Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Get Your Bleed On

I think some people take their gender too seriously.

“It’s awesome”, says a University of Winnipeg student as she takes in The Gallery of Empowerment (and Menstrual Art) just after the artists erected the artwork. Presented by the university’s Womyn’s Centre, the gallery, which showcases the menstrual blood of collective members, went up November 25 to raise awareness about the Montreal Massacre and violence against women.

So. does that mean violence against men is OK? I dunno, there’s something kind of creepy about the idea of paintings made with dead human eggs and menstrual blood, or is that just me? I guess I must be a phall-opressor from the patriarchy or something. I guess semen art is out. Well, it doesn’t show up well on a canvas unless you use food dye.

And learn to spell Women, you crazies!

Cool Fork Art

Yes, you heard me.

Another Triumph for Socialism

This is what happens when Socialists have too much power, as evidenced by the disaster that is Zimbabwe.

Twelve-year-old Beatrice returns from the fields with small animals she’s caught for dinner.

Her mother, Elizabeth, prepares the meat and cooks it on a grill made of three stones supporting a wood fire. It’s just enough food, she says, to feed her starving family of six.

Tonight, they dine on rats.

“Look what we’ve been reduced to eating?” she said. “How can my children eat rats in a country that used to export food? This is a tragedy.” (Watch as Beatrice digs for rodents in the fields of Zimbabwe)

This is a story about how Zimbabwe, once dubbed southern Africa’s bread basket, has in six short years become a basket case. It is about a country that once exported surplus food now apparently falling apart, with many residents scrounging for rodents to survive.

Robert Mugabe is another Castro/Kim Jong Il. Fortunately, like Castro he’s an old man not long for this world. But what of the people starving until that day?

The Reality of Reality: Global Warming

NOTE: This is a repeat of an older article. Why am I reposting it? More on that later.

STEDMAN Med. Dict. (ed. 7) 737/1 Paralogia, false reasoning, involving self-deception. Facile sliding from one idea or logical category to another, losing the thread of logic which supports the fabric of communication (Hart, 1938).

Call it chains of logic. But human beings are adept at forging them.

Clinical paralogia is often associated with schizophrenia. It’s a state of mind where a person takes unrelated ideas and strings them together to form a belief system. For example: Airplanes and jets blow air around. Hurricanes and typhoons blow air around. As do fans. We’re seeing major hurricane activity recently. What if planes and fans have been pushing air around, which sets in motion a cascade effect. Like the chaos theory of a butterfly in the Amazon flapping its wings and causing a hurricane in Florida. We have scientists who can show you in charts, graphs and computer projections


that, yes, planes and fans move air around. And there are so many of them, the combined effect is probably causing hurricanes. In fact, several Hollywood celebrities and politicians believe this to be true and are calling for planes and fans to be banned in order to prevent more Katrina-like disasters. Except for theirs, of course.

If someone presented you with an argument like this, you’d probably laugh at them. After all, hurricanes have naturally occurred for millions of years before man walked the earth. We’ve had storms as bad, or worse, before the plane was invented. So it’s illogical to assume that just because we’ve had a rough year of storms, that planes and fans had anything to do with it.

But some people take this kind of logic seriously. It’s the problem with what I call passive paralogia. While hysterical paralogia is the providence of madness, passive paralogia is symptomatic of lazy thinking.

It goes like this: Human beings tend to take the path of least resistance when doing things. It’s easier to take shortcuts. After awhile, these paths become instinctual. For example, if you drive the same way home every day from work, eventually you don’t even have to think about it. You can almost do it on mental autopilot. The same goes for belief systems. Since it requires an education to know detailed facts about complex subjects, and understand them, many people often take the word of experts. When scientists, politicians and famous people say something is true, it’s no trouble to go with the flow and accept what they say.

It becomes even easier to accept the opinions of people who agree with your politics, because then you see them as filters. The argument has passed a test. It was validated by people you respect.  And when the media jumps on it and reports on it as if it’s a fact, that make it even easier to accept. From then on people’s beliefs tend to run on inertia.

I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. But let’s run down a few facts first.

• The earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old.
  
• For approximately three billion of those years, there was some kind of life.
  
• In that time the earth’s magnetic poles have flipped multiple times. This is estimated to have caused major climate changes.
  
• In addition to this the earth has seen periods of extreme climate change. All of this has taken place before the existence of mankind.
  
• In the extremely brief amount of time mankind has existed and developed a civilization, the earth has seen an Ice Age and a temperate period warmer than it is now. These happened well before modern times.
  
• Solar activity has been known to cause the earth to get warmer. This is because solar flares cause massive waves of radiation to hit the earth.
  
• Carbon Dioxide (C02) is produced by living things. The largest producers of it are deep sea algae. Every time you breath, you exhale it. Methane is also produced by living things.  It is also produced by volcanos which release it from the Earth’s mantle.

So we’ve established that the earth is old. The climate is constantly changing over time. The sun can cause it to get warmer. None of these things are in dispute. Even a creationist has to admit the weather changes, even if they believe the world is only 7,000 years old.

Yet, GW believers assume there’s something wrong with climate change. And it must be man’s fault. The logic chain that brings them to this conclusion probably came along like so:

America became the pre-eminent super power after WWII with the invention of the atomic bomb. We used the bomb on two cities in Japan. Having killed so many people, so easily, had a double edged impact. It made people confident in American supremacy. It also made people afraid that it could happen to them. Then scare stories about the effects or radiation came out. Suddenly, the public came to worry that science had gone to far and we had opened a pandora’s box.

Popular culture began to churn out stories about mankind creating monsters by fooling around with science and the power of the atom. In addition to this, the holocaust forced the culture to look honesty at discrimination, which resulted in social upheavals in the form of various civil rights movements. The Vietnam war, the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Watergate made a generation question the government. People started looking for reasons to doubt everything because the reality they had previously accepted was thrown into turmoil.

Previous to all these events, most Americans had a positive view of their society. The Europeans looked at us favorably. But things began to change.

Around this time, the environmental movement began to form. Among the many causes they championed was the reduction in air pollution. The concern was what it was doing to people’s lungs. How it was effecting the environment. At some point the theory of the greenhouse effect was born, and it was considered mostly a good thing. Because CO2, a greenhouse gas, is beneficial to plant life. But then the environmental movement became a big money making machine. The EPA was formed by President Nixon and began to grow exponentially in size. To justify this, it found more and more excuses to engage in every aspect of society. Government grants to study environmental issues soon became a great way for scientists to make a living. A whole industry blossomed around it. To justify their grants, some scientists looked for things to scare politicians, so they could keep that grant money flowing.

The Green movement is ironically named.

And to keep the green rolling in, they had to concoct crises to frighten the public with.  In the 1960s it was pesticides. In the 1970s it was Nuclear Power plants. In the 1980s it was the Ozone Hole. In 1990s it was global warming. I’ll deal with those issues in other posts, but let’s take a look at global warming.

One of the things that makes me question a claim is when it comes from only one political side. And it’s rather curious that most crises we’ve heard about in the last 40 years were created by the left. A scientific argument should be apolitical. It should be about facts, not ideology. Unfortunately, environmental issues have become politicized.

And Global Warming is championed by the left.

It doesn’t matter if politicians like Al Gore claim it’s real, and made a movie about it. It doesn’t matter if celebrities claim it’s real. Because ultimately, they had to get their ideas from somewhere. And they need “facts” to back them up. So along came the scientists.

The biggest document that GW advocates like to wave around, like a crucifix, is the IPCC Third Annual Report. Or IPCC TAR. The IPCC is a UN funded agency. The report came out in 2001, so it’s findings are already 5 years behind us. New studies have come out since, refuting much of it. We’ve also seen, in the last 5 years, what a ridiculous, corrupt organization the UN is. How it’s driven by the worst kind of politics and double-dealing. Naturally, the left thinks they’re great. So they don’t question the report or the politicians behind it.

Their subjective reality tells us that man is destroying the earth and only by giving up a large part of our advanced society can we somehow fix things. It’s rooted in the logic that we have pushed science too far, and have made a mess of things. That we’re bad, and everything we do is corrupting.  Except they’ve done a poor job of proving anything. Without getting into the report, which is long and redundant, you can click the links above and read it for yourself. You’ve heard all the alarmist talk about the glaciers melting and sea levels rising and so forth. They claim, among other things that greenhouse gasses produced by factories, automobiles and the like are over saturating the atmosphere leading to the greenhouse effect. One of those gasses is carbon dioxide.

In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences USA 99: 4167-4171 report by Dan H. Rothman, Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT did a study of 500 million years of the Earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration. This was done by examining the “chemical weathering of rocks, volcanic and metamorphic degassing, and the burial of organic carbon, along with considerations related to the isotopic content of organic carbon and strontium in marine sedimentary rocks”. What they found was: “Over the bulk of the record, earth’s atmospheric CO2 concentration fluctuates between values that are two to four times greater than that of today at a dominant period on the order of 100 million years.  For the last 175 million years, however, there has been a rather steady long-term decline in the air’s CO2 content.”

One of the arguments the GW crowd like to use is that there is a scientific consensus on the subject. But if you ask them to back that up they can’t, because there isn’t a consensus. As Dr. S. Fred Singer, Research Professor at George Mason University and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia puts it, “There isn’t even a consensus on whether the atmosphere is currently warming—never mind on whether humanity should be held responsible.”

Dr. Philip Stott, Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London (England), explains, “The whole feel of the IPCC report differs between its political summary and the scientific sections. It comes as a shock to read the following in the conclusions to the science part: “In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear system, and therefore that the prediction of a specific future climate is not possible.” - quite a contrast to the alarmism of the Summary for Policymakers.

Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and one of the lead authors of the science sections of the IPCC report, has scathingly described the summary as “very much a children’s exercise of what might possibly happen,” prepared by a “peculiar group” with “no technical competence.” Professor Lindzen further described the inept and unethical behaviour of the IPCC in preparing their reports in his May 2, 2001 testimony to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee - the full transcript of that testimony can be viewed at http://www.senate.gov/%7Eepw/lin_0502.htm. On hearing about Canada’s Minister of the Environment David Anderson’s confidence in the dramatic conclusions of the IPCC summary report, Dr. Lindzen laughed, “There is a certain charm when politicians are so certain of the science when the scientists are not.”

“The UN IPCC WG1 Summary for Policymakers of the Third Assessment Report is not an assessment of climate change science, even though it claims to be,” sums up climate specialist, Dr. David Wojick. “Rather, it is an artfully constructed presentation of just the science that supports the fear of human induced climate change. In short, this is advocacy, not assessment.” *

Even the science part of the IPCC report is suspect. “It is absolutely remarkable how inferior and one-sided this report is,” said Dr. Nils Axel-Mörner, Professor of Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics at Stockholm University. “Where are all the real sea level specialists from our Commission and from IGCP? They have had little or nothing to say in this report. If science is treated in this way, it is bound to go wrong.”

It gets better:

NASA’s James Hansen, who is widely credited as being the “father of global warming” recently wrote that the climate change scenarios put forth in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) “may be unduly pessimistic,” and that the IPCC extreme scenarios are “implausible.” In fact, he argues, the observed trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane concentrations for the past several years fall below all IPCC scenarios, so consequently future temperature rise will most like be about 0.75ºC during the next 50 years.


Hansen makes these claims in articles including “Defusing the Global Warming Time Bomb,” which appeared in the March Scientific American. He bases his


conclusions on simple empirical evidence that he considers more precise and reliable than model results “because it includes all the processes operating in


the real world, even those we have not yet been smart enough to include in the models.”

One of the main points that the GW side likes to use is proof is that the earth’s climate has warmed in the past two decades. But solar activity has increased in that time.

In what could be the simplest explanation for one component of global warming, a new study shows the Sun’s radiation has increased by .05 percent per decade since the late 1970s.

The increase would only be significant to Earth’s climate if it has been going on for a century or more, said study leader Richard Willson, a Columbia University researcher also affiliated with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The Sun’s increasing output has only been monitored with precision since satellite technology allowed necessary observations. Willson is not sure if the trend extends further back in time, but other studies suggest it does.

“This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change,” Willson said.

In a NASA-funded study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, Willson and his colleagues speculate on the possible history of the trend based on data collected in the pre-satellite era.

“Solar activity has apparently been going upward for a century or more,” Willson told SPACE.com today.

A large part of the IPCC TAR report are based on computer models that have been peer-reviewed by many scientists, as above, who have pointed out the flawed math and jury-rigged computer models to support a largely absurd premise. e.g. It’s man’s fault that the climate changes. 

In fact, you know the whole thing is a joke when they had to change the name from Global Warming to Climate Change. That way, they could say it’s happening no matter what. They’re using a non-falsifiable hypothesis. Anytime the weather gets weird, as it often does, they can claim it’s proof. But the climate is always changing. It always has.

And if you provide proof that their theory doesn’t hold up to analysis, they resort to ad hominem attacks rather than back it up. Their favorite ploy is to claim any scientist who criticizes GW studies accepted money from the oil or tobacco industry. But that’s not an argument. And its immaterial. Either global warming is true or it’s not. Either they can back up their studies, or they can’t. If they resort to attacking the messenger, and not the message, it’s a capitulation of sorts. A failure to continue the debate.

When you consider the major economic hardships that would be caused by shutting down our economy, based on the theories proposed by leftists and their ilk, it becomes crystal clear what the reality of this reality is.

More reading here:

Recent Research in Climate Change Issues: A compilation from World Climate Report

Climate of Fear: Global warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence

Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged Scientific Consensus

Envirotruth Regarding Climate Change

IPCC TAR Neutrality in Question

Counterpoint: Global Warming

Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century by Michael Crichton

Common Misconceptions About Global Warming

The Real Inconvient Truth

IPCC TAR Dissenters

UPDATE: In the Recent Research in Climate Change Issues: A compilation from World Climate Report that I linked to above, there is a resignation letter from an IPCC scientist Dr. Christopher Landsea. He resigned from the IPCC report for the following reason, which sheds light on how biased and hackneyed the report is.

I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record. Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).

It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.

Plenty of Bullshit

One of my favorite shows is Penn and Teller’s Bullshit. I don’t always agree with them, but they do a great job exposing the frauds, fakes and scams that we’re relentlessly pounded with.

This site offers an incomplete sampling of episodes for web viewing.

You can find everything from exposes on Environmental Hysteria to Feng Shui to Gun Control. Good stuff.

ISG = Imbecilic Saudi Groupies

David Zucker on the Iraq Study Group. [Video Link]

UPDATE: More on the ISG and how Baker is a Saudi shill.

Ecopalypse?

I don’t know how true this is. But it certainly is alarming, and there is some truth to it. The government, which brings in trillions in taxes each year, more than any nation on earth, has committed seriously criminally negligent acts. Couple it with this story and you have to wonder what’s really going on, or is this just more hysteria from the internet fringe.

Hopefully, that’s all it is. But we’ll know sooner or later. The facts are, the way the government spends and has treated our money IS unsustainable. We’ve let them get away with it for far too long.

UPDATE: Just one example of how the government wastes tax payer money. $8 Billion a year. 

Let It Snow

Boy, that Global Warming has really hit Las Vegas hard. I woke up this morning to see snow on my lawn. I had to do a double take because it doesn’t snow here. I’ve only seen it happen a couple times and usually the snow melts before it hits the grass.

I’m sure it will be melted in an hour or so. It was mainly a dusting. But hey, Merry Christmas.

Maybe I should worry about a new ice age.

Naw.

My Space for Comics

A new site has come on the scene and is exploding. It’s called Comic Space. It works exactly like My Space, but the focus is comics. A lot of pros have joined, including myself. And plenty of fans, as well. It’s been growing in leaps and bounds.

Check it out. My page, which I need to work on, is here.

Legalize This!

If the government really wants some revenue, they should legalize and tax marijuana. It’s now the largest cash crop in the US.

For years, activists in the marijuana legalization movement have claimed that cannabis is America’s biggest cash crop. Now they’re citing government statistics to prove it.

A report released today by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion — far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops.

California is responsible for more than a third of the cannabis harvest, with an estimated production of $13.8 billion that exceeds the value of the state’s grapes, vegetables and hay combined — and marijuana is the top cash crop in a dozen states, the report states.

Personally, I don’t touch the stuff. But its very beneficial to some patients with pain issues. And frankly, as Prohibition showed, all we’ve done is enrich criminals and create a huge, uncontrolled black market. Crime stats are largely inflated by the drug war.

This is one of those drugs that is a lot less harmful than alchohol or cigarettes, yet it’s illegal. There are many theories as to why, but the fact is, the government is missing out on huge tax revenues by keeping it illegal.