One has to ask since the stratosphere is shrinking where is it going when it shrinks?

The only progress made regarding health care was by Democrats. They accomplished the Affordable Care Act and Patient Protection Plan on their own without any Republican support while FOX News gamed the legislation for ratings using the old "Hillary Strategy," from the time Gingrich was serving in the USA House.

The issue of the climate has never been addressed by the USA, except to corruptly let Big Oil dictate energy policy in the USA. Basically, the USA Congress has royally failed the entire world when it comes to the Climate Crisis.

This failure cannot continue. It cannot continue on racism, income inequality, healthcare, and the climate crisis. These huge issues change the way Americans live and their quality of life. The actions regarding climate will change the way Americans live today, but, also the way they may survive into the future.

The evidence is in, Earth itself in the way it maintains the upper layers of the atmosphere is in jeopardy. No one can ignore the findings of this past winter in that the MIXING of the troposphere and stratosphere has become more severe and is damaging the stratosphere, as it shrinks due to the mixing.

One has to ask if the stratosphere is shrinking where is it going when it shrinks?

We know all matter is stable. If two air masses interact in a mixing of the two where did the mixed atmosphere go because the stratosphere that is shrinking is giving up it's content to the mixing? Follow that?

The shrinkage of the stratosphere is not normal. It is occurring because it was impacted by the troposphere. The mixing has REMOVED a portion of the stratosphere and those molecules are in the troposphere thinning the amount of oxygen and at the same time, increasing the oxygenation of the ozone layer.

Got that?

The MIXING of the gaseous troposphere and stratosphere is redistributing the gases in those two layers. The oxygen content of the stratosphere is going up while the displaced gases of the mixing are going into the troposphere to think out that layer of Earth's atmosphere.

If the mixing creates an imbalance in the support of the two layers of air as they are today or were at the turn of the century in 1900 before the industrial revolution, there is absolutely nothing to stop the collapse of the troposphere to completely mix with the stratosphere and then what is supporting the rest of the layers of Earth's atmospheres directly into space?

The pollution of every greenhouse gas on Earth must stop now. When the dinosaurs died, they rotted into the oil. That was their burial and it should have been respected and left undisturbed.

As far as Greta's statement about beef and dairy, she is correct in that there is an emission of methane from those sources, however, it is less than 2 percent of actual and anticipated methane emissions on Earth. Americans are already making changes to their choice of milk. I am sure those choices are occurring all over the world, except, Brazil where they burn down lush rainforest to graze beef cattle.

In the USA there is a mission in those industries, beef and dairy, to look to adjust the type of feeds these farm animals are given to reduce the methane emitted. I consider that a serious attitude in those industries and they are taking their small contribution seriously. The petroleum industry should take its disastrous emissions as seriously as the beef and dairy industry does.

On all other counts, as stated by Greta Thurnberg, I have no criticism. She is amazing in her resolve. She is highly moral in her statements. "The money" that the US Supreme Court stated has equal rights with people, doesn't breath, and only exists to be used as a currency. We all know how currency is shaping up these days.

But, the climate crisis is a highly moral issue whereby all the people of Earth are equal in their right to a CLIMATE SAFE life; generation after generation after generation.

I wish the climate crisis solutions were fast-tracked in the way the Alzheimer's drug for profit has been handled. There is a profit to moving quickly on climate. The profit is the repurchase of the future. The bargain of all bargains, we get to keep Earth intact for generations to come. If we do this correctly, Earth will be around and habitable until Sol supernovas.

The time to act on all these issues is now and not two decades from now when there is another reason for war to take precedent of our very existence.

Shazam, there it is. Let's use a vast number of real Americans to study the drug.

 June 7, 2021

Today FDA approved Aduhelm (aducanumab) (click here) to treat patients with Alzheimer’s disease using the Accelerated Approval pathway, under which the FDA approves a drug for a serious or life-threatening illness that may provide meaningful therapeutic benefit over existing treatments when the drug is shown to have an effect on a surrogate endpoint that is reasonably likely to predict a clinical benefit to patients and there remains some uncertainty about the drug’s clinical benefit.

This approval is significant in many ways. Aduhelm is the first novel therapy approved for Alzheimer’s disease since 2003. Perhaps more significantly, Aduhelm is the first treatment directed at the underlying pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease, the presence of amyloid beta plaques in the brain.  The clinical trials for Aduhelm were the first to show that a reduction in these plaques—a hallmark finding in the brain of patients with Alzheimer’s—is expected to lead to a reduction in the clinical decline of this devastating form of dementia....

This is the initial discussion about the application of Aduhelm

This was in the middle of the vaccine trials for COVID-19 vaccines. The vaccine trials were Emergency Use basis. One of the facts pointed to in this presentation is that deaths from Alzheimer's Disease increased 150 percent from 2000-2018. That has to play on the minds of this panel in an atmosphere of urgency regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.

Friday, November 6, 2020

Page 23 of 325 pages

...Before briefly describing some of the issues (click here) we will ask you to discuss today, I want to stress that we have not made any final decisions on the approvability of this application. With that said, you have had the opportunity to review background materials, including the briefing documents and presentations from the applicant and FDA prior to today's meeting.  Today, following my remarks, you will first hear a summary presentation from the applicant reviewing important aspects of the data presented in support of aducanumab's approval. After that, I will return to discuss the issues involved in consideration of these data. The reason we are here today is to gain your input into some of the issues we have confronted during our review process. Thank you for the substantial efforts you have made in preparing for and attending this meeting, and thank you for the important work you will do today....

This is flooded Germany.

If one looks at the devastated places in Germany where waters destroyed so much and follow the water into Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxemburg; the breadth of the destruction can be appreciated. This is a huge land area where many people lived.

July 16, 2021
By Alissa Higham

Record amounts of rainfall (click here) in Western Europe has caused widespread devastation and death, with at least 80 people confirmed dead and hundreds more left unaccounted for. Germany has been the worst affected, but flooding has also caused many in the Netherlands to flee their homes.

Residents of towns and villages along the Meuse river in the province of Limburg were urgently advised to seek refuge until at least Friday.

Water levels on the Meuse and Rur rivers reached record levels on Thursday, prompting panic among locals and authorities following the devastation that has taken place in Germany over the course of this week.

In Germany, the states of Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia are the worst hit.

Unusually heavy rains from a slow-moving low pressure system have inundated Western Europe, causing rivers to burst their banks and flooding streets in cities, towns and villages, while power was knocked out for hundreds of thousands of households....

The devastation to Germany's infrastructure is catastrophic.

The land is missing. 

I was worried this would occur. The Dutch military was magnificent. They were ready for this nightmare.

July 16, 2021
By Thomas Erdbrink

A breach in the dike along the Juliana Canal (click here) in the southern Netherlands on Friday was closed by the Dutch military by dumping hundreds of sandbags into the growing hole. Hours before, thousands had been told to evacuate after the dike was breached along the canal, a 22-mile waterway that regulates the Meuse River.

The river’s water level is at heights not witnessed since 1911, the Dutch national broadcaster NOS reported.

That is no small thing in a water-logged country where taming water has been a matter of survival for centuries and the imperative to keep levels under control is inextricably bound up with Dutch identity. Much of the country sits below sea level and is gradually sinking. Climate change has also exacerbated the twin threats of storms and rising tides.

Residents of the villages of Brommelen, Bunde, Geulle and Voulwames were ordered to evacuate immediately, after initially being told to move to higher floors in their homes. About 10,000 people live in the area....

There is abject destruction in large areas of the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium.

July 18, 2021

This is what Olivier Hamelers, (click here) chief production officer of rail operator Crossrail Benelux told sister publication RailTech Belgium. This was also confirmed by Infrabel.
Fifty trains cancelled.

The Belgian rail operator saw its train traffic to Germany come to a standstill from Wednesday after severe weather in the province of Limburg had damaged the track. Crossrail has about thirty trains daily commuting between Belgium and Germany.

“We have tried to shift trains to the Brabant route through the Netherlands, via Venlo. Because this connection is very busy with traffic from the Betuweroute, where work is underway, the options were limited”, continues Hamelers. Fifty trains were impacted at Crossrail due to the problems with the track.
Liège region still impacted

In the Liège region, where a lot of cargo to and from China departs for Germany via the Montzen route, the problems have not yet been solved. “The damage to the track in the Liège area is much bigger”, says Hamelers, who hopes that this traffic will also start again by Monday.

According to Infrabel, the infrastructure manager, the prospects for the Walloon axis between Charleroi and Liège are positive. “If everything goes according to plan, railway lines 125 and 130 could run again on Monday, 19 July. The railway line between Liège and the Dutch border at Maastricht is closed at the border crossing. The water damage is significant there and the recovery is not in sight until 2 August. Infrabel is in close consultation with its customers and foreign infrastructure managers to seek and offer solutions.”...

These are our allies and they are missing by the thousand. This is directly due to the Climate Crisis.

July 7, 2021

Europe (click here) has been battered by days of torrential rain and floods that have left more than 160 people dead and hundreds more injured.

By Saturday, waters were receding across much of the affected regions, but officials feared that more bodies might be found in cars and trucks that were swept away.

Germany has borne the brunt of the extreme weather, with at least 141 people killed in two states.

Belgium’s national crisis centre said the country's confirmed death toll rose to 27.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier travelled to Erftstadt in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where a massive rescue effort unfolded on Friday.

“A lot of people have lost everything they spent their lives building up — their possessions, their home, the roof over their heads,” Steinmeier said.

“It may only be possible to clear up in weeks how much damage needs to be compensated,” he said....

There is a lot of buzz about this book. There should be a lot of buzz, but, Donald John Trump did not have one catastrophic year, he had four. And, why? Because he thought he alone could fix it.

What is IT, in the title of the book? It is the country? What was so wrong with the USA that wasn't identified decades ago that he had to call the country, IT. That was his personal statement, "I alone can fix it." That is not a title pulled out of thin air.

It is a con. He wants whoever believes he is so important to their future that he and only he can carry out the rehabilitation of the USA. Well. If rehabilitation means removing eons of American thought and policy, then anyone able to write with a crayon can do that.

There were so many things wrong with his time in office. The "signing ceremony" where people gather to receive a pen at the signing of the legislature by the President; turned into a political icon whereby his signature was witnessed with special cameras so his followers could scrutinize every word and every stroke of the pen. Like, what? It made the viewer think there is something to the idea that our government is wrong and only one person is even willing to prove he will correct paths of wayward centuries of abuse of power.

It is all a con, played out in front of the American people as if it really is supposed to have status in history.

"The Fix" definitely was in during the Trump years.

Racism

There is nothing else to call such horrible treatment of Native Americans. Most or all of us never knew this horror existed.

We owe these people sincere means to make up for this horrible destruction of their families.

Between segregation, oppression, blatant racism, and a homogenized culture in the USA, we really aren't the people we believe we are. Diversity and cultural acceptance have to occur. The parts of culture that can enhance the entire country's American experience need to be appreciated and celebrated. 

Juneteenth is a beginning, but, where do we start with the Native American families. This is a horror. Children are dead for taking them and pretending they were an inferior race.

The USA has a lot of penance to do. A lot.

Judy Woodruff is hitting every subject that needs attention. Thank you.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

November 1, 1998
By Nicholas Lemann

I rarely state the title to any article because a sincere reader of the news will move past the attention-getting title quickly to the content. But, the title to this New York Times article is rather compelling and should ring familiar to many liberals in the USA. Today we call it income inequality.

The New American Consensus; Government of, by, and for the Comfortable (click here)

...They huffed and interrupted. Davis made sure to work in a reference to his military service. (Lungren didn't serve.) Lungren made sure to work in a reference to his three children. (Davis is married but childless.) The debate's tonal culmination was Lungren's use of his closing statement to advance a cheerfully out-of-left-field theory about the undetected assonance between the police unions' support of Gray Davis and the notorious incident in which Latrell Sprewell, the basketball player, throttled his coach.

But the larger end to which this fiesta of contempt was directed was the elimination of all meaningful differences between the two candidates. This debate, like the two that had preceded it, conformed to the following structure: Candidate A, with a malicious glint in his eye, accuses Candidate B of taking an unpopular position. Candidate B draws himself up self-righteously and protests that, no, in fact his position is actually almost indistinguishable from Candidate A's. Lungren wants to cut taxes on innovative new businesses. Davis wants to also, in a slightly different way. Lungren is for eliminating the car tax, Davis is for reducing the car tax. Davis supports abortion rights. Lungren insists that during the five terms he served in the House of Representatives, ''we never once voted on denying a woman the right to have an abortion.'' Lungren is for the death penalty. Davis, suspect because he used to be Gov. Jerry Brown's chief of staff, insists, ''I have always believed in the death penalty.'' They are both committed environmentalists. They are both for H.M.O. reform. They are both for establishing tough new standards in public education....

...All over the country, Republicans and Democrats seem to be racing for the center. In New York, the two major-party Senate candidates, Charles Schumer and Alfonse D'Amato, are presenting themselves as pragmatists. Jeb Bush, who lost the Florida Governor's race four years ago, is running again this year as a distinctly more moderate Republican. Even Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, one of the two or three most conservative members of the United States Senate, is stressing his support for environmentalism and health care reform in his re-election campaign....

I think the New York Times needs to do this type of compare and contrast at least every two years so Americans have a clear measure of where their government is failing them.

This is ridiculous. In the year 1998, the two parties were understanding the need for a national health policy and the confrontation of the climate crisis.

What the heck happened in the decades that followed? Because we were making the right issues front and center. There was no reason to allow the RADICAL shift to the right with such direly important issues before the country. What happened?

Here is my guess. Terrorists that hated The West, rightly or wrongly, caused an enormous catastrophe in Lower Manhattan and Washington, DC and all of a sudden all the benevolent domestic programs were erased from the consensus through trauma and no one came to address them again until the Global Economic Collapse and President Obama was elected.

This vacillation between the extremist right agenda for the USA and the idea we have a right to health care that is affordable and we need to move past the internal combustion engine and natural gas to a clean energy economy with wind and solar a mainstay.

Vacillation on issues only postpones what needs to be done and today we are imperiling our children and our grandchildren's world.

Enough of this. Get rid of the lousy filibuster and pass some real reform to protect the generations of Americans that have the right to health and safety that this country promises them.

It is Sunday Night

To the left is the 1960s actress Brigitte Bardot.

Sexiest Icons of the 1960s (click here)

I remember these women. I was born in 1955. They made an impression on me as I grew up. So did the women marching for equality and asking for an Amendment to the USA Constitution that would bring about equality for women. My value system grew out of the 1960s and the movement to change in the USA. I was thirteen when my mother decided to find her first job. She was 33 years old. She had been married 14 years to my father and wanted more. Imagine that. She was looking at the women marching for equal rights alongside me, and she decided she wanted more out of life than my father's paycheck would bring.

Her first job was ironing clothes at a small factory. She was good at ironing clothes and never thought in her wildest imagination it would bring her a paycheck. It did. She would work from 6 PM to 10 PM, Monday - Friday so she could get dinner ready before she left for work. Being 13 years old, I was expected to see my sisters were in pajamas and with my father's authority would be in bed before she returned home.

My mother's move to work and earn a paycheck was not received well by my father. There were many arguments and as time went by he accepted it because she actually improved the quality of life of the family. Eventually, we would move to a nicer apartment with a really nice neighborhood and from there my parents purchased their first home. I was married by then. My mother was 42 years old when she and my father received Veteran Benefits and bought their first home. 

By the time my parents purchased their first home, my mother had worked in several different jobs, including as a saleswoman in a gift and card store. She blossomed and she eventually would interview for a small company called "Jelco," which would, soon after she was hired into the accounts payable office, become a member of the Johnson and Johnson family of companies.

She retired at the age of 62 from Johnson and Johnson from their accounts payable department with a very nice retirement package of benefits and a pension payment every month.

The women's movement provided a new kind of "female image" to admire with the ideas of a better life with the beginnings of a career became iconic and still pervades most women's understanding of their own ability even today. 

My mother finished high school with a focus on business but wasn't prepared the same as the men in high school. The men in high school never took shorthand and typing as a business major. She was and still is remarkable. She is 86 now. She survived the pandemic because I helped her during that time to adjust to grocery delivery and pick-up, wearing a mask and accepting the fact even though she felt fine all that could end with a slip-up. 

Women do that with each other. We care for each other and our families, even when we have very demanding careers. I marvel at the young women I know. They are dynamic and so are their families.

When it comes to millennials, which my two sons are, they need to accept the idea that even though "The Boomers" were teens or younger in the 1960s, those are the years we bonded with and profoundly defined our values as we grew into adulthood.

When watching the video think of world peace and mutual trust and interest and the climate crisis.

All together now by 

One, two, three, four

Can I have a little more?
Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten
I love you

A B C D
Can I bring my friend to tea?
E F G H I J
I love you

Bom bom bom bompa bom
Sail the ship, bompa bom
Chop the tree, bompa bom
Skip the rope, bompa bom
Look at me

All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now

Black, white, green, red
Can I take my friend to bed?
Pink, brown, yellow, orange, and blue
I love you

All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now

Bom bom bom bompa bom
Sail the ship, bompa bom
Chop the tree, bompa bom
Skip the rope, bompa bom
Look at me

All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now
All together now