27 August 2008

Living is an art - not a science

There is darkness and there is light. Remember, living is an art.   --Henrik Ibsen, Brand

19 August 2008

Arctic Ice Grows 30 Per Cent In a Year

Predictions of "ice free" summer for first time in history completely debunked

Paul Joseph Watson
Propaganda Matrix
Tuesday, August 19, 2008

StumbleUpon




 

 

Alarmist scientists who predicted that the North Pole could be "ice free" this summer as a result of global warming have been embarrassed after it was revealed that Arctic ice has actually grown by around 30 per cent in the year since August 2007.

Back in June, numerous prominent voices in the scientific community expressed fears of a mass melting of the polar ice caps, including David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, who told National Geographic Magazine, "We're actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history]."

"This summer's forecast—and unusual early melting events all around the Arctic—serve as a dire warning of how quickly the polar regions are being affected by climate change," adds the article.

In February, Dr. Olav Orheim, head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, told Xinhua, "If Norway's average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away, which is highly possible judging from current conditions."

As per usual, the reality has failed to match the hype of the climate doomsayers.

According to collated data from the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and the University of Illinois, Arctic ice extent was 30 per cent greater on August 11, 2008 than it was on the August 12, 2007. This is a conservative estimate based on the map projection.


Blue pixels represent increased ice coverage over the North Pole in the year since August 2007.

The video below highlights the differences between those two dates," reports The Register. "As you can see, ice has grown in nearly every direction since last summer - with a large increase in the area north of Siberia. Also note that the area around the Northwest Passage (west of Greenland) has seen a significant increase in ice. Some of the islands in the Canadian Archipelago are surrounded by more ice than they were during the summer of 1980."

But what of the Antarctic down south? Figures tell us that ice coverage in the year since August 2007 has grown by nearly one million square kilometers.

As The Register article notes, "The Arctic did not experience the meltdowns forecast by NSIDC and the Norwegian Polar Year Secretariat. It didn't even come close. Additionally, some current graphs and press releases from NSIDC seem less than conservative. There appears to be a consistent pattern of overstatement related to Arctic ice loss."

A general cooling trend across the planet is now clearly apparent as sunspot activity, the main driver of climate change, dwindles to almost nothing.

As we reported last week, A top observatory that has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next two decades as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age.

While the mass media, Al Gore and politicized bodies like the IPCC scaremonger about the perils of global warming and demand the poor and middle class pay CO2 taxes, both hard scientific data and circumstantial evidence points to a clear cooling trend.

How man-made global warming advocates will spin this one remains to be seen - maybe they will just continue to adopt their current tactic by claiming that any geological or weather event whatsoever, be it hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts or floods, temperature increase or decrease, and even a 30 per cent growth of the polar ice cap - is a result of that evil life-giving gas that we exhale - CO2.

16 August 2008

Cults: The Wave

1981 - Based on the real experience of a high school class in Palo Alto, CA in April 1967, whose teacher wanted to explain the rise of the Nazi party to his students.

14 August 2008

Dearth Of Sunspot Activity To Herald New Ice Age?


Observatory predicts two degree drop in temperatures over next two decades as solar activity dwindles

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, August 14, 2008

A top observatory that has been measuring sun cycles for over 200 years predicts that global temperatures will drop by two degrees over the next two decades as solar activity grinds to a halt and the planet drastically cools down, potentially heralding the onset of a new ice age.

While the mass media, Al Gore and politicized bodies like the IPCC scaremonger about the perils of global warming and demand the poor and middle class pay CO2 taxes, both hard scientific data and circumstantial evidence points to a clear cooling trend.

Following the end of the Sun's most active period in over 11,000 years, the last 10 years have displayed a clear cooling trend as temperatures post-1998 leveled out and are now plummeting.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)


China recently experienced its coldest winter in 100 years while northeast America was hit by record snow levels and Britain suffered its coldest April in decades as late-blooming daffodils were pounded with hail and snow on an almost daily basis. The British summer has also left many yearning for global warming, with temperatures in June and July rarely struggling to get over 16 degrees and on one occasion even dropping as low as 9 degrees in the middle of the afternoon.

"Summer heat continues in short supply, continuing a trend that has dominated much of the 21st Century's opening decade," reports the Chicago Tribune. "There have been only 162 days 90 degrees or warmer at Midway Airport over the period from 2000 to 2008. That's by far the fewest 90-degree temperatures in the opening nine years of any decade on record here since 1930."

The reason? Sunspot activity has dwindled. There have only been a handful of days in the past two months where any sunspot activity has been observed and over 400 spotless days have been recorded in the current solar cycle.

"The sun's surface has been fairly blank for the last couple of years, and that has some worried that it may be entering another Maunder minimum, the sun's 50-year abstinence from sunspots, which some scientists have linked to the Little Ice Age of the 17th century," reports one science blog.

Long-time man-made global warming advocates NASA assure us that significant sunspot activity will return in 2012, but a recent a paper on recent solar trends by William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, predicts that sunspots will all but vanish after 2015.

Since the sun, and not carbon dioxide, is the principle driver of climate change, a dearth of sunspot activity would herald a repeat of the Maunder Minimum, the name given to the period roughly from 1645 to 1715, when sunspots became exceedingly rare and contributed to the onset of the Little Ice Age during which Europe and North America were hit by bitterly cold winters and the Thames river in London completely froze.


The spotless sun: Eerily quiet solar activity has many scientists concerned that a new ice age could be on the horizon.

Forecasts of a sharp cooling trend are backed by the UK's Armagh Observatory, which has been observing solar activity for over 200 years.

The observatory notes that solar cycles 21 and 22, which were characterized by being short and intense in their activity, led to the natural global warming observed in the 80's and 90's.

"Cycle 23, which hasn't finished yet, looks like it will be long (at least 12 to 13 years) and cycle 24, which has still to start, looks like it will be exceptionally weak," writes one observatory scientist.

"Based on the past Armagh measurements, this suggests that over the next two decades, global temperatures may fall by about 2 degrees C — that is, to a level lower than any we have seen in the last 100 years…."Temperatures have already fallen by about 0.5 degrees C over the past 12 months and, if this is only the start of it, it would be a serious concern," concludes David Watt.

Such predictions are of course of little interest to a global PR machine that butters its bread on attributing every weather event, be it droughts, floods, volcanoes or earthquakes, to man-made global warming.

No matter that the last ten years have showed no global warming and the next 10 years are predicted to show no global warming, the fact that temperatures are clearly dropping in correlation to the lack of sunspot activity means nothing to people who are already committed to a quasi-religious belief system and governments that have resolved to squeeze the middle class citing fraudulent claims of eco-apocalypse as an excuse, while the real environmental crises - deforestation, GM madness, cell phone tower radiation, genetic splicing and chemtrails go almost completely ignored.

25 July 2008

8th Grade Test from 100 years ago

HOW MANY COLLEGE GRADS COULD PASS THIS SIMPLE TEST WE HAD IN THE 8th GRADE ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO???

--Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out. Could any of us have passed the 8th grade in 1895? This is the eighth- grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS -1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)

  1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
  2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
  3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
  4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of"lie,""play," and "run."
  5. Define case; Illustrate each case.
  6. What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
  7. - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
  1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
  2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
  3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
  4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
  5. Find the cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
  6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
  7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per metre?
  8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
  9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
  10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
  1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
  2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
  3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
  4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
  5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
  6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
  7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
  8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.
Orthography (Time, one hour)
  1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
  2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
  3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals
  4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.'
  5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
  6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
  7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
  8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
  9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
  10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
  1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
  2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
  3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
  4. Describe the mountains of North America
  5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
  6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
  7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
  8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
  9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
  10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.
Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete. Gives the saying "he only had an 8th grade education" a whole new meaning, doesn't it?! Also shows you how poor our education system has become...

12 March 2008

Count like the butterfly

"The butterfly counts not months
but moments,
and has time enough."


– Rabindranath Tagore

Deepak Chopra Quote

"Everything is the same spirit
watching itself through the eyes
of different observers."

– Deepak Chopra

Einstein Quote

"Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing
which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy."

– Albert Einstein

01 March 2008

Warren Buffett on his own mortality

I've reluctantly discarded the notion of my continuing to manage the portfolio after my death -- abandoning my hope to give new meaning to the term 'thinking outside the box,' Buffett said. (Floyd Norris, New York Times as quoted in Houston Chronicle, March 1, 2008)

29 February 2008

Springsteen Interview on Charlie Rose

Here is one of the better interviews Charlie Rose has conducted as he speaks with Bruce Springsteen about his life, family and music. About 20 minutes in he speaks about his family and how his family dynamics effected his understanding of life and his musical themes.

16 February 2008

Interpreting the Singularity

As science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has pointed out, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The gap between today and tomorrow is closing at a staggering rate, while the future continues to become more and more surreal. A perfect example comes from the work of inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil, who often talks about a point sometime in the next 50 years when our rate of technological progress begins to approach the infinite—an event he calls "the Singularity." This essentially represents the event horizon of our own technological evolution, beyond which we simply cannot imagine. Is there actually something to the concept of the Singularity, or is it just a sort of mythical Rapture for tech geeks? What are the implications of such exponential advancement of technology to human consciousness? As data becomes more and more free, and therefore more and more ubiquitous, how can the Integral vision help us navigate the "global brain" currently under construction?

Integral author Ken Wilbur answers a question about how to respond to the coming singularity.

18 January 2008

"Imagine"

(sung to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine”)

Imagine there’s no Apple,
No products that begin with “i,”
No monthly iPod models,
No Apple stores to get you high.
Imagine all the people
Finding other things to do!

Imagine there’s no bloggers...
It isn’t hard to do!
No viruses or spyware,
No weekly Windows patches, too
Imagine all the people
Learning to get a life...

(You-hoo-hoo!)

You may say it’d be a nightmare
Without Google, Mac or Dell
We might have real conversations--
But the world would be dull as hell!

Imagine no new cellphones;
Kiss console games goodbye.
No David Pogue or Mossberg
To tell us what to buy.
Imagine all the people
Getting some exercise!

(You-hoo-hoo!)

You may say that I’m a loony
But rest assured I’m almost done.
I’m pretty sure it’ll never happen
So we nerds can live as one!

--by David Pogue