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Friday, 31 January 2014
Cyclone hits Queensland
Cyclone
Dylan hits north Queensland
Torrential
rain and wind gusts up to 140km/h are battering north Queensland as
Cyclone Dylan makes landfall.
31
January, 2014
The
Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) says the category two cyclone made
landfall near Proserpine, north of Mackay, just after 4am (AEST) on
Friday.
Forecaster
Chris Joseph told AAP the storm is moving about 16km/h in a southerly
direction and is expected head inland in the next three to six hours.
"It
is still a dangerous storm," he said.
Wind
gusts up to 135km/h were felt at Flinders Reef, about 250 kilometres
off Bowen.
Mr
Joseph says heavy rain is battering much of the north Queensland
coast.
About
450mm of rain was dumped at Pioneer River basin, west of Mackay, in
the 24 hours from 9am (AEST) Thursday.
About
200-300mm of rain is expected in other areas.
Mr
Joseph says residents in low-lying areas could be flooded during a
king tide on Friday morning.
A
cyclone warning remains in place for coastal and island communities
from Townsville to St Lawrence, extending to adjacent inland areas
including Collinsville.
A
BOM alert issued at 2am (AEST) said damaging gusts up to 120km/h are
possible between Townsville and St Lawrence on Friday morning.
Destructive
winds up to 140km/h may be felt in some areas for brief periods.
Winds
are expected to ease rapidly by the afternoon.
Heavy
rain, which may lead to flash flooding, is expected about coastal and
adjacent inland areas of the Herbert and Lower Burdekin and the
Central Coast and Whitsundays districts.
Coastal
residents between Ayr and Mackay are being warned a dangerous storm
tide may hit during high tide on Friday morning.
"The
sea is likely to rise steadily up to a level well above the normal
tide, with damaging waves and flooding of some low-lying areas close
to the shoreline," the weather bureau said in a statement.
Residents
are being advised to take measures to protect their properties.
A
separate severe weather warning is current for remaining coastal and
island communities from Cooktown to Cardwell and from St Lawrence to
Gladstone, extending inland to the northern Central Highlands and
eastern parts of the Central West districts.
Atlantic ocean currents
I
was struck by these comments by Prof. Chris Busby. Although he is not
a climate scientist his comments resonate with me
Chris
Busby: "Gulf stream seems
to failing. i have noticed increasingly the depressions get stuck in
mid - Atlantic. we have had stuck depressions mid atlantic since
november and a continuous high over scandinavia which means high
winds and rain in England and cold easterlies in Latvia with no snow.
Scary."
I
have followed with some apposite comments from Michael Green.
Is
the Gulf Stream failing?
Must'a
been a reason why I felt moved to see "The Day After Tomorrow"
once again a few days ago.
People rightfully complain about the
hyperbole and the bad acting/storyline, but that really wasn't of
importance.
We will not "wake up" and do anything
meaningful until something like this occurs.
It could be an
interruption of the thermohalene current or a spike in the wet-bulb
temperatures in summer, rather like Singapore was threatened with
last year, except this time causing millions of deaths.
Or
perhaps Ft. McMurray will flood, spilling its guts into the Arctic
Ocean, which would decimate the economy of Canada, not to mention
turning the Arctic black as night, which will superheat the waters
and the climate even more.
We can do impact statements till the
cows come home, but one way or another, this kind of thing is
probably in the offing, and I am guessing very soon.
New updates
for earth.nullschool.net!
Now you can see global ocean surface
currents in near real-time. Just click
here:
(A
browser refresh may be required to pick up the changes.)
This
image shows the Gulf Stream, which you can read about on
Wikipedia:
What
other powerful ocean currents can you find?
Earth & Space
Research in Seattle, WA, produces this data every five days as part
of the OSCAR project:
A collective meltdown
Why
the rich are freaking out
29
January, 2014
NEW
YORK — The co-founder of one the nation’s oldest venture capital
firms fears a possible genocide against the wealthy. Residents of
Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side say the progressive mayor didn’t
plow their streets as a form of frosty revenge. And the co-founder of
Home Depot recently warned the Pope to pipe down about economic
inequality.
The
nation’s wealthiest, denizens of the loftiest slice of the 1
percent, appear to be having a collective meltdown.
Economists,
advisers to the wealthy and the wealthy themselves describe a
deep-seated anxiety that the national — and even global — mood is
turning against the super-rich in ways that ultimately could prove
dangerous and hard to control.
President
Barack Obama and the Democrats have pivoted to income inequality
ahead of the midterm elections. Pope Francis has strongly warned
against the dangers of wealth concentration. And all of this follows
the rise of the Occupy movement in 2011 and a bout of bank-bashing
populism in the tea party.
The
collective result, according to one member of the 1 percent, is a
fear that the rich are in deep, deep trouble. Maybe not today but
soon.
“You
have a bunch of people who see conspiracies everywhere and believe
that this inequality issue will quickly turn into serious class
warfare,” said this person, who asked not to be identified by name
so as not to anger any wealthy friends. “They don’t believe
inequality is bad and believe the only way to deal with it is to
allow entrepreneurs to have even fewer shackles.”
And
so the rich are lashing out.
In
the latest example, Thomas Perkins, co-founder of legendary Silicon
Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, wrote a letter to The
Wall Street Journal over the weekend comparing Nazi Germany’s
persecution and mass murder of Jews to “the progressive war on the
American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”
He
went on to say he feared a progressive “Kristallnacht,” referring
to the 1938 German pogrom in which nearly 100 Jews were killed and
more than 30,000 arrested, a dark omen of the murder of 6 million
that would follow.
People,
to put it mildly, went nuts.
Even
Perkins’s old firm disavowed him and his comments and said he no
longer has anything to do with the company. Perkins then went on
Bloomberg television, ostensibly to apologize for the remark. But
instead he doubled down on the analogy, saying “when you start to
use hatred against a minority, it can get out of control.”
Perkins
was not the first wealthy investor to invoke Nazi Germany as a
warning over current attitudes toward the wealthy. In 2010, when
Obama suggested raising the tax on “carried interest” earned by
private equity executives, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said,
“It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Obama
still hasn’t managed to persuade Congress to hike the 20 percent
rate on carried interest even though most on Wall Street expect to
lose the perk at some point. Schwarzman eventually apologized for his
Hitler remark.
More
recently, the New York Post dedicated considerable ink to complaints
from residents of the Upper East Side that newly elected progressive
mayor Bill de Blasio directed plows to avoid the neighborhood as some
kind of revenge for their wealth and support of de Blasio’s
opponent.
“He
is trying to get us back. He is very divisive and political,” Upper
East Side resident Molly Jong Fast told the Post. “By not plowing
the Upper East Side, he is saying, ‘I’m not one of them.’”
The
mayor dutifully trundled up to the neighborhood to admit mistakes in
plowing but strongly denied any ulterior motive.
It
doesn’t end there.
Ken
Langone, a wealthy investor and co-founder of Home Depot, recently
told CNBC that the Catholic Church in New York might see a decline in
donations if Pope Francis did not tone down his comments about the
dangers of economic inequality. “You want to be careful about
generalities. Rich people in one country don’t act the same as rich
people in another country,” Langone said.
New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman this week wrote that even
plutocrats who manage not to invoke Nazi Germany “nonetheless hold,
and loudly express, political and economic views that combine
paranoia and megalomania in equal measure.”
The
phenomenon is not limited to the U.S. Bankers across the globe who
gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last
week complained publicly and privately that in their view
vilification of the rich, particularly in the financial industry, has
gone far enough.
“Life
is hard enough, and I think this constant lecturing on ethics and on
integrity by many stakeholders is probably the most frustrating part
of the equation. Because I don’t think there are many people who
are perfect,” Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS AG, told The
Wall Street Journal. “We are far from being perfect … but it’s
not going to be very helpful to be constantly bashing banks.”
But
perhaps nowhere is the collective freakout more pronounced than the
financial capital of the world. Here in New York, even wealthy donors
who tend to favor Democrats are deeply concerned about the current
political discourse at the city level in which de Blasio wants to
increase taxes on the rich, and the national level, in which
Democrats have pledged to make the 2014 midterm elections about
addressing economic inequality.
“I
think this is going to be disastrous for the city,” one top
executive at a large Wall Street bank said on the eve of de Blasio’s
election. “The people who pay taxes could move out, the businesses
could leave. What’s keeping us here?”
Nothing
Obama proposed in his relatively mild State of the Union address
would do much to impact the lives of the nation’s top earners.
Raising the minimum wage wouldn’t do it. Nor would extending
unemployment benefits or instituting universal pre-kindergarten.
Even
the president’s toughest lines on the issue of inequality were
hardly the kind of fire-and-brimstone condemnation that Franklin D.
Roosevelt heaped on bankers’ heads in the 1930s.
“After
four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices
have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done
better,” Obama said. “But average wages have barely budged.
Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.”
That
was pretty much it.
Obama
made no call to raise taxes further on the rich, who still enjoy
rates dramatically lower than they were through most of the booming
1980s. He did not summon Occupy Wall Street protesters back to the
barricades or threaten new actions to bust up big banks.
Meanwhile,
de Blasio has no power to raise taxes unilaterally on the rich
despite his fiery campaign rhetoric.
On
a practical level, the wealthy are jumping at shadows.
“None
of the issues currently on the table would have a large effect on the
very rich,” said Justin Wolfers, economics professor at the
University of Michigan. “If there is anything driving this rise in
rhetoric, it’s that the president pivoted to talking about
inequality, which some interpret as taking from the 1 percent and
giving to the 99 percent.”
People
who counsel the wealthy for a living say there is both an unease with
growing income disparity and a fear of even greater persecution.
“I
think that with Occupy Wall Street there was a sense of the heat
getting turned up and a feeling of vilification and potential
danger,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a psychologist whose Wealth
Legacy Group focuses on counseling the affluent. “There is a worry
among our clients that they are being judged and people are making
assumptions about who they are based on their wealth.”
Much
of the current anxiety is also driven by the precarious nature of the
recovery from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
The
U.S. economy is showing signs of picking up speed with job creation
and consumer confidence on the rise. But there is still an enormous
sense of national pessimism about the future, as evidenced in the
latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that showed 68 percent of
Americans believe the country is stagnant or worse off since the
president took office in 2009.
And
the recent stock market swoon, the bad December jobs report and
gyrations in emerging market currencies could convince some wealthy
Americans that their pessimism is well-founded and that another
economic downturn is not far off — and might carry even greater
risks for the rich.
“People
are very anxious about the decline in the stock market and feel that
this may be just a hollow shell of a recovery, and we may see in the
next few years that things really haven’t changed,” said Louis
Hyman, a historian of capitalism at Cornell. “They are afraid the
critics are right and that inequality really is a driver of all this,
and are afraid of what that means for them.”
Debunking the debunkers
When
I post stories such as the snow that can't be melted, I always get
comments like “why do you post shit like this?”
On
reflection, I think I have as many problems with debunkers as with
the perveyers of conspiracy theory. As for sceptics – they are
beyond the pale for me.
There
are definiitely areas that remain a mystery and go beyond science.
Obsessive
Debunking Disorder (ODD)?
Are
Hardcore Skeptics and Debunkers Actually Brain Deficient? Their Own
Beloved ’Hard Science’ Might Well Suggest Many Are.
16
May, 2013
We
have all encountered them. The men and women of ’reason’. The
self-appointed guardians and vanguards of materialist dogma along
with their absolute faith and belief in official government and
corporate press releases. The debunker, the hardcore skeptic—how
they love to compulsively ridicule and mock all they deem
’pseudoscience’ and ’conspiracy theory’—while also
declaring anyone who thinks outside the box or questions the
prevailing orthodoxy, a "moron" and a "tard".
Matters not how solid the evidence you present them with is, nor how
flimsy their own state-sanctioned ’hard science’ which they
smugly offer up as their rebuttal; they are driven by a messianic
compulsion to root out unscientific ’idiots’ with all the zeal
and fanaticism similar to that of a Dominican or Jesuit charging
through southern France in the twelfth century seeking out ’heretics’
for the burning. Irony does not even come into their myopic
worldview—unless of course a government, corporate or university
press office states this. Then it becomes an undisputed fact. Thanks
to the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christoper Hitchens, these
Internet-bound warriors of rationality see ’Creationists’ and
’hidden Christians’ around every corner and seek to root them out
and expose them as part and parcel of their own peculiar secular
witch hunt mentality.
The reality is that apart from their own kind—other self-proclaimed non-’idiots’—most people find such arrogant and obnoxious debunkers and hardcore skeptics to be strangely angry and boorish, and often confrontational to the point of hysterical. So many of them seem to lack basic social and behavioural skills when ’debating’ with their ’kook’ of choice. Their absolutism can be staggering at times. Yet, despite all this, they have somehow come to consider themselves ’cool’ and even ’sexy’ within the last decade. This is simply a lack of critical thinking on their behalf; a distorted worldview where only they are right and everyone else is an idiot.
However, when you strip down their whole mandate into its constituent parts, one soon finds that most of these ’scientifically’ minded crusaders have no actual accredited scientific background, and the entire thrust of their endeavours remains nothing less than unconditional servitude and unquestioned devotion to authority figures and the status quo. They seek entrenched orthodoxy, not exploration and wonder. They see an open-minded individual as being akin to a brain being infected with a disease, or the mark of a witch. They act as if Creationists are a real danger to human survival, as if the US Bible Belt has extended beyond its absurd boundaries. Creationists are about as much danger to the advances made by scientists in the last two hundred years as Graneda was to Ronald Reagan back in the early 1980s.
It is only fair to point out that there are also healthy skeptics who genuinely do look at anomalies and unexplained phenomena within the natural and unseen cosmos with a cautious eye. They will at least indulge a novel or radical opinion and look at the evidence before taking a stance—often it is an arbitrary position—based on using the Scientific Method coupled with Carl Sagan’s "extraordinary evidence". They are generally polite and only moderately condescending at worst.
The debunker and the hardcore skeptics, on the other hand, will even attack these open-minded Materialists, similar to how a flying saucer cult will have very public witch hunts of so-so members who have not shown their unconditional devotion to the messages sent from the ’space brothers’. The irony is that many of the open-minded skeptics that they attack often have a scientific or engineering background, and these folks are being attacked by debunkers whose sum total of their own quest for reason and logic rarely extends beyond procuring a ’Mythbusters’ DVD box set or having a poster of Richard Dawkins on their wall. Any Reductionist fence-sitters will be treated with ridicule and contempt—even fascistic vitriol and vicious insults.
There is simply no grey areas within the concrete consciousness of the debunker or the hardcore skeptic; instead, only a kind of scientific idealism—and idealism, both secular or otherwise, is really just a nice way of saying ’fascism’.
So what gives? How come they behave the way they do? A complete lack of social intelligence? An inability to debate, share interesting banter and listen to what another person is saying which might be at odds with their own beliefs? Surprisingly, their own beloved science might well provide the answer to these questions. It may well be an over-stimulation of the left hemisphere of their brains leading to a kind of self-induced schizophrenia whereby the right hemisphere of their brain has been switched off. Hence, why they place no value on other forms of non-lateral intelligence: noetic wisdom and intuition.
THE LEFT RIGHT BRAIN—MYTHOLOGY AND FACT
During the 1960’s and well into the following two decades, a branch of pop psychology developed which began to make some very speculative assumptions about the specific roles the two hemispheres of our brain play in our cognitive awareness and functioning. The general understanding developed that the left hemisphere of the brain was essentially analytical and concerned with processes and quantitative evaluation, while the right hemisphere of the human brain was where the artists and dreamers resided. This is a very simplistic understanding; and in recent years, imaging research has shown that both hemispheres share more or less the same attributes, and both can equally process the same cognitive functionality. However, and this is crucial, there is a level of redundancy in both hemispheres.
The growing speculation for the need for two (asymmetrical) brain hemispheres is to perform two acts of awareness. The left brain is devoted to specific tasks and objectives, while the right brain acts as a kind of peripheral awareness. There has to be a kind of background seeing, as well as immediate attention to the task at hand. Think of an early human on the side of a riverbank trying to spear a salmon—the left brain would be devoted to this task. In order to maintain awareness of the environment and possible dangers therein, the right hemisphere of the human brain is ’looking’ out for predators such as a saber-tooth tiger seeking an easy meal in the form of a prehistoric human who is completely concentrated on catching a fish. Hence, why the right brain is often associated with insight, intuition and noetic realisations. Which is why artists tend to have an ability to see changes in their environment and social conditions before the rest of the population. Their ’background vision’ is more highly developed due to them using both hemispheres of their brain for the purpose they were intended.
The left brain, on the other hand, has been shown to be highly narcissistic and with an inflated sense of its own worth and status. The left hemisphere sees no problem with itself, and this has been shown in stroke patients who lost the use of the right hemisphere of their brain. Operating in left-brain mode only, they assumed they were perfectly fine until they attempted to get out of bed only to discover they were paralysed on one side.
The reality is that apart from their own kind—other self-proclaimed non-’idiots’—most people find such arrogant and obnoxious debunkers and hardcore skeptics to be strangely angry and boorish, and often confrontational to the point of hysterical. So many of them seem to lack basic social and behavioural skills when ’debating’ with their ’kook’ of choice. Their absolutism can be staggering at times. Yet, despite all this, they have somehow come to consider themselves ’cool’ and even ’sexy’ within the last decade. This is simply a lack of critical thinking on their behalf; a distorted worldview where only they are right and everyone else is an idiot.
However, when you strip down their whole mandate into its constituent parts, one soon finds that most of these ’scientifically’ minded crusaders have no actual accredited scientific background, and the entire thrust of their endeavours remains nothing less than unconditional servitude and unquestioned devotion to authority figures and the status quo. They seek entrenched orthodoxy, not exploration and wonder. They see an open-minded individual as being akin to a brain being infected with a disease, or the mark of a witch. They act as if Creationists are a real danger to human survival, as if the US Bible Belt has extended beyond its absurd boundaries. Creationists are about as much danger to the advances made by scientists in the last two hundred years as Graneda was to Ronald Reagan back in the early 1980s.
It is only fair to point out that there are also healthy skeptics who genuinely do look at anomalies and unexplained phenomena within the natural and unseen cosmos with a cautious eye. They will at least indulge a novel or radical opinion and look at the evidence before taking a stance—often it is an arbitrary position—based on using the Scientific Method coupled with Carl Sagan’s "extraordinary evidence". They are generally polite and only moderately condescending at worst.
The debunker and the hardcore skeptics, on the other hand, will even attack these open-minded Materialists, similar to how a flying saucer cult will have very public witch hunts of so-so members who have not shown their unconditional devotion to the messages sent from the ’space brothers’. The irony is that many of the open-minded skeptics that they attack often have a scientific or engineering background, and these folks are being attacked by debunkers whose sum total of their own quest for reason and logic rarely extends beyond procuring a ’Mythbusters’ DVD box set or having a poster of Richard Dawkins on their wall. Any Reductionist fence-sitters will be treated with ridicule and contempt—even fascistic vitriol and vicious insults.
There is simply no grey areas within the concrete consciousness of the debunker or the hardcore skeptic; instead, only a kind of scientific idealism—and idealism, both secular or otherwise, is really just a nice way of saying ’fascism’.
So what gives? How come they behave the way they do? A complete lack of social intelligence? An inability to debate, share interesting banter and listen to what another person is saying which might be at odds with their own beliefs? Surprisingly, their own beloved science might well provide the answer to these questions. It may well be an over-stimulation of the left hemisphere of their brains leading to a kind of self-induced schizophrenia whereby the right hemisphere of their brain has been switched off. Hence, why they place no value on other forms of non-lateral intelligence: noetic wisdom and intuition.
THE LEFT RIGHT BRAIN—MYTHOLOGY AND FACT
During the 1960’s and well into the following two decades, a branch of pop psychology developed which began to make some very speculative assumptions about the specific roles the two hemispheres of our brain play in our cognitive awareness and functioning. The general understanding developed that the left hemisphere of the brain was essentially analytical and concerned with processes and quantitative evaluation, while the right hemisphere of the human brain was where the artists and dreamers resided. This is a very simplistic understanding; and in recent years, imaging research has shown that both hemispheres share more or less the same attributes, and both can equally process the same cognitive functionality. However, and this is crucial, there is a level of redundancy in both hemispheres.
The growing speculation for the need for two (asymmetrical) brain hemispheres is to perform two acts of awareness. The left brain is devoted to specific tasks and objectives, while the right brain acts as a kind of peripheral awareness. There has to be a kind of background seeing, as well as immediate attention to the task at hand. Think of an early human on the side of a riverbank trying to spear a salmon—the left brain would be devoted to this task. In order to maintain awareness of the environment and possible dangers therein, the right hemisphere of the human brain is ’looking’ out for predators such as a saber-tooth tiger seeking an easy meal in the form of a prehistoric human who is completely concentrated on catching a fish. Hence, why the right brain is often associated with insight, intuition and noetic realisations. Which is why artists tend to have an ability to see changes in their environment and social conditions before the rest of the population. Their ’background vision’ is more highly developed due to them using both hemispheres of their brain for the purpose they were intended.
The left brain, on the other hand, has been shown to be highly narcissistic and with an inflated sense of its own worth and status. The left hemisphere sees no problem with itself, and this has been shown in stroke patients who lost the use of the right hemisphere of their brain. Operating in left-brain mode only, they assumed they were perfectly fine until they attempted to get out of bed only to discover they were paralysed on one side.
Between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain is the corpus callosum, which is a thin membrane of nerve fibers which separates the two halves and has now been shown that rather than being a communicative link between the two brain halves, it acts more like a buffer, with the left brain in Western people having a desire to literally switch off the neural activity in the right hemisphere. This is one meme which Betty Edwards was correct about in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain—the left hemisphere is a bully. In overly logical and analytical individuals, fMRI scans have shown the left brain actually inhibits the right brain—via the corpus callosum nerve fibers—from offering its contribution to the entire cognitive process. This state of right hemisphere nullification is where the debunker and the hardcore skeptics are trapped and can never leave—in their intolerant and highly narcissistic left hemisphere—using the two percent of neural wiring into their right hemisphere in order to shut it off. Ordering the right hemisphere to cease activity while the left side of the brain saves the world from ’morons’ who dare question official government press releases or the mandates from any authority figure or bureaucratic institutions.
Along with this, their intuition and ’background awareness’ are likewise diminished. Can you see where this is going? For all their obsession with brain functionality and brain size, as well as their entrenched (and completely unproven) notion that all human consciousness resides in the brain, the debunkers and hardcore skeptics are only using one half of their brain.
EVOLUTION AND THE CORPUS CALLOSUM
Despite what one would assume, the further we get from our hunter-gatherer ancestors, the thickness of the corpus callosum has actually increased. Pushing both halves of the human brain further apart rather than removing it. This presents Darwinists with a problem; as we move further away from the dangers of the natural world, there should be an on-going lateralisation and symmetry of the two brain hemispheres. Another problem is presented here; in that it has now been shown that people of higher intelligence and IQ are much easier to hypnotise and mind control than more creative individuals, and even people with lower IQs are less likely to be mesmerised than formally educated persons with advanced degrees. This would go a long way to explaining why the most absurd flying saucer cults are populated with PhDs and other highly qualified people waiting for the ’space brothers’ to arrive. The over-dependence upon and submission to the left hemisphere of the brain leads to just as much delusion and risk of being deceived as the flighty and poetic over-stimulated right hemisphere.
A COGNITIVE AWARENESS STRANGLED BY STATISTICAL INFORMATION AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS
All the great scientific discoveries were ’eureka’ moments. They were not developed in the labs by white coats working for corporations and foundations. Scientific discovery was not gained by piling sequential ’certainties’ upon previous ’certainties’. They were intuitive insights which were validated through the Scientific Method of measurement and constant re-testing. The Western system of education has created a kind of trial separation between the left and right hemispheres of the human brain. Therefore, similar to a stroke patient who is not aware that one side of his or her body is paralysed until they attempt to get out of bed, the deeply entranced hyperactive left brain debunker and hardcore skeptic is simply unable to grasp how the rest of us see the world and experience life. Unable to see the wood from the trees, they do not comprehend intuition and noetic insights. They are cognitively blinded to these experiences and the rest of us trying to explain to them how some official announcement or world event—does not "feel right"—is a human experience that they are completely unaware of. This is why you cannot explain an alternative viewpoint of view to them. Humans need both sides of their brain working in tandem in order for their consciousness to synthesise a more complete and richer understanding of the world as well as human and social dynamics.
THE JOURNEY INTO ORTHODOXY MADNESS
This can be seen as a kind of self-induced schizophrenia, resulting from over-hyperactivity in the left hemisphere of the brain. There is too much information being processed, and the intense devotion to the analytical leads to a kind of overload in the ’here and now’ dominant cognitive rationalisation based on statistical data, while neglecting the right hemisphere of the brain and the ’background awareness’.
Much of this has to do with how our minds process ideas and concepts through visual thought forms, and how this is then expressed in language and the written word. By neglecting the right hemisphere, extreme stress is then placed on the left hemisphere, and the results can be catastrophic. Philo Farnsworth, the Utah farm boy who invented the modern television system and then went on to develop over 150 patents in television and broadcast technology, ended up drinking himself to death due to—according to his family—being unable to shut his mind down and live a normal life. His initial discovery was a result of a ’eureka’ moment, when as a teen, he observed how the plough lines behind his tractor represented the ideal method for transmitting images by radio waves; however, his obsession with formulae and endless analytical pursuits literally blew his mind. Farnsworth is not unique in this respect.
When one becomes completely entrenched within the left brain and obsessed with an exclusively analytical lifestyle (which then becomes a belief package to be defended), there is a loss of cognitive functioning and behavioural control. This explains why there is so much anger and hostility among debunkers and hardcore skeptics. The bullying aspect of their narcissistic left brain creates a superiority complex, in that they come to believe they know all and see all, when in reality, they are running half-empty with one aspect of their human experience essentially missing. This part of the human experience where intuition, hunches, insight and social intelligence of the most subtle and intricate forms are a complete mystery to them. To the skeptical debunker, things—’either are or they are not’—there is no grey area, as they are ironically not fully utilising their own grey matter to its full potential.
Stress is then incurred upon their left hemisphere cognitive functioning and behavioural deficiencies result. They are not calling people ’morons’ and ’retards’ as a general insult or standard Internet ’courage’—the debunkers and hardcore skeptics are deeply frustrated and near hysterical to the point where they see anyone who is open-minded and willing to indulge the mysterious as being akin to an alien life form. They simply cannot relate to the rest of us. We are ’irrational’, ’lacking reason’ ’lost in woo’. Their experience of being human and how they describe it through crude metaphors whereby ’we are just DNA robots’ and there is nothing else going on—is not how the rest of us experience our lives. We know there is much more to the human experience than these left-brained internees of the hardcore skeptic and debunker faction assume. Much, much more.
So the next time you find yourself confronted with a hardcore skeptic or debunker, do not even bother to try and make your argument or present your point of view to them, as you are throwing 100% of a human experience in 50% of a self-repressed cognitive understanding. It’s not their fault they are the way they are. They are victims of an educational system which began in Prussia in the eighteenth century and which has led humanity into one scientific genocide and meat grinder after the next.
Use your intuition and ignore them. You do not need their validation and approval, as they are only interested in what the men in the white coats tell them that which is a ’fact’. Be polite and continue to follow your own field of study and knowledge path, and then see where it leads you. This may lead you nowhere, but so what. The journey is often more important than the destination. Your life will be more rewarding, creative and enriching for allowing your right brain to take part in the imagination of yourself within this five-sense reality we call human existence.
Further Resources:
Left Brain, Right Brain: Perspectives From Cognitive Neuroscience by Sally P. Springer and Georg Deutsch
The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist
Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, by S.B. Kaufman
Connecting the dots
Picking cherries
Guy
McPherson
30
Janaury, 2014
I’m
routinely accused of cherry picking information about climate change.
I plead guilty, with the following 1,000-word disclaimer.
I’ll
start with a line from recently deceased professor emeritus and
long-time teacher Albert Bartlett: “The greatest shortcoming of the
human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
When I speak and write about climate change, most members of the
audience are stuck in fifth grade, unaware that nature often exhibits
non-linearity.
I
pick cherries because I see nobody else connecting the dots on
climate change. I see nobody else making an honest effort to describe
our predicament. So, by default, I’m The Connector. I collate,
summarize, and synthesize information about climate change. And in
the process of serving as host for the finest reality show on the
Internet, I
connect people, too.
In
return, I’m the dark-horse candidate for Golden Horseshoe liar of
the year award. No, really: You can read all about it here.
This planet has become so Orwellian that those who collate the facts
and pass them along are hated as liars.
I
see plenty of support for denying the obvious. According to
a December
2013 paper in Climatic
Change,
the climate change counter-movement is funded
to the tune of nearly a billion dollars each year.
That’s just in the United States, where we continue to brag about
our prowess in destroying the living planet long after a few of us
recognized the irony in the following advertisement from Lifemagazine
in 1962. The story is similar in
other countries.
How
obvious is ongoing climate change induced by anthropogenic global
warming? If you’re unwilling to look outside, consider
the following
graph from Climate Central.
And
even as abnormal
is the new normal,
we’re just getting started. Bruce Melton, writing forTruthout in
a 26 December 2013 piece featuring climate scientist Wallace Broeker,
points out that“today
we are operating on atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases
from the 1970s. In the last 29 years we have emitted as many
greenhouse gases as we emitted in the previous 236 years.” In other
words, the
four-decade lag between emissions of greenhouse gases and
consequences of those emissions is not complete.
But it’s on the way, and there is nothing to be done today to undo
what we did during the last 40 years. And, as pointed out with
numerous scientific articles at mycomprehensive
summary dating
back to February 2003 from the folks
at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
abrupt and dramatic changes in climate aren’t out of the question.
This
knowledge brings with it horror and relief. I’m horrified by what’s
to come, which includes the near-certainty of human
extinction by 2030 as we surpass 4 C above baseline.
I’m relieved to know that today’s consequences result from
emissions dating to the 1970s, when I was excitedly learning to drive
an automobile. I experience no teenage guilt from youthful, ignorant
actions.
I
recognize that collapse of industrial civilization leads to a world 2
C warmer than baseline within a few days post-collapse. Where I live,
in the southwestern interior of a large continent in the northern
hemisphere, that means we’re headed for ~5 C locally shortly after
collapse is complete. And that means no habitat for humans: Welcome
to the dust bowl that never ends within a matter of months
post-collapse.
Yet,
seemingly contrary to these simple, easy-to-reach conclusions, I work
toward collapse. Largely unafflicted by the arrogance of humanism, I
work on behalf of non-human species. Industrial civilization is
destroying every aspect of the living planet, and I know virtually
nobody who wants to stop the runaway train. Yes, collapse will kill
us. But our deaths are guaranteed regardless, unless I missed a memo.
I’ve
given up on civilized humans making any effort to take relevant
action. Never mind our stunning
myopia:
The money to be made is clearly more important than the extinctions
we cause, including our own.
As pointed
out in
March 2012 in Nature
Climate Change,
several psychological reasons explain why people have a hard time
dealing with the stark reality of climate change (David
Roberts comments
at length in his article at Grist:
1. To the extent that climate change is an abstract concept, it is non intuitive and cognitively difficult to grasp.2. Our moral judgement system is finely tuned to react to intentional transgressions — not unintentional ones.3. Things that make us feel guilty provoke self-defensive mechanisms.4. Uncertainty breeds wishful thinking, so the lack of definitive prognoses results in unreasonable optimism.5. Our division into moral and political tribes generates ideological polarization; climate change becomes politicized.6. Events do not seem urgent when they seem to be far away in time and space; out-group victims fall by the wayside.
At considerable risk of pummeling the dead equine, I’ll reiterate a couple paragraphs I pointed out before:
Leading mainstream outlets routinely lie to the public. According to a report published 11 January 2014, “the BBC has spent tens of thousands of pounds over six years trying to keep secret an extraordinary ‘eco’ conference which has shaped its coverage of global warming.” At the 2006 event, green activists and scientists — one of whom believes climate change is a bigger danger than global nuclear war — lectured 28 of the BBC’s most senior executives.
Mainstream scientists minimize the message at every turn. As we’ve known for years,scientists almost invariably underplay climate impacts. I’m not implying conspiracy among scientists. Science selects for conservatism. Academia selects for extreme conservatism. These folks are loathe to risk drawing undue attention to themselves by pointing out there might be a threat to civilization. Never mind the near-term threat to our entire species (they couldn’t care less about other species). If the truth is dire, they can find another, not-so-dire version. The concept is supported by an article in the February 2013 issue of Global Environmental Change pointing out that climate-change scientists routinely underestimate impacts “by erring on the side of least drama.”
In
other words, science selects for conservatism (aka picking cherries
long after they are ripe). Science, after all, is merely the process
of elucidating the obvious. Climate-change scientists routinely
underestimate impacts “by erring on the side of least drama” (aka
looking for the cherries long after they’ve fallen off the tree,
onto the ground, and been consumed by rodents).
The
feedbacks are too numerous, the inertia too strong. We
fired the clathrate gun by 2007 or earlier, coincident with crossing
the point of no return for climate change.
The corporate media and corporate governments of the world keep
lying, and too few hold them accountable.
____________
With an eye to improving my “bedside manner” when I deliver presentations, I’ve recently become a certified grief-recovery counselor. A brief summary of the program, which I learned about from a contact on Facebook, is here.
I was extremely impressed by the workshop. In fact, I told the facilitator it was about a thousand times better than I expected halfway through the first of four emotionally wrenching days. The facilitator was among the best teachers I’ve ever seen.
I learned about my own grief, and how to deal with it. I learned dealing with grief is a process that requires practice. I learned that some losses associated with individuals represent opportunities to move on from the relationship.
I have suffered many of the usual and customary losses typically associated with grief, along with a few others. Who knew there are more than 40 kinds of losses?
These include moving, losing a job, divorce, death of a loved one, and many others. I suffered considerable grief when I left the university: the loss of ego, friends, and colleagues was enormous, as was the sudden inability to teach.
These include moving, losing a job, divorce, death of a loved one, and many others. I suffered considerable grief when I left the university: the loss of ego, friends, and colleagues was enormous, as was the sudden inability to teach.
I also learned a little bit about helping others deal with their own grief. That in itself is a big deal for a left-brained, science geek. I recommend this workshop to almost anybody who is willing to put themselves into the position of eager, heart-wide-open student.
I’m still working through the tools I picked up at the workshop. I suspect the process will continue for a long time. Like, as long as I have.
The snow that refuses to melt
This
is going viral over the whole internet so I can hardly ignore it. I
certainly put it down to 'WEIRD', but am unwilling to jump to the
conclusions of the article. Make up your own mind.
"I did it here in North Idaho. I got the same results BUT when I melted it on the stove it melted almost instantly and evaporated with no residue or smell. I would have to conclude that a butane lighter is simply not a good tool for melting snow."
That seems a pretty reasonable explanation to me
Proof: Massive snowstorm yields ‘fake snow’ signifying false flag weather manipulation or massive social experiment
'Massive
chemtrail’ operations found to be dumping ‘fake snow’ over
Atlanta and parts of West Virginia, may signify a false flag attack
on the populace
30
January, 2013
Stop
the press! A recent snowstorm that blanked Atlanta and parts of
Virginia sending thousands of residents into turmoil, causing nearly
the entire city to come to a standstill, may have been a false flag
operation or beta test carried out by diabolic factions of the U.S.
government.
While
the motive is not yet fully known, one thing is for sure, havoc has
ensued and something is just not sitting right with people in the
region.
KTLA5
reported:
Rebekah
Cole left work Tuesday afternoon and was still sitting in traffic 10
hours later — at 1 a.m. Wednesday. She said she hoped her car
wouldn’t run out of fuel as she prepared to spend the night in it.
She
described what she had seen as a “zombie movie” — droves of
people got out of their cars and were having conversations.
In
the dead of night, they talked and walked between cars covered in
white powder.
But
what if that powder was made of a synthetic material?
The
Proof
How
many times have you seen snow in your life?
I
am guessing that everyone reading this likely has seen and handled
snow at one time or another. I mean, anyone that has handled snow
knows that it melts as it is simply made of water.
Shockingly,
after “massive chemtrail” sightings over the state of Georgia and
parts of West Virginia over the last few days, residents are becoming
wiser–nonetheless the government and mainstream media remains
silent.
Response
by Atlanta city officials including the mayor have been limited,
blaming the storm on a “faulty weather forecast”.
Concerned
citizens and experts alike have been left to wonder how such a big
city can be caught off guard by a snowstorm.
It
is also important to point out that mainstream media rhetoric has
become extremely unusual regarding the weather in Atlanta over the
past 24 hours.
A
Call To Action
While
the true intent of this operation, likely militarized, is currently
unknown, it begs for a few good questions. I mean, why would the
military want to demobilize the city of Atlanta for days? If they
did, what would be the purpose? Interestingly, a few things actually
come to mind. So if you are in the area please contact us with your
reports as Intellihub News is an open source portal for suppressed
information.
A
few areas worth investigating are:
- The Center for Disease Control (CDC), based in Atlanta
- Preparations for martial law based on a known future event to take place soon
- Prepositioning of military forces
Right
now we are looking for boots on the ground reports out of Atlanta, to
help aid our investigation into this matter.
'Fake
snow' in the south? It's called sublimation
30
January, 2014
As
a winter storm blanketed the southern US residents with snow they
aren’t accustomed to seeing, social media was similarly blanketed
with claims of “fake snow” that won’t melt. Videos
and heated
discussions
are making the rounds where people are attempting to melt snow
gathered out of their backyards with lighters, and finding the snow
won’t melt at all.
What
is this “fake snow”? No one knows for certain, though many are
chalking the strange non-melting substance to government
conspiracies, chem trails and other nefarious possibilities.
Unfortunately,
no one is getting it right. As is the case with this misinformation
age, no one is doing their own research, rather simply exclaiming how
tragic it is that we’re all being poisoned by fluffy white
toxin-flakes or recreating the exact same experiment with the exact
same results.
Had
the ambitious kitchen scientists done their due diligence, they would
learn about a process called “sublimation,” explained
here
in an elementary unit on the water cycle for children.
According
to the US Geologic Survey, sublimation is, “the conversion between
the solid and the gaseous phases of matter, with no intermediate
liquid stage.” It’s used to describe the process of snow turning
into vapor without first melting.
And
if you don’t believe it coming from a US government source, how
about a regular scientist? Steve
Ackerman,
a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of
Wisconsin- Madison explains that what we would call “evaporation”
from a liquid is called “sublimation from a solid.”
“Whenever
there is an interface of air and water, either liquid or solid, you
have molecules trying to leave the water,” Ackerman
explains.
Sublimation is most common when the surrounding air is
cold and dry. Humid conditions and warmer temperatures would cause
the snow to melt first. The dramatic change in temperatures when snow
or ice is touched with a lighter, for instance, immediately converts
the solid into a vapor.
The
snow isn’t melting because it is vaporizing. It’s changing forms
in a scientific process. And as to the claims that trying to melt
this snow results in an odd smell, you may want to look to the
lighter fluid or the lighter itself-- which is likely far more toxic
than even yellow snow.
While
I am often the first to suspect nefarious government actions and am
well-aware of the many toxins in our environment, we owe it to
ourselves and other information-hungry consumers on the web to put
out accurate information.
The
bottom line is that if there were lighters hundreds of years ago and
the curious kitchen scientists of olden days ran the very same
experiment, they would have the very same results. Not because of
pollution, chem trails, or intentional contamination but because of
the properties of water—or in this case snow—when heated under
certain conditions. True, snow may be dirtier now thanks to
pollution, but it is snow and under the right conditions it
will melt.
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