The state of Texas has just engaged in the mass abduction of wives and children from Christian polygamists because of the alleged bad conduct of one Christian polygamist – though strangely they seem unable to find the person who alleged this bad conduct.
Evidently, although Muslim polygamy is multicultural, Christian polygamy is not.
It is an open question, though with the evidence mounting against a substantial anthropogenic effect.
I often write as if Anthropogenic Global Warming was disproven or obviously false. Global Warming is an open scientific issue, one which more information is needed – and in due course will be forthcoming. The position among real scientists is that Global warming is a conjecture – not a conjecture very likely to be true, but conjecture that could be true.
Over the next decade or so, the truth, or more likely the falsity, of Anthropogenic Global Warming should become more apparent. We have plenty of time to discover the actual situation before taking big dramatic actions. If human are warming the world, it is pretty obvious we are not warming it very fast.
In 2007, there seems to have been a dramatic change in the weather on the sun. The abnormally active sun of the past several decades is most likely changing its ways. If global warming is cosmogenic, the next decade or so is going to get mighty cold.
“Brutally Honest” complains that Christianity is immoral because it does not hate capitalism enough – no of course that is not what he complains. He complains Christianity is immoral, because it teaches that God gave us the world, and commanded us to be fruitful and multiply, to take dominion over the world, to fill it and subdue it. He is worried that we are going to run out of oil, and there will be no oil left for our children.
But Christianity, at least the old fashioned kind, has faith in capitalism, and so long as we have capitalism, we shall have fuel for our cars
Old fashioned, unecumenical, not-in-the-slightest-bit-multicultural Christianity commands private property, and prohibits coveting, let alone stealing other people’s stuff. You are allowed to look at your neighbors house and think
“That is a nice house, I should build a house like that.”
But you are forbidden to look at your neighbors house and think
“That is a nice house, he must have some how cheated me and done me wrong to have a house like that, there is some conspiracy of people like him out to get me, he should be punished and I should have his house.”
The stone age did not end for lack of stones. Oil at present costs about a hundred dollars a barrel. Supply is restricted politically. Most oil companies have been nationalized, and are run by Sheiks or the like, who are incapable of getting the hot water connected to the hot water tap, let along maintaining and upgrading oil rigs. Most remaining oil is located in places where if you find oil, build an oil rig and a pipeline, your rig will be nationalized in violation of the agreement that the government signed when you went looking for oil. Paying off the thieves is, as he points out, not working, irrespective of how much oil remains in the ground, and indeed is funding terror.
But we can make oil substitutes from coal for a cost equivalent to thirty five to forty dollars a barrel – possibly a good deal less, if we were to convert our fuel systems to use methanol, and our fuel distribution system to distribute methanol by the tanker instead of by the drum. China is slowly converting to methanol, and expects to be about ten percent methanol in five years or so.
The main thing slowing the conversion is that businessmen fear that high oil prices are temporary, that the prices are the result of political obstacles to oil extraction which will be politically resolved, which would leave expensive investments in coal to liquid plants high and dry.
The major alternatives to oil based fuels are synfuel, which is good for jets and diesels, not so good for ordinary engines, methanol, which is good for ordinary petrol engines (with radically modified carburettors), but only gives you half the mileage, and dimethyl ether, a good substitute for LPG, good in diesels, no good in regular engines. We should be converting. If oil prices stay high, we eventually will be.
Because everyone pretty much accepts the idea that Osama bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan, it might sound sensible to send more troops in that general direction if you don’t think about it too hard. But it isn’t sensible because no matter how many troops we send to Afghanistan, they are not going to invade Pakistan, and that’s where Osama bin Laden is.
So everyone accepts that the guy who brought down the two towers has safe haven. And everyone accepts that Christian polygamy is a crime against women and children, while Muslim polygamy is muticulturalism. And everyone accepts that we pay off terrorists to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
That is not war on terror, or war on the axis of evil. That is acceptance of defeat.
Steve’s Climate Audit has found yet another entertaining example of carelessness or dishonesty by the Anthropogenic Global Warming holy Gaia rollers, as he does ever week or so.
I think the underlying mechanism of all these many errors is that the holy Gaia rollers massage the data one way, then they massage it another way, then another, and another, until they come up with a result that is on message, without ever bothering to think about what these various data massages mean.
“Global” means “let us throw any data into the pot that we can find, without regard for accuracy or even relevance, and if we cannot find any data sufficiently global, let us just make it up”, and “analyze” means “let us find obscure statistical excuses for chucking out any data that is off message, while pretending we are still taking account of it rather than rejecting it”.
When prophecies of doom are not working out, the first reaction is to escalate them:
Ted Turner tells us:
We will be eight degrees hotter in thirty or forty years, and basically none of the crops will grow, most people will have died, and the rest of use will be cannibals, civilization will have broken down.
Over past millenia, global temperatures have risen and fallen several degrees. A few thousand years back, hippos and crocodiles basked in the warm waters of the river Thames. A little after that, the Thames froze over. A few hundred years back, trees large enough to support ship building grew in Iceland, and people made wine from grapes grown in Northern England.
Over recent decades temperatures have been warming, and if we draw a straight line through the warming, it has been warming at the far from alarming rate of 0.2 degrees per decade. Walk, walk for the hills!
But a straight line may not necessarily be appropriate. Global temperatures maxed out a decade ago, and are now falling. Because global temperatures are now falling, we are now hearing the prophecies of doom being escalated.
E-gold, which I thought would save the world, turned out to be something of a bust, with essentially zero use in real internet commerce, but “unenumerated reports” that we are seeing the financial markets going into commodity based fractional reserve monies in a big way, many trillions of dollars. Still, you cannot pay for your we hosting or cell phone minutes with commodity based monies. These moneys are for big deals, and only big deals. The revolution begins when you can send commodity based money over end to end encrypted instant messaging, and the money is good to pay for your web hosting and your prepaid cell phone minutes.
I was wrong about Muslim reaction to the video “Fitna”. I said that Muslim’s were not reacting, just their pals in the west. This is not the case. Muslims are reacting, and, as usual, threatening murder and terror, though their western pals reacted first.
The state of Texas has just engaged in the mass abduction of wives and children from Christian polygamists because of the alleged bad conduct of one Christian polygamist – though strangely they seem unable to find the person who alleged this bad conduct.
Evidently, although Muslim polygamy is multicultural, Christian polygamy is not.