What I Did On My Vacation and other stuff...

Hi-ho, people of CommentaramaPolitics! I hope you didn't miss me too much. I just spent a glorious week in jolly ol' London and had a mahvelous time. London is a wonderful city of civilized people where autos actually stop for pedestrians crossing the street and the Underground runs like clockwork. If the New York subway system ran one tenth as efficiently, New Yorkers would have to find something else to complaint about! Seriously, London is great.

The most astounding was Westminster Abbey where I stood at the graves of the entire history of the British Empire. I paid homage to Henry V who was immortalized by Shakespeare in the "St. Crispin's Day" speech. I was walking through this glorious Abbey, I stopped to look around. When I looked down, I was standing on the grave of Charles Darwin! I admit that I wept at Poet's Corner where all of the greatest writers of the English language are buried - Keats, Shelley, Audin, Austin, the Brontes, the list was endless. And then there was Sir Isaac Newton. All of it was a breath-taking.

However, on a bitter note, I was disappointed that the Queen did not answer the doorbell at Buckingham Palace. I mean, really, I am about 6 millionth+ in line for the Crown. You'd think that she wouldn't be so ill-mannered to not receive me. But then again, with the pending birth of little Charlotte Elizabeth Diana, I can only assume that she and the other royals were otherwise occupied. But frankly, I thought it was really rude that they couldn't arrange for Kate to give birth while I was there. I suspect that they specifically waited until I was safely on the plane going back "across the pond" to announce the birth. Well, I will certainly return that baby gift!

All bitterness aside and as a complete non-sequitor to my vacation, I want to share something that I read before I left for jolly ol' England. It is one of the most elegant responses that I have ever read on the subject of "Religion v. Science". Of all places, it appeared on the Village Voice blog written by a young man who goes by the moniker of Andrew W.K. To look at his photo, one would suspect that he would not or could not be so elegant. To me this is the perfect example of why I strive to "never judge a book by its cover". I am copying his response to a question in its entirety because it is worth reading: Ask Andrew W.K.: 'How Do I Show Religious Freaks That Science Wins?':

Yo, Andrew.

How can anyone believe in religion? It's so ignorant and obviously fake. I've always backed science since I was a little kid, and now I'm proud to say that I'm studying to be a molecular biologist in college. The thing is, I'm surrounded by a lot of religious idiots at this school, and whenever I try to explain to them how believing in a man in heaven who rose from the dead and all that superstitious BS is literally causing the murder of millions of people, they argue back and tell me that "science is evil and is playing God," and that I should develop my "faith" before I blow up the world.

What is the best way to finally get through to these ignorant people and explain to them simply and finally that they're wrong? If they would just give in and accept the scientific future, they would see that they don't need religion to enjoy life.

Thanks for your feedback,
Enlightened Scientist

Dear Enlightened Scientist,

Science versus religion.

I've always found this to be one of the most unnecessary arguments in contemporary society. Why does it have to be one way or another? I may not be the most mature or educated person, but when I see highly esteemed academics twice my age arguing about this, on and on, it puzzles and concerns me. Arguing about whether science or religion is better seems about as futile as arguing about whether day or night is better. Both have their qualities and shortcomings; neither can (nor should) be expected to replace the other. They are two sides of the same coin, and they both emerged out of — and are aspects of — a fundamental search for reality.

Both science and religion came from mankind's desire to know. Both are striving for truth. Science wants to understand truth. Religion wants to experience it. Science wants to get at truth from the outside in. Religion gets at it from the inside out. Science gives us the how; religion gives us the why. Science gives us the means to an end, religion gives us the meaning of that end. Science wants to bring comprehension to the universe. Religion wants to bring tangibility to the intangible.

You say your argument is that science has never killed anyone like people have been killed in the name of religion. While people may not murder each other "in the name of science," we do know that nuclear bombs, chemical weapons, eugenics and biological experimentation can also contribute to death and killing in an endless variety of ways. Both science and religion can be used as a method or justification by those who want to cause pain and suffering and break the rules of common sense and humanity. And even if one has a more extreme body count than the other, it doesn't mean that one should exist and the other shouldn't. None of the crimes that humanity has committed against itself mean that science is evil or that religion is bad. All it means is that people can do horrible things to each other using all sorts of convoluted reasoning.

Ultimately, it seems that when people complain about the harm of religion, they're often simply complaining about people behaving badly. They're talking about their dislike of people behaving barbarically. As much as the truth of God may be beyond description and intellectual grasp, the truth of human cruelty and ignorance is all too familiar and measurable. And when people claim to talk about the evil of science, they're actually just complaining about those unfortunate scientists who lack the ethical tools or moral integrity to guide and refine the use of their discoveries. Both religious people and scientific people can behave badly. A closed-minded scientist can be a jerk just as easily as a devout religious person can be a fool. No mode of thought or set of beliefs should be blamed for the lack of character in a particular individual. Nor should the vast array of benefits found in both science and religion be thrown away just because some people behave poorly in spite of them.

So your complaint really shouldn't be with religion or people who are religious, but simply with the unfortunately all-too-familiar shortcomings of the human race. Any religion that promotes hatred is not really a religion at all. And any scientist who cannot live with the spirit of brotherly love in his heart has more problems to investigate inside himself than in the material world. Every person who feels it necessary to battle over the definition or location of truth is neither in possession of any truth to begin with, nor do they have the possibility of experiencing any truth while existing in a prejudiced, spiteful, and unloving state of mind. We must do better than this. We have to grow.

Out of all the principles we should tirelessly strive to live with, gentle kindness, flexibility of spirit, open-mindedness, and a type of pure and unconditional love are the most crucial — especially when we feel most compelled not to behave that way. We simply cannot claim to be real human beings until we can learn to live with the other human beings around us, no matter how religious or scientific they may or may not be. Learning to live with one another remains our first and most urgent challenge, and it starts with each of us honestly working at it from the inside. It's much easier and much more tempting to lash out and attack everyone else we think is wrong, but we must start much closer to home. We can't fix the world until we fix ourselves first.

Someday, maybe science or religion really will claim dominance and beat the other once and for all. But until then, it seems that we each have plenty of work to do personally and internally, in order to become more gracious, more tolerant, and more humane human beings.

Your friend,
Andrew W.K.

Please feel free to discuss...

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Kit's Thoughts: Nature vs. Nurture vs. Free Will

[Ed.] Today we’re starting a new series. Our very own Kit often sends me emails dealing with topics he encounters at school which are rather interesting. I’ve asked him to turn some of these into quasi-articles so they can be shared with all of you. Tonight’s topic involves the nature versus nurture debate. Enjoy!

Nature vs. Nurture vs. Free Will
By Kit

The more I look at the nature vs. nurture debate the more I find it to be very inadequate. Though I lean heavily towards "Nurture" and the belief that the environment in which one is raised has a big impact on your adulthood, both fail to adequately explain why some people are good and others are bad.

The reason? Both leave out that frightening wild card: Free Will.

Or, rather, one’s choices becoming one’s habits. When a person makes one good choice it becomes easier to make a good choice in the future. Especially if it is risky. Conversely, if a person makes one bad choice it becomes easier for that person to make bad choices again in the future. These choices add up to habits, both good and bad, and those habits add up to form one’s personality.

I’ll grant that people who advocate Nurture/Environment/Culture do usually acknowledge free will, but those who claim Nature/Genetics to be the reason for good and bad behavior deny free will and the power of choice more sternly than even the most fanatical of Hyper-Calvinists. They firmly believe in the doctrine of Predestination, but one of random genetic mixing instead of divine sovereignty.

That is because Free Will is a Wild Card. Nature and Nurture are favored because they provide easy solutions. Nature opens the doorway to sterilization or brain re-wiring while Nurture says good parenting and good teaching.

However, if it is true that in any society a certain number of people will simply decide to be bad, for no clearly defined reason other than they want to do bad things and enjoy doing it.

Interestingly, while scientists and theologians have spent centuries struggling with this question, artists have long since answered it. Shakespeare understood it when he had Macbeth slip from war hero to mad tyrant as the blood he spilt when he killed King Duncan begets more and more blood, each act easier than the last, and when he had Prince Hamlet say to his mother, urging her to avoid the King’s amorous advances,

Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature,

“For use almost can change the stamp of nature”. Billy Wilder knew it. Spielberg knew it when he filmed Schindler’s List and compared Oskar Schindler to Amon Goethe. Both German, both Nazis, both lovers of wine and women, yet one was a hero and the other a villain. Why? Schindler decided to save life while Goethe decided to take it. No real reason, it is just what they chose to do.

The artist, who must make a living from delving into all of the facets of human nature, even when he is the son of a small town English glove maker and only had a “grammar school education”, seems to have a leg up on those who study it professionally at universities and seminaries.

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Measles and Vaccines

by Kit

After over a decade-and-a-half of anti-MMR vaccine activism by celebrities, quack doctors, and (some) politicians the moment that many epidemiologists and pro-vaccine watchers of the movement feared has come true. In Disneyland a group of unvaccinated children contracted it and it has spread like wildfire. A headline for the Los Angeles Times gives us some idea of what has happened: “California measles: baby diagnosed, infants quarantined, day care shut.”

In California there are 92 case of Measles and “Cases connected to the California-centered outbreak have been confirmed in Arizona (five), Utah (three), Washington state (two), Michigan (one), Oregon (one), Colorado (one), Nebraska (one) and Mexico (two).” One of the California cases was a 12-month old infant, which is too young to be vaccinated for the virus.

The incubation period can last up to a little over two weeks so we may have to wait to see how big this thing grows but it appears the only thing that may stop it from actually killing people is the country’s 92% rate. Though that still leaves about 24,000,000 people unvaccinated for a disease with a mortality rate of 1/1000. And even if it does not kill can leave you permanently blind or deaf. Because of the vaccine, however, which is injected twice, first when you are 1 year-old and again when you are about 5 or 6, the US was declared Measles-free in 2000.

However, in 1998, the British journal Lancet published a study by British doctor Andrew Wakefield claiming that the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccine can be linked to autism. Though not a single study by any other group has been able replicate these results and a British newspaper’s investigative report revealing numerous discrepancies and outright lies resulting in Dr. Wakefield losing his medical license (making him “Mr. Wakefield”), it has caught on like wildfire garnering support from celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and Oprah Winfrey.

Anyway, the result of all this was a decrease in MMR immunizations, first in Britain then in America with immunization rates in certain Southern California schools lower than South Sudan. This meant a few years ago Britain saw a sharp uptick in Measles cases, including a few deaths (and a sharp increase in immunization rates from 89% in 2011 to 95% in 2014). Then last year, the US had 400 Measles cases and now we have a major outbreak centered around a major theme park and over 100 cases in a single month.

Since, as said above, children under a certain age those with immunity problems stemming from medical conditions or treatments like chemotherapy cannot be vaccinated that means infants and kids with leukemia are at risk because of Dr.— excuse me, Mr. Wakefield and his supporters.

As for Mr. Wakefield, despite Lancet revoking the paper and him losing his medical license in the UK, has developed a fiercely loyal following consisting of Christian fundamentalists, “all-natural” crunchy hippies, and, most infuriatingly, parents of children with autism searching desperately for some kind of answer with many anti-MMR advocates pushing “cures” as a means of removing the toxins that they claim caused autism. These include bathing in epsom salts, enzyme supplements, large vitamin doses, and bleach enemas. I wished I was making that last one up.

Unfortunately, this means that Mr. Wakefield’s debunked claims are not the province of one political party but firmly bipartisan with (thankfully few) supporters on both sides, including Robert Kennedy, Jr. and a Republican congressman and others willing to play it up for political gain (such as Obama in 2008). A Washington Post article described it as “uniting the tea party with limousine liberals”. The only time members of one party will push it more seems to be when they are out of power. The Democrats pushed it during the Bush era as proof of Big Pharma caring more about greed and profits than people while certain “genuine conservatives” have pushed it as proof of big government sticking needles into little kids. The want of power caused by the lack of it seems to have quite an impact on a person’s susceptibility to (or willingness to support) crackpot ideas.

And the fanaticism of these advocates needed to have been seen to be believed. When Dr. Paul Offit published his book Autism’s False Prophets, he and his publisher decided to cancel the book tour due to death threats and hate mail. When British writer Theodore Dalrymple, a conservative has written extensively on his time as a Doctor serving some of Britain’s poorest citizens and the afflictions of the Welfare State, published a column at City Journal criticizing the anti-vaccine movement the comments section of his article and his mail box were quickly inundated with accusations that he was receiving money from major pharmaceutical companies for promoting his pro-vaccine views. No proof was needed or offered except (1) he was a medical Doctor and (2) he was pro-vaccine. The anti-vaccine lobby operated on the assumption that anyone opposed to them was hurting children in order to make some money, which allowed them to think their enemies the most vile and evil human beings on the planet. Offit mentioned special vile aimed towards parents of autistic children who supported vaccination (which is where the majority actually stand). After all, what king of mother would support such wicked abuse of her own child?

But now appears to be a massive backlash against the anti-vaccine movement and, despite claims of some in the left-wing media, that open support for vaccination is firmly bi-partisan with Rubio, Jindal, Walker, Cruz, Ben Carson et al announcing their support for vaccination. Several congressman spent half a hearing this morning intended for influenza promoting the measles vaccine. Even Christie said vaccines are wise, only parting on whether or not they should be mandatory. Only one major politician has made statements leaning towards anti-vaccination; Rand Paul. Just about everyone else is firmly pro-vaccine. And, irony of ironies, anti-vaccine advocates are now complaining of anger thrown at them over the measles epidemic.

Edmund Burke once said “Example is the school of mankind and he will learn at no other,” C.S. Lewis said “Experience is a brutal teacher but by God do you learn.” Measles is proving a brutal teacher and a harsh school for America on the importance of childhood vaccinations and the folly of forgoing them on the basis of a lone quack doctor appealing to our fears and a celebrity mom’s opinion about what caused her child’s autism.

Now, on one final note. Jenny McCarthy, whenever someone pointed out that the science supports the pro-vaccine argument she would respond by saying “My son is my science.” Since the Measles epidemic hit, a 1986 pamphlet written by Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and James and the Giant Peach, about the death of his daughter Olivia from the Measles in 1962 (before the vaccine was available). It is as if he is coming from the grave an responding to Jenny McCarthy by saying, “My science is my dead daughter!”

I think it is worth posting an excerpt:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything.

"Are you feeling all right?" I asked her.

"I feel all sleepy," she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her.

You can find the full link here: LINK.

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We Landed On A Comet!

In the middle of all the stupid stuff going on, including the indignity of a certain woman with no discernable talent whatsoever parading naked all over the newspapers, we landed a spacecraft on a comet! Well, by "we" I mean, the European Space Agency not NASA. NASA doesn't do anything like this these days. Long gone are the days of grand Presidential challenges to explore the universe and reach for the stars. Nope, NASA has seen its shuttle fleet scuttled and has been reduced to hitchhiking to the International Space Station they built years ago. But that doesn't mean that we can't still marvel at others and their amazing feats of human ingenuity.

And an amazing feat it is. In 2004, the ESA shot a spacecraft called Rosetta and Philae, the lander decribed as "the size of a medium washing machine" into space to explore the surface of a comet 4 billion miles away. Think about that for a minute. Ten years ago, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers calculated with pinpoint accuracy, the trajectory of a piece of machinery blasted into space and managed to land it on the surface of a comet on November 12, 2014 - 10 years later and 4 billion miles away. It is astounding what humans can do when we put our minds to doing stuff that advances human knowledge.

One would think the world would be calling for a parade for these scientists, mathematicians and engineers, right? Well, not so fast. Watch this clip and at 1:40 you will see what happened that has feminists around the country shreaking and fainting in horror...



You thought you'd see a giant space bug or large-eyed alien peering into the camera? No, they were shreaking and fainting because of a shirt worn by Dr. Matt Taylor, one of leading mission scientist, during an interview as the lander was making its decent. The fabric of this offending shirt that made especially for Dr. Taylor by a female friend was a montage of large breasted, scantily=clad cartoon women. Nooooooo! Feminists far and wide took to Twitter decrying "Who cares what he has done. How dare he demean women this way!" and "That shirt has done more damage to little girls than anything ever and why they HATE science!"

So, instead of heralding another giant leap for mankind, it has devolved into a social media feminist rage-fest claiming "this is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields." Seriously. They so bullied this poor guy at the moment of his greatest achievement that he ended up having to give a tearful public apology days later. Not one of those fake "I am sorry you were offended" non-apologies that we have become so accustomed to these days, but a real honest and tearful mea culpa. And yet these same women who think he has set women back to the 1950's will swoon with delight at the bravery of a talentless imbecile as she objectifies women to down to their ample body parts - no brains needed. What a great example for little girls! This is exactly why I cannot and will never call myself a feminist.

Anything to add, subtract, multiply or divide?

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Moar Friday Hits

Back by popular demand (and because I need to shift a more substantive article to next week), here are a few quick hits to round up the week's stories in post-partum depression and liberal failures, but mainly liberal failures.

Just A Reminder: Universal Health Care Is Terrible And Will Probably Murder You In Your Sleep

Okay, maybe that's a bit strong. But in the ObamaCare debate, we were always reminded by liberals how awesome socialized medicine is overseas, so turnabout's fair play, I think. Anyway, the link is to an article from the Daily Telegraph, which found that under Britain's NHS, over 1,100 nursing home residents have died since 2003, not because of their illnesses or old age but because of severe dehydration--despite the homes having adequate numbers of staff and (of course) good ratings from the government review boards, the patients weren't getting enough water. As if that wasn't bad enough, nearly three times as many died over the same period from malnutrition or bed sores. Yikes.

It's been noted before that the Brits remain stubbornly positive about their health care system, partly because it does work under certain circumstances but partly because they just don't want to admit defeat. One wonders how many stories like this they have to hear for that to change. (Just to show Britain's not the one bad apple, here's a story from Canada about how the wait times to see a doctor have become so long, the Great White North's considering re-privatizing some of its health care. Good times, good times.)

Rule Of Thumb: Always Fact-Check A #HATECRIME!!!!!! Story

This seems to be a running theme lately--messages bashing an ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation get reported, community crackdown on anything slightly offensive ensues, everyone gets lectured by higher-ups on the need to be respectful and accepting of others....and then it turns out the victim and the perpetrator are one and the same. Of course. No sooner did New York's Vassar College start a witch hunt, I mean launch a task force to find out who was writing messages like "F--k N-----s" and "Hey Tranny, Know Your Place," then it turned out the transsexual student who filed the hate speech report was the one who wrote them in the first place...and was also a vice-president of student government, and a member of the investigating task force. Ohhhh.

I could go into detail on other stories, like the Boston-area high school which ended its football season early (but not the requisite candlelight vigils) when racist graffiti was scrawled on one of the players' houses, then found out his mom did it to get attention; but I'll let you read through that one on your own.

GOP Hypocrisy? Eh, Not So Much

Among the things liberals (especially those in the media) just LOVE doing, calling out the Republicans for hypocrisy, or at least betraying their constituents' own interests, stands near the top of the list. Take this Time article noting that congressional Republicans have voted to scale back the food stamp program (not that much, mind you), despite the fact that, on average, a GOP lawmaker is likely to have a higher proportion of his constituents on food stamps than is a Democrat. The implication is clear enough: Republicans care more about their ideology than they do about helping real people, and also Democratic voters are usually more successful and probably smarter, too. Except, not only is a sizable chunk of the data on which the article based this claim missing, that which is present shows the results are really all over the map, with red states such as Idaho, Nebraska and even West by God Virginia (!!!) relying on food stamps than, say, "progressive" Oregon. Oops.

Though, even if the evidence had borne out Time's claims, I'm not sure what that would prove. Given that the Left relies on some watered-down quasi-Marxist rhetoric about class conflict to make many of its claims, wouldn't such proof show that rich people are not mean jerks who want to screw over the poor?

Paging Descartes....

And finally, just to reassure you that you really may be smarter than a big chunk of the population, check out this article from the so-called Scientific American which basically says that, because scientists are a bit vague on the boundaries between life and non-life and because you can sorta think of organisms as just really complex machines, "life" doesn't actually exist at all. I briefly toyed with the idea of laying out an objection to this, but you know, on that rare occasion when you find an article so patently dumb you don't have to waste breath refuting it, it's best to take advantage of it. Just go into the weekend with the knowledge that you know more about the world than some "scientists" do.

If you've got other good stories, mention them in the comments, by all means. Otherwise, enjoy.

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Popular Science Does Right Thing For Wrong Reason

Popular Science did something interesting the other day. From out of the blue, they announced that they would no longer allow reader comments on their articles. Their reasoning in the big picture sense is that allowing such comments is “bad for science.” I agree with that and with what they’ve done... though they also wrongly and regrettably politicized their decision. Ultimately, I think this will be the beginning of a trend. Here’s why.

What Popular Science said (in a big picture sort of way) was that science requires a certain degree of rigor. It requires the creation of a theory, the advent of some testing procedure that lets you test the theory, and then a peer review process whereby people who actually know what they are talking about examine what has been proposed and offered and render some conclusion... pro or con.

Popular Science views itself as part of this process by disseminating the latest theories and ideas to the public in a readable way. The idea is to educate the public about the current state of science. What is happening in their comments section, however, interferes with that mission. Indeed, what they see happening is that gangs of morons show up in their comment section and attack their articles with lies, ignorance and politicized myths. The result is that people who come to them to be informed leave confused with bad facts, bad theories and wrong beliefs. In effect, the public is de-enlightened.

I also suspect, though they didn’t say this, that they are having a hard time getting people to write articles for the public knowing that no matter what they write, they will be savaged by mouth breathers. That’s bad for science too if scientists withdraw from the public.

So was this a good decision or a bad one? Well, on the one hand, I tend to think that valid theories need to be able to stand up to criticism. That would seem to make this a bad decision. But hold on... “Criticism” implies certain things. For one thing, it implies that the criticism is “informed” rather than ignorant. Ignorant criticism is merely disruptive. It is the equivalent of something screaming “nuh uh”. It makes people waste their time talking about things that are not genuinely in dispute or not even relevant. It also wrongly implies some genuine dispute where there isn’t one.

Moreover, the concept of “criticism” assumes a level of good faith. That good faith at a minimum requires (1) not repeating discredited arguments over and over, (2) admitting when your criticism has been defeated, (3) not making assertions without some basis in fact or logic, and (4) staying on the topic rather than trying to divert the topic.

The problem with the comments at places like Popular Science (and many more) is that the “criticism” doesn’t meet this basic standard. The people making these comments repeat the same discredited arguments over and over, no matter how many times their claims have been debunked. They never provide any evidence to support their claims. They refuse to admit when they are wrong. Rather than addressing the issue at hand, they try to redefine the issue to shift the debate to other areas. And they are hostile, insulting, and they try to shout down their opponents.

In effect, they are hecklers, not critics.

Because of this, I reject the claim that Popular Science is trying to stifle “criticism.” They are trying to stifle propaganda... propaganda that misleads people who don’t know better and who come to the magazine to be informed. I have no problem with that. And make no mistake, these people are doing this to every single topic Popular Science discusses, be it discussions of climate change, evolution, drones, fracking, missile defense, vaccines, etc. – even discussions of space turn into environmental diatribes from the left and attacks on the Islamofication of NASA on the right. Essentially, both fringe left and fringe right have polluted their comment section with utterly politicized nonsense.

Hence, I find myself applauding the move, and I think others will follow suit because this same problem exists all over the web. Articles on films turn into anti-liberal Hollywood diatribes (or personal attacks on actors). Articles on law get filled with attacks on lawyers and utterly false assertions of law. Articles on medicine turn into diatribes for or against Obamacare. Business articles turn into OWS or anti-Fed rants. It’s a mess. And few have found a way to deal with it. Some have tried requiring people to register. Others even require the submission of a credit card to open an account. Some use heavy moderation. But none of those things work very well.

For this reason, I suspect that websites that are dedicated to educating people about topics that require some level of expertise, e.g. legal advice, financial advice, tax advice, science, etc., will gradually eliminate comments and will instead allow reader input only through the submission of letters to the editor or by letting people with counter-ideas submit their own articles for review... both of which can be vetted for what value they add to the debate.

Yeah, it’s elitist, but sadly, it’s necessary.

(Note that this will not stop genuine criticism as genuine critics, i.e. the kind who can actually support their criticism, tend to submit their own articles for publication or run their own websites debunking false science, medicine, law, etc. What this stops are the hecklers who make debate impossible.)

Now, all that said, Popular Science does actually deserve a lot of criticism. Why? Because they politicized themselves. Making the point that the comments were a fountain of idiocy that was misinforming people was a valid reason to do this... but they didn’t stop with that. Instead, they said this:

“A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again.”

Uh, wrong. Science is not about “popular consensus”.... science is about theory and proof. In fact, if we were to believe that science is about “popular consensus,” then banning the comments would be the anti-science move since it would prevent people from shaping that “popular consensus.” Moreover, “the origins of climate change” are not subject to a consensus and a magazine dedicated to the state of science should realize that. In fact, this is one of the most disputed topics in science since... well, ever.

Unfortunately, this betrays Popular Science’s real motive. Rather than being a smart decision to protect science from hecklers, this tells us that all they really wanted was to stifle dissent to their politicized theories. That tells me that Popular Science must be viewed as politicized and should not be trusted.

So ultimately, my conclusion is this. In a big picture sense, this is a smart and necessary decision and I think this will spread. But Popular Science’s real motive was despicably political, and for that, they deserve scorn and to lose our trust.

Thoughts?

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IQ, Race, Science and Politics

This will be an odd discussion. It's about IQ. But first, some background.

The article that sparked today's discussion was published at Politico by a man called Jason Richwine. I don't trust Richwine. He co-authored the ludicrous Heritage Foundation report about the supposed cost of immigration. Even worse, a thesis he wrote in college was then unearthed in which he made some racist suggestions about immigrants; he also wrote briefly for a "white nationalist" blog. The Politico article is his attempt to resurrect his reputation. In my opinion, he fails pretty miserably because he distorts what the problem was with his thesis: the problem wasn't that he discussed IQ, it was that he started suggesting that we keep Hispanics out because they have low IQs.

So why discuss his article? Well, before he starts spinning to defend his thesis, Richwine presents a credible set of facts that interest me. In particular, he notes that there is a huge disconnect between the scientific community and the media when it comes to the issue of IQ. He notes that if you listen to the media, you will hear that IQ is considered meaningless by the scientific community, that there are no ethnic and gender differences and those that do exist are the result of biased questions, and that no legitimate scientist really pays any attention to the whole idea. Science, however, has a different take. Indeed, Richwine notes that there IS a consensus in the cognitive ability field that:

● Virtually all psychologists believe there is an intelligence factor that explains the performance of individuals on cognitive tests, and IQ tests measure that factor.

● IQ scores correlate with educational attainment, income and other socioeconomic outcomes.

● A person's IQ score is influenced by their genetic make up and environmental factors. It tends to remain stable after adolescence.

● There is an observed difference in IQ scores among different racial/ethnic/gender groups, with northeast Asians scoring the highest, followed by whites, followed by Hispanics, followed by blacks.

● Psychologists have tested and rejected the notion that racial/gender differences are the result of biased testing. They have not, however, accepted the idea of a genetic cause for these differences because no link has yet been shown between DNA gene combinations and intelligence.

In other words, everything the media claims is false is actually true and media claims that the scientific community has reached a consensus that these things are false is backwards, as the consensus goes the other way. To prove the consensus, Richwine cites numerous books and studies and even a committee report by 52 experts from the American Psychological Association which noted the above; against these, he lines up quotes from hack journalists who say things like, “IQ is a metric of such dubiousness that almost no serious educational researcher uses it anymore.” (Ana Marie Cox -- The Guardian, May 2012).

So let's forget Richwine and talk about the above bullet-points. These strike me as true. I know this in two ways. First, since at least the 1980s, leftists have struggled to disprove the above. The fact they keep struggling and have now gone into "it is heretical to say this" mode suggests it is true. Moreover, they've even gone so far as to remove testing questions from things like the SAT when minorities or women fared poorly on those questions, yet the differences persist despite these efforts to rig the tests. In my book, massive continuing statistical consistency is proof. Secondly, anecdotally, some of this is obvious. It is obvious there is an intelligence factor. It is obvious that some people are more intelligent than others. The people who seem more intelligent not only tend to do better in education and employment, but they score better on tests too. That suggests that intelligence is real, can be measured, and does impact our success. I can also say that I've met a ton of geniuses and quasi-geniuses and successful people, and they are disproportionately Asians and honkeys and male. Thus, it seems there are race/gender differences as well.

Now, I can't and won't say that this is 100% true because it's not; there are individuals in every group who are near the top or near the bottom of the human race. There are people who are well above average and well below average for their own groups and for other groups. But as groups, there appears to be noticeable differences which lead to different outcomes for the group average. I also cannot tell you if the difference is genetic, cultural or environmental. I doubt it is genetic though, or you would have consistency. In other words, if being purple made you stupid, then there would be no smart purples... but there are. Ergo, I think the race/gender differences are the result of something other than race or gender.

Why this matters to me is this: it exposes the left's thinking and that they don't care about people.

If we know that purples as a group will have lower IQs by the time they hit adulthood than blues, and we know that IQ will correlate with other measures of success, then in my opinion, we should be looking for the cause so we can find a solution to help purples do as well as blues. If there's something purple parents or purple teachers or purple celebrities are doing wrong, then we should find out what it is and fix it. If it's something blues are doing to purples, then we should find it and fix it. If it's environmental, perhaps pollution in purple neighborhoods, then we should fix it. This is true of blacks, Hispanics, whites, or anyone else who doesn't do as well as the top group. Indeed, when we find evidence of something that negatively affects a group of people, we should always investigate and find solutions.

But that's not what liberal journalists and educators do. Instead, they scream bloody racist murder at anyone who dares to suggest there is a difference. Then they go back into denial mode because that is their dogma. But what kind of people are we that we let whole groups of people get handicapped just to "prove" dogma?

Unfortunately, this seems to be getting worse too. The go-to solution these days is to demand that problems not be discussed for fear of hurting "acceptance." Everyone from race groups to gender groups to fat groups are taking this stance. How idiotic. It's like a demand that we let people fail lest we suggest that people who are failing just might be failing. I can't say this is unique. In fact, it's been pretty common throughout history, but it is unhelpful.

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All The News That's Fit To Blog

Here’s all the news you need to know this week, all wrapped up in one tidy article. Read this and you can sleep in until Sunday! Guaaarunteeed.

● Apple: Obama just vetoed the ruling of the International Trade Commission which said that Apple could not sell old iPhones because they used a technology that infringed upon a patent held by Samsung. This seems like a head scratcher. After all, patent rights are ownership rights and if Apple wants to use Samsung’s stuff, they should pay for a license, right? But there’s another angle to this that I only read about the other day. Apparently, the technology in question was something Samsung agreed could be used as an “industry standard.” That throws a different light on this. Essentially, they agreed that their invention could be viewed as public domain and that the whole industry could build around it. If you do that, then you really shouldn’t have the right to later claim ownership of it again and demand a fee for the use of that. So I agree with Obama on this.

● Detroit: They say there’s a serial killer on the loose in Detroit. I have a hard time believing anyone in Detroit has the kind of dedication it takes to become a serial anything.

● Big Terror: We’re told that al Qaeda has something “big” planned for the coming season. I’m not entirely sure what this means, but I think Big Lots and Shoney’s Big Boy should hire more security. In all seriousness, this kind of proves that al Qaeda wasn’t wiped out by the O, doesn’t it? When Team Obama claimed they had all but destroyed al Qaeda that struck me as a total fraud the moment they said it. You can’t kill an organization like this by killing its members, by choking off its money, or by killing its leaders. Organizations like this die from indifference, not bullets, and as long as they have things they can use to whip up retarded Arabs and Africans, they will have a steady flow of morons to carry out their plans... “Yes, Jobu, Americans took your lunch money.”

Anyway, what does this tell us? Well, it tells us that all the bombings and invasions over there have pretty much been a waste. It’s time for a strategic rethink.

● Goldman Sachs: I’ve been saying for sometime that these big Wall Street banks are a menace, and that they are enriching themselves not through capitalism, but by forcing themselves into transactions as unneeded middlemen through crooked regulations. A perfect example of this has just arisen and, as of now, I commend the Justice Department for getting off their butts and thinking about doing something about it.

Here’s the set up. A few years back, our government changed the rules to let investment banks dabble in hard assets, e.g. buy actual metals rather than contracts. Goldman Sachs took advantage of this and bought a huge warehouse complex in the Detroit area in February 2010. This warehouse collects aluminum directly from makers and then ships it to purchasers when they are ready. It holds about 42% of the aluminum shipped to the US in any one year. When Goldman purchased the warehouse, it took around 3-6 weeks to turn around an order and get people their aluminum. Now it takes more than a year. Goldman claims it’s just that hard to find anyone’s order.

So people complained to the London Metal Exchange, the industry-created regulatory body that regulates warehouses. But guess who sits on the board of the LME? Goldman. Also, the LME gets funded by a kickback from warehouse rents. To “solve” this, the LME passed a rule requiring warehouses to move a certain amount of product out of the warehouses each day. But here’s the catch. They don’t say “deliver,” they just say move. So Goldman has drivers taking aluminum from one warehouse to another.

Why would Goldman do this? For one thing, they’re collecting $165 million a year in rent doing this. But that’s not the real purpose. The real purpose is to manipulate the price of aluminum by creating a shortage by keeping what is produced from reaching the market. Estimates are this scheme has increased the price of aluminum by $40 a ton. That works out to around $0.02 to $0.05 of every can of soda sold to a couple hundred dollars of every car. It is estimated that these faked delays cost consumers $3 billion a year. Companies like Coke have complained and have even taken to having their aluminum shipped directly to their plants by the makers, but they are still paying the higher aluminum prices that have resulted.

Think about that. Goldman has used a phony regulatory agency to let it inject itself into the aluminum market as an unneeded middle man, where it has injected waste into the marketplace to jack up its own profits. That has nothing to do with capitalism. It has nothing to with helping consumers or producers. This is about enriching Goldman at the expense of everyone else and using regulatory extortion to do it. Fortunately, the Justice Department is now investigating this as anti-competitive behavior. Probably not coincidentally, JP Morgan just announced they are getting out of the physical commodities business... they were about to try the same thing with copper. Goldman still owns this and other metals warehouses. Isn’t it about time someone looked at Goldman for what it is? A RICO enterprise.

● Uh, No: If you have to announce something, then it's probably not true. Zooey Deschanel decided this week she needed to deny the fact that she's stupid. She said, "I am an intelligent person." Uh, huh. The girl is a rock. And White Trash Barbie Miley Cyrus (or is it Smiley Virus?) felt she had to announce that she works hard. Yep, she's "not a ratchet white girl," which the Urban Dictionary defines as "ghetto diva." Uh, huh. Nice try girls.

● McDonalds: Leave McDonalds alone, Mofos! The left is waging a coordinated campaign against McDonalds right now. They want to unionize the place and raise wages. To do this, they’ve attacked McDonalds for not paying a “living wage” and they claim that doubling salaries would only increase the cost of the noble Big Mac by $0.68 cents. Interestingly, the study they are using was discredited because the guy who did it misread the numbers and compared only the labor costs of McDonalds corporate against the profits of the entire chain. So whoops, that $0.68 cents idea is total crap... much like Wendy’s new burger. Yeah, I don’t know, it looked so much better than it was. Sigh. Anyway, besides not understanding how to read a balance sheet, this tool also doesn’t seem to understand that once you start raising prices, consumers go elsewhere... silly commie.

Ultimately though, here’s the biggest point in this debate: No, McDonalds does not pay a “living wage,” i.e. a wage that will make you upper-middle class. No ever claimed they did, because you’re not supposed to make being a burger jockey a career choice. They’re called “entry level” jobs because they are intended for people who are just starting to build a work history. If you prove you can do that, then you move up quickly onto what is called “the career path.” That’s when you start making the kind of money you can live on. Retards.

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Logic v. Global Warming

We all know that Global Warming in a hoax. . . well, most of us know. There are some gullible people out there, particularly in Europe. But the rest of us know. Even the left knows, I think, they just keep the theory going because it’s useful. Anyway, that’s not the point... stop distracting me!... the point is that logic tells us the theory is garbage.

Global warming is based on a simple idea: mankind puts carbon in the air when they do things the left doesn’t like, like running a factory, driving a car, or raising flatulent cows.... no, I’m not kidding about the cows. This carbon then sits in the air like a blanket and keeps all the heat from leaving our planet. That causes the planet to become warmer which causes bullying... or something.

To repeat, the theory is simple: carbon causes heat retention.

So riddle me this...

According to “federal scientists” at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Earth has hit a milestone. The amount of carbon in our atmosphere has reached a level it hasn’t been in millions of years – 400 parts per million. But if carbon causes heat retention and we’ve never had more carbon in the air, then why has it been getting colder for a decade now? LOGIC tells us that this disproves the theory doesn’t it?

Not enough? Ok, try this.

The same scientists tell us that the last time the level of carbon was at this level was 2 million years ago during the Pleistocene Era. And back then, “It was much warmer than it is today. There were forests in Greenland. Sea level was higher, between 33 to 66 feet.” Interesting. So it was a lot hotter, but the carbon level was where it is now. Hmm. Doesn’t that disprove the causation as well? After all, shouldn’t causation always cause the same effect... seeing as how it is causation? Apparently not. Apparently causation now means, “kind of like each other around the same times... sometimes.” Interestingly, that used to be called “correlation” and that’s evidence of NOTcausation.

Anyway, I know that many of you are now thinking, “Wait a minute, if it was this carbony warm before and all these species survived from then to now, what’s the danger now?” Well, that’s a good point. In fact, it’s hard to see how all these species will die off if they made it through an ice age that took out Greenland and dropped the water level by between 33 and 66 feet. . . an oh so precise measurement. . . and then turned around and got warm again back to the nice toasty way things used to be in the gold age of Pleistocene. How could a couple degrees hurt anything?

Well, Penn State’s disgraced Climategate participant Michael Mann has an answer. See, animals can indeed adopt to changes in temperature, but not if the change is too fast. “If the carbon dioxide levels go up 100 parts per million over a thousands or millions of years, plants and animals can adapt. But that can’t be done at the speed it is now happening.” Right. Makes total sense. Animals can adapt to a couple degree change every million years or so, but not anything quicker than that. Got it. Oh, by the way, did you know that the average temperature in Colorado during the Winter is 28 degrees. During the summer it’s 65 degrees. That’s a difference of 37 degrees. Strangely, nobody dies off here between the seasons. Nope. I wonder why? Perhaps animals have a mechanism that lets them average their temperatures during the years? Or maybe, just maybe, animals are more adaptive than Mann gives them credit for being?

Anyway, Mann and his Climatecult claim that we are raising temperatures about 2 degrees every hundred years. Seeing as how animals in Colorado can take at least a 37 degree change in temperature, I’ll guess we’ll find out soon enough if Mann is right. . . say, in 2,400 years or so. Maybe in the meantime, Mann and his cult can learn to do science rather than politics?

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Stuff We Didn't Know We Needed

Sometimes you just have to slap your forehead and go "Gee, I wish I'd thought of that!" I mean, thank goodness there are scientists and inventors who will solve problems we didn't even know we had and create new things that we didn't even know we needed. Here's a perfect example...glow-in-the-dark sheep!

Yes, a group of scientist in Uruguay have solve the age old problem of sheep getting lost in the dark. They attached a protein of a fluorescent jellyfish to the DNA of a sheep to see if they could breed an otherwise healthy sheep that glows. And, voila, we are saved! [Don't tell T-Rav, but other scientists have done the same thing to kittens!]

The funny thing is I can't think of a single use for a sheep that glows...in the dark. But then I was skeptical when they put cameras on phones and now I can't live without that! Let me know if you can think of any uses for these sheep OR any other stuff that might be useful if it could glow in the dark. We could give a list to the scientists.

Just for the record, when they do stuff like this in the movies, it never turns out well...

As usual, please feel free to change the subject at anytime.

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Science and Liberalism

Since many of us have just endured another interminable period of very cold weather, I thought this would be a good time to bring up global warming. And no, that's not really fair, but shut up. But also, I want to talk about the way in which the Left "does" science, and why it's so bad.

Where are we on the whole global warming/climate change/dead polar bears crisis? Well, as far as the broad outlines are concerned, there's not a lot I can tell you that you don't already know. It's early April and I'm still shivering in my long-sleeve shirts, so the temperature's not going up and up and up; impartial scientific measurements continue to show a plateau in global temps for the past decade or so; and as far as the public goes, belief in the reality and importance of global warming continues to remain steady or even decline somewhat, depending on who you talk to.

Likewise, although there has been some weakening in a few quarters, I'm sure I don't need to tell you that the general response from the Left to all this has been to double down. In particular, many climatologists and commentators like to claim that a significant cold snap is itself proof of the reality of global warming. As an example, a senior editor from Time, which surprisingly is still in business, explained the cold wave a couple weeks ago by saying that "the Arctic is warming faster than elsewhere" and this is causing a changing "temperature differential" that results in rapid changes of the weather, so it's not just "global warming" but "global weirding."

Uh....okay. First of all, that makes no sense. Second, it is nonetheless possible that changes associated with global warming, assuming it actually is happening, could cause a short-term cooling effect in some areas. (Although not on the ridiculous scale of The Day After Tomorrow.) Third, why am I even talking about this? Isn't it a given by now that liberals will just make up the rules of global warming or whatever they're calling it this week to keep pushing environmentalism? Well, yes it is, because that's liberals for you, but it also has a lot to do with some differing interpretations of science.

Now by "interpretations," I don't mean whether result X should be considered scientific. No, I'm talking about what it means for something to be considered science. There's actually a very deep philosophy about this, which I can't do much justice to, but in summary, there are a couple different schools of thought, generally known as verification and falsification. According to the former, science consists only of that which can be proven true (or verified), while falsification says it only consists of that which can be proven, well, false. I know it sounds like there's no difference between them, but there kinda is, and falsification is the one conservatives should go with.

Again, I can't explain why this is so without making myself fall asleep, but here's the bottom line: Proving something false (or ultimately failing to do so) requires a heck of a lot more rigor than does an effort to prove something true. The most famous example is that of swans. If you go with verification to prove the statement "All swans are white," all you have to do is find some swans, observe that they're all white, extrapolate to the general population, and voila! Statement proven. To prove it through falsification, though, you have to go out and find a swan that isn't white (there are, but they're in Australia or something).

Now what does this have to do with liberals and conservatives? Well, I'm not saying that each group adheres to one side alone, because most people don't actively think about this. But verification, with its looser standards, leaves a lot more room for pseudoscience and circular logic--the sort of thing that the Left specializes in. Consider AGW. At the very least, we can find a lot of data that suggests the earth is getting warmer, right? And that there's a connection between that and rising carbon dioxide levels, right? Boom! Theory verified. And this can apply to lots of theories. Evidence that rich capitalists are exploiting the poor? Boom! Marxism verified!

And the beauty of this approach is that non-evidence or contrary evidence is a lot easier to shoehorn into a verification of sorts. Rather than throw out your favorite theory altogether, you only have to modify it slightly. Thus AGW suddenly becomes responsible for global cooling AND global warming. Evidence of people acting for reasons having nothing to do with economics isn't evidence that Marxism was wrong, it's merely an instance of "false consciousness." And so on.

Now like I said, verification, falsification, etc. aren't terms you run across in everyday life. And most liberals, like most conservatives, probably aren't aware of how all this works. So why bring it up? Well, I think it's important not to underestimate the Left. Although liberal thinking is deeply flawed, there is some structure to it, and to challenge it, we need to understand it. And there's a lot of truth in the charge that radical environmentalism and other "causes" are just updated versions of old-line Marxism. Ideas come and go, but the assumptions that give rise to them haven't. To refute liberals, you can't just disprove individual claims, you have to get at why they came up with them in the first place.

Then again, pointing out it's really freaking cold outside isn't half bad if you're short on time.

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Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Global Warming is failing. Yep. Just as Marxism slammed into human nature without a helmet and got decapitated, Global Warming Enthusiasts are finding that reality can be harder to manipulate than they hoped. And it’s been a bad year or two for them. Observe:

You’d kind of have to be an idiot not to realize that the biggest determinant of the temperature on our planet would be the sun. That is not only the primary source of warmth on our planet. . . it’s the only source. Moreover, we know that the sun does not put out a constant heat. This means that any model that fails to address the effects of the sun on our temperatures is worthless. Yet, the global warming models used by the enthusiasts all ignore the effect of the sun.

This point has been brought home by a leaked report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the lead propagandists for the Enthusiasts' ideology. This report admits (buried in Chapter 11) that the sun is more important than previously acknowledged:

“Results do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate.”

Translation: “yeah, the sun could be causing a lot more warming that we thought it was. Curse you sun!!”

But here’s the kicker. Despite this admission, the models upon with the IPCC report relies in concluding that warming is a a man-made problem do not take the sun into account. How in the world can you legitimately exclude something from your analysis which you admit could be a much larger cause of your problem than you realize? This is nonsense. This is theology, not science.

And don’t forget, this isn’t the first bit of evidence that they are fudging the science and ignoring evidence that blows apart their theories. The biggest example was of course Climategate (and Climategate 2) where they were caught manipulating data and using political pressure to smear opponents. But there’s more. Consider these things we’ve seen from Warming Enthusiasts:

● Climategate exposed the manipulation of data to generate a warming trend where none existed. Specifically, they excluded a warming period in the Middle Ages and they only used certain data to make sure that the present period showed abnormal warming.

● The famous “hockey stick” which shows the supposed warming (the one highlighted by High Priest al Gore) was debunked. It uses a fake formula which will take any sequence of numbers and spit out a hockey stick type result.

● The IPCC relied upon data from flawed weather stations which wrongly created warming.

● The IPCC wrongly used summer data for winter months to generate warming.

● The IPCC claim that global warming will hurt biodiversity was shown to have no basis -- not to mention that the world’s species are at least one million years old and thus have all been through hundreds of climate cycles.

● The IPCC had to retract a completely unsupported statement that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

● The IPCC had to retract unsubstantiated statements about threats to the Amazon rainforests.

● In January 2011, IPCC scientist Osvaldo Canziani was listed as an advisor on a report that overstated warming by 1000%, and which was published unfixed even after this error was pointed out to the study’s authors.

● In January 2010, the IPCC had to retract the part of its report which claimed that Global Warming would cause sea level rises equal to 2.3 meters per century, with 2.7 feet happening this century. This report was retracted because of “mistakes in time intervals and inaccurately applied statistics.” It also turns out this report was based on data collected in a part of Hong Kong that is sinking.

Incidentally, in May of that year, a paleogeophysics/geodynamics professor from Stockholm University in Sweden issued a report that observations from around the world showed NO rising sea levels in the last 40 years. How did Enthusiasts respond? A year later, the University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group simply added 0.3 millimeters a year to their sea level figures to create rising sea levels where none exist.

● In June 2011, experts from Finland and the United States were shocked. . . shocked to learn that rising carbon dioxide levels caused forest density to increase: “Global warming, blamed by the U.N. panel of climate experts mainly on human use of fossil fuels, might itself be improving growth conditions for trees in some regions.” That’s right, trees are getting fatter. And the consequence of this is. . . well. . . um. . . it’s “offsetting climate change.” In other words, it’s keeping global warming from happening.

So let me sum this up...... there was supposed to be warming, but there wasn’t... the seas were supposed to rise, but they didn’t... the sun is an “unknown factor” in warming that is much more significant that the models expect but we don’t want to know how much... trees absorb carbon in much greater amounts than we expected. And all of this is based on data that either doesn’t exist or which has been manipulated to exclude contrary data or which is the result of bad collection techniques or which is the result of the fraudulent use of statistics. Nice work, boys.

Now there’s undeniable evidence that the warming ain’t happening. In a truly embarrassing admission, the British agency responsible for pimping Global Warming, the Met Office, admitted on Christmas Eve (to try to bury the story) that there has been no warming for 17 years now, even though all the models predicted significant warming for that period – they attribute this to solar activity, natural variability, and the movement of the oceans.... all things any competent model needs to account for. Anyway, what makes this a particularly humiliating admission is that during this same period, Enthusiasts were claiming that warming was actually accelerating.

Moreover, in 2008-2010, global temperatures dropped sharply enough to cancel out the entire supposed net rise in the 20th century. This is important because global warming theory relies on cumulative increases. Thus, their whole theory has fallen apart. . . again. Enthusiasts tried to blame this on the "unexpected" solar cycle -- an eleven year pattern that has repeated itself consistently throughout history and seems to coincide with scaremongering about new global ice ages or new global warming. Enthusiasts also complained that the oceans reacted in an "unexpected" manner by doing what they've always done rather than changing as the climate models suggested. And then the dirty trees have done the "unexpected" by doing what they've always done and refusing to conform to the models. Are you seeing a pattern? It seems that every time the Earth does what it's always done, it's "unexpected."

The jig seems to be up for the Enthusiasts. When cap and trade failed in the US, that signaled the death of their movement. Obama lost interest and the Democrats haven’t picked it up. Obama then went to Copenhagen with the idea of securing a fake agreement to agree which would get the environmentalists of his back and even that blew up in his face when China, Brazil, India, and South Africa met behind his back and agreed to do nothing to change anything. At this point, there are some stragglers. The UK, for example, remains brainwashed, though I’m reading lots of reports about the huge cost and consequence of trying to reduce their carbon emissions which may make them think twice. Australia’s Labor Government seems intent on imposing a carbon tax. But that’s about it. Everyone else seems to be ready to move on.

It’s never wise to predict the death of a religion, but I think the Cult of Warming’s days are numbered.

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Overpopulationists: How Did This Not Happen?!

Ah, liberals. They’re such fun to watch. When their theories prove false, they stand there, like idiots who can’t for the life of them understand why NOBODY saw that their theories were garbage (of course, they conveniently ignore all the people who told them their theories were garbage). Yep, the world was blindsided. The overpopulation crowd just ran into this.

Anybody who understands... well, anything... knows that the world is not overpopulated nor will it ever be. The idea of overpopulation was born in the 1970s when chicken-little leftists noticed that it took a lot less time for the world population to go from one billion to two, and less to get to three, and less to get to four, and less to get to five. Here’s a handy chart of DOOOOOM:

123 years.... 2 to 3 billion
33 years...... 3 to 4 billion
14 years...... 4 to 5 billion
12 years...... 5 to 6 billion

At this rate, we’ll be at 100 billion in minutes, right? Well, hardly. If you have even the slightest grasp on demographics or anything else in nature, like how diseases spread, you know that these things peak and then collapse. So it’s inevitable that this will actually stop and reverse itself. But don’t tell that to liberals because they LOVE straight-line projections... one... two... infinity!

Anyway, the academic world has now caught on to the problem. It turns out that it took 13 years to get to 7 billion, i.e. longer than it took to get to 6 billion. This shocked people because it wasn’t supposed to happen, so they began looking for an explanation and, lo and behold, they discovered that birthrates are falling everywhere. They are falling so much that Western Europe is expected to fall from its estimated peak of 460 million to around 350 million by the year 2100. China’s population will fall by half in that time, as will Russia’s. Mexico’s birthrate has crashed from 7.3 births per woman in 1960 to 2.5 today and is still falling. India’s fell from 6 to 2.5. Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. And so on.

What happened is this. Birth rates soared when mankind learned to stop the diseases that were killing most of people when they were young. Then capitalism reached every corner of the world and birth rates started to collapse because prosperous people have fewer kids. This trend isn’t stopping either: it’s consistent across countries and cultures. And the people studying this now believe that most of us will still be alive to hear the news that the world population has actually begun shrinking.

Sadly for the left, the premise of so many of their beliefs is this idea that the population will continue to rise forever. That won’t happen now and you can already see them decoupling their ideology from this rotten apple. Indeed, the article mentioning this tried to pretend that the whole population bomb was just one of those US things and not leftist dogma. It actually said,

“This is a counter-intuitive notion in the United States, where we’ve heard often and loudly that world population growth is a perilous and perhaps unavoidable threat to our future.”

Yeah, right. Actually, none of us believed it except dogmatic enviro-leftists.

Anyway, not all liberals are onboard with the newthink yet. The Los Angeles Times is running a seven part series on the horrors of there being seven billion of us and how this trend of growth without end will lead to “bleak living conditions.” Oh well, give them time. Soon all of liberaldom will be safely within the groupthink and they will be preaching the dangers of the population shortage. No doubt they’ll recommend forced breeding, which sounds like a perfect solution for liberals: it’s simple, it’s oppressive, and it’s guaranteed not to work. Ah, liberals.

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That’s Why They Call It Dope

Every once in a while, a story comes along that just makes you laugh. That’s the case with a new scientific study about the effects of smoking pot. Get this. . . smoking pot makes you stupid. Really? Noooo way, dude!

The study in question was conducted by an international team under an NHS grant. They followed 1,000 teenage boys and girls between the ages of 13 and 14 for twenty years. Each test subject was given a battery of IQ tests. What the researchers found was that the test subjects who smoked marijuana in their teens fell behind their non-smoking peers by 8 points on these IQ tests by the time they turned 38. That may not sound like much, but it’s enough to take someone from average intelligence to the bottom third of the population. Moreover, these same users also showed early signs of dementia, which is a very bad thing.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone however. Anyone who has known a pot smoker knows that they are, in a word, stupid. They are slow, they have poor memory recall and their personalities are like talking to mud. And that’s when they aren’t high.

No doubt the pot legalizers will dismiss this because they dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their idea that smoking pot is healthy. But this study merely confirms what anyone with a brain should already know. So the next time some pothead tells you that smoking pot is harmless, go ahead and shove them down some stairs. . . I said Dave’s not here!

Speaking of dopeheads, the left is once again out in full force polluting the airways with their intolerance and idiocy. As some of you are no doubt aware, the Republicans are currently holding a little get-together in Tampa right now. So check out these quotes from famous celebrity haters:

● Ellen Barkin, who hasn’t had a hit in forever, tweeted this:

“C’mon #Isaac! Wash every pro-life, anti-education, anti-woman, xenophobic, gay-bashing, racist SOB right into the ocean! #RNC”

Nice! She’s wishing death on her political opponents, just like a good tolerant liberal.

● Samuel L. Jackson, who is quickly losing my respect, tweeted that he “was not understanding God’s plan” since God had "spared" Tampa. He said:

"Unfair Shit: GOP spared by Issac! NOLA prolly Fucked Again! Not understanding God's plan!"

Unlike Barkin, he at least apologized. . . sort of, a few hours later, saying “Apologies to God, Tampa, da GOP & Isaac! Who played the Race card?!”

Who indeed Samuel L? It sounds to me like you played the race card a couple weeks back and Obama and Chris Matthews have been playing it all week. Also, reading your quote as written, you seem to be implying that God, Tampa, the GOP and Isaac all played the race card. Stay off the dope Sam, it makes you stupid.

Perhaps we should return the favor and hope that Hollywood gets wiped out by a tsunami or an earthquake or a plague of rabid hamsters, but I’m not liberal, so I don’t wish death on my political opponents or on the people of cities where those political opponents happen to be meeting.


By the way, for those who didn't watch the convention last night, the speeches were excellent. This has been one of the better conventions I remember in my lifetime.

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Burning Down The House

If there’s one thing liberals/leftists just can’t get out of their systems, it’s the desire to act like Nazis. They just love the idea of imprisoning and killing those who disagree with them. And no, I’m not kidding. Every single socialist movement the world over has rounded up opponents and even here there are those who openly wish such things. . . people like global warming enthusiast Steve Zwick.

Steve Zwick, for those who don’t know, is a “climate change” alarmist who periodically writes for Forbes magazine. In his most recent article, he pulled a Hitler. Specifically, he said this:

“We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. . . They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?”

Stick in the word “Jews” and this thing comes right out of any speech by Hitler. Note how Zwick suggest the creation of an enemies list. Those people need to be marked, perhaps with a yellow sun on their lapels. They are to be considered subhuman. And when Zwick decides it’s time for his final solution, we are to burn their houses and drown them. They must pay for their treachery, these climate Jews.

And don’t think this is an isolated incident. Earlier this month, University of Oregon “Professor” Kari Norgaard (right) said climate change skeptics are akin to “racists” and should be “treated” (medically) as if they had a mental disorder. Norgaard also wrote a letter to Obama in which she called on Obama to suspend democracy to satisfy her climate-fetish. Norgaard, by the way, is a big supporter of Obama climate advisor John P. Holdren who wrote in 1977 that we should carry out forced abortions, mandatory sterilization procedures and drugging of the water supply to weed out the surplus supply of humans. She has also praised NASA global warming alarmist Dr. James Hansen, who has advocated eco-terrorism, including blowing up damns and demolishing cities in the hopes of returning the planet to an agrarian age.

She’s not alone either in advocating dictatorship. Environmental James Lovelock asserted that “democracy must be put on hold to combat global warming.” (Maybe that’s where Dem. Gov. Bev Perdue got the idea that we should suspend elections until Obama can fix the economy?)

In 2006, environmentalist magazine Grist Magazine wrote that there should be “Nuremberg- style war crimes trials” for the “bastards” who are part of the “denial industry” who oppose the global warming enthusiasts. . . both Al Gore and Bill Moyer have endorsed that magazine.

Nice huh?

Anyway, back to Zwick. Besides advocating the murder of people with whom he disagrees, Zwick also became the point man for trying to defend the climategate scandal. In that defense, he actually argued that the Freedom of Information Act should not apply to requests made by right-wingers.

So there you have it:

● Right wingers should not be allowed information on what the government is doing. The law should only work for liberals.

● Climate change critics should be tracked and their homes burned.

● Obama should suspend democracy to enforce global warming enthusiasts' goals.

● And murder, forced abortion, forced sterilization and eco-terrorism are all valid tools for the government to use in helping the global warming enthusiasts achieve their fetishistic goals.

So much for it only happening in Nazi Germany. Now that I think about it. . . maybe we should start burning their houses down?

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Global Warmists Lie About Ocean Levels

No sooner did we discover that the trees are sabotaging global warming, than we get news that global warming enthusiasts are fudging their data to make the oceans appear to be rising, when they aren’t. This has been a bad month for the enthusiasts. In fact, it’s been a bad couple years.

Climate change enthusiasts have had a bad time of late:

1. Their seminal religious text, the Nobel-Prize-winning Fourth Report (2007) of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been repeatedly disgraced:

● They had to retract a completely unsupported statement that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

● Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. In fact, global temperatures are currently below the “low end” of the IPCC’s prediction. What’s more, 1999-2008 showed no warming, and certainly not the 0.20 degrees Celsius expected by the IPCC.

● It was revealed that flaws in weather stations wrongly created warming.

● It was revealed that the report wrongly used summer data for winter months to generate warming.

● The IPCC claim that global warming will hurt biodiversity was shown to have no basis -- not to mention that the world’s species are at least one million years old and thus have all been through hundreds of climate cycles.

● They had to retract unsubstantiated fears about threats to the Amazon rainforests;

● The IPCC’s statement that sea level would rise 2.3 mm per year was shown to be based on data collected in a part of Hong Kong that is sinking.

2. Real scientists have debunked much of the enthusiasts claims. For example, despite claims by enthusiasts, CO2 does not constitute 3% of the atmosphere, it actually constitutes 0.037%. What’s more, ice core samples show that we are currently in a low CO2 period compared to earth’s history. Indeed, CO2 levels have been as much as 10 times higher than today. And CO2 changes typically follow temperature changes, i.e. they do not lead temperature changes, and often by hundreds of years.

3. In 2009, the climate “scientists” primarily responsible for tracking global warming were caught fudging their data and formulas and waging a jihad against their opponents (see climategate).

4. In January, IPCC scientist Osvaldo Canziani was listed as an advisor on a report that overstated warming by 1000%, and which was published even after this error was pointed out to the study’s authors. They neither corrected nor noted the error.

5. Last week warming enthusiasts had to back down from claims about warming because it turned out that trees were actually absorbing carbon dioxide. . . as expected.

Now we have the sea level issue. Warming enthusiasts assert that rising sea levels would wipe out islands and coastal cities. The IPCC predicts sea level rises equal to 2.3 meters per century, with 2.7 feet happening this century. But in January 2010, they had to retract this report because of “mistakes in time intervals and inaccurately applied statistics.” Then in May of 2010, a paleogeophysics/geodynamics professor from Stockholm University in Sweden issued a report that observations from around the world showed no rising sea levels in the last 40 years.

So what do you do when the sea just won’t do what you predict? The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided to add 0.3 millimeters a year to their sea level figures to create rising sea levels where none exist.

But don’t worry, they assure us, this rising is real. . . you just can’t see it because the land level is rising too. Does this make sense to anyone? If this is true and both land and sea are rising equally, then where is the justification for panicking the world into fighting global warming? And if it’s not true, then this is just another example of poli-scientists fudging their data to make their predictions appear to be true. And if land and sea are rising equally, why add 0.3 millimeters to create the impression that the sea is rising faster than the land?

Do you know what the Sea Level Research Group responded? Come on, we're not adding much.

I kid you not.


(P.S. Sorry for not continuing the 2012 contender series today, but Bachmann is requiring more research than expected. Besides. . . Ronald "Huntsman" Reagan has it all sewn up, right?)

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Global Warming Fails Again

Global warming is a politically-created myth. It relies on climate models that are so inaccurate they couldn’t predict an increase in room temperature if you started a fire. What’s more, warming enthusiasts have shut down all inquiry that might improve the science because those inquiries keep disproving the underlying theory. Now we have perhaps the biggest laugher yet to blast a glaring hole in their theory: the very trees are against them.

Ok, let’s start with some grade-school logic, the kind global warming enthusiasts can’t do. What do trees and plants need to grow? Yes, soil, water and. . . carbon dioxide. Trees, flowers and grass absorb carbon dioxide from the air. The more they get, the more they grow. The more they grow, the more carbon dioxide they absorb out of the air. Thus, logic tells us that an increase in carbon will be largely offset by plant life growth.

Sounds simple, right? The problem is that’s heresy.

Global warming enthusiasts don’t want to hear this because it undermines their theory that carbon dioxide is a useless industrial pollutant that will sit in the atmosphere forever causing the earth to warm up over centuries. Indeed, they’ve even put out “studies” (read= guess work opinion pieces) like one by the University of Minnesota in 2006, which claimed that “atmospheric carbon dioxide levels may rise even faster than anticipated, because ecosystems likely will not store as much carbon as had been predicted”! Oh my! Note, by the way, the hedging throughout this sentence. There is no science here, just speculation that reality might not be reality and thus we should destroy the world economy now to stop the release of carbon dioxide. . . evil, evil, pointless carbon dioxide.

Well, on June 5th of this year, experts from Finland and the United States were shocked. . . shocked to learn that reality works like everyone other than global warming enthusiasts knew it would. This report found to the enthusiasts’ horror that rising carbon dioxide levels caused forest density to increase: “Global warming, blamed by the U.N. panel of climate experts mainly on human use of fossil fuels, might itself be improving growth conditions for trees in some regions.” That’s right, trees are getting fatter. And the consequence of this is. . . well. . . um. . . it’s “offsetting climate change.” In other words, it’s keeping global warming from happening.

Yep. Everything the enthusiasts predicted is once again proving false and everything we realists said would happen is happening. The earth remains in balance as always.

Of course, this isn’t what global warming enthusiasts want to believe, so we’ll see if they accept this or if they choose instead the burn the heretics at the carbon-free stake?

Interestingly, this follows some other recent revelations. For example:

● In 2008-2010, global temperatures dropped sharply enough to cancel out the entire supposed net rise in the 20th century. This is important because global warming theory relies on cumulative increases. Thus, their whole theory has fallen apart. . . again. Enthusiasts tried to blame this on the "unexpected" solar cycle -- an eleven year pattern that has repeated itself consistently throughout history and seems to coincide with scaremongering about new global ice ages or new global warming. Enthusiasts also complained that the oceans reacted in an "unexpected" manner by doing what they've always done rather than changing as the climate models suggested. And now the dirty trees have done the "unexpected" by doing what they've always done and refusing to conform to the models. Are you seeing a pattern? It seems that every time the Earth does what it's always done, it's "unexpected."

● In 2008, hundreds of actual scientists heaped scorn on the supposed “scientific consensus” reached by the enthusiasts, a collection of psychologists, gynecologists and other assorted experts with no knowledge of climate science.

● What’s more this most recent report notes that the evil United States, which we know is dominated by people who just like killing trees for no reason except pure spite, has experienced a surge in forest density. Between 1953 and 2007, forest volume in capitalist America grew by 51%. That's right, the whole time they were putting out PSAs and experts were appearing before Congress decrying “deforestation,” forest volume was increasing by half. And not only were there new trees, but existing trees were growing, something we were told wouldn’t be happening -- indeed, the last decade was all about growth, not replanting.

These are hard times for Chicken Little.

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