Category: American wilderness

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:

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.”

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The 97% consensus, and the demise of already-corrupted search engines

We here at POM know that among climate scientists there is no 97% “consensus” that Earth is getting warmer and humans are causing that warming. But we can also see that a wall was being built around the propaganda spewing out of IPCC, NASA and other places. Soon to be used following the 97% thrust was the term “denier”. 

97% serves a useful purpose in terms of propaganda – it signals to people who are not paying attention that the work has been done, case closed, no need to think or investigate. It’s a deliberate tactic used because the work has not been done, the case is not closed, and indeed people of intelligence need to think and investigate. 

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Isaac Newton on head butting

A long long time ago I knew a guy in Bozeman who worked in the campus bookstore, let’s call him Roger. It was at least five years after 911, as I had a blog at the time and did not start this blog until 2006. I mentioned to him that what we saw on 911 violated Newton’s laws of motion, and therefore could not have happened as we saw on TV.

He got very pensive on me, and said that experts, real experts, within that university were pondering Newton’s third law of motion in light of the events of that day. Do you get that? “Experts” in the engineering department of Montana State University were afraid to speak up about what happened that day. They would probably  lose their jobs. That’s how I interpreted Roger’s thoughtful comment.

  1. An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
  2. The acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied.
  3. Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first.

These are called “laws” and not hypotheses, not theories, meaning that in our world they always work. The have not been disproven.

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Easy listening while Waiting for a Chinook

The painting above is titled “Waiting for a Chinook” by Charles M. Russell (1864-1926). He was a great artist who lived in Montana. My dad, who grew up in Great Falls, Montana, dispelled any mythology about him, saying that he would sell his doodles in bars in exchange for drinks. But man could the guy paint. Here’s what another favorite artist of mine, Ian Tyson, had to say about Charles in his unduly sentimental song, The Gift:

God hung the stars over Judith Basin
God put the magic in young Charlie’s hands
And all was seen and all remembered
Every shining mountain, every longhorn brand
He could paint the light on horsehide shining
The great passing herds of the buffalo
And a cow camp cold on a rainy morning
And the twisting wrist of the Houlihan throw

The “Houlihan throw” is a cowboy on a horse roping a calf.

By the way, a “Chinook” refers to warm winds blowing off the western slopes of  our Rocky Mountains – having grown up in Montana, a good old Chinook was a sign of warming – a cold spell ending, snow melting, spring on the horizon. Willard Fraser, once mayor of the town I lived in, Billings, complained that the official stationery of the city had “that damned cow” on it. He ordered it changed, saying it had scared off too many tourists.

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