Celebrities who served

David Biden has a SportingZ article about celebrities who served in the military:

Bill Cosby:

Cosby has been in the news a lot of late, for the wrong reasons, so it’s easy to forget that he once bravely served his country. The comedy veteran served in the Navy for four years, after enlisting in 1956.

Johnny Carson

The late television host Johnny Carson joined the Navy in 1943, at the peak of World War Two. He was a crew member on the USS Pennsylvania and became an unbeaten amateur boxer during this time.

It certainly won’t surprise you to hear that Mr. T also served in the Army. In the mid-1970s the A-Team star was in the Military Police. He became A squad leader and received a letter of glowing recommendation.

Before becoming an acclaimed director, Mel Brooks was drafted into the Army. He actually had a pretty scary role working in an Engineer Combat Battalion, defusing land mines in World War Two.

Who’d have thought that jazz legend John Coltrane had a military career?! The saxophonist enlisted in the Navy, served some time at Pearl Harbor, and was discharged as a Seaman First-Class.

Before shooting to fame as host of The Price is Right, Bob Barker was a Navy man. He became a fighter pilot for the Navy, but he never went to sea. He was ready to go, but the war came to an end.

Before The Man in Black, Johnny Cash, changed the world of music he served in the Air Force. It’s widely documented that he began writing songs there. Many of his songs were influenced by his experiences in the service.

Reggae fusion singer Shaggy is a former military man. The singer of It Wasn’t Me singer enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, and served in the 10th Marine Regiment during the Gulf War.

Mister T wasn’t the only famous T to serve in the military. Legendary rapper Ice-T served for four years in the 25th Infantry Division. He then accepted an honorable discharge and went home to his daughter.

How different could the history of entertainment have looked had Sammy Davis, Jr. been KIA?Luckily, he survived his stint in the Army, but was met with racial prejudice during his time in the service.

Before he was a Hollywood icon, Steve McQueen was a member of the United States Marine Corps. He joined in 1947 and saved the lives of five Marines during an Arctic expedition. (He's also one of Rico's favorite actors.)

We bet you had no idea that MC Hammer joined the Navy, seeing this as a way out of a life of crime, and spent three years here; he was a petty officer when he was discharged three years later.

Legendary author Ernest Hemingway was an ambulance driver during World War One. The author wrote about the experience in his book Death in the Afternoon.

Another of the Hollywood elite to serve their country in its hour of need was Paul Newman. The legendary actor served in the Navy during the Second World War. He wanted to be a pilot but couldn’t fly, as he was colorblind!

Comic legend Richard Pryor developed a reputation for his black comedy, but there was nothing funny about his two-year stint in the Army; he spent almost all of it in the stockade for stabbing someone.

Rapper Nate Dogg also spent some time in the military. He served as an ammunition specialist in the Marine Corps for three years. After his stint in the Corps, he went on to have success in music.

You probably know Vincent Pastore best as a gangster in the Sopranos, but, once upon a time, he enlisted as a sailor in the Navy right out of high school. H he served from 1964 to 1967.

Legendary actor James Earl Jones is most famous as the voice of Darth Vader. He joined the Reserve Officers Training Corp at a young age, and was due to serve in Korea, but joined a training unit instead.

Montel Williams is an American actor and television personality who had a fifteen-year service career, during which he served in the Navy and the Marine Corps, and climbed as high as the rank of Lieutenant Commander.

Jimmy Stewart has always been a man of honor, so it’s no surprise that he was a veteran of World War Two and Vietnam. He attained the rank of Brigadier General, and is the highest ranked actor in the military.

Harvey comes to Texas

Yahoo has an article about the hurricane:

Texas residents are fleeing inland as Hurricane Harvey takes aim at the Gulf Coast. Harvey is expected to be the most severe hurricane to make landfall in the United States since the 2005 devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina. A dramatic storm surge is predicted to cause extensive flooding across the region. It will also mark the first time President Trump will be tasked with handling a natural disaster emergency response. Yahoo News will offer live updates through the weekend on the storm’s path, its impact and the emergency response. Harvey sent devastating floods pouring into the nation's fourth-largest city Sunday, as rising water chased thousands of people to rooftops or higher ground and overwhelmed rescuers, who could not keep up with the constant calls for help. The incessant rain covered much of Houston, Texas in turbid, gray-green water and turned streets into rivers navigable only by boat. In a rescue effort that recalled the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, helicopters landed near flooded freeways, airboats buzzed across submerged neighborhoods, and high-water vehicles plowed through water-logged intersections. Some people managed with kayaks or canoes, or swam.
Volunteers joined emergency teams to pull people from their homes or from the water, which was high enough in places to gush into second floors. The flooding from Harvey, which made landfall late Friday as a Category 4 hurricane and has lingered, dropping heavy rain as a tropical storm, was so widespread that authorities had trouble pinpointing the worst areas. They urged people to get on top of their houses to avoid becoming trapped in attics and to wave sheets or towels to draw attention to their location.
Residents living around the Addicks and Barker reservoirs, designed to help prevent flooding in downtown Houston, were warned Sunday that a controlled release from both reservoirs would cause additional street flooding and could spill into homes. Rising water levels and continuing rain was putting pressure on the dams that could cause a failure without the release.
The Army Corps of Engineers early Monday started water releases at the reservoirs ahead of schedule, after water levels increased dramatically in a few hours' time, a Corps spokesman said. Harris and Fort Bend county officials initially said Sunday that residents should be prepared for the influx of water that was scheduled to happen at Addicks around 0200 Monday and a day later at Barker. Officials warned residents they should pack their cars Sunday night and wait for daylight Monday to leave.
The timetable was moved up to prevent more homes from being affected by flooding from the reservoirs, Corps spokesman Jay Townsend said; he added that water levels were rising at a rate of more than six inches per hour in both reservoirs.
Meanwhile, officials in Fort Bend County, in Houston's southwestern suburbs, late Sunday issued widespread mandatory evacuation orders along the Brazos River levee districts. County officials were preparing for the river to reach major flood stages late Sunday. County Judge Robert Herbert said at a news conference that National Weather Service officials were predicting that the water could rise to sixty feet, three feet above 2016 records and what Herbert called an "eight-hundred-year flood level". He said that amount of water would top the levees and carries a threat of levee failure.
Judging from Federal disaster declarations, the storm has so far affected about a quarter of the Texas population, seven million people in eighteen counties. It was blamed for at least two deaths.
As the water rose, the National Weather Service issued another ominous forecast: Before the storm that arrived Friday as a Category 4 hurricane is gone, some parts of Houston and its suburbs could get as much as fifty inches of rain. That would be the highest amount ever recorded in Texas. Some areas have already received about half that amount. Since Thursday, South Houston recorded nearly 25 inches, and the suburbs of Santa Fe and Dayton got 27 inches. "The breadth and intensity of this rainfall is beyond anything experienced before," the National Weather Service said in a statement.
Average rainfall totals will end up around forty inches for Houston, weather service meteorologist Patrick Burke said.
The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Brock Long, predicted that the aftermath of the storm would require FEMA's involvement for years. "This disaster's going to be a landmark event," he said.
Rescuers had to give top priority to life-and-death situations, leaving many affected families to fend for themselves. Several hospitals in the Houston area were evacuated due to the rising waters.
Tom Bartlett and Steven Craig pulled a rowboat on a rope through chest-deep water for a mile to rescue Bartlett's mother from her home in west Houston. It took them 45 minutes to reach the house. Inside, the water was halfway up the walls.

What we know:
- Harvey is currently a Category 1 storm with sustained winds of 74-95 mph.
- Potential for "feet" of rainfall through early next week. The National Hurricane Center warns of "catastrophic flooding" over the next few days
- Harvey made landfall about 10 p.m. Friday northeast of Corpus Christi as a Category 4, with winds in excess of 130 mph.
- Forecasters predict the storm could double back to where it made landfall by Monday night.
- President Donald Trump says he has signed a disaster declaration for Texas, "which unleashes the full force of government help!", he wrote on Twitter.
- Harvey is the first Category 4 hurricane to hit the Texas coast since Hurricane Carla in 1961:

Latest from the National Hurricane Center:
A NOAA tide gauge at Port Lavaca, Texas, recently measured a water level of 6.2 feet above Mean Higher High Water. The site has also recently reported sustained winds of 52 mph, with a gust to 72 mph).
An automated weather station near Victoria, Texas, recently observed a sustained wind of 58 mph with a gust to 77 mph.
Another tide gauge at Seadrift, Texas, recently measured a water level of 5.7 feet above Mean Higher High Water.

Rico says he has friends in Austin; they're gonna get wet.

Wrong volcano

Rico says it was a long time ago:

After centuries of dormancy, Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79 in southern Italy, devastating the prosperous Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and killing thousands. The cities, buried under a thick layer of volcanic material and mud, were never rebuilt, and largely forgotten in the course of history. In the eighteenth century, Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered and excavated, providing an unprecedented archaeological record of the everyday life of an ancient civilization, startlingly preserved in sudden death.
The ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum thrived near the base of Mount Vesuvius on the Bay of Naples. In the time of the early Roman Empire, twenty thousand people lived in Pompeii, including merchants, manufacturers, and farmers who exploited the rich soil of the region with numerous vineyards and orchards. None suspected that the black fertile earth was the legacy of earlier eruptions of Mount Vesuvius. Herculaneum was a city of five thousand and a favorite summer destination for rich Romans. Named for the mythic hero Hercules, Herculaneum housed opulent villas and grand Roman baths. Gambling artifacts found in Herculaneum and a brothel unearthed in Pompeii attest to the decadent nature of the cities. There were smaller resort communities in the area as well, such as the quiet little town of Stabiae.
At noon on 24 August 79 AD, this pleasure and prosperity came to an end when the peak of Mount Vesuvius exploded, propelling a ten-mile mushroom cloud of ash and pumice into the stratosphere. For the next twelve hours, volcanic ash and a hail of pumice stones up to three inches in diameter showered Pompeii, forcing the city’s occupants to flee in terror. Some two thousand people stayed in Pompeii, holed up in cellars or stone structures, hoping to wait out the eruption.
A westerly wind protected Herculaneum from the initial stage of the eruption, but then a giant cloud of hot ash and gas surged down the western flank of Vesuvius, engulfing the city and burning or asphyxiating all who remained. This lethal cloud was followed by a flood of volcanic mud and rock, burying the city.
The people who remained in Pompeii were killed on the morning of 25 August when a cloud of toxic gas poured into the city, suffocating all that remained. A flow of rock and ash followed, collapsing roofs and walls and burying the dead.
Much of what we know about the eruption comes from an account by Pliny the Younger, who was staying west along the Bay of Naples when Vesuvius exploded. In two letters to the historian Tacitus, he told of how “people covered their heads with pillows, the only defense against a shower of stones,” and of how “a dark and horrible cloud charged with combustible matter suddenly broke and set forth. Some bewailed their own fate. Others prayed to die.” Pliny, only seventeen at the time, escaped the catastrophe and later became a noted Roman writer and administrator. His uncle, Pliny the Elder, was less lucky. Pliny the Elder, a celebrated naturalist, at the time of the eruption was the commander of the Roman fleet in the Bay of Naples. After Vesuvius exploded, he took his boats across the bay to Stabiae, to investigate the eruption and reassure terrified citizens. Going ashore, he was overcome by toxic gas and died.
According to Pliny the Younger’s account, the eruption lasted eighteen hours. Pompeii was buried under twenty feet of ash and pumice, and the nearby seacoast was drastically changed. Herculaneum was buried under more than sixty feet of mud and volcanic material. Some residents of Pompeii later returned to dig out their destroyed homes and salvage their valuables, but many treasures were left and then forgotten.
In the eighteenth century, a well digger unearthed a marble statue on the site of Herculaneum. The local government excavated some other valuable art objects, but the project was abandoned. In 1748, a farmer found traces of Pompeii beneath his vineyard. Since then, excavations have gone on nearly without interruption until the present. In 1927, the Italian government resumed the excavation of Herculaneum, retrieving numerous art treasures, including bronze and marble statues and paintings.
The remains of two thousand men, women, and children were found at Pompeii. After perishing from asphyxiation, their bodies were covered with ash that hardened and preserved the outline of their bodies. Later, their bodies decomposed to skeletal remains, leaving a kind of plaster mold behind. Archaeologists who found these molds filled the hollows with plaster, revealing in grim detail the death pose of the victims of Vesuvius. The rest of the city is likewise frozen in time, and ordinary objects that tell the story of everyday life in Pompeii are as valuable to archaeologists as the great unearthed statues and frescoes. It was not until 1982 that the first human remains were found at Herculaneum, and these hundreds of skeletons bear ghastly burn marks that testifies to horrifying deaths.
Today, Mount Vesuvius is the only active volcano on the European mainland. Its last eruption was in 1944 and its last major eruption was in 1631. Another eruption is expected in the near future, would could be devastating for the seven hundred thousand people who live in the “death zones” around Vesuvius.

Rico says he, selfishly and meanly, needs it to be Mount Hood:

Not Rico, alas

The Washington Post has an article by Travis M. Andrews and Lindsey Bever about a big lottery win:

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. Mavis Wanczyk (video) won the second-largest lottery prize in history on Wednesday, a $758 million Powerball jackpot that she celebrated by calling in newly rich, telling her longtime employer that she would not be coming to work. Not now, not ever.
The 53-year-old from Chicopee, Massachusetts, said that she was just starting to come down, barely, from the shock and overwhelming excitement of discovering that she held the lone winning ticket. “Last night, it was kind of like, I didn’t realize I had won,” she said at an afternoon news conference, where she smiled and posed with a giant check, on which the following was written: “Pay to the order of Mavis L. Wanczyk: $758,700,000.”
“Now,” she said, “it’s like, I am a winner, and I’m scared. But I’ll be okay. I had a pipe dream, and my pipe dream finally came true,” she added, explaining that she had hoped to retire early from Mercy Medical Center, where she has worked for 32 years.
Or had worked, anyway: After winning the Powerball, Wanczyk said, “I called them and told them I will not be coming back.”
Powerball announced that a single ticket sold at a convenience store in Chicopee, Massachusetts, was the winner of the 23 August 2017 jackpot of $758.7 million. Here’s how winning the lottery has brought more than a windfall for some:
Wanczyk, a regular lottery player, said she bought two quick-pick tickets at a Pride Station & Store in Chicopee. Then, she said, she chose the winning numbers on a separate ticket: 6, 7, 16, 23 and 26, plus the Powerball number, 4.
“This was a chance, a chance I had to take,” she said. The payout, which can be taken in a lump sum or in 29 yearly payments, is estimated to be around $443 million, depending on state taxes.
Officials with the Massachusetts State Lottery initially reported that the winning ticket had been purchased at the Handy Variety convenience store in Watertown, about nine miles west of Boston.
The lottery later corrected that statement, saying the lone ticket had been purchased more than eighty miles from Watertown, in Chicopee, where Wanczyk lives. Handy Variety, in fact, sold a one million dollar prize, according to the lottery.
Michael Sweeney, executive director of the Massachusetts State Lottery, apologized for the mix-up, saying it was the result of a “human error”, but added that the lottery’s internal systems always had the correct information. He said those internal systems ran a routine report in the morning identifying Chicopee as the correct location, and lottery officials then checked to ensure that it was accurate.
Bob Bolduc, founder of Pride Station & Stores, where the prize was actually purchased, said the multimillion-dollar winning ticket was sold at about 1430 on Wednesday. He said that, in the past year, the convenience store chain has sold a handful of winning tickets worth a million or more, and he suspects that will “resonate with a lot of lottery buyers.” Bolduc told reporters that the convenience store will receive a bonus for selling the winning ticket, and plans to donate it to local charities throughout western Massachusetts. “We just all happen to be the lucky people involved, that’s all,” he said. “We’re glad to be able to pass it on. So I’m happy in that sense; there are a lot of needs around here.”
Powerball Product Group Chair Charlie McIntyre said in a statement that several other tickets also struck gold, the The Associated Press reported.
Six tickets, sold in Connecticut, Illinois, Louisiana, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and the Virgin Islands, won two million dollars each. Thirty-four others across the United States won a million.
To win the jackpot, a person must correctly pick all six numbers. The odds are roughly 1 in 292 million.
As The Washington Post’s Alex Horton reported:

Tweaks to the game in October of 2015 increased the number of total balls, from 59 to 69, from which players need to pick five. It may seem a modest change, but the odds of winning the jackpot plummeted. “Powerball has been revamped seven other times in its twenty-plus-year history, so that the game can continue to be attractive to players by delivering the big jackpots that players want, and these new changes will do just that”, Gary Grief, executive director of the Texas Lottery, said in a statement when the change was implemented. It worked: Last year, the jackpot hit a historic $1.6 billion, which was split three ways in January of 2016.

Wednesday’s jackpot might have been the second-biggest, but many expected it to actually surpass that $1.6 billion record if that lucky Massachusetts ticket-holder hadn’t hit on the right numbers. That’s because of what Kelly Tabor, a spokeswoman for the Colorado Lottery, calls “jackpot chasers”, casual players who rush out to buy a ticket when the jackpot gets big enough. “That’s really driving up sales right now,” Tabor told The Post this week.
Wanczyk, Wednesday’s Powerball winner, needn’t fret, though: lottery officials said it was the largest jackpot ever won by a single ticket in North America.

Rico says that he was supposed to win this one...

Charleston again

Yahoo has a Reuters article by Harriet McLeod about yet another idiot with a gun:

A disgruntled employee who fatally shot one person and held another hostage on Thursday at a restaurant in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, was shot by police, the city's mayor said.
Witnesses said the gunman brandished a pistol and said "there's a new boss in town" as he entered Virginia's On King in the heart of the city's commercial district, while about twenty people were having lunch. Many fled.
The gunman was transported to a local hospital in critical condition and the hostage was rescued, said Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg. "A disgruntled employee came back to his place of employment with a gun and killed an individual in the restaurant, and held another hostage for some time," Tecklenburg told reporters at the scene. "This was not a terrorist act. This was not a hate crime. This was a tragic case of a disgruntled individual, with a history of some mental health challenges, who took his anger into his own hands," he said.
Police had earlier said one shooting victim was transported to a hospital. It was not immediately clear whether that was the person who later died.
The Medical University of South Carolina received one patient from the incident, a hospital spokeswoman said. She declined to give more details.
Police helicopters had buzzed overhead and police SWAT team members had closed several blocks of King Street, which is home to many restaurants, bars, and boutiques, and is popular with residents and tourists.
Virginia's On King is an upscale restaurant serving traditional Southern comfort food.
The local Post and Courier newspaper quoted a couple, Tom and Patsy Plant, who said they were eating lunch with their daughter Laura when the gunman walked in from the kitchen. The Plants, who said they fled with other customers through a back door, described him as a black man in his late fifties. Patsy Plant told the paper he looked like "an ordinary grandpa, but had a crazy look."
The restaurant is just a block and a half from the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where on 17 June 2015, a white supremacist fatally shot nine members of a Bible study group in what officials called a racially motivated hate crime.
The church shooter, Dylann Roof, has been sentenced to death in Federal court for the massacre. He pleaded guilty in April to separate state murder charges.

Rico says it's probably just the heat and the humidity...

Trump for the day

Charles Pierce has a Esquire article about The Donald:

At least old Ted Agnew had the late William Safire writing his stuff for him. "Nattering nabobs of negativism." "Pusillanimous pussyfooters." I mean, that's the top-shelf brand right there. It's an honor to have such invective thrown in your direction. Ol' Ted broke new ground in only two areas: taking cheap-ass bribes in the office of the Vice President and attacking the media. Instead, 45 years later, we get this mendacious litany of sixth-grade sneering:

So the truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories. They have no sources in many cases. They say "a source says", but there is no such thing. But they don't report the facts. Just like they don't want to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry and violence and strongly condemned the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists, and the KKK.
I openly called for unity, healing and love, and they know it because they were all there. So what I did --
So what I did is I thought, I'd take just a second, and I'm really doing this more than anything else, because you know where my heart is, okay?
I'm really doing this to show you how damned dishonest these people are.
You know why? Because they are very dishonest people. So I said, racism is evil. Now they only choose, you know, like a half a sentence here or there and then they just go on this long rampage, or they put on these real lightweights all around a table that nobody ever heard of, and they all say what a bad guy I am. But then you wonder why CNN is doing relatively poorly in the ratings. Because they're putting like seven people all negative on Trump. And they fired Jeffrey Lord, poor Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lord. I guess he was getting a little fed up, and he was probably fighting back a little bit too hard. They said, we've better get out of here; we can't have that. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold true as Americans. Now let me ask you, can it be any better than that, in all fairness? And you know I mention that, but to the best of my knowledge when there was a big problem, Barack Obama never said it took place because of radical Islamic terrorists, he never said that, right.
And, finally, the full Schickelgruber: 

And I say it, and you know, we're all pros. We're all, like, we have a certain sense. We're smart people. These are truly dishonest people. Not all of them. Not all of them. You have some very good reporters. You have some very fair journalists. But for the most part, honestly, these are really, really dishonest people, and they're bad people. And I really think they don't like our country. I really believe that. And I don't believe they're going to change, and that's why I do this. If they would change, I would never say it. The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself, and the fake news. These are sick people. You know the thing I don't understand? You would they'd want to make our country great again, and I honestly believe they don't. I honestly believe it. If you want to discover the source of the division in our country, look no further than the fake news and the crooked media...
Before we get to the other stuff, and there was lots of other stuff, I'd like to address myself to those people represented by the parenthetical notation in the above transcript, those people who waited for hours in hundred-degree heat so that they could have the G-spot of their irrationality properly stroked for them. You're all suckers. You're dim and you're ignorant and you can't even feel yourself sliding toward something that will surprise even you with its fundamental ugliness, something that everybody who can see past the veil of their emotions can see as plain as a church by daylight, to borrow a phrase from that Willie Shakespeare fella. The problem, of course, is that you, in your pathetic desire to be loved by a guy who wouldn't have fifteen seconds for you on the street, are dragging the rest of us toward that, too.
A guy basically went mad, right there on the stage in front of you, and you cheered and booed right on cue because you're sheep and because he directed his insanity at all the scapegoats that your favorite radio and television personalities have been creating for you over the past three decades. Especially, I guess, people like me who practice the craft of journalism in a country that honors that craft in its most essential founding documents. The President of the United States came right up to the edge of inciting you to riot and you rode along with him. You're on his team, by god.
Are you good people? I keep hearing that you are, but let's go back to Tuesday night's transcripts and see what we find.
One vote away. One vote away. We were one vote away. Think of it, seven years the Republicans and again, you have some great senators, but we were one vote away from repealing it.
But, you know, they all said, Mr. President, your speech was so good last night, please, please, Mr. President don't mention any names. So I won't. I won't. No I won't vote, one vote away, I will not mention any names. Very presidential, isn't' it? Very presidential. And nobody wants me to talk about your other senator, who's weak on borders, weak on crime, so I won't talk about him.

Right there, in the passive-aggressive fashion of the true moral coward, he made a bobo out of a former POW who currently is undergoing treatment for what is likely terminal brain cancer. And you chanted and cheered. Do good people chant and cheer a rhetorical assault on a dying man of respect and honor?

I have no more patience, and I had very little to start with. I don't care why you're anxious. I don't care for anybody's interpretation of why you voted for this abomination of a politician, and why you cheer him now, because any explanation not rooted in the nastier bits of basic human spleen is worthless. I don't want any politicians who seek to appeal to the more benign manifestations of your condition because there's no way to separate those from all the rest of the hate and fear and stupidity. (And, for my colleagues in the Vance-Arnade-Zito school of Trump Whispering, here's a hint: They hate you, too.) I don't care why you sat out in a roasting pan since 5 am Tuesday morning to whistle and cheer and stomp your feet for a scared, dangerous little man who tells you that your every bloody fantasy about your enemies is the height of patriotism. You are now the declared adversaries of what I do for a living, and your idol is a danger to the country and so are you. Own it. Deal with it. And, for the love of God, and for the sake of the rest of us who live in this country, do better at being citizens.
As to the rest, I might have been a little groggy, but I thought I heard him say he was going to shut down the government unless Congress gives him money for his stupid wall that Mexico was supposed to finance. I thought I heard him tell that evil racist, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, to count on a pardon down the line somewhere. And, I swear to God, I thought I heard him call the Democrats in the Congress communists.
Wait. What?
It's all they're good at. It's all they're good at. That's all they do. On healthcare, they have fifty Democrats. We got no votes. We got no votes. And it would have been great healthcare. And by the way, would have been great healthcare for Arizona. Would have been great. So the Democrats have no ideas, no policy, no vision for the country other than total socialism and maybe, frankly, a step beyond socialism from what I'm seeing.
(Also, note to all the Purity Police who think people like Joy Reid are "red-baiting" when they mention that Russian ratfucking helped decide the last presidential election. That bit right at the end there? That's actual red-baiting. Please take notes. I don't want to have to go over this again.)
It was a deadening, numbing seventy-seven minutes. (If there's one modern orator he most resembles, it's Fidel Castro.) The abiding feelings that I took away from this carnival of the Id were twofold: first, that this jefe manqué is on the verge of sending people infinitely better than he is to die in a war he doesn't understand, and second, and probably most important, this is a president who is scared to death. He's frightened of the responsibilities of his office, of the mounting unpopularity of both himself and his policies, and of the hounds baying at the frontiers of his shady past and shadier present. He's terrified, and he should be. He's desperately shoring up the bubble that his ovine followers helped him build to insulate him from the truth and from empirical reality.
Come to this house.
Be one of us.

Rico says let's hope the morons don't reelect him...

Subs are dangerous

Rico's fellow history buff Kelley forwards this Yahoo article:

The mystery of how the crew of one of the world’s first submarines died has finally been solved: they accidentally killed themselves.
The HL Hunley sank on 17 February 1864 after torpedoing the USS Housatonic outside Charleston, South Carolina, during the American Civil War. She was one of the first submarines ever to be used in conflict, and the first to sink a battleship. It was assumed the blast had ruptured the sub, drowning its occupants but, when the Hunley was raised in 2000, salvage experts were amazed to find the eight-man crew poised as if they had been caught completely unawares by the tragedy. All were still sitting in their posts, and there was no evidence that they had attempted to flee the foundering vessel.
Now researchers at Duke University believe they have the answer: three years of experiments on a mini-test sub have shown that the torpedo blast would have created a shockwave great enough to instantly rupture the blood vessels in the lungs and brains of the submariners. "This is the characteristic trauma of blast victims, they call it 'blast lung'," Dr. Rachel Lance. “You have an instant fatality that leaves no marks on the skeletal remains. Unfortunately, the soft tissues that would show us what happened have decomposed in the past hundred years.”
The Hunley's torpedo was not a self-propelled bomb, but a copper keg of over a hundred pounds of gunpowder held ahead and slightly below the Hunley's bow on a sixteen-foot pole called a spar The sub rammed this spar into the Housatonic's hull and the bomb exploded. The furthest any of the crew was from the blast was about forty feet. The shockwave of the blast travelled about 1500 meters per second in water, and 340 m/sec in air, the researchers calculate.
While a normal blast shockwave traveling in air should last less than ten milliseconds, Lance calculated that the Hunley crew's lungs were subjected to sixty milliseconds or more of trauma. "That creates kind of a worst case scenario for the lungs," added Dr. Lance. “Shear forces would tear apart the delicate structures where the blood supply meets the air supply, filling the lungs with blood and killing the crew instantly. “It's likely they also suffered traumatic brain injuries from being so close to such a large blast. All the physical evidence points to the crew taking absolutely no action in response to a flood or loss of air. If anyone had survived, they may have tried to release the keel ballast weights, set the bilge pumps to pump water, or tried to get out the hatches, but none of these actions were taken.”
The fate of the crew of the forty-foot Hunley remained a mystery until 1995, when the submarine was discovered about three hundred meters away from the Housatonic's resting place. Raised in 2000, the submarine is currently undergoing study and conservation in Charleston, South Carolina by a team of Clemson University scientists.
Initially, the discovery of the submarine only seemed to deepen the mystery. The crewmen's skeletons were found still at their stations along a hand-crank that drove the cigar-shaped craft. They suffered no broken bones, the bilge pumps had not been used and the air hatches were closed. Except for a hole in one conning tower and a small window that may have been broken, the sub was remarkably intact. Speculation about their deaths has included suffocation and drowning. The new study involved repeatedly setting blasts near a scale model, shooting authentic weapons at historically accurate iron plate and calculating human respiration and the transmission of blast energy. 

The research was published in PLOS ONE. 

Rico says hey, it happened to the Thresher in 1963...

Generals running things

Matt Bai has a Yahoo column at Political World about Trump & his generals:

Well, that’s a relief.
For a while there, it seemed as if our democracy was starting to look like some backward former colony in Africa or Latin America, where everything is controlled by the ruling family whose demagogue patriarch doles out fiefdoms to a tight circle of privileged heirs.
But ever since Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. got pulled into this whole mess with Russia and the campaign, you don’t hear as much from the Trump Bunch. (Also, Jared is busy negotiating peace in the Middle East, which is, like, really time-consuming.) Even when the president seemed to sympathize with neo-Nazis, his Jewish son-in-law and daughter were oddly absent.
No, apparently, we’ve now moved on to a government administered by military council; a powerful trio with oversight of all cabinet agencies and armed forces that the civilian President refers to as “my generals”.
So you see, we’re on our way from being Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia to, say, Myanmar. How badly can that go?
Actually, this latest turn has done a lot to buoy the spirits of President Trump’s liberal critics, a generation of whom grew up thinking of military leaders through the twisted prism of Dr. Strangelove. They’ve learned to love the generals now, and you can understand why.
There’s been a sense these last few months that nobody can put a brake on Trump’s careening crazy train; not the kids, not establishment Republicans on the Hill, not the Wall Street guys or the Cabinet of billionaires. While North Korea tests its missiles, Trump whines about the media in middle-of-the-night tweets and self-delusional rallies.
At least now, the current thinking goes, the administration seems to be in the hands of strong and serious-minded patriots who can fill in a map without help. As Newsweek put it in a subtle headline last week: Trump’s Generals Can Save the World From War — and Stop the Crazy.”
That’s a low bar, and maybe the generals— Kelly, McMaster, and Mattis— can clear it. But even if these guys can keep Trump’s presidency from immediately derailing, that doesn’t mean they’re likely to steer it in the right direction.
Modern America has a real mythology around its generals; we’ll ask them to fix almost any problem. Generations removed from a time when the burdens of war were shared by everyone, we tend to idealize the men and women who still rise up to shoulder them.
Our weathered institutions sag under the weight of bureaucratic inertia. We imagine that a battlefield commander will attack intractable problems as he might a battery of machine guns, immune to petty grievances and lawyerly objections.
Except that, in reality, and with few exceptions, military leaders haven’t had much success running other things —political campaigns, school districts, businesses, Cabinet agencies. The courage and brilliance they display in rising up through the armed forces don’t seem to translate very easily.
Maybe that’s because the careers they spend in service to the public are also spent inside a kind of socialist bubble, with very little exposure to the more mundane trials of civilian life. There’s no reason, really, that a general should know the first thing about finance or domestic policy or politics. We only like to pretend they do, since we’ve pretty much lost faith in everyone whose job it really is.
If I told you I had a novel plan to partition Syria, you’d wonder, with good reason, what I could possibly know about it. But when John Kelly, the chief of staff, assumes responsibility for legislative strategy or tax policy, he’s like the guy in the ad who stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night; somehow we assume he’ll figure it out.
Even in foreign policy, where generals are assumed to hold vast expertise, that may not translate into progress. Modern generals are, in fact, nothing like the cigar-chomping, Cold War cowboys we remember from iconic movies, hell-bent on killing Commies and reducing villainous countries to rubble. Today’s more cerebral military leaders were schooled in the lessons of Vietnam, which taught them the value of cautious incrementalism, of staying within political objectives, of carrying out the policy set by others with maximum efficiency and minimal loss.
Look at Colin Powell, who was the most successful of recent military leaders in the political realm. His stature was such that, in 1996, he quite possibly could have become our first black president, if not our first politically independent one.
He will likely be remembered now, chiefly, for having persuaded the world that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration told Powell to go out and make the case, because no one had more credibility in the country or the world. And Powell, whatever his personal misgivings, agreed to complete the mission, because that’s what modern generals are supposed to do.
I remember sitting in a Pentagon briefing room, not long after Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council, listening to Jay Garner, soon to become the commanding general and overseer in occupied Iraq, talk about how simple it would be to make Iraq great again after the invasion. (I’d been to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that didn’t sound especially simple to me.)
Garner later said we never should have gone to war there in the first place. Okay. But at the time, given a completely unreasonable objective, he never considered the possibility that it couldn’t be done.
Which brings us to the president’s speech on Afghanistan this week, in which he offered virtually no departure from the last two presidents, other than a new and entirely meaningless, contradictory slogan: “principled realism.” (Why not “pragmatic idealism,” or maybe “flexible paralysis”?)
What we’re doing in Afghanistan, at bottom, is following the same basic policy drift that now stretches across three administrations, because the generals were given a political objective sixteen years ago, and they’re going to see it through to the bitter end. They aren’t trained to acknowledge failure, much less futility.
What follows from all this are two essential possibilities, neither of which is very inspiring. One is that while “Trump’s generals” may well stand ably between us and some kind of all-out lunacy in the world (which is no small service to render), they may also continue to doggedly lead us down well-worn and dangerous paths, mainly because they’re not willing to rethink policies that aren’t working.
The second and worse scenario is that they may become not so much Trump’s advisers as his enablers, applying a credible, military sheen to whatever half-informed policy he decides to implement.
How did Kelly become Trump’s chief of staff, after all? By carrying out the president’s religiously based immigration order as efficiently as he possibly could, with no apparent objection or sense of alarm.
I’ve no doubt Kelly is a brave and decent man with a superior intellect. He’s just conditioned to carry out the mission, and that’s what he’ll do.
Given the choice between a bunch of rich, Manhattan-bred dilettantes (or a bunch of white nationalist ideologues) on one side, and a trio of battle-tested generals on the other, I’ll take the generals in a heartbeat. No one who is rational is going to seriously argue that point. When it comes to addressing the country’s problems and divisions in a thoughtful way, though, the only guy who can do that is the President himself, and I don’t see it happening, no matter how many square-jawed warriors surround him or how many slogans they latch onto.
Trump’s the principal, and that’s the reality.

Rico says more rats off the ship...

Liz, knocking it back

Josh Duboff has a Vanity Fair article about Elizabeth:

The Queen, it would seem to us, more than essentially anyone else on the planet, deserves to be able to eat and drink and behave absolutely however she wants. If she wanted to jump on a trampoline from 4 to 5 pm every day while the Friends theme song played, and wanted to eat sushi with a side of sliced American cheese for every meal, we would just smile, nod our heads, and ask what size trampoline she wants and what brand of American cheese she prefers.
The monarch of more than six decades does, in fact, have quite peculiar and specific dietary preferences. We learned not too long ago that the Queen has a favorite kind of cake, made by the Buckingham Palace chefs, that she has a slice of every single day.
And Food and Wine uncovered another detail about the her daily intake: the ninety-year-old reportedly consumes four cocktails a day. And why shouldn’t she!? Let’s run through what they are:

Her first drink, per former royal chef Darren McGrady, enjoyed shortly before lunch, is a gin and Dubonnet with a slice of lemon and a “lot of ice.” Sure, this sounds about right. A classy and posh and powerful concoction.
Then, during lunch, she’ll have a piece of chocolate and a glass of wine at meal’s end. (That we have been eating lunch all these years without closing with a piece of chocolate and glass of wine now makes us feel utterly foolish.)
Okay, then, also at lunch, the Queen drinks a dry gin martini, according to her cousin Margaret Rhodes. So, yes, we are now at three drinks by roughly 1 p.m.
Her final drink of the day? It actually doesn’t come until she’s going to sleep: a glass of champagne before bed.

The way her four drinks are spaced out throughout the day is not really how we would have anticipated it, but maybe, likely, the Queen knows something we don’t. Three drinks before the end of lunch, and then a break until bedtime: the key to success and longevity and happiness? Perhaps the Queen is really onto something. If she didn’t already have enough on her plate, we would be encouraging her right now to start a Goop or Draper James of her own; we can only imagine what other sort of lifestyle-related tips she must have to share.

Rico says it's good to see the old gal can hold her liquor...

I'm melting...

Rico says it's not the Wicked Witch of the West, but Alaska, according to an article in The New York Times:

There’s a climate time bomb of sorts ticking away in Alaska, as in other northern lands. As temperatures rise, permafrost, the permanently frozen land that underlies much of the state, is thawing. When it thaws it starts to decompose, putting ancient carbon back into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases.
Scientists are studying Alaskan permafrost, trying to get a handle on its future as the world warms. I accompanied a few of them to a part of the state where the permafrost is most threatened: the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in western Alaska. On the sixty-mile helicopter flight from Bethel to the researchers’ field station, I had a bird’s-eye view of the beautiful tundra, a colorful mosaic of shrubs and grasses, lichens and mosses that is dotted with the deep blues of countless lakes.
Today we’re publishing my article about how warming is already having an effect on this beautiful landscape and the permafrost beneath it. I invite you to read and share the article, which is accompanied by spectacular maps that clearly illustrate the problem, fantastic photographs and even a video that I shot from the helicopter. 

Let me know what you think.
Henry Fountain, fountain@nytimes.com

Rico says it's okay, Trump won't believe this, either...

Diana's funeral

People has an article by Simon Perry about Diana's boys:

Should young Prince William and Harry  have been made to march behind the coffin of their mother, Princess Diana? At the time, Diana’s brother, Charles, the Ninth Earl of Spencer, argued against them being part of the procession, and some government advisers were wary too. But friends of the royal family have said that it was their grandfather, Prince Philip, who told the princes, then aged fifteen and twelve, “If I do it, will you?”
Now, William confirms in the new BBC documentary Diana, 7 Days that “It was not an easy decision, and it was a collective family decision to do that. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But we were overwhelmed by how many people turned out, it was just incredible. There was that balance between duty and family and that’s what we had to do.”
Harry recalls, “I think it was a group decision. But, before I knew it, I found myself with a suit on with a black tie and a white shirt, I think, and I was part of it. Genuinely, I don’t have an opinion on whether that was right or wrong. I am glad I was part of it. Looking back on it now, I am very glad I was part of it.”
William calls the march a very “long and lonely walk”. He says he hid behind the floppy blond bangs he had as a teen, calling them “my safety blanket”, while noting that ”the balance of me being Prince William and having to do my bit versus the private William who just wanted to go into a room and cry because he’d lost his mother.”
Harry says he remembers hearing people screaming in the crowds. “The broadcast news today still talks about the silence and of course there was a huge amount of silence, but what I remember is every fifty yards or whatever certain people in the crowd just unable to contain their emotion. That was a big thing.”
Calling it an “alien environment”, William said, “I couldn’t understand why everyone wanted to cry as loud as they did and show such emotion as they did, when they didn’t really know our mother. I did feel a bit protective at times; I thought, you didn’t even know her, why and how are you so upset? Now, looking back, I’ve learned to understand what it was that she gave the world, what she gave a lot of people. Back in the 1990s there weren’t a lot of public figures doing what she did, so she was this ray of light in a fairly gray world.”
William added that “Both our parents brought us up to understand that there is this element of duty, and responsibility that you have to do things you don’t want to do. When it becomes that personal, walking behind your mother’s funeral cortege, it goes to another level of duty. But I just kept thinking about what she would want and that she’d be proud of Harry and I and effectively she was there with us. It felt like she was walking alongside us to get us through it.”
As discussions raged through the week, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office worked alongside Buckingham Palace courtiers to plan and prepare for the funeral.
The princes’ uncle, Charles, the Ninth Earl of Spencer, called the walk a “tunnel of grief” and told People and The Story of Diana on NBC he didn’t believe that “tiny” Harry should have made the grueling walk.
“I was just so worried; what a trauma for a little chap to walk behind his mum’s body,” Spencer said. “It’s just awful. And, actually, I tried to stop that happening, to be honest.”
Blair’s aide Anji Hunter recalls in the BBC documentary that she made “an intervention on that. I thought, ‘How can he, at twelve, walk, behind his mother’s coffin?'” But Hunter says she found it “astonishing and so moving” to see the boys undertake the task.
Meanwhile, Blair’s spokesman Alastair Campbell said in the documentary that “there was doubt until the final day as to whether the boys would feel able to do it, up to do it, whether they should do it.”

Diana, 7 Days airs on NBC on 1 September 2017.

Rico says his mother just went away, taken by the hospital staff in the night, so there was no funeral...

Scientists, detecting bullshit

Gizmodo has an article by Alejandra Borunda , a science journalist and climate researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, about science and politics:

There’s this pervasive idea that science is somehow exempt from the ugly political world in which the rest of us wallow. But even a perfunctory look at the history of American science shows that this hasn’t always been the case, and the circumstances that pushed scientists into the public sphere in the past aren’t that different from those scientists are facing today.
Since Trump’s election, many scientists have found themselves in an unfamiliar position: actively advocating for their work, their jobs, and the very idea of free scientific inquiry. Scientists are mobilizing and organizing en masse, planning marches and running for office. They’re pushing back on potential nominees and boycotting conferences.
Kelly Ramirez, a microbiologist and one of the founders of the 500 Women Scientists network, never thought of herself as an activist before. “I had my head down,” she said. “You do your work, you publish your papers; it’s not encouraged to take political positions.” But after the election, she realized that she had to take a more active role. “Now, it’s a good time to start being louder,” she said.
Scientists haven’t always been as disengaged from the political world as many think they are today. “Scientists were at the forefront of much of the social change that was taking place in the US between the 1930’s to the 1980’s,” said Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. They advocated for the same kinds of things that today’s protesting scientists are talking about: open, unfettered, uncensored research; funding support; and ethical responses to problems that science identifies.
In the early twentieth century, scientists were in a pretty good position. They were popular; they were well-funded by both public and private money; they were stars in the eyes of the public. Many were loath to do anything that might endanger either their perceived objectivity or their sources of funding. This studied avoidance extended up into the professional societies, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which shrank away from engaging in political issues. During a 1919 meeting, the AAAS leadership suggested that “that sectional officers avoid placing on their programs’ papers relating to political questions on which public opinion is divided” (sound familiar?).
This disengagement didn’t, or couldn’t, last. The crumbling economy of the 1920’s left thousands of PhD’s unemployed and government funding for research slashed. Most importantly, science lost some of its luster in the eyes of the public. Kuznick explains that the public blamed science (and technology) for the economic collapse. People thought the advancements in technological capabilities, so entrancing in the previous decade (and for which scientists had gleefully taken credit), had led to “technological unemployment,” job loss, and economic ruin (sound familiar?). “The things they had been lionized for in the 1920’s, they were being castigated for in the 1930’s,” Kuznick says. Scientists realized that if they wanted to regain the country’s respect, they would have to think deeply about their role in and responsibilities toward society.
By the mid-1930’s, scientists from all disciplines were organizing efforts toward defining their social responsibilities. Left-leaning, anti-war groups composed largely of scientists formed; the Association for American Scientific Workers (AASW) and the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (ACDIF) both aimed to support science, encourage scientists to take moral stands, and push back against government and industry restrictions on intellectual freedom. In late 1938, The Washington Post described the birth of the AASW, “a new society whose purpose will be to democratize science abd will attempt to make scientists realize their social responsibilities.”
Later that year, the prominent anthropologist Franz Boas authored a Manifesto on the Freedom of Science” denouncing fascism and calling for scientists to recognize their moral obligations both as researchers and as citizens; nearly thirteen hundred scientists signed it. At the same time, though, some scientists thought that their work on war-related issues was an ethical requirement: only with their research would the war come to an end. Manhattan Project physicist Joseph Rotblat and others resigned from their positions because of moral or ethical concerns. Other Manhattan Project scientists kept on doing the research necessary to develop atomic bombs.
By the end of World War Two, many American scientists, not just the nuclear physicists of the Manhattan Project, recognized that they had been implicitly or explicitly linked to the atrocities committed during the wars. “The physicists have known sin,” said the eminent physicist and director of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, “and this is a knowledge they cannot lose.” Chemists had produced horrifying agents of chemical warfare. Biologists and doctors had tested those weapons on black and Puerto Rican troops, as well as Japanese-Americans. Many spent the rest of their lives trying to make up for their involvements.
“Many prominent scientists involved in research that led to the development of the atomic bomb expressed regret,” said Al Teich, the former Director of Science and Policy programs at AAAS. (Others didn’t). “They organized to favor and encourage disarmament in the world,” advocating for thoughtful, ethical reflection in the scientific process and, more concretely, for legislation that would prevent an escalating nuclear arms race. Manhattan Project scientists founded the Federation of Atomic Scientists (now the Federation of American Scientists), which explicitly advocated against further nuclear war.
Many other scientists came to activism during this postwar period, drawn in by ethical concerns about the militarization of research. As “politico-scientists”, they positioned themselves as links between the scientific community, the general public, and politicians. One of these young, socially-engaged scientists was biologist Barry Commoner, who became a driving force in the modern environmental movement. “I’m not sure there’s an American scientist who spent more time thinking about how science is profoundly political,” Michael Egan, an environmental historian at McMaster University, told Gizmodo. “He was a scientist first, but also an ardently political socialist. He didn’t see a contradiction.”
Commoner had been involved in the AASW and pre-World War Two science activism. After serving in the war, he returned to research at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he founded the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems (now the Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment, based at Queens College in New York City), a research institute dedicated to searching for scientific truths that mattered to people. “The scholar’s duty,” he wrote, “is toward the development of socially significant truth.”
Commoner’s social-scientific activism was baked into the research he and his colleagues at the Center undertook. For example, in the 1950’s, scientists around the world were wondering how aboveground nuclear testing affected public health, but the official message from the American government was that the risks from fallout exposure were minimal. Commoner and his colleagues coordinated with a group of citizens from St. Louis to develop a comprehensive study showing that radioactive fallout from nuclear tests was making its way into American children. He eventually pushed that data all the way through the corridors of power, to President Kennedy’s desk. Shortly thereafter, Kennedy signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Many of the other projects of Commoner and his colleagues served as templates for how scientists could involve themselves in questions that mattered, politically and socially. (Commoner also, very unsuccessfully, ran for president).
Scientists’ forays into public advocacy weren’t always welcomed. In many cases, the scientific community shunned their own for participating in “activist science”, which many thought weakened their brand. For example, several biologists testified in the 1958 Long Island trial in which plaintiffs claimed DDT spraying in their town had caused unacceptable health effects. In doing so, “they aroused the wrath of the scientific community, because other scientists felt that advocacy was not something scientists should or could do,” said Mark Lytle, a science historian at Bard College.

 

Only after biologist and writer Rachel Carson (photo) collated thousands of similar studies into a coherent story (told in her book Silent Spring) did the public health community recognize that they might have a role as public advocates as well as researchers.
Political engagement continued to rear its head in the scientific community, periodically, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, from universities and professional societies like AAAS opposing the use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War, to scientists like Carl Sagan debating the ethical and practical dangers of nuclear weapons during the Reagan years. Then in the late 1980s, another issue snuck into the politico-scientific world: climate.
In 1988, the then-NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies head James Hansen told Congress that “with 99 percent confidence we can state that the warming observed between 1950 and 1988 is a real and warming trend.” He also told The New York Times that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” The conversations around climate change would drive much of the politico-scientific activism of the 1990’s and 2000’s.
Since the 1990’s, public trust in scientists started eroding again, particularly around subjects like climate, GMO research, vaccine research, and fetal tissue research. “There’s increasing distrust of science during this period,” Barrow said, “as the public began to fear that it was being co-opted or distorted.” Many scientists felt the funding pinch as their subjects grew politically controversial. Others saw their work twisted, discounted, or discredited. In some cases, this pushed scientists to lobby harder and speak up louder, but in many other instances, scientists backed away from political engagement.
Scientists are back in a position they’ve been in many times before, in which they might have to voice their political views, both to ensure their own survival and as an ethical necessity. “The level of activity I’ve seen in the past few months has been incredible,” Teich said. “I haven’t ever seen scientists get this worked up before.” Kuznick said that the level of organization is reminiscent of the 1930’s or beyond. American scientists are planning marches, running for office, speaking publicly at meetings, and reaching out to the general public. They’re trying to make their way back into the political world they’ve inhabited before.
“The idea of the disinterested, removed scientist is dead everywhere except in pop culture,” said Egan. “The public still thinks that’s what a scientist is, but closing yourself off in the lab is no longer an option.” Kelly Ramirez, like scientists across the country, recognized that right away on the morning of 9 November, and, in the wake of the election, she and many other scientists like her knew exactly what they were going to do: organize, resist, and advocate for science.

Rico says his father is a scientist, but hasn't told off a President in quite awhile...

Another one off the ship

Gizmodo has an article by Ryan F. Mandelbaum about another Trump administration defector:

It's no secret that the screaming Twitter man in charge of the United States and scientists do not get along. Everyone knows this.
As if scientists weren’t angry enough from Trump’s rejecting evidence-based facts, they also happen to be human beings, human beings who do not like the fact that the President of the United States finds it difficult to condemn white supremacists and literal swastika-waving neo-Nazis. In response, one scientist, Daniel Kammen (photo, right), has resigned from his post in the Department of State’s Science Envoy position. 

The letter contains a secret message: the first letter of each paragraph spells out “IMPEACH.”

Kammen runs the Renewable and Applied Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. As a science envoy, his role is to “leverage his expertise and networks to forge connections and identify opportunities for sustained international cooperation,” according to the state department website. Kammen’s role, specifically, is “building capacity for renewable energies.”
In his letter, Kammen lists his decision to resign specifically as Trump's “attacks on core values of the United States,” including his “failure to condemn white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” which has “domestic and international ramifications. He lists the Charlottesville response as “particularly troubling”, as part of a “broader pattern of behavior that enables sexism and racism.”
The resignation comes in the wake of tons of others in response to Trump's post-Charlottesville behavior. CEOs began stepping down from the Trump's manufacturing council before he disbanded it. All of the members from the White House Arts Committee also resigned this week. And the assault on science continues, as NOAA under the president disbanded the National Climate Assessment Advisory Committee, also last week.
I’ve reached out to Kammen and the White House for further comment.

Rico asks: will the last staffer to leave please turn out the lights?