Author: Kate

Y2Kyoto: The “Younger Cry-Ass Boundary”

After 15 years of deliberation, a team of scientists made the case that humankind has so fundamentally altered the natural world that a new phase of Earth’s existence—a new epoch—has already begun.

Soaring greenhouse gases, the spread of microplastics, decimation of other species, and fallout from nuclear tests—all were submitted as evidence that the world entered the Anthropocene, or era of humans, in the mid-20th century.

But the proposal was rejected in a contentious vote that has been upheld by the International Union of Geological Sciences, the field’s governing body said in a statement published on its website on Thursday.

The decision “to reject the proposal for an Anthropocene Epoch as a formal unit of the Geologic Time Scale is approved”, it said.

The only thing funnier than losing the vote is the notion that it could be determined by vote.

Fall Of Civilizations

The Greenland Vikings: Find out how these European settlers built a society on the farthest edge of their world, and survived for centuries among some of the harshest conditions ever faced by man. Discover how this civilization was able to overcome the odds for so long, and examine the evidence about what happened to cause its final and mysterious collapse.

The Iron Rule

Another good essay at Anarchonomicon: On the Origin of All Political Authority

You lose to tony Soprano in a game of cards, can’t afford to pay him?

He sets an interest rate. Still won’t Pay?

He’ll show up to bust out your business make you take out loans you can’t pay to pay him, make you purchase good online for him to resell, and make you destroy your life in fraudulent loans, til nothing is left…

And if you refuse or lie to him he’ll get violent. He’ll beat you, and if you over violence in turn and resist… maybe even win the fistfight with him and his goons…

He’ll either shoot you then and there, or he’ll leave and you’ll be shot by a henchman who can’t be tied to him.

The Sound Of Settled Science

Roger Pielke Jr;

In 2011, the United States experienced more than 500 deaths and over $30 billion in losses from tornadoes. As is now common, climate activists were quick to claim that the destructive tornadoes that year were due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rejected such claims, advising: [A]pplying a scientific process is essential if one is to overcome the lack of rigor inherent in attribution claims that are all too often based on mere coincidental associations.

The 2011 tornado season motivated us — Kevin Simmons, Daniel Sutter and I — to take a close look at trends in tornadoes and their impacts across the United States. The result was a peer-reviewed paper with the first comprehensive normalization of U.S. tornado losses, for 1950 to 2011.

Our results surprised even us — U.S. tornado damage and tornado incidence appeared to have decreased dramatically, contrary to conventional wisdom…

“Know yourself, know your enemy.”

New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay: Learning and Countering Leftist Strategy

Leftism, including Marxism, is operational. It is strategic. It knows what it’s doing and how to do it. It might look crazy, but that’s deliberate. In fact, Leftists proudly publish and disseminate activist guides for their agenda like the book Beautiful Trouble that spell out for anyone how to do “transformative” activism through deliberate and strategic troublemaking.[…] He starts by laying out that “Your Target’s Reaction Is Your Real Action,” explains how that progresses through “Put Your Target in a Decision Dilemma,” and illustrates how the program is accelerated with “Escalate Strategically.” He also takes pains to point out that all of their activism contains a performative element, like theater, to sway public or political opinion

“In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion.”

What would we do without research?

In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next 7 years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition.

In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa. The condition was included in the DSM-III the following year. Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women.

The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this way Bulimia entered the lexicon via women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which ran stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions.

Navigation