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The Life Slant

Too Much Forged in Fire

The Life Slant by

You might be watching too much Forged in Fire if:

  • Your kids are making a fortune selling snow cones, as there is a constant supply of chopped ice.
  • You can’t watch TV because the satellite dish is in the back yard filled with coal.
  • You walk into the kitchen to see why Sunday dinner is late, to find a $35 roast beef hanging from the ceiling, your wife wielding a knife in each hand, watching a youtube clip of Doug Marcaida.
  • The beater car in your neighbor’s backyard seems to be walking away piece by piece – first the leaf springs, then the axle …

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Burning Masterpieces for Heat - Trees

Trees: Nature’s Masterpiece Burned For Heat

The Life Slant by

*Would you dispassionately stand by and watch if every priceless Renaissance work of art in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, or Paris’s The Louvre, or 20th century masterpieces held in New York’s The Museum of Modern Art were burned for heat, one by one?

Ladies and gentlemen, our remaining ancient forests are indeed the equivalent to what the great master’s painted. They are Nature’s finest invaluable living, breathing masterpieces on our planet!

Trees - General Sherman Redwood
Each year, the largest tree on the globe, a sequoia named General Sherman, adds the comparable wood of one tree 1.5 feet (ft) wide by 65 ft high. Photo credit: Reese Halter

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Hot as Hell - Boy in Water

Hot As Hell, Everywhere

The Life Slant by

*12 footballs fields a minute are incinerating in California’s latest wildfires,  adding to the 104 football fields furiously felled every minute, 24/7/365, on our ailing overheated planet.

When heat and drought collide firestorms erupt across the western United States and elsewhere on the globe. The higher the mercury soars, the quicker the fine fuels in the forest become tinder-dry kindling, especially amidst a drought.

Hot as Hell - Map
Photo Credit: Weather Channel

113 million Americans are blanketed by a massive heat dome. It stretches from the Mississippi Valley up to Philadelphia, Chicago and arches over to New York City, Boston, Baltimore and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Temperatures are soaring into triple digits, 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (F) above normal.
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Dead Fish - Photo credit: Warren Carlton

Republicans Ransacking Nature

The Life Slant/The Political Slant by

*Last week, along the southern border of America, refugees were separated and children were caged. Shock and outrage ricocheted around the world. Under the cover of chaos the Republicans pushed through two atrocious assaults on our mother, Nature.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order, which washed away President Barack Obama’s emphasis on ocean conservation and a plan to mitigate the climate in crisis.

Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Obama, Dr Jane Lubchenco said, “The policy reflects a shift from ‘use it without using it up’ to a very short-sighted and cavalier ‘use it aggressively and irresponsibly’.”

Trump’s policy increases slaughtering the ocean and it greenlights more subsidized fossil fuel seismic surveys. It’s in keeping with his election promise to unlock $50 trillion of U.S. oil and gas.

In so doing, Trump is impoverishing all sea life by increasing ocean acidity and decreasing ocean oxygen.

Dissolved Shells - Article: Ransacking Nature
53 percent of free-swimming snails sampled off the west coast of the U.S. had severely dissolved shells. Photo credit: NOAA

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Separation of Church and State

Religion & the Tacet Underground

The Life Slant by

*What if He didn’t exist? At all. What if long ago, visiting ETs decided that the easiest way to keep these creatures (us) complacent was to chisel out some stony rules and promise a heaven and a hell, much like a kindergarten teacher promises stickers for good behavior and time out for bad behavior? Sure – it’s crazy. But just for a minute, what if?

What if the bible is not the ‘word of God’ as it is so flippantly called while held up and venerated? What if you discover that it is a collection of stories jotted down by the fallible and earthly predecessors of Aesop and the Brothers Grimm, later bastardized and edited and tilted to meet the selfish needs of a corrupt church hierarchy?

What if you woke up tomorrow and none of it made sense anymore? Keep Reading

Orcas at sunrise

Another Dead Wolf of the Sea

The Life Slant by

*Over the weekend, Friday Harbor-based, Center for Whale Research, reported a missing Southern Resident orca, L92, presumed to be dead. That brings the critically endangered Southern Resident Salish Sea population down to 75, the lowest since 1984. It’s yet another man-made fiasco.

Allow me to remind you that we are amidst the human-driven Sixth Mass Extinction. It’s accelerating 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the five other mass extinctions. This looting of Nature has collided with the horrendous man-made persistent organic pollutants and 300 zettajoules of fossil fuel ocean heat driving the climate crisis.

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Job Candidates - Applicants

An Imperfect Preference for Perfect Postulants

The Life Slant/The Money Slant by

*I recently read on a website a hiring manager who discarded the application of any applicant who had less than a 3.0 grade point average (GPA). This manager was quite proud of this fact. So let’s take a look at some of the critical qualifications of hiring and compare some of the good points and bad points. Included are some other characteristics that might on the surface demonstrate great qualities, but there might be some other considerations.

This reminds me of a person that I spoke with once who had a particular motorcycle that had a great reputation as a race bike. The person who had owned this motorcycle said that it was a great bike, but if you weren’t a very experienced rider, it was a nightmare, because it only performed well at very high speeds, and if you weren’t capable of holding the throttle wide open and slamming it around, it would torture you. The bike was essentially a production model of the bike that had won the world championship the year before. If you were world champion class rider, it was good for you; if you weren’t a world champion rider, it would punish you.

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Silk Road to Hell

Silk Road to Hell

The Life Slant by

*Despite our planetary climate emergency, the first and third largest economies on the globe are moving at the speed of light to extract and burn all available fossil fuels. The consequences are hideous.

China’s One Belt One Road, a 21st century Silk Road, is linking 71 countries with rapid rail-lines and new supertanker ports. China is spending $1 trillion on its infrastructure to add an additional $2.5 trillion to its 11 trillion GDP thereby narrowing the gap on the European Union, the second largest economy.

This plan requires mega zettajoules of fossil fuel energy. It’s an expansion of the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent, with 1,600 new coal power stations in 62 countries. Keep Reading

Go Vegan

Veganism Saves the World

The Life Slant by

*Go Vegan and Save the World

This week was particularly challenging. A number of separate reports are stark wake-up calls on the acceleration of the climate crisis and its collision with the hideous Sixth Mass Extinction. 

My colleagues proposed that we add a Category 6, or, sustained winds above 190 miles per hour, to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Increased combustion of subsidized fossil fuels is adding mega zettajoules of heat into the oceans. This heat is driving Nature’s fiercest storms, hurricanes and cyclones, to greater intensities. It is also slowing them down by 10 percent, causing more destruction.

On October 23, 2015, Hurricane Patricia had maximum wind gusts of 215 mph, making it a Category 6 in the proposed updated system. Credit: NASA

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R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Professors & Teachers

The Life Slant by

Professor.  Just the word elicits respect, and respect is something we don’t have or show a lot of in 2018 America.  We call physicians ‘doc’, coaches, bosses, aunts and uncles by their first names, and almost everyone else ‘dude’ …  except for politicians and lawyers.  But even the most confident of us wants to impress when dining or conversing with a professor.

Teacher doesn’t have the same shine, does it?

Teachers seem more human, more approachable, and generally speaking are not shown the type of respect college professors enjoy.

Why?
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