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News Briefs 22-04-2005

By Katon

Some news makes you larger, and some news makes you small. For logic and proportion, try the first 3, by Jim Fournier. All pdf, but worth the wait. p.s. See ‘thank you’ in the comments section.

  • The Shift Scenario: Peak oil and atmospheric CO2 build up actually represent the second climate crisis and perhaps the third energy crisis in the biological history of life on Earth.
  • Prophesy and the Point of Inflection: we are at a critical moment not just in human history, but as was shown in ‘The Shift’, in the history of life on Earth.
  • Carbon, Peak Oil, Global Warming and Biomass: human effects on the balance of CO2 in the atmosphere appear at the dawn of agriculture 10 or 12 thousand years ago, not at the time of the industrial revolution. There is a little-known cause for optimism — a fundamental new class of solutions.
  • How to use coal to produce electricity, hydrogen, and fertilizer, while simultaneously sequestering more CO2 than the process produces.
  • Years of philosophical study, and classical training as a musician, may be necessary for the creation of an original thinker — whose ideas, these days, would likely be thrown in the trash.
  • A profit opportunity unparalleled even by oil or gold: a review of Troubled Water: Saints, Sinners, Truth And Lies About The Global Water Crisis.
  • Hunt on for vanished Saxon bowl: Archaeologists want public to check their attics for the Witham Bowl, which has been missing since 1868.
  • Egyptian sea vessel artifacts discovered in man-made caves.
  • Skara Brae: Stone Age houses were a lot grander than most imagine.
  • Asteroid Belt Discovered Around Our Sun’s “Twin”.
  • Extreme life discovery in Yellowstone bodes well for astrobiologists.
  • Journey to the Center of the Earth — well, almost. Warning: Don’t click on this one if you have a fear of heights.
  • Hearts, Minds, and Dollars: In an Unseen Front in the War on Terrorism, America is Spending Millions…To Change the Very Face of Islam. (10 pages)
  • Our Energy Conundrum. Mortimer Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S.News & World Report, asks, “How dumb are we, anyway?”
  • High-tech Probes Can Go, Not Just Inside Your Cells, But Inside Your Cells’ Nuclei, And Can Be Attached To DNA.
  • Fly Brains Manipulated by Remote Control.
  • Scientists can elicit complex behaviors in primates by stimulating specific areas in the brain.
  • President Bush Wants to Wire the Earth.
  • Mind Bending: Could it be that they’re not all charlatans — the Uri Gellers, the Amazing Kreskins, the “spoonbenders,” paranormalists and mentalists?
  • Thirty Years of UFO Newspaper archives now online.
  • Earthquake Lights. Nice photo.
  • Pope Joan: Truth Or Tall Tale?
  • America The Medicated.
  • Allergies to pollen, pet dander, and other common allergy triggers have increased by nearly 5% per decade since the mid-1970s, but the cause is still a mystery.
  • New method to generate human bone. Dr. McCoy would be proud.
  • From Cosmic Log — Whales in space: saving Kirk and Spock a trip through time.
  • Many culprits have been blamed, but it’s actually a faulty body clock which leads to obesity and diabetes. Or maybe it’s your mum’s body clock.
  • Painkiller Warnings Rekindle Debate Over Medical Marijuana.
  • Cell phone fakes. Just as you suspected.
  • The trickle-down effect of ridiculous, ostentatious wealth. Reminds me of the 1936 movie, My Man Godfrey.
  • Author of ‘Rejecting Agape: Fear of control by the creator’ says recent articles about Dominionists have it all wrong.
  • Dominionists say Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith Promotes a New Age Messiah.
  • Strangely Enough: a very strange controversy involving a Pulitzer-winning novelist and a professor of creative writing. As Nostra would say, “Clear as mud, that is.”
  • Star Wars universe revolves around archetypal You-Know-Who.
  • “It was worth every damn minute in that jail.” Only in America.

Quote of the Day:

Priests are ordained to apply the Gospel to the realities of history.

Robert Holtby, Dean, Chichester Cathedral, England

Kat
Related

18 Comments

  1. I don’t get the quote
    It sounds like it means that there is the reality of history and then the gospels are applied to it and bingo it isn’t the reality of history anymore.

    That’s a terrific news list Kat.I look forward to reading it in the morning.

    Thank you,

    shadows

    1. Precisely the point
      >>”I don’t get the quote. It sounds like it means that there is the reality of history and then the gospels are applied to it and bingo it isn’t the reality of history anymore.”

      Holtby said this in 1985, in an address at Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration, NYC. When I first read it, I couldn’t figure out what he meant either. Then it occurred to me — maybe he didn’t understand what he was talking about either, since that seems to be a common phenomena among public figures these days. But if that was the case, the question now is, did he know at that time that he didn’t know what he was talking about, did he come to understand that later, or did it never occur to him to even consider the possibility?

      So there you have it.

      Kat

  2. first article 🙂
    Our current climate change is not the second major climate crisis, there have been many more in the history of life on earth. Whatever happens with human civilization, the bacteria will be just fine, they don’t need us.

    The article makes a simple mistakes near the beginning, saying that a log curve gets steeper and steeper. The opposite is true.

    Have to read the rest of the news, it’s a long list 🙂

    1. More first article
      I waded through the whole thing and was impressed with much of what he said, but there are quite a few issues that he discussed that smack of the usual GW myths.

      First, energy conversion efficiency as we currently understand it, is way better than he implies. Electrical power generation, whether from coal, solar, or other established means is typically 15 – 35 percent. It is hard to see how that can be improved by one or two orders of magnitude!

      Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is an energy storage medium. That is the primary problem with the euphoria about hydrogen cars. We have to expend energy twice: once to produce the hydrogen and again to power the vehicle.

      I’m not sure what the whole diatribe about money accomplishes. It seems completely out of context. More like the wacky right wing nuts that worry about trilateral commissions, etc. The ‘market’ responds to what the cunsumer demands. We are getting hybrid cars, not because of mandates, but because consumers are willing to pay almost as much as it costs to make them 😉

      Xavier Onassis

      1. Jim Fournier’s reply to earthling and X_O
        Via email, Jim Fournier has briefly responsed to points brought up by earthling and X_O, and has emphasized again that the documents we are viewing are just rough drafts.

        earthling: Our current climate change is not the second major climate crisis, there have been many more in the history of life on earth.

        Jim Fournier: From what I have learned so far, there is one the stands out, when the oxygen level spiked. I would welcome detailed elaboration on this if you are an expert in the field and know better than I do.

        earthling: The article makes a simple mistakes near the beginning, saying that a log curve gets steeper and steeper. The opposite is true.

        Jim Fournier: Perhaps I’m missing something here. Are you a mathematician? If horizontal could be said to be flat, and vertical maximally steep, a log curve approaching a vertical asymptote would seem to me to be approaching maximum steepness, but minimum curvature.

        X_O: First, energy conversion efficiency as we currently understand it, is way better than he implies. Electrical power generation, whether from coal, solar, or other established means is typically 15 – 35 percent. It is hard to see how that can be improved by one or two orders of magnitude!

        Jim Fournier: Yes, this was a rough draft. It is our overall net efficiency of both energy and especially resources that must improve by somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude if we are going to make it. I’m not sure that we can do it. But that is apparently what we are up against.

        If we can do it, it will not be on the generation end, though we can pick up a lot through cogeneration. The problem with the vehicle fleet is not just the inefficiency of the engine, but the mass of the vehicle we are hauling around. If you look at the energy actually required to move the mass of a human vs what we do, etc. there’s more than an order of magnitude there also space heating & cooling etc. if we go to zero, i.e totally passive, is that two orders of magnitude or infinite? see RMI

        X_O: Hydrogen is not an energy source. It is an energy storage medium. That is the primary problem with the euphoria about hydrogen cars. We have to expend energy twice: once to produce the hydrogen and again to power the vehicle.

        Jim Fournier: Yes, is not a source, but my point is it is the natural end-state transport media, along with lithium hydride batteries, you can see this from mass. How the energy is transformed is the question. There are multiple answers we are just beginning to understand. Primary renewable energy sources are (only) solar, wind, tidal, hydro and geothermal and biomass (bio-solar). The question is the overall efficiency of transformation, and cleanliness of the cycle. However, even today’s crude hybrids are a good example of a net gain wherein one recaptures kinetic potential energy.

        X_O: I’m not sure what the whole diatribe about money accomplishes. It seems completely out of context. More like the wacky right wing nuts that worry about trilateral commissions, etc. The ‘market’ responds to what the cunsumer demands. We are getting hybrid cars, not because of mandates, but because consumers are willing to pay almost as much as it costs to make them 😉

        Jim Fournier: Yes, it is not smoothly integrated in that draft yet. However, I would say based on your response that you are, like most people in our society, like a fish who cannot see the water you are swimming in. The market is not God, it is a human construct that depends heavily on the design of the particular form of fiscal game rules we construct. The ones we have effectively enforce short-term time horizons. They were appropriate when resources were abundant, and we were most constrained by industrial capital (equipment) and to some degree labor. We are now awash in human labor, have over-capacity of industrial capacity, and are rapidly exhausting our natural resources, based largely on the inevitable logic of these unexamined and now suddenly dangerously inappropriate game rules. Debt-based money has consequences. It is not the only possible form of money. The market as currently constellated is also not neutral, it is highly tweaked with uncounted externalities. This is not peripheral, it is the core of the challenge.

        1. Market is not good
          Interesting last paragraph.

          All I would add to this at this point is rather that these measures ‘seemed’ appropriate when we ‘thought’ we had an abundance of resources. All things being relative, if you have one pie and you eat it all at noon, there won’t be much left in the evening. Of course, the shortsighted won’t care; he had his fill.

          The market system is typical of the lack of personal authority we have on our own lives and how easily we are led to allow forces external to ourselves to dictate what will be. Then, we are surprised if the results don’t line up with our personal whims. All you need is the promise that as an individual, you can get to milk the system to your fill and voilà! you are sold to the idea. If you don’t get your fill while others get it; you become a revolutionary. It’s the whole human mentality that is the problem.

          If as a race we were evolved, there would not even be a need for currency, especially not for markets.

          1. Market is not good
            “If you don’t get your fill while others get it; you become a revolutionary.”

            I would say, If you don’t get your fill because others have stolen it from you, you become a revolutionary.

          2. …Because others have stolen it from you…
            You are right.

            The point I was making though was that the poor want the rich to pay, which many could agree with. On the other hand, when these same people suddenly become rich, they would not have anything to do with supporting others.

            That also happen. Still, you are very right in saying that when one is being deprived of what should be his normal share of the pie, he may very well revolt against the situation.

            I guess what I am getting at is that the victim of theft often has himself the seed of the thief within, even though he may not be in position to act as such at that time.

            Human psychology is not different simply because we are the aggressor or the victim at a particular point in time. The basic psychological mechanisms remain and the individual will easily rationalize his situation by blaming the others or the context.

            The rich will blame the predicament of the poor on their inability to act upon their life or their lack of will while the rich remain blind to their partial responsibility in the matter and the poor will blame the rich for their own predicament, blind to their own partial responsibility in the matter and so on. The same is true with countries.

          3. What?
            “The poor will blame the rich for their own predicament, blind to their own partial responsibility in the matter and so on.”

            There you go again, blaming the victim. When the revolution comes, you’ll be first against the wall! :-O

          4. Not blaming the victims
            Simply pointing to human psychology as the seed of all the blames.

            The psychology of blame is one of the important reasons why we don’t develop real will. There is a difference between blaming conditions or others for what we are and pointing to reasons for the condition.

            I am pointing at the condition which I would call psychology of blaming to be part of the ego’s ability at rationalization that makes it possible for him to say why things are like they are and that there is nothing he can do about it. The same goes for the rich who will say the poor are to blame themselves so that they can rationalize and say that they don’t have to change and that there is nothing to do since the poor are too dumb to help themselves.

            This psychology of the blame has for effect to install the status quo where everyone points his finger at everyone else, from the parents, to society and to other groups, always in an effort to dump onto others the responsibility of their fate or to avoid being caught with the need to share the wealth of the planet.

            It is through this mechanism that man refuses all change and sticks to his impressions of being right, since it is always somebody else’s fault.

            This being said, beyond the understanding of the psychology of the blame, it remains nevertheless that the karmic responsibility of those that abuse and dominate cannot be erased simply by recognizing that others have not developed the will necessary to mutate their impression of existence into a realization of authority upon their own lives.

            Revolution is a social consequence of the piling of abuses. Unfortunately, as history has shown us, revolutions, which are fought in the name of the poor and the oppressed, end up generally in a government and system takeover that does not eradicate the predicament of the weak, on the contrary, but rather transfer power and authority in the hands of a select few.

            As long as someone sees himself as a victim, the chance that this person will see himself as a powerless victim is great. It would seem to me that it should be more important for that person to be freed from victimization complexes so that at least, what cannot be gained materially because of the systemization of principles of domination in this experimental race, does not become an impairment of that person’s ability at developing a richness of spirit that cannot thrive under the psychological umbrella or the psychology of blame.

            A conscious man will always tend to protect the weak. It is as nearly impossible for a man who is too poor and stretched by life’s sent hardships than it is for a rich man who believes he has attained an advantage and does not need to go further. It is hard to develop a greater consciousness when your stomach is screaming famine and every move you make is related to fighting just for your material survival.

        2. market
          I would submit that the ‘market’ is _not_ a human construct. Nor is it a goal that we should aspire to. Instead, a market system arises naturally, whether we want to or not. You can observe this, for example, in the existence of black markets in most economies. Of course this does not mean that we should not install other, better mechanisms to serve some of the functions that markets provide. But it practically guarantees that if these mechanisms we install deliberately don’t work well enough, markets will again arise and address any shortcomings, often with very undesirable effects.

          1. re: market
            Then you would be implying that the market system is rather a function of the collective unconscious, right?

            If in your mind you see this as not being a human construct, would it then mean for you that the collective unconscious is not a human construct as well?

            Perhaps you see it stemming from something else; still, even though it may not be a human construct in that sense, it is still implemented through the human psyche. This then would mean that human institutions or social mechanisms, such as markets, are implemented by using the psyche of humanity.

            This then could lead us to the realization that little from our interactions is the product of the will and intelligence of humanity but that it is implemented through it at its expense for the benefit of social perennity under a particular form that shapes the interactions of the individuals, funneling them through the specific requirements of the implemented system.

          2. more market
            Actually I see markets as ’emergent behaviour’, a fanciful term for what you get when you have a group of individuals interacting. The behaviour of the group is no a magnification of the behaviour of the individual. At least for my purposes, this is strictly a descriptive mechanism, not presuming any intention of the individuals or some globally acting force.

            You can see this sort of thing in flocks of birds, or schools of fish. In those cases, the movement of the group can be described by local behaviour of each bird (or fish), relative to its neighbors, no group-wise factors are not necessary for this description. Since adding any higher-order intentions or goals does not add any new behaviour, it is tempting to assume that the higher-order intentions are in fact not present. Markets, I believe, are more or less the same kind of thing, they are the behaviour you get when you add together a bunch of people with normal individual behaviours.

        3. log function
          When I say that a log function does not get steeper and steeper, I mean that the value of the function log_base_y(x), with increasing x, will grow slower. This is for any y>2 certainly, the others I would have to look up.

          Define D_k(x) as the increase in the log function over an interval of positive width k, as in D_k(x) = log(x+k) – log(x). Then what I am
          claiming is for x1>x0, D_k(x0)>D_k(x1). In other words, the second derivative of log_base_y(x), for y>2 and x>0, is negative. This is high school stuff, I don’t need to be a mathematitian.

  3. Temperance is over-rated
    The guy who says recent articles on Dominionism have been wrong is actually saying Dominionists are even worse! They don’t want to rule the secular State, they want to dismantle it…and he is a Dominionist so he should know.

    Scary people. Temperance is obviously an over-rated virtue for these Christians.

    Regards, C

  4. Like having Yoda in your computer?
    One reason I rarely link to articles from conservative media outlets is that, even on the rare occasions they do run an article that would normally be of interest, it seems they feel duty-bound to give it a sceptical slant. For instance, take Friday’s ‘Mind Bending’ article. The author’s tone probably put you off so much, you didn’t finish reading it.

    Another thing they tend to do is bury the subject so deep, you’re likely to loose interest. This ‘Mind Bending’ article has 25 paragraphs, but you don’t find out what the article’s about until the last sentence of the 12th paragraph, which says, “Consider biofeedback, a form of therapy that trains patients to physiologically repair various ailments.”

    The sceptical 11-paragraph intro ridicules a whole host of things — the movie, “What the Bleep Do We Know”, the movie’s co-director Betsy Chasse, the Amazing Kreskin, Geller, a chiropractor who the author says believes in “Jesus miracles” ala Stephen King’s ‘The Green Mile’, levitation, mind-reading, remote viewing “(think X-ray vision)”, water-walking, New Age Spiritualists, paranormalists, mentalists — which doesn’t exactly leave readers primed to seriously consider the science of biofeedback.

    Check out the author’s tone as he tells his readers what practicing biofeedback really can accomplish: “Spontaneous remission of tumors — check. Piercing oneself with a sword and blocking out the pain — check.”

    Hey, I’m convinced. How about you?

    By now you should be asking yourself, so why the heck did Kat post this article in Friday’s news? Truth be told, when putting together TDG’s news, it’s simply impossible, time-wise, to read every article from start to finish.

    But there are a couple of nuggets in there — like, if you really want to learn about cutting-edge biofeedback research, you should read the thoracic medical journal ‘Chest’.

    And in the last couple of paragraphs we find out there’s an interactive biofeedback computer game called The Journey to Wild Divine. You play it by manipulating your heart rate, which is measured by biofeedback finger sensors. Meditation opens closed doors. Laughter juggles balls.

    Sounds cool, and maybe even useful. So I’m wondering — have any of you TDGer’s out there tried it?

    Kat

  5. Thank you, Jim Fournier
    Hi All,

    After posting Friday’s news, I sent Jim Fournier an email, telling him that I’d posted his articles at the top of TDG’s news, and inviting him to have a look around TDG.

    Boy, was he surprised! He said these are just ‘rough drafts’ of a manuscript in process, which he’d just posted for private review, and hadn’t password protected because no one knew it was there. But like an all-seeing eye of god, google had found them for me mere moments after they were posted.

    Although Jim said he’d soon be posting better versions, I want to thank him for agreeing to let us all have a look at his rough drafts. And I hope you lot are taking proper advantage of his generosity!

    So Thank You, Jim. I look forward to reading your whole book — and I promise I’ll try to patiently wait until it’s back from the printer. 😉

    Kat

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