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.
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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.