Personally, I think that the President should send in the 101 Airborne ...

... to integrate the University of Massachusetts.

I mean, you can't expect those sorts of people to do it without the full force of the United States Government.  Maybe if we have 50 years of indoctrination for individual liberty, but right now they're barely above the level of savages.

So civilize them with a Krag.

When You Say Nothing At All

Jack loved snowballs.  More accurately, Jack loved chasing snowballs.  Winters in Maine gave him a lot of opportunity for this most favorite of all pastimes.

Jack was the reason that I never really lived alone.  He was the dog where lightning was caught in the bottle, where dog and master were so in tune with each other as to almost merge into a single spirit.  And so, a couple years later when I graduated and got my job in Maryland at Three Letter Agency, I wasn't living alone in a one bedroom apartment.

I was living with Jack.

I wrote about him before, and you can RTWT if you want, but this bit says what needs saying:

Up in Maine, there was a forest trail not 100 yards from my door. Here in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, folks would drive for an hour to take that walk. It was almost always just Jack and me. Big pine trees. Otters. Old stone fences from when people actually tried to grow crops there.

It wasn't as good in Maryland, there just isn't the same kind of space. But once we bought our own house, there was the neighborhood school which had great fields. Jack had a real nose for softballs, and since people would lose them in the trees all the time, we never lacked for something to chase.

I never really lived alone.  Growing up, I lived an entirely ordinary life at home with Mom and Dad and my brothers.  At State U, I was in a dorm, and while you might not have a room mate, you have 200 other students in the building that you hang out with.

In Maryland, I had Jack, and then a family of my own:

That's the newborn #1 Son, getting introduced to Jack.  He doesn't remember Jack at all, but I'll never forget my four footed soul mate.  Byron's epitaph to his own beloved Bo's'n is cliche, but somehow doesn't quite pay Jack his due:

Near this Spot
are deposited the Remains of one
who possessed Beauty without Vanity,
Strength without Insolence,
Courage without Ferocity,
and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.

And so, I find that in a half century of life, I've never lived alone.  Until now.

It's quite odd.  I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I am channeling my inner Neat Freak.  Back home at Camp Borepatch, you're living in the eye of the tornado what with teenagers, pets, and the whole gang.  Here, it's just me.

I think that keeping things always tidy is a defense mechanism of sorts, a statement that I'm keeping tight control.  It makes me wonder what might happen if I didn't.  Probably nothing.

But it's very odd to not have the opportunity to speak a single word from when you leave work until when you return in the morning.  I think on Christopher Hitchen's musings on losing his voice, and think just how much of our humanity is contained there in the vocal chords.  And I wonder about what happens when you have no reason to exercise them.

You see, with Jack, I'd have someone to talk to.

Thanks to everyone who left comments to yesterday's post.  As with the long, sad journey I took with Dad, it helps to write about it.  To say something about it.  Thanks for listening.

After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

- Aldous Huxley

Caption Contest

LOLcats style.

Leave your caption in the comments.  This was Boris and Natasha, in 1989.

UPDATE 17 June 2011 18:59: We have a winner, submitted by jetaz.

Bravo.  We'll see if the LOLcats post it.

UPDATE 17 June 21:21: Go vote for it here.

More bad news for the Global Warming crowd

Whoops:

The paper, published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics focused on the period 1844-1960 (but extended at least one graph back to 1600) and finds our current warming period is not that different from earlier episodes and that the increase in solar activity in the last 400 years explains the warming, without any need to invoke a man-made enhanced greenhouse hypothesis.

Ah, but this time it's different.  Srlsy.  I mean, Greenpeace said so.

But really, how on earth are you supposed to get any sweet, sweet research grants saying nothing to see here folks, move along?

LECTURER, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience.

- Ambrose Bierce

Star Wars: The Old Republic meets Mystery Science Theater 3000

The Escapist : Unskippable : Star Wars The Old Republic

You're welcome.  Via #2 Son, who deserves the thanks.  The Snark is strong in that one ...

Sigh

Greenpeace writes the IPCC reports

This is my shocked face:

Returning now to the original lead to the IPCC Press Release on renewables:

Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.

The basis for this claim is a Greenpeace scenario. The Lead Author of the IPCC assessment of the Greenpeace scenario was the same Greenpeace employee who had prepared the Greenpeace scenarios, the introduction to which was written by IPCC chair Pachauri.

The public and policy-makers are starving for independent and authoritative analysis of precisely how much weight can be placed on renewables in the energy future. It expects more from IPCC WG3 than a karaoke version of Greenpeace scenario.

All I can add is that Greenpeace Karaoke would be a simply smashing name for an alt.punk band.

It seems, though, that some folks are actually shocked that the fox is sleeping in the scientific henhouse:

So what to conclude? My view is that the IPCC renewables report has told us nothing – except that Greenpeace thinks we can solve the climate change problem entirely with renewable energy, which of course we already knew. But whilst I still hold the hard-science Working Group 1 of the IPCC in very high regard, I have lost a lot of confidence in Working Group 3. That it allowed its headline conclusion to be dictated by a campaigning NGO is an extraordinary failure, and one which cannot simply be forgotten.

Dude, why on earth wouldn't they want to?  And it's not like this hasn't happened before.  There comes a time when you have to step back from the fray, and take a cold hard look.  What you might find is that the folks you thought were Selfless Campaigners for Science™ have been "at it", and those who you've thought have been the Great Satan™ have been right all along.

Quite frankly, it looks like Mr. Lyntas may be having one of those moments.  Good.

And meanwhile, can all the Progressives who ever went on about the "Republican War On Science" please shut up and sit down in the back of the room?  Grownups are talking now.

Lockhart, TX blogshoot

Southern Belle is channeling her inner community organizer.  If anyone's in the area, it would be fun to meet up.

Mouse guns

Really:

Flares Into Darkness finds a Russian site that has insanely detailed miniature replicas.

What do Occam's Razor, Sunspots, Climate, and Ernst Mach have in common?

Lots of folks are commenting on the recent blockbuster announcement that solar activity is dropping off a cliff and we may be headed into a little Ice Age.  Basically, some of the most prestigious solar scientists have published a study saying that sunspot activity has dropped so low that the next 11 year solar cycle (Cycle 21) may not even happen.  The last time that this happened was the Dalton Minimum - a period of unprecedentedly cold winters around 1800 AD that included "The Year Without A Summer".

This would be very bad news - many more people die in cold events than in hot ones.  Most of those deaths have historically been from starvation, and there's really nothing to suggest that anything is fundamentally different today.  Sure, world wide transport is easy, but world food stocks are the lowest they've been in decades.  So it is much to be hoped that the American Astronomical Society is wrong.

They're probably not.  William of Occam tells us why.  Occam's Razor tells us that if you have two theories that both explain the same thing, the simpler of the two is almost certainly correct.  The classical lesson in scientific reasoning here involves the Ptolemaic Earth-centered view of the Solar System vs. the Copernican Sun-centered view.  The Ptolemaic theory had to resort to ever more rococo ad hoc tweaks like epicycles to explain the orbits of the planets.  Johann Kepler explained the Copernican system simply and elegantly with his mathematical laws.

Occam's Razor says that simple and elegant beats complicated and crufty 999 times out of 1000.

And so to sun spots and climate.  We have quite good records of sunspot activity going back to 1700 A.D.  We have decent records of the price of wheat going back much further - pretty good ones to 1500 A.D., and sporadic records all the way back to 1250 A.D. (!).  The reason is that bread is the staff of life - no bread, and people starved.

In short, grain prices are a pretty good proxy for climate, in the days before thermometers.  Certainly better than, say, bristle cone pine tree rings.  This is important for two reasons, and the combination is very bad news indeed for people who cling to the "Carbon Dioxide is killing Mother Gaia" theory.

First, the price of grain and the number of sunspots have been known to be very closely correlated for hundreds of years.  William Herschel (who discovered the planet Uranus) first published this, back around 1800.  When there are a lot of sun spots, he said, the price of grain is low - harvests are good.  When there are few sun spots, harvests fail and the price of grain soars.

Remember, we have records on this that are so old that this has been known for literally hundreds of years.  You might say that, err, the Science is Settled.

Second, there's a theoretical foundation that explains why these two are linked.  Henrik Svensmark has proposed that Cosmic Rays are linked to clouds.  Specifically, the very high energy (ionizing radiation) rays generate aerosols when they strike high altitude molecules in the atmosphere, and that these aerosols form the nucleation points for high altitude clouds.  These clouds reflect incoming solar radiation back into space, cooling the earth.

Everybody knows that when the Sun's magnetic field is strong, fewer Cosmic Rays reach Earth.  And when the magnetic field is strong, we see lots of sun spots.

The Svenmark Hypothesis was recently experimentally confirmed at CERN, where artificial Cosmic Rays were crashed into an atmosphere.  And aerosols were born.  Pretty cool when a scientific prediction is confirmed.

To understand why this is so incredibly bad for the warmist crowd, you need to compare and contrast with the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (Carbon Dioxide heating the planet).  The theoretical underpinning of AGW predicts a warm zone in the mid-Troposphere (say, 8 miles up or so) in the tropics.  Essentially, this is a heat pump that cycles captured heat from the increased Greenhouse effect down to lower atmospheric levels (rather than radiating out to space).

The only problem is that with maybe a million weather balloons looking for the hot spot, nobody's found it.  Let's call this Epicycle #1.  But the plot thickens.  We're told that the correlation between CO2 and warming is clear.  It's not:

If I adopt this 10:1 ratio by looking at the last 100 years worth of data I find 1910-1940 temperatures rising while CO2 was not. 1940 to 1975 temperatures falling while CO2 rising, 1975 to 1998 temperatures rising while CO2 rising and 1998 to 2009 temperatures falling while CO2 rising. Three quarters of the period shows no correlation or negative correlation with CO2 and only one quarter shows positive correlation. I do not understand how one can claim a hypothesis proven when ¾ of the data set disagrees with it. To me it is the clearest proof that the hypothesis is wrong.

That's Epicycle #2.  But wait - we're not done yet.  CO2 is a very weak greenhouse gas.  There are a lot of GHGs, the most powerful of which is Methane, at 1400 times more powerful than CO2.  But the real action is with water vapor, which makes up 90% of all greenhouse warming.  So what's with all the focus on CO2?

We're told that it's positive forcings, where some CO2 leads to increased temperature, which creates more moisture in the air, which makes more greenhouse warming, which makes more moisture, and so on.

So why didn't we see this out of control increase in past warm periods, like the Medieval Warm Period which was at least as warm as now and likely warmer.  Why didn't it spin out of control into Thermageddon, instead of crashing into the Little Ice Age?

Epicycle #3, right there.  And the temperatures are diverging pretty spectacularly from the Climate Models' predictions:

We'll just call Epicycle #4 the Hide The Decline Memorial Epicycle.

At this point, you should hear William of Occam whispering in the back of your head.  The simpler explanation is better.

Or it could be shouted at you.  The most famous failed scientific experiment of all time was the Michaelson-Morley Experiment, which tried to measure the Luminiferous Aether.  The problem of the day was that light was known to be a wave, but space was known to be a vacuum.  A wave needs a medium to propagate through, like waves through water.  Obviously, there was no water in space (or air, for that matter), and so the Luminiferous Aether was proposed.  It was a mathematical formulation, and its properties were derived from the observed properties of light.  Those properties meant that it had to be an exceptionally rigid vacuum.

Ernst Mach (of supersonic fame) was contemptuous of the whole idea.  The whole edifice was constructed from cardboard and tape (err, or nineteenth century words to that effect), and anyone could see that it was wrong.  Michaelson and Morley set out to directly measure the Aether, and failed.  Completely.

Because Mach was right: there is no Aether.  Looking back, this is obvious, and scientists of the day should have thought that a simpler explanation would be forthcoming, as indeed it was (the photon).

And so back to the matter at hand.  William of Occam politely (as befits a church man) suggests that AGW is overly complex.  Ernst Mach sneers that it's plain as the nose on your face.  CERN shows aerosol formation.

Of course, I'm one of those Deniers (Epicycle #5) who don't recognize that the Science Is Settled® (Epicycle #6), and who should be locked up as an Enemy Of The State™ (Epicycle #7). 

Or perhaps e pur si muove: and yet it moves. Instead of a bunch of epicycles, you can look at an elegant hypothesis backed up by experimental confirmation and 300 years of correlated observations.


The house of cards is only held together with tape after all.

UPDATE 19 December 2017 09:42: Updated model vs. temperature diagram and link due to Internet bit rot devouring the original version.

They told me that if I voted for John McCain ...

... that White Male Patriarchal politicians would threaten to "smack around" "uppity" women.

And they were right!

This is when the idiot media starts hounding Rep. Fred Clark with charges of hypocrisy.  Oh wait, never mind.  He's a Democrat.

Will all Wisconsin "Progressives" please shut up and sit down in the back of the room?  Grown ups are talking.

TheOnesDay® No. 5

It's Wednesday, which means it's time to mock the First Ego, who knows everything you can learn in a book and nothing that you learn outside one.

President Obama was walking along a road in the countryside comes across a shepherd and a huge flock of sheep. He says to the shepherd, "Let me be clear: I will bet you $100 against one of your sheep that I can tell you the exact number in this flock." The shepherd thinks it over; it's a big flock so he takes the bet.

"973," says the President. The shepherd is astonished, because that is exactly right. Says "OK, I'm a man of my word, take an animal." Obama picks one up and begins to walk away.

"Wait," cries the shepherd, "Let me have a chance to get even. Double or nothing that I can guess your exact occupation." Obama smiles condescendingly and says sure. "You are the President of the United States," says the shepherd.

Obama is non-plussed. "You're right! But tell me, how did you figure that out?"

"Well," says the shepherd, "put down my dog and I will tell you."

Remember folks - mockery is Alinsky's most powerful rule.  Now that the Professor has become The Man, show him that The Man is still a ripe target for mockery.

OK, I confess

Holy cow:

We’re one lesbian away from a bona fide Fleet Street “trend”. Further to yesterday’s post, a lesbian blogger who helped unmask the Syrian lesbian blogger as a middle-aged American male has herself been revealed to be a middle-aged American male

And so, to my confession.  I'm not actually lesbian*.  "Borepatch" is actually a middle aged man.  I just can't keep up the pretense anymore.

Or a lesbian, it seems - so long as the story is "too good to check".  And now back to reading through Sarah Palin's emails and trying to find out who's actually Trig's mom ...

* Not, of course, that there would be anything wrong with that.

Dear MSM ...

Will every one of you who ever called Sarah Palin "dumb" please shut up and sit down in the back of the room?  Grownups are talking here.

Do Space Aliens have souls?

Lone Star Parson has an answer.

How I became a gun nut

Jennifer asks how we became gun nuts.  I don't think I am a gun nut.

I'm a freedom nut.

I'm one of those people whose minds changed about a lot of things after 9/11.  That event caused a reappraisal of a lot of old, comfortable ways of thinking: the value of the technocratic elite state, the truthfulness of the media, and the position of the state and its citizens.  In each of these, I abandoned the admiration for the centralized for the admiration of devolved authority.  In this, I was really returning home to the values of the 1960s.

Trust the people.

9/11 showed the bankruptcy of the state, laying bare its incompetence to provide basic security for the people of this land.  This realization cast a cold light on a lot of the old arguments that I had kind of skimmed past before:

"Guns are dangerous."  So are cars.  Lots more people die in car accidents than in shooting accidents.

"You need a car.  You don't need a gun."  You don't need a boat, either.  Boats are dangerous, too.  Per capita accident rates are a lot higher in recreational boating than in recreational shooting.

"This isn't about accidents.  Look at the murder rate."  Yeah, and you think that the State will protect you there?  Fail.

From there, I found myself following some of the gun blogs, most notably Kim du Toit's.  What resonated there was the love of the history of firearms, especially the history of self-reliance empowered by common ownership of firearms.

And so, I see this not as a technical appreciation (although there's certainly some of that), but a moral one.  Owning a gun is a moral statement, that the People have been - and remain - not just trustworthy, but the foundation of the Republic.

I see opposition to private gun ownership as an affront to the People.  What, are they not to be trusted?  Am I not to be trusted?  If so, then the Republic is built upon a foundation of sand.

And if so, who then can we trust with the sole possession of the tools of power?  The same elite that failed so spectacularly in 9/11?  It is to laugh.

None of that requires much in the way of gun nuttery.  Freedom nuttery - yeah, it's full to the brim.

Fly away

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

- Psalm 90:10

It's now been three score and six years since D-Day.  That's a good long season.  Most of the veterans of that maelstrom have flown away, and we wonder how many - even with the miracle of modern medical science - will see four score.

What's astonishing is the number of veterans of Gettysburg who lived to see the 75th anniversary in 1938.  The world then stood on the edge of the precipice, balanced on the knife's edge as it had been in 1860.



75 years is only nine years from now.  I wonder how many won't have flown away by then, to relive that reunion of the Blue and Gray?

Kamelot - Soul Society

Some stories are timeless, and are refreshed each generation as new art forms emerge to renew a story springing deep from the soul.  Goethe's Faust is one such story - the corruption that can result from the very best of intentions.

Kamelot's version of this story, renewed as latter day Rock Opera, inspired #1 Son to go to the library in search of Goethe.  Subversive actually, targeting a new generation with thoughts that all Right Thinking People® recognize as double-plus ungood.

Somehow, I like to think that Goethe looks down on all this, and smiles.




Soul Society (Songwriters: Kamelot)

If my soul could revive
from my carnal remains
what does it matter to me
If it all fades to black
If I’m born once again
then no-one really is free
How could I be condemned
for the things that I've done
If my intentions were good
I guess I'll never know
Some things under the sun
Can never be understood

How can we believe in heaven
Human reason counters all
Ideas of a soul society
my life is just a fragment
Of this universe and all
there must be more than I can see

In the dark we're the same
In the concept of time
We're like a grain in the sand
And we strive for the flame
As if death was our aim
'Cause we cannot understand

How I wish there was heaven
All for one and one for all
a flawless soul society
Our lives are just a fragment
Of the universe and all
there may be more than we can see

How could I be condemned
for the things that I've done
If my intentions were good
I guess I'll never know
Some things under the sun
Can never be understood

How can we believe in heaven
All for one and one for all
Ideas of a soul society
my life is just a fragment
Of this universe and all
there may be more than we can see

Woah

Not only is the world a strange place, it's stranger than we can possibly imagine.  It's a place where people dress squirrels up:

This is Sugar Bush Squirrel, an actual live pet squirrel.  His master dresses him up to celebrate different events.  This was Special Ops Squirrel, hunting for Osama.

Here he is in his Dress Blues.

And here he is wearing more traditional BDUs.  It's not just military stuff, either, although quite frankly this is a little scary:

Enjoy.

Rep. Weiner could not be reached for comment

Shooting buddy Burt left a comment leading me to DamnYouAutocomplete, which had this stunningly appropriate entry:

You see, not only is Burt a fine shot, but he can fix your watches and clocks.  Lol.

I for one would welcome our new Digital Overlords, but am laughing so much that I can't quite catch my breath.

But Rep. Weiner really needs to learn the "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" thing:

Err, not that there's anything wrong with that.  Or something.