Author: VD

The Broncos have the faith

And really, that’s all that matters. In considering whether Tebow can make it as a starting NFL quarterback who doesn’t throw the ball much, I don’t pay any attention to the media. I pay attention to the men who play with him:

“If it ain’t broken, and it ain’t, then don’t fix it,” McGahee told me from San Diego Sunday night. It was a 23-carry, 117-yard day by McGahee, with his 24-yard run in overtime setting up the winning field goal that led to the 16-13 overtime win. Afterward, McGahee said the game had the feel of another close one, and he said to Tebow in the middle of the second half, “Me and you gotta win this game.” And the two men combined to do it, helped by a third-and-11 conversion catch by Decker that was upheld by review on the game-tying drive at the end of the fourth quarter. You know, when Tebow takes over. “It’s cool everybody doubts us,” McGahee said. “Don’t respect us. All we know is, if it’s close at the end, we’re gonna win.”

“If it’s close at the end, we’re gonna win.” That’s the sort of statement that sends chills down opposing coaches’ spines and causes the other team to get tight and choke if they can’t pull away early. It’s the sort of confidence that can’t be taught, but can only be developed as a group over time. Talent always matters, but superior teamwork and willpower can surmount a bigger talent gap than people often credit.

Open letter to a climate charlatan

Willis Eschenbach calls out the foremost science scammer and “serial liar”, Dr. Phil Jones:

Here’s my problem with all of this, Dr. Jones. You tried out a variety of claimed reasons for not responding to a request for your data. None of them were even remotely true. They were all intended to hide the fact that you didn’t know where the data was. Dave clearly spelled out the problem: “we don’t know which data belongs to which stations, right?”

You claimed that the data was out there on the web somewhere. You claimed you couldn’t send any of it because of restrictions on a few datasets. You claimed it came from GHCN, then you said from NCAR, but you couldn’t say exactly where.

You gave lots and lots of explanations to me, everything except the truth—that your records were in such disarray that you could not fulfill my request. It is clear now from the Climategate emails that some records were there, some were missing, the lists were not up to date, there was orphan data, some stations had multiple sets of data, some data was only identified by folder not by filename, you didn’t know which data might have been covered by confidentiality agreements, and the provenance of some datasets could not be established. The unfortunate reality was that you simply couldn’t do what I asked.

Rather than just saying that, however, you came up with a host of totally bogus reasons why you could not give me the data. Those were lies, Phil. You and David Palmer flat-out lied to my face about why you couldn’t send me the data.

Now, I’ve come to accept that you lied to me. Here’s what I think. I think you are a scientist, and a reasonably good one, who was hard squeezed by two things—the Peter Principle, and Noble Cause Corruption. When you began your scientific career, your sloppy record keeping didn’t matter much. And you didn’t want to be the record keeper in any case, you wanted to do the science instead, but you kept getting promoted and you ended up curating a big messy dataset. Then things changed, and now, climate decisions involving billions of dollars are being made based in part on your data. Disarray in your files didn’t make a lot of difference when your work was of interest only to specialists. But now it matters greatly, money and people’s lives are at stake, and unfortunately you were a better scientist than you were a data manager.

So when my FOI request came along, you were caught. You were legally required to produce data you couldn’t locate. Rather than tell the truth and say “I can’t find it”, you chose to lie. Hey, it was only a small lie, and it was for the Noble Cause of saving the world from Thermageddon. So you had David tell me the data was available on the web. You knew that was a lie. David, apparently, didn’t realize it was a lie, at least at first. You hoped your Noble Lie would satisfy me, that I would get discouraged, and you could move on.

But I asked again, and when I called you on that first answer, you thought up another Noble Lie. And when that one didn’t work, you invented another Noble Lie.

OK, so you are a serial liar. Like I said, I’ve made my peace with that. It used to rankle me, but not any more. I just accepted that you can’t be trusted and I moved on. I do have compassion for you, Dr. Jones. None of you guys set out to do the ugly things you ended up doing. You all got caught by Noble Cause Corruption, by the vision of being smarter than everyone else and of being the only people standing between us and global destruction. It’s heady, treacherous stuff.

I have been a victim of that same self-delusion myself. I understand the sweet seduction that arises from the conviction that your mission is of vital, crucial importance to the whole planet. However, I quit that kind of nonsense around the time the sixties wound down … but again I digress. I have compassion for your position, and I was, although not satisfied, at least at ease with the outcome.

So if I made my peace with you, why am I writing this letter now?

I’m writing because in response to the new Climategate 2.0 email release, over at the UEA website, you have a new post in which you are up to your old tricks, trying to peanut-butter up the cracks in your stories.

Again, I repeat: there is no global warming outside of the usual range of temperature fluctuations caused by natural process. Contra all the climacaustal predictions, there has been no global warming at all for the last decade. There being none, it is not caused by human activity. What is described as “climate science” is not science, but corrupt government-funded scientific fraud and the greatest science scandal in the history of science.

If you still believe in “anthropogenic climate change” at this point, you obviously possess far more blind religious faith than the average illiterate religious fundamentalist.

The consequence of tolerance

Maximus destroys a conventional atheist defense in the process of pointing out a powerful reason for the appeal of Islam:

Can we come to a conclusion on the historical record between religious and atheist forms of man’s governance in terms of quality of life OVERALL?

I think we can conclude that while religious traditions, using the name of God as political cover, have committed much oppression and tyranny, atheism under the Communist banner committed far WORSE atrocities since they were committed in the name of NOTHING! Nothing, that is, other than a man made philosophy about how he should organize and govern himself outside the purview of God’s divine law since He does not exist. Man governing himself does not seem to have worked out all that well for him when he removed God from the equation.

This takes the common – if absurd – atheist defense of historical atheist crimes and turns it on its head. The fact that the crimes of atheists like Stalin, Mao, and others were not committed “in the name of atheism” not only doesn’t serve as an effective defense of atheism, (as I and many others have pointed out), but was actually a factor in exacerbating the magnitude of the crimes.

But this is actually the less interesting aspect of his piece. He notes that the appeal of religion, specifically Islam, was magnified by the way in which it mitigated the slaughter in Rwanda:

Islam…was a small faith in the country of Rwanda at the time of the genocide, almost non-existent. It is rising now faster then ever, mosques overflowing, and playing a part in healing wounds and bringing forgiveness to that country. Why is Islam growing in Rwanda? In their own words:

During the genocide, Muslims were among the few Rwandans who protected both neighbors and strangers. Elsewhere, many Hutus hunted down or betrayed their Tutsi neighbors and strangers suspected of belonging to the minority.

But the militiamen and soldiers didn’t dare go after Tutsis in Muslim neighborhoods like Biryogo, said Yvette Sarambuye, a 29-year-old convert. ”If a Hutu Muslim tried to kill someone hidden in our neighborhoods, he would first be asked to take the holy Quran and tear it apart to renounce his faith,” said Sarambuye, a Tutsi widowed mother of three who survived the slaughter by hiding with Muslims. “No Muslim dared to violate the holy book, and that saved a lot of us.”

For many Hutu extremists, Muslims were regarded as a group apart, not to be targeted in the genocide.

Muslims take God and the Quran VERY seriously. They don’t have faith or belief…they KNOW God exists and that his word came down to man through the holy prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

You will note that while Muslim Hutus did partake in the slaughter, but when they were confronted by their own religious community and asked to leave Islam because it forbids the killing of innocents, they put down their machetes, at least in Muslim neighborhoods. Islam saved lives…by the Koran alone. In contrast to the Christian majority that the country is now moving away from, the Bible did not save anyone as a holy book:

Although the Christian clergy in many communities struggled to protect Tutsis and often died with them, more than 20 Roman Catholic and Protestant priests, nuns and pastors are facing charges related to the killings. Rwandan courts already have convicted two Catholic priests and sentenced them to death.

The Rwandan church failed in much the same way that the Christian church in the West has failed. We tolerate the unrepentant sinners in our midst rather than doing what is explicitly commanded in the Bible, confronting them, demanding repentance, and expelling them from the church community if they will not do so. And in both cases, the resulting consequence is that people walk away from a faith that is not true to itself.

The church that will not confront the adulterer, the thief, the homosexual, the liar, or the gossip is one that will not confront the murderer either when he appears at their door, demanding the blood of the innocent.

WND column

Weekend at Bernanke’s

It’s perfectly understandable why so few people are paying attention to the crisis that is threatening the global financial system, even though the professionals are biting their nails like little children about to embark upon their first rollercoaster ride. In addition to all the confusing and esoteric terminology being thrown around more freely than medical terms on a hospital show – before being introduced to “House,” I didn’t realize that all medical conditions, no matter how rare, are treated with either surgery or steroids – it is hard to distinguish between the gravity of a Dubai corporation asking for a loan extension and the Italian government collapsing for the 343rd time since Mussolini fled Rome.

There is a certain amount of crisis fatigue now, even among those of us who pay close attention to the ups and downs of the global markets and the economic statistics. One can only anticipate disaster so many times before being tempted to throw up one’s hands and assume that the global economy is going to muddle through somehow, all apparent reason and evidence to the contrary.

NFL Sunday

Not much to say this week. AD is out, so about all Vikings fans have to hope for is Jared Allen going after the sack record and learning if Christian Ponder can play at this level.

The season is shot, but at least Minnesota parents are still bringing up their children properly. This little girl is not only a true Vikings fan, she’s already well-prepared for the worst life can throw at her.

On polemic and prosaic license

I have long felt that Terry Pratchett is badly underrated as an author. Despite his massive success, the manner in which his book are marketed – a fabulous romp – tend to significantly underplay both the intelligence and the sensitivity of his Discworld novels. His books are simultaneously less superficially funny than they are supposed to be and more intellectually entertaining. Whereas the humor in the earlier novels tended to revolve around slapstick gags, obvious subversions of genre tropes, and puns, it gradually gravitated towards an amusing form of social commentary wherein he addressed everything from Hollywood film-making, women in the military, and the theory of fiat currency to the precarious nature of technology investment. While his conventional and fundamentally decent form of humanism has always been the foundation of his commentary, (usually shown from the perspective of his most fully developed character, Sam Vimes), he has seldom permitted it to override either the plot of the story or the ojbective of entertaining the reader.

Read the rest at The Black Gate.

The secularist’s dilemma

It’s hard to feel a whole lot of sympathy for the secular scientists who, in their ignorance of history, failed to understand that by attacking Christianity, they were opening the door to much less reasonable opposition:

Professors at University College London have expressed concern over the increasing number of biology students boycotting lectures on Darwinist theory, which form an important part of the syllabus, citing their religion. Similar to the beliefs expressed by fundamentalist Christians, Muslim opponents to Darwinism maintain that Allah created the world, mankind and all known species in a single act.

Steve Jones emeritus professor of human genetics at university college London has questioned why such students would want to study biology at all when it obviously conflicts with their beliefs.

He told the Sunday Times: ‘I had one or two slightly frisky discussions years ago with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches, now it is Islamic overwhelmingly.

What is particularly ironic is that the only reason all of those Islamic students are at English universities is because the secular humanists have lobbied for and defended open immigration for decades. It should be interesting to see what form the cognitive dissonance will take once the Islamic students start beating up their professors for theological impurity as they are known to do in their own countries. I suspect our brave secular scientists will be recanting their belief in Darwinian evolution faster than you can say “Neo-Darwinian synthesis”.

It’s rather like watching a Lovecraft novel in real-time. “We’re just going to open this little dimensional gate here. I’m sure whatever walks through will be friendly and behave in perfect accordance with my beliefs.”

No doubt all this will inspire an even more fervent attack on the danger to science posed by Christian Creationists and stickers on elementary school textbooks by the usual suspects. Then again, it may not be long before the first Somalis begin to show up in the Fowl Atheist’s biology classes…. It is funny. It is also well-merited. But don’t be mistaken, it is going to be ugly indeed. The only good that may eventually come of it is that the secularists may finally get on board with the great clash of civilizations that has been inevitable ever since the oil-hungry West woke the sleeping giant of expansionist Islam. But it’s entirely possible that they may prefer the collapse and/or subjugation of the West to the restoration of Christendom, once they realize that their shiny, sexy, secular society isn’t going to happen.

It’s all fun and games

It’s all fun and games being a neocon, invading other countries, and spreading world democratic revolution, right up until the moment that someone accidentally pokes a nuclear power in the eye with “collateral damage”. If “well, we didn’t mean it” doesn’t work for kids, it’s probably not going to work for nations either:

NATO helicopters and fighter jets attacked two military outposts in northwest Pakistan on Saturday, killing as many as 28 troops and plunging U.S.-Pakistan relations, already deeply frayed, further into crisis.

Pakistan retaliated by shutting down vital NATO supply routes into Afghanistan, used for sending in just under a third of the alliance’s supplies.

Pakistan should cease all cooperation with the US military. Why should they tolerate the US killing Pakistani soldiers in Pakistan any more than we would tolerate the Pakistani military killing American soldiers in the USA?

Mailvox: atheists are thankful too

MD drops a note:

Although we don’t have thanksgiving here, I admire the sentiment so I must give thanks to you for (although often infuriating; & even just sometimes plain wrong) relieving the tedium of the working life. Although I disagree with you at least as much as I agree with you, you are at least (& rarely for most of the media) both clever and interesting and free-thinking. Anyway, us Brits don’t do love-ins, so that’s enough til next year.

Clearly someone needs to set him straight about this being an atheist-hating, anti-science echo chamber of stupid Christards waiting for Round Two…. The truth is that I’m always glad to see intelligent and well-educated critics participate in the discussion and challenge my views, either privately or publicly, so long as it is in a straightforward and intellectually reasonable manner. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me on everything; my family and my best friends never have, so why would you or anyone else?

No one gets it right all the time. Certainly not me. Religion doesn’t claim to contain all the truth – now we see as though through a glass darkly – and any honest scientist is open about the limitations of science. How can we, who are mere mortals, possibly think to either know it all or even possess a proper understanding of what “all” means?

But I would encourage MD to give thanks to God rather than to me. Even if he doesn’t believe in Him… especially if he doesn’t believe in Him. After all, if He doesn’t exist, then what could be the harm?

Destroying the currency to save it

Apparently no one thought through the obvious implications of refusing to recognize an obvious credit event:

[P]erhaps the biggest sin of the lot was effectively to render all credit default swaps (a form of insurance against default) on sovereign debt essentially worthless, or void, by making the Greek default “voluntary”.

This has made it impossible to hedge against eurozone sovereign debt purchases, and thereby destroyed the market. Worse, it’s made investors believe that the euro cannot be trusted, that it’ll repeatedly find ways of reneging on contract. That’s the point of no return. This is no longer a serious currency.

It’s really astonishing that the European Union has refused to recognize that Greece has gone bankrupt. In trying to save the banks holding sovereign Greek debt, they went and destroyed the value of all the trillions in credit default swaps. It’s like declaring that corpses aren’t really dead, so therefore the insurance companies don’t have to pay out on any life insurance policies. That might save a company or two in the short term, but it destroys them all in the intermediate term for the obvious reason that no one is ever going to waste their money on life insurance again.