Harvey is a rabbit.

The National Weather Service announced 8/29.2017 that preliminary data indicates the all-time record for total rainfall from a tropical system in the continental U.S. was broken in Cedar Bayou, Texas -- about 30 miles from downtown Houston -- at 51.88 inches.

If confirmed, the record is .12 inches shy of the record for total rainfall from a tropical storm in the entire U.S., including Hawaii and Alaska. The storm, which dropped a foot of rain from Galveston to Beaumont overnight, according to meteorologists, is expected to continue in Texas until Wednesday afternoon.

HOUSTON (AP) - The rains in Cedar Bayou, near Mont Belvieu, Texas, reached 51.88 inches as of 3:30 p.m. That's a record for both Texas and the continental United States, but it doesn't quite pass the 52 inches from tropical cyclone Hiki in Kauai, Hawaii, in 1950 (before Hawaii became a state).

Million Dollar Homes.

The nation’s fourth-largest city is still being inundated by record-setting rain and floodwaters from the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. The National Weather Service has predicted that many areas in and around Houston could total more than 50 inches of rain before the storm ends.

“We are seeing wide spread flooding and this will likely expand and it will likely persist, as it’s slow to recede,” said the National Weather Service. Several fatalities have already been reported, and tens of billions of dollars in damage and loss have already occurred, officials said.

Hurricane Harvey has already dumped 9 trillion gallons of water on Texas and may leave much more before it returns to the Gulf of Mexico. Starting as a category 4 hurricane as it made landfall on Friday night, Harvey has been breaking weather records every hour—and is leaving some scientists wondering why it stalled over south Texas (God’s will) instead of moving cruising northward to Oklahoma and then to the Midwest as storms typically do.

Is climate change to blame for its atypical path of destruction? Well, a bit, according to climate researchers.

Global warming didn’t spawn Harvey it just made him more dangerous. But scientists are careful not to blame all of Harvey’s destruction on greenhouse warming. Houston's lack of rain-sponging green space and devil-may-care zoning laws—have probably made things worse as well.

“Hurricanes are hazards that are exacerbated by climate change,” says Katharine Kayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech. “But the actual risk to Houston is a combination of the hazard—rainfall, storm surge, wind, and vulnerability to the exposure." In Houston's case, vulnerability is particularly high. "It’s a rapidly growing city with vast areas of impervious surfaces," Kayhoe says.

When Hayhoe and others scientists look at the storm itself, they see a hurricane that has been able to keep one foot on the gas pedal while still connected to the gas tank. Warmer water means more water vapor available to power the hurricane, and Harvey’s fuel source—the Gulf of Mexico—is unusually warm right now, thanks to global warming and an unusually hot August in the gulf.

Gulf ocean temperatures are 2.7 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average. “That provided a deep, warm pool of water used as fuel,” says Dalia Kirschbaum, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who studies hurricane hydrology. Harvey used this hot spot to shift from a tropical depression to a category 4 hurricane in just 48 hours.

In just a decade, the sea surface temperature of the gulf region has risen from 86 to 87 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State. Mann said that a relationship known as the Clausius-Clapeyron equation tells us there is a roughly 3 percent increase in average atmospheric moisture content for each 0.5 degrees Celsius of warming—almost 1 degree Fahrenheit. That means 3 to 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere in the Gulf region near the south Texas coast. So Harvey has a bigger tank of tropical moisture that it has been dumping on land.

Over the weekend, Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looked at the rainfall data from Harvey and did a few calculations on its landfall at Rockport, Texas. He calculated that Rockport would get a foot of rain about once in 1,000 years, based on the average climate of the past 38 years. But taken in the context of the past three years and recent high temperatures, the odds increased to about once in 250 years. For all of southeast Texas, the probability of getting that foot of rain has increased from about once in 100 years to about once in 25 years.

Why the change? First, the Gulf water is warmer. Second, while rainy tropical cyclones like Harvey aren’t more frequent, the high-level winds that usually push them out to sea or north to Oklahoma have stopped blowing.

“We don’t know why the winds have collapsed," says Emanuel, "and it’s too early to connect it to anthropogenic (man caused) climate change." But the effects are clear: the collapse of these winds over south Texas started in 2010 and have remained absent—a time during which Houston has been hit by numerous disastrous storms that have flooded the city.

DEPRIVATION

Before taking the stage at the Phoenix Convention Center, Trump watched the sparse crowd gather from a waiting-room television. Gigicos had arranged the rally in a large room with a large part of the floor space left empty.

Trump grew angry at how the empty space would look on television.

Trump brags about his YUGE crowds, but videos showed that the crowd was much smaller in real life than the 15,000 attendees Trump claimed showed up — far fewer.

A side-by-side comparison of the crowds at Barack Obama (2009) and Donald Trump's (2017) respective inaugurations reveals that Trump's crowd isn't as large as he boasted it would be.

Trump is a bully - he can hand it out but not take it...

Trump HIRES PEOPLE to cheer for him. It is no secret!

MORE HERE

OUT damn spot! Hire more people. Hire more claquers.

Upstaged by Harvey

Trump, the "look at me, mommy" boy does not like being upstaged.

If harvey is where tha attention is, then harvey is where the trumpster in the dumpster is going.

Face it. Trump is not very bright - even among dim candles. He lives in a world of one - where he alone, is everything.

He knows haw to tell a bigger lie!

Between the 14th hole and the 15th tee, Mr. Trump installed a flagpole on a stone pedestal overlooking the Potomac, to which he affixed a plaque purportedly designating “The River of Blood.”

Laughing at Trump.

Laughing out loud at Trump.

But, back to Harvey. Tropical Storm Harvey had drifted to the Texas coastline Monday morning. Some areas of the Lone Star State could see storm rainfall totals exceeding 50 inches.

The old colors couldn't reflect rainfall totals in Texas. Just how much rain has fallen so far? The rainfall totals are all staggering – assuming they’ve been drinking Trump Vodka.

Texans are not calling Harvey "An act of God!" I am.

A batch of Fundies done been flooded out!

The rainfall will continue for at least four days, complicating Trump’s planned visit to the region on Tuesday, with recovery efforts stretching (years) well into the unknown future.

Trump is already the least popular president in modern history. Prematurely declaring “mission accomplished” in Houston will come back to haunt him. Trump said he timed his pardon of Joe Arpaio to coincide with the deadly weather event to utilize high TV ratings to bring more awareness to his pardon.

“I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally – the hurricane was just starting,” Trump boasted.

Because he was the most unpopular politician in modern polling, it was vital for Donald Trump to broaden his base of support after he took office. But seven months into his term, there is no sign it will ever happen.

By no means certain

Castro Valley has its share of sickos. There is a simple (and often wrong) answer for everything.

"God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."

These Bible thumpers think that they have the answer.

In the 1611 Bible, there are approximately 15,735 errors in translation.

Passages by the score could say this, that, or something else! Inerrant as a dingle-berry.

I will not revisit the lost languages of the Levant and the Ugaritic contribution.

For decades, scholars have been aware that Genesis (1:26) is actually translated "Then the gods spoke: 'Let us make man in image -ours, after our likenesses.”

“Intersex” refers to humans whose bodies, reproductive systems, chromosomes and/or hormones are not easily identified as male or female. These variations include females with XY chromosomes and men with ovaries instead of testes. Intersex characteristics occur in approximately one out of every 1500 births. That means an intersex child is born every two days in Canada, and five intersex children are born each day in the US.



Degrees of intersexuality vary in intensity from presence of an additional Y chromosome (XXY, XYY) to being born with a mixed set – or both sets (hermaphroditism) - of genitals. Treatment of cases of intersexuality is generally (but not always) surgical in nature, with surgical procedures performed on the infant to either add or remove body parts. Parents end up with a child that is either male or female in physical appearance. Hormones may also be given, but there is a limit to what can be modified medically. Though the facade of male/female sexual normalcy can be constructed, fully functional reproductive organs cannot.

Jamie Lee Curtis?



So, In the beginning, God created man, woman, and intersex individuals.

And gay?



About 80% of intersex births are diagnosed with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH).



Contamination by endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) is a factor is almost 20% of the cases.

Shifting the Paradigm of Intersex Treatment

So binary thinking – male or female – is obsolete by centuries.



So, even if we DON”T get scientific about sex, we can see that there are many intersex variations between the binary male and female.





Have a little compassion.

What Ever revE tahW

When a group of far-right activists came to San Francisco to hold a rally yesterday, they were met by peace activists offering them flowers to wear in their hair.

The presence of Patriot Prayer, whose “free speech” events in the Pacific north-west have frequently sparked violent street battles, in notoriously liberal San Francisco has city authorities on edge.

But for many San Franciscans, an unwelcome visit from members of the “alt-right” is an opportunity to fight back in the spirit of the city by the bay – with flower power, drag queens, and a little creativity.

There were contingents of clowns, kayakers, cars, and kids – all hoping to use their particular strengths (humor, seaworthiness, the ability to monopolize parking spaces, and cuteness, respectively) to thumb their noses at hate.

“You have a significant number of creative and crazy ideas. I kind of like that,” said veteran labor and LGBTQ rights activist Cleve Jones.

Jones works with local drag queen Juanita More to host a rally and march for equality beginning at Harvey Milk Plaza in the city’s Castro district. “There’s this desire to create fear,” he said of media coverage showing torch-wielding racists spewing hateful chants. “With these kinds of creative actions, we dispel fear. We say we’re going to fight you and we’re going to have a ball doing it and we’re going to laugh and love each other.”

“When the dust has settled and the smoke has cleared,” Jones said, “I hope that the appearance of rightwing extremists in San Francisco will raise a significant amount of money for the people they seek to harm.”

At Crissy Field, a handful of Trump supporters hung out in the shade of a tree in mid-afternoon. Several members of the dejected group said they had driven from as far as Portland to attend Gibson’s rally, and were disappointed that so many of their allies were no shows.

Joey Gibson, the founder of Patriot Prayer and the main organizer of the Crissy Field rally, held several news conferences throughout the day in which he denounced San Francisco leaders for trying to restrict his speech.

A Saturday online news conference featured Gibson and Kyle Chapman — a right-wing protester who was bailed out of jail the day before —blaming the “far left” and “anti-fascist” protesters, whom they described as oppressive and violent. Chapman, who was charged with possessing an illegal weapon, was ordered to stay away from this weekend’s rallies.

He made a brief appearance in Pacifica, just south of San Francisco, saying he was “here to promote love and peace and freedom.”

About 4:30 p.m., Gibson and a small contingent of followers gathered at Crissy Field, but the group departed within an hour as counterprotesters started to gather after they heard Patriot Prayer members were there.