I lived in Cape Canaveral during the shuttle years and saw all but 5 launches in person. My two other sisters and I happened to be in Augusta, GA visiting my third sister that day. As we were getting ready to leave, I remembered the launch was just minutes away and decided to watch it on TV before we left.

When it exploded, I didn't understand at first that the shuttle exploded. My first thought was that it sure looked different on TV. Then it sunk in what was really happening. I couldn't believe what was happening.

It was time to leave and go back home. We got into the car and I drove for about 10 minutes thinking about what I just saw. Then it hit me. I had to pull over and cried until I was able to proceed.

Seven months later, people were finding small pieces of debris washing up on the shores of Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach.

______________________________________

Live Port Canaveral Cam

https://www.portcanaveralwebcam.com/

They went round the wrong way? Jeebus, Chile is a huge leeward shore to avoid... That bit about having to then fight the current to go 200 miles further west before you can turn north so that you have enough sea room not to get smashed onto the rocks of the Chilean coast when the weather turns rough... We had engines at least as a backup, but just in case of emergency. Plus we had weather radar and modern forecasts so we could plan a route to avoid the worst of what was to come. Respect.

I especially loved the part about how sailors on the upper yards like the royals or the masthead being "as close to heaven as a sailor ever gets".

Let me guess, another from the college level advanced creative writing class for seniors in high school being presented by her as a normal everyday class book (and hinting it’s in 4th grade classes).

If you’re upset a senior in high school might be voluntarily exposed to this material in his college prep class, you need to move into the Westboro Baptist Church compound and hate sex and freedom along with them, leave the public out of your puritanical shariah insanity.

You get worse language on prime time broadcast tv, WAY worse on say, Howard Stern, or Jersey Shore…this is maybe pg 13+ content, not xxx….and guaranteed not required reading. Get a grip.

Yes.

All alone or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall
Some hand in hand
And some gather together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists
Make their stand

------------------------------------

Walked out this morning
Don't believe what I saw
Hundred billion bottles
Washed up on the shore
Seems I'm not alone at being alone
Hundred billion castaways
Looking for a home

------------------------------------

If you could swap places with just one of those that are suffering loss, would you?

this is a fine example of what a year locked up does to a body.

sure. willing to listen to the p o s s i b i l i t y of corona being manufactured, but have some hard evidence. please. in a country billions +, origins of swine, bird, and ABC123 lettered viruses - it's not unreasonable to expect a lab to be located in a region where the pandemic started.

as it is, not versed in immunology (nor psychology or 'why are the following me') so rely on those who know (and don't have stock in Alcoa). that and the experiences of a lifetime being ginned up preparing for the next life-altering bug.

herpes, aids, penicillin-resistant gonorrhea/syphilis/chlamydia/TB, cjd, zika, lyme, west nile, ebola or the plethora of viruses, of eastern origins, that could become the next Spanish Flu.*

all those diseases have natural origins.

so, yeah. this pandemic wasn't a surprise. no more than Hurricane Katrina (why did they build that bridge over Lake Pontchartrain) or why the ere-orange administration left a 'play book' for Virus X.

it was foreseen, it happened, and could happen again. much more likely another flaming arrow from natures' quiver. (shivers given via a quiver?)

Occam's razor, in essence (should have led w/that).


* even new strains of hepatitis caused waves for a while and there was a bit of time, a virus in the NW USA was akin to airborne aids but disappear as quickly as it came and schistosomiasis has come closer to our shores - - - AND NOW -https://www.livescience.com/mystery-brain-disease-cluster-canada.html that hopefully isn't the precursor to zombie-itis.

Tides come in if you are on shore.

Tides come out if you are in the water away from the shore.

Hope that helps.

Depends on your definition of "need", and your definition of "stopping" climate change.

Because I'm convinced enough natural feedback loops are in effect that there's no chance at all of stopping further climate change, and only a slight chance of slowing the rate of change and only if humanity fundamentally changes first, I find the question flawed.

I find it odd that tidal energy (different from hydro) is never considered in these debates. It's simple, relatively cheap, easy to maintain, and best of all predictable and consistent. All you need is a shoreline with a relatively large tide swing, a small inlet, and a tidal flat.

At best, nuclear is a stop gap measure that trades one planetary poison for another.....largely because we aren't responsible with it....building on shores in earthquake zones for convenience, banning fuel recycling, having no long term waste plan and handling waste insanely (Japan, I'm looking at you and your plans to dump Fukushima irradiated water into the ocean)....It's far from "green" the way we do it.

I thought I addressed that. Travel was also open between states, and many countries with "free travel amongst nations" had no-travel/stay at home orders in place, unlike the U.S., and afaik, mandatory quarantine for all international travelers.

Again, because he eradicated the international Global Health Security and Biodefense unit, I can legitimately ascribe every single non Chinese death and most Chinese deaths to his actions directly. A pandemic on this level WAS foreseen after SARS, Ebola, and Swine Flu, it's why we created the GHSB. It's why we had a pandemic response plan that Trump completely ignored and actually denied it existed for months and months.

I also am going by facts. My facts say that at least four things Trump did against professional advice took us from prepared to minimise any pandemic to at worst a foreign epidemic to a place where months after pandemics start our leader denied any danger and made no moves to stop it.
1) Eradication of the GHSB, missed opportunity one to have zero US cases and avoid a pandemic completely.
2) Repeated early public denial of the danger while encouraging others to do the same and go about business as usual, missed opportunity two to have zero US cases, and a missed opportunity to minimize any spread if quarantining travelers (something else he failed miserably to even consider early on) failed.
3) Encouragement of those who trust him to ignore all mitigation efforts, don't mask, don't social distance, don't shut down non essential businesses, don't close schools, don't listen to medical professionals....missed opportunity number three to minimize US infections to thousands instead of hundreds of thousands. Remember the many months he said grandma would gladly die to get people back to work, pretending many months in that only feeble octogenarians get sick?
4) Denial of a prepared response plan, never following it and claiming total ignorance, missed opportunity number four to follow prepared plans based on science from day one, missing the opportunity to keep our infection rate at S Korean levels.

That's four well researched and vetted moronic, irrational, and irresponsible mistakes he personally made that multiplied our infection rate by 100- infinity times (if we could have had zero without his multiple massive and stupid mistakes, which is not just possible but likely, he can be said to have CAUSED every single US case, multiplying our infections by infinity.). There were more, but I'm beating a dead horse.
Remember, his real plan was natural herd immunity, with an expected 3-60 million deaths depending on who you asked.

I say if intelligent decisions could have avoided all US infections, and that's undeniable IMO, you can lay the blame for as high a percentage as you like on the leader who made bad dangerous decisions out of pure narcissistic ignorance and hatred of his predecessor...up to 100%. 80-90% still seems like I'm coddling him, at least two failures could have made cases zero, and others minimized it to under 10% of what we have. All four I listed almost certainly allowed >90% giving every doubt and giving him all possible credit....so yes, I'm satisfied I'm not exaggerating.

Obama's responsible and responsive planning and execution stopped Ebola from ever spreading here despite it making it to our shores, and it was FAR more contagious and deadly. Had we had Trump then doing the same things, there would be tens of millions dead and likely still spreading disease, imo.


Edit: let me try analogy...If a mayor removes the stop signs from 4 way highway intersections, they are responsible for every wreck that happens, even though other towns with stop signs still have wrecks at intersections. Trump pulled the signs, removed the flashing red light, and cut first responder funding, and claimed there never was a highway code to follow and he takes no responsibility for the jump in highway deaths.

OMFG...can you even fucking read?
From your article I found on my own.....

...the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.

The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.

Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program.

For Trump and his allies were running their own campaign to spoil the election. The President spent months insisting that mail ballots were a Democratic plot and the election would be “rigged.” His henchmen at the state level sought to block their use, while his lawyers brought dozens of spurious suits to make it more difficult to vote–an intensification of the GOP’s legacy of suppressive tactics. Before the election, Trump plotted to block a legitimate vote count. And he spent the months following Nov. 3 trying to steal the election he’d lost–with lawsuits and conspiracy theories, pressure on state and local officials, and finally summoning his army of supporters to the Jan. 6 rally that ended in deadly violence at the Capitol.

You call that defrauding America? You are absolutely totally bat shit crazy, it describes a bipartisan effort defending democracy from Trump's baseless partisan attacks on it, on voting, and on truth....claiming if he doesn't win, it's rigged, if he wins, it's perfect. No where did anyone even imply voting machines defrauded anyone, it clearly states the obvious opposite, that they not only didn't have any serious issues, but also a physical paper backup that, in multiple recounts, still matched the results the machines gave.

You are such a non stop and just dumb liar. No doubt it effects your family life horribly.

Oh fuck, Bobby...20 lies to debunk? You suck.

1) and how many lost?...tens of millions
2) citation needed, and even if true, there are many more unemployed too, there are more of us. What you neglect is that there are more trying to work because it’s impossible to live on one average income and even children have to work to pay the family bills
3) citation needed, and lost how many millions? The net has been a loss of manufacturing, most of his gains never materialized
4) for one quarter after declining at the fastest rate in history for two. If I drop you off a 100’ cliff yesterday, then lift you up by 6’ today, I still made your position much worse even though it’s incredibly better than yesterday when you were falling...I don't get kudos for picking you up after stomping you into the dirt.
5) economic growth the quarter before reduced by what was it, >30%? That’s still a loss, dummy. See #4
6) new unemployment claims hit 50year highs for 3 quarters before, and new rules take many unemployed off the list so it looks better for Donny. The unemployment rate is still historically high
7)average household income has decreased. Rich became much richer, poor became poorer. Average Americans saw a loss in income
8 ) already discussed unemployment, you’re misstating or obfuscating the whole picture
9) anyone suspected of being undocumented is removed from the list....not an honest number by far
10) more fake numbers
11) more fake numbers
12) more fake numbers
13) more fake numbers
14) more fake numbers

Here’s the real data, notice only three states weren’t in the worst unemployment position ever last year.... https://www.bls.gov/web/laus/lauhsthl.htm
Also note not a single one is at it’s historic low unemployment, and most saw record high unemployment rates for most of 2020.
I give him credit, at the beginning of 2020, before he screwed it all up with his failures over the Trump pandemic, about 1/3 of states were near record unemployment by the newer standards. I have to wonder how much of those gains were due to changing g the criteria for counting the unemployed.
When you drop your victim in a 100’ hole you don’t get kudos for throwing them a 6’ ladder
15) you mean thrown out of the programs, there’s more need than anytime since the Great Depression. It's incredibly dishonest to make qualifying for assistance far more difficult, then use the lower numbers of people who qualify as proof you improved conditions. Utter bullshit.
16) they’ve pledged that before. Call me when they graduate, until then it’s another empty promise
17) citation? Probably a Trump speech talking point
18) it was Christmas...they ALWAYS surge in Dec, usually by a ton more than this year. Let’s see the yearly number for 2020. I don’t believe for a second it was better than 2019...citation? Oops, looked it up, declined, didn’t go up. I think you’re looking at predictions for December, they were WAY below predictions.

US Retail Sales Unexpectedly Drop in December
US retail trade fell 0.7 percent from a month earlier in December 2020, following a revised 1.4 percent decline in November and compared with market expectations of a flat reading. That was also the third consecutive month of decline in consumption, amid record COVID-19 infections, high unemployment levels and lack of government's support. Receipts declined at electronics & appliance stores (-4.9 percent vs -8.3 percent in November), restaurants and bars (-4.5 percent vs -3.6 percent), food & beverage stores (-1.4 percent vs 1.5 percent), general merchandise stores (-1.2 percent vs -1.3 percent), sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument & books stores (-0.8 percent vs -1.7 percent), and furniture stores (-0.6 percent vs -2.1 percent). In addition, online trade slumped 5.8 percent, accelerating from a 1.6 percent decrease in the previous month.

19) not for people making less than millions a year, our tax cuts were minimal, temporary, and unnoticeable. What’s the debt now? He cut revenue and increased spending....thanks to failing to deal with COVID, it’s likely he doubled the debt. What was the low estimate, >$6trillion in unplanned off the budget socialist handouts to fix his lack of a public pandemic plan. This year the debt is going to outpace gdp....the deficit was up by 35% BEFORE the Trump recession.
$300 billion didn't leave...that number was the total high estimate of businesses that said they were moving off shore because they didn't want to pay taxes or said they would move back...if you believe him...and it was only for one quarter, a one time gain at a cost of >$1.2 trillion per year In lost tax revenue. Great plan. It was a one time thing, and much of that business left anyway within the year. GM plant? Foxconn? Harley Davidson? How much of that claimed $300 Billion was based on promises that never materialized?

20) not most small businesses, only those making what was it, >$500000 a year? That’s not most “small businesses “....and that tax rate is temporary, phased out completely after 10 years, corporate tax rates and rates for billionaires is permanent.

You must ignore or fake all economic data from 2020 to make these claims, and even then they would be dishonest exaggeration based on baseless claims from a constant liar.

Not one point you made is honest...that’s why you can’t provide references or citations, you would be embarrassed to admit it all came straight from Don the con’s lying mouth and not organizations that professionally study these claims.

And you want this guy to pick?
Joe would off shore the SCOTUS job to China.
No thanks. Landslide MEGA 2020

Can you blame him? He was on his way to the Jersey shore! Probably Seaside Heights... <_<

Trump denied it was a problem, just a China hoax, until there were hundreds of infected on our shores, despite being told by every adult to start testing and quarantining months earlier.
Trump removed the CDC officer in China that was there to give the U.S. early warning about exactly this kind of pandemic.
Trump cut CDC funding making them less prepared, which has now cost hundreds of lives and trillions in losses that could have been prevented if this was taken seriously. It could have been stopped from spreading in America if Trump didn't actively ignore the blaring warning sirens for months, or had not instructed his subordinates to do the same.

Trump now says any governor that isn't nice enough to him personally will be abandoned by the federal government with their calls for help going unanswered by the Whitehouse, threatening to just let thousands of American citizens die if governors don't properly kiss his ass and claim it tastes like peaches.

But hey that the lane your in.

No. Do you think Obama was the one starting payment agreements 30+ years ago? I think that would be Bush or Regan. Obama didn't end the practice of negotiating payments for military support, but he certainly didn't start it.

What we've done in Korea and Japan (and elsewhere) after fighting wars on their shores has no resemblance to how Trump is renting our military to Saudi Arabia.

What I'm saying is Trump has bastardized our process of asking allies to help fund our military actions in their countries that also benefit them into a process of asking non-allies (including the country who spawned and funded the worst terrorist attack on the U.S. and viciously murdered an American citizen recently, edit: and committed a terrorist attack in Florida this month, with 21 more Saudis being deported from the same military training program he was in for not only posting jihadist anti American material but also child porn not caught by the current vetting process) if they want to rent our military for their military actions, actions that don't align with our foreign policy and make us new enemies. FAUX won't touch that story.

@newtboy is right @bobknight33

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/27/house-pass-election-security-bill-require-paper-ba/

"House Democrats voted Thursday to improve election security, including requiring states to maintain a paper trail for all votes cast, as they sought to stiffen defenses against potential cyberattacks."

"Senate Republicans made clear it had no future in their chamber...Republicans said they support shoring up election security, but said there was no evidence that election results were actually hacked in 2016 or 2018."

Yes, who's trying to steal votes?