Trapiche - Intense Green - Coscuez Colombia - One Of The Trapiche's On The Left
Mark made this video with text in English and Spanish and no audio for use in the Caribe Emerald Museum - Cartagena, Colombia.
Mark then made this video with text in English and Spanish and no audio for use in the Caribe Emerald Museum - Cartagena, Colombia.
Mark made this video for Caribe Emerald Museum - Cartagena, Colombia.
Mark made this video for Caribe Emerald Museum - Cartagena, Colombia.
Mark made this video for Caribe Emerald Store cruise ship advertisement spot.
Mark made this video for Caribe Emerald Store cruise ship advertisement.
The Last C17's Salute Before Leaving The Boeing Facility At Long Beach Airport In California Where 279 C17 Globmaster's Were Built Between 1991 and 2015.
The Last C17's Salute Before Leaving The Boeing Facility At Long Beach Airport In California Where 279 C17 Globmaster's Were Built Between 1991 and 2015.
Mark #78 lapping others at Irwindale NASCAR 1/2 mile oval track. 600HP NASCAR.
Mark #78 lapping others at Irwindale NASCAR 1/2 mile oval track. 600HP NASCAR.
Mark made this video just after the Las Vegas Strip shut down in April 2020. Additionally, as you will see in the video, the national debt is nearing 24 trillion dollars ($24,000,000,000) and growing. In June of 2022 the national debt had exceeded 30 trillion. That's 6 trillion dollars of government spending in 2 years. Things are not looking good!
Mark made this video just after the Las Vegas Strip shut down in April 2020. Additionally, as you will see in the video, the national debt is nearing 24 trillion dollars ($24,000,000,000) and growing. In June of 2022 the national debt had exceeded 30 trillion. That's 6 trillion dollars of government spending in 2 years. Things are not looking good!
Although HALF (50%) of the total number of people shot and killed by police in the U.S. are white, black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. African Americans account for less than 13 percent of the U.S. population, but are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a similiar disproportionate rate.
Below you will see that the rate at which black Americans are killed by police is more than twice as high as the rate for white Americans.
Black 36 per million - 1,512 killed of 42 Million.
Hispanic 27 per million - 1,058 killed of 39 Million.
White 15 per million - 2,890 killed of 197 Million.
Other 5 per million U.S. population - 240 killed of 49 Million.
Maybe black and Hispanic populations occupy more of other categories than whites? Involvement with caterories like gangs and crime would put black and Hespanic populations in contact with peolice more frequently than white populations. The notion that it is acceptable to run from police, innocent or guilty, most certainly contribute to the disproportionate rate of killings.
So here is a chart that shows the race and ethnicity of gang members from 1996 to 2011.
So, I think it is safe to say that there are significently more Hespanic and African American gang members than white.
I was going to show the crime data but it is long, complicated, and actually shows that even though there is evidence in the official police-recorded figures that black Americans are more likely to commit certain types of crime than people of other races (murder, robery, gambling), whites commit their proportional percentage of most other crime types.
While it would be naive to suggest that there is no racism in the US criminal justice system, victim reports don't support the idea that this is because of mass discrimination.
Higher poverty rates among various urban black communities might explain the difference in crime rates, although the evidence is mixed.
There are few simple answers and links between crime and race are likely to remain the subject of bitter argument.
Trump as president - a prediction!
It's currently November 2024. I want to make a prediction about what our situation as a nation is going to look like in 2028, 4 years from now.
1st - I did not want to see Kamala Herris become president for any reason.
Trump won by a fairly good margin.
It looks like many Americans agreed with me on that account. However, I did not want Trump either. I think he has multiple issues that I do not think are presidential.
So, here is what I think.
Trump is going to keep his promise regarding his desire to increase the application of tariffs and increase their intensity. Inflation will begin to rise again in late 2025. The fed will have to begin increasing rates again in 2026. There will be a world war 3 or a conflict that is just as intense.
Trump will get US troops involved. A Vietnam type conflict will consume everything.
The national debt will soar at a rete never see before. It is currently 35.99 trillion but will increase to 50 trillion or more quickly. This debt will cause problems that no one will see coming.
Immigration reform will not happen. Immigrant gangs will go to war with the local authorities, there will be more and more lawsuits, and only a few million illegal immigrants will end up having to leave the US. The judicial system will be hog tied by the huge magnitude of court filings.
At the end of Trump's 4 years, Trump will refuse to adhere to the peaceful transition of power and will cause history making measures to let him stay in power. Remember, he can now do anything without being held liable for doing so.
By the time he is finally ousted, most will be thankful to see him go.
Let's see if any of my predictions come true or not.
Music
A Led Zepplin tribute in 2012 at the Kennedy Center.
A Led Zepplin tribute in 2012 at the Kennedy Center.
One of Mark's favorite female guitar masters - Orianthi playing Highly Strung with Steve Vai!
One of Mark's favorite female guitar masters - Orianthi playing Highly Strung with Steve Vai!
Yet another of Mark's favorite female guitar masters - Sophie Lloyd.
Wow! What can I say. Two of the best complementing oneanother.
A word about mysterious places and ancient civilizations. The things someone did with stone thousands of years ago is incredible. Even more incredible is that there are examples of this type of handy work on all 6 continents. Are you into ancient aliens? How about explanations as to how they sculpted giant stones? Check out the links to see how some contend these mysteries are connected.
The map shows the proximity of the sites in Peru and Bolivia that contain some terrific examples of these mysteries. There must be a reason for this. I think there is more to be found in the region that has remained hidden for all these years.
This demands more exploration!
The most beautiful women in the world as derived from winners of the Miss Universe competition from 1952 to 2022. The USA has won 9 times. Venezuela has won 7 times. Puerto Rico has won 5 times. The Philippines has won 4 times. Sweden, South Africa, India, and Mexico have won 3 times. For the remaining countries, some have won 2 times, and many have won 1 time. So, there you have it.
Did you know that there are several Bible's that exist today? The King James version, the most famous version of modern times and assembled from accepted ancient writings in 1604, contains 66 books. The Catholic version contains 73 books. The Ethiopian Orthodox version, and the oldest, the Ethiopian Coptic Bible, contains 81 books. It includes books like the Book of Enoch which is a very old writing that other religious sects consider too controversial and even dangerous to be included in later Bible's. Enoch was the father of Methuselah who was the father of Lamech (the first man in the Bible to take 2 wives) and Lamech was the father of Noah. My point here is that these characters and writings go back a very long time and include The Book of the Giants, also an Enoch era writing. The Apocrypha is another book excluded from modern Bible's but is included in the Ethiopian Coptic Bible. The word Apocrypha means "hidden things". Again a book considered to be too "dangerous" for the common man.
These books talk about the watchers, fallen angles, or guardians of the sky. They speak of a time when giants roamed the earth and consumed human flesh. They talk about Noah and a flood that rescued man from the giants. They talk about the comings and goings of prophets via chariots of fire. They talk about a time where men walked with the gods.
I think there is much we do not know about religion and the various teachings we are all encouraged to believe in.
Now let me blow your mind! Try to wrap your head around this.
At the equator the earth spins at 1000 miles per hour (1609 kilometers per hour).
The earth rotates around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour (107,826 kilometers per hour).
The sun is rotating around the galaxy at about 559,000 miles per hour (250 km/s according to Vera Rubin, the lady who discovered this in the 1970's). In fact, the majority of the suns in all galaxies rotate around their respective black hole very close to this same speed. One would expect the rotation to be much like our solar system where the outer planets rotate slower and the inner planets rotate faster. Not so for the stars in a galaxy. Stars, at many varying distances from the black hole at the galaxy center, are all rotating at the same speed. This results in the pinwheel shapes common to most galaxies. No one really knows exactly why this is. It is being explained as the result of dark matter.
Our galaxy, along with the local group of galaxies, is moving through space at about 1,340,000 miles per hour (2,156,521 kilometers per hour).
Astronomers speculate that space is expanding at about 152,112 miles per hour (244,801 kilometers per hour).
Add it all up and we are traveling through space at more than 2,000,000 miles per hour (3,218,688 kilometers per hour). Other estimates say upwards of 2.8 million miles per hour (4.5 million kilometers per hour). That is somewhere between 550 and 800 miles per second (1,288 kilometers per second). At that speed you could travel from the earth to the moon, 238,900 miles away, in under 6 minutes. In any case, it is fast - damn fast.
It's hard to imagine traveling that fast. It's impossible to relate to these speeds especially when we feel like we are standing still in space.
As a comparison, the speed of light is 6.706e+8 mph or 670,600,000 miles per hour which is about 671 million miles per hour or about 186,000 miles per second ~ 300,000 kilometers per second.
That is about 300 times faster than we are traveling through space.
I should also mention is that in addition to moving through space at such an extreme speed, our sun with the planets moves up and down through the plane of our galaxy like a merry go round while traveling around the galaxy.
This merry go round up and down oscillation is on a 60,000 year cycle. So, this up and down movement through the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy takes us into areas of our galaxy that may be less desirable than others. It could take us through debris clouds or near magnetars or black holes that could cause havoc in various catastrophic ways for the earth.
New Discoveries
Very cool and mind-blowing!
New space telescopes are allowing astronomers to verify structures in the universe that are contradicting much of what science has considered fact for many years. Galactic clusters are being found that have the experts conflicted. Recently a circular cluster of galaxies have been discovered that spans 1.3 billion light years. In fact, we are looking at a helix (corkscrew) structure on end (blue stars), so the galaxies form a circle from our perspective. Prior to this, other large structures of galaxies known as walls have been discovered that are hundreds of billion light years in size.
Why is this so important?
The mere fact these structures exist contradicts the notion that a "big bang" started our universe some 13.7 billion years ago. All the theories regarding the notion of a "big bang" contend these galaxy clusters cannot exist. Matter must be distributed more evenly throughout the universe. These findings may well change the way we look at the beginning of our universe and its age.
Did you know?
The universe has more platinum atoms than silver atoms? Platinum is the pricier metal because on earth it is much rarer than silver because billions of years ago much of the platinum and gold sank out of the earth's crust and into its core. There is an estimated 6 times more platinum than gold in the earth's core.
Why Is Earth's Weather Changing?
Now let's look at the earth's path through space and how it affects the weather. Global warming or cooling - absolutely. Manmade - a little but nothing like earth itself. No doubt humankind is contributing to weather change, but the earth's orbit will override and exceed anything man will do.
Why you ask?
The earth's rotational axis is tilted slightly ranges between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and is currently 23.5 degrees. The earth's axis rotates around this circle once every 20,000 years.
The north star today is Polaris, however, 5 thousand years ago it was a different star altogether (Theban) and thousands of years from now it will be Vega. Today the orientation is the northern hemisphere is leaning away from the sun.
This position is why the Sarah Desert is a desert where it was more tropical, wet, and green 15,000 years ago.
The earth's orbit around the sun is also not constant and varies widely over time. Today the earth's orbit around the sum is almost circular so summers and winters are mild. However, due to influences from the Sun and moon, earth's orbit can go slightly elliptical. The cycle between elliptical and circular is 100,000 years. The effect of this orbital change will be hotter summers and colder winters.
Jupiter and Mars have an even bigger effect on earth's orbit where a 405,000 year cycle takes the earth's orbit on an extremely elliptical orbit. This orbit is thought to have been responsible for snowball earth several times in earth's past.
The entire earth has been covered in thousands of feet of ice in its ancient past and probably will again at some point in the future.
Yes, earth's climate is changing, and it is going to change way more dramatically than any of us can imagine. All these orbital changes have happened several times in the past and will happen again many more times in the future. 20,000 years from now there will be vast changes where the Sarah Desert will be green again. But these changes will be the result of the earth's orbit around the Sun and will probably have little to do with human evolution.
Another event not often associated with weather disturbances is the occasional flip of earth's magnetic field known as geomagnetic reversal. Earth's magnetic poles are not static. The magnetic poles wander and occasionally reverse around every 200,000 to 300,000 years. The earth's magnetic field has reversed nine times during the past four million years.
The last known complete 180-degree magnetic pole shift last happened 42,000 years ago and took approximately 1000 years to complete the shift. As of late, earth's magnetic North pole has wandered considerably on a path toward northern Russia. Scientists know that earth's magnetic field has weakened about 9% in the past 170 years. The magnetic North pole has also been drifting more rapidly since the 1990s, at a rate of 30 to 40 miles per year.
The pole shift 42,000 years ago is suspected to have contributed to the demise of Neanderthal's. While the poles were shifting, additional cosmic rays and high-energy particles from outer space would have depleted ozone concentrations, opening the floodgates for more ultraviolet radiation in the atmosphere over a long period of time. Shifting weather would have expanded the ice sheet over North America and dried out Australia, prompting the extinction of many large mammal species. Solar storms, meanwhile, might have driven ancient humans to seek shelter in caves. As competition for resources grew, our closest extinct human relative, Neanderthals, may have died out.
Problems in the near term.
As the moon orbits the earth the two celestial bodies that affect it the most are the earth and the sun. They line up in ways that influence how gravity acts on the earth. The phenomenon is what causes ocean tides to wax and wane. This gravitational pull differs from year to year.
To us, the moon appears to "wobble" in space. This is due to the tilt, velocity and shape of the moon's orbit which takes 18.6 years to complete. Half of the cycle suppresses tide activity by making high tides lower than normal and low tides higher than normal.
But the other half exacerbates them. Therein lies the problem.
According to NASA. the moon is currently in the "tide-amplifying part of its cycle". By mid-2030, when this intensified series returns, people living in coastal cities may be dealing with severe floods "every day or two."
Why you ask?
This natural yet amplified lunar cycle will be coupled with higher sea levels caused by global warming, triggering a decade of dramatic surges in the number of days with high-tide flooding on nearly all mainland coastlines in the world.
High-tide flooding is projected to exceed thresholds across the world more often and occur in clusters that last a month or longer, the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team of the University of Hawaii said. This study was published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
These kinds of floods are already plaguing many cities on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. In 2019, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported more than 600 such floods, which occur when high tides reach about 2 feet above the daily average "and start spilling onto streets or bubbling up from storm drains."
The problem, researchers say, is that these events are often considered less important or damaging than floods caused by hurricanes, for example, because they involve smaller amounts of water.
But "it's the accumulated effect over time that will have an impact," study lead author Phil Thompson, an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, said in a statement. "If it floods 10 or 15 times a month, a business can't keep operating with its parking lot under water. People lose their jobs because they can't get to work. Seeping cesspools become a public health issue."
What's more, these repeated events will eventually occur in clusters in about a decade when the moon's amplified wobble merges with future higher seas, the team says. The dangerous cocktail is predicted to spark increased high-tide flooding over a short period of time, creating extreme months of activity. The bottom line - the world is headed for coastal flooding without rising sea levels. With rising sea levels coastal catastrophe is eminent.
We know greenhouse gases can change the climate based on multiple lines of scientific evidence point to the increase in greenhouse emissions over the past century and a half as a driver of long-term climate change around the world. Laboratory measurements since the 1800s have repeatedly verified and quantified the absorptive properties of carbon dioxide that allow it to trap heat in the atmosphere. Simple models based on the warming impact of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere match historical changes in temperature. Complex climate models, recently acknowledged in the Nobel Prize for Physics, not only indicate a warming of the earth due to increases in carbon dioxide but also offer details of the areas of greatest warming. Long-term records from ice cores, tree rings and corals show that when carbon dioxide levels have been high, temperatures have also been high. The chart below shows the change in temperature vs CO2 levels over time. It is an obvious correlation.
Does the below graphic concern anyone? Fires across Canada - summer 2023. 130 fires across Canada spring of 2024.
But there is more to our travels through space than drastic changes in the weather.
Mass extinctions of life on earth appear to also follow regular patterns based on our solar system traveling up and down in relation to the galactic plane.
Widespread die-offs of land dwelling animals - which include amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds - follow a cycle of about 27 million years.
Additionally, these mass extinctions coincide with major asteroid impacts and devastating volcanic outpourings of lava, rock, and a lethal amounts of deadly gases poisoning the atmosphere.
Global mass extinctions are presumably caused by the largest cataclysmic impacts and massive volcanism, perhaps sometimes working in concert.
Paleontologists had previously discovered that similar mass extinctions of marine life, in which up to 90% of species disappeared, were not random events, but seemed to come in a 26 to 27 million year cycle.
These new findings of coinciding, sudden mass extinctions on land and in the oceans, and of the common 26 / 27 million year cycle, lend credence to the idea of periodic global catastrophic events as the triggers for the extinctions.
Three of the mass annihilations of species on land and in the sea are already known to have occurred at the same times as the three largest impacts of the last 250 million years, each capable of causing a global disaster and resulting mass extinctions.
These impacts can create conditions that would stress and potentially kill off land and marine life, including widespread dark and cold, wildfires, acid rain and ozone depletion. The most infamous asteroid strike we know of is the one that killed off the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago, which overall wiped out 70% of the species on earth.
It seems that large-body impacts and the pulses of internal earth activity that create flood-basalt volcanism may be marching to the same 26 / 27 million year drumbeat as the extinctions, more than likely paced by our orbit in the galaxy.
And as for where we are in the current cycle, we are about 20 million years away from the next predicted mass extinction that's due to a comet strike or volcanic activity.
How could this be? Aren't asteroid or comet impacts completely random? Not so. Because our sun with the planets travels up and down through the plane of our galaxy like a merry go round while traveling around the galaxy, our planet will pass through a crowded part of our Milky Way galaxy about every 26 / 27 million years. During those times, comet and meteor showers are more likely, leading to large impacts on the earth.
The above study was published 12/11/2020 in the journal Historical Biology.
BUT WAIT - THERE'S MORE
Mark has had a theory for a very long time. We know from Albert Einstein that time and space are relative and therefore are not constant. Affecting one affects and changes the other. Gravity warps space and also time. Speed also warps time. Time runs slower wherever gravity is strongest. This is because gravity curves space-time. Also, the faster the relative velocity between two people or places, the greater the time dilation between one another.
They say this rate of time diminishes to zero as one approaches the speed of light. This effect is not linear. It is exponential like the Mohs hardness scale or the Richter earthquake scale.
For sufficiently high speeds, near the speed of light, this effect is dramatic.
For example, a persons perceived one year of travel near the speed of light might correspond to ten years of time on earth. That said, our time here on earth is influenced by speed because, as you know, we are traveling through space at somewhere around 2+ million miles per hour. So we can see that our perceived time is slower, about 0.5% slower, than the time of something standing still in space. We also know on earth we are influenced by the gravity of the earth, the sun, and the galaxy we are traveling through space in so our perceived time is also slowed by all that gravitational influence. This effect is also exponential where higher gravitational influence cause the most dramatic effects. Adding up the slowing of our time resulting from our speed and the gravity that is influencing us means that our perceived time is slower than actual time in space without these influences. So, when we look out into the universe, we see the universe not only expanding but speeding up (accelerating) because our time is running slower than what we are looking at. Therefore, Mark doubts that the speed of galaxies in the universe are accelerating away from one another as scientist's have speculated. The universe is expanding, maybe, but not accelerating. Mark has been mulling over this concept for years. Some think this concept has merit and many think it is nuts. What do you think?
One of the newest ways of looking at the expansion of the universe, and a remarkably interesting one indeed, speculates that the galaxies in the universe are all speeding away from one another as a function of their distance from the observer where some galaxies are traveling away from us at more than the speed of light. This is because space in that area of space is expanding at greater speeds the farther something is away. So, a galaxy 4 light years away is traveling away from us 4 times faster than a galaxy 2 light years away. If we were to travel at the speed of light in one direction, there would be galaxies disappearing before our eyes because they are so far away that they are moving away from us faster than the speed of light because, where they are, space is expanding faster than the speed of light. Furthermore, this expansion of space in all directions is going on relative to every other point in space. What makes no sence to me is that to some observer far far away, we should then be expanding faster than the speed of light but we do not see that kind of expansion in our area of space? And, this expansion is supposedly all caused by a substance we can neither see and apparently does not affect us - dark matter and dark energy. Called dark because we have no idea what it is but without it the universe, mass wise, does not work.
Moving on - they say the H0liCOW estimate puts the Hubble constant at about 71.9 kilometers (44.7 miles) per second per megaparsec (one megaparsec equals about 3.3 million light-years). In 2001, Dr. Wendy Freedman determined space to expand at 72 kilometers per second per megaparsec - roughly 3.3 million light years - meaning that for every 3.3 million light years further away from the earth you are, the matter where you are, is moving away from earth 72 kilometers a second faster. In 2015, another team, using observations of the cosmic microwave background, determined the rate was 67.8 kilometers per second per megaparsec. Time dilation in a gravitational field is equal to time dilation in far space, due to a speed that is needed to escape that gravitational field.
Here is the proof:
Click on the below graphs to learn more. If you read the article the link takes you to, remember that it was not too long ago that scientists thought it was impossible to travel faster than the speed of sound. The pressures spikes to infinity at the Mach 1 barrier but then decrease beyond it. After breaking the barrier, it becomes easier to go faster to Mach 2 and so on.