Rush Limbaugh – smarter than ten thousand ecology PhDs

August 8th, 2010

Back when BP’s oil was spouting into the gulf of Mexico, Rush told us:

“The beach will fix itself”

“More oil spilled every year in Africa, in Nigeria, than so far in the Gulf, so it’s not unique. It’s not exceptional. It’s not the largest. Mexico had a spill that larger than this, nobody talks about except apparently me”

And behold:  The beach has fixed itself.

The reason that BP was drilling there in the first place is that giant oil plumes occur naturally from time to time in that location– not as big as this one, but comparable. There is an entire ancient oil eating ecology naturally present in the gulf

This supposed crisis is akin to the supposedly horrifying crisis of the radioactive boy scout – any man made radiation is deemed ten gazillion times worse than naturally occurring sources of radiation, and any man released oil is deemed ten gazillion times worse than naturally occurring sources of oil.

Just as the soil is full of living creatures things that turn dead leaves into compost, the Gulf of Mexico is full of living creatures that turn oil into asphalt. The asphalt sinks to the bottom, and eventually gets buried in mud. It appears that sea creatures ate most of the released oil, and cleanup crews collected only a tiny portion. No doubt it was rough on those sea creatures that cannot eat oil, which all the cute charismatic creatures from seagulls to crabs cannot, but nature is rough whether humans meddle or not.

And while the cute charismatic creatures had a hard time for a while, now the oil is gone.

A solution to the gay marriage and the covenant marriage problem

August 7th, 2010

The Other McCain agrees.  Get the government out of the marriage business.

Let each church decide for itself what marriage is, which views the government should ignore, and let people draw up what contracts they choose for living together.

You have the right to contract.  Let us have gay nuptial contracts, not gay marriages.

And the same for heterosexual relationships:  If a seventeen year old girl can contract for gigantic college debts that cannot be expunged by bankruptcy, in return for some academic training that will not necessarily give her a career, then she can agree to a nuptial contract that government does not necessarily think is fair to women.

Palin Power

August 5th, 2010

According to polls, Palin’s Support for a Candidate Doesn’t Matter or Is Mostly Negative, yet we observe that  in practice that when Palin endorses a candidate that is way behind, that candidate shoots up in the polls, and quite often wins.

There are several possible explanations of this

  1. People tend to give politically correct replies to polls, rather than what they genuinely believe.
  2. Republican party activists do what Palin tells them to do, and republican party voters do what republican party activists tell them to do.
  3. A nobody cannot beat a somebody. Get Palin’s endorsement, you are no longer a nobody, you are a serious candidate, the one to beat.

I suspect all of these explanations are true.

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

July 30th, 2010

Pajamas media has found an excellent quote from Richard Feynman, which skewers every global warmer:

“The Pleasure of Finding things out” by Richard Feynman, page 187

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations and they make lists and they do statistics, but they do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science-like the South Sea Islanders making airfields, radio towers out of wood, expecting a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely, they don’t fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are-experts. You teachers who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, maybe you can doubt the experts once in a while. Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

When someone says science teaches such and such, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it. If they say to you science has shown such and such, you might ask, “How does science show it-how did the scientists find out-how, what, where?” Not science has shown, but this experiment, this effect, has shown. And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but we must listen to all the evidence), to judge whether a reusable conclusion has been arrived at. . I think we live in an unscientific age in which almost all the buffeting of communications and television words, books, and so on are unscientific. That doesn’t mean they are bad, but they are unscientific. As a result, there is a considerable amount of intellectual tyranny in the name of science.

Genuine science is replicable. And “replicable” does not mean two priests recite the same doctrine, it means they explain what they did in such a fashion that anyone else could do it also.

If they refuse to explain, they are not scientists, but priests of Gaea.

Unsupported and unexplained politically correct pseudo science appears all the time in “Science” and “Nature”
For example:

Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre’s repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored.

This sort of thing (that PC science is in practice exempted from data disclosure, and proudly proclaims results on the basis of secret evidence) has been an ongoing scientific scandal from the very beginning of the global warming movement, and everyone aware of this unscientific practice should have realized that global warming science is not science, but politics and religion, and that global warming scientists are not scientists, but priests of Gaea.

Environmentalism, and several other isms, are state sponsored religions, which because of state backing have the privilege of publishing their holy texts in scientific journals despite conspicuous and infamous failure to comply with the standards and rules of those journals.

Nine years later, Briffa’s Yamal data for twentieth century temperatures turned out to be that one tree of ten selected trees grew unusually rapidly during the twentieth century as compared to fossil trees of the same type from the same area. These ten trees were selected by Bricca after a great many other trees in the same area were measured, but the rest of the measurements were not included.

The larger population of trees, taken as a whole, shows much the same growth pattern as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from those ten, Yamal06, and most of the evidence for climate change vanishes. Restore the much larger set of tree measurements from which the ten trees were selected, and all of the evidence for climate change vanishes – the population as a whole is has the same growth rates as the fossil trees.

Take out one tree from half a dozen graphs of global warming in near a dozen papers, and suddenly they do not show global warming any more.

Bricca has, at this time, not yet explained why those ten trees, and not other trees in the same area measured in the same survey. And whatever his explanation, ten trees is not enough.

The government likes data that supports more government power, rewards those that tell it what it wants to hear, and punishes those that tell it what it does not want to hear.

Environmentalism is a state sponsored religion, for it is perfectly visible to anyone that wants to look that it is not subject to the same standards as normal science, the story of Briffa and the Yamal data being one example of a great many.

People have lost their jobs for reporting that glaciers are advancing in a particular area, even though they fully agreed that most glaciers are retreating. This makes it hard to tell whether most glaciers are indeed retreating.

Environmentalism generally, and the Global Warming movement in particular, acts like a holy and sectarian religious movement, a religious movement backed by state power, not like science.

Recent events prove that on certain topics, they do not carry science, but are mere megaphones for the holy ranting of the priesthood.

Science is not that which the state decrees to be science. It is that which follows the rules of science, which unwritten rules correspond, more or less, to the written rules of the older and more prestigious journals.

If these journals are reluctant to apply these written rules on certain sensitive topics, then what appears on those sensitive topics will not be science, and hence what appears or fails to appear in such journals is not an indication of truth, but of religion.

In particular if the replacement hockey stick had been genuinely peer reviewed, then, in accordance with the unwritten rules of science, and the written rules of the older and more prestigious science journals, the data and calculations supporting the graph would have been made available. Had the data and graphs been made available, people would have objected nine years ago that ten trees are not enough.

Since not genuinely peer reviewed, since not in conformity with journal rules, therefore not genuine science, therefore mere theology.

No democratic solution

July 24th, 2010

Doctor Zero has a carefully thought out proposal on how to save America through mass democracy, through getting 50% of the voters plus one behind the measures necessary to save America, behind measures that are carefully pruned to be the minimum  possible measures that could save the country, measures that are as “moderate” as possible, which is not very moderate at all.

No way Jose.  Democracy is doomed, or the country is doomed, or, quite likely, both. Read the rest of this entry »

“Diversity”

July 20th, 2010

What academia means by “diversity” is people of all colors and all sexual preferences chanting their master’s words in unison.

Steve Sailer found an interesting paper on admissions policy. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are not at the government’s table, you are on the government’s menu

July 20th, 2010

Vox Populi:

While the economic value of anything depends on sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu.

The revolving door:

This is an administration that almost employs more Goldman Sachs officials in financial and regulatory positions than Goldman Sachs itself does.  One of the first acts of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar was to hire a BP executive to serve as a deputy administrator for land and minerals management.  And now they’ve just hired to implement the new healthcare law someone who was just recently in charge of the lobbying and government activities of the nation’s largest private insurer.

If someone genuinely opposed big business, he would opposed all government regulation and all taxes.

The ruling class

July 18th, 2010

Roissy links to an insightful article on the growing divide between rulers and ruled

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters – speaking the “in” language – serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats.

It is in the nature of government to grow, and so it swallows up everything. The parasite eventually destroys the host. Government has seized upon a multitude of justifications, the most recent justification being the welfare state, the coming justification being saving the earth. Insolvency approaches. Trees do not grow to the sky. That which cannot continue, will stop.

The left is astroturf, it is the voice of the state. But we have already reached the point where persuading people to vote for more government, or interpreting their vote as a vote for more government no matter how they vote has become ineffectual, depriving the left of any reason for existence, depriving democracy itself of the reason for its existence.

The death of science

July 14th, 2010

“Scientists” complain that the government is interfering in “science” by denying them regulatory authority over other people’s economic activity.

Nasa’s primary goal is to make Muslims feel good about Muslim science. Read the rest of this entry »

The politics of Hit-Girl

July 13th, 2010

The politics of Hit-Girl

For a long time the left has controlled the gates for movies, books, and comics, in part because of the government control of television. Lately, however, I have been seeing more and more politically incorrect stuff.

As you probably figured out if you watched the movie Kick Ass, Hit-Girl is a conservative, what with being home schooled and all

It is a great movie.

In the comic book, her politics is more overtly conservative than in the movie, not that she is pacifist hippie in the movie. Here are some political scenes from the comics: Read the rest of this entry »