Me:

Me on PW: Comment by MC on 2/29 @ 5:27 pm #

It appears from the results of history that Americans have not elected a President on the basis of their eschatology. There’s certainly a Christian based eschatology that understands portions of scripture in a prophetic context and there are several other Christian eschatologies that vary in that scope. Americans expect tolerance with each other as regards belief.

I don’t expect that because Hagee grants support to McCain and McCain accepts it that Hagee has the expectation that McCain embraces his eschatalogy. I certainly don’t think that’s what it means.

But all that is certainly a far cry from Mr. Obama’s nanny-state religion that takes from my productive hands and gives to those who will waste it and who promises to inhabit our lives with the benign state. That’s the inherited eschatology from the far left that he offers and while I’m willing to tolerate what they believe, I won’t support that admixture of church and state.

Me:

Me on PW: Comment by MC on 2/29 @ 7:29 pm #

Rob: Yeah, but the resident illiterate doesn’t care if *those* theocrats take power.

Which certainly represents a problem. Many of those who stormed the Bastille were of the same sort of illiterati, filled with rather yes-we-can expectations not realizing that they were laying palm fronds for Robespierre and Napoleon.

Am I being too hopey to think that there are enough of us who will stand athwart history yelling, ‘Stop!’?

Me:

Me:

Me: So, you're not into the hopey, changey?

Me: Nope, I'm athwarty.

Me: Think they'll get the WFB reference?

Me: {Sigh}, I dunno. Just leaving some little breadcrumbs you know...

Rest In Peace.

Godspeed.

Faithful reader, you know by now that I've been around for a while. Old as dirt you know.

That means that I can remember many of the science fads of recent history. (Maybe, not as old as dirt after all, I can at least remember, and old as dirt can't do that - can it?)

Way back before everything was searchable by the Google crawlers, oh back in 1975, the NYT, Time Magazine, Newsweek and the like published dire warnings about - heavens! - Global Cooling. (And, if you are willing to go look through some 'fische the NYT published dire warnings about cooling in 1924, warming in 1935, before settling on cooling again in 1975.)

Newsweek, for its part, felt moved to address their 1975 scary stuff with this blurb in 2006 which begins:

In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production." Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.

Newsweek apparently felt compelled to issue this explanation because the article is still being quoted regularly and they must defend themselves - journalistically speaking, of course, they impart: In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate."

Hmmm... sounds almost Ratheresque to me.

Check the link and you'll be treated to a few paragraphs of twisted conjugation about how ice ages might happen, maybe, but the consensus now is that human impacts will swamp [those ice age theories].

And Newsweek concludes:

The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today. And for good reason: the tools scientists have at their disposal now—vastly more data, incomparably faster computers and infinitely more sophisticated mathematical models—render any forecasts from 1975 as inoperative as the predictions being made around the same time about the inevitable triumph of communism. Astronomers have been warning for decades that life on Earth could be wiped out by a collision with a giant meteorite; it hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean that journalists have been dupes or alarmists for reporting this news. Citizens can judge for themselves what constitutes a prudent response-which, indeed, is what occurred 30 years ago. All in all, it's probably just as well that society elected not to follow one of the possible solutions mentioned in the NEWSWEEK article: to pour soot over the Arctic ice cap, to help it melt.

Yes, it's true. Some scientists in 1975 thought it would be a good idea to work on melting the Arctic ice.

But the key point here is that we should understand that we are so much smarter now, we have global consensus, and news magazines like Newsweek aren't alarmist - there's equal value in the public square to presenting data on either side of this particular issue. That's just good journalism. Right?

Well, it's now a scientific fact that the past twelve months have completely wiped out the 'warming' trend of the last one hundred years (OK, three one-hundredths of a degree short of wiped out). So much for the increase in parts-per-million of CO2. Something far more powerful than the increase in CO2, at least one hundred times more powerful, has reversed that trend. Perhaps it's time to consider Global Cooling again.

As of this writing, a brief survey of mainstream media shows no coverage of this incredible scientific finding. Only USA Today has an environmental front page item about a study revealing high toxin levels in National Parks. Deep in CNN today there is an article about Algore warning off Wall Street about 'subprime carbon'.

Just think, they've eschewed a front page item like: Science Determines That Something Far More Powerful Than Carbon Emissions Has Reversed The Effects Of Global Warming In A Single Year. I mean that would just be good journalism wouldn't it?

Perhaps this is the reason that the politically correct speak of the algorologists recently has morphed to Climate Change.

Because, you see, no matter what the effect is now, warming, or cooling, it is the presence of the incipient pestilential human race that causes Climate Change. Nobel clout will be wielded. Actual scientific measurement be damned.

And as time progresses, I suppose, to paraphrase something my friend Jeff Goldstein once said, we'll continue to see the obvious certainty of terrestrial physics, and the global temperature will rise and it will fall, for reasons that we do not know.

And fraudulent charlatans, some even well-meaning, will continue to prey upon the globe, effecting action with politic, public spending and legislation against the very forces of nature as if a single utterance they make could alter the particle stream from the sun or change the law of gravity.

Until, I fear, that the notion of climate and temperature becomes a palimpsest, and is replaced by global suicide.

Some excellent blog coverage: Hot Air, Ace (who wins the best headline award) among them.

Prerequisite.

So I realize that I'm seriously clogged up. They give me a few meds and send me home.

Refer me to a cardiologist. He can see me in a couple weeks.

What do I do when I'm not sure I'm going to be OK and I'm fitting in with the Doc's schedule?

I do what I know how to do. I ate nothing but raw green vegetables. That's it, rabbit food. Drank nothing but water. Slept. Mostly slept.

Within a week I start to feel better. Now 'better' means that I can walk to the bathroom and back to bed instead of crawl. My episode and the decline preceding it had weakened me beyond what I could imagine. I was continually amazed at how sick I got so quickly.

For some time, I have been decrying the demagoguery of the Brahmans of Science.

Many of the opposing view feign shock that there could be such a thing - for example, note this comment exchange:

Here's what it comes down to ... Either there is a massive, global, air-tight conspiracy of atheist, evolutionist scientists OR Humphrey [Ed: a scientist with an alternative view] is a crank.

EMCEE: I never asserted that there was a conspiracy. You have been tossing that about on your posts - I never said it. A conspiracy is secret. Scientific elitism is practiced openly and observable evidence is being suppressed. Those are just the facts. I've mentioned a few cases in my post. Or perhaps you are aware that Humphrey has been invited to present to the next symposium on radioisotope dating? No? Oh, yeah, he's not doing science digging up those crystals around the world and measuring their helium content.

It's not a conspiracy, it's completely open disbarment of dissident views from the public square. And it just happens that subjects such as the age of the earth have religious implications. I've given several examples where there are no such implications - and the disbarment is the same.

This spring, in theaters, everyone will have the opportunity to see the suppression at work.

Enter, Ben Stein, activist, entertainer, speech writer - champion of freedom of speech.

See Expelled the movie. Coming soon to a theater near you (unless the 'science' establishment can prevent it from being released).

This took a second plus exposure on the tripod late at night in central Akasaka (which is west central Tokyo)...

Yes, I was rather elevated above the roadway.

This was a few weeks ago - before the big snowfall - I was able to get close to some blacktail in the meadow in front of the house.

This yearling wasn't too sure about the big guy.

Oh, didn't you know that Valentine's Day is alien to the Religion of Peace?

In the aftermath of the Archibishop of Canterbury's recent pronouncements about the unavoidable adoption of Sharia law in Britain, Mark Steyn's comments in the Guardian newspaper almost three years ago - these in the aftermath of the tube bombings in London - seem, well, just downright prescient.

He, of course, brilliantly followed these ideas up in his outstanding book: America Alone.

It does seem clear that Eurpope is indeed dead - has already succumbed. Perhaps unintended, but by his words, Rowan Williams was pounding nails into the continent's collective coffin.

I got Amazon's latest gadget back in December. In a little over a month, it has become indispensable gear.

This device features a non-back lit 'ink' display that is a fantastic reading surface. It has a 'free' cell phone network connection that works most anywhere (in the US anyway) and downloads a book (in Kindle format) in about a minute or so. There are newspaper, magazine, and blog subscriptions available.

I've currently downloaded many books and it's great for reading while traveling. It doesn't completely replace books - but it's the closest thing I've seen and has terrific usability. 

It also contains experimental features like a web browser (fairly primitive). You can download PDFs, JPGs, and MP3s on it as well.

Might take a while to get one when you order - Amazon is perpetually sold out - seems like it took about a month to get it from the time I ordered it.

Highly recommended gear from eMCee.