3rd September 1956: A London Zoo worker cleans the teeth of ‘Moby Dick’, which formed part of an exhibit on whales. One of Moby Dick’s inspirations ? the true to life sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820 ? is a story that?s steeped in horrific events like starvation, cannibalism and the crew slowly driven mad by their tragic circumstances. (Photo : Fox Photos/Getty Images)

Whaling, Human Sacrifice and the True Story of ?Moby-Dick?

On the morning of November 20, 1820, in the Pacific Ocean, an enraged sperm whale rammed the Nantucket whaler Essex. As the boat began to sink, her crew of twenty?had time only to collect some bread and water before pulling away in three frail open boats. Without charts, alone on the open seas, and thousands of miles from any known land, the sailors began their terrifying journey of survival. Ninety days later, after much suffering and death by starvation, intense heat, and dehydration, only eight men survived to reach land. One of them was Owen Chase, first mate of the ill-fated ship, whose account of the long and perilous journey has become a classic of endurance and human courage. The elements of his tale inspired Herman Melville (who was born the year the Essex sank) to write the classic Moby Dick.

In its day, word of the ill-fated voyage created a kind of tidal wave of horror, passing from ship to ship and shore to shore. The tale so haunted whaling circles that Melville, already familiar with the story, was intrigued when a shipmate, on a long ocean journey, pulled a book from his sea chest. It was a chronicle of the disaster written by the sailor?s father, Owen Chase, the first mate on the Essex. ?The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea,? Melville later wrote, ?had a surprising effect upon me.? Chase?s memoir would go on to serve as the basis for the climax of Melville?s 1851 novel, Moby-Dick.

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Remember the shock, horror announcements about a supposed island of plastic in the middle of the Pacific ocean?

All bullshit. Now it’s been busted as a lie and a myth.

The ?Great Pacific Garbage Patch? has been billed as a floating island of plastic debris, stretching out across an area of ocean the size of India, a testament to man?s abuse of the planet.

So when images emerged from the first aerial survey of the area they proved somewhat underwhelming.

Far from showing a vast swathe of plastic containers, fishing nets and rubbish, the detritus was seen to be scattered over a wide area, with just 1,000 large objects discovered in a survey of thousands of square miles.

Although The Ocean Cleanup, the charity who carried out the sweep, claimed that they had found more plastic than was expected, other experts said the ?garbage patch? was a myth which had never been substantiated by any proper scientific research and risked diverting attention from the real problem ? a dangerous build of microplastics in the area.? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz

Angus and Evelyn Jane.

My Mother’s Lover

What Happens when Your Mother’s Dying Wish is to Rest in Peace with…Someone You’ve Never Heard of Before?

For years my mother wore a gold locket. When I was a boy, I liked to pull it up from inside her blouse on its chain, tugging it up from between her breasts so I could squeeze the curved button that ran along one edge and make the curlicue gold cover, heavily sprung, pop open to reveal a photograph of my mother?s grandparents.

On an elegant chair sat her grandmother and namesake, Ivy Evelyn Stone, a formidable-looking woman wearing a full skirt, a fuller blouse, and an immensely confident expression. Next to her chair stood her husband, Gene, a railroad engineer in their hometown of?Wichita Falls. Especially in Wichita Falls, a railroad town, this was a high-status position then, like that of an airline pilot 50 years later. He is dressed in suit and tie, hair slicked, with his hand on the back of the?chair.

I viewed this portrait as a fair representation of the distant world from which my mother came: a stable, solid existence full of aunts and uncles and her mother and father and grandparents all living toughly but carefully in the high bright sun struck towns of north Texas. The picture agreed with the steady, accomplished, morally sturdy person I and many others knew my mother to be. But it hid the fact that she came from a world that moved violently beneath her?feet.

The February after my mother died, my brother, Allen, left his New Mexico home and boarded a plane for Honolulu. He carried a backpack that carried a rosewood box that carried our mother’s ashes. The next day, on Maui, he bought six leis and rented a sea kayak. With the leis in a shopping bag and our mother’s ashes in his pack, he paddled into the Pacific.

That day nine years ago was the sort one hopes for in the tropics: warm and balmy, with a breeze that pushed cat’s paws over the water. Beyond the mouth of the bay he could see rising plumes, the spouts of humpback whales gathered to breed. He paddled toward them. When he was closer to the whales than to the shore, he shipped his oar and opened his pack. He pulled out the box and sat with it on his lap, letting the boat drift. He watched the distant spouts. Without any prelude, a whale suddenly but gently surfaced about 30 yards in the distance and released a gush of air. It bobbed, noisily breathed, and dove.

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I just want to get this on record, so that every time the Green Taliban and it?s enablers complain about warm dry conditions, I can point back to this and show them they?re still no better than last year?s Luddites.

An El Nino hitting New Zealand this summer is now “extremely likely”, climate scientists say.

The National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) today issued its climate outlook for the next three months, reporting that it was “virtually certain” – with a 97 per cent chance – that the ocean-driven El Nino would continue through to October.

Further, it was “extremely likely” – with a likelihood of above 90 per cent – that the El Nino would persist into the summer of 2015/16.

Over the next three months, above-normal pressure was forecast over and to the south of Australia, while below normal pressure was expected well to the northeast of New Zealand. ? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz

One of the big scams of the whole climate change fraud is the claim that pacific islands and atolls will disappear under a rising sea.

Apparently if we transfer billions of dollars from first world countries and give it to third world countries this can be solved.

Apparently climate science?is the only science in the world that is settled and can’t change, but there are pesky scientists out there that show the claims of the past are bunkum….like the atolls will disappear.

Now a new study from the Geological Society of America?shows otherwise:

Coral islands defy sea-level rise over the past century: Records from a central Pacific atoll

P.S. Kench, D. Thompson,M.R. Ford,H. Ogawa andR.F. McLean

 

Abstract

The geological stability and existence of low-lying atoll nations is threatened by sea-level rise and climate change. Funafuti Atoll, in the tropical Pacific Ocean, has experienced some of the highest rates of sea-level rise (?5.1 ? 0.7 mm/yr), totaling ?0.30 ? 0.04 m over the past 60 yr. ? ? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz

New Zealand sent 18 people to Lima in Peru for a talkfest about doing?”SOMETHING, ANYTHING, PLEASE” about global warming. Eighteen people flying across the Pacific ocean to talk about how we can contribute to stopping the poles melting.

It never occurs to these morons that stopping such talk-fests would be a good start.

We are about to likely send even more people to Paris for the next talk-fest, but it turns out the poles don’t need saving, not that you will ever read about in NZ media or hear from our government.

In fact, the poles are “much more stable” than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought.

For years, scientists have suggested that both poles are melting at an alarming rate because of warming temperatures – dangerously raising the Earth’s sea levels while threatening the homes of Arctic and Antarctic animals.

But the uncertainty surrounding climate change and the polar ice caps reached a new level this month when research suggested the ice in the Antarctic is actually growing.

And there could even be evidence to suggest the polar bear population is not under threat.

Ted Maksym, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, conducted a study in which he sent an underwater robot into the depths of the Antarctic sea to measure the ice.

His results contradicted previous assumptions made by scientists and showed that the ice is actually much thicker than has been predicted over the last 20 years.

Dr Benny Peiser, from the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF), said this latest research adds further proof to the unpredictability of the supposed effects of global warming.

He said: “The Antarctic is actually growing and all the evidence in the last few months suggests many assumptions about the poles was wrong.

“Global sea ice is at a record high, another key indicator that something is working in the opposite direction of what was predicted.” ? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz

Slave ship

New Zealand has a low level of modern slavery but people are still being exploited and changes need to be made, a global survey has found.

“Modern slavery for us is any situation where one person deliberately takes away another person’s liberty for some sort of profit or gain,” Walk Free Foundation global research executive director Fiona David says.

Modern slavery traps 35.8million people

This includes human trafficking, forced labour, forced or servile marriage, and the sale and exploitation of children.

New Zealand is estimated to have 600 people in modern slavery, the fourth lowest prevalence of 167 countries in the Global Slavery Index.

The known cases involved workers in modern slavery with the most widely documented being on fishing charter vessels in New Zealand waters, Ms David told NZ Newswire.

“Their situations have included being subjected to violence, sexual abuse, being fed stale bread and fish bait, working 30-hour shifts and even being paid 35 cents an hour.”

New laws clamping down on fishing boat conditions come into force in 2016, which was “really positive”, she said.

-NZ Newswire

So who in New Zealand are responsible for modern slavery? I did a bit of digging and came up with this…

Read more »

SB

If you agree with me that’s nice, but what I really want to achieve is to make you question the status quo, look between the lines and do your own research. Do not be a passive observer in this game we call life.

You can follow me on Gab.ai 

To read my previous articles click on my name in blue.

Once of the great warmist theories about the missing heat that is causing the “pause” in global warming, something everyone except the most brainwashed now admit to is that the oceans are soaking up all the spare heat and it is hiding in deep water.

Except it isn’t, as NASA has just proven.

The cold waters of Earth?s deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, analyzed satellite and direct ocean temperature data from 2005 to 2013 and found the ocean abyss below 1.24 miles (1,995 meters) has not warmed measurably. Study coauthor Josh Willis of JPL said these findings do not throw suspicion on climate change itself.

“The sea level is still rising,” Willis noted. “We’re just trying to understand the nitty-gritty details.”

In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s oceans — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.

Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array. ? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz

You’d think listening to opposition parties and politicians that New Zealand sucked.

The problem with that is visitors love our country.

And now we have been rated top spot to visit by luxury travellers.

New Zealand has topped leading US luxury travel agency Virtuoso?s annual ?Hot List?, winning the honour for the biggest year-on-year growth in luxury travel.

The announcement was made at Virtuoso Travel Week, held in August, in front of 4,420 delegates, attending from 92 countries ? the largest delegate attendance ever.

New Zealand topped the list by a wide margin, with a staggering increase of 196 per cent growth year-on-year. Chile followed in second place, with an increase of 103 per cent, while Indonesia, Hungary and Hong Kong made up the remainder of the top five. ?? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz

Isaac Davidson has an article in the Herald today about allegedly rising sea levels, in particular the unique scientific anomaly where water levels are rising faster in the Marshall Islands than anywhere else on the planet…yes I’m not kidding they really claim that.

The Marshall Islands have a population of 55,000 spread over 180sq km of coral atolls and islands.

*?2m above sea level on average.

*?Sea levels have risen 7mm a year since 1993, compared with a global average of 0.4mm.

*?Sea levels are expected to increase by up to 15cm by 2030.

Really? …Does Isaac know anything about fluid dynamics? How can a sea level rise faster in the Marshall Islands…than say Fiji, or Samoa?

Quite apart from the fact that this is impossible…go on I dare you to try and raise the water level in your pool in just one spot…say…at the shallow end…go on try it…add in more water at the shallow end…it should according to Isaac Davidson raise the water level just where you added the water…and increase it more than the rest of the pool.

But hey, let’s not let facts get in the way of a good story from the “decent journalists, trained and skilled” at the Herald.? Read more »

Cameron Slater

As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news, he tends to be in it, with protagonists using the courts, media and social media to deliver financial as well as death threats.

They say that news is something that someone, somewhere, wants kept quiet. Cam Slater doesn’t do quiet and, as a result, he is a polarising, controversial but highly effective journalist who takes no prisoners.

He is fearless in his pursuit of a story.

Love him or loathe him, you can’t ignore him.

To read Cam’s previous articles click on his name in blue.

http://whaleoil.net.nz