And speaking of "outfits" I have to admit to a secret liking of Cher. This video, with her 'outfit' (I think I understand the meaning of it) and the visual 'big guns'. Personally I don't want to turn back time since I was not a happy camper back then when I was a younger person. But I am all for 'happy camping' for others!!

Time change for me means just one more hour of insomnia. I'm looking forward to chewing another piece of an ambien mid night. No worries tho.

Kdog, I caught a bit of a piece of CNN piece on Ahawaska (sp??) tonite during the Duck ads. I have two close friends who traveled over 2,000 miles and then up the Amazon river to take that around 10 years ago. One had an amazing experience, the other just had a ho-hum experience with the "medicine".  As a teen I tried out every drug available to me - lsd, mushrooms. opium, pot and hash, alcohol, sex, and several others too.  Usually just one time to try it out. Not much cocaine tho - always hated the idea of cocaine and being around people on cocaine. I took the SATs seriously hung over and did not do as well on those as my parents expexted (600s). Oh well. My grades were good, and I really wanted to go into art instead of economics and investments too (to the horror of my dad).

That's perfectly understandable, really, given this Pontiff's cockamamie notion that serving the greater good for humanity's sake actually matters more than kowtowing to an increasingly politicized and militant conservative doctrine.

Ross Douthat, the professional Catholic convert who loves to lecture the rest of us about what it takes to be a real Catholic -- and to think of all those years I wasted as a youth in Catholic schools -- goes so far as to warn Francis that the Holy Mother Church stands on the precipice of schism.

With all due respect, Douthat is the type of holier-than-thou guy for whom my late Catholic grandmother had no patience or use, the man who wears his religion so prominently on his sleeve while failing to make room for true faith in his own heart.

Like I and others here have said before, I'm really liking Pope Francis. If Douthat and the other malcontented Catholic retrogrades want to long for the olden days when the Magdalene Laundries was once considered enlightened social policy, then let them seek the Lord themselves armed only with a washboard, bucket of scalding water and some dirty sheets, all under the watchful eye of Sister Mary Hellsablazin.

Kurt Weill's September Song, sung by Lou Reed

pre·dic·tive
prəˈdiktiv/
adjective
relating to or having the effect of predicting an event or result.
"predictive accuracy"

But none of the wild claims of doom made by the UN's hoxers have come true.

A preliminary draft of a report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was leaked to the public this month, and climate skeptics say it contains fresh evidence of 20 years of overstated global warming.

The report -- which is not scheduled for publication until 2014 -- was leaked by someone involved in the IPCC's review process, and is available for download online. Bloggers combing through the report discovered a chart comparing the four temperature models the group has published since 1990. Each has overstated the rise in temperature that Earth actually experienced.

"Temperatures have not risen nearly as much as almost all of the climate models predicted," Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, told FoxNews.com.

Link

Neil Patrick Harris has joined the Freak Show, the American Horror Story: Freak Show that is. Sources confirm to E! News that Harris and his husband David Burtka will appear at the tail end of the FX hit's current season.

NEWS/ Yes, All of American Horror Story's Seasons Are Connected!

And now, co-creator Ryan Murphy has finally ended the speculation: All of AHS' seasons are in fact connected!
"They're all connected. We're just beginning to tell you how they're connected," Murphy said in an interview with EW.com. "They're all very separate but there's clues every season that we're now telling you how the different worlds are intertwined."

Conservatives Are Already Freaking Out About Jeb Bush's Possible Run For President

During a prominent gathering of conservatives in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire, the largest spattering of boos among the crowd didn't come at speakers' frequent mentions of President Barack Obama.

The loudest jeers came when a speaker would mention former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
...
Steve Deace, a prominent conservative in the crucial early presidential state of Iowa, summed up conservatives' problem with Jeb Bush: He's everything they hated about Romney, and nothing they liked about him.

" I'm saying there's a chance" Bush could win the backing of conservatives and the nomination, Deace told Business Insider in an email, adding, "The same chance I have to  look good in a thong."

Here in Iowa, Suzanne Ortiz, 54, said she voted early for Braley because she fears Republican control of the Senate would lead to a stripping-away of the safety net and evisceration of the new healthcare law.

"We lost everything," said Ortiz, a former 911 operator who said she and her engineer husband were forced to rely on Medicaid and food stamps after the economic collapse. When her husband's work picked up after two years of unemployment, they found their income was too high to qualify for help, but because of health problems, Ortiz said, "no insurance company would touch" her. Now they are both covered by Obamacare, and their sons are moving beyond minimum-wage jobs to a place "where they finally can keep their head above water."

If Republicans control both houses of Congress, Ortiz said, she's afraid "that everything goes back to where we were."

"At least now we can pay the bills," she said. "Maybe not on time, but we can pay them."

Feeling that same uncertainty -- but emerging on the other end of the electoral spectrum -- were Wayne and Karen Gray, retired farmers who came to hear Ernst over breakfast at Big T Maid-Rite, a Toledo, Iowa, diner, during Ernst's recent swing through in an RV emblazoned with the encouragement to "Honk if you think Washington's broken."

"It's a disaster -- this Ebola mess -- we just don't have any leadership right now," said Karen Gray, 74, of Tama, who described the Obama administration as "very reactive" on issues from Ebola to terrorism.

She and her husband both felt reassured by Ernst's promise to bring "Iowa ways" to Washington, and the part of her talk when she noted that she had served in Kuwait and southern Iraq with the Iowa Army National Guard. "We could have kept ISIS from spreading," Ernst told the crowd at the Maid-Rite, chiding Obama's early description of Islamic State militants as a "junior varsity" force.

And he's still going as of now.  

His book The Great Global Warming Blunder, published as a mainstream work after Spencer took his ball and went home after all the other scientists said mean things about him, includes some truly bizarre stuff. At one point, he outlines the current scientific theory for the ice ages, tiny fluctuations in the Earth's orbit called Milankovitch cycles. The theory holds that temperature changes brought about by the orbital perturbations, though not strong enough to trigger glaciation or deglaciation in themselves, trigger feedback mechanisms that lead to wildly fluctuating temperatures - including the release or sequestration of large amounts of CO2 from the ocean and the biosphere. This puts CO2 at the forefront of non-solar climate charge throughout history, and also explains the well-known 500-year "lag" between temperature and CO2 during one climate change recorded in the Vostok ice cores. Spencer clearly and concisely summarises all this - and then declares it all to be nonsense. His reason? Because there's that CO2 lag in the Vostok ice core and he wants it explained![9] Yes, despite having explained it himself, he seems incapable of understanding what he has just written. So what does Spencer think caused the ice ages? He cheerfully admits that he doesn't have a clue.[10] This may be willingly swallowed by idiots, but to a reasonable eye this makes Spencer seem either hideously mendacious or an ignorant fool.