kenneal - lagger wrote:From my memory we have had our first "White Christmas" in the south of England in my 66 years in recent years; we have had more cold winters in quick succession in recent years; we have had milder winters recently and plants that usually don't flower until well after Christmas are in flower well before Christmas on a fairly regular basis; we have had more rain and longer droughts in recent years; we have had once in 100 year floods every ten years or less; in general in the UK our weather has got more extreme in recent years than in the past.
Our weather is getting much more extreme as it is in much of Europe. Your part of the world must be sheltered if you're not suffering the same changes.
We are quibbling over the word "More"! My contention is that the weather here in Vermont has "Always" been extremely variable and it will take quite a lot before one can say we are getting "More extreme".
My grandfather hitched up his team and plowed ground during one January thaw just so he could say he had done it. That would have been sometime around 1900. In 1938 a hurricane ripped the roof off my father's house. Knocked over the silo on the end of the barn and blew flat ten acres of mature maple sugar bush. The '27 flood wiped out half the bridges in Vermont. There was the year without a summer where it snowed in every month of the year called 1800 and froze to death.
On any given April first I can expect to have bare ground unless there is three feet of snow still on it.
I remember watching the first flakes of snow falling through the glow of the street light outside our house on that Boxing Day evening. And I can remember the remains of the huge snow ball that we made and hollowed out to sit inside still being there in April '63. But the first white Christmas was three years ago.
Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling trolled Republican voters by asking them if they would support bombing the city of Agrabah — the fairy-tale setting of Disney’s “Aladdin” — and 30 percent said they would.
In a tweet, PPP said it asked the same question of Democratic primary voters and found 19 percent support bombing Agrabah.
It won't be a Muslim (or mexican, black, hispanic etc) main terrorist threat the USA will face in the future. It'll be from bullies like these guys. Poor America. Poor doomed, psycopathy-riddled, brainwashed America.
When contemplating the American mindset you should consider today's American football game in Minnesota. Out door stadium with a temperature of -3 Degrees F. that only warmed up to -1 by the end of the game. You'd think that people would have stayed home and watched it on their wide screen TVs but for 60,000 odd people the game was the thing and they came and stayed for the whole show. Fans were sporting icicles on their beards , sitting on Styrofoam pads and covering up with blankets and sipping lots of free coffee but they all seemed to be having a good time.
Ticket prices were lower by about half but that is to be expected.
How are you going to get ahead of people that are that stubborn?
The CO₂+ footprint of sporting events must be huge.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
Now there is a person that really fits the title to this thread.
When contemplating the American mindset you should consider today's American football game in Minnesota. Out door stadium with a temperature of -3 Degrees F. that only warmed up to -1 by the end of the game. You'd think that people would have stayed home and watched it on their wide screen TVs but for 60,000 odd people the game was the thing and they came and stayed for the whole show. Fans were sporting icicles on their beards , sitting on Styrofoam pads and covering up with blankets and sipping lots of free coffee but they all seemed to be having a good time. 
