h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Gay trailer parks are the absolute worst!

But not to everyone.

Gays in trailer parks, seriously?

(I wouldn't believe it except for the lovely gay couple that live across the street from me in my trailer park).

But gays in *other* trailer parks?? Surely not!

(I'd also like to add that my park has never been hit by a tornado.)

Next you're going to tell me there are gays that have never been in a hurricane!

OH!...


And speaking of which, there is a LOT of speculation regarding Drumpf's administration pics and one of those bandied about yesterday was ing Jerry Falwell, Jr. for Education Secretary.


Now, this is just speculation from the "liberal media" so I'll wait before my brain explodes to see if it actually pans out.

Protect your brain, BG. There are hundreds of thousands of politicians and their staffers and think-tank researchers and ward bosses, and other politically connected people. At this point, about all the rest of us can do is write letters to whoever seems likely to go to bat for you. If that seems insignificant, remember that lawmakers use formulas to estimate true public opinion. For every letter from one constituent they receive, ten or twenty people are assumed to think the same way. A really, really incisive and well-supported letter can have a big effect.

Is there any sense that Trump is building a team or is he just collecting a bunch of egoists? The Dirty Dozen had Lee Marvin knocking them into shape for at least three quarters of their time together. Has anybody spotted the Lee Marvin in the transition team?

Most governments lose a few high profile figures in their early days. This one may lose more than most.

I don't know... His confirmed appointments have been a bit more reasonable than many feared. Today the news is about Trump appointing Nikki Haley as UN Ambassador who was a very vocal critic of Trump from within the Republican party. Much better than John Bolton who was previously in that position and had an adversarial attitude toward the UN.

Some of the speculation about appointees has so far proven to be baseless, outrage-baiting suppositions, like a climate denier for the EPA and a young earth creationist for Education secretary.

There are still some concerning issues with some of his appointments, like Bannon and Sessions, but they've not been as bad as some feared.

Most of the picks need to be vetted by the Senate before they can assume their positions.

Let's remember how narrow Trump's victory margin was, and how narrow the party margin is in the Senate.

Might we get some actual discussion and compromise now? We got gridlock when Clinton and Obama had to contend with Republican congresses.

I don't think the Dem minority will be so adamantly opposed to compromise as the Republicans were when Obama had a Democratic congress and wasted it trying to meet in a nonexistent middle.

AAAaand, there goes my optimism.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/nov/22/nasa-earth-donald-trump-eliminate-climate-change-research

The U.S. has about 6.6% of the world's land area, and 4.4% of its population. Global warming, as the term indicates, is global. The rest of the world can still do research.

But, yeah, we have the big bucks that are needed for research, and it's going to be hard for the rest of the world to pick up the slack.

They play this off by saying that other agencies could take over the climate research currently done by NASA, but they do NOT indicate they will be increasing other agencies' budgets to do so. It's highly unlikely NOAA will be getting more funding.

And considering how antagonistic republicans are in general to regulation for fossil fuel industries this could very well be catastrophic.

It's definitely discouraging. My only hope is for some as yet unknown transformative technology that can take large amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air and make useful things with it. Nature already does this with plant photosynthesis, but we keep taking what Nature produces and use it for buildings, fires, and food supply.

Plus, we silly animals are constantly turning oxygen into CO2 in our lungs .

Wouldn't it be neat if our lungs could change CO2 back into oxygen?

I did recently read something about some scientist tweaking photosynthesis to make it more efficient and much faster.
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-scientists-tweak-photosynthesis-boost-crop.html
And there's always hope that soon renewable energy will become the market preference in vehicles and public energy, maybe one of the many "breakthroughs" in battery technology will actually make it to consumers.

But it would be much better if we had something like a carbon tax, which we KNOW would work to speed up the switch to renewables. But with this coming administration and legislature, we're more likely to see increased incentives for fossil fuels and cuts, possibly even punitive fees (some power utilities now charge people with solar panels).

And cutting the budget for climate science is like putting fingers in our ears so we don't hear the fire alarm.

Well, George Washington's administration didn't spend on climate science, and look how well they did.

Ben Franklin's version of climate science was simple and inexpensive: a kite and some string.

Here's what's winding me up just lately: lefties. Not all lefties, obviously, otherwise I'd be winding myself up. No - I'm talking about a very specific subset. They're mainly but not only Americans, mainly but not only Democrats.

They've been bleating about Trump since July 2015 while simultaneously ridiculing the very idea that he could win the nomination, let alone the presidency. Every time he said anything controversial you'd think the sky was falling.

What's hilarious and irritating in equal measure now is that
(a) he's won the election and they can't believe it
(b) this pathological liar has turned out to be lying about all those things he promised to do (wall, remove Obamacare, lock up Hillary, the list goes on and on and he's not even been inaugurated yet) and yet apparently the sky is STILL falling.

There appears to be literally nothing he could do or say at this point that would make people calm down... which makes their hysteria worthless. If you're going to be hysterical whatever happens, I and everyone else can safely ignore you. And nobody seems to get this. It's times like these I look at my so-called allies on the left and wish I was with the grownups.

I agree, and I think that Americans will learn to cope with Trump. It might actually be handy to have someone at the top you can blame for things. Also, he looks like someone who makes decisions, and sometimes that's more important than making the right decision (within reason).

At least they're not in the Brexit economic meltdown we're in here.

"It might actually be handy to have someone at the top you can blame for things." [Icy North]

Every president I can remember was blamed for things. The president is the country's number one whipping boy, and a thin skin just isn't going to cut it.

Hoo, you're right. That and two dollars will get you a cup of coffee, which is just an expression in case coffee isn't your cup of tea [another expression ]

The coal thing worries me a lot less. The cost per MW/h when setting up renewable energy generation is already less than coal.

Unless Trump is planning to actively subsidise coal, nobody is going to build new coal capacity.