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?
University College London Hospital. Hmmm, pointy...
If the City of London is the centre of the financial power of the British oligarchical elite, the area around University College is the heart of its psychological and pharmaceutical power.
The City is about fucking with your wallet. Bloombsury is about fucking with your brain and your body
Bloomsbury is home to a delightful mix of state run academia, big pharma and benevolent (sic.) charitable foundations, all fused into one big yummy, indistinguishable mass; which some people would describe as fascistic but I think is just plain scary
The local architecture is a bit of a give-away And one thing that continues to baffle me is, how when some of us point out that the oligarchical elite has a demonstrable fondness for fruity little clubs, rituals, symbolism and architecture, the sheer lunacy of the fruity little clubs, rituals, symbolism, and architecture is somehow laid at the door of the people doing the pointing out, not the people responsible for it all Did I mention that the Tavistock Institute was founded in Bloomsbury? .
Normal service on this blog continues to be hampered by the fact that I've moved halfway around the world, am still looking for a home and a job and can only access the internet whilst peering at a poxy little netbook hooked up to a modem/ internet connection that would have been laughably inadequate ten years ago...
but
there's no way I'm going to pass by on the opportunity to link to this little gem which will delight George Monbiot fans worldwide (and cheers to Parabellum, yet again, for the heads up)...
A more accurate title for Monbiot's article would be something along the lines of 'How to make yourself look like a Complete Dick in 26 seconds', or as George himself admitted in more round about terms...
Now, much as I hate myself for saying so, we all make mistakes and George did fess up pretty quickly
Mind you, the red, trident wielding, pixie standing on my right shoulder is whispering in my ear to remind me that George's article was presented as a personal attack on Christopher Booker, so it's actually perfectly fair game to point out that Monbiot is an utter, utter tosser
and a wrong tosser at that
but that's all by the by
The really disturbing thing, and this has been a constant theme of this blog, is the uncritical, faith-based, adulation poured on Monbiot by his genuinley adoring commentators underneath
There's also the usual tediously involved debate, along the lines of how many angels can you fit on a pin head, about completely irrelevant, inconclusive trivia which virtually all on-line 'discussions' about Man Made (?) Climate Change inevitably degrade into
The interesting, and disturbing, thing is, of course, is that the fact that even though Monbiot is actually demonstrably and self-admittedly wrong in this case, that news will make absolutely no difference to people who commented positively about his article before George admitted to his error
as Parabellum said when pointing me towards Monbiot's article...
"Why do people don't see that they *themselves* can fall prey to heuristics and biases? Why do many many people think that only *other* people make mistakes? On the other hand, I try to stay critical of my own judgement but this is not very healthy if overdone. Sometimes I envy people that are so sure of themselves that they can ignore all the mistakes they make..."
If there's one common denominator connecting themes and ideas discussed on this blog it's the mischievous thought that, actually, if you look closely, and objectively enough at most things that 'every rational personal knows to be True', be they 'shit just happens' based explanations of human events or sacred scientific theories which are venerated as religious dogma, they all pretty much turn out to be bollocks
Which is only fair enough
Every generation that's ever lived before Us based their lives on belief in an awful lot of bollocks which was subsequently proven to be bollocks
So why should We be any different?
Well, except for George Monbiot followers, they're obviously different, and a little bit special
Remember - if it's cold it's only weather, if it's warm it's Man Made Climate Change
Large swathes of the UK are currently draped in an ever thickening blanket of snow
Apparently, the country has virtually ground to a standstill
Daily Express readers will no doubt blame the fact that lots of people can't get to work on eleven years of 'ZanuLabour' misrule.
The alternative point of view is that quite a few people are secretly just a tiny wee bit pleased that they don't have to go in to work today and didn't try that hard
Including, I fear, the people behind this website...
...which attempts to monitor how well our national electricity grid is holding up at any given point in time
Here's what things were looking like last night at about 10pm...
There was me watching the needle gradually drop lower and lower ...when the bogging site goes off line
Boo
Spoilsports
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When not sitting around waiting for the lights to go out, I'm also staring morbidly at the price of stuff going up, especially photographic equipment
I've been keeping an eye on the prices of a couple of lenses I was planning to pick up before heading off to the other side of the world and I've noticed a couple of things over the last few months...
- Suppliers, even the solvent ones, have been running out of stock because normal scheduled deliveries haven't been turning up. I'm guessing that's at least partly due to the much discussed collapse of the global shipping trade (I've had a dozen boxes sitting in a warehouse waiting to hitch a ride to the Antipodes for a month and a half)
- Thanks to the £ tanking, photographic manufacturers have started jacking up their prices; in Canon's case twice in a month, in Sigma's case only once, but by 40%
Camera gear is hardly one of Life's essentials but this doesn't bode well for the future pricing and availability of the slightly more essential
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
I can't put my finger on exactly when but at some point over the last six months a crossover point was reached when the alleged spoof news on The Daily Mash became more factual and less satirical than the current affairs coverage offered by the BBC
At least a couple of times a day now I have to do a double check halfway through reading a news story just to remind myself which site I'm actually on
Being shit at making predictions has never stopped them before. And it has certainly proved to be no impediment to the Bank of England, the Meteorological Office, the Intelligence Services and just about every other fucker out there who's been earning a tidy living churning out dishonest bullshit
nope, I can't see any kind of a clear trend there...
For 'Too difficult' read 'We could make an objective, rigorous prediction but it's not the objective, rigorous prediction we're paid to make and we can't even pretend the lie is true anymore. So we're packing up and starting Christmas early, bye. PS UK house prices are fucked'
Me, I'm confidently predicting that 2009 is going to be a peach
Taleb seems to think he was the only fucker out there who saw what was coming
Taleb is essentially promoting a varient of the 'cockup not conspiracy' aka 'tragic schoolboy error' explanation of how the world works
This is important, I think, because some variant of Taleb's Black Swan' thesis is set to become the orthodox explanation for what is happening to the world's finances
and, as such, no-one is to be held accountable for what lies ahead
Sure, the majority of mid-level contributors to this mess were daft fools driven by greed and fear; with no comprehension of where they were headed
But to believe that only Nassim Taleb, and some net based Loons, were the only people who could see a crash coming is nonsense - and more than a little arrogant
It's also worth remembering that, at the same time the seeds for the current crash were being sown, the key components of a fully-blown surveillance and detention state were being rushed into place in the same countries that were inflating the bubble.
It's also worth asking yourself just how much, or little, wealth the people responsible for inflating the bubble have lost personally
The fact that history is littered with, admittedly simpler, smaller scale, occurrences of the same kind of kleptocratic economic terrorism is also a bit of a give away
No doubt any non Loons passing through this blog would, if they could be bothered, dismiss my outpourings as being those of a deranged paranoid lunatic
But then there's the small matter of my blog, and countless others out there, detailing quite specifically what lay ahead
So, sorry, claims that what is happening was inherently unpredictable don't impress me much at all.And shame on all those fuckers out there in cyberspace and the mainstream media who devoted their time to sticking the knife into us 'tinfoil hatters' when the infrastructure for chaos-driven rape and pillage was being laid down piece by piece
Taleb's almost certainly correct when he argues that the specific outcomes of this crash can't be predicted with any degree of certainty
But, there again, if you control all the guns, money and food would you need to?
(Something which dawned on me whilst pondering the Conspiraloon vs the Non Conspiraloon mental models for comprehending how the world of high finance works is that the Loon looks upon the financial markets as being a means of waging war on ordinary people. And, in war, any successful general makes provision for the unexpected, engages in contingency planning, retains reserves, and makes cold-blooded calculations about what proportion of his own forces he is willing to expend. In warfare, chaos and Black Swan events are pretty much a given and positively encouraged. Your objective is to comprehensively fuck up your enemy's ability to comprehend and respond to what you are doing, and then kill him. Non Loons who simply take the markets at face value will probably lose me totally at this point...)
- 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
Thanks to Paul over at the Conspiraloon Alliance for making me aware of this powerful simulation of what might really happen under certain circumstances:..
this is going to be a winner with the kind of people who hold in-depth conversations with their cats or who buy pyjamas for their poodles .
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
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...
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
Handy Tips for Internet-based identity thieves: Mother's maiden name: Yamamoto,
Primary Education: The mean streets of Lambeth,
Secondary School: St Trinians,
Pet's Name: Zoltan! Hound of Dracula,
Memorable Date: Yesterday
This Blog approves of Economicians who sound like ducks
Michael Hudson
F W Engdahl
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This blog is also an Official™ Member of the Dame Pauline Neville Jones Fan Club
Fish of the Month
Piglet Squid
Sudden Adult Death Syndrome
In our first ever public health campaign, we seek to highlight the unexplained and deadly curse that stalks our world - and has left our greatest scienticians baffled! Please alert us to possible sightings and help eradicate this menace once and for all.
University College London Hospital. Hmmm, pointy...
