March 5, 2007

26 tips to help you get a handle on message mayhem.
Here are some interesting tips on spam and protecting your e-mail address...
http://pcworld.about.com/magazine/1906p127id47516.htm?terms=chain+letter+e-mail+bandwidth

Earlier date for springing forward may lead to ‘mini Y2K’
March 3, 2007
...Although it's more of a nuisance than a catastrophe in the making, older computers, PDAs and DVRs may not automatically update their times when daylight-saving comes three weeks early this year — on March 11.

…Few computer experts think the new date will make a big difference. ...Consumers can prepare for the change by using a rule of thumb: If a computer or device is a bit older, it may not correct the time automatically. (Define "a bit older")

Any Microsoft operating system older than Windows XP may not recognize the new time change come March 11, says Jeffrey Garcea, a computer consultant and o

wner of Garcea Computers in 2000, Windows Me, Windows 98 and Windows 95.

For more information, customers can visit http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cp_dst.

...For the everyday computer user, the effects won't be evident… Those with newer devices and operating systems need not worry...

But the change could trip up computer calendar programs such as Microsoft Outlook. Experts suggest that users print their meetings and appointments a day before March 11 just in case.

Users could also type in the actual time of a meeting or appointment into the description of a calendar entry, a suggestion from en-terpret.co, a technology firm in Chicago...

...Daylight-saving time will end Nov. 4 instead of the usual last Sunday of October. Glusman says once computer updates or 'patches' are installed for this daylight-saving time, users shouldn’t have a problem come November. Those with older systems and devices, however, are likely to experience glitches again…

http://www.rrstar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070303/BUSINESS/103030016

England: Samurai swords to be banned
Banning guns wasn’t enough…

05/03/2007
The sale of imitation samurai swords could be banned by the end of the year, the Home Office announced today...

Breaching the ban, which is targeted at cheap imitation samurai swords rather than the more expensive genuine collectors' items made by licensed swordsmiths in Japan, would result in up to six months in jail and a £5,000 fine.

Collectors and martial arts enthusiasts owning or using genuine samurai swords would be exepmt from the ban

According to Home Office estimates, there have been at least 80 serious crimes involving the swords in England and Wales over the last four years. (80 out of how many thousand upon thousand crimes?)

One MP recently warned that they were being used by criminal gangs as the preferred weapon of choice after guns…

…It is currently legal to buy samurai swords - which are freely available at martial arts shops and on the internet - provided they are not brandished in a public place.

The Home Office now wants to ban their sale as part of a wider crackdown on knives and bladed weapons.

…Vernon Coaker, the Home Office minister, said.. "Banning the sale, import and hire will take more dangerous weapons out of circulation, making our streets safer…Samurai sword crime is low in volume but high in profile…” (this just proves that it is about show and not substance)

"We recognise it is the cheap, easily-available samurai swords which are being used in crime and not the genuine, more expensive samurai swords which are of interest to collectors and martial arts enthusiasts."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/05/nsamurai105.xml

ACLU exec busted for child porn in court today
February 28, 2007
A former American Civil Liberties Union executive, who once argued that Internet filters in libraries that limited children's access to pornography would interfere with their ability to learn and communicate, is facing a federal court hearing today on charges he possessed child pornography.

… Rust-Tierney admitted to investigators he had downloaded videos and images from child pornography websites onto CD-ROMS, which reportedly depicted graphic forcible assaults on young girls.

Rust-Tierney, who served as president of the Virginia ACLU chapter for several years, was the lawyer who argued against Internet filters in libraries in the early 2000s when the ACLU was opposing the Children's Internet Protection Act, which later was approved by Congress…

…The overall national ACLU's stance on pornography was made clear when in 1985 Barry Lynn told the U.S. Attorney General's Commission on Pornography that child pornography was protected by the First Amendment.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54471

Exploding Stars and the Sun Cause for Global Warming
March 5, 2007

Two new reports cast doubt on the manmade global warming theory and instead point to another cause for the recent warming of Earth — changes in the sun.

One report from National Geographic News asserts, "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause, according to one scientist’s controversial theory.”

...The other report offers a mechanism behind the changes in the sun — variations in its magnetic field.

Compiled by scientists at the Danish National Space Center, it maintains that the Earth’s climate is strongly influenced by cosmic rays from exploded stars.

The cosmic rays help make ordinary clouds, and high levels of rays and cloudiness cool the planet, while lower levels of radiation lead to milder temperatures, according to the Danish report, which is cited by Marc Morano, communications director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, on the committee’s Web site.

"Cosmic ray intensities — and therefore cloudiness — keep changing because the sun’s magnetic field varies in its ability to repel cosmic rays coming from the galaxy before they reach the Earth,” the Danish report by Henrik Svensmark, head of the Space Center, explains.

Whenever the sun’s magnetic field was weak, cosmic ray intensities were high and the climate cooled, most recently in the little ice age that climaxed 300 years ago.

Several scientists cited in the report believe that changes in the Earth’s climate are linked to "the journey of the sun and the Earth through the Milky Way Galaxy… http://newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/3/5/115518.shtml?s=ic

Prominent French Scientist Reverses Belief in Global Warming - Now a Skeptic...
March 02, 2007
Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming...

...In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us. Since then, governments throughout the western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists. With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.

His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in l' Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro's retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. "The cause of this climate change is unknown," he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the "science is settled."

- - -

Claude Allegre received a Ph D in physics in 1962 from the University of Paris. He became the director of the geochemistry and cosmochemistry program at the French National Scientific Research Centre in 1967 and in 1971, he was appointed director of the University of Paris's Department of Earth Sciences. In 1976, he became director of the Paris Institut de Physique du Globe. He is an author of more than 100 scientific articles, many of them seminal studies on the evolution of the Earth using isotopic evidence, and 11 books. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Science.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2f4cc62e-5b0d-4b59-8705-fc28f14da388

The Profit of Doom
2/28/2007
…how Gore buys his "carbon offsets," as revealed by The Tennessean raises serious questions. According to the newspaper's report, Gore's spokesperson said Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management:

Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe, she said...

Gore is chairman of the firm and, presumably, draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he "buys" his "carbon offsets" from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn't buy "carbon offsets" through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks...

...The intended goal of carbon offsets is to combat global warming. The appeal of becoming "carbon neutral" has contributed to the growth of voluntary offsets, which often are a more cost-effective alternative to reducing one's own fossil-fuel consumption. However, the actual amount of carbon reduction (if any) from an offset project is difficult to measure, largely unregulated, and vulnerable to misrepresentation.

Did you get that? Carbon offsets are an "alternative to reducing one's own fossil-fuel consumption" and yet "the actual amount of carbon reduction (if any) from an offset project is difficult to measure, largely unregulated, and vulnerable to misrepresentation."

One way to misrepresent things: Tell a newspaper your stock purchases are really purchases of "carbon offsets."

As one commenter posting here and on other blogs has noted:

Hmmm. The Goracle is chairman and a founding partner of Generation Investment Management LLP, a boutique international investment firm that invests other peoples' money, for a fee, into the stocks of 'green' companies. ... So when Al beats the drum for possible future global warming, he's also drumming up business.

And profiting from hyping the "global warming" crisis.

Asides:
Gore's huge electric power usage at his Nashville home isn't the only example of how the prophet profit of environmental doom hasn't always lived as if he believes his message. During the eight years Gore was vice president, he voted in four national elections. Every single time, he and his entourage and security detail and accompanying media flew to Nashville on a large government jet, burning thousands of gallons of fossil fuels and pumping huge amounts of carbon emissions directly into the earth's atmosphere, and then drove in a caravan of fossil fuel-burning vehicles from Nashville International Airport east on I-40 to Carthage, Tennessee, so the local and national TV cameras could get video of him at the voting booth. And then the whole caravan headed back to Nashville for the plane ride back to DC. Traffic had to be halted on Nashville's interstates and side streets every time - sometimes during rush hour - idling thousand of vehicles that just sat there, burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon pollution, just so Gore could create a media photo-op.

He could have instead voted by mailing in an absentee ballot.
http://billhobbs.com/2007/02/more_on_gore.html
Gee, and people screach about VP Cheney and Haliburton...

Cutting carbon
...The carbon offsets, on the other hand, sound like a very reasonable plan. That is, they did until I began thinking about them.

Most carbon offsets seem to work on one of a few principles: they plant trees, invest in renewable energy sources, or pay someone in a developing country to use some less-polluting technology, like a CFL.

It turns out that a lot of websites have already devoted quite a lot of space to discussing why these plans don't work particularly well. Calculating one's carbon output, and the carbon savings from various offsets, is very tricky and may be manipulated by unscrupulous offset firms. Trees take quite a long time to get to the stage where they are actually absorbing all that carbon—and tend to die shortly thereafter, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere, there to wreak havoc. By legitimating carbon usage, offset companies may actually be increasing it.

But surprisingly few make what, to me, seems like a more basic point: energy is a tradable market good. It is not as if there is some fixed demand for energy, so that by using less carbon-emitting energy, you actually decrease the amount of carbon emitted.

This is, of course, ridiculous. When you donate money to build a new windfarm, you don't take any of the old, polluting power offline; you increase the supply of power, reducing the price until others are encouraged to buy more carbon-emitting power. On the margin, it may make some difference, since demand for electricity is not perfectly elastic, but nowhere near the one-for-one equivalence that carbon offsets would seem to suggest. Especially since the worst offenders, big coal-fired plants, are not the ones that renewables will substitute for; solar and wind power are not good replacements for baseload power. Instead, renewables are likely to take relatively clean (and expensive) natural gas plants offline, since those are the ones that provide "extra" power to the system. Similarly, by giving villagers in Goa energy-saving CFL bulbs, you do not lessen the amount of electricity consumed; rather, you make it possible for other people to purchase the extra energy freed up by more efficient lightbulbs. This may be excellent poverty policy, but it does not lessen the carbon footprint of your international flight.

http://www.economist.com/debate/freeexchange/2007/02/the_oscar_win_for_al.cfm

Gore's 'carbon offsets' paid to firm he owns
Critics say justification for energy-rich lifestyle serves as way for former VP to profit

Gore stands to make a lot of money from his promotion of the alleged "global warming" threat, which is disputed by many mainstream scientists.

"In other words, he 'buys' his 'carbon offsets' from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself," Hobbs writes. "To be blunt, Gore doesn't buy 'carbon offsets' through Generation Investment Management – he buys stocks."

As WND reported, Gore, whose film warning of a coming cataclysm due to man-made "global warming" won two Oscars, has a mansion in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville that consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, citing data from the Nashville Electric Service.

The think tanks says since the release of Gore's film, the former presidential candidate's energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kilowatt-hours per month in 2005, to 18,400 per month in 2006.
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54528

Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe
12/7/2006 By Peter Schweizer

...For someone who says the sky is falling, he does very little. He says he recycles and drives a hybrid. And he claims he uses renewable energy credits to offset the pollution he produces when using a private jet to promote his film. (In reality, Paramount Classics, the film's distributor, pays this.)

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths...

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm

David & Karen Bennett <><

http://www.freewill-predestination.com