garth hallberg.com & weird-weather.com

Two years ago, on the morning after the election, I wrote to you acknowledging our disappointment, even despair, but cautioning against a rush to judgment about our new President. My hope was he might step up to the responsibilities and gravity of the office. Those hopes were quickly dashed.

But I also reminded you that our democratic system is stronger than any one man or woman, and if Trump proved incapable, we would exercise our Constitutional rights and find a new leader

I know you are disappointed once again, but don't be. I believe that Constitutional process began yesterday. In fact, I'm willing to go on the record with a prediction: other than a possible Supreme Court vacancy, yesterday was Trump's last political hurrah.

The political rock stars on whom so many Democrats were pinning their hopes—Gillum in Florida, O'Rourke in Texas, Abrams in Georgia— went down to a narrow defeat. Trump gets the credit for energizing the worst instincts  Read More 

VOTE YOUR VALUES

VOTE YOUR CONSCIENCE

JUST VOTE!

It seems like years, not weeks, since the nation was transfixed by the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. So many other horrible news cycles have come and gone since then, with the only constant our President’s deep desire to divide the nation even more deeply to further the election of members of his adopted Republican party, and to solidify his base for the 2020 race, Mueller permitting.

But an article in today’s New York Times about the Homecoming football game at Georgetown Prep, headlined “Kavanaugh is Hailed as a Hero,” made me want to unilaterally declare an end to any cooling off period and examine our new Justice’s positions on a critical issue that America is facing today, Read More 

For anyone who remains unconvinced about climate change after seeing the horrific destruction in the Florida panhandle levied by Michael, the most powerful hurricane ever to hit the US mainland, or the ominous new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describing a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires as soon as 2040, there’s always the threat of our old friend, “Jaws.”

A few weeks ago, a 26-year-old boogie boarder was killed by a shark in the first fatal attack in Cape Cod in 80 years (Spielberg took some liberties with the truth in “Jaws” the movie, released in 1975) and  Read More 

“There’s nobody with a squeaky clean past like Brett Kavanaugh,” Mr. Trump told reporters Saturday night in Topeka, Kansas, as he dismissed allegations of sexual assault and misconduct by his new Supreme Court justice.

Ironically, Trump’s customary mangling of the English language led him into accidentally uttering a rare truth. Based on the reports in the media these past few weeks, there is no one indeed, with a squeaky clean past who would even think about behaving anything like what the country heard about Justice Kavanaugh’s behavior back at Georgetown Prep and Yale.

Whether or not Kavanaugh was actually guilty of sexually assaulting Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, there was more than enough reliable testimony from people who knew him at the time to indicate that he was often in an inebriated state  Read More 

Atlas, Boston Dynamic’s 165-pound robot and YouTube sensation, can run, jump, and even do backflips, and is rarin’ to go to work. But who wants to hire him?

Atlas is a classic case of technology outstripping utility. He’s designed to mimic a human being’s movements, but not to do anything useful that a human might do.

One of Atlas’s UnHuman Resource issues is that he’s not a self-starter. He needs a very-human handler to control him with a laptop, a joystick, and a wireless radio. He’s also clumsy, according to the New York Times. In a recent demonstration he stumbled to the floor several times and crashed headlong into a pylon. But given how quickly robotic technology is advancing, his deficiencies are unlikely to be anything other than growing pains. I wouldn’t be surprised if, like many humans seeking to enter the work force for the first time and lacking a saleable skill set, he ends up in the military.

The immediate future in robotics appears to be highly specialized, single-task applications. Flippy, Miso Robotic’s hamburger-making robot,  Read More 

Are hurricanes stronger and more frequent because of climate change?

That seems like the pertinent question after watching now-Tropical Depression Florence slow walk over the Carolinas, bringing record storm surges, rainfall, and river flooding. The answer is an unambiguous Yes according to the New York Times, which has put a dedicated team of expert reporters on the climate change desk.

The data is indisputable. So is the physics. The planet is warming dramatically. Increased water temperatures create more favorable conditions for hurricanes,  Read More 

A “Potemkin village” is an impressive façade or display built solely to deceive people into thinking a situation is better than it really is. We owe the term to Grigory Potemkin, the Russian governor of Crimea in 1787, who supposedly constructed fake villages along the route the Empress Catherine II was to travel, to  Read More 

Although it may not always seem that way to cable new viewers, Stormy Daniels isn’t the only meteorological phenomenon that the media is covering. There’s been a noticeable uptick in stories about climate change, thanks to the thirty-year anniversary of then-NASA scientist James Hansen’s testimony before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. It was that hearing that first brought the concepts of greenhouse gases and global warming to the public’s attention.

Thirty years after Hansen’s seminal testimony, our president has declared climate change fake news, Congress is still dithering, and the news media are doing their best to confuse the issue. Read More 

That’s a riff on the killer question asked by most politicians. And if you believe what you read in the papers or your alternate go-to news source, your answer should be a resounding YES!

It’s difficult to find a dissenting voice about the strength of the US economy in the media. Take the unemployment rate, for example. The customarily sober-minded New York Times went so far as to headline their story about the eighteen-year low of 3.8% in the May report, “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are.” The lead states,  Read More