How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again! (Mark Twain)
This link is to Fakeologist and a video that is very brief, a minute or so of Carl Sagan interviewed by Charlie Rose not too long before his death in 1996. In the clip, Sagan is warning us of scientific tyranny, what happens when the public has no basis in science.
Of course, that is fait accompli now. Covid was the worst expression of such tyranny, a complete hoax with a fake virus and a testing process guaranteed to imitate a spreading disease.
It is a well-advertised fact that putting CO2 (usually referred to as “carbon” ***) into the atmosphere causes global warming. My problems with this idea are that 1) the planet is barely, almost imperceptibly warming, and 2) CO2’s role in this mild warming is very tiny. The demonization of carbon dioxide is another agenda, having nothing to do with warming, and everything to do with command and control, population reduction, and perpetuation of poverty, especially in Africa. Climate Change is in large part a racist agenda.
So, I say CO2 is not a cause of warming. Where are my facts? There are quite a few “greenhouse gases,” the primary ones being water vapor, CO2, and methane. The latter two, CO2 and methane, pale in significance to water vapor, which is the cause of 95% of the so-called greenhouse effect. That is more than twenty six times that of CO2, and over 237 times that of methane. So that if we truly wanted to stop or slow down the greenhouse effect, we would be sequestering water, not CO2.
This subject came up in the post beneath (A Tale of Two Countries) about the 14th Amendment. Was the South legally justified in seceding from the United States? BMSeattle left a comment that summed up my attitude on the question, here. Of course it was justified! Voluntary going in, voluntary going out.
My only thought about the violent response was what we now call “Balkanization,” or the fragmentation of a large region or country into smaller countries, as happened with Yugoslavia after the death of Marshall Tito. While it may seem a normal and legitimate process, it is usually accompanied by warfare. I was once years ago listening to Larry King on radio late at night, not being a good sleeper. He had on a CIA analyst, and he commented on the United States. I paraphrase: “The remarkable thing about this country is that it has held together as long as it has, and not fragmented.”
Barack Obama is said to be a “constitutional scholar”. He is no such thing, although I grant the man his due in terms of real abilities, such as personal charisma and a sense of humor. The reasons I say he is no scholar are two:
A couple of matters, and I need to do this quickly. Our Internet signal degrades as people awake and turn on their devices. I can already see things slowing down at 7AM MDT. Later in the day, as people turn on streaming services and little Johnny decides to do some gaming with his friends, our signal will be so intermittent as to be unusable.
This has always been the problem we face with Centurylink (CL) Internet service. We moved here in 2010, and at that time CL offered 1.5 mps, and oddly, that was all we needed. Our TV was supplied by DirectTV, and we did no streaming. For a brief period we switched to a company that beamed their signal from a nearby mountain. The installation technician said that day that signals could range as high as 7 mps, but he was lying. It was 1.5 mps. The company cut back all of its clients to that level to allow for more customers and to make a few more $$$. Since that was all that CL offered, no one up here in the foothills had choice. The dish on our front porch was ugly, so we gave it back to them and went back to CL.
We get our Internet from Centurylink, one of the few Baby Bells left in form. Consequently, it comes to our house on a wire. There is a switch box a couple of miles down the road that serves our neighborhood, and we are at the end of the line. For that reason, whenever I check speed at 192.168.0.1, it reads that our line status is either “poor” or “moderate.”
Last February we traded out an older model modem (Centurylink does used modems, and not routers), and the service agent who came by the house said to be careful, we might be “overprovided.” Not too long after that our service started blinking out now and then, and modem reboots had to be done frequently. I called tech support about that, and ask them if we were indeed overprovided. They had no clue what I was talking about. I suggested we drop our service back to perhaps 10 mps but the agent said not to do that, and I allowed him to keep me at 17mps. The intermittent service continued. It finally got so bad that I was convinced that the new modem we got in February was defective. An agent agreed with me, and sent me a new modem.
What Dave refers to as “highpointing” is known to me as “peak bagging.” The object is to reach the highest point in all fifty states. Some, like Florida or Delaware, you can drive to. Others, like Gannett (Wyoming) or Denali, formerly McKinley (Alaska) require great effort, skill, courage, and specialized equipment. My older brother Steve was a Peak Bagger, but he never got to Denali or Hawaii’s Mauna Kea, as he simply did not have time. Denali especially can be a challenge – think of being holed up in your tent for days at a time waiting for the weather to clear. He did manage to do the lower 48. He told me once of coming down from Ranier in Washington in a state of hallucination, dehydrated and physically exhausted. After that, the next day, he and his two companions decided – “What the hell. Let’s go do Elbert too!” That is the highest peak in Colorado, one that I have done. It is a “walk-up”, albeit a 4,000+ feet walk-up with two false summits. (I regard the words “false summit” as the two ugliest words in the English language.) So they drove from Seattle to Colorado the next day, and if I got the story right, jogged up Elbert.
I would say “I don’t get that”, but I do. I am just not motivated in that manner. But I do know that when we, all of us, set out to do something hard, even dangerous, and we accomplish the task, be it highpointing or rafting a dangerous river, what follows is a great sense of satisfaction. With peak bagging, it starts with an adrenaline rush, and ends with that sense of accomplishment. I do indeed get it.
Dave writes of climbing Mt. Borah, the highest point in Idaho. I warn you that he uses foul language, as real people do when in the wilderness. That does not fucking bother me.
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Chicken Out? Panda Mayor? What Gives?
By: DS Klausler
I was in the saloon a couple of weeks ago and had arrived “late” according to The Guys already present – uh huh, sure – it was just 3:50pm on a Friday. The usual rambling discussion of past events was ongoing. A relatively new User to the Tall Tale Club was present and they had meandered to hiking stories – he had never strapped on the big package, or ventured up high enough to challenge flatlander breathing. Specifically, they were speaking of a hike that had a lasting impact on me. Coincidentally, my dental hardware buddy[i] had recently commented out of the blue on the very same location; I didn’t even think to ask from whence the intrigue originated – ding for me. I probably had mentioned it offhanded in one of my [verbal] reports upon return from the trip – I do this following most outdoor adventures. However, I usually write up a brief trip report with as little as long bullet points; this trip generated vocal expansion of the story line. Even more so, this trip warranted this essay. Let me first assure you that no, I do not speak this way professionally, nor would I at your wedding… but certainly at my own funeral (I’ve got skills[ii]).
I normally do not do “recommended” reading, but will do so in this case with a large caveat: If you are interested in climate change, and if you can handle some technical detail and are proficient at interpretation of graphs, AND if you think critically AND want a one-stop place for a narrative that is well written and succinct, while at the same time maintaining a high level of skepticism, then give this book a chance.
I cite the following as an example:
Several days ago, we had a perfect storm of sorts. On the very same day our Internet went down, and our microwave over fizzled as well. Gadzooks! Zounds!
To make a short story long … nah, details do not matter. We now have Internet, and while a replacement for our old GE Profile microwave would have cost $479 at Best Buy, a $70 model at Target would have to do. The cupboard space for the Profile is 24x12x12, and only a very few machines fit in that space, but to save $409, we will make do. This is the second time that GE Profiles have failed on us.
“We’ve had a complete unchallenged view of the climate change deniers. I think we need to have rather more balance in the debate, particularly when we saw a recent analysis of 12,000 scientific papers…and of the scientists who expressed a view – these were climate change papers – of the scientists who expressed a view 97 per cent said that climate change was happening and that it was human-made activity”. ( UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Davey, 2013)
“97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening, and that human activity is responsible.” (Former Secretary of State John Kerry, 2014)
“Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous”. (Barack Obama tweet, 2011)
Let me be clear at the outset here that two days ago I posted for the third day in a row, and that after that WordPress emailed me to say that I was on fire, and keep it up! So yesterday I posted for the fourth day in a row, and WordPress got even more excited in another email. So today I am posting a fifth article, and perhaps then WordPress will have an orgasm.
This post is not new information, but I like getting those emails.
Continue reading “Scientific Consensus: 97% of landfills are full of garbage”
Piece of Mindful 