Fire and Ice
Der Spiegel examines the chain of events that led to the cancellation of 17,000 flights over Europe, including the diversion of medevacs from Afghanistan and rerouting of the German Chancellor’s flight home. Ash clouds from an Icelandic volcano disrupted flights all over Europe. The question is whether the policy makers over-reacted to the thread. As volcanoes go Eyjafjallajökull was accounted by Icelandic volcanologists as “a weary old man”. It’s recent eruption was unremarkable.
Ash from the volcano’s plume has reached an altitude of only about 10 kilometers (six miles), not high enough to reach the stratosphere … images taken by the Eumetsat satellite … concluded that Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull has spewed 2,000 tons of sulphur dioxide into the air. Pinatubo spouted 10,000 times that amount.
These facts are clear in hindsight. But when the eruption was first reported it triggered a series of remarkable precautionary events driven by predictions from the British meteorology office’s supercomputer. The Telegraph explains how that prediction cascaded through the European bureaucracy.
The decision was based on a computer model operated by the Meteorological Office’s Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre, which suggested there was a cloud of ash covering northern Europe. This prompted a warning from the Met Office, which triggered the wider European ban, via Eurocontrol, the Brussels-based air traffic control centre.
Once the estimate was taken as the best available knowledge, the shutdown of the air transportation system mirrored the spread of the alarm through the system. A cloud of information — whether right or wrong we will examine in a moment — drifted like a virtual ashfall across the continent’s airports. Spiegel takes up the story.
It all began midday on Wednesday, when a telephone rang in Exeter, southern England. Icelandic meteorologists were calling to inform their British colleagues at the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s national weather service, that Eyjafjallajökull was spouting ash and a cloud of volcanic dust was blowing eastward from Iceland. …
The meteorologists immediately put their supercomputer on the job, feeding it measurement data, weather forecasts and satellite images. Fifteen minutes later, they had their first forecast of how the dust cloud would probably spread. A warning was sent out to airlines at 2 p.m., long before the cloud reached the European continent…. On Thursday morning, air traffic authorities closed Scottish airspace. Shortly afterward, the skies above London also experienced a state of quiet such as the city hadn’t known in decades.
By the time the dust settled that single “weary old man” of a volcano had accomplished what all the terrorists in the world had failed to do. The director of Germany’s Cologne-Bonn airport said he had never seen anything like it, even on September 11.
Heathrow, Paris, Frankfurt, Schiphol and all of Europe’s other major hubs came to a standstill on Friday afternoon. Airlines canceled 17,000 flights, while Frankfurt and Amsterdam airports set up thousands of camp beds. Losses for airlines are estimated at up to a billion dollars.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to interrupt her flight home from a visit to the US, landing in Lisbon instead. A Medevac Airbus air ambulance carrying injured German soldiers home from Afghanistan only made it as far as Istanbul.
The military historian Max Hastings wrote that “the great volcanic shutdown was the price we pay for a society that overreacts to any risk”. Hastings argued that societies had forgotten the concept of accepting risk. An accident, no matter how statistically insignificant, could be magnified by press coverage into a Grecian tragedy. The result was that many systems, including those which were unprecedentedly safe, spent huge marginal costs to attain the last word in perfection.
But perhaps risk is the wrong word. Tradeoffs only apply when choosing between outcomes governed by probabilities that are well known. We trade off a certain number of fatal reactions to vaccines because more lives are saved by its use than are lost thereby. But what if we don’t know the probabilities? What if we can’t know the probabilities? This describes the worst examples of over-reaction which Hastings cites, where public policy is made on the basis of estimates, projections or models which are so inaccurate as to be meaningless. Hastings cites fiascos which are less failures to assess risk than to recognize uncertainty:
In 1988, health minister Edwina Currie almost destroyed Britain’s egg industry when she said that salmonella in eggs might cause a human catastrophe – only for it to be later discovered that salmonella could not get into eggs.
In 1996, Britain spent £7 billion killing millions of the nation’s cows in response to the alleged threat of CJD killing humans eating burgers made from cattle infected by BSE. We now know that the likelihood of this was almost infinitesimally slight.
In 2009, the government spent £1 billion on unneeded vaccines against swine flu, which we were told might kill half a million people. The SARS virus, said some ‘experts’, could prove more devastating to humanity than Aids. It was once suggested that bird flu might kill 150 million people worldwide.
University of Chicago Professor Frank Knight described the distinction between risk and uncertainty in these words. “Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated…. The essential fact is that ‘risk’ means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement, while at other times it is something distinctly not of this character … It will appear that a measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.” In other words, Knight wanted to differentiate between risks we could measure and those which we could not estimate. Donald Rumsfeld conveyed the same idea much more eloquently and comprehensively.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.
But Rumsfeld was one of the few officials willing to admit there were limits to his knowledge. He knew there were categories of risk and uncertainty and was prepared to deal with each. Lesser bureaucrats and many institutions are less secure. They simply cannot operate without a Number, even if that Number is hogwash. It was important to pretend to know, to “be in charge” rather than endure the humiliation of confessing ignorance. But all the power of supercomputers cannot save policy makers from the fact that they will sometimes have to face Knightian uncertainty. In those circumstances leaders can sometimes get it wrong and should forgiven their error because they had no choice but to act in the presence of a threat, but in the absence of intelligence. But they would be more easily forgiven if they admitted upfront that they were spinning wheel, turning the cards and flying by the seat of their pants because they had no other choice. Perhaps the most interesting example of a decision under uncertainty is Pascal’s Wager.
Pascal then asks the reader to analyze his position. If reason is truly corrupt and cannot be relied upon to decide the matter of God’s existence, only a coin toss remains. In Pascal’s assessment, placing a wager is unavoidable, and anyone who is incapable of trusting any evidence either for or against God’s existence, must at least face the prospect that infinite happiness is at risk. The “infinite” expected value of believing is always greater than the expected value of not believing.
Frank ignorance is often preferable to feigned knowledge. Mark Twain knew this long ago. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Vanna, spin the wheel.
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I sometimes wonder if the growing aversion to risk in the Western world, at the most basic level, coincides with the lessening of religious faith.
I’m not saying I prefer being in an East African matatu (taxi) where my fellow passengers merely mutter “Shari ya Mungu” (It’s God’s will) when the driver starts nodding off, but you usually get to your destination and it’s never boring.
Unlike Rumsfeld, an unknown but apparently overriding percentage of bureaucrats can never, never, never admit to not knowing “something’. This sad trait will soon be the downfall of the EuroCrats, followed a few months later by Barack UnBush and his cronies, too.
Thank God none of them were wagon masters attempting to settle the American west during bygone days. Otherwise the term “scouts” would never have been born.
They are usually either under-prepared or they over react to such situations. What is the lesson here ?
I think that the 19th century mind parasites created by the likes of Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Darwin (to name but a few) not only killed off God but much of the best of being human as well.
You don’t like reality? No problem. If you have the right connections you can just make up your own.
I’m beginning to believe that Western culture is suicidal because people instinctively know that it has so badly screwed things up over the last century or so that only a complete intellectual and spiritual redo can make it right.
Into what, Peter?
Two emotions move markets, greed and fear. Perhaps they also motivate civilizations. The cumulative impact of the first half of the 20th century is that the West moved from a civilization of greed to one of fear. Oh for the return of greed.
I had assumed the reason was that there might be children on the airplanes.
The aspect decreasing religiousness in the West which is responsible for the increase in risk aversion is the inability of otherwise adult humans to deal maturely with mortality.
Atheists who are terrified of death will naturally be almost completely risk averse.
no mo uro
Well that is the question, isn’t it?
You just gotta’ throw out an anchor and hope it sticks long enough to figure out what’s coming at you. For me it is Orthodox Christianity. No Enlightenment, no Reformation, no popes, no additions, no subtractions. You get dropped into the world 2,000 years ago and get to decide for yourself if all these people are crazy or if something really weird just happened.
Hmmm. First thing I thought of when considering “risk” vs “uncertainty” was the AGW crowd. So willing to spend at least several bazillions of dollars to abate something that ‘may or may not’ have a disastrous effect. They don’t even bother getting out the back of an envelope to do any BOTE calculations as to whether adjustment to or abatement of the circumstance is the proper response.
They are in a search for “THE NUMBER”, which in this case is ‘average annual global temperature’. A search for unicorns if you ask me. That number is a reduction to absurdity of several thousand(?) adjusted temperature readings from many weather stations, each of which has its own peculiarities regarding its reported temperatures. To produce one number from such a variety, from ‘we know better than the readings, so we will adjust it based upon our experience’, from throwing away records that don’t fit a preconceived notion of the world is just hubris.
” Measure with a micrometer, cut with an axe.” Or chainsaw, as you prefer.
After much verbiage, the point is they don’t know their unknowns even exist, and won’t consider their existence as it would preclude getting their ‘number’. Does anyone else perceive a similarity to a religious seeking, such as for the Holy Grail?
tom
Better to shut down the whole world than chance being wrong. And so why thus, BECAUSE most of these people believe they have no other job possability. The JOB is so important to them that nothing else matters. Therefore the answer is to force term limits upon them. Max govt. job is 10 yrs. Then no one becomes indispensable and we reintroduce turnover into the process. Same with politicians 12 yrs. max.
If there is no metric for success except to not make an error then we need to re-engineer the system for possative accountibilty.
Nick Taleb wrote extensively about this in one of the few absolute must-read books of the last few years, “The Black Swan”. He postulated (with much evidence) that the “unknown unknowns” will always be the greatest source of instability to any system, and that the effects of these “unknown unknowns”, which he called Black Swans, will ultimately overwhelm the effects of all the known factors. One way to describe these is to see them as systemic flaws that can never be prepared for since they can never be anticipated, or even if anticipated not taken seriously. He also made the point that there are so many interactions going on that events that only have a one in a thousand chance of happening still happen all the time. Assuming that highly improbable = impossible is a flaw that dooms any attempted calculation of risk.
One can of course limit risk through common sense methods, such as restricting obviously risky behavior. But the idea that risk can be measured and controlled mathematically is generally a laughable conceit. While some immediate risks of course can be mitigated, overall risk ultimately depends on factors we cannot percieve and cannot control. (which is something rational humans have known since ancient days) Living rationally includes acceptance of the fact that there is some unknowable level of risk in every moment and every action, and there is nothing we can do to eliminate that.
Lest anyone think Taleb was just being pessimistically philosophical, he devoted a large part of his book to showing why the statistical methods used by the Wall Street quants to mitigate for risk were mathematical nonsense bordering on fraud. He published this to widespread scoffing in the financial industry – until a year later, when all the derivatives based on the methodology he had criticized began to collapse, in ways that their makers said were impossible.
The unknown unknowns again – in an inflationary world, who would ever have thought that real estate prices could actually drop? So no one told the computers that it was possible, and the computers pumped out reams of beautiful numbers to justify all the dreaming that went along with them. And that perhaps puts a finger on the greatest limitation of computers and computer models – if they assume anything is possible, then they are likely to generate nothing but nonsense. The range of calculations must be limited to be useful. But if they are instructed to assume only what their programmers tell them is possible, and to ignore what their programmers believe is impossible, then all of the programmers limitations of perception are built in to every function from the start.
Something tells me that this is the core reason why “free will” is important as a founding principle of true intelligence. Without it, no new thoughts or perceptions can ever be generated, only endless echoes of the original programming. And it may be why Kurzweil is wrong, and true AI will never be achievable.
But who can ever know – no one, until the events themselves play out in real time. And then, in hindsight of course, it will all appear obvious.
Peter Boston wrote: “I’m beginning to believe that Western culture is suicidal because people instinctively know that it has so badly screwed things up over the last century or so that only a complete intellectual and spiritual redo can make it right.”
Oswald Spengler, in his seminal “Decline of the West”, made the point 100 years ago that all cultures and civilisations reach this point eventually, and that our time was just about up. Let me see if I can recall his theory of cultural progression – First a great Religion infuses and inspires a people. A great Religion creates a great Culture. (one can argue about the interaction of these two, since they often seem to go hand in hand) A Great Culture creates a great Civilisation, and a great Civilisation then creates a great Empire. Empires then proceed to slowly destroy the religion, the culture and eventually the civilisation until nothing is left but a dry husk of form. When this stage is reached it all collapses and must be replaced by some new strain of human history. Babylonians, Egyptians, Mayans, Romans – all great cultures of our past appear to have followed this trajectory. No reason to think that we’re immune, or that we are any bit smarter than the people at the end of those cultures who tried so desperately to save what they had built.
And with regard to the bureacratic activity, there is another factor at play here besides simple risk avoidance – look at how many functionaries can add to their own personal power and status by using the manufactured emergency as a means of grabbing control and using it to dispense favors. I suspect that this is the real reason for the Age of Overhype that we live in today. As with most endgames, it’s really all about power, the last thing left to fight over in a top heavy system.
“Never let a crisis go to Waste”, after all. And if you don’t have a crisis handy, simply invent one. For someone who thinks that “reality” is only what they can get people to believe, why not?
The company I work for is in the business of risk management. The first thing you need is a number that defines the threshold of acceptable risk. For space launches that number is based on the hazard presented to the general public from air travel; space launches cannot increase that risk.
Once you have a number, you can perform all kinds of analyses to figure out what the real risk is for a given operation, because you now know how to evaluate the results. You can do analyses for hazards such as blast effects, falling debris, and toxic plumes. You need a prediction of the nature of the hazard, the probability of occurrence, and the number of people affects. Then you crank out a number and if the expected casualties are less than your predetermined threshold, you are Go.
There is an old rule of thumb in the space business. If you have a special test you want to run, figure out what you will do if you get Result A and what you would do if you get Result B. If the answer is that you would do the same thing for both A and B, then don’t run the test.
The problem we have in so many things is that we don’t have a threshold, and indeed the very concept of one is alien to political thought.
no mo uro: The aspect decreasing religiousness in the West which is responsible for the increase in risk aversion is the inability of otherwise adult humans to deal maturely with mortality.
You’re kidding, right? The entire phenomenon of religion is the result of an inability of otherwise adult humans to deal maturely with mortality.
The concept of an afterlife and an eternal soul that goes on long after the brain has turned to pudding can be attributed to the simple paradox of trying to think about a time when one is no longer thinking.
The Evangelical Protestant doctrine of a pre-tribulational rapture of “true believers” where the living are simply beamed up to heaven is a case of everybody wanting to go to heaven but nobody wanting to die to get there.
Before Greek philosophy trickled into Jewish thought in the centuries after the construction of the second Temple in Jerusalem, there was no belief in an afterlife, only a mature, adult acceptance that man has a finite span in time. Eccl. 9:5 “For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.”
This. Is. Why. You. Don’t. Put. Bureaucrats. In. Charge. Of. Anything.
There are two components in risk evaluation: fist, the probability of an event; secondly, the cost of the event. The valus is one multiplied by the other.
Regardless of Rummy’s known unknowns…, there is one known that weighs heavily on the beaureacrat – his career.
Because, to a beaureaucrat his career is of infinite value, no matter how small the probability, he will close down the throw of the dice.
That is all that happened in Europe this week.
ADE
The meteorologists immediately put their supercomputer on the job, feeding it measurement data, weather forecasts and satellite images. Fifteen minutes later, they had their first forecast of how the dust cloud would probably spread.
And these learned alarmists use the very same crystal ball super-duper-computer to predict our doom-by-global-warming.
T/15; –i’d say it’s about authority. To be an ascendant culture, to be a civilization with a future, the people have to cooperate willingly with an authority somewhere. Rome, the south and central American, the middle eastern ancient cultures, almost any you pick had troubles but no existential troubles (weather, or the king’s army next door) until the loss of the people in the the authority feedback loop.
A priest class which failed to provide rain and crashed a culture –is the rain’s fault, or the priest class which overpromised and caused maladaptation? A warrior class which lose the city gates, was the fatal blow lost power or lost will? Rome still had the physical and human assets, it just decided to quit trying not to dissolve. If any of that is true, the religion then isn’t so much a retreat from rationality as the thing which provides an authority. If so then to tear it down may be progress toward rationality and humanism, but it is also and perhaps far more importantly a dissolving of the essential cultural glue.
Which is fine, i guess, provided no other better-glued (if more primitive on that account) peoples come a-marching over the hill.
If a jet encounters a certain amount of ash, it will be severely damaged. If it isn’t forced to land off airport (that is, crash) it will require millions of dollars in repairs that will ground it for months. If this happens to a lot of planes, the backlog of repair work could make it years. How much ash? It’s not clear. A smaller amount might not actually seize the engine, but could reduce its life significantly and require much more expensive repairs when overhauled.
I hope the lesson is research needs to be done. Somebody needs to take an old jet transport- there are plenty waiting to become beer cans- and fly it into an ash cloud, measure the concentrations, and assess the damage. Of course some method must be developed to measure ash composition and density by satellite.
I know a guy who was stuck in Europe with a very expensive airplane, and he was looking to get out VFR. I recommended he wait.
Well. First of all, nobody yet knows if there is or isn’t a huge danger out there, or ever was, and if that danger is that a plane would fall out of the sky, or simply that it would wear out a jet engine prematurely, in days or weeks instead of years. We still don’t know. Now, if they grounded all these planes, and yet nobody went up AND TOOK SOME SAMPLES and analyzed them, then that’s pretty stupid. Billions of dollars of revenue disrupted, and nobody could locate a few tens of thousands for some analysis? OMG.
Second, I’m surprised nobody seems to jump on the idea that this panic is more about an exercise of power by ambitious bureaucrats, than it is real fear or caution at all. Some of these UN types worrying about CO2 and swine flu, playing a well-known organizational game in which the most excited wins, irrespective of the facts, just makes the eyes to roll and the head to shake. But it’s not the Fall Of The West, unless these faceless types are somehow given credence by real people.
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PB what *are* you going on about, “Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Darwin”, good grief, each of those things is not like the others.
Get some Predator class drones, or something a tenth the size, equip them with appropriate sensors and filters, and start flying them around the purported ash cloud, send the samples to the local universities – and aerospace companies. That volcano looks like it’s going to stay around for a while.
Finally, isn’t it just about as stupid, or likely, if airlines pretend there is no problem, and allow themselves to be rushed back into flying by irate passengers and greed, only to find they destroy billions of dollars of engines and/or airframes? I remain bemused by the whole thing, and will remain bemused until and unless some actual science comes in on this.
The entire phenomenon of religion arises from those pesky auditions/visions that people receive every now and then, often unsought and unbidden, from God. The wishful thinking and various eccentricities that distinguish one sect from another arise when the humans who receive these attempt to transmit these revelations to the rest of us. It is also unfortunate that not all auditions and visions
are from God but are introduced by other actors in an effort to
confuse the situation as much as possible.
No. 18. Insufficiently Sensitive: great point! The super duper computer will output garbage if its input assumptions are garbage.
We need Whiskey’s input on this thread – this hysterical over-protectiveness is part of the feminization of Western culture. I even saw it at the dog park this week, where a lady told me that my German Shepherd was being overly aggressive toward her Pit Bull. After said Pit tried to mount my boy dog! I ask you!
Nicholas Taleb has contributed greatly to a contemporary understanding of risk: but his trading strategy would lead a junior trader to getting fired from his job – it involves buying deep out of the money puts and calls that usually expire worthless – rolling over, or buying the position again is appropriately called ‘bleed’.
No. 4 Peter Boston, I agree with much of everything else you say here, but you need to reread Kierkegaard. He deserves much better than to be tossed into your rogues gallery. His confrontation with a materialist, mechanist world as a man of faith is passionate and still worth reading. His exploration of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac when the Lord required it of him is likewise great stuff. His ‘leap of faith’ is a dramatic version of Pascal’s wager. I’ll credit your Eastern Orthodoxy, and go so far as to say that Soren would have been better off Catholic than Lutheran, but bottom line, he was a very good Christian philosopher.
When the priest asked Voltaire on his deathbed to renounce the Devil and all his works the great man replied that “Now is no time to be making new enemies.” Earlier he had written a description of the Quakers in England that admired their personal qualities but condemned them for their “Enthusiasm.” Much of the Liberal zeal to control the world by defining and restricting the possibilities of the future can be tied to a sense of religious enthusiasm. This can be traced back to the excesses of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation movements. Unfortunately the swing away from that into an arid skepticism and secularism offers no basis for a productive law abiding and tolerant society. What is needed is a willingness to remain modest regarding your own grasp of the unknown but still committed to the principles and mechanisms that have transmitted the moral values that are proven to work. Obamism is exactly the inversion of what works as it claims a wholly specious and arrogant predictive power coupled with a preemptive determination to deconstruct existing economic, social and political structures.
The great danger of ideologies like Socialism or Scientism is that they claim a predictive power. Lincoln Steffens almost said “I’ve seen the future, and it works.” If the authority of the State is wedded to the power of elites and the possibility of evaluating results to correct their models is pushed into the future rather than based on a valid historical record then dissent will be crushed. What we need are social and political systems that always leave room for the insubordinate voice willing to remind us of GIGO. As Rumsfeld noted we do not know what we do not know. What is catastrophic is when we refuse to consider what we should know and build our models to justify policies that could already be adjudged failures by experience and which can only be seen to be failures in the future after the damage is done.
Here’s question for some of our learned specialists.
Obama signed an executive order that raised the CAFE standards for US automakers to 35MPG by 2015. This is projected to remove some amount of particulate by 2020.
How does this amount compare to the particulates being spewed into the global atmoshere annually by the Icelandic and other volcanos? I mean, if the amount removed by increased mileage is less than injected by vulcanism, we’d immediately have to increase the MPG requirements to 100MPG, no?
21 Josh: Isn’t that amazing? None of those governmental air agencies would fly a drone into the cloud, take samples, and analyze them. The reliance on computer models instead of scientific experimentation is becoming exasperating. It is truly a lazy man’s easy way out. Or possibly a better way to create crises.
While volanic ash is clearly a problem for jet engines, is it still a problem for piston driven engines?
Yes the ash is a problem for piston engines as well, but a jet simply breathes a lot more of it, and with less filtering, and the cloud strangely enough is at altitude and not at ground level.
geoffgo, I see the EPA passing new volcano regulations by next year, why not?
iris @ 29.
Insofar as the piston engines require combustion air, it is a problem. However, the wear is probably confined to the cylinder rings, which can be replaced pretty easily.
Back in the days of sail, ash would not be a problem. Ditto the age of steam, since external combustion engines don’t trap the ash, but blow it back up their stacks.
Turbines and impellers are vastly efficient, but their parts move at very high speed (far faster than the aircraft moves) and so even particles with little mass still generate a lot of kinetic energy (m x v squared).
And that energy gets absorbed by the moving parts, abrading their surfaces. Uneven abrasion can throw the turbine or impeller out of true with catastrophic results. I think that is the mechanism that is feared.
I have an acquaintance who runs a middling sized business.
He does not overthink decisions, reasoning that the most important things–after the obvious–are neither known or, at this point, knowable.
He does his homework and thinks about it, but compared to some of his counterparts, he’s just one step above flipping a coin.
Does about as well, worries less.
11 docbill: HEAR, HEAR!
The idea of term limits on ALL government employees is brilliant!
LOTM–I thought that quote was from Machiavelli, not Voltaire, but I may be wrong.
But it is a good quote, and sensible too.
So, it looks like the precautionary principle has run amok.
Now, the question is who pays for the scientific research to determine which densities of ash are safe for jet engines and which densities of ash are unsafe for jet engines.
Should “big government” do the research? Should universities and research laboratories apply for government grants to conduct these controlled tests? Should the airline industry pay for the testing? Should the airplane manufacturers pay for the testing?
In reality, I expect taxpayers to foot the bill. The question is whether the money comes from a surcharge on airplane rides or whether the money comes out of a general appropriation.
This entire air travel shutdown in Europe not only exposes the horrors of the precautionary principle, but it also exposes the politicization of scientific research. For example, politics made “anthropogenic global warming” seem much “sexier” than conducting engineering tests on the density of volcanic ash a jet engine can tolerate.
The wind tunnels exist to measure the effects of ash. It is a question of will. And cash.
And just think. It was neither media analysis nor philosophers nor national elections that truly challenged the precautionary principle in Europe – it was an ash cloud.
Neo-Inquisition. Torquemada lives again.
The heretics: the conversos, the moriscos, the Lutherans, the skeptics, the dissenters, etc.; the neo-Inquisition is a deep-sea trawler; its net is filling; its net is a mansion with a room for everyone; in its house there are many ….. autos.
Fear vs Hope.
…-
“B.C. climatologist sues National Post
Skeptics and believers in climate change could battle in civil court”
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2010/04/21/bc-andrew-weaver-national-post-lawsuit.html
Josh @ 30: “I see the EPA passing new volcano regulations by next year, why not?”
They (the EPA) will be forced to pass new regulations since existing ones were insufficient to prevent the current crisis. I remember being incensed in 1980 that Mt. Saint Helens had the temerity to blow its top without first filing an EIR. Even today, I believe existing law still does not address this deficiency since volcanos continue to do damage to the environment with impunity.
wS/25; i too am a Kierkegaard fan –his meta message –about owning your own truth as far as reason can allow –is very kind –very golden rule-ish. and the ‘leap of faith’ is hopeful even for the hopeless-feeling. Just for two recent examples, i think Vonnegut and the Coen bros are Kierkegaardians –Vonnegut may have gotten a little ‘out there’ late in life but his body of work is suffused with acceptance of human nature as-is and the kindness we have to see because it’s there. Anyhoo K is an optimistic sunny sorta guy, unlike he’s oft thought to be, prob due to his dolorous profession.
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In the North African Campaign of WWII the allies played hell with fine dust in the aircraft engines –the wear and performance loss, not so much catastrophic failure like a jet engine turbine coming apart. Anyhoo the desert air forces modified extremely quickly, to outsized air filters –you can see ‘em in the pix –big suckers.
I am always bemused by people who think that Christianity is an easy way out inspired by the fear of mortality, and that this completely explains the phenomenon of religion. #24 foont is absolutely correct that numinous experience is instrumental in the rise and persistence of religion.
Now I don’t doubt for a minute that many people become Christian because they contemplate mortality and can’t face it. But I also know for a fact that many people confront the possibility of an infinite intelligence before whom they will face judgment and run from that into atheism. Failure of nerve is an equal opportunity seducer.
I am a Christian. Christ wasn’t kidding when he told his people to take up their cross and follow him. I find my Christianity both terrifying and exhilarating. Facing the frightening injunction to be perfect as God is perfect has many times tempted me to atheism, but if I took that out I would be running away from the love of my life. Life is difficult no matter which road you take.
Best,
Richard
Nothing new about all this: Garbage in, garbage out.
39, Buddy Larson, Thanks. That’s what I thought. It’s not that piston engines are immune to the effects of ash, but such engines are easily made ash-tolerant by the simple addition of an oversized air filter.
There is a second volcano, next to the one that is currently erupting, that has historically always erupted when the current one has erupted too. Can’t remember its name in Icelandic, but its eruptions have historically been around 10 times bigger. Right now, it is still buried under ice and is not visible. It has been about a century since its last eruption and it has historically gone off about every 80 years. Could this volcano be the black swan that some of us are waiting for?
But all the power of supercomputers cannot save policy makers from the fact that they will sometimes have to face Knightian uncertainty.
Wait. They use supercomputers to do their modeling? I thought it was color crayons and a legal pad.
I loved that CRU computerized climate model. Whenever the “model” made a mistake, they just tortured it. They treated the model like Bill Murray treated that one student volunteer in “Ghostbusters”: when they did not like the answer, zap — a corrective was applied. And they did not often like the answers.
This approach results in known crap that we now pretend is a known known. This is “known told crap labeled as fact.” Then you got the “known untold crap” that is the known crap that you don’t want anyone else to know about (namely, that your facts ain’t facts but crap). Then you got “Known unknown crap” which results when you are so far into your own crap — as is everyone you talk to — that you don’t know it’s crap. Then you got the “unknown known” crap, which is crap you have to make up to cover up the other crap, but you ain’t yet sure what that crap is going to be. Problem is, you got alot of different crap to choose from. You got Kraparoo crap, which is fast hopping, fast acting crap that goes by so quick and changes direction so often no one can catch it. You got Krap-a-ooze crap, which is slow moving but comes from a huge, bottomless vat of crap in a continuous stream and just sort of inundates everything in its path. And you got Krap-a-pallooza crap, which is like a giant celebration of Crap! A Carnival of Crap! But don’t eat the candied apples.
Holden Caulfield worried about phonies. He should have worried about crap.
Where was I? Oh. Right. Of all the crap out there, the bestest crap is the crap produced by rogue PhD’s using a supercomputer. This is just my opinion, of course.
All I’m trying to say is, be careful out there.
The currency of government is its ability to get out in front of a crisis and save us all. It is their promise to their constituents and trumps any other charter. Unless it is an existential threat from Iran or some other man-made disaster then it is only a political hindrance that the government would rather not dwell on. The government’s knee jerk reaction is to control liberties of the populace, not challenge the legitimacy of its tyrannical peers abroad, therefore the problem with Iran is intransigence of western democracies and the problem with uncontrolled illegal immigration is those damn white racists.
In the engineering disciplines risk is computed to be probability multiplied by consequence, the higher the consequence the lower the threshold for probability to require someone to react. The problem there is putting numbers on these consequence and probabilities. I would think that a proactive approach would be to put an aircraft into it, or at lease sniff out the edges of the plume. Hell, aircraft fly into hurricanes. Can’t say that isn’t a risk.
I admit to a slight satisfactory shadenfreude feeling knowing that these self-proclaimed masters of the universe were unable to get this one right. Certainly the climate models are infallible and can be used for the reordering of the world, taxing the successful, and putting hard-caps on liberty itself. Nice to see how that works on a much smaller level where we can see the moving parts more easily.
The Rubicon, sir, cross or not
Perhaps some risk entails
The omens, sir, look not so hot
So say the scanned entrails
The weather in the Channel, Ike
Is making up to blow
The weather boffins say don’t strike
They say we shouldn’t go
The Delaware is filled with ice
It’s snowing, Christmas Eve
Who knows if we shall pay the price
Too risky I believe
Now Orville thinks that he can fly
Like robins, jays and shrikes
I told him not to even try
Should stick to making bikes
Just look at Og, that’s not his trade
He’s crazy, I do feel
It’s such a risky bet he’s made
No one will buy a wheel
And so it goes, and so it went
For history doth show
For every crackpot there’s a gent
Who says you shouldn’t go
w/42; The Japanese/American feller –hosts the science show on Discovery channel (name lost to Al Zeimer) –was on tv yesterday saying that the ‘other’ volcano eruption is not a given –the dual eruptions are historically sporadic. He said this one is acting like the 1821 eruption. I missed whether he said the ‘other’ one went off then or not –
W/45;
But for every risky hero show,
a thousand others fell below;
all those unknown fortune riskers
who went right out and lost their whiskers,
whose names in no book ever go.
***
They said it couldn’t be done,
but with a smile he went right to it!
He tackled that job that ‘couldn’t be done’!
He couldn’t do it!
Governments are always under prepared and always over react. I don’t think you can fill a room with politicians and do anything on time on budget and on target.
The causes for modern risk aversion could be attributed to our litigious legal system. On the other hand, government, which is not bound by liability, must protect the individual bureaucrat’s credibility and career standing while they stand for the legitimacy of their agencies mandate. Cops always did this in the past. Agencies are more bound to this paradigm. Look at the NOLA politicians circling the wagons to blame the Feds, oh no, George W. Bush, for the disaster and the chaos that ensued after Katrina. Every bureaucrat is hide-bound to promoting the worth of their tax spending agency and just when you forgot one another crisis arises to justify spending the money that is no longer available. Expect more crisis’s in the future as the flailing last gasps of the department of redundancy whimper into fiscal bridge funding. A fire investigator starting fires, why’d they do that?
As Buddy says, in WWII in North Africa the Spitfires and Hurricanes had very large air filters added to handle the dusty conditions. So did the BF-109′s. But you don’t see the same thing on P-38′s, P-40′s, P-47’s, and P-51′s because, unlike Europe, the USA actually does have dusty conditions in some areas. Our aircraft already had the filters built in. Similarly, our fighter aircraft all were longer ranged than the European ones because it would have been at the very least rather embarrassing to not carry enough fuel to get out of Texas.
After 6 June 44 the Typhoons the RAF sent to France had the same problem, operating from dusty strips, and less obvious filters were added to their intakes as well.
I was thinking that what we should do is keep around some of those old KC-97’s, C-118’s, C-121’s and C-124’s for situations such as these. Outfit them with suitable carb intake filters, put a bunch of spares in the cargo compartment, and start hauling people across the pond. You could have made a bundle!
“Assuming that highly improbable = impossible is a flaw that dooms any attempted calculation of risk.”
Reminds me of Douglas Adam’s quip: “if something is infinitely improbable, it will happen.”
The Black Swan of AGW could well be something like this: “We have reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide worldwide by 30%. This was done, in part, by allowing the gamma emitting particles to increase by a factor of one million.” Thank god, or man anyhow, for this reduction in plant food.
RWE/50; i sometimes wonder about –well say the P-47, with eight M2s and hardpoints for 1000 lbs of rockets and/or bombs, cost maybe a hundred grand in 1945, maybe today you could get a dozen for one Warthog –i know, pilot training is a major cost –but, low, slow, armored, and no heat target, what a ship for Afghanistan!
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0418/Iceland-s-Eyjafjallajoekull-volcano-is-nothing-to-Angry-Sister-Katla
…sez, the Angry Sister will likely erupt …oh hell ….
josh
I have not done enough reading or thinking yet to provide a cogent explanation but my sense of it from what I have read is that the aggregate of 19th century intellectual development has changed the way that people think so that process has become an end unto itself and has displaced consequence as the only basis of determining “correct” human behavior.
I accept the correction on Kierkegaard.
Richard (#40)
My sentiments exactly.
Jamie Irons
Rumsfeld penned one of the great postmodern poems of our time.
Buddy #52:
Just think, the P-47N, or better yet, the P-72, would have been the perfect airplane for Korea, but even by then we had too few 47’s around to use.
In 1955 a guy went to Tinker AFB and purchased a couple of dozen or so P-47’s as surplus. Then he drained the gas tanks of the high octane fuel and sold it, making enough off of that transaction to pay for the airplanes, which he then scrapped.
For that matter the 50 P-38’s we had in Korea would have been very useful, but at the insistence of the US State Dept, in order not to anger the North Koreans, we destroyed all of them a month or so before the commies invaded. And somewhere along the way the records of that act got destroyed too….
Speaking of records, I am wondering, considering how badly the financial meltdown affected Iceland, if all that “volcanic ash” might just be worthless securities they dumped into that volcano to cover up their stupidity…
Oswald Spengler, in his seminal “Decline of the West”, made the point 100 years ago that all cultures and civilisations reach this point eventually, and that our time was just about up.
Spengler wrote that the West was declining a century ago, but his assumptions proved wrong. We moderns think we have reasons to believe that the West is definitely declining now. I think I see “decline” all around me, but — in the grand scheme of things — am I, and others, right, or are we just so many little Spenglers declaring doom too soon?
You’re kidding, right? The entire phenomenon of religion is the result of an inability of otherwise adult humans to deal maturely with mortality.
Beware of tidy, antiseptic, intellectual answers to what religion “is all about.”
I’m an agnostic who used to be a rather militant atheist. I concluded it was useless and silly to categorize religion as a delusion. Too many people have done well by it, and it has inspired a good deal of beautiful expression in many forms that has uplifted humanity despite the many wrongs done in the name of religion.
I remember Eric Clapton talking about how he and Cream had “absolutely cleaned up” when playing at a 1960s concert at the Fillmore alongside Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, and the Buffalo Springfield. He said, “It was as though they hadn’t listened to the proper music.”
Lots and lots of us haven’t listened to the proper music for over a century now. But instead of an impossibly bad rendition of “Summertime” we’ve ended up with a culture that’s afflicted with panic attacks and wild narcissistic swings from delusional grandiosity to paranoia.
Far from a useful delusion (self-refuting as that is to begin with) good religion provides a grounding in reality that buffers us from such madness as we’re seeing. When the modern world left its moorings at the turn of the last century, all sorts of demons were let loose. And here we are, just like we are supposed to be:
“They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.” 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12
The problem with Pascal’s Wager is that it is always a bad bet.
Betting on the Wrong God, if there is indeed only one, or even more than one, is possibly worse than not betting on any God at all.
Do you burn in hell if you simply don’t believe, based on anything you’ve seen, versus if you wrongly choose to believe in Jesus, when it turns out there was only Allah, and he sends you to hell. Or perhaps you choose Yaweh and Moses, and it turns out Odin and Thor run things. Or perhaps its Baron Samedi.
All religions are not the same, all beliefs are not the same, all conceptions of God are not the same. The only spirits I ever saw were in a glass. Even in New Orleans. The only ghosts, my own memories, fading all the time. My only connection, dreams, which are so personal as to be uncommunicable to anyone else.
—————
Hyper avoidance of risk is indeed hyper-feminine. The flip side to hyper willingness to take risk. Osama felt there would be no comeback for 9/11, and largely his bet has paid off. However, what will be the payoff for the latest Moscow subway attacks, or those in Beijing. Putin and the hard men of the Chinese Politburo are not Obama, nor the American elite and media. Putin killed half of Chechnya. What will he do now?
And avoiding risks by never getting out of bad merely makes you a good candidate for a heart attack.
Women have many, MANY virtues. Chief among them, compassion, tenderness, consoling, open-ness, and a healthy skepticism of the virtues of risk. But like every strength and virtue, if taken to excess, it produces vices as bad as that the virtue seeks to avoid.
We see this issue in the design, operation, and regulation of nuclear power plants. The bureaucracy in the US sometimes makes valid contributions to nuclear safety. But the expensive and time consuming exercise of applying for and obtaining a license for a new reactor can take over 4 years – for a design that has already been evaluated and certified on a generic basis.
Most of the effort goes into CYA paper.
On the other hand, one of our major tools is probablistic risk assessment (PRA). This is an extensive, sophisticated and expensive engineering tool for predicting melt down risk and how one can get to that sorry state (and beyond). It has its value, certainly, but its weakness is external events; those drivers outside the plant not under management control.
The underlying premise of the European volcano response was based on ignorance – how sensitive to this kind of ash from this volcano are modern jet engines. We still don’t understand that very well but it sure seems that the bureaucrats panicked.
Whiskey #61 – great call:
“Women have many, MANY virtues. Chief among them, compassion, tenderness, consoling, open-ness, and a healthy skepticism of the virtues of risk. But like every strength and virtue, if taken to excess, it produces vices as bad as that the virtue seeks to avoid.” The last sentence sums up the argument.
Just as post-9/11, we’ve sunk a ton of money into “Homeland Security” instead of all-hazards management.
Thanks to all those who stepped in to put Teresita’s bigotry into its place.
Not much to add to your comments, except that anti-religious (especially anti-Christian) bigotry, in my experience, is the last resort of those whose personalities combine insecurity, hubris, and arrogance about the way the universe works.
It would appear that the various authorities controlling airspace over Europe over-reacted. But I am not at all sure that anyone knows whether that was the case or not. Volcanic ash in some concentration will do serious damage to a jet engine; in some rather greater concentration it will stop said engine. I have never seen any data about where the limits for either are.
However, I personally have one admittedly imprecise datum. Every day for the last week or so, I have had to clean an unusual amount of dust off my car’s windscreen, which is of course at least 20,000 feet below the altitudes of interest. It seems at least plausible that the dust is volcanic ash. By the way, I live in Northern England.
One more datum is that on several occasions volcanic ash has caused, or nearly caused, fatal accidents in the air. To quote Paracelsus: “The poison is in the dose.”
Whiskey#61
“Hyper avoidance of risk is indeed hyper-feminine.”
You neglected to leave out society’s corollary quality of (hyper)feminized, which is emasculated.
They’re related, but not the same – and both are to blame.
“neglected to leave out” should have been “neglected to mention”.
No edit function from this machine.
Risk is part of evolutionary biology. A nomadic life is more fraught with risk but its rewards are an every changing bio-system that never wears out under the nomad’s footprint. They say that the Polynesians populated Easter Island around 400AD. It is a speck of an island thousands of miles from any other land save tiny Pitcairn Island which is 1,260 miles away. How many intrepid travelers sailed past land only to starve in the angry seas? Not every journey had a happy ending. I’d imagine less than even did.
In defense of Oswald Spengler, he was NOT predicting the imminent decline of the west in his work; he was predicting the ultimate decline. He was clear that at the time or his writing (about 1910) the West still had not entered a true Imperial age, although it was about to. (Defined as the unification of all major parts of the West into one dominant cultural/political unity) He didn’t try to predict how long an imperial age could last; Rome’s lasted for 4 1/2 centuries, after all. He simply said that it would come, and it’s arrival would lead to an inevitable collapse not just of that government, but of the entire civilisation. Not the end of humanity, of course – sooner or later a new civilisation always arises from the ashes of the old. But that will take centuries, with a new dark age before the next light shines.
Germany certainly tried to bring this about, and then Soviet Russia after them. Both failed thanks to the uniqueness of America, which can quite rightly be pointed to as the only source of power great enough over the last century to withstand these tides. And as long as America looked like it was going to retain it’s dominant military position, these forces remained in check.
But what now? Who now truly believes that America is going to retain the power to stop the next round of would-be rulers who come to test their strength? If not now, then in 30 years, or 50, when we have fallen into complete corruption and our armies are as toothless as Europes are today? In fact, one can make the case that Spengler has been *exactly* on the mark with regard to Europe; it is America alone that has kept the West going for at least 7 decades now. How much longer can we continue?
And they will come. They always do.
69. wws
In defense of Oswald Spengler, he was NOT predicting the imminent decline of the west in his work; he was predicting the ultimate decline.
Thanks. I stand corrected.
bob, LOTM
Voltaire did not say that sentence, for the good reason that he ask for a priest on his death bed, not because he was worshipping the official religion (not only catholiscism, but all the religions, he was a Deist like most of the enlightened that are at the origin of our both “revolutions”), he had fought it all his life long, but because he didn’t want to be burried with the poors, the unknowns, the renegats… like it was the use for those that had no “social” recognition
Whiskey/61. I like a man who takes a stand, and you are certainly one of those. And I mostly agree with your anthropology as presented here and your reading of history.
But dude, those are some truly convoluted metaphysics.
(not only catholiscism, but all the religions, he was a Deist like most of the enlightened that are at the origin of our both “revolutions”),
Only some minor objections to the notion that the American Revolution (I can’t speak for the French one) was led primarily by Deists. First off, one has to define “Deist,” and I won’t try to do that here. It is true that the more historically prominent founders were not devout, but they weren’t necessarily Deists. Jefferson and Franklin, very likely, and Tom Paine may even have been an agnostic. In Paine’s case however, he drew upon the Old Testament to help justify the notion of unalienable natural rights, and he did so in the opening paragraphs of Common Sense. Some lesser known founders were more religiously inclined, and even devout, and John Carrol of Maryland was a practicing Catholic. Most typically, The founders were men who simply didn’t attend church or engage in religious activities except on occasions that demanded it. Like their European counterparts, they sent their wives and children to church. There is even documentation of clergymen lamenting the frequent absence of some of the Virginians among the founders.
As to the people they led: a majority of Americans were practicing Protestants, and a lot of them were fairly devout. Just before the revolution, the American colonies had gone through a major religious revival that they shared with the British — the Great Awakening, spearheaded by the likes of Jonathan Edwards. This revival and its sentiments helped to foment rebellion against the Crown, so it would be innacurate to say that the revolution was only the product of the Enlightenment and its most ardent (Deistic) parcticioners. The freedom of religion aspect of the 1st Amendment was added in large part because the various Protestant denominations took their differences very seriously, and their was also a desire to protect the rights of the newly re-enfranchised Catholics, and also to protect Jews.
yesterday morning there was a light layer with dots of rain and white dust on cars parked outside, like there are re-brown dust when a Sahara hurricane happens.
Such sahara dust can be like fog, we saw such a fog on canaries Islands, and planes were flying in spite of the implied danger, just that the fog was right on the ground, planes had to dive
“The coward dies a thousand deaths–the brave man dies but once.”
And that is why the cowards hate and envy the brave. Simplistic, yes, but I believe it to be true And when you put cowards in charge of the nation don’t be surprised that they go running off with their tails between their legs when the wolves come running in, and never be surprised when they make deals with the wolves as to how you should be allocated and eaten.
59. Don Rodrigo — Well said.
I too am agnostic, and have increased my appreciation for the wonderful things our shared Judeo/Christian heritage has given us in the West. It is easy to get into the weeds when only looking at the ways Christianity has run astray of its tenets, but without the overarching structures of Western ethics, the foundations of which are enumerated in Judaic law, we never would have developed the staggering treasures of plurality, democracy (with help from our Greek forebears), rule of law, and perhaps even our form of capitalism which requires a certain adherence to those Judeo/Christian ethics to perform at its best. The Chinese understand capitalism extremely well – but are fairly lacking in certain ethical frameworks which make it clear, for example, that pirating intellectual property is ultimately self-defeating, or that personal ownership of property is the sine qua non of true wealth creation. China’s economic system is a pale simulacrum of the West’s structure. They ape our forms and structures – but until myriad innovations begin to pour out of their civilization as they have done in ours for millenia, I’d put our system above all others by every measure.
On the topic of agnosticism — I cannot believe in the formulaic anthrocentric godheads which world religions envision — and yet I gain a greater understanding of the nature of humanity through the Bible, or religious writers such as Milton, Dante, Aquinas, than I do from anyone writing from a purely secular viewpoint. Having said that, I’d posit that Christianity is so pervasive in the West that even those radical secular atheists who disavow any possibility of a God do so strictly through the lens of Christian reactionism — they are, in short, profoundly products of Christianity, and so therefore can’t really get away from it in the end…
69 wws
“But what now? Who now truly believes that America is going to retain the power to stop the next round of would-be rulers who come to test their strength? If not now, then in 30 years, or 50, when we have fallen into complete corruption and our armies are as toothless as Europes are today?”
Well…I know of about three million or more Veterans of our wars that think that we can and will retain the power. Not counting the hundreds of thousands of active duty Military.
In the coming years many will be elected to our various political offices. Most will believe in doing things by the vote and by the political way. But there will be millions standing by if that way doesn’t lead this Republic back to sanity and conservative ways. They will assure that we do not fall into corruption and never worry about them being “toothless”.
The fight has just began, prepare yourselves and your families.
Papa Ray
DR@58: I think I see “decline” all around me, but — in the grand scheme of things — am I, and others, right, or are we just so many little Spenglers declaring doom too soon?
Bill Cosby has an ancient skit where he talks about the harsh trials of his childhood:
he had to WALK to school,
TEN miles,
BOTH ways,
in the SNOW,
BAREFOOT, and
BACKWARDS.
While my sympathies align with the general consensus of cultural decline in the west and a measurable amount of concern that the post-WWII generations might not be on speaking terms with The Right Stuff to survive an environment that could abruptly return to the physical constraints of the 19th century, I have to balance that with the observation that a healthy component of the post-war demographic shows every sign of being raised right, with the clear bright vision of what we used to call ‘decent people’ but also competent and responsible people who operate within some form of moral charter. I see more and more of them in positions of authority and influence – late 30′s/early 40′s and they’re doing good work.
The Washington political class will be a tougher nut to crack, but in ten years we will see a different crop of candidates.
m@72: But dude [whiskey], those are some truly convoluted metaphysics.
The modern dialectic has expanded to include some strange profiles. Whiskey reminds me of Pat Buchanan. I recall listening to a Buchanan interview quite a few years ago. He was talking about economic policy and making a lot of sense, with facts and figures to support his reasoning – very reminiscent of Newt Gingrich at his best. Then, suddenly the subject segued into immigration policy and Buchanan veered directly into nutball territory. It was bizarre to watch and listen to. Whiskey reminds me of Buchanan. One is well advised to tread very carefully.
On a lighter note, I wonder if the gravitas of Whiskey’s message yields, like a marinating ice cube, to a Sarah Palin wink that suggests a level of boredom not seen since since we perf-a-taped the living room walls.
while the civil planes were stopped the NATO planes were pursuing their flights
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_VOLCANO_JETS_DAMAGED?SITE=NYMID&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
the funny thing, Russia didn’t buy the “ash conspiracy” Medvedev went to Kczynski burial ceremony by plane.
infos taken from http://www.voltairenet.org/article165055.html#nb2 site, which is generally a sulfurous source, but in the occurence it had interesting links and infos
I’ve noticed that the left doesn’t seem to define science as it was explained to me in 7th grade. They seem to be blessedly ignorant of gathering data, making hypothesis, preparing multiple experiments with controls, contrasts, and mains. That be reproduced by other scientists to test the validity of a theory.
Because of the chaos and unknown unknowns of large scale human activities many of the participants use the term “Art.”
The Art of War, The Art of Investing, and etc. While these Arts have general rules, they are derived from experience, history, and statistics. In application, things end up being more dependent on instincts based on experience and education but seeming to come from quick processing by the subconscious as there is never enough time to do a rational complete analysis of what is happening.
Day traders are interesting. They start out by making dummy buys to test out whatever system they are going to try. Then they start making actual buys. Then things start falling apart for the majority of them. When you try to get the system that the successful ones are using often as not it seems that they can’t explain it. They sit and watch the tickers, read financial news, and then make their moves.
Marie Claude (#79): “Russia didn’t buy the ‘ash conspiracy’ Medvedev went to Kczynski burial ceremony by plane.”
So if I understand correctly, you are saying that the “ash conspiracy” was a KGB plot to ensure that foreign leaders wouldn’t be able to make it to Poland?
Bon sang, tout est clair! (So to speak.)
“I’ve noticed that the left doesn’t seem to define science as it was explained to me in 7th grade. They seem to be blessedly ignorant of . . .”
Good point. The left is virulently anti-science, for the most part, if you think of science as a technique for further defining material reality through impartial observation. Probably stems from its bedrock belief that everything is just a (relativistic) matter of perspective, i.e. that the only truth is that there are no truths.
At any rate, all you get from them is vomiting in the Woman’s Room when Larry Sommers points out an obvious sex difference, unfounded and unshakable notions about human sexuality, psychology and anthropology, a religious attachment to discredited Darwinian ideas, polarity therapy as a healing breakthrough, and projected accusations about the anti-scientific bias of traditionalists.
Bob, ne te fais pas plus “bête” que tu n’es !
I tried to post a “US Air Force in Europe” link, forbidden ?
anyway there was a Nato training from 12/04 until 22/04
link in Voltaire site, I recommand to read t’em (most are in english)
Suite à l’éruption du volcan Eyjafjöll, la fermeture de l’espace aérien dans la zone orientale de l’OTAN a été décidée sur la base de recommandations infondées de l’organisme britannique de surveillance. Celles-ci ont été immédiatement rejetées par la Russie, mais appliquées par les États de l’OTAN à leur seule aviation civile, tandis que l’Alliance faisait voler ses chasseurs bombardiers, pourtant théoriquement plus vulnérables. Les vérifications ont été retardées par les autorités, malgré l’impatience des compagnies aériennes. En définitive, la gestion de cette catastrophe naturelle a été délibérément catastrophiste
Following the volcan eruption, it was decided to close the aerian space of the oriental NATO zone on the basis of unfunded recommandations from the Brit survey organisation. These were immediatly rejected by Russia, but followed by the NATO states civil aviation, while the Alliance made its jets fighters fly, though,theorically, these planes are more vulnerable. Verifications were delayed by the authorities, thus in spite of the impatience of the aerian companies. Definitly the management of this natural catastrophe was deliberatly catastrophic
une soixantaine d’avions de l’Alliance participe à une vaste opération de tests de nouvelles armes tactiques liées au bouclier anti-missile
60 Alliance planes participated to a vast operation of tests of new tactical arms tied to the anti-missils shield
A friend sent me a link concerning the resignation (apparently in disgrace because of the disastrous Khost operation) on Wednesday of the CIA’s deputy director. Some passages echoed wretchard’s recent theme of “risk and bureaucrats,” so I thought I’d share.
“Kappes transformed CIA operations into a liaison service,” a former senior CIA operations officer told me. By that, he meant that Mr. Kappes no longer insisted that CIA case officers recruit agents and clandestine intelligence sources themselves, but rely on the cooperation and the offerings of “friendly” intelligence services willing to take the risks…
In his book, Mr. Jones describes several incidents with Mr. Kappes, who consistently blocked case officers from recruiting sources in order to avoid risks. It was all part of a risk-avoidance culture, Mr. Jones says. “Kappes was a master at making small operations appear momentous and making vast numbers of government employees appear busy.”
Hee…where is whiskey and others – they need to read this:
“A socialist Cry for Immigration Reform”
snip…
“My challenge to black folks, and to people of color and civil rights folks, are as this: the face of immigration needs to be a lot blacker than it is. Because once they can frame the immigration debate as about Latinos, crossing some mythical border, when in fact we have second and third generation black folks in this country who come from immigrant families. But they’re not standing up and marching with their Latino brothers and sisters, and saying “I am an immigrant too””
Yea sure.
Papa Ray
http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2010/04/19/daily10.html
there will be some good earnings for the lawers soon
Don rodrigo (73) re our founders: I think of them like our cowboys, who may not darken the doors of the church outside their marryin’ and buryin’ but they have nothing to prove to any man. They know God knows somebody has to get the work done.
Morton Doodslag (76), re “Christianity is so pervasive in the West that even those radical secular atheists who disavow any possibility of a God do so strictly through the lens of Christian reactionism — they are, in short, profoundly products of Christianity, and so therefore can’t really get away from it in the end… ”
One of the least recognized truths of our age. (and very well stated)
And, tangentally, a reason the value of hispanic immigration is so often misapprehended as somehow dangerous to conservatives and good for progressive causes, when in fact the good people from Mexico who come to stay bring our roots back home to us, in all their original robust, virile, sacred glory.
I don’t want to be buried with the poors or the renegats neither. Who did say it, MC, somebody must have.
I think in Pascal’s mind, his famous wager, which originally came from some Islamic fellow centuries earlier, was just a proslytizing tool. After all, he’d had his night of enlightenment sometime earlier. “Certainty, certainty”–no need to wager if you already know.
She just won’t stop giving:
Fmr ACORN head calls Tea Parties “bowel movement” and claims “they’re coming after you”
snip…
“Any of these groups that says, “I’m young, I’m Democratic, and I’m a socialist,” is okay with me. You know that’s no light thing to do — to actually say, I’m a socialist. You’ve got to know, actually, we are living in a time that’s going to dwarf the McCarthy era. It is going to dwarf the internment of World War II. We are right now in a time that is going to dwarf the era of Jim Crow and segregation.”
Here is the Video.
She must have a Crystal Ball…nah, she just talks to Obama’s wife.
You know, the one that hates white America.
Papa Ray
I’m a theist and Stephen den Beste is an aetheist. However I agree with him that the existence or non-existence of a diety can not be proved by the use of logic, but it is a mater of faith or belief. Somewhat parallel to Godel’s Theorem.
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/05/Beliefinatheism.shtml
According to one article I just read, Voltaire’s last words were “For God’s sake, let me die in peace”–everymans wish. I’m still searching Machiavelli.
Toad, the problem with human logic is that it is, well, human. And I think you’re abandoning your post as an apologist prematurely.
The existence of God seems to me to be demonstrated, not by faith or belief, but by subjective experience. Like the FACT that a sunset is beautiful, which is not demonstrated by logic and not really a matter of belief or faith.
Of course, once experience produces belief, then understanding of many things not otherwise grasped becomes possible. And this would explain Stephen den Beste’s lack of understanding of such basic truths.
The existence of God seems to me to be demonstrated, not by faith or belief, but by subjective experience. Like the FACT that a sunset is beautiful, which is not demonstrated by logic and not really a matter of belief or faith.
Faith or belief don’t demonstate a damn thing. Experience is better, but an atheist can appreciate the sunset. Best of all is some transformative experience, like in Black Elk Speaks, for instance. A theophany of some sort. Or the transformative experiences William James talked about. Faith and belief just lead to trouble, and, in the wrong hands, murder. I can’t stand Bible believing Christians, though their hearts may be in the right place. God, suffer for your own sins, will you not?! Quit this putting your shit over on Jesus to handle, he don’t need it, don’t want, didn’t ask for it, it ain’t his problem.
PR @ 54: I have not done enough reading or thinking yet to provide a cogent explanation but my sense of it from what I have read is that the aggregate of 19th century intellectual development has changed the way that people think so that process has become an end unto itself and has displaced consequence as the only basis of determining “correct” human behavior.
Your complaint is ancient. The archetype would be the medieval scholastics, and their “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
(which is actually in the context of discussing what is abstract, and I find quite interesting, but one can see how it would befuddle the masses)
And pre-Socratic skeptics made fun of the pre-Socratic sophists 2500 years ago, just as you look for sophistry in the 19th century.
But one man’s sophist is another man’s philosopher, so you have to be careful with stuff like that, and your list was an incredibly mixed bag.
/end bloviating lecture
Your complaint is ancient. The archetype would be the medieval scholastics, and their “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”—–b.s. Show me where that ever, ever happened. It’s total bullshit, they never, ever argued that. You don’t know what the hell are talking about. It’s disgusting, to talk like that. It’s a theological urban legend, you unread fool.
A little perspective:
George Carlin “Saving the Planet” and other insights.
So, So True.
Papa Ray
“b.s. Show me where that ever, ever happened. It’s total bullshit, they never, ever argued that. You don’t know what the hell are talking about. It’s disgusting, to talk like that. It’s a theological urban legend, you unread fool.”
Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, by Thomas Aquainas.
See Angels.
These are no fools here.
And, tangentally, a reason the value of hispanic immigration is so often misapprehended as somehow dangerous to conservatives and good for progressive causes, when in fact the good people from Mexico who come to stay bring our roots back home to us, in all their original robust, virile, sacred glory.
Yeah, right.
Therefore several angels can be in the one place. This makes some sense, but I don’t see the word pin there. Nor the word “dancing”. And, if all the angels are different, each a species to themselves, why would they hang out together?
And on a pin too, of all places. I see it as an effort to make a mockery of old thought, which was very good in it’s own way. On a pin, I’d think your angel ass might get pricked. Ouch! And I thought angels were immaterial, what are they doing dancing, dancing!, on a material pin?
73 Don Rodrigo: Excellent points. I’d add that although most people think of the French philosophes when the Enlightenment is mentioned, there was also a Scottish Enlightenment, which did not have the strongly anti-clerical tint of the French one. The Scottish Enlightenment probably influenced the colonists at least as much, if not more, than the French, since the Americans were English-speaking Protestants.
(Scotland really was a remarkable little country in the 18th and 19th centuries – a barren, isolated place that nonetheless managed to produce philosophers, scientists, inventors, and engineers by the score. The Scots literally built the British Empire. Now, alas, they’re a shadow of their former sturdy Calvinist selves, utterly addicted to the government teat. )
Well, let the angels dance. I’m going to bed, I hope my dreams do as well, dancing without getting pricked. owie, my toe!
That Rumsfeld quote, the unknown unknowns, that’s actually based on Stephen R. Covey’s motivational business books. A boss at my old job used to quote from that all the time.
I could have edited all of bob’s posts but I didn’t. Where can I cash in my karma points?
Right here, at bob’s Karma Point Redemption Center, if you use the certificate today at Wal-Mart, you get 5 percent off. The best Redemption offered in America these days.
i think he was bobbing along in fire-water creek
the so-called Scottish Enlightenment was incredible –a not over-long but still good wiki section –scroll down to ‘industrial revolution, clearances, and enlightenment’ is here.
How many angels on the pin buddy? And just not in Texas. But really. I respect old thought, thinking, there’s not much difference between old thought and new. And the wager was just an old idea, from the Islams, recycled, and meant nothing to Pascal. If you know the “truth” you try to convince others, best as you can. Like with a wager, which is really a lame idea when you think about. Are you so undignified, that you want to wager your very being on some such idiotic theological casino bet? Hell, you are smarter than that.
Let us wager this bet–that Mo was the final prophet of GOD ALMIGHTY, and you have everything, EVERYTHING, to win if it comes up Mo, and if it doesn’t, it’s No More, no Mo, and you have EVERYTHING to lose. That was the original wager of the Islamic from which Pascal got his wager. Will you take that bet, Buddy?
I don’t give a fig about Zeus, goodnight.
Infinitely solipsistic bob.
“Lord, give us the wisdom to utter words that are gentle and tender, for tomorrow we may have to eat them.”
from Prophet “Mo” Udall
Infinitely solipsistic bob. Nonsense, my wife and I have worked our asses off for other people, for little pay, working with the disabilities. Grow up, we are talking theology, not sociology. Let us hear what you think about the wager, and the sources of human knowledge, if there is any. Perhaps, an idea like expressed in “BioCentrism” makes some sense. huh? After all, it’s a relative of Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer.
Bob, can’t take the bet until we figure out a way to ascertain the winner and loser.
The ‘big’ bet, we all already took it i think.
But anyhoo the so-called ‘god gene’ goes back as far as we can see into pre-history –so, the bet, or side bet, on rationality would be between whether mankind has always been irrational (with G_d, God, a god or gods, a diety, a higher power) and is just now becoming rational (with secularism), or the other way round.
Good luck arguing that one to any conclusion!
for me, if i hadda put it into words, it’d be ‘accept the mystery’ –
Bob, I am sorry you are so poor.
I’m sorry he was so rude.
2x/114; i’m sorry for all of us. what other creature is born knowing it must grow old and die? why couldn’t we be born old and dead and just keep getting younger and immortal? it’s a pisser, and i want every one of you to go to your window, right now, and throw it open, and holler as loud as you can, “I’m Mad As Hell and I’m NOT Gonna TAKE it Anymore!”
That oughtta do it!
***
MD/115; sometime firewater him heap good, sometime him heap bad
Hell Buddy, I don’t know, really, a damn thing, and can’t ever get to sleep. You can bet on that, and win.
it’s a pisser
You ain’t a shittin’ God Almighty, who’s have ever thunk it would have come to this, when we did our very best? And our daughters have tatoos?
i hear ya –sometimes only a good sense of Yuma can help.
*I KNOW EVERYTHING*
I’m just eeking out my vast, ever-changing, unlimited knowledge of eternal past/present/future lessons incrementally so as not to overwhelm y’all in between my van-down-by-the-river bong-hit enlightened existentialism and my “Git ‘er done, truther, Bush-hater, rah-rah Islam” youth pep-speech.
Disgruntled pep-talker, have shoes, will match; have undies, will ignite.
Alla dinga-linga-ding-dang-dong. poop
9/11? What 9/11?
My sense of Yuma is that it’s dry.
The best thing about ‘now’ is that it isn’t yesterday or tomorrow.
Make of ‘it’ what you will.
You’ve got all ‘now’.
we’re translucent membranes
we’re trance-loosened meme-brains
Well, is Foxboro Baptist bob the one the lady was looking fer in the barber shop? Or is he the notorious bob-tailed nag who came in second while the bay was next to last?
Question of the hour: Can there be such a thing as faith without religion? I sort of doubt it.
‘Twas Gordon Dickson who illustrated that faith is a vital ingredient in survival of the human species. His ultimate “Friendly” (or man of faith) was named James-Child-Of-God. In a situation where reason was irrelevant, James-Child-Of-God did what blind faith told him to do. As a result, the inevitable was avoided and
key reasoning individuals preserved. Victory over darkness again became possible.
And did James-Child-Of-God remind me of any real-life individual? Does the name “Whittaker Chambers” mean anything to you? Convinced that he was leaving the winning side for the doomed side, he went ahead and
the USA is still here today because of him. ‘Nuff said.
i still think, had senator Joe mccarthy, on new-fangled TV –live and being seen by the American people for the first time –had a snappy comeback to Joseph N. Welch’s question, “At long last, sir, have you no decency?” –something perhaps along the lines of “Sir, have you no memory –of World War Two?” –then much more of the housecleaning recommended by Mr. Chambers, could have been done. Ahh, those ‘pivot’ moments, he who is ready when the lightning strikes will move the balance point of history.
Another example of how faith motivated men to run contrary to everything reason was saying to do: “A Time To Stand” by Walter Lord. What if they had not spontaneously and unanimously decided to stay where they were for the full thirteen days?
None of us would be as well off as we are or have the kind of fighting chance(s) that we do have.
Does all this mean I disparage reason? Not no, hell no.
However, in and of itself, reason is not enough. It may well prove to be that faith without reason is a pain in the posterior but reason without faith is non-survivable. So Mote It Be!
Buddy, Joe McCarthy’s problem was poured out of a bottle.
Acute alcoholism prevented his being effective. Had somebody grabbed him by the seat of the pants and the hair of the head and dragged him to 90 meetings in 90 days, he
could have come back and done some good. But in his condition, he was quite incapable of snappy replies to Welch or anybody else.
Now where did Tail-Gunner Joe go after death? To Heaven of course. He developed a wet brain and had about three years of the DTs before liver conditions did him in. He had spent his time in Hell!
(There but for the Grace, would have gone little old me.)
BTW, what had prompted that Welch/McCarthy exchange, was McCarthy’s bringing up that one of Welch’s staffers had been a member of one of Hoover’s ‘possible communist front’ referrals, the National Lawyers Guild. Welch was defending the staffer, his own firm, and himself by inference. The senator should have stood his guns, rather than being blown back by the BOOTB verbal thrust. He probably knew it within seconds –but –no second chance, the moment had passed, and the crusade had crested. Armistead had reached the stone fence at the angle, but there was no force behind him.
Dave…
At the end McCarthy was under morphine, by prescription, for terminal cancer.
It was the morphine that caused him to be late to his own hearing — famously recreated in the Clooney Loony Left Show.
Lordy, Lordy, stay up late enough and you never know who might drop in. Howdy, blert.
Two off-topic things here: I took a few minutes off to catch up with my essential readings of every day. The ones I am lost without. (a) Mallard Fillmore (b) Mandrake the Magician and (c) The Ghost That Walks, aka Phanthom. Too bad, Rick and Hipshot are defunct. But you can’t have everything.
Anyhoo Buddy: Hope you have some spare time come October. Am planning to stop in Midland for Air Sho,
proceed to Big Bend from there and then on to San Antonio for reunion. One of the groups trips will be to Nimitz Museum on Friday 14 Oct. After Saturday banquet in Santone on Saturday we will sojourn to Laughlin/Del Rio for a day and a half in order to discuss the differences between P38 and T38. Think your shining face might be available somewhere along the way?
BTW: Google up 1412 West Ohio Ave in Midland. Then I will give you three guesses as to who was the FIRST little boy to reside there.
The weird thing about atheists is that they must live with the certain *knowledge* that there can never be an answer to the question “why?”. What’s weirder still is, they’re okay with that.
Why are we here, why anything exists, why… all this? They can ask “how” all day long, but “why” – doesn’t make sense to ask.
Dave, could that have been GW Bush at that address?
D/126; that’s an intriguing thought –it always has been, at least back to Homer. What good can you do yourself dead, is one side of it, and the other is, well you’re gonna be dead anyway, at least you can leave a mark. Those thirteen days take a big place in Valhalla, that will forever be for sure. i agree on that ‘so mote it be’ thought. Survival has no doubt far more times been wrestled away from prudence by that old ‘oh what the hell’ –
didn’t know old Joe had it that bad –poor guy. at least he tried to get ‘er done before he fell all the way in, hey –
***
Nimitz –Oct 14 –i’ll recognize your group i’m sure –i’ll be wearing my P-38 beanie with the two counterrotating spinners –!
***
heh –well MY Bush story is i met papa once in houston when i went to a fundraise with my dad –for the 80 election. he said ‘nice to see young people here” and i, smart ass and at a loss, siad, ‘well it’s nice for us to see you OLD people here” –and he and his whole group wandered off laughing.
Now how can I rush off to slumberland with the lovely Karen Yvonne on the thread?
Actually, GW Bush was the second little boy at that address. One guess down, two to go. Remember you are looking for the FIRST little boy.
i was thinking the same thing –what a lovely name –but sleep is sleep –
(the first –hmmm —Geronimo?)
Thank you, Dave, for that sweet thought.
Shoot, I thought I had it. I give up already, who WAS the first?
Here, a lullaby to rest your mind in preparation for slumberland: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEGgoi6zawg
Well, I am holding eyes open with toothpicks and it looks like Buddy went to the hangar already.
So I’ve no choice unless I want to fall over on the keyboard.
Can you imagine the look on faces next fall when the old P38 pilot with me (a) asks the same question and then (b) tells them that he brought said little boy with him?
Anything for a laugh. Even telling you how my Godfather flew Smokey the Bear from New Mexico to Washington DC. ‘Night now.
Philo of Alexandria took a peculiar approach to theology to analize the Unchangeableness of God. That bit of scribbling IMO scrapped sociologically the book of Genesis like a bulldozer leveling a bee hive.
Notable for the definition of peace of mind and…
“Happiness was first defined by Democritus as the calm and stable condition of the soul, which is untroubled by fear, superstition or any other passion.”
Being the fruit of suspense of judgment the Stoic doctrine that what the vulgar reckon as good things are really things indifferent.
IOW, The uncreated is indifferent, but my quiet mind depends not on indifference but acceptance of this curse of freewill which is to question the nature of god and not the nature of man.
From the link…”To suppose that God really is like a man involves the unspeakable mythology of the impious, who profess to ascribe to God the form of man but in reality credit him with man’s passions. But Moses’ one object is to benefit all his readers, and if the men of body cannot be schooled by means of truth, let them learn the falsehoods by means of which they will be benefited. They need a terrible master to threaten them. And so to these two doctrines correspond two attitudes of God’s worshippers, fear and love. To them who conceive of the Absolute without any mortal part or passion, but honour him as he is, belongs the love of God, and the fear of God to every other.”
Personally I find no thrill in gambling, but I have been known to place a bet.
Philo of Alexandria took a peculiar approach to theology to analize the Unchangeableness of God. That bit of scribbling IMO scrapped sociologically the book of Genesis like a bulldozer leveling a bee hive.
Notable for the definition of peace of mind and…
“Happiness was first defined by Democritus as the calm and stable condition of the soul, which is untroubled by fear, superstition or any other passion.”
Being the fruit of suspense of judgment the Stoic doctrine that what the vulgar reckon as good things are really things indifferent.
IOW, The uncreated is indifferent, but my quiet mind depends not on indifference but acceptance of this curse of freewill which is to question the nature of god and not the nature of man.
From the link…”To suppose that God really is like a man involves the unspeakable mythology of the impious, who profess to ascribe to God the form of man but in reality credit him with man’s passions. But Moses’ one object is to benefit all his readers, and if the men of body cannot be schooled by means of truth, let them learn the falsehoods by means of which they will be benefited. They need a terrible master to threaten them. And so to these two doctrines correspond two attitudes of God’s worshippers, fear and love. To them who conceive of the Absolute without any mortal part or passion, but honour him as he is, belongs the love of God, and the fear of God to every other.”
Personally I find no thrill in gambling, but I have been known to place a bet.
Funny, I’m a Baptist and I got my mickey mouse degree from Dallas Baptist University. Survey courses of the Old and New Testament were required and history courses had a lot of the history of religion in them.
One of my instructors who had been to Nigeria on missionary work and several other students got into a discusion on faith. I liked the instructors opinion on faith. It doesn’t matter so much on how much you have, but where you put it.
There were a lot of discussion on the difference between mysticism and faith. The failures of logic that led to schisms and heresies in the past, Gnosticism and other such.
So I really get a kick out of amateurs advising me on my religious beliefs. They have such faith in logic.
Salt Lick,
That “Ishmael Jones” book is on my list, sounds fascinating (and from what I can gather, mostly accurate).
His book just came out on paperback, if anyone else is interested:
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Factor-Dysfunctional-Intelligence-Culture/dp/159403382X/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_1
buckets — Yes, it does sound fascinating and I hope I find time to read it, too. Made more interesting to me because the link was send by a friend who used to do that kind of work. I gotta wonder if Khost-like disasters had something to do with the step-up in Predator activity. I mean, if they blow themselves up at a welcoming party in their honor, what’s the use?
Cheers,
Sorry if I came off as snarky or superior, Toad (assuming your comment was directed at me). You’re right, I’m an amateur. And I was reacting to your seeming acquiescence in the face of atheism. But was I also wrong in my analysis of the logic/faith/experience thing?
The “angels on the head of a pin” argument which has been mocked for centuries actually combines two fairly interesting questions, one theological and one scientific. When these are examined seriously, you can see that the scientific question was one of the stepping stones leading to our current understanding of atoms and particles.
The question came out of the early efforts inside the Roman Catholic Church to combine theological theory with scientific exploration. What we percieve as absurdity is just a good example of why the questions need to be split into their separate realms. But once separated each question can lead to quite interesting conclusions.
First, the theological question: do hypothetical spiritual beings, here referred to as “angels”, have a discrete physical reality? From a Christian standpoint, this is actually fairly easy to answer – “angels” are seldom mentioned bit players in Christian scriptures, provided with no explanation and no sanctioned background. (everything you’ve heard probably comes from Milton) Therefore, a Christian is almost certainly free to believe anything he wants about them, including deciding whether or not they even exist. Most people do seem to have an affinity for the idea, and that may or may not have some cosmic significance. That’s another thing you’re free to decide for yourself.
Second, the Scientific Question: what is the smallest unit of space that a unique element of our physical reality can occupy? Rather than “angel”, use the word “particle”, and you can see where this leads scientifically. What is the lower limit of existence? How many particles can fit on the head of a pin? Trying to learn the answer to this question leads to the theory of Molecules, and to the need to develop microscopes to see just what’s going on in the microworld. Then it leads to theories of Atoms and Elements. For a while, those were thought to be the smallest units – but then we found protons, neutrons, electrons, and a host of subatomic particles. Now we’re down to quarks – is that the lower limit? We don’t know yet, we’re still working on it.
And thanks to the discovery of brownian motion, we know that all of these particles do indeed “dance” constantly. So the answer to the question, slightly rephrased: How many particles can dance on the head of a pin?
More than there are stars in the universe. And that’s a truly fascinating answer.
wws (#143):
Superb comment.
It occurs to me that when statements like the one concerning “angels” that you analyze have become a target of reflexive and traditional mockery, more often than not they ought to be examined more closely, as their original meaning has probably been corrupted and/ or completely lost.
Jamie Irons
If angels are spiritual beings, and that is the idea, and I am not mocking the idea, actually I kinda believe in them, if they are spiritual beings, it would seem by definition they do not take up space. Therefore, ‘how many on a pin’ would seem to be an illogical question, as a pin has space, and angels don’t occupy that. Did I not read somewhere, that angels are all different, each a species to itself? If we, as Coleridge said, are just beginners, the lowest, as far as we know, of the self reflective sort, and if self reflection is the beginning of spiritual life, then maybe we are beginning angels, who knows? I wasn’t mocking angels, I was mocking the old crime of saying they used to debate how many on the head of a damned pin.
I’ve been reading a book “BioCentrism” by a Dr. Lanza that maintains that consciousness is first, the rest follows. Debunks materialism, debunks reductionism. Time and space are our creations, for experience. The way we perceive things, and our perceptions are all we have, but it is leading somewhere. He has interspaced many quotes, quite good, by Emerson and David Thoreau to this point. It takes off from Berkeley, through Hume and Kant and that divine man, Schopenhauer. We are just beginners. In it for the experience of it, and to grow.
102 Donna V:
(Scotland really was a remarkable little country in the 18th and 19th centuries – a barren, isolated place that nonetheless managed to produce philosophers, scientists, inventors, and engineers by the score. . . .
They were a remarkable country well before then. One aspect of the Protestant Reformation was the desire to reduce and/or eliminate intermediaries between God and Man, hence the emphasis on reading the bible. Scottish Protestants formed “public schools” for the very purpose of teaching children to read the Bible. It would only follow that someone who could read the Bible could read all manner of texts as a result. The Scottish (Presbyterian?) contribution to the notion of educating the coomon man is incalculable.
87 Tina
And, tangentally, a reason the value of hispanic immigration is so often misapprehended as somehow dangerous to conservatives and good for progressive causes, when in fact the good people from Mexico who come to stay bring our roots back home to us, in all their original robust, virile, sacred glory.
The Spanish presence in the New World has shadowed America since well before it ecame a nation. Even Jamestown’s colonist were constantly looking over their shoulders for the Spanish. They were, in part, founded as a bulwark against Spanish expansion. Lewis & Clark were shadowed (at a distance) by Spanish troops, and the Spanish influence in our evolving culture in the West was huge. As to many of the Mexicans, illegal and otherwise, who live here in the U.S., a whole lot of them are Pentecostals rather than Catholics.
Heard the other night on hannity a black guy give a definition of racism in the context of a white stanford running back being slimed for being white by a pro scout. (most running backs in the professionals are black these days.)
the (black)tv commentator defined racism as prejudice plus (official) power. Black guys have been running this definition for years so as to make the point that black people cannot be racist because they don’t have (official) power.
Now on the other foot the argument looks a little different.
I think it reasonable to say that everyone on this board has prejudices. That’s natural as breathing. And you can see the prejudices of everyone after awhile. But no one on this board has (official)power–(except Wretchard.)
Can one infer from this that no one on this board is can be racist? (except Wretchard)
No. rather what one can infer from this –is that the charge of racism is right about in the same category as the charge of homophobia. That is, the charge is more of a reflection on the person who does the charging than on the object of their charge.
For example, was Joe McCarthy racist? Heck even anti Semitic? These were the sorts of charges that were hurled at him at the time. And they stuck for decades. But time has worn them off.
These days we think of tail gunner Joe as a true patriot –albeit poorly tempered & misunderstood. ( imho Less well known was that McCarthy’s public anti communist hearings began and ended within weeks of the beginning and ending of his weekly meetings with JE Hoover & that McCarthy’s relationship to Hoover was very much like Hoover’s relationship to the NSA.)
The Scots were smart, but why didn’t they inquire more deeply into their own native traditions, rather than let themselves be taken over by an alien, foreign thought process, and give up their individuality? They let it go, individuality, and bought into a corporate religion, where you are a member, only, of a church, a synagogue, or a godamned mosque. And nothing of yourself. I think we should try to get back to the older European tradition, which was alive once, and is now mostly buried. Where you don’t have to be a member of some self defeating group, groups being always self defeating. Where you might, kinda, be yourself! and not take God’s Word from some tradition or other. If the mideast blows up, it’s their own damn fault. They will have gone the wrong way. The corporate way– and I hate your guts, cause you disagree with me a little. Therefore we blow up the world. I’d rather be Nez Perce.
Charles, what’s funny is that if black people don’t have offical power, what is Obama? This reminds of Valerie Jarrett’s recent exhortation to group of liberal activists to “Fight the Power!” That’d be who, exactly?
buddy @113: for me, if i hadda put it into words, it’d be ‘accept the mystery’ –
Or, “Let the Mystery Be” in Iris Dement style.
Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they they all came from
everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go
when the whole thing’s done
but no one knows for certain
and so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be
Some say once you’re gone you’re gone forever
and some say you’re gonna come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Saviour
if in sinful ways you lack
Some say that they’re comin’ back in a garden
bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I’ll just let the mystery be
Some say they’re goin’ to a place called Glory
and I ain’t saying it ain’t a fact
but I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory
and I don’t like the sound of that
I believe in love and I live my life accordingly
but I choose to let the mystery be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awmgpZFXHfk
On the the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s always been a derisory question meant to ridicule an aspect of acedemia. It mentions angels only because it comes from a time when theology was heart and center of acedemia; the point of the question is to highlight the tendency of acemedics to get caught up in trivial, frivolous, or even misguided details.
I was taught the phrase came from theology itself, anyway. The angel-pin question has never been a serious one of theology. Rather, the charge originally came from the military leaders of Byzantium during the final seige of Constantinople. The Byzantine’s organizational incapability to respond to the threat meant, for military leaders, that they could not organize a sufficient response to the approaching Muslim forces. The charge was that barbarians gathered at the gates, literally, while the court wasted its time debating how many angels danced on the head of a pin.
Take out the angels and rephrase the question in terms of antropogenic global warming — it’s that kind of thing. What’s ironic is that those who use the phrase today are most often intellectuals who mean to deride religion in some way, yet unkowningly they are usually exactly of the type the phrase itself targets.
edit — “I was taught the phrase did NOT come from theology itself, anyway”.
My edit function’s gone missing somehow.
151. Cowboy
Its not so funny when you hear American Moslems hurling the charge of McCarthyism.
Keith Olbmermann, the new Joe McCarthy
what’s amazing is that this comes from a liberal writer, disgusted at the way Olbermann
forced MSNBC to summarily fire fellow liberal Donny Deutsch, for the crime of Deutsch daring to say openly that Olbermann was just as inflammatory as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. To prove how noniflammatory and under control he is, Olby demanded that Deutsch be fired on the spot, and MSNBC meekly complied.
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2010/04/keith_olbermann_deutsch_msnbc.html
“Well, the 24 hours are up, and here I come to write once again about what a reckless TV figure Keith Olbermann is — and how irresponsible MSNBC and NBC News management are for giving him a national platform and the network’s credibility to spread his innuendo, invective and smears. Olbermann tries to talk like he’s Edward R. Murrow, but he operates in the dirty tradition of Joe McCarthy.”
Teresita @ 15:
You’re kidding, right? The entire phenomenon of religion is the result of an inability of otherwise adult humans to deal maturely with mortality.
toad @ 91:
I’m a theist and Stephen den Beste is an aetheist. However I agree with him that the existence or non-existence of a diety can not be proved by the use of logic,
IMO, logic is a tool, and a very useful one for clearing out intellectual clutter. If one is going to spend time and effort on debates, it is greatly helpful to spend that time and effort debating things that actually exist or are possible, rather than on the non-existent and impossible. Logic helps eliminate the time-wasting underbrush.
A statement like Teresita’s does not stand up to logical examination. She offers what is essentially a scoffing universal negative (no religion is true) which, unless she is omniscient (perhaps we should ask Delia??), is unprovable. A little more humility and a little less hostility, such as the addition of a qualifying phrase such as, “the entire phenomenon of religion as we have seen it so far is the result of …” would have saved the assertion from the logical dustbin.
*****
Okay, two sets of propositions:
A1. There is no such thing as God.
A2. The concept of God is not inherently illogical.
A3. There is a God.
B1. All religions are false.
B2. Some religions are false.
B3. At least one religion may be true.
B4. All religions are true.
A1 and B1 are unprovable universal negatives. B4 becomes self-contradicting when the contents of various religions are examined, e.g. Jesus cannot be both God and non-God at the same time in the same way. Christians may be wrong about this, or non-Christians may be wrong about it, but they cannot both be right.
So, universal rejection is unprovable, and universal acceptance is illogical. That leaves the middle, propositions A2, B2 and B3, as where the action is. People of good will and strong spine should be, and have been, able to debate in that middle arena for millenia now. Furthermore, there is so much to debate in that middle arena that incursions by the hostile, close-minded dogmatists from both ends should be rebuffed by everyone who is engaging honorably in the middle arena. As a rule, angry dogmatists don’t want debate or even inquiry; they want to shut down all of that stuff. Methinks they have issues.
*****
Does den Beste call himself an atheist or an agnostic? (Sorry, too lazy to look it up right now.) The latter would seem the more logically consistent position, if he is going by logic. Hmmm.
And there is a LOT that happens between “the existence of God can be neither proved nor disproved by logic alone” (a statement I agree with), and “belief in God is a matter of faith” (a rather muddy statement, depending on context and definitions). People also frequently conflate the terms “evidence” and “proof” … not a helpful habit, esp. in the arena of theological debate. A lot of Christians, me included, believe that there is considerable evidence for Christianity, and thus believing in the deity of Jesus is not a weird, indefensible, blind leap of faith, but actually a reasonable conclusion based on that evidence. (To quote a famous fictional detective: “When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”) What this evidence is, for Christians, is the stuff of apologetics.
*****
And finally, one of my favorite riddles for logic geeks:
A troll stops a man at a bridge. The troll says to the man, “I’m going to allow you to make one statement. If that statement is true, I shall tear you apart and devour you. If that statement is false, I shall crush your bones and drown you. Only if your statement is neither true nor false will I let you pass over this bridge.”
The man thought for some time, then uttered his statement. The troll had to let him pass over the bridge.
Q: What was the man’s statement?
A: “Everything I say is a lie.”
Bob @ 150: “I think we should try to get back to the older European tradition, which was alive once, and is now mostly buried. Where you don’t have to be a member of some self defeating group, groups being always self defeating. Where you might, kinda, be yourself!”
Which older European tradition was that, Bob?
In the 14th Century Declaration of Arbroath, which Scottish leaders sent to the Pope to explain why they were fighting the English king, they claimed that the Scots had come from Syria. And probably fought all the way. Then cleared the Picts out of Scotland, while fighting off attacks from the Scandinavians and getting ready for the main event with the English. Of course, Scotland was then a pretty quiet backwater compared to the group conflicts going on in mainland Europe.
There’s a Hemmingway quote about a man alone doesn’t stand a chance. Throughout most of history, only groups survived. And the bigger & nastier your group was, the better your individual chance of survival. Hence the dominance of the Romans and later the English. And the importance of voluntary associations like Churches.
The idea of the individual being “yourself” is a recent invention, made possible by half a century of Pax Americana, now sadly receding into the past. Expect history to resume shortly. And that unfolding history will feature the supremacy of groups. Groups such as the Chinese, the Russians, and the Islamists. Enjoy!
There’s a Hemmingway quote about a man alone doesn’t stand a chance. Right, I know it well, from To Have and Have Not, if I recall. And it is a real problem, society and self. The European tradition I think of is the troubadors, minnesingers, etc. and the knights aquesting, on their own. They all went out, don’t you know, from the round table, each in his own way, there into the forest, alone, where the forest was darkest, ariding. That is the European tradition, now long forgot.
Charles #149: Say “Hoover” to me and the image to me
is “self-serving empire-building crook”.
So you take a perpetually inebriated McCarthy being
manipulated by a man dedicated to making FBI into KGB on steroids and you get a prescription for disaster.
How did we avoid worse than what we got? The words
“Divine Intervention” do come to mind.
BTW: Paul Johnson compared Hoover’s bureaucratic style to that of Joesph Stalin. A chilling comparison.
The Hoover stunt that rankles most with me is his sliming of OSS Agent Frank Wismer, Captain Constantine Cantacuzene and Princess Catherine Caradja.
Most ridiculous of the three was Hoover’s “proof” that Captain Cantacuzene was really a communist. He fled Romania and was flying airplanes for that notorious leftist, Francisco Franco. And Joe McCarthy swallowed it hook, line and ethanol.
Like I said, Tail Gunner Joe needed to become a friend of Bill W. That was the missing ingredient that could have improved things greatly.
Update: Torquemada of the left.
“leftwing champion of the legal doctrine of universal jurisdiction,” … Fear.
Universal Fear/jurisdiction is the weapon of the left and its clone/sister, the AGW warmites.
Torquemada is the Model; Fear was his ultimate weapon.
However, the Spanish Empire dissolved because of the Inquisition.
AGW has dissolved because of its own Fear.
…-
“The Rise and Fall of Spanish “Super-Judge” Baltasar Garzón
Baltasar Garzón, a high-profile Spanish judge and leftwing champion of the legal doctrine of universal jurisdiction, has been charged with abuse of power. Spanish Supreme Court investigating magistrate Luciano Varela charged Garzón with knowingly overstepping his jurisdiction by launching an illegal investigation into political crimes committed during and after the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War.
The indictment of Garzón has implications that reach far beyond Spain. A guilty verdict would effectively terminate Garzón’s career as a judge, and thereby deprive the global Left of one of its most ambitious legal activists. It would also mark the beginning of the end of Spain’s foray into cross-border jurisprudence, which has been branded as politically motivated harassment of select right-leaning foreign governments, including in Israel and the United States.
The current dustup began in October 2008, when Garzón accused General Francisco Franco and 34 of his former generals and ministers of crimes against humanity in connection with mass executions and tens of thousands of disappearances of civilians between 1936 and 1952. Garzón also ordered the exhumation of 19 mass graves.
Considering that the Spanish Civil War ended more than 70 years ago, and that Franco died in 1975, few suspects, even if identified, would be alive today to stand trial. But the main objection to Garzón’s probe has stemmed from the fact that he decided to limit his investigation only to crimes committed by the right-wing Nationalists (ie, the Francoists). His enquiry did not extend to political crimes committed by the left-wing Republicans (anti-Francoists), which included Marxists, liberals and anarchists. Republican death squads murdered up to 70,000 clergy, nuns and ordinary middle class Spaniards in a veritable reign of terror that largely contributed to the rise of Franco.”
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/4405
149. Charles
( imho Less well known was that McCarthy’s public anti communist hearings began and ended within weeks of the beginning and ending of his weekly meetings with JE Hoover & that McCarthy’s relationship to Hoover was very much like Hoover’s relationship to the NSA.)
The NSA byo the the Venona cables found a couple hundred communist spies in the US government. (KGB files opened in the early 90′s showed more.) The NSA handed over the names to the FBI but told the FBI that the FBI could not use the Venona cables in court. That is, the FBI had to develop their own leads. For the most part, the FBI did not. The FBI could not develop corroborating evidence. Most of the communist spies got away. There were a host of reasons. Some stepped out of government. A couple went to England. Two went to the soviet union where they formed Russia’s version of the silicon valley. But most of the spies stayed in the USA. They were not charged with anything. Hoover’s weekly meetings with McCarthy began just before McCarthy began his famous hearings. McCarthy’s hearings ended just after his last meetings with J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI to this day maintains that Hoover never told McCarthy anything about Venona cables–and they are safe from contradiction because McCarthy never mentioned anything about Venona. Nevertheless its easy to see how Hoover would have visited on McCarthy similiar terms as the NSA visited on the FBI.
There was a 20 year period after the early 1950′s where no American spies turned up working for the soviets. They started showing up again in the early 70′s. But their motives had changed. They spied not for ideology but rather for money or hubris.
The relationship between moslem terrorists and various mosques all the USA in 2002–when the FBI began opening their files–looked very similiar to the relationship between the US communist party of the 1930-1940′s and various communist spies. That’s why– when moslems hurled charges of McCarthism–much of the American public thought that meant that the Moslems likely were guilty of what they were charged with.
Then of course there have headlines like these in the NY Times and LA Times
NY Times
Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits to Soviet Spying
September 11, 2008
LA Times
Case Closed Rosenberger were Soviet Spies
Julius and ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But last week, they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend, Julius, had both been Soviet agents.
………….
John Earle Haynes among the foremost scholars of the McCarthy period gives a review of the scholarship Here.
Pravda.Ru
23 April 2010
The American Self Immolation, Truly a Sight to See
The unfortunate truth here is: the Republicans and Tories are the Mensheviks to the Democrat and Labour Bolsheviks. In other words, they are the slightly less radical fellow travellers who are to stupid to realize that once their usefulness is done, they will go the very camps they will help send the true opposition to. A more deserving lot was rarely born. Of course half of the useful idiots in the Bolshevik groupings will go to those very same camps.
On the the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, it’s always been a derisory question meant to ridicule an aspect of acedemia.
yes of course, it was never the actual debate exactly, but it still shows the same perceptions and tendencies that PB was seeing in his 19th century writers. and some enteprising researchers have found vaguely similar discussions that might have prompted the remark in the first place.
and looking into it one finds debates that may have been obscure but perhaps not as ridiculous as might have seemed. well, not *all* as ridiculous, no doubt plenty of them were ridiculous, but so are plenty of inept conversations about perfectly mundane matters.
Charles/163
Boy! How times changed! 25 years ago, I would never think I would find that kind of article in Pravda.
Not only that, there is really nothing in it I could disagree with.
bob #159
“They all went out, don’t you know, from the round table, each in his own way, there into the forest, alone, where the forest was darkest, ariding. That is the European tradition, now long forgot.”
bob #150
“Where you don’t have to be a member of some self defeating group, groups being always self defeating. Where you might, kinda, be yourself! and not take God’s Word from some tradition or other. If the mideast blows up, it’s their own damn fault. They will have gone the wrong way. The corporate way– and I hate your guts, cause you disagree with me a little. Therefore we blow up the world. I’d rather be Nez Perce.”
Bob, if you haven’t already, you ought to read “Comanches: The Destruction of a People” by T.R. Fehrenbach.
It’s a great book in terms of telling a story. It’s unique because it takes neither the “Dances with Wolves” postmodern liberal fantasy view of the Indians being the gentle stewards of mother earth, nor does it take the John Wayne “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” path. It respects and criticizes both the Indians and the various white cultures (Spain, France, Anglo-American) that clashed.
One of the main themes of the book was that it was impossible for the Plains Indians (particularly Comanches) and European settlers to coexist, that war was inevitable because their points of view and perceptions of the universe were so fundamentally different. It was also true that once the whites understood the nature of the Indian point of view (not the point of view itself, but its nature) it was inevitable that whites would win that war.
They had been practicing for a long time, Bob. The West had had millenia to hone its deterministic, cause-and-effect based philosophy, and used that philosophy to defeat Persians, Picts, Celts, Teutonics, Vikings, etc. As Hanson has so beautifully proved, when Westerners act like authentic Westerners, no other culture can prevail against them. A culture like the Shoshone-Comanche one, based as it was on magic and wonder at the world, an extreme form of individualism, and without the slightest regard for the sacrosanct quality of human life outside of one’s self or limited local tribe, in the end was no match for the West and the Western concept of the power of a group of individuals. I admire a lot about the Indians, but would I rather be a Nez Perce in 1700 or a Westerner any time the West was being its unalloyed self? I’d choose the latter. Not even a hint of a question.
Like you, Bob, I find the current state of the West, devolved as it is into a collusion of the worst parts of corporatism and big government, to be deplorable and in need of reform. But would I want to live the absolutely brutal, murderous, torturing and raping life of the Plains Indians (and that way of life was in place far in advance of the arrival of the white man) just to be able to ride off alone when I felt like it and stare in wonder at the universe, instead of being alive here and now? No way.
I share your affection for the notion of being able to ride off into the forest alone and find some peace. I suppose it’s why I like to hunt and fish. Maybe it’s a primal part of being human. Taken to an extreme, though, it creates brutal, indifferent men and brutal societies nearly 100% of the time.
I remember a science fiction author (name escapes me) once wrote that the most exciting time to be a human being was right after the retreat of the glaciers 12,000 years ago – vast tracts of open land to explore alone in every direction. It’s a beautiful and romantic thought, but we don’t live in those times. And there’s no going back.
In addition to liking the aloneness of the wild, I also esteem the good parts of the group – community, specialization (to some extent) of jobs that makes life better for the whole, justice, and the notion that other humans’ lives have value. If I have to give all those up to be able to ride off alone into Sherwood, or the Black Forest, or the Smokies, or even the beautiful mountains around the Big Hole Valley in Montana that the Nez Perce inhabited, that’s not a good deal.
I can only hope that humanity finds a way to have the civilizing aspects of the group that make us into something a little more like God and a little less like animals – without simultaneously losing all the good parts generated by the impulse to ride off alone and find peace in the wonder of the universe.
It seems a delicate and difficult-to-achieve balance.
Shakespeare’s birthday 04/23
here’s from All’s Well that Ends Well
“Love all, trust few, wrong none.”
no mo uro: And as Unca Fehrenbach points out, when McKenzies 4th Cavalry left Concho in 1874, it was not High Noon for the Commanche. It was already sunset.
New book out: “The Commanche Empire” Author is Finnish. Name escapes me at the moment. I am told that this is a darned good complement to Fehrenbach.
Drought coupled with the requirement for excessive quantities of horses, a disdain for agriculture or animal husbandry for that matter, etc. had the Commanch
on a slide towards oblivion without any help from the white eyes.
What made them into the dominant force on the southern plains waas that unlike almost every other group of Plains Indians, Commanche did not engage in intercine warfare. Commanche did not kill Commanche, or rape Commanche women or steal other Comanche’s horses. That is what kept them in business for as long as they lasted.
And at the last, they took their licking like men. Buffalo Hump became a farmer. Quanah a lawyer. Others learned how to cowboy, and then to roughneck.
Solution was a satisfactory as humanly possible. Good enough fer me.
There just weren’t enough of ‘em. Seven or eight thousand warriors cannot hold the Great Plains –even without the five-millenia gap in tech. Europe was overflowing with farmland demand. No force on earth was gonna stop the flood into the essentially open land.
Wretchard is right, this time it’s about money and this time it’s personal because money equals (for many of us) toil/labor/work/sweat.
When ‘money’ comes down to your labor paying for your retirement or paying for a tyrant or TRYrant to do with it what he/she will, yeah, we gotz issues.
Whiskey, I don’t care WHAT COLOR someone is, if they are an ugly asshole, I could care less about their personal welfare.
It’s the white empowered ELITES who got us where we are. Minorities are reactionary racists to be sure, but the real a-holes to blame are the power-hungry white LEFTY LOONS.
Entitlements and envy aren’t a ‘minority’ thang. Plenty of whites are guilty of teat-suckin’ and that especially goes for UNION GOVERNMENT JOBS with insane, unsustainable retirement/health-care packages.
The problem is, when people begin to feel ‘desperation’ they do things they normally would NEVER DO including selling their souls and their country down the shitter for a quickie safety-net.
How strong can a starved, angry, poor populace be up against a bloated, tyrannical government without any checks and balances? By the time we ‘get there’ into bread-line mode, it will probably be too late for the sheeple to awaken.
We shall find out.
As Buddy has alluded to, we can starve the beast by going as GALT as possible and speak out and gather as many people as we can to fight this takeover and rape of our liberties.
I pray for us all but, violence by a few is not the answer to the bigger, looming question, which is:
The more we divide ourselves racially/religiously/politically the more we weaken our UNITED states and lay bare our torn souls rife for tyrannical power grabs that will lay waste the once beautiful landscape of a precious and just country so full of true hope and freedom.