Overview This report adds new insights to an ongoing debate about the extent of social isolation in America. A widely-reported 2006 study argued that since 1985 Americans have become more socially isolated, the size of their discussion networks has declined and the diversity of those people with whom they discuss important matters has decreased. In particular, the study found that Americans have fewer close ties to those from their neighborhoods and from voluntary associations. Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears suggest that new technologies, such as the internet and mobile phones, may play a role in advancing this trend. Specifically, they argue that the type of social ties supported by these technologies are relatively weak and geographically dispersed, not the strong, often locally-based ties that tend to be a part of peoples’ core discussion network. They depicted the rise of internet and mobile phones as one of the major trends that pulls people away from traditional social settings, neighborhoods, voluntary associations and public spaces that have been associated with large and diverse core networks. The survey results reported here were undertaken to explore issues that have not been probed directly in that study and other related […]
The American Meteorological Society released the results of a survey of TV meteorologists gauging their opinions on climate change. With a full 50% of respondents disagreeing that man is responsible for global warming, the survey indicates continuing cracking in the ‘consensus’ of the manmade climate change theory. The survey results, published in the October 2009 issue of ‘Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’ (BAMS), show that a significant portion of meteorologists continue to doubt that man is the driving force of climate change. When asked about the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) statement that ‘Most of the warming since 1950 is very likely human-induced,’ a full 50% either disagree or strongly disagree. 25% were neutral and a mere 24% said they agreed or strongly agreed. Similarly, meteorologists doubt the very global climate models on which the anthropogenic global warming theory is based. These models have been shown to be incapable of predicting historical climate changes and their predictions continue to fall outside of scientific norms. Reflecting this, 52% of the meteorologists disagreed with that statement that ‘Global climate models are reliable in their projections for a warming of the planet.’ A mere 19% said they agreed […]
NEW ORLEANS — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Army Corps of Engineers’ failure to properly maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in Hurricane Katrina. U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval sided with five residents and one business who argued the Army Corps’ shoddy oversight of the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet led to the flooding of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward and neighboring St. Bernard Parish. He said, however, the corps couldn’t be held liable for the flooding of eastern New Orleans, where one of the plaintiffs lived. Duval awarded the plaintiffs $720,000, or about $170,000 each, but the decision should give more than 100,000 other individuals, businesses and government entities a better shot at claiming billions of dollars in damages.
COLUMBUS, OHIO — Few would argue that the debate on global warming engenders a lot of emotion. What else are we to make of comments that ‘within the last 40 or 50 years there has been a very great observable change of climate,’ that ‘a change in our climate … is taking place very sensibly’ and that ‘men are led into numberless errors by drawing general conclusions from particular facts?’ That these comments were actually tossed around back in the late 18th century by the Pennsylvania doctor Hugh Williamson, Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster reminds us that history has a tendency to repeat itself. (One can imagine what television talk shows would have been like then. Would Jefferson have promoted ‘An Inconvenient Treatise’only to be acrimoniously contradicted by Webster on ‘Hard Quoits,’ assuming either could get a word in amid the jabbering of the host?) In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson opined in his ‘Notes on Virginia’ that ‘both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged,’ expressing views articulated as early as 1721 by Cotton Mather: ‘Our cold is much moderated since the opening and clearing of our woods, and the […]
Parliamentarians in Lithuania have voted to launch an investigation into allegations that the CIA operated a clandestine prison in the Baltic state to hold ‘suspected al-Qaeda terrorists.’ The lawmakers have asked the National Security and Defense Committee of the parliament to find out whether Lithuania had hosted al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons and, if so, whether Lithuanian state authorities were aware of it. ‘We will seek to establish whether such a prison existed in Lithuania, and whether any (CIA) prisoners were moved through the country,’ said Arvydas Anusauskas, the chairman of the parliament’s national security and defense committee, Reuters reported Thursday. ‘If we show our investigation to be deep and wide ranging, I hope our conclusions can be trusted, but I don’t exclude the possibility (that) we may fail to establish such a prison existed,’ he added. In August, the US-based ABC News alleged in a report, citing unnamed former intelligence officials, that a secret CIA prison operated near Vilnius airport from early 2004 to late 2005, and that CIA planes flew into Lithuania with high-profile al-Qaeda suspects. Ruling out the allegations, the Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said: ‘If this is true, Lithuania has to […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
