General Kelly shakes up the White House

Kelly’s Rules for Trump’s West Wing: Stop Bickering, Get in Early, Make an Appointment. New Chief of Staff John Kelly moves quickly to bring order and discipline to a West Wing riven by conflict.

There is a giant oil field offshore Norway called Johan Sverdup. Statiol is buiilding an amazing group of drilling platforms. Last week the jacket for the oil & gas riser platform was installed by Thialf crane vessel. The jacket reaches 140 metres from the seabed.  Watch this video of the support structure deployment.  Considering that the jacket is wider than a football field and weighs 26,000 tons, the ship with the cranes is pretty impressive as well.  To appreciate how much money is being spent on this project, take a look at this video animating the whole installation. The quality of the video is as good as anything out of Pixar.

California State Universities have required entering students to take remedial courses in math and English if they fail tests on the subjects. In other words, 39% of the students are not ready for college. These remedial courses do not generate credit towards graduation, and the academics think this discourages the students. Many don't even complete the remedial courses. The proposed solution: elimiate the remedial courses.

Here's a plannng guide tor viewing the upcoming solar eclipse.

What is it about a thoroughly discredited doctrine like Communism that just won’t die?  The New York Times is publishing a series of articles about the glories of totalitarianism. Further on the same subject, a new book out "Communism for Kids".

Another liberal denominaation is losing members. It would help them to treat the Bible with more respect.

Obama paved the way for the Trump administration to crack down on leaks. This from a NY Times reporter.

This author argues that we should boycott Chic-fil-A. I thought the recipients of the Chic-fil-A foundation seemed like good choices. The comments are kind of fun.

The NY Times reviewed Al Gore's new documentary on global warming climate change. Not surprising, they liked it.  I haven't seen the movie, but in the review Gore seems to confuse climate change with weather. On the other hand, this reviewer didn't much like the movie's focus on Al Gore. Update: "An Inconvenient Sequel" bombs at the box office (with some good links).

Former “Alarmist” Scientist Says Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Based In False Science, but there's too much money to change course. Australia's Bureau of Meteorology doesn't adjust the readings to show global warming manually like the rest of the world, they programed the instruments to do it automatically.

Do you trust the media? Here's a survey of peoples level of trust for different sources.  Some of the results are if not surprising, at least different than my opinions. For example, NPR is way up on the trust scale, though if you listen to it, they definitely have a liberal bias; not so much errors, but omiting relative perspective. Rush Limbaugh is faily for down on trust, but I believe that most people who don't trust him don't listen to him either, instead basing their opinion on what liberal sources tell them about his program.