February 06, 2023
"Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to."
-Theodore Dalrymple
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I just learned a fascinating fact from Lyle Hancock Sr. Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard (who was the father of the atom bomb because he figured out how a nuclear reaction would work back in the early '30's) invented a type of refrigerator which required next no power.
We mostly think of Einstein and Szilard as theoretical physicists and impractical men, but the reality was they invented this cooling system that used the properties of different gases (and the subsequent differences in evaporation temperatures) and a magnetic pump to cool. It had no moving parts and did not rely on a compressor as does a standard freon refrigerator.
The gadget - called an absorbtion refrigerator - required only a candle to be lit and placed under it (or a pilot light using propane or oil). It was as cool as any freon refrigerator.
Einstein and Szilard patented this in 1930.
Unfortunately the state of the art was inadequate for mass production of these units, and so they have largely been forgotten.
They work with two ccoolants. One is evaporated and absorbed by the second coolant. Heat is required to break the two back down into separate gases. Often ammonia and water are used. They absorb heat and then dump the heat via a heat-exchanger. The heat source breaks it back down.
Today many RV refrigerators use this technique.
It's fascinating to me that Einstein and Szilard were the inventors. I never realized the two men had any practical ideas.
Einstein is well known, Szilard less so. But the story of the atomic bomb could not have happened without him.
Szilard had just red H.G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds and was thinking about how the Martian death ray could work. He was sitting at a stoplight when it occurred to him that a death ray could use neutrons, triggering a chain reaction wave of neutrons hitting neutrons. He began work on this and wrote a paper theorizing the possibility of annihilating matter with neutrons. He quickly realized the vast amount of energy that would be released via fission.
The rest, they say, is history. Einstein's equations were used to work out the details, and the atomic age was born.
Pretty cool stories - in both cases!
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February 05, 2023
This warms my heart; the tinhorn dictator learns what it feels like at last.
Just in: Elon Musk bans Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter account
spacexmania.com
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Earth’s plate tectonic geology is unique in our solar system. It is due to tectonics that Life developed and is sustained. This article explains in greater detail. However, ignore any references to the greenhouse gas effect or subduction. Neither exist at all. Mantle convection does not exist. Continental Drift does not exist. more...
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Interesting details of the balloon shoot-down. The remains are in only 50 ft of water, so relatively easy to salvage (if they watched where it went in, which I'm sure they were planning for all week). The F22 was flying VERY high, 58,000 ft. It used a heat-seeking sidewinder missile (hard to believe there was enough heat signature for that).
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February 03, 2023
Once upon a time children were to be seen and not heard.
Now why was that? Because they didn't know anything, or knew little.
This is important if we are to understand what is wrong with our modern world.
We are born knowing nothing at all. We don't even know to breathe, and the doctor has to slap our suddenly cold bottoms to get us started. After that it's years of learning. We first must learn the rudiments of living, like how to walk, how to decode those noises made by those giants who give us food, and how to reproduce that code ourselves so our wants are better understood. Then how to walk, how to do everything.
We are pure students. We listen and learn. Others, those older who already know, teach.
It takes decades to learn enough to really be able to think. Oh, children think after a fashion. They rearrange prejudices, wants, and needs and take steps to acquire them, sometimes quite cleverly and creatively, but they lack the knowledge base needed for any serious thought. As the Apostle Paul put it "when I was a child I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child, but when I became a man I put away childish things." At some point one must become a man or a woman. That is where the knowledge base is adequate and the student then learns how to think - not what to think.
Here is where our modern world has failed.
Colleges used to be places where those who demonstrated mastery of facts learn how to use those facts, how to think, how to reason. Colleges used to teach subjects like rhetoric or logic; ones that assume the student has already mastered the what and is now about to learn the why and how.
Oh, they dabbled in it earlier in school, but the lower grades emphasized facts and not opinions or feelings or the value of your own ideas. The teacher was there to teach the core basics. The student was there to learn and master those facts.
That is why college was an elite thing; not that many youths reached the point where they could be taught how to think. Most young people took jobs and made a living where they did not need to think.
We turned this all on it's head. Public education was implemented thanks to the Germans and Dewey, who was a socialist who wanted to radically transform the world. They put everyone in mandatory public education, and they began changing the approach to teaching. Now it became more about creating worker drones, and the "education" was about instilling approved values into the young. The schools took over for the overworked parents as guardians and educators, and the kids believed what the schools told them because they had done that by habit from their births. Their parents told them to listen and believe. So the kids were easy fodder for the radicals who seized control early of the nascent educational system.
Today it is the hallmark of education to produce naive, gullible yet closed-minded young adults. They believe what their teachers told them as Gospel, and it is very hard to deprogram them. (The Jesuits used to say "give me a child for the first seven years and I will give you the man". That statement has been proven correct.) And since the Sexual Revolution brought many unwanted children into the world, and since the rise of feminism took women out of the home and put them into the workforce (at first voluntarily but now most couples have to have two incomes) the child was at the mercy of the post-modern educrats. More and more the State was the determining factor of values and beliefs.
Colleges stopped teaching HOW to think and became trade schools or propaganda mills. And this was even if they did not want to do that; the kids coming to them were sorely in need of remedial education since the public high schools did little to teach facts but everything to teach Progressive values. So the colleges had to teach facts - something that they were never intended to do. Rhetoric and logic and higher level thinking was pretty much removed from college curricula. It was replaced by STEM at best and "Gender Studies" or "American Studies" or some other work pile of Prog manure. The Liberal Arts completely rejected traditional education in favor of the post-modern thinking. Gone were the great books from the English Departments, replaced by liberal faux literature. The History departments dumped Western Civ in favor of Multiculturalism. Art rejected the classics in favor of this juvenile form of expressionism. Emotion came to trump reason. Feelings came to matter more than facts. The young students had limited facts, after all, to work with and that was by design by the revolutionaries running public education. But reason and facts are what diffentiate Man from the brute animals. So the educrats taught kids to live by emotion and not reason, and to dismiss facts as "white supremacism" or "patriarchy" or whatnot.
Man controls the animals because Man thinks better. We are not stronger, or faster, or better in any other way. And if we dumb down the public than those who were educated properly will be kings.
An emotion driven public is an easily controlled public.
That is where we are at today. It is now at a point where we can provide smoking gun proof of something and a majority will simply yawn, or openly argue when there is no evidence to support the conventional wisdom they espouse. We have taught our children to believe their elders and what is written or said, and now they will not depart from it. Those who speak truth to power are now the enemy.
The only way we can turn the tide on this is to go back to the start. It will only come first in the families, where the older values must be reinstilled. Public education must be restricted, limited. We need a moral and religious revival, for it was in that loss that this all came to the fore. People who do not believe in any sort of eternal truths certainly have no reason to believe anything at all. They can be convinced there are multiple sexes and that a man can have a period, for instance. That is a direct result of our failure to teach children enough to actually think.
Nietzche thought that Western science and Western culture bore in it the seeds of it's own destruction. He believed that eventually the fundamental assumptions of Western Civilization - that the universe is basically rational, that things are knowable, that there is a cosmic purpose, etc. would be challengedand eventually uprooted. Nihilism. And he was right. The cultural mandarins have amplified the idea that we can know nothing and so all is relative have the magaphone, and our children are their unwitting foot soldiers. They fight in the name of ennui and emptiness. They are angry at us for daring to tell them there is meaning to life and that there is right and wrong, truth and lies. Their anger stems fromt heir ultimate desire for such things but we told them to listen to those who denied their reality.
Now normality is the insurgent, having to fight a culture that is dying from it's own navel-gazing.
It all goes back to letting others do what we should have done. Children need to be told the way they should go. They need to learn facts. They need to understand that it is their role to listen and not speak. The old saying "children should be seen and not heard" was far wiser than anyone realized. We let them do their own thing, and then handed them off to radicals who turned them against us and against the world that provided for them.
The time has come to update the motto.to include liberals with the children. That is essentially what most leftists are anyway.
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So, Joe Biden is bragging about low unemployment numbers and slowing inflation. Why was inflation high to begin with? Because of his spendthrift policies and the Federal Reserve bailing him out by running the presses to make money to cover his debt.
Between 1930 and 1933 the dollar deflated at a whopping rate of 7% per year, corresponding with a drop in production during those same years. That was the core of the Great Depression.
Prior to the deflation the Federal Reserve had pumped the money supply up, all through the '20's.
We have good employment numbers because the Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply to pay for the spending of this Administration. That created an image of prosperity, a mirage where people had money and worked little. The unemployment numbers are down because so many don't seek work even now.
There are two surveys that determine employment. One surveys businesses, and asks about their need for workers compared to the number of jobs available. The other is the household survey, which asks people about their employment status. The former shows great job numbers because companies are having trouble finding workers. The latter shows workers are underemployed or out of work.
Why the deviation? The former just looks at raw numbers. If a company can fill positions via outsourcing, or by hiring moonlighters, or by automation it goes into the plus column. The household survey actually determines who is working and who is not.
Couple that with the fact that the employment numbers look at who is actively looking for work and we have a mirage of prosperity. But the reality is lots of people are unemployed or underemployed. And the Biden people ignore that, all the while pushing for more immigration to fill the jobs Americans Just Won't Do. We won't do them because they won't give them to us.
Now the bill is coming due and they are trying to cut the money supply to keep inflation from becoming similar to that of Weimar Germany. So what does that mean?
Right now unemployment is low (in no small part because people don't have to look for work; they are living off the money that was created by the Fed and given them by Dementia Joe) but it is a woeful prospect. We could well wind up in a Depression because of this. Biden took a roaring economy and turned it into sewage. You can't keep sucking wealth out of the economy forever; at some point you have to pay the bills.
That bill is massive.
How long before the dollar collapses? When it does we will go to a cashless society, I am sure. And where will that leave America?
My father just got his AARP magazine and they were talking about what to do in the coming cashless society. This is a magazine for OLD PEOPLE. So the editors and writers and analysts at AARP clearly believe it will come while the current generation is still alive. That bodes quite ill.
Unless we take steps now to restore fiscal sanity we are doomed.
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So the Chicoms sent a spy balloon to hover over the U.S. and Biden does nothing.
Why?
The Chinese told him to "be cool fool".
They got that fool part right anyway.
This balloon crossed over the Aleutians and went down the coast of Canada and has flown over Montana. White House Spokes Twisty Jean-Pierre (what is it with Democrats and the French?) said we'd MOVE anything they shouldn't see!
This is a test by the Chinese to see what we would do. They violated our airspace precisely to test the Geriatric Wonder.
And he fears shooting it down for what reason? To protect the people of Montana from falling balloon? In a state with just 3 people per square mile?
This is no doubt a futile effort by Biden to distract attention from the problems he is facing. But it just makes him look weak - to both the Chinese and the American People.
The perception of weakness is a dangerous thing; it invites trouble. This test, having been failed, may well be the clincher, the go-ahead for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. They see we won't even defend our own airspace.
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08:24 AM
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"After querying all pilots across the DOD, for all-cause morbidity and mortality, I found a stunning increase in the number of reportable events, spiking from an average of 226 reportable events a year (2016-2019) to 4,059 reports
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February 02, 2023
I worry about this sort of thing. Not that I fear the creation of some sort of mutant zombie monster but because I fear something far more dangerous; mutant zombie diseases that jump species.
I know; fish diseases, or alligator, probably won't become infectious to humans. But what of other fish? Could we wipe out, say, trout by creating a pandemic of alligator infection?
Many diseases start in other animals and jump species. Covid is a prime example (although it was created in a lab more than likely.) Ebola started in bats. I could go on but the point is made.
This CRISPR technology presents a huge existential threat to the long-term survival of the human race. We keep mixing genes from different critters. Eventually we are going to create a plague that will make the Black Death look like a head cold.
Every time you mix DNA you make a new species, and the diseases that were endemic to one species becomes possible for the other.
I would also add the article states the resultant catfish is sterile. That may be a good thing, but it's a lucrative thing for the "manufacturers" of these new life forms. Like GMO grain it means fish farmers will have to go back endlessly to Monsanto or whoever winds up with the patent. Certainly MIT will get an endless cut.
Is the danger worth a few more healthy fish?
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11:52 AM
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So, the GAO is ripping school uniforms and dress codes, calling them racist and sexist and homophobic.
First, what is the Government Accounting Office sticking it's nose into this for? It lies outside of their mission and scope.
Second, why do they think this to be the case?
Certainly with uniforms everyone is dressed alike and that is the exact opposite of racism or any other ism; the students are STUDENTS, not black students or white students or whatnot.
This is pure Fascism. Mussolini said "everything within the State, nothing outside the State." As this is not the States concern they decided to make it so.
And clearly they don't want standards of any sort for society.
We are doomed as long as we keep letting these clowns have their way.
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11:17 AM
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Old sailors have many a yarn, and many a tall tale is told on the high seas. Most - like the Flying Dutchman or mermaids - are figments of the imagination. But sometimes they are true.
Here is an old sea tale that may well turn out to be true after all.
There was a Frenchman named Etienne Bottineau who figured out a way to predict the arrival of ships. He invented what he called Nauscopia, which was a "the art of ascertaining the approach of vessels, or, being in a vessel, the approach to land, at a very great distance". Bottineau could predict the arrival of a ship days, even weeks before there was any sign of it. He could find land while out to sea.
How did he do it? His exact methods were unclear, but he argued that life in the oceans generated gas which formed a kind of envelope over the sea. Ships - or land - formed disturbances in this gaseous layer. By carefully studying the horizon and the atmosphere (particularly sunrises and sunsets) he could ascertain the arrival of ships or the nearing of land.
Bottineau worked out his "science" on Mauritus some time before 1785 (when he went public with the discovery.) It wasn't until much later that the story was remembered and chronicled
But he was a poor scientist who kept poor notes, and it was believed he was a charlatan of some sort by most modern scientists.
But was he?
It turns out that the oceans do indeed "breathe" out benzyne and toulene over the Southern Ocean. It was thought that these were a result of pollution, but new research shows it to be a result of phytoplankton.
This immediately caught my attention as it made me think of Nauscopia.
Jo Nova observes:
This matters because these two gases increased the amount of organic aerosols by, wait for it, between 8% and up to 80% in bursts. And all that extra aerosol matters, of course, because aerosols seed clouds, which change the weather.
And the expert climate models, upon which a $1.5 Trillion dollar industry depends on for its very existence, did not know this. If hypothetically there has been less phytoplankton in the worlds oceans in the last few decades, there may also have been less cloud cover, and thus more warming. But who knows?"
End excerpt.This alone is fascinating; another climate forcing that is unaccounted for and that shows how much we have yet to learn.
But it makes me wonder if Bauscopia wasn't in fact real.
As Shakespeare pointed out, in Hamlet "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Perhaps Nauscopia is one of them. Clearly this heretofore unknown environmental phenomenon is another.
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When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, For then it costs nothing to be a Patriot.
– Mark Twain
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Global Temperatures Fall Below 30-Year Baseline, Now Down 0.75C From 2016 Peak - Electroverse
electroverse.co
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Surprising. Published by a leftist magazine.
"We made science a team sport, and in so doing, we made it no longer science. It became us versus them, and "they" responded the only way anyone might expect them to: by resisting."
It's Time for the Scientific Community to Admit We Were Wrong About COVID
newsweek.com
Tim adds:
When the pandemic broke out I remember a number of science-related publications crowing about how this would restore faith in "science" which has been flagging in recent years (decades) because of the descent of the scientific community into pseudo-science like global warming and transgenderism and the like. (Funny; people used to laugh at Dianetics or astrology or UFO research, and yet Science has gotten into things with even less scientific evidence.)
So the pandemic would restore everyone's faith in Science, they said. It has had the exact opposite effect, because they fed us a load of manure from the very beginning about this, and everyone saw that the so-called vaccine (it's really a therapy, and a poor one) failed to fulfill the promises. We did not reopen thanks to the vaccine. We did not see it prevent Covid, nor keep us from getting Covid again. We saw no real value to it but Big Science (meaning Big Pharma) pushed and pushed and demanded we all take the shot, a shot which has caused a lot of young people to die suspiciously.
And the scientific community refused to level with the public. If they had said "we don't know how much this will help" at the beginning we would still be listening to them. But they pretended ore knowledge than they actually possessed, and attacked anyone who pointed that out.
It became obvious the scientific establishment was working for political ends rather than health interests.
So this IS a huge admission, but it is closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out. It's being done now that the damage is done, and for damage control. This is the way they always do it; mea culpas after having razed the countryside in their Shermanic march to the sea.
When you lie with dogs you get fleas. The scientific community crawled into bed with the government long ago, and has damaged ti's own credibility because it had to whore for government dollars.
And we've learned Fauci and the U.S. science establishment probably made this thing in the first place.
Had they been straight with us this could all have been avoided - but they haven't been straight with us for decades now.
We have a modern religion - Scientism. Scientists are the new high priests of that religion. So they refuse to admit they are wrong or when they do not know something because a high priest cannot be seen as wrong or not knowing. People go into science these days often for the adulation and respect they can receive, and are loathe to admit they just don't know. It's our modern religion.
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09:16 AM
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Red Cross Endangering Blood Supply in Compliance with Woke, Transgender Politics
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Woke British Hiring Illiterates and Convicts as Police to Fulfill 'Diversity' Goals
Tim adds:
Sort of like Memphis...
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Heavy metals and radioactive wastes deserve our thoughtful treatment and disposal. That said, the rabid hysteria about radioactive wastes impedes the very efforts at clean-up.
Phytoremediation uses certain grasses to selectively extract heavy radionuclides from dilute radioactive waste streams. The radionuclides concentrate in the biomass. The grasses are harvested and left in compost heaps. The biomass decomposes. As the biomass decomposes, the radioactive elements are brought into closer proximity. Shared radiation accelerates the decay process. This is the process for handling dilute streams from radioactive water.
1.7 billion years ago Life had only advanced to slimes. The Pre-Cambrian Era. Slimes in shallow tidal basins served as chelating agents which wrap around polyvalent heavy metals, much like Velcro. The Actinides, the fissiles, are the most electropositive elements on the Periodic Table. The heavy guys concentrate naturally.
In the 1950s, a Japanese immigrant and nuclear chemist, Paul Kuroda, identified this process as the possible means to achieve a critical mass and nuclear fission reactions in Nature. He was soundly derided. So it was in the 1950s, with the heavy intrusion of government into Science, it would seem that we descended into a modern Dark Age of Science, where Climatology and rabid Environmentalism have become a modern version of Voo-Doo.
Then in 1972, fifteen separate naturally-formed nuclear reactors at Oklo, Gabon were identified. They operated 1.7 billion years ago as on-off pulse reactors spanning millions of years with ground water as the moderator.
Calcium acts as radiation blocker. Thus, concrete shielding for nuclear reactors. The classic treatment for inhalation or ingestion of radioactive elements such as Strontium 90 or any other heavy metal is Calcium-fortified milk. Strontium 90 is known as a "bone seeker”, hence the dangers of leukemia from exposure to Strontium 90. The answer ? Flood the system with Calcium.
The Pre-Cambrian Era ended 500 million years ago. Then the Earth entered the Cambrian Era and the Cambrian "Explosion of Life”, with the first vertebrates. Those organisms which could incorporate Calcium into their bodies had protection from radiation. Now examine how your vital organs are encased in bone. Calcium. Your arms and legs give you mobility and food gathering capability. The wonder of the opposable thumb giving you the ability to clutch and hold tools.
At Chernobyl (1986) there were very immediate fatalities and mutations due to radioactive fall-out in the flora and fauna surrounding Chernobyl. Since then, Nature has resurged in those regions. Without human presence, wolves and moose have resumed their balance, much as the wolf and moose across Isle Royale in Lake Superior.
Yet somehow there are fools who think man is a threat to this planet and the fools have arrogated upon themselves the holy mission to "Save the Planet”.
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February 01, 2023
Some more thoughts on potential biases introduced into the global sea surface temperature dataset.
Here I have found a nice graphic showing the relative proportions of various methods of sea water sampling over time.
You can see that buckets predominated right up until the second world war, when ERI (engine room intake?) took over.
When bucket measurement disappeared during world war 2, that just left ERI as the primary form of measurement.
And what we see, is that the raw temperature shot up, for the duration of the war.
Of course, this looks bad, so in all analyses this spurious warming is nullified. The blip is removed.
But, after the war there was then a steady growth in the use of ERI.
We can see from the WW2 period that a switch to ERI produces spurious warming requiring a massive correction.
So, don't we need to also correct for the warming bias introduced by the more gradual shift to ERI following the war i.e. in the 50's and 60's?
No, apparently not. Because, I suppose, that post war gradual warming is exactly what the alarmists want to see.
But what if the post war use of ERI was also creating a false warming bias, just as it clearly did during the war years?
(In the second graph you can see the raw data in blue with the final processed HadCRUT data in red. The black line is the difference.


Sources, and excellent articles on this topic:
https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/2xxlfhva/release/3
And:
http://euanmearns.com/making-the-measurements-match-the-models-part-2-sea-surface-temperatures/
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US leftists are actively underinformed by their news sources. THE EVIDENCE in that bottom 30%…

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