Looking for Lightning

The Daily Plasma

Re-posted courtesy of Thunderbolts.info

One thing you can say about lightning – it’s not very subtle.

Geomorphologist Stephan Grab and Geologist Jasper Knight at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa have studied the Drakensberg Peaks in Lesotho and discovered the primary force shaping them is lightning.  They studied 90 sites where lightning blasted away basalt rock faces, leaving pits up to three feet deep and scattering ten tons of debris. They found lightning shifted boulders as big as small trucks.

Their research is published in the January 1, 2015 issue of Geomorphology. Their findings contradict the standard belief that ice and heat are the main forces shattering rocks on the Drakenberg summits.

Lightning can generate temperatures over 52,000 ºF (30,000 ºC.) Hot enough to create an explosion, instantly melting basalt and vaporizing water in rock pores and fissures.

Lightning may be positive, or negative in polarity, depending on…

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Craig Murray – Paid Lying Bastards at the Guardian

Craig Murray on how the Guardian are sinking to even lower depths:

Watching live, I too did not think that John McDonnell’s Chairman Mao joke was wise, because of the obvious misrepresentation to which it was open in the right wing press. But in fact while the openly right wing media all have a go, they all respect the basic tenets of journalism by fairly reflecting both the content and the context of what Corbyn said:

Daily Telegraph

The Labour shadow chancellor mocked the Chancellor – who he dubbed “Comrade Osborne” – for encouraging China to invest in British infrastructure projects…

After joking about the sale of public assets to the Chinese government, Mr McDonnell said: “To assist Comrade Osborne about dealing with his new found comrades, I have brought him along Mao’s Little Red Book.”

Daily Express

Mr McDonnell accused his Tory rival of selling off Government assets to foreign nations such as China.

He said: “Nationalisation is ok for him as long as its by any other state but ours.

“To assist comrade Osborne in his dealings with his new-found comrades, I have brought him along Mao’s Little Red Book.”

The Daily Mail

The Shadow Chancellor, who could not be mistaken for Jimmy Tarbuck even on a good day, was essaying a satirical dig at Mr Osborne for becoming too chummy with Chinese investors. He argued that Mr Osborne was nationalising our economy – but turning it over to the Chinese state.

That is pretty plain, is it not? And actually fair journalism.

Yet astonishingly the Guardian ran three whole articles entirely about the McDonnell gaffe. You could read every single word of these three articles and not learn the basic information provided in each of the three Blue Tory papers above. The utterly disgraceful Jonathan Jones, John Crace andTom Phillips all managed to produce articles which utterly omit what McDonnell actually said and why he said it, to contrive to give the impression that McDonnell was quoting Mao straight and with approval.

As a member of the NUJ myself, I cannot say how much it pains me to see colleagues renouncing every single tenet of professional, let alone ethical, journalism in order to produce a deliberate distortion of the truth. Even the Blue Tory newspapers did not here sink to anything like the depths plumbed by the Red Tories of the Guardian.

Crace, Jones and Phillips have crossed a line and are not journalists. What are they? Paid lying bastards.

Read the rest here

Andrei Sakharov on Radioactive Fallout

Frank Davis

The designer of the 1961 50 megaton Tsar Bomba was Andrei Sakharov. Some years earlier, Sakharov had become concerned about the effects of radioactive fallout, and in 1958 he had published a paper in which he estimated the numbers of human casualties in subsequent generations. He believed that the Tsar Bomba, even though it was exploded over an uninhabited area, would end up killing 500,000  to 1,000,000 people.

In Chapter 14 Sakharov writes that after the success of his
1955 Soviet H-Bomb test, he “worried more and more about the
biological effects of nuclear tests… The long-term biological
consequences (particularly atmospheric testing, in which
radioactive fallout is dispersed throughout the hemisphere) can be
predicted and the total number of casualties calculated with some
accuracy.”

Considering only such fission products as radioactive carbon,
strontium and cesium, he calculated that genetic damage, plus the
immediate and delayed damage to immune systems would…

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Watch Gavin’s “Seventh Winter 2015/2016 Update”

A nice look at how things are shaping up.