The above is not an active video, just a screen grab. The reason – it is on Ab’s Fakeotube at Fakeologist. Use this link to access the video. I have watched it, and posted about it too. I encourage others to do so too.
Author: Mark Tokarski
Just a man who likes to read, argue, and occasionally be surprised.
Zounds! Cancelled by Facebook!
Let me say at the beginning here that I do not care that Facebook cancelled me. It is as if I was going with a girl and tired of her, but before I could dump her, she dumped me! I put myself in that position, however. Let me explain.
Prior to 2020, I was into Facebook, having reacquainted with many of my high school classmates. We had a class reunion in 2018, and I discovered, with only a maybe four exceptions, that I did not care for these people! I rather abruptly unfriended most of them, leaving me with only a handful of “friends,” including a former television journalist in Billings, Montana. I thought him very nice and patient with people, even if typical of journalists, quite shallow. I also had a few cousins online. That’s how I entered the year 2020.
Deep down, I did not like the approval-seeking I was doing on Facebook, putting up a post and then checking back to see if it got “likes”. I would occasionally put up something that would not garner approval:
Impressions of Michael Mann
This has been bubbling inside me for quite some time now. Maybe it started some years back when Dr. Michael Mann, the hockey stick guy, was on a TV panel show and someone suggested that climate affairs were so bad that it made her/him want to cry. As if on cue, Mann generated crocodile tears, pretending to lament the situation of our climate. It made me want to puke.
But I have a lot of impressions of Mann … perhaps foremost, that while his so-called Hockey Stick is pseudoscience at best, it is very detailed work that requires a great deal of intelligence and effort, even if he was probably exaggerating his case, perhaps even engaging in creative accounting. Steve McIntyre, the Canadian mining engineer who took apart the stick piece by piece, had to devote tremendous effort to replicate Mann’s efforts, not easily dissembled and beyond the reach of us mere mortals. What we found was that tree rings are a complicated science, and without a strong working knowledge of statistics cannot be assembled in a way that sends a “temperature signal” from the past to the present.
When bad journalism reports on bad science
I ran across an article in the Powell (Wyoming) Tribune called Yellowstone Lake defies warming temperature – what’s its secret? I originally saw the article in the Billings Gazette, but it was paywalled. I went to its city of origin, and again, paywalled. Finally I saw it in the Powell newspaper, where I get four visits before the walls go up.
Continue reading “When bad journalism reports on bad science”
Approximate results from proxies
I have for quite a while now been following Climate Discussion Nexus. That is a Canadian group that formed for the following purpose:
It offers a forum for more open debate on all aspects of climate change, especially better use of scientific information in public discussion and policy formation. By passing the hat we raised sufficient seed money to launch operations we will sustain through crowdfunding.
Start at the back
I was maybe 21 years old, which would be 1971, and I do not know how I came to be aware of a magazine called National Review, but I suspect it was my mother’s admiration for William F. Buckley, Jr., who had a weekly TV show called Firing Line. I was living on my own with two friends in a rented house, but was still in failure-to-launch mode. For some reason I decided to send a check for what (in those days), $7? to subscribe. I began receiving the magazine, and would be a regular subscriber for the next 20+ years. I think around 1990 or so, when I underwent a titanic shakeup in outlook, I dropped it. Now I am back.
Just a few memories about the magazine and Buckley:
Wikipedia: A Confidence Game
The con man
The term “con man” may bring to mind images of shady, underworld characters, but reality is quite different. A good con artist needs to appear trustworthy and likable in order to win the trust of his victim. Con artists are charismatic, intelligent, have good memories, and know how to manipulate people’s hopes and fears. They attempt to blend in, to look and sound familiar, and often work diligently at appearing to be smooth, professional, and successful. A con man may wear an expensive suit and appear to work in a high class office.[2] Or, conversely, a con artist may put him or herself in a weaker position to play on a victim’s sympathies: They may take on the role of illegal immigrant, a likable man down on his luck, or a woman with a small child who needs to use the bathroom. From city official to roofer, the con artist can appear to be just about anyone.
Two names came to mind as I read the above definition: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Oddly, they both belong to a list of US presidents who changed their names prior to taking office. Isn’t that odd? Top of the list is Gerald Ford (Lesley King), followed by Clinton (William Jefferson Blythe III) and Barack Obama (Barry Soetoro).
The accountant builds a staircase
The above diagram looks so simple. In residential and commercial construction, the most commonly used rise and runs for stairs are 7 and 11 inches. That yields a pitch line of about 33 degrees (32.7). I have built two staircases for our house. For the first, to overcome a five-foot retaining wall that kept us from being able to circumnavigate the house, I consulted my son and using sine and cosine, he gave me the run and number of steps. See below.
Congresswoman Lee: The moon’s a balloon, dammit. Not a gas ball.
I have been unable to get anything but short snippets of an incredibly stupid speech given by Rep Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) on the day of the Solar Eclipse. Go to timestamp 16:16 to view the entire painful exhibition. The most disturbing element here is that Lee used to sit on the House Science Committee and the House Space Committee.
Around the same time, The View’s Sunny Hostin blamed the recent solar eclipse on Climate Change, along with the New York earthquake and the return of cicadas. This was too much even for host Whoopi Goldberg, who slammed her for discrediting the show. (Link)
And the beat goes on.
Mansplaining, and cosmic justice
I have a cousin and we talk on a regular basis – she’s in Delaware now, but we grew up together in Billings, Montana. My dad called her “Punky”, a nickname she hated, so of course, I always use it. I am “Marky,” a name my mother would yell out the front door when dinner was ready. That was especially nice if I was talking to a girl I wanted to impress. She is constantly reminding me of the grades where I was held back a year, and I explain to her that the teachers were so fond of me that they wanted me around for one more year. That’s what my mom told me, and she would not lie to me. “How old were you when you finally got out of school?” another cousin asked. “I don’t know – 39, 40, somewhere in that range.”
Piece of Mindful 