When did THIS happen?!

By Joseph Walther

I retired several years ago. Even though I’m having the time of my life, I make sure that I stay on top of things scientific. I have friends, my age and even older, who haven’t retired and they still do science for a living—real, genuine, objective science! Some of them are still with NASA.

I bring this to your attention for a reason. During this past week, ALONE, I’ve heard more talk about the weather than I’ve heard over the past ten years. It’s October 28^th, and we are just getting to some fall-like temperatures, mild though they’ve been. “Are we going to have fall this year?” is one of the most common questions I’ve heard.

The local TV weather people remind us, nightly, that this past October has been the warmest in history. As I think about it, the entire year, to date, has been one with some notable weather extremes, especially as they apply to hot weather. And, this past year has NOT been the hottest one on record.

These friends of mine that I referred to above work at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. We’ve talked! Here’s what they’ve told me.

The year 2005 was the hottest one on record. Not only was it the hottest, it was the driest. Its weather patterns produced twenty-six tropical storms in the warm waters of the Caribbean, more than ever before. Three of them became Category 5 hurricanes.

The ice cap at the North Pole is melting at a speed best described as “nearly exponential. The Amazon—home of a 1.2-billion acre rainforest—has been in the throes of a drought, the likes of which we’ve never seen.

Something is going on! Even the staunchest deniers of global warming, the ones with the opaque blinders, have to see the evidence. And, even though climatology is not my long coat, I do have a couple of short jackets hanging in my closet.

Climatologists love to dig in the ice, especially that thick ice in Greenland and Antarctica. They like it because they can dig WAY down… you know, like hundreds and hundreds of feet. There’s something unique about the ice that far down.

It’s very old ice down there. It dates back as far as 700,000 or so years. Not only this, it contains lots of atmospheric gas bubbles that give us a pragmatic, cross-sectional analytic view of our planet’s climate history. Wow! Guess what they found.

Samples of the ice bubbles studied, representing eons of time, revealed that the levels of carbon dioxide—a primary “greenhouse gas”—is NOW 27 percent higher than at any other time in Earth’s history, at least as it applies to the past 700,000 years.

Keep in mind that the planet experienced several abrupt and dramatic temperature shifts during the same period, when glaciers appeared and melted in a cosmic blink of an eye. Still, the current increase in carbon dioxide is even higher, dramatically higher.

Humans have influenced the condition. While there is some excess, I’m not going to blame it all on the human race. The world population has increased dramatically over those 700,000 years. There are over 6-billion of us today. As such, we’ve got to expect an increased amount of carbon dioxide, for God’s sake.

I’ve written about it before and I’ll repeat it here. I estimate that about half of the increase in carbon dioxide emissions has been unavoidable. There are MANY more of us nowadays. And, we’ve become rather used to many things that provide us with an acceptable degree of comfort and security.

So, what we could give up, even though modest, won’t put a dent in global warming. It would have the same scientific effect as offering human sacrifices to appease the gods.

In view of this recent revelation, we can look forward to temperature increases of between 5-and 10 percent over the rest of this century. In order to avoid it, we’d have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50- to 60 percent.

There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of this happening. So, while it’s not going to have a tremendous affect on people my age, you youngsters, especially those yet to be born, had better just sit back and brace yourselves for a rough ride.

I think that the fact that we exist at all is astonishing. If we break down a human being into chemical equivalents, we find that we are made of the same stuff as the stars in the universe. But, we’re not LIKE the stars. Nature configured us to a degree of complexity that makes it possible for us to THINK. Stars can’t do this.

Consciousness arose on this, the “third rock from the sun.” As far as we know for sure, it’s the only place that it’s happened. Some, about 74% of us, believe that God caused it. Still, others credit the powerful tautology of evolution—what “survives, survives.” But, if we’re honest with ourselves, no one knows for sure.

Science has told us a lot. Science has become an authority figure, especially in the eyes of many scientists. Keep in mind, however, that scientific discovery is based on the idea that we’re privy to an infinitesimally small fraction of the universe and everything it contains.

At its best, science can only tell us what’s actually there, based on years, decades, and centuries of hypotheses tests. Sometimes even then, what we learn is based on some small degree of assumption.

Delusion and naïveté, conversely, are the forces that tell us the things that we’d LIKE to be out there. Often, though, we base this “knowledge” on HUGE leaps of faith. Understand, however, that it doesn’t mean such things are untrue. It just means that healthy skepticism justifies seeking verifiable proof.

As wishfully as we sometimes like to think about many of these “truths,” it doesn’t make them facts. We’d do well to remember that no matter how strong a martyr’s conviction in a cause, it reveals only the martyr’s belief in the cause, not the veracity of the cause itself.

Global warming is one of Mother Nature’s ways of balancing things out. She produces greenhouse gases, more than humans can ever produce. We may contribute, but we’re incidental. Contrary to what we often hear, the human species is not capable of destroying the planet, only ourselves..

We call space, space, because it is mostly empty. In the vastness of the universe and the immensity of time, NOTHING is the rule; SOMETHING is the exception. Likewise, science knows that species SURVIVAL is the exception; EXTINCTION is the rule.

In Nature, the things that can extinct our species that we can’t do anything about, exceed, by a large margin, the things that we can prevent. Still, ignoring the latter will NOT destroy EARTH, but it will speed up our own destruction.

But, I caution you! Cockroaches will survive until our sun, in the throes of its death dirge, engulfs the planet in an incendiary demise. So grit your teeth and bear whatever comes. I’ll be back next week, assuming we’re still here!

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Oh GREAT! Another damn meeting and more jargon...

By Joseph Walther

I retired from the working world because I wanted to and I could afford to do it. I freely admit, however, that mandatory meeting attendance was a prime motivator behind the “I wanted to” part.

While governmental agency meetings were the worst. Those conducted by post-secondary education administrators were the worst of worst.

Over the forty-plus years of my career, it seemed like I had attended thousands of them. Admittedly, though, not all of them were a total waste. I distinctly remember two of them being not only meaningful, but also enjoyable.

Unfortunately, ninety-nine-percent of the rest should never have been scheduled. As for the remaining one-percent, a short, one or two sentence memo would have covered the points nicely.

Administrators seem to love expressing themselves in passive voice while employing meaningless jargon. Unnecessary passive voice—about 99% of it—requires too many words to express a few bad ideas.

Personally, I think they do it in a vain attempt to project more intellect that they actually possess.

Here’s an example. It’s real. I have the original, as well as a copy of the letter that precipitated its publication. The complaint was specific to two NAMED professors who, habitually, failed to show up for assigned classes. I’ve substituted fake names for the real ones because, I assume, some sort of action is pending.

September 28, 2007

To: All Faculty

From: T. Iccabog Furd, Ph.D.

It has been brought to my attention that faculty are failing to teach their assigned classes. As you are aware, faculty compensation is substantial. Teaching personnel are expected to arrive, in person, on time, and well prepared to teach their classes.

It is regrettable that a notice like this one must be sent to remind professionals of their obligations to the University. Additional incidents will be dealt with most severely.

The point is that Dr. Furd should NOT have sent the notice at all. The complaint did not pertain to 99.75% of the faculty. He should have sent personal notes to each of the two named professors.

“I’ve received a letter complaining that you fail to show up for your assigned classes. Please call me to explain. If you don’t, I’ll certainly call you. It probably won’t be pleasant.” My goodness, how direct and unambiguous! Active voice, you have to love it.

Succinctness, unfortunately, often requires direct, one-on-one confrontation with offenders. Whoa! Can’t have THAT. It’s safer to, “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” And, so they do.

These folks love jargon, too. As a social class, American administrators—and let’s include politicians—are the best users of jargon on the face of the planet. I mean these people are bullshitters of no less than major league caliber.

It isn’t that the terms they use are not real ones with legitimate definitions. It’s just that these people have no clue as to the meanings of the terms they use. But they sound impressive, though. While I can’t list all of them; here are a couple of my favorites.

STOCHASTIC is a mathematical term. It describes a purely random process but, because it has direction, it has a calculable probability.

For example, postal customers arriving at a post office is certainly a random process. However, those random arrivals increase and decrease (direction), depending on the time of day and season of the year.

Therefore, postal managers can use probabilistic methods to forecast queue lengths to minimize waiting times for those randomly arriving customers.

Administrators, who claim helplessness at reducing long line waits at registration time because of the “STOCHASTIC” nature of the registration process, show that they have no idea what the word means. It simply becomes hyped-up jargon.

Synergy is another of my favorites. Marketing managers love this one because they know that no matter how stupid an idea may be, describing its synergistic qualities will have people swooning over it.

I was present at the birth of online courses. Post secondary administrators immediately began to envision technology centers with no parking lots. There would be no need for people to drive to class. The magic of synergy was going to revolutionize the way we deliver post-secondary education!

College and university enrollments would increase almost exponentially through online classes thanks to synergy.

Theoretically, such classes, because of the cooperative efforts of the participants, “would create an enhanced combined learning effect compared to the sum of their individual effects.”

Intellectually capable, self-motivated students do well in online classes. This is a fact. Other students, many lacking intellectual self-confidence and in need of structured direction, either fail or drop out of such courses. This is ALSO a fact.

Since there are at least as many students in the latter category as in the former, it may not be a good idea to build learning centers without parking lots. Also, if you count yourself among the intellectually capable and motivated, but find yourself enrolled with a number of enrollees not so gifted, you’ll see how quickly “synergy” goes straight down the crapper!

Again, a term misunderstood is term often misused. And, as a consequence, assumes its rightful place in jargonville where vast numbers of administrators fail to understand that hyped-up jargon is NEVER a substitute of brains.

I’m going to finish with a real incident that happened to me about 6-years ago. I’ll admit that I started the feud with references to a person’s synaptic deficiencies. While it doesn’t deal with jargon, it certainly shows some of the depth in stupidity.

In one of my published technical articles, I challenged the notion that there is a morally significant difference between addiction to “prescription” medication and addictions to illicit drugs.

The article was generally well received, but a reader took exception to it. She claimed that she was a guidance counselor at a small liberal arts college.

I didn’t find fault with her taking exception. I did find fault with the complete absence of scientific backup supporting her reasoning. Essentially, the email she sent me was a 5-paragraph moral tirade based on nothing more than the bible.

She claimed that people make their own choices. To her, honest, innocent patients who become addicted to legitimately prescribed pain medication are helpless victims of circumstances beyond their control.

Conversely, people who choose to abuse alcohol, pot, or myriad other illicit drugs are nothing but junkies who have made bad choices. Addiction is God’s punishment for doing so.

I joked in my article that if your primary concern is which wine goes best with whiskey, you have a drinking problem. More seriously, I stated, “Drug addiction is drug addiction; whether you take them to help you fall asleep, to dull unbearable physical pain, or to make you perfectly happy to stay awake, is immaterial.”

Circumstances tend to control poorer people most of the time. However, pain is pain and some of the most excruciating pain is mental anguish. People living in the depths of depression (rich, poor, or in-between), for whatever reason, seek help.

Sometimes they receive it from physicians. If medical help is not obtainable, they buy their medicine in a liquor store, and yes, sometimes they get it from a drug dealer.

I’m not justifying any crimes committed by the addicted. Society should, justifiably, punished them for their crimes according to severity. The addiction that got them there, however, is another matter.

I made the point that tossing addicts into prison without some modicum of effort at helping them kick their habits, benefits only prison construction companies and all endeavors that support prisons. Also it makes the law and order absolutists happy because it makes them feel safer.

This “educated” (my assumption) woman sent me an email wherein she agreed with Iran’s position on drug addicts: execute them. I questioned both her education and challenged her logic in view of her professed “Christian” principles. She didn’t like it. The last paragraph of her email is below, verbatim and in total context.

“I am almost positive that I am at least as educated as you. Unlike you, I would never ever wimp out and support illicit drug addicts. Your—her word verbatim—stating a position that that presents no logic. The bible is quite clear about this.”

I hit the delete key and I’ve never heard from her again. However, I did find it strange that an educated person would not understand that “positive” is an either/or position. There is no “almost” about it.

Her use of “never ever” struck me as strange, too. Is “never ever” a longer period than “never?” Perhaps it’s a sentencing term used by our criminal courts. I know that inmates serving sentences of life without chance of parole sometimes misbehave.

Could it be that when this happens, even though they’re already NEVER going to get out of prison, some judge will bump the sentence up to “never ever” just to be safe? I’ll bet that will straighten them out!

Stay safe. I’ll be back next week. I have another report—for real—that possibly sheds some light on a possible correlation between legal liability and the effects of intentionally exposing ourselves to atmospheres consisting of combinations of too little oxygen, too much nitrogen, and way too much doobie vapor.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

Um, how about that North Pole!

By Joseph Walther

“Global warming’s a joke!” Yep, that’s what some readers have told me. It’s also noteworthy that none of these particular readers has a science background. Since I do AND I disagree that it’s a joke, I decided to do some non-scientific surveying of my own, right here in the thriving metropolis of Delaware.

Several years ago, we had a multi-millionaire governor by the name of Pete Dupont. In the final analysis, Pete turned out to be an effective governor. But, along the way, he showed an amazing propensity to alienate the average working type. Referring to them, collectively, as “Joe Six-Pack” tended to do it every time.

So, since I am all over Delaware on a weekly basis, I decided to talk with a number of “Joe-Six Packs” about global warming. I also included as many “Jane-Six Packs” as would speak with me.

I managed to speak with a total of 103-adults: 68-men and 35-women. In addition, nine of the men had either undergraduate and/or graduate degrees in a hard science. Six of the women fell into the same category. Most of the others were high school graduates. A handful held GEDs or less.

There was NO middle ground relative to opinions, which were that “it’s happening,” or it’s a “bunch of bull.” What did vary was the degree of fervor and concern relative to the topic.

All of those with a science background agreed that global warming is taking place. None of them seemed panic-stricken and only two of them seemed to think that humans were a major contributor. The rest of the “Six-Packers” espoused varying degrees of agreement and disagreement.

Of the remaining men, 70% expressed DOUBT that the world is warming up. They chalked all of the hype to “politician’s trying to get elected,” the government looking for ways to “raise” taxes, or “tree-hugger special interest groups” trying to make money off unfounded fear.

Of the remaining women, 80% expressed agreement that the world IS warming up. The other 20% thought along the same lines as the men above. It was interesting to observe the degree of concern among the believers, both men and women.

There was virtually no panic among the disbelievers, only scorn for the “tree huggers” and their scare tactics. However, among the believers, panic was genuine and the degree ranged from mild concerns for us humans to a genuine fear for our complete extinction, perhaps as early as next Thursday.

If by, “global warming is a joke,” the disbelievers mean a seemingly disingenuity on the part of politicians and special interest groups, I think it’s a valid assessment. Otherwise, if they really mean that global warming is NOT happening, I think they’re idiots.

It’s understandable, though. Such people are the very ones who immerse themselves in TV between 30- and 40-hours a week. All they hear, according to the news and entertainment programs, is that the entire world—the United States in particular—is going to hell in a hand-basket.

However, serious, legitimate, and objective scientists throughout the world agree that global warming is a fact that is happening NOW. They also agree that humans are contributing to it and always have been.

The disagreement, at least among real scientists, is about the extent of human contribution. How extensive and whether it’s cost effective to remediate the problem leaves considerable room for intellectual debate.

Every time humans exhale, they send greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Unless we’re willing to die, we can’t stop it. If the entire human population abandoned all technological advances and climbed back into caves, there would still be massive amounts of greenhouse gases spewing into the atmosphere.

They would come from the fires we’d have to burn to stay warm, cook our food, do our cave drawings, read, and write. And—Purists prepare to be shocked—some humans like to have light during sex. It makes watching in a mirror possible.

The output of greenhouse gases would be tremendous because there are now around 6.2-BILLION of us as opposed to the few hundred million the last time this happened.

Regardless, such population growth obviously indicates that there has been a lot of sex going on, which means more mirror viewing, which requires more fire, which increases the gas house effect even MORE!

In fact, modern humans must do many things that produce greenhouse gases; most of them are non-discretionary. In other words, we have to do these things just to survive in a meaningful way.

If we total those human processes that contribute to greenhouse gas production and subtract out those that are discretionary (the ones we don’t really need to survive), scientists tend to agree that our contribution to the problem ranges between 2- and 20%, depending on who weighs the variables AND how they apply the weights.

So, yes, we contribute through the very nature of our existence and drive for self-survival. If we find a way to eliminate, cost-effectively, our discretionary contribution, will it alter the outcome in a meaningful way? This, also, is a legitimate debate within the objective science community.

Consider that a single, moderate volcanic eruption vomits forth more greenhouse gases in 15-minutes than the total contribution from every automobile on the planet over a ten-year period. I won’t even get into the stuff evaporating from the world’s oceans every single day!

Mother Nature takes care of business whether we like it or not. To her life is life, whether it’s a creeping, hissing cockroach or the Roman Catholic Pope. It makes no difference to her whether human and animal life continues or dies. To her, turf boundaries do NOT exist. It’s all one planet.

If humans screw things up bad enough, they’ll be gone and Mother Nature won’t even attend the funeral. Nor will the rest of the universe notice that we’re gone. But, you can bet the mortgage payment that the cockroaches will still be here, and in a state of war with the cockroaches in the Middle East.

This past summer, scientists discovered that about a million square miles of sea ice had melted. A million square miles comes to about 402 Delawares, or about 15-thousand Washington DCs. It spells disaster for polar bears, walruses, and penguins. Humans will eventually feel it, too.

Crying wolf over global warming is not an inaccuracy because there IS a wolf. Only, we can’t kill it. We can’t even scare it away. But we can learn to defend ourselves against its attacks.

Humans possess the intellectual capacity to deal with massive problems, global warming included. It won’t happen, though, until we lose the political crap that pits one side of the issue against the other. And, if we’re going to do it, we’d better do it sooner than later.

Just for the record, there are dangers lurking out in universe land that are far more devastating than global warming; gamma-ray bursts from colliding pulsar stars, for example. It’s happened before, you know. There just weren’t any humans around.

Just one of these babies, even in the far reaches of our own galaxy, would destroy 90% of the world’s resources in a matter of hours, while leaving the living population intact… at least for a few years.

Yep, we’d have 6-plus billion people vying for the remaining 10% of our planet’s life-sustaining resources. Talk about your turf wars! But, hey, I don’t want to worry you. Relax! Sleep tight. Things will look better in the morning… well, unless the Sun explodes. Nah, just kidding.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.

There's absolutely NO cause for alarm!

By: Joseph Walther

“Statistics show that taking Tylenol^® within the recommended threshold limits does not pose any risks of physical harm.” Yep, those were his exact words. HE (the clerk… I mean store associate) was restocking shelves in the toothpaste isle at a local drug store. HE also looked no older than about seventeen.

If my estimate of his age was correct—I’m sure of it—my belt was 3-years older than HE was!

The customer he was speaking to was a senior citizen, somewhere between seventy- and eighty-years of age. He was wearing a pair of those huge, tortoise-shell eyeglasses, the lenses of which were just a tad thicker than the bottom of one of those old, 7-oz, green-tint Coca-Cola bottles.

This isn’t about the store associate or the customer. It’s about what things mean. Threshold, for example, does not mean what the average citizen thinks that it means. In fact, many people are clueless.

Average is another word that many people don’t seem to understand in critical terms. There are many others, but I’ll concentrate on threshold and average this week.

Misunderstanding either of these, if not both, makes lying like hell with numbers a foregone conclusion, especially when there is money to be made or elections to be won.

Threshold is a physical science term. Biologists have used it for centuries to define the minimum stimulus needed to produce a response in irritable tissue.

Confused? Many are. It’s the misuse—sometimes blatantly—that gives rise to the confusion. It’s the main reason that advertisers and public relations shysters stole it.

For example, every time some oil refinery “accidentally” releases toxic gases, some PR spokesperson quickly tries to explain that the emissions were well within the safety threshold limits.

“There is absolutely no reason for alarm,” they tell us. “We have everything under control and we’ve taken steps to prevent it from happening again… EVER! TRUST us.”

All environmental pollutants have “safety” thresholds. In legitimate science, we define such thresholds as levels below which we’ve not detected any harmful effects.

However, this does NOT mean that exposure at such levels IS safe. In truth, exposures at such levels may BE safe.

On the other hand, it may be a matter of the effects being too subtle, at such levels, to be noticeable. Or maybe the sophistication level of our measuring devices is simply inadequate.

In fact, we may not have a clue for, perhaps, ten or twenty years or so. Think asbestos exposure. Think formaldehyde babies. Think thyroid cancers in children.

Shortly after 1986, radiation releases at Chernobyl gave rise to record numbers of thyroid cancers in children who lived within the affected areas (Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia). But, according to the threshold studies of the time, this was not possible.

Radiation from Iodine-131 released by the accident was well within the safety threshold limits. According to those “experts,” it simply could not have caused the increase.

However, the threshold study never took into account the elevated degree of sensitivity of children’s thyroid glands! Oops! Our bad.

Along this trend, taking excessive amounts of Tylenol can cause liver damage. It says so right on the outer container and, AGAIN, on the container label holding the pills!

But, if you already have a damaged liver, even if you don’t know it, taking Tylenol can kill you. It can kill you even if your dosage remains well within its safety threshold limits, a drug store associate’s advice notwithstanding.

Now, let us get into the wonderful world of supposedly more familiar numbers, even if mass confusion reigns supreme, thus providing for exponential confusion.

First, though, let’s digress for a second and talk about the difference between mathematics and its child by an unknown father: arithmetic.

You may not deal with mathematics. Most normal people don’t. Oh, it’s important enough. Science would be impossible without it. I know that my working life would have been difficult without it.

But, while mathematicians don’t deal much with arithmetic, they still do themselves a disservice.

Normal folks call them “cloud-9” theorists because, in part, they go glassy-eyed over a perpetual debate as to whether humans invented or discovered mathematics.

Trust me, the nation’s banks don’t care. They just want you to pay your mortgage payment on time, in the proper amount, and without the check bouncing.

Also, when you’re trying to measure the proper ratio of ingredients to make the chicken batter, you probably don’t give much thought as to the fact that theoretical mathematicians have calculated π out to ten billion decimal places without seeing a pattern.

No, mathematicians don’t deal much in adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Neither do they delve much into averages, medians, or modes. These are arithmetic functions. Technicians do this kind of stuff.

For others, things like averages (and their cousins, medians and modes), mean little unless they have a direct bearing on their lives. Even then, many people can’t tell what in the hell the numbers REALLY mean, especially when we add the ever so suspicious term, statistics, to the conversation.

Worse, such folks tend to like and believe the statistics they agree with, and discard as suspicious, those they don’t like; giving little thought, or none at all, to the mechanics of the calculations.

A friend of mine owns a production company. He employs 32-people, including himself. On average, not including his take, the average annual salary per employee is $47,231.54 a year.

But, his draw is $600,000 a year. If I throw HIS annual earnings into the mix, the average annual salary per employee is $64,506. Quite a difference, as you can see.

So, which is true? I guess it depends on whether he’s talking to the IRS or potential investors.

I heard a prosecution’s expert witness testify that the chances of another DNA sample matching the one found at the scene of a homicide were 1-million to one. It was in New York City, where the population exceeded 8-million people.

The jury seemed impressed. I wasn’t. With an 8-million plus pool of people, combined with a one in a million chance of additional matches, seven other people could have had matching DNA.

Without additional corroborating circumstantial evidence, reasonable doubt had to be in the preponderance of the jury’s thinking. As it turned out, it was and the jury acquitted the defendant. The prosecutor didn’t like it.

Never take an average at its word, not even if your own mother gave it to you. Ask questions. Ask, “Can we talk? It’s about that standard deviation. Is it high?” Sounds ominous and complicated, but it’s not.

The standard deviation is a measure of by how much the individual data elements deviate from that calculated average. All you need is a simple calculator, the $9.95-variety.

Take each data element. Subtract it from the calculated average. Square the answer (multiply it by itself). Then, add up all of those squares. When you derive the total, calculate ITS average, and take the square root of it. Congratulations! You’ve just calculated a standard deviation.

The higher the standard deviation, the more likely that what you originally thought to be an etched in stone, divine revelation… ISN’T one.

OK, I’m out of here for this week. According to the data I found on a social website emailed to me by a loyal reader, the average male scores, on average, 7-times a week. MAN! I have a ton of make-up to do. I’ll worry about the standard deviation some other time.

Joseph Walther is a freelance writer and publisher of The True Facts. Copyright laws apply to all material on this site. Send your comments. Just click here.