Good Morning, Cousins!
Today’s weekly audio is ready. I begin with a big burst of energy flying off of the Sun in our direction. I forgot to mention something: a human being is an electrical instrument.
Whatever else we may be, and whatever anyone might try to fool you into thinking, a human is one of the most amazing pieces of electrical circuitry ever designed. So when the Sun makes these big bursts, so far as I can figure, there’s no way we don’t feel and experience them. Here is that one-second movie of the Sun going off I mention. The black disk is the Sun (blocked out with SPF One Zillion). All I can say is: holy f*ck. It looks like a HUGE flash going off, which splats right onto the Earth and everything else in its direction.
Though I’ve never seen research to this effect, these events must have an influence on the human psyche and our affairs. This is synchronous with the Leo Full Moon opposite Neptune in Aquarius — which is actually a pretty interesting image of lots of electricity flying as a plasma storm through space.
The Full Moon takes place overnight Thursday to Friday in North America and Europe, and Friday in Australia and New Zealand. The Full Moon is opposite many planets. The Moon has been making one opposition after the next and is right in the peak of that; many planets are clustered around the Sun in Aquarius and Pisces. So this is tense, but plenty should come out in the wash. We might not figure out where people are really coming from until the Sun ingresses Pisces Friday and makes a conjunction to Chiron.
I’ll leave the rest to the audio presentation. The old player is in its usual location. The new player is the nifty gray icon below. Enjoy.
Yours & truly,
Valentina –
Ouch! That sucks, not really being able to ‘blame’ anything at all. It simply happens…
Printers are notoriously bad, and not meant to be fixed either. They simply have a life of planned obsolescence, and continued ink sales. Monitors not so much, but still, two parts of a system at once, that hurts.
You know, Brendan, that’s the thing. All my stuff is on surge protectors. These two items, along with the 7 year old computer I *was* just about to replace (*was* because now I might wait until the solar weather improves) might have just succumbed to the ambient energy from old age. Corrolation not being causation however, it may have just been their time. We’re living in such interesting times right now that pondering possibilities is more fun than ever.
astro pick of the day today provides a beautyfull shot of the X-class flare
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Shebear – you’re very welcome! Japanese companies are already working on rare earth substitutes, especially when the Chinese exporters ran into ‘difficulties’ with the export paperwork last year and were not allowed to export to Japan for a few weeks. This was in response to the Japanese arrest of a Chinese fishing boat crew over trespassing in Japanese waters. A lot of alarms went off over that one, since China now controls something like 90% of all rare earth materials.
It’s not that they are that rare, we (the US) actually have a lot too, but we stopped mining them a few years ago and the processing plants were sold to Chinese buyers who moved them back to China. The self-induced headaches are the worst…
Valentina – large solar flares have been known to induce auroras, which in turn have induced massive voltage surges in long distance power lines, and these surges have caused large portions of the grid to go down. Any voltage surge is bad for electronics, especially computer equipment, so protection is a must. I would not be surprised if you had a voltage surge that took out your stuff. Bad news is it may not have been this latest solar flare, but something much more local and subtle.
Amanda,
It coincides with the sun spot theory of the Maya and of earth entering the next 13,000 year cycle. They believed the quality of the suns rays will have changed by Dec, 2012 or more poignantly, a new sun will be born.
If this solar flare is a cursor of these imminent change up ahead of us…gee whiz, doesn’t it ‘feel’ great? It’s as if we are birthing something new on a collective level, this very week in fact.
http://planets-comets-2012-maya-two-suns.blogspot.com/2010/04/sunspot-cycle-warning-for-2012.html
….and it’s quite sickening to hear about the variety of problems associated with gathering rare earth magnets. I do love my earphones and can’t imagine not having them but I don’t feel comfortable with this high price we pay for producing them. 🙁
Aha, thank you for the education Brendan, I did not know that. When I happened recently to put the two ends of my earpieces closely facing each other, I was intrigued to notice them *repel* each other and I did think it was only that particular brand that had them. At least when I did a mini search on the subject that’s what I came away with. Little did I know.
Still I do wonder what it means to have them placed so close to our brains and for such extended periods of time, even if they are tiny little things.
Hmm. This might explain why I lost both a monitor and a multifunction printer/fax/scanner/copier recently.
Shebear – all earphones, headphones, loudspeakers, et cetera, have magnets in them. They are what make the coil move back and forth, recreating the sound waves so that we can hear whatever we are listening to. All the way back to Alexander Graham Bell they go.
Some earphones (and so on) are now using “rare earth” magnets, which means they can be smaller and louder. Also more expensive and more ‘elite.’ There are also many problems associated with rare earth materials, most of them not involving electronics: relative scarcity, Chinese market control dominance, geopolitics, military usage, etc.
I just checked in for my news update from the BBC and they had this article on the solar flare.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12485104
What I’m curious to know, and if someone can enlighten me please do, is how our earphones might be affected by solar flares and the like. I know a certain make of earphones has miniature magnets in them, which I just discovered very recently, and I couldn’t help but wonder if we are zapping our brains while listening to music or more importantly that we are leaving ourselves susceptible to conducting big electrical surges and causing some serious damage between the ears. Ouch.
Today I had my first ever chakra alignment this afternoon and I really felt the therapist’s hands twitching or vibrating while working on me. I asked her about afterwards and she said she felt a *lot* of energy from me, more so than usual.
‘Tis all veery, veery interestink! 😉
ah. It is all coming together. Thanks, Eric.
Thanks for an enlightening podcast, Eric. Especially interesting about Iran. Yesterday someone sent me this link which is a great tool for learning where all of the important hot spots are in the Middle East:
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html
I thought the reason my legs have been going herky-jerky at night was because of acupuncture. Maybe it is the solar flare!
Thank you for the info Martha, Star and Amanda.
FB comment on solar flares:
“Eric, i just happened to find this on internet about the massive Sun Solar Flair. It says: that ‘From 2011-2013 will be the most violent in 100 years. According to Dr.Richard Fisher, director of NASA the super storm would hit like a bolt of lightning, causing catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security. The reason for the concern comes as the Sun enters a phase known as Solar Cycle 24 and could bring a 1-2 Trillion $$ in damages and 10 years for complete recovery’ Things are sure heating up!”
Great podcast today, Eric! Thank you for sharing your insights – they make it so much easier to navigate one’s way!
Here is a link to a blog by meteorologist, Jeff Masters concerning the “Carrington Event” in 1859 and how a solar flare of that magnitude might affect the world today.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1206
Also, I found it interesting that I could not find a single news story about the solar flare on any of the major sites.
Eric- this is spectacular, and thank you for explaining why I have been dealing (with greater and lesser skilfulness) with lumpy, bumpy, spikey surging energy these last few days. Your audio brought to mind one of my pet peeves, which is the misunderstanding of Adam Smith and his definition of capitalism.
Unfortunately, most folks these days, including various hot shot MBAs I interview year in and year out, see Adam Smith as the “father” of capitalism and that’s all they know. They don’t realize that he simply gave a name to and identified a framework of a pattern of economic activity that had already been in robust use for over a century. As Smith also pointed out, capitalism on its own is an expansionary force. Understood from the standpoint of physics, or space/time, nothing can expand indefinitely, and must, like bread dough left to rise too long, eventually collapse in on itself.
Unfortunately for our planet, most MBAs and even serious students of Economics or Political Science fail to read Adam Smith’s other major work: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which he considered to be his most important by far. The Reader’s Digest version is that a person is supposed to earn what they can in an ethical way, and use the proceeds as follows: keep a roof over the family’s head and food on the table, educate the family to the extent called for by their intellect and motivation, and then GIVE THE REST AWAY to those in the greatest need. This ties back to your point about being free enough to give away your internet signal (a quirk I share by the way), and the freedom to GIVE generally.
I’m going to go out on a limb and offer that if capitalism were grounded in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, the ethical altruism at its root would provide a center of gravity strong enough to prevent the over-expansion of the economy and its inevitable cyclical collapses.
So roll on change. Roll on the rising tide of awareness. And thank you for continuously bringing the important, the challenging, the difficult, the downright revolutionary to our attention in such articulate and compassionate detail. Bless you for what you do.
Bug burst of energy! I love it! I just hope the bug mentioned is a firefly. I miss those little suckers.