Tag: civilization

Democrats get a taste their own vicious swatting tactics

2:43 pm

The first amendment: no longer honored
No longer honored.

For more than a decade anonymous leftists have used the ugly tactic of swatting to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who opposes them, with the hope that in some cases it might even cause the attacked person or someone in his or her family to be killed.

For those still unaware of what swatting is, let me explain. The attacker simply calls the police and reports falsely a dangerous gun-related crime in progress at the victim’s home, often suggesting there are hostages involved. The police then respond in full force, guns drawn and in large numbers. The victims, who are often asleep at the time, are suddenly faced with a military style attack by SWAT teams, at their home with their family (including children) present, with the real chance that someone will make a mistake, overreact, and begin firing.

The left has been doing this to conservatives both in and out of the political world for years (for a few specific examples going back to 2012, go here, here, and here). In some cases the perpertrators have been caught (with many being teenage boys reacting to the leftist press and thus acting out stupidly), but usually the evil-doer is not identified or punished.

Without question however this tactic has become increasingly popular on the left, which in itself has become increasingly radicalized and intolerant of any opposition.

It now appears the left is beginning to reap what it has sown. In the past few weeks a number of very prominent Democrats have been swatted themselves.
» Read more

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We are becoming a nation of barbarians

2:16 pm

From Netflix's Barbarians series
Making heroes of barbarians, on Netflix

I have previous railed against the decline in the use of language in the United States. Not only do Americans now routinely use obscenities in normal language, they have been meekly acquiescing to the demands of the radical and somewhat insane queer movement to accept its weasel words in order to hide what it really is.

The recent viral and passionate endorsement by conservatives of all stripes to a new song and the performance by a new country singer, Oliver Anthony, illustrates how this decline to barbarism is accelerating. The focus of Anthony’s song is the cruel destruction of the American way of life by the power-brokers in Washington, and how those power brokers are making life so difficult for ordinary people.

What makes Anthony’s song indicative however of society’s increasing barbarous trend is his language. Right from the start he nonchalantly uses obscenities that would have once been considered unacceptable by everyone, and until recently utterly unacceptable among our more conservative population.

Yet now, even conservatives see nothing wrong with Anthony’s use of obscenities. Apparently, it is now okay for everyone to spew curse words everywhere, in public, in songs, for all to hear, from children to adults. Anthony’s message condemning the tyranny coming from Washington is too important to ignore. It must be touted widely, no matter how obscenely he couches his statement.

In other words, now even conservatives don’t care if our culture is debased and damaged. It doesn’t matter if we teach young children that they can act like barbarians, cursing and expressing wild emotions without thinking. It is policy and political power that matters, not doing right and behaving properly.

For though curses and obscenities have their place and proper time, in a civilization of rational civil adults one does not encourage their use. » Read more

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Midnight repost: A scientist’s ten commandments

11:59 pm

The tenth anniversary retrospective of Behind the Black continues: The post below, from September 27, 2010, reports on one of the simplest but most profound scientific papers I have ever read. Its advice is doubly needed today, especially commandment #3.

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A scientist’s ten commandments

Published today on the astro-ph website, this preprint by Ignacio Ferrín of the Center for Fundamental Physics at the University of the Andes, Merida, Venezuala, is probably the shortest paper I have ever seen. I think that Dr. Ferrin will forgive me if I reprint it here in its entirety:

1. Go to your laboratory or your instrument without any pre-conceived ideas. Just register what you saw faithfully.

2. Report promptly and scientifically. Check your numbers twice before submitting.

3. Forget about predictions. They are maybe wrong.

4. Do not try to conform or find agreement with others. You may be the first to be observing a new phenomenon and you may risk missing credit for the discovery.

5. Criticism must be scientific, respectful, constructive, positive, and unbiased. Otherwise it must be done privately.

6. If you want to be respected, respect others first. Do not use insulting or humiliating words when referring to others. It is not in accord with scientific ethics.

7. Do not cheat. Cheating in science is silly. When others repeat your experiment or observation, they will find that you were wrong.

8. If you do not know or have made a mistake, admit it immediately. You may say, “I do not know but I will find out.” or “I will correct it immediately.” No scientist knows the answer to everything. By admitting it you are being honest about your knowledge and your abilities.

9. Do not appropriate or ignore other people’s work or results. Always give credit to others, however small their contribution may have been. Do not do unto others what you would not like to be done unto you.

10. Do not stray from scientific ethics.

It seems that some scientists in the climate field (Phil Jones of East Anglia University and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University are two that come to mind immediately) would benefit by reading and following these rules.

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The terrible consequences of NOAA’s data tampering

3:36 pm

Link here.

In 2017 Tony Heller broke the story of how NOAA and NASA have been routinely adjusting their historic global temperature records to cool the past and warm the present in order to create the illusion that the climate is warming, far more than it is.

The post by Heller at the link above focuses in on how that tampering, which erased from the temperature data the record-hot year of 1934, is then used by both NOAA and NASA to claim each year for the past decade was the hottest ever.

The raw data however tells a far different story. The raw data from 1934, as reported amply at the time, recorded big heat waves and murderous droughts and extensive dust storms, all far more extreme than anything we have experienced in the past decade. Moreover, that raw data matches well with public news stories, and also matches well with all the published science prior to the 2000s.

Since then, however, intellectual honesty and the real scientific method has been replaced by an agenda-driven political manipulations. Having 1934 be the hottest year ever cannot stand, especially if present temperatures do not exceed that year’s records. Global warming demands a correction!

The nicest interpretation we can give to these adjustments is that the scientists are innocently engaged in confirmation bias. They believe the Earth is warming due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thus they must find evidence of that warming, even if it requires data adjustments to past record-hot years like 1934, adjustments that they then rationalize as necessary and scientifically justified.

More likely, they have decided that their political agenda to prove human-caused global warming requires them to be intellectually dishonest and the falsify the global temperature record. If so, this is a tragedy beyond words, as it signals that the revolution in human thought that began with the Renaissance and Galileo and was reinforced and cemented by the Enlightenment and Francis Bacon, has now ended.

That revolution made possible a burst of human creativity and civilization that lasted more than five hundred years. The consequences for future generations should that revolution be rejected now cannot be good.

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