decrease in immigrant’s freedoms of movement.”
We must add, because conservative sources do not, that the environmental harms are likely to be severe.
In other words, the facts show that walls don’t work. Instead, they create even bigger, more expensive problems.

So what happened after I posted this conservative-sourced, fact-based list of why the wall is a bad idea? Silence.
I waited for someone to respond, to engage with me. Where were the angry defenses or rebuttals? But when I searched for the post after a few days, I couldn’t find it.
My Facebook friend had deleted it. You could say, like Trump with the government, he shut me down rather than deal with the facts.
The ugly genius of Trump is his ability to manipulate deep, primal emotions—namely fear and hate. Along with Fox News, he has convinced his base that immigrants put them in “extreme danger” and only a wall will make them “safe.”
Unfortunately, their need to feel safe is much stronger than their will to grapple with a complex, multifaceted problem—a problem that will require serious engagement with complex policies to get at the root of it.
And so, here we are, paralyzed by shutdowns at every turn.

Conservative-Leaning Sources Explaining the Uselessness of Trump’s Wall

The Cato Institute: “Why the Wall Won’t Work”
Former Reagan staffer and Tea-Party liaison Donna Wiesner Keene: “The Conservative Case Against a Border Fence” published by U.S. News & World Report.
The Chicago Tribune (a conservative-leaning paper): “Trump’s Wall Is Performance Art, Not Border Security”
National Review (conservative magazine): “Trump’s Border Wall Plan Is Ridiculous on Its Face”

Additional Sources

Harvard Business Review (business-oriented): “A Wall Won’t Secure the U.S.-Mexico Border, but Economic Policy Could”
Nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI): “Borders and Walls: Do Barriers Deter Unauthorized Migration?”

https://medium.com/s/story/what-happ...tjASddH-Ul-wbs

**Uncle Sparky** · January 22, 2019, 18:49

Here is an interesting picture of the Covington Catholic schoolboys in a different setting. I apologize to any snowflake I may have injured in the previous discussion. They are obviously not racists, in fact trying their best to 'be' black.

**Berzerker** · January 22, 2019, 21:27

So going to the same school as a racist makes you a racist? What happened to those two kids?

Did you know English isn't the only language on earth? I'm guessing you don't. The elder was speaking in his language, and was met by good American boys making noise. There is a language called Cantonese. If a person came up to you speaking Cantonese, would you go, "Me Chinese, Me make joke...?" or "ching chang, bing bang' singing along with them? OK, you might. Kid would. But someone not an ass wouldn't. These teens were behaving badly. Other protesters behaving more badly - that is no excuse.. But the chaperones failed miserably. At one point one of the teenagers took off his shirt and started waving it around... I assume the Catholic chaperones were so turned on by a teen boy stripping that they missed the rest of the bad behaviour.

Oh, everybody keep quiet, he's speaking in his language. He wasn't met by the kids, he went to stand in front of them because he decided the House of Israel folk needed his protection. And the kids were already doing their school chants before he showed up, same with the kid who took his shirt off to lead the group in one. He was intruding on them, not the other way around. Your hero actually went around the bible thumpers who had just spent hours hurling insults at people including Indians and walked up to a white kid with a MAGA hat and started banging a drum inches from his face and you blame the kid. He's such a peacemaker!

**Uncle Sparky** · January 23, 2019, 00:23

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/22/us/co...ats/index.html

Well, good for them.

But the real newsworthy news for today -

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...s-donald-trump

I'm voting for Trump!

**Dinner** · January 23, 2019, 01:23

Sparky, you are just wrong on this one. I get that you are disappointed, you wanted it to be something else, but it isn't. Reality can seem cruel and disappointing sometimes but it is better to stay in reality then get lost in a propaganda bubble. If you did that what would make you different drom the Trumpers with their "alternative facts"?

**BeBMan** · January 23, 2019, 05:39

State Department cancels border security conference due to shutdown over border security

Linkus Maximus CNNus: https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/22/p...ned/index.html

**Dinner** · January 23, 2019, 12:29

Originally posted by Uncle Sparky View Post

Here is an interesting picture of the Covington Catholic schoolboys in a different setting. I apologize to any snowflake I may have injured in the previous discussion. They are obviously not racists, in fact trying their best to 'be' black.

I see someone shouting at a sports game. What did he shout?

**Dinner** · January 23, 2019, 12:30

Originally posted by OerdinISstupud

*slap
You constantly post fake news
*back hand
You live in a ****hole state

What "fake news" did I post? The only link I posted to was CNN which most certainly was not fake news. Please quote what you imagine to be fake news then we can debate specifics.

**Dinner** · January 23, 2019, 12:33

Originally posted by Uncle Sparky View Post

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/22/us/co...ats/index.html

Well, good for them.

But the real newsworthy news for today -

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...s-donald-trump

I'm voting for Trump!

For the record, I am not a Trump supporter. You could see what I have posted for months and months in the Mueller thread.

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