6 Seconds in Dallas

Josiah Thompson's thought process is incredibly impressive. A true forensic scientist, he looks at cause and effect with persistence, intellect and objectivity, essential traits every real scientist exhibits when trying to discern how reality works at deep level, something the Warren Commission totally ignored when coming up with their take on what actually happened on November 22, 1963. This is a must see video to learn that Kennedy was killed via a conspiracy involving two shooters and possibly three. At the same time, click here to see the Errol Norris documentary of Thompson further explaining why the film and photos taken at the event "self authenticates" what happened in Dallas separate from any commentary that has issued forth from that dark and tragic day. 

Hopefully, his 1967 book will be republished as the analysis done in this work should be read by every American who needs to know what really happened in Dallas. 

Priorities

Two riffs on religion, one on scheduling, the other on women's rights, both dependent on priorities, right? :)

Phase Transition Writ Large

Back in November, 2011, BRT wrote a post titled Something to Consider, a riff on the Permian Extinction AKA the Great Dying whereby 90 - 95% of all life went the way of the Dodo due to a massive "injection of CO2 into the atmosphere", probably due to "the eruptions that formed the Siberian Traps, the stairlike hilly region in northern Russia." which resulted in the "long-term ocean acidification, ocean warming and vast areas of oxygen-poor ocean water." that extinguished nearly  all life on the planet, something we are starting to see today thanks to the continued and unfettered use of fossil fuels, today's answer to the Siberian Traps, when it comes to producing CO2, the start point for all of the mass extinctions life has faced over that past 3.8 billions years.

With this in mind, Last Hours is most apt don't you think?

Maher on Kennedy

Maher gets it right on Kennedy, a president with style and wit, a president yours truly admired as someone who had a clear vision of what the world could be if one had the intellect and courage to make it so, a vision sadly not shared by any of Kennedy's successors following the unspeakable tragedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

To this writer, one sensed Kennedy was different, especially when listening to his electrifying Inaugural speech that will live forever in the hearts of Americans who were alive at that time (including me) when he uttered the words Ask Not on a bitter cold day in Washington, January 20th, 1961. 

Van Damme Rules :)

An Unexpected Gem

New Dan on Flickr shot this gem, another reason why the net rocks. Enjoy.

Agent Smith was right

In The Matrix, Agent Smith describes man as a virus, a species moving from place to place, consuming all resources of said place before moving on but now, there is no other place, a reality being played out as we speak, regarding the Monarch Butterfly, wild bees and other insects crucial to our survival. 

This year, for or the first time in memory, the monarch butterflies didn't come, at least not on the Day of the Dead. They began to straggle in a week later than usual, in record-low numbers. Last year’s low of 60 million now seems great compared with the fewer than three million that have shown up so far this year. Some experts fear that the spectacular migration could be near collapse.

“It does not look good,” said Lincoln P. Brower, a monarch expert at Sweet Briar College.

It is only the latest bad news about the dramatic decline of insect populations.

Another insect in serious trouble is the wild bee, which has thousands of species. Nicotine-based pesticides called neonicotinoids are implicated in their decline, but even if they were no longer used, experts say, bees, monarchs and many other species of insect would still be in serious trouble.

That’s because of another major factor that has not been widely recognized: the precipitous loss of native vegetation across the United States...

A big part of it is the way the United States farms. As the price of corn has soared in recent years, driven by federal subsidies for biofuels, farmers have expanded their fields. That has meant plowing every scrap of earth that can grow a corn plant, including millions of acres of land once reserved in a federal program for conservation purposes.

Another major cause is farming with Roundup, a herbicide that kills virtually all plants except crops that are genetically modified to survive it.

As a result, millions of acres of native plants, especially milkweed, an important source of nectar for many species, and vital for monarch butterfly larvae, have been wiped out. One study showed that Iowa has lost almost 60 percent of its milkweed, and another found 90 percent was gone. “The agricultural landscape has been sterilized,” said Dr. Brower.

What's interesting is the fact Monsanto is a primary player in this sad scenario as the maker of Roundup, along with Bayer and Shell (Neonicotinoids), as GMO foods (corn/soy etc, etc.) require extensive use of Roundup and insecticides in order to survive, something that's beginning to change as nature always finds a way to subvert artificiality via, in the case of GMO corn, the corn borer beetle, as seen in a BRT post titled Monarchs & GMO Corn.

For Agent Smith fans, here is the virus quote courtesy YouTube.

Light Echo

 Space is vast, so vast that one can actually see light moving through a nebula produced by a variable star known as V838, even though the speed of light in a vacuum = 186,000 miles per second.

The unusual variable star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) continues to puzzle astronomers. This previously inconspicuous star underwent an outburst early in 2002, during which it temporarily increased in brightness to become 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun. Light from this sudden eruption is illuminating the interstellar dust surrounding the star, producing the most spectacular “light echo” in the history of astronomy.

As light from the eruption propagates outward into the dust, it is scattered by the dust and travels to the Earth. The scattered light has travelled an extra distance in comparison to light that reaches Earth directly from the stellar outburst. Such a light echo is the optical analogue of the sound echo produced when an Alpine yodel is reflected from the surrounding mountainsides.

8 minutes is all it takes for light from the sun to reach us rubes.

Where Credit is Due

Click the graphic to go to a wonderful NYTimes graphic depicting the byzantine world of credit and how it has changed finance forever. When finished, scroll down to Addicted to Growth to learn why the loan is the prime driver to all the manifestations of Where Credit is Due. :)

Addicted to Growth

Scott Erickson's a terrific writer and environmentalist who cuts to the chase when it comes to explaining why growth is no longer sustainable using the clever alias of a 14 year old girl named Amy, who explains, in wonderfully clear language, where growth comes from and why it has to stop. 

Let’s say you get a loan for $100, but because of the interest you pay back $110. Here’s an interesting question: Where did that extra $10 come from? 

It didn’t come from you, since you can’t create money. Only banks can – by making loans. So the extra money could only come from one place: More loans! If you trace money to where money comes from, it almost always comes from a loan. 

People can get personal loans, but what’s more important for the economy is business loans – loans to start or expand a business. Of course all the loans have interest, which means paying back more money. But we’ve already figured out that money is “created” by banks issuing loans. So to pay off past loans, somewhere else in the economy there has to be new loans which create more money. But then THOSE loans have to be paid off with money, which means MORE loans. 

It always comes back to the banks making more loans to pay off the existing loans. This has been going on for hundreds of years, which is how the economy “grows.” 

Economic growth needs more money, but more money needs more economic growth, which needs more money. And it doesn’t stop. It can’t stop. 

That’s not only how the economy grows, but why it HAS to grow. We can never get to a point where growth is “enough.”

This is why we’re addicted to economic growth. We’re not creating money; we’re creating debt! Like with any addiction, we keep doing it even when it’s not working any more. 

Read the rest of this wonderful excerpt from the book, you won't be disappointed. :)

I like his splash image as well.

Mistakes were made

Kind of says it all, don't you think?

Pick-Up-Sticks

Like a moth drawn to a flame, one is drawn to the slow motion disaster known as Fukushima,  an ongoing catastrophe that could end our short term residency on planet earth.

Specifically, the greatest short-term threat to humanity is from the fuel pools at Fukushima.

If one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, it could have severe adverse impacts not only on Japan … but the rest of the world, including the United States.   Indeed, a Senator called it a national security concern for the U.S.:

The radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen and physician Helen Caldicott have both said that people should evacuate the Northern Hemisphere if one of the Fukushima fuel pools collapses. Gundersen said:

Move south of the equator if that ever happened, I think that’s probably the lesson there.

Former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura calls removing the radioactive materials from the Fukushima fuel pools “an issue of human survival”.

So the stakes in decommissioning the fuel pools are high, indeed.

What's even more terrifying is the fact a magnitude 7 earthquake (all that's needed to bring down the fuel pools @ Fukushima) hitting Japan within the next 3 years is estimated to be 95%, which could be the closest thing to a done deal regarding the most serious threat mankind has ever faced during his tenure on a tiny planet we call home.

Pick-up-Sticks, a game requiring mental dexterity and physical skill under pressure, is basically what has to be done at Fukushima but with the added fun of having to pick up thousands of damaged rods loaded into damaged racks, which reside in a deteriorating, water filled environment in danger of collapsing at any moment. Adding to this rosy scenario are the absolute requirements that said rods must remain in water at all times (or they will explode) and cannot touch one another in any way, shape or fashion (or they will explode) because if they do either, uncontrolled fission will ensue, thus making Chernobyl a walk in the park.

Factoids: Carefully plucking more than 1,500 brittle and potentially damaged fuel assemblies from the plant’s unstable Reactor No. 4 is expected to take about a year, and will be seen as a test of Tokyo Electric Power Co’s ability to move ahead with decommissioning the whole facility – a task likely to take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.

If the rods – there are 50-70 in each of the assemblies, which weigh around 300 kg (660 pounds) and are 4.5 metres (15 feet) long – are exposed to air or if they break, huge amounts of radioactive gases could be released into the atmosphere.

Addendum: This is a picture showing the impact the earthquake and tsnuami had on Reactor 4's spent fuel rod pool building. Reassuring, right?

Needless to say, the rods in the pool no longer look like this.

But rather like this.

Any question as to why Fukushima is a fubar beyond description?

40 Billion & Counting - In just our Galaxy

BRT has often talked about the possibility of life existing on other planets, (They're Everywhere) something this author thinks, is a done deal given just how vast the multiverse truly is. Seems that Kepler has upped the ante for this part of reality as per the NY Times piece titled. 

Cosmic Census Finds Billions of Planets That Could Be Like Earth

Astronomers reported Monday that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy, based on a new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.

One of every five sun-like stars in the galaxy has a planet the size of Earth circling it in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot, not too cold — where surface temperatures should be compatible with liquid water, according to a herculean three-year calculation based on data from the Kepler spacecraft by Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.

Needless to say, the odds that BRT may be right, thanks to Kepler, warms the cockles of my heart. :)

Click on the graphic below to access the terrific interactive NY Times graphic to see the different kinds of planetary systems Kepler has discovered to date. Simply unbelievable yet it's just the tip of the iceberg in man's search for extraterrestrial life especially in lieu of the fact there are approximately 200 billion galaxies in our part of the multiverse, which means... the number of earth sized planets in our neck of th woods goes beyond calculation.