Do you believe in magic?
We'll dance until morning 'til there's just you and me
And maybe, if the music is right
I'll meet you tomorrow, sort of late at night
And we'll go dancing, baby, then you'll see
How the magic's in the music and the music's in me"
John Sebastian and the Lovin' Spoonful. Rain on the Roof. Summer in the City. They made some of the music of my generation that moved us Boomers to dance and sing and kiss the girl.
I believed in good feelings and good music.
Magic. Music. The stuff of hot summer nights in the days of my youth.
Magic is now apparently thematic in the scientific community these days. Al Gore magically becomes a climatologist, for instance. Proof of man-made global warming magically appears but then goes *poof* away whenever you try to actually inspect it.
Two recent movies with magic and magicians as themes were released at about the same time. The Illusionist (2006) starred two of my favorite actors (Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti), had a plot with a few nice twists and turns and if I say much more I will begin to give something away. It would be a nice popcorn-and-movie-night choice. But so would the other...
The Prestige (2006) had at least as much star power with actors like Hugh Jackman and Michael Caine and a David Bowie interpretation of Nikolas Tesla. The two movies played within the world of the magician, yet they were in no way similar. What seems to be happening at first glance may not be real. Or, what appears to be false is actually real.
I love movies. They aren't real life.
From Magic Tricks and You
"Now that you’ve got a handle on it, simplify your movements. Chances are, your drawing too much attention to your hands and not luring the audiences attention away from what you’re doing. If you were to go attempt the trick and fumble, exposing exactly what you meant to hide, you’d probably end up fairly discouraged, which is never a good thing."
Magic is largely a matter of getting your audience to pay attention to one thing while you do something else. Magicians incorporate props and gimmicks and spend countless hours working on their sleight-of-hand, their presentation. It is all a charade. However, it is a convincing charade if well done. Some people make millions of dollars at it. Ask David Copperfield.
From Goodtricks.net
| Easy Magic Tricks | |
| "The solutions to many easy magic tricks and secrets of illusions and sleight of hand are explained in easy lessons. Find the answers and secrets to many a good magic trick. Easy card sleight of hand and for sleights for beginners are explained in a clear and fun to learn style." |
I spend a lot of my time exposing magic tricks. Only the tricks I expose are the naturalistic materialistic scientific community's idea of science. For instance, let us consider the idea of anthropogenic global warming. It appears that the Obama administration is intent upon taking drastic and economy-threatening measures to keep man from making the Earth too warm. Meanwhile, we are experiencing one of the coldest winter seasons of my lifetime. In fact, around the globe the weather itself is telling us that the Earth is cooling rather than warming.
In Australia they are dealing with summer rather than winter, but it appears that cooling is taking place all over the planet.
GLOBAL warming preachers have had a shocking 2008. So many of their predictions this year went splat.
Here’s their problem: they’ve been scaring us for so long that it’s now possible to check if things are turning out as hot as they warned.
And good news! I bring you Christmas cheer - the top 10 warming predictions to hit the wall this year.
Read, so you can end 2008 with optimism, knowing this Christmas won’t be the last for you, the planet or even the polar bears.
1. OUR CITIES WILL DIE OF THIRST
2. OUR REEF WILL DIE
3. GOODBYE, NORTH POLE
4. BEWARE HUGE WINDS
5. GIANT HAILSTONES WILL SMASH THROUGH YOUR ROOF
6. NO MORE SKIING
7. PERTH WILL BAKE DRY
8. ISLANDS WILL DROWN
9. BRITAIN WILL SWELTER
10. WE’LL BE HOTTER
Read the entire article here. Suffice it to say that global warming scientists have been spectacularly wrong about what is going on in the Southern Hemisphere.
How about the Northern Hemisphere? Well, the Midwest has been hit with major snow and ice storms, the East was crippled by early ice storms that caused thousands of homes and businesses to lose their power. The Northwest was slammed by an historic blizzard that, among other things, imprisoned those travelers stuck at the SeaTac airport and for the police to ban any non-four wheel drive vehicle from even attempting the roads other than front wheel drive cars with chains.
I posted earlier that over 430 all-time records for lowest temperature were achieved during a six day period in early November. Allow me to present a post from Dennis Avery, posted on the Canada Free Press:
Dennis T. Avery, is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute in Washington. Dennis is the Director for Global Food Issues ([url=http://www.cgfi.org]http://www.cgfi.org[/url]). He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State.
Alaska’s Glaciers Are Growing
By Dennis Avery Monday, October 27, 2008
"Alaska’s glaciers grew this year, after shrinking for most of the last 200 years. The reason? Global temperatures dropped over the past 18 months. The global mean annual temperature has been declining recently because the solar wind thrown out by the sun has retreated to its smallest extent in at least 50 years. This temperature downturn was not predicted by the global computer models, but had been predicted by the sunspot index since 2000.
The solar wind normally protects the earth from 90 percent of the high-energy cosmic rays that flash constantly through the universe. Henrik Svensmark at the Danish Space Research Institute has demonstrated that when more cosmic rays hit the earth, they create more of the low, wet clouds that deflect heat back into outer space. Thus the earth’s recent cooling.
Unusually large amounts of Alaskan snow last winter were followed by unusually chilly temperatures there this summer. “In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years,” says Bruce Molnia of the U.S. Geological Survey, and author of The Glaciers of Alaska. “It’s been a long time on most glaciers where they’ve actually had positive mass balance (added thickness).”
Overall, Molnia figures Alaska had lost 10–12,000 square kilometers of ice since 1800, the depths of the Little Ice Age. That’s enough ice to cover the state of Connecticut. Climate alarmists claim all the glaciers might disappear soon, but they haven’t looked at the long-term evidence of the 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles. During the Little Ice Age—1400 to 1850—Muir Glacier filled the whole of Glacier Bay. Since then, the glacier has retreated 57 miles. But the Little Ice Age was preceded by the Medieval Warming, the cold Dark Ages, a Roman Warming, and a whole series of moderate warmings and coolings that extend back at least 1 million years based on the evidence of the microfossils in the world’s seabed sediments.
The real question is whether today’s warming is different than the previous Dansgaard-Osechger warming cycles. I think that the difference, if any, is slight. Most of our Modern Warming occurred before 1940 and virtually all of our human-emitted CO2 came after that date. The temperatures in 1998—the recent peak—were only 0.2 degree C higher than in 1940. After the temperature drop of the past 18 months, the temperatures are now cooler than in 1940.
The 1,500-year cycles usually start with a sudden shift of 1–2 degrees—in temperate zones—and double that in Alaska. Then temperatures erratically rise and fall with the sun’s total irradiance changes, often in 11-year cycles. At the end of the warming, comes another Little Ice Age; or, every 100,000 years, a Big Ice Age that will drop temperatures about 15 degree C. That’s when insulation will truly become the most important invention in history.
The sunspots are now predicting a 30-year cooling of the earth. That would thicken the Alaskan glaciers somewhat, but probably wouldn’t refill Glacier Bay with ice. That’ll have to wait for the next icy age.
The sunspot index has a 59 percent correlation with our temperatures (with a roughly ten-year lag). CO2 has only an “accidental” 22 percent correlation with our temperatures, which should be grounds for dismissing CO2 as a major climate player.
All this is radically different from the 5-degree C warming predicted by the computer models. However, the scientific rule says: if actual observations tell you something that’s the opposite of your theory, change your theory."
If actual observations tell you something that’s the opposite of your theory, change your theory.
I like that statement. It should be SOP for all scientists. If it was, climatologists would be suggesting that the Earth was likely entering a period of cooling and that future plans concerning energy consumption and crop plantings would be impacted thereby. But we prefer to believe that by some magic the Al Gores of this world are right, evidences to the contrary.
Evolutionists would abandon their hypotheses. They postulate that evolution magically happened despite the fact that it never happens. They believe life came from non-life although this has never been observed to happen. If they simply believed that statement in bold above then scientists who did not believe in God might well give up the whole evolution thing and go back to the drawing board. Or look for a cancer cure or something else useful.
Me? I don't believe in magic, I believe in miracles. I believe that there is not only a natural and created world, but a supernatural God who created it. It is a world created wonderfully well, surrounded by a massive and glorious Universe to astound and inspire the inhabitants. Our world is ruled by natural laws that are comprehensible. But any action directly taken by the Creator could well violate those laws, thus comprising a miracle. A miracle like the Son of God coming to Earth as a man to save men from their sins, for instance.
A New It's A Wonderful Life - I can see it in my mind's eye right now - Scientists running down the street while the snow flurries fall, crying out "hello, you good old church and belief system" while running headlong back into a science that follows the evidences and doesn't refuse to include the supernatural when considering options. But it is more likely that Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens would jump into the water and drag Clarence down with them rather than agree that there just might actually be a Creator. If George Bailey had been a Darwinist, he would have thrown his integrity into the water and drowned it there. He would have cooked the books, sent Uncle Billy to the State Pen and sold the Building & Loan to Potter for a small profit and a large kickback, then run for State Senate with Potter's backing.
Merry Christmas, you old readers and friends!