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Quote by Christopher Hitchens

“Don't write in to ask whether I would prefer Gingrich to Clinton. Ask, rather, whether Clinton prefers Gingrich to you. Go triangulate yourself.”

Quote by Christopher Hitchens

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Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens was an English-American author, journalist, and social critic. He was known for his sharp wit and controversial views, particularly on religion and politics. Hitchens was a prominent figure in the public discourse of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. more

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“We know that relatively minor sea-level rises could set off major ice-sheet breakups, and it has been suggested by Stephen Oppenheimer that the tremendous earthquakes caused by isostatic rebalancing at the end of the Ice Age could have stirred up 'mountain-topping superwaves' in the northern regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Other than Oppenheimer's own investigations, however, my impression is that while many brilliant individual scientists have studied individual post-glacial phenomena in great depth, very little has yet been done to investigate all these phenomena together as part of a complex system or to consider the effects on the earth and its human population of multiple, interacting cataclysms -- floods, lands subsiding into the sea, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions -- all occurring at the same time.”

EarthquakesDeep Human HistoryCataclysmIce SheetsVolcanismSea Level RisesSuperwaves
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“Let’s examine the history of Genesis I, II, and III. There are many schools of thought on this subject, but the most predominant one is that Moses was the originator. This seems not too far-fetched, since Moses was reared in the Egyptian tradition, in a royal household, and probably had access to many religious writings and teachings now lost with the passing of the archives of Egypt, in Alexandria, Heliopolis, and Sais. Certainly the Ten Commandments were a condensation of the forty-two questions of Osiris for entering heaven. If Moses did write part of the Old Testament, he then must have had Naga tablet writings, or Egyptian interpretations of them, handed down to the Egyptians for thousands of years; and the Egyptian priesthood had knowledge of a cataclysm 11,500 years ago. Priests of Egypt are supposed to have told Solon during his ten years in Egypt (about 600 B.C.) that 9,000 years before that time there was a cataclysm which buried Atlantis beneath the ocean. Note that 9,000 + 600 B.C. + 1950 A.D. equals 11,550 years ago [, when the Younger Dryas ended].”

LostTraditionCatastropheTeachingsArchivesCataclysmYounger Dryas
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“This ability to zoom in at very high resolution on a time window just 21 years wide and almost 13,000 years in the past comes to us courtesy of an amazing scientific resource consisting of ice cores from Greenland. Extracted with tubular drills that can reach depths of more than 3 kilometers, these cores preserve an unbroken 100,000-year record of any environmental and climatic events anywhere around the globe that affected the Greenland ice cap. What they show, and what Allen is referring to, is a mysterious spike in the metallic element platinum--'a 21-year interval with elevated platinum,' as he puts it now--'so we know that was the length of the impact event because there's very little way, once platinum falls on the ice sheet, that it can move around. It's pretty well locked in place.”

ScienceClimate ChangePreservationYounger DryasCosmic ImpactImpact Event
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“The evidence claimed for an impact event includes a charred carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found at some 50 Clovis dated sites across the continent. The layer contains unusual materials (Nano diamonds, metallic micro spherules, carbon spherules, magnetic spherules, iridium, charcoal, soot, and fullerenes enriched in helium-3) interpreted as evidence of an impact event, at the very bottom of the black mat of organic material that marks the beginning of the Younger Dryas. The idea that Earth-based volcanism, or other natural processes, or human activity being responsible has been ruled out.”

EvidenceCatastropheGeologyCataclysmYounger DryasComet Impact
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“To this day, scientists know of only two layers of sediment 'broadly distributed across several continents that exhibit coeval abundance peaks in a comprehensive assemblage of cosmic impact markers, including nanodiamonds, high-temperature quenched spherules, high-temperature melt-glass, carbon spherules, iridium and aciniform carbon.' These layers are found at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary 65 million years ago, when it has long been agreed that a gigantic cosmic impact in the Gulf of Mexico caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, and at the Younger Dryas Boundary 12,800 years ago.”

ScienceCataclysmYounger DryasCosmic Impact
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“The black mat formed on top of the layer of proxies,' Allen replies. 'Down here it has a lot of charcoal in it. But it also has algal remains so it's not just fire. The Younger Dryas changed the climate and made the area much wetter. Algae began to grow along the edges of the lakes.' He puts a hand on the black stripe along the arroyo wall: 'So the remains of about 1,000 years of dead algae, charcoal, and a lot of other stuff are all embedded in here, and at the bottom of it, where the impact happened, we find iridium, platinum, and a layer of melted spherules where the temperatures must have been so high that they would have melted a modern car into a pool of metal.”

ClimateYounger DryasBlack Mat
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“In the case of the Younger Dryas, the jeopardy that humanity faced was not from nuclear missiles but from the incoming fragments of a disintegrating giant comet, traveling at tens of kilometers per second, with the larger fragments as deadly as hundreds of nuclear warheads. Indeed, it is estimated that the total explosive power of the comet fragments that struck the earth in repeated episodes over a period of 21 years some 12,800 years ago would have been of the order of 10 million megatons--1,000 times greater than all the nuclear devices stockpiled in the world today.”

ApocalypseJeopardyDeep Human HistoryCataclysmYounger DryasComet Impact
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