More Twaddle

Japan has not warmed since 1989!

1989 is the year that Dr. James Hansen, then Director, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before a Senate subcommittee, its name too long to matter.  Prior to the hearing, air conditioning was turned off in the room and the windows opened. They wanted people to be hot and uncomfortable. This was the hearing that introduced the world to the concept of Global Warming, later changed to Climate Change (probably to avoid the embarrassment of absence of warming).

This article shows three graphs, one each for Tokyo, the island of Hachijō-jima, and the entire island of Japan. Winters there have not warmed since 1987 (the entire island), and 1984 (Tokyo). The graph for Hachijō-jima goes all the way back to 1947. If anything it shows a slight cooling trend.

Above is the graph for Tokyo, said by the authors to be taken from “the untampered data from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA).” Tampering with the past is a huge problem , as Climate Alarmists are not honest about the trends of the future, so why would they not alter the past? The graph looks like a jumble, as weather varies widely from year to year. It can be seen that the rolling average line has declined from 7.2 degrees centigrade to 7.0 degrees (about 45 Fahrenheit) during  the 37 years in question. There is no warming going on in Japan.

I learned something new reading this piece: applying a rolling average line to a graph as done here is not something done without rigorous rules, called the Western Electric Rules, or WECO. These are eight rules used in statistics to detect out-of-control or non-random data in a chart like the one presented above. They were developed in 1956 by a Western Electric committee. You can read about those rules here, and yes, the charts presented in the piece about Japan’s winters are vetted and have passed the WECO rules. The island of Japan is not warming. If anything, it is cooling.

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It’s quiet here … too quiet

We feed birds on our back deck, a fun and relaxing activity. Birds, according to some expert I once listened to, will take in up to 20% of their diet from feeder food. As population follows food supply, I reckon that many of our birds are alive due to us, that is, they never would have come into existence without us. Winter is the best time for feeding, especially during storms when we have wild activity all day long. During breeding season, there is no activity at all. This, according to the same expert, is because when birds are feeding their young, they switch from seed food to insects. Young chicks need more protein than seeds provide. So in late spring we remove the feeders.

Two days ago we were having the usual frenzy out there, and then it suddenly stopped. No bird in sight anywhere, just dead silence. Having been at this for a while, I suspected I might know the reason, seen below:

That is a sharp-shinned hawk. That species is known for coming in to cities and towns and preying on birds around feeders. Its diet consists of other birds.

This particular bird sat on that branch for maybe half an hour, and during that time not one bird offered up a target for him/her.  (Male/female sharp shinned hawks are virtually identical in appearance.) Often when they come around we will find a pile of feathers, or see feathers on a beak. This time it had no luck. In fact, I wondered if this is a young bird, as it lacked stealth. All predators develop tricks to trap their prey. I would think this one would want to stay a little more hidden, and then swoop. Its position here is maybe twenty feet from the feeders. It left empty-handed, or empty-taloned, I should say.

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Autotune this!

The comedian Lewis Black was not a fan of Britney Spears. [On a Super Bowl commercial starring Spears:]  “She came out, and she was singin’ about Pepsi. But you don’t know what she’s singin’, ’cause she can’t SING!” You have to imagine Black, his tiny hands shaking, his voice rising to almost shouted anger. I suspect he was privy to real-mic, or un-Autotuned versions of her actual performance, as she cannot sing.

The video below is four minutes, but I urge that you only glimpse into it, as it is painful. What we hear is true of many performers, I imagine.

In 1997, Autotune was invented by Andy Hildebrand, and was instantly a massive hit in the music business. Spears above is not sounding that bad in concert because a studio version of the song, corrected with Autotune, is what the audience hears. She is merely lip syncing and we are (un)fortunate to be able to pick up what the microphone is hearing.

Autotune is controversial. A Jay-Z song is titled D.O.A., meaning death of Autotune. Music critic Neil McCormick says Autotune is “… a particularly sinister invention that has been putting extra shine on pop vocals since the 1990s” by taking “a poorly sung note and transpos[ing] it, placing it dead centre of where it was meant to be”

I imagine that without Autotune, live performances by star singers and groups would diminish. They’d be exposed for what they are, a selected few with aristocratic ties who are chosen for fame and puffed up, none dare calling them out for lack of talent. In the 1960s and 70s we had the Wrecking Crew for that very reason – the star attractions lacked the one thing to make it in the business, real talent.

I am curious if the whole of the music business, but especially the concert venue, is but a show backed by electronics but lacking real talent. If they could fake it for Britney, why not for all of them? Is anything real in that business?

But there is another side of the story, not about Spears, but one of my favorites, Karen Carpenter. I ran across the Wings of Pegasus YouTube channel, and I do not know the narrator’s name. He is part of the band, and has injured his hand and so is doing talking videos like this one. In it he analyzes KC in the recording studio and in concert (1971, long before Autotune). It is 19 minutes long, and very interesting, but it you don’t have time, I’ll give you the details below the video.

Karen (can) could sing. She hit notes precisely, and was even better in live performances than in the recording studio. She was close to pitch perfect. Our Wings of Pegasus friend uses visual aides to confirm this, and finds that even though her rendition of the Burt Bacharach song Close to You differs slightly in tempo from studio to stage, that she is amazingly consistent and musically dead-on.

Interesting note: Even in 1971 they were not taking chances in concerts. The Carpenters concert in which she sings Close To You is her real live voice, but everything else is studio recordings. The guitars, drums, even Richard on piano, are muted for the performance, which had to frustrate him. He is a gifted and versatile musician and song writer, but had to take a back seat to her remarkable voice. To sit there banging on silent keys – he must have been swearing like a blue comedian (Lewis Black?) under his breath.

17 thoughts on “More Twaddle”

  1. Twaddle- And more Twaddle. Gotta love it, You can’t make this stuff up. First of all, your Grandpa was one helluva Rogue. Didn’t like to be pushed around or told what to do…A man after my own heart, Just an unwashed immigrant yearning to “breathe free”. it took a Patato truck and a “Stand-up woman” to bring him to where he wanted to be…How cool is that? Thumbs up to “Grandma” for pulling it off. There’s always a moral to every story- And a moral to the song…And that is, That one should never be where one does not belong.

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    1. Sorry Mark, My comments keep going to moderation. So I write my thoughts again and they are showing up here “twice”.. in a similar version

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  2. Mark-

    The color pattern on your sharp-shinned hawk made me think I had taken pictures of the same breed. However, after consulting the experts online, and finding out that yours is “tiny” in size (compared to other hawks), I then settled on “red backed hawk”, only to change my mind, finally, to “red shouldered hawk”. I’m comfortable with that.

    One interesting fact with my hawk is that where it exists in various places in the midwest or east of the country, it is much more drab in appearance. Only here, near the west coast, does it develop the beauty of color like in these photos.

    I had seen this hawk several times, and noted that it tended to allow more closeness than other hawks I encounter, and on this day posed for me as you see him/her…
    I take photos. I don’t go looking for birds. Mostly photos of plants and plant parts, they’re always right there. I’ve posted this before, this link to some of my pics, for those who like exploring images. “https://www.juzaphoto.com/me.php?p=124645&pg=allphotos&l=en”


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    1. Kind of hard to see on your end, but I have the Sibley’s book open before me. Your diagnosis is correct, it is a red shouldered hawk, and yours is the California adult. The book says that the upper orange on the breast is diagnostic. The map makes them kind of rare in Oregon, maybe three green dots, meaning that three breeding pairs have been spotted there at the time of this book going to press (2001).

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  3. RE: Mrs. Carpenter
    I did some quick checking about on “Perfect Pitch”… sure, that’s nice, but I place more value on a powerful delivery. All personal preference, no?

    If you want to stick to that earlier time, I’d take Cass Elliot over her any day. More recently: Carly Simon; Pat Benatar, Annie Lennox; Sinead O’Connor; Sheryl Crow… Adele can rip it up, so can Florence Welch. Any of which I’d rather listen to. Of course a strong [full] band behind you adds to the beauty.

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    2. By the way, it’s all a matter of personal taste, and Cass Elliot was a subject of interest here, as she could knock it out of the ball park. Choking on a ham sandwich? An undignified fake death, if you ask me. And that is my interest in Karen, as far as I can research without going $$$ crazy, alive and well in North Fort Myers, but deprived of her seat before fans paying tribute to her real talent, unable to perform publicly, a cruel fate. So too with Cass, Ellen Naomi Cohen. She was a great singer.

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      1. Greetings: I saw Cass Elliot’s daughter in a video about her mom’s life; she said that Mama Cass died of cardiac arrest (which, of course, may have been fake). The “choking on a ham sandwich” story was “just another nasty poke at the fat lady” nothing but a “vicious rumor”.

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  4. I’ve been watching Wings of Pegasus, too, which I find quite fascinating although I’m not really that interested in music – he just popped up on my YT feed – the last one I watched was Roy Orbison who, seemingly uniquely, would sing notes starting in vibrato rather than going into it.

    Cass Elliot daughter said that her manager made the cause of death a ham sandwich when it was really probably more a combo of drink and drugs – the sandwich next to her bed wasn’t touched. I don’t think her death was faked … just like the sad, recent death of Shane Warne, Australia’s most notorious cricketer who departed this mortal coil at a youthful 52. It’s reasonable to think that the jab may have played a role but at the same time his lifestyle (not necessarily lots of drink and drugs but just a bit extreme in certain ways) wasn’t conducive to a long life according to what his friends say.
    Cass Elliot’s daughter

    I’m not entirely sure that’s Britney singing. A comment on the video says that when you lip sync you don’t sing along as that will cause distortion and that makes sense to me. If it is, oh my goodness, but she certainly seemed to have a good voice as a 10 year old in Star Search. I think poor Britney’s had enough done to her without nasty people making videos about her voice.

    BTW, Mark, I have this comment awaiting moderation on your Snopes post.
    https://pieceofmindful.com/2022/02/27/snopes-for-dummies/#comment-235102

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    1. It has been a long time since I and another person looked into the untimely death of Cass Elliot. Since she was but a few months short of attaining age 33, we operated on the assumption that it was a fake death.

      Deaths from overdose are very uncommon, and usually the result of street drugs with foreign ingredients. The higher quality drugs, which wealthy rock stars can afford, do not cause death. The assumption that rock stars are so often addicted to drugs is often just preplanning, as the careers are to be short and they need a reason to exit the public scene. This would be my assumption with Cass, but we had to leave it at that as we found no evidence of fakery and nothing in the way of fake photos that I found with Karen Carpenter. So Cass is presumed dead until shown otherwise, but I am highly suspicious.

      There was a spate of dead rock stars in that era, as if they could do no better than cheap street drugs. It was part of Operation Chaos, wherein children of military families took on the roles of band members, and performing music written by others and issuing albums where the instruments were played by others, changed our habits of dress and musical taste, and encouraged us to take drugs, especially LSD, and leave our families behind. Woodstock was a seamy result, mass debauchery and shameless substance abuse and sexual indulgence. This whole effort, which included infiltration if the antiwar movement, culminated in the Tate/Manson affair, a completely staged episode of such horror that the entire country was traumatized, and the antiwar and countercultural movement, compromised anyway, ended.

      The dead rockers were merely reassigned to new roles, or retired to normal lives, mission accomplished. My most fascinating research followed the lives of a set of twins known as “Buddy Holly”, who later became two more rockers known as “Gram Parsons,” who faked their death, later to become David Geffin and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the K and G in SKG, Spielberg’s production company. That’s where I left it, who would believe me anyway? It is too bizarre, but that is where the evidence took me.

      Given all that, it seemed reasonable to suspect that Cass’s untimely departure was a planned event, perhaps due to an unsustainable career (as with Janis Joplin) or merely a desire to lead a normal life. Her weight and self esteem might have played a role, but the talent was real. My suspicion, she is alive somewhere, or at least lived a few more decades. Of course, I cannot prove anything. I have to be satisfied with my own research and suspicions, and let the criticism fall by the wayside. I have put in the time and effort, no one else has done so.

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      1. Mark, I’m with you on many, many events but I’m afraid I can’t get into the rock-deaths-faked-morphed-into-other-people theories – not to say that none of them have happened but, in general, I can see no reason for them and I don’t see the similarities in the people.

        Loads of other faked deaths, of course, including, for example, David Kelly’s, the alleged weapons inspector who supposedly was made a scapegoat over the Iraq WMD and committed suicide but who, it’s intimated to those who distrust the authorities, was murdered. BS! It was neither. Fake! We are told lots of nonsense in his Wikipedia bio (the site where intelligence gives us all the psyop clues) including that he was working on decontaminating Gruinard Island of anthrax which – supposedly – had been used for experiments during WWII on weaponised anthrax. BS! Anthrax is a complete phoney just like nuclear just like bioweapons in general. Weapons are generally either physical, chemical or in the electronic arena I think – perhaps radiation is also used but not in nuclear bombs.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)

        In this interesting interview with Dr Mark Bailey, Sam Bailey’s husband, he speaks of how the graphene in the jabs may be responsible for the heart problems being caused due to conductivity.
        https://www.humanley.com/blog/episode44

        BTW, the Tokyo temperatures shown are only for winter which doesn’t necessarily give an accurate picture and I wonder why they use winter figures, why not annual?

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        1. If one set of figures are not warming, then others cannot be either. Other things are going on. Here in the US, the lower 48, I have data showing that daytime monthly high temperatures over the last 100 years are rising, but in a barely perceptible manner, usually less than 1 degree Fahrenheit per decade. But nighttime temperatures are rising at a higher rate. Why? Global warming? Cannot be so. If so, then daytime temperatures would also rise. Look for other causes. So if Japanese winters are not getting warmer, look for other causes for other temperature variations. Yes, the planet is warming, and has been since 1680 or so, the bottom of the Little Ice Age. Warmth is good, cold our enemy. Glaciers, at least in the northern hemisphere, appear to be shrinking. Arctic ice is stable, Antarctic ice increasing. We need warmth more than ice.

          When we discovered that the whole Janis Joplin business was a hoax, that she became “Amy Goodman” of Democracy Now!, and that Bobby Fuller became Bill O’Reilly of FOX News, that similarly Charlie Rose of PBS and Brian Williams of NBC and Bill Maher of HBO, all people of former rock backgrounds and fake deaths, (and all references that might be unfamiliar to a European), we did not know what to make of it. We just knew that the deaths appeared fake, as death at young ages (27, 33, 53) are statistically highly unlikely, and that while coupled with a person amazingly resembling a news public figure can indeed be coincidental, that but in all of life, people rarely precisely resemble on another in facial plate, we were onto something, but we did not know what exactly.

          What to make of it? My conclusion: News is controlled at all levels, and all outlets, FOX, NBC, PBS, even little Democracy Now! answer to the same piper. They craft their appeal to different audiences, but deliver the same propaganda to each. Every agent of news is controlled.

          That is what our evidence, rather than our beliefs, told us.

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          1. Good stuff. 10,000 channels, all colors, sizes and genders, writing/talking from the same template. We’ve seen this happen twice in the last two years, of course. I think the whole “the press used to be free” is a little overstated, as printing presses, etc were quite expensive. However, seems newspaper op/eds were more varied in the past than they are now; I believe the example given was the Vietnam War, but there seems to have been massive support amongst the cannon fodder for non-intervention in both WWs, until certain unforeseen events occurred which forced “us” to take action. Seems Congressional votes were less unanimous back then too. Groupthink brings us together!

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