Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
The perpetuation of the deception that humans are causing the inevitable collapse of the world because of global warming works because of the deliberate exploitation of human traits and frailties. Usually, they are exploitations of ideas and misdirection’s that worked in the past. Despite clear, concise, explanations with evidence under oath before political leaders by well-qualified scientists of what is wrong with the science the lies and deceptions continue. It is hard to believe that all or even a portion of the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) don’t know what is wrong with the hypothesis. Senator Timothy Wirth instrumental in the creation of the AGW deception was quoted by Michael Fumento as early as 1993 that,
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
It is hard to believe that a majority of the politicians and public continue to ignore the truth. There is a degree of the Pied Piper syndrome as people just follow the magical music deliberately created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, there are ominous signs, especially in America, of a growing loss of moral direction. Ironically, Osama bin Laden said the west had lost its moral direction. In my opinion, he was right. However, I don’t want his moral opinion either.
Most of the information and activities related to deceiving the people were deliberate, as evidenced in the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in 2009. It was evidence that should have led to serious levels of accountability. Instead, it triggered deliberately orchestrated cover-ups that, although weak and easily dismissed, were easily brushed aside. In addition it is easy to quickly marginalize and destroy anyone who questions it. Misuse of the law and other actions that screamed suppression, bullying, and intimidation fell on deaf ears. This is particularly troubling in the US, which claims it is a nation of laws. All this can only occur in a society that has lost its moral direction, that no longer knows or wants to know what is right and wrong. It is a nation that is locking people up for invented claims of crimes when actual perpetrators of such crimes walk free and even gain from their actions.
I can accept that quite a large number of people don’t know or understand what is happening, but I am no longer convinced they would do rectify it if they did. I can understand how the deception is so effective because some of the vehicles involved in its creation, spread, and perpetuation, are arcane. This reminds me of, former Harvard University President Derek Bok’s observation,
If you think education is expensive – try ignorance.
A good place to educate yourself about what is happening and the parallels in history is in the work of Victor Davis Hanson. His observations remind me of Santayana’s warning that those who don’t learn from history will repeat it.
One of these arcane, but pervasive false ideas in history, was supposedly discarded with the advent of modern science, yet it continues to distort how most see and understand the world. It was called The Great Chain of Being and was illustrated in 1579 with a diagram putting everything and everybody in their place (Figure1). Here is one author’s interpretation.
In the Great Chain of Being model described by Tillyard, each kind of object in the universe is allocated a place in a hierarchy, from the lowest kinds of object (rocks and other inanimate matter), through the lower and higher forms of terrestrial life, up to the higher beings and finally to God.
Plato and Aristotle created the original idea, and because their ideas formed the basis for the Christian and Catholic view of the world, called scholasticism, it dominated western people’s beliefs. A good example of how this dominated perception of the World and the Universe was the Ptolemaic geocentric belief that the Sun orbits the earth that Copernicus challenged and changed.
Figure 1: The Great Chain of Being.
There are many interpretations of the idea and as many claims about the impact. It is easy to see how, with its hierarchical view, it easily provides for charges of racism and misogyny, among others. However, I am unable to find any discussion about the concept of a chain as an interlink. The idea that if one link breaks the entire strength and connectivity is lost. Chain is another of those words that automatically create ideas in people’s minds, like “holes” in the ozone, or hot greenhouses, that preset and distort understanding and allow lies and myths to persist. It makes the challenge of removing emotionalism only to consider logic and the facts almost impossible.
The focus of environmentalism is on plants, animals, and ecologies that people find attractive. For years I raised the issue in the context of adaptation and extinction in many forums. I pointed out that many species were benefitting from human activities. For example, pigeons, rats, mice, snakes, and coyotes are all thriving. I would then pause and ask, “Have I mentioned any you like yet?” After another pause, I would say, “Sorry, I forgot, you prefer warm, cuddly, big-eyed creatures like Pandas, Koala Bears, and Dolphins.” It is mandatory for any good alarmist environmental or climate change story to include something for which there is an emotional public attachment. Gore used the Polar Bear and the enigmatic, emotional, environment of the Arctic to spin his tale. It is an unknown region to 99% of the world where so many intrepid explorers created heroic stories to create a frozen fantasyland, and ecology. They created the myth that it is a fragile, vulnerable environment more easily damaged than other places. This is false. In fact, if you look at any area that experienced a catastrophe, it is amazing how quickly they recover. The inability to recover was another of the false stories created by environmentalists. They said the impact of Mount St Helens would take centuries to recover. They were completely wrong.
All this makes people vulnerable to the massive deception that humans are to blame, and no self-respecting human wants that stigma. You either broke the link or condoned actions and activities that broke the link. Coral reefs are another favorite ecosystem for stoking, poking, and exploiting emotionalism and guilt. In a story headlined
Racing to save Florida’s coral from climate change, scientists turn to a once-unthinkable strategy: ‘assisted evolution.’
The words “assisted evolution” are environmental ‘newspeak’ to make George Orwell proud. What they are contemplating is geo-engineering.
If it was once unthinkable what changed? Jessica Levy, the reef restoration program manager at the Key Largo foundation, said,
“We are looking at a potential complete ecosystem loss, which to my knowledge has not happened in human history,” Levy said. “I don’t think anyone wants to be responsible for that occurring.”
Levy is saying, we don’t want to play God, but if you thoughtless humans don’t listen and send billions more in research funds, you will force our hand.
“We have no choice now,” said Michael Crosby, chief executive of Mote Marine Laboratory, which runs the 19,000-square-foot laboratory on Summerland Key. “These coral are not able to come back on their own. They are really sliding into functional extinction.”
What the heck is “functional extinction”? More newspeak and the cause of this inevitable action is the unproven pseudoscience of anthropogenic global warming.
But as global warming rapidly brings the natural wonder to the brink of extermination, scientists are abandoning their hands-off approach in favor of a once-unthinkable strategy: a massive intervention to manipulate the natural balance of the reef.
In another story about coral reefs, the researchers make an unsubstantiated claim that anthropomorphizes the reef and links it back to human-caused climate change.
“But climate change is really changing that. The reef is battered and bruised. It’s more impacted than it’s ever been before.”
How can a reef be battered and bruised? The terms apply to people, not reefs. It is used to strengthen the link between the inference that it is human-caused climate change that is the issue. Climate change has always caused everything in the world to respond.
The level of deception and exploitation associated with the misuse of science even in this small example is troubling. However, after I wrote this article, two events pushed the lack of morality it exposes off the table. The events push America past a point of moral decline from which, I believe, there is no return. It can only result in a complete collapse of the society following a civil war. America is finished because the events take it into an immoral quagmire from which there is no return or escape. The first was the approval by the City of New York of full-term abortions, that is up to nine months. Kermit Gosnell is serving a life sentence for performing similar abortions and is identified as the biggest serial killer in American history. The second event involved the arrest of Roger Stone. It was an event and action normally associated with dictatorships and police states that have no rule of law. The legal community and society did nothing. Most didn’t even know that the same lawyers who carried out this attack were responsible for an earlier unjustified destruction of people’s lives.
FBI Director Christopher A. Wray was an assistant attorney general in 2004 when he heaped praise on an ambitious Mafia-tested prosecutor while promoting him to the top of the Justice Department’s high-profile Enron task force.
Mr. Wray specifically lauded Andrew Weissmann for obtaining convictions against two Enron clients: accounting giant Arthur Andersen and executives at banking dynamo Merrill Lynch. Andersen was finished as a company; four Merrill executives went to prison.
That all sounded very efficient, and I know I was angry at Enron and the Andersen people at the time, but here is what happened later.
Those convictions for which Mr. Wray offered praise in 2004? Mr. Weismann’s cases against Andersen and Merrill Lynch lay in shambles just a few years later. The Supreme Court, in a 9-0 vote in 2005, overturned the Andersen conviction. A year later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals erased all the fraud convictions against four Merrill Lynch managers. The jury had acquitted another defendant. “People went off to prison for a completely phantom of a case,” said Mr. Kirkendall.
An estimated 85,000 people lost their jobs related to the demise of Andersen accounting and at least 4000 at Enron. The Supreme Court and Appeals Court rejection of the verdicts meant little or nothing to them. They were the victims of the loss of morality and ethics in America typified by these gross misuses of the law. The ultimate failure is the legal professions failure to launch a massive PR campaign and exposure to what is going on. If things are going wrong and you are doing nothing you are, in many ways, guiltier than the perpetrators of the wrongs. This is a nation of laws that has lost its legal and moral direction. The unchecked power these stories illustrate, confirm James Madison’s concerns,
“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.”
Nature is not a single chain linkage. So, yes, you can take a link out, and the entire system does not collapse. However, you cannot continue to allow such egregious misuses of fundamental structures of a society and survive.
“It is hard to believe that a majority of the politicians and public continue to ignore the truth. ” It is on the one hand amazing, on the other hand understandable when one takes into account the fear factor which is being played very effectively. Furthermore in combination with tainted PC education we generate a culture reminiscent of the Children Crusade.
There is no such thing as the absolute truth; the truth is just what one happens to think of believe at the time through own (or induced from someone else’s) knowledge or experience.
Stand on the railroad tracks when a train is coming at 70 mph. The truth is you are going to get spattered. You say, “Yes, that is true based on my knowledge and experience.” But if you are two years old, had never seen a train before, had no knowledge of them, and are standing on the tracks, the truth is that you will be spattered all over the place.
What you wrote is valid as far as it goes, but there are truths that exist regardless of our beliefs or knowledge or experience.
An example is the effect of gravity. The truth of the effect of gravity exists regardless of our beliefs or knowledge or experience or our own existence.
I hear ya, vukcevic, but I’m only giving partial credit for that one. 😜😁
The laws of physics are the truth, and they don’t care one whit about our beliefs or experience.
The ‘Laws of Physics’ are NOT the truth. The EFFECTS of ‘Physics’ are. What we call the ‘Laws of Physics’ are merely what we have worked out as best we can through trial and error.
What we call the law of Gravity may well stand for the next hundred years, or it might be replaced tomorrow with something better. In fact, since we still can’t reconcile it with the other 3 fundamental forces, I’d almost guarantee we don’t have it right yet.
Is it close enough to figure the trajectory of a bullet? Or how much steel you need in a bridge? Looks that way.
Is it close enough to figure how much ‘Dark Matter’ is in the Galaxy? Or IF there is any? Who knows.
~¿~
Well said. Of course, gravity is good enough for calculating bullet trajectory but not good enough for the GPS navigation.
http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html
with a look at.
Laws of physics lean heavily on mathematics, which in turn is an abstract concept.
I’m with Schitztree on this one. That’s why I referenced the effects of gravity, not the “Law of Gravity.”
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OK, vuk. Full marks for that reply. 😜😁
I hadn’t thought about mathematics in relation to truth and morals. I’ll not comment further because it drifts away from Dr. Ball’s main points, but thanks for bringing it up. It’s something to chew on for a bit this afternoon.
E.C. hi
Premise is: “It is hard to believe that a majority of the politicians and public continue to ignore the truth. ”
Majority of the politicians and public might see truth differently to what Dr. Ball, maybe you or even me might perceive it to be, thus I concluded there is no absolute truth in this particular matter, and same may be said for numerous scientific conundrums.
Nit-picking over semantics. An electron must do what it does, down to the level of quantum uncertainty. It has no choice. Call it a law, or a rule, or an effect, or whatever- the computer you’re typing on (not to mention our entire technological infrastructure) depends on that. If a physical behavior is measurable to umpty decimal places, and no exception to that behavior has ever been observed, what’s wrong with calling it a Law?
The “laws” of physics are hypotheses. They are extremely useful ones at the macro level. They are able to predict almost all of what we may encounter with sufficient accuracy to yield useful predictions. However they are not really laws.
E.C. What an electron ‘does’ is a meter of a statistical estimate.
“The behaviors of the electron does not allow for it to be observable as a particle or as a wave. The two sided nature of the electron is known as the Wave-Particle Duality: The property of particles behaving as waves and the property of waves behaving as particles as well as waves.”
De Broglie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929 for his hypothesis predicting dual nature of mater, specifically consideing electron and Thompson and Davisson shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for their experimental work confirming Dr Broglie hypothesis. Similar experiments in later years confirmed dual nature of protons and neutrons. In final analysis we know statistically what might happen but there is no absolute certainty about it.
Uncertainty rules !
The Laws of Physics correctly predict what one will observe under conditions where a theory has been carefully tested experimentally. In other words, a validated theory tells us the truth about what we will observe under certain circumstances. However, as Newton’s Law of Gravity has been replaced by General Relativity, the explanation for what we observe can change, and predictions made outside of the range of experimental testing can turn out to not match what we observe. Newton’s theory of gravity was known to incorrectly predict the orbit of Mercury long before general relativity came along to “explain” why that theory’s predictions were wrong in this particular situation. Saying a theory tell us “the truth” depends on experimental testing, particularly serious efforts to demonstrate a theory is inconsistent with observations.
Dark matter is postulated to exist because star on the edge of galaxies are moving faster than expected from the mass of the galaxy as inferred from it’s luminosity. The theories that connect the luminosity of a galaxy with its mass could easily be wrong or incorrectly calculated or the luminosity could be blocked by dust. As these alternatives were tested and appear less likely and as other evidence has accumulated (gravitational lensing, for example), physicists have become more convinced that something besides typical barons provides the bulk of gravity we observe in other galaxies. In this case, the “truth” about dark matter is that there are phenomena in other galaxies we don’t fully understand right now.
There is a reality and there is just one version of reality. Reality is what it is. Each truth is what it is. Each truth is a part of the whole truth. The one reality is the sum of all truths. And fantasies are numerous and all are fantastic. And what you may be willing to believe does nothing to change reality to be anything other than what it is naturally.
Science is the quest for truth, for understanding the laws of nature. It requires experimentation whose results are repeatable. Newtonian physics is true for the environment that human beings experience, even if the relationships it describes no longer hold at subatomic geometries or as you approach the speed of light.
From science, we can see that God has revealed enough of his design in nature that we ought to know that he exists and that we are morally accountable to him. Amazingly, this is true no matter how advanced our scientific understanding becomes, from cosmology to biology. The cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments all independently point to a creator whose own character is the source of moral truth.
The notion that you can make and decide your own truth is the oldest lie of human civilization and has caused more death and destruction than any other human idea.
A little bit of conflating of Empirical and Forensic science is displayed here (and is unfortunately used by nearly everyone every day). Empirical science is grounded in the here and now and is experimentally verified. Forensic science is grounded in the past and is based on what evidence indicates happened. It is not reproducible. What you derive from it is based on your pre-suppositions when you go into the investigation. History, evolution, creation-science are all Forensic science disciplines. There are no experiments that can prove or disprove any one. And when one’s prejudices rule out one line of evidence as historians did when they said the Bible was wrong that there never was a people called the Hittites, one winds up with egg on their face when evidence proved **them** wrong. To those who say Creation didn’t happen, then I ask, what then was the Big Bang? The universe creating itself? (as Stephen Hawking claimed) I find that harder to believe than Creation by a timeless being.
BTW I don’t see anything in the article about Creationists, Who wrote the headline?
Belief in a particular God or gods has certainly claimed its share of lives, as well.
True but they were acting against the teachings of Jesus, so you could say they are not Christians. The body count from atheists dwarfs anything those “Christians”did, over 100 million dead in the 20th century.
Mike,
Atheist and pagan regimes arguably outkilled Christians in the 20th century, but that was not true in previous centuries, to say nothing of other religiously motivated slaughter.
The Taiping Revolt, for instance, in the mid-19th century caused 20 to 30 million deaths. Some say 50 millon. Its leader was a Christian, but it’s debatable to what extent religion played a motivating role in the rebellion.
The Wars of Religion in early modern Europe are a clearer case, but the waters there are also muddied by economic, social and dynastic factors. The European conquest of the New World, while cloaked in religion, was clearly also motivated by quest for gold and other resources. Charlemagne spread Roman Catholicism to Germanic pagans by fire and sword, literally, as later occurred during the Prussian and Lithuanian crusades. During its early expansion, same goes for Islam.
What’s dangerous are belief systems, whether ideological or religious, justifying violence.
Indeed. My understanding of that concept is moral relativity or cultural relativity. It is what many have labeled as Satanism. The great deceiver.
I’ve tried to have conversations about morality with my “educated” friend, an academic with an English doctorate (sorry folks, but they aren’t real doctors). She told me point blank there are no things as facts.
But then why does she believe in critical theory and patriarchy, if there are no facts? I attempted to discuss with her that ascribing to any views as valid and simultaneously claiming no such thing as fact, is impossible. They moment you declare no such thing as fact, you are stating something to be held as factually accurate, which by their logic also cannot be factual or accurate. She tried to say it could be accurate but not factual.
She’s in her 40’s, votes Democrat, lives alone, no children, supports all the typical modem socialist talking points yet cannot see her own glaring hypocrisy.
I assert that worldview the foundation of all that can be considered evil in the world.
In fact, I just attempted this morning to talk to another one of “them”, you know, the CAGW faithful, on the matter given today’s snow accumulation vs. the forecast. I started with a snarky, “what was the prediction? Half inch? But, they can’t get the forecast 24 hours correct how could they possibly get it correct 30 years in advance.”
It was an exercise in futility. I’m still trying though. Funny thing… You could have cut the tension in the air with a knife. Immediate shock and disgust that I could possibly hold such a perspective or draw such conclusions about “The science”
If there are no facts, then how an there be sccience?
Valid observations of nature are scientific facts, without which there can be no explanations, hypotheses or theories to test.
“There are no such things as facts.”
But, in her mind, she was stating a fact.
Which, in her mind, did not exist.
Or is the only fact, that facts don’t exist. As facts….
which would then be a factual statement.
I hope that she was able to see the irony in her statement.
Oh what tangled webs we weave, when first we practice to deceive…
Vuk, I think in this post normal age where the extreme of this form of thought is destroying culture, economy and civilization itself, your characterization of the truth represents support for all this nonsense. Your view is actually the product of the terminally corrupted irrelevant dead philosophy and social science that has taken over and filled academe with marxy eggheads.
If I build a Brooklin bridge, and it does what I designed it to do for a century, it is not open to wifty poofty philosophers ‘orherwising’ it! Does a tree falling in the forest make a noise if I don’t hear it? Even true it does!
How am I supposed to appreciate your often thoughtful offerings here at WUWT now? Stick to real science. The part that isn’t true we have enough of.
Hi there,
I’m just expressed a view that what is held to be true may not be same in everyone’s mind. Some of the above comments conflate physical reality with an individual’s perception of truth. There is an overwhelming consensus what reality is, but how each individual perceive it is their private property and I have no intention on trespassing onto it.
Therefore, to me it is not“hard to believe that a majority of the politicians and public continue to ignore the truth.”(perhaps word ‘reality’ would have been more appropriate) may be, since they are not all liers and fr…sters, that in their minds they see the truth differently to how Dr.B. sees it himself.
There are perceptions, and there are facts.
Your perception may be your reality, but your reality
may not be based on fact.
Many people believed as fact that people are entitled to free healthcare.
If this were fact, then they would have a claim on the free labor of other individuals.
I do hope that you do not believe that you are entitled to the free labor of others.
Most would call this slavery.
If someone should choose to work for you for free, that is their right. Not yours.
In the US Constitution, these “facts” were called “truths”.
They were given by God. Not man.
As Dr. Ball mentions, we have lost our moral compass.
The reason for this is that our Government has replaced the creator with men. (and women) As such, there are no truths except what our leaders choose.
If you asked people if it were moral to end the life of another human being, my guess would be 95% would say no. But when it comes to abortion, then it gets fuzzy. The claim is that it is just tissue. That is incorrect. With the exception of some cells at the interface of the uterus and the placenta, all DNA of the placenta, umbilical cord, cord blood and the fetus are a separate and distinct human being. The DNA does not belong to the mother. The mother’s blood is not even shared. They may even have blood types that are incompatible; Which is a non-issue unless there is a problem and their blood types do mix due to trauma or certain tests.
So, with all of that said, is it still wrong to kill another human?
And we are not talking about killing in self-defense or state executions.
So is that statement absolutely true? Your premise disproves itself. You aren’t allowed to exclude your statement from itself.
That is correct. The truth is an individual’s subjective understanding of physical reality and certainly is not absolute or unquestionable representative of that reality.Deficiency in human cognition is supplemented by recourse to God and religious beliefs. ‘Laws’ of nature as developed by science over past centuries are a step forward in the cognition process, but even in the industrialy advanced societies often take second place to the religious dogma among majority of population.
What I was an am saying is
“The truth is just what one happens to think or believe at the time, through own (or induced from someone else’s) knowledge or experience.”
No. What you believe may or may not be the truth. It is only what you believe to be true. You may be wrong. There are truths that are absolutes. They are true no matter what you think or believe.
Idea of a particular truth resides in an individual’s consciousness as that person’s perception of relevant reality (e.g. does God exist?).
Truth is affected by reality, while the reality is independent of what someone’s understanding of truth might be at any time.
Money makes the AGW go ’round.
I suppose there are lots of examples Dr. Ball could have used, but I thought Martha Stewart should have been included. We all here in the United States more or less sat still while she was railroaded into prison.
Even the Enlightenment figure Thomas Jefferson clung to belief in the Great Chain of Being longer than justified on purely scientific grounds. He resisted the concept of extinction, even after it was shown real by Cuvier in 1798,
Part of his resistance was a desire for mastodons still to exist, in order to prove wrong Buffon’s assertion that New World species and people were degenerate compared to the Old World’s. He ordered Lewis and Clark to be on the lookout for large elephant-like animals on their western journey.
But late in life, after more evidence for extinction had piled up, he accepted its reality, but still attributed it to God’s plan. Jefferson, while often anticlerical, was actually deeply religious, just not a conventional Christian, but rather a Deist. His changed attitude, accepting change in the universe, is evident in an 1823 letter to Adams:
It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion, their preserver and regulator while permitted to exist in their present forms, and their regenerator into new and other forms. We see, too, evident proofs of the necessity of a superintending power to maintain the Universe in its course and order. Stars, well known, have disappeared, new ones come into view, comets, in their incalculable courses, may run foul of suns and planets and require renovation under other laws; certain races of animals are become extinct; and, were there no restoring power, all existences might extinguish successively, one by one, until all should be reduced to a shapeless chaos.
Whether he would still adhere to faith in design in the universe, given all that science has discovered in the following two centuries, no one can say today. His views had already changed a lot. He once adhered to the then already outdated belief that fossils only accidentally resembled living things.
Jefferson’s wise remarks on design being displayed in the universe have held up well. Of course, so has the obtuse bigotry against the patently obvious truth of the Designer and His grand designs.
Intelligent design is yet another example of “Texas sharpshooting” and disregards of all the examples of unintelligent design.
Life is a “spray and stick” method in that it constantly “sprays” the environment with potential spawn each with differing abilities (mutations) and allows what ever “sticks” to remain around as long as it can and allow it produce imperfect copies of itself.
There are far more ‘failed’ configurations than ‘successful’ ones. We just don’t often get to notice the failures as they don’t last long.
Original design, perhaps. The rest is chaotic change a.k.a. “evolution”, which is notably unpredictable, but rather stable in a limited frame of reference a.k.a. “scientific logical domain”.
There is no evidence of intelligent design in the history of life on Earth, but abundant examples of idiotic design.
Sorry, but I must disagree.
The fact that the human body is crated by a program written in four chemicals, that is able to turn on and off which cells will become bone, muscles of various sorts, a miraculously complex working digestive system from mouth to anus (just think about that for a second, if any one of those components did not exist at the same time, the creature would have died.) Juices of all sorts, neurons, eyes that interpret electromagnetic radiation, ears that detect pressure waves, taste buds that detect different chemical signatures and a brain that ties it all together?
I’m sorry, it requires an incredible amount of faith to suggest that all of this occurred through chaos.
My personal interpretation of Genesis 2:24 refers to the production of children.
…”For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”
Through shared DNA, the husband and wife do indeed become one flesh in their offspring.
note:
The traditional interpretation is a sort of metaphysical thing that happens between the husband and wife. The interpretation also goes on to explain why this is the 2nd most important relationship, and why children should not come before it.
Jim,
Zero faith required to understand how the processes which you cite have evolved.
Even a very low mutation rate gets you from perhaps a single gene (protein-coding sequence) 4.2 billion years ago to about the presently estimated 19,000 genes and their control sequences (such as on/off switches). Assuming just one whole genome doubling every 300 million years (we know it happens more often than that from vertebrate genetic history alone) gets you from then to now. And that’s without factoring in the even more common other sorts of mutation and genetic change.
All of our current AI systems are trained using the same basic “spray and stick” method. If it is such a clumsy and inefficient method, why would it be used?
Actually, if you want to fill a planet with successful lifeforms, natural selection (evolution) is probably the easiest way. Of course, it is quite dependent on the materials available, the environment, the “rules” for self-replication, etc., which would require an enormous intellect to calculate an optimal set of parameters. That is where the intelligence comes in.
Paul,
We now use directed evolution to engineer proteins:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_evolution
John,
I don’t see how that was responsive to my comment. In fact, it seems more in agreement with my points than anything else.
Paul,
Yes, it was meant as support. Sorry if too terse.
While there is no such thing as “simple lifeforms”, because life at is “simplest” is more complex than all of the happenings in a large metropolis. Yet, life at its simplest is made up of a set of incredibly complex nanotechnological wonders that take part in a highly choreographed dance, as each studiously works through multiple steps in intricate, precise recipes. And the “go juice” for this astounding dance is provided by a proton-powered rotary nano-motor spinning at 10,000 RPMs, running at virtually 100% efficiency. Quadrillions of these perfect nano-motors constantly churn out units of energy in the precise currency needed for virtually every single biological function that occurs on the planet – from the twitching of a muscle to the assembling of a protein.
All of this shouts “Design!” and “Purpose!” to anyone who will listen. Sadly, it seems one of the terrible side effects of being willfully obtuse is to be deaf.
Matt,
The simplest extant organisms lack “nano-motors” and many other cellular apparatuses common in prokaryotes. Such nano-structures have evolved repeatedly. There is no such thing as “irreducible complexity”. You have fallen for the lies of shamelessly mendacious spewers of blatant “Intelligent Design” falsehoods.
Here’s an example of a modern simple but indubitably living life form:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycoplasma#Characteristics
At fractions of a micron, they are even smaller than the littlest normal bacteria with rigid cell walls. That they are today mostly parasitic or saprotrophic doesn’t matter. In the environment of early Earth, before it was covered with heterotrophic organisms, such simple life forms and even more basic, would have fed on the abundant organic and other compounds then available, not having been promptly consumed by the present plethora of ravenous microbes and larger organisms.
The simplest life forms wouldn’t even need membranes, but consist of strands of RNA or other nucleic acids, in concentrated solution with amino acids to make proteins and with nucleobases, five carbon sugars and phosphate groups with which the RNA could copy itself.
By simple experiments, Nobel Laureate Jack Szostak’s lab at Harvard has shown how cell membranes evolved from lipid bilayer vessicles, to make protocells:
https://origins.harvard.edu/pages/research-spotlight-jack-szostak
His and other labs around the world are now working on remaining issues in origin of life research. I’d urge you to study the actual science, rather than buying into ID lies.
You can’t tell whether a plan is smart or dumb, until you know the entire plan.
Matt,
Of course there are simple lifeforms. And even simpler ones which preceded those of today.
There are also reproducing nucleic acids which stretch the definition of life.
Mark,
Sorry above response ended up out of place.
Sure you can tell whether a trait is stupidly designed or not. Please state why you think that having mammalian gonads arise in the fish position, ie the chest, is a smart design. Or why you imagine that God thinks that’s a good design. It is if you want mammals to be vulnerable to hernias.
Why would God not design a well-engineered bipedal foot from scratch, rather than doing such a crummy job of adapting a grasping foot for plantigrade walking?
The inescapable scientific conclusion is that there is no plan.
No bigotry. Just no evidence for a Designer. Simply a belief.
And that’s the way God wants it. If there were evidence for the God hypothesis, then of what value would faith be? It wouldn’t be needed.
God, sure seems to “want” a whole slew of conflicting things. It is hard to find a more prevalent yet despicable “reason” for most of history’s atrocities than “What God has ordained!”
True.
God clearly wants to remain well hidden.
Wehrmacht belt buckles still read “Gott Mit Uns”.
Bishop Amalric, after a siege during the Albigensian Crusade, famously said, “Kill them all. God will know His own.”
God must be hiding in the same spot with all the missing heat. 🙂
..or there is the null hypothesis.
Just going by what the Bible says as to what God wants, according at least to Protestant theologians, and even Scholastics who tried to prove His existence.
Or has it been cynically used for an agenda. Atomic Energy is a most wonderful thing if we dont use it to blow stuff up. Water is is indispensable to life but you dont want your head held under water.
Rocketscientist
January 28, 2019 at 11:28 am
——————
Rocket.
If you really knew anything about religion.
You will see and understand, that this what you say:
“It is hard to find a more prevalent yet despicable “reason” for most of history’s atrocities than “What God has ordained!”
Is exactly as propagated and maintained in the religion of the God of Abraham, Israel, Mosses +++ to Muhammad.
Justifying, or trying to, any atrocities, or human bloodshed,or even death or murder even in or by the means as per case of capital punishment in accordance of the law of the land, in any way or form happening, under the support of “What God has ordained”, or as per will or wish of God, or in God’s name, will render that “one” person or entity or authority to be considered by default as committing the worst and higher crime as per accord of the religion and God, the crime of the high treason else known as infidelity…by default.
So, if you believe what I am telling you to be correct, in terms of religion and the God you addressed, then you may find that you quite in same line with the means of God and religion there…as per the issue.
The problem with the atrocities and bloodshed in man’s history, is man and not God.
There is nothing God had to do, but man, with the extermination, collapse, and total cultural and economical destruction of Carthage, Cleopatra’s Egypt, or Ancient Greece or Macedonia of King Philip, or Sparta, or Arab World, or even Ancient Rome for that matter,
or the atrocities of the Wold Wars of the latest times.
Oh just saying….
cheers
I am having difficulty understanding your response.
BTW if I recall correctly the religion of Abraham includes numerous transgressions for which the penalty is death (capital punishment). Clearly God isn’t against killing, or were those also ‘misinterpretations’ of God’s will?
OK, this is GETTING WAAAAYYYYY OFF TOPIC. End it – both of you.
Anthony:
I was about to put up the old link to what I said on Caleb’s site.
Glad I saw your comment before you had to say “-the three of you.”. 😎
Religious faith is not blind faith. I have reasons to think there is an uncaused first cause. The fine tuning of the universe is just one.
ike,
No shortage of natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for “fine-tuning”.
Sorry about the missed “M”.
A well written piece Dr. Ball. I dare say you are correct that the loss of a moral compass has allowed the infiltration of the evil of money and power to corrupt many, which is not a new thing of course, but to corrupt “science” and “scientists” to such a level is extremely disturbing. I have made my mind up to not sit quietly and allow this to occur without a fight. As you point out this resolve is required of the masses in order to fend off a tyranny of the wealthy minority.
Well Said!
Can’t push one world government globalism with a strong, intact, moral population. That starts with the family.
I’m one of the last people you will find apologizing for myself black culture, but there are some glaring historical events that should horrify everyone:
1. Southern Democrats were responsible for implementing the minimum wage laws because young whites couldn’t compete. Black youth in those days could work for less because they had lower costs of living, and therefore were gainfully employed at much higher rates than white youths. Apparently this wasn’t just the youth either but blacks in the workforce in general.
https://mises.org/wire/racist-history-minimum-wage-laws
2. Before the welfare system, 4/5 black families were intact with a father in the home, and now that rate is approximate 1/3.
Countless studies confirm the lack of balance, and especially a male father figure in the home strongly correlates to higher delinquency, violent crime, mental health, etc. I’d dare say it’s proven but I’m also emotionally invested in that data considering what I’ve had to go through to stay in my son’s life, as the state is inherently biased towards mothers.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/03/the_decline_of_the_africanamerican_family.html
3. Blacks are hit hardest by abortion; not in raw numbers but as a percentage. Hispanics track just behind them, and then whites. All of this tracks the Bell curve and I’ll provide that link as well:
https://www.guttmacher.org/infographic/2017/abortion-rates-race-and-ethnicity
https://youtu.be/pry963pLIg8
James Vincent puts together excellent videos on the topics he covers, with screen shots of the data and it’s source.
Look what state has the largest population of blacks. New York. Although as a percentage they are 11th in terms of population density, the raw numbers are staggering.
http://blackdemographics.com/population/black-state-population/
https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-271-planned-parenthood-exposed/
Margaret Sanger was a racist promoter of eugenics and it was clear she despised blacks.
How disgusting and unfortunate the new York Senate reacted with raucous applaud when the governor signed that disgusting law. By the way, since they claim this is about women’s rights… How can killing a female baby the day before it’s due in any way concern itself with women’s right to life?
Dr. Ball, thank you for your broad perspective and the scope of your work. This entire push for carbon tax funded global control is based in eugenics and depopulation. Society has welcomed moral relativity and can’t remain prosperous and safe if continuing on this trend.
Thank you for those links, particularly the one on minimum wage. I had never heard of that until now, and I’m 64.
I’m glad someone appreciates it.
I’ve decided to start tossing in links to my claims because I would wager that often people here think I’m making things up I found on fantasylandtinfoil.ufo
😋
I’m not STEM educated so I try to provide the non mathematic line of sight
Scientists have simply become the Pharisees of the modern age. Instead of pointing to text they now point to numbers. In both cases they claim their interpretation is the truth.
“Plato and Aristotle created the original idea, and because their ideas formed the basis for the Christian and Catholic view of the world, called scholasticism, it dominated western people’s beliefs.”
Nonsense. Platonism underlies gnosticism that found it’s full expression in Christianity and is diametrically opposed to it.
It’s complicated but I would say that Tim is correct.
It’s true that Plato’s ideas underlie gnosticism. It’s also true that Plato’s ideas had a huge influence on Western Christianity as a whole, and that includes scholasticism.
It’s important to note that scholasticism is more a method than it is dogma per se.
When you talk about Plato’s ideas, you have to be specific about which ideas and you have to be aware of who is interpreting them.
I would recommend a reading of Aquinas’ Summa Theologica.
By coincidence, today happens to be his feast day, for those who take note of such things.
There’s no question that Platonic dualism heavily influenced the Catholic church via gnosticism, and later Protestantism (primarily because both established doctrinal provenance on Augustine rather than the earlier church fathers), but Christianity, no, because dualism and gnostic ideations are diametrically opposed and incompatible with Christianity.
Dr Ball I share your concerns about the state of public policy in the USA and appreciate all that you have contributed in the fight for a rational environmental policy.
I can’t say that I share your assessment of the moral state of the american people. Both of us are old enough to remember the morass of the 1970’s. Everything appeared to be adrift with everyone from our President down telling us that we had to rein in our expectations. Many problems were deemed insoluble or so it seemed at that time.
My personal experience that there was nothing wrong with the citizens and particularly their children came in 1980 at a military technical school in Virginia. President Carter was stumbling his way through the Iran hostage crises. The nightly news showed large crowds of Iranians threatening not only the hostages but the entire country with “Death To America”. We were a helpless giant.
Our company of 30 mostly teenage young Americans became so frustrated and enraged at this that we decided to place a call to the Ayatollah from a pay phone in the barracks. To our surprise we made a connection with the operator in Tehran. We asked for the Ayatollah which of course she wasn’t going to do. All of were packed around the phone straining to hear. We asked her to give him a message. She agreed. In unison we yelled “we are ready to fight!”
A change of direction or sunrise was just around the corner as Churchill said in his broad uplands speech. Yes times appear dark. What better time can we ask for than this to fight.
Reality Check from one who grew up in the 1970’s troe cites above. Both then, and now, the vast majority of Americans (or any other country’s citizens) do not have politics front and center in their consciousness, let alone their implications for the next hundred years. They are too busy living their lives; raising kids, paying rent or mortgage, trying to achieve at their jobs and, in free moments, enjoying the vast palette of sports and entertainments now available to almost everyone. They are NOT twisting their sheets at night about “American morality” let alone worrying about a civil war. Whether they like Trump or they don’t, most don’t have the kind of time on their hands that lets them hang on and despair over his every word. Or Macron’s, Trudeau’s, or Merkel’s. A vast section of the middle, estimated at 33%, is politically disengaged. The book FACTFULNESS is a good grounding in relative realities.
In the 70’s, we were worried about the Population Bomb, Peak Oil, Mutually Assured Destruction was still hanging around, and most of us on both sides of the aisle thought our leaders execrable. Nixon to Ford or Carter, gee, THAT was a choice! 😉 Yet we mostly grew up with the “morals” our parents inculcated, not some fool talking head, somehow we mostly didn’t become a feral, predatory rabble, and most of us look back on those times with fondness. God knows we had better music! BTW, the Republic stood, the Soviet Union did not, the Gipper came but the Ice Age never arrived. Nor has the Great AGW Cook-Off.
And we’re still living our lives. Perhaps the best advice is still what Timothy Leary said: Tune in, turn on, drop out. Today that means turn off the Nattering Nabobs of Negativity and Doom, and go outside. Oh, and for God’s sake don’t put one of those “Alexa” things in your house. Flip your own damn switches!
I too enjoy playing me head firmly in the sand 😋
I concur regarding your perspective on the general population. I disagree that it is acceptable to just go on going on letting the world crumble around us.
There is quite a concerted attack on individual sovereignty, especially in white Western Nations by those who are jealous and want to redistribute wealth. They want a global society, void of any true cultural separation, the only culture remaining being nostalgic plays and playing dress up to ancient times past. They desire conformity and complete control of everyone’s life.
Look at smart technology, push for AI, 5G dangers, mandated vaccination (regardless of your stance they are saying the government owns your body and your child’s too!), biometric surveiling, attacks on free speech, unrelenting attacks on the second amendment, now open push for stratospheric aerosol spraying, full term abortion in New York (I’ve already discussed that atrocious eugenics above), constant attacks on the family and those of Christian faith (interestingly no mention of Islamic practices against women and gays, but they will damn will rip Trump about Russia and gays… Hypocrisy much?)…
The difference between now and the 1970’s is the saturation of carefully crafted propaganda that is damn near inescapable.
It’s in academia/schooling (whites learning to hate themselves while racist blacks and others can call for murder of whites with zero consequences)
It’s in entertainment (over representation of mixed race families, lgbtqxyz123, cuckold males, saturated with dark occult symbolism and purely satanic symbolism, etc)
It’s all over advertising (I listen to Dan Patrick but the commercials are sickening)
And the technology now can directly transmit audio perceived at 60db directly into an individual head with no one else hearing it.
(MIT just admitted this).
Google and tech giants censoring anything non mainstream and non leftist status quo talking points, selling personal data (by the way they have a complete history of everything you’ve ever searched, everything… And those who work for them can look into your files, strangers… Think about that), they also manipulate search results, ban controversial content producers, etc, and are actively trying to influence election results through these de platforming campaigns)
Yes, there is a major shift that demands attention by everyone
Can’t argue with any of that, but caving to all this Central Planning crap is, at this time, still mostly voluntary. For instance, I cut my cable back in 2007 and run full ad-blocking on my desktop. That means practically ZERO exposure to advertising of any kind. I refuse to own a “smart” phone, I have an old flippie with data blocked by the carrier, and I leave it home a lot.
No “smart” devices in my home as I think unless one is a quadriplegic they are toys. My browser is a non-tracking add-on (SmartPage.com, equivalent to DuckDuckGo). I read news aggregator sites with an equal mix of both left and right source links, and also read 2 of my local newspapers because some stuff is just better in print. WSJ for the globalist perspective, and at least some handle on what goes on in those back rooms where the deals are REALLY made. Many headlines, concerning “climate,” “health,” “nutrition” and other subjects I click all the way back to the source of the primary study, usually to find there’s no “there” there.
Several examples: 40 years of the disastrously wrong low-fat dietary can be blamed almost entirely on Ancel Keys, George McGovern, and lobbyists for Big Sugar. It turns out the entire “aerobics” fad, this idea that one must do “chronic cardio” until they drop to stay alive, can be laid at the feet of one man, Kenneth Cooper, founder of the Cooper Institute, whose initial research was literally out of this world–he was to find a cure for cardiac atrophy in SPACE in astronauts! Similarly, the recent spate of articles, most out of the UK, claiming “loneliness” is a “health crisis” seems to be 100% the papers published by ONE couple, and most of the experiments were with RATS! I could go on . . . call it the Drudge Syndrome. 😉
The danger is that most people, scrolling on phones and partially distracted away from home and pressed for time, read only the headline which may not even resemble the body of the article. But it IS still possible, at least for now, to shop with cash, eschew social media, and at the very least clear your browsing history and cookies at the end of each online session. Oh, and save your MAGA hat for the rallies.
If totalitarianism comes, it will be through the back door of “socialized medicine.” “For your own good, dear” in the name of that Holy Grail, “health,” (which no one can define, BTW), legions of useful idiots already happily strap on monitoring bands, join the various true-believer dietary cults, etc. But the basic biology pig farmers know is also still a thing for those who wish to ignore all these loons with their belief-based “sciency-sounding” rebooted religions.
It is well documented that humans are imperfect. When we recount the same story multiple times, the story changes
This has now become a process crime of “lying to authority” in the US. This is not the crime of perjury.
It is now being used to invent crimes after the fact, using the high cost of defending yourself against prosecution to railroad defendants.
The “land of the free” is meaningless in a legal system stacked against enemies of the bureaucracy.
Well said, Ferdberple
Cheers
Mike
re. Mount St. Helens. link It’s not back to where it was but the recovery is indeed impressive.
Thanks to the warming since the Little Ice Age, the Sahara desert is becoming green again. link Warmer is better.
That’s because no cleanup was attempted at Mt. St. Helens. But with just a little luck, the Greens may be able to stop the greening. They are surely trying hard.
I have made this observation before, perhaps not on this site, but I really think it is valid:
A baby born today is intellectually no different from one born a thousand years ago. It can easily believe in witchcraft, voodoo, astrology, evil spirits, divine right, moral legitimacy of slavery, human sacrifice, racial right to dominate, or any other past beliefs that were at one time culturally accepted. What the infant grows up to believe is solely based on what it is taught, or how they are indoctrinated.
Teach them from an early age that Man is an evil, unhealthy parasite on the planet Earth, and they will believe it, many for their entire lives. When you have accomplished that, full-term abortions become acceptable.
If we do not demand changes in our educational systems, particularly at the university level, our society will descend into one with no redeeming moral values, and a totalitarian government.
My respect for this site just went down quite a bit:
“…The second event involved the arrest of Roger Stone. It was an event and action normally associated with dictatorships and police states that have no rule of law….”
WTF? Roger Stone lied to congress under oath and threatened witnesses. He should be locked up for the rest of his life.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/25/7-biggest-claims-in-robert-muellers-indictment-of-trump-pal-roger-stone.html
===
“You are a rat. A stoolie. You backstab your friends-run your mouth my lawyers are dying Rip you to shreds,” Stone allegedly wrote.
Stone told Credico he would “take that dog away from you,” the indictment says.
“I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive],” Stone allegedly told Credico.
Too early for me to make a judgement. You may even believe the CNBC, the New York Times, or the Washington Post.
You assume facts not yet in evidence. Did you learn nothing from Dr. Ball’s recitation of the Enron and Anderson conviction time line? This prosecutor is out of control. The original remit was to find collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians. Does anyone remember that?
Watters
You don’t agree with something an author says, and expect Anthony to hold the same views, and to exercise censorship. You are willing to accept the accusation of Mueller without the benefit of a trial by jury to establish guilt or innocence. You want Stone to be punished more severely than most murderers for lying to Congress. You are unbelievable!
Riiight, and the Covington Catholic School boys surrounded and blocked the path of a decorated Vietnam Vet while shouting ‘Builders the Wall’.
Except, when all the evidence was examined, every part of that proved to be a lie. Like always.
Repeat after me. ‘The Left Lies. It’s what the do.’
~¿~
The thing I hate most about spellcheck, is when it takes a word I know I spelled right, and changes it into a different word for no reason I can fathom.
>¿<
I call it ‘auto-corrupt.’
I feel your pain. Happens to me too, but I’m never entirely sure if I typed it correct or if the “auto-correct” (a misnomer if there ever was one) decided the word was something far removed from what would be the obviously meant word to the human eye. At least in this case it picked a word that was close to what you meant, I’ve gotten ones that left me scratching my head as to where it came up with the word it used.
That’s auto-correct, which I always turn off when I can. Spell check by itself just highlights words it suspects to be invalid.
Yes, I prefer spell-check to auto-correct. Tell me what you think I got wrong and I’ll fix it (if it needs fixing) myself.
proof read every thing you post at least twice.
Lots of bad grammar, poor punctuation, bad spelling, poor word choice, etc. make many post very difficult to decode, if at all.
https://babylonbee.com/news/new-google-technology-autocorrects-users-thoughts/
Just so you know.! 🙂
BTW you should read some books by Thomas Sowell and get a handle on thinking.
So I accept some on the left lie, but when you have a president like Trump who is an olympic level lier, I’m bewildered that you can not see the irony of your statement? I mean he lies daily and by the time it’s pointed out there is another one on the table.
Interesting you bring up deceit, especially regarding Trump. First, he’s a politician now so let’s save everyone the feigned moral outrage. You don’t get to that level without being a habitual liar.
Secondly, you claim he lies everyday. Well, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised but I’m interested to know who you trust as your sources regarding his deception. Should they be any of the following…(CNN, NYT, Washington Post, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, BBC, guardian, vox, Ars Technica, Snopes, politifact and all the other”fact checkers” fake news outlets, interceptor, increasingly The Hill, and others, to a lesser degree FOX but still relatively untrustworthy) well…I don’t genuinely trust pathological liars to be a beacon of credibility.
The list of lies is nearly endless, most notably the coverage of the illegal invasion (yes, the proper term is invasion), and the Covington kids.. outright fabrication. Don’t forget NYT hired an outright racist Sarah Jeong as editor and rather than fire her once her racist tweets were uncovered, they doubled down in support of her… How can that rag be trusted when they favor such a glaringly biased worldview?)
Third, what is the track record of the left in American history?
Well, as I’ve pointed out:
1. Minimum wage- built on racism, primarily hurt blacks
2. Welfare- same, and look at the results in the family structure
3. Abortion- same, look who is most severely hurt by these practices
What party put these into effect?
What constituency continues to “trust” that party?
This is a critical aspect to consider when discussing who is lying and who can be trusted. The majority of the media, entertainment & academia (all areas of major influence over the minds of the masses) is left of center ideologically and the consequences have unfolded for all to see.
BTW, you can keep your insurance 😉
Simon’s only impressed by lies when they’re delivered in faculty-room jargon and backed up by ‘fact-checkers’ – basically an entire institution of liars.
THEN he feels comfortable repeating them.
Matthew Drobnick
Well that was a good old right wing rant, but none of it justifies why the liar in chief is excused so easily by the blind fools who follow him with no regard or account for his dishonesty? Saying all politicians lie so Trump is excused is simplistic nonsense. I think the real reason people here accept his intolerable dishonesty is because he says what they want to hear and they are happy to bend their morals accordingly so they get what they want. And then laughably they turn round and accuse those who call him on his deceit of being dishonest. The man is going down in a fireball and it is sooo much fun to watch and at the same time reassuring that there is a level of accountability still in the world, even for blowhard gangsters like Trump.
I think the real reason people here accept his intolerable dishonesty is because he says what they want to hear and they are happy to bend their morals accordingly so they get what they want.
Well, that’s how lefties like you operate in regard to the lies from your side. So why berate the right for what you on the left happily do every day? The old do as I say not as I do schtick you lefties trot out gets old real fast..
Simon – leaving his daily stain on the mattress.
And in comes Simon to prove the point.
As always, the left defines a lie as being any fact that doesn’t benefit them.
PS: The left also defines anyone even slightly to the right of themselves to be some form of conservative. That’s how socialists can be called conservatives in much of Europe.
Seriously – after the last two years of near-hysterical accusations and open political assassination – Simon’s here calling TRUMP a liar?
And seems to consider this claiming the moral high-ground?
Talk about not seeing the irony.
It’s also worth mentioning that he’s never specific about any of ‘Trump’s lies’ – just that he tells them all the time.
It’s the same sort of non-specifics you use when you’re bullshitting your way through a college exam you didn’t study for.
He has tried to be more specific in the past. However having the rest of demonstrate that the so called “lies” weren’t, has caused him to stop citing specific instances.
Simon has already drunk the kool-aid. He’ll believe whatever the Left Wing media’s tells him to believe.
I remember an article somewhere, last year I think, that did a rundown of all the things Trump or the Media claimed were lies during his first year in Office. They rated them on a scale, with only the outermost two being that Trump or the Media had told an actual lie (something they either knew or should have known wasn’t true).
I think there was well over a hundred items. Trump had about a dozen confirmed Lies. The Media had 3 times as many. Most of the items were things that could be seen either way. Differences of opinion, like how effective the wall would be.
Some were things that are ‘technically true’ but left an impression of something else that either wasn’t true or was at least not proven, and there too the media was far ahead of Trump.
I wish I could link to that article, but I’ve lost it in the last year. I’ve looked for it, but needless to say even duckduckgo,(which uses Google’s algorithm if not their spying) only gives me endless pages if supposed counts of all Trump’s lies.
Funny how The Media and The Left (but I am redundant) never got The Vapors when Obama lied, When Clinton (BOTH OF THEM) lied, when Susan Rice Lied, when Lynch lied, when . . . oh, you should get the point, but probably won’t.
I noticed you wrote “allegedly” when quoting Stone. Would you like to offer an explanation why news organizations (and you) are so careful to include that word when making accusations?
WTF? Roger Stone lied to congress under oath and threatened witnesses. He should be locked up for the rest of his life
Whether or not that’s true (that’s for the courts to decide) does that justify sending an heavily armed SWAT team to his door at 6 in the morning to bring him in (only for him to be released from custody hours later)? Usually sending in overwhelming armed forces against one relatively harmless old man is something one would expect in a police state.
Don’t forget the CNN news team that ‘just happened’ to show up too.
Indeed. The whole debacle had little to do with his alleged crimes and everything to do with intimidating and embarrassing him. Simply asking him to turn himself in would have been the normal procedure, save the heavily armed early-morning raid for violent criminals and fugitives from justice (neither of which describes Stone).
and threatened witnesses. He should be locked up for the rest of his life.
========
You can be very sure that the FBI and the special prosecutor routinely threaten witnesses. They threaten to put you in jail and bankrupt you and your family if your version of events does not match the official version of the truth.
It is the threat of bankruptcy against your family that is most damaging. It is no different than medieval torture. Most witnesses will sing any story you want to avoid this.
The outrage is the FBI is used evil, from a democracy’s standpoint, excess force to attack a citizen and no one stands up for DEMOCRACY.
If the FBI had used the same tactics, the same super, super over use of force, against a ”Democrat’ there would be marchers in the street and the Democrat news outlets would be running their talking heads pushing the firing of all involved.
This not two standards.
This is a chaos evil conspiracy.
i.e. Chaos in that the idiots’ plans do not work. It absolutely impossible to reduce world CO2 emissions by let say 30% using wind and sun gathering.
Their science is all wrong as there is no CAGW and only CAGW requires us to impossibly, as it will destroy our economies and send us back to the medieval ages, reduce CO2.
Regardless as it is fact that there is no CAGW, they are true, born again, believers.
CAGW believers will use force to attack and will manipulate the data.
The outrage is the a 29 member SWAT team in full tactical gear with assault weapons would surround my house, 17 vehicles in my front yard, including two armored vehicles, a helicopter overhead, amphibious vehicles in my front yard, …..
To serve a warrant for possible fibbing to Congress. How many fibs were told by Hillary and HIllary’s people? Hundreds. Any warrants? No
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/27/roger_stone_decries_fbis_gestapo_tactics.html
I’m 66 years old. I don’t own a firearm. I have no prior criminal record. My passport has expired. The special counsel’s office is well aware of the fact that I’m represented. The idea that a 29-member SWAT team in full tactical gear with assault weapons would surround my house, 17 vehicles in my front yard, including two armored vehicles, a helicopter overhead, amphibious vehicles in the back where my house backs onto a canal and I would open the door looking down the barrel of assault weapons, that I would be frog marched out
https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/01/28/roger-stone-fbi-stormed-my-house-more-force-than-what-was-used-bin-laden-el-chapo/
Roger Stone: FBI Stormed My House with More Force Than What Was Used on Bin Laden or El Chapo
“It is frustrating,” Stone outlined. “It’s a raw abuse of power in the fact that a CNN reporter was allowed to film my arrest when the street was sealed off and the fact that the CNN producer in question is a former assistant to James Comey at the FBI and formally worked for the FBI. His claim that he just had a hunch is not credible.”
Aaron,
Oh, come on! Even if every charge is proven in court, there is absolutely no justification to use that kind of force in arresting him. 17 armed FBI agents and a SWAT team in full gear? The only reason to do that is to intimidate not only Mr. Stone, but anybody else that thinks they can stand up against Mueller. No matter how much you dislike this president, surely you can see what an abuse of power this was. How could you possibly support it?
Watters, I agree with those that point out that “you are rushing to judgment, presuming it true having heard one side, in the face of evidence suggesting you should wait.
You make one of the very points that Dr. Ball makes about morality, if morality includes being fair.
The willingness to rush to judgment is underscored everyday not only by the media and its constant nonstarters, but by the massive growth in acceptance of ‘social justice’ as being fair, when in fact it is an unjust concept based on presumptions, presumptions that all you need is a picture of a person and you then know if they are in a struggling class of people…. and that putting people in classes and acting on that is somehow just and fair.
Acting on presumptions about people based on not much more than what amounts to a picture of them have produced lynchings and some of the worst injustices in history.
A lot of people have lied to congress but weren’t arrested in a dawn raid for the process crime of lying to congress. Those who have been charged were allowed to turn themselves in with no huge fanfare. The issue isn’t he shouldn’t have to face justice the issue is how they went about arresting him.
BTW I assume you would be okay for the same treatment to occur for anyone that has lied to congress.
That would keep the courts busy and the jails filled for some time! The number of people that have lied to Congress (just in my lifetime) must be in the 10’s of thousands. It’s one of the most under prosecuted laws on the books.
“Sorry, I forgot, you prefer warm, cuddly, big-eyed creatures like Pandas, Koala Bears, and Dolphins.”
Speciesism.
“Plato and Aristotle created the original idea, and because their ideas formed the basis for the Christian and Catholic view of the world, called scholasticism, it dominated western people’s beliefs.”
The basis for Christian and Catholic belief, is the Jewish Torah, the Five Books of Moses, which pre-date Plato and Aristotle by centuries.
For an idea of what influenced Western Christianity, I suggest the Summa Theologica. The Philosopher (Aristotle) is referred to a lot.
The Catholic church tries to encompass all the truth it can find.
It falls apart at the “ought”. Who decides what ‘ought’ to be and what ‘ought not’ to be”
Therein lies the rub.
Tribal rules still persist. The tribes are merely much larger.
Western Christianity went off the tracks beginning with Augustine, a former Manichaean gnostic. Eastern Christianity rejected the Manichaean influences that captivated Rome.
Jordan Peterson has an interesting perspective. link
It is a characteristic of humans that we try to explain everything. In that regard, what passes as rational thought is, more often than not, just confabulation. That, IMHO, explains a lot of religious thought, more so in the Western church than the Eastern.
I admire and respect Mr. Peterson, but he is definitely out of his league in this matter. A purely epistemological approach just doesn’t work in this subject; historical context is essential. It’s well documented how the eastern religious leaders rejected the gnostic influences championed in the west. Pelagius vs. Augustine was a definitive moment in this battle and sealed the schism. It basically boils down to free will vs. no free will. I would love to have a conversation with Mr. Peterson about that.
btw this is a subject I am very confident in and know a lot about. It’s not something that in and of itself would ever interest me (church fathers? GAG!), but I stumbled into it in online discussions with a person who taught a modern version of gnosticism (hyper-grace, or modern grace). The first video he shared that stimulated my interest was by Andrew Farley, who ironically (for me) is Katherine Hayhoe’s husband. How’s that for weird?
Icisil… I’m sure he would entertain just such a conversation. If you want I would be glad to assist in getting his attention to request a conversation on the matter.
Although right now I’m sure he’s inundated with events, but, I am confident if you are genuinely interested he will eventually make time. Email me at my name at Yahoo and I’d be glad to work on that.
Email sent.
That’s only a little, tiny, bit over simplified. 🙂
Here’s a link to Father Michael Azkoul’s take. Things have evolved a lot and the differences are now greater than they ever were.
From my own perspective, the major problem with the Western church is the reliance on human wisdom.
I asked a person who knows a good deal about the early church fathers and this was his reply.
Augustine was one of the great shapers of historic Christian orthodoxy. The Christian Augustine viewed his former Manichean sect as a heresy and critiqued it. The Western Churches (Catholic and Protestant) and the Eastern Churches (Eastern Orthodox) share the Nicene Creed in common.
“The Western Churches (Catholic and Protestant) and the Eastern Churches (Eastern Orthodox) share the Nicene Creed in common”
You may be interested in reading about the great schism between East & West:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Filioque_controversy.
While based upon older oral traditions and written texts, the Torah was not completed until c. 400 BC, ie during Plato’s lifetime.
That late date represents the addition of the book of Malachi, a minor prophet . There’s nothing Platonic in it. The rest of the torah was completed centuries before then.
No, it wasn’t. I refer specifically to the Torah, ie Pentateuch, the first five books of the OT.
Here’s an authoritative source in biblical scholarship:
https://www.amazon.com/Pentateuch-Introduction-Anchor-Reference-Library/dp/0300140215
No, it wasn’t. I refer specifically to the Torah, ie Pentateuch, the first five books of the OT.
Then you probably should have been that specific and said “Pentateuch” or “first five books of the OT”.
http://www.jewfaq.org/torah.htm
And how likely is it, accepting your time line arguendo, that the authors had the slightest knowledge of Plato during his lifetime? Possibly bought his books on Amazon? Ideas travelled a bit more slowly.
Geoff,
I didn’t suppose that Plato did influence pre-Hellenistic Judaism. Just setting the historical timeline straight.
While based upon older oral traditions and written texts, the Torah was not completed until c. 400 BC, ie during Plato’s lifetime.
That’s the “Documentary Hypothesis” which attributes the writings to writers referred to as J P E D and R.
R (whom is believed to have combined the writings of J P E and D and thus the “finisher” of the Pentateuch) is assumed to be Ezra who lived circa 480–440 BC Plato lived circa 428/427 – 348/347 BC. the two do not overlap.
For an effective takedown of the “Chain of Being” theme, try reading some of the works of Steven Jay Gould. While a leftist, he could recognize unreason and illustrate it.
Except when pushing his own brand of magic, “punctuated equilibrium”.
And of course he was entirely wrong about Samuel George Morton’s work in his 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man.”
“In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.
But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.”
Morton measured the skulls correctly and reported the results correctly. link His analysis and conclusions are up for argument.
Ever since I was a pup people have accused Morton of messing up his measurements because of bias. That shows the bias of the people making the accusation.
It is a trifle more complex than the straw man version used by his critics. Gould was something of a lumper, and noted that by that standard, the bulk of fossils appear to change fairly suddenly.
Tim Ball ..
“Senator Timothy Wirth, (who was) ? instrumental in the creation of the AGW deception, was quoted by Michael Fumento as early as 1993 that,
“I can accept that quite a large number of people don’t know or understand what is happening, but I am no longer convinced (that) they would do ( anything to ) rectify it if they did.” ?
“Assisted evolution” is also called “breeding”.
Someone said,”If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it”
I find that happening all around me.
Next, CAGW is becoming the biggest religion in the world today. I also find that you cannot say anything convincing to some people. You get, “but we must do something about climate change”. And that is the sum of what you hear.
Those folks are right.
“we have to do something about Climate Change” I agree. We have to do the right thing. The right thing to do is to understand that irrational arguments now being put forward today will end in bondage and misery. Working for cost effective and reliable energy sources will ensure that all people have an opportunity to lead free and prosperous lives. I know you will join me in that.
Liberalism implies the rejection of convention. Many Liberals start with the rejection of outmoded concepts and eventually move on to abandon all of them.
More proof that this isn’t about climate. Does anyone think the climate changing so little would receive this much monetary backing, media support, changes in school curriculum, and political backing without an ulterior motive? That any questioning of the narrative would elicit such vilification? We thought the United Nations was about preserving civilization as we know it but we were fooled. The UN has put together the greatest collection of useful idiots ever known to man, even crossing religious boundaries and dwarfing the numbers of believers in such a relatively short time. You have to give them credit for the superb execution of their plan. Two things will ultimately defeat them: 1. Man’s willingness to maintain his lifestyle and progress 2. Time.
This is what a post-Christian Western civilization looks like. CAGW, like Lysenkoism, can only be conceived and grow in an irreligious society.
Oddly enough CAGW is a religion, full of false worship and misattributed observations. Religion’s history is replete with examples of misdiagnosing the issue followed by incorrect attribution and wrong actions for correction.
Not much has changed from: “The crops are failing…we must throw a virgin into the volcano.”
The minor difference is in this instance they are suggesting we throw everyone into the volcano.
Yes, the “Great Chain of Being” is but an egotistical representation of the superiority of mankind as it nears absolute “Godliness”, but the Evolutionist’s “Tree of Life” and “Ascent of Man” show the same egotism. What the Darwinist cannot admit is that the life form that shows the greatest ability to adapt to environmental stress, the most rapid genetic response to challenge with the least demand for resources, in short, to be the “fitist to survive”, is the single-cell microbe organism. They exist in nearly any conceivable environment. Anything more complicated than that suffers on the “fitness” scale, requiring much more time and resources to attempt to respond to any environmental challenge. One might imagine that they allow more complex organisms to compete successfully for resources solely to act as their hosts, after all, we humans are host to ten times more microbes than we have cells.
A minor quibble regarding understanding Darwinism. It is a mistake to characterize it as ‘survival of the fittest’.
A better characterization is: “survival of the fit enough”. This may be simplistically demonstrated by one’s ability to outrun a predator. You don’t need to be the fastest member of the herd, just faster than needed to avoid the predator. Those who aren’t ‘fast enough’ get removed from the gene pool. Many more than “only the winner” of the race get to survive.
Most of us, including myself, are in there.
You don’t need to be the fastest member of the herd, just faster than needed to avoid the predator.
which brings to mind the old joke about two guys camping. goes something like this:
During a camping trip, Sam and Tom saw a bear coming their way. Sam started to take off his backpack and told Tom he was going to run for it. When his surprised friend said, “You can’t outrun a bear,” Sam replied, “I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.”
It appears that you have never studied the scientific discipline upon which you yet feel competent to comment.
“Fitness” in biology is simply a measure of relative reproductive success. What matters for evolution is not just survival but reproduction.
Some microbes succeed in multiplying and evolving into new species, genera, families, orders, classes and phyla, while others go extinct. Same as with multicellular eukaryotes, ie plants, fungi and animals. There is a great variety of single-celled organisms, in three domains, ie bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes. They vary enormously in size and complexity.
But, yes, after multicellular organisms can no longer survive on Earth, some microbes will probably continue to exist, possibly underground even until the Sun goes red giant.
Correction – this is a New York *State* law not just the city.
“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered the spire to be drenched in the ghoulish hue in “celebration” of the state’s new law that permits fully developed preborn babies to be slaughtered even on what would be their birth days.”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/27/new-york-abortion-law-allows-for-barbaric-butcheri/
Legal infanticide means reversion to paganism.
Was it not the Roman rule of patria potestas that allowed the father of a child to kill it at any time, any age or for any reason? Come on Cuomo, stop being such a piker and get with the program.
In Greek culture, unwanted babies were exposed on dung heaps. Any one who wanted a baby could take one until the child died of exposure and thirst.
Personally, I trust doctors much more than politicians of any hue.
“Have I mentioned any you like yet?”
After the Bald Eagle was removed from the endangered species list, the next renewal of the act sat for years waiting. As one reporter said, “It’s pretty hard to sell a list dominated by moles and voles”
“It is hard to believe that a majority of the politicians and public continue to ignore the truth.”
You must not be trying very hard.
Politicians are generally in favor of higher taxes, more infrastructure spending, and increased regulatory reach.
The UN is always in favor of wealth transfers.
Liberals are always wanting to save the world from something.
Media outlets generally have a sensationalist bent, and favor liberals and liberal ideology.
Scientists play King-of-the-Mountain in their field and will work to squash contrarians.
Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, especially when they caused TRILLIONS of dollars to be wasted.
In addition, CAGW is very hard to DISprove. Models can continually be adjusted. Data can be massaged. Estimates and variables can be changed.
It’s not remarkable at all that people continue with the original ideas, even in the face of contrary evidence. What is remarkable is that anyone will admit they were wrong, and convert. It’s not an original thought, but Science will advance one funeral at a time.
One more thing — people have a general desire to not leave trash by a campsite, and they generally favor a “leave no trace” approach when visiting the wilderness. Reducing our impact on the planet fits naturally into that mindset.
You have got to be joking.
If what you say is true there would be no “Litter”.
What about you yourself? If you stop at at fast food restaurant, do you ever throw the trash out the window of your car? How about anyone in your family, or any of your friends? Do you yourself know ANYONE who would do that?
Yes, there is litter. But it’s from a tiny minority of people. Most people, if they went camping, would leave the campsite pristine.
A C, “generally” does not mean “all”. yes there is a minority who “litter”, but generally most civilized people don’t/prefer not to. How often do you litter? How about your parents/siblings/spouse/children/friends, how often do you see them littering? If the answer to the above questions is “not at all” or even “very rarely” why do you think you/they are exceptions and not the rule?
I must disagree with you regarding that characterization. People may have a desire not to be beset with ‘vermin’ or unwanted visators, but they must learn how to avoid this situation. People have to be taught “not to foul their own nest”. The more clever ones will learn this from observation and practice, but “the desire” still must be learned.
People throughout history have been yearning to leave their ‘trace’. Archeology is based upon this very concept. Often the pattern is habitation until a site becomes uninhabitable. The degradation of the site is often due to “human traces”. We have learned through trial and error created improved practices to extend the habitability of our sites, but it is not an innate ability.
“It is hard to believe that a majority of the politicians and public continue to ignore the truth.”
No, it is not. A politician’s job is to get elected or re-elected. Our needs and wants are a distant third. Elections are not cheap, so to get the money needed to elected/re-elected politicians will satisfy the desires of those individuals. But the big donors are a vast minority, or a business that cannot vote. So the politician now has to do something to get the poorer majority to vote for him/her/it. And it has to be something to keep people from asking that inconvenient question “what are you really doing for me?” So they play nice on the campaign trail, shake your hand and smile (even though after the election they wouldn’t let you anywhere near them), make empty promises, and play on your fear. ‘Vote for me … because my opponent wants to take away your rights.’ Leftists (which is the majority of Democrats) like to keep people stirred up by decrying racism where there is none, sexism where there is none, class warfare where there is none, and similar. They can do this because the majority of the media are card carrying hardcore Democrats, so they amplify their message; Republicans cannot really do something similar because the media won’t listen to them.
It is not hard at all to believe the politicians and public continue to ignore the truth. The truth does not satisfy the politician’s desires of being elected/re-elected; so they work hard to distract people away from those truths which are damaging to them. And the media, which are blindly partisan, play right along in the scheme.
Tim Ball, please explain the use of the word “Creationists” in your title.
Is that a reference to “Creation Science”?
Tim of course can answer for himself, but IMO he rightly considers the Great Chain of Being to be a creationist belief. It assumes that the creation was perfect, with each immutable species occupying its appropriate place.
When Cuvier demonstrated the reality of extinction in 1798, creationists objected to the concept, since it meant that some species weren’t perfect and could thus drop out of the Great Chain. He used mammoth fossils to support his discovery of extinction, reasoning that mammoths were too big to have escaped detection, and were clearly a different species from living Asian and African elephants.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_08
When Cuvier demonstrated the reality of extinction in 1798, creationists objected to the concept, since it meant that some species weren’t perfect and could thus drop out of the Great Chain.
Cuvier was creationist himself. So looks like that was something like ‘discussion in the family’ about interpretation of natural phenomena when great chain of being was challenged.
It assumes that the creation was perfect, with each immutable species occupying its appropriate place.
Yet they did believe for example that all human races (i.e. variety) descend from few families that survived the great flood and eventually can be tracked down to single pair of first human. That implies that they accepted some variability within ‘species’. Besides, modern definition of ‘species’ may be quite different to medieval.
Great chain of beings was an interesting idea, they had that, we have Darwin’s Great Tree of Life but I cannot see what it is relevance to current issues discussed by Dr Ball. Modern dangerous ideas come rather from a different end of spectrum than great chain of beings.
I’ve not read Cuvier speculating as to how new species arose, but I might have missed where he claimed that God created them. He notes instead observed but unexplained change over Earth’s history. For instance, an age of reptiles as the dominant vertebrates seemed to precede the age of mammals. New organisms appear in the geologic record, then go extinct.
A devout Protestant, Cuvier did however regard as historical parts of the Bible now considered mythical. For instance, he thought Genesis to record the last of many catastrophes visible in the geologic column. And he took Adam to be a real person, it seems.
A skilled anatomist, he is an important transitional figure in the growth of understanding geology, biology and paleontology. Modern geology incorporates both his catastrophist views and Hutton’s uniformitarianism. The distinction is a false dichotomy, since even Lyell, apostle of uniformitarianism, recognized that catastrophes were part of the background, less frequent events in between which gradual processes, ie erosion and sedimentation, are always at work.
I’ve not read Cuvier speculating as to how new species arose, but I might have missed where he claimed that God created them.
He certainly did not claim that God did not create them. As ardent Christian Cuvier believed that God created the Universe and living creatures.
A devout Protestant, Cuvier did however regard as historical parts of the Bible now considered mythical. For instance, he thought Genesis to record the last of many catastrophes visible in the geologic column. And he took Adam to be a real person, it seems.
Nice one! So, he looks like role model for creationists. He also went further arguing that organisms are whole beings consisting of many interlocking parts. Therefore major transformations are highly doubtful. To verify this claim he studied mummified ancient Egyptian cats brought to France during Napoleonic period. As he found that cats did not changed much through millennia he concluded that his view is justified by empirical evidence.
Neither Darwin in 1837 or 1859 had a “Great Tree of Life”, nor do biologists today.
There is no such thing.
Of course it is! Surely, biologists interpret that very differently than common imagination suggests but this term happily exists. For instance Tree of Life project attracts hundreds of biologists and hobbyists. Surprisingly, even professional biological literature uses that, like ‘Uprooting the Tree of Life’. If there is no such thing it would not be nothing to uproot.
Paramenter,
As I tried to explain below, the Tree of Life is not in any way, shape or form comparable to the Great Chain of Being in conceptions.
I also pointed out that Cuvier was a Protestant. But please point to anywhere in his work where he states that God created each new species after each of the catastrophes which he concluded happened in the past. Thanks!
Darwin’s geology mentor Rev. Sedgwick did however believe in continuous creation. The evidence from fossils in the strata he studied in Wales and elsewhere plainly showed that life forms changed over time. Since he rejected “transmutation” of species, as evolution was called then, he had no other alternative to special creation to explain “development”, as life form replacement was known.
Neither Darwin in 1837 or 1859 had a “Great Tree of Life”, nor do biologists today.
There is no such thing.
Using the symbolism of a tree for descent was more associated with Ernst Haekel than anyone else.
Darwin’s 1837 notebook concept sketch remarkably resembles modern diagrams of relationships among organisms, although of course with much less detail. It’s not even a shrub, let alone a tree.
Darwin did mention a Great Tree of Life in “Origin”, but it’s nothing like the Great Chain of Being. There is no concept of a hierarchy, with each species occupying a fixed place. Equating the two “Greats” in this way is simply wrong. Key to Darwin’s conception was the replacement of dead limbs with new buds. He recognized change, rather than imagining perfect stasis.
Haeckel took up the expression and tried to inject meaning which Darwin didn’t intend.
Bring back the Cold War! At least people had something to worry about then!
Professor Ball, are you aware of the work being done by Jason Goodman and David Hawkins on ‘Crowdsource the Truth’, to reverse engineer crimes through investigation, using an “online discovery” process whereby crimes of massive magnitude can be exposed once and for all?
They’re connecting the dots between agencies and key people who’ve played significant roles in aiding and abetting the continuation of the IPCC deception, for the purpose of financial gain. They would be willing to work with groups of people putting together class action lawsuits or possibly even a RICO lawsuit.
Dr. Ball,
Good post and good comments.
Thanks,
JimG1
I appreciate Tim Ball, but I don’t always understand him. Upon reading this article, I found myself transported back to the early Holocene when I was taking high school writing composition. The teacher, Sister Theresa, would always ask us about the ‘theme’ of our essay, and scold us if we were meandering about and losing focus. I think Sister Theresa might have a problem with the above article.
One issue is the title: “Another False Premise that Underlies Environmental, AGW, and Creationists Views Thriving in a Moral Vacuum.” I searched the whole web page for the phrase ‘false premise’ and it only occured 4 times, when the title of the article was given or referenced. The word ‘premise’ is not found outside of the title.
I was looking forward to a declaration and explanation of the ‘false premise’, but it never came. I believe the theme is about a declining moral environment in America making ‘belief in false ideas’ more likely or more acceptable, although the relationship between morality and gullibility was not presented.
I have the impression that Tim Ball has a lot of wonderful and important thoughts in his head, and that he completely understands the relationship between his thoughts. In his writing however, he fails to make those relationships clear to the reader, assuming, perhaps, that we all share his knowledge, experience and world view. Unfortunately, the Vulcan Mind Meld is fiction, and the only way we have to effectively communicate with others is through our use of the language and how clearly we can express and organize our thoughts.
That is a difficult task that I struggle with as well. It is particularly difficult when writing about how science, politics and human behavior are entwined. I appreciate Mr. Ball’s efforts to call attention to these very important topics. He would be more effective, however, if he would spell it out more clearly, and at least delivers something that fulfills the title of the article.
I do hope this criticism is received constructively, and not in any way an attack of Tim Ball or his ideas around climate change. I wish him all the best in his endeavours.
Religious or moral philosophy is premised on axioms or articles of faith. For example: individual dignity, intrinsic value, and, perhaps, inordinate worth. Go forth and reconcile. As for science, or rather scientific logical domain, of which there are five logical domains: science, philosophy, faith, fantasy, and twilight, it is a utilitarian philosophy that is self-evident by virtue of what we know, don’t know, and cannot know, and evident through observing that accuracy is inversely proportional to time and space offsets from an established frame of reference.
“How can a reef be battered and bruised? The terms apply to people, not reefs. It is used to strengthen the link between the inference that it is human-caused climate change that is the issue. “
Storms can easily batter and shred coral reefs with waves during low tide periods. But the research literature now on coral recovery clearly shows that storm broken reefs can recover very fast. And scuba-divers using transplantation of storm-broken pieces can further speed this process as better understandings of which coral species should be used and how to place and attachment coral fragments.
With regards to an apparent increase in coral bleaching events, modern high spatial and temporal monitoring (regular satellite photos and aerial digital photographs) now enables researchers to compare today’s event with the past century records. But the problem better monitoring today is similar to the one of tornado counts in US’s pre-NEXRAD deployment and now NEXRAD era. Before the national network of NEXRAD radars many small EF0 and EF1 tornadoes, especially at night and in rural areas, would go undetected and thus uncounted. So skepticism needs to be in place when researchers discuss modern day increases in coral bleaching frequency compared to historical records on coral bleaching.
Storms can easily batter and shred coral reefs with waves during low tide periods.
the phrase was not “batter” it was “battered and bruised”. Coral does not have circulatory systems filled with blood thus have no blood vessels to rupture ego they cannot be “bruised”.
ergo not ego (stupid auto-correct).
I have just finished reading Ian Dear’s book “Sabotage and Subversion” on the history of the SOE and OSS operations in support of the resistance movements in WW2.
The chapter on “Black Radio” being most illuminating and relevant to the strategies of the CAGW and Green outpourings now littering our airwaves.
Black radio was specifically designed to broadcast newscasts with false information laced cleverly between factual reports with the object of generating confusion and emotional concern in the ranks of the enemy and the population in general.
It was remarkably successful; but DECIDEDLY UNETHICAL, justified at the time as a valid weapon of war.
To me the dark techniques developed then are alive and kicking today and may be found in many of the purported “Green” blogs sites and also in some of the MSM and academic institutions, having now reached viral proportions.
Don’t lose hope. There may be enough sensible people around to help pull us out of any socialist nightmare. We still have the potential to vote the socialists out of office, but we need to get busy.
They resist Trump. We resist them.
The Silent Majority showed itself when it elected Reagan and again when it elected Trump. It’s still out there.
Great article. Thanks Dr. Ball.
Dr Ball, I apologise that I posted a version of this on an earlier thread but it was a late comment and didn’t get a response….and I feel it may be relevant to your post here:
Now, here’s where I have a problem with this (new paper on AGW):
“Anthropogenic emissions of CO2–emissions caused by human activities–are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere and producing unnatural changes to the planet’s climate system. The effects of these emissions on global warming are only being partially abated by the land and ocean.
“Currently, the ocean and terrestrial biosphere (forests, savannas, etc.) are absorbing about 50% of these releases–explaining the bleaching of coral reefs and acidification of the ocean, as well as the increase of carbon storage in our forests.”
From
AFAIK It seems that TPTB are claiming it’s ONLY the ’emissions caused by human activities’ that are causing global warming (at least, the bit they’re worried about – natural warming seems to get a free pass), yet these are being ‘partially abated’ – 50%, they say (by the ‘carbon cycle’?). Then, because re-radiation of IR from the CO2 molecule is 50/50 – to space or towards the Earth the effect is abated another 50%.
So here’s the problem I’m having:
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is currently (using round numbers) 400 ppm and the increase over the period of the AGW scare (since 1900, say) is actually 100, and that only a proportion of that increase will be down to ‘human activities’ – say 50 – and that 50% of that is abated, and 50% of that is lost to space, then the whole of the man-made warming is down to the effect of (in round numbers) 12 molecules of CO2 in a million. That’s an extremely powerful little sucker.
What I want to know, has anyone explained the physics to say how effective each molecule is in contributing to the GHE – not forgetting that that is logarithmic?
And how does that compare to the far more prevalent GHG, water vapour, which I believe is far more abundant? When do we start to see a drive to ban H2O (which will no doubt get truncated, like CO2 has become Carbon, to #HTOO).
Yep! Let’s ban it! #HTOO!“
Sorry, everything from “Now here’s a thing…” was meant to be in italics.
Sheesh!!! “where I have a problem…..” (I obviously do!)
So … if I dutifully pay my carbon taxes, and drive an electric vehicle … I will be SAVING a doe-eyed puppy somewhere on the planet? Yeah, that’ll coerce the population to give up their capitalist abundance. Idiots.
The Council of Cultural Freedom (CIA cultural warfare under Britain’s James Jesus Angelton) put a lot of money and effort to induce this misnamed “loss of compass”. Since the early 50’s a constant barrage of garbage.
As a keen observer noted, Trump actually told the truth about the garbage of the “failing NYT” – imagine that happening, totally unexpected! So we have actually a poet there, in spite of every effort of Angelton’s “intelligence”. Poets Percy Shelley and Edgar Poe are really necessary medicine!
Now, the reference to Plato and Aristotle is shallow – see Poe’s “Eureka” on Aries Tottle, Neuclid and Cant – absolutely hilarous. And Hog, (Bacon)? The piggishness of the enemy is filthy.
Another point – the founder of the western church, Augustine, wrote Socrates was the first christian saint – the link is closer than most in the Vatican today are aware of. Augustine grew up when Mithra, the Roman state religion borrowed from Babylon, demanded bloody Friday circuses. His confessions describe the effect that culture had on his teens. So the CCF is simply based on Rome, as is the British Empire (Gibbon) – that which the US threw out. Lord Cornwallis never expected youngster Lafayette to flout him.
So don’t worry about Aries Tottle, Neuclid, Can’t , and pick up a volume of Edgar Poe or Percy Shelley.
Once again, I owe thanks to Dr. Tim Ball for yet another great article pointing to the cause of so many deficiencies in modern society that stems from the loss of Moral compass. Dr. Tim Ball is struggling hard against the Sea of Lies rising around us these days.
“Great Chain of Being” brought to mind the now expunged third verse from Cecil F. Alexander’s hymn “All Things Bright and Beautiful”;
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
No revolutions in the UK, thank you. (Alexander was born in Dublin, Ireland)
People want to live forever. Death sucks. To stop that, just become a God, rule the earth, control everything. Once you do, you run the climate and as a bonus stop cancer. Go for it.
Tim says, speaking (of course) of the USA:
Not exactly, Tim. It’s not so much a “nation of laws” as a”nation of lawyers”, from what I can see.
It’s also a “prosecutocracy“. I blatantly steal the word from Conrad Black, who (as many will know) spent time in a Florida jail for doing what capitalists usually try to do – making a load of money without actually breaking any laws (OK, maybe bending a couple if you want to be pedantic). He described the process that sent him to prison, and it’s exactly parallel to what’s happening in Washington now, but now of course, it’s on a much larger scale.
The core philosophy of a prosecutocracy is that it’s a good thing to destroy a rich, powerful and prominent person for no apparent reason, other than “because we can”.
Its core process involves threatening associates of the target with very long prison terms unless they can
providefabricate evidence that might help to destroy the target.Its only value is that it enhances the careers of the prosecutors. It certainly does nothing for the country or its reputation.
It’s not so much because they can, it’s more venal than that. It’s because destroying rich people get’s the prosecutor’s name in front of the public as a hero of the people, which is useful when he’s ready to run for governor.
What the heck is “functional extinction”?
functional extinction is the hope in nostrification of “climate deniers” to “the right side”.
Gotta love how he twists it all into unsupportable claims of social collapse and turns out to be anti-Mueller and pro Big Bank.
Negate your own argument much?
Eh? could you try rephrase your “point” into something coherent?
Mark Levin on FoxNews did an interview 2 days ago about this prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, and his horrible treatment of Andersan and the Merrill Lynch managers.
Revealing and shocking.
It’s a calm, lucid analysis of this abuse of power by the people who are now hunting president Donald Trump.
“The perpetuation of the deception that humans are causing the inevitable collapse of the world because of global warming works because of the deliberate exploitation of human traits and frailties”
Yes sir.
Our brains are wired for superstition and confirmation bias because these things once had a survival function.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/03/confirmationbias/
“If there is no God, everything is permitted.” F. Doestoevsky
Dr Ball write: “An estimated 85,000 people lost their jobs related to the demise of Andersen accounting and at least 4000 at Enron. The Supreme Court and Appeals Court rejection of the verdicts meant little or nothing to them. They were the victims of the loss of morality and ethics in America typified by these gross misuses of the law.”
Most of the 85,000 people who lost their jobs at Arthur Anderson went to work for other companies that provided accounting services to former AA clients. Roughly the same amount of accounting work needed to be done; it simply wasn’t being done by a corrupt accounting company that cared more about continued profits from other services than their core accounting function. They mistakenly thought their client was Enron management, not the Board of Directors and the shareholders who deserved an accurate accounting of the company’s finances. Enron wasn’t AA’s first accounting scandal; it was simply their last. There was no doubt that AA personnel shredded thousands of pages of accounting documents as the truth about Enron’s earlier accounting practices (approved by AA) became understood and the company collapsed. The judge (not Weissman) instructed the jury that Enron could be found guilty even if the evidence presented in court didn’t prove that Enron employees knew their shredding and accounting decisions were illegal. In other words, the judge told the jury that they could infer those employees should have known that their actions were illegal. The jury found the company and its employees guilty. An appeals court UNANIMOUSLY upheld the judge’s instructions to the jury, so the judge’s instructions were COMPLETELY REASONABLE at the time. However, the Supreme Court decided to extend the protection afforded by the law and require prosecutors to prove to juries that such defendants were fully aware of the laws they were breaking. This follows an old principle in common law which says that conviction for a crime involves demonstrating two elements: a guilty act and a guilty mind. The Supreme Court ruled that the judge’s jury instructions were inadequate and ordered a new trial (which didn’t take place as AA was long gone). AA might have lost again.
Ironically, the FBI was able to show many guilty acts of mishandling classified information by HRC and her colleagues, but Comey asserted the FBI had no evidence proving a guilty state of mind when those emails were being written. (Almost all were classified years after they were written by the organizations that generated the information that was being discussed. The fact that such email was sent to a private server was irrelevant; classified subjects must only be discussed on a special secure email system, not via ordinary insecure @dos.gov accounts used by HRC’s colleagues.) By criticizing the prosecution of AA, Dr. Ball is unknowingly approving the decision not to prosecute HRC!
As for the Merrill Lynch bankers, they arranged financing to “purchase” some dubious assets (Nigerian oil barges?) from Enron to get them off of Enron’s public balance sheet with the understanding that Enron would latter repurchase the assets at a higher price if the buyers wanted to sell. The objective was to fool Enron’s shareholders. Proving someone’s guilty mind beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury of 12 in such white collar crimes can be very difficult, but a verdict of not guilty shouldn’t be confused with a finding of “innocent” in these Enron cases.
The only reason Dr. Ball is mis-representing the past is because Mr. Weissman (and Wray) are a part of Mr. Mueller’s team that just indicted Roger Stone for lying to Congress about his interactions with WikiLeaks, the emails that were hacked by the Russians and his contact with a high Trump campaign official, most likely Steve Bannon. Having the DoJ investigate a Presidential Candidate and then a President is an extremely stressful process for partisans on both sides. The tendency for both sides is to exaggerate the unfairness to their side and tear down a government institution that Americans need to trust. The lies in this post are merely another stone cast at an organization that could easily have leaked the Russian investigation and Steele Dossier in October 2016. Their integrity then was the only thing that kept the Steele Dossier out of the 2016 election. Shameful.
Hey John,
As I tried to explain below, the Tree of Life is not in any way, shape or form comparable to the Great Chain of Being in conceptions.
Who said those concepts share the same shape? Both serve similar purpose though: interpreting and explaining world around us. Great chain of beings by introducing hierarchical structure of the Universe, tree of life by introducing common ancestry. Great chain of beings was bit more ambitious though: it included also inorganic matter and supernatural beings as higher orders of creation. Great tree of life is much more modest encompassing only biological realm.
I also pointed out that Cuvier was a Protestant. But please point to anywhere in his work where he states that God created each new species after each of the catastrophes which he concluded happened in the past.
Why he should be saying such things? He clearly believed that God created species in the first place, whereas ‘creating each new species after each of the catastrophes’ is not article of faith – nowhere near.
Darwin’s geology mentor Rev. Sedgwick did however believe in continuous creation. The evidence from fossils in the strata he studied in Wales and elsewhere plainly showed that life forms changed over time. Since he rejected “transmutation” of species, as evolution was called then, he had no other alternative to special creation to explain “development”, as life form replacement was known.
I reckon that’s not very far away from thinking of some modern scholars and scientists. For instance Francis Collins, the former director of the National Human Genome Research, also believes that creation is ‘continuous’ by means of intelligently guided evolution.
Still, fossil record puzzled not only Reverend Sedgwick. Darwin himself was surprised by not seeing in the fossil record numerous ‘transitional forms’ he expected to see. He, quite rightly so, predicted that transitional forms should be very common, in fact deeper towards the trunk of tree of life fossilised organisms should become more and more similar. What he saw instead was sudden appearance of fully developed forms and stasis. That puzzled him greatly, indeed, he said the fossil record is the grave objection against his theory.
Darwin didn’t consider the whole fossil record to be a problem. Just parts of it, like the Cambrian.
But now we have a lot more fossils, including clear transitions in major groups. The discovery of pre-Cambrian fossils has elucidated the history of life before the Phanerozoic.
Promptly after the 1859 publication of “Origin”, a transitional fossil between “birds” and “reptiles” was found, the marvellously preserved Archaeopteryx. “Darwin’s Bulldog”, anatomist Huxley even recognized it as a dinosaur.
Collins recognizes that the “evidence supporting the idea that all living things are descended from a common ancestor is truly overwhelming”. So he agrees with Darwin on both his main contributions to evolutionary theory, ie common descent and natural selection. He also touched on some other evolutionary processes, but was hampered by not knowing how inheritance works.
There is always more to learn, but the fact of evolution is a lot better understood than the fact of gravity.
Darwin didn’t consider the whole fossil record to be a problem. Just parts of it, like the Cambrian.
Not quite, the whole fossil record was problematic for him. Instead of seas of transitional forms between ‘islands’ of fully formed species he saw sudden appearance of the fully formed organisms followed by stasis where very little change or even not at all had occurred. Discontinuity between species, instead of anticipated by tree of life smooth continuity.
Promptly after the 1859 publication of “Origin”, a transitional fossil between “birds” and “reptiles” was found, the marvellously preserved Archaeopteryx. “Darwin’s Bulldog”, anatomist Huxley even recognized it as a dinosaur.
Is Archaeopteryx still regarded as a transitional form? I was taught so but now it may be promoted to the actual distinct specie. In the similar manner as modern platypus is treated – it shares features of mammal and birds but is not treated as ‘transitional form’ between birds and mammals.
Collins recognizes that the “evidence supporting the idea that all living things are descended from a common ancestor is truly overwhelming”. So he agrees with Darwin on both his main contributions to evolutionary theory, ie common descent and natural selection.
Collins certainly does believe in the common descent yet his view of evolutionary process cannot be further away than Darwin’. Collins understands evolutionary process as designed and guided by higher intelligence. Darwin view was that this process is blind, naturalistic and driven purely by blind forces of nature. There is no purpose in it, no predefined endpoints.
He also touched on some other evolutionary processes, but was hampered by not knowing how inheritance works.
Saying that fellow who was teaching genetics on the university level and lead the flagship project in the field of genetics does not know how inheritance works may be bit exaggeration.