The Apocalyptic Error of St Paul

It is tempting these days to think of ourselves as traditionalists. The modern world is defined by insanity, more or less, thus the past must be defined by rationale and virtue. We must be careful, though, for while traditions tend to be good, because they've survived some societal test of time, they aren't necessarily so. Some are downright awful, or antiquated. A dogmatic devotion to traditionalism leads invariably to stagnation, which is death. Life is about growth.

I've been reading, slowly but surely, the letters of Paul. Despite being raised Catholic, I know very little of his writings. I only recall being taught that he had been transformed by a religious experience from a persecutor of Christians into their foremost early leader. (Perhaps even the founder of Christianity, or sometimes referred to as a "second founder.") There is little to disagree with in Paul's writings. While he is not a humorous author (there seems to be little humor in the Bible at all) he does come across as lively and intelligent, making numerous practical arguments for living a noble life. Still, one flaw sticks out. From Corinthians I,

Do not look for a wife. But if you do marry, you have not sinned; and if a virgin marries, she has not sinned. But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this. What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in them. For this world in its present form is passing away. I would like you to be free from concern. An unmarried man is concerned about the Lord’s affairs—how he can please the Lord. But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world—how he can please his wife— and his interests are divided.

Paul was apocalyptic. He was a true believer, not just that Christ would return to judge the world, but that it would happen soon. Within the lifetimes of his contemporaries. Thus, not only did he take on a vow of celibacy, he encouraged his followers to do the same. Why bother with such worldly endeavors as family building when the world is soon to be destroyed anyway? Fortunately for western civilization, most Christians did not heed the advice, but the effect of his early stance on marriage has lingered on, much to the detriment of the Church.

Most people on the right realize that a major problem with the left is the number of older childless women. They project their maternal instincts in unhealthy and unnatural ways, and adopt the world's underclass as their progeny. But what of these unmarried priests..aren't they living unnaturally too? I say they are. Perhaps it makes sense when the world is soon to be razed by vast cosmic powers of destruction. That's not a natural circumstance, to be sure! But, 2000 years later, we must admit, at least, that the impending doom is not of the short-term. Priests would be better to lead by example, raising families that sustain the congregation and the nation.

The major problems of the Catholic church result from this dynamic. Their flocks are dwindling. The priests are caught constantly is sex scandals involving children. The pope is a pinko. The latest news is that he donated half a million dollars to "refugees" camped out at the US south border. He calls it an act of charity. I call it an act of war. What gospel preaches that Christian lands shall be demographically invaded? None, of course. Perhaps he might argue that the Hispanics are more devout, thus entitled to the fertile lands of an increasingly materialistic people. It would be a sound argument, perhaps, but it's not one he makes. No, he is merely a communist, always seeking to destroy social structure, to invert order. The busybody has no children to tend to, no legacy of his own. His only legacy is pandering to virtue cults obsessed with worldly concerns. Why does he lead migrants away from lives of poverty, a life Jesus recommended? Why does he lead them into the realm of the godless? He cannot answer properly, for he is a materialist, not a Christian.

Would you attend services in a Catholic church? Would you put alms on the plate? I would not. There is no Biblical imperative to commit treason against one's own nation. I will not fund an organization that promotes it. And I'd prefer not to attend mass where the men aren't permitted to marry. They should be required to. Celibate clergy is tradition for the sake of tradition. After 2000 years, perhaps they should finally realize that all teachings of impending apocalypse can be safely downgraded. What good is the promise of Christian salvation when all the churches are empty or destroyed, like the Christian nations?

Contrabang #4 Black Dark Matter

This Is How To Bring Dark Skies Back In An Increasingly Developed World (link)

An overview on the growing problem of light pollution, which affects nearly everyone in the developed world. 

Scientists Didn’t Really Find The First Molecule In The Universe (link)

There was a buzz last week because scientists found the spectrographic signature of helium hydride, theorized to have been the first molecule formed in the universe. However, the helium hydride they found was not primordial, but generated in some nebular region. Ethan took the opportunity to explain the Big Big Theory to his supposedly astronomy-savvy audience, which he likes to do. The whole thing is a non-event.

Ask Ethan: How Can A Black Hole’s Singularity Spin? (link)

How [is] angular momentum conserved when stars collapse to black holes? What [does] it means for a black hole to spin? What is actually spinning? How can a singularity spin? Is there a “speed limit” to this spin rate and how does the spin affect the size of the event horizon and the area immediately around it?

As usual, Ethan doesn't shy away from the difficult questions. Now, if only he'd ever deliver a reasonable answer! Let's see how this one goes...

While the laws of physics break down at this point — some physicists cheekily refer to singularities as places where “God divided by zero” — no one doubts that all the matter and radiation that passes inside the event horizon heads towards this point-like region of space.

No one doubts accretion disk theories? He must have forgotten about me! Not only are singularities places where God divides by zero, but they are places where he counts to infinity, which is what the angular momentum question is going after.

Just as a spinning figure skater speeds up when they bring their arms and legs in, astrophysical masses rotate more quickly if you decrease their radius.

Exactly. If the figure skater could decrease her radius to zero, her angular velocity would become infinite, which isn't possible. Yet, that is what must happen when a spinning star is reduced to a point mass.

If [the sun] became a neutron star — with the same mass but a radius of 20 km — it would rotate once every 2.4 milliseconds: consistent with what we observe for the fastest pulsars. 

Neutron stars are complete rubbish. If he'll believe that, he'll believe anything. Those who make analogies to neutron stars to build their case are only making a mockery of their own arguments.

This is okay! Einstein put forth his theory of General Relativity in 1915, and it was only a few months later that Karl Schwarzschild found the first exact solution: for a point mass, the same as a spherical black hole. The next step in modeling this problem in a more realistic fashion — to consider what if the black hole also has angular momentum, instead of mass alone — wasn’t solved until Roy Kerr found the exact solution in 1963.

It's okay guys, there's a mathematical solution! **pushes up glasses**

The exact solution for a black hole with both mass and angular momentum was found by Roy Kerr in 1963. It revealed, instead of a single event horizon with a point-like singularity, an inner and outer event horizon, as well as an inner and outer ergosphere, plus a ring-like singularity of substantial radius.

Just add a ring-like singularity, and now you have angular momentum accounted for. Hypothetical mass at far distance to account for unexpected angular momentum...where have we heard this line before? It is the dark matter of black holes! Perhaps we should call it...black dark matter.

There is a maximum ratio of angular momentum to mass that is allowed; if there is too much angular momentum, the black hole will radiate that energy away (via gravitational radiation) until it’s below that limit.

What do you do if your system has unaccounted-for energy? You just assume that it is radiated away by black holes - which are called dark because they fundamentally don't radiate anything. So easy.

All of this is true for a rotating black hole from the instant you create the event horizon for the first time.

So for all black holes, since all the systems are assumed to be rotating. There really is no such thing as singularities, but singularity rings. Then why do we keep talking about singularities?

There’s also an important distinction between a mathematical solution and a physical solution...…you should not physically trust in the inner horizon or the inner ergosurface. Although they are certainly there as mathematical solutions of the exact vacuum Einstein equations, there are good physics reasons to suspect that the region at and inside the inner horizon, which can be shown to be a Cauchy horizon, is grossly unstable — even classically — and unlikely to form in any real astrophysical collapse.

It's okay, there's a mathematical solution - which you should not physically trust. That's actually the answer!

Perhaps the most profound takeaway from all of this, though, is that in a rotating spacetime, space itself can indeed move without any sort of speed limit at all. It’s only the motion of matter and energy through space that’s limited by the speed of light; space itself has no such speed limit. In the case of a rotating black hole, there is a region of space beyond the event horizon where space is dragged around the black hole at a speed faster than the speed of light, and this is just fine. Matter still cannot move through that space at speeds exceeding the ultimate cosmic speed limit, and all of this is consistent with both relativity and what we observe.

Not content that spacetime must be expanding as necessary to accommodate for redshift theory, we must now believe that spacetime rotates as necessary to allow for black holes. It's the trick of last resort for the modern astrophysicist. If you can't add in enough dark matter, dark energy, or ring-like singularity to make the math work, you can always just let spacetime do whatever is needed, since it is free to violate any laws of mathematics or the fundamental constants of their own theories. Very profound indeed!

Hyabusa2 Followup

In Japanese Asteroid Bomb, we covered a mission to find water in a near-Earth asteroid. In the three weeks that have passed since then, the vessel has moved back within view of the impact site, and reported that the crater is twice as large as anticipated. In hindsight, we should have expected that, because they always seem to be surprised at the magnitude of space collisions. They were surprised at the magnitude of the explosion caused on a comet by the Deep Impact probe a decade ago, as well as the dramatic demise of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 into Jupiter a couple decades ago.

Regarding the asteroid impact, we stated,

The question isn't whether they will find the water they are looking for, but how they will respond when they don't. We'll likely hear excuses like the crater wasn't deep enough, drying by radiation was stronger than expected, etc.

The first excuse has been removed. There won't be any credible claims that the crater impact was insufficient. It will be interesting to hear their reports when the probe returns to Earth next year.

Intersectional Astrophysics

Last year, a feminist academic from Europe stirred a few amused headlines when she attempted to co-opt quantum physics into her social analysis. The gist of her article is that Newtonian physics with its discrete state space is separatist and bigoted, but the wave function distributions of quantum mechanics sounds more appealing to people who use terms like genderfluid. She doesn't realize that those wave functions only represent uncertainty and collapse to classical states upon observation, but that's what makes it fun. We can see why wave functions would appeal to professionals of the various intersectional "studies" programs - which all amount to an assault on objective reality. Their whole ethos is not to be judged, since they inherently know they don't measure up. They much prefer the pre-observation wave function uncertainty to post-observation discrete reality.

The normal reaction is to scoff at the feminists for attempting to latch onto more serious disciplines to substantiate their fake studies. I would counter that it is merely the logical progression for astrophysics - a field that already rejects objective reality in favor of magical fantasies. If we can't dismiss what the astrophysicists are claiming, then we can't really dismiss the feminists either. It is a free-for-all where everyone is always right. Sounds exaggerated? Consider this AP science article that appeared this week, covering the recent work of a Nobel Prize recipient. (That is, it couldn't be more mainstream.)

New Study Says Universe Expanding Faster and is Younger.

The universe is expanding faster than it used to, meaning it’s about a billion years younger than we thought, a new study by a Nobel Prize winner says. And that’s sending a shudder through the world of physics, making astronomers re-think some of its most basic concepts.

The last sentence should catch your attention if you regularly read the science articles here...and I love pointing these out. Results routinely mandate that the world of physics should "re-think some of its most basic concepts." They always say that, and yet it never happens. It's comical, at this point, to see the constant flood of results indicating that the basic assumptions are wrong, and yet they just keep trudging along, adding complexity where they can to try to get the numbers to work.

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Johns Hopkins University astronomer Adam Riess concluded in this week’s Astrophysical Journal that the figure is 9% higher than the previous calculation, which was based on studying leftovers from the Big Bang.

The trouble is, Riess and others think both calculations are correct.

Confused? That’s OK, so are the experts.

What happens when results are contradictory? In astrophysics, everyone gets to be correct! Or at least so long as they've won a Nobel Prize. (One of the other fun aspects of modern physics is seeing how blatantly wrong Nobel Prize-winning results will have to be for the scientific community to admit it.)

They find the conflict so confounding that they are talking about coming up with “new physics,” incorporating perhaps some yet-to-be-discovered particle or other cosmic “fudge factors” like dark energy or dark matter.

“It’s looking more and more like we’re going to need something new to explain this,” said Riess, who won the 2011 Nobel in physics.

(For background, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics is the same one that this blog critiqued last year in The Nobel Prize in Creative Writing as the foremost example of the Nobel Prize being issued for what are most likely flawed conclusions.)

It is quite pleasing to see honest reporting these days. Scientists are "confounded," and hypothetical constructs like dark matter and dark energy are "fudge factors." That is entirely correct. I wish they'd go one step further and describe these research institutes as "fudge factories."

NASA astrophysicist John Mather, another Nobel winner, said this leaves two obvious options: “1. We’re making mistakes we can’t find yet. 2. Nature has something we can’t find yet.”

Everyone here understands the pattern, I suspect. The correct option is #1, yet they will go with #2.

To come up with his measurement of the Hubble constant, Riess looked to some not-so-distant stars. Riess observed 70 Cepheid stars — stars that pulse at a well-observed rate — calculated their distance and rate, and then compared them with a certain type of supernovae that are used as measuring sticks.

Both approaches make the same flawed assumption, which is that class 1A supernovae are "standard candles" - all of identical luminosities. Questioning the standard candle theory is the kind of "re-thinking of basic concepts" that they always talk about, but never do.

It took about two years for the Hubble telescope to make these measurements, but eventually Riess calculated an expansion rate of 74. Using that 74 figure means the universe is somewhere between 12.5 billion and 13 billion years old. That’s much younger than the established estimates of 13.6 billion to 13.8 billion. [...] Riess calculated the odds that the disparity between the two calculations was an accident at 1 in 100,000.

On the other hand, the odds of a disparity when basic assumptions of the domain are false is very high.

The next section just needs to be posted in its entirety.

While there is a chance either the Riess team or the Planck team is off, astronomers are talking about both being right.

Both calculations make sense and “nobody can find anything wrong at this point,” said distinguished University of Chicago astrophysicist Wendy Freedman. Other outside experts praised both teams’ research.

If that’s the case, astrophysicists need to make adjustments in Einstein’s general relativity theory.

“You need to add something into the universe that we don’t know about,” said Chris Burns, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “That always makes you kind of uneasy.’

In the past, astronomers added hard-to-fathom dark energy and dark matter to explain why calculations didn’t add up, borrowing from a once-discarded Einstein theory. Now they’re saying they need to do something similar again.

It could be there’s an extra “turbocharge” from a past odd pulse of dark energy — an unseen expansion force that fits well in Einstein’s theories — that caused the speeded-up expansion, Riess said.

Or there could be a new particle of matter that hasn’t been discovered, Burns said.

“We have this dark sector that already has two ingredients, and maybe we’re discovering a third,” said Planck team member Lloyd Knox of the University of California, Davis. “That’s a scary prospect. Are we just going to always be introducing fudge factors?”

Yes, you are always going to be introducing fudge factors until either (1) you actually do what you always say you'll do, and question basic assumptions like redshift theory, or (2) the funding runs out and you are forced to take productive jobs.

Astronomers at the University of Chicago, led by Freedman, spent five years looking at different stars than Riess to come up with a third calculation of the expansion rate. They just submitted their work to the same journal. Freedman wouldn’t reveal her number but said it is between the two other figures.

A third study using a third set of stars comes up with a third result. More evidence that theory is flawed? Of course not! Like gender studies, everyone gets to be correct. It just means more opportunities for hypothetical exotic states of matter and - most importantly - more opportunities for funding initiatives.

If astrophysicists are allowed to be wrong over and over again, and attribute their shortcomings to as-yet unknown universe magic, why can't feminists? It only seems fair. At this point, the "intersectional physics" is probably more realistic than the actual astrophysics.

Laws Mean Violence

From Armstrong Economics, Police Bust Down Doors with Guns Drawn to Take a Toddler Because of a Fever.

This entire incident was over a toddler who was unvaccinated, who they thought had a fever. They had guns drawn, and as always, they are not afraid to use them if they’re met with any resistance. In the process, they took all three kids into custody and handcuffed the father.

The common belief that permeates our national political discourse is that things will be better if only we can just pass the right set of laws. The left are maniacal about this, and the right is hardly immune. Constant bickering about which laws are bad and which are good, as if the penultimate goal of society is to get the right words written into the right books. (We are quite aware that the Soviet Union had a very liberal, humanistic Bill of Rights, which they ignored.) Our way of understanding things is that the specific laws don't matter all that much. Much more important are the morality and IQ of the populace, and our ability to promote the right people to decision-making positions. The left believe that more laws equates to a better society. We disagree fully with that. Mike Huckabee likes to say that "the size of government is inversely proportional to the morality of the people." More laws is what programmers would call a bad smell. It is a clue that something is rotten underneath. Consider that Japan runs a very orderly society with very few laws or lawyers. Consider also that the country with the most lawyers per capita is the US, followed closely by notoriously corrupt Brazil. (Similarly, the US boasts the most prisoners per capita, followed by El Salvador and then a long list of backwaters countries.) The first of those links contains a nugget of ancient wisdom:

"In a state where corruption abounds laws much be numerous." Cornelius Tacitus, historian, 95 AD.

When it comes to laws, it is the enforcement that matters most. When police are corrupt, more laws means more opportunity for tyranny through selective enforcement. It means they can imprison anyone at any time, because the odds are strong that some law has been broken at some point. It's why Mueller was able to shake down Trump's people. The left will take his token prosecutions as validation that the operation was justified, before returning to arguing that blacks are over-represented in prisons because of system racism in the justice system. Generally, everyone knows that rules are selectively enforced, but pretends otherwise whenever convenient.

Law enforcement means violence. There is no other way. Usually we can get away with the just the threat of violence, but not always. Some people like to pass laws requiring every child to be vaccinated. It sounds nice...a utopian world where every child is safe from disease. They don't like to pass laws where children are torn away from their parents at the barrel of a gun, but the enforcement aspect is rarely considered by cloud people. Public policy has become not an exercise of creating the optimal impact on the world, but in writing the most fanciful and feel-good legal fiction. They are writing fairy tales, more or less, and their narrative creeps ever further away from reality.

Fix It 'Til It's Broken

One of the general rules about liberals is that their policies generate the opposite of their intended effects. That's a redeemable quality, actually, since their goals are normally undesirable. They tried to make college more affordable and the costs skyrocketed. They tried making homeownership more accessible to minorities and drove a mortgage crises. The examples are endless. Here's another one.

One of their goals is to reduce or eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. I happen to believe that carbon dioxide emissions are good for the planet. Fortunately for me, the left disagree and, as such, are working in my favor. Environmentalists have been lobbying furiously for a transition to electric vehicles. Many of us have pointed out that the cars aren't nearly as eco-friendly as they believe them to be, but, fortunately, they don't listen to us. Germany has gone so far as to consider banning diesel cars in their push to convert drivers to electrics. Now a recent study shows that, in their own country, electrics create up to 28% more CO2 emissions than diesel cars. Those trendy Tesla drivers, if their own theories are correct, are driving the world even faster to climate apocalypse than us science deniers. Fortunately they are wrong, and their increased emissions are contributing to a greener globe, but not a warmer one.

Things don't always work out so well, though. The UK celebrated a new "coal-free record" this weekend by running 90 hours without any coal plants. They intend for this to be the new normal as they transition completely away from coal by 2025. They intend to rely on renewables, with gas for peaking power. Like the electric cars, their energy policy is likely to increase rather than decrease carbon emissions when all factors are considered, because such an approach requires nearly duplicating the country's power production infrastructure. It also puts them at the mercy of the European gas markets, dominated by Russia. Not only will their energy policy make electricity more expensive and less reliable for Brits, and increase dependence on foreign dictators, but likely will only serve to worsen the problem it set out to solve in the first place. That's really the new normal with modern western governments. Make the original problem worse, and introduce some new ones along the way.

Social Gospel Movement

From an article at coversation.com titled Why Pete Buttigieg may be reviving progressive ideals of the Social Gospel Movement.

In recent weeks, Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg has captured wide media attention. One reason is that Buttigieg is the first openly gay presidential candidate. Another is that he has been unguarded in speaking about his religious beliefs, arguing that his faith shapes his politics.

Those aren't separate reasons. The second can't stand alone, because Christianity is demonized by the left. An average white guy running as an out-of-the-closet practicing Christian would be lambasted for believing in barbarism, more or less. However, Buttgay gets a pass. Even praise. Why?

Remember, a while back, there was some right-wing outrage about child transexuals who often posed erotically or were even paid to dance for men in bars. If you do an image search for child transexuals (you can just take my word for it) you'll find that all the images have one thing in common: the child is always white. Most people realize that liberal diversity just means opposition to straight white guys. (Not Ben Shapiro, but most people.) So, if the left loves diversity, why wouldn't they find a nice black or latino kid as their child tranny poster boy? It's because everyone innately realizes that there is hardly anything more degrading than compelling a boy to dress like a girl and dance for perverts. A white tranny is marvelous...such progress! A black tranny kid would stoke a lefty outrage about a black serving the lusts of despicable men, modern day slavery, etc etc. (They'd be correct, too.) The white tranny is praised because it satisfies their deep desire to humiliate whites.

This Buttgay fellow is a similar deal. A gay progressive Christian! The left will simply adore this open mockery of the Christian faith. He's just the kind of degeneracy the left is looking for. And, the first gay president beating Literally Hitler...it's a story arc that's hard to resist. [My prediction, at this point, is Buttgay wins the Dem nomination, but loses in the general because blacks and Latinos are not going to turn out strongly for a homosexual.]

In a recent interview, Buttigieg said that “Christian faith” can lead one “in a progressive direction.”

No it can not. Christianity does not tolerate sexual immorality nor idleness. Nor does it permit lies in the pursuit of worldly power. Christianity is diametrically opposed to "a progressive direction."

He has also argued that Christianity teaches “skepticism of the wealthy and the powerful and the established” while elsewhere expressing concern that in the U.S. “concentrated wealth has begun to turn into concentrated power.”

Okay, but "skepticism of the wealthy" is hardly the same as an embrace of progressivism. They aren't calling for skepticism, they're calling for socialism, and a rejection of nearly every social norm of the Christian faith.

While [in Indiana], [early Social Gospel advocate Francis J. McConnel] published a book that made arguments similar to Buttigieg’s belief that faith should inspire social action. McConnell insisted, “The moral impulse calls for the betterment of all the conditions of human living.”

You can see the root of the problem here. We've long described liberalism as a secular Protestantism where they have replaced God with themselves, and seek to mold the world into their particular vision. There isn't anything in Christianity calling for the "betterment of all the conditions of human living." Jesus called on his followers to adopt a life of poverty. Surely these lefties aren't calling for global poverty! It's one thing to fall short of the Christian ideal, quite another thing to reject it entirely, and even more to proclaim that rejection as the new Christian ideal. It's just like Paul said in 2 Thessalonians (see yesterday's post): He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God.

 Historian Susan Curtis writes that McConnell “participated in the promotion of an evolving welfare state.”

Again, 2 Thessalonians delivers:

In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers and sisters, to keep away from every believer who is idle and disruptive and does not live according to the teaching you received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you to imitate. For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” We hear that some among you are idle and disruptive. They are not busy; they are busybodies. Such people we command and urge in the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and earn the food they eat.

Pretty damn clear. There is nothing in Christianity to permit stealing from the productive, nor in allowing the unproductive to partake in handouts.

The Social Gospel’s critique of big business resonated in communities throughout the Midwest.

Christianity is opposed to greed. You don't need "Social Gospel" for that. Perhaps this indicates a failing of the church. Christians should have been opposing anyone engaging in greedy behavior that is harmful to the integrity of Midwest communities.

Like Buttigieg, who argues that his Christian belief makes him skeptical of the effects of concentrated wealth, these Midwesterners saw Christianity as the antidote to distant corporate power.

The problem is that he believes a fake Christianity. Skepticism of corporate greed is perfectly fine. Obsession with materialistic statuses, forced redistribution of wealth, acceptance of the unearned, and praise of unholy lifestyles are definitively unChristian, and to pretend otherwise is the exact type of false proclamation that Paul warned us about.

Easter, Hope for the Good

We'll take a break from Counterbang for the week. That is an exercise in exposing falsehoods, whereas Easter seems more like a day for speaking truths. Plus, most of Ethan's posts this week have been about the black hole photo, which is something I'll be covering anyway.

This Easter, the following snippet out of Paul's second letter to the Thessalonians seems relevant.

The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.

Clearly, evil times are nothing new. Also apparent is that Paul, the founder of Christianity, used the story of Jesus to instruct his followers on the role that evil plays in the world. It certainly seems prophetic in relation to today's world. He preaches against lies, delusion, and wickedness, and that salvation lies in loving the truth. To that we can only say, "Amen." In that context, Easter Sunday is a festival of hope. It is a belief that evil is ultimately punished, and that, even with all its worldly power, it can never stamp out the good. The only true question left is not whether evil will prosper, which it cannot, but whether each of us will be condemned as wicked, or reject the threats and temptations of demons.

No One is Guarding Clown World

The leader of the armed militia in New Mexico that has been making citizens' arrests of border jumpers and turning them over to border control agents has just been arrested by the FBI (the same organization that has spent the last two years trying to un-elect Donald Trump.) We now live in a country where those violating our borders are given money, and those defending the borders are given jail time. Clown world means always doing the opposite of whatever is virtuous or logical. Pay the invader, arrest the defender. Spare the murderer from the rope, but terminate the unborn. Imagine a lioness that eats her own cubs while nursing baby gazelles. That is an imaginary analogy, because there are no proper comparisons from nature.

Not only that, but I don't believe there are is anything equivalent from human history, either. There is no shortage of dumb behavior, to be sure. The Trojans wheeled the wooden horse into their walls, which was dumb, if true. The Athenians were dumb to invade Sicily. Napoleon was dumb to invade Russia, which makes Hitler double dumb for repeating the mistake. The Aztecs murdered a quarter of their own children. That seems pretty dumb. And yet, nothing registers even remotely as dumb as paying invaders while arresting patriots. There are scenarios where outsiders were invited by some disgruntled subset of the populace. In late Rome, the rural peasants were so abused that they welcomed Germanic invasions. But that isn't the same dynamic. Had the Roman emperor himself invited the Germanics to invade while punishing anyone who raised a defense, then he'd have been as stupid as we are today. But he didn't do that, because no civilization in history has ever been as stupid as the one we are living in today.

A Niche on the Spectrum

The Big Five personality traits are used by psychologists to classify personalities. The traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each trait is measured over a spectrum. For instance, most people aren't completely open or completely closed but exist somewhere in between, distributed over a bell curve. Generally, problems lie at the extremes, where some trait has gone out of balance. According to Jordan Peterson, the Big Five taxonomy has been successful because the traits can often be correlated to other social attributes. For example, high openness and low conscientious is typical of liberals, and the opposite of conservatives. The other traits play little role in political disposition, nor does IQ.

Each trait is really a set of two opposing traits, each of which can be beneficial to humans under different instances. Openness permits positive change, but also invites dangerous change. That is why the spectrums exists within the human psyche. If openness always gave a reproductive balance, then we'd have evolved to always be open. But, a highly open society is ripe for invasion and destruction. (I'm sure readers can provide their own examples.)

While Dr Peterson was able to effortlessly muse on the various benefits of the opposing traits, he struggled with the introversion/extroversion dynamic. It's easy to see how extroversion would aid survival for highly social humans. Extroversion means social engagement, which means improvements in hierarchal status, yielding greater access to resources and mates. It's hard to see what benefit could come from introversion. Peterson admitted he struggled with it as well, and that he supposed it had something to do with nature or alignment with nature. It seemed like a flimsy explanation.

An extroverted person is said to be well-adjusted. They're extroverted because they're good at social engagement. Success reinforces, failure deters. Introverted people tend to avoid social activity. Some have a natural disposition for solitude, and others are quite capable of handling socializing, but find it so stressful that they engage sparingly. Many are just poor at socializing, so they become solitary for the same reason that the short kid who can't dribble eventually quits trying out for the basketball team. Their lack of social practice means their skills degrade even further, and the natural trait becomes reinforced.

So what good could possibly come from that? Why have the introversion trait at all? What is the Darwinian benefit of not being well-adjusted? One more question gives us the answer...well-adjusted to what? Well-adjusted to society. Look around. Is this a society to be well-adjusted into? For readers here, probably not. You must be poorly adjusted from mainstream society to spend your free time reading obscure cynical blogs rather than mainstream gospels like the New York Times or the Atlantic. Being "well-adjusted" in this climate means professing a belief that sexual perversion is something to have Pride in, while family values are bigoted. Being well adjusted in this clown world means encouraging young boys to castrate themselves or cracking jokes while our churches are burned down by hostile foreigners. Just like the other traits, the benefit depends on circumstance. It is no virtue to be well-adjusted in a degenerate culture.

The survival advantage arises because degenerate cultures die. They are either invaded or they become unable to sustain the population that grew during more productive eras. The well-adjusted die the most. The old elite are hung up, often by irate mobs from their own populace. Those most dependent on the society are most in danger when it falls. Similarly, those who fostered an ethos of self-reliance are more likely to persist during the downturns. If societies were perfectly stable, there would be no selective pressure for introversion. But societies grow and die with regularity. Strong, virtuous nations become weak and degenerate, and they collapse.

As it turns out, Peterson is correct when he relates introversion to an affinity for nature. Introverts know an irrational society is unnatural and cannot survive. Their withdrawal is not just personal preferences, but a deeper survival instinct. As with the other traits, success is dependent on circumstance, and danger lies at the extremes. A pure introvert loses access to the great benefits that society provides, but a pure extrovert will happily follow the lemmings right out to sea.

A Nation of Builders (RIP)

While many on the dissident right were once libertarians, the general consensus these days is a rejection of that political outlook. Not because it doesn't sound nice, but because it doesn't work. A libertarian or civic nationalist would be liable to say something like "feminism is a vile movement, but I will fight the to my death to protect their civic liberties." Or they might say to allow it to fail by its own detects in the free market of ideas. The problem is that the marketplace of ideas is not free, and it's not the feminists paying the cost of their agenda. "Live and let live" is very nice until a collapsing pedestrian bridge crushes your family. That's the whole point of conservatism, is that our lives are intimately intertwined with our societies. It's impossible not to take politics personally, because it is inherently personal. If modern society collapsed, billions would perish. If it falters, we suffer. There is a lot at stake.

Many libertarians and nearly all liberals support open borders. People are interchangeable, they say, so it doesn't matter who goes where. What harm could it do to let a bunch of Somalians settle in Minneapolis? Well, now you can't even visit the Mall of America - a national attraction - without risking having your child randomly thrown off the balcony by a Muslim. It's quite fitting that it would happen in the Mall of America. Much like watching Notre Dame burn, the event is a strong symbol for the state of our civilization.

Emmanuel Macron pledged to have the state-owned cathedral rebuilt within five years, praising France as a "nation of builders." Who does he think he's kidding? What has modern France built? The cathedral was built back when France actually was a nation of builders. Now it's a nation where near 20% are of a certain religion that love to burn and vandalize churches. They are a nation of looters, sucking dry what the nation of builders left for them. The modern western nations can't even build a foot bridge. The leftists acknowledge the distinction. From the Rolling Stone,

Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was — a non-secular, white European France — but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making. 

Basically, we should let Muslims come burn down our churches, and then not rebuild them. We should let them throw our children off balconies, and not expel them. We should totally abandon the civilization we inherited, and make way for the next dark ages. That is what liberals are fighting for, and libertarians are encouraging us to permit.

The Weasel And The Lion

A reader asked a while back, why do I dislike Ben Shapiro so much? After all, we're on the same side, right? Indeed, we both believe that liberals are an unhinged secular religion, but that is not so important. So he notices the obvious! Good for him, but it hardly merits praise. The truth is that I could not be on Shapiro's side if I wanted to, because his side has room for only one. He does not understand fidelity, only self-promotion. He gains support by calling out the left for using terms like racist as political weapons, but then piles on anytime there's a good virtual lynching about. Often, he initially sides with the left and then scurries back to safety whenever necessary. It is the strategy of a weasel, not a man.

Consider this little performance he gave yesterday.

And also:

Who exactly are these Judeo-Christians? Was it Louis VII, the French King who attended the cornerstone-laying ceremony for the great church? Let's see.

LOUIS VII (called the Young), king of France from 1137 to 1180. In 1144, Louis banished from the kingdom those Jews who had been converted to Christianity and had later returned to Judaism. In 1146, Louis authorized the Jews to return to Sens, from where they had been expelled. During the preparations for the Second Crusade, of which Louis became one of the principal leaders, Peter the Venerable of Cluny wrote to the king advising him to confiscate the possessions of the Jews; however, Louis followed the more tolerant counsel of Bernard of Clairvaux, who suggested that only the interest on the debts that Crusaders owed to Jewish moneylenders should be canceled.

Hmm, doesn't sound like a Judeo-Christian to me. What about Shapiro, is he one? Not likely, since he saw the Notre Dame tragedy as a great opportunity to make snarky jabs at the president. Remember, Shapiro recoils from this kind of controversy, as seen by his retraction in the face of opposition. His instincts are to find the stance where he can get support from both the left and the right by being a reasonable moderate. So how did he misstep so badly on this one? It's because he feels little to nothing at all for the destruction of the cherished cathedral. When I first saw those images of the inferno, it was gut-wrenching. The normal Westerner is naturally saddened, pained, and angered at the event. Shapiro feels none of that.

Trump is not an articulate man, but his tweet falls right into his pattern of behavior. He is a leader, a natural alpha. In the case of disaster, his instincts would be to quiz his subordinates on the possible approaches, and then take bold, decisive action. He may have little technical understanding of firefighting or medieval construction, but he knows how to be a decider. He was advising French leaders to consider all bold possibilities and be quick, or risk losing their irreplaceable cathedral. Such times require men of action.

Shapiro is a weasel of words. His entire existence is to say the right words to increase his own status. That's all he does, and all he knows how to do. He likes to have conversations on the conversations he'll have about future conversations. It's words, words, words. So when he saw Trump hit an off note with "flying water tankers," he just couldn't help but lay on the snark. This word master just can't believe that the elected president is so bad at words, but Ben has no grasp of the reality of the situation. The president was giving a quick alpha tutorial in disaster management. Assess all the options (even the wild ones), make a firm decision, and act fast. And Shapiro missed that his own supporters mainly are not Judeo-Christians, but Christians who were in agony over the event.

Trump and Shapiro both tend to be self-interested and self-promoting. The difference is that Trump instinctively understands us and will take action to help if he can. Shapiro will not. Hopefully people are realizing that we're a lot more isolated than we'd like to believe. (I predict that the haunting imagery of the collapsing cathedral will have a significant, long-term impact on the collective conscience of the West.) Conservative word weasels are not on our side. They will not fight for us or with us. You'll never find yourself in a foxhole with Shapiro, defending so-called Judeo-Christian values. You can only count on him to be always out there, saying his words.

Notre Dame, Icon of the Fallen West

Notre Dame is one of the great iconic buildings of the West. We can only marvel at how medieval engineers built such a soaring structure from stone in a low-tech era. It predates the printing press, firearms, and even chimneys. It was built when religious conviction was the norm, and the Church held great power. Medieval cathedrals were typically built over numerous generations, and much of the work was done by volunteer laborers and artisans out of a sense of duty and pride. Notre Dame took a hundred years to complete. No one who started the project lived to see it completed! Today, we can hardly fathom such profound devotion to God and community. That was the ethos present in the rising West.

And now, with the partial destruction of the cathedral, we see the decline of that same civilization. It may have been an act of arson. It follows on a long streak of vandalism and arson against churches in France which has gotten little media coverage, for the obvious reason. Estimates have been that something like ten churches a week are desecrated by you know who. Just two months ago, France's second largest cathedral suffered a fire that was ruled to have been intentional. Authorities already have thwarted two plots seemingly aimed at Notre Dame itself. It's possible that the fire was an accident resulting from carelessness during renovation, but the pattern of events points more towards an act of cultural terrorism.

In either case, the reality is the same. Westerners inherited a civilization which they are either unable or unwilling to maintain. Perhaps it was torched by the migrants they import and embrace as fellow Frenchmen. Perhaps it was from carelessness in restoring the priceless site. Who was supervising? Why did it take two and a half hours to get fire hoses on the scene? If arson, was there proper security, or were they just trying to pretend that French churches aren't being attacked on a daily basis, like everyone else?

The Catholic church once inspired men to build architectural masterpieces for the benefit of their great-grandchildren. Now it is mainly seen as an archaic institution of pervert priests and a commie pope busy kissing Muslims' feet while his cathedrals burn to the ground. (Yes, he's been at it again.) If the cathedral was once an icon of Western strength and devotion to transcendental grace, it is now one of neglect and foolishness. The images of Notre Dame ablaze and its pinnacle crashing to the ground should haunt us all, or one day they will adorn history books with names like How the West Fell.

Contrabang #3

6 Supermassive Questions On The Eve Of The Event Horizon Telescope’s Big Announcement (link)

The major takeaway is that general relativity predicts a perfect sphere, although they might observe something else, and that's okay. I'll write a dedicated post about the black hole photo later this week.

What If It's Just Us? (link)

When it comes to the question of extraterrestrial life, humans optimistically assume the Universe is prolific. After all, there doesn’t appear to be anything particularly special about Earth, and life not only took hold here on our world, but evolved, thrived, became complex and differentiated, and then intelligent and technologically advanced. If the same ingredients are everywhere and the same rules are at play, wouldn’t it be an awful waste of space if we’re alone?

No, it would not be a waste of space at all. The vast cosmos are "worth it" alone just for our wonderment at the night sky. From their perspective, life is just a natural side effect of physical processes innate to the universe. They can't comprehend that in all the enormity of the universe, life may have only arisen once, and they are truly bothered by the possibility.

He lists three big steps that must have occurred for intelligence to exist elsewhere in the universe.

1. Life must have somehow arisen from non-life. That is his materialism showing. We might also suggest that non-life somehow arose from life!
2. Life must have thrived and evolved to become multicellular, complex, and differentiated. There are some compelling counterarguments. The gist is that, to modern scientists analyzing the genetics of various species, similar traits are taken as evidence of evolution, and dissimilar traits are taken as evidence of evolution.
3. Intelligent life must have evolved, with the right traits to also become a technologically advanced civilization. Again, more materialist assumptions. Ethan believes that only a long series of random changes could cause intelligence, so he must consider the probability of that chain of random events occurring. (Too bad for him that the chances are zero.)

What To Do If You Encounter A Visitor From Another Universe (link)

One of the dumbest things you'll ever read. (But you shouldn't.)

Fine-Tuning Really Is A Problem In Physics (link)

The one good thing about Ethan is he doesn't shy away from the difficult contradictions and paradoxes that face modern physics. If only he took a step back for a moment and realized that those questions are profound and provide cause for skepticism, he might stop with his ridiculous cheerleading.

By comparing the observations we make with our theoretical predictions for what those fluctuations should look like in a Universe with varying amounts of curvature, we can determine that the Universe is extremely spatially flat, even today. If we extrapolate back to the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang based on our modern observations, we learn that the initial expansion rate and the initial energy density must be balanced to something like 50 significant digits. [...] This puzzle is known as the flatness problem, as a Universe where energy and the expansion rate balance so perfectly will also be perfectly spatially flat.

This is a big one. Although it may not be intuitive what they mean by a flat universe, understanding it is not necessary to see the improbability of their assumptions. He goes on to describe a flat universe as akin to a boulder in unstable equilibrium. It's so unstable that the universe has to be tuned to 50 digits of precision to remain flat. Interestingly, spacetime would also appear "flat" if it didn't exist at all. So, what is more likely: that the universe is randomly balanced with an infinitesimally small probability, or that spacetime is bullshit? This is another one of those cases of an unfalsifiable theory. If your theory requires universal constants to be randomly tuned to 50 digits of precision, it should be taken as proof that the theory is bunk. But no, they just say they have a "fine-tuning problem." The name drips with hubris and is so indicative of the mindset of the modern scientist. They always assume that they pretty much understand everything already, and the remaining unknowns are just a matter of ironing out the wrinkles.

When we see what appears to be a cosmic coincidence, we owe it to ourselves to examine every possible physical cause of that coincidence, as one of them might lead to the next great breakthrough.

How about examining that the concept of spacetime is nonsense? See, they do this constantly. Always talking about considering all possibilities to explain the absurdities of their theories, while always deliberately ignoring the obvious ones.

The Fatal Solution

Fatalism is the belief that a person has some pre-ordained fate, and that their own decisions have little or no impact on the outcome. It's an old concept. The ancient Greeks were big on fatalism, but always within the larger scope of life as a human drama or morality play. We may know ahead of time that the character is doomed to a tragic end, but how he gets there and how he composes himself are revealed in the journey. The Greek gods had great influence over human events, but not control. They might help guide an arrow to give their preferred side an advantage in battle, and similar interventions, but men were not depicted as puppets under the direction of all-powerful gods.

Christianity carried the Greek balance of fate and moral agency into the modern world. The Christian god is all-powerful and all-knowing, but does not normally intervene in human affairs. Christians pray for guidance or strength to navigate life in a holy way, rather than directly for some specific outcome. Muslims are more fatalist, constantly evoking language such as "God-willing" or "God wills it." To them, the spirit force controls all things. Such a mindset risks being abused to excuse immoral acts. Genghis Khan - the most murderous human to ever life - took fatalism to an extreme, dubbing himself the "Scourge of God." If God was willing to let a people be savaged by the Golden Horde, he mused, then they surely must have been wicked and deserving of punishment.

It may appear that fatalism has been relegated to the dustbin of Western history, lingering only in 3rd world backwaters. Actually, the modern world is incubating a form of fatalism more extreme than anything imagined by the worst of history's wild-eyed fanatics: determinism. It's been brought to us by the scientific branch of materialism - the modern effort to remove all meaning and purpose from life. [I suspect that materialism is itself a branch of the larger progressive ethos of Occidentalism, or hatred of the West. Part of hating the West mean attacking its traditional religiosity and transcendentalism. The reason the Left self-describes as the "pro-science" party is because they believe science means anti-Christianity. And they are correct, so long as they are referring to science that is obsessed with materialism and randomness.] Determinism is the belief that the world is governed solely by physical laws of the universe. That is said to account for human behavior as well, which they take to be merely the result of physical processes in the brain over which we have no control. The major scientific explanation for consciousness is that it is but an illusion! Just an interesting side effect of information-processing brains that evolved for material advantage in the world.

It is a bitter pill to swallow, that consciousness is just a quirky aspect of a purely mechanical universe, which we're also told is doomed to eventual heat death. No wonder suicide rates are through the roof, and measured happiness at all time lows. The increased malaise especially affects whites. Think, all that alleged privilege comes with added misery. Is it guilt? No doubt the nonstop shaming has its effect, but, then again, that is still a low-grade disease. Our ancestors survived much worse than shame. It can only kill the weak, but we are weakened already by rampant materialism and demoralization. I believe that whites are especially affected because our psyches are most dependent on the transcendent. Take it away and everything goes haywire, resulting in despair, escapism, and self-numbing through drug use. 70,000 overdosed on opiates last year. The number is beyond alarming. Many try their best to fill the "God-shaped hole" that has been forged by blind atheism. Liberalism is just Neo-Puritanism. All the aspects are there: a strict moral code, shaming of the impious, public displays of virtue, destruction of heretics, mystical forces of evil, and the constant threat of apocalypse as punishment for our sins (both original and earned). It's not that the spiritually religious are immune from fanaticism, but that fatalism leads inevitably to fanaticism.

In a world where materialism reigns, questions such as this one are considered to be profound philosophical discussion.

If the Big Bang were to occur under the exact same conditions again, say in a separate universe, would the outcome be the exact same?

If you browse the answers, you might be relieved to find that most answer in the negative. Consider just the first part of the top answer.

Very likely no. The universe is probabilistic [...]

Those here who follow William Briggs' blog (linked on the sidebar) will understand that probability is not a concept in the physical world. It is a measure of our own uncertainty. Calling the universe probabilistic is a convenient way to accept the materialism viewpoint without having to deal with the implication that their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are not their own, but merely an inevitable consequence of physical processes put into motion billions of years ago by the Big Bang. They resist determinism just enough to avoid facing its logical contradictions, but not enough to avoid the soul-crushing conviction that existence is futile and tragic.

Clearly the fatalists pose an existential threat to our civilization. What are we to do about them? I suggest that we start killing them. It's morbid, but please entertain, for a moment, the scenario of murdering a determinist.

Me: Okay, I will be murdering you now.
Determinist: But you can't! Murder is immoral!
Me: What role is there for morality? I am merely following the physical processes that occur in my brain. You and I are both powerless to affect the outcome.
Determinist: Your logic is impeccable. Yes, then, please murder away.

The nice thing about murdering fatalists is you wouldn't have to kill all of them. You might not need to kill any. Just the threat could do the trick. People who survive attempted suicide jumps off bridges report that they immediately felt a sense of regret and a strong will to live. Even the most determined determinist will likely find something subliminal in life, if the alternative is to become a murder statistic.

Duke University Fined Over $100 Million for Research Racket

Lately, this blog has been primarily focused on highlighting scientific fraud. I get little feedback on those pieces (and somewhat less interest, based on click counts), but I wonder how many readers believe the claims of systemic academic fraud to be overstated.

Fresh on the heels of the college admissions scandal, Duke University has agreed to pay an enormous fine of $112.5 million for years of scamming the US government's academic funding bodies. It was estimated that the amount of grants for the fake research amounted to over $200 million. That's at a single institution! It's not even the kind of fraud we focus on here - mostly where study results are either misinterpreted or ignored. This was the result of an insider who blew the whistle on the outright fabrication of data. It was deliberate fraud.

It took a whistleblower, of course, because the quality of academic research is so poor that funding agencies have no way to tell the real garbage from the fake. The major surprise is that the DOJ would pursue the case. I wan't sure if they were still in the business of investigating actual crimes, or it was all political treachery at this point. I guess the lesson is that the federal government is primarily concerned with it's own interests, enough so that don't take lightly to being scammed by their ideological brethren in the ivory towers. That's actually a good thing. We're so far down the rabbit hole that converged institutions routinely work against their own interests to aid the cause. For example, the city of Chicago allowed itself to be scammed by a high-profile false police report.

The Duke biology department is at the center of the fiasco. Medical research is so untrustworthy that pharmaceutical companies are opting to roll their own research rather than gamble money on the publicly funded results. Fraud is rampant in cancer research field as well. Many people, by now, are aware that the biggest so-called charities take most of the donations for themselves as "overhead" or to "raise awareness," as if no one ever heard of breast cancer before. What they don't know is that even the dollars that make it to the researchers are often squandered if not outright embezzled.

Contrabang #2

For the second round of Counterbang, we'll just a pick out a couple of particularly interesting posts from the week.

How Can We Still See The Disappearing Universe? (link)

Addresses the apparent paradox that the standard theories present. Because light travels at a finite speed, when we look at distant galaxies, we are effectively looking back in time. If we observe a galaxy that is a billion light years away, then we are viewing it as it was a billion years ago. But, they also say that cosmic inflation is pushing those galaxies away at increasing speeds, which for far away objects already exceeds the speed of light. Thus, the galaxy was a billion light years away, a billion years ago. Now it is much farther. So far, in fact, that the light it is emitting today might never reach Earth.

When we start at the beginning and come forward in time, we get a single, consistent conclusion. Our Universe has been around for 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, is made up of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4.9% normal matter...

They say these things so often that the insanity of it no longer phases them. "Scientists have reached a single, consistent conclusion, that precisely 68% of the universe is a hypothetical form of elusive energy that has never been observed either in nature or the lab. They are also mathematically certain that 27% of the universe is a hypothetical form of mystery matter that has never been observed either in nature in the lab. In fact, normal matter is a mere 4.9% of the universe, making it far from normal."

Remember as kids trying to keep track of astronomy versus astrology? Astronomy, we were told, is a respectable pursuit of study, while astrology is a bunch of gobbledygook with numbers and mystical forces. As adults, it's becoming obvious that they were the ones who had the descriptions flipped the whole time. 😄

The most distant object we can see, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, is presently 46 billion light-years away from us. But any object that’s presently within 61 billion light-years of us will someday have that light eventually reach us.

At this point we should consider cosmic inflation and big bang theory to be unfalsifiable theories. There's no amount of absurdity, contradictory evidence, or appeals to decency that will persuade these madmen from their ravings. Cosmic inflation is just too sweet a temptation to resist. It allows them to resolve all the internecine contradictions of their various theories by suspending basic laws of physics. Universal constants like the speed of light, and fundamental principles like the laws of thermodynamics, can be placed aside in favor of dark energy.

No, Physicists Still Don’t Know Why Matter (And Not Antimatter) Dominates Our Universe (link)

Another unsolved detail from the Big Bang Theory is that they provide no reason for there to be any matter at all. The Big Bang posits that everything in the universe was created in an instance from a single point of pure energy. (Just don't say it was created! No, God didn't say "let their be light." That was done by the immutable laws of physics...which incidentally did not apply at the beginning of the Big Bang.) Their models predict that the Big Bang should have produced equal parts matter and anti-matter, which would annihilate each other and leave nothing. Yet, when we look around, we see lots of something. Why?

The Universe was thought to be born matter-antimatter symmetric, as the laws of physics dictate. But something must have happened during that first fraction of a second to preferentially create matter and/or destroy antimatter, leaving an overall imbalance. By the time we get to today, only the matter survives.

The number one rule of all modern science is that contradictory evidence does not challenge standard models or basic assumptions. No, it always means that there is simply some complexity to add somewhere in the model. Today's contradictions are not tomorrow's contradictions. They will surely be explained by then, so there's no need to be overly concerned about them.

Examples of this abound. One is that the standard gravitational model of planetary motion is inherently unstable for many bodied systems. How do they explain that our own solar system seems orderly? They don't. It hasn't been proven that our solar system actually is stable over the long run, therefore there is no contradiction.

The same is true with the matter / anti-matter issue. No, it doesn't invalidate the Big Bang Theory, it just means we don't yet know the full BBT yet. Only taxpayer funding can tell us more. As to what the extra complexity may be, he admits that they haven't got a clue. (A rare admission of honesty from these people.)

Apocalypse Imminent, Says Computer

A headline from USAToday: Earth's carbon dioxide levels highest in 3 million years, study says. It seems like fake news, at first blush. Is that true, highest in 3 million years? Let's dig in.

Taking those in order:

• If Greenland was green the last time CO2 was as high as today, does that not refute the CO2 = temperature claim?
• Even trace amounts of CO2 raise temperatures. Ergo, we should eliminate all traces of that insidious gas!
• Sounds more like the sinister description usually given to dangerous molecules like carbon monoxide.

“It seems we’re now pushing our home planet beyond any climatic conditions experienced during the entire current geological period, the Quaternary,” said study lead author Matteo Willeit of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “A period that started almost 3 million years ago and saw human civilization beginning only 11,000 years ago. So, the modern climate change we see is big, really big; even by standards of Earth history.”

So the Institute for Climate Impact Research has concluded that the climate is being impacted. Hardly a surprise. Let's see the basis of their conclusions.

Willeit and his colleagues used sophisticated computer simulations of Earth's past climate to reach their conclusion.

Well there you have it. A computer simulation. Golly, that's science!

He said his team compared their results with hard data from the deep sea, which matched what the computers said.

What hard data? No description, no link. Just...trust them, there is evidence that confirms. If so, why the need for the simulation at all?

Today, CO2 levels measure over 410 parts per million. While that may not sound like a huge amount, scientists have known for decades that even trace amounts in the atmosphere can raise temperatures around the world. 

This is bizarre language. They seem to be demonizing "even trace amounts" of the one gas that is required for all carbon-based life on earth.

Finally, at the end of the article is the major premise.

All the nations of the world – except for the United States – are part of the Paris climate agreement, which aims to reduce humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, in order to prevent rising global temperatures.

It's a political ad, more or less. A computer program written by a prejudiced institute says you should vote for the left or Earth is doomed!

[Afterthought]
Having read this, can we conclude that the CO2 levels really are at their highest level in 3 million years? No, but it doesn't matter. The bigger question is whether H2O is at the highest levels in 3 million years. The climate alarmists don't like to admit it (most have no idea what they're talking about anyway) but CO2 is not actually the greenhouse gas that leads to climate apocalypse, in their own models. It is a trace gas, and doubling it has little effect, whatever the article might imply. The mainstream hypothesis is that CO2 triggers low-scale warming which causes more atmospheric water vapor - the most significant greenhouse gas. The whole theory becomes an exercise in absurdity. They propose that earth is a positive-feedback disaster just waiting to be triggered by stupid humans who refused to listen to Al Gore. But, they state in their same argument that CO2 levels were just as high 3 million years ago. So, if previous CO2 levels already triggered the runaway warming scenario, how did Earth ever recover and cool? There is no reason, in their own models, for that to have ever happened.

Japanese Asteroid Bomb

Today from APNews,

TOKYO (AP) — Japan’s space agency said an explosive dropped Friday from its Hayabusa2 spacecraft successfully blasted the surface of an asteroid for the first time to form a crater and pave the way for the collection of underground samples for possible clues to the origin of the solar system.

Prediction: they won't find what they are looking for.

This is an easy prediction, since every probe sent to comets or asteroids yields results that surprise scientists. Domain knowledge is hardly necessary; just bet against their expectations by default. The pattern is routine. In the short-term aftermath of a mission's results, mission leaders express sentiments that the collected evidence should compel scientists to question basic assumptions about planetary science, go back to the drawing board, and so on. In the long term, that never happens. The inconvenient evidence is downplayed and explained away. In fact, this same mission has already disappointed scientists once, and that reporting is itself an example of the process in action.

Two weeks ago, CNN ran the headline Japan asteroid probe in 'tantalizing' solar system discoveries.

"It's far dryer than we expected, and given Ryugu is quite young (by asteroid standards) at around 100 million years old, this suggests its parent body was much largely devoid of water too," Sugita added.

The finding is significant, he said, because of all of Earth's water is thought to have come came from local asteroids, distant comets and the nebula or dust cloud that became our sun.

"The presence of dry asteroids in the asteroid belt would change models used to describe the chemical composition of the early solar system," he added.

Amusingly, that was not CNN's original headline. The first headline, as seen cached here, was Hayabusa 2 data forces scientists to reevaluate early solar system. The scenario is most likely the routine one. The reporters expressed the sentiments of the mission leaders, then received pushback from the wider scientific community - who don't like being forced to reevaluate anything - and the headline was modified. One of these days, we should create a catalogue of all the instances where missions have returned results that challenged fundamental assumptions of the standard models, but then no fundamental changes to models are ever made. It's academic fraud! They launch the missions at great public expense, but then ignore the results that they don't like...which is most of them.

At stake is the astrophysicists' standard model of the solar system lifecycle, which depends on gravitational accretion disk theory. We've picked on accretion disks here before, although not nearly enough. It's one of their only tricks, so they use it for everything. The planets were said to have coalesced out of a dusty accretion disk that surrounded the primordial sun. Supernovae are theorized to be driven by accretion that pushes a star to critical mass for fusionable material. Most amusing, quasars - the brightest objects of the sky - are said to be glowing accretion disks powered by supermassive black holes...allegedly the most anti-bright objects of the sky.

Asteroids and comets are thought to be leftovers of the primordial accretion disk, and thus something of a time capsule for scientists to peer into. Their model of planetary birth suggests Earth would have been too hot to condense the liquid water that covers most of its surface. Thus, they reckon water must have come from asteroids and other objects that formed further out from the sun, and then bombarded the Earth later after it had cooled enough.

Their theory predicts that the asteroids which still exist should contain significant amounts of water. They found the asteroid to be surprisingly dry (which isn't surprising) so now they suggest that the asteroid was dried out by eons of bombardment by solar and cosmic radiation. The core of the asteroids should be intact, though, so they are now blasting craters into asteroids to see. The question isn't whether they will find the water they are looking for, but how they will respond when they don't. We'll likely hear excuses like the crater wasn't deep enough, drying by radiation was stronger than expected, etc. They might make some minor tweaks to planetary formation models, but the major premises will not be challenged. While an interesting mission from an engineering angle (and well done, it seems), the Hyabusa2 will ultimately be a complete waste of $148 million in Japanese taxes (16.4 billion yen) because scientists ignore mission results they don't like.

A Whale of a Tale

Paleontologists claim to have discovered a nearly complete skeleton of an ancient, four-legged whale in Peru. Other fossils believed to have come from proto-whales (based solely on a single ear bone) were found in Pakistan, thus scientists hypothesize that the creatures traveled westward from southern Asia, across northern Africa, across the Atlantic Ocean to South America, and around the northern end to present-day Peru.

While scientists know that whales’ ancestors came from the sea onto land, then evolved to once again live in the sea, the exact details of that journey have been sparse.

This is the kind of language common from the scientific community these days. They know what happened, even when evidence is "sparse." The scientific process consists of searching for evidence to support what is already known to be true.

Appearance-wise, this whale did not look like the whales we have come to know. Like its ancestors in South Asia, it still had small hooves, which indicate that it was still capable of standing and even walking on land. Bones in its tail are reminiscent of beavers’ and otters’ tails, suggesting that the body part was essential to its swimming capabilities.
[...]
This skeleton, dug out from the coastal desert Playa Media Luna, is the first indisputable record of a quadrupedal whale skeleton for the whole Pacific Ocean.

They say that the earliest whale was a land-dwelling hooved relative of the modern cow or hippo, with a tail like a beaver, which could swim across entire oceans. They call the evidence "indisputable." Do not try to dispute the evidence! It cannot be done.

Overall, the ancient animal was four meters long, and the physical evidence suggests it possessed locomotion abilities that enabled it to travel great distances. This specimen’s existence also demonstrates that four-legged whales were able to cross the South Atlantic Ocean and disperse as far as the Pacific Ocean — all while retaining functional, weight-bearing limbs — less than 20 million years after their origin.

The evidence neither suggests nor demonstrates that it could travel such great distances asea while yet land-dwelling. The need to confirm the whale evolution theory does all the suggesting. A careful survey of the evidence does not lead to such a conclusion, and certainly not to the level of certainty being conveyed. As usual, the tail wags the dog; the cart comes before the horse. The theory is assumed to be true, the evidence is just "details."

While the journey is still impressive — from South Asia, to the western coast of Africa, to South America — researchers say that was in part possible because the distance between the latter two continents was half what it is today. This ancient whale also would have been assisted by westward surface currents, which pushed it onward as it swam.

Why resort to such musings to explain a beaver-like ocean-crossing cow? Because, they must tie the new fossil - which they call a proto-whale - to the Asian fossils that they previously called proto-whales. To fit their timeline, the ocean crossing must have happened while the creature was still hooved, and the ocean already vast.

Illinois: Blacks on the Board

While we normally think of the border and coastal states as being those in the worst shape, Illinois may be headed fastest towards disaster. It is not only the fastest shrinking state, it also holds perhaps the worst financial outlook. The response of the Democrats, who now hold the governorship plus supermajorities in both houses of the General Assembly, has been predictable. Mandatory gay/transexual education for schoolchildren. Yeah, that's what the state needs. Now the lower house has passed a bill requiring that every publicly traded company within the state must have at least one woman on the board and at least one African-American. One minority? One Latino? One guy who speaks with an accent or has a dark complexion? No. The language is very specific.

• "African American" means a citizen with at least partial Sub-Saharan African ancestry and who self-identifies as being African American.
• "Female" means an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual's designated sex at birth.

So the female requirement can be dodged - if desired - by merely claiming the fairer gender as one's own. But the African standard requires blood! And not just any blood, but sub-Saharan blood. Sorry Egyptians, Tunisians, etc. You don't count. Elon Musk, you can pretty much fuck off, too. Every company must have a bonafide negro on the board, and that's just the law.

While I appreciate Illinois' embrace of accelerationism, I do have to wonder about the plight of the downstaters. (I was born & raised in downstate Illinois, myself.) What exactly will it take for those good people to separate themselves from the tyranny of Cook County? It appears that they will tolerate about any abuse. It might be an interesting pool. What would it take for the downstaters to declare state secession? More taxation (they're already the highest taxed state)? Reparations? Sacrifice of the first-born child? Surely there must be a breaking point in there somewhere. Maybe we'll find out.