Sunday Reads: 2012 is finally here!

Good Sunday Morning!

Oh wow, I am so freaking happy that 2011 is over! These last two weeks have been long and agonizing, since both kids have been home from school…but they go back tomorrow! Yeah!

Here’s to a better year, with some improvement all around…cause another year like last year and I will welcome the Mayan Doomsday.

As we enter the new year, the most important question on people’s mind is whether or not the world will officially end as we know it by next December. But let’s face it, if 2012 is really going to bring about end times (because we should clearly be basing our plans for the end on the Mayan calendar), it’s going to have a tough act to follow. Many people are writing up 2011 as the year of this or the year of that, but let’s keep things in perspective here: 2011 was the year that the world descended into random chaos.

Look, 2012, I know you think you’re so important because the Mayans said everything ends with you. But short of sharks rising from the seas, the sun mysteriously vanishing, or some other supernatural event taking place, you’re really not going to come close to just how insanely screwed up this year was.

No kidding! Follow that link for a summary of the kind of news stories and reports from 2011. If this year starts out like last year, with a huge number of birds falling dead out of the sky, then start to prepare yourself for the final outcome. It is already starting with a rumble…from Japan to Ohio.

 Magnitude 7.0 quake his Japan, no tsunami warning.

Officials: 4.0 magnitude quake in northeast Ohio related to wastewater injection well connected with the practice of Fracking.

I have lots of links for you today, I figured that everyone will wake up late and be in a lazy mood. So if this post is a bit much, just come back and finish it later.

Hopefully, those who partied hard last night…are recovering from their New Years hangovers. If you ever wondered why alcohol makes your head spin, take a look at this video.

There has been a rash of fires in Hollywood, hmmm…is this a protest against the crappy movies that Hollywood has put out this year?  (I don’t understand why Twilight isn’t on that list…but it made this list of 10 worst films of 2011.) Anyway, I guess everyone can be a critic…Luckily no one has been hurt, but the number of arson fires is up over 30 now. LA firefighters on New Year’s alert amid arson attacks.

At least 11 vehicles were burned on Saturday in the San Fernando Valley suburb of Los Angeles, police said. The city fire department reported vehicle or structure fires at other locations.

The early Saturday fires followed on 21 intentionally set fires involving vehicles or car ports in the Hollywood area late on Thursday and early Friday morning, according to the fire department.

Since I’ve touch on some end of year list articles, let’s stick with that for a bit.

We had the worst movies of 2011, here are the 10 Pop Monstrosities That Almost Destroyed Our Culture in 2011

Every year, things go down in pop culture that seem to signal the coming armageddon — like offensive and popular reality shows, for instance — and we wonder, could it possibly get worse? And every year, it does. We could list 2011 terrible things in American culture this year and not even come close to completing the list, so for brevity’s sake, here are the top 10 worst things that happened in pop culture this year. May 2012 have fewer of them.

For a more detailed look at the Top MuckReads of 2011: Domestic Surveillance, Shell Companies and College Sports Corruption.  This link takes you to a ProPublica article.

Here are some of this year’s top must-read stories from #MuckReads, ProPublica’s ongoing collection of the best watchdog journalism.

This past week I had a link up for Jezebel’s Woman of the Year, strange but I can’t find the results, maybe they are forthcoming. But while looking for who made Woman of the year, I found this link: Was 2011 A Joke?

Was 2011 a joke? Was everything that happened a complete and utter farce? All signs point to yes.

Our planet was a mess. The tsunami in Japan; the floods in the Philippines, the earthquake on the east coast; a deadly tornado in Missouri; wildfires in Arizona, Hurricane Irene; and meanwhile, the global population reached 7 BILLION. In the words of Seth and Amy: Really?!?

Instead of being completely apathetic or lazily complaining, people unhappy with corporate greed, the flailing economy and the 1% and huge bonuses going to Wall Street bandits took to the streets as part of the Occupy movement. And what happened when these citizens exercised their democratic right to protest? They got arrested or pepper sprayed in the face. What a joke. A joke that became a meme.

The Sandusky debacle lead to a lawsuit filed by a an alleged victim who claimed that the former Penn State football coach sexually abused the victim on more than 100 occasions — and has been abusing boys for more than 30 years. And no one said anything until now? You have to be kidding.

Wait, the State of Georgia killed Troy Davis, are you kidding? For real?

And yet: Zygotes are people, so you can’t kill them. Ba-dum-bum.

Charlie Sheen, who has a history of violence toward women, announced he had tiger blood and waved a machete and claimed to be “winning” and people cheered. That had to be a joke.

Ashton Kutcher simultaneously became the highest-paid TV star and pulled the ultimate prank when he told Demi Moore he’d be faithful. We all got punk’d.

And who could forget this one:

Oh, and Hilary Clinton was Photoshopped out of a Situation Room photo, are you fucking serious?

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter was talking about how her blacks are better than your blacks. Comic!

At the box office, Breaking Dawn blew right through the $500 million mark. Half a billion dollars, for a movie in which a vampire procreates and bites the demonic parasitic fetus out of his skeletal bride’s belly and then a man who can turn into a wolf falls in love with said newborn infant. Ludicrous.

You guys. Snooki wrote a book. A book that became a bestseller.

Go ahead and read the rest, if you want…

However if you want to read something a bit more scientific: Scientists List Their Favorite Discoveries of 2011

Wait, there is more, here at this link about my favorite cosmologist: Scientist who rewrote the laws of survival

He is, perhaps, the world’s most unlikely superstar. Despite a lifetime of fighting disease and defying medical predictions, Professor Stephen Hawking has become the planet’s most celebrated cosmologist.

Divorced twice, with three children and a jet-set lifestyle transcending the confines of academia, he turns 70 next week.

A rare insight into the man will be given this week by his children and some of his closest friends when they pay tribute to him on Radio 4.

Diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21, he was warned he might not live to see his 22nd birthday. Yet he has spent decades working on groundbreaking theories and the nature of the universe.

Hawking has turned his disability into a trademark and has become a cultural icon, with appearances on many TV series. His appeal extends to lads’ mags: Nuts voted him British Bloke of the Year in 2011 – beating Daniel Craig and David Beckham.

Cool huh, that is an interesting article about Hawking, give it a read through.

This next link isn’t about planets and the existence of God, but about climate change and how Human Pollution May Cause Tornadoes.

A new study has found that tornadoes seem to have an overwhelming preference toward forming in the middle of the week. This isn’t necessarily because the hyper-destructive funnel clouds are dedicated workers that live for the weekend, but rather because of the pollution created by humans commuting to work. Just another example of human beings sewing the seeds to their own destruction.

Looking at data set running from 1995 to 2009 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), study authors Daniel Rosenfeld from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Thomas L. Bell at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center found something odd. They found that tornadoes and hail storms were 20% more likely to form in the middle of the week. With results that slanted, it seemed clear that there is a preference toward storm formation during that time period.

Rosenfeld and Bell believe that this increase in storms is caused by a similar increase in aerosol pollutants that generally peak mid-week due to workers commuting to their job. Correlation is, obviously, not causation. However, the team has a pretty solid explanation as to what they think is happening.

Give the link a click to read more.

In other news, the Organic movement is fading…Questions About Organic Produce and Sustainability

Del Cabo Cooperative, a supplier here for Trader Joe’s and Fairway, is sending more than seven and a half tons of tomatoes and basil every day to the United States by truck and plane to sate the American demand for organic produce year-round.

But even as more Americans buy foods with the organic label, the products are increasingly removed from the traditional organic ideal: produce that is not only free of chemicals and pesticides but also grown locally on small farms in a way that protects the environment.

The explosive growth in the commercial cultivation of organic tomatoes here, for example, is putting stress on the water table. In some areas, wells have run dry this year, meaning that small subsistence farmers cannot grow crops. And the organic tomatoes end up in an energy-intensive global distribution chain that takes them as far as New York and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, producing significant emissions that contribute to global warming.

From now until spring, farms from Mexico to Chile to Argentina that grow organic food for the United States market are enjoying their busiest season.

“People are now buying from a global commodity market, and they have to be skeptical even when the label says ‘organic’ — that doesn’t tell people all they need to know,” said Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. He said some large farms that have qualified as organic employed environmentally damaging practices, like planting only one crop, which is bad for soil health, or overtaxing local freshwater supplies.

The article points out that this organic agriculture has brought jobs to areas that desperately need them, however:

To carry the Agriculture Department’s organic label on their produce, farms in the United States and abroad must comply with a long list of standards that prohibit the use of synthetic fertilizers, hormones and pesticides, for example. But the checklist makes few specific demands for what would broadly be called environmental sustainability, even though the 1990 law that created the standards was intended to promote ecological balance and biodiversity as well as soil and water health.

Experts agree that in general organic farms tend to be less damaging to the environment than conventional farms. In the past, however, “organic agriculture used to be sustainable agriculture, but now that is not always the case,” said Michael Bomford, a scientist at Kentucky State University who specializes in sustainable agriculture. He added that intense organic agriculture had also put stress on aquifers in California.

[…]

While the original organic ideal was to eat only local, seasonal produce, shoppers who buy their organics at supermarkets, from Whole Foods to Walmart, expect to find tomatoes in December and are very sensitive to price. Both factors stoke the demand for imports. Few areas in the United States can farm organic produce in the winter without resorting to energy-guzzling hothouses. In addition, American labor costs are high. Day laborers who come to pick tomatoes in this part of Baja make about $10 a day, nearly twice the local minimum wage. Tomato pickers in Florida may earn $80 a day in high season.

With so many states adopting these ridiculous Immigration laws, there is likely to be many more laborers looking for work in these organic farms…I wonder what that will do to the amount of money a laborer makes in Baja…compared to what they used to make in Georgia and Alabama…it makes you think just how many people are affected by some of these draconian immigration laws passed last year.  You can read more about the sustainability of the Organic Agriculture movement at the link up top. I’ve got a link further down the post that relates to the new laws going into effect today throughout the US…but first.

Yesterday marked  The 20th Anniversary of the End of the Soviet Union.

In addition to being the last day of the year, today is also the twentieth anniversary of the official end of the Soviet Union, when the last Soviet government institutions shut down. Today’s quasi-authoritarian Russia is far from admirable. But, despite Mikhail Gorbachev’s lame and self-serving claims to the contrary, it is still a vast improvement over the USSR. In addition to the benefits for Russia and other parts of the former Soviet Union, the fall of the USSR also created important benefits for the rest of the world. I covered the many advantages of the end of the USSR in more detail in this post.

With the demise of the USSR, we were spared a regime that slaughtered millions both within and outside its borders, inflicted numerous other human rights violations, and created a threat of nuclear annihilation that hung over the entire world. Compared to that, the very real dangers of the post-Cold War world seem minor by comparison. I recognize, of course, that the USSR in the last years of Gorbachev’s reign was much less dangerous and oppressive than it had been previously. But had the regime survived, it is far from clear that Gorby’s reforms would not have been reversed. Previous episodes of Soviet liberalization in the 1920s and 1956–64 had been followed by waves of repression at home and expansionism abroad. Moreover, Gorbachev himself was not as much of a liberal democrat as he is often portrayed in the West. He used force to try to suppress the independence movement in the Baltics, and otherwise sought to preserve the Soviet regime, not end it. He was certainly much less ruthless and repressive than his predecessors. But that is judging him by a very low standard of comparison. Nonetheless, it is fortunate that Gorbachev’s efforts at limited liberalization spun out of his control and led to a beneficial outcome that he did not intend.

Lately, I have had Moscow on my mind, I’ve been reading a book about Catherine the Great on my new Kindle, and last night on TCM, they showed the movie Fail-Safe. It’s about a US military glitch that sent nukes to blow up Moscow. When the bomb hits the Russian city, the US president…played by Henry Fonda, gives the go ahead for a US Airforce bomber to hit NYC with the same nukes that were sent into Moscow. I liked Dr. Strangelove better…the plot is very similar, but it was fun to watch the actor who played Boss Hog, Sorel Brooks, act his part in Fail-Safe as a fat bald congressman.

Anyway, this next link is something I came across earlier in the week. Time Lapse Moscow

If you’re like me and have lived your entire life in the United States, odds are most of your impressions of Russia come from Cold War-era movies: A bleak sky with people huddling about while some kind of droning chant plays in the background, endless military parades in front of harsh leaders, general dreariness. This amazing little time lapse video from zweizwei completely shatters that image, showing a colorful and bustling metropolis of Moscow. Go on and take a watch if you think your view of Russia could use a bit of a refresher.

Let’s take a trip from Moscow to Ecuador: Hulk, en fuego!

Ricardo Bohorquez

How’s this for a New Year’s cleansing ritual? In Ecuador, residents build massive dummies called años viejos (old years) and then… burn them.

Goodbye 2011! And take your rage-filled Hulk-ified baggage with you!

Back in the States, here are 40,000 things that 2011 brought us, which we now will start to see enacted: 40,000 new laws to go into effect in 2012

About 40,000 state laws taking effect at the start of the new year will change rules about  getting abortions in New Hampshire, learning about gays and lesbians in California, getting jobs in Alabama and even driving golf carts in Georgia.

Several federal rules change with the new year, too, including a Social Security increase amounting to $450 a year for the average recipients and stiff fines up to $2,700 per offense for truckers and bus drivers caught using hand-held cellphones while driving.

NBC News, the National Conference of State Legislatures, The Associated Press, and other organizations tracked the changes and offered their views on the highlights.

Many laws reflect the nation’s concerns over immigration, the cost of government and the best way to protect and benefit young people, including regulations on sports concussions.

From Minx’s Missing Link File: Take this next series of links with a grain of salt…or should I say with a twang of a banjo string. In connection with the Mayan end of the world, I have this to offer you. Mayas in Georgia?  Yes, there is speculation that Mayans cultivated the land where I live today.  Ruins in Georgia mountains show evidence of Maya connection

This 3D virtual reality image was made from the Johannes Loubser site plan. There may be many other hidden structures in the ancient site.

Credits:

VR Image by Richard Thornton

Archaeological zone 9UN367 at Track Rock Gap, near Georgia’s highest mountain, Brasstown Bald, is a half mile (800 m) square and rises 700 feet (213 m) in elevation up a steep mountainside.  Visible are at least 154 stone masonry walls for agricultural terraces, plus evidence of a sophisticated irrigation system and ruins of several other stone structures. Much more may be hidden underground.  It is possibly the site of the fabled city of Yupaha, which Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto failed to find in 1540, and certainly one of the most important archaeological discoveries in recent times.

Check it out:

In 1839, English architect, Frederick Catherwood, and writer, John Stephens “rediscovered’ the Maya civilization on a two-year journey through southern Mexico.  When their book on the journey was published in 1841, readers in Europe and North America were astounded that the indigenous peoples of the Americas could produce such an advanced culture.  Architects in both continents immediately recognized the strong similarity in the architectural forms and town plans between southern Mexico and the Southeastern United States. Most agronomists were convinced that corn, beans and tobacco came to the natives of the United States and Canada from Mexico.

In the decades since Catherwood’s and Stephens’ book, archaeologists have not identified any ruins in the United States which they considered to be built by a people who had originated in Mexico.  This was primarily due to their unfamiliarity with the descendants of the Southeastern mound-builders — tribes such as the Creeks, Alabamas, Natchez, Chitimachas and Choctaws.  In particular, the languages of the Creek Indians contain many Mesoamerican words.

Historians, architects and archaeologists have speculated for 170 years what happened to the Maya people.  Within a few decades, the population of the region declined by about 15 million. Archaeologists could not find any region of Mexico or Central America that evidenced a significant immigration of Mayas during this period, except in Tamaulipas, which is a Mexican state that borders Texas on the Gulf of Mexico. However, Maya influence there, seemed to be limited to a few coastal trading centers.  Where did the Maya refugees go?  By the early 21st century, archaeologists had concluded that they didn’t go anywhere.  They had died en masse.

The evidence was always there

In 1715 a Jewish lass named Liube, inscribed her name and the date on a boulder in Track Rock Gap. When Europeans first settled the Georgia Mountains in the early 1800s, they observed hundreds of fieldstone ruins, generally located either on mountaintops or the sides of mountains.  These ruins consisted of fort-like circular structures, walls, Indian mounds veneered in stone, walls, terrace retaining walls or just piles of stones.   Frontiersmen generally attributed these structures to the Indians, but the Cherokees, who briefly lived in the region in the late 1700s and early 1800s, at that time denied being their builders.

This connection to Mayan culture is more than just fieldstone ruins…

In 1999 archaeologist Mark Williams of the University of Georgia and Director of the LAMAR Institute, led an archaeological survey of the Kenimer Mound, which is on the southeast side of Brasstown Bald in the Nacoochee Valley. Residents in the nearby village of Sautee generally assume that the massive five-sided pyramidal mound is a large wooded hill.   Williams found that the mound had been partially sculpted out of an existing hill then sculpted into a final form with clay.  He estimated the construction date to be no later than 900 AD.  Williams was unable to determine who built the mound.

Williams is a highly respected specialist in Southeastern archaeology so there was a Maya connection that he did not know about.  The earliest maps show the name Itsate, for both a native village at Sautee and another five miles away at the location of the popular resort of Helen, GA. Itsate is what the Itza Mayas called themselves. Also, among all indigenous peoples of the Americas, only the Itza Mayas and the ancestors of the Creek Indians in Georgia built five-side earthen pyramids as their principal mounds. It was commonplace for the Itza Maya to sculpt a hill into a pentagonal mound. There are dozens of such structures in Central America.

The name of Brasstown Bald Mountain is itself, strong evidence of a Maya presence.  A Cherokee village near the mountain was named Itsa-ye, when Protestant missionaries arrived in the 1820s.  The missionaries mistranslated “Itsaye” to mean “brass.”  They added “town” and soon the village was known as Brasstown.  Itsa-ye, when translated into English, means “Place of the Itza (Maya).”

There is more of this article for you to read at the link, in fact, so much was made of this “discovery and theory” that another article was written here: Mayas in the USA controversy: You be the juror

The article presents evidence to support a position long held by the Creek, Cherokee and Chitimacha Indians; namely that sea-going merchants, illiterate farmers and escaped slaves fled Mesoamerica during a period of chronic wars, drought and volcanic eruptions, then settled in what is now the Southeast and Mississippi Basin.

Although already generating approximately 81,000 “Likes” on Facebook, the article has also generated considerable controversy. A group of archaeology professors in the Southeast have vigorously objected to the article and created a separate web site to organize opposition to it.  Numerous archaeologists from around North America, however, have also placed positive comments on the article.

Makes you think of the strange possibilities doesn’t it? It is all very interesting to read.

Your Easy Like Sunday Morning Link of the Week:  This past year marked the end of Roger Ebert’s show, At the Movies. Yesterday he had a blog post which pulls at your heart-strings. It talks about two friends, one who passed recently, and another one who is very near death. It seems fitting to end 2011 with these final reflections from Mr. Ebert.   O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done – Roger Ebert’s Journal

Those who opened their eyes when I did are closing them now. Word reached me on New Year’s Eve of two friends, one who has died, another who has returned home from hospital for palliative care. The first memories that come into my mind is of them laughing. I believe anyone who knew them would say the same thing. In my exploring years, when I was young and healthy and life was still ahead, they were stars in my sky, who had always been alive and would always be alive, because that is how we must act if we are to live at all.

A new year is born in a series of photos around the world, let’s hope this year is better.

May all our readers have a wonderful first day of 2012…we have a wild ride coming up this year…an election year…let’s make the best of it and try to laugh at the political circus act. One thing is certain, I am looking forward to another year of blog post here at Sky Dancing!