Manniacal Maddness

Australia Burnt Area

(Graph prepared by Dr. Bjorn Lomborg)

Michael Mann, of Hockey Stock infamy, is in Australia, and as usual is littering the landscape with nonsensical statements about the fate of our planet. He said

“Australia’s Wildfire Catastrophe Isn’t the “New Normal.” It’s Much Worse Than That.  … These are the things that keep us up at night as climate scientists.”

Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts had enough of it, and gave a speech on the floor of the Australian Parliament which is reprinted in full beneath the fold. It’s to the point: Mann has no evidence of anything, and never has. Hardly anyone calls him out on it.

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Coronavirus Scare Tactics

This is not a full post, but rather just a reminder to readers to not be suckered in by the fear tactics in the media surrounding the Chinese Coronavirus. All available data suggests a fatality rate below 1%. You should be much more afraid of the regular old flu! They should call it Coronavirus because to get over it, you should kick back and enjoy a Corona or two…

 

Navajo Mystical Precognition & the St. Francis Dam Collapse

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In what has become a series of posts about supernatural phenomena, here I will add a new instance to the collection from a case that I recently came across. It is a fascinating and virtually untold historical example of precognition, and I think it is worthy of more attention than it has ever before received. This story is ultimately a footnote within a footnote…a story within a story that has already been largely forgotten. That story? The collapse of the St. Francis Dam late in the evening of March 12th, 1928, which killed at least 500 people and was the largest American engineering disaster of the 20th century. The detail I hope to illuminate is a group of Navajo Indians who ultimately did not perish in the flood. The means by which they escaped a horrible death is what is so remarkable and merits being retold.

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Speciation: The Achilles Heel of Darwin’s Natural Selection

historyoflife

Those who have followed this blog recently might know of my interest in the fossil history of the Earth. It should not be surprising, then, that I also have a deep interest in Biology as a subject. As a card-carrying science geek for most of my life, my particular area of interest was always Biology. Of all the geeks in AP Biology, I was geekiest among them. My AP Biology teacher once told my mother that if she had a daughter, she would want her to marry me. This should tell you a thing or two about the impression I made.

Anyway, just like any student of the time, we were taught about Darwin and Natural Selection. Also known as “survival of the fittest”, the concept of Natural Selection does a lot to explain the behavior of species in real life. It is especially good at explaining how species adapt to a particular niche, and how certain traits are favored over time if they lead to some kind of survival advantage. However, once a species is adapted to its niche, we no longer see changes. There have been species in the oceans which are virtually unchanged for the past 500 million years, even if improvements could still be made (the Horseshoe crab, for instance). Indeed, these unchanged species are not perfect, but they are perfect for their particular niche. If Natural Selection were constantly driving new species (speciation), then these unchanging species are a big problem for it being the main driver for speciation events.

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Back when we had vineyards in Billings, Montana

Pittsburgh Snowfall

Last September in a mountain refugio in Northern Italy, we met three German psychologists. One thing about traveling Europe, I find that Germans speak very good English, so conversing with them was easy.  And, as with all trail people we meet, they were friendly, welcoming and interesting.

They were from Hanover, Germany, and told us that it has stopped snowing there, and that in years gone by it used to snow regularly. In other words, they had bought into Climate Change. Because we were all nice people, we were able to disagree amiably.

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Millennials: Stop your moping, start reproducing!

Birth DeaarthI just got done reading a long piece at National Review by Lyman Stone, a Hong Kong resident, called Our Global Birth Dearth. It’s behind a pay wall, unfortunately, but they do allow three free articles.

I first subscribed to NR when I was perhaps 21 years old, and carried the subscription for a couple of decades. I ventured off into liberalism, and dropped it. I recently re-upped, not imagining that I would find much of interest, and generally that is true. I don’t care about party politics or Trump or the Democrats or the elections. NR cannot go near the notion that any major public event might be a hoax. In fact, such ideas would be quickly subject to derision.

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The lead OJ actor has a new gig

I have not paid much attention to the Trump impeachment proceedings, assuming it is all a sideshow complete with clowns and carnival barkers. It could be that something real is in store, as Trump is, like all presidents before, just an actor. In my worst imaginings, he is set up to act as controlled opposition in the Climate Change game and will take all of the remarkable skeptical community down with him.

Climate Change is one of the biggest hoaxes I have seen, and I have lived through McCarthyism, the assassinations of the 1960s, The Cold War, The Missile Crisis, The Iran Hostage event, Jonestown, the Iraq Wars (including the alleged starving of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi kids and old people), the Soviet Collapse, AIDS,  911, the 2000 election, and, oh yeah, I almost forgot, Bill Hicks’ cancer death. Commenters will add to this list no doubt. In the end, we might have 33 or more major hoaxes.

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United Nations & Proper Introductions

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My first two posts have left me feeling like I owe readers a more proper introduction. There have been some side glances perceptible towards me in that my username, Fauxlex, is spooky-sounding (I mean, it does have two X’s). A commenter versed in Latin who may or may not have been Miles Mathis himself called the name into question as meaning “false law” or “false principles”. He was not the only one, and they are correct on the facts. While this was not anything I considered at the time, it is a valid translation of my username. I have to own that. Now, taking a step back from myself, I completely understand why the name might seem nefarious. The real truth is that in college, I spent a month in Manhattan doing a seminar at the United Nations. This was for college credit…a paper had to be written, but ultimately what we got to do was meet with the UN Missions of upwards of 50 countries. You name the country, and good chance I met with them. We got to ask them anything we wanted without restriction, since these were supposed to be well-trained diplomats versed in the art of clever answers. I could tell you all many, many stories from this month. Anyway, during this month, one of my favorite stops was to Chinatown on a quest to buy a fake Rolex. All you really have to do is say the word “watch” while in Chinatown, and you will be approached by a stranger and handed what looks like a Chinese food menu, but is actually a menu of fake watches. You pick one out, various signals are given, money is exchanged, and pretty soon a fake Rolex is yours. This was a lot of fun…I cherish my fake Rolex as being a great memento from this time. Many years ago, when creating a username to comment in a completely unrelated sports blog, I came up with “Fauxlex” (pronounced Fo-lex). It made sense to me because “Faux”-lex rhymes with Ro-lex. Fauxlex, Rauxlex. A fake Rolex is a Fauxlex. This is why I uploaded the photograph as my main avatar…it was taken the day of that purchase in the NYU dorms, where we were staying.

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Baseball’s sign stealing scandal: Bang the can slowly

AstrosI had an interesting conversation with a buddy a couple of days ago as we hiked a Colorado trail. He’s a baseball fan, and so am I, him Cubs, me Reds, and we both agreed that the teams we support were not good enough last year to be part of the sign-stealing scandal. I cannot rule that out, however.

First, a couple of baseline thoughts:

  • Baseball has a very clean image, and to the casual viewer it would appear that games are very hard to fix. Instant replay tends to get every umpire call right. But games are actually easy to fix. Baseball hitters are some of the best athletes in the world, able to hit fastballs traveling nearly 100 mph. Pitchers are only good to the extent that they are able to fool hitters by concealing their pitches. They cannot just overpower them. However, if a batter knows what pitch is coming, the odds are high that he will send that pitch to the cheap seats. That’s really all it takes to fix a game – tipped pitches.
  • We are told that last year that the baseballs used in Major League games were “juiced.” Home runs were up for nearly every team. The aerodynamics behind a juiced baseball were said to be compressed seams that allowed it to go further and faster than in years prior.

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