Anything Prose

Ethnic Profile THIS!!!

Happiness is Being Ethnically You

In the West the individualistic culture means that your mood matters much more than it does in the East. When assessing life satisfaction, Japanese and Koreans count what their parents think about how they're living their lives more highly than their own moods.

What about the Scandinavians, are they the happiest? Read on HERE.

Global Warming

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Special Issue on Global Warming

by Brian Peterson (editor, Miami Education Review)

MER will devote several issues to environmental problems in China and possibly India. We are interested in whether environmental problems are likely to stymie economic development in those nations before 2050. In order to get a global context for this, we are devoting this issue to the problem of global warming.

MER has covered global warming in the past and we were dismayed to learn that the earth could naturally decide to heat up or cool down of its own volition, regardless of any human tampering. And it could be that temperature increases resulting from human activity could trigger some mechanism that would result in a serious cold spell.

Human beings are just one more chaotic element in an already unstable climate history. But there is no serious question but what human activity is contributing toward a rise in global temperatures that could have disastrous effects within a hundred years.

We are interested in figuring out the biggest contributors to global warming and what can be done to minimize this problem. The human causes of global warming include: vehicle exhaust gases; industrial greenhouse gases; home heating and cooking; and soot from smoke and diesel exhaust which diminishes the reflectivity of snow.

We were surprised in preparing this issue of MER to see that several Asian cities have banned two-stroke engines because of the great amount of exhaust that they emit (they mix oil with gas and burn the fuel very inefficiently). And one Arizona city has banned old diesel engines.

Less-developed countries are being more responsive to at least some environmental problems than we had believed them capable of. That is a very good sign.

Hydrogen fuel cells may one day replace internal combustion engines. But capitalism is seldom willing to go totally clean, and we found a vivid Village Voice article on the nasty environmental secrets behind the making of fuel cells.

It seems as if we chose just the right time to do an issue on global warming, because there is a huge amount of material including a brand new study on the future extinction of a million animal species if global warming is not stopped.

Canada Can Blame Florida for Cold Weather

Returning Snowbirds Bring Frigid Air from Miami

Ben Franklin spent much time in Quebec and France both before and after the American Revolution. Francophiles the world over started to like the old letch because he represented a colony that stood up to the British master. We also, today more than ever, thank Franklin every winter for arming us with information to combat the American media propaganda that insidiously brainwashes audiences in the States in their attempt to blame Canada for freezing weather in New England and in the orange groves of Florida.

Why is there is so much low pressure in the Southeast dragging cold air over us Quebeckers was the chicken and egg question even Ben couldn't answer. The extreme conditions this year may be exacerbated not only by the rush of snowbirds back north to open their government pension checks for January, but also by all Iowa's retired farmers breathing a sigh of relief that they don't have to put up with all of Howard Dean's door-knocking volunteers and telemarketing tactics in his bid to win their vote in next week's Democratic Party primaries. Not only did out migration of expat Iowans put distance between them and the political hucksters, but it also proved that they are true Republicans.

Be that as it may and whatever the cause and effect, up north thanks to Benjamin Franklin's pioneering scientific impetus, we are armed and forewarned, perfectly justified in blaming the Sunshine State for clouds, ice, freeze-outs and any storm that comes along.

The term Nor'easter arose in the colonial days before the concept of wind circulation around a low pressure center was established. Storms were then considered to travel from the direction of the wind. If a storm came with southwesterly winds, it originated from the southwest. A Nor'easter, therefore, originated, and arrived, from the northeast of those feeling its fury. Those beliefs began to change in the mid-eighteenth century, in part through the insights of Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin had looked forward to viewing a lunar eclipse but had been denied the visage by clouds associated with a storm that rolled into Philadelphia that evening. Later, he was surprised to hear that his brother living in Boston had seen it. Franklin had expected the obscuring clouds had moved over Philadelphia from the northeast, around Boston, but Franklin's brother wrote the eclipse occurred before the clouds rolled in.

From this and other correspondence, Franklin began to suspect that, contrary to then-current beliefs, large storms moved quite differently than indicated by their main wind direction. He reasoned that his "eclipse storm" had come from the south or southwest rather than the northeast. While Franklin never fully grasped the cyclonic flow pattern, he did realize that storms often moved in directions other than that of their winds.