Drones, love them, hate them.

I am being seduced by all the really astounding images that drones have been able to produce especially since every great invention of man has been weaponized and deployed. I love them and I hate them. We have an opportunity to do incredible positive things with the small aerial platforms that today carry only cameras. The problem is that minds like those of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld see them as military assets that can deliver a payload to a specified target with a precision never before possible.

These amazing devices are on the vanguard of a whole new world. A world we humans might not like.

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Man's Failure To Understand How Things Work

Man's Failure To Understand How Things Work

Many of these situations cannot fully be divorced from the Natural Systems because many of these situations are predicated on Man's lack of understanding of how things work. By declaring forest fires evil, he must marshal his resources to fight this evil even to the point where he creates a new problem. The 100% suppression policy has created forests that perpetually are on the verge of collapse due to the accumulation of natural litter and small trees that are easily ignited and proceed to big burns of the grand older trees that last for weeks.

When we spread fertilizers and insecticides on our crop fields to enhance the quantity and quality of the yields, we get improvement on one side of the equation and degradation on the other.

We have burned fossil fuels for hundreds of years. Before that we burned surface carbon that circulated in the environment on annual or maybe decade-long balanced equations. The failure to understand that there is an equation, and that anything done on one side of the equation affects the other side leads to the Principle of Imminent Collapse. In earlier times it was reasonable to assume that the trees, plants, phytoplankton in the oceans and the water itself could absorb all the carbon we could liberate. However the high rate at which we are introducing of these components into the biosphere is surpassing the biosphere's ability to sequester or otherwise neutralize these destabilizing effects. We cannot dump 8 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year without expecting some movement on the other side of the equal sign. Something will happen as a result.

Based upon our state of knowledge of the relatively new sciences of complex systems and ecology, we now understand how even small fluctuations in the concentration of these powerfully controlling constituents can lead to a disastrous cascade of disruptive events in our biosphere which, once started, cannot be stabilized or recalled.

A new question that has been asked is: what does all that carbon in ocean water do to the ability of aquatic life to thrive or even exist?

Wood has roughly ½ the carbon content of anthracite coal and therefore has a lower BTU energy content. However, wood is produced over a very short period of time as compared to coal and therefore cycles the carbon over a much shorter time interval. From the standpoint of maintaining stability in the complex chemical and biochemical processes in the biosphere, taking the carbon out of the environment and putting it back within, say, the 20 years for a tree to grow, is a far better method -- no matter what tonnage you use -- because the net carbon change in the atmosphere over the time period is Zero.

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Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

Rachel and Nikki Step Out

an #eBook at #Amazon by Robert Carlson
Please visit my Amazon Author Page at bit.ly/CARLSON

This book merges an "explanation" with the events of one very unusual night at a local night spot in Gloucester, MA where two young women seemed to have cut loose from the confines of conformity. They left the people who were there that night with the big question "Where did these two come from?"

The book suggests an explanation with the possibly fictional events that lead up to the wild and crazy night. The explanation revolves around two exceptional and brave Boston Terriers.

Please visit my Author Page at Amazon to buy this book and read about other titles that are available. Also tell your friends about it. This is my Author Page

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More Ruminations of a Bird Brain - Vols 1 and 2

An eBook by Robert Carlson available at Amazon
My Author Page

Visit my Author Page for more on this book and other titles that are available. Thank you.

After the success of the "Ruminations of a Bird Brain" I decided that more was needed. The Bird Brain thought the same thing and we collaborated on Volume 2. For those who have not visited my Author Page and bought the original eBook, I bundled both into the "More" eBook and titled it "Volumes 1 and 2". Therefore, no one needs to miss out on all the great characters and the odd events of the first eBook.

"To say that pigeons were intellectual and contemplative would be a lie. There is such uniformity of mind that all pigeons in a group actually blink in unison. But if you ever asked about it, they would deny that pigeons ever blink. No one had ever seen a pigeon blinking. Well, duh! Their eyes were closed at the time. There was no convincing any of them. Seeing is believing, and they never saw it happen."

Chapter One

Here I sit on my roost overlooking the street below. It’s my favorite roost at 18th and Smallman Street. My human intellect is wrapped in the body of a pigeon. How exactly it got here I do not know. I can remember many of the things that I did when I was human including the reading of the great and lesser philosophers and Hindu clerics who teach about the transmigration of the soul or speculate on its possibilities. Well I do what to say that all speculation is over.

From my view of the world several stories above the street I drink in the daily activities of the people and other creatures that inhabit that little reality. As dawn breaks, the city Streets Department water truck washes a day’s debris into the gutter leaving the shiny wet streak behind like the viscous trail of a snail or common garden slug. Frederico, I call him Frederico, that scrawny mongrel dog trots down the middle of Smallman Street casually sidestepping the occasional car or truck that heralds the beginning of a new day in the produce market down by the river. Later in the day Frederico will be sniffing up the butts of every other dog that makes its way through his territory, as he does every day without fail. Sometimes the encounters end in a snarling fit or, just as likely, they trot off together to explore the next block and all its smells and opportunities.

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Tweets by @IvSeenTheCanary

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When Regulators are In Bed with Business

When Regulators are In Bed with Business

The Principle of Imminent Collapse invariably shows up when the people who are supposed to inspect and report deficiencies and non-compliance to laws fail in the performance of that public trust. It would be one thing if the failure was due to inexperience and not knowing what the outcomes would be, but all too often the failure is due to a tacit agreement that the regulation is only for show and that no actual interference will be manifest.

Rampant Capitalist Buying and Selling leads to the Principle of Imminent Collapse. When one allows free-market forces to run amuck free from oversight, regulation and rationality, a crash is unavoidable. The fallacy of Laissez-faire is that it assumes that corporations are peopled with only honest and earnest directors, managers and staff. It would be true if emotions did not interfere. The role of government oversight is to reign in the adrenaline and testosterone fueled frenzy that emerges as a corporate personality trait when the wild ride begins.

These un-watched enterprises are responsible for all the Boom and Bust cycles of the economy. In recent years, the hydraulic fracturing/drilling speculators are riding high on the adrenalin of big money from holes in the ground. They will drill, drill, drill irrespective of the production outcomes of their operations. When the price of gas falls far enough the gas from their wells will be too costly to sell and the speculators will cease operations and walk away from the toxic waste water basins they built to hold the wastes until they were ready to leave. Government action has always been required in order to remediate the damage done in the Bust phase after every Boom.

There are two levels within each regulatory organization: The workers who see the everyday activities that they monitor; and there is the management level to which they report. While the front line workers usually want to do their job, it is the unstated position of the management that government needs to stay out of the process and let business prosper. Nobody wants to hold up the rollout of the latest jet aircraft. It will cost millions if there is a delay. We can’t have big businesses incur losses due to safety concerns that are only alleged anyway. No one has proven that three rivets instead of four really would make the wing fall off.

In the Soviet-era manufacturing environment, performance criteria were commanded. Without respect to capabilities of the factory to perform, they were told they will ship 1000 refrigerators per month. They had an inspector counting the units shipped. It always was 1000 units. The problem arose when the plant had only 900 compressors to install in the 1000 units. In that case 900 functional units were shipped along with 100 non-functional ones. The inspectors were satisfied and the economic planners vindicated that they were meeting the needs of the people.

So what happens when a mortgage finance institution needs to produce 10,000 new mortgages per month to package and sell to investors and they can only find 9,000 good qualified house buyers to sign on the dotted line? Well 90% of the mortgages were good and at cursory glance, all the T’s were crossed and the I’s dotted. Everything looked good until you dig deeper and discovered that many of the mortgagees did not have adequate income to assure confident repayment. Without actually visiting the dwelling, how would the reviewer know that the $400,000 price tag was $100,000 too high? They don’t. But someone certified that the dwelling was fit and suitably priced. Somebody fudged the numbers and the report. And no one was reviewing the performance of the appraisers. Everyone was making money and the economy was flush with discretionary funds to pay for all the stuff we Americans love to buy and consume.

Older people were able to retire to upscale communities like the Charlestown Village in Catonsville, MD or other Erickson communities or hundreds of other “active adult communities” and assisted-living communities. Children could go to college and private Christian high schools.

At the top management level of the finance banks, they were seeing dollar signs floating in their dreams, too. Multi-million dollar salaries, bonuses and stock options abounded. The measure of performance was not solid quality manufacturing and delivery, but it was how many units they could ship and put the price on their Accounts Receivable ledgers. This is were the Principle of Imminent Collapse meets the metaphorical Tuna. The two concepts are so intertwined that they are almost one Principle. There were no independent regulators or auditors to call out the business practices as being damaging.  In many cases the government relied of the companies themselves to self report and self-regulate. How smart is THAT?

Whatever is in store for us, we have to be prepared to survive it

Author's Note: The book cover images in the side margins of this blog are my own publications of eBooks available at both Amazon and B&N. Please take a moment and go to the sites and read about them. Then if you like it, buy one or two.

Let's put Global climate Change in its proper perspective. What ever the causes, whatever the magnitude, we humans need to figure out how we will live in the New Equilibrium.

Humans are only one of the direct causes of atmospheric greenhouse gas buildup. We are also the indirect cause of a lot more than by the mere burning of fossil fuels. In some of the cases listed below, one event creates another and the other feeds back and increases the cause.

We used to learn that there was a "food chain". This was a linear progression from plankton in the sea and ended with humans triumphantly standing at the top. Each animal ate a smaller one and up the chain to us. But then we realized that it wasn't a line but a web, a network of predators and prey. One predator was keeping another predator in check by eating the food the other predator wanted to eat. We kill off the one predator so we can have the salmon or the cod but the other predator takes over and eats even more of the fish we want. This is to say: nothing happens in isolation.

This description won't make sense at first but keep reading. A figure skater starts a slow spin to impress the audience. He or she suddenly accelerates to a very rapid spin, then slows down again and stops with a flourish and wave of the arms held high. We are impressed. It is physics that allowed the skater to accomplish that very rapid spin. The skater starts with arms outstretched and he/she accelerates when the arms are quickly pulled in close. The spinning mass out far has the same energy as the mass close in, so the speed must be faster to compensate. The opposite applies for slowing down again.

This applies to the Earth as well. When the atmosphere gets warmer it expands and the rotation of the Earth slows down a tiny amount. When the water that is at the poles as ice melts it flows to the equator and the Earth gets wider in the middle. This slows the rotation a tiny bit too. This may only be a few microseconds but over time it adds up to longer days.

Now for a list:

• Heat doesn't ever really go away. It radiates off the planet into space otherwise the sun's heat would melt it. Nuclear reactors liberate a lot of heat into the air. Burning coal, oil and gas also directly heat the air as well as add greenhouse gases.
• One degree of temperature rise from 60 to 61 or 90 to 91 is a small change. On the other hand a rise from 31 to 32 causes glaciers and snow pack to melt.
• Tundra and permafrost lands are peat bogs with a lot of dead vegetation that is inactive because they are frozen. When they thaw out, they become biologically active and produce copious amounts of methane. Methane buildup traps more solar heat and further thaws the permafrost areas releasing more methane.
• There are dozens of deep ocean volcanoes and fissures that are off-gassing carbon dioxide into the water. The depths are so deep that we do not see and bubbles. The gas is there nonetheless. It gets into the atmosphere too.
• Methane that seeps into deep cold ocean water "freezes" into a solid form called hydrate. Methane hydrate keeps billions of tons of methane out of the air where it would trap solar heat.
• Hydrates are unstable and can erupt when sufficiently shaken. A deep water earthquake, even a small one, or a volcano can cause the eruption of the methane from the hydrate.
• People breed livestock in great numbers. Cows, pigs and chickens being the most prevalent are also manure creators and have copious amounts of methane flatulence. We eat the livestock and create our own manure and produce out own methane flatulence. Seven billion people produce those gases, too.
• People and livestock all breathe. Their respiration includes higher levels of carbon dioxide on the exhale than on the inhale.
• The sun shines on a field of grain. The grain grows and removes CO2 from the air. Livestock and people eat the grain and we eat the livestock. The carbon is returned to the environment. A lot of the carbon is held in the humans' bodies for many decades. Incidentally, obese people sequester more carbon in their lifetimes than do thin people.
• Cows are fed grains, pass gas and respire for about 2 years before slaughter. Pigs do it for 4 months to 1 year. And chickens live 30 days to 6 months. While they contribute to GHG loadings they also cycle carbon into the food web and into our bodies where it stays the longest.
• A field of grain growing takes carbon out of the air during its growing period. If you just burned it, it would immediately return all the carbon to the air. If you eat it some of the carbon will still immediately return to the air while the remaining carbon that stays in our bodies will return when each of us dies.
• If you grow a field of corn it takes carbon out of the air during the growing cycle. If you distill it into ethanol and burn it in your automobile engine, all that carbon is returned to the air in the same year for a net zero carbon gain. This is the same no matter how efficient or inefficient the distillation process is.
• If you cut down a twenty year old tree and let it rot on its own or you burn it in your furnace, the same amount of carbon is released as was removed during the twenty year growth of the tree. So on a carbon cycle, 20 year, it is a net zero.
• Growing grass in your yard removes carbon from the air, but when you mow it, the clipping rot and release the carbon right back into the air for a Net Zero 14 day cycle.
• Deciduous trees remove carbon from the air during the spring and summer only to release all of it in the fall and winter minus the amount turned into wood. Nearly Carbon Zero – 1 year, definitely carbon zero when the tree dies.
• Making trees into paper cycles carbon very fast. Making trees into lumber for houses keeps a lot of the carbon out of the air until the house burns down..

There are so many cycles that carbon makes as it is moved around for both the benefit and the detriment of people and the other species on the Earth. Some of these cycles are insignificant while others are disastrously potent. It is up to wise thinkers and planners, and not the people and businesses which prosper by not doing what is right, to make sure we are following a sustainable path.

Four messages to keep in mind:

1. That which we relied upon to bring us through the last century will not see us through the next.
2. "Men go and men come. But the Earth abides" ~ Ecclesiastes.
3. The Earth doesn't care how high or how low sea level is… We do.
4. Whatever is in store for us, we have to be prepared to survive it.

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The Truth About Chemtrails

Any conspiracy theorist worth his salt can tell you that governments are poisoning the human race with the dispersal of airborne chemicals, heavy metals and even viruses. They point to the white trails that aircraft make as the criss-cross the skies. Somehow they see a difference between the contrails that high altitude jets make as they disturb the stratosphere with their wings. Some of the condensations ultimately comes from the burnt aviation fuel but mostly the moisture was already there but invisible until the jets stir up the air and the water condenses. Usually the condensation just re-vaporizes and disappears from our sight.

The theorists claim that the trails that remain for hours are the results of a covert plan to do something sinister to the planet and to mankind. Such claims range from manipulation of the weather so as to control food production and thereby maximize profits for agri-businesses to population control by lowering sperm counts and virility of men. Other claims are to induce cancers and viral diseases that will cull earth's human population to about 1 billion people. Another claim is that they are poisoning the human race as collateral damage to an attempt to stem global warming by reducing the amount of sunlight that heats the oceans.

There seems to be little consensus among the many Internet-based purveyors of theory. What each person has in common is the notoriety he or she receives from a cadre of followers who believe the conspiracy because it was couched in terms of a conspiracy which the listener want to be true.

The facts are that cloud seeding has been going on for decades in order to provide microscopic particles in the atmosphere onto which water molecules can attach and make rain droplets that will precipitate. If the shadowy presence wanted to decrease solar heat accumulation through the atmosphere they certainly would not do it over land. It would be far more effective in equatorial ocean areas where no one would be seeing it done.

What is most interesting as a characteristic of the conspiracy theorists is that they put forth sinister governmental/corporate actions while ignoring the obvious vectors of doom that mankind is doing to himself without a master plan to do so.

The theorists are silent on the billions of tons of carbon-dioxide that we pump into the atmosphere each year that is causing the warming that "someone is trying to counter". Why not just stop the cause rather than seek a remedy?

Agri-business and pharmaceutical companies have been producing toxins and body/mind altering chemicals for decades. These substances leak into our water and air in huge quantities. The EPA even has a permitting process by which corporations can dispose of chemical byproducts by injecting them into old oil and gas wells. These substances pollute the ground water that is either withdrawn by domestic wells or leaches back to the surface through other old well casings that they did not consider.

Agri-businesses regularly create and distribute genetically modified organisms without proving their safety in the environment at large. One single field of GMO corn or wheat is capable of polluting the entire crop of every field across the nation. Millions of square miles of crops can be permanently contaminated with seeds that carry the mutant genes. We have little knowledge of what this altered gnome will produce as it mutates itself outside the laboratory that created the initial changes. Where is the conspiracy theorist to warn us of the dangers there?

Coal burning electric plants emit millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere every year. Among the substances are sulfur, mercury, antimony, lead and other trace heavy metals. All the chemtrail aircraft cannot hope to keep pace with the coal industry in disbursing the same quantity of pollutants in the air.

There are 104 nuclear reactors licensed at 65 sites in the United States. Additionally there are decommissioned reactors and military reactors in various places. None of these reactors has any plan for the ultimate disposal of their nuclear wastes. They all archive that toxic waste on-site in cooling pools that must be maintained lest they over heat and release massive amounts of radiation. While under normal circumstances the wastes are well protected and pose little danger, the kinds of abnormal events such as the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Fukushima Daiichi plane in Japan do happen and all safeguards that were imagined fail to protect us from that danger. Planet Earth has been polluted with radiation from that plant for 10,000 years at least.

Even though the prior explosion at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine added to the radiation loose on the planet, the 100's of air, ground and underwater nuclear detonations have added more toxic isotopes than either of the two "accidents." Such levels of radiation far surpasses anything that a fleet of jets could disperse in a chemtrail. Ultimately the governments of the world did something about the problem with first the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty than the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. That stopped the contamination of the planet with stupid insistence on detonating nuclear bombs. The biggest peril that humans face is not war. It is not hurricanes. It's not a pandemic disease. It's not even sea level rise due to Arctic ice melt. What it is is the change in weather patterns that impact the availability of fresh water and the growing of food crops. The summer of 2012 brought with it a US Heartland drought that decimated the crop yields. The East Coast received more than its share of precipitation as the weather patterns had shifted a thousand miles eastward. So far the world has only been inconvenienced by Supply and Demand price increases. Two or three years of this shifted weather pattern could make the total amount of food produced be too little to feed everyone.

Climate change driven by a warmer atmosphere will do several things. Changes in crop yield is but one. Warmer oceans will cause algae blooms and smaller fish and crustaceans. Much of the world depends of protein from the sea. The third item is the snow fall in high elevations that remain through the Summer to feed the rivers in otherwise arid regions. When the water stops flowing, that region may be doomed.

The Mighty Mississippi River was humbled this year by the drought in the Midwest. If that persists, we could be in for some terrible times ahead. So chemtrails or not, our bigger concerns are just what nature has in store for us from our neglectful treatment in most everything we do.

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