Barrel Strength

Unleash your inner geek, Prime Minister!

O QanaDa, juHqo’maj je vav saq.
Batlh je rewbe’, qod Hoch roghvaH ra’.
tiDu’ wew Hot’bey, legh HoS je tlhab.
Da ‘u’, O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.

joH’a’ jegh juHqo’ yay je tlhab.
O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.
O QanaDa, pe’av Hochlogh.

And the translation:

O Canada, our home world and fatherland,
Honour and love in all its people command.
Our hearts glowing, we see strength and freedom.
Throughout the universe, O Canada, we will stand guard for all time.

God give our home world victory and freedom.
O Canada, we will stand guard for all time,
O Canada, we will stand guard for all time.

First, Geoffrey Sachs. Then me, in five carefully worded megatons.

Geoffrey Sachs in the Guardian:

We are witnessing a predictable process by ideologues and right-wing think tanks and publications to discredit the scientific process. Their arguments have been repeatedly disproved for 30 years — time after time — but their aggressive methods of public propaganda succeed in causing delay and confusion.

Climate change science is a wondrous intellectual activity. Great scientific minds have learned over the course of many decades to “read” the Earth’s history, in order to understand how the climate system works. They have deployed brilliant physics, biology, and instrumentation (such as satellites reading detailed features of the Earth’s systems) in order to advance our understanding.

And the message is clear: large-scale use of oil, coal, and gas is threatening the biology and chemistry of the planet. We are fuelling dangerous changes in Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry, giving rise to extreme storms, droughts, and other hazards that will damage the food supply and the quality of life of the planet.

 On the motives of those who oppose the global warming agenda:

“the same group of mischief-makers, given a platform by the free-market ideologues of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, has consistently tried to confuse the public and discredit the scientists whose insights are helping to save the world from unintended environmental harm.”.

Finally, it is our duty to obey:

“The IPCC and the climate scientists are telling us a crucial message. We need urgently to transform our energy, transport, food, industrial, and construction systems to reduce the dangerous human impact on the climate. It is our responsibility to listen, to understand the message, and then to act.”

So let us review his argument:

• Those who oppose us are against the scientific method itself, it is not a mere disagreement about some facts.
• Our side is filled with wonderfully intelligent minds.
• Their side is corrupt and evil.
• Obey or be damned.

And now I am going to  give some of it back.

[After the passage of a few days since first reading the Sachs article, I realize what drove me and Antony Watts up the wall about it. It was not intended to rationally persuade anyone who differs in the least from its views. It was the equivalent of an officer slapping a dazed private, saying "get back in line, soldier. Nothing has happened". The entire eastern front has collapsed. The shattered wreck of armies is drifting past the position, and the officer is merely trying to cow the soldier back into line. It was an assertion of authority over weak minds, and the insult lies in the author's belief that we are weak minded. But he was not talking to us. He was talking to the wavering fanatics.]

First, this line of attack is entirely typical of all global warming alarmists whom I have encountered personally and in print, without exception. I have not met any global warmist who has failed to use his adherence to the dcctrine as a signal of his moral superiority, rather than as a position in a rational discussion. The most disturbing thing about warmists is their religious enthusiasm and intolerance.

Second,  I have observed this form of argument many times before.  I have argued with Jews, of whom Geoffrey Sachs is one, for over forty years on all matters political, theological, factual or legal. Many Jews, if not most, exhibit a strong tendency to overstate the argument in the terms used by Sachs. We shall discuss what those features are below.

Third, the global warming movement shows many of the features associated with ideological movements of the twentieth century: Feudianism, Boasian sociology, and subsequent intellectual movements making  left-wing critiques of society (the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer, Marcuse et al). These were mostly Jewish in origin, composition, and working styles. These groups exhibited or exhibit:

• high degrees of authoritarianism: intellectual subordination of the group to a charismatic leader or his ideas;
• sharp in-group out-group distinctions, between the elect/the saved/the initated and the rest, who are divided into the possibly useful and the damned (those who knowingly disagree).
• a conspiratorial style: worldly success in ensuring members of the in-group are placed in the right spots to manage the propagation of the group’s ideas and the upward mobility of its members;
• Condescension towards and failure to respect the ideas of others. Indeed, failure to agree is a sign of psychopathoogy.

To summarize:

1. The pattern of thought and behaviour of the global warming alarmists exhibits many resemblances to the intellectual fads of the 20th century.
2. The style of argument of Geoffrey Sachs is particularly Jewish.
3. People should not be cowed by Sachs’  style of discourse, particularly they should not be afraid of being called anti-semitic for saying that this style of argument is obnoxious, authoritarian, and anti-liberal.

Freud, Boas , Marcuse and their doctrines  have turned into the equivalent of a pet rocks.  Global warming via CO2 emissions is rapidly joining these intellectual poseurs on the rubbish dump of failed ideas.

The style of argument, the conspiratorial methods, the inability to withstand criticism from members of an out-group: all this will persist. It will simply find a new authoritarian ideology to latch onto.

So Geoffrey Sachs can go fuck himself.

No actually I don’t. I hate his doctrines. David Warren is a tower of intellectual strength and and integrity. On many issues, he represents a voice of long-term sanity, though as a Holy Fool he aggravates many.

My problem with David Warren is that he is not of our species, and does not know it. Consequently on the subject of sex he preaches to some other class of being not commonly found among humans – those who feel no lust. He may share human DNA; but I can scarcely believe it from the way he talks.

In this week’s sermon, he writes:

“A woman, who is not the victim of a rape, has always had that right; and even my Catholic Church recognizes a method of contraception that is quite infallible. Gentle reader may guess what that is. And while it is only a rule of thumb, “no sex without babies, and no babies without sex” does in fact provide adequate guidance for any conceivable life issue.”

How else can you account for his advice in a major newspaper, that the best course was “no babies without sex, no sex without babies”. Wilful perversity? Possibly, but not on this issue.

This is not Roman Catholicism, David. It is just the voice of a man in whose veins no testosterone runs. I am not saying that you lack courage, for clearly you have profound moral convictions and have suffered greatly for them. I am saying that you have critical absence of the vital juices that make humans the most sexual of all species.

A man who explained his conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism on the basis that the Anglican Church was getting too gay-friendly has some serious thinking to do about the nature of the priesthood of the Roman Church, the largest gay-owned and -operated institution in the world.

Warren continues:

“This moral injunction (no babies without sex, no sex without babies) is dismissed as “too simple.” Yet merely by trying to draw some alternative line, say between contraception and abortion, we have already found the means to become irretrievably lost. All moral injunctions are simple, and the sinful heart has always cried out for a little complexity.”

Warren continues in the long line of Catholics from Saint Paul and Saint Augustine forward, to find something inherently sinful about the human desire for sex, whether with oneself, or others, whether with the opposite sex, or one’s own.  One of the 39 articles of the Anglican religion, written in the 1540s,  expresses it thus.

 IX:…..”the lust of the flesh, called in Greek, phronea sarkos, (which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh), is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized; yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.

If lust be something not subject to the law of God, one asks how it is different from the production of bile or hemoglobin, or the production of neurotransmitters or snot, or any other bodily function. And if lust is subject to the will of God in the same way as other bodily functions and processes, one asks how or why it has the nature of sin.

Sex is how we got here. I mean more by sex than by how we were given birth. I mean sexual selection, how you chose your mate and how you were chosen, is the only means of evolution directed enough, intelligent enough, discriminating enough, to take us from furry-faced bipeds under the plains of Africa to listening to Mozart under northern stars, dining on food with cutlery and table cloths, in the space of 30,000 years. Read Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind for a more complete exposition of this argument. To place in sexual selection the burden of sin is a portion of traditional Christian doctrine that we have all walked away from, for many profound reasons.

All but David Warren and his lonely band of traditional Catholics. May God bless them and preserve them, for they have been made crazy. Our revenge shall be to outbreed them.

Real men iron their shirts. At least I like to think so. 

Ironing has many advantages.

The activity is mindless in the zen sense, a series of repetitive actions of flattening fabric with the hands and passing the iron over it to bring perfection to wrinkled matter. Like ritual of any kind, the activity misleads the mind strategically, so that the mind thinks that it is busy doing something while it empties itself. It is a whole lot easier than sitting in a chair contemplating one’s thought processes. It involves less social self-presentation than church. It involves less risk from inattention than driving. It is far less expensive than fly-fishing, being able to be conducted in your basement with a minimum of equipment.  It conduces to large amounts of spousal approval, while permitting serious listening to one’s favourite music. 

As I ironed my wife’s blouses, I considered the fact that the buttons of women’s shirts run down the left side rather than the right. I speculated whether some bored housewife in the late 1950s used this same fact to argue that the differences between men and women were merely conventional, like the placement of buttons on a shirt. It would have marked the humble orign of one of the world’s stupidest and most damaging ideas, that has trampled through society like King Kong in a rage.

A friend of mine who went to university after me, in the 1980s, said that there were two large unquestionable ideas reigning in his day: 1) Reagan was stupid and capitalism was evil and 2) the differences between men and women were merely conventional. You will recall in the seventies and eighties  that mothers gave their boys girls’ toys and their girls’ Tonka trucks, in the attempt to demasculinize the male and masculinize the female, though they did not use those terms. There was also the doctor who used some poor boy who had lost his penis in a medical accident. The boy, used as the poster child for the notion that a genetic male could be raised as a female, subsequently resumed his male identity, got reconstructive surgery and married. There were many attempts of a similar nature to eradicate male-female differences.

How come these experiments, when conducted by social engineers, are never labelled ideological? When parents  support spanking children , they are being “ideological”. When parents oppose spanking children, they are called “progressive”? A recent study from social researchers at Calvin college supported the benefits of spanking between the ages of two and six for the later development of responsible adults. I do not know whether any such study can prove anything useful, but I did remark that the Usual Suspects sniffed that the Christian origin of Calvin college maight have induced a bias into the experimental method. As if the leftist assault on society by Horkheimer, Adorno and their successors and imitators proceeded from some Burkean satisfaction with hierarchical social arrangements.

There was always an  ambiguity in the argument too, of the socially constructed view of  male-female differences. They could never quite get it clear whether the differences were socially constructed, or whether the male was, in essence, just violent and evil. We men were all supposed to wear the red ribbons of shame for twenty five years because some abused Algerian boy, Gamil Gharbi, renamed Marc Lepine, killed the fourteen women engineering students at the Universite de Montreal. Even in 2010 it takes a brave newspaper to publish an article suggesting this tragedy might have been about Islamic male contempt for women than reflective of a general male hostility to female success.

Amid the terrible news of earthquake in Haiti and the world-historical confrontation between Google and China over the unity of the Internet, comes this news: the male Y chrmosome keeps reinventing itself.

The Whitehead Institute, in Cambridge, across the river from Boston, published this today in Nature
The study compared the Y chromosomes in chimpanzees and man, to discover that the rate of change in humans was phenomenal.

Quoting from Nature:

“As the earlier studies had suggested, many of the stark changes between the chimp and human Y chromosomes are due to gene loss in the chimp and gene gain in the human. Page’s team found that the chimp Y chromosome has only two-thirds as many distinct genes or gene families as the human Y chromosome and only 47% as many protein-coding elements as humans. The remainder of the chimp and human genomes are thought to differ in gene number by less than 1%.

“Even more striking than the gene loss is the rearrangement of large portions of the chromosome. More than 30% of the chimp Y chromosome lacks an alignable counterpart on the human Y chromosome, and vice versa, whereas this is true for less than 2% of the remainder of the genome.”

All this reinforces how different we are from chmps as a species, but how much more different we are becoming over time. It also reverses the previous notion that the Y chromosome was residual or of declining importance. As we male chauvinists expect, it is the source of most of the change in the human species. Take that, Andrea Dworkin!

[Note: The genome sequencing comparison between men and women, and chimps of either sex, has yet to be conducted. So my headline is yet unproven.]

 Test: Which of the three items just mentioned: the disaster in Haiti, the unity of the Internet, or the rapid evolution of the Y chromosome, do you consider most important? Discuss.

Study shows: greens are pious hypocrites.

The more you assign yourself moral superiority because you shop “green”, the more inclined you are to cheat in a number of different ways.
“Co-authors Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong, professors at the university’s Rotman School of Business, set up tests for a sample of university students, which asked them to purchase a basket of goods at either a hypothetical organic shop or a typical grocery store. Those who bought more green items were found in separate tests to be significantly less likely than their conventional counterparts to share money with an anonymous recipient and more likely to cheat on and lie about the results of a simple quiz.”

We have all noticed this about lefties and fundamentalists: their self-attribution of a vast reservoir of moral superiority, so that they can be ruder, nastier, more arrogant, less tolerant, than their sinning conservative or less fundamentalist neighbours.

“Grant us, mother Gaia, the grace to be more ecologically conscious and concerned, and to pardon us our sins against our fellow humans, for thy Name’s sake”.

The tendency to assign oneself moral superiority is universal. The greens are only the latest manifestation.

As the science behind global warming evaporates, it becomes necessary to increase the vilification of opposition, while changing the subject. Pull back from any concrete assertions of fact, and sling shit at your opponents from the high ground of self-declared moral superiority.

George Mobiot’s vapourings in this week’s Groniad are a case in point. Observe how he eliminates any middle ground:

“‘Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impedimentsand those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.”

Notice two distortions by which Monbiot frames the debate. First, those who oppose are inherently unreasonable: Read the rest…

Klavan: “Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal.  Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be.  There are honest ways to confront that.  You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love.  Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. 

“But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. 

“That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle.  And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is:  an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue. 

“That’s why they demonize any opposition.  To them, we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves.  Which, without God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.

Andrew Klavan is a screenwriter, crime novelist, and former atheist.

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-woods-index.html

The method used divided webpage lookups by media articles, or pages.  (The author is British).

“Using the TWI (Tiger Woods Index) as a comparator, the public in general are more interested in “Climategate” than Tiger Woods, by a factor of nearly 20 times.

“Applying the “ratio analysis” (doesn’t that sound grand!) to ten current issues, including the two already mentioned, an arbitrary list emerged, ranked by importance to the general public, against media interest. This is as follows:

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

The author says that a statistician might fault him but that, unlike Micahel Mann, his methods and date are open to public insepction.

The method allows for infinite expansion. It allows for a possibly consistent measure of public interest versus newspaper (media) interest. More work needs to be done on this, because it is a simple measure of the frequent gap between popular interest in a topic and the newspaper’s interest.

The article, published in today’s Globe and Mail, and derived from the Guardian, has to be read in the complete inverse of its intentions:

-the result looks likely to sully the country’s image abroad

-the vote represented a triumph for the far right Swiss People’s Party

-the vote also reflected an act of mass defiance of the national establishment

Well, what else would they say? That it was a triumph of the ordinary white Christian Swiss who says he wants to live in a white Christian country? And moreover, have a say on the direction of his own country’s basic nature? No, the Guardian could never say that. That would be….. wait a minute…. uh, racist!!

From an AP report:

“The nationalist Swiss People’s party (SPP) described minarets, the distinctive spires used in most countries for calls to prayer, as symbols of rising Muslim political and religious power that could eventually turn Switzerland into an Islamic nation.

“Muslims make up about 6% of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people, many of them refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Fewer than 13% practice their religion, the government says, and Swiss mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.”

I seem to recall a Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, who  had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”

  Maybe someone listened to him.

PS: It should be noted that Switzerland is a republic, not a disguised monarchy, and that voter initiatives are allowed.  That would explain the difference between Switzerland, say, and Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and so forth.

With the revelations of scientific fraud in the AGW debate, I await the emergence of our next Senator McCarthy. Who was a party to this conspiracy? Who is covering up for them? How many warmists have been inflitrated into government? What is their relationship to Maurice Strong? Who authored the Copenhagen Treaty and why are they still in government?

Why is the Gaiain religion Leftist?

Let’s start with Leftism. I posit that there is such a thing as Leftism, which is a permanent feature of the human species. It basically says a large No to reality. Reality is wrong and needs to be fixed. Here is a set of its characteristics:

• The world is wrong at some fudamental level.
• The world is rationally knowable.
• Our party has that knowledge.
• That knowledge is perfect.
• Armed with perfect knowledge, we can remake the world.
• Since our knowledge is true and perfect, those who oppose us must in principle be ignorant, or in bad faith.
• The only thng standing in the way of remaking the world into the place it ought to be is the ignorance and bad faith of those who do not know.
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge.

Compare this to the Gaian religion/ideology:

• man is poisoning the planet with carbn dioxide, and if nothing is done, we will destroy ourselves with the by-products of fossil fuel consumption.
• Our science is unassailable.
• We can re-engineer the world production systems through treaties requiring new production methods to reduce carbon footprints, as well as wealth transfers  engendered by those transfers.
• Those who oppose us are ignorant or deniers.
• The only thi
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge: viz. the Copenhagen Treaty.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

I was riding in the back seat of a taxi, about a decade ago. The driver was a Lebanese Christian. We saw some girls walking along the street, looking quite attractive, as young women tend to be. We were talking about Muslim immigration, the Lebanese civil war, how things were different in Canada. Considering his Muslim countrymen now in Canada, and the girls looking attractive, he said: “This society will drive them crazy. Everything about it. Especially the freedom of women.”

The head of Ottawa’s taxi union, a Muslim man, was sentenced to a year in jail for criminal harassment of his daughter.

It is pleasing to see the Court’s condemnation made no allowance for his Islamic cultural-religious belief system about women. The article by Andrew Seymour reads:

“Ontario Superior Court Justice Lynn Ratushny said the jail sentence was the minimum penalty that Yusef Al Mezel could serve to address the “strong need” for denunciation and general deterrence after he implied that the actions of his 23-year-old daughter would be met with violence because she had shamed and dishonoured her family.

“While the judge recognized Al-Mezel was a respected community leader whose threats would not likely result in an honour killing, she said they do remain as threats of some possible form of violence in the name of honour that required significant condemnation.

“They invoke a seriously dangerous belief system that can and has led to violence against women,” Judge Ratushny said. ”

Hurrah! “A seriously dangerous belief system” indeed.

The article continues:

“In the message, he also wrote of “the Sharaf of the family,” which Eman Al-Mezel later explained to police was the belief that she had shamed and dishonoured her family because she had run away from home and shed her hijab and Muslim beliefs.”

Is this the one place where western society will not invoke multi-culti rationalizations for bad behaviour, the status of women? It seems to be an excellent hill on which to stand. It rounds up both men and women in defence of commonly-held culture against the attacks of the barbarians. It invokes neither Deity nor denomination. It says: this is the way we do things here. , Obviously, some people just need to be told, and when they do not heed, to throw them in jail for a while to reflect upon the message.

As reported in the Brussels Journal.

The EU is intent upon enacting legislation in the style of the Canadian Human Rights Act and its provincial counterparts. An offensive environment is created when I think your comment is offensive.

“Harassment, as vaguely defined in the directive, allows an individual to accuse someone of discrimination merely for expressing something the individual allegedly perceives as creating an “offensive environment.” The definition is so broad that anyone who feels intimidated or offended can easily bring legal action against those whom he feels are responsible. Moreover, the directive shifts the burden of proof onto the accused, who has to prove the negative, i.e. demonstrate that he or she did not create an environment which intimidated or offended the complainant. If the accused fails to do so, he or she can be sentenced to paying an unlimited amount of compensation for “harassment.” ”

Fortunately, it will need the approval of all 27 member states to pass.The article was first reported here at the Hudson Institute website.

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE59D0BR20091014?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=11604

Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister has published a book entitled “Manthropology” and provocatively sub-titled “The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male.”

The lack of physical stress in modern life has led us to be much slower and weaker than our ancestors of 30,000 years ago, according to his evidence.

How come every advance of ease of life is greeted with derision, yet we all will refuse to haul water up hill if we can get a pump to do the work? North American Indians immediately took to European firearms, as did the rest of the world when they faced a choice.

Human nature, of course, causes us to avoid unnecessary labour. Human ingenuity devises the tools which make labour unnecessary. It also devises the societies in which humans can live together peaceably long enough to invent and use labour saving devices, and even to reward their inventors.

But there is a more subtle objection to Professor McAllister’s argument. The general weakening seems to apply to all of humanity, even those who still hunt for a living, such as Australian aborigines.

Why does the general weakening postulated by McAllister apply as well to those hunters who might be expected to have retained the capacities of their distant forebears?

Are human capacities as plastic as he thinks? Were we once much stronger and faster? There are reasonable grounds to think so.

We know that chimpanzees are much stronger, pound for pound, than humans.  It takes a large  200 pound human male in superb condition to wrestle a chimpanzee, for instance. And even way back then, we were no match for neanderthals. But here we are and neanderthals are in their graves.

Musculature and speed are obviously not decisive for fitness in the Darwinian sense.  Go figure.

Relevant and more important is The Ten Thousand Year Explosion. Evolution is accelerating under the influence of civilization. If we are not the six-foot tall superbly muscled athletes of 15,000 years ago, it is because we have found better ways to live.

The modern man is weak thesis will inform much cocktail party chatter this fall.

The condescending behaviour of the MSM never ceases to amaze your correspondent.  The haughty Charlie Gibson of ABC News opened his interview with Sen. Olympia Snowe as follows.

Gibson:  And Senator Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine joins us tonight.  Senator you are now the only Republican House or Senate to vote for any of the health care reform bills that are out there.  What do you know that your fellow Republicans don’t?

Translation: Why are your fellow Republicans so stupid and why are they not falling in line with Obama?