Knowing Is Half The Battle

Tonight, the spookiest night of the year, is a good opportunity to talk about the reality of evil. Not everyone likes Halloween. My very Christian neighbors take their kids Trick-or-Treating, but say they don't care for it much. They are uneasy with what seems like an occultist celebration. (Although I suspect the issue is they feel they are supposed to shun the holiday, as proper Christians.)  I don't share their concerns. Halloween is the day that little kids go out dressed as adorable ghouls and goblins to earn sweet treats, thus making a mockery out of evil - a force which strives to mock and degrade the good and the righteous. It's nice to see the tables turned from time to time.

Evil inflicts suffering onto two groups of people: the possessed, and the victims of the possessed. If you're walking down the street and a stranger randomly shoots you, both are are victims of evil. You are innocent, but the assailant is not because he has made some sort of compact with evil. It is possible to avoid becoming a victim of the first type, but you can only reduce the odds of becoming a victim of the second type by avoiding the possessed and defending yourself against them. Many will be victimized in an evil society, but also many will be victimized in a weak society.

I think that evil doesn't just seek out weakness, but is fueled by it. Power corrupts, and the weak-willed feel evil rising in situations where they hold the balance of worldly power over others. Priests don't enter the clergy because they see it as a good opportunity to prey on children. They all enter with noble intentions, but over time the position as shepherd of sheep subjects them to evil influences. How do you know if someone should be trusted with children? The standard cannon of this era is to avoid toxic masculinity, which means that masculinity is predatory and devours the innocent. Fortunately, you know that this era happens to be that of Clown World, thus the opposite must be true, and so it is. The strong are more likely to reduce temptations. The soft-spoken schoolteacher with a weak handshake and poor eye contact is the one who naturally raises the suspicions of protective parents.

The possessed become victims by making a compact with evil. Indulging in low impulses without repentance and without a struggle for improvement is the behavior of evil, but the compact is signed by accepting lies. That is not the same as being misled by lies. For instance, the average person is not making some deal with the devil when they accept false scientific constructs like dark matter or new-Darwinism as being true, because it's not reasonable to expect them to know better. But the scientists should know better, and they pretend they don't so that they maintain their worldly positions as the vanguard of the materialist priestly caste. Also, those who passionately defend the technical positions of which they actually know little about, or those who accept as truth the word of authorities who are known to lie in other domains, are partaking in the lie. In the corporate, academic, and political realms, career progression almost always requires the acceptance of a number of lies. The Faustian deal is on full display for all who wish to see.

For a glimpse of evil in action, consider this video from Bombard's Body Language - which is the one that got her banned from YouTube - where she describes the body language behavior of various families standing with then Vice President Joe Biden at a Congressional photo op event. I was not able to find it on any video sharing sites - not even Bitchute - but fortunately she hosts her own site. She shows the pattern that if the father of the family acts submissively, then Biden will become very handsy with the wife & children and will separate the young daughters to touch them throughout the photo session while making creepy comments about them having boyfriends. However, if the man instinctively keeps himself physically placed between his family and the predator, then Biden backs off, acts normal, and the photo session is just the boring routine you'd expect out of a Congressional photo op.

It can take as little as that to defeat a demon. They did not have to outsmart him, act aggressively, or really take on any risk at all. They only had to know that the behavior was wrong, and to be willing to show that they knew it was wrong. Evil recoils from the light like a hand from a hot stove. Most of the men were too afraid or ignorant to counter Biden in any way, but that is weakness - which evil cannot resist. Thus, they and their families were degraded in front of a public audience. Biden is something of a victim here, too, because that video is very politically damaging, which is why it has mostly been scrubbed from the internet. But, in the face of such weakness, he just can't resist the evil urges that swell up from within him, even in front of dozens of cameras and witnesses.

Many of the fathers are probably so naive that they didn't even realize what was happening. They are not accepting the lie, but neither are they protecting their families from becoming victims of the possessed. Some probably realized the behavior was creepy, but did nothing to intercede. They offered their families up as sacrifices to their careers. They are themselves accepting the lie and making their own compact with evil. For evil to cause harm it only needs to exist. But for evil to spread, it must reveal itself. There must be a fair chance for the target to realize they are embracing a falsehood. The lies that permeate our own society are so egregious that there is little chance that anyone accepting them isn't a willing participant. However, if we take a similar set of lies, and place them in a higher trust/naivety culture like Sweden, then the balance changes a bit. The Swedes are almost hardwired to accept the social consensus as truth, thus many are honestly misled. They maintain their innocence but increase their risk of victimhood. Eventually, the reality of their situation will become so apparent that the soul of the Swede must finally decide whether or not to reject the lie. As wickedness becomes increasingly prevalent and brazen, the excuse of making honest mistakes becomes increasingly unbelievable.

Knowing is half the battle. The other half is showing that you know. It can be terrifying to shine a bright light in an increasingly dark world. What other choice do you have? You could accept the lie, or cower from fear. Watch the video again, and try to convince yourself that you want to be the father smiling like a dope while his daughter gets sniffed by Joe Biden.

The Right Gets It Wrong On Genetics #3

I had no intention of firing off two salvos of the fledgling Right Get It Wrong series so quickly, but the references to bad biology keep showing up in the bloglist. Keep in mind that these are not arguments made by people I want to dismiss as inept, but by writers I've added to my own daily reading list. There would be little use in a Left Gets It Wrong or Center Gets It Wrong, as they are too willfully ignorant on such matters to even concede basic observations about the domain. In this case, unfortunately, the battle line against materialist dogma cuts right through our own camp. Most, I imagine, have not taken time to see for themselves that the scientific evidence weighs heavily against neo-Darwinism, despite all claims made to the contrary. Still, these guys are far too smart to be repeating such easily disproven falsehoods.

Spandrell

We'll start with Spandrell, who has come off hiatus to express his pessimism for the demographic outlook of the West. Perhaps he is correct - there is certainly room for pessimism - but he rests his argument on some faulty assumptions about genetics.

“Oh come on”, you may say. It’s never going to get that bad. At some point demographic trends self-correct, right? Evolution will run its course. Leftists aren’t having children, eventually the differential fertility of conservative people will make sure everyone is based and redpilled.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that, I’d be the pope. Yes, Catholics love this argument. Christians, more widely. They have sacrificed a lot to have children and stable families in this society which does everything it can to promote unhappiness and dysfunctional lifestyles. If there is a God, surely at least their sacrifices will win them the future of the species? History will talk about them as ancestors of the next stage of humanity. Right??

Wrong. I’m sorry guys, but evolution doesn’t work like that. Yes, sure, evolution is about differential reproduction. Whatever genes make you have more babies in a given environment, spread in the genepool. And whatever genes do the opposite, make it marginally harder for you to reproduce, disappear from the genepool. So yes, on the face of it, “genes that make you want children” are by definition being promoted by natural selection. The argument, as explained by promoters such as Anatoly Karlin, is that humans until now have been fruitful and multiplied perfectly well through a basic motivation: seeking sexual pleasure. But that motivation doesn’t work anymore in an environment with easy contraception, so the future belongs to people with psychological traits that make them enjoy family life.

Does it work like that, though? Are there any genes that “make you want children”? Does the brain work like that? The human brain is complicated, you see, but it is also an evolution of the more basic mammal brain, and its circuitry must follow roughly the same pathways. And last time I checked all mammals reproduce exactly the same way. The male produce quadrillions of sperm every minute, and are at the hunt of every ovulating female. The moment they find one they jump onto her, copulate semi-forcibly, and babies ensue. Yeah, this pretty much includes humans.

The idea that humans are going to single-handedly evolve, over single-digit generations, a completely different pattern of reproduction to replace one which has been functional for 60 million years strikes me as pretty wild wishful thinking.

The Anatoly Karlin article referenced is Breeder's Revenge, and was previously discussed in the first installment of this series this past January. Karlin makes the argument that the current environment is culling out those with low propensity to parenthood, leaving behind a core of heavy breeders who will push the fertility numbers back up. He shares some evidence that we may already be past the inflection point.

Spandrell rebuts by arguing that genes for breeding could not change significantly in such a short time spans. More generally, that the observed complex trait could not have evolved in the given timeframe. Welcome to the theory of evolution, Mr. Spandrell, I hope you enjoy your stay. If you'd be so kind, please tell me which complex human trait did evolve in the time allotted by anthropologists.

Spandrell sort of stumbles into one of the two major arguments against neo-Darwinism: space & time. Here, we normally rebut the theory by pointing out the lack of genetic space: there is only a pittance of genes that are particular to human beings. Another argument is about time, and is the one Vox Day uses by simply taking the assumptions used by geneticists and showing that they are impossible. Most people don't realize the process that must occur for a trait to evolve by random mutations. There must be some proposed series of mutations that must occur - more or less in order - to get from the pre-trait to post-trait species. Each individual mutation must spread throughout the species (fixate) before the next step is viable. That means each step must be accompanied by a significant survival advantage. The number of generations required for a genetic fixation depends on the size of the population and its dispersement, but an average given is 1600 generations. For humans with generations at about 20 years spaced (historically), that is 32,000 years per mutation. However, that assumes that each new mutation comes right when needed. Experiments with bacteria suggest about 1000 generations for each beneficial mutation (we'll take them at their word for sake of argument). That pushes us back to over 50,000 years per mutation. Suddenly the few million years separating man from chimpanzee doesn't look very long to accommodate the many millions of mutations that are said to separate the two.

 He almost starts to get the right picture.

Does it work like that, though? Are there any genes that “make you want children”?

But then veers back into the genetic weeds. No, there are no genes that promote parenthood, but that doesn't mean the desire to do so isn't a heritable trait. Most biological traits are not transmitted by genetics. Which means the daunting limits incurred by the actual mechanics of random gene mutation are not actually relevant. We can't know right now if Anatoly's theory is correct, but if the fertility rate really does start to turn back upwards, it will be strong evidence in his favor.

Zman

Z makes the list again, in Ethics and Authority. He says,

This connection between ethics and authority is what has always haunted atheism, which denies the most common source of moral authority. In fact, atheism is mostly a negative identity, so the atheist invests heavily in attacking the moral authority of Christianity. Oddly, they suffer the same defect in logic as evolution deniers.

I would invite Z to specify what defect in logic I make in my scientific arguments against the neo-Darwinian hypothesis of evolution. It's certainly not a "negative identity." I always assumed I was an evolutionist, until I realized that the evidence clearly contradicts it. Z is himself a self-described dissident - an inherently negative identity - but that doesn't mean it invalidates all the insightful social commentary he makes.

Contrabang! #26 Often In Error But Seldom In Doubt

This Is Why ‘Physical Cosmology’ Was Long Overdue For The 2019 Nobel Prize (link)

In the mid-20th century, ‘physical cosmology’ was considered an oxymoronic joke. Today, it’s Nobel-winning science.

He's not wrong, except the reason is that the Nobel prize has itself become a joke too. Most of the big ideas of "physical cosmology" like dark energy, dark matter, black holes, etc. are absurd, and the long-term effect of giving this prize to Jim Peebles (plus the one they gave in 2011 for dark energy) will be to damage the reputation of what was once - perhaps - the most acclaimed award in all humanity.

Regardless of what you’re measuring, one fact remains true about any and all structures and objects in existence: they all formed naturally in a Universe governed by the same laws and made up of the same components everywhere.

One of the big problems we talk about with the physicists is they never challenge their core assumptions. Another problem - even bigger, perhaps - is that they don't even track their assumptions. That's an important thing, even when the assumption is reasonable. As a software engineer, when I review the code written by others I'm not just looking at code quality and correctness, but also in trying to surface whatever assumptions may have been made. This sometimes unveils subtle bugs, and helps give a better understanding of the risks involved with the work and where trouble may come from.

These physicists don't do that. Once a theory is "settled science" (by which they mean there's a consensus, which isn't a scientific concept) they build on top of that with yet more assumptions, and then more yet again. They never are faced with having to take live traffic on the stack of assumptions they've made. (That is, have it all tested by reality.) In their world, they can keep explaining away all inconsistencies with more complexity and promises that future evidence will be better.

Ethan vows that we can at least be certain that the universe is governed by the same laws at all times and in all places. That's a very old assumption made in the Western tradition, but it is still an assumption. We don't actually know that it's true. For instance, the gravitational constant is notoriously slippery, and can't be established with high precision. Some scientists have observed that many of the larger dinosaurs don't seem to have been structurally feasible, and have proposed that gravity was weaker in earlier era. The speed of light also shows some variation, frustrating scientists who eventually redefined the meter in terms of the speed of light, supposedly making that little problem go away. Now, maybe it's perfectly reasonable to make the assumption that the physical laws and constants are fixed, but that assumption needs to be tracked, otherwise scientists become overconfident that they are standing on much more solid ground than they really are.

In physical cosmology, what you do is you start with:

• the known laws of physics,
• the relevant physical ingredients for the system you’re considering,
• the initial conditions of your physical system that your Universe begins with,
• and an accurate model for the interactions among the ingredients (including the background of spacetime).

Once you have all of that, then you do the calculations to derive what you expect to exist within our Universe. When your observations come in, you compare them with your theoretical expectations. Where observational and theoretical cosmology meet is where we, at long last, can scientifically determine what does and doesn’t accurately describe our Universe.

There is a major logical error going on here, which is the declaration that in physical cosmology they start with initial conditions - which they have no way to measure. Instead, they've taken current conditions and used the known (and proposed) laws of physics to walk back to some theoretical initial conditions. They then use those same laws of physics to "prove" that we end back up in the current state.

In the middle of the 20th century, legendary physics curmudgeon Lev Landau famously said, “Cosmologists are often in error but seldom in doubt.” With the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics going to Jim Peebles, perhaps the world will recognize it’s long past time to retire Landau’s quote. We may live in a dark Universe, but the science of physical cosmology has shed a light on it like nothing else.

It is amusing to see Ethan dismiss a quote about cosmologists' arrogance with such self-assured bravado.

For The Last Time, No, A NASA Engineer Has Not Broken Physics With An Impossible Engine (link) 

We previously described Ethan as the King of the No-Comma but perhaps it should have been titled Queen of the No-Comma, because he delivers this one with some sass. The No-Comma is a lecturing, almost condescending rhetorical advise that helps us understand why other physicists might perceive the astrophysicists as a bit smug. I have trouble reading this title in anything but the voice of the comic book guy from The Simpson's.

Dark Matter’s Biggest Problem Might Simply Be A Numerical Error (link)

In principle, if you can write down the initial conditions describing the Universe at some early time — including what it’s made of, how those contents are distributed, and what the laws of physics are — you can simulate what it will look like at any point in the future.

In principle, you can't, as consequence of two of the biggest scientific insights of last century. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us that we can never perfectly know the state of any system, not even of a single particle. Chaos Theory tells us even slight non-linearities in real-world system turn small differences in initial conditions into large differences in outcomes. The idea of the universe as a mechanical clock that you can just wind forward and backwards with perfect, calculable determinism is not realistic.

The 1990s also saw the first simulations of dark matter halos that form under the influence of gravity. The various simulations had a wide range of properties, but they all exhibited some common features, including:

• a density that reaches a maximum in the center,
• that falls off at a certain rate (as ρ ~ r^-1 to r^-1.5) until you reach a certain critical distance that depends on the total halo mass,
• and then that “turns over” to fall off at a different, steeper rate (as ρ ~ r^-3), until it falls below the average cosmic density.

Here he just casually throws out some mathematical symbols without defining them. Either he's being very lazy, or he's hoping to intimidate non-technical readers so they'll just trust that he is correct and move along.

This problem, known as the core-cusp problem in cosmology, is one of the oldest and most controversial for dark matter. [...] However, it’s also possible that they don’t represent real physics, but rather represent a numerical artifact inherent to the simulation itself.

It's also possible that it's a "conceptual artifact" inherent to the simulation itself.

For decades, contrarians opposed to dark matter have latched onto these small-scale problems, convinced that they’ll reveal the flaws inherent to dark matter and reveal a deeper truth.

Yes, if you question a hypothetical state of matter that is sprinkled liberally where needed to make the equations work, you must be a contrarian. He is wrong that we're convinced we'll reveal the flaws to dark matter and reveal a deeper truth. No, we're convinced we'll reveal the flaws inherent to dark matter and that's enough by itself. (In the long-run, I suppose, the truth can only be found if the distracting lies are done away with.) He reveals a flaw in the mindset of these people, which is that they will only discard one idea if a better one is immediately available to replace it. They're like the girls who will never break up with a guy until the next one is lined up. Branch swingers, we call them. Ethan just can't fathom that we'd reject some theory because it's false, and not because we have a different theory we want to promote and get some smart-boy internet points for being right.

If this new paper is correct, however, the only flaw is that cosmologists have taken one of the earliest simulation results — that dark matter forms halos with cusps at the center — and believed their conclusions prematurely. In science, it’s important to check your work and to have its results checked independently. But if everyone’s making the same error, these checks aren’t independent at all.

No, that can't be right. Peer-reviewed is the gold standard, and anyone who disagrees with any peer-reviewed science is a contrarian.

Climate Anxiety

Greta Thunberg Is Behaving Rationally relayed the theory - which came via E Michael Jones - that young Greta's anger against her society is very real and deserved, but she has shifted it into a domain which earns her accolades from the public rather than scorn. We must wonder...how much of apocalyptic climate doomsday hysteria is secondary in nature? I suspect that the movement is almost entirely driven by misplaced angst.

William Briggs shared a relevant article in his recent post Reader Challenge: Is This Article A Troll, Or Are We Doomed? He bemoans the vapid nature of what passes for intellectual conversation these days, but I'd like to explore the article a bit. It is called Struggling with climate anxiety? You’re not alone. Off the bat, we have to wonder if climate anxiety is really a thing, or is just a vehicle to package other anxieties that are either difficult to articulate or are avoided due to social stigmas.

These are trying times. Mass extinction, mass destruction, massive injustice — it can be flat-out depressing. One common prescription for climate woe is: Do something. Go to a march! Call your representative! Join the fight! But throwing your heart and soul into climate and justice work comes with its own set of tolls.

The working premise for this post is that global warming fanaticism is a direct consequence of the collapse of spirituality in the West, and in the first paragraph the article reveals itself. "Throwing your heart and soul into climate" suggests that if we only believe and strive enough, we can will a change into Earth's climate.

The article then relates responses from three different interviewees from within the climate activism community.

Kristen Poppleton 

So I started out as a naturalist. But at some point I just started feeling like, this isn’t enough. In the early 2000s, when the Union of Concerned Scientists put out their report on climate change in the Great Lakes — that was the first time I had seen something that put climate change in this format that was digestible for normal human beings, and also localized it. Like, this is my place. It wasn’t this super high-up-there global thing, it was a local issue. That hooked me.

That report, from 2003, predicted that the low lake levels would continue to lower because of hotter weather:

Lake levels were highly variable in the 1900s and quite low in recent years. Future declines in both inland lakes and the Great Lakes are expected.  

In May of this year, the Great Lakes recorded their highest levels ever recorded. Now in October Kristen shares that the report is what hooked her. In the climate change community, either facts don't matter, or they only carry a 4-month shelf life.

Minnesota has the fastest-warming winters in the country.

I'm sure she knows Minnesota weather patterns better than I do. But then, they did set all kinds of all-time cold records this past winter and tied the state record for lowest recorded windchill. It does make the subsequent claim of "fastest-warming winters" tough to reconcile.

I mean, I live in probably the most liberal neighborhood of one of the most liberal cities in the state of Minnesota, which is one of the most liberal states in the country. My friends are all on board with climate change being real. But it’s still like a weight you carry around that you feel like no one else really gets. It’s this burden.

Climate change is a political, not scientific, stance, and they are comfortable describing it as such. And for the left, politics is really their religion. The burden of the cross has been replaced with the burden of climate zealotry. It's a pretty clear example of a claim we often make here: progressivism is just Protestantism where Man has replaced God. When asked what she was grateful for, she responded:

My kids. And that’ll make me cry right now, just saying that out loud. They’re little hope machines.

Kids?? Hope?? Surprisingly, she has managed to make her embrace of the secular religion work to a satisfiable degree, although she is still highlighted in an article about anxiety.

Olatunji Oboi Reed

He's the founder of Equiticity, which appears to be a webpage with the words "racial equity" and a portal for donating so that white people can alleviate some guilt.

I’ve struggled with depression since high school, so over 30 years. And for most of my life I was able to mask it. In my early career, I didn’t acknowledge that I had depression. Then I went to corporate America, where I couldn’t hide it — I couldn’t fight through it in a way that kept me safe at work.

In America, you study hard in high school to get into a good college. Then study and network well in college to get into a good corporate post. Then you work countless hours to improve shareholder profits and suffer phony virtue signaling initiatives attempting to boost morale as you look forward to your next major life milestones of retirement and death. His name indicates he's a foreigner. So he left his family in Africa, traveled clear across the world, and found his immersion into big-city corporate American materialism to be depressing, which is perfectly reasonable and has nothing to do with climate.

He then relates his first experience with bicycling.

Just a Saturday, summer morning, beautiful day out. The sun is in and out of the clouds, and it feels like it’s playing hide-and-go-seek with me. The waves crashing on the sand, on the beach — they felt like they were dancing with me. The wind blowing the leaves felt like a song in my ear. Nature spoke to me in a way that I had never experienced that morning, and it was beautiful and transformative. And that day, I became a cyclist.

He found serenity in nature. Many of us do. This is all normal.

What’s hurtful and harmful for me is the racism inherent in the work. Shortly after I started the bike club, the mayor [of Chicago] at the time, he was rolling out this huge strategy for bikes, right? Bike lanes, and Divvy — our bike-share system. And I was quoted in the New York Times, in essence saying, it’s great what the mayor is doing, however, should the historical pattern repeat itself, bicycle resources will be concentrated in predominantly white and middle- to upper-income neighborhoods, and we’ll see a trickle of those resources.

And up until that point, I was sort of like the darling of the bike advocacy community because I was black, I was organizing black folks on the South Side to ride bikes. Everybody was like, “Yeah Oboi, go, go, go!” And then when I made that statement, a lot of them turned on me, told me that I was putting the mayor’s entire strategy at risk, that I have no evidence that what I’m concerned about is the way it’s going to be. It was intense backlash. There was enough pain associated with that that I didn’t know that I wanted to deal with this anymore.

He confesses he got special, unearned status because of his race, but then plays the racial oppression card anyway. The reason he got special attention in the biking community is that black Americans don't do biking or nature. On hiking and backpacking trails the people you encounter are almost entirely white, plus some Asians. That's it. Occasionally I'll see a black dad along with an otherwise all-white Boy Scout troop. The mayor is ignoring bicycle lanes in black neighborhoods because it would be the most useless infrastructure investment in all human history.

I know it’s tough to talk to some people about it. As open as I am publicly with this stuff, it’s tough for me to talk to my mom and my father about it, my brother. I’ll stand in front of a thousand people and tell them my whole story about depression instead of a room full of my friends.

He's completely alienated from friends and family. Why wouldn't he be depressed?

Margaret Klein Salamon 

So, psychotherapy is kind of my family business. My parents met in clinical psychology graduate school. Virtually all of our family friends had at least one member who is a psychoanalyst. I mean it’s kind of like a religion. So, because of that, I became a patient of psychotherapy starting as a teenager. And it was extremely, extremely helpful to me.

The things to always keep in mind about psychotherapy is that it's useless - probably causing more harm than good - and the field tends to attract crazy people as practitioners.

I came to New York, to Adelphi University, where they have a very strong psychoanalytic program. And I thought, wow, I’m going to have a great career, great life. For a long time I was in a state of willful ignorance [about climate change] — which means I knew enough to know I didn’t want to know more. But living in New York City, especially through Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy, I started to be really, really preoccupied with the climate emergency. And I started to do a little bit of writing and publishing online about some of the emotional elements of this.

So she went to college and got indoctrinated, and admits that climate change advocacy became a therapeutic emotional outlet for her.

It’s a movement that says, “This is not a problem. This is an emergency. We do not need incrementalism or tweaks to the system. We need total system transformation right now.” It’s really an amazing thing to be part of that. I sound like such a hippie …

No, you sound like a revolutionary.

Like, ‘No one understands the climate emergency. My friends don’t understand, my family doesn’t understand, my colleagues don’t understand’ — that kind of feeling. It’s a really defining experience for people who understand ecological reality. It’s a little bit like being in a nightmare: ‘Why is everyone acting normal? Why, when I walk down the street in Brooklyn, are there still all these people, like, idling their cars? Am I crazy or are they crazy?’

You're crazy.

I also have a little bit of an unusual situation, which is really great for me. I live in a brownstone in Brooklyn with my family. My husband and I live on the third floor. My brother, sister-in-law, and nephew live on the first floor. And then my parents, when they’re in town, which is about a third or a fourth of the time, are on the second floor. That’s really nice for me, that set-up, because I can kind of dip in and out, go see my family just for an hour or something, you know, have dinner, and then go back to work.

Good for her. I'm a bit surprised that both women interviewed here are married and family-oriented.

Fear is a major thing in the climate movement. And we have this idea that we can’t scare people, that fear doesn’t work as a motivator. Fear is one of the most basic motivators, not just for humans, but for all animals. Fear is literally how we translate our perception of risk into taking defensive action.

Fear is a major thing in the climate movement because it has become a socially accepted outlet for liberal atheists to focus their overwhelming existential dread. She finishes, in the question about gratitude.

Before I got into this work, I was just very self-involved. I was big into my resume and personal achievement, academic achievement. I was preoccupied with how I looked, and whether people liked me — all these kinds of questions that are honestly so boring. It’s so much better to feel like I’m a vessel, I’m part of this mission.

She has rejected materialism for religion. Which is great, except that she has found a false religion. She uses language lifted from Christianity (call herself a vessel for a high purpose) yet worships a false idol, in violation of the First Commandment.

Conclusion 

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these people. A mother who adores her children. A man dissatisfied with corporate life who is re-energized by nature. A woman who stays near her family and rejects materialism in pursuit of a mission. What they all suffer is a spiritual crisis, a God-shaped hole that lives in the heart of every liberal atheist. They believe what they are taught to believe by Science: that the universe is a purely mechanistic machine, that humans arose thanks to randomness and nothing else, and that the entire universe will one day destroy itself and won't leave a trace of anything or anyone that ever existed. They don't believe in life, so they obsess about death, which surfaces as histrionic claims of impending Earthly catastrophe. Their religious fervor drives them to punish sinners & heretics, and to gratuitously signal their own piety and make public displays of self-flagellation.

It can easily be seen how this has descended from apocalyptic Christianity, but there are a couple key differences. Paul thought God was going to destroy the world within his lifetime, and the proper course was to prepare and purify oneself for the coming doom. Climate changers believe that Man is going to destroy the world within their lifetimes, and that only Man can save the world from its doom, if only the people will believe strongly enough. Paul recommended to Christian communities that they cast out evildoers and focus on their own sanctity. Climate changers will not tolerate even outsiders to practice wrongthink because their morality is communal, rather than the individual preparedness of Christianity. Because Man is now deity, all of Mankind must be converted to the ethos of saving the world from bigotry, or it will be destroyed by lack of collective virtue.

This is not just esoteric philosophy. The spiritual crisis will destroy modern civilization. It's why millions of Californians are currently sitting in the dark, and why there is a growing trend of blackouts in major cities all over the Anglosphere. It's why Europe is losing a thousand farms per day and Dutch farmers are protesting "green fascism." Nature abhors a vacuum, and the God-shaped hole will be filled by evil forces in otherwise decent people. Those evil forces will cause war and famine by destroying the energy and agricultural systems which allow for modern civilization. The spiritual crisis of the West - and secondary effects such as climate anxiety - puts at risk the lives of billions of people.

The Right Gets It Wrong On Genetics #2

There are two domains of debate where conservatives tend to get it wrong more often than not: genetics and economics. Today we'll be discussing genetics. The common fallacy made is the same one that nearly everyone makes: to conflate inheritance with genetics. It's part of a larger tendency of conservatives to adopt the liberal framework and then struggle to comprehensively argue against the excesses of liberalism they disagree with. It's why there was pushback recently from the hard right against DDR3 (Dems Are the Real Racists) arguments because they are roughly the same as claiming "conservatives are the real liberals." Similarly, when race realists attempt to substantiate their claims through argument of pure genetics, they are saying, "we are the real biological materialists."

We can sympathize with them, of course, because they are attempting to fight against lies. In this case, the lie is blank slate theory - the belief that all people are inherently equal, thus any disparities between groups must be caused by privilege/oppression dynamics. They have good evidence that many traits correlated to outcomes are biologically inherited - which is true - but get tripped up by their own form of scientism by trying to validate their arguments through mainstream science. Unfortunately, the mainstream conviction that all inheritance comes from genetics is not just wrong, but so easily shown to be wrong, so consistently shown to be wrong by their own study results, that it amounts to little more than a lie. Attempts to use one lie to counteract another lie will always end in frustration.

The Zman recently fell into the trap in his post The Gay Debate. He begins,

For the longest time, it was assumed by science that there was not a single gene that caused homosexuality. The reason is a gay gene would make the person less sexually fit and therefore less likely to reproduce and pass on the gene. It does not take much of a disadvantage for a trait to disappear from the pool over enough time. If such a gene did exist, so it was thought, it would have disappeared from the human gene pool a long time ago and homosexuality with it. Therefore, something else must be at work.

This is obviously true. This is a nice little logical argument that effectively disproves the existence of a gay gene - there is no gene that destroys the chance of reproduction because it gives an enormous disadvantage to reproduction. Such a strong argument is not even necessary in this debate; it is not actually our responsibility to disprove their theories. You would think that it would follow that if there is not possibly a single gene that causes homosexuality, then similarly there is not a group of genes that cause it either.

The source of this divide is the philosophical argument that there are facts that can be tested and values that are purely opinion. A scientific theory is one that can be tested, while an ethical proposition cannot. If something cannot be tested and possibly falsified, it is not science. In the case of something like human traits, it means there is either a biological mechanism to explain it completely or it is purely a social construct with no biological root. Traits fell on either side of the fact-value divide.

Exactly. A scientific theory is one that can be tested; an ethical proposition cannot be. What the left does on this issue is to take the ethical proposition that homosexuality is natural and attempt to convert it into the scientific theory that homosexuality is biologically determined. Because they also believe that all biological determination is genetic, they have a clear bias to find evidence of gay genes. Thus, we can predict that there will be scientific publications where the claims made of genetic influence on sexuality in the titles and abstracts will be stronger than the supporting evidence, and the results themselves will tend to be skewed towards supporting that outcome. (That is, they will not be reproducible.)

In the case of homosexuality, it is starting to look like it may be the result of both a combination of genetics and environmental factors. A recent study has found two SNPs that influenced both male and female homosexuality. These are not the “gay genes” some thought existed, but two “switches” that have a strong association with homosexuality in men and women. That means homosexuals tend to have these two markers, but it does not mean all people with them are gay.

The link he provides (which is to a blog post about the study) does not say that the two SNPs have a "strong association" with homosexuality. It says "small but statistically significant." The paper claims to have found a higher correlation of genetics overall to homosexuality - between 8% and 25% - but were  unable to find specific genes with any large any influence. So at most, genetics play a third the role that social conditioning does, and perhaps less than a tenth. In itself, these results refute the liberal claim that gays are "just born that way" and support "pray the gay away" Christian camps and general attempts to direct men's sexual energy away from deviance and towards building families. Even then, those correlations don't prove anything at all. The fundamental fallacy that all Psych 101 students are warned about is correlation does not equal causation. Just because there is a small - even statistically significant - correlation doesn't mean genes cause sexual behavior. It could be a coincidence. For instance, Israeli Jews are the gayest people on Earth with lots of pride parades and all that. However, in Palestine homosexuality is suppressed. Because there are specific genetics between those two ethnicities, a genetic survey of Israel would certainly find a correlation between genes and sexuality, but it wouldn't mean anything.

Note also the syntax of the genes not being gay genes but gay "switches." Biologists refer to this kind of verbiage frequently when they attempt to find the genetic influences for complex traits. They never can find the genetic causation they're looking for, so they assume that the trait is biologically determined elsewhere and that the gene somehow acts as a switch to that mechanism. It's the conclusion you'd expect to see if there is no genetic basis for the traits but scientists are so eager to find one that they'll concoct any excuse possible to elevate coincidental correlations into evidence for solid causal biological pathways.

He continues (emphasis added).

As with intelligence, something as complex as human sexuality probably has many genes that influence the trait. It could also mean other traits come along with the ride, as they are also associated with the set of genes that cause homosexuality. It’s entirely possible that this set of genes is responsible for a range of behaviors that are often associated with homosexuals. In other words, the attraction to the same sex is just one result of many from a set of genes turned on or off in the person.

Not very strong language here, and it makes the same mistake and applies it to IQ. As always, the genetic surveys do not support the theory, so it is theorized that there are complex webs of genetics underneath that we've not been able to tease apart. Sure, perhaps a viable hypothesis if there were millions and billions of genes in the web, but there are only about 190 genes said to be unique to the human genome. There is no genetic space for the alleged webs of complex genetics needed to account for the wide range of heritable complex behavioral and physiological traits observed in humans. The results of the Human Genome Project disprove all this, yet the bitter clingers just can't let go of their genetics.

The last sentence of the actual study's abstract is:

Overall, our findings provide insights into the genetics underlying same-sex sexual behavior and underscore the complexity of sexuality.

Of course, they never will say that the results - which don't support a genetic basis for biological inheritance - don't support a genetic basis for biological inheritance. They'll say it's more complex than they realized, more funding is needed, etc. The same is seen in astrophysics. The more money we spend chasing false assumptions, the more money we are asked to spend chasing increasingly complex false assumptions.

Ultimately, Zman still manages to end up in the right place.

If sexuality is purely natural, then debating the culture issues surrounding it is a waste of time. On the other hand, if culture matters a lot, then debating the morality surrounding sexuality is a primary concern. Do we want more homosexuals or fewer homosexuals becomes a valid topic of debate. Leaving it up to nature is no longer a justifiable response.

Despite all the efforts to find underlying genetic causes, the studies still show that social influences are a much stronger influence on behavior.

A second example of one of our writers making bad genetic arguments comes from Steve Sailer in Race, Genetics and Pseudoscience: An Explainer, which critiques this article by the same title.

If they wanted to be more persuasive, they should give more examples to back up their assertions. For example, they repeatedly claim that old scientific and popular ideas about how best to lump and split human populations have been debunked by modern genomics, but they don’t tell us which of these ideas that have been disproven and what has replaced them. The essay would be far more interesting with more factual examples.

This is true. Most people, including the relevant scientists, believe that modern genomics proves the neo-Darwinian theories of evolution. In fact - and as we saw above - modern genomics always rebuts those theories, but they are interpreted as hinting at previously unknown complexity.

The following paragraph comes from the original article, which Sailer quotes on his own post.

… Moreover, since it is a complex trait, the genetic variation related to IQ is broadly distributed across the genome, rather than being clustered around a few spots, as is the nature of the variation responsible for skin pigmentation. These very different patterns for these two traits mean that the genes responsible for determining skin pigmentation cannot be meaningfully associated with the genes currently known to be linked to IQ. These observations alone rule out some of the cruder racial narratives about the genetics of intelligence: it is virtually inconceivable that the primary determinant of racial categories – that is skin colour – is strongly associated with the genetic architecture that relates to intelligence.

This is correct! Granted, inadvertently so, and it gives way to larger false conclusions. The reason that the same genes that give rise to skin color aren't the ones that give rise to IQ is that genetics don't play that big a role. Yes, race is a real thing and correlated with IQ, skin tone, behavioral inclinations, and all that. However, because race realists have rested all their arguments on genetics, they open themselves to be countered completely by the reality of the human genome.

Sailer responds:

Wow, that’s pretty embarrassing. Folks interested in human biodiversity tend to have vastly more sophisticated views than those attacked here.

His rebuttal would be more interesting with more factual examples. 😉By sophisticated he really means more complex, because the right-wingers who adopt biological materialism are forced down the same rabbit hole as the lefties. Because his opinions were countered by the left using actual evidence - in exactly the way I've said they would be - he is reduced to petty "wow, how embarrassing" commentary. All political arguments rooted in genetics will be rebutted by evidence. However, while the left's shortcomings will be excused with quiet mutterings about hidden complexity, the right's will be widely lambasted as disproven hate speech.

Greta Thunberg Is Behaving Rationally

Aidan Maclear posted yesterday after a lengthy hiatus on the subject of mental illness. The major point was that we can't unequivocally label a seemingly deranged person as psychotic if they are reacting to their circumstances in a reasonably rationale way. Garbage in, garbage out goes the mantra in the data sciences. If the data input is bad, then there is no point in spending time perfecting the algorithm, because the output will be bad in any case. The same for people. We know that depression and anxiety are chronic these days. Nearly 20% of whites are on anti-depressants (source) and the number who medicate in one form or another is of course much higher. Opioid abuse claimed a staggering 70,000 lives last year. There have been 43 so far this year in my county alone. The rates of overdoses and suicides among whites is so high that our average life expectancy is now declining.

Are these people mental? Are their brains faulty? No, the outputs are a consequence of the inputs. Whites have much higher rates of antidepressant use (3X other groups) because they are constantly berated and told they are to blame for all the world's suffering. If they don't believe those accusations (and many don't, but grow weary of them nevertheless) then they still live in a miasma of materialism. They don't attend church and are taught that they were created not in love, but randomness...that their lives are utterly meaningless and that the universe will eventually end by totally annihilating itself and won't leave even a trace of all that existed before. Can we fault someone for becoming depressed or anxious under such indoctrination?

Yesterday, E Michael Jones sat down with Henrik from Red Ice to talk about Greta Thunberg (embedded below). Jones has read the memoir written by Thunberg's mother and has much to say on the matter. Greta was born to a feminist mother - as most Swedish children are - but her's happens to be a famous musician in Sweden, who spent most of her time out tending to her career. Thus little Greta was raised with a largely absent mother in feminist Sweden, where it is accepted and even expected that women not be subjected to the shackles of motherhood. Mothers are not so necessary anyway as the state raises children.

Part of that government-run child rearing includes the most important academic subject in the prog agenda: sex education. Greta was subjected to sex education that featured cartoon depictions of - you could probably guess - white females engaging in intercourse with nonwhite males. This had the effect of unleashing the sexual energy of the ethnically non-Swedish students who believed they had license to the white girls of their host country. Greta became terrified of being sexually assaulted, but of course could not say whom she was afraid of because the society does not permit such things for little Swedish girls.

Around this time, she started to develop a so-called eating disorder. Because she was not eating, her father - also a musician but less successful than her mother - opted to pause his career to stay home and care for his daughter. But that didn't help and her anorexia persisted. With no other choice, the mother was compelled to stay home instead. Greta slowly improved and was able to eat small meals prepared by her mother, which then took over two hours to eat. In effect, the unhappy child of the feminist utopia went on strike to force her mother back into the kitchen. And she won.

Greta is now the poster child of climate activism. Her technical understanding may be flawed, but the deeper currents of her doomsday rage against her society are very, very real. She can't direct her rage at the real problem: that she was neglected by her parents and left to the state, who in turn invited hordes of foreigners in and trained them to rape her. Lecturing against climate sins is perfectly fine, though, so there her rage is directed.

What part of Greta's behavior has been irrational? She has her mother back, and she's enacting a terrible price on the country that mistreated her. The Swedes will pay dearly for the climate hysteria Greta is leading. (For a sneak preview, millions of Californians are again without power tonight.) Around here, we talk about restoring families and prepping for the inevitable collapse of the current order. Well, Greta restored her own family and is doing more than anyone to hasten the feminist Swedish state towards its collapse. She may be the clown-world version of Joan of Arc.

Bitter Beliefs

The Zman's most recent post, Better Beliefs, is a good one and worth reading if you missed it. He relates how a civic religion does not necessarily need a god, but it certainly must have a devil. The modern leftist religion, which is something like Puritanism where God has been replaced by man, has shifted into overdrive on their devil narratives. He shares a sentiment that can't be shared too much:

If they were sober minded enough to reason through these things, they would not be on the Left. To be on the Left is to abandon all reason in favor of a set of beliefs.

Stefan Molyneux has put it similarly, "you can't reason a man out of a belief he didn't reason himself into." It's the reason why the alt-right learned in the last election cycle that memes and insults were more effective persuasion tools than facts and logic. Call it a consequence of universal suffrage. A lowest-common-denominator electorate demands a lowest-common-denominator political discourse. Arguing against lefties with logic is inherently unproductive because their identity is defined by a rejection of reality. Being a liberal requires convincing yourself that you don't know certain things.

One story in the news is about an adjunct professor at Victoria University who just lost her position. She was noted for having produced a study showing that polar bears are doing very well these days - in contradiction of climate change propaganda. She was fired for daring to publicize an unauthorized bear-related hate fact. Many of the comments in right-wing discussions forums were to the effect of "they're scared because they know the global warming narrative is falling apart, and they're lashing out." Those kinds of comments betray a low understanding of the mindset of the global warming promoters. No, they don't think that they have a narrative, let alone one that is failing. They are believers, so they are convinced they have the truth, and that while evil forces are trying to sabotage progress, their side is right and will prevail. They are in the upside-down world, where true is false and false is true.

The question could arise...how do we know that we aren't actually the ones in upside-down world? Our response is that we know we are correct because our side is congruent with reality, while theirs must ignore, distort, or outright fabricate reality to fit their beliefs. However, they would claim the same thing as well! So, who is correct? Let's consider this not as a strictly right versus left issue, but as masculine versus feminine, which is roughly equivalent to technical versus social. Consider the two valid mindsets that either side might hold.

• The predictions of the global warming people always fail, and the model for runaway greenhouse warming is technically flawed, therefore global warming theory is false.
• Global warming has the power to ruin the lives of professionals who contradict it, therefore global warming is real.

Women are much more oriented towards social dynamics than men. Women navigate social webs; men solve physical problems. Men take a while to realize that many alleged technical debates are really just social phenomena with a mask of analytical rigor. Women inherently have a sense that social fads come and go, and that it is wiser to float with the tides than to constantly swim against the currents. Just as men learned to hold off death by acquiring resources and fighting hostile outsiders, women learned to hold off death by not allowing their families to be branded as heretics in times of mandatory piety.

Machiavelli said the same thing. He advised to have your own independent thoughts, but to always feign allegiance to the religion. Today, that religion is climate hysteria, trans kids, and all that. Is it worth condoning such awful lies for the sake of social cohesions? I say not, but mostly people do. Well, I skew heavily to the analytical, so that makes sense. A highly social person, the type of person who never "got" math but is invited to every party, is going to pick the socially smart choice, which is to stay in the middle of the herd on divisive issues. There is some conventional wisdom that these socialites have bigger hearts, they're liberal because they care, and the analytical types are too cold and systematic. I think that's a big lie. I think these social chameleons - so aligned with Machiavelli - are selfish, caring for only their own survival. They'll allow the gender-confused children to permanently mutilate their reproductive organs, so long as they don't risk sabotaging their own careers for some politically incorrect comments on social media.

But that's not entirely fair to the feminine sector, which is mostly women - although increasingly includes men soy boys. What binds our perspective to theirs is children. Ultimately, women are cunning social creatures so that they can protect and promote the interests of their children. A woman with a child in danger is a force of nature to be reckoned with. So, consider this, a woman is naturally inclined to do exactly what we believe to be our foremost duty: to protect children from the evil forces of the world.

That common intersection of masculine and feminine objectives is like a little bridge that brings us back to where we started. We should see now that if an article provided a thousand solid, indisputable reasons why global warming is false, and also mentioned that a professor lost her career for stating an unauthorized fact, that article would tend to increase support for climate change policy. The bulk of society want to side with the strong horse and aren't interested in even the faintest of technical facts. The most convincing article against climate change support would be one where climate activist professors are ruined by unreasonable tyrannical power. The moment that support of climate change hysteria starts to trigger women's ancient faculties of child protection, the popular sentiment will shift very quickly.

We can see some problems here with modern democracy. Universal suffrage means that the group least inclined to think systematically is empowered to make the systematic decisions. In an electorate where the bulk flock to the strong horse, a petty tyrant is more popular than a principled peacenick. When the safe choice is always to avoid contradicting mob mentality, then mobs are certain to run amok, thereby threatening everyone's safety anyway.

Contrabang! # 25 Dark Entropy

There was no edition of Contrabang! last week because Starts With A Bang! didn't leave a whole lot to chew on. However, there is plenty for this week. There's a lot to go through, but if you make it all the way to the last article, you'll learn about another "dark" element of the universe previously undiscussed here that is needed to make modern cosmology work.

Three Astrophysicists Reveal Structure Of Universe To Win The 2019 Nobel Prize (link)

Well, you can pretty much tell by the title what has happened. Another Nobel Prize for Physics has been issued which will eventually have to be retracted if the award is to have any merit. (I predict it will not be, and eventually the Nobel Prize for Physics will carry about as much credibility as their Prize for Peace.)

This year’s physics prize goes to three individuals ⁠ — Jim Peebles, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz ⁠ — for discoveries in theoretical cosmology and exoplanets. At last, looking into space and existentially dreaming of what’s out there, and then physically/astronomically discovering it, has its own Nobel Prize.

At issue here is Jim Peebles for his "discoveries in theoretical cosmology," not the work in exoplanet discoveries made by the other two recipients. Peebles is perhaps an even more ardent cheerleader for the mainstream narrative than Ethan Siegel, and his contributions towards the Big Bang Theory should have instead won him a Nobel Prize for Creative Writing. Rather than taking on Ethan's rambling monologue for this one, lets look at the more succinct description give by the Nobel board.

James Peebles’ insights into physical cosmology have enriched the entire field of research and laid a foundation for the transformation of cosmology over the last fifty years, from speculation to science. His theoretical framework, developed since the mid-1960s, is the basis of our contemporary ideas about the universe.

The Big Bang model describes the universe from its very first moments, almost 14 billion years ago, when it was extremely hot and dense. Since then, the universe has been expanding, becoming larger and colder. Barely 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe became transparent and light rays were able to travel through space. Even today, this ancient radiation is all around us and, coded into it, many of the universe’s secrets are hiding. Using his theoretical tools and calculations, James Peebles was able to interpret these traces from the infancy of the universe and discover new physical processes.

The results showed us a universe in which just five per cent of its content is known, the matter which constitutes stars, planets, trees – and us. The rest, 95 per cent, is unknown dark matter and dark energy. This is a mystery and a challenge to modern physics.

So the prize was given for contributing to the notion that 95% of the universe is constructed from hypothetical states of matter of which there is no evidence at all. They really should have narrowed the scope (such as his prediction of the cosmic background radiation) because making the award about his general contributions to the fabulous fairy tales now en vogue will probably become embarrassing when those theories are eventually discarded.

Did Our Universe’s Structure Grow From The Top-Down Or From The Bottom-Up? (link)

If there’s one lesson that humanity should have learned from the 20th century, it’s this: the Universe rarely behaves the way our intuition leads us to suspect.

Eh, that's a dangerous mindset to take. Why shouldn't our intuition be generally in sync with how the world operates? Our minds have either (a) evolved specifically to make intuitions about how the universe behaves, or (b) been given to us by the same spiritual force that created the cosmic order. Why should our intuition be generally at odds with the world? I don't buy the verbiage that the 20th century shows our intuitions rarely help us. The two examples he likely refers to - quantum mechanics and general relativity - only apply at very tiny scales or at near light-speed velocities.

Cosmologists — people like me who study the large-scale structure of the Universe — have known about these peculiar motions for a long time. If you map out where each galaxy is according to its redshift, you’ll find something unexpected: the map you make of the Universe will have galaxy filaments that all appear to point towards your location. Decades ago, cosmologists called this effect “Fingers of God,” because they all point at you no matter where you are. Fortunately, we immediately recognized that this is not a real, physical effect, but an effect of incorrectly analyzing our data.

The "Fingers of God" go away if the strict assumption that redshift equals distance is relaxed. A lot of problems do, actually, such as the need for dark energy. There are structures of the universe that appear to be physically connected, yet have different redshifts. Astronomers assume that the appearance of physical connection is just an illusion and that the redshifts reveal the ultimate truth. Thus, their models depict the structures as stretched out radially from Earth.

The way that the Universe looks on the largest scales provides us with an enormous amount of information. Because we know how gravity works, we can use these observations to reconstruct two things together:

1. What the Universe is made out of: dark energy (68%), dark matter (27%), normal matter (4.9%), neutrinos (0.1%) and radiation (0.01%).
2. What the initial conditions of the Universe were: in what ways and by how much it departed from being perfectly uniform. 

I always enjoy reading these kinds of statements; strong testaments to the Dunning-Krueger effect running rampant at the highest levels of academia. Because we know how gravity works, we know that 95% of the universe consists of theoretical states of matter of which there is no supporting evidence.

The two possibilities for how our cosmic web came about are known as top-down or bottom-up scenarios. In a top-down Universe, the largest imperfections are on the largest scales; they begin gravitating first, and as they do, these large imperfections fragment into smaller ones. They’ll give rise to stars and galaxies, sure, but they’ll mostly be bound into larger, cluster-like structures, driven by the gravitational imperfections on large scales. A bottom-up Universe is the opposite, where gravitational imperfections dominate on smaller scales. Star clusters form first, followed later by galaxies and clusters, as small-scale imperfections experience runaway growth and eventually begin affecting larger scales.

Reading this, what do you predict will be the result of their analysis? I'll give you a hint: there is a precedent that has been discussed before in the Contrabang! series.

Today, our best measurements of the Power Spectrum of the Universe and of the scalar spectral index, n_s, tells us that n_s = 0.965, with an uncertainty of less than 1%. The Universe is very close to scale-invariant, but it’s tilted to be just a little bit more top-down than bottom-up.

The precedent was the analogous question of whether spacetime is curved convex or concave, and then discovering it is actually flat - which also happens to be what we'd observe if spacetime isn't really a thing in the physical world but an abstraction created in the minds of physicists. Here, also, they're trying to decide if the Big Bang proceeded in a top-down or bottom-up fashion, and finding the result that is the equivalent to "flat". That is, the answer just so happens to correspond to the one that would be found if the Big Bang theory was false. Quite a coincidence, idn't it?

Physics, Not Genetics, Explains Why Flamingos Stand On One Leg (link)

There’s an enormous evolutionary advantage for flamingos to stand on one leg, but only physics explains why.

Mostly we criticize Ethan for regurgitating unsound science, but sometimes there is cause to suspect that he doesn't really know what he's talking about. In this article, he relates one advantage given to flamingos by their habit of standing on one foot, which is reducing body heat lost to their aquatic environments through their large, webbed feet.

But the flamingo is perhaps best known for an odd behavior: they can often be found standing on one leg. There’s a scientific reason for this, but it’s based in physics, not biology.

I don't think the behavior is actually all that rare. I've seen ducks doing it. At any rate, he says the cause is physics, not genetics, as scientists have not found any genes associated with the behavior. Well, what does he think the body is? All of the form & function of the physical body is physics. According to mainstream evolutionary biology (a paradigm Ethan has previous parroted), all that physics within the body is explained by genetics. This blog has - outside the scope of the Contrabang! series - taken the stand that genetics don't explain the physics of the body because there are not nearly enough genes. Ethan helps us out here by providing evidence for an animal behavior that is not explained through genetics, but he alleges is acquired by social learning. That is, the survival advantage of standing on one leg is a trick passed on from one flamingo generation to the next. Conveniently, it is bird behavior. (We have previously used the example of birds building nests as a behavior that is not learned, but can't be genetically programmed either.) The social learning hypothesis should be easy to scientists to test.

• Do flamingoes raised in isolation display the behavior?
• Do they display the behavior if raised in water?
• Do they display the behavior if raised on dry land?

If so, then when know that there is some aspect to inherited traits that does not come from genetics and does not come from social conditioning. That is, that there is a major component of inheritance that the modern scientists are unable to account for. Of course, we already know that to be true, but this would be yet more evidence in that direction.

Ask Ethan: How Dense Is A Black Hole? (link)

Black holes are a favored subject of modern astrophysicists, which are not only predicted by General Relativity, but one which they are convinced have been proven to exist - they even have a photograph! But all is not well in black hole theory.

Under the rules of General Relativity, black holes can have mass, electric charge, and angular momentum.Once you make a black hole, all the information (and hence, all the entropy) associated with the components of the black hole are completely irrelevant to the end-state of a black hole that we observe. Only, if this were the true case, all black holes would have an entropy of 0, and black holes would violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Hey look, they're pretending to be concerned about violations of the laws of thermodynamics. The problem is that, if you model a black hole and its surrounding accretion disk as closed system, the entropy of the system would be decreasing in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

If the singularity at a black hole’s center doesn’t depend on those properties, there must be some other place capable of storing that information. John Wheeler was the first person to realize where it could be encoded: on the boundary of the event horizon itself. Instead of zero entropy, the entropy of a black hole would be defined by the number of quantum “bits” (or qubits) of information that could be encoded on the event horizon itself.

The proposed answer is that the in-falling particles leave information encoded on the black hole's event horizon: an imaginary line in space where light is unable to overcome the pull of the singularity's gravity. How does this information get encoded into empty space? It doesn't matter! It's dark entropy, and it makes their equations work, so it must be real.

There is one other aspect of this article to address before we call it a week.

If your black hole is non-rotating, the singularity is nothing but a mere point. If all the mass is compressed into a single, zero-dimensional point, then when you ask about density, you are asking “what happens when you divide a finite value (mass) by zero?”

Yes, that is a question that a skeptic of black holes would be asking.

If you need a reminder, dividing by zero is mathematically bad; you get an undefined answer. Thankfully, perhaps, non-rotating black holes aren’t what we have in our physical Universe. Our realistic black holes rotate, and that means that the interior structure is much more complicated. Instead of a perfectly spherical event horizon, we get a spheroidal one that’s elongated along its plane of rotation. Instead of a point-like (zero-dimensional) singularity, we get a ring-like (one-dimensional) one, which is proportional to the angular momentum (and the angular momentum-to-mass) ratio.

This is quite a paragraph, because it reveals that Ethan is confused about his own domain of expertise. In previous editions, we talked about the fact that, because all black hole systems in reality will be rotating, there cannot be a point singularity at the center of a black hole, but a ringularity, or ring singularity as they call it. The ringularity is a theoretical construction made by physicists to account for the violation of angular momentum that would occur by a point singularity. If the rotating body collapses to a point of infinitesimal radius, then finding the rotational velocity requires dividing by zero. Because that's not possible, the ringularity was introduced. It has some radius and rotates, thus angular momentum is conserved without the need for infinite velocities. How does the ringularity physically function and form? They don't say, but it makes their equations work, so it must be real.

Now, Ethan is addressing a different problem: the question of infinite density. If mass is pushed into a volume of size zero, then finding the density also leads to a divide-by-zero error. Ethan remembers there is an issue with division by zero, so he throws out there answer: ringularity! But that is for angular momentum...it does not solve the problem of indeterminate density. It's almost as if this PhD in astrophysicists, who writes extensively on the subject, doesn't actually understand the domain that well but mainly recites the answers he has been trained to provide.

LGBTQP Cereal

Kellog's has introduced an "LGBT themed" All Together Cereal. The campaign includes a $50,000 pledge to GLAAD for "LGBTQ advocacy work." So if you love breakfast, and also corporate sponsored gay propaganda, there is now a cereal just for you. (For more, see the Newsbusters article on the subject.)

When I was a kid, Saturday Night Live created a sketch called Schmitt's Gay, a commercial for a fictional gay-themed beer, with a Phil Hartman voiceover that began, "if you have a big thirst, and you're gay..." The ludicrous concept had the audience in an uproar and become a well-known gag.

We like to point out that yesterday's satire is today's reality, but this goes far beyond what prior satirists would have considered to be funny. Beer is inherently an adult-themed product, since it can only be legally consumed by adults. Kellog's has gone far beyond sexualizing an adult product and is marketing sexuality to children using cartoon characters.

The big push now is to normalize gay indoctrination of children. It's everywhere: in schools, in libraries, and in children's products. States such as Illinois have made "gay history" mandatory for all schoolchildren, and nationwide they are making October into Gay History Month. Yes, they already have June as Gay Pride Month, but that falls inconveniently outside the school calendar, so an additional month is being added. Gay history is a fictional subject; it is merely the promotion of homosexuality wrapped in the veil of academic credibility. For instance, there is some debate amongst historians that Alexander the Great may have had a relationship with a male assistant. By and large, no one cares. Alexander made history because he forged an empire of unprecedented scope at an early age - not because of whatever alleged sexual proclivities he may have had. There is no such thing as gay history, only history.

Just yesterday, someone told me of a mutual acquaintance who took his 12-year-old niece to the annual Gay Pride Festival in our town's public square. At one point, the child declared "I'm gay! I'm gay!" This, mind you, is in a red city in a red state. There are increasingly few safe places left for children to just be children. Not in schools, not in conservative town squares, and now not even in the cereal aisle.

What Is Falser Than False?

Things keep getting weirder with Joe Biden. Consider this headline regarding last week's Democrat party town hall, Biden: President Obama 'Gave Me a Kiss' for Leading on Gay Marriage. I assumed it was satire, but there's an embedded video link. I just can't tell anymore.

Biden tells the story of how he came out of the closet as supporting gay marriage before Obama did, and that rather than becoming upset at being outpaced in proclamations of prog allegiance, Obama rewarded his VP with a kiss. Not content with merely making a spectacle of probably the most overt pandering in US history, Biden approached the openly gay host of the debate as if to re-enact the kiss between two men, but aborted before he could complete the deed. (Why, is he homophobic?) In the next presidential cycle, the candidates may have to prove that they truly embrace LGBT by performing gay acts on stage, the rate things are going. SNL spoofed the event by having Biden and Cooper kiss. That was satire. In four years time, maybe it won't be.

Biden then shared this story of his childhood.

Biden then explained how he arrived at his position as a very young man in the early 1960s.

He credited his father:

"I remember getting out of a car when I was trying to be dropped off at the local city hall to get a job to be the only white employee in the east side of town in the neighborhood, in the projects, as a lifeguard," Biden said.

"And as I got out, there were two guys in the corner in Rodney Square, they call it, which is the sort of corporate capital of the world. It's where the chancery court and all that is. And these two guys, well dressed -- this is back in 1960 -- probably 1963, and I'm revealing that I'm almost as old as you," he joked with Anderson Cooper.

"But look, as my dad was dropping me off so I could go around the block and run and get the application. And two well-dressed men kissed one another as I was opening the door. And I hadn't seen that before. And I turned around and one walked off to the DuPont building, one walked off to what used to be called the Hercules Corporation.

"And I looked at my dad, and he looked at me and said, 'It's simple, honey. They love each other. It's just basic. There is nothing complicated about it.' That's how I was raised, for real. And so for me (applause) -- for me, and Barack knew that. Barack knew that.

It's truly a wonderful tale where he ties himself to both gay pride and the civil rights movement back before most voters todays were alive. He only makes one mistake, which is to credit his father for his progressive instincts. (White privilege!) As the Democrats move to add the letter P to their alphabet soup of sexual identities, he will surely have to amend the story to include himself as a young boy joining the gay black men he witnessed at Rodney Square in consensual acts of sexual liberation from white supremacy.

Today I saw on a television headline - I believe it was Fox News - Biden taking credit for the latest impeachment efforts against Trump, saying something to the extent of, "if it wasn't for me there would not be an impeachment inquiry." The absurdity! "If I hadn't actually had real corrupt dealings with Ukraine, we wouldn't be investigating Trump for fictional ones." The pure evil of it all. It's like Hillary Clinton claiming "we'll we wouldn't have investigated Russiagate for three years if I hadn't committed all the corruption in those emails that leaked out." And that's just the thing. I was saying in 2016 we were hitting peak absurdity, but it's three years on and things are only getting worse. I hesitate to make such claims anymore. Where can we draw the line? There has to be some sort of mathematical limit to what can be the absolute opposite of the truth. What happens when the official narrative becomes as false as false can be? Where do we go from there? What is falser than false?

Conservatives Kill Red Herrings

The other day there was an article about Elizabeth Warren pledging a trillion dollars to stop "climate racism." The claim - that climate change adversely affects communities of colors - is straight out of the Democrat party's official platform from 2016 and has been previously discussed on this blog. What's new is the specific proposal for an enormous sum of money to address the alleged injustice.

I ran across this article on a far-right news aggregator. Some of the top comments were to the effect of "she's insane." Many point out all the factual flaws in her arguments. She's actually not insane (in this case, at least), but such responses are overly literal and square.

Imagine a similar headline where Elizabeth Warren pledges a trillion dollars to minorities because whites are summoning purple dragons from outer space to eat their inner organs. Would conservatives prattle on about the extreme unlikelihood of purple dragons from outer space, and whether they really would have evolved a taste for human flesh? Apparently so! It's easy to picture Ben Shapiro penning a smarmy op-ed about how ridiculous it is to talk about purple dragons and all his dork followers nodding along in agreement.

But it's all just a transparent bribe for votes, and the number is completely fictional - meant to grab headlines. Her taking a trillion dollars and giving it to non-whites is just the libtarded equivalent of Trump promising to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. It's not meant to be taken literally. Trump knew that the biggest issue influencing voters that the media wouldn't let them talk about was immigration, so he cornered the market on it, so to speak. On immigration, no one would outflank him to the right. Now Warren wants to corner the market on what she sees as the biggest issue for voters: pandering to minorities and white guilt. Well, Warren is awful square too, because that's exactly what all the other liberals are doing. Note the difference between her approach and that of the incumbent. Trump did his homework and found that immigration was the value buy. It had a big payoff for less investment. His 15 opponents were not buying, so it was cheap. He ran a lean campaign, found the value buys, and sailed into the White House riding a wave of free press on an ocean of liberal tears.

Warren is trying to corner the market in a segment that every one of her opponents is also buying as frantically as possible. She's not shopping for value, but chasing trends. If she really wants to be the analog to Trump, she should look to the liberal equivalent to the Tea Party, which was Occupy Wall Street. Instead, she's scrambling to the SJW left to clench the nomination, and leaving herself exposed for such wild promises in the general.

The major handicap of whites is they are high-trust people in an increasingly low-trust society. They generally assume people are acting in good faith - just misguided in their facts or reasoning - and demand only the vaguest pretense of plausible deniability. That assumption is a critical liability in today's world. We don't live under the principled, limited republic of the Founders; it is an open-air democracy. Votes are bought with lies and bribes. Elizabeth Warren is telling the non-whites - whom her party can't immigrate fast enough - that she will reward their votes by taking money from whites. Whether or not she's lying, or climate change or purple dragons are real, is all totally irrelevant to what is actually happening.

Who Predicted Shorter Growing Seasons?

There seem to be about three general stances on climate change.

1. The belief that human CO2 emissions are causing drastic, unprecedented global warming is the official establishment viewpoint in most places - at least in the West. It's not necessarily the stance that most people believe, but it's the only opinion that the people in charge will tolerate. In some places, such as Oregon, the schools have banned any challenges to the warming theory. Greta Thunburg recently showed that someone can be catapulted into widespread media adulation merely by expressing the warming dogma with vigor.
2. The belief that the Earth is primarily operating within in its normal cycles, and any manmade influence is negligible, is perhaps the most commonly held belief, but not by the types that travel in private jets and tell us what to think. Surveys shows that this is actually the majority opinion in the US, but not in Europe.
3. The belief that Earth is entering a new grand solar minimum is really a subset of #2, but the predictions are different enough to warrant its own category. They predict that the coming decades will come with weather patterns similar to those seen in previous grand solar minima.

All of those stances could encompass "climate change," but when used by the left the term always means global warming. A good example is a recent article by USAToday titled 'Historic' winter storm could bring up to 2 feet of snow to central and western USA.

Here, the terms global warming and climate change are used interchangeably. Global warming is the cause, climate change is the effect. Thus they take any evidence of climate change (which could be in line with any of the three climate stances) as evidence of the global warming theory.

If you watch the video from the screenshot, it explains that global warming causes increased snowfall in northern latitudes because warmer arctic air holds more moisture. Let's assume that is a plausible explanation. (It's probably not, but we'll get to that.) Even so, it doesn't account for the disparity between global warming predictions and climate change observations. In a warmer globe, snowfall should be pushed towards increasingly northern latitudes during increasingly narrow seasons of the year. Global temperatures should increase. Despite their claim that "climate change is making winters colder despite rising temperatures and hotter summers," there is no explanation for colder winters in their "warmer air holds more water vapor" explanation. In fact, if the air contains both more CO2 and more H2O (the real greenhouse gas) then that should only contribute to an increase in heat retention and thus milder winters. There is nothing in the global warming theory to explain colder winters. But they do, interestingly, admit that winters are indeed getting colder.

What they engage in is a slight of hand where they list the apparent shortcomings of the global warming theory, offer a plausible explanation for just one, and then act as if they've explained it all away and everything was predicted. And even their one explanation seems faulty. Does more humid arctic air cause more mid-latitude snowfall? I'm not sure, but I think it doesn't. Storm systems are created when fronts of cold air meet areas of warm, humid air. In the midwest, violent thunderstorms occur when cold, dry air races down the Great Plains and slams into hot, humid gulf air which is pushed upwards, cooling it and wringing it out like a sponge. What matters most to the precipitation is the humidity of the warmer body of air, plus the temperature gradient. Thus, more humid Arctic air probably doesn't lend to much more precipitation and - most importantly - if the Arctic is warming even faster than other areas, as they claim, then there will be a smaller temperature gradient between the polar cells and Ferrell cells, meaning storm systems should drop less precipitation, not more.

Headlines such as this are a degree of damage control for promoters of the official narrative, because the unusually early winter follows an unusually late winter. The upper midwest saw all kinds of delays in planting and destruction of stored grains because of multiple rounds of late snowfall. Now they will be struggling to remove crops and many may be destroyed by abnormally early snowfall. This year has been so bad that it has affected this year's harvest, last year's harvest, and - if many seed plant crops are lost - next year's harvest as well. No one in the global warming camp ever predicted that global warming would cause longer winters that squeeze down the growing seasons.

I've been expecting a cold winter, and early indications support that intuition. It will be fun to watch the media scramble to rationalize away the evidence if there is another deep winter that breaks yet more cold-weather records.

Contrabang! #24 You Don't Deserve A Seat At The Table

Is The Universe Filled With Black Holes That Shouldn’t Exist? (link)

When it comes to the objects that are found all throughout the Universe, most of them align with our theoretical expectations.

Most of them except the 95% of the matter & energy that is alleged to be "dark." Or the quasars. Or neutron stars. Or primordial supermassive black holes. Or....

You get the idea. Most of the objects are not "theoretical expectations" so much as the theory has been stretched, warped, and retrofitted to observations. For instance, nothing about neutron stars was theoretically expected. They observed a blinking light. All the complexity with the multiple layers of proposed exotic states of matter follow from only the observations of blinking lights, which occasionally change frequencies.

Occasionally, however, scientists will find an object that seems to defy conventional wisdom. When this occurs, however, it’s usually not because there’s a flaw with our understanding of the rules that govern the Universe, but because we’ve modeled certain physical processes or environments too simplistically.

Here he has succinctly summarized a truth I have spent many paragraphs prattling on about. Whenever unexpected observations occur, the default response is to leave all previous assumptions unquestioned and add complexity wherever necessary to make the current problem go away.

There are two dominant flaws seen in astrophysics. The first is stacking unproven assumption on top of each other to build a comprehensive dogma of the universe, and then being unable to challenge those assumptions for fear of the whole structure collapsing. The second is the insistence that, if only a single explanation can be thought of, then that explanation is effectively proven - a logical blunder that this blog previously labeled as Sherlock's Folly. Both are present in this article.

For black holes, the overwhelming majority of them originate from a supernova explosion occurring in a massive star near the end of its life.

This is only theoretical. No black holes are actually proven to exist anywhere, let alone in supernovae. Because physicists don't how else to explain supernovae, the can claim with great confidence that they are are stars collapsing into black holes. This is in spite of evidence that should invalidate the whole premise, such as recurrent supernovae - which cannot occur in the collapsing star model. Despite the presence of invalidating evidence, the theories remain because they've not yet thought of anything to replace them with. The standing theories are simply too big to fail - above the scrutiny of mere evidence.

If you think the logical trainwreck of this article is bad, it actually still gets worse.

Whenever you have a large enough collection of mass, whether it’s in the form of a cloud of gas or a star or anywhere in between, there’s a chance that it can form a black hole directly: collapse due to insufficient pressure to hold it up against gravitation. For many years, simulations predicted that black holes should spontaneously arise through this process, but observations failed to see a confirmation. Then, a few years ago, one came in an unlikely place, as the Hubble Space Telescope saw a 25 solar mass star simply “disappear” without a supernova or other cataclysm. The only explanation? Direct collapse.

No matter what is observed - stars exploding, stars winking out - it can all be explained by black holes. It's a bit like the issues this blog has taken in the past with evolutionary biology. If two species share a trait and are related, it is proof of evolution. And if they are not related? Still proof of evolution? And if they do not share a trait? More proof of evolution. The issue is that there are no observations that are allowed to be called negative evidence, thus the theory is not practically falsifiable. Thus, astrophysics, as practiced by Ethan and those he advocates for, is actually not a science at all, but a pseudoscience.

The One Science Lesson Every American Adult Can Learn From Greta Thunberg (link)

I wish I could say this piece was satire, but it isn't.

She’s not a scientist, an expert, or even an adult. But she’s got one good lesson to teach us all.

Golly, I wonder what it could be. (Spoiler Alert: if you guessed "believe as you're told," then you were correct.)

Like most people on Earth, Greta Thunberg is not a climate scientist. She has no formal scientific training of any type, nor does she possess any expert-level knowledge or expert-level skills in this regime. She has never worked on the problems or puzzles facing environmental scientists, atmospheric scientists, geophysicists, solar physicists, climatologists, meteorologists, or Earth scientists.

Like most of us, she is an ordinary citizen of the world: with strong beliefs, opinions, and political inclinations. But unlike most of us, Greta has shown a willingness to do what most of us refuse to do. Her starting point for how to move forward in the world is to begin from a position of scientific consensus. While most of us prefer to be given the facts and trust that we, intelligent as we are, can figure it out for ourselves, Greta recognizes the unparalleled value that scientific expertise brings to our world.

Naturally Ethan, cheerleader for scientific consensus himself, is a big fan. What he fails to realize is that virtually everyone begins from a position of scientific consensus, because that's what we're all taught in school. I certainly did not begin in astrophysics with an inherent doubt of, say, neutron stars. But as I've learned more about them, I've realized that not only are they wrong, but their is sufficient evidence that physicists should throw the theory out, but have reasons for not doing so which have nothing to do with the scientific method.

 It’s true that there are many scientific conclusions that are only provisional, and that much of what we conclude is accurate today may be overturned by superior evidence in the future. The way science proceeds is by constantly re-evaluating your theories, ideas and hypotheses in the face of the ever-changing full suite of evidence. When the evidence contradicts the theory, the theory must be thrown out, modified, or otherwise revised.

It all sounds well and good, except that's not what they actually do. They ignore contradictory evidence or file it away as something that will be explained later. At this point, sending probes to asteroids and comets is a waste of funds because, despite a consistent return of surprising results, no major changes have been made to the relevant theories. Scientists just base their models on the subset of data for which their models work.

But when the evidence lines up with the theory’s predictions, it provides confirmation and validation that we’re at least on a thoroughly reasonable path. This is how scientists in all fields, whenever they’re doing good science, proceed. It applies to any issue you can imagine, from vaccinations to fluoridation to evolution to dark matter to the Big Bang and more. And yes, it also applies to global warming and, more generally, to the field of climate science.

Good grief, it's like he's giving us a short list of junk science. Why is he defending water fluoridation? Because some prestigious organization promotes it, I guess. If the scientific consensus was that you should jump off a bridge, this guy would be first in line. (Actually he wouldn't, which we'll see...)

What Greta Thunberg has to teach us, that most people (perhaps even most scientists) fail to grasp, is that the scientific expertise you learn in the process of becoming a scientist is what enables you to make informed judgments about the merits of various scientific assertions. And, if you care about achieving the most desirable outcome, you must accept the best science the world has to offer — the scientific consensus on an issue, where one exists — or you don’t deserve a seat at the table.

It's simple: you toe the line or you don't get a career. Most scientists actually know this too, which is why they pretend to believe such concoctions as neutron stars and dark matter. Only believers get tenure! It's why I - an amateur - am able to point out holes in their logic big enough to drive a snowplow through, week after week. The demand for conformity has resulted in an orthodoxy so unsound that the flaws have become low-hanging fruit for armchair critics.

A consensus will only arise when a theory is good enough to make predictions that are robust, verified by multiple lines of evidence, backed up by a statistically significant amount of data, and where definitive observations have been taken that discern one particular theory’s predictions from the others.

Of course, this is only practiced where convenient. The only evidence for neutron stars is blinking lights in the sky.

It’s why General Relativity is the consensus theory of gravity, but also why we continue to challenge it with new observations in regimes where it hasn’t yet been tested.

The consensus theory of gravity has major flaws, such as a failure to predict motions at scales larger than a solar system. They've had to invent dark matter to account for it, the only evidence of which is that the consensus theory of gravity isn't working.

It’s why evolution, via the mechanism of genetic mutation and natural selection, is the consensus theory on the origin of the species currently found on Earth.

As yet, there is zero evidence of evolution via genetic mutation. There is yet no evidence for the random evolution of a species, a chromosome, a gene...or even an allele of gene.

It’s why vaccination and fluoridation are overwhelmingly recommended by public health experts as near-universal goods, while vitamins are only recommended for those with nutritional deficiencies.

Interestingly, Ethan happens to live in Portland, Oregon, a city which has chosen to stop adding fluoride to its water supply. Does Ethan add the poison to his personal drinking water? Better still, does he use the reach of his platform - the largest independent science blog on the net - to advocate that his own town end a policy in that directly rejects the scientific consensus? Let's take a look.

Of course he doesn't. He is completely full of shit. Just a mindless hypocrite. You should poison your children because of the scientific consensus, but he won't.

There is an overwhelming scientific conclusion being ignored by the entire world. For decades, scientists have sounded the alarm, only to be met by a government that complains about the volume and tone of the alarm while ignoring the contents of the message. The time for arguing over whether this problem is real, severe, or our fault is long past.

I love it when they disprove themselves in their own zeal. For decades, scientists have sounded the alarm that the world will end in about a decade! For normal people, the longer climate doom predictions don't come true, the less seriously they are taken.

It’s time for real action, and long past time to vote out any impostors that can’t get on board with the scientific consensus. Every one of us has a voice and a vote, and we cannot let these obstructionist tactics obscure the truth any longer. There’s a real problem here, and while fixing it will be a long-term endeavor, we all know where to start: by accepting the truth and considering solutions that address the scientifically legitimate issue at stake. If we can’t at least take that step, we’re dooming future generations to the worst possible climate scenario. We’re capable of preventing that outcome. Whether we do or not depends entirely on what we do next.

I was too generous in the previous section when I described what Ethan is doing as pseudoscience, because this is just vanilla liberal political action. Whatever the domain, Ethan seeks out the official approved opinion and becomes its biggest cheerleader.