If you are like me, then you spend way too much time reading political blogs, political books, watching MSNBC and generally staying way too stressed, especially now.
I like to think of this GNRU as a crazy quilt of love. Lots of pieces that have no theme, but sort of end up stitched together into something cozy and warm. There is also a lot of articles and links here about animals, and animals always help everyone feel better. I even have a happy blog about baby bats that should make everyone smile. So let’s pour some morning coffee and get started with the feels.
Here is a veteran of the Post Office to reassure us that the Post Office is up to the job of handling ballots.
Chill. The Post Office has everything under control
By Ruth Y. Goldway
Ms. Goldway is a retired chairwoman and commissioner of the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission.
I Was a Postal Service Regulator for 18 Years. Don’t Panic.
I served as a regulator of the Postal Service for nearly 18 years under three presidents and I urge everyone to be calm. Don’t fall prey to the alarmists on both sides of this debate. The Postal Service is not incapacitated. It is still fully capable of delivering the mail. The focus of our collective concerns should be on how the Postal Service can improve the speed of delivery for election mail.
The Postal Service has the capacity to ensure that ballots sent to voters arrive on time and that ballots dropped into the system by voters are postmarked and delivered in times that accord with state and local guidelines. In their meeting with Congress next week, the leaders of the Postal Service should guarantee that election mail will continue to be treated as first-class mail. The Congress should agree that there will be no additional financial support for the Postal Service without this promise.
Just call me Pioneer
[V]ice presidential nominee Kamala Harris has chosen “Pioneer” as her Secret Service code name, according to a report.
Harris chose the moniker, reported by CNN, shortly after being placed under Secret Service protection last week, when she was tapped as presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s running mate.
The California senator’s code name choice appears to be a nod to the historic nature of her nomination, being the first female of color vice presidential nominee.
Secret Service code names are known for often signifying something about that individual’s character. Former President Barack Obama’s Secret Service code name is “Renegade,” former Vice President Biden’s is “Celtic,” President Trump’s is “Mogul” and Vice President Mike Pence’s is “Hoosier.”
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This one puts the puck back in Pucklady.
Under the ice of a hockey game, one of the most important artifacts of the game is the Blue Line.
NHL Players line up on the black blue line
This line is used to determine off-sides and is instrumental to the game. It has always been a blue line. But the players in the NHL — the whitest game in professional sports — are demanding that the NHL change the blue line in support of Black Lives Matter. Here are the players standing on the black blue line.
Hockey Diversity Alliance, an association made up of seven players whose stated purpose is to eradicate systemic racism and intolerance in hockey, have also revealed these demands:
- Team owners offer NHL rinks to be used as polling stations for the upcoming US election
- NHL should be fully transparent about “all information related to the policies, targets and commitments” related to the hiring of employees who are visible minorities.
- NHL to commit to funding $100 million dollars over 10 years to battle "systemic racism."
- NHL make a statement by temporarily changing the blue line to black.
- NHL to run PSAs for the HDA during the playoffs this summer.
- NHL to have on-ice presence of the HDA logo.
- HDA has also proposed “Black out” warm up jerseys to help build awareness of their organization and its agenda. Later to be auctioned off to raise money for their cause.
This diary is ready for some pie
Over the years as pioneers (the other kind) built farms, planted orchards, and then abandoned those farms, varieties of apples they planted have been forgotten and lost. But a lot of those venerable old trees are still out there neglected but surviving. The Lost Apple Project is a volunteer group of botanists/adventurers who go out into the bush and try to locate those trees and take cuttings so we can enjoy the bounty that our great-grandparents enjoyed.
Follow the link above and read the whole article. It is fascinating how they determine where to look for apple trees.
PORTLAND, Ore. —
A team of retirees who scour the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct — the largest number ever unearthed in a single season by the nonprofit Lost Apple Project.
The Vietnam veteran and former FBI agent who make up the nonprofit recently learned of their tally from last fall’s apple sleuthing from expert botanists at the Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon, where all the apples are sent for study and identification. The apples positively identified as previously “lost” were among hundreds of fruits collected in October and November from 140-year-old orchards tucked into small canyons or hidden in forests that have since grown up around them in rural Idaho and Washington state.
Mapping ocean currents is critical for monitoring global warming. But Antarctic currents flow under the southern ice and scientists can’t reach it reliably. Enter the elephant seal.
Male elephant seal hanging out while assisting scientists
What is known about the marginal ice zone is that it is an important storage system for carbon and heat emitted by humans. The global ocean as a whole stores more than 90 percent of Earth’s excess heat, and the Southern Ocean is the portal through which much of this heat is transferred from the atmosphere. This makes ignorance of the region particularly worrisome.
But Dr. Swart and Louise Biddle, a researcher also at Gothenburg, found a way around this methodological roadblock in a paper published in May. To do so, they turned to unique organic instruments that can gather consistent information from under the ice: southern elephant seals.
Seals in the Southern Ocean have been monitored for decades. Small sensors and trackers that are attached to their bodies and the tops of their heads, like tiny hats, transmit information from dives — depth, lateral distance, water temperature, salinity — that gets filed into open-access databases. A typical southern elephant seal is a masterful diver, and spends around 90 percent of its time underwater foraging for fish and squid, only surfacing for a couple minutes between expeditions to catch its breath before sinking back down to the inky depths.
Nigeria is the last African country to be declared free from wild polio, having accounted for more than half of all global cases less than a decade ago.
This good news has been addressed in previous GNRUs and it is very good news indeed. Also, it’s personal for me because my father had polio. But there’s more reason to be glad about this.
As the world battles a pandemic, Africa has become polio free. Lessons learned can help its fight against COVID-19.
Leadership from all levels of government across party lines, a historic public-private partnership which raised billions, millions of health workers reaching children across the region - from conflict zones to remote areas only accessible by motorbike or helicopter - and a culture of continual improvement were all critical to overcoming challenges and bottlenecks.
As countries work to suppress COVID-19, many of the same basic traditional public health methods used in polio eradication, including contact tracing and surveillance, are key to breaking the chains of transmission and saving lives and livelihoods from the first coronavirus pandemic in human history.
…
While thanking and congratulating governments, health workers, civil society and all groups that have been part of this titanic struggle, it is important to use the momentum to invest further in health systems, as well as the health worker force, to protect people from this pandemic, and prepare them for future disease outbreaks.
There is apparently such a thing as predatory bacteria. The predatory bacteria literally chase down other bacteria and destroy them. Want to watch a bacteria rodeo? Unfortunately, I can’t embed the video, but it’s here at this link. Scroll down the page a bit to find the video. vp.nyt.com/…
While microscopic and little known, predatory bacteria are among the world’s fiercest and most effective hunters.
Predatory bacteria carry immense promise in an extraordinarily small package. Deployed under the right circumstances, they could help people beat back harmful microbes in the environment, or purge pathogens from the food supply. Some experts think they could someday serve as a sort of living therapeutic that could help clear drug-resistant germs from ailing patients in whom all other treatments have failed.
And where do you find predatory bacteria? Everywhere.
That predatory bacteria eluded detection for so long is somewhat surprising. Many dozens of species teem in the seas and in clods of dirt. They are thought to be hardy enough to weather animal guts, including our own, and seem to persist everywhere from raw sewage to the gills of crabs.
“My students have isolated them from soil, from snails in freshwater streams, from the drain in a custodial closet down the hall from our lab,” said Laura Williams, who studies predatory bacteria at Providence College in R.I. “Anywhere there are bacteria, there are probably predatory bacteria trying to eat them.” And scientists are identifying more of these predators each year — a striking parallel to the world’s diversity of phages.
Ok. But how about the disease that we are all thinking about right now, especially as it concerns our colleges and universities?
The University of Arizona has successfully fended off a potential breakout of Covid before it got started.
The University of Arizona found early signs of COVID-19 in a
University of AZ
student dorm this week by testing wastewater and were able to head off an outbreak there, school leaders announced Thursday.
Researchers at the school have looked for traces of the virus in wastewater samples taken from the greater Tucson area since March and have gathered samples from 20 buildings on the UA campus since school started.
Earlier this week, data collected from the dorms found higher viral loads in wastewater samples taken from Likins Hall. A team led by Dr. Ian Pepper, director of the UA's Water and Energy Sustainable Technology Center, tested the samples five more times to confirm the findings, said UA President Dr. Robert Robbins.
The university on Wednesday tested the entire dorm, about 311 people, and found two positive cases, Robbins said.
The two individuals, who were asymptomatic, are now in isolation, preventing further spread in Likins Hall.
How about getting the doggos involved?
Dogs are being trained to sniff out COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
Several groups of scientists around the world are training dogs to detect the coronavirus. There are programs in Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia.
While the coronavirus itself doesn’t have a scent, if you get sick, your body gives off a certain smell through your sweat, spit, or pee. This smell is what the dogs are trained to sniff out. To train the dogs, scientists need lots of samples, both from people who’ve gotten the coronavirus and those who haven’t.
Scientists say that the dogs can smell the virus even if the person isn’t showing any signs of illness. That could be important, since the coronavirus can be spread by people who don’t even know they’re sick.
Our inmate population has been receiving the worst of the virus and not being able to receive visits is just awful. But that may be changing in a few weeks.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal Bureau of Prisons will begin allowing inmates to have visitors again in October, almost seven months after visits were suspended at the 122 federal prisons across the U.S., according to a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
The visitation plan — detailed in a memo to senior bureau officials on Monday — instructed wardens to “immediately begin developing local procedures to reinstate social visiting.”Social visiting is scheduled to begin no later than Oct. 3, though physical contact will be prohibited, according to the memo. Inmates and visitors would be required to wear face coverings and visitors would have their temperatures taken and would be questioned about whether they have shown any coronavirus-related symptoms.
Good News from my Hometown
Eight years ago he had cut short a budding music career because he felt he had
another purpose
Tad Worku, a son of Ethiopian immigrants, sometimes sings at work.
As a nurse in the emergency department at Loma Linda University Medical Center, he gets requests from co-workers.
On rough days, said fellow ER nurse Kay Kurian, “and we have some rough days … I’ll ask him ‘Give me some harmonies, give me a little bit,’ and he will, and it just soothes you.”
Have a listen to Tad Worku, the singing nurse:
This has been a brutal year for wildfires here in the West and fire season is just getting started. But there is some good news here. When I look at the containment map, there is more blue than red and that is a good thing. We are also getting some international assistance in the fire fighting effort.
Here is the containment picture as of this morning. These reports are from CalFire.
California Statewide Fire Summary September 2, 2020
Today, there remain over 14,200 firefighters battling over 20 major fires and lightning complexes in California. Containment efforts continue to increase despite weather conditions continuing to get warmer and drier. Today over 18,200 people remain evacuated, though crews are working hard to get people back into their homes. Over the weekend a team of 10 Israeli firefighters have deployed to California to assist in battling some of the largest wildfires in the state's history.
CAL FIRE is urging all Californians to ensure they are prepared for wildfires by creating a wildfire preparedness action plan. Download CAL FIRE’s new web-based app to create your custom plan at www.ReadyForWildfire.org.
The military is coming to help, too.
BOISE, Idaho — Officials with the National Interagency Fire Center say about 200 active duty U.S. Army soldiers are being mobilized to help fight wildfires across the Western United States.
It’s the first active-duty mobilization for wildfire support since 2018. More than 5,900 square miles (15280 square kilometers) have burned so far this year, and 105 large wildfires are burning across the Western United States.
The soldiers will be trained over the next week at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, and are expected to begin firefighting on hand crews in early September.
In other news,
A message of gratitude to Swedes for their support offered to the Solidarity trade union and Poland's striving for freedom in the 1980s was published in the Aftonbladet daily on Monday. It was signed by the Polish Embassy and the Polish Institute in Stockholm.
"On the 40th anniversary of the Solidarity trade union's birth, we express our thanks to the then Swedish members of the union, representatives of academic associations, politicians and thousands of Swedes, who in the 1980's actively supported the Solidarity independent trade union," reads the message.
The authors of the message recalled that Solidarity started democratic and peaceful socio-political changes in Central and Eastern Europe, and that it was the first independent trade union in the states of the former Eastern Bloc.
In the 1980s, the Swedish people organised humanitarian shipments to Poland and smuggled printing machines as well as paper to help Polish underground activists fight against the communist regime. Many persecuted Polish opposition activists found shelter in Sweden.
I’m obsessed with YouTube. Last month, I introduced you to Joseph Carter the Mink Man who does natural pest control using trained minks.
This month, it’s adorable bat babies in Australian flying fox rescue. Have you ever seen baby bats with pacifiers?
I vant to suck your grapes
Good News Graffiti
Happiness in small pieces
Balugas return to the sea
Last year, a group working to protect sea animals rescued two beluga whales from an aquarium in China and flew them to Iceland. The belugas have now been moved into a protected ocean area off the coast of Iceland.
Yes, it’s a tiny elephant, and it’s adorable. This link won’t play, but if you click it, it will offer to redirect you to watch it on Youtube in a new window.
| here is a random table that I can’t delete |
phooey |
Last week, two 18-year-olds participating in a volunteer excavation near the central Israeli city of Yavne spotted a clay jar hidden in the sand that contained ancient gold treasure.
When they opened the jar, they found 425 early Islamic gold coins that archeologists say date back 1,100 years.
I think that’s about it for this Roundup. News for me is that I will be retiring from the grocery industry in a few days. I’ll be able to write my next roundup without staying up half the night after coming home from work. Woohoo!
