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Methodist Leaders Would Rather Break Up Entire Church Than Accept Marriage Equality
Politics posing as religious beliefs always screws things up. 
The United Methodist Church is going through a tough break up—with itself. According to the Washington Post, Church leadership has decided to break into two separate denominations as a solution to their internal debate on same-sex marriage. The newer denomination of the United Methodist Church, reports the Post, will…
Here Are the 207 Members of Congress Who Just Asked SCOTUS to Consider Overruling Roe v. Wade
Vote them all out! 
A coalition of 207 members of Congress on Thursday filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking it to “reconsider” two landmark abortion cases—Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Se. PA v. Casey—in an apparent effort to crush reproductive rights at the federal level. The brief, which is hinged on battle over a…
Those Steel Promises
Closing Thought–30Dec19
Does anyone remember the promises Trump made in 2016 about the return of our industries like steel?
If you are a Trump supporter you will NOT remember that lie or that promise broken…..
Just to let Americans know…the steel industry is struggling and NOT returning….as a matter of fat it is closing down another plant…..
U.S. Steel Corp. announced this week that it will close a mill near Detroit, laying off more than 1,500 workers as it tries to address financial losses.
The news comes just months after U.S. Steel announced it would be laying off 200 workers at the same mill, Great Lakes Works.
U.S. Steel said they expect to end the mill’s iron and steelmaking operations by April 1, 2020, with another part of the mill closing by the end of 2020. The estimated job loss is 1,545 workers.
Steel production will instead be shifted to a plant in Gary, Ind., where the company has invested $750 million after both the city and state gave U.S. Steel tax breaks. Those tax breaks aimed to keep at least 3,875 jobs at the plant.
The changes, along with a plan to slash its dividend and suspend stock repurchases, come as the company predicts major losses in the fourth quarter of the year. According to MarketWatch, U.S. Steel reported an adjusted loss of $1.15 a share in the fourth quarter. The number is far more than analysts’ original projection, which put losses at 62 cents a share.
“We are conscious of the impact this decision will have on our employees, their families, and the local community, and we are announcing it now to provide them with as much time as possible to prepare for this transition,” CEO David Burritt said in a press release.
“These decisions are never easy, nor are they taken lightly. However, we must responsibly manage our resources while also strengthening our company’s long-term future – a future many stakeholders depend on. We will be taking steps in the weeks and months ahead to assist impacted employees by providing additional education about benefits available through our company, as well as community resources.”
The announcement comes as steel has been at the center of President Trump‘s ongoing trade war with China. After the first round of tariffs, the White House celebrated domestic steel price increases and Trump said tariffs were rebuilding the industry, but the prices have since seen a sharp decline.
The U.S. and China have closed in on a new trade deal this month, and are working out the final details. Officials said the deal involves lifting some U.S. tariffs on China, while Beijing has agreed to purchase more agricultural products from the U.S.
(thehill.com)
Just another lie that will go unchallenged…..
We hear all the time just how good the economy is doing….but do not ask the steel workers they may crap all over the “good news”….
I Read, I Wrote, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”
Bogs Lose Their Carbon-Chomping Powers When Roads Cut Through Them
In recent years, Northern Alberta’s boreal peatlands have seen a string of unwelcome visitors, in the form of access roads that criss-cross the ecosystem. The wetlands make up 20 percent of the province’s forests and capture almost 60 percent of carbon stored in Canada’s soil. But new research suggests that local wetland microbes are not responding well to the intruders. (If the microbes could talk, they might sound a little like Shrek, the fictional ogre who was known to shout: “What are ye doing in me swamp?!”)
Though these wetland roads might look benign, they disrupt a bog’s natural order, multiplying its methane emissions by as much as 49 and making the soggy soil a hapless driver of climate change, according to a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research. “Whenever we disturb these peatlands, it releases carbon,” says Saraswati, an ecohydrologist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and the lead author of the study. “It’s problematic.”
For much of Northern Alberta, a toxic whiff of methane is nothing new. Canada, which has produced oil since the 1850s, is home to one of the world’s most destructive oil sands operations, according to National Geographic. It’s part of the reason that Canada is warming twice as fast, on average, as the rest of the world, according to the country’s national assessment of its climate. Extraction industries are partly to blame for the construction of more than 135,000 miles of these peatland roads, the authors note.

In 2016 and 2017, Saraswati and Maria Strack, a biogeochemist at the University of Waterloo, examined roads that cut through bogs and fens, two distinct but swampy kinds of peatlands. Bogs are considerably more solid, receiving water and nutrients from precipitation alone, according to the U.S. Forest Service. “The bog is very spongy,” Saraswati says. “When you jump, you can see the other areas wiggling with you.” Fens, on the other hand, receive water and nutrients from groundwater, making them much more pondlike than a bog. “We chose a forested bog and a shrubby, rich fen.” The fen in question was surrounded by greenery like paper birch and silvery sedge. The bog was carpeted in green sphagnum moss and crested with black spruce, bog cranberry, and globular patches of sherbet-colored cloudberries—an oasis of wildlife surrounded by oil extraction.
Both bogs and fens capture carbon dioxide in the same way, drawing the gas from the atmosphere through the plants and trapping it underground as carbon before it can entirely decay. Here, carbon can last for millennia, and can even turn into coal over the course of millions of years—unless someone decides to extract it, or disrupts it.
The bog and fen were both located in Carmon Creek, the former site of a Shell extraction project in Alberta. Saraswati and Strack dug into the peat and buried a closed chamber about two feet by two feet, leaving a colored flag above ground to help them relocate it. The chambers collected emissions from the bog. The researchers expected that more methane would be released from the road-adjacent fen, which, due to its drippier nature, would be more easily disturbed by a passing truck. But in 2017, the highest emissions came from the road-adjacent bog, which released an average of 16 times the methane that it released in 2016. (The worst spot released 49 times its 2016 emissions.)

The roads weren’t triggering these methane emissions by sending vibrations into the ground, but rather by cutting off the water flow, Saraswati says. The areas of the bog with the greatest increases in methane had sections of road built perpendicular to the water flow, disrupting the natural cycle of the bog and breaking up the natural water level. On one side, the water had gotten shallower, exposing new peat to the heat of the sun and encouraging microbes to decompose more plant matter, she says.
Still, roads are far from the region’s greatest climate threat. This past summer, Alberta’s forest and peatlands went up in flames during a series of wildfires, according to PRI. According to Saraswati, the answer to this simmering carbon dilemma isn’t to remove the roads, which is a painstaking, expensive process. Instead, she hopes that future peatland roads will be built parallel to the natural direction of the water, minimizing their ecological effect.
Road-riddled peatlands will likely take decades to recover the plant coverage and species diversity of their formerly wild state, according to a 2012 study of abandoned winter access roads in northern Canada. But the researchers did find that even in severely disturbed peatlands, a green carpet of sphagnum moss made a steady comeback, entirely on its own.
Christianity Today Editor Condemns President Trump as ‘Morally Lost and Confused’

In a nearly unimaginable turn of events, Christianity Today has released an editorial condemning a now-impeached Donald Trump. Founded by Billy Graham, the outlet has traditionally stayed away from outright criticisms of the Trump. That changed this afternoon.
Nancy Pelosi Wore Her Best Funeral Outfit For the Impeachment Vote

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi entered the House floor of the Capitol building on Wednesday wearing a knee-length high neck black dress, accented with gold touches: gold necklace, gold bracelet, and gold Mace of the Republic pin. The mace symbolizes the authority of the House of Representatives, and there’s a…
Jimi Hendrix Hosts a Jam Session Where Jim Morrison Sings Drunkenly; Jimi Records the Moment for Posterity (1968)
Two psych rock superstars at the height of their fame, both notorious for epic drug and alcohol consumption, and neither particularly suited to the other’s sensibility, Jim Morrison and Jimmy Hendrix might have been an oddly consonant musical pairing, or not. Morrison, the egomaniac, looked inward, mining his dark fantasies for material. Hendrix, the introvert, ventured into the reaches of outer space in his expansive imagination.
What might come of a musical meeting? We know only what transpired one night at Manhattan’s Scene Club in 1968, and let’s just say it didn’t go particularly well. It seems unfair to lob criticism at a bootlegged, one-off, improvised performance. But that hasn’t stopped critics from doing so. The recording has appeared under several names, including Sky High, Bleeding Heart, Morrison/Hendrix/Winter (under the assumption Johnny Winter played on it), and as the very resonantly titled Woke up this morning and found myself dead.
Eventually, some anonymous distributer settled on Morrison’s Lament, “an apt title,” Ron Kretsch writes at Dangerous Minds, “if by ‘lament’ one means ‘drunken, formless discharge of inane profanities.” Morrison, it seems, invited himself onstage, and Hendrix, who made the tape himself, seems not to mind the intrusion. At one point, you can hear him tell the Doors’ singer to “use the recording mic.” Some bootlegs credit Morrison for the harmonica playing, while others credit Lester Chambers.
Hendrix starts with his go-to blues jam, “Red House.” He’s backed—depending on which liner notes you read—by either Band of Gypsys’ drummer Buddy Miles or McCoy’s drummer Randy Zehringer. Rick Derringer may have played rhythm guitar. Johnny Winter reportedly denied having been there, but the Scene Club was owned by his manager, Steve Paul. “Jimi was a frequent visitor here,” writes Hendrix biographer Tony Brown in the notes for a 1980 copy of the session. “He loved he atmosphere and also loved to jam and as he always had a tape machine on hand, that night was captured forever.”
That’s a very mixed blessing. “Some of the tracks kinda kick ass,” writes Kretsch, including the effortlessly brilliant “Red House” Hendrix and band play in the first six minutes or so at the top. Then Morrison steps onstage and begins to howl—sounding like a random inebriated audience member who’s lost all inhibition, instead of the eerily cool singer of “Riders on the Storm.” Maybe there’s good reason to hear Morrison bellowing “save me, woman!” as a serious cry for help.
But there’s little reason to take this performance seriously. If that still leaves you wondering—what might have resulted from a sober, well-rehearsed session between these two?—you’ll have to make-do with the mashup above, which convincingly combines Morrison’s “Riders on the Storm” vocals with Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” playing. Listen at least until the solo at around 1:20 to hear Ray Manzarek’s organ trickle in. Now that would have been a great collaboration. If you every come across any bootlegged Manzarek and Hendrix jams, send them our way….
Related Content:
Jimi Hendrix Plays the Beatles: “Sgt. Pepper’s,” “Day Tripper,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows”
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness.
Jimi Hendrix Hosts a Jam Session Where Jim Morrison Sings Drunkenly; Jimi Records the Moment for Posterity (1968) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.
The Pure Spirit of Greta Thunberg is the Perfect Antidote to Donald Trump

Carolyn Kormann writes about how the teen-age climate-change activist Greta Thunberg stands in stark contrast to President Donald Trump.
Kafr Aqab… beyond congestion كفر عقب … ما وراء الأزمة الخانقة
Kafr Aqab is considered the last series of villages within northern part of Jerusalem . People settled in it since the early bronze ages.the photos I captured today reflect on a story that the current people of this highly congested area with population and buildings may hardly notice









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