SCIENCE! – Page 3

GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

What a way to go

Posted on August 9, 2023 by Mike

As a lifelong sci-fi geek, I used to think I’d love to hitch a ride on a ship to space, just for the sheer hell of it. After reading this, ehh, not so much.

Here’s Exactly How You’d Die in the Vacuum of Space
In the depths of interplanetary space, it’s not the unimaginable cold that kills. It’s everything else.

You did it. You annoyed your crewmates enough that they did the unthinkable: they shoved you into the airlock and kicked you out of the space station. No suit. No air. Nothing. Just you and the vacuum of space. If you want to survive this grisly scenario, you’re going to have to act quickly.

First, It’s Going To Be Colder Than You Can Imagine…
But you’re not going to have to worry about freezing to death. Yes, space is generally cold, around 3 Kelvin, due to a bath of radiation soaking the universe known as the cosmic microwave background. However, the human body is rather inefficient at getting rid of heat, especially in the vacuum of space. There are three ways to transfer heat from a warm body to its surroundings: convection, conduction, and radiation. Convection is the movement of a fluid, like warm air rising to higher altitudes. Conduction is the transfer of heat through physical contact, like when you accidentally touch a hot stove. Radiation is just that: emitting electromagnetic radiation.

Without any air or water to surround your body, there’s no way for convection or conduction to transport heat and cool you off. Instead there’s just radiation. A typical human body emits around 100 watts of infrared radiation (about the same amount of energy as an old-school incandescent light bulb). That’s not all that impressive, and it will take several hours to bring your internal body temperature below freezing.

But the coldness and the vacuum of space is going to affect you in other, faster ways. For starters, any oils or moisture on your skin will immediately evaporate in the vacuum, leaving a nasty frostbite behind in their departure. Even though you’ll be surrounded by vacuum, you won’t explode. Your skin is pretty good at keeping your insides on the inside of you, so your blood won’t boil and your eyes won’t bulge out. Instead, you’ll suffer a rare vacuum-induced malady known as ebullism (not to be confused with an embolism, which is a type of blood clot).

Ebullism occurs when the surface of your skin is exposed to vacuum (which it now unfortunately is). The lower pressure on the outside of your body causes the liquids just inside your skin to expand, causing you to swell up. Fortunately we don’t have a lot of experimental evidence that has explored the full effects of ebullism, but in some cases of accidental exposure to vacuum, people have experienced swelling of up to twice their normal size.

That’s not going to be pretty, but it is generally survivable as long as you return to a pressurized environment within a few minutes.

But you’re not going to get a few minutes.

Don’t Hold Your Breath
The moment the atmosphere escapes the airlock, you might be tempted to hold your breath to buy you more time, the same way you would when going underwater. That is an extremely bad idea. The problem is that your squishy bits (particularly your lips, throat, and upper respiratory system) are not designed to hold in a lungful of air against a vacuum. All that air in your lungs will come out, despite your best efforts, and if you try to hold it back it will escape in an especially violent and sudden way, causing irreversible damage on its way out.

Just let the air out; it’s gone.

And so, unfortunately, are YOU. Yeah, not interested, no thanks.

Warp factor 7, Mr Data!

Posted on July 19, 2023July 19, 2023 by Mike

Another from PopMech, this one of far more practical use than that last one. Well, at some point further on down the line. Maybe.

By Meddling With Spacetime Dimensions, We Could Finally Reach Warp Speed
New research shows that the “superluminal observer” needs three separate time dimensions for a warp-speed math trick that would please even Galileo.

The secret to faster-than-light physics could be to double down on the number of dimensions, according to new research published last month in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. Specifically, the solution may lie in three dimensions of time, with just one representing space. The math is deep and complicated, but the ideas may be within our grasp after all. And there’s one math trick at superspeeds that may just “flip” your lid.

The key idea at play here is that of a “superluminal observer.” “Superluminal” means faster than light, from super– meaning “more” or “most,” and –luminal like, well, Lumière from Beauty and the Beast, and the lumens that power your home movie projector. The superluminal observer is a hypothetical thing that is looking at the universe while traveling faster than light. It’s you in your Star Trek warp-speed shuttle.

Ha! Shows what you know, dipshit. Most shuttles, excepting certain of the Type 7 shuttlecraft, had only impulse engines and were thus incapable of attaining warp velocity/FTL travel, as every Trekkie worthy of the name knows full well. It’s a bit like comparing, say, a deuce-and-a-half with an F16 in terms of power and speed.

The research team—led by theoretical physicist Andrzej Dragan of the University of Warsaw and the National University of Singapore—has theorized that many parts of quantum physics, like indeterminism and superposition, can be explained if you take general relativity and apply its principles to the superluminal observer. In other words, how messy does spacetime get if we take our shuttle up to warp speed? Is everything suddenly in multiple places at once?

Dragan’s new work indicates that it’s at least a possibility. Perhaps more interestingly, the way general relativity becomes quantum phenomena at speeds greater than light doesn’t seem to introduce any causal paradoxes. In earlier work, published in the New Journal of Physics in March 2020, Dragan and his coauthor studied “just” one space dimension and one time dimension, known as 1+1. In the new paper, the researchers upped the ante to include one space dimension and three time dimensions, or 1+3.

Why do we need three time dimensions? To understand, we have to talk about some math.

Annnnd that lets me out. I’ve always been a complete dumbass when it comes to math; being just barely capable of totting up a restaurant tip in my frazzled old noggin, mathematics any more involved or complex than that leaves me stammering and stumbling like Too Old Jaux. The last word here can only be Picard’s.

Betcha didn’t know THIS

Posted on July 18, 2023July 18, 2023 by Mike

Borepatch links to one of his golden oldies (from 2011, no less) that’s just chock-full of fascinating stuff.

We have quite good records of sunspot activity going back to 1700 A.D. We have decent records of the price of wheat going back much further – pretty good ones to 1500 A.D., and sporadic records all the way back to 1250 A.D. (!). The reason is that bread is the staff of life – no bread, and people starved.

In short, grain prices are a pretty good proxy for climate, in the days before thermometers. Certainly better than, say, bristle cone pine tree rings. This is important for two reasons, and the combination is very bad news indeed for people who cling to the “Carbon Dioxide is killing Mother Gaia” theory.

First, the price of grain and the number of sunspots have been known to be very closely correlated for hundreds of years. William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) first published this, back around 1800. When there are a lot of sun spots, he said, the price of grain is low – harvests are good. When there are few sun spots, harvests fail and the price of grain soars.

Remember, we have records on this that are so old that this has been known for literally hundreds of years. You might say that, err, the Science is Settled.

To understand why this is so incredibly bad for the warmist crowd, you need to compare and contrast with the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (Carbon Dioxide heating the planet). The theoretical underpinning of AGW predicts a warm zone in the mid-Troposphere (say, 8 miles up or so) in the tropics. Essentially, this is a heat pump that cycles captured heat from the increased Greenhouse effect down to lower atmospheric levels (rather than radiating out to space).

The only problem is that with maybe a million weather balloons looking for the hot spot, nobody’s found it.

BP carries on from there, and it’s…well, like I said, it’s fascinating. Among other notable things, the piece utterly demolishes the persistent shitlib tomfoolery insisting on CO2 as the primary cause of all climatological woes, piece by piece and bit by bit, until not a single molecule of that mythology remains viable. The Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ hoax is explained in plain, non-obfuscatory language which doesn’t require a hard-sciences doctorate to comprehend. As Borepatch so pithily puts it: The whole edifice was constructed from cardboard and tape, and anyone could see that it was wrong.

Elegantly written; brilliantly conceived; meticulously researched; reliant entirely on actual, for-real science instead of the usual shitlib Pseudo variety, with politicking left entirely out of the mix for once and a solid dollop of historical fact thrown in for additional backup—with sincere apologies to the fine folks at Watt’s Up With That, who have been doing yeoman’s work on the subject for many years now, this is without doubt the best, most comprehensive yet concise treatise on the subject I’ve ever seen. BP has an equally-stellar (of an even older vintage, namely 2009) companion piece here.

You mustn’t miss a single word of this one, folks—both the linked posts, really, they’re good, good stuff. Taken altogether, they add up to all the debunking of the AGW hoax you’ll ever need. Bravo, Borepatch, and well done indeed.

Update! Fool that I am, it just hit me like a pie in the face that Watt’s Up is in neither my browser bookmarks nor Ye Aulde CF Blogrolle. Error corrected, with further red-faced apologies to WUWT for the reconkulous oversight.

Testosterone: a cornerstone of civilization

Posted on July 9, 2023 by Mike

For starters, there is no such thing as “toxic” masculinity. The term is no more than a politically-useful insult, a cruel slander against males designed to cow and intimidate them. Period fucking DOT, end of fucking story.

The simple assertion of the ‘toxic masculinity’ crowd is that specifically male behaviours are a problem. The most extreme aspects of male misbehaviour are portrayed as though they are routine. So young feminists insist that we live in a ‘rape culture’, in which men are alleged to be allowed to rape with impunity. Likewise, male-on-female domestic violence is portrayed as a kind of pandemic. And the answer to all these things is essentially to feminise men – to tell specifically young heterosexual men that they must curb their masculinity and subdue many of their most natural instincts. In every direction their path is cut off. For instance, men who come to the rescue of women are dismissed as ‘white knighting’, as though even the wish to help a woman is proof of ‘toxic masculinity’.

Of course, the concept itself is toxic – quite as much so as if our age decided to talk about women in a similar way. There’s no reason why ‘toxic femininity’ couldn’t be made as popular a concept as its opposite number. There are certainly plenty of grounds for talking about such things. For if men are, for example, more prone to physical violence then the data also shows that women are more prone to subtler methods of undermining opponents, such as reputational destruction. There are behaviours that are more male and behaviours that are more female, and the fact that some members of each sex are quite capable of one or other, or both, does not negate that fact.

Nevertheless, we do not hear much talk of toxic femininity. It is men who have been portrayed in recent years as a problem. And if you don’t believe this, speak to any teenage boy. They will be able to tell you some version of this.

Yet there must be consequences to interventions this hamfisted. It is one thing to try to fine-tune our species; quite another to attempt to do so while wearing mittens. And that is what concepts such as toxic masculinity are. They are blundering, blunt, inept efforts at rewiring – efforts that must have consequences.

It couldn’t be more obvious that they have, and not pleasant or in any way positive ones either. This next article looks at the grievous injury Leftist (who else) purveyors of this absurd, hateful shibboleth have inflicted not just on men and boys, but on society at large, men and women alike—knowingly, intentionally, and with malice aforethought.

In Japan, an estimated 1.5 million people — many of them young men — now live in complete isolation.

The problem has grown so severe that the Japanese have a term for it: Hikikomori, one who literally withdraws from society.

Some 6,000 miles away, the United States is experiencing its own form of hikikomori.

During a recent interview with Chris Williamson, a British podcaster based in Austin, Texas, the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt discussed the fact that 7 million men of prime working age are currently without employment and not seeking jobs.

Many of these men, said Eberstadt, spend inordinate amounts of time indoors, totally withdrawn from society.

They play video games, watch pornography, and tend to engage in heavy drug use, according to the author of “Men Without Work.”

Work carried out by academics at Kyushu University in Japan has found that a low testosterone level is one of the common metabolic signatures of hikikomori in young social recluses — which is important to note because testosterone levels among young American men are plummeting and have been for years.

The drop now reportedly affects 1 in 4 men in the US.

It’s commonly assumed that testosterone fuels anti-social behavior.

In December, “Avatar” director James Cameron made headlines when he claimed that testosterone is “a toxin” that needs to be worked out of one’s system.

Last month, NPR discussed the association between “toxic masculinity” and testosterone.

But this belief is not supported by science: There is no strong evidence to suggest that men with higher levels of testosterone are overly aggressive or violent.

On the contrary, testosterone has been linked to more social behavior in males — while low testosterone levels in males are associated with social anxiety and socially submissive or avoidant behaviors.

Research carried out by Dr. David Terburg, an expert in human behavior, has shown the many ways in which testosterone improves both individual behavior and broader cooperation.

In one study, Terburg and his colleagues identified a clear association between the administration of testosterone and increased levels of social cooperation and better moral judgment.

Low testosterone — otherwise known as hypogonadism — meanwhile, was associated with brain fog, poor memory and focus, and an overall lack of mental clarity.

Mark Spritzer, a behavioral neuroendocrinologist at Middlebury College whose research focuses on the cognitive benefits of testosterone, told The Post, that “There is now considerable evidence that testosterone enhances some forms of learning and memory.”

Moreover, he added, “There are a number of studies that have shown that low testosterone is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia in older men.”

And there you have it, folks. Shitlib darling Pajama Boy was unavailable for comment, having quietly “transitioned” himself into infamous brand-wrecker Dylan “Dirk” Mulvaney some years back.

Foresight…and the lack thereof

Posted on July 7, 2023July 7, 2023 by Mike

Teh Experts™ had one job. ONE fucking job.

Nebraska solar farm crippled by hail, underscoring power source’s fragility
A recent major hail storm in western Nebraska took an entire solar farm out of commission, forcing the local community to turn back to traditional power sources, local officials said.

The so-called Community Solar Project – a 4.4 megawatt solar field comprised of 14,000 solar panels and located in Scottsbluff, Nebraska – is not currently operating and will remain offline until repairs are completed, the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) confirmed to Fox News Digital. NPPD, the state-owned public utility, and energy firm GenPro Energy Solutions developed the project in 2020.

“The solar complex was destroyed by hail,” Scottsbluff City Manager Kevin Spencer said in an interview. “They’re assessing the damage, but it certainly looks destroyed to me.”

“I don’t think we’re ready to give up on solar power,” Spencer added. “It was our understanding that these solar panels were at least hail resistant. This hail was extreme, you know, the size and probably the speed of it. So, I don’t know that we would give up on it just yet.”

Because OF COURSE the stupid prick doesn’t, and won’t. A never-say-die, damn-the facts obstinacy goes hand-in-glove with being a shitlib, don’tchaknow. Like beans and cornbread, one might say.

The problem is, of course, that “extreme” and/or “unusual” are NOT synonyms for “never.” So when one lays thousands of square feet of thin, flimsy glass panels on their backs on a flat, open field with no trees or other vegetation to shield all that expensive fragility from the vagaries of outraged nature, any intelligent soul would have to expect certain dire consequences. To wit:

Building a solar array in an area prone to hail is like building a house in the flood pool of a lake. It’s going to be damaged by weather eventually.

Ace has a favorite line about there being no knowledge gained in the second kick from a mule. As Scottsbluff prepares to rebuild its demolished solar array, it would be helpful if anyone there understood that they’ve already received the first kick from the mule.

Oh, they don’t, and they never will. It’s Agenda Über Alles with these Sooperdoopergenii™, and it’s always gonna be. If a few million flyover rubes have to suffer without power and a/c in the dead of summer to help out with the full realization of The Plan, well, hey, that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Eggs and omelets, right?

WE’RE ALL DEAD! Women and children hardest hit, film at 11

Posted on June 23, 2023June 23, 2023 by Mike

Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ is officially o-v-e-r OVER, there’s no longer either need for nor use in worrying about or even mentioning it ever again. Mark it on your calendars, folks, because as of yesterday, June 22—according to “a top climate scientist” as quoted by a moderately well-known teenager with some neurodevelopmental issues, which affliction she prefers to refer to as “her superpower”, in the grand old shitlib tradition of comforting self-delusion—it is too late to do anything to save ourselves, like eliminating all usage of “fossil fuels.”

Nope, no use in even trying now; we’re all as good as dead, and that’s flat. Homo sapiens sapiens entire is absolutely, positively headed for the bone orchard, probably sooner than later, although no specific date has yet been given for the Big Die-off. According to Teh SCIENCE!™, the extinction of all humanity is now a dead cert, and completely irreversible. So, y’know, act accordingly. Might as well throw a big party, that’s what I think.

Of course Greta Thunberg was wrong about fossil fuels
Climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted five years ago that catastrophic climate change will wipe out humanity unless the world forgoes fossil fuel usage and ceases consumption.

But to Thunberg’s dismay, her prediction didn’t exactly pan out. On the contrary, realizing this, she quietly deleted her tweet in March in anticipation of Wednesday’s anniversary. While gone, it forever lives in our hearts as a reminder not to fret over reactionary, alarmist predictions.

Aww gee, I sure do hate it for the wee on-the-spectrum harpy. The heart bleeds just thinking about how very disappointed she must be; the Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ religion has seduced, then betrayed another True Believer by dumping another tremendous letdown on her poor addled noggin. Since, according to her own forecast, there’s no longer any use in scolding everybody else about the goddamn climate, wonder what she might be planning to do with the rest of her life now?

How was Greta wrong? Let the WashEx count the ways.

In fact, humanity has sustained itself today due to continued fossil fuel usage, not in spite of it.

Let’s begin with oil, which is often blamed for our societal woes. Despite being assigned a dirty image by preservationist environmentalists, it’s the lifeblood of civilization and an essential resource here in America. Could you imagine our first-world society without oil? Life would be miserable, uncomfortable, and harder. Petroleum and its byproducts are ubiquitous in our daily lives. We fuel our cars, boats, and homes with it. Our clothes are derived from it, as are our cellphones and computers. It’s inescapable. Why get rid of it?

Another unappreciated energy source is natural gas. It’s arguably a clean-burning fuel that produces lower emissions. During the Trump administration, the U.S. became a net exporter of liquefied natural gas ( dubbed “molecules of freedom”), propelling our nation into energy independence while continuing to lead the world in overall emissions reductions.

Natural gas stoves, for example, are found in over 40 million homes and are preferred by 90% of chefs . Why? They boast faster conduction rates, make meals tastier, and are more economical to use compared to electric stoves. But these benefits, sadly, haven’t stopped many elected Democrats — along with the Department of Energy and the Consumer Product Safety Commission — from trying to phase them out through unrealistic “electrification” efforts.

Last but not least is coal, a common scapegoat of environmentalists despite it being an abundant domestic energy source.

Coal is undoubtedly reliable for heating and powering homes. Globally, it remains the top source of electricity generation and will remain one for years to come despite nations, including ours, closing down plants and curbing its mining. Additionally, there are myriad nonenergy uses, such as cement production, medicines, and carbon fibers. Metallurgic coal also happens to be a key component to steel, a popular building material.

Coal, oil, and natural gas cumulatively supply nearly 80% of American energy. This industry also supports nearly 13 million jobs and pumps billions into the economy. Additionally, continued use of these resources will help families save an average of $2,500 a year in energy expenses. And paradoxically, fossil fuels make intermittent clean energy sources such as solar and wind possible.

To be fair about it, I guess we really shouldn’t be so hard on poor little Greta the Greenhouse Grinch; after all, she’s but the latest in a long, “distinguished” line of auto-beclowning Leftard enviro-nuts whose we’re all gonna DIIIEEEE!!! screeching and preaching didn’t exactly pan out.

The incredible arrogance of the Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ cult

Posted on June 21, 2023June 21, 2023 by Mike

The latest installment of Mike Walsh’s continuing series examining the scam of the century.

Having failed to destroy us with the Covid Hoax (even the loathsome Facebook nazis have given up on it), the Left has now moved “climate change” front and center as the international left’s preferred soul-sapping means of destruction. Based on the small (in the cosmic scheme of things), 140-year-old sample of randomly gathered temperature data, jealous and vengeful cultural Marxists have decided to extrapolate from cherry-picked, manipulated, and massaged data to convince a gullible and trusting public that the world is coming to an end any day now, unless we act now. Like sleazy used-care salesmen, they employ scare and pressure tactics in order to get you to work against your own best, self-preservative instincts and willingly destroy infrastructure, cripple food production, kill sea life, and incinerate forests.

The key to their successful sowing of confusion can be found in the Heisenberg Principle, which states: “we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle’s position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.” In popular understanding, this term of physics is expressed thus: the act of observing a thing changes its behavior and the closer it is observed, the more its nature becomes unclear. Or, if you stare at the word “cat” long enough, you can convince yourself that “cat” is misspelled.

The same is true of the “science” of “climate change.” No one from the ancient Greeks to the mid-Victorians would have seriously entertained the notion of “man-made climate change” were it not for the relatively recent invention of rudimentary means of measuring temperature and forecasting the weather. Armed with this little bit of knowledge, we have now created — in our own minds — the dangerous thing called “climate change.” Take that, Aristotle!

The evidence-free assertion of man-made “climate change” is easily disproven without resorting to a shred of Heisenbergian data. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant (no matter what the man-made Environmental Protection Agency says) — unless, that is, you subscribe to the Leftist Suicide Cult theory that mankind itself is a pollutant. If you do, then there’s no help for you; seek psychiatric help. Further proof is provided by actual climate history, whose only constant state is one of continual change. In case you doubt that, pay a visit to any important art museum with a large landscape collection. Finally, look at the calendar, walk outside, note how the weather is pretty much exactly what you would expect in your region for this time of year and ask yourself: do I really believe we have only a few years to save the planet? Of course you don’t. The planet is doing just fine.

At which point Walsh embeds that classic George Carlin vid I’ve deployed here myself more than once, wherein Carlin dismisses the monumental arrogance behind the patently risible notion that we mere hoomons, rather than being a small, relatively recently-arrived part of the much-larger planetary ecology, are somehow outside of it, apart from it, in conflict with it, and now constitute a serious, credible threat to its continued existence. Following that, Walsh goes on to make an assertion that I myself have made over and again (which I’ll put in bold so’s you can’t miss it):

The simplest way to defeat the “climate change” hysterics would have been to ignore them, but they are relentless little devils who won’t stop until they are stopped. Unfortunately for the sane among us, they’ve enlisted those lovable scamps of the madcap Corporate Media to raise hysteria to such a fever pitch that a great many otherwise sensible people actually take a disturbed, saturnine child like Greta Thunberg seriously.

Well hey, any weapon in the armory, y’know, any tool in the box—whatever might be useful to them, they’re gonna use, and straight to hell with any- and everybody who might not like it. Credit the soulless, amoral monsters with this much, at least: they DO know how a war must be waged if one intends to win the damned thing. Not for-real shooting wars, of course, just their phony ones.

The cold, hard truth

Posted on June 15, 2023June 15, 2023 by Mike

Remember that 800 pound gorilla in the room I mentioned the other day in the Eyrie post? Well, in the way of all 800 pound gorillas, he’s still there, and isn’t going anywhere until he’s captured the undivided attention those pesky, implacable 800 pound gorillas always tend to seek…and, sooner or later, one way or another, get.

California Can Either Charge Its EV Fleet Or Keep The Lights On
Can California transition to a portfolio of 100% renewable energy sources and still generate enough electricity to meet the state’s future needs, including the addition of millions of electric cars on the road?

A: No. Next question. For that matter, neither can any other state. Turns out, there’s a reason why the human race abandoned “renewable” (read: inadequate to meet the demands of a modern industrial civilization) energy for more reliable, productive sources several centuries ago, see. UNEXPECTED!™

California is already incapable of generating enough electricity, importing 30% of its current electricity needs from other states. With respect to current generation sources, nearly 60% of California’s in-state electricity generation is produced by natural gas and nuclear power plants. Including conventional hydroelectric generation, which does not count as a renewable source for purposes of California’s policies, nearly two-thirds of the state’s current electricity comes from disfavored generation sources.

It is doubtful that California will be able to generate sufficient electricity to meet future energy needs using only the favored generation sources; and it is not even close.

Overall, total electricity generated will be 21.1% below the amount of electricity demanded — and this does not even account for the impacts from all the likely future mandates. Beyond the electric vehicle mandates evaluated above, officials are rapidly prohibiting connections for stoves, furnaces, hot water heaters, and dryers in new construction projects.

There are reasons to be exceptionally skeptical that California’s current energy policy environment is achievable. Either the policies will cause extreme energy shortages and jeopardize quality of life or the state’s political leaders will need to repeal the current suite of mandates.

“Reasons to be skeptical”? Oh, you just bet there are at that. But since, as every good “liberal” knows, electricity is something that happens when you flip a light switch—just as food is something that comes from the grocery store—there really isn’t a problem here at all. It’s just a damnable lie made up by those godawful MAGA H8RRRZZZ to oppress them, that’s all.

Modern religion

Posted on June 13, 2023 by Mike

When you get right down to it, there’s not a lot of difference between the new one and the old ones.

What do the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) have in common with each other? Besides some form of putative monotheism, quite a bit, as it turns out. Each relies on “prophecy” to justify the validity of its teachings. Each has a canon of sacred scriptures, dictated by the Almighty whether directly or through human intermediaries, which its scholars and adherents pore over in order to discover hidden meanings and glean new insights into the human condition. Each regards itself as the sole repository of truth, to the exclusion of all other rites and practices. Each, in its own way, believes that it alone is God’s prescription for the good and moral life, handed down on high via (pick one) Moses, Jesus of Nazareth, or Muhammad. Each anathematizes heretics. Each defines sin and regards its expiation as essential to eternal salvation. And while they share many of the same cast of characters, each is dogmatically exclusionary of the others.

Let us now add a fourth faith to this trinity: “man-made climate change.” Its professed goals might be quite different, but in practice, it is indistinguishable from the other three. Computer projections forecasting certain doom are its “prophecies” and climatologists are its Hoseas, Jeremiahs, and Isaiahs. Apocalyptic books such as Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance and his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, are Holy Writ. And Greta Thunberg, the Swedish school striker, is its embodiment of Bernadette and Joan of Arc. It is not enough to believe in some of what its votaries say: one must believe in all of it, and the only way to salvation is through its teachings. Time, of course, is of the essence.

Early Believers came to their faiths in part because of their assurances of immediate relief from tribulation. In the early days of rabbinical Judaism, which more or less coincide with the origins of Christianity, the Jews cycled through various messiahs, including Jesus (the Ebionites, who accepted Jesus as the prophesied messiah but kept the Mosaic Law, existed for the first three or four centuries A.D.), and Simon bar-Kokhba, who led the final rebellion of the Jewish Wars against the Romans between 132 and 136. The immediate goal was the restoration of the Kingdom of Israel, according to the prophecies.

Similarly, many early Christians believed in the aftermath of the Crucifixion that the Second Coming was imminent and that Jesus, too, would expel the Romans and establish a new kingdom on earth. (They had thought that even before his execution as a political criminal by Pontius Pilate.) The early ferocious appeal of Islam was that it was inevitable and invincible, and it inspired its followers to a stunning conquest of the Sassanid Persian empire, much Byzantine territory, the remnant of the Western Roman Empire in North Africa and Spain — until it was stopped dead in its tracks by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732, a stunning, almost inconceivable blow to Arab and Muslim pride, as we read in the contemporaneous Islamic accounts of the battle. Call it the “fierce urgency of now.”

So it is with “climate change.” The new Kingdom of Heaven will arrive if only we follow the scriptures; otherwise, we have only a limited time left to survive. That these predictions have been to date entirely wrong doesn’t matter. The appeal of prophetic faith conveniently lies in its non-specificity. The Messiah will come… some day. The risen Jesus will return… some day. The whole world will become the dar al-Islam…someday. The goal is a state of permanent fear with a chimerical hope of relief.

Which state of permanent fear will always and forever be exploited by TPTB to maintain, extend, and magnify the power of the State over its benighted subjects. As it turns out, some things really are eternal. Gee, who knew?

Why we can’t have nice things anymore

Posted on June 4, 2023June 4, 2023 by Mike

Enviro-nuts, that’s why.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS ARE WHY WE CAN’T HAVE INFRASTRUCTURE
California’s high-speed electric train has burned through nearly $10 billion, far more than its original $9 billion bond, without building a single mile of track.

Where did that money go?

$1.3 billion was spent on environmental impact clearances.

After over a decade, Brian Kelly, the CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, cheerfully announced that, “we’re making true progress on nearing full environmental clearance for the entire Phase 1 high-speed rail project.” By the summer, the high-speed rail which hasn’t even begun construction might finally get its full environmental impact clearance. Perhaps.

California’s infamous high-speed train to nowhere, which began in 2009 and whose budget already tops $100 billion, financed by corrupt environmental cap-and-trade robbery that makes cryptocurrency seem legitimate by comparison, may seem like an outlier, but it’s not.

Every time presidents make a pitch for an infrastructure bill, they visit the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River for a photo op.

“Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge,” Obama declared with his back to the bridge. “Help us rebuild America.

After Obama, Trump came to the bridge, and more recently Biden claimed that his infrastructure bill, which spent nearly three quarters of a billion on electric cars, and little on infrastructure, would finally fix the bridge. Over $10 million has been spent on environmental impact studies going back 18 years to explain why nothing much was being done about the bridge.

But why spend money on bridges when you can instead spend it on environmental reviews of hypothetical bridges? People can cross the former, but the politically connected get rich off the latter.

In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, $5 million was needed to fund an environmental impact study to build a new bridge, another $5 million to consider building a bridge in Mission, Texas. The current status of that bridge is unclear. After wasting millions and years on environmental impact studies, projects often never move forward due to changing finances or circumstances.

The endless environmental studies drain massive amounts of taxpayer money. For example, the Yeager Airport in Central West Virginia needed a $5.6 million grant for its environmental impact study. And the sheer scale of taxpayer money stolen by the green industry is not being tracked.

Why, it’s almost as if the whole Green Weenie, EnviroTard, Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ thing was nothing but a scam right from the start or something. But no, that can’t be right, the very idea is just completely absurd.

Isn’t it?

(Via Brother Bob)

Attributes

Posted on May 26, 2023 by Mike

BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

RightWingGirls

I can see several other fine traits in the above pic that are worthy of consideration, but yeah, the no-peeny thing would have to come in first and foremost among ‘em. Sad, innit, that we’ve now reached the point where that would even figure into the equation at all.

Shamelessly swiped from WRSA.

Science, anyone?

Posted on May 22, 2023 by Mike

Borepatch has put together the most masterful, comprehensive debunking of the Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ scam I believe I ever have seen, anywhere. No excerpt, just go read the whole thing.

Mask on, mask off

Posted on May 17, 2023 by Mike

Anybody surprised by this? You shouldn’t be, really; people like me have only been screaming it from the rooftops since, oh, early 2020 or thereabouts.

The Harm Caused by Masks
A new study suggests that the excess carbon dioxide breathed in by mask-wearers can have major health consequences.

Evidence continues to mount that mask mandates were perhaps the worst public-health intervention in modern American history. While concluding that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” in preventing the spread of viruses, a recent Cochrane review also emphasized that “more attention should be paid to describing and quantifying the harms” that may come from wearing masks. A new study from Germany does just that, and it suggests that the excess carbon dioxide breathed in by mask-wearers may have substantial ill-effects on their health—and, in the case of pregnant women, their unborn children’s.

Mask-wearers breathe in greater amounts of air that should have been expelled from their bodies and released out into the open. “[A] significant rise in carbon dioxide occurring while wearing a mask is scientifically proven in many studies,” write the German authors. “Fresh air has around 0.04% CO2,” they observe, while chronic exposure at CO2 levels of 0.3 percent is “toxic.” How much CO2 do mask-wearers breathe in? The authors write that “masks bear a possible chronic exposure to low level carbon dioxide of 1.41–3.2% CO2 of the inhaled air in reliable human experiments.”

In other words, while eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels.

The German study, a scoping review of existing research, aimed “to investigate the toxicological effects of face masks in terms of CO2 rebreathing on developing life, specifically for pregnant women, children, and adolescents.” The latter two groups, of course, have been among those most frequently subjected to mask mandates in schools, despite Covid’s low levels of risk for them and the evidence that masks don’t work.

Gee, who could’ve known that the shitlibs were right all along? That CO2—THE SILENT KILLER!!!™—would ultimately prove to be the death of us all? Or that, of course and as usual, it would prove to be WOMEN AND CHILDREN HARDEST HIT™ once more?

Setting aside my sarcastic glee for the nonce, there’s plenty more sciencey-type stuff to the article, which is well worth a read. Don’t tell any of your Karen friends about it, though; it’s long been my contention that, from here on out, panic-ninnies going about in public wearing the accursed things—ie, people who aren’t on-the-job doctors, nurses, and/or EMTs—will be effectively marking themselves out as likely targets when/if the shooting starts.

Will it NEVER end?

Posted on May 17, 2023 by Mike

A: No. No, it will not.

Adidas on Wednesday became the latest woke, globalist corporation to shove the radical left trans agenda in America’s face.

The company decided to feature an ugly biological male who calls himself a woman as their newest female swimwear model.

As Fox News reported, Adidas collaborated with radical South African designer Rich Mnisi to release the “Let Love Be Your Legacy” collection and campaign. The company claims to want to “encourage allyship and freedom of expression without bias, in all spaces of sport and culture” with its campaign with Mnisi.

Mnisi said this in an Adidas news release:

In creating this collection, I had a strong impulse to speak to my inner-child and express to the world how LGBTQ+ allyship can create a legacy of love. “Unifying these themes together through my own visual language and Adidas’ iconic performance and lifestyle pieces is a powerful combination, making the collection a symbol for self-acceptance and LGBTQ+ advocacy. My hope is this range inspires LGBTQ+ allies to speak up more for the queer people they love and not let them fight for acceptance alone.

In classic woke speak, this means replacing attractive females with hideous males dressing up as women.

Because hey, as the classic Irving Berlin show-tune almost but doesn’t quite say: anything girls can do, men can do better. Among the responses over at GP is this gem.

The new Adidas women’s swimwear range, modeled by men pic.twitter.com/rXwMj6deOR

— McPepe’s (@McPepes_AI)

May 17, 2023

Heh. Sure, why the hell not.

Diesel rules

Posted on May 16, 2023 by Mike

God help us all if all the truckers finally realize just how much power they have over this faltering NiNO (Nation in Name Only), and decide to start exercising it.

Honestly, I kind of look forward to it, in a way.

HIGHWAY TO HELL
Trucks run America. Heavy trucks move the stuff we buy and sell along the largest highway network in the world. They clean our streets, control our disasters, fight our fires, and rush to our rescue during emergencies.

In the medium-heavy (Class V-VIII) truck world, trucks fall into two categories: “On Highway,” the trucks you see pulling trailers across the country, and “Vocational”, the dump trucks, cement mixers, ambulances, fuel trucks and a dozen other variations that keep every town in this country operating. Most these are powered by diesel. Diesel engines are ideal for commercial purposes, being more reliable, more durable, and with better fuel economy than gasoline. Over 99% of all trucks working in America today have diesel engines. Without these, nothing moves. Not food, not goods, not our industry, and certainly not our economy.

California, as usual, is leading the “Green” charge. This month, the California Air Resources Board voted 14-0 to pass a law that will ban the sale of diesel trucks in California by 2036. The board warned citizens that “the time for putting public health second to the economy is over.” The new law also stipulates that all trucks operating in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach (home of 50% of US foreign trade) must be zero emission by 2030.

“Putting public health second to the economy”—oh, how I love that line. Tell me, genius, how healthy you think we’re gonna be when the food stops coming in, medical supplies and prescription meds become unavailable at any price, and nobody can buy any of it anyway because they lost their jobs when the economy goes kerblooey? Stupid shitlib doesn’t seem to realize that the two are inextricably linked; when the one goes pear shaped, the other will be drastically impacted, and not for the better either. Every. Single. Time.

As the bumper sticker says: if you have it, a truck brought it. It’s as true now as it ever was, representing a hard, implacable reality in which residents of California will soon be getting an up close and personal schooling when your moronic PC folly kicks in fully and long-haul truckers begin to refuse to go to the Golden State, no matter how much they’re offered to do so.

America is a behemoth. The United States faces logistical challenges greater than that of any nation in history. The distance from Los Angeles to Washington DC is roughly the same distance as Madrid to Moscow. Despite some local attempts to regionalize food production, feeding Americans is still a national effort. The ability to transport food, medicine, and spare parts across the vast American continent can only be achieved by trucks. Highway trucks move 75% of the nation’s freight from city to city, and from region to region. Everything you buy, everything you eat, and every medicine you take has at least one truck involved in the transportation chain.

Truck manufacturers don’t have the technology to replace diesel engines with equally capable zero-emission engines, nor the production capacity to replace the soon to be illegal diesel engines. The United States also does not have the electrical infrastructure to support that many Lithium Ion Battery vehicles. For decades we have depended on these engines to sustain us, and they have not failed.

Which is probably what shitlibs hate the most about them: they simply work, far better than any other technology humanity has ever come up. There’s a reason, after all, that the world abandoned windmills, electric vehicles, and solar power a century or more ago: those outdated, primitive technologies are incapable of powering a First World economy.

Instead of making what works better, we are about to attempt to replace all of them with vehicles that are four times the cost, but only capable of doing a quarter of the work…at best. Large fleets are already slowing, and in some sectors companies are cancelling existing “green” orders in favor of procuring diesel engines while they still can. CEO’s are doing the math, and recognizing that virtue signaling is not worth bankruptcy. But the damage may already be done.

When we think of military vehicles, we imagine tanks and jets, but logistics is what wins wars. For every tank, there are a half dozen support vehicles. Fuel tankers, runway sweepers, water trucks, and wreckers are all bought commercially off the shelf from civilian truck manufacturers. Every vehicle the military buys needs to be capable of running JP8 fuel: a high sulfur fuel, which simplifies military supply requirements and enables military vehicles to run on even the dirtiest local fuel sources. Government mandated changes to emissions have created a technology gap between the civilian and military markets. Sensors in modern trucks can no longer survive with high amounts of sulfur in JP8, and so manufacturers have begun to stop making trucks capable of running on a JP8 engine.

Progressives don’t want solutions that avoid a collapse.

Annnnnd BINGO, we have ourselves a correct answer, folks!

The ongoing logistical nightmares caused by the government’s response to COVID-19 is just a prelude to the horrors of this potential future. Factories that can’t get enough components, hospitals that can’t get repair parts on time for life-saving equipment, crops dying in the field while the people starve…That’s where we’re heading.

Yep—because that’s where the idiot Left is pushing us, whether we will or no. When you get down to the nutcutting of almost every problem, impasse, or issue, no matter what it might involve on the surface, that’s what it always comes down to. What we have here is not a diesel problem, an economic problem, nor even a climatic one; we have a Leftist problem, plain and simple. Until we’ve dealt with that fundamental issue, unequivocally and forcefully, all the others and more will continue to plague us.

(Via WRSA)

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