Four really important things, in order, most important to least

Most important: Emojis

I recently purchased a new iPad. I generally like it, but one annoying feature is the keyboard. In the lower left, if you look closely, is a smiley face. If I hit that key, which at present time I often do, I get hundreds of Emojis offered to me.

I am not an eight-year old. I do not use Emojis. In fact, if I may risk being a braggart, I think my vocabulary is well developed, so much so that if I need to express an emotion, I can call up the necessary words. For instance: “That makes me smile”. “That is funny”. “I am a bit perplexed and need more and better information”. “‘Dr.’ Michael Mann makes me wanna puke”.

You see? The words are always within reach. I can imagine that if I was eight, a third grader, I might struggle to find the right words to express something, and so might scan the hundreds of emojis to find the right one. As a fully grown adult, I got resources.

So, I thought I will just get into settings and choose a keyboard without the emoji button. Under version 18.3 General/Keyboard I can turn off stickers so that I won’t be sending them from the Emoji keyboard. But the keyboard is still there. I went to Apple help, a discussion group where many people like me do not care to be treated like juveniles. What I found is that Apple does not listen or care, as they know their market, and we are stuck with Emojis, like it or not.

If anyone knows how to get rid of the Emoji keyboard, please advise … ;>).

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Here, there and everywhere

I support a forum called Climate Discussion Nexus, Canadian, so you know they are polite. It is run by Dr. John Robson, and I like the guy and his writing, which is often snarky and clever. On two occasions now I have attempted to post a comment under one of his topics. I take trouble to be courteous and thorough, perhaps entering new material to the many readers. My comments have disappeared.

I went to the website, and found a form to fill out to question the CDN people and aspects of the website, and told them that my comments disappear, would they please find them in SPAM or Trash, as we do here, and post them. John answered personally twice, each time saying there was no sign of any comment submitted by me. The second time he offered that YouTube,  through which they run their comments, often mangles them.

That was all I needed to know. I am banned at YouTube, and if you know me, it would not be because I disrespected someone, but rather that I offered an opinion outside mainstream thought. Long ago I was first banned on YouTube at a Paul is Dead site for offering that there are two Paul’s, both alive and well, twins. That comment disappeared, and anything after went to ether.

Probably, though I do not recall, I might have more recently questioned the existence of SARS Cov 2, and my reasons for doing so are not frivolous. I read scientific papers and abstracts, I have followed the work of Dr. Stefan Lanka, a German “virologist” who eschews that title.  Canadian Christine Massey has, using the Freedom of Information Act in its many forms internationally, sought copies of the SARS Cov 2 genome, which is supposedly the gold standard behind the PCR test. None, including the vaunted CDC, have it. I have read books by Drs. Sam and Mark Bailey, whom I like, and Dr. Tom Cowan, who I do not like. (I just recently removed Cowan and Andrew Kaufman from our blogroll, suspicious of both.) Oh, yeah, I pored over Virus Mania, a tome, which everyone curious about virology should at least skim. I read it and transcribed 62 pages of notes, 33,600 words total. My object there is to revisit important passages, hoping a thing or two sticks to my brain. Sometimes that happens.

The point is that I should not be banned from YouTube for any other reason that I fly in the face of their propaganda. They (and Facebook in tow) refer to their justification for bans as violation of their “community standards.” They have no standards. That’s trash talk. That’s insulting.

The larger point is that if other web sites, like Climate Discussion Nexus, use YouTube for their posting and comments, then a YouTube ban goes far deeper than merely commenting on their cat videos. It means YouTube has extended its power far into the Internet, and is operating to ban people from other forums for reasons unrelated to the purpose of the other websites they serve. They are insinuating themselves into the broader discussion, limiting debate in far more forums than we know.

It’s insidious, and apparently widespread, censorship.

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Christopher Monckton prattles on

I have nothing but respect for Christopher Monckton, a member of the British peerage, the Third Viscount of Brenchley, a journalist an former advisor to Margaret Thatcher. He is diminutive, arrogant, and tends to mansplain. I am going to reprint a few words of his that I endured this morning reading an essay of his from an Australian publication. Read along if you must, but if you so choose, skip over his words and get back to mine, which are far more useful. So I claim.

Statistical analysis based on published intervals of doubed-CO2 effect of forcing (IPCC 2021, p. 925), transient double-CO2 climate response TCR thereto (ibid., p. 93) and an estimated interval of omissions abated if all nations moved straight from current admissions to net zero in 2050, shows that, despite the quadrillions that would be spent on attaining net zero, only 0.2 [0.1 to 0.3] K global warming would be abated even if global net zero were attained by that year. After correction to allow for the factor-two access of originally-predicted compared with subsequently-observed warming, the midrange warming forestalled by global net zero would be less than 0.1 K by 2050.

He’s saying that there is no cost-benefit to net-zero, no reason to pursue it or spend trillions on it. This leads to my real, and much larger complaint: He, and all of the others who write articles and books about Climate Change and real science are like a bunch of peons in the court of a king on a high balcony, rattling tin cans at the base of the wall. The king and his court know what’s real. So do most of the “scientists” called “climatologists”. But they all have each others’ backs. They know how the system is structured to shut out any who question the science as put forth by that profession. It is pseudoscience, at best, trash at worst. Outsiders are not welcome.

I just got done reading in another work that the “science” that pegged global warming to CO2 arose in the 1976-1990 era, where indeed warming and CO2 traveled hand-in-hand. But it was only then that CO2 had any explanatory power. In yet another work that I spent extensive time reading (I will review it later), I found a list of things related to climate that the GCMs (Global Climate Models) used by the IPCC either cannot explain or are wrong about. I will list just five of 28:

  • Models fail to accurately represent stratospheric response to solar changes. [IPCC claims that the Sun is not important in climate.]
  • Models fail to reproduce the cooling period observed between 1945 and 1975. [The modelers would have to tweak it to do so, and tweaking can upset the entirety of a GCM.]
  • Models failed to predict the divergence of Arctic and midlatitude winter temperature trends [including our Polar Vortex blast this current winter].
  • All models show warming in the tropical upper troposphere that is absent from observations. [Heat emanates from the tropics … but does not stay there.]
  • Models produce ten times smaller interannual changes in ocean latent heat flux than observed. [“Flux” is another way of saying “transfer”, as in heat from the tropics moving poleward.]

More so, models generally cannot reproduce the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age even as they are supported by a wealth of historical, biological, geological and climatic evidence.

The overarching point here is that what we refer to as “climatology” has been hijacked by thieves, taken behind closed walls, and now is only offered in forums where no dispute, no contradictory evidence, no dissent is allowed. That is not science. It is propaganda. Counter-cultural scientists like Monckton should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt, and call them what they are: Frauds. And stop niggling us with details, getting clearly to the point, and quickly. Monckton can always offer footnotes for the less casual reader, you see.

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I forgot the fourth thing.

Ah, remembered! I opted to watch a serialized show called Pitt, about an emergency room in Pittsburgh, thinking it might offer a variety of characters and conflicts. Indeed it does, with the usual shortcomings going all the way back to the beginnings of allopathic medicine – overreliance on simplistic solutions like drugs and vaccines, and treatment of anyone entering life out of med school as some sort of treasured authority on health and wellness.

They do a credible job on emergency treatments, where today due to centuries of warfare medicine does offer some relief from pain and suffering caused by accidents, gunshot wounds and stabbings.

That’s all covered elsewhere and is too big a subject for part four of a post where I merely want to bitch about medicine. Well into the first episode, the lead character, Dr. Michael Robinavitch, is having flashbacks to Covid, and they place him in a large ward with gurneys everywhere and doctors gowned and masked behind curtains … you know, like a real pandemic instead of a fake one. It’s much like medieval Europe during the Black Death, which at least had a real (and uninvestigated) cause.

We all know here, or should, that during the height of the pandemic, activists all over the world traveled to emergency rooms only to find them empty, attendants engaged in wheel chair races and watching TV. There was no pandemic, and no need for a medical response.

What’s going on? Entertainment is doing its function, filling the gaps left behind by real life with fiction. Unfortunately, Noah Wyle, selected to play lead character and grabbed from the original 1994 cast of ER, is no George Clooney. Creator R. Scott Gemmill is no Michael Crichton. Audiences in 1994 were no brighter than those today, so this series might, sadly, catch on. It is heavily funded and so offers high production values. But these days everything on TV has limited reach due to oversaturation. Nothing stands out as excellent entertainment, least of all Pitt.

22 thoughts on “Four really important things, in order, most important to least”

  1. “I just recently removed Cowan and Andrew Kaufman from our blogroll, suspicious of both.”

    Being that I feel the same (Not just a feeling of grifting but something I can’t put my finger on), I’d like to know your reasoning. I did read the Mathis paper so I’m not referring to his reasoning per se

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    1. Did I read the Mathis paper? Was it recent? I think, if I recall, he refers to both of them as Jews. Since both have Jewish names, that follows.

      I was suspicious from shortly after the start of Covid that both C and K* appeared on the scene much too quickly and glibly, as if put in place to do what the people who regulate behind the scenes wanted – to isolate opposition, perhaps to lead it down a gangplank or through a Potemkin village. They did not seem natural, and going just by my personal experiences, not necessarily typical, neither were responsive to questions or queries from followers. (Cowan’s front person even said outright that he does not respond to queries from readers or viewers.) Both were too glib, too well researched at such an early date to be on top of matters. It was as if they were waiting in the wings to be put to work.

      That’s just a general response, don’t use my thoughts over your own, which I would like to hear. Also, *C is the third letter of the alphabet, K the 11th, which yields 33. Now really, that has to be a coincidence, right? This time I went too far.

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  3. I got into Cowan until he started calling everything a hoax – DNA, ribosomes, atoms? He mixes in a lot of legitimate criticism of mainstream science, with absolute bullshit. I really dislike these renegade scientists who throw the hoax bomb without offering an alternative. Ribosomes are how proteins are made, from the mRNA and amino acids. All these things have been isolated and very well characterized for many years. He’s clearly trying to muddy the waters and de-legitimize those who are skeptical of infectious virus particles.

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    1. Offering an alternative isn’t required, they’re not the ones making the claims. All they have to do is show that the theories aren’t credibly supported by the evidence given. It sure looks hinky as hell to me, as I continue to read that controlstudies substack.

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    1. Welcome to my world, SMJ. Yes, I think it possible to disbelieve the fashionable world of viruses and disease, and at the same time find that there is something going on with DNA that is real and impactful, which it has been in my life.

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  5. The part about DNA to be skeptical is that it is the sole source of inheritance. That is an extremely materialistic, and neo-Darwinian way of looking at life. DNA is a template for proteins, and highly complex in how its expression is regulated. However, I recently ran a thought experiment on how much information must be packed into a fertilized egg. It has all the instructions, if you will, for all the cell differentiation pathways, along with their timing, a full body plan for each stage of development, the whole body architecture for all the organs, etc etc etc. And we clearly inherit very particular morphology and even behaviors from our parents. It’s an extraordinary amount of information, that is “dynamic”, in that it is attuned to environmental clues and responds appropriately. There’s no way the one-dimensional coded information in DNA is sufficient to contain this level of information. So we are missing something by looking purely at a chemical and physical level. It’s not unreasonable to believe there is some reality we are not privy to access using purely materialistic means.

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    1. i had the hershey-chase experiment in mind. The one with the kitchen blender and the little lunar lander like bacteriophages.

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    2. Good points, thanks. Kind of on similar lines, someone pointed out (maybe SMJ one time? I forget) the strangeness of this whole “instruction manual” being copied in every cell in the body – hair, skin, blood, organs, etc – where it seems superfluous. It would seem to be only necessary in spermatozoa and eggs, no? Why waste all that “work” putting copies of the blueprints in every brick of the building. I may be missing some simple explanation of course, happy to be informed of it if there is one.

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    3. YOUCAN CALLMERAY I think this is really well said. An even balanced assessment. I’m putting this one in my personal collection.

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    4. YOUCAN CALLMERAY I think this is really well said. An even balanced assessment. I’m putting this one in my personal collection.

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  6. My God, Mark, you are a much more patient man than I am. I do not understand how you have continued, all these years, to engage with the aggressively stupid and intentionally mind-boggling absurdities of “climate science”–and think about them and write about them so much–without completely losing your mind. My ability to tolerate the elite minority’s disdain for my intelligence is pretty much gone. On a regular basis, for the sake of my health, I have to pause and do circular breathing exercises to avoid losing my cool whenever my phone or laptop sends me down endlessly winding roads of long-forgotten passwords to long-abandoned accounts from websites like Yahoo or Amazon or Microsoft so that I can perform some simple little task on a that’s connected to some other site that I had long ago vowed not to mess with again. Oh, I know they just want to protect my safety, bless their hearts. But God help me, I’m getting old, and I’m not sure how many more tsunamis of impotent rage my heart can endure.

    As for that Pitt TV show… I had a similar experience when I tuned into a Netflix show called Shameless, executive-produced by John Wells, who was also the head honcho for the 1990s ER show that Wyle starred in and Pitt (I guess, I haven’t seen it and won’t) rips off. The aptly-named Shameless mixes genuinely compelling, darkly comic and often surprisingly insightful explorations of familial and societal dysfunction with jaw-droppingly stupid, intellectually and morally dishonest scenarios that completely undermine all the credibility it’s built up in the service of an obvious political agenda. William H. Macy is quite good as a superficially charming and irresistably funny but frighteningly narcissistic and entitled father who refuses to work in order to earn all the alcohol and drugs he’s addicted to. I initially thought the show was using his glib manipulation of government programs like Disability—and, much more shockingly, his own young-adult offspring’s gullibility and love–as a satire of the hollow platitudes of the Left. But by around the fifth season, I realized the show itself was manipulating me with the exact same hollow platitudes and empty ideologies, and I tapped out.

    (I went ahead and read spoiler alerts for the last season, so stop reading if you don’t want to know. In the end, Macy’s cheerfully sociopathic character dies from Covid instead of from the effects of being drunk and/or high on any and every drug he was able to get his hands on every day for the entirety of his long and surprisingly healthy adult life. What a clever twist, huh?)

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  7. Spoiler alert, Macy is a sociopath in real life. True story: long time friend who has worked as a ski instructor/equipment expert making custom fitted footbeds worked in Aspen Colorado about 10-15 years ago. He was in some lodge high up on the mountain, and Macy actually tried to make off with his ski boots, as you take them off when you enter the lodge. Ostensibly because my friend was had very nice boots, and who knows what was up with Macy. In any case they got into a heated argument with Macy pulling a “do you know who I am?” Macy stormed off without my friends boots.

    I remember in high school when doing intervals at the track twice I had my distance shoes stolen from the stands, as I changed into track spikes for the workout. At the time it was a big deal since my parents were tightwads and I had to buy the shoes myself. What kind of person steals used shoes?

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    1. YOUCANCALLMERAY,

      Yeah, as a theatre guy I’ve always simultaneously liked Macy as an actor and had serious questions about him as a human being. He was/is a disciple of playwright David Mamet, whom I’ve always considered a pretentious and somewhat loathesome rabble-rouser. I’ve acted in a couple of Mamet’s plays, though, and they sure can be a rush, even if they don’t amount to anything more than a loud and juicy fart in the wind. A while back, Macy’s wife Felicity Huffmann got busted participating in some scam, along with some other rich entitled mothers, to get her daughter into a good college despite poor grades or test scores or something. I think she might have even gone to jail? I can’t be bothered to look it up right now. The shoe thief story is amusing, but not a big surprise.

      Oh, and Macy has bragged in interviews that the awful Covid ending for Shameless was his idea. It would be even funnier and more pathetic, and not at all surprising, if it wasn’t and he was lying. lol.

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      1. I’ve long suspected Macy in real life is the same as the character he plays in Fargo, a completely gutless weasel schemer.

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        1. This is way off-topic, but since we’re having fun hating on Macy… have you seen the movie Oleanna? It’s a 1990s film written and directed by Macy’s mentor, David Mamet. The play was a sensation on Broadway (where Macy also starred), and it basically predicted cancel culture, but the movie was a forgettable flop. Macy plays John, a young college professor who believes the tenure he’s counting on but not yet received is a done deal as he and his young wife close on the house where they plan to raise their new-born son. A young female student, Carol, visits him in his office, claiming to be struggling with his class, and we watch their entire conversation. He often interrupts it, either to take calls from his wife or jot down notes on his own long-winded responses to her often vapid questions. He’s a pretentious, arrogant, pseudointellectual buffoon, and when I played him onstage, I thought he was far too shallow and comically self-absorbed to be the tragic figure Mamet seemed to think he was. But I also thought he was a surprisingly honest fictional version of the pretentious, arrogant, pseudointellectual buffoon Mamet himself struck me as being when I watched him in interviews.

          Anyway, Carol mischaracterizes John’s words and deeds to the tenure committee and claims he was sexually inappropriate. John meets her in his office a second time, certain he has the wit and charm to talk her into dropping this frivolous complaint which could put his tenure in serious jeopardy. By the time they meet in his office for the third time, Carol has told the tenure committee he raped her during their second meeting, and the university has fired him. He makes some pathetic hail-Mary attempts to get her to show some humanity, have some mercy, and change her story. When she refuses, he beats the shit out of her, and his life is destroyed.

          As a piece of writing, it was a masterpiece of cheap, amygdala-agitating, rabble-rousing manipulation. I was in a production of it, saw a production of it, and thought you’d have to work hard NOT to whip audiences into a frenzy with it. But Mamet’s film adaptation somehow manages to be dull as dust… mainly because William H. Macy gives such a mind-numbingly lifeless, almost robotic performance from beginning to end. Even when he’s punching and kicking Carol all over his office, he looks like he’s half-asleep.

          Mamet has never been an actor, but he has taught acting, written a book about acting, talked a lot about acting in interviews, and everything he has said about it shows he has zero respect for it as an art form. Actors are just the writer’s and director’s meat puppets, as far as he’s concerned. He thinks it’s silly for them to worry too much about creating an inner life for their characters and bring their own emotional truth to it. Just memorize the lines exactly the way the author wrote them, mind all the stage directions, do what the director says, and turn your brain off. I never read his acting book, but every actor I know who did considers it to be an utterly useless, incredibly insulting pile of garbage.

          I’m really ragging on Mamet more than Macy here, but considering how dynamic and engaging he has been in everything else I’ve seen him do, I find it fascinating that Mamet–by his own admission–is one of his biggest mentors, and that he so completely submitted to Mamet’s dehumanizing view of the actor’s craft in that tedious film. Worth watching if you feel like getting your rocks off hating on either of them. Just thought I’d pass that along. 🙂

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  8. Oh, as for DNA… Since I have long ago given up trying to figure out what’s real and what’s fake within the realms of materialistic science (which was never my bag anyway), I’ve enjoyed exploring non-dualistic, spiritualist viewpoints that probably lie far outside the interests or toleration levels of most who read (or at least comment on) this blog. But I very much like the idea that DNA carries ancient collective wisdom–stuff like the Akashic Records–as well as information pertaining to our personal ancestral history, I dunno maybe even past lives. The idea in some esoteric circles, if I understand correctly, is that this info is encoded in our DNA and we are supposed to be able to access it, but our consciousness has been separated from it via centuries or millennia of mind control and the damage done from living and thinking and behaving in ways that our bodies and brains were not meant to live and think and behave. Scoff if you must, but at this point I much prefer mystical woo-woo over materialism’s fuck-you’s thank you very much.

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    1. I’ve never proscribed anything like that to DNA, only thinking that if they put two strands side x side and then compare them using PCR technology as it was meant to be used, it can tell you if it did or did not come from a certain person. It’s a tremendous crime-fighting tool. I would never have known who raped my daughter without it.

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        1. and….what is the “scientific” basis for this electrophoresis? What is first of all “isolated” (seen), “seen” in some mess of cellular fragmentation, and then put back together in some neat little observable chemical package supposedly representing any species’ or individual’s DNA?

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