Earth is a dangerous place. Of all the species that have ever lived, over 95% have already been extinguished by natural disasters. Ice, not global warming, is the big killer and this recurring calamity often strikes quickly. Thousands of mammoths and other animals were killed by ice storms and their snap-frozen bodies are still entombed in ice around the Arctic. Just 15,000 years ago great ice sheets smothered the northern hemisphere as far south as Chicago, Moscow and London and all life had migrated towards the equator. This deadly ice had gripped Earth for about 50,000 years.

     Ice ages are also times of dry winds and drought as cold oceans and cold dry atmospheres produce little evaporation or precipitation. Great deserts like the Sahara and the Gobi expand, and wind-blown dust fills the skies and rivers. Adding to Ice Age woes, cold oceans suck the gas of life (carbon dioxide) out of the atmosphere, thus making surviving plants less able to cope with cold and drought. One of the great serendipities of modern life is that man’s use of carbon-rich fuels like oil and coal not only provides energy but also adds carbon dioxide plant food to the severely depleted carbon stocks of the atmosphere. Satellites have detected the resultant greening of the Earth.

     Greens worship woody weeds. Their proposed tree-clearing bans in Queensland are the latest salvo in a long war favouring trees and damaging grasslands and pastoralists.

     For millennia Australia’s open forests and treeless plains have supported our national emblems – the kangaroo and the emu, which in turn sustained aborigines, eagles and dingos. Australian grasslands also nurtured now-endangered species such as bustards, quail, pigeons, finches and grass parrots.

Dear John Roskam,
     I have just watched John Anderson’s interview with Jordan B. Peterson and want to bring to your attention some historical facts.  Facts which I don’t expect Jordan Peterson (a Canadian) to know about but I am sure you could easily recall if you have a mind to.

     But first, please, please.  Enough of the humbug from the mouths of so-called ‘leaders’ of this nation now brought to its knees!  And as for John Anderson... He should be hanging his head in shame and not using a visiting media celebratory to raise his profile.  To view him ‘tut tutting’ whilst recalling the atrocities committed by the Soviets in the Ukraine in the 1920-30’s and yet not seeing his own role in the centralisation of power in this nation just beggars belief!

     This is going to be really bad for all the Greenies and environmentalists when we get fusion power and heaps of free energy, so we can have radiators going 24/7, air conditioners, clothes driers, you name it:
  http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/03/12/scientists-say-dream-unlimited-clean-energy-is-about-to-come-true.html 

“In just 15 years, the U.S. will be producing unlimited amounts of nearly free, completely green energy. Not only would such an energy holy grail mean the end of humanity’s dependence on expensive fossil fuels, it would also be a panacea for climate change. Amazingly, this is not a science fiction. It’s actually about to become reality if a collaboration between MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a private company, is to be believed. The collaborators announced Friday in the journal Nature that they believe they are on the verge of cracking the code to nuclear fusion — and it could be commercially viable in just 15 years, according to The Guardian.

     It looks like the insane computer technocrats will do the inevitable and manufacture killer robots, which will be used to, well, kill you and me. After all, it was done in the movies, so it would be disappointing in a way, if they did not replicate the evils of fiction:
  http://www.collapse.news/2018-04-09-coming-soon-an-army-of-hunter-killer-robots-that-will-murder-humanity.html

“Just like something straight out of a post-apocalyptic horror film, scientists are now concerned that an Artificial Intelligence robot army that is currently being developed by a top South Korean university could potentially wipe out all of humanity. In February of this year, KAIST University allegedly launched a brand new AI weapons lab, which has thus far led dozens of researchers to believe that the technology being developed there will “have the potential to be weapons of terror.” One of these researchers is Toby Walsh, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who argued in an open letter:

The Simulation Argument

      Philosophers, and some physicists have speculated about the world not being “real” as we normally think but being a computer simulation, as seen in the Matrix movies. For example, British philosopher Nick Bostrom wrote a now iconic paper, “Are You Living in a computer Simulation? Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 53, 2003, pp. 243-255. There he reasoned that with runaway technological advancements in computing power, and the reaching of a singularity producing post-human superintelligences, the post-human civilisation may run ancestor simulation on their computers. Given the standard assumption in the materialist paradigm of the philosophy of mind, that these simulated minds would be conscious (minds are just computers), then it could well be that the vast majority of minds like ours could actually be simulations, and given the vast number of simulations run, it would be more likely that we are among the simulated minds, rather than the original biological minds.

     I knew it, I knew it, they were up to no good in the skies:
  https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-05-03-geoengineering-destroy-us-climate-change-scientists-dim-the-sun.html 

“Remember when the mere mention of “chemtrails” in public was immediately shot down by scientific know-it-alls as a wacky “conspiracy theory” with no basis in reality? Well, chemtrails have now been given an official name – geoengineering – and even the mainstream media now openly admits that they’re real and being used to combat “climate change.” Scientists from developing countries like Bangladesh, China, India, and Thailand are actively studying how chemtrails might be used to “dim” the sun’s rays by putting a chemical layer between them and the earth.

     Back in the early 1990s the Australian elites were falling over themselves licking Japanese boots in the hope of the Japanese building a high tech city in Australia (ultimately in the polluted swamp lands of Gillman, Adelaide), believing that all sorts of riches would be given to them. Oh, how the academics went along for the ride on that one, hanging out of the politically correct train and screaming “racism” to critics, their puny chest’s puffed up with moral superiority. Then, the scheme all fell apart, wasting millions of dollars, and the Gillman land was sold off in a fire sale:
  https://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/state-politics/sa-strikes-land-deal-for-gillman-exmfp-site/news-story/6cacbf844cdbd2235601d1984ee4b991

A big book could be written about the whole sorry mess, but it would probably be a waste of time since things have moved on. China is now fast colonising us, and is now at the level of building cities in Australia:
  https://stopforeignownershipinaustralia.com.au/2017/04/27/chinese-to-build-new-1bn-city-between-brisbane-and-the-gold-coast/

     I continue my series on amazing things about physics that people may not know. Take the so-called Mpemba effect for example:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect  

     Some folk like to put African people down, belittling their IQ, as we see in the so-called racial realist school, but it was a  poor Tanzanian form 3 school boy, Erasto Mpemba who noticed the effect, previously noted, and variously explained by historical figures such as Aristotle, Francis Bacon and Descartes, that hot water freezes faster than cold. Mpemba, posed this question during his high school education to visiting physicist Dr Denis G. Osborne: “If you take two similar containers with equal volumes of water, one at 35 °C (95 °F) and the other at 100 °C (212 °F), and put them into a freezer, the one that started at 100 °C (212 °F) freezes first. Why?”
The teacher and class mates ridiculed him, but Dr Osborne, as a good empirical scientist went and conducted some experiments and confirmed the results. He then published a paper with the lad, rather than keeping it for himself:
  http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9120/4/3/312/pdf 

     This one is a real puzzler, that perplexed the ancient Greek and Chinese scientists. The moon appears to be larger in size when it is near the horizon than when it is higher in the sky. The moon does not increase its size, nor does it get closer nor is there any atmospheric effect generating this, such a refraction. One can take a photo of the full moon on one’s mobile phone when the moon is full, and see that the object which seems so large and close that one could touch it, is really the same size as before. Thus, the effect is an illusion, but what causes it?

     This puzzle has resisted explanation from scientists for over 2,500 years, and according to one frequently cited review, is still unexplained: F. Egan, “The Moon Illusion,” Philosophy of Science, vol. 65, 1998, pp. 604-623; S. Nanavati, “A History and Experimental Analysis of the Moon Illusion,” The New School Psychology Bulletin, vol. 6, 2009, pp. 15-25. The later paper gives a good historical overview of proposed solutions, but my article will focus upon modern attempts since it is generally agreed that the ancients failed to solve the problem.

     It seems that NASA are about to spend a whole heap of money in the search for alien life:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-12/congress-planning-spend-millions-search-aliens-ufos

“Now, the U.S. House of Representatives has proposed a bill that includes $10 million in NASA funding for the next two years “to search for technosignatures, such as radio transmissions, in order to meet the NASA objective to search for life’s origin, evolution, distribution, and future in the universe.” Such technosignatures would come in the form of radio waves that have the telltale features of being produced by TV- or radio-type technologies. An intelligent civilization could also produce those signals intentionally to communicate with other civilizations like ours. “If it passes, it would definitely be a sea-change in Congressional attitude since Sen. Bryan terminated NASA’s SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, in 1993,” Tarter told Live Science in an email. She added that the funding seems to be an extension of the efforts of Rep. Lamar Smith, R–Texas, to bring attention to the search for life beyond Earth when he was the chairman of the House Science Committee. (Smith, who announced that he will retire at the end of his term this year, is a known denier of human-caused climate change.)

     Mike Adams was issuing a lot of warnings about Bitcoin a few month’s ago, or was it longer? Things have gone a bit quiet on the Bitcoin doomsday front. Until now:
  https://www.livescience.com/62582-bitcoin-energy-how-much.html?utm_source=ls-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20180518-ls
  https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30177-6 

“This paper has outlined various methods that are currently used in determining the current and future electricity consumption of the Bitcoin network. These methods tell us that the Bitcoin network consumes at least 2.55 GW of electricity currently, and that it could reach a consumption of 7.67 GW in the future, making it comparable with countries such as Ireland (3.1 GW) and Austria (8.2 GW). Additionally, economic models tell us that Bitcoin’s electricity consumption will gravitate toward the latter figure. A look at Bitcoin miner production estimates suggests that this figure could already be reached in 2018. With the Bitcoin network processing just 200,000 transactions per day, this means that the average electricity consumed per transaction equals at least 300 kWh, and could exceed 900 kWh per transaction by the end of 2018. The Bitcoin development community is experimenting with solutions such as the Lightning Network to improve the throughput of the network, which may alleviate the situation. For now, however, Bitcoin has a big problem, and it is growing fast.”

     This is one of those stories where you can’t trust secondary sources and “professional” (not really) journalists like me go right to the primary source to check. Yep, its true: out there in university land there are scientists who think that extraterrestrial aliens may destroy us because global warming indicates that we are a destructive species, and thus a cosmic pest:
  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations 

“It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth’s atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain. This highly speculative scenario is one of several described by a Nasa-affiliated scientist and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University that, while considered unlikely, they say could play out were humans and alien life to make contact at some point in the future. Shawn Domagal-Goldman of Nasa’s Planetary Science Division and his colleagues compiled a list of plausible outcomes that could unfold in the aftermath of a close encounter, to help humanity “prepare for actual contact”.

     So, if you think all of those global warming socialists are environmentally friendly, and I am thinking of you Al Gore, think again:
  http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/study-global-warming-skeptics-more-likely-to-be-eco-friendly-than-climate-change-alarmists_05092018

“Published in the April edition of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the one-year study broke 600 participants into three groups based on their level of concern about climate change: “highly concerned,” “cautiously worried,” and “skeptical.” The study by Cornell and the University of Michigan researchers found that those “highly concerned” about climate change were less likely to engage in recycling and other eco-friendly behaviors than global-warming skeptics, according to The Washington Times. Those “highly concerned” about climate change were the most supportive of government climate policies (meaning they want others stolen from and forced at gunpoint to pay for their beliefs) but were the least likely to report their own individual-level actions.

     I am not aware of any interest, outside of this site about the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) issue in Australia. With the threat of a war with China fast approaching, ordinary people should be aware that EMP attacks, by exploding an atomic bomb in the atmosphere, have the capacity to knock society back to a pre-electric era, by destroying unprotected electronics, and that is a lot of the modern world: There is some discussion of this issue in the US, where, unlike Australia, the issue is being taken seriously:
  http://readynutrition.com/resources/emp-commission-warns-of-year-long-blackout-and-a-massive-death-toll_14052018/ 
  http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/emp-commission-warns-of-year-long-blackout-and-a-massive-death-toll_05102018

“A federal EMP commission report warns that even the smallest EMP attack on our grid system would down it for about a year, if not longer.  A year-long blackout would certainly be coupled with a massive death toll that would devastate entire populations. The so-called EMP Commission report said that this threat is very real, jeopardizes “modern civilization,” and would set back living conditions to those last seen in the 1800s. As a result of the chaos, millions would likely die, according to the report titled “Assessing the Threat from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP),” from the recently re-established Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack.

     I don’t normally report on Sweden because it just sets off my already sky high blood pressure, but, I notice that this nation of cucks and sissies is preparing for war:
  http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/sweden-warns-every-single-household-to-prep-for-war_05222018

“The government of Sweden has produced a 20-page pamphlet which they’ll be sending to each of the 4.8 million households in the country urging them to get prepared for…WAR. Although they haven’t been at war for over 200 years, for some reason, right now, they want their citizens to get prepped – and fast. This goes along with an article I wrote in January of 2018 when the government urged their people to be ready to cope “without help” for at least a week. Shortly before Christmas, the Swedish government quietly published a paper called “Resilience.” Initially, the requirement had been for people to be prepared for 3 days without help, but it seems like that was a baby step.

     Not just atheists, but related insect species such as liberals, have been the subject of my late night  deep mediations with a bottle of wine, regarding the hypothesis that such beings are genetic mutations, and deleterious ones at that. Until now, I have not revealed my deep, dark thoughts. But, then there is this paper: “The Mutant Says in His Heart, “There Is No God”: The Rejection of Collective Religiosity Centred Around the Worship of Moral Gods Is Associated with High Mutational Load,” Evolutionary Psychological Science, December, 2017, at
  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs40806-017-0133-5
  https://www.vdare.com/articles/are-atheists-genetic-mutants-a-product-of-recent-evolution

“Industrialisation leads to relaxed selection and thus the accumulation of fitness-damaging genetic mutations. We argue that religion is a selected trait that would be highly sensitive to mutational load. We further argue that a specific form of religiousness was selected for in complex societies up until industrialisation based around the collective worship of moral gods. With the relaxation of selection, we predict the degeneration of this form of religion and diverse deviations from it. These deviations, however, would correlate with the same indicators because they would all be underpinned by mutational load. We test this hypothesis using two very different deviations: atheism and paranormal belief. We examine associations between these deviations and four indicators of mutational load: (1) poor general health, (2) autism, (3) fluctuating asymmetry, and (4) left-handedness. A systematic literature review combined with primary research on handedness demonstrates that atheism and/or paranormal belief is associated with all of these indicators of high mutational load.”

     Famine has haunted humans for most of their history. In the days of the Pharaohs, whenever the Nile River failed to flood, Egypt starved. Joseph was called in and he organised stockpiling of grain for famine relief. Even mighty Rome suffered famines – in 436 BC thousands of starving people threw themselves into the Tiber. The cold Middle Ages in Europe were haunted by famines. In the 11th and 12th century, famines averaged one in 14 years. Even in England there were 22 recorded famines in the 13th century. In 1235, 20,000 people died in London and people ate horse flesh, bark and grass. There were great famines in India, Bengal, France, China and Russia.

     In more recent times, man-made famines were more common in the Comrade Societies – some wit once remarked that “Soviet agriculture has just suffered its 23rd consecutive year of unseasonal weather”. Some famines were deliberate policy such as Stalin’s liquidation of the Kulaks in 1918 and his starvation of Ukraine in the 1932-33, while other dictators like Mao in China and Pol Pot in Cambodia caused famine with destructive collectivist farm policies. Famines eased in Europe and North America from about 1860, partly because crops improved with warmer weather and also because of the great increases in land opened up in the Americas for farming and grazing.

     I am the science guy of sorts at this site, so I don’t go into apocalyptic collapse or religious end times scenarios, unless the evidence suggests it. But, with all those volcanoes across the world suddenly going off their “noodle,” it makes one stop and ponder, hmmm… volcanic apocalypse … maybe. Guatemala’s “volcano of fire’ has obliterated entire towns, and it make one wonder what would happen if one of these geological pus boils decided to pop up in, or near a major Western  city:
  https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-07/shocking-satellite-photos-reveal-entire-towns-obliterated-guatemalas-volcano-fire 
  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-06/hawaii-volcano-lava-destroys-hundreds-of-homes/9839494

     Then there are thoughts that that Yellowstone may be getting ready to blow, which will devastate America like nothing ever seen:

     I do not believe that UFOs represent visitation of aliens from other planets. First, the West has more than enough aliens to deal with, trillions too many. Second, why would any creature with more than two neurons to rub together want to visit Earth anyway? Surely, there is no intelligent life on this planet, given human behaviour?
  http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/leaked-military-report-ufo-rendezvoused-with-something-big-under-ocean_05302018

“An in-depth government report “prepared by and for the military” and obtained by a Nevada newsroom, details a 2004 incident involving an alleged “UFO” sighting recorded by the US military off California’s coast 14 years ago. Dubbed the “Tic Tac” incident, the unidentified flying object “rendezvouses” with a huge underwater object. So named for the white, fast-moving, mint-shaped object that was involved, the video’s release made waves last year when it was first revealed by the New York Times. Over the course of two weeks in 2004, a 13.7-meter-long (45-foot-long) Anomalous Aerial Vehicle (AAV) defined as “aerodynamic” with “no visible means to generate lift” was detected by US naval ships in short glimpses.