A hot summer in the North of the world

When I read the article below about unusually hot weather in the Northern hemisphere I had to laugh.  Why?  Because I live in the Southern hemisphere in Australia and we have been getting a lot of reports of an unusually cold winter -- e.g. here.

So the Green/Left have been up to their old tricks again and reporting only the facts that suit them.  There is not one mention of cold weather anywhere below.  It's so blatant. It is one big cherry-pick and as such is totally dishonest.  You can "prove" just about anything by carefully selected examples. The report is not remotely scientific.

Two comments from fellow skeptics were also interesting.  They also mentioned the selectivity in the reports below.

Climatologist Tim Ball wrote:

"Why don’t they report all the record cold temperatures being set. For example, the coldest July 2 in 107 years in Eugene Oregon and the lowest ever recorded by satellite in Antarctica at -144°F.

The pattern is due to a normal Meridional flow in the Rossby Wave of the Circumpolar Vortex.

One  of the failures of climate science is it studied averages initially then in the 1970s started looking at trends. Even today it has ignored variation and that is a sure indicator of the increased Meridional flow.

What is happening is normal, explainable and yet being exploited by those with a political agenda"

Paul Driessen wrote:

"My recollection is that the hottest temperature ever recorded in Alaska was 100 degrees F … in Fort Yukon … in 1915. I’ll bet the Post didn’t want to mention that little inconvenient truth, nor a lot of other record highs in other parts of the world, many inconvenient decades ago"


In the town of Sodankyla, Finland, the thermometer on July 17 registered a record-breaking 90 degrees, a remarkable figure given that Sodankyla is 59 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in a region known for winter snowmobiling and an abundance of reindeer.

This is a hot, strange and dangerous summer across the planet.

Greece is in mourning after scorching heat and high winds fueled wildfires that have killed more than 80 people. Japan recorded its highest temperature in history, 106 degrees, in a heat wave that killed 65 people in a week and hospitalized 22,000, shortly after catastrophic flooding killed 200.

Montreal hit 98 degrees on July 2, its warmest temperature ever measured. Canadian health officials estimate as many as 70 people died in that heat wave.

In the United States, 35 weather stations in the past month have set new marks for warm overnight temperatures. Southern California has had record heat and widespread power outages. In Yosemite Valley, which is imperiled by wildfires, park rangers have told everyone to flee.

The brutal weather has been supercharged by human-induced climate change, scientists say. Climate models for three decades have predicted exactly what the world is seeing this summer.

And they predict that it will get hotter - and that what is a record today could someday be the norm.

"The old records belong to a world that no longer exists," said Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It's not just heat. A warming world is prone to multiple types of extreme weather - heavier downpours, stronger hurricanes, longer droughts.

"You see roads melting, airplanes not being able to take off, there's not enough water," said Katharine Hayhoe, director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. "Climate change hits us at our Achilles' heel. In the Southwest, it's water availability. On the Gulf Coast, it's hurricanes. In the East, it's flooding. It's exacerbating the risks we already face today."

The proximate cause of the Northern Hemisphere bake-off is the unusual behavior of the jet stream, a wavy track of west-to-east-prevailing wind at high altitude. The jet stream controls broad weather patterns, such as high-pressure and low-pressure systems. The extent of climate change's influence on the jet stream is an intense subject of research.

This summer, the jet stream has undulated in extreme waves that have tended to block weather systems from migrating. The result has been stagnant high-pressure and low-pressure systems with dire results, such as heat waves in some places and flooding elsewhere.

"When those waves are very big - as they have been for the past few weeks - they tend to get stuck in place," said Jennifer Francis, a professor of atmospheric science at Rutgers University. Last year, scientists published evidence that the conditions leading up to "stuck jet streams" are becoming more common, with warming in the Arctic seen as a likely culprit.

Gone are the days when scientists drew abright line dividing weather and climate. Now researchers can examine a weather event and estimate how much climate change had to do with causing or exacerbating it.

Last year, when Hurricane Harvey broke the record for how much rain could fall from a single storm, researchers knew climate change had been a factor.

Months later, scientists presented findings that Harvey dumped at least 15 percent more rain in Houston than it would have without global warming. Theory, meet reality: When the atmosphere is warmer, it can hold more moisture. Climate change does not cause hurricanes to spin up or thunderstorms to develop, but it can be an intensifier.

In Dallas, where the temperature hit 100 on 10 out of 11 days this month, three homeless people have died of heat-related causes in the past week, said Brenda Snitzer, executive director of the Stewpot, a downtown shelter.

SOURCE 





Wind Turbines, the Military, National Security

As Otto von Bismarck said: “The person who wishes to keep his respect for laws and sausages should not see how either is made.”

This was very much on display recently with the machinations going on with the annual US federal legislation for our military: the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). To understand the disturbing decisions made, some background as to how we got to where we are today is needed. (FYI the guilty parties here want you to skip this part, as they do NOT want citizens to have any real understanding of this issue!)

It would be nice to be able to convey this whole story in a single sound-byte sentence, but that’s not possible. If you care about US national security, it is essential to understand some related information. I’ll summarize it as simply as I can. Let me know any further info needed…

Point #1: There has been several years of conflict between military operations (in the US and elsewhere) and industrial wind energy. This is for multiple reasons, ranging from radar interference, to tall structures obstructing low-level flight paths, to specialized cases (like deteriorating the exceptionally important ROTHR facility).

Point #2: Initially the Commanding Officers (COs) of affected military facilities simply voiced their objections, and in most cases the proposed offending wind project was not approved.

Point #3: As sensible as this might seem, it was totally unacceptable to the powerful wind industry lobbyists, and some of their well-connected supporters. Their plan was to get military base COs basically out of the equation — while giving the public the impression that military concerns were being fully considered. That might seem like a tall order, but we’re dealing with some superior slicksters here. Their ingenious and deceptive end result was to create the DoD Wind Siting Clearinghouse.

Point #4: The Clearinghouse was all about expanding US industrial wind energy, not protecting US military or our national security. To pull this off, the rules and regulations for the Clearinghouse were essentially written by wind lobbyists, and the initial people in charge were unabashed wind energy promoters. (Upon retiring, the first person to head the Clearinghouse was quickly hired as a wind energy lobbyist — you can’t make this stuff up!)

Point #5: Not surprisingly, numerous conflicts continued to exist between wind energy and the US military. The public has little awareness of these due to backroom, classified agreements made. The wind industry took advantage of this lack of knowledge, repeatedly trumpeting that everything was peachy. For those who didn’t bother to closely look behind the curtain, it may well have seemed to be.

Point #6: Effectively what happened was that military defenders had to now look for some protection from state level legislation. Of course the wind lobby has infiltrated state politics as well, so this was no easy solution. That said there have been some major victories — e.g. Texas passing S277 and North Carolina passing a two year statewide moratorium (see here, Part XIII) while they did an investigation of the wind energy interference matter.

Point #7: Ultimately, though, the defense of our military, and our national security, is a federal matter. Towards that end, earlier this year I sent to some key legislators an outline of this problem, which included three (3) simple but effective solutions to this serious matter (at the end). I was hoping that they would be incorporated into the current year NDAA.

Point #8: Both the House and Senate committees involved with the NDAA actually did specifically endorse one of my three recommendations. The current wind industry written Clearinghouse rules basically say that to reject a proposed wind project, that there has to be substantial proof that it is a major national security risk. This has to be then endorsed by the DoD Secretary. Of course this is one of several things intended to fool the public (and legislator not paying close attention): it sounds good, but it’s actually worthless. In other words, the bar was purposefully set absurdly high, so that it was almost impossible to turn down a proposed wind project — and in fact only one has been so terminated via the Clearinghouse process over many years now.

Point #9: One of my three recommendations was to fix the rules so that if a wind project could be reasonably shown to threaten the lives of our military personnel, that this would be an acceptable justification to deny it a permit to be built. It was gratifying to see that BOTH the House and Senate committees reviewing the NDAA, approved changing the Clearinghouse rules, to add words to that effect. Excellent!

Point #10: However, a few days ago, for some inexplicable reason, this extremely important change was extracted from the NDAA legislation! A very experienced DC lobbyist told me that he could not recall a single case ever, where an important provision agreed to by both House and Senate committees, was then removed from the legislation. The question to ask our federal legislators: is promoting wind energy really more important than protecting the lives of our military?

Point #11: Probably due to guilt for this egregious lapse of responsibility, our esteemed legislators then added a new provision to the NDAA: Section 318 (page 179). Basically it authorizes the DoD to engage the National Weather Service (NWS) to do a study about the impact of wind turbines on weather radars and military operations. Once again the intent here seems to be to convey the illusion that we are serious about our military and our national security, and that something meaningful is being done.

Point #12: Of course the devil is in the details. This amounts to kicking the can into the ditch. Nothing in the study is about protecting the lives of pilots from wind turbine obstructions. Nothing in the study is about assessing the impact of wind turbines on navigation radar. Nothing in the study is about protecting the exceptionally important ROTHR facility. Furthermore, who knows what will happen when the study is finished? In the meantime our military and national security is being compromised.

Point #13: What’s really disturbing is that plenty of good reports have already been generated on this issue. For example, Here is a detailed NWS explanation of the problem. For example, earlier this year the NWS wrote a blistering report about how wind development in upstate NY was compromising FIVE (5) different important NEXRAD radar facilities! For example, Fort Drum issued this official statement about wind energy interference. What else do legislators need to know? Oh, they want more pertinent studies? How about: this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. We already have studies up the wazoo. We already know what the problems are and what some good solutions are.

Point #14: The reason we are procrastinating, is that the wind industry has done a superior job in creating the hallucination that wind energy is a societal benefit. The fact is that industrial wind energy is a technical, economic and environmental net liability. Once that understanding is fully absorbed, no reasonable legislator would agree to sacrifice our military or national security for such a detriment.

Point #15: The bottom line here is that the protection of our military (and our national security) is being compromised by powerful special-interest lobbyists. Our legislators are talking-the-talk, but not walking-the-walk.

That our legislators would accept a trade-off that wind energy promotion takes precedence over the lives of our military personnel, is a good indication of how badly this situation has deteriorated, and how much special-interest lobbyists are running the government, and our lives. (For more info on that, see here.)

US citizens should contact their federal representatives and insist that the NDAA to be properly fixed, today.

SOURCE 





New EPA chief's first moves show he's following Pruitt's agenda, without the sirens

Following the chaotic tenure of Scott Pruitt, the new acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Andrew Wheeler, is trying to bring more competence and transparency to the job, but all signs indicate he’s continuing to carry out President Trump’s assault on regulations.

Wheeler, unlike Pruitt, is a longtime insider who understands the machinations of Washington. He’s unlikely to unilaterally overturn environmental protections the way Pruitt did, and more likely to dismantle them slowly through the appropriate channels. Wheeler’s know-how and political sophistication suggest he will be less vulnerable to lawsuits and less prone to gross ethical violations — meaning he could be far more successful.

“Whereas Pruitt was careless and hasty and made dozens of mistakes, if not more, Wheeler as a polished lobbyist, well connected on K Street, well connected on the Hill, has the potential of being very dangerous. He won’t be as careless and sloppy as his predecessor,” Melinda Pierce, the legislative director for the Sierra Club, told Yahoo News.

Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said Wheeler is much smoother in how he presents the EPA publicly and even to his own employees.

“Pruitt came in saying, ‘We know the EPA is a terrible place, and I’m going to fix it all,’ and he didn’t really buy into the mission. I think there’s more finesse in Mr. Wheeler, but I don’t think his actual policy agenda is any different,” Rosenberg told Yahoo News.

Wheeler, who was sworn in as the EPA’s deputy administrator in April after a heated confirmation process, was a top aide to Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., from 1995 until 2009. Inhofe was outspoken in rejecting the overwhelming scientific consensus behind anthropogenic climate change and notoriously tossed a snowball on the Senate floor as “proof” that climate change is not real. Wheeler spent 12 years on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works fighting government regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.

Starting in 2009, Wheeler worked for the Faegre Baker Daniels law firm in lobbying for coal producer Murray Energy, which is owned by prominent Trump supporter Robert E. Murray, and he actively opposed former President Barack Obama’s proposals to protect the environment and address climate change. He has also dismissed the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s science as politically motivated.

“Pruitt was a fiercely ambitious ‘outsider’ from Oklahoma, whereas Andrew Wheeler is a Washington, D.C., insider,” Pierce said. “Here’s a guy that’s swampy as it gets in terms of being a D.C. lobbyist insider working for K Street and a noted climate change denier.”

Wheeler was sworn in as acting head of the EPA on July 9 following Pruitt’s resignation two days earlier. He kicked off his first day at the helm with an 18-minute speech to the agency’s employees. It was essentially a charm offensive in which he went through his abridged biography. He defended his work as a coal lobbyist by emphasizing how he fought to protect the pensions and health care benefits of coal miners: “I did work for a coal company, and I’m not at all ashamed of the work I did for the coal company.”

Wheeler said the EPA has made “tremendous progress over the last year and a half” thanks to the leadership of Trump and Pruitt. Under his leadership, Wheeler continued, the EPA would continue to keep cleaning “Superfund sites” (which have been contaminated with hazardous substances), investing in the nation’s water infrastructure, improving air quality and updating the chemical safety review process.

Wheeler used much of the same language Pruitt had when he came to the EPA. Both emphasized returning to the EPA’s original mission, taking a narrower view of the agency’s responsibilities than previous administrators.

“We’re also restoring the rule of law, reining in federal regulatory overreach and refocusing EPA on its core responsibilities,” Wheeler said. “As a result, the economy is booming, and economic optimism is surging.”

To Rosenberg, Wheeler sounded more concerned about risks to industry and the economy than about risks to communities.

“[He said] that EPA needed to communicate risk. Actually, EPA needs to address and mitigate the risks to communities. That’s their job. It’s not just communicating ‘You’re about to be sick,’ or ‘There’s about to be a toxic waste explosion.’ It’s actually doing something about it,” Rosenberg said. “I was nervous he wasn’t speaking to the real mission of EPA, which is to protect public health and safety.”

Rosenberg added that most of what Pruitt touted as regulatory rollbacks were merely giveaways to the oil and gas industries. “The career professional staff, they’re the ones that have continued to try to push forward with real public health protections in spite of the administration,” he said.

Rosenberg said Wheeler has been a little more open to the press than Pruitt and less obsessed with secrecy, security and ostentatious displays of prerogatives — such as having his driver use his siren to cut through traffic on his way to a restaurant. Wheeler promised greater transparency, but neither Rosenberg nor Pierce was too impressed by these slight changes.

“That should’ve been status quo,” Pierce said. “I’m not going to give you a gold star for transparency for doing what’s expected but somehow surprising in the wake of Scott Pruitt.”

The former coal lobbyist’s first major act as EPA acting chief was to overhaul the rule for how toxic waste from the burning of coal should be disposed of at power plants around the country. It was the first of several expected revisions to Obama-era rules for handling toxic waste to avoid contaminating waterways. The Obama-era regulations were inspired in part by two disastrous coal-ash spills in Tennessee (2008) and North Carolina (2014).

“The [Obama-era] rule wasn’t as protective as the environmental and public health community wanted it to be, but it was still a huge step forward,” Becky Hammer, the deputy director of federal water policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Yahoo News.

Hammer said the new standards required owners and operators of coal-ash disposal sites to publish groundwater monitoring data, but the EPA hasn’t made this information easy for anyone to find. Rather than creating a central database, the EPA is directing the public to each individual facility’s own website in order to see its data.

The Environmental Integrity Project, an environmental nonprofit, downloaded and compiled all the data from each facility’s website and determined that almost every single site — roughly 95 percent of them — identified groundwater contamination from coal ash.

Coal ash, the material left over after coal is burned for electricity, is the second largest waste stream in the country after household garbage. Coal-fired power plants produce roughly 140 million tons per year.

“There are a number of heavy metals in it that are very dangerous to human health: lead, arsenic, radium, hexavalent chromium, all kinds of things you don’t want to come into contact with under any circumstances because they’re carcinogenic, they’re neurotoxic, they’re poisonous,” Hammer said.

Coal-ash landfills are enormous, typically 120 acres with an average depth of over 40 feet, and sometimes quite close to houses.

“The problem is that about half of all the ponds and landfills don’t have any liners or safeguards to prevent this dangerous material from leaking downward into the groundwater,” Hammer said. “We already know of about 200 sites across the country where coal ash has been found to definitively taint water supplies. There are probably a lot more than that, but a lot of the older sites aren’t monitored at all.”

Hammer pointed out that an Obama-era EPA study found that people who live near coal-ash disposal sites have a one-in-50 chance of getting cancer from drinking water contaminated by arsenic, and they have increased risks of liver, kidney and lung disease.

The coal industry petitioned the EPA to reconsider the regulations, arguing that the cost of compliance was excessive and would result in significant financial loss.

“They didn’t want the cost of more secure areas. Effectively, they’re just dumping the cost onto the public by saying, ‘OK, you clean it up,’ as opposed to ‘We, the ones that created the waste, should clean it up,’” Rosenberg said.

Pruitt was sympathetic to their case and in September 2017 started the reconsideration process that Wheeler completed.

“These amendments provide states and utilities much-needed flexibility in the management of coal ash, while ensuring human health and the environment are protected,” Wheeler said in a statement. “Our actions mark a significant departure from the one-size-fits-all policies of the past and save tens of millions of dollars in regulatory costs.”

Hammer said Wheeler’s new rule allows groundwater monitoring standards to be waived and extends the deadline for facilities to close coal-ash pits that are known to be contaminating groundwater. The 2015 rule said those facilities have to close by next April, but now that deadline has been pushed back one and a half years.

“The EPA didn’t even consider what the health effects of this would be. They just didn’t look at it at all. All they considered was how much money it would save the coal industry,” Hammer said.

Sources have told Bloomberg and others that Wheeler’s EPA is preparing to roll back Obama-era emission targets for cars, which were among Obama’s major regulatory efforts to control greenhouse gases. Under Wheeler, the EPA reportedly plans to revoke California’s authority to regulate its own car emissions, which it has done since the 1950s.

Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told Yahoo News that his state would not stand idly by while the Trump administration took away its ability to set stricter emissions standards. “We also have a long history of the federal government respecting California’s right, as a state, to regulate our own air. When I was governor, the EPA thought they could stop us, and we won. The EPA even tried to claim that greenhouse gases were not a pollutant, and we took them all the way to the Supreme Court and we won that,” Schwarzenegger said.

Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has taken the lead among members of Congress in calling on Wheeler to restore the trust of the American people in the EPA after Pruitt’s scandal-ridden tenure. In an open letter, Carper urged Wheeler to follow in the footsteps of former EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus, a Republican who earned “an emotional hero’s welcome” from EPA staffers when he took over the agency (for the second time) in 1983, replacing the scandal-tarnished Anne Gorsuch. Ruckelshaus, who was also the first EPA chief, appointed by President Nixon in 1970, promised to follow environmental laws, making no “Big P” political decisions and seeking help from scientists and environmentalists.

“The damage Scott Pruitt has done to the Agency will not easily be undone,” Carper wrote. “While you and I have not always agreed, and will not always agree, on every environmental policy matter, it is my hope and expectation that you will carefully consider the lessons of the past as you prepare to chart the Agency’s future.”

Wheeler is surrounded by Pruitt’s top aides, many of whom have strong industry ties, including Richard Yamada, who worked for Texas Rep. Lamar Smith, Nancy Beck, who was an executive at the American Chemistry Council, and William Wehrum, who was an attorney for the oil and coal industries.

Under Wheeler, Rosenberg said, expect to see more or less the same goal of slashing regulations unless he gives “very strong different direction to his folks — many of whom I believe have serious conflicts of interest.”

SOURCE 





Nat. Geographic Admits They Were Wrong About Famous Climate Change Polar Bear Pic

They say the retraction never gets as much attention as the original mistake did. That’s doubly true when the picture in question went viral and the correction came months later.

You perhaps remember the photo of an emaciated polar bear that appeared in National Geographic last December. It was captured by photographers Cristina Mittermeier and Paul Nicklen on the Baffin Islands in Canada.

This is what you probably saw last winter:

“We stood there crying — filming with tears rolling down our cheeks,” Nicklen said.

However, in an article for the August 2018 issue of National Geographic titled “Starving-Polar-Bear Photographer Recalls What Went Wrong,” Mittermeier says that the narrative that grew up around the photograph — in particular its relation to climate change — was inaccurate.

“Photographer Paul Nicklen and I are on a mission to capture images that communicate the urgency of climate change. Documenting its effects on wildlife hasn’t been easy. With this image, we thought we had found a way to help people imagine what the future of climate change might look like. We were, perhaps, naive. The picture went viral — and people took it literally,” Mittermeier wrote.

“Paul spotted the polar bear a year ago on a scouting trip to an isolated cove on Somerset Island in the Canadian Arctic. He immediately asked me to assemble our SeaLegacy SeaSwat team. SeaLegacy, the organization we founded in 2014, uses photography to spread the message of ocean conservation; the SeaSwat team is a deployable unit of storytellers who cover urgent issues. The day after his call our team flew to an Inuit village on Resolute Bay. There was no certainty that we would find the bear again or that it would still be alive.”

The implication here, of course, is that this wasn’t a dispassionate attempt to convey the effects of climate change but a deliberate attempt to dramatize things. Also, we don’t know why the polar bear was wasting away — it could have been some form of disease. However, Mittermeier argues that she and Nicklen didn’t mean for it to take off the way it did.

“When Paul posted the video on Instagram, he wrote, ‘This is what starvation looks like.’ He pointed out that scientists suspect polar bears will be driven to extinction in the next century,” Mittermeier wrote.

“He wondered whether the global population of 25,000 polar bears would die the way this bear was dying. He urged people to do everything they could to reduce their carbon footprint and prevent this from happening. But he did not say that this particular bear was killed by climate change.” (Emphasis mine.)

Mittermeier said their “mission was a success, but there was a problem: We had lost control of the narrative. The first line of the National Geographic video said, ‘This is what climate change looks like’ — with ‘climate change’ highlighted in the brand’s distinctive yellow. In retrospect, National Geographic went too far with the caption. Other news outlets ran dramatic headlines like this one from the Washington Post: ‘‘We stood there crying’: Emaciated polar bear seen in ‘gut-wrenching’ video and photos.’”

“Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story — that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear.”

It is a relatively frank admission by the photographer and the magazine, especially given the leanings of both. Still, this isn’t something that should have happened in the first place. In a rush to tie this to climate change, National Geographic was willing to usher its readers past the actual facts of the picture and instead paint it as a pure result of climate change. And then there’s the fact that this comes eight months later.

Let this serve as an example for other publications: In a rush to fill a leftist narrative, don’t ignore reality. If they do, readers are going to be there to hold them accountable.

SOURCE 




Sexy ‘Miss Climate’ Competition To Combat Climate Change Apathy.  I’m not making this up

The president of our university forwarded some flashy brochures he received from Virendra Rawat, Indian founder and director of the global “Green Schools” concept.

They are auditioning for young females to compete to become “Miss Climate – 2018”.

As the letter states, “winners of this beauty pageant will serve as Global Ambassador of Climate Change”:

Hmm. There is so much to say, and the letter raises so many questions, one hardly knows where to begin…

Miss Climate brochureFirst, the overt sexism: A “beauty pageant”? Has Mr. Rawat not heard that even the future Miss America will not be judged on physical appearance?

The letter is addressed to “Dear Sir” (I suspect many universities are run by females);

The qualifications are young females 18-25 years old, with a minimum height of 5’5″, and unmarried.

QUESTIONS:

1) Can contestants self-identify as female, 18-25, and of minimum height 5’5″ tall?

2) Is the former IPCC director Rajendra Pachauri involved in this in any way? It sounds like something he’d have some interest in.

3) Will the contestants’ knowledge of global environmental concerns be up to the standards of, say, the world peace concerns of the Miss America contestants?

4) Given the global warming theme, will there be a — ahem — heat level requirement of some type for contestants?

5) Will Anthony Watts enter his dog Kenji in the competition? (At least Kenji is a card-carrying member of the Union of Concerned Scientists).

I’m sure others can think of additional questions which naturally arise from this announced beauty pageant. For now, my jaw is still rising up from the floor.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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