Young Earth Warmists

Climate Change, the Long View | Power Line:

Mostly just posting to have these charts in one place for future reference.

This has been well covered in this Blog, but sometimes a little repetition is good, a little repetition is good ... Marco Rubio ;-)

Young Earth Creationists tend to put the age of the earth at 6-10K years.

Compared to them, our current warmists are like fruit flies compared to elephants! In order to reach their "scientific conclusions", they restrict their data to AT MOST 155-160 years (1860 to now), and in many cases MUCH less ... like "since 1979" for satellite data.

The linked article is short and has three excellent charts to give a little perspective. A scientist would take 160 years of climate data next to 100's of thousands of years ( I find the "billions" to be spurious, no real climate data available on those ranges) is far MORE laughable than your typical scientist likes to consider Young Earth Creation!

They want to show a "trend" on a couple hundred year scale when they have data from thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years to answer for?

Here is the last 10K years of climate data, in GENERAL it has been getting warmer, seas have been rising and C02 levels have been getting higher that whole time. That is what it means to be in one of the 5 "interglacials" in the last 500K years. If you wanted to point out something "scientific" rather than political, the fact that the peaks of warmth seem to be getting lower and the length of the cold periods getting longer MIGHT give a bit of a pause if you also looked at the 500K data.

The following chart is the last 500K data of Vostok data ... the fact that the last 10K shows that while it HAS been getting warmer since the "little ice age", we are only in a "warm period" relative to that cool period ... which is why "climate scientists" talk "avg temp vs baseline" ... the "baseline" is 1981 - 2010.  (Gee, I wonder why they picked THAT?)

At least Young Earth Creationists COMPLETELY admit that they are acting with religion in mind -- but hey, at least it is an OLD religion! The Climate Faith is at best only been holding worship services since 1980!

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Time Reborn: From The Crisis In Physics to the Future of the Universe

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Crisis-Physics-Universe/dp/0544245598

Perhaps one of the best cases I'll ever see of someone passionately trying to escape from shadow of God and going to ANY lengths in an attempt to create a "completely new way of thought" in order to imagine that he is free from any transcendent concepts.

I had to go back and review my blog on "Reason And Analysis", because in many ways this book was more "attempted philosophy" than physics.

Smolin tells us what is bothering him on page 11:

There is a cheapness at the core of any claim that our universe is ultimately explained by another more perfect world standing apart from everything we perceive. If we succumb to that claim, we render the boundary between science and mysticism porous.  

Our desire for transcendence is at root a religious aspiration. The yearning to be liberated from death and from the pain and limitations of our lives is the fuel of religions and mysticism. Does the seeking of mathematical knowledge make one a kind of a priest with special access to an extraordinary form of knowledge? Should we simply recognize mathematics for the religious activity it is? 

He wants to explain the universe ONLY in terms of itself, and does a good job of pointing out how the incredible correlation of mathematics to the observable world in Newtonian Physics, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and the fact that all those "models" are timeless -- in that the formulas work in any place and time and are even reversible in time, is a "cop out". WHY!!! Why do they work? Why THESE particular formulas and initial values? He must know WHY!

The standard model just assumes "it is" -- and this obviously smacks WAY too much of "god" to Smolin. So, he goes for the "other great idea" -- Darwin. "Natural" Selection -- we MUST have had a LOT of universes, so therefore, each black hole is creating yet another universe, and the fact that we see a lot of black holes in our universe "must mean" that there is "natural selection" of universes and the fact that we have a "large number" of black holes "must mean" that we are in an "adaptive universe".

Evolution (of universes) requires time ... "real time", not "relative time", so he especially hates the ideas of relative space-time, "the block universe" and the multiverse. I go into those here a bit if you have not been suitably exposed

A lot of his thinking is based Leibniz's "Principle of Sufficient Reason" ... Everything must have a reason (cause).  Smolin wants to go farther, and make the "cause" be randomness -- as in Darwin, "lots and lots of random tries" and EVENTUALLY you get ANYTHING, including in this case, the laws of physics and the initial conditions of the universe. Although Smolin no longer finds the "laws" to be "laws", but rather "precedents" that may well be "evolving" from our "current approximations".

My nasty brain wonders if the Principle of Sufficient Reason would be required to have a reason? Smolin apparently chooses to be nicer to himself than that.

He is not however so kind to non-believers in Global Warming, religious people, etc. He finds that:

"If our civilization is to thrive, it would be helpful to base our decision making on a coherent view of the world, in which to, to begin with, there is consilience between the natural and social sciences. The  reality of time can be the foundation of this new consilience, in which the future is open and novelty is possible on every scale from the fundamental laws of physics to the organization of economics and ecologies. " 

Oh, "consilience" ... all the knowledge of the universe fitting together and us understanding the implications for "ultimate meaning" ... whole book on it covered here. "Coherence" is a great idea, but while you are in the process of throwing out the standard model of physics for a new evolutionary "precedence model", it seems possible that there may be a "slight delay" in achieving such a "coherent / consilient" view!

I looked up Smolin on the web ... he is 60, so I'm thinking he is having a midlife crisis. In the epilog you get insightful quotes like "The problem of consciousness is an aspect of what the world really is. We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron ..." ... so therefore, understanding MUST be "about relationships" ... oh, and "Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains". Hmmmm

He sums it up with "the only certainty is that we will know more in the future".

Well, assuming that we survive the scourge of Global Warming, there aren't any monster natural disasters, rogue gravity waves, epidemics, etc, we will LIKELY have "more data", but is that really "knowledge"? I'd argue that prior to Einstein and certainly prior to Quantum Mechanics, many people at least THOUGHT they "knew more".  Is consciousness being an intrinsic essence of brains somehow supposed to guide us to "a better world"? Oh, and what would "better" be? (hint ... science has no ideas)

I enjoyed his descriptions of the standard model of Physics. I think they were in some ways better because he was trying to be critical of  rather than just explaining. Ultimately though, it comes down to one of two basic beliefs as covered in the "Reason and Analysis" link:

1). "Something" (God) created what we see with order, timeless and laws DISCOVERABLE BY US -- and that "something" is the "root" ... the causeless cause.

2). OR, the "root" is chaos -- there "just was" a lot of "chaotic stuff", for "no reason". The "wind of time" kept blowing over that junkyard of "stuff" and EVENTUALLY, it just "happened" to arrive at  the 747 universe where I'm typing this.

What Smolin (and some others) add to #2 is that EVERYTHING is RANDOM -- including the laws of physics, the relation of matter / energy, the speed of light, "the wind of time", EVERYTHING!!!

On top of that entirely random EVERYTHING -- including "pre-universe", he adds the faith statement that (due to randomness we assume) that "everything MUST have a REASON" (oh, and randomly developed consciousnesses of unknown character is able to discern those reasons! Tidy!)

But, hey, people that believe in God, math, laws of physics, etc are "cheap mystical priests".

Some guys handle their midlife crisis by buying a convertible and chasing a younger women I'm told ... in a completely random universe, perhaps ????

Crossing Einstein and Life

Einstein Cross - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Do I find these images to be "compelling evidence of God giving us a sign"?

No, I find them to be little hints that stir the soul -- like the little chrome or paint touch on a custom motorcycle, the "Easter Egg" in the game or other computer program or movie ... maybe. As always, God is a both a VERY showy God and a VERY subtle God. He BOTH lavishly stacks the deck to show he is there, yet he leaves enough room so that those who are determined to deny him are not absolutely forced (in this life) to admit the "obvious answer".  (Although, the more we learn, the harder atheism becomes ...)

But such visuals are fun ... and beautiful, and they give that little shiver of recognition of the work of the ultimate creative artist.

The top picture is the Einstein Cross and link takes you to more detail about it if you are interested. It is a visual of gravitational lensing predicted by the general theory of relativity.

The bottom is laminin protein molecule that literally "holds life together".

Both have been become somewhat popular in various Christian circles, but in general I find such things to be a danger if they are taken TOO seriously. The Bible is the Word of God -- it certainly tells us that God created us and holds us together physically, but much more importantly, spiritually and eternally. The creation will all pass away -- only the spirit is eternal.

But while we are here, God has blessed us with little "shivers of eternal awareness" to help light our way home to him.

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Atheists Can't Exist

Eric Metaxas: Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God - WSJ:

Actually, based on current scientific knowledge, NONE of us can be here -- but that seems especially poignant for atheists.

I once knew of an atheist whose last name was "May", who proudly declared himself a "Maytheist" -- "their own god". God is infinite, but is human hubris really limited? I sometimes wonder if the sad and hard to understand requirement of Hell doesn't fall to the need to contain the infinite hubris of Satan and those who deny the spiritually obvious with infinite hubris. Humans (in the flesh) are finite beings -- but perhaps they are allowed infinite hubris if they choose it? Would that be the opposite of choosing the infinite love of Christ? (not that we CAN choose the love ... it is by GRACE, however, since we have free will, we can choose to reject the love)

Reading the whole linked article is well worth it. I've written on the basic topic before.  A revelation of  especially the last 30 years is that another wave of human intellectual hubris in regard to our origins has washed up on the beach of reality and is now receding, leaving the beach as it was before.

After Newton and Darwin, science was pretty sure that all it took was "a few basic elements and processes", and "billions and billions of years" for us to sit back with a Scotch and observe how random chance "easily" bootstrapped a universe for us relax and ponder as lords of all -- albeit with a fairly significant concern that there HAD to be MANY other life forms out there pondering similarly.  We fervently hoped (but not prayed if we were "smart") that they were equally smug, enjoying a crackling fire and adult beverage rather than dreaming of nasty things like universal conquest!

In the early '80s there were few atheists as smug as Carl Sagan, whose "Cosmos" was a very entertaining, but very snooty journey to the beginning of time and to the far reaches of the universe "explaining everything" so that "intelligent people" could dispense with ancient religions and superstitions. Sagan pretty much cried out for the "If he is so smart, how come he is dead?" question.

Sagan now has indeed returned to the much less haughty dust from which he came, and has been replaced by an at least equally smug new "little god that shits", named Neil Degrasse Tyson, who proves to us that dust comes in different shades (he is black). Here is a quote from Neil that fits well with the theme of this post:

Every account of a higher power that I've seen described, of all religions that I've seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.

What a learned position for someone whose faith says that he can't exist! Back in 1966,  Time Magazine featured a "God is Dead" cover, and Sagan  proudly gave the odds for life on other worlds:

The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 27 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.

So, given 50 years and a lot of research, how is our search for that highly likely life going? Hmmm ... well, the "odds" have changed just a bit:

What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

Where did the odds plummet to? Well, the number of parameters is at least at 200 now and you don't hear many hopeful predictions about life on other worlds. In fact, the odds against even US being here are astronomical ... I cover a few of them near the end of this old post. Just for our universe to exist, the "smart money" says you need something like 10⁴⁰⁰ UNIVERSES to get to one like ours ... something like double that for getting a planet suitable  for any life at all, let alone conscious life!

So we are faced with the paradox that a rational atheist has to conclude that according to the "intelligent odds", they simply don't exist. Odds ike that are the mathematical way of saying "NO"! In which case, how can they call themselves "rational"? Or as Fred Hoyle put it ...

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Strange how God has arranged it so that none have an excuse but their own blind will to reject his existence and Grace!

I did take exception to one aspect of the article. Our existence is not the greatest miracle, but the 2nd greatest -- God himself caring enough to take human form and die for our sins is the greatest miracle!

Merry Christmas!

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Paris, Religion, Money and Temperature

Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming | Watts Up With That?:

The linked article is to a new book by three PHDs that points out what the disagreement on AGW (Anthropogenic ("Human Caused") Global Warming) is and why. In summary:

The authors point to four reasons why scientists disagree about global warming: a conflict among scientists in different and often competing disciplines; fundamental scientific uncertainties concerning how the global climate responds to the human presence; failure of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide objective guidance to the complex science; and bias among researchers.

To a normal person, saddled with the burdens of reason and common sense, such conclusions appear obvious, inescapable even. To AGW believers however, the existence of such a book is immediate cause for anger, and quite possibly criminal proceedings to be taken up against the authors. AGW is a religion ... a very dogmatic and jealous one (thou shalt serve no god but government and AGW is it's holy word!).  It proves it's religious vs scientific credentials by falsely (and constantly) asserting the provably bogus religious claim that "97% of scientists agree". (science doesn't make "x% of people" claims, because it relies on experiment not opinion)

The main argument against the book from AGW will no doubt be that it is funded by "The Heartland Institute", a think tank dedicated to finding and implementing free market solutions to problems. Just their mission statement is enough for "The Party" (TP-D) and their media minions to break out the torches and pitchforks for a good witchhunt! Such groups are EVIL first because of the apostasy of claiming that a market might be better than central planning and control for achieving results!  Much like AGW, this has been PROVEN wrong! (see, N Korea is more successful than S Korea, and E Germany was WAY better than W Germany prior to the wall coming down -- oh, and the USSR was so darn successful that ... well, you have to BELIEVE to understand it! )

On top of this, Heartland is FUNDED BY CORPORATIONS! See The New York Times, CBS, NBC, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, etc, might actually BE corporations, have documents that claim they are corporations, etc, but they are just, moral, pure and most of all "Wholly Approved by TP!". They are "good guys" ... white hats, halos, etc.

Heartland is an evil NGO, meaning NON Government Organization! See, the billions of dollars that flow from GOVERNMENTS are like mothers milk ... pure, wholesome completely immune to causing any "bias" on the part of those that receive it! The taking of money by force from evil corporations, "the rich", or printing it on the holy government printing press (counterfeiting)  has the effect of sanctifying it (making it pure, or "laundering" it in coarser terms).

Once sanctified, this holy government money (Batman)! ... has no influence on those that receive it! So they remain completely pure in their "science", having no motivation whatsoever to arrive at conclusions that support increased government funding or adding power to the climate change industry! Note, there are many "corporations" in that industry (Solyndra comes to mind) as well, but just as the left wing media, they too have received the miracle of government sanctification!

This week, the college of climate cardinals is meeting in Paris to decree a new encyclical on temperature. As we know, his Stenchfulness BO has decreed that warming is "THE BIGGEST PROBLEM FACING THE PLANET!" ... yea verily, hubba hubba.

Choose ye which religion you follow, but know thee that no matter how much the oceans rise (or don't) in a century or millennium, the AGW religion will be of no import to you whatsoever when those days come to pass! Even the malodorousness of BO will no longer pollute this mortal plane in those days. Praise be to God!

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NASA Says Antarctica Gaining Ice, Packers Lose

Antarctica is actually gaining ice, says NASA. Is global warming over?

I very much question how any person with a hint of a scientific bent rather than a pure ideological, financial, or quasi-religious commitment to AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming)  could look at this information and call AGW "settled". It would be very similar to a Packer fan getting up this AM after the drubbing by Denver and saying that a prediction that Green Bay will win Super Bowl 50 is settled! 

The "fact" of rapid Antarctic ice loss has been a cornerstone of AGW orthodoxy. NASA is and has been a significant source of data presented as "proving" AGW. I find this quote to be especially telling:

"The good news is that Antarctica is not currently contributing to sea level rise, but is taking 0.23 millimeters per year away," said Dr. Zwally. 

"But this is also bad news,” he added. “If the 0.27 millimeters per year of sea level rise attributed to Antarctica in the IPCC report is not really coming from Antarctica, there must be some other contribution to sea level rise that is not accounted for."

So if you admit you haven't accurately measured the ice in Antarctica in the past, what makes it certain that you are accurately measuring it or global sea level NOW?

There MUST be another contributor? Just as measuring the total ice on a continent is way less certain than measuring the ice in your drink, precise measurement of global sea level is not the same as measuring out a shot of bourbon no matter how many times you claim to people that such measurements are "infallible". Infallibility is a stance of religion, not science. 

Of course, NASA could be wrong on this measurement and ice may being lost, or maybe it turns out that sea level is not in fact rising -- such is ALWAYS the case with actual science which is only called science because EVERY claim is "falsifiable", but never settled because of the problem of induction ... The Thanksgiving Turkey problem! 

Religion says that we live in a meaningful universe with a sovereign and all knowing God having ultimate and correct reasons and purpose for all, since he created it and us, it is perfectly reasonable that at least parts of it should be validly knowable by human minds. 

Science says that we have no clue on the knowability or repeatability of a completely random and capricious universe -- other than faith that it is knowable and repeatable. Which most scientists choose to believe for the same reasons that religious people believe in God ... "it makes sense to them", "it seems it HAS to be that way", "I feel it in my very core",  etc. Scientists are humans too -- their brains need a "reasonable story" (for them) to operate with so they naturally postulate a clockwork universe "just happened" if they decide that God is "too simplistic / imaginary". 

We can find "useful guesses that work over some domain of time and space" (hypothesis and theories), but like the turkey, we will never know what we don't know. There is no scientific reason to believe in "order", or even that what randomly selected or designed human minds happen to see as "order" is even meaningful -- unless we postulate some sense of "something" (meaning, order, rules, etc) beyond the physical artifacts that we perceive. 

We will never "prove" the existence or non-existence of "god" via science -- but we need look no further than AGW to know that man must have religion! 

BTW, my certainty in the Pack is a bit tattered this AM! 

Thinking Like a Cosmologist

All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists - The New Yorker:

This article is a bad example of thought, but a good example of the sort of thinking someone schooled in physics and not much else engages in. The base problem of human knowledge is that it is done by humans. There is only so much that a single person can know, no matter how brilliant they may be. When they focus on one thing to become very expert in it (a worthy cause), we know that they likely have very deep knowledge in that subject, so far so good.  The way the world works, that means their knowledge about most everything else is quite shallow.

Beyond that the shallowness, all but the wise fail the "Man's got to know his limitations" test -- absolutely everything "known" is "known" ONLY from the perspective of easily fooled and mortal man -- as evidenced by the author of the article, prideful beyond all reason. We could wax on at length about man's limits -- "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail" is another good one to apply here -- if you are a scientist it is easy to think you have the most important knowledge, and it ought to be applied to the exclusion of other knowledge.

Being finite beings, we have a choice between being "Knowing everything about nothing, or nothing about everything". Unfortunately, even that is an inadequate description of our limits -- I'm closer to knowing nothing about everything, but even so, each day I find some part of "everything" that I was totally unaware of!

Here is a paragraph that illustrates some of this from the article .

The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal.

The author has discovered the point (which even he claims to be "obvious") that "people see things differently" ... even more so, they see things as "widely varied in importance" (eg sacred, profane, good, bad, stupid, meaningless, etc).

So "modern society" legislates against "ideas vs actions". Can he name a society that didn't or doesn't legislate against actions vs ideas outside of George Orwell books or potentially our existing society with "hate speech"? The fact is that NONE of us know what others are thinking -- even speech is an "action", and if he believes that our "modern secular society" is somehow very "open" on that topic, he really needs to write an article on how it is OK to call other people N**S, Wetbacks, Faggots, ... etc. since those are "only words".

Therefore  his paragraph is nonsense -- nobody legislates against ideas, but US "secular society" comes as close as anyone has in a long time with their concept of "hate speech" and "hate crimes" ... so his supposed "model society" is a great example of what he claims he is trying to combat!

The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.

In what used to be the US, "The Government" was a servant of the people and was very limited in what it could do. When the government was limited, it was required to treat all people equally. If it was still so required there would be no "progressive" income tax, affirmative action. hate speech or crimes, etc. The government would be limited from doing a great many of the things that infringe on religious liberty today -- religious liberty supposedly guaranteed under that same Constitution that is no longer in force.

So in this paragraph, the author apparently finds one supposed "law of the land", ... religious freedom is inappropriate in a "secular society". Interestingly enough, since freedom of speech is under the same clause in the Constitution, is that ALSO disallowed in a "secular society"?

So what IS a "secular society"? He doesn't say -- it appears to have no "values", so one would assume no fixed rules at all. He does point out "The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems." So why did he not just stop the column there? If it is all purposeless and meaningless, why waste our time? Clearly he does not truly believe that -- because he hates God and religion. His hatred is at least enough to a motivator for him to write a column, so at least hatred still holds meaning for him in a supposedly purposeless universe.

He does say this at the end .

We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.

So then holding NOTHING sacred becomes sacred -- we have seen this "Brave New World" before  -- eugenics? genocide? slavery? medical experiments on human subjects? the Gulag? ... the shop of horrors is endless. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot -- this is an old movie. God is dead, all praise the man with the strongest "Will to POWER" (Nietzsche) ! Why not? ... it is all purposeless -- so any purpose found must be from the bootstraps of a "Superman" -- he with the greatest will to power!

 Certainly a Constitution that limits the government can't be "sacred" -- as it is no longer is here, otherwise we would not be having this discussion. We would be having a discussion about a gay "marriage" amendment passing both houses of congress by 2/3 majorities -- followed by a discussion on it passing 3/4 of the states.

**IF** it passed -- and it seems highly likely that if there was to be ANY chance of that, it would have included some sort of allowance for the first amendment religious freedom that the column author hates, in order to make it able to pass. Those are the sort of compromises that were the essence of what was once America under rule of law.

But as it is, we have no "law" to be compared with "religion" -- because we ALREADY hold nothing sacred as a nation, so there is no Constitution as a basis for law, and therefore no law to followed save raw power.

Which apparently to this cosmologist is either "fine" or "unknown" ... since his thinking on these subjects of law, rights, politics, morals, etc is so fuzzy as to defy parsing for any real meaning beyond that he hates God and religion and is very confused about the other topics he covers.

One hopes he seeks out an oncologist rather than a fellow physicist if he ever needs cancer treatment!

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Cholesterol, Connections, Causality

Big Fat Surprise

I got to hear the linked story on MPR yesterday and the host, Kerry Miller -- if you go out and listen to it, it is at about 4min that Kerry gets worried about "science denialism" because it seems that although "science" told us that they KNEW what we ought to eat, it turns out that they were WRONG!

The attempted response of dietary science being "fragile science" with some prevarication about "prestigious schools like Harvard" is kind of fun to listen to. "It is hard to find causality" -- yes, now there is something we can agree on!

Say your computer crashes "some of the time" when you are browsing the web -- or just "randomly". You can meticulously keep track of when it does it, what you are doing, keep charts, etc, etc. You (unless you are a programmer / maintenance person) build up a lot of information ABOUT the  problem, but it takes someone that can "look behind the curtain" to find the causality and FIX IT. Causality is HARD -- and that is in domain where we KNOW everything in your computer was designed and constructed by human minds / hands.

For the human body, most food, and the climate, NOTHING was constructed by human hands -- we can only postulate an ultimate causality of "God" or "random chance", and if we want it to be somehow "predictable", we better lean pretty hard to the side of "something with "order" created a reliable order around us that we can count on and find rules / patterns / etc.

Unsurprisingly -- for those that have some contact with what thought means , Kerry has stumbled into an epistemological problem -- what can/do we know and how do we know it? (a link to some cliff notes on that).

Hmm, and another link that might help on the issue.

Kerry seeks to BELIEVE in science -- so she is very concerned that what she sees as an "error" in science will spread and encourage "science deniers". But science is a PROCESS, and in fact an inductive process which  means that no matter how many times your experiment was repeated, that is NOT "proof" that it will not fail the next time.

 I call the induction problem the Thanksgiving turkey problem -- the little turkey develops a hypothesis that humans are benevolent creatures that feed and take care of turkeys. Each day of it's life this theory is "inductively proven". On the day the turkey has the greatest certainly of the correctness of it's theory, (having had the most successful tests), it is Thanksgiving. The turkey has discovered induction -- and epistemology.

We don't know what we don't know. The set of what we don't know is INFINITE!

"Progressives" believe in the Whig theory of history -- the latest knowledge is better, and generally believe in "logical atomism" -- each event can be studied in isolation to gain meaningful knowledge.

Another  mistake Kerry made is to drift toward a holistic view -- that things are related. For a moment the SHOCKING thought crossed her mind that if one kind of science could have an error, then how could she know in her heart that other science was not less than holy and true? She has been carefully taught that "it's all particles and progress", and each event is separate -- but something in her soul is wondering about that.

Progressive thought is founded on "the latest is greatest" and "believe the experts, not your own stupid mind". Plato, Christianity, Burke essentially claim the opposite -- there is a transcendent grand plan and everything is related to that plan.

Kerry is a transcendent, purposeful, related universe "denier" -- intellectually. She wants to isolate nutrition science from climate science. She wants to raise cigarette taxes to curtail smoking, but doesn't see raising income taxes as reducing income. She wants the universe to work in the way she wants it to work, with no reference to the "I AM".

To put it in the words of Mannheim:

"One must make one's choice between two views: on the one hand that there is a reason working in and through men's minds which can lay hold of a timeless structure of things: on the other, that thinking is a series of temporal events determined, like all other events, non-rationally"

There is either a God and a purpose so that everything is part of an ordered and related plan,  or it is is "a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing". 

Kerry clearly WANTS to believe in SOMETHING, and nutrition science has just been show to have feet of clay

Either it all makes sense ... or it doesn't, and that is a matter of faith! 

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Eggs More Complex Than Entire Planet

The U.S. government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol - The Washington Post:

“There’s been a shift of thinking,” he said. But the change on dietary cholesterol also shows how the complexity of nutrition science and the lack of definitive research can contribute to confusion for Americans who, while seeking guidance on what to eat, often find themselves afloat in conflicting advice.

No, actually there tends to be ZERO "conflicting advice" among at least government funded "experts" ... they weren't in ANY doubt about cholesterol being bad! The rule of the "expert" is "Always certain, frequently wrong". Often, they are even willing to tell you "it's settled" -- not that we ever hear that in these "enlightened times".

No doubt this will go the way of "wait an hour before swimming or you will get cramps" -- absolute gospel back when us Boomers were kids, forcing us to sit on the shore for the mandatory full hour after lunch!

The list is a long one -- parents being told their babies MUST be on their BACKS ... an especially sore point for our family since 25 years ago it was every bit as COMPLETELY CERTAIN that kids MUST sleep on their STOMACHS! Naturally, our first son HATED to sleep on his stomach, so we had rolled towels alongside him to keep him on his stomach.

Crib death ... like autism and vaccines, or like early heart attacks is something that we believe "there must be a reason for", so we are very suggestible when someone gives us one. Our brains are wired to "look for solutions / rules of thumb" and IN GENERAL that is a highly adaptive trait.

A place it breaks down however is dealing with rare events, or events that take place over long periods of time.

Crib death is (thankfully) rare ... like plane crashes. Any new parent is afraid of crib death, so very suggestible. They want to do "everything they can" -- so they are prone (as we were) to believe what the "expert" tells them. BTW, there is some evidence that SIDS may be caused by the same gene that makes one susceptible to dying in sleep apnea.

When something is rare, it is harder to pin down a "cause", and indeed, the incidence may be so low as to not allow a "cause" to be found. The theory at the time we had our son was that the baby spit up and choked on their vomit when they were on their back ...

The danger of "the expert" like all con artists and confidence men is greatest when one assumes their own ignorance -- the idea that "the expert", MUST know more than "poor little me".

ALWAYS look for alternative views, historical wisdom, "laws of large numbers" , ie if the condition is very rare, then any attempt to "fix it" is highly questionable. If something like climate is known to shift over many thousands of years, then someone making claims of "climate shift" in a period of 100 years or less is lying to you for certain.

We could go on ... but for now, enjoy those eggs in good health -- turns out we are back to being as smart as we were 45 years ago.

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Vaccinating Against Nazis, Danger Will Robinson!

 Chris Christie Call's for 'Balance' With Anti-Vaccination Movement - The Atlantic:

Herr Goebbels of the propaganda wing of TP (The Party-D) is hard at work trying to correlate "Climate Change" and "Anti-Vaccine" -- they are also painting Rand Paul with the same brush as Christie is painted in the title linked article.

First,  a tiny bit of  perspective  -- ALL of the people labeled "anti-vax" on the right in these articles -- Paul, Christy, Bachman, vaccinate their own kids. What they talked about is a SPECIFIC vaccine -- HPV, Hepatitis-B, etc and/or about the issue of parents having the FREEDOM to at least make SOME decisions on vaccines -- as in when, which ones, etc.  That is their "danger".

Naturally, if you are a Statist at MJ or Huffpo, ANY questioning of the state is VERY dangerous!

Strangely however the  anti-vaccine crowd is more correlated to the left than to the right! I highly recommend the linked MJ article, it is AMAZINGLY even handed for MJ! It even points out Lysenkosim, the greatest death toll from anti-science (USSR), even exceeding  the National SOCIALISTS in Germany.

Democrats, Communists, Socialists, etc are ALL "Statists" -- they believe the "experts" are right and want to force you to do whatever they say. (Ideas so good they have to be MANDATORY!) The main reason for these articles is simple demonization of the right, even though in this specific case, the actual anti-vax crowd is more left than right.

if the right doesn't agree with ALL of the pronouncements of the politically motivated "science" of the left, then they are DANGEROUS! Right now, the TP "Lost In Space" media is is just doing "Danger, Will Robinson"

Those with brains not completely addled by TP propaganda have some sense that this is so stupid that it is funny. Very true, except for the sad fact that as TP continues to gain more and more power, eventually these "divide and isolate as DANGEROUS!"  techniques become Gulags, big trenches, machine guns and lots of bodies -- which reduces the humor.

In a world of limited government, strong markets, evenly matched media sources and diversity in education --- basically US prior to 1960, all this would be of no danger whatsoever. When I was in school even in the '60s and '70s, the MANY mistakes of science were commonly pointed out -- thalidomide babies, BF Skinner and behaviorism, doctors recommending menthol cigarettes,  electroshock therapy -- even derided in movies like "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest".

The modern lefty meme of "infallible science" and the "danger" of all who question it had not yet been foisted on the easily led masses. We have indeed  been "progressed" to be a far more docile and easily led people ("sheeple").

The forces of the left operate by an amazingly similar script, in which control of "education" (indoctrination) and the media is a cornerstone. Prior to WWII the left in this country was PROUD to be called "Socialists" and often even Communists -- but as "National Socialism" got a bit of a bad name, even for Statists of the time, they changed their name to "Liberal", even though they were and are anything but.

Same with AGW "Anthropogenic Global Warming". When it failed to "warm" in correlation with their models, they changed the name to "Climate Change". It is a completely idiotic name, the climate is ALWAYS changing, but the main power that the left demands is the ability to control the meaning of words!

It may be time for me to read Orwell again!  He is a good vaccination against the kind of doublespeak propaganda used by TP that gave us the communists and the Nazis in the 20th century.

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Young Earth Science, History Began in 1880

2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics - NYTimes.com:

Last year was the hottest on earth since record-keeping began in 1880.

Fundamentalism is endemic to humans. Fundamentalist Secular Humanists love to poke fun at religious fundamentalists to who extrapolate from the genealogies in the Bible to a 6K age for the earth, but by comparison, the religious fundamentalists have a VERY old earth compared to the "settled science" of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming)  faithful who use 1880 as the beginning of time.

Note though that the 130+ years used for this startling historical dart to the souls of anyone that maintains any skepticism relative to "settled science" is somewhat aged compared to the time we actually have actual satellite global data, which begins in '79 ... and shows no statistical warming since '98, ranks 2104 as the 3rd warmest by a tiny statistically insignificant amount since '79.

Wow, time for a headline!! THIRD warmest year since 1979!!! We are talking a FULL 36 years here folks, a span of time virtually impossible to even conceive of in scientific history! Perhaps with immense scientific advancement, far in the future, humans will even be able to recall what life on this planet was like 36 years in the dim and distant past!!

Unlike the evolutionary crowd who like to talk about "great age", the AGW crowd has to contend with quite a few living human specimens that actually lived in such dim and distant past ages as 1979! Although given the distractions of TV, Rock Music, the Internet, Cell Phones, etc, I guess the assumption is that very few of them will  be able to recall such dim historical ages.

As noted here before, those of us of apparently exceptional memory recall the '70s and early '80s were pretty chilly times, when science was "nearly sure" (although less political about it) that an ice age was in the early stages. "Settled" is a bit of a short term phenomenon in modern "science".

From the amount of play this pronouncement of 2014 being "the warmest in history" is getting, it is fairly clear that the warmist faithful are feeling rather concerned about their religious faith.

Skepticism of science! We all know that science is a matter of FAITH! Something which can NEVER be questioned!


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"A New Science of Politics": Eric Voegelin

http://www.amazon.com/New-Science-Politics-Introduction-Foundation/dp/0226861147/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420587063&sr=1-1&keywords=new+science+of+politics

A very important work that I'm not going to claim to understand -- a great book for developing some personal intellectual humility.

Although not particularly long, the scope of the book is vast -- describing the problem of developing and discussing a theory of politics, "Political Science" if you will, as part of history. The idea that through the use of political symbols and texts, man tries to create a meaning for his political systems / cultures / etc in history as some sort of representation of a transcendent truth.

The attempt is to make political science a study of the context of how humans exist and develop politically in various epochs of history in which the symbols and thus the order are relatively stable.

Three are identified:

1. The Hellenic Crisis -- Plato and Aristotle. 
2. The Crisis of Rome -- St Augustine and Christianity
3. Hegel's philosophy of Law and History

The assertion is that man will demand SOMETHING that extrapolates his very limited existence into some whole that transcends his life -- religion, politics, society, culture, etc. There are 3 ways that man has historically defined this -- in some ways each is the same, we just like to think the current is more "advanced". These are Rite, Myth and Theory. Depending on context of course, a person will think one or more of them vastly superior due to "tradition", "emotional content", "science" (really "scientism"), "sacredness", or some other value system, which will include emotional attachment. 

My biggest learning from the book (outside of looking up a bunch of long words, latin words, etc) relates to the the vast changes caused by Christianity and it's bastard child Gnosticism (the worship or divinization of "special knowledge").

Prior to Christianity, the entire world and everything in it was "divine" and cyclical. There were "gods" everywhere which explained everything, and history nor even existence had much "direction" other than cycles -- seasons, life, etc. However the "meaning" of everything was "divine". 

Then came Christ with a a separation of past and "known" future in that it had an end, a way for man to be completely unique and eternal, OUTSIDE of "nature", and even more, with an ending -- the eschaton (end of the world, heaven on earth), and the idea of eschatology -- the study of how things would (if you were a believer) end, or OUGHT to end, if you were not a believer. (much of this is also in Judaism, but it wasn't universal -- it was just for the Jews). 

Christianity "de-divinized" the world. God/Christ/Holy Spirit were divine -- and the idea of the Trinity itself as a symbol was applied to many things. Including many cases of "three epochs" "ancient, medieval, modern", Hegel's dialectic, the three phases freedom, Marxism with primitive communism, class struggle and final communism, and of course one of the most "successful" applications of gnosticism, "The Third Reich". 

One of the connections made very clear is the application of "divinity" / "teleology from some unknown source" in the case of Marxism -- history is supposed to "inevitably" be going the communist direction, because "that's the way it is". Much like "science", or really "scientism", it is an application of gnosticism -- attempting to make the secular somehow "divinely" (and therefore uniquely correct) "known". 

All of the supposed "modern" isms -- communism, socialism, etc are about "immanentizing the eschaton" -- using gnostic magic to create "heaven on earth". The last greatest attempt was Germany, but the attempts go on, including Obama's "Hope and Change" here early in the 21st century. 

This book was published in '52, I'll close with his quote on the German attempt to create heaven on earth -- you can see if you see any similarity with attempts today: 

"The German Revolution, finally, in an environment without strong institutional traditions, brought for the first time into full play economic materialism, racist biology, corrupt psychology, scientism and technological ruthlessness -- in brief, modernity without restraint."

Science, and other Myths

An Apple a Day, and Other Myths - NYTimes.com:

The NYTs discovered in February that mammograms are not the slam dunk we once thought they were, now they seem to have realized that a ton of the "well, isn't it obvious" diet pronouncements on red meat, fats, fruits and vegetables, etc, etc are at best questionable.

This really ought not be news -- folk wisdom that has been around for at least 100s if not thousands of years tends to be MUCH more reliable than any late breaking science on a whole host of things relative to being human.

Why? Because the universe and the world is either "a random phenomenon" over such huge periods of time that humans have no chance to getting any big picture on what we are looking at with our tiny and also randomly created brains. Or it is designed by a being that is so much beyond our power of thought that the amazing thing is that we can even get some short-term localized hypothesis that SEEM to hold for some period of time -- maybe even a few decades, or as much as 100 years sometimes.

My belief is randomness and time are just other tools in the Creators toolbox and I have none of the qualms that Einstein had about "God playing dice". Yes, there is "order", but it is God's order, not mans. Let's face it, it if it IS all random as the atheists believe, then it is purposeless -- and understanding that for which there is no reason is best done with a shoulder shrug and a malted beverage.

We step into this physical realm for at most 100 years -- the first 20 we are not yet mentally developed enough to really know much of anything. For the next 50 or so we have "a decent chance" to learn a lot -- hopefully humility most of all, and maybe even believe that we got to know a couple people somewhat well.

I'm convinced that we are pretty much wrong on that actually knowing anyone else, but maybe that doesn't matter either. Maybe we just try to balance kindness and truth with as many people as we can. And focus on the long part -- eternity. If it is all meaningless, then so what -- pleasure is nice, but one doesn't usually have to make it all the way to their 50's to know that the best kinds of that as well are more focused on that hope of eternity. Church, family, friends, history, art -- maybe a big bike and the open road. Not all meaning has to be really meaningful.

Cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimers, accident, etc. Our exit is really the only certainty -- if you are in good enough standing with "The Party" (Democrat-TP), I'm of the opinion that taxes are no longer certain. Tom Daschle, Geitner, etc seem to be too much of a "sample" to believe that we all have to follow the same rules. Why should we? It's a pretty small step from breaking the Equal Protection Clause on "progressive taxation" to exempting "the right people". Why treat people equally? TP believes they are much "better" than that.  It looks to me that the payment of taxes has become yet another politically based uncertainty.

But not death -- so far. The Party may well start hastening the deaths of those that fail to get enough of the memos, but that is OK. Even the "members in good standing" are more and more ready to sign their own ticket to eternity.

So you know death is certain -- right now the #1 cause of injury death in the US is suicide, so apparently our Godless pseudo-socialist  nirvana isn't completely appealing to a pretty good segment of our population. Suicide along with addictions of all sorts and "mental health issues" is growing like crazy, but for some reason it is a lot easier for someone like Bloomberg to limit the size of folks sodas and try to take their gun rights away.

Bloomberg probably figures suicide, like abortion, increase in number of gay relationships and people not having children is GOOD -- we know that in the random world of natural selection, not having any offspring is a sure fire WIN! Right? Have we thought that completely through?

I often think that the 2nd half 20th century Western Civilization deserves the millennial cultural Darwin Award for voluntarily removing ourselves from the gene pool. Perhaps a crescent and a mushroom cloud would be a proper shape for such award?

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Outrunning Glaciers on Acid

Remember The Acid Rain 'Scare'? Global Warming Hysteria Is Pouring Down - Forbes:

Back in the late '70s when I was in college, we needed to go fast on I-94 to get to Madison for other reasons, but we all thought that it would be funny to tell any officer that pulled us over that we were "outrunning the glaciers". Those were the days of Global COOLING ... which I know as now gotten the left all riled up to be reminded of, so they have went to work trying to rewrite that part of history.

No, it WASN'T "the same" then,  since not EVERYTHING had been fully politicized yet! One of the outcomes of that was that "research" tended to end up in a lot of different places, and maybe more importantly started from a lot of different premises. Today, you can set out to "continue to prove" GW, or you can get no money, get no degree, lose your professorship, etc. Tough choice if you are an academic that wants an advanced degree and needs to eat.

In the "old days", we all watched, read, or listened to the same message on NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, NYT, WaPO, etc and if you were a complete low brow reactionary, you MAY have gotten some wild right wing thinking from the EDITORIAL page of the WSJ, although their news pages were (and still are) just as left as the rest of the media. Oh yes, there was Buckley and National Review -- which I had never heard of until I got bummed out because Jimmuh assured me that the era of fun in America was OVER!

"Many" scientists thought the data showed we were cooling. It was NOT a "religious issue"! The idea of using "science" as a political cudgel to pound down the apostates had not been even remotely associated with "science" in those days (we still had religion for for the fixed outlook).  "Acid Rain", "Coming Ice Age", "Ozone Hole", "DDT", "we are going to turn Japanese", "Detente --- the obvious reasonableness of surrender to the USSR", "the world is OUT of petroleum" .... those were the "smart topics" of the day.

The list of topics aren't an accident, They were ALL considered to be "common sense", and if had Fox news in those days, you could likely have done a poll showing that people "didn't know the answers to the issues of the day" ... as in, "all the forests will die from acid rain" (probably before the glaciers ran over them, but they were not clear on that), all us country kids will be dead of skin cancer long before now, and the penguins would ALL be gone due to the "ozone hole".

DDT, well, it turned out to kill 50 million plus 3rd worlders by NOT being around, but we are back to using it now with no problem to birds (if a couple beers are OK, a keg isn't necessarily better), we not only didn't turn Japanese, they started their eternal  government managed recession in '90 and are still in it.

We didn't ever try the surrender to the USSR route -- but given BO, maybe there is still time. Oh, and world oil reserves were at "400ish Billion Barrels BB) in '80 and they are N of 1.6 TB today with a lot of countries using less ... + a lot of the Baaken isn't even online! The US could push Venezuala and the Saudis for the the top of the list!  We talk about that as about as much as GW folks talk about GW during a record cold March.

Don't get the impression that EVERYONE was just stupid back then, and we have obviously gotten smarter. SOME predictions DID happen! Reagan DID consign the USSR to the ash heap of history for example (until BO resuscitated it like a long dead Chicago voter).

So the linked article brings back memories:

And lobby they did. Between 1994 and 1996 the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million to the Nature Conservancy, and together with the Pew Center and the Heinz Foundation they engaged in an energetic and successful global warming fear campaign which included attacks on scientific dissenters. Incidentally, the Heinz Foundation, headed by Teresa Heinz Kerry, generously provided a $250,000 award to Al Gore’s star congressional hearing witness, NASA’s James Hansen, who subsequently went on public record supporting her new husband John Kerry’s failed presidential bid.

A bunch of people hardly remember Enron ... going from the most admired business in America in the late '90s with a myriad of connections to both parties, to an early example of "W's fault ... he met with Ken Lay" (the CEO of Enron). As WSJs "Best of the Web" likes to point out, Paul Krugman was an Enron advisor and proponent and proud of it in the late '90s. Ah, how easy the memory hole works for one side of the political spectrum.

Historically, mankind inherently understood the relation between age and "wisdom", because it was ASSUMED, and UNDERSTOOD by at least the educated that to a very significant extent "education + experience = wisdom". Put that was before the cult of "progressivism", which assumes that the data/information/knowledge that they pick up today is INHERENTLY superior to the past (mostly because they have no clue about what happened in the past)

So, most no longer learn from the past ... even just a few short years in the past. It matters not that every time a set of policies has been applied in history, they have failed. If the "smart guys" think that printing bags of money + taxing it away from the economic winners so that the economic losers get "another chance" (typically to lose bigger amounts faster), it doesn't really matter how many times it doesn't work until you end up in Greece or Japan and you are just STUCK --- no capital to go forward, no successful folks left, and a bunch of unsuccessful ones that have even lost the will to fail after pissing away multiples of borrowed / subsidized fortunes.

I have to admit that as much as I'm looking forward to warmer temperatures, a nice big continental glacier forming would be VERY cool. Sure, the "30-40 tops" years I have remaining would only allow for a few100 feet of snow and ice AT BEST, puny by the 5000+ full monty behemoth, but the warmist tap dances would be a thing of beauty ... and there is always tracks for the Ranger!

Oh, never mind ... they will claim it is "due to human caused climate change" ... or it will just go down the memory hole like Krugman/Enron, "out of oil", "ozone", etc.

It is the age of OZ, and even when Toto pulls the curtain, the lefty witches will conjure SOME way to hide the humbug!

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Pedo-Earth Religion

When Did Global Warming Begin? | Power Line:

Many Christians are "Young Earth Creationists". They believe that the earth is 6K years old because that is what they believe they have extrapolated from the Bible. For them, it often becomes a "faith test" for someone to deny glaciation, light from galaxies billions of years old, the huge number of craters on the moon, etc. If you don't believe the earth is less than some date old (say "10K years max"), then you are not a Christian.

My personal view, (as it is in many things) is that an all powerful, all knowing and eternal God can create the universe any way he sees fit. If he did it in the last 10 min, it would likely have "the appearance of age" to an "unbiased observer", not because he is trying to "fool anyone", but because babies for example are not going to be able to live on their own, so doing creation with no ready made adults would be very counterproductive.

As an old boot path computer guy, I'm typing on a good analogy for this. When this iMac booted, there were a series of "bootstraps" (as in pulling up from bootstraps model) that were loaded in memory to set up the environment for the "boot load", that at the moment it began execution at some fixed address had memory tables, open file handles, a series of processes, etc that to someone looking at memory that was NOT from the boot path team would look like a whole bunch of things had happened that actually had not ... certain files being "opened", certain memory spaces being "allocated", certain processes being "initiated", etc.

A perusal of the state of the system would have certain "appearance of age" that would be "fake", not to "fool anyone", but just because it is OFTEN that "initial conditions" are different from the standard state.

It happens that I know WAY less about creating a universe than I do about booting a computer, and humans in general were not on the "universe boot team".  In the "it all just happened by accident" model, we only showed up after the thing had been running for like 14ish BILLION years.

I tend to be very magnanimous about allowing omniscient, omnipotent and eternal beings pretty much complete freedom in how they do their creation (call me libertine). I'm  interested in "how creation looks to me" and as in the case of the early stages of the running iMac, I doubt if the Apple boot load team would sentence me to any punishment for looking at a little memory and trying to understand what they did. My guess is that God is even more unsurprised by our curiosity about creation. So relative to a lot of young earth creationists, I'm a very liberal sort!

**NOTE** there is a principle here! The more "out there" the position, the more radical and combative it's adherents. True "Flat Earthers" are very zealous compared to "Sphereists". Watch this tendency in yourself and others, and you will have a powerful ally in wisdom. ** END NOTE **

What I find utterly amazing though are the "Young to Pedo-Earth Warmists", and the fact that their faith requires absolute fealty to their dogma or you receive all sorts of attacks relative to your intelligence and unwillingness to believe.

To get all nuts about current climate, you have to:

1). Completely ignore 100's of thousands of years of very good data about climate as in the linked column.

2). Focus ONLY on 130 years of data on "global temps", that is actually limited to something like "30ish" years of GOOD data, meaning data from orbiting platforms that can actually have a good bead on something approaching "planetary scale", as opposed to a bunch of anything but random local measurements extrapolated together.  Where thermometers and reporting stations were located in 1800 to say "1950" was NOT "random" in any sense ... cities, airports, universities, etc being the locations.

Even the most casual of skeptical people can see the difficulty of "global temperature".  The heat island of the Twin Cities to the N of me tends to run 10 degrees warmer than the surrounding temps. The area along Lake Superior is often TWENTY or more degrees cooler than just a few miles away during the summer. Mark Twain once commented on "the coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco" ... a phenomenon I first experienced on my honeymoon, where **I** (who am almost always warm compared to everyone around me) FROZE in the damp fog in late June after sweltering up a Yosemite in 100+ degree blast furnace heat. The list of local climate variation difficulties on scales of 10 miles or less is gargantuan, and must be accounted for in "global temperature".

Naturally those of the Warmist Faith assure us "it's all been worked out" ... at least as long as we pay no attention to their secret e-mails.

Even with satellites and computers, the amount of data required to compute an accurate "global temp" is very daunting, and requires A LOT of really unbiased and detailed analysis to be "accurate" by some measure. Ideally, the globe would be split up into say "10 mile cubes" and the temps at all levels ... ocean surface and depths, air column and land surface (and possibly depths in areas like tundra) would be gathered on a "few times a day" basis, say sunrise, noon, dusk, middle of night".

That sort of a measurement over a few thousand years would give an excellent basis for understanding climate. Once we had such a record for say "500K years", we would have a number of samples of how climate fluctuates relative to continental glacial advance and retreat, etc. Once we had that, then it would be much easier to try to figure out what the causes of the global climate changes are.

It is a testament to man's capacity for inconsistency that on one hand, science can wax poetic about "billions and billions of years", and on the other, base supposedly "settled conclusions" costing billions of dollars and affecting billions of people on AT BEST 130 years of data, which is so minimal as to provide only the most minimal of backing for even a "fad", let alone the proposed religion that Global / Warming cum Climate Change have become for many. Sadly, the Warmist Faith has become a state religion, breaking the Constitutional separation of Church and State.

I have a hard time with people that have faith in a religion that hasn't been around at least a thousand years! Even Scientology is "tried and true" relative to Pedo-Warmism!

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Weather, Climate, Science, Religion

Here we have a shot of our back deck this fine May 2nd AM. Were it not for a set of control freaks trying to use "science" as a religion in order to control the behavior of people, we would be able to just "talk about the weather" as man has done since he could communicate.

"Weather", like "shit", or "death" just happens. It is NOT like taxes ... taxes are actually under mans control and in even our natural social state up to a few hundred people living in a "tribe", there were no taxes. We have gotten so stupid, we seriously need to go back to basic definitions.

Science is about making ACCURATE predictions about phenomenon like climate and weather and then using MEASUREMENT to verify that the predictions match over LONG PERIODS OF TIME. A theory named "Climate Change" can certainly explain everything, which means it explains nothing. Predicting the climate will change is like predicting that the value of the stock market will change. If it is anything, it is religion.

SUCCESSFUL religion however is something that can be used to explain life from a transcendant perspective. Christianity has been around for 2K years and is one of the main drivers of what we used to call "Western Civilization" -- what gave science the gift of seeing an ordered and understandable universe. Without Christianity it is extremely doubtful if science would be any where near to the level of capability they were at before they began their "post modern" decline.

Snow in May is just that, snow in May. This will be our "ALL TIME record snowfall" here in Rochester, but of course that is absurd. We only have records for at best 100 years, which is a TINY amount of time even from a young earth biblical fundamentalist view. From the view of any good scientist, it is laughable ... this spot in MN would have been covered under over a mile of ice for tens of thousands of years at intervals of 10-20K for at least a few million years. "Snowiest on record" ... what a crock!

What we have misplaced is our place in reality and the universe. We are either pitiful little globs of protoplasm, here for but the blink of an eye in a purposeless cold random universe, or we are eternal souls, created and loved by a God whom wants us to be with him for an unimaginably wonderful eternity.

What we ARE NOT is some self-appointed deity that has any clue what is "natural" for either a God created or random accident of a universe, planet, etc. It snowed in May. It may snow in June -- the only month it has NOT snowed somewhere in MN even in our puny record keeping is JULY! Get used to it. It is EXACTLY as interesting (or not?) as last years record highs!

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Religion and Politics

The latest from Jonathan Haidt, and it is a great one. Extreme recommendation.

For people with a conservative bent, a lot of this book will be "didn't everyone know this already"? But for folks of the liberal bent -- like Haidt, although his research for this book migrated him to what he sees as "moderate", it will be something of a struggle.

Sadly, I'm sure that Haidt is due to discover that his observations about human nature may be hyper proven as the liberal establishment punishes him for his heresy of using actual science to point out some fairly obvious things about human nature that would seem to indicate that conservatives are not exclusively just "stupid and evil".

First, we are not rational beings, we are RATIONALIZING beings. The book carries on  the excellent rider/elephant analogy from "The Happiness Hypothesis" and builds off it. The Rider is best seen as the Press Secretary for the elephant -- the elephant does something or "leans" in some direction and the rider dutifully develops a case for the elephant. Humans developed into "hive creatures" (like bees) that could specialize labor and cooperate without all having to be related. Morality is the "wetware" that we use to create and enforce the rules to do that -- our "rider" (consciousness) was created so that our "elephants" (subconscious) could operate this way.

The Six Moral Senses:

1. Care/Harm
2. Liberty/Oppression
3. Fairness/Cheating
4. Loyalty/Betrayal
5. Authority/Subversion
6. Sanctity/Degradation

Liberals tend to be very heavily focused on #1 ... although interestingly, conservatives seem to "care" almost as much, they just don't "care" to the exclusion of all other moral senses. On #2, liberals and libertarians are somewhat close -- although liberals see corporate power as much worse and "oppressive" than government power, which they have a hard time even equating with oppression.

On #3, liberals think of "equality" and completely forget about proportionality -- or Karma. One of the huge problems in cooperation is the "free rider problem". Haidt covers this and why it is impossible to have cooperation without "punishment" (sanctions) against free riders.

Liberals are nearly blind (or claim to be) on 4,5 and 6. It turns out that when tested, the "moral modules" for even Sanctity are there and working in the liberal brain just fine -- they just don't want to admit it because in their view it seems "less enlightened" to admit that degrading things are degrading.

I believe that this book is an EXCELLENT base to at least attempt to open some lines of communication between liberals and conservatives, but I suspect that Haidt is in for a shock -- maybe somewhat equivalent to the shock that Edward O Wilson wrote "Sociobiology" back in the '70s.

The "divine faith" of liberals is that there is no God and man is an infinitely malleable blank slate. While proving that there is no god (or that there is) is not going to happen, it is scientifically known that man is NOT a blank slate, and at least in the "next few millennia" not likely to be improved upon much. Wilson was trashed for stating the basic outline of what a "human nature" was likely to be, now here comes Haidt with some fairly solid research showing what it actually is.

As Wilson outlined in "Consilience", the more science moves forward, the more we begin to see the fact of an intricate and complex human that is no less difficult to mold to our desires than ecologists are realizing the ecology of the planet is. We are each little ecosystems honed by selection (or created by God) to interact within the the planetary and social constructs that we are born with and into.

Reality has never been very much of interest to the Progressive Project -- now about 100 years in, with all of the progressive nations facing economic demise, even the social sciences start to point out that reality is not in line with the progressive vision. My guess is that the response is not likely to be very reasoned, but rather very emotional.

Physics = Faith

The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith—By Alan P. Lightman (Harper's Magazine)

Man lives by faith -- we can't even really choose our faith. We can reject God, in which case Satan helps us believe we have no faith at all. Oh, but we do -- we are all play the eternal faith game at the price of our immortal souls.

As I've commented in other blogs, it has become quite well accepted in theoretical physicists that our goldilocks universe is WAY too precise to be anything but directly "created for us", or a happenstance in something like 10 to the 500th universes. So you get to have faith that our universe was the random accident in a huge number of existing universes, and then you believe that over billions of years with no intelligent selection, we happened to evolve here with consciousness, a built in desire to know our origins and a randomly selected meme to postulate an infinite God. You can either believe in that, or you can believe in God ... either way, you have faith in what you believe.

That same uncertainty disturbs many physicists who are adjusting to the idea of the multiverse. Not only must we accept that basic properties of our universe are accidental and uncalculable. In addition, we must believe in the existence of many other universes. But we have no conceivable way of observing these other universes and cannot prove their existence. Thus, to explain what we see in the world and in our mental deductions, we must believe in what we cannot prove.

Nasty Chemical

If you happen to run into this stuff, throwing sand on it won't "put it out"
Clorine Triflorine

Laws of Nature

This is an excellent little article on some of the players / issues in the cosmology discussions in physics.

The ending is super. This article is closely related to this:

Maybe both alternatives — Plato’s eternal stone tablet and Dr. Wheeler’s higgledy-piggledy process — will somehow turn out to be true. The dichotomy between forever and emergent might turn out to be as false eventually as the dichotomy between waves and particles as a description of light. Who knows?

The law of no law, of course, is still a law.

When I was young and still had all my brain cells I was a bridge fan, and one hand I once read about in the newspaper bridge column has stuck with me as a good metaphor for the plight of the scientist, or of the citizen cosmologist. The winning bidder had overbid his hand. When the dummy cards were laid, he realized that his only chance of making his contract was if his opponents’ cards were distributed just so.

He could have played defensively, to minimize his losses. Instead he played as if the cards were where they had to be. And he won.

We don’t know, and might never know, if science has overbid its hand. When in doubt, confronted with the complexities of the world, scientists have no choice but to play their cards as if they can win, as if the universe is indeed comprehensible. That is what they have been doing for more than 2,000 years, and they are still winning