RIFLE RANGE BOY

Ancient Apocalypse (2022) Netflix, Documentary series Graham Hancock is an old hand at this. A veteran journalist prolific at this topic, he has earned himself the dubious reputation of being a pseudo-historian and pseudo-archaeologist. Many of his previous books have dabbled with the same issue. His premise is this: Even before mainstream history dated humans to be hunter-gatherers around the end of the Ice Age 11,600 years ago, Hancock's research posits that a far more advanced civilisation existed during this wave of hunter-gatherers.  The ruins he so skilfully shows in this series of documentaries depict the advanced skill of architectural marvel and skill that those people exhibited.  If Erich von Däniken had earlier suggested an ancient alien race to have assisted human civilisation, here Hancock does not invoke ancient intelligence. He instead suggests that we had already developed all these advanced levels of knowledge in building and astronomy but lost most of it to t...

FALSE ALARM How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet By Bjorn Lomborg There is no denying that the world is getting hotter by the day. If we go by our life experiences, we do not remember feeling fearful of staying outdoors in the heat of the afternoon tropical sun. Fans were luxury items, and air conditioning was opulent at its height.  In the early 1990s, I had the pleasure of meeting some guests from Dubai during a family function. I was surprised when they started complaining about the Malaysian weather, specifically the heat. Living in a desert country, they were complaining about the Malaysian heat. When enquired, they unanimously admitted that because of the architecture and setup of their infrastructure, they were nicely shielded from the blazing desert sun. That carries a significant weightage in how we handle climate change, according to this book which gives a different outlook on how the world should looking this problem....

Swans in Venetian Canal  Credit @filterjm Probably for the first time since Man started giving salutations to the feared forces around him, he has been asked to stop all kinds of religious congregations in big groups. For aeons, Man believed that maladies take place because the Divine forces have been angered. In their simple understanding, the only avenue left for them to correct the tragedy is to appease the Divinity by glorifying it to high heavens; hoping that He would throw us His Grace. Hence, despite appeals by the authorities, practitioners of various faiths continue to put their trusts in the forces above, not in rational thinking and the sciences. They feel that people have been misled for far too long. The way the human race appears to be heading does not assure them of a happy ending. Too many have placed self-interest above salvation to expect altruism to prevail. There are groups of people who are hellbent in finding scapegoats. In their minds, many if not mos...

The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007) Channel 4; UK. I thought that it is a given thing, that Man's existence is the reason for nature's degradation, that our carbon footprint is leaving irreparable damage to the ecosystem, that our reaping and raping of its resources for our selfish needs is going leave our descendants cursing at our lackadaisical attitudes, that our mere existence is going to increase the atmospheric carbon dioxide content and raise the global temperature. That was the prophecy that had been pushed down our throats all this while. Well, now a group of scientists say that this is not the whole truth. That is the problem in the post-truth world where nothing is so clear cut anymore. For any argument, there is always another equally convincing counter-argument. The listeners are left baffled, confused and come to understand that the truth is a multilayered animal that is neither black nor white! This polemic documentary film is emphatic that...

Before the Flood (2016) This must surely be the follow-up to Al Gore's 2006 'The Inconvenient Truth'. It is an indirect manner of telling that nothing much has changed in the past ten years except that what was known as global warming is now referred to as climate change. The latter seems to be a more appropriate term as the weather change caused by the excessive emission of greenhouse gases also give rise to colder winters as well. Before the Industrial Revolution, the world used to be in a steady state. Greenhouse gases (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, fluorinated carbons and ozone) from the perspiration of plants and animals helped to maintain the temperature of Earth which would otherwise be too cold (-18 degree C) for human inhabitance. The corals in the sea and lush green forest act as a reservoir to absorb the extra greenhouse gases primarily carbon dioxide,  CO 2.   Man's insatiable desire to assault of Nature with their...