Conflicts

Golf.com, that great bastion promoting communism and world-renowned for attacking the American Way Of Life, has another nifty article criticizing our president.

"Yet another unseemly conflict of interest that would result in a benefit to Trump properties [...]"

Really.

A golf magazine highlighting politics.

I don't see it as a bad reflection on the magazine, rather a reflection of what a train wreck his administration has become.

Apologies

Anything that contains the word "if" is not an apology.

Here's an example from a Golf.com article (emphasis mine):

Bernhard Langer said President Donald Trump called him last week and apologized for involving him in a bizarre story used to bolster his unverified claims of widespread voter fraud.
“We talked on the phone, and he was very clear ... if there was anything that hurt me, he apologized," Langer told reporters at the Allianz Championship on Thursday.

That's not an apology.

Apologies are not conditional.

You are either sorry you did something or you're not.

You are not sorry if you offended someone.

You're not sorry that someone took offense.

You're sorry you did something that offended someone.

See the difference?

Apologies are about you taking responsibility for your actions.

Who Am I

Like my profile says, I'm a middle aged, middle class, white guy in middle America. I'm pretty much average in every way.

I'm fiercely independent politically and have never been a member of any political party.

Since coming of age as a voter, I've voted for Republicans, Democrats, and candidates from other parties.

As an analytical person, I study the data first and make decisions based on that data. I don't start from a policy stance and look for data that confirms it.

Natural Cycles

I was chatting with some friends over the weekend.  They said they don't believe in climate change because there have always been warm periods and cold periods.

Yes, there have been two periods over the past 60 million years where the world warmed by 4-6 degrees.  Those naturally occurring warming trends happened over thousands of years.

And here's what's different this time.

The the warm period we're currently experiencing is happening over a scale of a couple hundred years.  We've already gained nearly 2 degrees in the past 100 years and the warming trend is accelerating.

There aren't any naturally occurring phenomena that explain the drastically different and much faster rate of change. There are cool visuals that demonstrate the point at Bloomberg Interactive.

Real data doesn't lie.

There isn't any scientific controversy; 97 out of 100 climatologists agree that global warming is happening and that it is caused by human factors.

But it's OK if you don't agree.  Every time there's been a rapid dramatic change in the earth's climate, the dominant life form has been wiped out.

It's been nice knowing you...