Senator debunks global warming with snow

Here is the venerable Sen. Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma disproving climate change with coldness:

And just like the snowball in his bag, his IQ seems to be inexorably melting and evaporating before our eyes. I wonder if, in his mind, these other historic snow events also provide compelling evidence against climate change, even though many of them took place before all the mass “hysteria” about climate change erupted.

I also wonder about the series of events leading up to this speech. Did he gather the snow in the bag himself, or did he get a staffer to do it? If the latter, did the staffer gathering the snow feel more like a tool than usual? Did Inhofe worry that the snow would melt before he got his chance to deliver the decisive blow to climate change on the floor of the Senate? And if it did melt, did he worry that this fact would have dealt a serious blow to his own argument? Given my hypothesis about the disintegrating IQ, I would guess not.

Workers left behind in Florida cold

Here in Northeast, Georgia, just down the street from where I live, those in need of winter coats can go pick them up for free at a weekly food giveaway and soup kitchen on any given Thursday on Main Street.

But in Florida, folks are ill-prepared for extremes in temperatures as we’ve seen recently. Even more so are workers in Florida’s orange fields (and other plants), whom, according to this article from The Atlantic survive on $50 per day, “on a good day” and coats in those parts are far from cheap and almost certainly not free (folks were having trouble finding any for less than $30). The planters, of course, get federal help when tough times disrupt and wither their production. And, they benefit from higher prices due to less supply in the market. The workers, then, bear the brunt of, not only the cold weather, but the economic climate it produces. This quote from the article sums it up well:

“The situation is going to be hopeless for people,” (Gerardo) Reyes said (a former worker from the state of Zacatecas, Mexico.) “Before, they were living in abject poverty. They weren’t making enough when there was work to put anything away for a disaster like this.” Meanwhile, the workers will have to rely on strained social service agencies and church soup kitchens for something as basic as food. How they will be able to afford rent is a question for which Reyes had no answer. And with widespread cold damage, there is no place they can move to where they might find work. “Basically, every crop is affected,” said Reyes.

Further down, Reyes added:

Whenever there’s a natural disaster here—hurricane, heavy rain, freeze—it’s the workers who suffer.

Safari, Firefox, WordPress snow, hacks

A few notes on browsers, snow and hacks …

Browsers

Insomuch as this is possible, I try to use alternate browsers, products other than Microsoft. Of course, the company makes this as difficult as possible in its seeming attempts to blanket a monopoly on PCs, browsers, operating systems, the Internet and the rest of it.

At home, as my whims dictate, I alternate between Safari, Firefox, Opera and Explorer. The former three are actually the least dependable as I have run across numerous Web sites that either cause them to crash or where some script on the Web site fails to work and the Web site suggests I change browsers. I have the most recent versions of all the browsers (except Explorer, ironically), so it seems to still be a matter of compatibility against mighty Microsoft. That said, I know some would disagree with me about the dependability of alternate browsers — and I don’t like admitting it either — this has just been my experience thus far. Of the alternate browsers, I think Opera is my favorite, though the least compatible with a wide array of Web sites, while Firefox I would probably judge to be the best all around.

Since snow doesn’t just conjure up images and memories of the holidays — indeed, it snows in many, many places in America from November-March — I think the WordPress snow should be an available option through the rest of the winter. Since the ability to see and enjoy snow here in South Carolina is mostly fleeting, the scripted snow is something of a treat for us Southern folk. Folks up north are probably less amused as they look out the window at a freshly shoveled white pile.

Haxors

Because of all the php included in the packages, I have found WordPress blogs, those run on external servers, like at www.jeremystyron.com (shameless and redundant plug, since the content there is the same as here) and Joomla sites to be quite a bear when it comes to locking them down to security compromises. This is something that was fairly new to me as I attempted to develop a site for a retail client, but I am learning. After finding bunches of erroneous code in numerous WordPress files, I upgraded to 2.7, created a .htaccess file and tried some other methods to lock things down. I still have to run through some steps to do the same over at the Joomla site.