Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite
Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Bob Shane, John
Stewart, and Nick Reynolds, as the Kingston Trio, performing
Scotch & Soda, ca. 1967 (2:44).
As y’all know, for many years now there has been an ongoing debate between those who think that recent abnormal changes in the temperature of the earth’s biosphere have been caused by side-effects from the behaviour of homo sapiens, and those who do not think they have been so caused. It turns out that in practice they are both wrong: there have not actually been any abnormal changes in said temperature. As a result of the exposure of The CRU Papers, we now know that claims of such changes were fraudulently fabricated and perpetrated by the priests and believers of the fear-mongering climate-change faith system.
And, just as fraudulent claims by the false priests of any other fear-mongering religion claiming to be saving your soul in some non-confirmable way say nothing about the metaphysics of theology, so too the protection-racket extortions being perpetrated by the false priests of abnormal climate change say nothing about the epistemology of science.
What we have here is not science, folks, it is neither more nor less than yet another example of the never-ending phenomena of human mob behaviour so well illustrated in Charles Mackay’s 1852 classic, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds. Like other frauds and bubbles documented therein, this one is now bursting due to the inadequacies of its own undergirding. Because of the degree of deployment in this case, the terminal phase of this bubble will take some time, but eventually The CRU Papers and Climategate will become known as the beginning of the end of the current Climate Change Bubble.
Meanwhile, homo sapiens will merrily continue on: first chasing and then bursting whatever other fraudulent bubbles happen to capture our mob fancy from time to time, such as various instantiations of collectivism and godism and dowsing and other mystical and paranormal beliefs. If it weren’t that somehow we seem to continue to incrementally improve our temporo-normative situation, three steps forward and two steps back, one might as well be a pessimist, but since we do, one might as well be an optimist (besides, as Heinlein pointed out: it’s more fun).
So, to be clear, my additional Reader Tip for you tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is: try to avoid saying that these recent results tell us something about science. They only tell us something about some people who were lying to us about doing science: they said they were and they were not. Don’t let their malfeasance reflect badly upon you by dint of your mischaracterizing it.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Yesterday I was watching an episode of The Ascent of Man. Bronowski was cautioning that science should never become a tool of politics or a closed association of the elite. He revealed his disgust of trendy pseudosciences and western cultural decay/cowardice. A very perceptive man who accurately predicted the direction of both science and western culture. In the AGW “science”, his worst fears about politics and western culture have been realized
Of course not all scientists should be discredited because of a few bad apples but they will be. Too few scientists spoke out when they should have, too few are speaking out now.
Posted a link to a website detailing how Goldman Sachs is invested in carbon trading and what have you. All fact.
‘Climategate’ is what you get when big money co-opts a cause for its own profit. Hopefully it will be enough to derail Copenhagen, but don’t count on it.
Those who say carbon trading was a scheme to divert money from the first world to the third world are badly mistaken. This was never in the cards. The transfer of wealth was to be from first world middle class, what’s left of it anyway, to the global elites. Do you really think the 4 or 5 billion people living in abject poverty were to see a single red cent from this?
And you don’t need carbon trading for this transfer of wealth to take place, it already happens. Goldman Sachs will pay 23$ billion in year end bonuses. Your bailout dollars at work. This is a country were 40 million people are so poor, they need food stamps to eat. Where countless millions lost their jobs and their homes. With an allegedly ‘socialist’ administration.
What have those ‘bankers’ don to deserve 23 billion? Nothing. None of them grew any food, built anything, fixed anything, or invented anything. Parasites, every last one of them.
And don’t give me that pap about ‘the top 1% pay 40% of the income tax’. I call bullshit. If scientists can fudge climate data, the wealthy elites can pay others to fudge economic data.
Sorry for the Chinese Water Torture, but it should not be forgotten that the Judeo-Christian faith, despite its many foibles, including excommunication of Galileo, has more often than not been the Gatekeeper of Western Culture.
‘Cut off the cultus (system of religious worship) and you have no culture: Eeba dee, eeba dee, that’s all folks.
Well said Vit, but..but. A tool is nothing but a dumb Tool!
The elitist blatant denial, of some, provides an insight into the future role of science.
Copenhagen will act as a turd Comb Filter, separating stake holders into camps of science/politics/gangsters/sales (MSM),…
The world wide Carbon WAR is next… all about nothing.
Since this whole climategate broke out , I have delighted in debated with devote AGWers only to discover that their main premise for believing this lie is the “melting ice caps” one women had lived in her home for over 50 years and had taken pics of the ice covered mountains near her home every year – 50 years worth of photos and yes they show that the glacier has melted significantly – to her this all the proof she needs, seems others are believers due to melting ice caps around the world as well. My response is a simple one: these people are believing this ice should not be melting because it has been there for thousands and thousands, if not millions, of years. Well therein lies another lie. Evolution has the world believing that the earth is billions of years old and only changes at turtle speed. The fact is – we do not know how long the ice has been there to begin with. According to Suzuki and others, there use to be a huge waterfall in the great lakes that was above water and is now under water – apparently this change took place only a few hundred years ago, yet we are suckered into believing that the ice caps have been there since the last ice age. I say bullshit. Look how the tsunami of 2004 changed the topography and geography of Indonesia and Sri Lanka in day. Seems few even consider this melting is normal and the evolutionists are wrong – the earth is not billions of years old. There starting point is a false one, so all information or conclusions based on thes false assumptions are going to be wrong.
Nice post, Vitruvius. I like the reference to Charles Mackay and his deservedly famous work, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”.
A commonly referenced quote from that book is: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
With regard to AGW and the politics thereof, they (we) have surely gone mad as a herd, but we are now moving into sense recovery mode. It is happening slowly, as Mackay said, but the momentum is now becoming discernible.
India is now Canada’s most crucial/important ally in Asia.
India is a bulwark in the war against Islam.
This deal is crucial to Saskatchewan* and for Canada.
…-
“Canada, India ink nuclear deal
“Ottawa and Delhi have concluded negotiations on a deal allowing Canadian companies to resume sales of uranium and nuclear technology to India for the first time since it used Canada’s technology to develop warheads 35 years ago.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, whose minority government is eagerly courting Indo-Canadian voters and India’s nuclear industry market, made the announcement today while at a Commonwealth leaders’ summit in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
“This agreement is a testimony to the undeniable potential that Canada and India can offer each other and the world,” Mr. Harper said in a statement after meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-india-ink-nuclear-deal/article1381488/
…-
*Saskatchewan:
“Uranium
A significant portion of the world’s known uranium resources are located in Saskatchewan. Uranium deposits in Saskatchewan’s are large, contain high-grade ore and can be extracted at production costs below those in many other parts of the world. Saskatchewan’s uranium resources are sufficient for more than 40 years at current rates of production.”
http://www.ir.gov.sk.ca/Default.aspx?DN=3564,3541,3538,3385,2936,Documents
LC Bennett mentioned: “The Ascent of Man. Bronowski”.
But, Darwin’s opus magnum is:
“Descent of Man [ 1871 ]
Charles Darwin [ 1809 – 1882 ]
Chapter VII – On the Races of Man”
http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_darwin/descent_of_man/chapter_07.html
Now, in 2009, appears the descent of Mann.
Evolution in process.
Today, Mark Steyn touched upon something that I also thought about yesterday. Here’s Steyn’s analysis: http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWI1MDg3ODM4OWU2MDE4MGI2NGU3MWYzNDcxN2RmMjE=
He refers to an op-ed by Michael Gershon in the WaPo. I guffawed when Gershon wrote this:
“[Journalism is] a profession — the journalistic tradition of nonpartisan objectivity. Journalists, God knows, didn’t always live up to that tradition. But they generally accepted it, and they felt shamed when their biases or inaccuracies were exposed. The profession had rules about facts and sources and editors who enforced standards.”
He then goes on to smear Cable TV News channels and blogs, like this one. BUT he REFUSES to acknowledge what a HORRENDOUS job the print MSM, especially the WaPo and NYTimes have been doing.
I wonder how a psychologist would describe this denial?
Very nice comments, vitruvius. My own view is that another term for this endless dyad is the conflict between ideology and reality. I’ll maintain that this dyad is part of our essential psychological make-up and thus, we’ll never move fully into either realm. But, it’s quite the battle between these two.
The ideological realm is the imaginary. We humans are unique in having an imagination that we can actually visualize and articulate. We can ‘picture’ what it would be like if we did such and such. Therefore, unlike any other species, we don’t need to wait around for the biological appearance of wings; we invent cars and airplanes. Thus, we are uniquely adaptive by virtue of our imagination.
Alas, the downfall of our imagination lies in its very essence; this mode exists..but only in the imagination. And some of us make the error of thinking that it COULD exist in reality. If only we did this and that, then, we’d actually grow biological wings. The ‘this and that’ is usually some strategy of material purification, i.e., changing the real matter of which we are formed, and purifying it to achieve our idealistic goal.
Politically, we are very involved in the imaginary world, which we define as ‘in the future’ and which some call utopian. The thing about utopians, whether they be the leftists in the US Democratic Party or the Liberal/NDP/Bloc in Canada or the European Union or the Communists or the Fascists…is that all of them are focused on the imaginary realm. Not the real world. They seem to find a great deal to despise in the real world. And in real people.
And, to get to this utopian imaginary world, they’ve got to mash up and beat up and pound down…real material things. Real people. Real events. So, utopian realms are always filled with hubris, with tales of future glory and yet, are authoritarian and anti-democratic.
The other thing about the imaginary realm in the political scenario is that rarely, do ‘real people’ actually vote them in as their utopian selves. The EU government is not a result of any vote of real people. The Liberal/NDP/Bloc Coalition and its attempted takeover of Canada was deliberately done to prevent any election or ‘tainting’ by real people.
Even Obama’s election, though a valid election, was a fraud because he wasn’t presented as a utopian but as someone based in reality.
The real world operates in the complex networked realm of individual and discrete material things: individual people, local environments, local resources…finite, discrete yet interconnected, yet biologically adaptive and with no ‘end state’ of purity or utopia. This is the world, or should be, the world of science. It’s accountable; it has to be, because it has no imagination.
The thing is, we need both worlds. Only humans can articulate and be empowered by the imaginary world, but we must acknowledge that it has to be restrained and indeed, must respect, the real world.
John Sobieski and Charles Martel were the gate keepers of civilization or we all would be wearing robes.
Europe is first . We are next.
http://www.muslimmafia.com/
It’s not that I disagree with you, Vito, quite the contrary. But I wonder if there isn’t a very serious problem revealed here? Society has long recognized the value of science, and has agreed to spend substantial amounts of money on science – and the money, and the institutions, which we have been at such pains to dedicate to science, have effortlessly been appropriated and turned to non-scientific and anti-scientific purposes. And no whistles blown, and no consequences when the truth comes out. Shouldn’t we be gravely concerned? Can science survive if the resources we devote to it are used against it?
Thomas Woods is the author of the superb Meltdown.
Mises article: Thomas Woods: The Forgotten Depression of 1920
SYNOPSIS:
President Harding cut the budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third. .
MND comment:
The piece contains an excellent description of Austrian business cycle theory and explains how the artificial Fed expansion of bank credit distorts the capital structure causing a cluster of errors (technical term: clusterf**k) among entrepreneurs who acted upon false signals about the availability of REAL savings.
an early hoax. not as dangerous as the AGW hoax.but guaranteed to get you into hot water.
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/A_Neglected_Anniversary/
The Forgotten Depression of 1920 by Thomas Woods
(Woods is the author of the superb Meltdown.)
LINK: http://tiny.cc/TPJAi
SYNOPSIS:
President Harding cut the budget nearly in half between 1920 and 1922. Tax rates were slashed for all income groups. The national debt was reduced by one-third.
MND comment:
The piece contains an excellent description of Austrian business cycle theory and explains how the artificial Fed expansion of bank credit distorts the capital structure causing a cluster of errors (technical term: clusterf**k) among entrepreneurs who acted upon false signals about the availability of REAL savings. The “Austrians” believe that the regular occurence of booms and busts are NOT, pace almost everyone else, a feature of free market capitalism — that capitalism is NOT “inherently unstable”.
The science is never bad. but sometimes the theories or equations are a inaccurate.
for example.
The precession of Mercury is 5600 arc seconds per century. Newtonian mechanics, taking into account all the effects from the other planets, predicts a precession of 5557 seconds of arc per century.[77] In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity provided the explanation for the observed precession. The effect is very small: the Mercurian relativistic perihelion advance excess is just 42.98 arcseconds per century, therefore it requires a little over twelve million orbits for a full excess turn.
It took a better theory to predict this. however, the scientists did go down several wrong paths such as looking for an inner planet and obstructions . what they didnt do at the time was fudge the data and say that the orbit was not showing procession.
ah jeez the old scotch and soda tune. lemme tell you about the 1st time I heard it. true story.
it was 1970, I was living at a farmhouse cum church cum hippy commune(for some). one of the regulars with contacts in the music business came up with the idea of a free concert to close out the summer.
quick version: we had our free concert, an unsurpassed success (you could tell by the amount of litter on the front lawn !!! LOL !!!). so the next night we all got drunk to celebrate. I got the idea to call the local radio station in the late hours to thank them for the free promotion ads they did for us and made a request for ‘Mississippi Queen’ by Mountain:
3w.youtube.com/watch?v=qFhM1XZsh6o
in a drunken state that is.
the d.j. came on soon after suggesting a more apropos tune, thus I heard the Kingston Trio’s ode to alcohol for the 1st time whilst intoxinated.
to cap it off next day a couple more of the regulars chided me about being drunk on live radio but congratulated me for my thoughtfulness.
it all happened summer of 1970.
Speaking as an engineer who imagines making changes to the real world and who then designs and implements said changes, in order to effect his imagination, I would have to agree that imagination and reality are both good ideas, ET. Nevertheless, when it comes to the matter of science in and of itself: we are talking about an epistemological methodology. So if one hears someone say something like, “the science was bad”, then (unless they are actually arguing that discovering the truth is bad) they are not speaking well. What they should be saying is that the work wasn’t good science, or in extreme cases such as this one, that the promulgators of the fraud weren’t actually doing science at all.
In that sense, EBT, science doesn’t care whether or not we are doing it; as an epistemological methodology science survives whether or not homo sapiens does. But more importantly, perhaps, you are I think overgeneralizing when you apply the malfeasance of a particular group of people who were fraudulently claiming to be doing science to the many people and organizations who actually are properly doing proper science. Remember, what you read in the media and in blog comments is only marginally related to the truth.
Should we be gravely concerned, EBT asks? In my opinion, if you like being gravely concerned (and I must admit that before the blogosphere I had no idea that so many people like being gravely concerned so much) then I’d say go for it. Otherwise I wouldn’t worry about it too much because (1) there’s nothing much you can do about anyway, other than pandering to populist demagoguery, which is just as bad, (2) it will all change to something else soon enough anyway, it always does, and (3) you’ve probably got better things to do (unless of course you’re one of those people who gets their jollies by sitting around getting angry in blog comments all day, in which case, hey man, have fun).