Posts Tagged ‘science’

A Wall? Or Common Sense?

Posted: January 22, 2019 in News and politics
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How much has border security been historically rooted in racism?       (John Love; read my note at the end before you run screaming back into your cave!)

Reece Jones: If you look at the history of immigration laws in the United States, it’s a history of racial exclusion. The U.S. didn’t have any national immigration laws at all until 1875 [the Page Act], then the first big immigration law is 1882, which is the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the entire purpose of that act was to prevent non-white people from being able to migrate to the United States. The first comprehensive national rules for immigration is the 1924 National Origins Act, which was justified at the time very much on racial terms about continuing to allow white northern, western Europeans to migrate to the U.S. while it completely bans Asian immigration and dramatically limits southern and eastern European migration. The border patrol was established two days after those National Origins quotas were put in place. The entire idea of patrolling the border and having restrictions on immigration in the United States is founded on racial exclusion.

Note by John Love; Trump has actually promoted the idea stated in the last sentence above, on camera. Basically saying that Northern Europeans are the kind of immigrants we need, and at another historic moment called certain nations “junk countries” we need to exclude from our shores.

Elisabeth Vallet: I think the government that began building the India-Bangladesh border said something like, “You know, a border fence is the best way of doing nothing while showing that you are doing something.” The wall is really addressing internal politics. It’s symbolic, political, electoral and populous, but it’s not what it says it is.

It’s interesting, in terms of public policy, that we’re using border policy to address an issue that lies, like, 500 kilometers away, south of the border. The real problem in that instance is in Central America. The public policy applied here — border policy — is not the right one. It should be a foreign policy. So the remedy is like if you were giving aspirin to a cancer patient. The patient thinks you’re curing him, but you’re not really curing the root problem.

Joseph Nevins: The wall will not last forever. That’s the one thing that we can be sure of. Walls always fall. When, how, and under what conditions? Those are totally different questions, but social orders built on violence and injustice, which are inherently unstable. They can last a long time, in terms of a human lifespan, but history is littered with examples of unjust societies that dissolve very quickly. This will too unless we can rectify it in the meantime. And that’s the challenge that we have.

With the Israel-Palestine border, there are differences and there are also real similarities. The underlying issues in Israel and Palestine are as palpable as ever. What the wall does, it allows people in Israel, especially, not to have to think about them. At the same time, it builds up pressure on the other side, that when it explodes, it explodes with unprecedented strength. In the case of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, a similar type of dynamic is unfolding. This is why we see the caravans and things of these sorts. The problems on the other side of the border, whether they’re in Honduras, Guatemala or Mexico are treated as if they belong there, as if they were created there, and as if they have nothing to do with us. These people are fleeing issues the U.S. has helped produce, and fleeing to the place that helped produce them. The wall helps us and prevents us from seeing that. At the same time, at least temporarily, the goal is to prevent the chickens coming home to roost.

So my take here, (John Love) and one I hope you are starting to glean despite being lied to, is that the wall approach is not the “fix all” Trump wants you to believe that it is. You can look at all kinds of facts about how most immigrants get here, how most drugs get here, how terrorists get here. It is not prevented by a wall, and never has been! I do think barriers are necessary for many reasons though! Immigrants need to come here in an orderly legal fashion. But spending billions on steel or cement is not the answer. Tone that down some and spend the money on electronic surveillance. Hell, for the price of the wall as Trump wants it, we could have satellite surveillance that can read a newspaper over your shoulder and readily pin-point activity such as a person or persons tramping toward an unauthorized entrance into our country or the digging of a tunnel and immediately alert border personnel to the location!

Excerps from an article I found in Rolling Stone Magazine>

(Do not roll your eyes; I have fact-checked this periodical many times!)

 

 

 

 

Climate Change Critics (The real Facts)

Posted: January 2, 2019 in climate change, News and politics, science
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Climate Change Critics

(The Real Facts)

The Trump administration released its first major climate report, the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4) on November 23, 2018. The two-part report by the United States Global Change Research Program(USGCRP) was the result of two years of work by a team from 13 federal agencies with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as the lead administrator. The first volume released in October 2017, [39]

A 2018 CRS cited

The first volume, entitled “Climate Science Special Report” (CSSR) released on October 2017 said that, “Detection and attribution studies, climate models, observations, paleoclimate data, and physical understanding lead to high confidence (extremely likely) that more than half of the observed global mean warming since 1951 was caused by humans!

The U.S. Global Change Research Program reported in June 2009[41] that:

Observations show that warming of the climate is unequivocal. The global warming observed over the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. These emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), with important contributions from the clearing of forests, agricultural practices, and other activities.

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment[edit]

In 2004, the intergovernmental Arctic Council and the non-governmental International Arctic Science Committee released the synthesis report of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment:[42]

Climate conditions in the past provide evidence that rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are associated with rising global temperatures. Human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), and secondarily the clearing of land, have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and other heat-trapping (“greenhouse”) gases in the atmosphere…There is an international scientific consensus that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.[43]

Academies of science (general science)[edit]

Since 2001, 34 national science academies, three regional academies, and both the international InterAcademy Council and International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences have made formal declarations confirming human-induced global warming and urging nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The 34 national science academy statements include 33 who have signed joint science academy statements and one individual declaration by the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2007.

A consensus, based on current evidence, now exists within the global scientific community that human activities are the main source of climate change and that the burning of fossil fuels is largely responsible for driving this change. The IPCC should be congratulated for the contribution it has made to public understanding of the nexus that exists between energy, climate, and sustainability.

American Geophysical Union states that human activities are changing Earth’s climate. At the global level, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases have increased sharply since the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuel burning dominates this increase. Human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are responsible for most of the observed global average surface warming of roughly 0.8 °C (1.5 °F) over the past 140 years.Because natural processes cannot quickly remove some of these gases (notably carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere, our past, present, and future emissions will influence the climate system for millennia.

European Federation of Geologists

The EFG recognizes the work of the IPCC and other organizations, and subscribes to the major findings that climate change is happening, is predominantly caused by anthropogenic emissions of CO2, and poses a significant threat to human civilization.

European Geosciences Union

Asserts that the IPCC represents the state-of-the-art of climate science supported by the major science academies around the world and by the vast majority of science researchers and investigators as documented by the peer-reviewed scientific literature.[83]

National Association of Geoscience Teachers

Adopted a position statement on climate change in which they assert that “Earth’s climate is changing [and] “that present warming trends are largely the result of human activities“:

The American Meteorological Society

There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers, and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of warming since the 1950s is human activities. This scientific finding is based on a large and persuasive body of research.

The Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Global climate change and global warming are real and observable … It is highly likely that those human activities that have increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been largely responsible for the observed warming since 1950. 

World Meteorological Organization

The WMO concurs that “scientific assessments have increasingly reaffirmed that human activities are indeed changing the composition of the atmosphere, in particular through the burning of fossil fuels for energy production and transportation.” The WMO concurs that “the present atmospheric concentration of CO2 was never exceeded over the past 420,000 years;” and that the IPCC “assessments provide the most authoritative, up-to-date scientific advice.” 

I could go on for pages and pages, one scientific organization after another worldwide that support that climate change is here and that human activity is responsible for most of it! I am just pointing out to all you climate change deniers that finding one or two individuals that do not support climate change and our role in it is just that, one or two individuals. The real scientific communities around the globe agree that it is real, that we, the human equation along with our love of fossil fuels is responsible!

You can find links to all of these organizations and more by just accessing Wikipedia and Climate Change. You do not have to take any Wikipedia author’s claim, as I said, the links to every one of my examples are there, and you can check them all out yourself. Every time one of you anti-science idiots decides to go out and find someone pissed off they are not getting enough attention as proof there is no climate change, or that it is not human interaction accelerating it, I am going to clobber you with this blog! The evidence is glaring, the facts easily available. Quit letting an oligarch, bent on selling you his fossil fuel wares convince you atmospheric contamination is false and there is no climate change, as a result, be your example!

 

 

Does College Make you Liberal

Posted: October 4, 2018 in News and politics
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There are several reasons that the answer is highly educated may make you liberal, not the college experience per say! The conservative mantra that colleges are nothing more than evil liberal training grounds is a political move. It gives their base someone to hate for their plight, along with immigrants and people of color being the reason for all of the ills in life confronting them!

One of the reasons is, as you get more educated, you are introduced to a wider variety of cultures that you might have been afforded living in a microcosm before college. Your parent’s friends would tend to only be people who mirrored themselves! They would also tend to live in communities that also mirrored their belief system if possible. It is also true that high school students who are liberal tend to also go to college in much greater numbers! Hence a more liberal college population results! It has nothing to do with the college experience itself in that case.

Another possibility might be the growing numbers of women getting college degrees. Women, in general, tend to vote with the Democratic Party more than men. So as the population of highly educated people grew more female, that may have swung it left.

Third, the mainstream population that is conservative tends to be less educated! They do not tend to trend towards the highly educated or attend college, 31 percent of people with post-grad educations are consistently liberal, compared to 5 percent of those with high school educations or less according to the poll I saw! My own research tends to tell me this is factual even if the figures are not exact! Take that as you will, but it was not meant as any kind of detrimental slight! I myself have no college degree. I have gone to college a lot off and on, been to and graduated from several trade schools, let the military educate me to work on computer warfare aircraft in avionics, but basically, I am self-educated. I am liberal in case there was some doubt, but I have no formal college degree!

Yes, rich kids tend to be conservative also, and yes they tend to get educated, but they also tend to stay away from science-related pursuits! They tend to favor education that will help guarantee them a lifetime of successful avenues to get money and to keep it. Ok, not a sin, but you take a look at your GOP Senators, for example. A lot of lawyers, business majors, etc., you find not many scientists among them, no evolutionary biologists, no paleontologists, no teachers, you see where I am going. So you tend to only get a House or Senate with people of one mindset in that party. The other side of the aisle has a tendency to also come from that same background I freely admit that! You will find in the Democratic Party, however, more than a few with degrees in education, or science degrees, way more than you will in the GOP.

Also, if you are religious, especially those influenced by evangelicals, you will, even though highly educated, shy away from any form of study that makes you uncomfortable with what your Bible teaches! So we tend to have a lot of politicians who have absolutely no background in science as it makes them uncomfortable. It also makes them dangerous when it comes to being put in charge of entities whose whole being is based on science. NASA and the EPA are prime examples. You can talk about big government and over-regulation all you want, but big government is what you have right now under the current administration, and getting bigger and narrower in its scope and understanding every day!

These are a few ideas that have come out of this administration. Radiation is good for you, just like sunlight as long as it is moderate! Asbestos, one of our biggest killers, is safe! Dumping into streams and rivers is ok again! The clean air initiative is too extreme, so just get rid of it altogether. Oh, and let’s sue any state that still wants to make clean air a priority! Some GOP states have actually made mentioning climate change illegal; one has stated that you cannot connect rising sea level data to any study of climate change, even though their coastlines are in extreme danger! The white house has actually instructed that anything to do with climate change should just be ignored!
Is this really what you want? Sure the government is full of red tape and it is cumbersome and that does need to be fixed. But these cuts in protections all have one thing in common, a greater profit margin for big business and no concern for health issues. That cannot be the standard!

So, my point is, getting educated in itself tends to make you liberal, it is not that colleges are some kind of evil cabal indoctrinating our youth, they are just thinking for themselves, which has never been good for conservatives. Red states tend to be less educated with a poorer population on average! They also tend to be in need of more welfare than blue states, so why would they want to leave control in their state to the GOP whose leadership is responsible for the condition they find themselves in! Well, in this case, I say they are the ones being indoctrinated, why else would they vote against their own well-being!

I will not go into any moral issues I have with the President and the GOP, as they are more numerous than snowflakes in a blizzard! I just have to believe we will come to our senses at some point!

The Trail to Modern Humanity

Posted: September 20, 2018 in science
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This information was gleaned from the science and tech division of the Daily Mail, as are the artists renditions and graphs you will see in this article.

 

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Hybrid Neanderthal love child is found in a cave in Siberia: Teenage daughter of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father who lived 50,000 years ago reveals how humans’ ape-like cousins frequently interbred!  

A prehistoric 13-year-old girl who lived 50,000 years ago was the love child of two separate species of ancient human ancestor, according to a new DNA analysis of her remains.

A study of a tiny bone fragment found in a cave in Russia shows the teenager had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, giving fresh insight into how the now-extinct species interacted.

The find suggests that our ape-like cousins mated far more frequently than researchers thought, according to archaeologists.

Neanderthals and Denisovans share a common ancestor with humans and roamed Eurasia as far back as 400,000 years ago having migrated from Africa.

The pair of human-like species then intermingled with modern humans when they arrived on the continent 40,000 years ago, with members of three species sometimes crossbreeding.

This means that tiny amounts of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA can be found in our genome today! As much as 2% of our DNA was passed on to us from Neanderthals.

Research also shows that two modern genomes, one from Oceana and another from East Asia have distinct Denisovan ancestry.

“Previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together,” said study coauthor Viviane Slon of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

“But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups.”

Archaeologists came to their finding after sequencing the DNA of bone found in the Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains.

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The ancient individual is only represented by a single fragment so small that researchers call it a ‘bone needle’.

‘The fragment is part of a long bone, and we can estimate that this individual was at least 13 years old,” said Dr. Bence Viola, an archaeologist at the University of Toronto who was not involved in the study.

After sequencing the genome of the young girl, scientists found she was the child of a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father – putting her among the first specimens to show direct evidence the species mixed.

“An interesting aspect of this genome is that it allows us to learn things about two populations – the Neanderthals from the mother’s side, and the Denisovans from the father’s side,” said co-author Dr. Fabrizio Mafessoni.

Thousands of ancient hominin bones were uncovered in the Denisova Cave in 2012, including the 120,000-year-old toe bone of a Neanderthal and the first ever evidence of a Denisovan – the phalanx of a child who lived between 30,000 and 40,000 years ago.

It is commonly believed that a common ancestor of the two species migrated from Africa to Eurasia between 400,000 and 300,000 years ago and then split.

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The traditional “Out of Africa” model suggests that modern humans evolved in Africa and then left in a single wave around 60,000 years ago.

The model often holds once modern humans left the continent, a brief period of interbreeding with Neanderthals occurred.

This explains why individuals of European and Asian heritage today still have ancient human DNA.

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There are many theories as to what drove the downfall of the Neanderthals.

Experts have suggested that early humans may have carried tropical diseases with them from Africa that wiped out their ape-like cousins.

Others claim that plummeting temperatures due to climate change wiped out the Neanderthals.

The predominant theory is that early humans killed off the Neanderthal through competition for food and habitat.

How the story is changing in light of new research

Recent findings suggest that the ‘Out of Africa’ theory does not tell the full story of our ancestors.

Instead, multiple, smaller movements of humans out of Africa beginning 120,000 years ago were then followed by a major migration 60,000 years ago.

Most of our DNA is made up of this latter group, but the earlier migrations, also known as “dispersals”, are still evident.

This explains recent studies of early human remains which have been found in the far reaches of Asia dating back further than 60,000 years.

For example, H. sapiens remains have been found at multiple sites in southern and central China that have been dated to between 70,000 and 120,000 years ago.

Other recent finds show that modern humans reached Southeast Asia and Australia prior to 60,000 years ago.

Based on these studies, humans could not have come in a single wave from Africa around this time, studies have found.

Instead, the origin of man suggests that modern humans developed in multiple regions around the world.

The theory claims that groups of pre-human ancestors made their way out of Africa and spread across parts of Europe and the Middle East.

(I support the above hypothesis, as I have done other studies that support the multiple group theory! Opinion by John love)

From here the species developed into modern humans in several places at once.

The argument is by a new analysis of a 260,000-year-old skull found in Dali County in China’s Shaanxi Province.

The skull suggests that early humans migrated to Asia, where they evolved modern human traits and then moved back to Africa.

 

Physicists Have Discovered A New Form Of Matter Called Excitonium

Posted: December 10, 2017 in science
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An international team of physicists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of California, Berkeley, and University of Amsterdam, claim they have finally proven the existence of a new form of matter called excitonium, almost 50 years after it was first theorized. Upon studying non-doped crystals of the transition metal dichalcogenide titanium diselenide (1T-TiSe2),…

via Physicists Have Discovered A New Form Of Matter Called Excitonium — Sparkonit

Forbidden Writings of Jesus Discovered

Posted: December 7, 2017 in Christmas, Life, News and politics, science
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Biblical scholars at the University of Texas, Austin have discovered an oldest known copy of a heretical Christian writing that describes Jesus’ secret teachings to his brother James. The biblical texts, which relate to the First Apocalypse of James, contain information about the heavenly realm and future events, including James’ inevitable death, according to news…

via Researchers Discover Forbidden Texts Of Jesus’ Secret Revelations To His Brother James — Sparkonit

Why Is Sleep So Good For Your Memory? — Sparkonit

Posted: November 26, 2017 in science
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Researchers at the University of York have shown that sleep strengthens new and old versions of the same memory to similar extents. Instead of overwriting the old version of the memory, the brain generates and stores multiple (new and old) versions of the same experience, helping you use your memory in the most flexible and…

via Why Is Sleep So Good For Your Memory? — Sparkonit

Lightning Creates Antimatter in The Atmosphere by Sparkonit

Posted: November 24, 2017 in science
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Lightning is one of the most incredible natural phenomenons and there’s a lot we don’t know about it. Now, a study at Kyoto University, Japan has found that lightning strikes can set off photonuclear reactions in the atmosphere, and the gamma rays – emitted in lightning – react with the air to produce radioisotopes and…

via Lightning Creates Antimatter In The Atmosphere – And It’s Powerful Enough To Set Off Nuclear Reactions, Study Finds — Sparkonit

The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing — Sparkonit

Posted: November 20, 2017 in Health and wellness, Uncategorized
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If you think you are smarter than everyone around you, you’re definitely not. If you have a colleague who thinks he is much better at his job than everyone, he is definitely not. Well, if you feel this way about yourself, or come across anyone who overestimates their own abilities the same way you do,…

via The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing — Sparkonit

The Facts, Nothing But The Facts!

Posted: October 12, 2017 in Health and wellness, Life, News and politics, science
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This is in response to a post about how Democrats were originally for slavery and were opposed to civil rights! Well I had to respond, actually a friend asked for my opinion, and she got a little more than she bargained for, I am sure! So here goes! 

If you look at history and the platforms of both parties they have completely switched ideologies since the days of Lincoln. So what used to be the democrats is actually represented by republicans, and vice-versa. It of course is not as simple as just switching names, but the Democratic Party of old does not exist as such anymore, has not probably in our lifetime! So what is claimed is accurate, just not accurate to ascribe those attributes to the current party. The democrats have lots of problems which they need to solve, but if you look at what Republicans are trying to do right now, for example getting rid of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, trying to completely shut down the education and environmental agencies in total, trying to open up open pit mining in the heart of the last remaining natural Salmon fishery, closing down or vastly reducing our park systems and opening them up to mining and oil interests, I cannot see this as in our interest. The premise of the Republican Party is a solid one, but Republicans now in power are not abiding by or even resembling such a premise. I used to be a staunch Republican, but when they became bought and paid for, I had to leave. Not saying there are not bought and paid for Democrats, but way less in my opinion. If you dig into social security, it is income deduction based, does not affect the debt, and would be solvent if left alone and not the Fed piggy bank. But employers, especially large ones, have to match the Soc. Sec. contribution. Now they figure all that in when deciding how much salary to pay an individual, along with 401k matching, health care, vacation time, etc. But that is the driving force to the GOP hatred of this particular program, and in other forms of imagined attacks on their bottom line tend to foment hatred for all healthcare programs! Why after seven or eight years did the Republicans not build their own healthcare bill instead of trying to shove a hastily thrown together bill down our throats in secret to try and fool us into thinking they had our interest at heart! Because they never intended to offer a healthcare plan. They thought we would let them  get rid of the ACA and then they would just ignore cries for a new program until it faded away!  Big business, pharmaceuticals, petroleum companies, and others, all make billions, even trillions in profit, and they need to keep increasing profit or their stockholders get nasty! So that is what is being legislated, not our needs or wants or desires. Politicians get their money for re-election from these sources so you and I do not figure into their machinations in congress anymore. We have always been a socialist democracy. Otherwise there would be no fire, police, emergency response teams, paramedics, interstate highways, and the list goes on. So you have to decide if backing a person who acts like a bully in a grade school sandbox, who lies every single day, tells you exactly what you want to hear but has no intention of actually doing any of it, who changes horses midstream on policy weekly, and who cannot let any slight go no matter how insignificant it is! So he undermines his own secretary, his cabinet members flee in disgust, almost all of his appointments are still empty, he has no takers, despite his blaming democrats or Obama for everything. Tillerson almost left this summer! The buck stops at the Presidents desk, but he does not know that! Sorry for going postal here, but I have a lot of pent up rage at what is going on. I spend long hours reading bills, studying history, and looking at foreign news, even Russian outlets along with British, Irish, etc., to try and get the real picture of our world and our place in it. We are not the jewel of the earth anymore, we are more like a cancer! Education and science are scoffed at right now, and we are going to be sorry for letting those two slip our grasp. We need to start paying attention to science and education again or we are going to fail as a country! Our esteem in the world by our peers has diminished by leaps and bounds. This is not my opinion, it is a fact! You cannot replace a scientist with multiple degrees with a used car salesmen in an agency based on science and expect him to make the right choices for our well being. I am talking about the Environmental Protection Agency, oh and NASA as well! Anyway, I will shut up now, but I was asked!

 

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