Contra Bang #1

Welcome to the first installment of Contra Bang, intended to provide counterpoint to a popular, independent astrophysics blog. I intend to run this series every week, although real life will surely intervene from time to time.

Ask Ethan: Could ‘Cosmic Redshift’ Be Caused By Galactic Motion, Rather Than Expanding Space? (link)

A reader asks,

When we observe a distant galaxy, the light coming from the galaxy is redshifted either due to expansion of space or actually the galaxy is moving away from us. How do we differentiate between the cosmological redshift and Doppler redshift? I have searched the internet for answers but could not get any reasonable answer.

Understandable that he couldn't find a reasonable answer. How do I find out how much redshift is attributable to normal cosmic motion, and how much to expansion of the universe, which is still motion, but also isn't? It's not exactly a reasonable premise.

As it turns out, there are actually a total of four possible explanations for the redshift-distance relation we observe. They are as follows:

1. The light from these distant galaxies getting “tired” and losing energy as they travel through space.
2. Galaxies evolved from an initial explosion, which pushes some galaxies farther away from us by the present.
3. The galaxies move rapidly, where the faster-moving, higher-redshift galaxies wind up farther away over time.
4. Or the fabric of space itself expanding.

Notice how effortlessly he sets up a Sherlock's Folly? Provide four possible theories, and eliminate three with evidence. Thus, the remaining one must be the truth! This argument  assumes (1) that there really are only four possible theories, and (2) that all presumptions are correct. In this case, to assume that there really is a redshift-distance relation. What if there isn't? A lot of complexity has to be added if it's true. For instance, quasars - which are highly red-shifted - are forced to be "extremely luminous" objects only in distant space that only existed in the early universe, and thus none are observed in our nearby space. Some quasars are so impossibly bright that scientists have to invent additional explanations. Quasars are said to be directional, thus only the quasars that happen to be oriented towards Earth are observable. Also, the brightest quasars were determined to be gravitationally lensed, increasing apparent luminosity by an order of magnitude. On top of all that, of course, is the cosmic inflation theory, with all it's requisite suspension of doubt.

A simpler explanation is that quasars are not vastly distant objects, thus not impossibly luminous, and we currently don't know why they are so red-shifted. This hypothesis is not considered by modern astronomers. Redshift theory is assumed to be true. Thus, all theories it depends on - such as accretion disks that account for "extreme" and "hyper-luminous" emissions of x-rays and gamma rays - and all resulting theories - such as cosmological expansion - must also be true.

If we lived in a Universe where the distant galaxies were so redshifted because they were moving away from us so quickly, we’d never infer that an object was more than 13.8 billion light-years away, since the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old (since the Big Bang). But we routinely find galaxies that are 20 or even 30 billion light-years distant, with the most distant light of all, from the Cosmic Microwave Background, coming to us from 46 billion light-years away.

Contemplate how nuts that sounds. The redshift theory contradicts Big Bang theory. The resolution is a yet another bizarre theory, this one of unexplained cosmic inflation caused by "dark energy." It's not quite clear to me why physicists wouldn't just assume that the speed of light has slowed down, which would have the same effect without the needed magical dark energy. I suppose it's because the speed of light is believed to be a fundamental constant, and the community utterly fails to challenge its own belief systems.

It’s important to consider all the possibilities that are out there, as we must ensure that we’re not fooling ourselves by drawing the type of conclusion we want to draw. Instead, we have to devise observational tests that can discern between alternative explanations for a phenomenon. In the case of the redshift of distant galaxies, all the alternative explanations have fallen away. The expanding Universe, however unintuitive it may be, is the only one that fits the full suite of data.

Please take a moment to appreciate the utter hypocrisy of this paragraph. The modern scientists are very, very good at pretending that they apply logical and scientific rigor, and very bad at actually doing so. They absolutely do not "consider all the possibilities that are out there." They certainly won't consider the possibility that the redshift-distance relation is faulty.

5 Killer Events From Space That Could Wipe Out Human Life On Earth (link)

Ethan lists 5 cosmic events that could devastate Earth.

1. Comet/asteroid strike
2. Gamma-ray burst. Certainly possible, but the diagram shows gamma ray bursts as caused by colliding neutron stars, which is fantasy.
3. Random encounter. Effectively the same as #1.
4. A supernova.
5. Our own sun, which will consume the Earth in 2 billion years. The sun-eats-earth prediction is based on a theoretical model for star lifecycles, of which there isn't really any evidence, and I don't believe to be true. Of much more concern should be a catastrophic CME event, which would be similar to an EMP nuke attack on the US, which would fry our electrical grid. The DoD has estimated that such as an event would kill half of Americans within a year, and as many as 90% overall.

This Is What’s Special About A Full Supermoon Occurring On The Equinox This Year (link)

Ethan provides some interesting facts about the supermoon coming up on March 20th... on March 26th. I guess he was off by about a week on that one.

What Was It Like When Oxygen Appeared And Almost Murdered All Life On Earth? (link)

An interesting piece on the great oxygenation event which caused a catastrophic extinction event on Earth and an extreme glacial period. Keeps allusions to current-day CO2 emissions, which are having a "massive impact on Earth's climate", to a minimum.

No, Quantum Tunneling Didn’t Break The Speed Of Light; Nothing Does (link)

A lengthy article refuting recent science reporting which claimed that quantum tunneling breaks the speed of light. He ends with this sentence.

But going faster than light? That’s still restricted to the realm of science fiction alone.

As if he shies away from science fiction.

 One Of These Four Missions Will Be Selected As NASA’s Next Flagship For Astrophysics (link)

There is always a concern that the big-budget missions will be dedicated towards some nonsense science - for instance, LISA, a proposed gravitational-wave detecting satellite. The four missions Ethan covers are all dedicated to general astronomy, and thus valid scientific ventures.

Ask Ethan: Why Haven’t We Found Gravitational Waves In Our Own Galaxy? (link)

The question asks,

Why are all the known gravitational wave sources (coalescing binaries) in the distant universe? Why none has been detected in our neighborhood? […] My guess (which is most probably wrong) is that the detectors need to be precisely aligned for any detection. Hence all the detection until now are serendipitous.

He responds,

If we come forward to the present day, we’ve actually detected a large number of mergers: 11 separate ones thus far. [...] If we look at the distances to these objects, though, we find something that might trouble us a little bit. Even though our gravitational wave detectors are more sensitive to objects the closer they are to us, the majority of objects we’ve found are many hundreds of millions or even billions of light-years away. 

He gives two explanations for why we haven't seen any sourced from within our own galaxy, or anywhere near, for that matter.

But again, we have not observed them in our ground-based gravitational wave detectors. And there’s a simple, straightforward reason for that: our detectors are in the wrong frequency range!

And

It’s true: during the time that LIGO and Virgo have been operating, we haven’t seen any mergers of black holes or neutron stars in our own galaxy. This is no surprise; the results from our gravitational wave observations have taught us that there are somewhere around 800,000 merging black hole binaries throughout the Universe in any year. But there are two trillion galaxies in the Universe, meaning that we need to observe millions of galaxies in order to just get one event!

It's not clear to me how they've inferred, from several observations over several years, that 800,000 black hole mergers occur in a year, but we'll assume it follows logically from their premises. There is a sound argument to make that, if we can detect events out to billions of light years, and only 11 have been seen, then the odds of any being nearby are faint indeed. However, there is another possible explanation, which Ethan would likely not consider. As described in More Tax Dollars for Gravitational Sinkhole, the gravitational detection process consists of looking at a very noisy signal, removing the noise somehow, and then seeing if what's left matches a hypothetical signature from a catalogue of over twenty thousand possible scenarios. That is our major complaint with the ground-breaking results. It seems that, whatever is detected, they'd eventually find something that looks like one of the signatures.

What they've found so far have been weak signals buried in the noise, so they're thought to come from great distances away. A nearby event would create signal many orders of magnitude stronger, which would clearly jump out from the noise. There would be no need for clever - and questionable - noise-canceling techniques. So here's the rub: if they're really just picking up false positives from the noise, they will never see a powerful, nearby signal. The detected gravitational waves are weak and "distant" because they would have to be if gravitational waves don't really exist.

Banned From Facebook

This blog has been, for all practical purposes, banned from Facebook. As RT reports (via Audacious Epigone):

“Going forward,” the company announced in a blog post on Wednesday, “while people will still be able to demonstrate pride in their ethnic heritage, we will not tolerate praise or support for white nationalism and separatism.”

…

White nationalism and white separatism are hazy concepts. Facebook initially considered them in the same category of Basque separatism in Spain, the Zionist movement, or Malcolm X-style black separatism. However, the latest decision seems to place explicitly white movements into a category of their own.

Black nationalism (e.g. BLM)? Allowed.
Latino nationalism (e.g. La Raza)? Allowed.
Jewish nationalism (i.e. Zionism)? Allowed.
White nationalism? Not allowed. White nationalism is racist.
Omni-nationalism (nationalism for everyone)? Not allowed, since that would include white nationalism, which is racist.
Nationalism for every race except whites? That is allowed, and not racist.

This blog is omni-nationalist, and, by extension, verboten on Facebook. As described by Zman in today's post, anyone who believes there should be white countries is now part of an underground resistance. Vying for attention in the public square is hardly an option any more, and probably not worth the cost. Most people actually behave this way already. When I used to share posts from this blog on Facebook, the traffic stats showed a strong conversion rate of clicks, but very few likes - fewer than ten percent of readers left one. People liked reading the articles, but most opted not to leave a public trace of it.

Our energy is best spent in finding ways to increase the cost of enforcement by our cultural occupiers. As far as Facebook is concerned, the best rebuttal is not to argue the new policy on the platform, or challenge it by posting nationalist content, but to quit entirely. It's a dying platform, estimated to have lost a million American users already. The best course of action is to accelerate its death spiral by leaving and never going back. Last I saw, it had already become a platform populated almost entirely by women and liberal males. They can have it.

Creepy Joe Unofficially Announces Presidential Run

Several candidates have confirmed our claim that any white Democrats wishing to run for the highest office are required to (1) denounce their own race, and (2) praise the other races, particularly blacks. Bernie Sanders dragged Shaun King - a walking parody of black activism - on stage to announce his candidacy. Elizabeth Warren stumbled into quite a national embarrassment in her desperation to show even a trace of non-white genetic heritage. It may have made her unelectable to a general population, but also more likely to cinch the Democratic nomination. For them, no amount of racial self-hatred is too much.

Biden has sought to separate himself from the pack, by outright condemning "white guy culture." Our heritage as an Anglosphere nation? Also decried, in no uncertain terms. His comments were in context of questions about Anita Hill, a black woman of color, one of the left's heroic sexual assault survivors who manage to surface anytime a big upcoming vote is likely to go towards the conservative. She never should have had to face a "bunch of white guys", says a white guy who served in that same body for over 40 years.

With his requisite public display of racial self-humiliation completed, it is safe to say that Biden will indeed be running for President in the next cycle.

Aspiring Towards Mob Rule

A common exchange between a liberal and a conservative goes something like this.

liberal: You don't believe in democracy!
conservative: It's a republic!

On it's face, the dialogue shows the liberal as immature and dependent on emotions to navigate the world rather than reason. The conservative, on the other hand, displays an intellectual grasp of the reality of our social system. The founders intentionally architected a limited government to restrain the destructive anarchy of an empowered mob. These assertions are correct, but the larger question at hand is, is this actually better?

Lately, Vox Day has been making the argument that, as terrible as direct democracy may be, it's actually preferable to representative democracy. In a direct democracy, Brexit would not be getting sabotaged, illegal immigration would be all but halted with a wall built, banks would have never been bailed out (and crooks sent to jail), and the European Union wouldn't have passed Article 13, which effectively bans memes. As uninformed as the typical voter may be, public opinion polls tend to show a more favorable opinion on policies than what is enacted by our professional representatives. It's hard to think of counter-examples. Under direct democracy, we'd have elected Hillary, right? Well no, actually, because Trump's opponent would have been Bernie.

We normally think of democracy as some healthy balance between two extremes: unlimited mob rule and harsh autocracy. And yet, we can see that our compromise solution is actually worse than one of those extremes. It might also be worse than either extreme. There are many authoritarian nations that provide better governance. According to opinion polls, the Chinese hold their national government in high regard. That should give us some incentive to re-think the situation.

It seems that there is more to the debate than the degree to which decision making is centralized. What trait do the autocrat and mob have in common, which the elected representative lacks? They have skin in the game. They have ownership. The mob is easily misled, but voters will normally act in their own self-interest. They support policies that will benefit them. Autocrats and even plutocrats also have skin in the game. Alienate the people too far, and risk a coup. Weaken the country too far by indulging the people or by inefficient administration, and risk deposition by outside armies. A king won't normally plunder his own people and then bequeath his son a barren, resentful land.

Elected representatives, on the other hand, have much less skin in the game. Their fortunes come not from their service, but from bribes. Career politicians amass fortunes in the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Their only tie to the people is to make whatever promises are needed to be elected so the embezzlement can continue another term. Their outcomes are not as dependent on the quality of legislation passed nor the long-term health of the country, so much as their willingness to sell out to whichever special interests can provide either cash or votes. The banks get bailed out at taxpayer expense, because they own everyone in Washington. The war the people disapprove of is still fought, only covertly and more indirectly.

Recent events show that the only thing that matters in this country is the corruption. In the Democrat primaries, the party stole the nomination from an anti-corruption crusader and gave it to - perhaps - the most corrupt family in America. Then, when emails leaked of the scandal, the corrupt system blamed it on her next candidate, another anti-corruption populist. Somehow he did it! Hillary was never indicted despite a mountain of public evidence. Trump committed no crime yet his presidency was neutered by a two-year publicly lauded shakedown. It's not because Trump is conservative and Hillary liberal, although that makes it easier to get the ideologically possessed media nutjobs roped in. No, the real reason was corruption. The griftocracy defends itself from all enemies, foreign and domestic. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a movie scenario with a more glaring example of a deep, systemic rule by corruption. America must be the most corrupt nation on earth, on the whole. It's right there, in plain sight. It's so normalized that the people hardly notice anymore.

The long-term prognosis, of course, is that our decision makers are not solving our problems. They are enriching themselves however they can. A country that doesn't solve problems will collapse. Whatever follows will be uncertain, minus one aspect: rulers will be made accountable for their decisions, one way or another. They will not be able to prop themselves up with a constant slew of lies while they plunder a great nation of its wealth. There will be nothing left to steal.

Blackouts

The state of a nation's energy sector is often a reflection of the nation itself. Venezuela's situation has become dire, as many technicians have abandoned ship. Electrical outages have not only disrupted what remains of the economy, but actually caused water shortages as well. Much is made of the starvation common of social collapses and now seen in Venezuela, but even deadlier are the disease epidemics that follow famine and deteriorating living conditions. The inability of the 3rd-world socialist utopia to keep the lights on and the pumps running will be the leading cause of outbreaks of diseases like dysentery.

The Japanese Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant was built to withstand earthquakes and tsunamis, but not to the extent of the 9.1 magnitude Tohoku event. When the plant went down with the on-site backup generators flooded, the spent-fuel holding tanks began to overheat. The problem was fairly straightforward: they needed a temporary solution to add water to the tanks until electrical service could be restored. They attempted to ship in portable generators, but the plugs weren't compatible. In the end, they failed to maintain the situation, leading to fires in three of the reactor buildings and core meltdowns. Their failure largely reflects the culture obsessed with conformity and face-saving. The electrical company routinely failed to communicate the reality of the situation to Tokyo authorities, and was unable to cope with a disaster that fell outside of expected scenarios. The bigger tragedy was that the resource-starved country shut down most of its remaining nuclear reactors, and imports $38 billion in coal per year. The Japanese are one of the highest IQ and most conscientious societies on Earth, but certain aspects of their culture make nuclear power a threat to themselves and their Pacific Ocean neighbors.

In the US, electricity has historically been plentiful and stable. In modern times, over-regulation has led to higher prices and the stifling of innovation. Nuclear power is not particularly competitive on price, thanks to heavy regulation, and a number of coal-fired stations were shuttered by the Obama administration. And yet, when de-regulation was permitted, corporate vampires like Enron immediately engaged in abusing the markets to generate crises and extort high prices from desperate customers. It highlighted the plight of the American citizen, trapped between a government behemoth on one side and rapacious corporate racketeers on the other.

As reviewed in Greenouts, several Australian states now suffer routine rolling blackouts, thanks to environmentalism. They are establishing a pattern that will soon become common throughout the western world: widespread mental instability gives rise to electrical instability. Germany, currently dismantling all coal and nuclear plants, will likely be the next to falter. In the US, New Mexico has passed a law mandating it become a zero-carbon electricity consumer, joining Hawaii, California, and D.C. in making such pledges. Is it a coincidence that those places also happen to be 4 of the 5 majority-minority states of the union? Remember, the electrical grid is a reflection of the people. California spent over a billion dollars repairing the 819 MW Oroville dam after its 2017 crisis, which may be tested by floods as early as next week. The sanctuary state, where illegal aliens can freely shoot white women, will get to experience for themselves why the 3rd world is not renown for its public infrastructure.

Of all the examples of electrical grids failing in once-industrial nations, none are as glaring as that of South Africa, where blackouts have become pervasive enough to cause water shortages in its major city. One major incident occurred when a supplier provided rocks instead of coal. When the automatic alarms sounded, none of the control room staffers could be found. This all is typical in a country where companies are forced to hire large numbers of blacks who often sleep on the job or fail to show up at all, and crime is so rampant that it is actually halting major infrastructure projects. They will discover the hard way why Zimbabwe's electrical production history looks like this and agricultural output looks like this. In three decades, South Africa has degraded from a nuclear-armed modern country, to one that tries to burn rocks for electricity.

The Mueller Retort

There's not much to say about the recent news on the Mueller report. Just as all evidence indicated, the theory that Trump somehow collaborated with Russians to steal the election from the establishment candidate is a complete work of fiction. Normally we're more interested in the media response, but that is all predictable as well: lots of denial and scrambling to memoryhole the entire fiasco. The left will be onto the next fabricated crisis within the next few weeks, no doubt. Any overtures to self-awareness should be taken with skepticism. Remember, after Trump's election, The New York Times ran an apology for their terrible reporting and promised to do better and stop running fake news. (Update: they didn't.) But, it's mostly a moot point anyway: the doubling down by the media has been even stronger than I would have predicted. Here are some headlines that come up currently, as I'm writing this, on the Google News feed.

• NPR - Mueller Report and Barr Letter Means Impeachment Less Likely [still on the table, of course! Major points: Trump not exonerated, a short-term win for Trump, investigation not over, etc.]
• Deutche Welle - Opinion: Mueller report gives no respite for Donald Trump
• The Hill - [opinion piece which says the major takeaway is Russia did interfere in the election]
• LA Times - No, Mueller’s report is not a ‘total exoneration’ for Trump 
• Washington Monthly - Barr’s Letter Raises More Questions Than It Answers
• New York Times - Trump’s Shamelessness Was Outside Mueller’s Jurisdiction
• Bloomberg - After Mueller, What’s the Political Fallout? [Answer: Investigations will - and should! - go on.]
• Washington Monthly - William Barr’s Whitewash Cannot Stand
• The Hill - Dem rep on collusion: 'Impossible' to 'write it off completely' just going off Barr summary
• Washington Post - Trump won with illicit help. He abused his power. His AG is blocking a full reckoning.
• Slate - William Barr Can’t Exonerate Donald Trump
• Bloomberg - Former Prosecutor Questions AG Barr's Decision on Mueller Report
• Vanity Fair - “A CRIME IN PUBLIC VIEW”: HOW WILLIAM BARR PARDONED DONALD TRUMP
• New Yorker - On the Mueller Investigation, the Barr Letter Is Not Enough
• ABC - Russian lawmaker cheers findings of Mueller's report
• Salon - What's behind Bill Barr's whitewash? We need to see the full Mueller report to know for sure

And on and on. If reality cured delusion, we wouldn't be here, now two years on. So the media response isn't actually that interesting, except perhaps as a case study of mass psychosis. More interesting will be Trump's response to the failed coup. In healthy nations, traitors hang. A number of high mutineers should be publicly executed. Those include Comey, McCabe, Brennan, and Lynch - among others - for their roles in overseeing the subversion of democracy, as well as people like Adam Schiff for constantly leaking classified information and lying about the proceeding of Congress in order to move along the unlawful overthrow of the elected government. A more likely scenario is that we'll see someone like McCabe sentenced to 20 years and serve 5. That would not be any sort of deterrent to future coup attempts. The even more likely scenario is that no one will be punished.

Public execution would be the best outcome, but 20 year prison sentences would suffice, given the ages of most of the culprits. The media would cry foul at such retribution, calling it an abuse of power and a sure beginning to a cycle of political turmoil, but they always lie. In fact, swift enforcement of US sedition and treason laws is the only way to stop a descent into lawless by our elites and the left. They are only compelled by greed and only restrained by fear. Reason does not work, nor logic, nor evidence, nor anything else. Only heavy-handed justice will right a ship-of-state so far off course. It won't happen, of course, and we will only drift further into chaos. Every anti-establishment candidate from here on out will be sabotaged. There is virtually no downside to treachery.

Mike Pence called it a great day for America. He couldn't be more wrong. It is a tragic day for America. Our Justice department was weaponized against the democratic system. All that we learned was they couldn't actually charge Trump with a fake crime. But the operation was an astounding success for the deep state. Remember, the whole ordeal came about because leaked Democrat emails revealed wide-ranging scandals and crimes. Will the media now discuss the DNC rigging its own election, or the numerous outlets who illegally colluded with the Clinton campaign, or the evidence of pay-for-play bribery schemes? No, the distraction and misdirection were flawless. The entire scandal was magically turned onto its head as a witchhunt against Trump, whose crime was to offer a platform Americans actually wanted. It won't be a great day for America until heads rest on pikes. Until then, the rule of law has effectively been suspended for a rule of lies.

The Multiverse

Yesterday's critique of the Ask Ethan blog was such fun, we should do another. It may seem tedious, but someone has to ridicule the charlatans. The ContraKrugman podcast is run by two economists who refute Paul Krugman - the left's premiere priest of economics - week after week. Their persistence in refuting a false prophet is commendable. Perhaps this blog will begin a weekly recap of all Ethan's nonsense (he seems to post almost daily). Someone needs to be doing it. The only real way to stop the lying liars is to ridicule them consistently and aggressively until they are too ashamed or marginalized to continue. For now, I'll just look at his most recent post.

One of the most solid logical arguments is the reductio ad absurdum. The premise is simple. If your argument leads inevitably to absurdity, it must be wrong. Ethan would like to turn that logic principle on it's head. The absurd must be true. Normal people might interpret this a little different. If cosmic inflation leads to the multiverse with "no way out", it must be an argument against cosmic inflation.

If this is the idea of the Multiverse, I can understand your skepticism at the notion that we could somehow know whether it does or doesn’t exist. After all, physics and astronomy are sciences that rely on measurable, experimental, or otherwise observational confirmation. If we are looking for evidence of something that exists outside of our visible Universe and leaves no trace within it, it seems that the idea of a Multiverse is fundamentally untestable.

But there are all sorts of things that we cannot observe that we know must be true. Decades before we directly detected gravitational waves, we knew that they must exist, because we observed their effects. Binary pulsars — spinning neutron stars orbiting around one another — were observed to have their revolutionary periods shorten. Something must be carrying energy away, and that thing was consistent with the predictions of gravitational waves.

The leading argument depends on the existence of neutron stars, which are an epic fiasco of scientific imagination run amok. But Nobel prizes have already been awarded, so the scientific community can't simply walk that one back. And, as we can see here, if you admit one absurdity, you leave the door open for about anything to follow. It remains to be seen how far things will have to get before the scientific community will refute research that has been awarded the Nobel Prize.