Author: VD

The scientific consensus is clear

Of course, it also happens to be totally incorrect:

Tim Yeo, the chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change committee, said he accepts the earth’s temperature is increasing but said “natural phases” may be to blame.  Such a suggestion sits at odds with the scientific consensus. One recent survey of 12,000 academic papers on climate change found 97 per cent agree human activities are causing the planet to warm.

I just like to get these things down before the scientists start whitewashing the record again.

Academia needs women!

Or the survival of the university system is at risk!  Although I don’t quite see how either more or less female professors is going to stop universities from being able to overcharge indebted young men and women for useless degrees.  Stickwick, who is herself a female academic with a PhD, has a few thoughts:

Thought you might find this interesting, if only for the way people are trying to spin this old news.

Truth: Few PhD candidates, male or female, want to pursue an academic career once they get a taste of the life in graduate school.

Spin: Women are being driven out of academia!! The survival of academia is threatened!!!

By their third year in grad school, only 21% of men in grad school say they want to pursue an academic career. The number drops to 12% for
women, and it’s for the usual reasons — women see academia as very competitive and requiring a lot of personal sacrifice. There’s nothing
new here; but the spin is very silly. What I find preposterous, besides the notion that academia cannot survive without women, is the claim th academia is in any way threatened by the fact that relatively few people want academic careers. The last thing we need right now is more PhDs. I have friends who are on their third post-docs, because they can’t even find jobs at small liberal arts universities.

For every job offered at a halfway good institution, there are literally hundreds of applicants. On top of this, there is very little grant money available; soft-money people everywhere are scrambling to find any funding at all. Universities are cutting every position they possibly can. It makes no sense for the author of this article to claim that academia is in any way threatened by a smaller applicant pool.

What I find amusing is this claim by the author of the article: “We will not survive because we have no reason to believe we are attracting the best and the brightest.”  But the fact is that the universities stopped doing that the moment they openly announced their intention to employ more women and minorities while at the same time blackballing Christians and political conservatives.  The best and the brightest at my university’s economics department were me and the White Buffalo.  He was the departmental award winner while I was permitted to do three independent studies with my professors rather than bothering with classes. And I’ve now published more books on economics than most of my professors had.  But neither of us ever considered, for a moment, an academic career, nor were we ever encouraged to pursue one.

The fundamental problem for the Left is that it is not possible to simultaneously pursue both equality and excellence.

Mailvox: media and social science

CL puts my “Black is the Absence of Color” media theory to the test:

Testing your theory: when the media fails to
mention the of race of those involved in an incident, it usually means
the perpetrators are black.

No mention of race.
2. Article at WOKV.com:
sample: “Police tell Action News several smaller fights quickly
escalated and became a large brawl involving about 30 people.”
No mention of race.
What do we find?  A group of blacks fighting at the beach gathering.
Will continue testing….

Never let it be said that we are not devoted to the scientific method here at Vox Popoli.  Of course, for anyone who once lived within a short drive of Sawgrass, there was no need for science.  To know who was responsible, the only thing required was the mere mention of Jax Beach.

100k martyrs annually

Don’t think the world has progressed past Christian persecution:

A top Vatican official has said around 100,000 Christians are killed
every year for reasons linked to their faith and pointed to the Middle
East, Africa and Asia as the biggest problem areas.

Monsignor
Silvano Maria Tomasi was quoted by Vatican radio on Tuesday as saying
that the figures were “shocking” and “incredible”.

Tomasi said
Christians were also forced to leave their homes and see their churches
destroyed in some parts of the world, and were often subjected to rapes,
kidnappings and discrimination. The Vatican official made particular reference to the kidnapping of two Orthodox bishops near Aleppo in Syria last month.

Unless new Charles Martels arise, secular and pagan persecution will eventually come to infest what was once Christendom just as it plagues much of the rest of the world.  The world always hates and fears what it cannot control. 

Christendom and the West were established by Christians willing to fight for their faith.  While there is room to discuss the theological correctness of their efforts, those who will give up their faith rather than die for it or fight for it have no place in the discussion.

A moment of silence

Of all the various sights of Rome, (and we did the full tourist program there with another homeschooling family), my favorite was this haunting image of the triumph of Christianity on the ceiling of the Sala di Constantino.  There are better paintings, and justly more famous ones, in the four Stanze di Raffaello, but there are none more powerful or poignant.

It would be hard to exaggerate the effect of the stark sepia simplicity of the image of the cross standing over the shattered pagan statue in comparison with the riot of colors and activity in the other paintings in the room, including The Vision of the Cross, The Battle of Milvian Bridge, The Donation of Constantine, and The Baptism of Constantine, an effect that is only heightened by the hordes of people shuffling through the Palace like vertical sardines. 

To look up from the press of that murmuring mass humanity and be viscerally reminded of the victory of the Cross, temporal as well as eternal, was both moving and inspiring.  Most of the messages encoded in the paintings are lost on modern Man, but this one is unmistakable.

A frightening economy

Zerohedge compiles 40 frightening facts about the U.S. economy.  The five worst, in my estimation:

#6 Back in 1970, the total amount of debt in the United States (government debt + business debt + consumer debt, etc.) was less than 2 trillion dollars.  Today it is over 56 trillion dollars…

#7 According to the World Bank, U.S. GDP accounted for 31.8 percent of all global economic activity in 2001.  That number dropped to 21.6 percent in 2011.

#17 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs.  Today, less than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.

#22 According to Forbes, the 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans combined.

#40 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”

So much for the “science” of global warming

Once more, it is seen that it is the skeptics who were correct and the “scientists” who had their arrogant, pointy heads up their asses:

The increase in global temperatures since the late 19th century just reflects the end of the Little Ice Age. The global temperature trends since then have followed not rising CO2 trends but the ocean temperature cycles of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). Every 20 to 30 years, the much colder water near the bottom of the oceans cycles up to the top, where it has a slight cooling effect on global temperatures until the sun warms that water. That warmed water then contributes to slightly warmer global temperatures, until the next churning cycle.

Those ocean temperature cycles, and the continued recovery from the Little Ice Age, are primarily why global temperatures rose from 1915 until 1945, when CO2 emissions were much lower than in recent years. The change to a cold ocean temperature cycle, primarily the PDO, is the main reason that global temperatures declined from 1945 until the late 1970s, despite the soaring CO2 emissions during that time from the postwar industrialization spreading across the globe.

The 20 to 30 year ocean temperature cycles turned back to warm from the late 1970s until the late 1990s, which is the primary reason that global temperatures warmed during this period. But that warming ended 15 years ago, and global temperatures have stopped increasing since then, if not actually cooled, even though global CO2 emissions have soared over this period. As The Economist magazine reported in March, “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, still no warming during that time. That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.

At first the current stall out of global warming was due to the ocean cycles turning back to cold. But something much more ominous has developed over this period. Sunspots run in 11 year short term cycles, with longer cyclical trends of 90 and even 200 years. The number of sunspots declined substantially in the last 11 year cycle, after flattening out over the previous 20 years. But in the current cycle, sunspot activity has collapsed…. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless.”

That report quoted Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory saying, “Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years.” In other words, another Little Ice Age.

Who would have ever imagined that it was the giant flaming ball of nuclear fire in the sky, the one that provides the Earth with the vast majority of its heat, that is the controlling factor concerning global temperatures?  What an outlandish notion!

Keep in mind that the scientists who tell you evolution by natural selection is a fact are, in some cases, the very same people who told you global warming was a fact.  In both cases, what they are relying on is far from science.

Blessings of the Diversity Gospel

This morning’s headlines from the UK:

Tensions on streets after slaughter of British soldier: War memorials defaced and mosque firebombed as EDL march on Westminster

  •     Bomber Command Memorial and Animals In War Memorial vandalised
  •     Police are unsure if attack was by Muslims or by far-right troublemakers
  •     1,000 EDL chant, sing and march from Trafalgar Square to Downing Street
  •     Police keep them apart from Unite Against Fascism counter-protest
  •     Mosque fire-bombed in wake of Lee Rigby’s execution in Woolwich

This is all just gentle prelude, of course, but things do appear to be heating up as we slowly inch our way towards summer. When UKIP starts echoing the EDL, that should indicate a significant corner being turned.  As it stands, things are much more violent in Chicago but talking to various Brits gives one the sense of a powderkeg sitting in the midst of some flying sparks.

The infernal Dan Brown

I have never read what passes for a Dan Brown novel, and it seems that this is probably for the best.  But I should note that the vast success of writers who write for idiots doesn’t bother me any more than the success of sixteen year-old pop stars who perform for teen girls does.  Given MPAI, it stands to reason that the writer whose primary goal is to sell as many books as possible should always cater to the lowest nominally literate consumer.

However, it is a bit much to be expected to also accept the intellectual pretensions of a man who is manifestly writing for the ignorati.  For not only is Brown’s “research” obviously incorrect, the fact that he confuses the ascents of the Purgatorio with the circles of the Inferno tends to suggest that it is entirely nonexistent.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn he’d never even read the entire Inferno, let alone the rest of La Comedia.

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, having written what
for lack of a mightier term we must call a novel, a novel that proved that John
the Apostle was a girl, Mary Magdalene a helpless goddess, and a hypotenuse an
African water buffalo—having revealed for millions the lavish colors of the
frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris (there are no frescoes in Notre Dame de Paris),
the grim austerity of Spanish Cathedrals (Spanish Cathedrals are notorious for
baroque exuberance), and the deep mystery of the Golden Ratio (every schoolboy
knew about the Golden Ratio)—having shown the world that he could write a novel
about art, theology, and Christian history while knowing nothing about art,
theology, and Christian history, except what he could glean from the covers of
matchbooks and obiter dicta from Cher—having shown how much
you can do if you do not bother to open an ordinary encyclopedia, this Dan
Brown, I say, this man of our time and of no time, has now written a novel about
the greatest poet who ever lived, Dante.

Only it doesn’t have
a damned thing to do with Dante, just as The
Da Vinci Code didn’t have anything to do with Leonardo.  Dante is just
a quick needle used to inject the “story” into the reader’s head.  This
time, Mr. Brown has opened a lot of encyclopedias, deluging the reader with 400
pages of material that belongs in Michelin guides to Florence, Venice, and
Istanbul, none of it to the point.  Even at that, he gets details wrong as
soon as he veers away from something you might find in a guide book, especially
when he engages in an exceedingly rare moment of telling us something about
Dante’s poem.  He says it was called a Comedy
because it was written in the vernacular, “for the masses.”  No, a comedy,
according to the medieval definition, was a poem in which a character moves
from misery to happiness, regardless of what language it is written in, and
there were no “masses” to read it, since books were still costly to produce and
scarce.

He says that Dante’s
Purgatory has nine circles of ascent; no, there are seven, one for each of the
deadly sins.  He says that Purgatory is the only way to get from the
Inferno to Paradise.  No, it isn’t; nobody but Dante visits Inferno and
leaves the place, and plenty of people do not have to ascend the
mountain.  Essentially, Dante’s poem is about the resurrection of a human
soul, by the grace of God, to turn from the lie of evil to the truth and beauty
of goodness.  Brown doesn’t get any of that, because he doesn’t care about
any of that.

What’s this book
about?  It’s 462 pages of bad prose.  Portentous sentence
fragments.  Italics, for somber
emphasis.  J—–, there are childish profanities!  Even childish
punctuation?!  Anticlimaxes, a good dollop of Most Favored Bigotry, for
sales; one dimensional characters, most of them pallid even in their one
dimension, and a message with all the sophistication of Sesame Street. 

I understand that Eco isn’t for everyone, let alone Calvino and Borges.  But it would be nice if someone in Brown’s position would be responsible enough, if not to actually bother reading Dante, to at least hire someone to read it for him and ensure that he isn’t actively misinforming the sort of people whose only exposure to the culture Brown is mining are his books.

Diversity in Sweden: Sixth Night

Apparently the real Swedes are getting tired of the violent antics of the paper ones:

Rioting spread to several Swedish towns on Friday night as police
stepped up arrests during a sixth night of unrest and far-right
vigilantes chased non-whites in southern Stockholm. In Linköping,
central southern Sweden, police responded to 120 incidents as cars,
caravans and two schools were set alight. At one point a blazing truck
was rolled into a building, which caught fire.

In Orebro, 120km west of Stockholm, police were stoned after cars and a
school were torched. In Uppsalla, north of Stockholm, there was minor
violence.

At this point, it should be obvious that my prediction of Anders Breivik being a harbinger of things to come was, at the very least, considerably less outlandish than many believed it to be at the time.  Nor are we seeing any sort of backlash in the form of more political support for the multicultural parties across Europe.

And if the police are stupid enough to play quisling and take the side of the immigrants, as they apparently are doing in Stockholm, then they’ll have to go too:

The number of police officers on the streets is simply staggering. The police appear to have focused all their resources on stopping the Swedes, Fredrik Becklin, spokesman for the nationalist youth organization Nordisk Ungdom (Nordic Youth), said Friday night. “It makes me sick to see the police clamp down on us Swedes with full force and without warning, using nightsticks and tear gas, while they don’t do a damn thing about the immigrants. We are only trying to help maintain order, while the immigrants set cars and buildings on fire,” said a young man who wished to remain anonymous.