No One Expects the Science! Inquisition

Via Daily Caller, a Canadian geneticist on Bill Moyers' PBS show wants to lock up climate change dissenters.


I have a question.  How long have we known that saturated fats contribute to cardiovascular disease and heart attacks?  I think it started up big time when Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack during his presidency in the '50s.  Ike was a heavy smoker and might have been slightly stressed during a few years in the '40s - especially around the sixth of June, 1944, but it was the cheeseburger he ate before he played a round of golf (or after, I can't remember) that caused his heart attack.

Oleo was going to save the American heart.  In the 1980s, we all needed a high-carbohydrate, low-fat, low-protein diet, or we were all going to die.

It's as though these scientists never heard of a little thing called "digestion".  When I eat a piece of bacon, I'm pretty sure there are not bacon bits in my blood stream.  I once heard a Seventh Day Adventist -- and he may have been a doctor -- talking about how a man going in for a heart procedure had eaten a cheeseburger and a milkshake beforehand, and there was literally cheese in his blood.  Seventh Day Adventists are advocates for healthy eating -- as am I.  I prefer to stick with eating herbivores -- you know, vegetarians, but, like our SDA brethren, I also like to eat raw vegetables and occasionally fruit.

What we are learning now is that low-carbohydrate diets with plenty of natural fats and protein are better for the majority of us than the high-carb, grain-based diets that were being pushed for most of my lifetime.  There is nothing wrong with carbs as long as they are consumed moderately, especially if they are complex or mixed in with plenty of roughage, as we used to say.  Stay away from sugar and starchy stuff that is easily converted to sugar.  In this case, marketing and agribusiness pushed the alleged "scientific consensus" for profit for decades. 

The point is that science, "self-correcting" or not, is often wrong and wrong for very long periods of time.  Climate science is questionable science at best.  It is based largely on computer models.  These climate scientists get grant money from governments based on how important and vital their work can be made to appear.  Some of these clowns appear to understand weather about as well as the SDA guy above understood what happens in the human digestive tract.

Here's a fact.  Sometimes Earth is warmer than other times.  Sometimes it get much colder, and it passes through an ice age.  This is primarily a function of solar activity.  If the furnace in your house is running, the house tends to get warmer.  When the furnace shuts down, the house may start to cool depending on the exterior temperature.  Yes, how much insulation you have in your walls and ceilings do affect how much energy needs to be added to warm the house and how long it takes to cool down after the heat shuts off.

Carbon dioxide, which is less than 1% of atmospheric gases, has very little in the way of insulating properties compared to something like, say, clouds, which are not CO2, but H2O -- water vapor.  Heat, especially over areas with lots of water on the surface, tends to enhance evaporation, putting more clouds in the sky.  In other words, within some degree of variability, the climate tends to re-balance itself.  Human activity is part of that self-regulating system.  In what we might think of as micro-climate areas, like the Los Angeles Basin, I will grant that the human hive residing there has a profound impact on the local environment.  But the impact on the planet as a whole is negligible.

No one is questioning the fact that the Earth's climate changes, sometimes quite dramatically and even disastrously over time.  That's pretty much a given.

Genuine scientific inquiry seeks out the anomalies and welcomes challenging questions.  That's a vital part of the process. 

When so-called scientists start talking about silencing dissenting voices, who are the new inquisitors and who is Galileo?  And who is profiting from this deception?

Actor Arrested in the Death of His Wife

From the UK Daily Mail, the death of April Jace, wife of actor Michael Jace, is being investigated as a homicide or accidental death.  I don't know who Michael Jace is.  I've never seen "The Shield" or "Burn Notice", shows the report says featured Jace.  The couple had been married for a little over ten years, and they had two children, with a third older child from a previous marriage.  I feel badly for all involved, especially the children.

Naturally, some of the comments about the story rush to blame the fact of April Jace's death upon the easy availability of firearms in America.  California, where the Jaces live, is one of the more restrictive states when it comes to owning and carrying weapons.

It's not clear yet, so we will give Michael Jace the benefit of the doubt.  If this was a tragic accident, it was completely unnecessary, especially given the fact that Jace appears to have portrayed a police officer in some of his work.  He should have been taught -- at the very least -- basic firearms safety, even with prop weapons. Hollywood could do the country and our youth a great service if they would show proper firearms handling and make it "cool". 

On the other hand, if this turns out to be an intentional shooting, I encourage people to look at the pictures of the couple in the Daily Mail article.  Mr. Jace is a tall man, markedly taller than his late wife, and no doubt heavier and stronger.  I'm sure he trains to maintain good physical condition for his profession.  He didn't need a firearm to kill his wife.  He could have used his bare hands, a knife, or a baseball bat, and it would have been just as deadly.

The problem is not the method, it's the madness. 

Missouri Legislators Triple the Waiting Period for Abortions

The St. Louis Pest-Dispatch tells us that Missouri has passed a somewhat controversial bill to force women to wait 72 hours to get an abortion even in cases of rape and incest.  Medical emergencies are exempt from the limitation.

Personally, I would rather have had the voter photo ID requirement that died in exchange for this measure, but I don't think it is a bad piece of legislation.

Governor Jay Nixon is constantly channeling Obama-like rhetorical flourishes while trying not to be too associated with the president as he prepares to challenge Roy Blunt in 2016 for a Senate seat.  I am sure he plans to veto this bill.  He made a statement calling it "extreme".  Because, you know, 48 hours more to think about whether a person wants to terminate an innocent life is really asking a lot.

I doubt Nixon would have the same qualms about a 72-hour waiting period to purchase firearms.  That would be more "common-sense" than "extreme", in his opinion.

I feel some sympathy for women who find themselves in difficult situations.  There are cases where rape and incest result in pregnancy, and I can understand the decision to have an abortion under those conditions, or where it is a medical necessity.  However, the number of those cases is miniscule relative to the number of women who have abortions for the sake of convenience after consensual sex. 

I'm pro-choice.  I think a woman ought to have a right to decide whether or not to get pregnant, and there are a number of ways to avoid pregnancy.  If a woman is too stupid to figure those ways out on her own, I'm sure she can find someone to explain them to her at no charge.

Choose to think. 

All I Gotta Do Is Act Naturally

From BusinessInsider, you can see a GIF of what a new, full-blown Ice Age might look like in North America. 

Note that you may -- if you're using Pale Moon or a similar browser, as I am, have a little trouble getting the link to work, but it's there.

The reason I post this is not so much because of the GIF and all, but one statement the author makes:

We've been in a relatively stable and warm period for at least 15,000 years. And we are unnaturally making the Earth even warmer. Before that, ice ages covered most of the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers.

The link is from the original.  I don't care about any of that.

What do these people mean by "unnaturally"?  What are we humans?  Are we not "natural"?  We are told all the time that we are just less hairy (some of us) apes.  We are acting like every other species on the planet when we act in our own best interests.  If you turn rabbits loose where they have no "natural" enemies, you end up with too many rabbits.  That is a perfectly "natural" thing to expect.

This is our world. "Naturally", we have adapted it to suit rather than merely adapting to it.  This is a function of our consciousness and thinking ability, which, materialists assure us, are "natural" products of evolution and "natural" selection.  

Even if I was stupid enough to believe in Anthropogenic Climate Change, why would I think it was unnatural?  Is there anything that we have that didn't come from something that existed here on the planet?  What is it?  What has man created ex nihilo?  What is unnatural about a human using fire to keep warm?  What is unnatural about taking metal from the earth and using fire to refine it into a vehicle that can run on something pulled from the ground and refined?  Is this less natural than a beaver dam, a bird's nest, an ant hill, or a coyote's den?

Nominee for the 2014 Darwin Award

Blake Randall Wardell, 25, donned a Kevlar vest and asked a friend to shoot him with a handgun.  Eighteen-year-old Taylor Ann Kelly fired the small-caliber handgun toward the vest but missed the Kevlar part.  The bullet went above the vest and struck Wardell in the heart, killing him.

This is truly sad, and I am not at all making light of the loss of a young life, not to mention the devastation caused in Ms. Kelly's mind by the guilt she must feel over such an incident.  The families and those involved need our prayers.

That said, one wonders if alcohol or some other intoxicant played a role because it is unbelievably stupid.  Never, ever point a firearm at anything you don't wish to kill or destroy.  Kevlar vest or no, you are still pointing a deadly weapon at a fellow human being.  Wardell foolishly encouraged his friend to violate the most basic of safety rules, and Kelly foolishly complied. 


Remember:

All guns are always loaded.

Mechanical safeties aren't safe, and they cannot be trusted with a life.

Keep your finger outside the trigger guard until you are ready to shoot.

Never cover anything with the muzzle of a weapon that you do not wish to see killed or destroyed.  That includes stuff on the other side of a wall, door, floor, or ceiling.  Or a bulletproof vest.

Be sure of your target before engaging.  Check again.  You're probably wrong.  Check it again.

Realize that a bullet will not necessarily stop in your target even if you hit it.  Know your backstop.

A Prediction We Can Track

People, including me, are apt to make statements that sound "predictive" but are filled with clauses, caveats, and conditions.  In looking at today's Producer Price Index (PPI), food, which is not part of the core inflation measure, is up significantly.  Denninger offers his thoughts on this:

The intermdiate trend in foods is bad news; that is a monthly change.  Energy has been the counterbalance the last two months on an intermediate term, and has kept things in check, and "less foods and energy" has been reasonably-behaved -- right up until this year.  Now it's looking less-so.  But the alarm bells are not there, they're in the forward trend on the crude side.

Here's the problem -- we're several percent ahead of last year's rate at this time of the year.  Spring into early summer tends to have a PPI increase in crude goods.  But if that spread continues we're going to have a major problem coming into the fall as this works through the system, and given unit labor costs and productivity numbers (both going the wrong way too) there is no ability to absorb it.

Keep in mind that Denninger, unlike me, has never advocated the idea of runaway inflation or hyperinflation.  He has held that the Fed monetary policy would eventually reach a point where QE and ZIRP stop because they are doing no good.  As far as it goes, that's already happened.  We are in Japanese-style stagnation, more or less, right now.  When actual inflation in essentials -- you know, like food -- kicks in, our stagnant economy cannot deal with it. 

This leads KD to make a prediction with no qualifiers:

But before you ring the "heh Denninger has turned into an inflationist!" bell let me put one final dollop of cold water on your insanity -- no, I have not.  There is no ability in the economy to absorb such price increases as productivity and unit labor cost figures have shown.  Instead, what this will produce is recession -- deep recession.

That "flat" GDP print is going to be revised to negative, and we're now odds-on to print negative for second quarter too.

That's the formal definition folks.

I think he reasonable in drawing this conclusion.  If food prices start putting pressure on a family's budget, they are going to -- generally -- cut back on other consumer purchases, including services.  Restaurant prices are heading up, so people might eat out less.  They might skip buying new clothes or new electronics or a new car.  In a consumer-driven economy, when people stop buying, it means recession.

Is Denninger right or wrong?  Bookmark his post and look at it around September.

Nigerian Christians and Boko Haram

The actual breakdown of religious groups in Nigeria is debatable.  Some people believe that there are now more Christians than Muslims in Nigeria.  If that is not the case, Christians make up at least 40% of the population, and Nigeria's current president is a Christian. 

Daniel Greenfield writing on FPM talks about the alliance between Obama and Boko Haram:

There’s a reason why the media and so many leftists have embraced the hashtag. #BringBackOurGirls isn’t a rescue. It denounces the Nigerian government for not having already gotten the job done even as the State Department stands ready to denounce any human rights violations during a rescue attempt.

Obama and Boko Haram want to bring down the Nigerian government and replace it with a leadership that is more amenable to appeasement. It’s the same thing that is happening in Israel and Egypt.

(h/t Commonsense and Wonder)

The left in America doesn't want to acknowledge that Nigerian Muslims and Muslims in general are a problem.  They want to shift the blame onto the legitimate government of Nigeria.  The Muslims are economically oppressed.  I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that they are violently opposed to any kind of western education? 

There has been a lot of mockery of the Wookie's hashtag sign because it seemed to be a symptom of the impotence of American foreign policy.  It's really a sign of the subversive nature of American foreign policy. 

Now it makes me wonder, again, what was really behind the Benghazi attacks.

Also see Brendan's related posts here and here.