Balafon

Read a great article this morning on the dangers of scientific consensus. The Royal Navy had established in the 18th century that lemon juice cured scurvy. But in the second half of the 19th century, when steamships’ fast travel times had mostly eliminated the danger of scurvy, scientists enamoured of the new germ theory of disease hypothesized that scurvy was in fact caused by bacteria.

Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes.

On Scott’s Antarctic expidition they made sure to boil all their fresh food extra long (in the process destroying all its vitamin C), and immediately began getting scurvy. They switched to freshly-killed seal while they stayed on the Antarctic coast, which cured them, but on their final push into the interior had to make do with processed food, with fatal results.

Thankfully, contrary to the fears expressed in my last post, the Copenhagen conference did not finally end up with a substantive deal.

The irony is that most of North America and Europe is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.

It seems that there has been an eleventh-hour deal in Copenhagen.

If you don’t think giving hundreds of millions of dollars to an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy with absolute power over the majority of the world’s economies is an inevitable recipe for corruption and tyranny, consider this:

Lord Monckton, an official delegate from the UK to Copenhagen, was barred from the conference hall, thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious by the police today.

His crime? Pointing out that the “evidence” for global warming “climate change” is suspect at best and completely fraudulent at worst.

I’m sure there are some who regard this as just a good start.

For some perspective on the mild uptick in temperature at the end of the twentieth century, watch this video:

Update: James Randi, the world’s foremost debunker of pseudoscience of all kinds, weighs in:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a group of thousands of scientists in 194 countries around the world, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — has issued several comprehensive reports in which they indicate that they have become convinced that “global warming” is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it, and that Man is the chief cause of it. They say that there is a consensus of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but a growing number of prominent scientists disagree. Meanwhile, some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous.

Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature. It’s often been said that once a conclusion is reached, proper scientists set about trying to prove themselves wrong.

…

It’s easy enough to believe that drought, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes are signs of a coming catastrophe from global warming, but these are normal variations of any climate that we — and other forms of life — have survived. Earth has undergone many serious changes in climate, from the Ice Ages to periods of heavily increased plant growth from their high levels of CO2, yet the biosphere has survived.

People with more time on their hands than me have been poring over the source code in the leaked CRU files. Here is a snippet of IDL code that produces a graph showing temperature data for the twentieth century (osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro):

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8, 1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)


That long string of numbers with some negative values in the middle and positive values at the end? Those numbers are multiplied by the real temperatures to hide a warm period in the 1940s, and exaggerate the temperatures at the end of the century.

This is scientific fraud, pure and simple.

Herodotus was right. A team of archeologists has discovered Achaemenid artifacts and human remains near the oasis of Siwa, leading them to believe they have discovered the lost army of Cambyses:

It was a rock about 114.8 feet long, 5.9 feet in height and 9.8 feet deep. Such natural formations occur in the desert, but this large rock was the only one in a large area.

“Its size and shape made it the perfect refuge in a sandstorm,” Castiglioni said.

Right there, the metal detector of Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat of Cairo University located relics of ancient warfare: a bronze dagger and several arrow tips.

“We are talking of small items, but they are extremely important as they are the first Achaemenid objects, thus dating to Cambyses’ time, which have emerged from the desert sands in a location quite close to Siwa,” Castiglioni said.

About a quarter-mile from the natural shelter, the Castiglioni team found a silver bracelet, an earring and few spheres which were likely part of a necklace.

“An analysis of the earring, based on photographs, indicate that it certainly dates to the Achaemenid period. Both the earring and the spheres appear to be made of silver. Indeed a very similar earring, dating to the fifth century B.C., has been found in a dig in Turkey,” Andrea Cagnetti, a leading expert of ancient jewelry, told Discovery News.

Demonstrates that ancient writers might have known what they were talking about.

I’ve recently been reading about the secretive fundagelical political organization described in Jeff Sharlet’s disturbing book, The Family. Some further links are via Amicus Dei and Slacktivist.

While I have some minor quibbles with certain aspects of Sharlet’s interpretation, the evidence and conclusion are as compelling as they are depressing: the US government — of both parties — and financial elite are pervaded by a clandestine organization whose express goal is global theocracy, and whose members, lacking any moderation via the wider context of scripture or theology or the main stream of orthodoxy in the church, are, as C.S. Lewis warned, capable of blithely colluding in the worst kind of oppression and violence in the name of “the will of God”.

Read more…

I should have noted this earlier, but the last month has been pretty busy. Turns out that the original research used to support the idea that vaccinations cause autism was based on falsified data.

That’s right. Made up out of whole cloth.

I feel tremendous empathy for the health-care professionals in places like the UK and Minnesota, where childhood diseases are making a comeback due to the idiocy of anti-vaccinators.

In case you wondered why we vaccinate, Jim McDonald has a whole list of reasons:

• Hepatitis B
• Polio
• Diptheria
• Pertussis
• Tetanus
• Haemophilus influenzae type B
• Measles
• Mumps
• Rubella
• Chicken Pox

You may not even have heard of these diseases, because we were this close to wiping them out. Now, thanks to a few noisy idiots, you may come accross them all to often in the future.

On tiny little gravestones.

Some excellent perspective on the war in Iraq from Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal:

It is not easy to tell people of threats and dangers they have been spared. The war put on notice regimes and conspirators who had harbored dark thoughts about America and who, in the course of the 1990s, were led to believe that terrible deeds against America would go unpunished. A different lesson was taught in Iraq. Nowadays, the burden of the war, in blood and treasure, is easy to see, while the gains, subtle and real, are harder to demonstrate. Last month, American casualties in Iraq were at their lowest since 2003. The Sunnis also have broken with al Qaeda, and the Shiite-led government has taken the war to the Mahdi Army

Another excellent essay by Robert Kagan on the fact that the American phenomenon of enthusiastic support for idealistic international intervention, followed by accusations of deceit when things don’t go as swimmingly as hoped, goes back a long way:

The Spanish-American War was probably the most popular war in American history, uniting left and right, southerners with northerners, Theodore Roosevelt with William Jennings Bryan. But when the aftermath of the war left a sour taste in the mouths of many, a new account of the war emerged, according to which a very small number of people had managed to manipulate the levers of power and the emotions of millions in order to pursue their imperialistic conspiracy. This account became the accepted version of events, so much so that to read many history textbooks today, you would imagine that the war was foisted upon an unsuspecting nation by a handful of cagey “imperialists”—Roosevelt, William Randolph Hearst, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Alfred Thayer Mahan—rather than having been launched enthusiastically by a bipartisan majority in Congress that all but trampled McKinley in its rush to war. When Americans came to regret their equally enthusiastic rush into World War I, many chose to blame the nefarious manipulations of bankers and munitions makers. Opponents of American entry into World War II, from Charles Beard to Robert A. Taft, insisted that Franklin Roosevelt “tricked” or “lied” the nation into war. Today it is the Iraq War, once approved by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the Senate and by large majorities of Americans, that is now inexplicable except by reference to a neoconservative conspiracy.

When [Hillary] Clinton rose on the Senate floor [in 2002] to cast her vote in favor of the resolution “to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,” the arguments she used were neither novel nor obviously disingenuous. They were the old Clinton administration arguments with which she was very familiar from her own experience in the White House. Thus Saddam Hussein, she noted, was “a tyrant who has tortured and killed his own people, even his own family members, to maintain his iron grip on power.” He had used “chemical weapons on Iraqi Kurds and on Iranians, killing over 20 thousand people.” He had “given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.” He had “invaded and occupied Kuwait,” and when the United States withdrew its forces after driving him out, he had taken his revenge against Kurds and the Shiites “who had risen against Saddam Hussein at our urging.”

No doubt there are things Hillary Clinton would have done differently had she been sitting in the White House in the spring of 2003. It is possible she would not, in the end, have gone to war. But there was certainly nothing in Hillary Clinton’s own foreign policy doctrine that precluded her from going to war. The Clinton administration had itself used force on several occasions, in Somalia, Sudan, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, of course, against Iraq. It had used force without UN authorization. It had bombed and fired missiles into Iraq over the heated objections of France and other allies, and it had done so based on the same evidence of Saddam’s weapons programs that the Bush administration used to justify its war. Certainly there was nothing in the worldview of the Clinton administration to stop it from going to war against Iraq in 2003, and much to support it—which is why nearly every former Clinton official and many Democrats in and out of Congress did. Only when the war went badly did it turn out that, as in 1898, 1917, 1941, and 1965, Americans had once again been lied and tricked into war.

the expansive, idealistic, and at times militaristic American approach to foreign policy has produced some accomplishments of world historical importance—the defeat of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet Communism—as well as some notable failures and disappointments. But it was not as if the successes were the product of a good America and the failures the product of a bad America. They were all the product of the same America. The achievements, as well as the failures, derived not from innocence or purity of motive, and not because Americans abided by an imagined ideal of conduct in the world, but from the very qualities that often make Americans queasy: their willingness to accumulate and use power, their ambition and sense of honor, their spiritedness in defense of both interests and principles, their dissatisfaction with the status quo and belief in the possibility of change.

The last outpost of feudalism in Europe is becoming a democracy:

John Michael Beaumont makes an unusual despot. In his standard-issue pensioner’s outfit – cosy crewneck jumper, blue work trousers, grey leather-look shoes – the 79-year-old ex-aircraft engineer looks much like any other septuagenarian. He drinks tea. He tends his garden. He potters. Kim Jong Il he most certainly is not. However benign, though, Beaumont is an old-fashioned sort of dictator – the hereditary overlord of the last independent feudal state in the world.

Why is there music in a church service? Why do we go to operas and musical theatre? What is it about music and lyrics?

Perhaps a demonstration is in order. Go take a listen to a regular-looking guy with a silly little harp telling a story in a thousand-year-old language, and then tell me you didn’t get shivers up your spine.

Via the indefatigable Instapundit:

Michael Yon emails: “I photographed men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the dome. A Muslim man had invited the American soldiers from ‘Chosen’ Company 2-12 Cavalry to the church, where I videotaped as Muslims and Christians worked and rejoiced at the reopening of St John’s, an occasion all viewed as a sign of hope. The Iraqis asked me to convey a message of thanks to the American people. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ the people were saying. One man said, ‘Thank you for peace.’ Another man, a Muslim, said ‘All the people, all the people in Iraq, Muslim and Christian, is brother.’

The Germans invaded Canada during World War II.

Only for four hours, though.

There are reports that because of all the publicity surrounding R. W. Bussard’s work in inertial electrostatic fusion, the US Navy has offered him an additional year’s funding. This is nowhere near enough to build a full-scale net power reactor, but should be enough to produce more convincing proofs of concept.

If Dr. Bussard’s work can be made to produce a net power fusion reactor, we could be on the verge of a significant period in history. Dr. Bussard is no crackpot; he’s been a respected figure in fusion research for over forty years.

The prevailing model of fusion reactor, called a Tokamak, which has not yet been made to produce net power in over forty years of research, has a significant problem, in that the easiest fusions it can use are Deuterium-Deuterium, or Deuterium-Tritium. The problem with these reactions are that they produce excess neutrons, which fly out and collide with the walls of the reactor vessels, causing them to become more and more radioactive over time.

However, Dr. Bussard calculates that his MaGrid Polywell design may easily fuse protons (Hydrogen ions) and Boron-11. This particular reaction does not produce neutrons. On the contrary, it produces extra protons, which, if things are balanced in precisely the right manner, may be induced to draw electrons from the walls of the reactor, turning themselves into hydrogen atoms which then may be pumped out or reintroduced to the reactor. A flow of electrons in the reactor walls is plain old electricity, which may be used directly — without any of the intermediate steps used in present fission reactors as well as tokamaks of heating fluids into steam which drive turbine generators.

This stuff really has the potential to change the world.

Arts & Letters Daily links today to a fascinating review of Andrew Roberts’ A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 — continuing in the spirit of Churchill’s famous work.

The review is a reiteration of what those few voices in the wilderness have been saying for years — that the Britain & America have been the world’s greatest forces for good in the last couple of centures:

Roberts argues that the successful reintroduction of West Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan into the democratic world was one of the great contributions of the English-speaking peoples to twentieth- century civilization. They were not to know whether ex-Nazis might stage an insurgency campaign lasting years. The example of Japan showed that liberalism and democracy could be successfully introduced even to authoritarian, theocratic societies with no Western political tradition.

Roberts argues that in trying to do the same in the Middle East today, the United States is acting out its traditional cultural imperatives. The desire to liberate from tyranny runs deep in the English-speaking peoples’ psyche. Just two hundred years ago, they were the first to pursue the unusual goal of first impeding and then abolishing slavery by force of arms. They are still carrying out the task, as the women of Afghanistan and the majority of Iraqis can attest.

That is not to say that Britain or America are or have ever been perfect:

The list of crimes, follies, and misdemeanors of the English-speaking peoples also includes: underestimating the Turks at Gallipoli and the Japanese before Pearl Harbor; failing to dismember Germany in 1919; not strangling Bolshevism in its cradle in 1918–1920; treating France rather than Germany as Britain’s more likely enemy in the 1920s; not opposing Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936; allowing too few visas to Jews wanting to escape Nazi Germany; not doing enough to publicize the Holocaust once the truth was known; transporting non-Soviet citizens to Stalin after Yalta; the U.S. State Department fervently supporting closer European integration after World War II; allowing Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal; encouraging the Hungarians to rise in 1956; Britain misleading Australia and New Zealand about the implications of its joining Europe; waiting for a century after Lincoln’s Emancipation Address genuinely to emancipate black Americans; fighting only for a stalemate in Vietnam; Jimmy Carter pursuing détente long after its initial purposes were exhausted; appeasing the Serbs too long after the collapse of Yugoslavia; failing to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War; encouraging the Kurds and Shias to rise against him while allowing Saddam to keep helicopter gun ships; treating the al Qaeda assaults of the 1990s as terrorist-criminal acts rather than acts of asymmetric warfare; relying too much on intelligence-led WMD arguments to justify the Iraq war; and not establishing a provisional Iraqi government immediately after Saddam’s fall.

This amounts to “a long and at times shameful catalogue of myopic and failed statesmanship,” Roberts admits, “but other powers would have done worse, and a century is a very long time in politics.”

What makes me screamingly frustrated is those fair-weather friends, who having voted overwhelmingly in 2002 to invade Iraq, now cry sour grapes and heap criticism on the executive for the crime of imperfectly implementing the lofty ideals that motivated the vote in the first place.

The supreme irony is that it is only because of the traditional freedoms of the Anglosphere that such criticism is possible:

World hegemony, however, has many costs. Like the Romans, the English-speaking peoples would be envied and hated by others. They would sometimes find, Roberts argues, that the greatest danger to their continued imperium came not from their declared enemies without, but from vociferous critics within. One of the constants of their common culture’s freedom of expression has been its propensity to harbor a degree of internal censure that among many other peoples would probably prove fatal.

As early as 1901, British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was complaining: “England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy.” He wrote this about the critics of his policy on the Boer War, an encounter which Roberts demonstrates has ever since been perversely and unfairly blamed entirely on Britain. Winston Churchill was later to remark in a similar vein: “I think I can save the British Empire from anything—except the British.”

Sounds like a great book. It’s too bad my birthday just went by :-)

The international courts in the Hague have lately been surrounded by a suspiciously anti-American aura, what with people constantly trying to prosecute Americans from the President on down to individual US soldiers, on the most specious of pretexts.

Now we’ll see what happens when people in actual free nations (including Canada, yay!) bring charges against a leader who gleefully and openly threatens real crimes against humanity, like, say, genocide with weapons of mass destruction:

[Outgoing US ambassador to the UN] Bolton will be joined in tomorrow’s launch of the legal action against Mr Ahmadinejad by a Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, and the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, together with experts from the US, Canada and Israel. A suit will be lodged with the international court of justice at The Hague, which will decide whether to hear the action. The panel said the Iranian president was guilty of inciting genocide “by making numerous threats against the United States, calling for the destruction of Israel and instigating discrimination against Christians and Jews”. His words violate a 1948 UN genocide convention, to which Iran is a signatory, they said.

The “progressives” in the Hague have long been talking the talk. Now can they walk the walk?

Belmont club describes the historical situation:

Imagine a time when America found itself in a war against a foreign foe whose strategy was to inflict a constant rate of loss on the army; invited US and British reporters to feed antiwar elements with atrocity stories; when US commanders who expected a quick war against a corrupt and oligarchic native elite found they had roused the countryside against them. Imagine a time when the issue of this war was central to an American Presidential election, caused a split in one of the major parties and planted the seeds for a world war. Not Iraq. The war was Philippine-American War and the election that of 1912.

Throughout the past century, the Philippines managed, though not without hiccups, to remain one of the most free and democratic countries in Asia.

I’ve recently discovered Steve Dutch’s pages on “Science, Pseudoscience and Irrationalism“. Full of wonderful stuff — clearly reasoned, scrupulously fair, and whitheringly contemptuous of those who would let fuzzy-headed feelings of goodwill determine their lives.

But . . . the absolute shocker for me was something that I have never heard of in years and years of interest in and study of the Middle East conflict. Allow me to quote from the Noble Qur`an, Surah 17 verse 104:

And We said to the Israelites after him: Dwell in the land: and when the promise of the next life shall come to pass, we will bring you both together in judgment.

Israpundit has determined the criterion for avoiding Israel’s brutal bombing and invasion campaign, which has killed millions of people all over the Middle East just last week alone (<- sarcasm): Don’t bomb or invade Israel.

No Arab or Muslim country that has attacked Israel has ever been attacked by it, no matter how harsh the rhetoric.

All of Israel’s wars have been defensive since 1948. If the world truly accepted that Israel had a right to defend itself, there could be no criticism of its actions, no moral issues, and no talk of war crimes even when innocent civilians get hurt. But Israel’s “right to defend itself,” to which its western critics are careful to pay lip service, hinges on Israel never actually doing so.

Unfortunately, Israel is stuck in the role of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice:

The Jewish State is entitled to armed self-defence; it just cannot shed any blood.

An interesting article by a former US Ambassador to Mali:

Despite persistent poverty and ongoing turmoil in neighboring states, in a single decade Mali has launched one of the most successful democracies in Africa. Its political record includes three democratic elections and two peaceful transitions of power, a transformation that seems nothing short of amazing.