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Lance Winters

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Obama Michelle Obama

Lance Winters

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Rush Limbaugh Obama

Lance Winters

WASHINGTON - MARCH 09: Dr. Howard Dean leaves a demonstration held by supporters of national health care legislation in Dupont Circle March 9, 2010 in Washington, DC. Demonstrators later protested outside the hotel as America's Health Insurance Plans annual policy conference took place inside. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

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Barrack Obama Bill Clinton

Lance Winters

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Barrack Obama Bill Clinton

Lance Winters

It's not unusual for candidates who've come up short in their bids for political office to take a second shot down the line, and this cycle is no exception: Less than three weeks after Election Day, a number of 2010 contenders who saw defeat (or are stepping down) this year are already making noises about running again. Some are defeated incumbents mulling rematches for their old seats; others are political newcomers who cut their teeth on a 2010 bid and are back for more. There are even a few statewide office-holders who are stepping down from their current jobs in 2011 but are mulling another bid for office in the next year or two. Here's a look at some of the potential contenders. Did we miss anyone? The comments section awaits! * Former World Wresting Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon (R): McMahon spent nearly $50 million this year on her bid

Source: http://feeds.voices.washingtonpost.com/click.phdo?i=87b88aab79224775a209b15a2c85f89c

Alvin Green John Mccain

Lance Winters

Having a bad weekend? Eh, it could be worse.

Billions of years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth. Thereafter the Sun will slowly become red and distended, presiding over an Earth sweltering even at the poles. ... Eventually the oceans will boil, the atmosphere will evaporate away to space, and catastrophe of the most immense proportions imaginable will overtake our planet.
-- Carl Sagan, Cosmos

In human terms, the Sun is in its thirties. A bit over four and a half billion years ago, the blob of hydrogen at the center of the nascent solar system gathered enough mass to trigger nuclear fusion. Today the Sun is almost exactly halfway through its time as a main-sequence, medium-sized yellow star. Over the last four billion years, the Sun has been remarkably stable. It's output has been gradually increasing, but only by a few percent every billion years, so conditions here on Earth have allowed for life since a short time after the Sun's "birth." Life was around under the toddler Sun, and expanded under Sun the teenager. As an adult, the Sun, the Earth, and the Earth's crust of living things have all gotten on swimmingly (and crawlingly, and flyingly).

But old age is coming, and it won't be pretty.

Four to five billion years from now, the center of our neighborhood star will begin to contract and heat up. Perversely, as the center shrinks down the outer layers of the sun will expand and cool – cool being a relative term, as the surface of the Sun will still be well over the boiling point of lead. As the Sun expands, it will swallow up the planets Mercury and Venus. The Sun will have lost considerable mass by this point, and for awhile it was thought that the Earth would spiral away from the expanding star, staying outside the growing ball of red-hot gas. This now appears to be unlikely. Tidal forces between the Earth and its parent star will keep Earth close to home, and around five billion years from now the Sun will swallow the Earth. The planet will not survive, not even as a scorched cinder.

This bloated "red giant" phase of the Sun's life will last only a few million years. Having burned off what's left of its fuel, the Sun will collapse into the long, cooling existence of a white dwarf star. Between red giant and white dwarf, the Sun will produce a planetary nebula of gas and dust. It should be spectacular. But there will be no human beings left to see it. No sign of Earth's existence will remain.

On our Teller Scale of Intolerably Large Disasters, this rates a T5 – the physical erasure of Earth itself. Like many of the potential problems I'm about to list, this event has a degree of certainty associated with it. In this case, that degree is quite easy to calculate: it's 100%.

As it turns out, the last day that any human being would attempt to pass off as "perfect," even by the standards of a nice afternoon in the central Nefud, is likely come a good deal sooner. As little as five or six hundred million years from now the average temperature of the planet will be elevated by an uncomfortable degree. The world's ice caps will have long since vanished. Instead of "mere" hurricanes, the world could be plagued by long-lasting "hypercanes" with winds topping 500mph that whip oceans to froth and drive 60' storm surges of 120+ degree water across land baked by both heat and unchecked ultraviolet radiation. These massive storms might be persistent enough that an observer looking down from space would note that the Earth was marked by one or more "great white spots." Give it another five hundred million years, and the oceans are likely to boil away. The Earth will become a ball of steam, slowly losing its overheated atmosphere to space. Even then, it will probably be another billion years before we can say for sure that we've hit T4 on the Teller Scale – the point at which we've extinguished life on Earth.

The only nice thing to say about these events is that while they are as certain as anything we know, they are also certain to be quite distant. We are in the comfortable middle years for our Sun, our planet, and for the conditions that support life. Solar activity over the last several hundred million years has fallen within a very small range of variation, a range that does not support the sun as a candidate for the warming we've experienced in the last century, much less a cause for major concern.

However, knowing that the Sun's demise is both distant and inevitable doesn't tell us if these events matter to us. By "us" I don't mean readers of this article in particular. Barring some radical breakthroughs, I suspect that most of you will have few concerns beyond the next century (though I've long predicted that mechanisms to halt aging will be discovered on the day I turn 80, and immortality is scheduled for the week after I kick off, so who knows). I mean humanity in general. Will we, or even our descendents, be around to smear on our 2000-factor sunscreen and open our lead umbrellas against the day's storms? That could depend on other events, ones that are less destructive, but also much less predictable.

One day about 1600 BCE, there was a last perfect day for the citizens of the Minoan settlement of Akrotiri. But at some time on that day the mountain at the center of the island must have signaled that trouble was ahead. The people of Akrotiri read the signs correctly. Among the beautiful tiled walls and artifacts that remain of their town, there is no sign of human remains. It's likely that they evacuated the island before the rumbles from the mountain turned into something more. It's also likely that it didn't matter. When the volcanic heart of the island exploded, it did so in a blast that sent more than 100 cubic kilometers of rock flying upward. On the Volcanic Explosivity Index (bet that's a new one to you), this rates as a 7. The official name of an explosion of this scale is wonderfully descriptive. It's called "super-colossal." It's also called about 100 times as big as the explosion of Mount St. Helens in 1980. If you've seen the film of that event, imagine a hundred such eruptions all happening at once.

On our Teller Scale, the eruption on Akrotiri definitely rates above a 1. How can we be sure? Because the name of the place was not Akrotiri. That's just what the Greeks called the place centuries later. We don't know the name of the town was before the explosion. We don't know how large it was, or who its leader was, or even how to read the alphabet they left behind. Minoan culture, which was spread in many locations across the eastern Mediterranean at the time of the explosion, was so throughly extinguished in the wake of the disaster (including invaders that rushed in to take advantage of this sea empire's sudden weakness) that it became a riddle. A name to ponder over, or to conjure with.

Akrotiri has other names. On a modern map you might find the name Santorini. Or Thera. If you look for a mention of it in ancient documents, try "Atlantis."

A volcanic eruption in the right place is definitely capable of rising beyond a 1 on our scale. But can it reach 2, the point at which it threatens the existence of civilization as a whole? Definitely.

On average, an explosion like that which destroyed Minoan Akrotiri happens around every 1,000 years. The last explosion on this scale was that of Mount Tambora in 1815. Over 10,000 people were directly killed in the initial blast of this volcano, and another 70,000 died in tsunamis, mudslides, floods, rains of ash, and other general awfulness. The year following its eruption was known as the "year without a summer." Crops failed around the world. In New England states, there were frosts in mid-June. Lakes and rivers remained frozen throughout the summer as far south as Pennsylvania. The cost of grain went up 800% in a year. It's not hard to imagine that, had the effects of "volcanic winter" stretched out beyond that summer, it might have resulted in mass starvation around the globe. Stretch that out more than a decade, and the world would be a very different (and much less populated place).

The Mount Tambora explosion didn't extend that long, but then the VEI doesn't max out at 7. There's a beautiful freshwater lake in New Zealand called Lake Taupo. From the lake you can look up and notice the rim of the surrounding valley -- which happens to mark the caldera of the massive Taupo Volcano. Around 2150 years ago, Taupo produced a blast to equal the one one at Akrotiri. Fortunately, no one was living there at the time (ancestors of the Maori didn't arrive for another 1200 or so years), but there are records of unusual weather that year in writings stretching from China to Rome. However, this relatively recent eruption was nothing compared to what the Taupo Volcano produced around 26,000 years ago. That more distant blast was at least ten times larger than Akrotiri -- over a thousand times bigger than the Mount St. Helen blast.

Taupo is a supervolcano, one of several such sites around the world. Supervolcanoes are so named because they're capable of producing multiple eruptions in the VEI 8 range. They seem to be associated with some phenomenon deep in the Earth, a "hot spot" that persists anywhere from tens of thousands, to tens of millions of years. There are several such locations on the Earth. One of them is called "Yellowstone."

Around 2.2 million years ago, and again around 640,000 years ago, the super volcano beneath Yellowstone erupted with a force that's hard to imagine. One of these explosions carried over 2,000 cubic kilometers of rock into the atmosphere, leaving an ash bed that stretched from California to east of the Mississippi river. Such an event today would certainly bury Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, Minneapolis, Las Vegas. Not "get a little dusty," bury. Depending on weather conditions at the time of such an event, significant falls of ash could reach cities on either coast. Such an event would almost certainly destroy America economically and politically. If we survived as a nation at all, it would be as something radically different than we are. But the effects of the eruption wouldn't end at the ash line. Weather and food production would be disrupted around the world. A VEI 8 eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano (or any other supervolcano) would spell doom for the nation that hosted the blast, and quite possibly generate a death toll in the hundreds of millions once starvation was factored in. And even Yellowstone's previous eruptions don't mark the top of the scale.

A peculiar ring-shaped lake in Indonesia is the site of the Toba supervolcano. Around 73,500 years ago, Toba exploded with a force unmatched by any other supervolcano in the last 25 million years. It's certain that Toba's eruption produced a severe volcanic winter around the world, one several times more severe than the single bad season of Mount Tambora. Around the same time that Toba exploded, the human population of the world took a severe hit. Genetic evidence suggests that the total number of people at that time may have dropped to as few as 2,000-10,000 people. Total. If a Toba event happened today, it would certainly be a civilization killer. It might even stretch toward a 3 on our scale – the point of threatening mankind's existence as a species.

And (believe it or not) Toba is still not as bad as it gets when it comes to volcanoes. For that, you need a whole different kind of eruption. 252 million years ago, the Earth was populated with a set of creatures that might surprise you. This was before the dinosaurs, but the animals that dominated the land were not their ancestors – they were ours. Or at least they were relatives. The group known today as "Therapsids" includes the mammals and the many types of "mammal-like reptiles" that swarmed across the world in the Permian Age. Then a series of volcanoes in the area known as the Siberian Traps began to erupt in what is known as a "flood basalt" event. They not only produced huge volumes of ash and thousands of square miles of lava, but enormous amounts of gases that changed the makeup of the atmosphere and altered the climate. Once it was thought that the eruption lasted for millions of years, but the best evidence today indicates that the period of eruption was relatively brief – a few thousand years. Maybe less. When the eruptions were over, 70% of all land species were gone, along with over 95% of marine species. We can't be sure that the Siberian Traps was the root cause of the event known as "the Great Dying," but it seems like a very good candidate. It took 30 million years for life to recover the diversity seen previous to this event (and when it did, dinosaurs would replace the Therapsids as the dominate group on land). If something like the Siberian Traps was to occur today (and there's no reason it couldn't) it would certainly spell the end for mankind, along with most large animals. Call it a 3.7 on the Teller Scale.

What are the odds of these events? Well, a volcanic eruption in the VEI 8 range (called, by chart makers clearly running short on adjectives, a "mega-colossal" explosion) happens on average around once in 10,000 years, though we haven't had one in around 26,000 years. Don't worry, we're not "overdue." Odds of such an eruption remain around 1:10,000 in a given year. Every year. Explosions like that of Toba are about three times as powerful, and about three times less frequent – say 1:30,000 odds. For a massive flood basalt event, the odds are considerably better, perhaps 1:5,000,000.

Those odds may sound pretty good. There's also the niggling point that our ability to affect these numbers includes a large dose of diddly and an even bigger shot of squat. So does this mean that we should ignore the threat that volcanoes hold? Nope. We may not be able to prevent, but we can prepare. Creating the kind of stockpiles and planning needed to survive another "year without a summer" (or worse) without major disruptions and loss of life would take a huge international effort – but we prepare for events that are much less likely to occur and which would be much less disruptive.

Source: http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/de4EXe73Z1Y/-Be-thankful-its-not-today

Rush Limbaugh Obama

Lance Winters

(CNN) - Many New York City voters would leave Mayor Michael Bloomberg off their guest list this Thanksgiving, according to...

Source: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/25/new-yorkers-say-no-to-a-bloomberg-thanksgiving/

Sarah Palin Alvin Green

Lance Winters

See our roundup of the best political cartoons of the year (so far), featuring memorable cartoons on the 2010 elections, the Tea Party's rise, President Obama's woes, Sarah Palin's antics, health care reform, the Gulf oil spill, TSA pat-downs, and more.