The Flying Horse

[usamommajoy]

Hello Peg yes this be a nice Oasis especially in times such as when some cannot seem to simply ignore the silly goofy fool such as ..."they who shall remain unnamed"
And today was sunny but only got to 61 degrees and supposed to get cold (although not nearly as cold as your part of the world).
Our forecast through this weekend:
High Surf Advisory
Special Weather Statement
Hazardous Weather Outlook

Tonight: Showers likely and possibly a thunderstorm after 10pm. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 51. Calm wind becoming southeast around 5 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%.

Friday: Showers likely and possibly a thunderstorm before 10am, then a chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 62. Southeast wind 5 to 10 mph becoming southwest. Chance of precipitation is 70%.

Friday Night: A 30 percent chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 54. South wind around 5 mph.

Saturday: A 40 percent chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 60. South wind around 10 mph.

Saturday Night: Rain likely. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 54. South wind around 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%.

Sunday: A 30 percent chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 61.

Sunday Night: A 20 percent chance of rain. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 52.
I must admit, I am spoiled! Anything above 75 and I feel hot and anything below 65 I feel cold!

[flyinghorse]

good morning my friends from Tuxy and me.

Today it's cloudy (16F) with a high of 25F and 80% chance of snow showers and winds 20-30 mph gusting to 40 mph. So far all we have had is wind. The snow passed north of us. Tonight is calling for cloudy and windy with a chance of a few snow flurries. Low 19F.

Today in history: In 1792, France's King Louis XVI went before the Convention to face charges of treasons; 1816: Indiana became the 19th state; 1936, Britain's King Edward VIII abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson; 1941: Germany and Italy declared war on the US and we responded in kind; 1946: the UNICEF was established

Happy Eco-Hanukkah!! Two Yeshiva students have created a wind-powered Menorah that will light up their Washington Heights campus in New York City. They took advantage of the windy conditions on Amsterdam Ave to build a turbine that captures the wind's energy and charges a battery connected to the lights on the menorah. And with a flick of the switch on today at sundown, their celebration will begin. Excellently done Fafi Holzer and Mark Stauber.

European Union leaders agreed to commit $3.6 billion a year until 2012 to help poorer countries combat global warming, seeking to rescue their image as climate change innovators and bolster the talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. All 27 members of the EU agreed to commit to a short-term fund. Many cash-strapped eastern EU states were thought to be only giving a token to reach an unanimous agreement. No matter, I still applaud the effort. Now if the US, China, India and Japan would add their fair share, maybe we could really get something done in making a dent in the carbon dioxide problem.

Will it never stop? Pope Benedict shares the "outrage, betrayal and shame" felt by the Irish people over a government report that said Church leaders covered up widespread sexual abuse of children for 30 years. In November, the Murphy Commission report said the Church had obsessively hidden the handling of child abuse reports from 1975 to 2004. The report said the Church was "obsessively" concerned with secrecy and operated a policy of "don't ask, don't tell" about abuse. Does this sound familiar? Seems like just a few years ago we were watching the same thing unfold in Boston and other parts of the US. Right about now if I lived in a predominantly Catholic country, such as France, Poland, South America, I'd be looking at my parish priest with speculation. Who knows? Is he next? And if I were a Catholic priest who was an abuser, I'd be afraid, very, very afraid.

November retail sales rise more than expected, boosting hopes that the all-important consumer sector will support the fragile recovery. Excluding autos, retail sales rose 1.2%, triple the o.4% economists expected. Now if the holiday sales will just follow suit. I hate to get hopes up only to fall again. So I'll try to be cautiously optimistic.

Now for my caffeine fix coffee and I hope you all have a mah-velous Friday.

[flyinghorse]

[flyinghorse]

Today it's fair (23F) with a high of 31F and partly cloudy. A nice calm day, chilly but no snow, no strong winds. I could use a little more warmth, but I guess I can't really complain (much).

Today in history: In 1787 Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the US Constitution; 1870: Joseph Rainey of South Carolina became the first black sworn into the US House of Representatives; 1897: The Katzenjammer Kids, pioneering comic strip by Rudolph Dirks, made its debut in the New York Journal; 1963: Kenya gained its independence from Britain.

Pres. Obama has singled out financial institutions for causing much of the economic tailspin and criticized their opposition to tighter federal oversight. He reiterated the fact that Wall Street institutions that gambled on risky loans and complex financial products in pursuit of short-term profits and big bonuses showed little regard for long-term consequences. He applauded the passage of a financial oversight bill and urged swift passage in the Senate. It's about time. If the government doesn't put curbs on the greed of the Wall Street banks, who will?

The GOP is at it again. This time their opposition is to US participation in an international agreement on climate change. They claim it would result in soaring energy prices and damage America's economic competitiveness. Supporters of the mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions argue that legislation can be crafted to mitigate many of the additional costs through increases in energy efficiency and other means. US industry has been dragging its feet, kicking and screaming for years over this. It's time to stop and do what is right for the planet. And that's curbing greenhouse. Instead of fighting it, embrace it and become a leader in the world in producing means to implement the restrictions and/or elimination of greenhouse gases. The US economic growth won't come from doing the same things over and over. Our economic health comes from finding new ways of doing things.

The Associated Press has made an exhaustive study of the e-mails stolen from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that show they stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data--but the messages don't support claims that the science of global warming was faked. The 1,073 e-mails examined don't undercut the vast body of evidence showing the world is warming because of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists can be as irascible and paranoid as any other people but that doesn't mean that their research is faulty. And how can people dispute global warming with the shrinkage of the ice caps and loss of habitat of polar bears? That is something tangible that is happening. We need to do whatever we can to minimize the warming not help it.

[flyinghorse]

[flyinghorse]

8-)Today it's rainy and 32F with winds out of the south @ 16 mph, in other words, cold, wet and windy just what I dislike about this time of year. And the weather map looks like it can't make up its mind between rain and snow with a little sleet thrown in for more misery. I guess I can be thankful that it's not freezing.<sigh>

:DToday in history: In 1642 Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sighted today's New Zealand; 1769: in Hanover, NH, Dartmouth College received its charter; 1918: Pres. Woodrow Wilson became the first sitting president to visit Europe when he arrived in France for the peace talks; 1981: authorities in Poland imposed martial law in a crackdown on Solidarity; 2003: Saddam Hussein was captured by US forces hiding in a hole at a farmhouse near his hometown of Tikrit

:)You have to admired the Iranian protestors. They keep at it knowing they risk prison. Today police have surrounded the campus of Tehran University trapping hundreds of students protesting what they said were fabricated government images showing the burning of a photo of the revered founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (an illegal insult). The students contend that the photo was fabricated by government agents and are being used to justify further crackdowns. No, really? I wish there was some way to help them, but there isn't. All the world can do is watch and and admire their courage.

;D Houston becomes the biggest US city to elect an openly gay woman mayor, City Controller Annise Parker, after a hotly contested runoff. She has never made a secret or an issue of her sexual orientation, but it became the focus after anti-gay activists and conservative religious groups endorsed her opponent and sent out mailers condemning her "homosexual behavior." To be fair, city attorney Gene Locke tried to distance himself from the anti-gay attacks. But Houston voters had the last say and they now have an openly gay mayor. Congratulations for ignoring such a totally irrelevant issue that has no bearing on a person's fitness for political office.

>:(If there's a silver lining in the continued popularity of non-scientific healing techniques, it's the fact that the scientific community is at long last putting these so-called treatments and potions through vigorous testing. And one by one they fail to live up to their purported benefits. The big bad mainstream medicine comes out ahead on all counts. Consider how HIV/AIDS has transitioned from a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease in about a decade, with a cure on the horizon. Advances in treatment did not involve understanding its qi or lack thereof or vibrational energy or the imbalance it causes in some holistic manner. It HAS entailed isolating the cause (a retrovirus) and then building on previous knowledge of DNA, RNA, enzymes, transcription and the inner workings of the cell (all Nobel prize-winning efforts) to create antiretroviral treatments that use nucleoside analogue and non-nucleoside reverse thanscriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitors. Does this sound complicated? Sure, because it is. People go to school for a long time to learn how this all works. And the medicine does have nasty side effects. But one thing is for certain, it works better than a foot massage.

[flyinghorse]

:Dgood afternoon from Tuxy and me.

8-)Today it's cloudy and 38F (feels like 33F) with mild wind. Tonight we are supposed to get rain tapering off to drizzle by midnight, low of 34F. A mild mid-month December but unfortunately not supposed to last--cold front approaching. Brrrrrrr!!

;DToday in history: 1799: George Washington died at his Mount Vernon home at age 67; 1819 Alabama joined the Union as the 22nd state; 1861: Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, died in London; 1911: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and team became the first to reach the South Pole; 1975: six South Moluccan extremists surrendered after holding 23 hostages for 12 days on a train near the Dutch town of Beilen; 1995: presidents Izetbegovic of Bosnia, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Tudjman of Croatia signed the Bosnian peace treaty in Paris; 1999 Charles Schulz announced he was retiring the Peanuts comic strip.

:-/The European Union says China, India and other developing nations have stopped their boycott of climate change negotiations at Copenhagen and have found a solution to their dispute with rich nations. Their demand that rich countries offer much deeper cuts in greenhouse emissions had brought a halt to the conference, delaying negotiators trying to resolve technical issues before the arrival of more than 110 world leaders. First--China and India are developing, i.e. "poor" nations? Really? China who is the holder of our nation's national debt, poor? India who has been stripping us of many of our tech jobs and 1000s of years older that we, developing nation? And both are major polluting nations. Second--if this is an example of what is going on at their "climate" conference, no wonder there are protestors in the streets. What a farce!

More Climate Change News--'Monster' island-sized iceberg is shedding hundreds of offshoots and breaking up as it drifts closer to Australia. It is now about twice the size of Manhattan but still formidable with more smaller bergs covering an area of 1000+ kilometres of ocean. A shipping alert has been issued over the possible hazard from icebergs. It is supposedly thinning from the bottom (under the water) up, facilitating the breakup. It calved from the eastern end of the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica 10 years ago An example why a serious conference on climate change is needed, ending in a sincere agreement by all the world's nations. But frankly, I don't hold out much hope. I think it is going to take a major catastrophe, like the disappearance of the Maldives, to galvanize the world into taking any kind of concrete action.

>:(An Associated Press review has found that tens of thousands of DNA samples are missing from state databanks because they were never taken or were lost. The missing evidence--combined with big backlogs at the nation's crime labs that result in samples sitting on shelves for years without being analyzed--prevents the solution to untold numbers of cases and some have tragic consequences. Such as the 20-year killing spree in Milwaukee by Walter Ellis. He left his DNA behind everywhere but the one place where it might have saved a life. When in prison in the early part of this decade, he had another inmate pose as him to give a DNA sample. So when analysts tried to identify DNA in bodily fluids of one of his slayings, no match turned up. In other words, all those CSI shows? Fantasyland. Sounds like the forensic labs need cold case file lab technicians. What I wonder is--will sometime some DNA that is finally tested after many years will prove that some guy electrocuted 10 years ago was actually innocent? But will anyone really care?

:(Sorry for the down mood today. I look out my window and the sky is gray, the trees are bare, there is no natural color except shades of gray and brown anywhere in sight. It's depressing. I hope you all have a better Monday than mine is turning out to be.

[flyinghorse]

[flyinghorse]

:)good morning everyone from Tuxy and me.

Today it's supposed to be cloudy and 44F (feels like 39F) with possible rain and/or snow showers becoming snow in the afternoon. It's only going as high as 38F (which isn't bad for mid-December).

Today in history: in 1791, the Bill of Rights went into effect after ratification by Virginia; 1890: Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and 11 others were killed in a confrontation with Indian police in Grand River, South Dakota; 1939: Gone With the Wind had its world premiere in Atlanta, Georgia; 1961: former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death by an Israeli court.

:o20,000 are evacuated as Philippine's most active volcano oozes lava and shot plumes of ash. They will be spending a bleak Christmas in an evacuation center. Once again nature proves that it is still the master of our planet and when it speaks, we'd better listen.

:DThe US government will acquire an underutilized rural Illinois state prison to be the new home for a limited number of terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo. The facility would house federal inmates and no more than 100 detainees from Guantanamo Bay. Pres. Obama has said he wants terrorism suspects transferred to American soil so they can be tried for their suspected crimes in US courts. So far so good. And I'm sure that the people in the area of the Thomson Correctional Center are happy with the prospect of employment in this current economy. I'd say that it is a win-win situation for all.

:-/Pres. Obama is pushing Congress to pass incentives for homeowners who retrofit their homes to make them more energy-efficient. He claims that this will create jobs and save families money on their energy bills. Last week he proposed a plan that would provide tax breaks for the retrofits. His plan also calls for small business tax cuts and new spending on highway and bridge construction, but it could cost more than $150 billion. Now if we weren't fighting two wars, that cost wouldn't hurt. I'm conflicted--the idea of government help in retrofitting the nation's homes to be more energy efficient is great. Rebuilding the nation's highways--great. But can we afford it when we are laying out so many billions in Iraq and Afghanistan? Can we afford no to? I'm not used to sitting on a fence and I find it most uncomfortable.

8-)Thought for Today:
"Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills."
— Minna Antrim, American writer (1856-1950).

[flyinghorse]

[flyinghorse]

:)good afternoon fellow refugees from Tuxy and me.

Today it's cloudy and 23ºF (feels like 16ºF). The sun is trying really hard to break through. We had a couple of inches of snow overnight and my car is covered, which means I'm stuck inside. <sigh>. And the forecast is for more snow showers (90% chance) with a high of 26F.

Today in history: In 1653 Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland; 1770; Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany; 1773: the Boston Tea Party took place as American colonists dumped more than 300 chests of tea overboard to protest taxes; 1907: 16 US Navy battleships, the "Great White Fleet," set sail on a 14-month round-the-world trip to show America's sea power; 1944: the WW II Battle of the Bulge began as German forces launched a surprise attack in Belgium; 2004: Britain's highest court deal a huge blow to the government's anti-terrorism policy by ruling that it could not detain foreign suspects indefinitely without trial.

>:(Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dead stated that the health care overhaul bill taking shape in the Senate further empowers private insurers at the expense of consumer choice. He asserted that the Senates health care bill would not prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and it would allow the industry to charge older people far more than others for premiums. "This is an insurance company's dream," said Dean. "You will be forced to buy insurance. If you don't, you'll pay a fine. It's an insurance company bailout." Is anyone surprised at this? Once again the middle class, seniors and poor are going to get the shaft.

:oPolice battled demonstrators outside the UN climate summit as leaders of developing nations (that include China and India) ripped the wealthier nations and exposing the obstacles facing a deal to tame global warming and the dangers from rising oceans, droughts, plagues and storms. I wonder why these demonstrators think that resorting to violence will gain them anything but negativity toward their cause. They are just contributing to an atmosphere of negativity toward their cause. Haven't any of these people heard the old phrase about getting more things with honey than vinegar?

:(A raid on an exotic animal delivery company in Texas found 1000s starving snakes, reptiles packed in sipping crates and rodents that had killed and eaten each other. The US Global Exotics advertises that it delivers worldwide but its warehouse held mostly reptiles, rodents, spiders, sloths and hedgehogs. A hearing will be held within 10 days to determine if the animals will be returned to the company or stay in the care of animal welfare groups. OK, PETA where are you? Aren't reptiles worth your efforts? Won't give you the publicity that is one of your main goals?

[flyinghorse]

Today is Beethoven Day

[flyinghorse]

[flyinghorse]

I love this Santa!!

[flyinghorse]

This year Santa is also imported from China.