Was this supposed to happen?

Canaries: Warning System for Coal Miners

Early coal miners didn’t have the special equipment miners have today to measure gas in the air, so it was impossible to tell if the gases were building up to dangerous levels.

Miners started to use canaries to test the air quality in the mines. Canaries are very sensitive to carbon monoxide. The canaries would chirp and sing and make noise all day long. But, if the carbon monoxide levels got too high, the canaries would have trouble breathing, and maybe even die.

When the canaries were no longer singing, miners would know that the gas levels were too high. They would leave the mine quickly to avoid being caught in an explosion. This is how canaries acted as a warning system for miners.

Most of my adult life I have been jokingly called the canary in the coal mine. Back when I worked at Borden’s, I ALWAYS knew there was an ammonia leak before the detectors went off. That’s true of most smoke and chemicals. They get to me before anybody else. Who else do you know who has gone into anaphylactic shock multiple times from movie screens?

My sensitivity to irritants waxes and wanes over the years for no apparent reason. You’ve heard plenty about me and smoke here. For the last week I have had to turn my oxygen up from 2 to 3 liters. I’ve been having a hard time getting enough air. I was blaming it on the heat and humidity. Last night I figured it out!

Yup…the heat and humidity are making the empty smoker’s apartment extra stinky. I kept smelling smoke after the strangers in the night woke me up at midnight last night. I got out of bed, went across the hall and simultaneously swung open the door and flipped the light switch. Just like before, there is a fan going in there and the doors and windows are open. It was the rain storm we had last night that intensified the smells

Even worse? Like they say…curiosity killed the cat! Just being in there for a minute or less made my neck swell up so it’s as thick as my head. My lymph nodes went nuts and swelled up huge I came back to my room and could still smell the stench coming through my ceiling. I thrashed around for hours and finally fell asleep.

My worst leg…swelling gone down from all the night sweats

WOW! Intense night sweats! The front of my neck has gone down somewhat, but the back of my head is ginormously swollen up!!!! It hurts like heck to hold my head up or turn at all.

It’s hard to take a pic of the back of your own head! If you were here in person, it would be very obvious that my neck has disappeared

Time for a camping trip?????????

Ohhhhhh….I forgot to mention there was a lot of laying down of chemtrails yesterday before the storm

I have been reading the history of the H1N1 virus when it first plagued the world during WW1

It turns out that the H1N1 virus can mutate.

The H1N1 circulated around the globe not one but three times between 1915 and 1918.

The first time it was a mild virus that did little harm. It started in Kansas and was spread in Europe by American Soldiers and from there spread globally.

The second time the virus mutated. It caused a violent overreaction in healthy people’s immune system which would destroy their lungs. Death could happen in hours. Every pregnant woman who caught it died. Estimates of the global death toll was 100 million.

The third time the virus mutated it lessened in strength. However, it spread completely around the world again.

Doctors still know little about H1N1. Pandemic specialists don’t know how to contain it. Pharmaceutical companies need a year to adapt flu shots to a mutation.

This is why the World Health Organization and every Disease Center in the world is worried.

The Canary in the Coal Mine is Dead.

Many of us who live in Silicon Valley pay no heed to decidedly unsexy materials such as aluminum. Of course, they’ve long been integral to our economy — just look at the world’s largest aluminum company, Alcoa. It turned 120 years old on Oct. 1.

A week later, however, the Pittsburgh-based company slashed its growth forecast and suspended its stock repurchasing program, battening down the hatches as the global credit crunch continues to hurt demand. As CEO Klaus Kleinfeld said:

Given the sharp decline in metal prices and increasingly soft demand in our key markets, we are stopping all non-critical capital projects, making targeted reductions to match market conditions, and are adjusting our manufacturing capacity to meet demand in rapidly changing upstream and downstream markets. We are halting production at our smelter in Rockdale, Texas, adjusting alumina capacity accordingly, and are continually reviewing under-performing assets throughout our portfolio. And, we are suspending our share buy-back program.

Why does this matter to Silicon Valley? After all, aluminum is used to make things like airplanes and cars. True, but that’s not all. As a quick visit to Alcoa’s web site will reveal, aluminum is also used to make displays, mobile phones, notebook computers and whole slew of tech-related things. Alcoa even sets up a booth at the annual Consumer Electronics Show.

And now the company says demand in North America is going to decline 10 percent this year. Meanwhile, it expects growth in China to only rise 15 percent compared with an earlier forecast for a 22-percent rise.

And guess where major electronics items are made? China, after which they are sold in North America. My feeling is that aluminum is the canary in the coal mine and is foretelling tough times ahead for both the consumer electronics and computer hardware sectors. We’re already seeing a slowdown in the sales of LCDs TVs — the makers of which are big buyers of aluminum.

There is a good chance the tech malaise is going to spread to the likes of Apple, which uses a ton of aluminum to make their products. Aluminum is also a key ingredient in mobile phones, another area where demand for devices is going to slump, especially for the more profitable, high-end devices. Keep an eye on Nokia and listen for its forecasts.

The automobile industry – a major consumer of aluminum – is already in a deep abyss, with monthly sales plummeting. Automakers are big consumers of technology and have put a whole lot of electronics (including chips) — $113 billion in 2008 — from companies that include chip makers like Freescale, Infineon and STMicroelectronics into cars to power everything from the GPS to the powertrain.

Any slowdown there is going to eventually move up the food chain and hurt these chipmakers. Strategy Analytics recently forecast a $1.1 billion decline in sales of automotive chips for engines in the U.S. alone.

Whichever way you look at it, the credit crunch is going to crimp consumer demand, which will in turn lead to a clampdown on ad spending, including on the web.

And you thought aluminum was boring!

BIODIVERSITY: More bird species means fewer West Nile cases

BIOFUELS: Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis: Internal World Bank study delivers blow to plant energy drive

CANARY IN THE COAL MINE: Penguin woes signal trouble at sea

CARBON: NYC to spend billions to cut greenhouse gases

CLIMATE CHANGE: Welcome to the climate insecurity generation, Grasslands hold up to climate change, California plants squeezed by climate change

CONSERVATION: Nature reserves attract humans, but at a cost to biodiversity, Nature 2.0: Redefining conservation

DAMS: Aral Sea revived by dam

ENERGY POLICY: American energy policy, asleep at the spigot

EXTINCTION: Orang-utans ‘on fast track to extinction’

FISHERIES: Lobsters, crabs, squid, and other invertebrates are becoming more common while populations of bottom-feeding fish are plummeting, according to a long-term trawling study of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay

FOOD: Ugly veggies to ease food crisis?, Taking bite out of banana mess

FUEL ECONOMY: Even modest increases in MPG can equal big gas savings

FUEL PRICES: NYC taxi drivers demand $1 fuel surcharge: Bloomberg Administration opposes idea; union threatens its own unspecified opposition

G8 SUMMIT: Environmentalists unhappy with G8 emissions goal, Environmentalists dismiss G-8 emissions target, Summit that’s hard to swallow – world leaders enjoy 18-course banquet as they discuss how to solve global food crisis

GLOBAL WARMING: Penguin chicks frozen by global warming?, Blocking sun not feasible warming solution

GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS: NYC to spend billions to cut greenhouse gases

HEALTH: Mississippi is the fattest state in the Union

INVASIVE SPECIES: Penguins strangled by invasive grass

MADAGASCAR: Madagascar hopes tourism saves ‘Noah’s Ark’

SCIENCE: Extreme rain grows mountains, Ancient ice sheets fell like dominoes

SOLAR: NanoMarkets predicts thin-film solar cell industry will produce more than 26 gigawatts by 2015, Meet the steel-melting solar mirror

WATER POLLUTION: Olympic sailors facing polluted waters

WILDFIRES: California grid urges conservation amid heat and fires, With resources tight, Californians take on wildfires themselves

WIND POWER: Oil billionaire Pickens puts his money on wind power

WTF?:: Restaurant: Man who died had ordered crab meat: No criminal charges will be filed, but investigators have suggested a mistake occurred

American Refugees are flooding into Canada:

Tens of thousands of Americans are now economic refugees

Read the stories HERE.  Click on the links for the related news stories! I’ve been watching stories on You Tube for a while. Keep praying, store food and water and be prudent financially. We are in for a roller coaster ride…

Somehow I have often been blessed to be the “canary in the coal mine”.  I seem to have all sorts of autoimmune diseases and have been homeless already. I just HAVE to be trendy! My  old postmistress would ask me where I was going on vacation and head in the opposite direction because everywhere I went, a natural (or un-natural) disaster was soon to follow! ;-o

If it happens to me or near me, be afraid….be very afraid….it just hasn’t gotten to you yet  

TONY
“That smog was really bad yesterday. I didn’t get here ’til 3:30pm. Anyway, thank God I got myself one of those Ventolins. You know, it’s harder than most people think, working in the summer.”