Barrel Strength

What do you do when you have just filled in the crossword puzzle? You toss it away with complete lack of interest, right? Up to that moment, you have been obsessed with every letter. Up to that moment, you have been spending hours, over the course of days perhaps, decoding. Then poof! A sudden change of value is made in your mind. I draw this to your attention because I am obsessed with attention, and how it shifts, and what happens when it does.

Once I removed an old piece of equipment from a circuit board in my house. The heavy piece of electrical equipment had been functioning perfectly all its life, since the 1920s probably. The next moment it was scrap. Who declared it scrap? I did. Another mental event. Useful one moment, scrap the next. 

Global warming of the man-caused variety. When did it move from “useful”or “true” to “scrap” or “false” in your mind?

But this is only one of any number of changes, decisions, evaluations we make in life.  Some of them are far more significant for our self-perception and social status. Grew up Protestant, become a Jew. Grow up Jewish, become a Unitarian. Grow up Unitarian, become a Roman Catholic. Grow up atheist and find yourself thinking a whole lot about Jesus and what He accomplished. Always thought you were gay, marry a woman and live happily. Always thought you were straight, move to Sante Fe with Allan and open a boutique. Eat meat, dyke and, behold! you do, and marry the rancher who tends to the cattle, move to southern Alberta and join the Presbyterians.

Most of our changes are far less dramatic in nature, I grant you, and occur at a slower pace than dropping the old circuit breaker into the garbage.  Most of them, in my case, have involved ceasing to concern oneself with issues that used to fascinate me. Most of them have involved retreating from publicly relevant associations, such as political parties and church, into my own private pleasures and concerns. As I am not the first to have done so, I assume it is a feature of ageing. Many go in the opposite direction.

But the topic  here is evaluation: the mysterious process that says this one, not that one. Which brings me around to us, you and me. Who does the deciding? You and I. So in effect, and in reality, you and I are the source of the value. We make the decisions. We make the evaluations. We say: “this, not that”. So how on earth did we ever get the idea that value comes from somewhere outside of us? We are the value. We are value. Not God, not earth, not Gaia, not dad, not neighbours, nor the wife. Us. You and I.

So value is not extrinsic to us. It is us. It is we who judge a thing or a person by its or their fitness to a purpose, and we judge the purpose.  We are not just making valuations, we are the source of the value by which things and people are evaluated.

Maybe this is just this morning’s approach to the saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. It is amazing sometimes to consider what happens when you decide to throw away the crossword puzzle.

Geert Wilders, the oppressed Dutch politician, under fire from the establishment for saying true things about Islam, has the momentum in forthcoming national elections.

See the article by Paul Belien in the Brussels Journal.

Will everyone please pay attention to the Wilders phenomenon? It is a huge issue, whether a leading national politician can be thrown in jail for saying that Islam is an enemy to civilization, and there is no defence possible under Dutch law? Except by taking over the government, that is.

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.

Whingeing Seventies rock star Sir Elton John announces to the world that Jesus Christ was a “super-intelligent gay man“.

And the increasingly awful Church of England does little to refute this fabulous theologian:

A spokesman for the Church of England said: “Sir Elton’s reflection that Jesus calls us all to love and forgive is one shared by all Christians.”

“But insights into aspects of the historic person of Jesus are perhaps best left to the academics,” he added.

Fittingly, at one point in the interview with that bastion of religious reflection, Parade Magazine, Sir Elton claims that “fame attracts lunatics”.

No argument here.

Conducted by Bruce Bawer, author of “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within“:

http://www.rights.no/publisher/publisher.asp?id=59&tekstid=3259

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.

I got a letter — I got a note today from one of my staff — they forwarded it to me — from a woman in St. Louis who had been part of our campaign, very active, who had passed away from breast cancer. She didn’t have insurance. She couldn’t afford it, so she had put off having the kind of exams that she needed. And she had fought a tough battle for four years. All through the campaign she was fighting it, but finally she succumbed to it. And she insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama t-shirt.  (Laughter.)

As is His wont, He chose not to name her and at the end of the Revelation, the Doubters laughed.  Barrack Hussein Obama is pictured below with the ever present halo.

The women in question was Melaine Shouse who died on Jan 30th, 2010 Anno Domini or 2 After Obama, in Overland, Missouri.  These then are the humble origins of Shroud of Overland.