February 16, 2017

Sam Bee torches brown-noser Paul Ryan for helping wildly incompetent bumblef*cks take the WH

Video at link:

Sam Bee on Wednesday eviscerated Paul Ryan for enabling Donald Trump’s rise to power despite once being a principled conservative leader.

“The latest criss involving the president’s staff of wildly incompetent bumblef*cks has raised a lot of questions, and as ever, Kellyanne [Conway] was there to not answer them,” Bee began on Wednesday’s episode of Full Frontal, playing a clip of Conway waxing poetic about how much President Donald Trump values “loyalty.”

“Loyalty is everything to him,” Bee said of the president. “And nobody has adapted to that reality better than Speaker of the House, and faithful husky, Paul Ryan.”

Noting Ryan’s former label as the “conscience of the Republican party” and the GOP’s “intellectual leader,” Bee asked how “a principled fiscal and social conservative like Ryan wound up in bed with a bigoted, adulterous grope machine” like Trump.


More: (Including video: ) http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/sam-bee-torches-brown-noser-paul-ryan-for-helping-wildly-incompetent-bumblefcks-take-the-white-house/

February 11, 2017

Scientists Drill Deep to Harness the Awesome Energy of Volcanoes

It's not every day that scientists can study a volcano up close, but researchers investigating the feasibility of volcano-powered electricity successfully drilled into the core of one in Iceland.

Scientists studied the volcanic system at Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland, which has been dormant for more than 700 years, according to a hazard assessment by Verkis Consulting Engineers for Invest in Iceland.

The depths of Reykjanes' geothermal field — an area with high heat flow — had never been explored, researchers with the Iceland Deep Drilling Project (IDDP) said in a statement. Beginning in August 2016, the IDDP spent 168 days drilling into the volcanic belly of Reykjanes. This well was completed on Jan. 25, reaching a record-breaking depth of nearly 3 miles (4.8 kilometers).

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Geothermal energy uses the heat trapped beneath the Earth's surface to generate electricity. Conventional geothermal energy utilizes steam from natural sources such as geysers, or by drawing water from the hot, high-pressue depths of the Earth. The hot vapors are then used to drive electric turbines.

In the case of volcanic geothermal energy, the heat comes from "supercritical water." The researchers explained that energy from so-called supercritical water is much higher than conventional geothermal steam. When molten rock and water meet, the extreme heat and pressure bring water to a "supercritical" state, where it is neither liquid nor gas. In this form, the water can carry more energy than normal steam, which could create up to 10 timesthe power output of other geothermal sources.

More: http://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/scientists-drill-deep-harness-awesome-energy-volcanoes-n719096

February 6, 2017

Did Neil Gorsuch Found a Fascism Forever Club'?

References to the organization appear to have been a yearbook-only joke.

Updated 2/6/17 at 2:30 p.m.: Catholic journal America Magazine reports the "Fascism Forever Club" was an in-yearbook joke, quoting the former student government adviser at Georgetown Prep during Neil Gorsuch's later high school years as saying students would create fake clubs and activities.

"They were all inside jokes on their senior pages,” Steve Ochs said.

In an update, The Daily Mail notes that a reference to the club appears in more than one place in Gorsuch's Georgetown Prep yearbook. But it also quotes a Gorsuch friend as saying the name of the club was a "self-deprecating joke" and that the organization never actually existed. A school spokesman also told Snopes.com that "no such club ever existed" there.


http://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-02-02/neil-gorsuch-founded-fascism-forever-club-report-says?src=usn_tw

February 3, 2017

In Rutland, sadness at Trump's ban

RUTLAND, Vt. — After two long days of travel and little sleep, two Syrian families landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City at the eleventh hour for immigrants hoping to find a new life in the United States.

Vermont-bound, the first family arrived two days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration; the second, less than 24 hours before he took office.

The remaining 25 to 30 families supposed to arrive in Rutland this year may never get there. Their plans stalled when the president penned an executive order on Friday that banned Syrian refugees from resettling in the U.S.

“They were the last out,” said Rutland Mayor Christopher Louras about the two families who resettled in his city of just under 16,000 less than two weeks ago.

“I feel desperate disappointment and sadness, and while I feel sadness for our community, the disappointment pales in comparison to the scale of the tragedy,” Louras said Tuesday in an interview at Rutland City Hall. “Unless there are substantive changes to the president’s order, they were the last to come to us. This is a national tragedy and people will die.”

More: http://poststar.com/news/in-rutland-sadness-at-trump-s-ban/article_4393e41f-77de-5b88-9d30-02ae564a58a5.html

February 2, 2017

Russian spy purge after suspected leaks to U.S. intelligence

There's a purge of spies underway in Moscow, where two high-ranking Russian security service agents, a cybersecurity expert and a fourth man have been charged with treason for passing along secrets to American intelligence, according to a lawyer defending one of the men.

The men were charged "with treason in favor of the United States," said Ivan Pavlov, the lawyer for one of the defendants.

So far, the counterintelligence raid is targeting computer security professionals -- men once trusted with Russian government secrets about hacking operations.

The crackdown comes shortly after the U.S. intelligence officials in October officially accused Russia of using hackers to try steering the presidential election to Donald Trump. American officials have never stated that Russian government insiders gave them information that led to that accusation.


http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/01/news/fsb-kaspersky-arrests/index.html