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Showing posts from March, 2009

Cognitive dissonance

Is there dissonance in your life? How do you deal with it? Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. The "ideas" or "cognitions" in question may include attitudes and beliefs, and also the awareness of one's behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Dissonance normally occurs when a person perceives a logical inconsistency among his or her cognitions. This happens when one idea implies the opposite of another. For example, a belief in animal rights could be interpreted as inconsistent with eating meat or wearing fur. Noticing the contradiction would lead to dissonance, which could be experienced as anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment, stress, and other negative emotional states. When people'

Reality

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 Real World intrudes on virtual fantasies and representations without being noticed; unless it's shaking right under your feet! Tonga Earthquake and Volcano Daily Sun: 21 Mar 09 The sun is blank--no sunspots. Credit: SOHO/MDI   Sacramento, CA Paris March 20, 2009

Have we seen the enemy?

Mr. Gatto offers some serious things to think about... "Information Clearing House" -- The United States continues to show its ignorance to the rest of the world by grouping everyone into friends, enemies, and potential friends or enemies. This translates loosely into categorizing the nations or cultures around the world into friend or foe. The worst part of this whole scenario is that many in this country actually believe all this rhetoric. We are a nation that has elevated national opinion into a fine art. In reality, we are a country that has a media that tells us how to think. It tells us what we like, what we approve of, what we despise and how we should act. We have become what we once hated. Politically correct Americans today have become the “plastic people” we criticized in the sixties and seventies. Timothy V. Gatto      http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/

When sunspots cease...

Between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were very rare and temperatures were low. Then sunspot frequency grew until, between 1930 and 2000, the Sun was more active than at almost any time in the last 10,000 years. The oceans can cause up to several decades of delay before air temperatures respond fully to this solar "Grand Maximum." Now that the Sun is becoming less active again, global temperatures have fallen for seven years. I believe there is more to the "Climate Change" story than is currently being discussed.

Warming-Cooling, Facts to Think About

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The sun is blank--no sunspots. Credit: SOHO/MDI From Michael R. Fox, Ph.D. discussion about global warming... First we must recognize the total atmospheric inventory of all greenhouse gases. Of the greenhouse gases, water vapor represents about 95% of the total. This is usually ignored for unexplained reasons. This also presents a major problem for the AGW people. If water vapor is 95% of the total greenhouse gas inventory, why isn't it involved with the hypothesis as stated above. It occurs in many forms from water vapor, rain, snow, and clouds. These all involve changes of state, transfers of huge amounts of energy, great reflectivity of huge sums of solar energy from the white tops of clouds. Why is this ignored? Does it make sense to ignore 95% of the greenhouse gases?   CO2 makes up most, but not all, of the rest of the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) inventory. We also notice that of the total CO2 inventory, about 97% of this comes from natural sources (volcanoes, oceans, decaying

Consensus or Science?

Over and over we hear and read “Global Warming, Climate Change.” This week the seas are rising, the ice is melting; carbon footprints are slamming down amongst proposed taxes, lifestyle modification and computer chips for cows, chickens, sheep and goats. Science is twisted, reworded into a kind of monster wisdom that can’t be mistaken or challenged because there is a “consensus.”  Michael Crichton put it this way in a 2003 speech: "Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science.

Sourcing the Truth

"Our concept of the past is very much an illusion, as much as our concept of the future. This is not to say that I don’t believe events actually happened, of course, but that our present perception of them is very much removed from the events themselves. So this is why, in the case of history, there is a great deal of leeway for delusions, illusions, lies and frauds to insinuate themselves in that gap between reality and knowledge. The idea of a fixed past is probably a brain delusion. "But the same is true about the present. We don’t have immediate access to events that are going on around the world. We rely on other people to tell us, and that supply chain can become a target of co-optation as well. So in fact we are very, very vulnerable to those people who control what we learn about the past and the present, simply because we have very little way to independently verify." francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/history-is-written-by-the-idiots/