Author: VD

The true believers in the hoax that is AGW/CC are getting desperate as fewer and fewer people buy into their scheme to bring in global governance by the back door. You can practically hear Paul Krugman foaming at the mouth in his column today:

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet. To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research. The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility.

It’s funny how the planet is changing even faster than the pessimists expected when global temperatures are dropping, in direct contradiction to those very models that Krugman is so concerned about. Of course, he’s still using an outdated economics model from the 1930s, so it should hardly surprise us that he’s not up on the latest climate science either.

Americans Walk Away

Mortgage lenders are rightly terrified that more and more of the 22 percent of American homeowners whose homes are now worth less than their mortgages are going to exercise their borrower’s right to default on them. At this point, most home defaults are still involuntary, but according to the paper cited above, more than one-quarter of them already consist of what the mortgage industry calls “ruthless defaults.” And yet, why shouldn’t homeowners be ruthless in their disregard for the financial interests of the home lenders when the lenders themselves have been utterly ruthless – and utterly stupid – in squeezing every last drop of potential demand out of the American public?

Apparently they believe the state of CGI has reached a sufficient level of quality to have another go at the public:

ECSTATIC space officials at Nasa could be about to unveil one of their most stunning discoveries for 40 years — new and amazingly clear footage of the first moon landing.
The release of the new images next month could be one of the most talked about events of the summer.

Of course, these revised “lunar tapes” will end up being exposed as fraudulent when hardcore gamers recognize the lighting model from the Unreal Engine 3.

I have little respect for the poor shrinking violets getting beaten by their women:

New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics figures show that over the past eight years, the number of women charged with domestic abuse has rocketed by 159 per cent. In 2007, 2,336 women fronted court on domestic violence charges, compared to around 800 in 1999.

What is the point of living your life in fear of a bully of either sex? If a woman is going to divorce you because you hit her back, good! Why would you ever want to continue to share your life with that person anyhow? In fact, if you know that you’re married to someone who would divorce you over something they started, you’re probably going to end up divorced because eventually your submission is going to become an unbearable provocation to her. There are exceptions, but in general, that’s how they tend to work.

Your mileage may vary, but I think I would rather emasculate myself and eat my deep-fried testicles rather than meekly accept a serious physical assault from a woman, especially a woman who claimed to love me. (I’m not talking about a Scarlett O’Hara slap here, I mean a genuine assault with harmful intent.) Start nothing, finish everything. Those who attack others with a genuine intent to harm merit whatever beating they end up receiving, no matter their size or sex.

The ironic thing is that these self-emasculated men claim their passivity stems from their chivalry, but that can’t possibly be true because chivalry requires honor. And a lady, for that matter. Speaking of honor, it’s not hard to imagine that female-initiated domestic violence cease to be an issue soon enough now that the concept of honor-killing has reached the USA and Europe.

The Congress isn’t even trying to maintain it anymore:

Through a series of parliamentary inquiries, the Republicans learned that the 300-plus page managers’ amendment, added to the bill last night in the House Rules Committee, has not even been been integrated with the official copy of the 1,090-page bill at the House Clerk’s desk, let alone in any other location. The two documents are side-by-side at the desk as the clerk reads through the instructions in the 300 page document for altering the 1,090 page document….

Global Warming is apparently so urgent that we can’t even wait until members of Congress know what they’re voting on.

This sort of thing is why I find the false and sentimental concern for Iranian democracy to be so ludicrous. Worry about your own so-called democracy, people, while you can still harbor the illusion that you possess it. They’re passing fill-in-the-blank legislation.

The weak and the sick have been weeded out, as always happens once people take the introductory quiz and realize that they actually have to read the book in order to do well on these quizzes. And yet, more than 850 staunch readers remain. Congratulations, if you are one of them. As before, please keep the extraneous and tangential elements to a minimum; I have some thoughts of my own on this chapter that I will expound upon in the comments once others have had a chance to say their piece.

The reading for next week will be Chapter 3 – “Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of Liberal Fascism”. The quiz for that chapter will be posted on Monday, July 6th. If you happen to be be on vacation, please note that you can always take it later by scrolling down through the blog posts or by clicking on the Voxiversity III link on the left sidebar.

I have something I intend to do once I finish the book – which is rapidly approaching the end – and I’m interested in knowing if anyone else might be interested in helping with it. I’ve made use of the figures from Angus Maddison’s The World Economy: historical statistics, but they end in 2003. It seems to me it would be useful to update them through 2008. I’ll handle the 21 nations in the Western Offshoots and Western Europe categories, but I’d like to know if anyone else wants to do any the other regions once I’ve worked out the conversion process required. If you’re up for it, please let me know how many countries for which you’d be willing to calculate Populatio, GDP, and GDP per capita.

Also, Don Reynolds, please email me. There’s a chapter which concerns Friedman that I’d like to run by you.

My lab amigo unfortunately fails to present much of an argument. If he was an economist, we would be forced to conclude that he was an extreme practitioner of the Ricardian Vice:

One somewhat frustrating aspect of this exchange for me has been that you seem to insist that any disagreement with your point of view is not genuine disagreement as such but is missing the point. My sense is that you cannot conceive how any sane, rational person can hold a point of view different from your own, so that if they insist on doing so, they are obviously being either obtuse or stupid. Your first long paragraph is all rhetoric along those lines. I’d add here that, while I won’t accuse you of intellectual laziness, I do feel that your absolutism is, like most absolutisms, the easy way out. There is then always a right answer, and your convictions supply it ready-made. I understand everything you say about religion being generally filled with irrational beliefs, and it would be very easy for me too to say that ‘people should not believe anything for bad or invalid or flaky reasons, and therefore we must strive to ensure that they never do.’ I suspect that philosophers might find that an epistemologically dodgy position to take, but I can see that it makes life easy. I don’t find it either attractive or useful, however….

But to the meat of your argument. I stated in my original article that at least your position can claim some philosophical rigour. I think this is the one aspect of the piece I might now have to withdraw.

I’ll write up a full review of this debate between atheists later, but the root problem is that because Harris’s basic argument is tautological in nature and empirically absurd – if you believe in religion then you must be incapable of scientific rationality – he finds it hard to understand how anyone can disagree with him. Compounding this is the fact that he pays no attention to what his opponent is actually saying and so fails to respond to the point at hand. And notice how, as usual, Harris is complaining that he’s being misunderstood. The thing is, if intelligent people continually fail to understand what you are saying, then the onus is on you to learn to communicate more clearly.

I’m looking forward to scoring this one for the skeptics soon:

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists’ open letter.) The collapse of the “consensus” has been driven by reality.

I’ve always had my doubts about the credibility of scientists due to their demonstrated willingness to sell biological philosophy as genuine science. But their collective behavior in what will eventually be known as the Great Global Warming Scandal really demonstrates what a bunch of greedy, power-tripping scum so many of them are. The amusing thing is that scientists like PZ Myers and Sam Harris, ex-scientists like Richard Dawkins, and would-be scientists like Daniel Dennett constantly worry about the “danger” supposedly posed to science by religion, while blithely and unquestioningly accepting the fraudulent gospel of global warming because it came wrapped in scientific clothing. They truly don’t seem to understand how utterly devastating this ongoing scandal is going to be to the public regard for science and scientists alike.

And let’s not forget those who declared global warming to be an established fact. Keep that in mind as you consider their credibility with regards to other matters where they claim science has settled the issue.