Tag: Limericks

New field to high school mandatory reading curriculum: Cli-fi or Climate Change Fiction. A Limerick.

Our schools push the Climate Change Fiction

as truth, not a mere contradiction.

You take heed, it is real

you must read. Then you feel

The Climate Change Fiction Addiction.

Background: Montpelier, Vt. (AP) — Colleges and universities worldwide are incorporating into their curriculums the evolving genre of literature that focuses on the changes coming to Earth as the result of climate change — “cli-fi.”

Some of the books and movies now being considered part of the genre are old classics, while others were written more recently in direct response to today’s changing climate.

“It’s a very, very energized time for this where people in literature have just as much to say as people who are in hard science fields, or technology and design fields, or various social-science approaches to these things,” said Jennifer Wicke, an English professor at the University of Virginia who will be teaching a course this June on climate fiction at the Bread Loaf campus of Middlebury College in Ripton, Vermont.

 

 

Carbon free sugar. A Limerick.

The Settled Science of Carbon Pollution has reached a new level. Now there is certified carbon free sugar.

Rejoice, diabetics, hear hear!carbonfreesugar

The Carbon free sugar is here!

No more Splenda for me

I’ll take sugar in tea

It’s Domino’s sugar this year!

(Disclaimer. Maybe, just maybe that is not what they meant?)

Give thanks for “the pause” and clouds. A Limerick.

The cause for the Climate change pause:

The CO2 increase; because

there’s more clouds in the sky

make more snow, that is why

the climate is stable. Applause!

During the last Ice-age snowfall over Greenland was less than half what it is now. As the Earth came out of the ice-age temperatures rose sharply, CO2 rose with a lag of about 800 years, snowfall increased until the Minoan temperature optimum was reached. Since then there has been a slow decrease in global temperatures until the little ice age, after which there has been a temperature recovery. At the same time CO2 levels have increased, and there seemed to be a correlation from 1950 until “the pause”. What controls temperature is not CO2 but clouds. Check the chart below:

Chart 14 - Greenland temperature with snow accumulationWe are still in the coldest 1000 years since the end of the ice-ageGreenlandgisp-last-10000-newThere is a strong correlation between temperature and CO2, not in the temperatures themselves, but in the temperature adjustments, also called homogenization. The adjustments are made to make old temperatures conform better to the climate models. The chart:

tempC02

 

 

 

 

Thought for the day. The Pope, The Trump, walls and bridges.

He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls. (Proverbs 25:28)

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”  Pope Francis.

The Vatican City’s old wall.Vatican_City_map_EN

A sign they’re not Christians at all?

For the Pope said as much

about Trump, walls and such.

Humpty Dumpty did fall, I recall.

The moral of this story: Be careful not to make off the wall remarks.

Joking aside, I took a look at how many times the word wall was used in the Bible and where it was used. There are so many tidbits we can learn from a word study. The first is in Leviticus 25: 29-31 ‘Likewise, if a man sells a dwelling house in a walled city, then his redemption right remains valid until a full year from its sale; his right of redemption lasts a full year. But if it is not bought back for him within the space of a full year, then the house that is in the walled city passes permanently to its purchaser throughout his generations; it does not revert in the jubilee. The houses of the villages, however, which have no surrounding wall shall be considered as open fields; they have redemption rights and revert in the jubilee.

This is old Mosaic law, and gives clear guidance that the law in a protected place with borders is different from the law in places without borders, and property rights are clearly established. As a civil society we no longer follow Mosaic Law, that would be as ridiculous as if anyone demanded we should follow Sharia Law.

Moving on, there are the walls of Jericho, the wall of Jerusalem, Nehemiah rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem and the watchmen on the wall.

Then in the New Testament walls are not mentioned at all in the Gospels (In the parable of the tenants in Matthew and Mark it is literally a hedge, not a wall) and only Revelation describes the walls of the new Jerusalem. So the Pope is right, building walls does not appear in the Gospels. Neither does the word bridge appear anywhere in the Bible, so that part is extra-biblical, if one is to take his admonition literally. So if Sarah Palin as Governor refused to build “the bridge to nowhere”, does that make her a non-Christian? (A Limerick from way back comes back to memory)

Sarah Palin did not even think of Nantucket

when plans for that infamous bridge kicked the bucket.

But profligate waste

and spending with haste:

She ordered the spendthriftest Congress to chuck it!

Joking aside, the Pope probably meant spiritual walls and bridges, but by saying it right near the U.S. Mexican border it is easy to assume he meant a literal border. If so, where is the literal bridge?

 

 

The Pope and off the wall remarks. A Limerick.

“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian.”  Pope Francis.

The Vatican City’s old wall.Vatican_City_map_EN

A sign they’re not Christians at all?

For the Pope said as much

about Trump, walls and such.

Humpty Dumpty did fall, I recall.

The moral of this story: Be careful not to make off the wall remarks.

 

Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Donald Trump worth ten points. He blew it all on skipping the debate in Iowa. A Limerick.

When Palin endorsed, her act bumped Trump up ten.

With Kelley the Trump-killer in it again,

he refused to debate,

lost it all, sealed his fate.

A second place loser, all pain and no gain.

Donald Trump was solidly in second place in Iowa, about 5 points behind Ted Cruz. Marco Rubio was way behind. Then, on Jan 19 Sarah Palin endorsed him, an endorsement worth at least ten percentage points. See graph:Iowa-Republicans-graphThen Donald Trump refused to debate right before the Iowa caucus unless Megyn Kelly was removed as a moderator. Unlike CNN, which caved in to Trump’s demands, Fox News stood their ground and refused to cave in, “on journalistic grounds.” print2The media should never cave in to political pressure. Having skipped the debate, Cruz and Rubio had the leadership fight to themselves, and could shine, all at the expense of Trump. The chart to the left shows the high water mark for Donald Trump.

Between the debate and the Iowa caucus Trump lost all the ground he gained from the Palin endorsement. Ted Cruz held his ground, but the big gainer was Rubio.

It is now a three way race, and this will very likely lead to a brokered convention.

All bets ate off.

I can understand Sarah Palin’s initial endorsement of Donald Trump, with his broad crossover appeal to disenchanted people, then having a chance to win the primaries outright. With his refusal to debate we are almost ensured a brokered convention. Personally I prefer Sarah Palin to enter the race on her own, making it a brokered convention, containing a majority of true conservative delegates.

 

 

 

 

Hillary Clinton’s emails. From bad to verse, or at least a Limerick.

Why Hillary Clinton’s mail server

will force FBI to soon serve her.

With  the CIA payroll

laid bare like a blogroll.

Will Federal Prison best serve her?

Hillary Clinton’s e-mails are released in drips and drabs, always on a Friday.

Of the document dump last Friday 243 emails were classified at some level, bringing the overall number of classified Clinton emails to 1,583. The State Department also announced Friday that it is withholding in full and into perpetuity 22 emails that contain “Top Secret” information — the highest classification category. In fact, they are so secret, containing “operational intelligence” such as names, whereabouts and methods of CIA agents, so secret the FBI does not have the security clearance to even read them.

 

 

 

 

Neonicotinoids are killing the bees, not climate change. EPA asleep. A Limerick.

Neonics are killing the bees

a “can’t find their way back” disease.

Neonicotinoids

pollination de-voids.

No apples are found on the trees.

From NeonicsSummary_XercesSociety.pdf:

Neonicotinoid pesticides were first registered for use in the mid-1990s. Since then, these chemicals have become widely adopted for use on farm crops, ornamental landscape plants, and trees. Neonicotinoids (AKA neonics) are systemic chemicals; they are absorbed by the plant and are transferred through the vascular system, making the plant itself toxic to insects.
The impact of this class of insecticides on pollinating insects such as honey bees and native bees is a cause for concern. Because they are absorbed into the plant, neonics can be present in pollen and nectar, making these floral resources
toxic to pollinators that feed on them. The long lasting presence of neonics in plants makes it possible for these chemicals to harm pollinators even when the initial application is made outside of the bloom period. In addition, neonics
persist in the soil and in plants for very long periods of time.
About 95 percent of all commercial U.S. corn and canola crops and most all commercial cotton, sorghum, sugar beets, fruits. vegetables, berries, leafy greens, and cereal grains are treated with neonics.
 Neonics affect the nervous system of the bees making them disoriented and simply disappear rather than finding their way back to the hive. Are neonics poisonous to humans? Probably not since no birds or animals seem to be affected, but the loss of our major pollinators, it is still an ecological catastrophe. The previous way of protecting the seeds with mercury was far more serious, nearly exterminating owls and eagles. EPA needs to immediately ban the use of neonics in orchards and other places where bee borne pollination is taking place. By majoring in climate change, calling CO2 a pollutant and spending an inordinate amount of limited resources going after the wrong targets. They should concentrate on real pollution.

 

Thought for the day: Rejoice always.

Rejoice always, (1 Thessalonians 5:16) 

It often is hard to rejoice.

As always I don’t have a choice

but to praise, pray and sing

to my Savior and King.

To Jesus I lift up my voice.

At my mature age I try to keep my brain active by making Limericks. There are many types of Limericks, and millions have been made and printed over the years, some straight forward as the one above, some with a twist. I try to stay with the clean ones.

In my childhood’s Sweden we started learning English in fifth grade. The first semester, since English has weird spelling we learned the basics in phonetic script, and right from the start we were introduced to finer English poetry, such as this Limerick:

There once was a lady from Riga

who rode with a smile on a tiger.

They came back from the ride

withe the lady inside

and the smile on the face on the tiger.

Since then I have always loved the format, a strict  rhyme scheme (AABBA), and a predominantly anapestic meter  88668, or in this case 99669.

But my real love has been for songs and music. I have a very hard time to memorize things, but if it is set to music I hear the melody inside me and it stays with me for life. Even now I sometimes wake up in the morning with a song in my heart, a song I heard maybe fifty years ago and have not heard since I emigrated from Sweden. Such is the power of music. The cadence in the song and the melody work together to bring to remembrance the emotions I felt as a young lad.

Coming to America I decided to join the Rochester oratorio society. We sang Handel’s Messiah. It meant nothing to me except fantastic music. But the next piece was Elijah, and at the performance, the great base William Warfield was Elijah. He didn’t just sing, he was Elijah!

We moved away from Rochester and I didn’t sing for five years. Things didn’t go so well moodwise, but circumstances led me to again sing Handel’s Messiah. This time it spoke to me and rekindled in me the joy I once had singing. So I joined a church choir, still unsaved, but they let me sing anyway.

Since I found new life in Christ I have found that whenever things go bad, as they often do, God brings back a melody in my heart, not always with words, but they usually come back to remembrance a little bit later.

Thank God for hymns and songs with melody and words that bring back to remembrance the greatness of God!

(Sometimes I wake up with songs I heard in my youth that has very little to do with God and His greatness, but that is another story).