Pardon the Interruption

I apologize for falling behind. I've been on vacation. I always pack the laptop, thinking I'll blog from the beach, but that doesn't ever really happen. I will try to get caught up on Contrabang! tomorrow, and get back to the usual routine.

I haven't followed current events much in the past week. The most interesting event I caught wind of was Reddit quarantining (a soft form of banning) r/the_donald - the biggest Trump forum on the internet. I've been expecting it to happen at some point before the next election, and hoping for it as well. Social media companies like Reddit are politically controlled operations. They have been converged, in the lingo of Vox Day. They were not created as political entities, but became politicized anyway. If there is one thing that should be obvious, it's that we shouldn't be building online communities that SJWs can destroy at their own leisure.

What is less obvious is whether we should be engaging in enemy territory at all. Many say we should, because the mainstream outlets are where the discourse is taking place. I notice that those people also tend to be the ones dependent on maintaining a large following for their own livelihoods. Others say that abandoning the mainstream sites amounts to surrender. If we simply leave, we are giving up even more institutions without a fight, and the whole problem is that we've allowed the left to take over the institutions nearly unimpeded. Still, I liken it to the way we face a cancer diagnosis. We'd rather the lung not have been infected to begin with, or caught and treated early. Once too far gone, though, and the only option is to remove the diseased organ. Many of our institutions are so far radicalized that they can never be treated. They must be destroyed.

Thus, I will be ending my own use of Reddit, abandoning my 11-year-old account there, as I have my 15-year-old account on Facebook. For both those platforms, I am their core audience. Facebook was built around college millennials, and Reddit's core audience is 30-something white men in the tech sector. They've grown and expanded, but still can't survive with their core audience shrinking. They will no longer be able to find actual investors and will have to rely on support from political entities. By leaving their platforms entirely, we at least help turn a political weapon that is self-sufficient into one that is a financial liability for the left. It's the best we can do, and we can focus our attention, energy, and money in better places.

Monosyllabic Memes

Big tech censorship has had an uptick recently. We understand that the platforms are merely political weapons which are turned on those who challenge the Democratic party. Vague references to policy violations are mere plausible deniability. But lately, they aren't even trying with the pretense. Tim Pool - a self-described liberal - had a YouTube video removed for discussing Project Veritas's undercover investigation of the political bias at Pinterest. Black Pigeon Speaks was completely banned from Youtube for apparently no reason at all, but then later re-instated. (Both of them can be found on Bitchute.)

On Reddit, a user was banned for commenting the single word "despite" - a reference to black federal murder statistics. A single word is all it takes. On Twitter, a user was banned for using the word "honk". That's a single syllable! It's meant to reference the Clown World meme, which is a silly way to describe our society's domination by morality inversion (or evil, in the Christian sense). It is not permitted to call our culture a Clown World. It is not permitted to say Honk! Honkers will be banned!! I do get enjoyment out of seeing them attack someone and utterly prove the point being made. It's like when Ilhan Omar said the Jews have a lot of influence, and suddenly every pol and pundit from both sides of the aisle was berating her as anti-Semitic.

It would be interesting to see how far they can push it. Would "hon" get a ban, if it was short for honk? Or maybe just the letter H? It's not stretch, as there was already tremendous success in getting the OK hand gesture turned into a hate meme (and, to a less extent, the thumbs-up). There was some attempt at taking the rainbow back from the gays by calling it a symbol of racial segregation. So far the lefties haven't taken the bait, but I don't think it's been pushed very hard, either.

In a similar vein, a straight pride parade is being planned in Boston, for some time in the fall. The organizers have secured Milo as their grand marshal. Some on the right have complained about having a flamboyant homosexual lead the straight pride parade, but they miss the point, which is to mock gay pride parades. Just as the progs now spiral over innocuous words and gestures, anything to soil their symbols by associating them with Nazis is a good thing. Remember, they stole the rainbow to begin with. Rainbows are for everyone. They are also a symbol of God's covenant not to destroy mankind out of wrath for our wickedness. (In that light, it does make sense why gays would cling to that particular symbol.)

Contrabang! #11 Incidental Electricity

In this edition, we'll be diving into a single Starts With a Bang! post, because it is deserving of some extra scrutiny.

Scientists Discover Space’s Largest Intergalactic Bridge, Solving A Huge Dark Matter Puzzle (link)

The subtitle is

Dark matter’s naysayers latched onto one tiny puzzle. This new find may have solved it completely.

and it is deceptive. Skeptics have not latched onto "one tiny puzzle." As one of Ethan's foremost naysayers (I don't know of another site that dedicates a weekly series to debunking his claims) I routinely demonstrate how dark matter amounts to a fudge factor of the discrepancies between theory and observations. It is fairy dust that gets sprinkled wherever necessary to make the numbers work. I, for one, have not latched onto the particular tiny puzzle he alludes to, and, even after reading the article a few times, I'm still not entirely sure what he's talking about, but that it has to do with the relative velocities of galaxies in two neighboring galactic clusters which are believed to be merging.

The gas within these [merging] clusters can heat up, interact, and develop shocks, causing the emission of spectacularly energetic radiation. Dark matter can pass through everything else, separating its gravitational effects from the majority of the normal matter.

This language arises because scientists believe that the gravitational mass of the galaxies does not coincide with the observed matter.

And, in theory, charged particles can accelerate tremendously, creating coherent magnetic fields that could span millions of light-years. For the first time, such an intergalactic bridge between two colliding clusters has been discovered, with tremendous implications for our Universe.

For decades, the electric universe people have been proclaiming to anyone who will listen that electrical forces dominate galactic-level dynamics. The mainstream scientific community has always responded that the cosmos are neutrally charged, and thus electricity plays a very minor role. They normally allow language like magnetic field and charged particle, but stop short of uttering anything that sounds like electric field or electricity. The recent observation of a massive electric flow between two galactic clusters spanning ten million light years is a major win for the electric universe advocates. The gist of this article is that Ethan will try to twist the results from a confirmation of plasma cosmology - which predicted such massive intergalactic current flows - to a confirmation of mainstream dark matter theories - which did not make such a prediction.

When we include simulations with gravitation alone, the fastest colliding clusters we predict move slower than the Bullet cluster does. [...] Either the observations were wrong, or something else — some physical mechanism — is causing this normal matter to accelerate beyond what the gravitational effects alone would indicate.

Next, he will - incredibly! - virtually propose plasma cosmology as one possible answer to the question.

One possibility for this would be a large-scale electric or magnetic field. When charged particles (like protons and electrons, which help make up the normal matter in the Universe) encounter an electromagnetic field, they accelerate. While galaxy clusters typically form at the intersection of cosmic filaments and are driven by dark matter, there’s normal matter present as well, much of which is in the form of an ionized plasma.

He even says electric field! And, indeed, it would be the most obvious cause of charged-particle acceleration. He uses the term "ionized plasma" which is redundant, as plasmas are inherently ionized. However, one would tend to downplay that fact when trying to discredit an electric hypothesis for an unexpected observation. He hopes to insinuate that there is some ionized plasma in this particular situation, when in fact all the cosmos are dominated by ionized plasma. Even in our own stable solar system, the sun is so dominant that the masses of all the other objects are nearly negligible.

These two galaxy clusters are separated in space by a distance of approximately 10 million light-years, which would make this magnetic field and the electrons lining it one of the largest known such structures in the Universe.

He does't say current flow or electricity. It is a magnetic field "lined" with elections.

This radio ridge is also larger than most naive simulations predict, but that’s an extremely good thing for dark matter theories.

This is the dark matter mindset in a nutshell. Failed predictions are an "extremely good thing for dark matter theories." Last week we described dark matter as the margin of error between theory and observation. The more the theory is wrong, the more dark matter there must be. In this case, the incorrect "naive" predictions were off, which means more dark matter! The usage of the term naive here that not enough dark matter has been stuffed into the right places.

The big puzzle for some of the colliding clusters we’ve observed is to explain how these particles can accelerate to such large speeds. Meanwhile, this enormous magnetic field and electron bridge between the two clusters suggests a mechanism to re-accelerate the particles present in the intergalactic gas: shock waves generated in the merger.

Now that they've managed to accept - but only in synonyms - that vast intergalactic electric currents have been observed, they must try to explain it. Any "naive" person with some education in electromagnetic physics would try to look for an electric field. Electric fields accelerate charged particles, thus accelerating charged particles is evidence of an electric field. But Ethan and the other standard cosmologists are more sophisticated than we are, and assume that large electric fields do not exist in the universe, and that the observed electric flows are only incidental. That is, the particles are being accelerated by some mechanical process, and they only so happen to be charged, which sets up the production of a long, filamentary magnetic field.

Govoni and her colleagues performed exactly this type of simulation. Her team showed that the electrons located between the galaxy clusters, already moving at speeds close to the speed of light, could be re-accelerated owing to these shock waves. If we apply this finding to the Bullet cluster, it stands to reason that we’d expect to find shock waves there, too, if we look at the X-ray emitting gas.

This is written in a way to insinuate that they made a theoretical prediction about shock waves, and then, lo and behold, came the confirming observation. Ethan always goes out of his way to convince us that observations were predicted by theory, even though usually they weren't. Dark matter scientists have been looking at these kinds of shock waves for years.

Lo and behold, these shocks are some of the first things you notice if you look at the Chandra images of the Bullet cluster on their own! The fact that we’ve identified relativistic charged particles in the presence of a large-scale magnetic field in one pair of colliding clusters is strongly suggestive of the same effects existing in other clusters. If this same type of structure that exists between Abell 0399 and Abell 0401 also exists between other colliding clusters, it could solve this minor anomaly of the Bullet cluster, leaving dark matter as the sole unchallenged explanation for the displacement of gravitational effects from the presence of normal matter.

A computer simulation where a shock wave might somehow accelerate a charged particle is taken as the "sole unchallenged explanation." He himself posited the electric field theory earlier in the article, but then referenced a computer simulation, whereby all other theories cease to exist. He has found what he is looking for, and seeks no more. That isn't scientific scrutiny; it is religious conviction. He hasn't even tried to refute the electric field argument, but merely ceased acknowledging its existence. As long as there is an explanation, somewhere, that includes dark matter, then it must be correct, and all the others ignored.

The existence of shock waves does not somehow automatically refute the plasma cosmologists, either. They themselves prattle on at length about shock waves, describing them as electrical effects. Even our sun's own heliopause is said to be a shock wave formed by the negatively charged solar wind encountering the relatively positively charged pressure of the interstellar medium.

He desperately claws to find any angle where dark matter is affirmed. Overall, a conversation between Ethan and an Electric Universe (EU) advocate goes something like this.

EU: There are vast intergalactic electric currents throughout the universe.
Ethan: No way man, Dark Matter Theory doesn't predict anything like that, and it's the sole unchallenged explanation. All observations have been predicted by Dark Matter Theory, so you're definitely wrong, bro.
EU: Well, what about this enormous electric current right over here, which spans ten million light years between two galactic clusters?
Ethan: Well, that's not really electricity, it just seems like it, and that was just caused by dark matter anyway. In fact, the observation itself is actually a spectacular victory for Dark Matter Theory.

We'll let Ethan have a last word, with his own last paragraph, and then the EU take on the story.

It’s always an enormous step forward when we can identify a new phenomenon. But by combining theory, simulations, and the observations of other colliding galaxy clusters, we can push the needle forward when it comes to understanding our Universe as a whole. It’s another spectacular victory for dark matter, and another mystery of the Universe that might finally be solved by modern astrophysics. What a time to be alive.

Lesbians Attacked by "British Men"

Last week, the Independent ran the headline Lesbian couple covered in blood after homophobic attack by gang of men on London bus.

A lesbian couple were hospitalised with facial injuries and left covered in blood after being attacked by a group of men after they kissed on a night bus in north London.

“We climbed upstairs and took the front seats,” Ms Geymonat said. “We must have kissed or something because these guys came after us. I don’t remember if they were already there or if they got on after us.”

The “hooligans” then demanded the two women kiss for their entertainment, harassed them and threw coins, she said.

Ms Geymonat said she tried to calm the situation down by making jokes, while Chris pretended to be ill. She then describes how the attack escalated, with the gang of men punching them both in the face until they were covered in blood.

"Gang" of men. "Hooligans." Everyone knows to whom they are referring. It is no secret to anyone, although you will called lots of terrible names if you dare state the obvious.

The number of hate crimes reported to police across the country’s transport network has doubled over the past five years.

In about the same timeframe as Angela Merkel instituted open borders for Europe, the official hate crime statistics have double. In reality, they've more than doubled because there is much bias in what is labeled as a hate crime. In this case, it's a hate crime because the victims happened to be of a protected group. Had they been a straight white couple, the paper wouldn't be referring to it as such.

Ms Geymonat said she hasn’t been able to go back to work, that her belongings were stolen and her nose may be broken.

These strong, courageous women get in a single scrape and they have to suspend their lives to hide away in their apartments for weeks. One of the victims looks to the future:

“I just hope that in June [attacks] like this can be spoken about loudly so they stop happening,” Ms Geymonat said.

She doesn't understand how Sharia law works. Broadcasting the event will only embolden other [unspecified identities] to engage in similar behavior.

Note that, while this article was written while the culprits were still at-large, no description is given other than they were a group of "four men." The London buses have cameras on them; descriptions, even images, could easily have been shared with the public. The article did include an image in their "Read More" section of a white man that had committed a hate crime two years ago, though.

They quickly followed up with another article, London bus attack: Four teenage boys arrested over homophobic attack on lesbian couple. Subtitle: Youths aged between 15 and 18 detained by Metropolitan Police. Again, everyone knows what was implied by "youths."

This week, one of the victims has spoken out about the incident as reported by the DailyMail.

She says a gang of young men attacked them during the early hours on the bus.

Notice how they are labeled as men, although previously described as youths. This article will later refer to them as teenagers.

Ms Geymonat said that she simply does not know if she will feel confident holding her partner's hand on the bus in the early hours of the morning anymore, revealing to The Times that her friends had told her to 'get the hell out of the country' following the incident.

Exactly. There's a reason Muslims promote violence against sacrilegious lifestyles: it works. It has worked for over a thousand years in the Middle East, and is continuing to work in their new home of London.

Both women were taken to hospital for treatment for facial injuries. Miss Geymonat said one of the men spoke Spanish and the others had British accents.

That's the first we've had of a description of the assailants. And it would seem to weigh somewhat our running assumption that they would have had Pakistani or African accents. When evidence is withheld, theories will certainly run wild. Because some of the attackers were 18, we should get at least a name at some point, unless even then it remains concealed for the normal reasons.

10 Ways to Fight Climate Chaos

Some time ago, global warming was re-branded because doomsday predictions, such as those made by the IPCC, were not being realized. Thus, it because climate change, that way any measurable change could be attributed to carbon, even if not a logical effect of warming. That concept has been taken even further lately and dubbed "climate chaos." It allows that virtually any observation can be taken as supporting evidence because the climate actually is chaotic - in the literal sense of being a determinist, nonlinear dynamical system sensitive to initial conditions.

Anyway, in the spirit of things, here is a list of some simple things anyone can do to reduce their carbon footprint, just in case it really is as bad as the doomsday prophets say it is. (There is a mix of parody and honest suggestions. The regular readers will get it.)

10. Cook at Home

Unless you're one of the few people without a functioning kitchen, your best bet is to cook at home. The general rule of thumb for efficiency is to utilize investments as much as possible. A magnificent oven/range combo, rarely used, is a waste of the energy resources that went into producing and maintaining it. Every second that a capital investment is unused is lost efficiency.

Further, eating at a restaurant means buying into their business practices, which are never environmentally friendly, whatever they might claim. Much of it consists of frozen, processed foods shipped shipped all over the globe. It surely must not be explained why eating Chinese-processed frozen chicken is not good for your body or planet. Some think they can save the world by switching to a vegetarian diet. But, they don't realize that those grapes often come up from Chile (depending on the season) and vast amounts of non-biodegradable styrofoam are used to ship them. At best, they come a couple thousand miles from California in diesel-powered reefer trucks. I worked for a time in a produce warehouse, and witnessed the great amount of packaging waste that is hidden from the consumer.

If you cook for yourself, you can control the source of your food. You can purchase eggs, meat, and veggies from local growers. You can supplement from your own garden. In general, artificial flavors can mostly be avoided if you're careful, as herbs are easily grown. Any of these people screaming about climate apocalypse who are consuming globally sourced food are absolute frauds with no interest in actually engaging in the changes they are demanding of others.

9.  Shiver in Winter, Sweat in Summer

I always find it amusing that so many businesses are colder in the summer than winter. There really is no way to heat & cool a building without carbon emissions, but it can be done reasonably. HVAC should take the edge off, not challenge nature. Most American corporations pretend to be environmentally conscious eco-citizens of the world. You must assume that the executives are showing up in expensive suits even throughout the summer months. If so, their A/C is wasteful.

8. Toyota, Not Tesla

Repair before replacing, and don't replace something that isn't fully used up. I don't see very many environmentalists doing that. They're worse than anyone about virtue signaling through copious consumption of "eco-friendly" products. Selling the aging - but still reliable - family Toyota for a Tesla is a huge waste. Upgrading old appliances and windows for Energy-Star rated equivalents is rarely a good investment either. Throwing old-but-usable items into a landfill in favor of foreign-made unmaintainable throwaway modern equivalents is the opposite of responsible stewardship for the environment.

7. Don't Fly

Driving is more frugal than flying, usually. Further, much travel in unnecessary. We have the internet. There is little that can't be learned from a laptop in any location. You'll find more cultural enlightment in a library than Bali. Meetings over Skype or Bluejeans are nearly as effective as in-person meetings. I find it amusing that, in some corporations, travel and conference expenses are reimbursed without question (even encourage), but getting upgraded laptops to developers is nigh impossible. Corporate travel is often not worth the cost, whereas even minor improvements to worker efficiency are usually cost-effective. Worse than us normal wage-earners is the private-jet-setting celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio who lecture the little people on their carbon sins. If we are serious about reducing carbon emissions, the obvious first action should be to ban private jets.

6. Don't Reproduce

More people, more pollution. Protecting sweet Mother Nature from human meddling means reducing the number of humans. The most any of us can do is to make our own choices. The more consuming the people, the less they should reproduce. Fortunately, that seem to be the natural trend. Third-worlders still breed like rabbits, city-dwelling liberals are nowhere near replacement rates of reproduction, and rural bumpkins are somewhere in the middle. Liberals, if you want to save the planet, please stop raising children.

Similar to this, any effort to reduce human populations should be supported. That means supporting foreign wars that kill millions of civilians, and opposition to medical research. A cure for cancer would be devastating for the environment!

5. Take a Pay Cut

In the era of the petradollar, money is roughly equivalent to carbon. Lowering your carbon footprint is virtually equivalent to lowering your income. The rich will pay money to "offset" their carbon, but that is a ridiculous vanity scam. If the progressives are serious about carbon cutting, they should make like Jesus and adopt a voluntary life of poverty.

4. Fat Shame

Liberals get really energized about carbon emissions. They should relax, because they are only increasing the rate of their own carbon dioxide exhalations. Ultimately, the carbon dioxide we emit from our noses comes from the carbon-based food we eat. More food, more CO2. If we're going to get serious about saving the planet, we need to get serious about shaming those who are converting the most organic material into that noxious death gas that plants crave.

3. Ban immigration

Reducing the global carbon footprint means reducing, not increasing, the average economic status of the world's citizens. That means that people of poor nations should not be upgraded to rich nations. All poor-to-rich migrations should be banned. In its place, we should encourage rich-to-poor movements. We need to start rounding up all concrete heat-island readers of the New York Times and deporting them to places like Venezuela. That would reduce both carbon and light pollution, but would have the intended downside of further encouraging Venezuelans to leave their homelands.

2. Go Completely Off-Grid

The carbon footprint can't really be offset. To be carbon-neutral means to be totally self-sufficient for food, water, shelter, and other necessities. It means never buying anything from any store ever, unless it is known that the supply chain is entirely powered by grass-fed donkeys.

1. Kill Yourself

Considering that #2 isn't practical, the only way to really eliminate your natural sin as a carbon exhaler is to cease your own biological functions. Only those truly dedicated to the cause of saving the planet from evil carbon will have the courage to take extreme measure to save the world for feminism. 😉

Uncertainty Yields Complexity

I write software for a living. What does that mean? To some more naive companies, a programmer writes lines of codes. More code means more productivity. The boss certainly isn't paying you to write less code, is he? Maybe he should. Some companies all but refuse to purchase software tools. "Why would I buy you software when I pay you to write software?" Those companies are to be avoided, because the decision makers don't quite understand how their businesses work.

Code costs money to write, which they understand, but it also costs money to maintain, which they sometimes miss. Writing twice the code does not just double the cost of maintaining it. More code means more complexity. Complexity makes it harder to understand, which makes it take longer to achieve a task, and means you're more likely to break something else in the process. The programmer's job isn't to add complexity, but to add the least amount of complexity possible, while still getting the job done.

Uncertainty causes complexity to increase. Imagine writing code that saves some common data, like a phone number. If you are certain what the format of the phone number is then the process is trivial. Just save the number to disk. It's probably a single line of code. But if the input is uncertain, things change. You have to consider that the number might have parentheses around the area code (or not), might have a dash, might have spaces or not, might be an international number, might not even be a proper number at all. It could just be the words "don't call me." Since the input is uncertain, it must be validated, then translated into the proper format, and then saved. There must be procedures for dealing with bad inputs. Do you save it anyway? Log it? Return an error message? Can the error be in English or does it have to be translated into dozens of languages? We can see how suddenly a trivial one-liner turns into hundred or thousands of lines of code. Not only that, but you'll have to write test classes to ensure you're code isn't buggy, which often require even more lines of code that the actual logic being tested.

Doubling uncertainty doubles complexity, which more than doubles cost. Thus, uncertainty costs time, energy, and money, and it doesn't scale linearly.

I thought of all this while shopping for a pickup truck recently. I normally lean towards simple vehicles, because I don't like dealing with them when they break. I want a manual transmission. I want 2WD, and as few gizmos as I can. Nearly everyone I've talked to says to get the 4WD (for a few extra thousand dollars). Our winters are mild, and I don't get out into the woods much these days. Still, they tell me to get it, because you just never know. If I did know, things would be easier. If I knew I'd ever find myself stuck somewhere, desperate for some 4-low, then I'd pay for the upgrade. Otherwise, I'd save the money for something else. Most likely, I'll follow the advice from other truck owners and get the 4WD, because really I don't know I won't need it. Not only will I pay for the mechanical feature, I will lose some fuel economy, and it will be one more thing that might break and require a costly repair. Uncertainty costs money!

Everything operates this way. We see it when middle east tensions flare up. Markets get scared and suddenly you're pay 50 cents more for gas. Not only that, everyone is paying more, raising the operating costs for all business, and the stock market slumps.

Political uncertainty is no different. Business can't plan long-term if the regulatory environment veers every time there's an election. Foreign nations can hardly enter trade agreements or other treaties with the US if they'll just be reversed every four years. The great political and cultural instabilities rattling our nation cause uncertainties, which companies must pay to mitigate. Even the most banal aspects of multiculturalism have a cost. Not long ago, marketing to American families was easy: just show a happy family enjoying the product. Now, that can be a landmine. Showing an all-white family might cause outraged allegations of racism from the left. Judging by the TV commercial these days, most companies - even those for whom whites are the primary target audience - use a calibrated cast of diverse racial and identity types in their adverts, with mixed-race families becoming the depicted norm. This requires additional marketing efforts, constant input from lawyers, and a PR firm on retainer just in case they still manage to trigger a national backlash. And then, they are still lessening their impact on the target audience, many of whom may even grow to resent the obvious pandering to political correctness, or might even trigger a backlash from their core market, as Gillette did with its recent marketing debacle.

Perhaps that is one reason why the ruling orthodoxy is so adamant about imposing its preferred worldview on every last man, woman, and child. Uniformity yields predictability. As it turns out, actual diversity is ungovernable and - worst of all - reduces corporate profit margins. This has always been the goal of the left. Utopian uniformity requires the destruction of natural, traditional identities and kinships. It's why corporate social media outlets are banning conservatives with hardly a pretense of due process, and rarely any evidence that terms had actually been violated. They only want the domesticated sheep. Free thinkers are too much trouble.

We can no longer be certain that the people around us share our values, or even that they aren't actively working as our enemies. If a Muslim immigrant moves into the neighborhood, you don't know if he's moved here because he loves America or he hates American and wants to commit a terror act. The government can't tell either, which is why the police state has grown enormously since 9/11. The cost of maintaining rule in an uncertain society is immense. The government must grow authoritarian until it exhausts itself or creates so much resentment that social unrest rises.

As our country grows increasingly uncertain, it also grows less capable of handling the growing complexity. By some measures, we have lost 10 average IQ since the 1960s. Education and academic institutions are too politicized to perform their tasks, even causing more harm than good in many cases. Scientists are consumed with materialism. Drug addiction is epidemic from coast to coast. In Europe, they were told that they needed immigrants because their weren't enough skilled natives to maintain the economy, which was only half true.

A society collapses when the people are no longer capable of maintaining the society they inherited. We are culturally collapsed, with economic and technological collapse currently staved off by massive, unmaintainable debt. As the systems start to falter, uncertainty will only increase, at the time that we are least capable of handling uncertainties. It's why things have a tendency to fail slowly, and then all at once. As times become increasingly uncertain, remember that your best chance will be to create a system that manages the uncertainty while ruthlessly cutting out extraneous complexity wherever possible.

Holocaustianity

In the same way that the left has inverted every social norm from traditional society, they've also managed to leverage the great tragedy of the Holocaust to further their social agenda.

Consider this story recently from the Times of Israel, covering a Holocaust center in South Africa that "reaches the general public by teaching tolerance through the lens of mass extermination." That is, they teach progressive values by guilting modern people with a past tragedy which, of course, had nothing to do with Africa.

The center’s founding director, Myra Osrin, recognized early on that the Holocaust and the issues it raised could serve as a teaching tool for a culture of tolerance in the new South Africa after decades of racism.

There is no mention, of course, of the creeping white genocide occurring in South Africa. The pretense that the centers are to prevent future racism or genocide are not credible, at this point.

South Africa is one of the few countries where Holocaust studies are a compulsory part of the educational curriculum.

Studies of the genocide of Ukranians by Russians, or Christian Armenians by Turks, are not compulsory but the study of the Jewish genocide by Nazis is required for all children. It should be clear why that is so. Genocides committed by whites supports a particular political agenda, while genocide committed against whites does not. In the neo-Puritan progressive religion, Hitler took the place of Satan as the embodiment of evil. These Holocaust centers are religious memorials, but not for Judaism so much as progressivism.

Freedman is set to be succeeded by Heather Blumenthal, the former owner of a television production company, one of whose projects was a weekly Jewish magazine show that included documentaries on the Holocaust and the education center.

Some things just really add up.

The programs that it offers enable young people to engage with things like the nature of propaganda, understanding pseudoscience and its practical impact.

It should be clear. The political movement that survives primarily by propaganda and pseudoscientific beliefs has hijacked education initiatives to cover its own tracks. It is not "anti-Semitic" to denounce these activities which denigrate the dead. If they were my ancestors, I would be outraged that their legacy was used to promote social justice political operations.

Dr. Stephen Smith OBE, the son of a Christian clergyman, delivered the keynote address at the center’s anniversary event, just as he had done at its launch 20 years prior. [...] "The more I investigated that, the more I realized that anti-Semitism was so deeply embedded in the Christian world."

Note that we can't even criticize a single Jew, not even the likes of George Soros, without being called anti-Semitic. Yet, they can place blame for the Holocaust on the entirety of the Christian believers.

On a return visit, Smith visited Yad Vashem and realized that while the Holocaust happened to the Jewish people, it was not a Jewish problem but one of Western European civilization that had to be clearly confronted to foment change.

They outright come and say it. Holocaustianity is all about "changing" all of Western European civilization. It is an affront to our culture and heritage. They deliberately say it, in plain English, in their major media publications.

Contrabang! #10 Alchemy Not Ruled Out

This Is How, 100 Years Ago, A Solar Eclipse Proved Einstein Right And Newton Wrong (link)

The problem with this one isn't the subject matter so much as the hubris. Indeed, it was an observation of apparent gravitational lensing that brought Einstein's theory of gravity into the mainstream. Still, Ethan overstates his case with claims like this.

The predictions of General Relativity have never once failed.

The reality is that general relativity has not failed because they've not let it fail. For instance, their theory of gravity does not properly predict galactic rotational dynamics. Instead of admitting that it's even possible that General Relativity is not, if fact, the holy grail of gravitational theories, they've had to create vast quantities of unobservable "dark matter." The theory is rock solid, if you can just believe enough in hypothetical unobservable exotic matter that vastly outweighs all the other matter in the universe. Similarly you have to believe that experiments like LIGO are above scrutiny. Tweaking the noise-canceling algorithms until the signal matches one of your 20,000 theoretical event signatures is not something that any properly skeptical scientist should accept as comprehensive proof of anything. Finally, under general relativity, with its non-instantaneous force of gravity, many-bodied systems - like our own solar system - are not stable. And yet, here we are anyway. They'll explain it away by stating that our solar system is not stable in the long run, are we are just enjoying an era of stability in the otherwise chaotic cosmos. Ethan is all about "making hypotheses and going out and testing them." Well, there is nothing in general relativity that predicts our quiet, orderly solar system.

This Is Why It’s Meaningless That Dark Matter Experiments Haven’t Found Anything (link)

In this one, we are told that, just because all experiments testing various hypotheses for dark matter have failed, that doesn't mean we should become skeptical or anything like that. He ends his piece with:

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. When it comes to dark matter, don’t let yourself be fooled.

I used to love irony, but these days it is often too painful. Absence of evidence means nothing, he says! Well gee, I suppose we can apply that principle to all theories, can we not? Just because we've not seen the Yeti, that does not prove he does not exist. Therefore, the Yeti is a valid scientific hypothesis, deserving of heavy public funding. And, while alchemists have not yet turned lead into gold, they have not yet tried everything, have they? The lack of evidence that lead can be turned into gold is not evidence that it cannot be done. 😄

You can imagine that the response to such criticism would be something like: that is a false comparison because there is not a theoretical underpinning for alchemy like there is for dark matter. That would be false, however, because there is no theoretical underpinning for dark matter. It was never predicted by anything. It is, in essence, an experimental error. The difference between theoretical predictions and the actual observations is called dark matter. The bigger the dark matter, the more erroneous the theories are. And the dark matter is very big, at six times the sum of all observable matter in the universe. That is literally a very massive experimental error.

As is common in so many realms of science these days, all observations support the theory, whatever they may be.

When Will The Universe Get Its First ‘Black Dwarf’ Star? (link)

Cosmologists have a theoretical stellar lifecycle model based on observations of the diverse array of different star types in the universe, in conjunction with the Big Bang Theory. The theory is that stars are born form the accretion of gases and dust into a sphere, they burn by nuclear fusion until the fuel runs out, and then one of a variety of things may happen, depending on the mass and the energy of the star.

When you read this article, keep a couple things in mind. First, neutron stars are a joke theory. (One of these days we'll do a deep dive into the various ways they've been disproven.) Second is that there are no observations to support the stellar lifecycle. And truly it would be difficult to do so, given then timespans involved. Ethan promotes a theory of "black dwarfs", which won't exist for another 10 trillion years, long after the universe has died its slow heat death, he tells us. If there's one thing modern scientists like more than creating hypotheses for which there is no possibility of collecting contradictory evidence, it is promoting their materialistic despair for the futility of life.

And our final entry for the week:

Ask Ethan: What’s It Like When You Fall Into A Black Hole? (link)

In this one, I was looking for Ethan to make a particular mistake, which he managed to avoid. We learned in a previous Contrabang! that the stereotypical depiction of black holes as a point mass singularities surrounded by an even horizon isn't really accurate, because it violates the conservation of angular momentum. Why the didn't just call it dark angular momentum and move on is beyond me, but they didn't, and now they use a model where there is not a singularity, but instead ring of singularity, which I've taken to calling the ringularity. There is no explanation given for how the accreting matter would accrue into a ring of infinite density, only that it must occur that way for the math to work. (Again, why they are willing to accept infinite density but not infinite angular velocity is beyond me.)

At any rate, Ethan is careful to state that his hypothetical description of a person falling into a black hole is a simplistic model, and that a real system would require a ringularity - which no one wants to have to thing about.

Evil is Inversion

Vox Day did a good livestream yesterday, This is the Actual Upside Down. He said that, when asked to define what evil is, the best he could come up with is that evil is inversion. He referenced a Bible quote.

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.

We could certainly expand on that verse today. Who put criminal for victim and victim for criminal. Who put brave for weak and weak for brave. And so on.

Isn't it interesting that the major ailment of our modern society was described some 2800 years ago? Inversion is nothing new. I think that is something to take comfort in. We find the modern times so insane that, at times, we wonder how we could even maintain our own sanity. And yet, we see that inversion has always been the dark side of the coin. What is happening now is merely what we've always been warned is the reality of life (for those raised in the western, Christian tradition). What we're going through is not unprecedented, we're not alone, and there is a world of advice from our predecessors on how to live a dignified life in undignified times.

There is little need for despair. Inversion is the work of dark forces. Those we see promoting darkness are not evil, necessarily, but they have fallen prey to evil forces. They have lost the moral struggle. They could not resist temptation. The good news is that, in every religion and virtually every movie or story ever written, there is also a dark time where evil forces seem insurmountable. [Spoiler alert: the light always wins.]

It's Okay to be Genetically Modified

Tim Pool did a video on the genetically modified Chinese babies. According to his headline, and the one he was covering, the procedure may have "backfired." As it turns out, the changes made are likely to reduce the overall lifespan of the subjects. Sounds scary, right? "Oh, they can't control the godlike powers they're unleashing!" Well, it's not really as big a deal as everyone is making it out to be.

First, let's consider the biggest genetic engineering success to date (economically speaking) which was Roundup Ready soybeans. Scientists managed to make soybeans resistant to glyphosate, a powerful pesticide. It's sounds spooky, but what they did wasn't very complicated, just technically difficult. Soybeans are naturally susceptible to glyphosate, as are most plants, because it interferes with a particular enzyme. (Snake venom works the same way.) The genetic engineers were able to take genetic code from other organisms which had a more resilient version of the enzyme (which is just a protein) and inject it into the soybean DNA. In short, they took an allele of a gene that was already found in nature, and inserted it into soybeans. They did not craft some new trait from scratch.

What the Chinese engineers did was to take a desired allele of a gene from a known source, and inject it into the targeted gene of the recipient. They didn't even move a gene across species, as Monsanto did, but merely ensured that a particular individual had the trait which already occurred in the species. Like the Monsanto engineers, they did not craft some new trait, and further, they didn't even't craft a new trait within the species. The work done by the Chinese scientists was actually less significant, except that they broke the rule of not monkeying with human genetics.

Tim Pool steers it to a morality question. He asks if it is moral to modify a person's DNA to prevent diseases, or to tailor offspring to have desired traits, like to be tall or have "big bosoms." He asked it as a single question, but really it is two, and it actually has a technical answer.

The first part - preventing genetic diseases - is a viable application of genetic engineering. It is technically feasible that scientists could scan the DNA of an embryo for know faulty alleles and replace them with good ones. Assuming they didn't otherwise damage the DNA, there should be no bad side effects. Since most babies are still made the old-fashioned way, it might not be worth the cost and complications of in vitro fertilization to screen genes like that, but someone already doing fertilization treatment could find it to be worth an extra cost if the technology was matured.

The second part, where we tailor our children to whatever set of traits we desire, is not feasible. Most human traits are not genetic, since we only have about 19,000 genes. There is no gene that controls height, so engineers will not be able to flip some alleles and reliably get tall offspring from short parents. They would not be able engineer a black baby from an embryo created by two white parents (much as the liberals would try). Nor would they be able to engineer a walrus from a human embryo. It would still be a human cell, trying to do human cell things. The cell would look to the DNA for instructions on building the necessary proteins, that would fail, and the cell would quickly die.

I'll go a step further. It is not feasible that scientists will be able to engineer any trait that does not already exist. Think of what it would take even to create a new allele of an existing gene. They would have to imagine what the new shape of the produced protein would be. Then, they'd work backwards to figure out what the amino acid sequence should be. They can't even reliably do that process working forwards, as seen by the protein folding problem. Then, they would have to determine the DNA sequence that would create such an amino acid sequence. (I have no idea how feasible that is, or what the state of research is.) Then, they'd have to create DNA with that particular sequence and inject into the proper place.

Even then, the most we'd ever likely see would be a modification of a known genetic trait. For instance, we do know that genes influence hair color (although the case of the domesticated Siberian foxes shows that hair color is not entirely genetic). Perhaps, working through all the obstacles, they could find an allele which causes naturally blue hair color. (Again, the liberals would be all over it.) That's hardly the same thing as crafting a hyper-intelligent human or one with uncanny strength. To this day, genetic engineers have never crafted a new biological trait. It is assumed that it is possible by materialists, who believe that the chromosomes fully specify the organism, and yet it's never been done (and likely never will be).

Since we've been poking fun at liberals, and the traits they'd likely prefer, it's interesting to look at what trait was chosen by the Chinese scientists. They chose to add an allele to Chinese children, taken from European donors, of a gene that reduces the chance of - I'm not making this up - of catching AIDS, and happens to also be correlated to shorter lifespans. What kind of parent would willingly make such a tradeoff? Who is expecting their child to have lots of gay sex more than they are expecting their child to desire a long and healthy life? (You know the answer.)

The moral of the story: I wouldn't get too worried about the genetic tinkering. They can't actually do as much as is assumed, because genes don't have the influence that nearly everyone assumes they do. Preventing genetic diseases is a wonderful application of science that we should fully support. In a nation where women aren't having that many babies, it would certainly be helpful to ensure women that their babies won't end up with one of these genetic ailments. Creating designer babies, on the other hand, is not technically viable, and will only end in disappointment and failed investments.

Northern Europe is Not Safe for Children

In the Netherlands, a 17-year-old Dutch girl has been euthanized. (Source, note that the terms girl and euthanized were their words, not mine.) She was able to procure assisted-suicide services as a legal adult. Normally these services are intended for terminally ill patients in such grave pain or ill health that they have no chance of any remaining enjoyable life. Noa Pothoven was permitted to commit suicide for depression.

As the story goes, she was sexually assaulted at the age of 11 at a schoolfriend's party, and similarly abused a year later under similar circumstances. You may be wondering what kind of environment she was living in.

At the age of 14, she was raped by two men in the Arnhem neighbourhood of Elderveld - but stayed quiet 'out of fear and shame'.

That single sentence tells you everything you need to know. Consider the context that the European newspapers are not allowed to include. They don't want to end up like Tommy Robinson, who was jailed for showing that Muslims were on trial for running organized child rape rings.

• Arnhem is a city with a large Muslim population
• The mayor of Arnhem is a Muslim
• Police occasionally must thwart terrorist activities in Arnhem
• Turkish high school students caused a stir when they stated on national television that the Holocaust was a blessing
• While rape is a crime common to all cultures, in Europe, gang rape is almost exclusively committed by Muslim men

Putting that all together, we get the real story: At the age of 14, a Dutch girl in a Dutch city was raped by two Muslims. She did not report the crime out of fear of being called a racist, so her rapists went unpunished. Instead, the victim was punished. Suffering understandable mental anguish from being raped in a society that views the rapists as the real victims, she was entered into compulsory mental health services.

She wrote in her autobiography that these stints in isolation made her feel 'almost feel like a criminal, while I haven't so much as stolen sweets from a store in my life'. 

In clown world, criminals are victims, and victims are criminals. The people of the Netherlands responded very firmly to the rape by issuing capital punishment, but meted it to the victim rather than the perpetrators.

What of the parents' role in all this? You might suspect that they're just a little bit libtarded.

Noa penned an autobiography called 'Winning or Learning' about her battles with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anorexia after being molested and raped at a young age.

She said she wanted her book to help vulnerable youngsters who struggle with life, saying that the Netherlands does not have specialised institutions or clinics where teenagers can go for psychological or physical aid.

'The book should be mandatory for social workers, but also for children's judges and municipalities, who are responsible for youth care,' her mother Lisette said.

As you can see, it's all about the state with them. No, the one's who are "responsible for youth care" are the parents. Even after watching their rape-tramautized daughter kill herself in their own living room, all they call for is a little more guidance for the government to do a better job of treating children who have been raped by foreigners who were never punished. The same government that invited the rapists into her city; the same government that lies about crime statistics to keep the people passive; the same government that created an environment where little girls are afraid to report their rapes to police because truth might be weaponized by evil right-wingers, who want to do evil things like kick out foreign invaders and hang rapists.

Lisette and Noa's father Frans had hoped that Noa would 'see bright spots again', 'perhaps fall in love' or learn to discover that 'life is worth living'.

Lisette told De Gelderlander last year that Noa and was 'at odds' with her parents, who had hoped electroshock treatment for major depression would help her symptoms.   

"Gee, our sweet daughter sure isn't handling her child rape by foreign invaders very well. You know, the one where she had so little faith in society to support her that she didn't even report the heinous felony? Something is definitely wrong with her. We should try treating her with electric shocks." At least they didn't permit her to commit suicide while under their authority but, my god, is that how low the bar is set now for European parents... that not signing off on your child's death wish is seen as a redeeming quality?

That poor, poor girl. She'd have been better off to have been raped by a conquering army in more primitive times. At least, then, everyone would tell her she was wronged. Instead, she was just told that she was wrong. Her people failed her immeasurably, and she lived in pure hell. I can't blame her for choosing suicide. She was still a child, and Northern Europe is not safe for children. Death is preferable to being offered up as a child sacrifice to the cult of diversity.

Why Scientists Can't Walk it Back

A common ailment of the problem sciences is that the practitioners often find it difficult to say "we don't know why." This causes them to say, "the least wrong theory must be right." In astrophysics, the insistence that all observed redshifts must be caused by relative motions leads to a constant stream of "surprising" results and all kids of theoretical absurdities, like dark energy. In evolution, the theory that the origin of species arises by random mutations of DNA has been destroyed entirely by modern genetic technology, but scientists cling on anyway, like children to a favorite blankie. Why?

A number of common reasons are given. Perhaps they just can't admit they were wrong. But that's partially wrong, at least. Scientists have no problem admitting when tests yield unexpected results, which happens time and time again, to the point that it's become amusing to watch. They're perfectly willing to admit the theories were wrong and improvement is needed, but they'll only admit it in a certain way: the theory must be repaired rather than discarded. Further, there should be great incentive for young scientists to be the ones to overthrow an old theory, in the way that Morley and Michelson became famous for disproving universal ether. So it's not just a reluctance to admit being wrong that drives the reluctance to reject the bad science.

Most will assume it's about money. Again, that may be partially true. Certainly veteran researchers will fight to maintain their established funding tracks, and upstarts will seek out pursuits with proven funding success. Still, it doesn't explain the systematic lingering on to failing theories. The scientists will be funded in any case. As long as they can make the case to funding officials that a different pursuit is likely to pay scientific dividends, the money will flow. The officials have egos too; they want to be the ones to fund the next big thing. They are, like the rest of society, investing in the areas that the scientists tell them are most promising. There is no real financial reason, besides some institutional inertia, for scientists to resist abandoning the theories that are being contradicted by evidence.

The most fundamental reason why scientists can't admit certain theories are wrong is because it has become a necessity of their new social role. Scientists are no longer mere implementers of the scientific method, but high priests of the progressive secular religion. There's a reason that one of the most revered public SJWs is a "Science Guy." Science, to them, means factual. It gives them a pretense of rational credibility. Science, to them, is also considered to be a refutation of religion. The leftists do not praise science as the pursuit of objective knowledge - progressive scholars openly attack objective truth as racist - but because they see it as a way to tell Christian bigots that they are wrong.

Consider this passage out of yesterday's edition of Contrabang!

If a theory cannot conceivably be proven false, then it is not a valid scientific theory. It's why scientists reject the theory of "God did it." How do you prove He didn't? It's more a matter of theology than science.

God lives in the dark corners where the light of science does not shine. In primitive times, man knew very little about the world, thus everything was explained by the supernatural. The shaman who could summon the rain gods held great power over agricultural societies. Over time, understanding of the world has grown, and the domain of things explained by interference of the gods has shrank. (Still, I'm sure some Midwest farmers are praying for the rains to stop, about now.) Progressives believe that the portions illuminated by the light of science will grow to encompass everything there is, and the realm of superstition will be totally eliminated. The irony is that they are not eliminating the old religious order so much as replacing it with a new one. The old shaman pointed out how the peoples' sins had angered the weather gods, and they must pay a penance to regain favor. The new shaman says practically the same thing.

The guiding principle is not that scientists can't be wrong, but they can't cede ground back to God. A domain, once illuminated, cannot be darkened. It's the essence of progressivism: there must be continual progress. It's not so much that they don't want to lose ground and thus admit a defeat; it's that they can't fathom such reversal of progress is even possible. In no area is this more important than in cosmological and biological evolution, which tells the story of why we are here. My detractors would naturally assume that I've gravitated to those particular scientific domains because of my religious convictions. It's not actually true! I harbor very few such convictions. Lately, I've become so disenchanted with the materialists who dominate our society that my religious conviction is a simple rejection of materialism: spirit must animate matter; it can't be that matter randomly simulates spirit. That's it. How the biological species arose, or the cosmos came to be, I really have no personal preference. I'm not drawn to astrophysics and evolution for some agenda, but because the science there is so demonstrably bad. It is their agenda! It is their religious bias! Neutron stars are disproven. A genetic basis for evolution is disproven. What will it take for scientists to admit it? Whatever it is, it will not be a scientific argument. They already misinterpret the evidence they have. (A study showed no genetic correlation with fox domestication, yet they reported it as "hinting" at a genetic influence anyway.) The only way to stop the bad science will be to kill science as a religious platform. The solution, I'm sorry to say, is societal, not scientific. An irrational society cannot produce good science. There's a reason the west didn't spark an industrial revolution until after the re-discovery of Aristotle.

With that said, I will continue doing scientific analysis, because I do think it is important for swaying one mind at a time. Most people think the evidence supports neo-Darwinian evolution. Most people think the evidence supports the Big Bang Theory and cosmic inflation. Once they realize that it doesn't, they will naturally wonder what else in the progressive worldview they've been misled about.

Contrabang # 9 Peering Past the Past

This week we'll be looking at Big Bang cosmology, primarily using a number of Starts With a Bang! articles. After that is short review of another article from this week on parallel universes.

Peering Past the Past

To understand Big Bang cosmology, there are only a couple of concepts needed to get started. 

1. The universe started from a single point of pure energy. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was a nearly uniform hot, dense soup, with slight irregularities caused by quantum effects. As the universe expanded and cooled, the soup condensed into normal matter, and clumped into galactic clusters with large voids in between.
2. Because the speed of light is finite, looking at distant objects means looking back in time. If we look at a start a million light years distant, we are seeing it as it appeared a million years ago.

It's more complicated than that. (The regulars here will understand why the theories grow increasingly complex as additional evidence is gathered.) But, this is enough to get us started.

According to their theory, looking at more distant objects means looking at a more primitive universe. Nearby we should see modern galaxies and galactic superstructures, but, as we get more distant, galaxies should get more primitive and more tightly packed. Even further back we should see the time before galaxies, with just individual stars in a hot, primordial soup, and further we should see a time before stars had even condensed. In practice there is a limit, because if we go all the way back before galaxies formed, it is too distant to actually resolve individual stars.

There should still be evidence to support the theory. In general, Redshift Theory plus the Big Bang Theory predict that there should be a high correlation between red shift and "primitiveness" of observed objects. Conversely, we skeptics would expect that evidence would routinely contradict the predictions, that scientists would have to shift goalposts to downplay the contradictions, and we should see them adding complexity to the models so they can say that the observations were, in fact, predicted by the theories.

I was curious about the evidence. Do we really see a more primitive universe as we look further back? I had no idea, so I did a quick DuckDuckGo search. The first hit was from Smithsonian, and lo, the second was an article by our good friend Ethan. Let's start with the Smithsonian article, titled Hubble Spotted the Oldest Galaxy It Has Ever Seen.

The “new” galaxy is called GN-z11, and it’s located 13.4 billion light years away. To put that in context, that means that the galaxy existed just 400 million years after the Big Bang.

The major takeaway from the short article is this:

GN-z11 is astonishingly old, but it’s exciting for another reason: its brightness. Scientists didn’t realize that such large, starry galaxies existed so far in the past.

The Big Bang Theory did not predict such early galaxies. If you look at older depictions of galactic evolution, they do not show galactic formation until billions of years after the big bang. They've had to revisit the theory to add "nascent" galaxies forming at the same time that stars were just beginning to light up. For instance, two sources (here and here) dating to 2001 and 2002, depict galaxy formation as not beginning until at least a billion years after the big bang.

It is amusing that Redshift Theory is causing problems with Big Bang Theory, but keep in mind that Big Bang Theory is downstream from Redshift Theory. If redshifts are ever explained by a mechanism other than relative velocities, then Big Bang Theory, cosmic expansion, and dark energy all must go away.

The Starts With a Bang! article is Ask Ethan: What Does The Edge Of The Universe Look Like? and doesn't include a review of the evidence, but a recital of the Big Bang Theory. One of these days, I'd like to count how many time he has explained the Big Bang Theory on his website. It seems to be about once per week or so.

After scientists observed the very, very old elliptical galaxies, they modified the timeline so that the proto-galaxies were present within the first billion years, when stars were just forming. Did that fix the problem? Consider this Starts With a Bang! article from early last year: The Earliest Galaxies Spin Just Like Our Milky Way, Defying Expectations. Here are a few select snippets.

• these internal motions look puzzlingly familiar
• unexpectedly, these galaxies don't exhibit chaotic internal motions, as instead, the gas swirls and rotates in a whirlpool motion, which is something we don't normally see until the Universe is about three times the age of these galaxies
• This flies in the face of what we would have expected!
• spectacularly puzzling
• We expected that young galaxies would be dynamically ‘messy,’ due to the havoc caused by exploding young stars, but these mini-galaxies show the ability to retain order and appear well regulated.
• a quite unexpected result

Suffice it to say, the Big Bang Theory does not predict that so-called modern galaxies would be detected with red shifts placing them within the first billion years.

Let's give a similar treatment to a spacetelescope.org article from 2016 regarding the oldest galaxy yet detected at the time.

• the galaxy is unusually bright considering its distance from Earth
• it’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed
• a great surprise to us
• showed us that our knowledge about the early Universe is still very restricted
• remains somewhat of a mystery for now
• tantalising

The pattern of cosmological observations is consistent. Surprise, followed by re-ordering of the theories (and additions of the complexity), followed later by re-assurances that the observations were, in fact, predicted all along. When they claim that the theories have predicted observations, we certainly have plenty of evidence to contradict that claim.

Could Parallel Universes Be Physically Real? (link)

This one is supposedly about parallel universes, but he spends most of it describing - what else? - the Big Bang Theory. I didn't really follow along with what the major premise of the article is, but include it here anyway to poke at a few of the individual statements.

You’ve likely imagined it before: another Universe out there, just like this one, where all the random events and chances that brought about our reality exactly as it is played out just the same.

Nope, can't say that I have. It's important to remember that this guy is kind of weird... it's not just an act. But that's okay, because he lives in Portland. At least he knows where he belongs.

Perhaps our Universe, with the version of events we’re familiar with, isn’t the only one out there. Perhaps there are other Universes, perhaps even with different versions of ourselves, different histories and alternate outcomes from what we’ve experienced.

As a rule of thumb, when Ethan starts leading off his sentences with "perhaps", brace yourself for a bunch of crazy talk. The issue at stake is the concept of falsifiability. If a theory cannot conceivably be proven false, then it is not a valid scientific theory. It's why scientists reject the theory of "God did it." How do you prove He didn't? It's more a matter of theology than science. Similarly, questions of parallel universes are more properly in the realm of science fiction than actual hard science. There is no imaginable test to disprove parallel universes. Ethan is perfectly free to talk about science fiction on his personal blog, so long as he distinguishes that it is science fiction and not actual, serious scientific inquiry.

This isn’t just fiction, but one of the most exciting possibilities brought up by theoretical physics. Here’s what the science says about whether parallel Universes might actually be real.

Well then... nevermind all that.

Our entire cosmic history is theoretically well-understood, but only qualitatively. It’s by observationally confirming and revealing various stages in our Universe’s past that must have occurred, like when the first stars and galaxies formed, and how the Universe expanded over time, that we can truly come to understand our cosmos.

That's an amazing non-admission of guilt. My taxes are theoretically well-filed, but only qualitatively. This car I'm selling you is theoretically well-maintained, but only qualitatively. Astrophysics has become a sect of mathematics more than a physical science. The theories are marvelous. It's too bad that the darned evidence gets in the way.

If the Universe were finite, we would see a specific set of properties inherent to the patterns that the Big Bang’s leftover temperature fluctuations displayed. But what we see instead are a different set of patterns, teaching us the exact opposite: the Universe is indistinguishable from being perfectly flat and infinitely large.

By the same patterns, the Universe is indistinguishable from one where spacetime and cosmological expansion are works of fiction.

But theoretically, the implications of our observations paint a picture that’s even more tantalizing.

Yes, the theory describes all kinds of awesome physics that can't be detected through observations. So tantalizing.

In the last episode of Contrabang!, I indicated that the exercise was starting to feel a bit like a psychological case study. What in the human psyche might drive someone to want to believe in parallel universes, and even call it valid science? Do they fantasize about a parallel version of themselves, one where they weren't bullied in school for being dorks, or where they had success with women?

Is it possible that there’s a Universe out there where everything happened exactly as it did in this one, except you did one tiny thing different, and hence had your life turn out incredibly different as a result?

• Where you chose the job overseas instead of the one that kept you in your country?

• Where you stood up to the bully instead of letting yourself be taken advantage of?

• Where you kissed the one-who-got-away at the end of the night, instead of letting them go? 

It looks like the evidence weighs in favor of our psychological hypothesis (unlike the Big Bang Theory).