Electric currents create magnetic fields in the Sun.

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Asking this question always gets a chuckle from a group of kids who haven't been asked that before. For adults, it confirms their conviction that unanswerable questions must be laughably ignored. For a farmer who gets into the egg business by purchasing a group of laying hens the answer is easy. "My chickens came first; that's how I got my eggs."

Solar astrophysicists who try to explain what causes coronal mass ejections (CMEs) have a similar conundrum: "Which came first, the change in electric current, or the change in the solar magnetic field?" Until the present day there has been no mention of electric currents in space by solar astronomers. There has been no acknowledgement whatever that electric current is needed to create magnetic fields or that it even exists.

In 1908 Kristian Birkeland suggested that electrical flows from the Sun caused the auroral displays that we see. Astronomers such as Sidney Chapman ridiculed him. When it came to descriptions of solar coronal mass ejections and similar phenomena, all we have heard about for decades was that magnetic fields move around and twist - their "magnetic lines of force" come together, touch, and then fly apart carrying matter with them. This is called "Magnetic Reconnection." Solar astronomers never mention electric currents. We are to believe that magnetic fields do it all by themselves, without help.

The Declaration of Independence is a poor excuse for an obscure historical document. It's not the Magna Carta or the Peace of Augsburg. Its name is so straightforwardly functional, it almost makes you wonder why the Founders weren't more imaginative.

Yet only 35 percent of American fourth-graders know the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to the 2010 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The findings of the test - administered to representative samples of fourth-, eighth- and 12th-graders - are another dreary recitation of the historical ignorance of America's students.

Only 20 percent of fourth-graders, 17 percent of eighth-graders and 12 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in history. More than half of 12th-graders were categorized as "below basic." Only 22 percent of 12th-graders knew that North Korea was allied with China during the Korean War. Education expert Diane Ravitch notes with dismay that 40 percent of these students were already eligible to vote when they took the test, and all will be eligible within a year.

They are the symptoms of a country engaged in a long process of erasing its memory. For decades, we have been congratulating ourselves for a broad-mindedness that is really a self-destructive national amnesia.

This video was removed/censured as well as fifty other videos posted on the channel of this French expatriate in Japan named Alex.

Come support him on his YouTube page:

http://www.youtube.com/user/playbacklapompe

A huge storm rears up like a giant tidal wave, sparking horizontal bolts of lightning.

Mike Hollingshead took this snap in Nebraska, USA.

The storm chaser, 35, said: "I've seen some cool storms but this one takes the cake."

Barely two weeks after the failure of a doomsday prediction by a United States (U.S.) based preacher, Russia and U.S. scientists are at war over another perceived threat to human existence.

The danger this time is not an apocalyptic occurrence, but the smacking of the Earth by a giant asteroid in five months time.

The potentially perilous space rock is known as Asteroid 2005 YU55, a round mini-world that is about 1,300 feet (400 metres) in diametre.

According to U.S. scientists, this asteroid will approach the Earth within a scant 0.85 lunar distances in early November.

Due to its size, and the way it will whisk by so close to the Earth, an extensive campaign of radar, visual and infrared observations are being planned.

Today a French government committee is expected to pronounce an opinion on a new proposal to filter and block web content.

The French media are suggesting that it represents industrial-scale filtering. Indeed, the proposal is the most far-reaching one we've seen to date. It is certainly over-broad and puts at risk both freedom of expression and free trade.

The French government proposes to give various ministries the power to order ISPs and web hosts to block content. Blocking orders could apply to commercial and non-commercial content, and potentially also to advertising and search engines.

It is all set out in a Decree which amends the existing law on electronic commerce. The Decree has been sent to the Conseil

Nationale du Numérique for an opinion, which is due today .

How many times have we all heard this bunk myth repeated?

"Humans can't actually digest meat: it rots in the colon."

And its variant: "Meat takes 4-7 days to digest, because it has to rot in your stomach first."
(Some variations on this myth claim it takes up to two months!)

Like most vegetarian propaganda, it's not just false, it's an inversion of truth. As the proverb says, "When you point your finger, your other three fingers point back at you." Let's take a short trip through the digestive system to see why!

A Trip Through The Human Digestive System (abridged)

Briefly, the function of digestion is to break food down as far as possible - hopefully into individual fats, amino acids (the building blocks of protein), and sugars (the building blocks of carbohydrates) which can be absorbed through the intestinal wall and used by our bodies.

While we were not watching, conspiracy theory has undergone Orwellian redefinition.

A "conspiracy theory" no longer means an event explained by a conspiracy. Instead, it now means any explanation, or even a fact, that is out of step with the government's explanation and that of its media pimps.

For example, online news broadcasts of RT have been equated with conspiracy theories by the New York Times simply because RT reports news and opinions that the New York Times does not report and the US government does not endorse.

In other words, as truth becomes uncomfortable for government and its Ministry of Propaganda, truth is redefined as conspiracy theory, by which is meant an absurd and laughable explanation that we should ignore.

As the mainstream media continues to be obsessed with Anthony Weiner and his bizarre adventures on Twitter, much more serious events are happening around the world that are getting very little attention. In America today, if the mainstream media does not cover something it is almost as if it never happened. Right now, the worst nuclear disaster in human history continues to unfold in Japan , U.S. nuclear facilities are being threatened by flood waters, the U.S. military is bombing Yemen, gigantic cracks in the earth are appearing all over the globe and the largest wildfire in Arizona history is causing immense devastation. But Anthony Weiner, Bristol Palin and Miss USA are what the mainstream media want to tell us about and most Americans are buying it.

In times like these, it is more important than ever to think for ourselves. The corporate-owned mainstream media is not interested in looking out for us. Rather, they are going to tell us whatever fits with the agenda that their owners are pushing.

That is why more Americans than ever are turning to the alternative media. Americans are hungry for the truth, and they know that the amount of truth that they get from the mainstream media continues to decline.

Everything I want to do is illegal. As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal's office.

And it doesn't stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

On-farm Processing

I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I've coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.

But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn't matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

OK, so I take my animals and load them onto a trailer for the first time in their life to send them up the already clogged interstate to the abattoir to await their appointed hour with a shed full of animals of dubious extraction. They are dressed by people wearing long coats with deep pockets with whom I cannot even communicate. The carcasses hang in a cooler alongside others that were not similarly cared for in life. After the animals are processed, I return to the facility hoping to retrieve my meat.

When I return home to sell these delectable packages, the county zoning ordinance says that this is a manufactured product because it exited the farm and was reimported as a value-added product, thereby throwing our farm into the Wal-Mart category, another prohibition in agricultural areas. Just so you understand this, remember that an on-farm abattoir was illegal, so I took the animals to a legal abattoir, but now the selling of said products in an on-farm store is illegal.