AdamSmith

Sorry, not by a court, but rather by the Office of Special Counsel that is now investigating the charge of violating the Hatch Act that Painter filed against Comey.

OUCH

The way Comey can be terminated is to be found by a court to have violated the Hatch Act. A suit has been filed charging him with having done so.

Comey's!

Some comic one time cracked, "Pleistocene, Eocene, on and on ... of course today we live in the Obscene era."

Of course the Gaia hypothesis offers the cold-eyed view that we have become a phage on the planet, and its systems are collectively generating an immune response that will ultimately eliminate the source of infection.

The ape-descended primitives march on... World on track to lose two-thirds of wild animals by 2020, major report warns The number of wild animals living on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, according to a new report, part of a mass extinction that is destroying the natural world upon which humanity depends. The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020. Researchers from WWF and the Zoological Society of London compiled the report from scientific data and found that the destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution were to blame... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/27/world-on-track-to-lose-two-thirds-of-wild-animals-by-2020-major-report-warns

Some here have posted that our ravaging the planet is the unavoidable consequence of overpopulation. That is surely half the problem: ecological scientists estimate that a sustainable global population for H. sapiens is 2.5 billion, whereas today we number 7.4 billion. However. The other half of the problem is the rapacious mandate for growth, at any cost, that is the engine of free-market capitalism. Our worship of the artifact of free-market capitalism as an unassailable and immutable good is misguided, and has possibly already become fatal to our species. It is a comparatively late production that did not exist before the Renaissance; it was created and fueled in great part by Italian bankers and financiers, with obvious implications; Piketty's recent Capital in the 21st Century documents how it is not inherently just or fair, but instead contains internal structures that over time concentrate wealth in a way that, at the least, is contrary to the social-justice charges in the Christian Gospels and other spiritual traditions. As Pope Francis has made one of his central messages. The climate evils we are, today, only on the front edge of suffering result from capitalism getting its hands on our scientific and engineering capabilities to overwhelm the natural world that were developed during and after the second World War. That was when our material understanding of the world grew larger than nature's capacity to contain us, and to absorb without consequence the war-making drive and combativeness toward all things -- both other and our own kind -- that we inherited from being, as the Silurians in Dr Who called us, the "ape-descended primitives." If we can't, as a species, engineer and implement some successor to free-market capitalism as a way to manage our material affairs, the world of Blade Runner will look good compared with what we get.

Our grandchildren's grandchildren are toast.

Ah. For some reason, on my laptop the Remember me switch on the login screen doesn't work.

One cheery reader's comment on this Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/oct/24/the-atmosphere-is-being-radicalized-by-climate-change... It is time for citizens around the world to wake up to the extreme danger that further global warming now presents to the future lives of all young people on this planet. Some key issues not yet being addressed with any urgency, if at all, are: 1. The true cost of fossil fuels not accounted for at all on the balance sheets of the fossil fuel corporations is estimated by the IMF to be $5 trillion in 2015. It is made up primarily of environmental damage to soils, rivers, lakes, forests, coastal waters, oceans, seriously damaged human health, human lives cut short, and a rapidly expanding bill for all the impacts on homes, agriculture and infrastructure, arising from global warming. These costs are paid by citizens and taxpayers around the world and fall disproportionately on those who have done the least to cause this harm. http://www.imf.org/external/np/fad/subsidies/ 2. The cumulative atmospheric carbon limit, incorporated into the 2014 IPCC assessment, a limit recognised as a good indicator of how close we are to making the task of limiting the rise in Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) to +2C MAX, impossible to achieve unless cutting carbon emissions becomes an immediate overriding global priority for restructuring economic and industrial activity across the planet. The scale and urgency of the task is made clear on this Oxford University calculator. http://www.trillionthtonne.org/ 3. As of today, aviation and shipping greenhouse gas emissions have not been accounted for by any nation's carbon accounts. 4. +2C GMST is not a nice balmy temperature that the human race will enjoy. To put this warming in perspective, the difference in GMST between today and the last glacial maximum 22,000 years ago with ice sheets up to 2 km thick across North America and NW Europe, when sea level was 125 metres lower, was only +5C. We have warmed the planet +1C since 1870, and will add at least another +1C within a lifetime. We have not yet begun to feel anything like the full climate effects of that +1C, due to 93% of the extra heat energy having passed into the oceans, and it will be many decades before the global climate system catches up with the severe consequences we have already baked in. 5. The last time the planet had a GMST equal to what we are calling +2C, sea level was at least 5 to 9 metres higher, with some evidence suggesting double that. 6. The rate of warming that humans are causing is unprecedented in the geologic record of natural climate change so the ice melt response of the polar glaciers can not be determined by past precedence. The maximum rise in sea level expected this century included in the 2014 assessment is already in need of revision upwards. The rise in sea level can be expected to accelerate as warming continues. It will not be a linear response. IUCN Gobal Marine and Polar Programme. Explaining Ocean Warming:Causes, scale, effects and consequences https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2016-046_0.pdf 7. Polar experts have repeatedly been taken by surprise since the year 2000 by the melt in Greenland, West Antarctica and now in some vulnerable glaciers in East Antarctica. Nearly all the non polar glaciers are retreating fast, many are past the point of no return. Thresholds and Closing Windows: Risks of Irreversible Cryosphere climate Change http://iccinet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/ICCI_thresholds_v6b_151203_high_res.pdf 8. +2C is not an assured safe zone for a climate system that is compatible with the habitable zones, food production on land and in the oceans, and the necessary stable climatic conditions that have made modern civilisation possible. Assessing ‘‘Dangerous Climate Change’’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People,Future Generations and Nature http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0081648&representation=PDF 9. The further we transition global warming beyond where it is today, the more likely it is that wars and revolution will take hold on every continent. 10. New global leaders must emerge who prioritise managing this isolated rock in space for the good of humanity, rapidly cutting carbon emissions, to stop further damage to the biosphere and to return it to stability, before it is too late to prevent a global tragedy for the human race.

Curious to know why you would want to sign out each time. I find it a joy that the system lets me remain always signed in, so I don't have to go through the minor torture of re-signing in each time I visit.

"There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago." Oppenheimer

Just about. Actually together 8 years when I started hiring behind his back. Then together another 7 years that ought not to have been.

Happy to share hard-earned wisdom. I learned it by staying with my bf/husband for seven years too long.

When you discover that somebody is a douche, walk away from them and don't look back. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in life is to think that you can change who somebody else is. It never works.

You might browse backpage for guys who advertise as straight, and contact them to see if they swing.

A very repressed town despite its social liberalism. Never mind straight guys -- even among the many gay guys in the vast local college population, hardly any are for sale. OTOH I have picked up the occasional guy who is living a straight life (married with a kid etc.) but is out on the town for a queer night out. These can sporadically be found at such places as Paradise in Cambridge, the Eagle and the Ramrod downtown. (For a pickup-of-last-resort-at-closing-time, the Eagle never fails. Gay not straight guys, but who's picky at 2am? )

When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards. Maxwell in his day got his equations, but only in an enormous mass of 'gear wheels' and so forth. Richard Feynman, "The Reason for Antiparticles"

And SEE! Nicole Kidman says of Kubrick exactly the same words that one Dororthy Robbins (Google her up, you ruffians :

Interview with Tom Cruise on the experience of working with Kubrick, on 'Eyes Wide Shut': What is astounding is the (unintentional) self-revelation by Cruise throughout this, of how very intelligent and psychologically astute he (I mean Cruise) genuinely is. Not just some grotesque display of his repressed real sexual orientation etc etc. Which he has gone to the nuclear option of joining Scientology to try to extinguish. But also how he clearly does know that, uses it (not necessarily in a way my smarty-ass psychoanalyzed point of view would be supposed to be able to articulate), but to real effect to bring many characters, effectively, to life on screen.