Apologies if I embarrass him, but today I am reminded of some words of inspiration from a blog friend, back on November, 28th of last year. I saved a copy of it to my desktop because, every now and then, I can use some inspiration, words of wisdom, like this. Thanks again, Peter. 🙂
Thanks for appreciating it and passing it along.
The Alabama Republican Party on Saturday will present former President Donald Trump with a framed copy of a resolution, passed unanimously by the party, that declares him "one of the greatest and most effective" presidents in U.S. history.
"The resolution, basically, it just talks about the greatness of Donald J. Trump, how he made America great again and I hope other states will follow suit," Perry Hooper Jr., a former state representative and a member of the state party’s executive committee, told Fox News in an interview.
Hooper will present a framed copy of the resolution to Trump at a reception at Mar-a-Lago, Florida on Saturday evening.
The resolution, which passed unanimously in the party, calls Trump "one of the greatest and most effective presidents in the 245-year history of this Republic" and lists his achievements in office.
"It’s just recognizing him for all the great things he has done for America for bringing back American manufacturing, cutting taxes, creating best economy ever, building up our military," Hooper said.
Hooper said he was speaking not only for the party, but for many Americans who voted for the 45th president in 2020.
"We love him in Alabama, America loves him and he got 75 million votes for a reason and I'm speaking basically for 75 million people in America," he said.
https://www.scribd.com/document/498609678/Alabama-GOP-Resolution#from_embed
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alabama-gop-trump-resolution-greatest-presidents-in-history
The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation carries warm upper waters into far-northern latitudes and returns cold deep waters southward across the Equator. Its heat transport makes a substantial contribution to the moderate climate of maritime and continental Europe, and any slowdown in the overturning circulation would have profound implications for climate change. A transatlantic section along latitude 25° N has been used as a baseline for estimating the overturning circulation and associated heat transport. Here we analyze a new 25° N transatlantic section and compare it with four previous sections taken over the past five decades. The comparison suggests that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation has slowed by about 30 per cent between 1957 and 2004. (emphasis added)
IT’S ONE OF THE MIGHTIEST RIVERS you will never see, carrying some 30 times more water than all the world’s freshwater rivers combined. In the North Atlantic, one arm of the Gulf Stream breaks toward Iceland, transporting vast amounts of warmth far northward, by one estimate supplying Scandinavia with heat equivalent to 78,000 times its current energy use. Without this current — a heat pump on a planetary scale — scientists believe that great swaths of the world might look quite different.
Now, a spate of studies, including one published last week[1], suggests this northern portion of the Gulf Stream and the deep ocean currents it’s connected to may be slowing. Pushing the bounds of oceanography, scientists have slung necklace-like sensor arrays across the Atlantic to better understand the complex network of currents that the Gulf Stream belongs to, not only at the surface, but hundreds of feet deep.
“We’re all wishing it’s not true,” Peter de Menocal, a paleoceanographer and president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, said of the changing ocean currents. “Because if that happens, it’s just a monstrous change.”
The consequences could include faster sea level rise along parts of the Eastern United States and parts of Europe, stronger hurricanes barreling into the Southeastern United States, and perhaps most ominously, reduced rainfall across the Sahel, a semi-arid swath of land running the width of Africa that is already a geopolitical tinderbox.
The scientists’ concern stems from their understanding of thousands of years of the prehistoric climate record. In the past, a great weakening or even shutdown of this arm of the Gulf Stream seems to have triggered rapid changes in temperatures and precipitation patterns around the North Atlantic and beyond.
The northern arm of the Gulf Stream is but one tentacle of a larger, ocean-spanning tangle of currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have strong evidence from ice and sediment cores that the AMOC has weakened and shut down before in the past 13,000 years. As a result, mean temperatures in parts of Europe may have rapidly dropped to about 15 degrees Celsius below today’s averages, ushering in arctic like conditions. Parts of northern Africa and northern South America became much drier. Rainfall may even have declined as far away as what is now China. And some of these changes may have occurred in a matter of decades, maybe less.
The AMOC is thus a poster child for the idea of climatic “tipping points” — of hard-to-predict thresholds in Earth’s climate system that, once crossed, have rapid, cascading effects far beyond the corner of the globe where they occur. “It’s a switch,” said Dr. de Menocal, and one that can be thrown quickly.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)—one of Earth’s major ocean circulation systems—redistributes heat on our planet and has a major impact on climate. Here, we compare a variety of published proxy records to reconstruct the evolution of the AMOC since about AD 400. A fairly consistent picture of the AMOC emerges: after a long and relatively stable period, there was an initial weakening starting in the nineteenth century, followed by a second, more rapid, decline in the mid-twentieth century, leading to the weakest state of the AMOC occurring in recent decades.
In this article, using several different and largely independent proxy indicators of the AMOC evolution over the past 100 to nearly 2,000 years, we provide strong evidence that the AMOC decline in the twentieth century is unprecedented and that over the past decades, the AMOC is in its weakest state in over a millennium.
Ron DeLord, a fiery former Texas cop turned labor organizer, has long taught union leaders how to gain power and not let go. He has likened a police union going after an elected official to a cheetah devouring a wildebeest, and suggested that taking down just one would make others fall in line.
He helped write the playbook that police unions nationwide — seeking better pay, perks and protections from discipline — have followed for decades. Build a war chest. Support your friends. Smear your enemies. Even scare citizens with the threat of crime. One radio spot in El Paso warned residents to support their local police or face “the alternative,” as the sound of gunshots rang out.
“We took weak, underpaid organizations and built them into what everyone today says are powerful police unions,” Mr. DeLord said in a recent interview. “You may say we went too far. I say you don’t know how far you’ve gone until you’re at the edge of the envelope.”
That moment may be now.
Unions — many of which have dug in despite the protests and challenged officers’ firings in high-profile incidents — are also increasingly seen as out of step with the public. Officers in big cities can earn more than $100,000 a year, far more than citizens they are assigned to protect. That success has stoked a backlash. Many cities say they are unable, or unwilling, to pay for ever mounting police costs.
Union and city leaders are especially watching negotiations in San Antonio. Years ago, officers there locked in some of the most highly coveted perks and protections of any department in the country: rules that helped shield officers from discipline; fat pensions, Cadillac health insurance plans, even taxpayer-funded payments for divorce lawyers. Their success became a case study for unions nationwide.
During the last negotiations, city officials claimed the contract would bankrupt San Antonio. Now, city officials are focused on undoing some disciplinary protections. Adding pressure, a May ballot measure in the Texas city could eliminate the union’s ability to bargain — a devastating blow.
Elsewhere, police and city officials studied the book. “After I read it, I understood we were in over our heads,” said Toby Futrell, a former Austin city manager. “Even though we knew what the playbook was, we had never played — it’s one thing to read the football rules and it’s another to play football.”
An unexpected voice urging police unions nationwide to compromise is that of Mr. DeLord, who is the chief negotiator for the San Antonio union. “The unions need to bend,” he said. “They need to be prepared to bargain over things that their community thinks are fair.” Unions that don’t understand are “tone deaf,” he added.
The 1997 book Mr. DeLord wrote with a fellow organizer, John Burpo, and a political consultant, Michael Shannon, “Police Association Power, Politics, and Confrontation: A Guide for the Successful Police Labor Leader,” is pugnacious. The book repeatedly urges union leaders to ignore the “losers,” “whiners” and “naysayers” in their way. “A police association leader must throw out all those traditional notions of right and wrong,” it exhorts. “So long as it’s legal, you do what you gotta do to get where you’re going!” It also quotes one San Antonio union official saying, “If all else fails, we’ll drop the bomb and live in the ashes.” (emphasis added)
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The GOP’s national push to enact hundreds of new election restrictions could strain every available method of voting for tens of millions of Americans, potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction, when Southern states curtailed the voting rights of formerly enslaved Black men, a Washington Post analysis has found.
In 43 states across the country, Republican lawmakers have proposed at least 250 laws that would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting with such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours or narrower eligibility to vote absentee, according to data compiled as of Feb. 19 by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. Even more proposals have been introduced since then.
Proponents say the provisions are necessary to shore up public confidence in the integrity of elections after the 2020 presidential contest, when then-President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of election fraud convinced millions of his supporters that the results were rigged against him.
But in most cases, Republicans are proposing solutions in states where elections ran smoothly, including in many with results that Trump and his allies did not contest or allege to be tainted by fraud. The measures are likely to disproportionately affect those in cities and Black voters in particular, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic — laying bare, critics say, the GOP’s true intent: gaining electoral advantage [that is, FGOP advantage gained by voter suppression].In many states, Democrats are trying to make those expansions permanent — and broaden voting access in other ways. Congressional Democrats are also pushing a sweeping proposal to impose national standards that would override much of what Republican state lawmakers are trying to constrict, including measures that would provide universal eligibility to vote by mail, at least 15 days of early voting, mandatory online voter registration and the restoration of voting rights for released felons. The measure has passed the House but faces steep opposition in the evenly divided Senate.
Republican state legislators, meanwhile, echoing Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him, are pushing hard in the other direction.
The outcome of dueling efforts will vary depending on partisan control of statehouses. The same party controls both legislative chambers and the governorship in 38 states — 23 of them Republican and 15 of them Democratic. Many of the most restrictive proposals have surfaced in states where the GOP has a total hold on power, including Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri and Florida. (emphasis and commentary added)
