This Blog is created to stress the importance of Peace as an environmental directive. “I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it’s hell.” – Harry Truman
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Mark Kelly is a brilliant man, a great American and he has a nice wife.
I am sure he prefers having the picture of him in a business suit over the orange one, but, he is different than others in the US Senate. He has a vision of tomorrow that most young voters can appreciate and hold onto as a promise. He knows Earth from a unique vantage point and he is aware of where the Space program can take Americans into their future of dreams. I believe he understands the climate crisis.
I think it is important for Mark Kelly to be in the US Senate. We need him there for a lot of reasons and he is on the side of Arizona all the time. He cares a great deal for this country and that is a big plus for all of us.
Senator Kelly (click here) is the son of two police officers, and he attended public schools from elementary school through the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. As a naval aviator, he served on the aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Midway and flew 39 combat missions in Operation Desert Storm. Senator Kelly was later selected as an astronaut in 1996 in the same class as his twin brother Scott. He flew his first of four missions into space in 2001 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour and retired from the Navy and NASA after commanding the final flight of Endeavour in 2011. Senator Kelly was sworn into his Senate seat on December 2, 2020 to finish the term of the late Senator John McCain. He lives in Tucson with his wife, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords.
She has tried to run for Sherrif and talks about horse maniure. That might be an issue for some folks, but, it is not an overwhelming topic. I think she is a reaction to the former Sherrif Joe. Maybe.
Mollick, Joseph "J.R." is the third candidate on the Democratic Primary for US Senate. I did not see much infomation online about this candidate, but, that probably plays to his strengths. He is mentioned on the candidate list in the newspaper. (click here) I am sure the local and/or state party knows him.
Arizona is currently in the 27th year of a long-term drought. (click here) Drought in the West is a long-term concept, which means that a single dry year does not constitute a drought in Arizona. Since Arizona has an arid and semi-arid climate, extremely variable precipitation is normal. Drought is instead characterized by a string of dry years, occasionally interrupted by a wet year or two. Since 1994, most watersheds in the state have experienced only a total of nine or ten wet years....
The description below of Arizona weather is similar to what we are seeing across the country. The rainfall comes with intense storms, while the overall accumulation for more than half the country is failing. (click here)
Even with rainfall in the eastern half of the USA fairly normal in volume, the methods by which it is being delivered results in a lot of damage to property and some deaths.
August 4, 2017
...The new study (click here) was published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. Using more detailed and localized precipitation information than is standard for weather data, Castro’s team compared monsoon rainfall throughout the Southwest from two periods — 1950 to 1970 and 1991 to 2010. The team found that Phoenix and many of the state’s low deserts saw rain falling in much more intense bursts. This happened even as the daily average rainfall across most of Arizona decreased by as much as 30 percent in some places...
He worked for Trent Franks in the US House of Representatives. Trent Franks asked two female staffers to have his baby and he would pay them $5 million. That was not a joke. When the staffer refused, Franks got angry. The staffer was afraid she would have to have intercourse with Franks as part of the surrogate process. There was an ethics investigation and Franks resigned shortly after.
I don't think as a Franks staffer he was a hero and stopped the entire encounter and protected the woman. There was no heroics that came out of Mr. Olson. He needs to keep his day job.
Retired Maj. Gen. Michael “Mick” McGuire, (click here) who led the Arizona National Guard through the state's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, formally began his campaign for U.S. Senate on Tuesday, becoming the second major Republican looking to unseat Democrat Mark Kelly.
McGuire introduced himself with an online video highlighting his military career and presenting himself as a political outsider tired of “weak leaders” and “politicians who sit on the sidelines.”
McGuire calls in the video for securing the border, and says he opposes abortion, will protect 1st and 2nd Amendment rights and “will walk shoulder to shoulder with law enforcement.”
In an interview, he said he's a “strict conservative constitutionalist cut from the same cloth as Antonin Scalia," the former U.S. Supreme Court justice who advocated interpreting the Constitution as the framers intended. He said he wants to use the leadership skilled he honed from a career in military command to unite a Republican Party fractured between supporters and critics of former President Donald Trump....
He seems like an nice guy that has all the verbiage of a serious Repuglican candidate, but, do we really need a general in the US Senate. Anyone who has seen the military budget would differ on his seat of power.
Blake Masters, the 34-year-old chief operating officer at investment firm Thiel Capital and a former protege of the billionaire at Stanford, announced Monday that he is running as a Republican to unseat Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly in 2022.
In his campaign launch, Masters pledged to “completely end illegal immigration” and fight “indoctrination” in the school system.
Masters has never held public office and faces a crowded GOP primary field that includes state Attorney General Mark Brnovich and wealthy energy executive Jim Lamon....
Evidently, Lamon couldn't come up with his own BRAND of slogan when attempting to secure the Republican candidate for US Senate.
January 10, 2022
By Julia Manchester
...Sept. 15, 2021. (click here) Lamon said the United States should not accept Afghan refugees, including translators and others who helped the American military during the 20-year war....
The ad, which kicks off a six-figure ad campaign throughout Arizona, will air tonight during the College Football Playoff championship game.
The Hill was the first outlet to view the ad, which is the first national campaign spot to invoke the slogan.
"Let’s take the fight to Joe Biden and show him we the people put America first," Lamon says in the ad. "The time is now. Let’s go, Brandon. Are you with me?"
Lamon is a part of a crowded Republican field to challenge Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) in the state's Senate race in November. It is set to be one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country, with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rating it as a "toss-up."...
Nothing comes between Republicans and their money, not even the USA Constitution. Brnovich is a candidate for Republican nominee for US Senate. Very hairy guy. That interfers with a space suit, doesn't it?
January 19, 2022
By Timothy H. J. Nerozzi
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (click here) published a letter Wednesday to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen after she threatened, on behalf of the Biden administration, to withhold funds from the state due to a difference in COVID-19 policy.
"Madam Secretary, the states created the federal government, not the other way around," Brnovich wrote. "Unfortunately, members of the Biden administration have continuously ignored this fundamental principle of our great nation when proposing and enacting bureaucratic mandates and harmful regulations upon individual states."...
Because of the audits, Arizona Republicans have out raised Democrats and have done NOTHING to improve the election status as they stated was the cause of the audits. Arizona Repuglicans need to be sued now for gross malpractice in election preparedness.
July 29, 2021 By Jonathan J. Cooper
Phoenix - Groups connected to prominent supporters (click here) of former President Donald Trump’s movement to cast doubt on the 2020 election results have raised more than $5.7 million for Arizona Republicans’ election audit, according to figures released late Wednesday.
Doug Logan, CEO of Cyber Ninjas, the little-known firm hired to lead the audit, ended months of silence about who was paying for it and how much it cost. The money from pro-Trump groups dwarfs the $150,000 contributed by the Arizona Senate, which commissioned the audit and hired Cyber Ninjas.
Among those leading the fundraising groups are Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor; Sydney Powell, his attorney who filed a number of baseless lawsuits challenging election results; Patrick Byrne, a former chief executive of Overstock.com; and correspondents from the pro-Trump One America News Network.
Republican Senate President Karen Fann says the audit is only meant to see whether improvements are needed to state election laws. But the audit has long been associated with the “stop the steal” movement, and Trump has predicted it will uncover evidence to support his discredited theories of fraud....
In an elevated valley of northeast West Virginia on Saturday morning, it was colder than just about anywhere in Alaska and among the most frigid locations in the entire United States.
Alaska hasn't seen frigid temperatures in nearly two decades as it once did. The icefields that at one time surrounded Alaska and kept it cold are no longer. They are all receding.
At the island community of Kodiak, the air temperature at a tidal gauge hit 19.4C (67F) degrees on Sunday, the highest December reading ever recorded in Alaska, said scientist Rick Thoman of the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy. He called it “absurd.”...
Just 125 miles west of Washington, the temperature at a weather station in Canaan Valley plunged to minus-31 degrees. It is the coldest reading on record in that part of the state.
The weather station is managed by Virginia Tech at the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge.
The previous lowest temperature measured in Canaan Valley was minus-27 on Jan. 21, 1985, according to Robert Leffler, a retired National Weather Service climatologist, who reported the news in an email.
Canaan Valley is a popular ski destination and home to two resorts, Canaan Valley Resort and Timberline.
Weather records have been kept in Canaan Valley since 1944, according to Leffler. The Virginia Tech weather station, however, was installed only about three years ago by meteorology instructor David Carroll. It is probable that the temperatures fell even lower there in the past....
Ballotpedia has all these UNKNOWNS about the 2022 elections. Really? (click here) All these dates and rules and regs should be in place by now and if they aren't it is malpractice. The level of malpractice only creates confusion.
...Researchers also studied Scott’s genome (click here) to see if gene expression changed during flight, as it tends to do in stressful situations. A team led by Chris Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, studied DNA and RNA modifications that would signal epigenetic adaptation. They observed some changes in how genes were expressed, and these variations accelerated in the last six months of the mission. More than six times as many differences in gene expressions cropped up over the latter half compared to the beginning of the flight.
The findings were was somewhat surprising, Mason says, because he’d expected these differences to slow down or stop after an initial period of adaptation to the new environment. The sustained and increasing genetic transformations show that the body continues to change over long periods of time in space.
Andrew Feinberg, a professor and medical researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and his team focused on methyl groups—chemical markers that usually signal changes in gene expression—and found the amount of epigenetic change was similar for the two brothers. Despite some minor differences, Scott’s genome behaved in a way that was “not worrisome,” Feinberg says.
After the mission’s end, 90 percent of the modified gene expressions returned to their pre-flight baseline—a good sign that the body can bounce back after a long mission, Mason says. The other 10 percent, which comprised over 800 genes, including ones related to immune response and DNA repair, were still being expressed differently six months after Scott’s return. “It seems, to some degree, that enough cells in the body have a memory of what happened that there's still some ongoing adaptation and recalibration to being back on Earth,” Mason says....
“The Ukrainian people have the sovereign right to determine their own future, and we stand with our democratically-elected partners in Ukraine,” the spokesperson, Emily Horne, said in a statement late Saturday.
“This kind of plotting is deeply concerning,” she added.....
NATO may as well begin the build up along the eastern borders of the alliance. It will be necessary. It's administrative offices should prepare the sanctions to be instituted at a moment's notice.
Putin has this "thing" about "Russian people." In his mind they all belong to the motherland. He called up the diaspora about five or ten years ago. It is on this blog. It is his politics. There is no disputing the fact that everything he has decided is the policy of Russia. He is now in the leadership of the communists longer than Lenin. He has decided within the practice of his politics that all Russian people, even those with dual citizenship, belong to Russia, hence, Ukraine.
This happens at a time when Ukraine has diligently cleansed itself of corruption. It is the condition on which Europe and the USA has placed in order to develop trade and continue to move toward a stable democracy with the ability to protect it's sovereignty and ultimately become part of the NATO alliance.
The current president of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, is held in esteem of the enforcement of anti-corruption and that means Russian influence. The Russians for the most part have been removed from power and young Ukrainian talent has been put in their place with the hopes of the current generations demanding freedom and a sovereign country that reflects tomorrow and the promise within it.
The USA and NATO cannot and should not back away from this aggression by Putin and his wayward politics. He is a danger to the Russian people as even as he called the diaspora home, he and the Duma made them register if they had dual citizenship and then a year later declared a dual citizen must pay a tax to maintain their duality. Needless to say, these people were dependent on Russia for their day to day lives and they more than likely denounced the second country of citizenship as the tax was out of their reach.
In that, understand, it is a form of racism. If Russian is the only real race tolerated within it's sovereign borders, there is every reason to be concerned for anyone that does not meet the description. That would include businessmen from other countries, especially The West. Spies, all those OTHERS are nothing short of spies.
The USA, NATO and the West in general need to be prepared for a full array of nuclear capacity in a first strike opportunity. They need to be prepared for aggression beyond the battlefield. The battlefield of conventional weapons belonging to Ukraine does not have the capacity of Russia and while The West is counting bodies and holding Russia responsible there is the possibility of of First Strikes coming through the air from other countries allied with Putin.
The Russia military recently slaughtered a lesser country into submission. It was all practice for what is to come with Ukraine. There won't be anything nice or CIVILIZED about the Russia advance against Ukraine. There will be brutal force as that brought into Kazakhstan (click here). The Russian military is crude. They are not good soldiers, but, they are killers.
So, with that, I hate every minute that goes by knowing that Putin is not a good and decent man, but, an egotistically driven man scared of his own fate should the majority of Russian people finally put together a democracy.
Just to be clear, the red, white and blue flag of the current Russia is taken from the former empire after the Soviet Union fell.
Moscow - Russia’s Foreign Ministry (click here) on Sunday rejected a British claim that Russia was seeking to replace Ukraine’s government with a pro-Moscow administration, and that former Ukrainian lawmaker Yevheniy Murayev was being considered as a potential candidate.
Britain’s Foreign Office on Saturday also named several other Ukrainian politicians it said had links with Russian intelligence services, along with Murayev who is the leader of a small party that has no seats in parliament.
Those politicians include Mykola Azarov, a former prime minister under Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president ousted in a 2014 uprising, and Yanukovych’s former chief of staff, Andriy Kluyev.
“Some of these have contact with Russian intelligence officers currently involved in the planning for an attack on Ukraine,” the Foreign Office said....
Until 2005, the life expectancy of the Russian people was below 70 years of age. That is why their pension system existed for younger people. The Russian Duma literally woke up one morning and decided, "Today is the day the Russian people will no longer receive their pensions." So, when Putin starts crying about living standards of Russians, he needs to look at the cause domestically before demanding relationships with other countries.
October 14, 2021
By Holly Ellyant
Improving Russian citizens’ living standards (click here) is President Vladimir Putin’s biggest concern right now, he told CNBC on Wednesday, offering a rare insight into the preoccupations of one of the world’s most powerful leaders.
“Our main problem, our main issue and goal is to increase the revenues of our citizens,” Putin told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble on Wednesday. His answer came after being asked what his greatest concern was today, be it inflation, stagflation or the gas crisis in Europe or tension in the South China Sea.
“This is our main challenge ... we need to ensure economic growth and to increase its quality. These are our long-term tasks,” he said.
Putin added that the government was “going to improve the social situation to increase the revenues of our citizens and to deal with the second very important task is the demographic situation. And it entails a lot of social issues, healthcare, education, supporting families with children.”...
In response to President Joe Biden’s speech marking the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Donald Trump issued a series of statements containing false and misleading claims about the 2020 presidential election results.
The former president has repeatedly promoted baseless claims about voting in the battleground state of Georgia, and in January 2021 he attempted to persuade election officials there to recalculate the state’s vote in his favor. Now, he claims ballots were sold there for $10.
“Where did all those votes show up from in Georgia, where it was just revealed they sold ballots for $10 a piece,” Trump said in a statement, which was shared to Twitter on Jan. 6 by his spokesperson Liz Harrington in a tweet that accumulated more than 4,000 interactions in a day.
This is the impossible international relationships with allies that the Biden administration needs to scale. This is a German general's take on respect for Putin. Since making this statement he has resigned.
Either the USA is a banana republic or not? If not then stop electing these bozos. If this mess continues, the world is going to want the USA to consider denuclearization to protect the world and USA citizens.
There is a real cost to pay everytime a populous person is elected to a seat of power in the USA. REAL COSTS THAT ARE NOT MEASURABLE BY THE USA DOLLAR.
