Trump’s Chumps

 Timothy Egan MARCH 31, 2017

You voted for a man who boasted of sexual assault, a man whose “university” defrauded thousands of people, a billionaire who thought the minimum wage was too high. You switched from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016 — one in four white working-class voters — because you thought he was on your side.

You don’t mind the lying. In fact, you’re all in with the biggest lies, the baseless claims that three million people voted illegally, that Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower, and on, and on. The lying is disruptive. Yay for disruption!

You don’t mind the flip-flops. Last year, Trump said the unemployment rate was “one of the biggest hoaxes in American history.” This year, because he’s president, it’s very real. Last year, Wall Street was a puppeteer for the Democrats. Now your man has brought in Goldman Sachs puppeteers to run the economy. Last year, a golfing president was lazy. Now your guy has paid 14 presidential visits to a golf course.

You’re not bothered by the foreign policy incompetence, the siding up to gangster regimes and human rights violators, the snub of the rest of the world in the name of America First. You don’t mind unleashing polluters. If the job creators want filthy air and foul water, give it to them.

You shrug at all of this hypocrisy and craziness, because you still think he’s going to help you. But you’ve been played, sucker-punched, duped. You can continue to believe Trump has your back, but the evidence is already overwhelming that the people his presidency will hurt most are those at the bottom who gave him their trust.

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1 in 8 Chance of Catastrophic Solar Megastorm by 2020

By Adam Mann
Science
Date of Publication: 02.29.12. 6:30 am.

 The Earth has a roughly 12 percent chance of experiencing an enormous megaflare erupting from the sun in the next decade. This event could potentially cause trillions of dollars’ worth of damage and take up to a decade to recover from. Such an extreme event is considered to be relatively rare. The last gigantic solar storm, known as the Carrington Event, occurred more than 150 years ago and was the most powerful such event in recorded history. That a rival to this event might have a greater than 10 percent chance of happening in the next 10 years was surprising to space physicist Pete Riley, senior scientist at Predictive Science in San Diego, California, who published the estimate in Space Weather on Feb. 23. “Even if it’s off by a factor of two, that’s a much larger number than I thought,” he said. Earth’s sun goes through an 11-year cycle of increased and decreased activity. During solar maximum, it’s dotted with many sunspots and enormous magnetic whirlwinds erupt from its surface. Occasionally, these flares burst outward from the sun, spewing a mass of charged particles out into space. Small solar flares happen quite often whereas very large ones are infrequent, a mathematical distribution known as a power law. Riley was able to estimate the chance of an enormous solar flare by looking at historical databases and calculating the relation between the size and occurrence of solar flares. The biggest solar event ever seen was the Carrington Event, which occurred on Sept. 1, 1859. That morning, astronomer Richard Carrington watched an enormous solar flare erupt from the sun’s surface, emitting a particle stream at the Earth traveling more than 4 million miles per hour.

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