Stef's Blog - a native London Southlander and unrepentant 'Conspiraloon™' who doesn't trust anyone, not even himself. Sometimes I take pictures. I also enjoy swearing immensely and think much faster than I can type, so each post comes guaranteed to include at last one confusing typo. OK?
Documentary which tells the story of evolution theory since Darwin postulated it in 1859 in 'On the Origin of Species'.
The theory of evolution by natural selection is now scientific orthodoxy, but when it was unveiled it caused a storm of controversy, from fellow scientists as well as religious people. They criticised it for being short on evidence and long on assertion and Darwin, being the honest scientist that he was, agreed with them. He knew that his theory was riddled with 'difficulties', but he entrusted future generations to complete his work and prove the essential truth of his vision, which is what scientists have been doing for the past 150 years.
Evolutionary biologist Professor Armand Marie Leroi charts the scientific endeavour that brought about the triumphant renaissance of Darwin's theory. He argues that, with the new science of evolutionary developmental biology (evo devo), it may be possible to take that theory to a new level - to do more than explain what has evolved in the past, and start to predict what might evolve in the future.
It was essentially no more than the usual collection of fibs, half truths, fantasies and non sequiturs but it made a nice change having someone other than Richard Dawkins presenting the same old fundamentalist bullcrap
And, no, Armand didn't fill in any holes but he did attempt to pass off some absolute whoppers whilst pretending to do so
There was one slightly novel element. It was I think the first time I've ever heard a TeleDarwinevangelist admit that this most beautiful and truthy of scientific theories is currently capable of predicting absolutely bugger all and only 'works' retrospectively
Ah well, it's only a century and half old. Give it time
You can only imagine how far Newton would have got trying to pull that kind of shit
"Isaac was fucked if he knew what was going to happen next"
A conversation between MegaLoon Rupert Sheldrake and Bruce Lipton...
WARNING!!: The following video contains traces of West Coast American New Age Hippies - which may be harmful to people with an allergy
The conversation continues in Youtube friendly bite-sized lumps here (Segment #3's my favourite)
If you're interested in out of the box thinking about the Science of Life, Rupert is certifiably out of his box. Whilst I personally don't buy everything Sheldrake comes up with I share his suspicion that there is some organising principle or force missing from the mainstream life science narrative. Sheldrake is a source of more interesting and challenging ideas, and warm humour, than Dawkins could even dream of...
I've got a crisp fiver in my pocket that says that's the last thing he's going to do...
well, the daft old cock is definitely right about one thing - farting on about God definitely is a distraction from all the shit that's going on in the world
Back in 2001/2 a couple of friends were thinking about buying houses and asked for my opinion on the future prospects of the UK housing market
My take was that, even back then, the cost of housing was moving ahead of historical affordability levels and there was no way that house prices could keep rising faster than people's wage rises.
I guestimated that house prices would peak in the Summer of 2003, then fall back 10-20%, quite sharply
Which, of course, didn't happen
or rather it did happen, but in nothing like my estimated timescale
My mistake was that back then, before my full-on Conspiraloonery days, I assumed that the people responsible for our government and banks were not amoral sociopaths; fully committed to the path of deliberately wrecking millions of lives
Only an amoral psychopath would have encouraged the boom to continue beyond the 2002/03 levels, to a point where the inevitable economic correction would have to be so large it would become a national, and international, calamity
Make no mistake, a ghastly economic crash was a 100%, guaranteed, dead cert, inevitable consequence of the way our economy was being run, and anyone who says no-one saw it coming is either a liar or a fucking idiot
Now, as it happens, I've concluded that only a minority of the people who claim that no-one saw it coming are liars.
The majority really are fucking idiots; easily manipulated, greedy, dissonant, fearful idiots
You can take pretty much anything you've even seen written or said in the mainstream media about economic and financial affairs over the last ten years and forget it. It was all Wrong and yet the people who earned a living peddling Wrong are still at their jobs peddling a new brand of Wrong. For all the good they did anyone, they may as well have stayed at home, playing with themselves and eating cheesy wotsits, and not bothered going into work for the last ten years
Better than a career in journalism or banking, especially when combined with self-abuse
The same also applies to millions of people employed in the service sector over the last decade. A ridiculous number of people have been whacking off, playing silly games and kidding themselves that they were engaged in meaningful work.They enjoyed an undeservedly high standard of material living off of worthless IOUs paid to foreigners who've been working in sweat shops and fields on their behalf.
So preoccupied did the British become with getting rich (sic.) off the back of shuffling paper that we took to importing several million immigrants to wait on us and wipe our kids' arses
This was all bonkers and wrong on so many levels
And there came a point where you would have to be an idiot yourself to believe that no-one in a position of power saw the inevitable collapse coming
It is also worth remembering that the infrastructure for a full-blown police state was being rushed-in at the same time the debt bubble was being inflated to calamitous levels
I now firmly believe that the people responsible for our governments and banks truly are amoral psychopaths, engaged in deliberate economic and social warfare against the rest of us, and the quality of my spooky predictive powers is now several orders of magnitude greater than it was seven or eight years ago
Put simply, if everything really was the result of a cock up rather than a conspiracy why is it that the apparent cock ups virtually always end up favouring the same class of people?
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And whilst on the subject of dissonant bullshit...
There are some interesting parallels between the mainstream coverage of the recent economic boom and the Man Made Global Warming narrative
Each involved people looking at graphs of recent upward trending data, extrapolating those trends way, way up and fabricating explanations as to why this time it is different and why the upward trend was going to continue for the foreseeable future.
Both groups of rampers, economic and MMGW, have had the bulk of the mainstream media, industry and government on their side
In opposition to the people who believe that Man Made Global Warming, like house prices, could only go up there was a minority of people arguing that global mean temperature, like house prices, is cyclic, that there are signs a turning point has been reached and a downturn could well be on the cards
If and when it is established that a turning point has been reached, we will doubtlessly be told that (virtually) no-one saw it coming and that the Man Made Global Warming advocates were acting on the consensus of opinion of the majority of the experts
Bullshit
As with predictions about which way the economy was heading, consensus counts for absolutely fuck all
Either something is right or it isn't
And popular climate 'science', as it is currently practiced, has a lot more to do with politics and story telling than hard, testable science
There's a world of difference between hard sciences like chemistry and physics, which involve testable, repeatable processes and the more complex, chaotic natural sciences, such a climatology and evolutionary theory; which involve making up stories to explain that which has already happened and which is unlikely to happen again in quite the same way
It is easy enough to whip up an experiment to prove or disprove a theory about gravity. A lot harder to come up with something repeatable and testable which explains where wombats came from or if it is going to snow in New Orleans next week
Which is why the often-repeated claims that Man Man Global Warming is all about hard-science are bollocks
Staring at graphs of natural systems and kidding yourself that you've come up with a computer model which tells you what's going to happen next, be it with the weather or the financial markets, is a mug's game and will inevitably end up with only one result.
My favourite comment from the 1,000 or so posted underneath this recent article. Reference to to 'serious' scientists, i.e. scientists who agree with the views of the commentator, is as good an indicator that the writer is an utter twunt as any I know.
And, remember, whenever commenting about MMGW underneath news articles, any stories about unusually cold temperatures or heavy snowfall are examples of 'weather'. Any stories about unusually high temperatures or Hurricane Katrina are examples of 'climate'. 'Climate' stories are inherently more significant than 'Weather' stories'
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A few days ago Lord Patel, because he knows I enjoy this stuff so much, sent me a copy of the latest press release from the Met Office. It's a corker...
30/12/2008 11:38
Met Office (National) (Met Office)
Pacific Continues to Influence Global Climate
2009 is expected to be one of the top-five warmest years on record, despite continued cooling of huge areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Nina.
According to climate scientists at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia the global temperature is forecast to be more than 0.4 C above the long-term average. This would make 2009 warmer than the year just gone and the warmest since 2005.
During La Nina, cold waters rise to the surface to cool the ocean and land surface temperatures. The 2009 forecast includes an updated decadal forecast using a Met Office climate model. This indicates a rapid return of global temperature to the long-term warming trend, with an increasing probability of record temperatures after 2009.
Professor Chris Folland from the Met Office Hadley Centre said: "Phenomena such as El Nino and La Nina have a significant influence on global surface temperature. Warmer conditions in 2009 are expected because the strong cooling influence of the recent powerful La Nina has given way to a weaker La Nina. Further warming to record levels is likely once a moderate El Nino develops."
These cyclical influences can mask underlying warming trends as Professor Phil Jones, Director of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, explains: "The fact that 2009, like 2008, will not break records does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming - the period 2001-2007, with an average of 14.44 C, was 0.21 C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000." ENDS
Wow! Warmest year for four years! Maybe...
Outstanding!
The Met Office has now taken to reporting predictions, predictions from people with an unparalleled record for making shit predictions, as if they were fact.
They're getting pretty desperate now
and really beyond parody
And, sure enough, this prediction was faithfully reported as 'news' by the press agencies straight away
The implication of the Press Release it that the deep ocean is acting as a huge heat sink, hiding all that 200 years' worth of alleged surplus warming out of the way for the time being. I would love to see some data that proves it's actually warmer down there - because everything I've seen to date points to nothing of the sort
As with the now discredited ramping of the housing and debt markets, this MMGW thing is now getting beyond the point where the people ramping it can claim honest error. Their subjectivity has become quite blatant. We're heading into outright dishonesty now.
Just like our fucked up financial services industry, the MMGW lobby is trying to tide itself over with some short-term fudging; in the hope that things will somehow turn back their way before the fudging is more widely comprehended
And, as with the now discredited ramping of the housing and debt markets, I'm not claiming for a second that the majority of people who have Faith in MMGW are being deliberately dishonest - the boundless human capacity for self-delusion, dissonance, religious belief and self interest can account for much of what is going on
But not all of it
There is no good reason to believe that the top people behind the MMGW agenda, or our economy, do not understand the inevitable consequences of what they are doing
and there's every reason to believe that they do understand what they are doing
- Disaster Capitalism being the corporate exploitation of people in the wake of disasters or upheavals
The big problem I have with both Taleb and Klein is that they both do a stand-up job of peddling that absolutist, stochastic, 'shit just happens' world view which is so useful to those people who gain the most when things get fucked up
Klein pays nowhere near enough attention to the possibility that many of the disasters and upheavals she refers to were staged, or at least anticipated
Taleb quotes events like the 9/11 attacks and stock market crashes as being examples of unpredictable, Black Swan events, when there's copious evidence that they were anything but. One person's Black Swan; be it due to deceit, dissonance, indoctrination, or plain incompetence, is very often another person's Bleeding Obvious.
Even the majority of natural, as opposed to man-made, disasters cannot fairly be described as Black Swan events. The people who live in places like New Orleans, Mexico City, Los Angeles or Naples know full well that their cities are inevitably going to get creamed sooner or later, and very possibly within the span of a human lifetime. The fact that many of those people engage in denial doesn't change the predictability of that creaming
Property Hot Spots of the Future #17 - Napoli
As such, both Klein and Taleb and the output of many others given prominence in the supposedly alternative, dissenting media, is paving the way for a truly useless, profoundly ineffective analysis of the ghastliness which many of us believe may be begining to overtake our world
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At the heart of the ghastliness which many of us believe may be begining to overtake our world lies the imminent (?) collapse of the dollar and related currencies
The Imminent (?) Collapse of the Dollar Story goes something like this...
Forty or more years ago America abandoned the Gold Standard and embarked on a policy of paying for its imports with increasingly devalued, worthless dollars
America simply printed as many worthless dollars as it needed and exchanged them for imported stuff that was actually worth something
This was made possible by the fact that everything sold on global markets was priced in dollars, so everyone around the world had to hold stocks of this intrinsically useless paper to buy essential commodities
Any time anyone comes anywhere to buying and selling essential commodities with anything but dollars the Americans blow the shit out of them
There are now so many useless dollars in circulation globally that the entire system is about to choke catastrophically. The Russians, the Chinese and others have had enough and are about to walk away from the whole stinking mess
On-line economician Peter Schiff tells a story about five Asians and an American stranded on a desert island. One of the Asians is responsible for fishing, another for hunting, another for growing vegetables, and so on. The American's 'job' is to eat a big fuck off meal prepared by the Asians every night and leave them enough crumbs to survive through to the next day...
Schiff is one of a loose group of bearish, Libertarian, Austrian School Economicians much beloved by Internet Loons, including my goodself
All of these guys have, to one degree or another, predicted that...
The dollar and other fiat currencies of non productive countries will tank
There will be a commensurate and massive rise in the dollar price of tangible commodities such as oil, wheat and gold
As it happens, commodities did rise and the dollar did fall earlier this year - to accompanying cries of 'this is it!', 'this is it!' from the little dollar bears
but it wasn't 'it'
The US dollar has subsequently strengthened massively and commodities, commodity-based shares and commodity-based currencies have dived to the floor
Any private investors following the advice of Schiff, Rogers, Keiser and Puplava will have lost up to 50% in two or three months. Anyone who follows their podcasts can't help but have been entertained by listening to Schiff attempting to placate one of his investors who called up after losing half of his life savings or the sound of Keiser melting down into a pool of despair and babbling about buying into dollars a few days ago
It's not that Schiff, Keiser, et al are actually wrong about the future
The dollar and associated currencies are fucked
The prices of things we can't do without - oil, food, water - will go up in a big, scary, unaffordable way
The prices of things we can do without, or need a loan to buy - houses, cars, plastic tat will fall
Their problem is that the secret of good economic commentary, as with all forms of comedy, is
... timing
These guys have got their timing wrong because...
1. They underestimated just how crooked supposedly free markets are.
The Chinese increased their oil imports by 46% in September and bullion traders around the world cannot meet demand, yet the reported market price of oil and gold have fallen dramatically. Conclusion? The markets are bent
2. They are attempting to comment in real time about insanely volatile markets
The poor quality of market information available to mere mortals and the volume of market 'noise' is such that only a completely bow-tie wearing berk would attempt to extrapolate daily moves out into the future. The Internet deserves a lot of blame for the rise of this kind of commentary
3. They are nowhere near Loony enough
A lot of people have heard the famous Jefferson quote...
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
...but don't seem to have understood its implications.
The process Jefferson was talking about 200 years ago is deliberate and managed. Switches between inflation and deflation are only nurtured when it suits the people doing the managing and they are not in the business of telegraphing when that would be.
Years of inflation have already ensnared the bulk of people in debt. All that remains is to mop up the minority of people, mostly Baby Boomers who until a few months ago were expecting a nice, cushy retirement, who actually put money aside over that time
And those who placed their money in the markets have just lost 40-50% of their savings
Those who've kept away from the markets and are holding cash instead can look forward to a 0% interest rate, whilst prices are rising 10%+, as their reward
Once the savers have been rogered good and proper, that's everyone in the bottom 99.99% of society accounted for, then all the money our governments have released to the shadow banking system can be unleashed to buy everything that's worth buying unopposed
A massive transfer of real wealth will then take place and a glittering future of supercharged debt-serfdom secured
And even if some ordinary people manage to avoid mortgaging their lives away and actually retain some savings, there will still be plenty of tricks left in the toybox to deal with them
None of this is too far off now but I won't be picking any dates
I met him whilst walking in the fresh, crispy mountains of Italy last week. I think it's what the locals call a 'Ghiro' - in English a 'Fat Dormouse'.
Conspiracy fans will be delighted to learn that the fat dormouse was introduced to the UK a 100 hundred years ago by Lord Rothschild...
"Their nickname is the Seven Sleepers as they hibernate for seven months of the year. Walter Rothschild, who later became the second Baron Rothschild, brought the first six Glis Glis to England in 1902. No-one knows exactly how, but they escaped into the wild from the Rothschild home at Tring Park and have spread and bred! However, instead of happily hibernating out of doors they moved inside for the English winter! Soon, local farmers were complaining of apple stores being ruined and local people were hearing unexplained bumps in the night ... a sure sign that the Glis Glis were making themselves quite at home in the attic. One woman was convinced she was going mad!"
This was clearly a pioneering act of primitive bioterrorism, though how fat dormice fit in exactly with the global banking conspiracy, the foundation of Israel, freemasonry and space aliens is still not 100% clear to me
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And because I'm more than a little bit sad, all the walking I've been doing here and in my Mothersland and my encounters with fat dormice, amusingly-shaped mushrooms (another time, another photo) and all sorts of other livings things in their natural environment, I've been pondering upon the 'Genius of Darwin' as much as ever - especially the impact of Darwinism on the way people think
As it happens, whether Darwin was right or wrong about the Evolution of Life makes virtually bugger all difference to most people's daily lives.However, Darwinism has affected the way people interpret tangible events that do impact on their daily lives
Before Darwinism and the Enlightenment, most people believed that someone, or some entity, was responsible for everything that happened. The weather, the outcome of battles, the shape of tea leaves in a cup, the throw of some dice; all was the Will of some god or other.
There was no such thing as chance. Everything that happened was the predetermined outcome of a controlling intelligence
After Darwin, it was considered very clever to believe that everything of any importance or scale was the result of blind chance. Any pattern of events that appeared to be result of design was simply the result of blind chance combined with some kind of selection mechanism
The result was that, in the act of denying the Hand of God in natural affairs, Darwinism also had the consequence of denying the Hand of Man in human affairs
Anyone who suggests that the course of human, or natural affairs, may be the result of the interplay of intelligent planning and the natural selection of random events is now branded an irrational religious lunatic or a conspiracy theorist
Shit just happens
and if you don't believe that Shit just happens then you're only fit for the Funny Farm
Because I'm a Loon I believe that the promotion of this kind of thinking, as an essentially exclusive model to explain how the world works, was an entirely deliberate course of action - but I would wouldn't I
If you would like to witness a nice example of what I'm talking about, the mainstream coverage of the recent financial turmoil is a nice case history
The unwavering message of the mainstream coverage of the 'Credit Crunch' is...
The impending implosion of our financial system is an unintended consequence of unreasoning, animalistic, undirected greed and fear
No-one could have predicted it
There is no predetermined objective
The people responsible for our great financial institutions are honestly trying to unfuck things as best as they can for the Common Good
The possibility that the crisis could have been deliberately engineered in some way, and that some very clever, powerful people knew exactly what was going to happen, is deemed so unlikely it is not raised even to be debunked
Presumably, the fact that so many On-line Conspiranauts have been predicting this crash for years, in accordance with their insane models of how the world really works, is merely blind luck
And if all those CCTV cameras, databases, terrorism laws and detention infrastructure are turned towards, instead of the shadowy terrorists, a general public fucked-off with being robbed blind that will be an unintended outcome too
The reason why I have such a very big problem with Richard Dawkins is not that he is the leading spokesperson for Darwinist Evolutionary Theory. As it happens, I personally have many strong objections to Darwinism. However, some of my best friends are Evolutionists yet I feel absolutely no need to direct abuse at them
Nope, it's not the Darwinism thing that pisses me off about Dawkins
It's the fact that he represents the perversion of what now passes for popular science which has little to do with the idealised scientific method and a lot more to do with advocacy, case-building, lawyers tricks and politics
Science shouldn't be about amassing whatever evidence you can find to support your ideas
It should be about seeking out the material which most strongly challenges your theories
The perfect scientist says to himself every day 'I don't want to be wrong so I'm going to come up with everything I can to prove myself wrong'
Some common clues which suggest that someone posing as a scientist might actually be behaving like a Dawkins-style scientician include...
Cherry picking of real data and the rejection, or editing, of anomalous data
Any attempts to force people into 'you're with us or against us' style false choices
Any claims that the science of any subject is 'settled once and for all'
Attempts to depict anyone with opposing points of view as a nutter
The problem is, of course, when faced with a fundamentalist pulling these kind of stunts is that it's difficult not to be drawn into a similar pattern of behaviour and respond to foamy-mouthed advocacy with foamy-mouthed counter advocacy
I've had a couple of recent exchanges with some chums on the subject of man made global warming
They send me links about temperatures going up. I send them links about temperatures going down
They send me links about polar bear numbers shrinking and pictures of cute baby bears stuck on ice floes. I send them links about about polar bear numbers not shrinking and pictures of ice breakers stuck in ice
and then I remembered visiting Athens this year, a few days after it had been covered by six inches of freak snow
and then I remembered a mate spending the night in my place after visiting China with a suitcase full of flip flops and chinos only to walk into the worst snowstorms in fifty years
Here in the UK we've just endured yet another spectacularly shitty summer, with the BBC covering up for that other bunch of propagandist stooges at the Met Office, who fucked-up their summer forecast yet again, by downplaying how bad the summer was and knocking out articles suggesting that there was nothing unusual about this summer at all...
I can't find any reference to that fact on the State Broadcasting Company's website but I did find an old article bigging up the implications of sunspot activity four years ago (link corrected), when sunspot activity was consistent with the global warming myth. The article ends with the most outstanding horseshit I've seen labeled as science for at least a week...
'This latest analysis shows that the Sun has had a considerable indirect influence on the global climate in the past, causing the Earth to warm or chill, and that mankind is amplifying the Sun's latest attempt to warm the Earth.'
When the language of climate change gets so screwed up that the Sun is referred to as having an 'indirect impact on global climate' (as opposed to the presumably ever so direct impact of that devil gas CO2) you can be pretty sure somebody's trying to sell you a serious lemon
That critical mass of people who reject the blanket, stochastic treatment of everything that happens in the world as being stuff that 'just happens' because everyone in charge of things is supposedly an idiot (except for the Islamic terrorists, obviously) - as peddled by smug bell-ends like Charlton - is almost there
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...and yes, I appreciate that calling someone like Charlton a big, daft, floppy cock is no substitute for reasoned argument and evidence
Charlton Brooker
but, every now and again, the fact you are considered fair game, as an individual or as part of a group, to be slandered as having mental problems, holding racist views or being some kind of ghoulish jackal for the simple act of questioning some of the crap you're told by proven liars is a bit too rich to digest .
After all, we're all only human
...except for the reptilian alien overlords all of us conspiracy theorists believe in, obviously
Human beings might not be the only species that kills for sport (an ignorant cliche from the same stable as 'religion is the cause of all wars') but it certainly is the only species that is self-aware enough and hates itself enough to contemplate its own eradication
1. They believe everything happens by accident 2. They believe everything happens by accident 3. They believe everything happens by accident
4. They believe everything happens by accident 5. They believe everything happens by accident 6. They believe everything happens by accident
7. They believe everything happens by accident 8. They believe everything happens by accident 9. They believe everything happens by accident
Afghan Opium Cultivation '94-'08 (hectares)
10. They believe everything happens by accident, except when it's wogs doing it
International Global Terror Conspiracy Centrale - Iocated somewhere between Mordor and Earthsea
Which I admit isn't strictly fair. Sometimes coincidence theorists believe that when bad people lie so that they can do bad things and bad things do indeed happen those bad things were unintended consequences
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Primary Education: The mean streets of Lambeth,
Secondary School: St Trinians,
Pet's Name: Zoltan! Hound of Dracula,
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Armand Marie Leroi - currently locked in a fierce competitive struggle with Richard Dawkins
"Isaac was fucked if he knew what was going to happen next"
