Black Swans and Austrian Teddy Bears

At the bottom of an earlier post there's a little discussion about a couple of books I've been reading that contain some overlapping themes

The first is Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan

- Black Swans being large-impact, hard-to-predict, random, unplanned and rare events beyond the realm of normal expectations.

The second is Naomi Kein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

- 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

Other members of this elite club include Jim Rogers, Jim Puplava and, of course, Maaaaaaaax Keiser

(and Michael Hudson and F W Engdahl, sort of)

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

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Fish of the Month August 2008 - The Coelacanth

Coelacanths are, of course, popularly known as 'living fossils'




The oldest Coelacanth fossils have been dated as being about 400 million years old. The youngest fossil Coelacanths have been dated at about 70 million years old

And, for a while, palaeontologists and evolutionists thought that the coelacanths could possibly have been the first fish to develop legs, take the first tentative steps on land (presumably whilst holding their breath until they evolved a set of complimentary air-breathing lungs) and started the land-based evolutionary branch which culminated in the birth of Richard Dawkins

There wasn't actually any direct evidence that leg-sprouting fish have ever actually existed but they would fit nicely into a particular story and so evolutionists have allways been keen to find, or draw, some

Fantasia (1940) - leg sprouting fish make their appearance @1:48

Unfortunately for the coelacanth's place in evolutionary history, the coelacanth had to be taken off the list of possible candidates when people started pulling living examples out of the sea from the late 1930s onwards...

which raised all sorts of interesting questions such as...

• Where had they been hiding for the last 70 million years?

• How is it that a fish that was once identified as being the possible ancestor of all land based tetrapods, which is a fair old slab of evolution by any measure, didn't actually evolve very much at all?
  
  According to the Coelacanth page on Talk Origins that's because -'The theory of evolution does not say that all organisms must evolve. In an unchanging environment, natural selection would tend to keep things largely unchanged morphologically'
  
  ...except for when things do change
  
  which is another way of saying that evolutionary theory is a great way of 'explaining' things after they've happened but crap at predicting what will happen (cf. Nostradamus)
  
  (things must have been very quiet around the waters off Japan, where this character lives, for the last 550 million years)
  

More walking fish - this time courtesy of Guinness

Coelacanths do, however, clearly have a sense of humour and are aware that humans used to draw pictures of them walking around the sea bed on their fins, rehearsing their conquest of Land

Because, whenever anyone points a video camera at a coelacanth, they swim around doing cute little vertical headstands, keeping their feet fins as far away from the sea bed as possible...





So, in the context of the coelacanth, the term 'living fossil' is another, shorter, way of saying...

'we used to think this creature was long dead and thought we could get away with making up all sorts of fairy tales about it but then the fucker turned out to be still alive and left us all looking like gimps, the bastard'

The Coelacanth - My Fish Selection of the Month, August 2008 - learn more over at...

DINOFISH.com

NB Richard Dawkins is currently appearing in Summer Season over at Channel 4 - and for someone advocating such a supposedly unassailable case his compulsion to tell one or two whoppers in the process is quite perplexing

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What staring at tits for over 30 years can teach us about climate change

And whilst on the subject of pathological thinking, there’s a recent article in New Scientist which a couple of people have sent me the link to largely, I suspect, because of its excellent title…

Great tits enjoying the warmer weather – so far

Putting aside the fact that average global temperature appears to be currently falling, I have been enjoying the sight of a couple of pairs of tits bouncing around my back yard for the last month or so and, yes, they do seem to be doing well

Apparently, scientists who have been staring at tits for over 30 years have discovered that tits have the uncanny ability to eat their favourite food if it becomes readily available earlier in the year

One would also suspect that tits also have the remarkable ability of eating less of their favourite food if it is not readily available

All of which proves, er, not very much at all

The New Scientist article includes a link to similar high grade research carried out on squirrels…

Squirrels evolve as the world heats up

...which proves that when faced with abundant food supplies squirrels ‘evolve’ in less than four generations into… fat squirrels

This is pseudo-scientific bollocks of the highest quality; combining, as it does, both climate change bollocks and neo-Darwinist bollocks in one seamless, grant application-friendly package

"Because climate change is happening so fast, the perceived wisdom is that mammals won't be able to undergo evolution to keep up with that. But this work offers a little glimmer of hope, at least for some species."

And, as with so much of what passes for rational orthodoxy in the new normal of our post 9/11 world, I keep asking myself did so much of what passes for science these days turn into politicised nonsense recently or has it always been this shite?

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They seek it here. They seek it there. They can't find that pesky excess heat anywhere

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Could anyone who knows the whereabouts of a few zillion missing joules of anthropogenic global warming please contact the relevant world government lobbyists



It’s about ten years old, answers to the name of Impending Global Apocalypse and was last seen in a computer model


(edit: there's some quality linkage in the comments underneath this post btw)

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Those Precious Bodily Fluorides

Sterling Hayden - a very interesting choice of actor, to say the least, to play a commie-hating lunatic

Dr Strangelove is, in my humble opinion, one of the most near-perfect movies ever made.

The only wee fault I can really pick with it is the fluoride thing

Fluoride is a fucking poison after all

As a fellow loon put it…

• If fluoride leaks into the air, it's a toxin.

• If fluoride leaks into rivers, it's a toxin.

• If States and Corporations put fluoride in your water, learn to love it, it's good for you.

And it always struck me as peculiar that a fully paid-up conspiraloon like Kubrick would so effectively damn anyone who has conceptual problems with drinking poison

Thanks to including a fluoride-obsessed nutcase, who is responsible for the destruction of the entire world, in such an excellent film Kubrick helped to kick objections to fluoridisation into touch for the next forty years

And because of Strangelove and because (most) British water supplies didn’t have fluorine-based crap dumped into them, most people in the UK haven’t been too concerned about the fluoride thing

Maybe we should now

Those twunts Gordon Brown and Alan Johnson are set on making fluoridisation of our water compulsory and are putting public money into promoting it

The almost perfect coincidence of timing with a government drive to do away with bottled water is, no doubt, entirely accidental

Even if the people who have campaigned passionately against fluoridisation of water for decades are wrong and fluoride doesn’t fuck up peoples' bones, brain chemistry and teeth, it defies common sense to believe that forcing the entire population to swallow a chemical just to prevent holes in kids' teeth, a chemical which is only supposed to work when applied externally anyway, is a good idea

Of course, the really interesting question is why do so many people in authority have such a hard-on for involuntarily medicating us all through our water supply?

Anyway, here’s a 30 minute long introduction to the Fluoridisation issue. It’s the best of the dissident material out there that I’ve seen to date and covers such amusing subjects as Edward Bernays ( = total c^nt) and the manufacture of consent, how to dispose of otherwise hard to handle industrial toxic waste by making people drink it, and the fine art of neutralising legitimate, science-based objections by using the power of the media to smear objectors as lunatics…





And here’s another film which isn’t anywhere near as comprehensive but does feature some superb Australasian accents

And if all this talk of fluoride, aspartame and all that other toxic filth governments and corporations are putting into our food and water for our benefit (a doped brain is a happy brain) really does scare the daylights out of you why not consider drawing those harmful toxins out of your body through your feet?

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PS

A top quote from the New Scientist at the end of this Q&A page on rumours about armies sticking compounds of that other fun halogen, bromine, into soldiers' tea…

“In the 19th century, bromide salts were used widely as sedatives to treat everything from epilepsy to sleeplessness. The bromide salts were said to "reduce the excitability of the brain". The normal dose was between 5 and 30 grains, which were taken several times a day (there are about 13 grains per gram). In the 19th century it was common for children of the upper classes to be flattered by the gift of a personal salt cellar for use at meals. They were led to believe this indicated their increasing status within the family group. The salt was in fact mixed with bromide to make the child better behaved.

Bromides are a sedative and the libido reduction is a side-effect. The use of bromide salts as a sleeping draught appears in the novels of Emile Zola, indicating their effects were recognised at some time in the 19th century.”

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A new Messiah in waiting

A scary thought just came over me whilst commenting on another blog on the subject of global warming

Having a little background in Earth history, a healthy mistrust of oligarchical dynasties such as the Windsors, the Goldsmiths and the Rothschilds and therefore their envirofeudalist spawn, and having visited Greece last month just a few days after the Parthenon was covered in six inches of snow, I'm just a teensy wee bit sceptical about the Man Made Global Warming thing

my comment went something like this...

"the new fad in 2009 might actually be how we’re all going to stop the climate getting cooler

…tax rebates on 4×4 ownership, fines for cavity wall insulation and double glazing, energy saving lightbulb crushing parties, all sorts of fun stuff

it’s all also worth pointing out the ‘debate’ is all about ‘climate change’ these days NOT ‘global warming’. The arse-covering has already been put in place in the language that is being used"


I must confess to being quite amused by the thought that the entire climate change industry might be obliged to one day rapidly turn 180 degrees and start extolling the virtues of pumping as much crap into the atmosphere as possible


What wasn't so amusing was the follow-on thought as to the identity of the person most eminently qualified to lead such a movement to try and maintain the Earth at its most correct temperature for the last 650 million years; as designated by the David Rothschild and his chums (that would be, of course, today's temperature), through the energetic promotion of deliberate Man Made Global Warming

It could only be one person couldn't it?



strange times make for some seriously fucking strange alliances

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Nuclear Pirates

There's been a little discussion over at the Conspiraloon Alliance blog about the latest 'Dirty Bomb' bollocks that has been fed to and faithfully regurgitated by the mainstream media




Nuclear 'Dirty Bombs' are, of course...

a) less lethal than bombs made out of the equivalent weight of regular explosive...

"Because a terrorist dirty bomb is unlikely to cause many deaths, many do not consider this to be a weapon of mass destruction. Its purpose would presumably be to create psychological, not physical, harm through ignorance, mass panic, and terror. For this reason dirty bombs are sometimes called "weapons of mass disruption". Additionally, containment and decontamination of thousands of panic-stricken victims, as well as decontamination of the affected area might require considerable time and expense, rendering affected areas partly unusable and causing economic damage."

(especially if people have been scared shitless of the things by a steady preparatory diet of terrorist fear-mongering from government, terror 'consultants' and the media beforehand)

'Dirty Bombs' are also...

b) non existent

Not that non-existence is considered a reasonable defence by the Crown Prosecution Service when deciding whether a case should go to trial or not - as demonstrated by the Red Mercury 'Dirty Bomb' trial a year or so ago

Inspired by tales of (t)errorists trying to get their hands on useless Dirty Bombs and non-existent Red Mercury, I started compiling my own version of other substances that MI5/MI6 might believe to be on Al-Qaeda's Terror Shopping List...

- Kryptonite
- Dilithium Crystals
- Soylent Green
- Unobtainium
- Fubarite
- Flubber
- Oxy-Gum...

Oxy-Gum was the substance that enabled one of my childhood heroes, Marine Boy, to breathe underwater and use his propeller boots and sonic boomerang (also on Al Qaeda's probable wish list) to maintain peace and security in the Earth's oceans

and imagine my delight when, on searching through Youtube for Marine Boy clips, I discovered a classic episode of Marine Boy entitled 'The Nuclear Pirates' dated c.1967 which dealt with the very subject of piracy of radioactive materials on the high seas and the sophisticated anti-terrorism tactics employed by Marine Boy in thwarting bearded (naturally) nuclear pirates...




Synchronicity is a very wonderful thing

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What's a Creationist's Favourite Sandwich?

The mysterious origins of Life - as illustrated by a large banana smeared with warm, dripping peanut butter

As I've posted on this blog, once or twice, I'm not a big fan of Darwinism. For many reasons, which I'm not going to go into here, I'm about as sure that it doesn't stack up as I can be about anything

I am also equally sure that mainstream scientific orthodoxy on the closely-related, though not the same, subject of abiogenesis - the spontaneous generation of Life from inanimate matter is also pretty ropey

It's not a question about abiogenesis being hugely improbable. As things stand, within the restrictions of our current level of knowledge, abiogenesis is flat out impossibile. There is nothing like a viable theory to explain how something as simple as a single-celled organism (not simple at all) can spring into existence out of its constituents chemical parts. And as for actually replicating that process in a lab, forget it.

Put simply, the notion that life spontaneously sprang out of nothing is currently a faith based belief; anchored on two extremely sophisticated scientific principles which only someone with a brain as large as Richard Dawkins' can comprehend...

1. Life must have come from somewhere
   
   
2. There's no fucking way I'm bringing God or Space Aliens into it

And if anyone bumping into this post thinks they can pull me up on this; without reverting to Dawkins-style bullshit and deceit, I'd genuinely love to hear from them (False-choice, 'you're either with us or against us', proofs that people who believe in Jesus are wrong about the origins of Life and therefore Dawkins must be right definitely don't count)

Over the years I've seen several thoughtful, intelligent attempts to communicate the deficiencies in mainstream science's attempts to grapple with abiogenesis

This is not one of them...

Peanut Butter, The Atheist's Nightmare!

I originally posted a link to that video on the Conspiraloon Alliance blog and wasn't going to bother replicating the post here

However, someone posted a link to another Masterpiece of Food-based Creationist PR in a comment underneath...

The atheist's nightmare: the banana

Where this Creationist obsession with high-calorie sandwich fillings comes from God(?) only knows, though it does apparently have its limits. Follow-up searches for titles such as 'Why Secular Humanists Fear Spreadable Marshmallow' and 'Jam - The Agnostic's Nemesis' on Google/ Youtube have, so far, stubbornly refused to yield any positive results :(

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Phew! What a scorcher!

This one is so priceless it's worth lifting straight from Lord Patel's blog

Per the UK met office...


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Catastrophic Gradualism (redux)

Thanks to Tony for pointing me towards an amusing article on the BBC website entitled ‘Climate scepticism: The top 10’…

“We look at 10 of the arguments most often made against the IPCC consensus, and some of the counter-arguments made by scientists who agree with the IPCC”

There is much sceptical amusement to be had here and for me personally the stand-out argument is #7…

7. A CARBON DIOXIDE RISE HAS ALWAYS COME AFTER A TEMPERATURE INCREASE NOT BEFORE

Sceptic

Ice-cores dating back nearly one million years show a pattern of temperature and CO2 rise at roughly 100,000-year intervals. But the CO2 rise has always come after the temperature rise, not before, presumably as warmer temperatures have liberated the gas from oceans.

Counter

This is largely true, but largely irrelevant. Ancient ice-cores do show CO2 rising after temperature by a few hundred years - a timescale associated with the ocean response to atmospheric changes mainly driven by wobbles in the Earth's orbit. However, the situation today is dramatically different. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere (35% increase over pre-industrial levels) is from human emissions. Levels are higher than have been seen in 650,000 years of ice-core records, and are possibly higher than any time since three million years ago.

Fellow Man Made Global Warming sceptics will no doubt enjoy that definition of ‘largely irrelevant’ immensely

And as a MMGW sceptic, I’m a little disappointed that the top reason for my own scepticism is absent from the list…

"Man Made Global Warming advocates are fucking pussies"

Not only are they Climate Change Deniers they are actually too scared to face up to the fact that there’s absolutely nothing we can do to prevent Climate Change

George Monbiot and some pals on the campaign trail

So, instead of advocating measures that will enable mankind to adapt to that inevitable change they prefer to kid themselves that tweaking Humanity’s CO2 output a few percent is going to ensure that global climate stays exactly the fucking same for all time. Somewhat akin to trying to steer a 100,000 ton supertanker into dock with a lolly stick

Well, I’m convinced

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Standing back from the MMGW ‘debate’ a little, it’s fascinating to see the Doublethink which underpins contemporary Natural Science being exposed on a such a big public stage

The godfathers of modern geology and evolutionary theory made it very clear that natural science was all about very boring things happening, very gradually over the kind of mind-numbing timescales that dwarfed a human lifespan.

This is known as the principle of uniformitarianism…

“Uniformitarianism is one of the most basic principles of modern geology, the observation that fundamentally the same geological processes that operate today also operated in the distant past. It exists in contrast with catastrophism, which states that Earth surface features originated suddenly in the past, by geological processes radically different to those currently occurring.”

However, the motives for the adoption of uniformitarianism were arguably more ideological than scientific

A uniformitarian view of earth history permitted the huge timescales required for Darwinian Evolution to be a viable concept and, more importantly, it separated science from religion and all those dusty old books filled with catastrophic creation myths; especially floods

The only problem being that uniformitarianism is a load of old, gradualistic cock

Trying to piece together the history of the Earth without acknowledging the key role played by catastrophes is like trying prepare a report on an air crash without making any reference to any actual crashing

The Earth is littered with evidence of past catastrophes and processes that are not in operation today

And for the better part of 200 years geologists have either ignored that evidence or made up some really silly gradualistic stories to account for it

Personal favourite examples of catastrophic, in your face, geological features with bollocks explanations include; the periodic reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, the formation of 1km thick beds of pure salt through evaporation (that’s a lot of fecking evaporation), limestone formation, the mechanism for plate tectonics and last, but not least, fossil formation.

Hands up anyone who can point me to anywhere on Earth where fossil beds or even that most tediously common of rocks, limestone, are currently being deposited

/ waits patiently

/ doesn't hold breath

The problem with contemporary uniformitarianism is that whilst pushing the Bible and religion out of the picture it also negates the Number One reason why Catastrophes were written into the Bible in the first place…

To scare the shit out of people

Big Scary Floods brought about by ignoring Prophets and continuing with Our Sinful Ways ...undergoing a bit of a Renaissance at the moment

And scaring the shit out of people, especially kids with their lovely squishy unconditioned minds, is very much the name of the game these days

and the Question for the Day is : "Why is it, with the constant diet of unrelenting optimism about their future being rammed down our kids' necks every day, that so many of our teens choose to drink themselves stupid on a regular basis? Yes, I know!! It must be the availability of alcohol. Yes, that's got to be it..."

We are now living in a weird point in time where mainstream science still pays lip service to uniformitarianism but simultaneously ramps up the catastrophe side of things to meet the needs of the current social and political climate

So, modern science is very much like the Bible then but without the Holy Men




OK, slightly fewer Holy Men

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PS Another favourite example of bollocks explanations for possibly catastrophic past events I didn’t list above was the level of radioactive isotopes in the Earth’s atmosphere. If you don’t calibrate/ fiddle raw data for atmospheric levels of Carbon and Helium isotopes you find yourself looking at some rather short, embarrassingly biblical-looking, dates for the age of our atmosphere. But that’s by the by. Whilst looking for pointers towards any new rationalisations in the field of radiocarbon dating I’ve just noticed that someone has sneaked in a couple of amusing links into Wikipedia’s article on RC dating

The links point towards the works of a guy called Anatoly Fomenko, a proponent of the most amusing piece of Loonery™ I’ve seen all week…

“Fomenko is a supporter of revising chronological history. He has created his own revision called "New Chronology", based on statistical correlations, dating of zodiacs, and by examining the mathematics and astronomy involved in chronology. Fomenko claims that he has discovered that many historical events do not correspond mathematically with the dates they are supposed to have occurred on. He asserts from this that all of ancient history (including the history of Greece, Rome, and Egypt) is just a reflection of events that occurred in the Middle Ages and that all of Chinese and Arab history are fabrications of 17th and 18th century Jesuits. He also claims that Jesus lived in the 12th century A.D. and was crucified in Constantinople; that the Trojan war and the Crusades were the same historical event; and that Genghis Khan and the Mongols were actually Russians. As well as disputing written chronologies, Fomenko also disputes more objective dating techniques such as dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating.”

Whilst I'm not exactly convinced by Fomenko’s thesis I have to admit that it does display a certain degree of style and can’t be faulted for lack of scope or ambition...






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PPS and a couple of stills of Klaus Kinski's finest hour I really wanted to, but couldn't find a legitimate way to, include in this post...



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Cast Your Vote(s) for Real Science

Thanks to Tony for pointing me towards a post on the Cognitive Daily blog which got a plug from Boing Boing a couple of days back...

"In the 'Weblog Awards Best Science Blog Contest' a psuedoscience web site denying the effect humans have on global warming is currently in the lead over real science blogs. Apparently conservative political sites have been directing their readers to vote for it, whether they read it or not."

And Cognitive Daily’s suggested response to allegations of on-line ballot stuffing?

"I would like to ask you do one thing for us in the name of promoting good science on the internet. Vote for Bad Astronomy in the Weblog Awards Best Science Blog Contest. You can vote as often as once a day, and I encourage you to take advantage of that option."

Oh the fucking irony

Naturally, I felt compelled to visit the ‘pseudoscience’ site in question and was rewarded straight away with an amusing little piece about Al Gore and his breezy, Devil may care attitude to graphs...







Even though I’m currently extremely sceptical about the current case being made for Anthropogenic Global Warming and detect the barely disguised stench of a controlling, elitist global agenda behind that case, I’m personally open to hearing what sincere, decent people who buy into AGW have to say.

Trying to make the debate a Left vs. Right issue, insulting people who hold honest and well-founded reservations about AGW, or circulating half-arsed propaganda in our schools in an attempt to terrify and condition our children doesn’t qualify.

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And on a slightly related subject, whilst I’ve been off-line a post I made on the Conspiraloon™ Alliance blog on the subject of fruity symbolism plastered all over our money generated a comment thread which ranged far and wide over the subjects of political and religious belief systems, culminating in one commentator posting a few images taken from Madonna’s performance of Ray of Light at the 7/7/7 Live Earth Concert…

Faster than the speeding light she's flying

Trying to remember where it all began
She's got herself a little piece of heaven
Waiting for the time when Earth shall be as one

So, who are the nutters then? The people who make, broadcast and consume this stuff or the admittedly much smaller number of people who think material like this is just a teensy wee bit fucked up and fascist and question where it is all going?

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