Pluto Rise From the Dead

Pluto is once again a planet, after 8 years dead to planethood. Actually, the priesthood of Scientists resurrected it. They are awesome.

The Religion of Peace...

...torches 185 churches. In Islam, "peace" means no more Christians, Atheists, Buddhists, or any other non-Islamic person on the face of the earth (except perhaps those females groomed for rape, and slaves, of course). It also means no more Shias or other offshoots from whatever the dictator of the worldwide emirate dictates as "truth from Allah".

Barbarism was practiced and preached by The Prophet; it is the primary worldview of the culture.

New Model Will Fight AGW Skeptics, Based on "Highly Accurate Estimates"

Scientists to ‘fast-track’ evidence linking global warming to wild weather
Aim is to thwart sceptics from dismissing extreme event as 'natural weather variation'

"Scientists are to challenge the climate-change sceptics by vastly improving the speed with which they can prove links between a heatwave or other extreme weather event and man-made changes to the atmosphere.

It typically takes about a year to determine whether human-induced global warming played a role in a drought, storm, torrential downpour or heatwave – and how big a role it played.

This allows climate sceptics to dismiss any given extreme event as part of the “natural weather variation” in the immediate aftermath, while campaigners automatically blame it on global warming.

By the time the truth comes out most people have lost interest in the event, the Oxford University scientists involved in the project say.

They are developing a new scientific model that will shrink to as little as three days the time it takes to establish or rule out a link to climate change, in large part by using highly accurate estimates of sea surface temperatures rather than waiting for the actual readings to be published – a process that can often take months.

“We want to clear up the huge amounts of confusion around how climate change is influencing the weather, in both directions. For example, the typhoon in the Philippines that dominated the UN climate change talks in Warsaw last November and that many people put down to climate change – it turned out it had no detectable evidence. And the same goes for Hurricane Sandy,” Dr Friederike Otto, of Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, told The Independent.

But there are plenty of other cases where climate change is likely to have been involved, she said. Examples include last year’s record heatwave in Australia – the severity of which an eminent scientist concluded this week “was virtually impossible without climate change” – and the flooding in the UK at the start of the year, which Dr Otto’s department has just established was made 25 per cent more likely by global warming."

I thought the term was "climate chaos"... no wait, that was last week; now it is "climate justice". No matter. They will now be making these declarations based on guesses which they claim are highly accurate, and of course, who is to challenge that? Without actual data, they can claim both cause and accuracy without fear of contradiction. As for a 25% increase in probability, that might change the numbers from, say, 80% to 100%. And it did happen, of course, so 100% is retroactively the correct answer. But 80% is pretty darn high all by itself, without any help from AGW. The reasoning of the true believers is, as usual, suspect.

When a Government Constantly Lies When It Fails...

...it will not be trusted to tell the truth in an actual crisis. In a clinch the officials will clam up and admit to nothing. It's the Obama Era; nothing different could come of it. And when politics get involved, the result will likely be disaster.

There's little margin for error in such a situation, because if infected person A contacts 15 persons B, and the persons B each contact 15 persons C, this third level amounts to 15^3, or 3,375 people, in just the third ring of exposure. This could happen in less than a day. The exponential exposure level would get to be too much to track, especially when it is several days late in starting - which is likely to be what has happened.

As Glen Reynolds said,

"Obama was quick to shut down travel to Israel, but still has not shut down travel from Liberia."

Politics trumps competence each and every day; either that, or maybe this is the crisis he has been hoping for.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: An Apologetic of an Apology

Neil deGrasse Tyson has apologized, well sort of. He admits that what he said was incorrect, technically, and yet the meaning remains: we are smart: you are stupid.

"That having been said, Tyson himself has not come out of this imbroglio well. He may not have actively assembled his clique, but, as the fake George W. Bush quotation demonstrates, he does play to it at least a little. Whatever he may claim now, the intention of his tale was absolutely clear: to demonstrate for his audience who in the world was stupid and who in the world was smart, truth be damned. Unsurprisingly enough, those who had paid to come and see him speak were classed firmly in the latter category — and they loved every second of being so praised. And who wouldn’t? The world is full of performers whose sole role is to flatter their customers. That’s why we have cable news.

Now, lest I be willfully misunderstood, I should say for the record that Tyson is an excellent astronomer and that his work popularizing science is extremely valuable. As an atheist who takes an interest in such things myself, I am delighted that people care about matters scientific, even if I do think that the vast majority of those who claim to do so are unfailingly shallow and irritating in their engagement. But, however good he may be at his job, it is inescapably true that he has also become a cultural figure who plays a cultural role and who is fetishized by a subculture. Why is this so hard for his admirers to admit? Why, too, I wonder, do we find it so difficult to concede that, even for scientists, there is a real danger in becoming so loved? As we have learned over the years from musicians, movie stars, politicians, and so forth, to acquire an expectant and ardent fanbase is to run the risk of becoming a pastiche of oneself. Has Tyson? Perhaps so, yes. He’s hardly exempt.

Consider, by way of example, the text of his non-apology. Had I been charged with parodying the man, I honestly couldn’t have done a better job. Before he even gets to the issue at hand, Tyson writes:

I own a half-dozen cosmically themed vests and another 100+ cosmically themed ties. Among them, I’m more likely to be seen in only two of the vests and about a dozen of the ties, they being my favorites. In large theater performance venues, I often remove my shoes. I can move more nimbly on the stage, but I also do so as a matter of silent respect for the countless performers — singers, dancers, musicians – who have previously sanctified the stage with their artistic talents.

Later, he explains that he doesn’t really like talking to adoring crowds for fame and fortune, but that, “knowing what I know about the physical universe – and our place within it – I’d be socially irresponsible if I did not.” Okay, then!

What would he rather be doing instead?

Doing scientific research. Writing books. Playing with my kids. Having a play-date with my wife. Eating homemade very-buttery popcorn while watching a movie curled up on the couch with the family. Reading antiquarian science books. Taking notes for my next book with quill and fountain pens by candlelight. Attending Broadway plays and musicals. Listening to jazz and classical music. Drinking malted milkshakes. Cooking dinners that are fancier than the day of the week deserves. Drinking a bottle of wine that is just a little more expensive than can be realistically justified. And cooking & eating waffles for breakfast. e.g.

http://www.reddit.com/r/photoshopbattles/comments/28yjr2/neil_degrasse_tyson_making_himself_a_waffle/

That the final suggestion was illustrated with a link to a fan post on Reddit is almost too perfect for words. As for “taking notes for my next book with quill and fountain pens by candlelight,” this strikes me as a level of self-indulgence that even Ron Burgundy would have considered unseemly.

Since the contretemps broke, I have been a little confused as to why Tyson didn’t quickly regain the moral high ground by saying, flatly:

I misremembered a George W. Bush quotation. In science we are always ready to be corrected and evidence is paramount. I apologize for having got this wrong, and I’ll stop using it in my public presentations. Thank you for pointing it out.

Today, though, I am less bewildered, for the nature of the apology seems to tell us exactly why he did not just own up and move on. He can’t. He’s trapped, having become responsible for the self-esteem and self-identity of millions of adoring followers. Deep down, I bet Tyson wished he could just say, “my mistake.” Instead, he had to embed his note in an avalanche of superfluous pseudo-context; to insist that the whole affair “fascinated me greatly”; to enter into peculiar digressions about the nature of evidence and of memory; and, rather than admitting that a critic was right, to propose extraneously that “the mind is surely the next mysterious universe to be plumbed.” I find this all rather sad, I must say. I like Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’m sure he’s a nice, smart, interesting guy. His most ardent followers, however, are not. And, if his behavior over the past month is any indication, he’s been captured by them."

Tyson remains as arrogant and self-promoting as ever. He has these fans, see, and they like to think they are scientists, see, without knowing anything about either science or intellectual discipline. And that's Tyson's responsibility, isn't it? To keep them focused and feeling good about their elitist worldview, regardless of actually being stupid.

When The Left Eats Itself (Continued)

The former sycophants who kissed Obama's creased pants and grovelled disgustingly at his feet are now not exactly giving him advice, they have turned their fangs from the Right to their once and always president-forever.

"Are significant chunks of the mainstream media in despair over Barack Obama? This past week, Obama used 60 Minutes to attempt to shift blame for the failure to anticipate the rise of ISIS, endured a cover-up of White House security disasters by the Secret Service, and saw a government-agency report that he had skipped nearly 60 percent of his intelligence briefings.

The reaction from some longtime Obama defenders was swift and harsh. “President Obama this week committed professional suicide,” wrote former CNN host Piers Morgan, now an editor-at-large for Britain’s Daily Mail.

He called Obama’s throwing of the intelligence community under the bus a “shameless, reprehensible display of buck-passing” that will result in some analysts’ exacting “cold-blooded revenge on Obama by drip-feeding negative stories about him until he’s gone.” As for the Secret Service fiasco, Morgan said it was “no wonder the Secret Service gets complacent when The Boss exudes complacency from every pore.”

Chris Matthews of MSNBC, the former White House speechwriter who once rapturously recounted that he “felt this thrill going up my leg” as Obama spoke, didn’t hold back on Wednesday’s Hardball. “Let’s get tough here,” Matthews began, as he lambasted Obama for being “intellectually lazy” and “listening to the same voices all the time.” He even named names, saying that Obama had become “atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie Jarrett and Mrs. Obama.”

Jonathan Alter, a columnist for Bloomberg News and the author of a sympathetic book on Obama’s first term, reported that Jarrett is an unusual presence in the White House: “Staffers feared her, but didn’t like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, ‘I don’t talk just to hear myself talking.’”

Everyone expects a presidential spouse to weigh in on issues, but the reference to Valerie Jarrett, the White House senior adviser who mentored both the president and the first lady at the start of their careers in Chicago, is telling. Her outsize role in many presidential decisions is known to insiders, but she remains resolutely behind the scenes. So when Jarrett does enter the news, it’s significant, because it may provide a window into how the Obama White House really works.

This week, Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business noted that President Obama was back visiting Chicago but “having to share headlines with Valerie Jarrett.” She began the week with a cameo appearance on CBS’s highly rated show The Good Wife. Then a column by Michael Sneed in the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Jarrett “may be the worst abuser” of any executive-branch official with a Secret Service detail, using guards “round the clock” even while she was shopping, at the gym, or visiting friends in Chicago.

At a time when a government report shows the Secret Service is more than 550 agents below its optimal strength, Sneed bluntly asked, “Is this expense justifiable or is it an abuse of power?” Sneed quoted a source close to the White House: “Jarrett is treated as a member of the Obama family, but she’s had no real death threats requiring the constant use of the Secret Service that I know of.”

Jarrett and Michelle O are co-criminals in the sense that in their Chicago government positions they managed to profit by taking buildings under their charge, allowing them to deteriorate, and then purchasing them in order to become slumlords. It's the Chicago way. But the Leftist "journalists" ignored all that because, omg: they're black!

"But if journalists really want a fuller explanation for how the Obama administration has reached its current low ebb, perhaps they should continue to follow the threads of the Jarrett string that were revealed this week and see where those lead."

The bullshit traders have no concept of following leads or objective reporting. Jarrett's story has already been told, but not by them. So now they still don't report it, they merely sling crap in a different direction. Over six years too late.

More For Dawkins to Consider

Not that he actually would. Ideologists and contrary data don't mix, in general. But this speaks to his love for socialist Sweden:

New 'feminist' government with a Green tinge in Sweden

Stockholm (AFP) - Sweden's new Social Democrat prime minister Stefan Loefven unveiled what he called a "feminist" government including Green Party ministers for the first time in the Nordic country.

It turns out that paradise has crumbled, so they voted in some more socialism:

""Sweden is in a serious situation -- unemployment has become entrenched at high levels, school results have collapsed and the welfare system has major shortcomings," he said."

Unemployment high in utopia? What about all those equal outcomes? If the unemployed make just what the employed make, then why would anyone want to be employed? And feel-good socialist education is not working? And the welfare system needs more...

It turns out that the socialists were "profit hunting" using government programs. Who would guess that government officials would be corrupt? Could that happen in utopia?

And of course there's always the "rape" panic. Will all PIV sex be banned in Utopia? How feminist will they be? Just a little? Or the whole lesbian agenda?

"He also vowed to criminalise Swedes that travel abroad for sex tourism, and to toughen the country's rape laws. "

Dawkins should be proud. Well, he's always proud, of course; but I mean proud of his socialist icon countries. They know that socialism is never enough: more socialism is always needed.

On The Road...

...So Posts will be sketchy for a week.

TIME Indulges Dawkins and His Toady

TIME online has published a - what should I call it? - article By Richard Dawkins and the head of his organization. They are incensed that anyone, especially a pol, would disrespect Atheists. Dawkins, whose mantra at the Reason Conference was to ridicule, RIDICULE, those who Atheists disagree with, declares such disrespect to be HATE, when he is on the receiving end of criticism.

"Unfortunately, not only does Huckabee have to be taken seriously as a possible Presidential candidate in 2016, but his suggestion that atheists who work for the government (primarily elected officials) be summarily “fired” is an applause line in too many quarters in the United States. That nonbelievers somehow deserve to be discriminated against is a view widely shared, particularly among Christian conservatives who seem to think “religion by the sword” is an oldie but a goodie.

This latest bit of hate was offered up – where else? – at the 2014 Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C. The ritual hookup between Christian conservatives and Republican presidential aspirants is a right wing, Jesus-loves-us debauch of Homophobia, Intolerance and Militarism, a trifecta easily remembered by the acronym “HIM”."

Atheists are hypocrites of the first order. They cannot comprehend why they are not trusted. But they feel totally justified in slinging their "trifecta" slurs: non-Atheists do this: Hate Homosexuals (homophobia); Are Intolerant of the "Do Anything I please" amorality of Atheism; Are guilty of defending the western nations from the barbarians using The Military. We Atheists will call it HIM for short, meaning The Other.

They are not speaking here to the normal person on the street. They are not even talking to Atheists any more. They are merely berserkoids out on a tear, angry possibly because no one ever listens to them any more. Here they go off on the metaphor "fired" without any comprehension that it means: vote them out:

"Huckabee, in a tortured metaphor about answering phones “God is ringing,” exhorted his audience to answer the God-call by making sure only people with the right values are hired for jobs in Washington and by making sure those who “refuse to hear … God’s heart” are fired. No joke, Huckabee is suggesting that we should: 1) Find out whether government employees are true believers; 2) Fire those who aren’t.

Yes, that is illegal, which makes the suggestion all the more stunning from someone who expects to be taken seriously on America’s national political stage."

Aside from not being an American, Dawkins is also no longer rational. What Huckabee means is that there are values which are "valuable" and which stem from a morality outside the elitist self; those contrast with the Leftist "values" which are merely the opinions of the elitist Leftists who want to dictate their opinions as moral values,which are actually valuable only to themselves.

"This Republican congressional candidate in Louisiana and nephew of “Duck Dynasty” patriarch Phil Robertson, suggested on his faith-based podcast that atheism contributed to the Sandy Hook massacre of 20 children and six adults in 2012.

Apparently, the premier driver was not the mental illness from which shooter Adam Lanza clearly suffered, nor was it that an unstable man was able legally to amass a stockpile of weapons, thanks to his mother supplying them.

According to Dasher, “the reason why (the Sandy Hook massacre) happened is that we have denied as a culture that man is made in God’s image.” He said the “atheist agenda” reinforces a message that says “you don’t matter … all you are is chemical, all you are is material.”

Dasher is right, especially in the case of Columbine, where the two teens were fans of Nietzsche, and likely in the case of Lanza, in an education system that preaches Evolution, secularism, and Atheism, the religion of demeaning human life as purely physical animal, while denying any and all possibility of non-physical existence. Atheism has no common moral base or grounding, no common set of moral principles, nothing at all to base a life and worldview upon except the fact that humans evolved just the same as gorillas, turkeys and bottom-feeding fish.

But they go on:

"Had Dasher bothered to find out about atheism, humanism and the nonreligious, he would have come to understand just how precious this community views life.

Unlike Dasher, who believes there is another existence – a better one — outside the temporal, atheists, humanists and freethinkers believe they have one life and one chance to do something meaningful with it. With no supernatural arbiter to fall back on, nonbelievers know it is up to them and them alone to promote justice, compassion and a fair society."

And if one cares to actually examine Humanism, for example, one would find the totalitarian, intolerant, elitist anti-moral group of misogynists that one finds in any collection of Atheists, Humanists and freethinkers. They always disguise this as justice, compassion, and a fair society. Which is why they are not only not trusted by rational non-Atheists, but are actually trusted to do only that which they "feel" is right for themselves, regardless of any morality of the Other.

"The proof that secular people are good, care for others and build healthy societies is evidenced in cross-national studies. The research of Phil Zuckerman at Pitzer College, demonstrates that secular societies, such as Sweden and Denmark, among others, are more likely to enjoy broadly shared prosperity and a high level of societal health and happiness than traditionally religious ones, and certainly more so than the United States."

Still quoting the fraudulent data from Zuckerman, too. That is pitiful, especially since it is so fundamentally wrong: the real, major Atheist societies in the past 100 years are not Sweden and Denmark, they are the USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. When these "secular", Atheist tyrannies are taken into account, Atheism is seen for what it really is: elitist totalitarian destructivism.

And as for "good", well it was this same Dawkins who declared that he could not say that what Hitler did was wrong. There is no "Good" or "Bad", nor is there "Good" or "Evil"; Nietzsche informed the world of that. No Atheist can be Good because there is no Atheist standard for Good. Conversely, no Atheist can be accused of being "Evil" because there is no standard for Evil.

It's so obvious that any competent adult can see it:

Any Atheist who claims to be Good is lying.

And lying is not bad or evil to an Atheist. It's merely consequentialist. It's just a tactic.

And quoting a self-appelled "evolutionary psychologist" doesn't resonate with anyone but the choir: Gregory Paul makes up Just So Stories based on no substance whatsoever.

"The historically unprecedented socioeconomic
security that results from low levels of progressive government policies appear to suppress
popular religiosity and creationist opinion, conservative religious ideology apparently
contributes to societal dysfunction, and religious prosociality and charity are less effective at
improving societal conditions than are secular government programs."

Paul makes the error in cause/effect because he claims to be an Atheist-evolutionist, and fitting the narrative is what these folks do. But reality is that abandoning faith in good times merely refers to the self-centered worldview that one develops when challenges in life lessen. Humans always assume that they are the cause of good times, and therefore, the good times will continue so long as they exist. And it always ends in decadence and the rise of totalitarianism: in other words, Atheist elitist "humanist" dictatorship of "Social Justice".

In fact, Gregory Paul appears to be a non-degreed fraud:

"So who is Gregory S. Paul and what are his qualifications to opine on the salubrious quality of agnosticism? We spent a considerable amount of time attempting to discover where Mr. (Dr.?) Paul received his training in sociology and/or statistical analysis, etc. Here’s what we found:

…

The above blank space is not a formatting error of some kind. It is the best we could come up with to signify nada, zero, zip, bupkis, nihilo, nothing. Yes, that’s right. We found nothing. As near as we can tell, Mr. Paul has no advanced degrees in statistical analysis, demography, sociology, or any other ology. In fact, it appears as though he holds no advanced degrees of any kind. He is, in fact, an artist and freelance paleontologist who has published two books in the area of dinosaur studies that re-imagine how they may have lived and operated on this planet. And to be fair, Mr. Paul seems to be respected for this work."
Verum Serum

But they, Dawkins and droid, veer ever Leftward as most Atheists do, toward communalism, aka communism, run by the elites:

"“(W)hen we consider the fundamental values and moral imperatives contained within the world’s great religions, such as caring for the sick, the infirm, the elderly, the poor, the orphaned, the vulnerable; practicing mercy, charity, and goodwill toward one’s fellow human beings; and fostering generosity, humility, honesty, and communal concern over individual egotism — those traditionally religious values are most successfully established, institutionalized, and put into practice at the societal level in the most irreligious nations in the world today."

So the actual Atheist nations, those who dominated the past 100 years, "put into practice" all the virtues mentioned above, which are actually attributable to religion, mostly Christianity? Anyone who reads either newsfeeds or cares a single whit about the history of world political cultures would gag at this assertion. North Korea? China? The USSR? Cambodia? Venezuela? Cuba? Really?

No, just the two relatively inconsequential countries mentioned by Phil Zuckerman, data which has actually been debunked.

Bayesian Statistics, in the News

The NY Times discovers Bayesian Statistical Calculations, and even gives a shout out to the obvious problems with it:

"One downside of Bayesian statistics is that it requires prior information — and often scientists need to start with a guess or estimate. Assigning numbers to subjective judgments is “like fingernails on a chalkboard,” said physicist Kyle Cranmer, who helped develop a frequentist technique to identify the latest new subatomic particle — the Higgs boson.

Others say that in confronting the so-called replication crisis, the best cure for misleading findings is not Bayesian statistics, but good frequentist ones. It was frequentist statistics that allowed people to uncover all the problems with irreproducible research in the first place, said Deborah Mayo, a philosopher of science at Virginia Tech. The technique was developed to distinguish real effects from chance, and to prevent scientists from fooling themselves.

Uri Simonsohn, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. Several years ago, he published a paper that exposed common statistical shenanigans in his field — logical leaps, unjustified conclusions, and various forms of unconscious and conscious cheating.

He said he had looked into Bayesian statistics and concluded that if people misused or misunderstood one system, they would do just as badly with the other. Bayesian statistics, in short, can’t save us from bad science."
[emphasis added]

It's actually worse than that. It is a favorite of ideological hacks who place their ideology into the equation up front, thereby getting the results they want rather than objective knowledge. Bayesian calculations are an open invitation to pretend that circular arguments are justified statistically.

That's not to say that with legitimate use of non-biased input, Bayes calculations can't be valuable, as in the case of the fisherman rescued by the Coast Guard which used Bayes to anticipate the location of the drifting man. But that uses known information, regarding physical data which is not ideological as an input to the calculation. That is far different from trying to calculate, say, the existence of a deity, where any input is prejudiced by definition.

Whenever Bayes is used, the calculations must ALWAYS be scrutinized for bias, because in some venues they always will be. And that is, indeed, like fingernails on a chalkboard.