Quickies: The Less You Look, The Less You’ll See

     (With apologies to the late Robert M. Pirsig.)

     The LGBTQ “community,” which seldom seems to be anything of the sort, is suffering declining acceptance among “young Americans:”

     An alarming new statistic from the annual Accelerating Acceptance report finds that young Americans — generally regarded as the most socially tolerant generation — are less comfortable with LGBTQ people than in previous years.

     The survey, produced by the Harris Poll in partnership with Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), found that Americans aged 18 to 34 who say they are comfortable interacting with queer people fell from 53% in 2017 to 45% in 2018 — even among those whom the report considers “allies” to the LGBTQ community....

     GLAAD president and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis says it may have to do with the fact that younger people are interacting with more LGBTQ people than older generations — and things that they don’t fully understand could be bewildering for some of them.

     A typical case of self-deception. Recent years have seen LGBTQ activism turn “in your face” and frequently ugly. Homosexuals in particular frequently harass persons and institutions that espouse traditional views, especially Christians. Reports about “Queer Story Hours,” children being forced into “drag,” “transitions,” and related phenomena have been multiplying. The most tolerant people on Earth will turn hostile to a “community” that behaves in such a fashion, especially if what they most prize is peace, quiet, and privacy. As ye sow, so shall ye reap, folks. There are no “gender”-related nor genital-employment exceptions.

     Have a perspective from someone who would know:

     “We’re accepted now as long as we don’t act up. So why act up? Why pull shit that’s gonna rebound on us? Aren’t the drag fags with their deliberately outrageous parades and the flaming queens that hassle the churches bad enough? Stuff like that’ll only get the straights riled at us again.”

     That was a word-for-word quote from the real person my character Howie Desjardins is based on.

     The progression from pleading for tolerance, to demanding acceptance and accommodation in all venues whether public or private, to attacking anyone who fails to pledge his enthusiastic support to the activists’ agenda has been well documented. It always has the same effects on those it targets. It always will. Younger Americans will not prove an exception.

     You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong....Treat men as pawns and nine-pins and you shall suffer as well as they. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

There Is No Defense

Occasionally, a Gentle Reader will write to ask why I haven't yet written on some topic of current interest, and whether I plan to address it in the foreseeable future. Such notes are flattering, as they imply that my correspondent values my take on such things. I try not to disappoint such persons by dismissing the subject of their interest as outside my sphere of concern or expertise, even if that's exactly the way I view it. But now and then, a recent event that's elicited copious commentary from other sources will lie on my thoughts for some time before a pattern emerges that allows me to write something about it that strikes me as worth anyone's reading time.

The Washington Navy Yard massacre is one such event.

---

Aaron Alexis, the gunman who ended the lives of twelve innocents a few days ago, was insane -- psychotic; delusional; unpredictably violent. Because he had never come sufficiently "into the system" for constraining such persons, he was able to acquire a pump shotgun and access to the Washington Navy Yard, and express his psychosis with flying lead. Twelve persons died before a policeman could end Alexis's own life with a round from an AR-15, currently America's most popular rifle.

And of course, the gun controllers and their Main Stream Media sycophants immediately revived their campaign against "assault weapons," by which they meant the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

Lunacy? Of course. The gun controllers have always been lunatics. As some wag said, every time some sort of atrocity is committed with a firearm, the politicians try to take the guns away from everyone who didn't do it. Nothing could possibly make less sense, right?

Wrong. We're looking squarely at the political disease that best characterizes America today: agendaism.

---

Agendaism is an ideology, but not one of the sort with which most persons are familiar. It consists of two parts:

• A firm and unchanging agenda: i.e., a set of goals to be pursued thought political mechanisms;
• A collection of context-specific tactics oriented toward achieving that agenda.

The overarching principle of agendaism is that with the right tactics, the right publicity, and the right "slant," an event can be made to serve any agenda whatsoever, as long as the tactics are properly fitted to the event.

There are numerous agendaists in public life today. Broadly speaking, any politically active person, whether he's a public official or a private citizen, who is indissolubly attached to his agenda, such that neither reason nor evidence could possibly sway him from it, is an agendaist. Some, of course, are more effective than others, but the defining characteristic is that unbreakable attachment to a set of unchanging political goals.

Why would anyone be so fixated on a specific set of goals, even in the teeth of contrary reasoning and evidence? Unclear. Perhaps the only answer available is Aristotelian: action to advance those goals is what makes him happy, or what he thinks will make him happy. Always remember The Algorithm:

1. Select a technique that you think will get you what you think you want.
2. Will this technique require you to lose body parts, go to jail, or burn in Hell?
   1. If so, return to step 1.
   2. If not, proceed to step 3.
3. Do a little of it.
4. Are you at your goal, approaching it, or receding from it?
   1. If at your goal, stop.
   2. If approaching, return to step 3.
   3. If receding, return to step 1.

...and bear in mind that "what you think you want" is not covered by the above; it's beyond all rational investigation.

Gun control is an important item on many agendaists' agendas. Never mind that criminals are the least likely persons on Earth to comply with a gun ban or gun registration law. Never mind that removing weapons from the hands of the peaceable and law-abiding cannot possibly bring about a reduction in violent crimes or crimes against property. Never mind that disarming a man renders him helpless before an armed predator. A gun-control agendaist seeks to disarm us peones because he thinks it will make him happy to have done so. You cannot persuade him otherwise.

Agendaists are like that.

---

I swiped the title of this piece from a Theodore Sturgeon short story. In the story, an unidentified spacecraft has entered the Solar System and has begun randomly and lethally attacking population centers and other spacecraft. Nothing seems able to stop it. It appears unwilling to communicate. Solar System authorities have one untried weapon: The Death, a radiation field that liquefies living tissue, against which there is no defense. However, its use has been forbidden since its one and only employment in war. After a great deal of bickering, the supreme council decides to authorize its use against the invader...and finds that it has no effect. Pandemonium ensues.

Ultimately, it's discovered that the invader craft is unmanned. At one time it possessed a living (nonhuman) crew, but that crew was killed by its enemies, by using The Death. However, its builders had arranged that the craft should fly on, wreaking death and destruction even once its crew had been eliminated, as an Ultimate Revenge against their supremely vicious blood enemies. They had anticipated that those enemies would succeed in exterminating their entire species, and were determined to strike at them even from beyond the grave.

As the protagonist of Sturgeon's story says in its last paragraph, "There is a defense against The Death. You can't kill a dead man."

Let that sink in for a moment or two.

---

One of our current subjects of public debate is how best to "prevent" outbreaks of mass murder such as those of Theodore Kaczynski, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Jared Loughner, Nidal Malik Hassan, Anders Breivik, Adam Lanza, Aaron Alexis, and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Note that none of the approaches suggested or tried have had perfect success, for a simple reason.

The reason? You can't deter a man who has already decided that the loss of his life is a worthwhile price to pay for what he wants. If there is such a man in your society, and if he decides that what he wants is to kill a lot of people, sooner or later he'll try to do so, even knowing that it will cost him his life.

Some years ago, I wrote on this subject in a more political context:

Conflict-resolution analysts have always based their approaches on the classic, game-theoretic approaches pioneered by John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. These men, themselves mighty geniuses, built atop the economic understandings of David Ricardo and Vilfredo Pareto. The thinking of Ricardo, Pareto, and the rest of the scholium of classical economics took its founding insights from the father of all rational economic reasoning, Adam Smith.

From Smith to the great thinkers of RAND and Hudson, we can trace an unbroken chain of calm, reasoned analysis, all of which rested on a silent, indispensable postulate: For any given thing a contestant in a contest might want, there is a maximum price he'd be willing to pay, and no more.

Seems unassailable, doesn't it? The contrary proposition would be that there's someone willing to pay an infinite amount for some good. That would imply that he'd be willing to sacrifice his life, the lives of all his loved ones and friends, and everything else he could manipulate, to achieve some desideratum. Insane! Who would be left to enjoy whatever it was he had purchased?

Before Black Tuesday, no one would have entertained the notion.

Somewhere in my time closet, I have a button that says, "If you're willing to die, you can do anything." Perhaps that's a bit of an overstatement, but it points up an unpleasant truth. The sacrifice of one's own life, which has been called "the ultimate price," will buy a lot of things that are available for no other currency. Yet the willingness to make that sacrifice contradicts the unspoken assumption of classical economics. It renders conventional methods of valuation, and the reasoning by which we use them, impotent.

The line of thought derived from Smith, whose fullest flowering arrived with Thomas Schelling, cannot cope with decisions that incorporate a willingness to pay an unbounded price.

You cannot deter a man willing to pay for what he wants with his life and all else that matters to him. Indeed, in a just society -- i.e., one that doesn't attempt to coerce or punish by inflicting harm on innocent uninvolved persons -- you cannot even deter a man who's merely willing to die. You can stop him by killing him; that's all. But there is no defense against him, if by "defense" we mean a shield for those he would like to harm. In a practical sense, he's already dead.

Some psychotics and sociopaths are detected in time to block their access to weapons. Some, like Aaron Alexis, are not. The ones that slip through the holes in the web will eventually take lives. There is no defense against them.

We cannot defend against them. But we can prepare for them: we can be ready to kill them when they decide to strike. It's not ideal; some innocent persons will undoubtedly die before we can stop them. But it's the best we can do -- and it's the ultimate argument for an armed populace.

---

If we look at the agendaist through the lens above, it appears that his absolute, unbreachable fidelity to his agenda renders him just as impossible to deter as any psychotic killer. There's no price he'd accept to back away from his agenda. He'll act on it unless and until he's stopped -- and stopping him is always a temporary thing.

(For the purposes of this discussion, allow me to omit consideration of "stopping" an agendaist by killing him. That's illegal in all fifty states and the District of Columbia, as attractive an approach as it might sometimes seem.)

If there is no defense against the agendaist, then we must be prepared to stop him. This is a bit more difficult than simply carrying a gun. Remember: he does not respond to argument or evidence. In the usual case, neither will others who buy into his agenda, for he won't attempt to gain adherents through reason or evidence. To stop him, he must be neutralized by other means.

"Other means" require that we either threaten what he values apart from his agenda sufficiently to silence him, or find a way to undercut his appeal to those he seeks to persuade. The former isn't a reliable approach; it's subject to heavy political counterfire. The latter sounds unappealing, even slanderous...but many an agendaist will put the weapon into our hands by his own actions, for he is willing to sacrifice any and every other consideration, including moral and ethical ones, to the furtherance of his agenda.

Consider the case of Barack Hussein Obama, an agendaist of the first water. This man was stoppable. He had enough unsavory associations and murky antecedents that the McCain / Palin ticket could have (and should have) walked over him. Obama's patronage of Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with Bill Ayres should have been sufficient. Yet the McCain strategists explicitly excluded the use of Obama's associations and antecedents, and thus doomed their campaign to failure. Mitt Romney committed much the same mistake in his 2012 bid for the presidency.

Rather than replaying the errors of that campaign, I will ask: Are we in the Right able to learn from our mistakes, or will we advance other candidates as lily-livered as McCain and Romney?

---

Agendaism, in case it's not immediately obvious, is a disease of the Left. We in the Right pride ourselves on being alive to good reasoning and pertinent evidence, and let's pledge that it will always be so. Despite that, we've allowed agendaists to permeate the federal government, and no few state and local governments, as if we were afraid to use the weapons at hand. An agendaist in public office will exploit every means and opportunity at his disposal, and will create them if none are immediately available.

Against an agendaist in the Oval Office, there really is no defense.

It's time for freedom lovers to cease worrying about "descending to their level" and take off the gloves. No more wimpy candidates; no more white-gloved distaste for publicly dissecting our opponents' misdeeds and failings. The Republic can't tolerate much more from the agendaists. It will take the rarest and most difficult form of courage -- moral courage, the courage of our convictions -- to stop them.

Religious Tests?

It's not that long ago that I repeated, for the uncountableth time, that all knowledge propositions fall into one of three categories:

• Mathematics: In principle provable or disprovable.
• Science: Only disprovable.
• Religion: Neither provable nor disprovable.

Anyone who takes a serious interest in religion, or in propositions about religion, or in the history of religions and religious affiliation, must accept ab initio that he's dealing with propositions for which neither proof nor disproof is available -- ever. That postulate imposes some strict rules upon his undertaking:

• He is forbidden ever to advance a religious proposition as a matter of incontestable fact.
• He is forbidden to characterize a religious proposition as "unreasonable" or "debunked."
• He is forbidden to exalt himself over others, by word or deed, whose religious convictions differ with his.

(Of course, in enumerating those rules, I've leaned heavily upon my partition of the categories, which some persons would reject. That doesn't trouble me; all such objectors are either idiots or aspiring tyrants. Bear with me; we'll get to that.)

Consider, for example, a test proposition about the death of a religious figure. If that death was witnessed, and the witnesses can be certified as both honest and not deluded, the contention about the death is a statement of fact. It is not a proposition about knowledge; a knowledge proposition is a statement of implication, most commonly about cause and effect. But the manner of that death and what it implies might qualify: for example, the proposition that since Jesus of Nazareth was returned to life three days after His Crucifixion, He therefore possessed the authority to proclaim His New Covenant for Mankind.

Note well: Christ's death and His Resurrection could have been closely and unimpeachably witnessed, beyond all possibility of doubt, yet the proposition that He is therefore the Son of God with Divine Authority would remain neither provable nor disprovable. There is no clear chain of reasoning from the fact to the implication that can be either established as logically and empirically sound, or refuted on the basis of bad logic or faulty evidence.

Therefore, no matter how passionately we Christians believe in the Divinity of Christ, our convictions fail to provide a basis for demanding that those who dissent must admit to error, or to submit to us in any other way. Similar proclamations about the Authority of this or that figure -- Moses, Buddha, Muhammad, Confucius -- being neither provable nor disprovable, are equally incapable of compelling agreement or submission from those who disagree.

Keep all that in mind while I fetch some decaf.

---

Some of the most brutal events in Mankind's long and bloody history were propelled by religious propositions advanced as if they were incontestably factual. The usual citations begin with the Spanish Inquisition, beyond all question a terrible, criminal undertaking. But far more blood has been shed by Muslims' military sallies at compelling the whole world to submit to Islam. Those slaughters continue today; indeed, they might have reached their apex in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century.

Islam, alone among the world's major religions, teaches that it is Muslims' right and duty to spread their faith "by the sword." Don't bother to cite me the superseded "Meccan" Koran verses about tolerance of others' beliefs; all of them, under the Islamic doctrine of naskh (abrogation) have been nullified by the later, Medinan verses that exhort the believer to use any and all means, including force and fraud, to impose Islam upon the whole world. This proposition makes Islam a totalitarian scheme founded upon a religious proposition -- i.e., the proposition that Muhammad, the Prophet of Allah, possessed divine authority to promulgate Islam and its dictates, and that that authority included the sanctification of deeds by Muslims that would be condemned as criminal if performed by a member of any other faith.

That religious proposition, like all others, can neither be proved nor disproved. Yet in Islamic theology it is considered impermissible for anyone to question the divine origin of the Koran or the absoluteness of any of its decrees. Those things are advanced as incontestable facts, along with all their moral and ethical implications.

Which should help to explain the following.

---

Recently, Fox News's Lauren Green interviewed Reza Azlan about his recent book on Christianity:

Lauren Green is probably the last of the religion correspondents in the news media. Religion is now taboo unless you are a Muslim.

After Green interviewed Azlan, the liberal media went on a Green-bashing tirade that is growing legs. It should prove another worthless distraction from the Obama scandals and the economy.

One of the obvious and harmless questions she asked of the author [Azlan] was:

“Now, I want to clarify: You are a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”

Azlan’s response was condescending and obnoxious but that seems to have escaped the left’s notice....

Among the accusations made by Azlan in his book are that Jesus Christ is not the son of God and the Crucifixion was the result of Jesus Christ’s attempts to foment violence. Azlan said ‘what a trouble maker he [Christ] must have been’ to have been crucified; crucifixion was reserved for insurrectionists, he said.

Azlan also wrote that the historical Christ and the Catholic Church’s mythical Christ are nothing alike.

No one cares that those statements by Azlan are very insulting to Christians. They only care that he was asked questions about the book.

Azlan also claimed his research was based on 1,000 books. Really? Seriously? I want the bibliography.

This issue brings up serious First Amendment issues. Does a journalist have the First Amendment right to free speech any longer? Green’s real crime was asking a Muslim why he wrote a Christ-bashing book which Azlan condescendingly claimed is not what it obviously is.

We can omit consideration of the left-wing media's attacks on Miss Green. They seize on every pretext, however flimsy, to mount such attacks. What's more significant here is that Azlan claimed to have been insulted -- at close to a mortal level of offense -- for Green's having challenged his authority, however indirectly, to make the Christ-denigrating statements in his book.

Azlan is merely adhering to one of the ethical precepts of Islam: No matter who does so, to question Islam or any of its dictates is blasphemy against Islam, which is a crime deserving of the severest imaginable punishment.

Naturally Azlan and Islam refrain from granting Christianity and Judaism the same degree of authority; as all the execrable "Highlander" movies say, "there can be only one."

We're not talking about something that happened centuries ago. We're talking about the present-day contentions of Islam's imams, its mullahs, its ayatollahs, and its muftis. Every last authority in the Islamic world maintains that Islam is incontestably true, suffused with Divine Authority, and entirely within its rights to subjugate the whole world by force, fraud, or whatever other means come to hand. Azlan is merely conducting himself in accordance with those preachments. No one who accepts Islam can publicly argue otherwise without fearing for his life.

What other scheme of thought or belief claims such latitude...such altitude above the ethical precepts that bind the rest of us?

---

It is true, and well verified historically, that various powers and populations of self-nominated Christians have also used force against unbelievers and "blasphemers." The last of those crimes occurred in the Sixteenth Century. Note that I call the perpetrators "self-nominated Christians:" Every last one of them violated the explicit teachings of Christ himself:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor[a] and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. [The Gospel According to Matthew, 5:43-48]

To use force to impose the Gospels upon anyone, for whatever reason, is the most blatant violation of that teaching anyone could possibly devise.

Christians have learned better, but then, it's one of our precepts that Man is "fallen," and therefore must rise above his natural, sinful state. Muslims, clearly, have not: They persist in maintaining that it is their right and duty to put "the black flag of Islam" over every nation on Earth, by whatever means come to hand. Not all take an active hand in that effort, to be sure, but rare is the professing Muslim who willingly says that he believes otherwise. Indeed, it is Islam's "religious test" for authority of any sort, from the lowest degree to the highest, that the wielder must be a Muslim.

That representation is so clearly vile, so clearly premised upon a religious conjecture about the will of God, that it can only be maintained by force -- including the heaping of denunciations and vilifications upon anyone, of any faith whatsoever, who dares to question it.

Which is why I advocate the swift expulsion of all professing Muslims from these United States, and the immediate closure of our borders to any others, including the ambassadors of Islamic states. We Christians might be enjoined to love them, but for the sake of our societies we must contrive to do so at a distance -- and the greater that distance, the better.

They Walk Among Us...

...silent and effectively undetectable. You can't tell them from normal folks by appearance, most of their statements and behavior pass unremarked, and they're on a mission, though definitely not from God:

More than 7,000 academics are gathered in Victoria, B.C., this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on everything from the errant lessons of Grey’s Anatomy to Justin Trudeau’s political brand power. In this week-long series, the National Post showcases some of the most interesting research.

Parents who read their kids stories about happy, human-like animals like Franklin the Turtle or Arthur at bedtime are exposing their kids to racism, materialism, homophobia and patriarchal norms, according to a paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Most animals portrayed in children’s books, songs and on clothing send a bad message, according to academics Nora Timmerman and Julia Ostertag: That animals only exist for human use, that humans are better than animals, that animals don’t have their own stories to tell, that it’s fine to “demean” them by cooing over their cuteness. Perhaps worst of all, they say, animals are anthropomorphized to reinforce “socially dominant norms” like nuclear families and gender stereotypes.

Please read the rest. Any offense you give or small, valuable items you break during the subsequent fit of uncontrollable laughter are entirely your own affair.

I do believe it's time to say a few things very, very plainly:

• Normal means usual, or overwhelmingly more common than any alternative.
• Therefore, when we speak of human attitudes, convictions, and behavior, normal should be interpreted to mean "what the overwhelming majority of humans feel, think, and do."
• It follows that:
  • "Racism," when applied to the human race vis-a-vis the subhuman races, is normal.
  • "Materialism," i.e. the desire / preference for material comfort and security, is normal.
  • Heterosexuality is normal.
  • "Homophobia," whether anyone likes it or not, is normal.
  • "Patriarchal norms," to the extent the phrase was intended to convey anything more than "men are icky," are normal.

Furthermore:

• From the anthropocentric viewpoint, "animals exist only for human use" is exactly correct.
• With due respect to Caligula et alii, humans are better than animals intellectually and ethically.
• Animals have no stories to tell, regardless of whatever stories humans tell about animals.
• "Cooing over their cuteness" is far better than what PETA does to the ones it "rescues."
• Nuclear families are the basis of modern civilization.
• Assuming the "gender stereotypes" the "researchers" have in mind are the usual ones, those stereotypes are irrefutably correct.

In short, the use of animals in children's books is rational, pro-social, and pro-child-development. Indeed, the practice helps children to develop kindness toward animals. But these "researchers" are angry about it. That says a lot more about the "researchers" than about animals, their use in children's fiction, the various ideas and attitudes mentioned above, or anything else.

If you need a list of dead-giveaway words by which to detect and reject such bilge without needing to read it attentively, my favorites are:

• Racism
• Homophobia
• Heteronormative
• Patriarchal

Are these "researchers" entitled to their opinions of our "racism," "homophobia," "materialism," and "patriarchal norms?" Of course:

Porretto's Bio-Social Theorem:
Opinions are like assholes:
Everyone's gotta have one.

But the rest of us are equally entitled to laugh ourselves hoarse at their notions...and to keep them as far away from our kids as contemporary technology and the laws of physics will permit.

Of course, this is the beginning of yet another attempt to condition our children into politically correct "pre-liberal" mindsets. Its risibility should not be taken as an indication of harmlessness. (It's certainly not an exculpation.) Fortunately, harsh, derisive laughter from a multitude of sensible sources is the best detoxifying agent for such malicious nonsense. Use it!

You're Getting Colder!

Today at Forbes, we have an excellent article by Peter Ferrara on the recently confirmed trend toward global cooling. The data, the correlations, and the grudging concessions by various powerhouses of global-warming alarmism leave no doubt that that house of cards, which always stood upon a shaky foundation of closely held temperature data and dubious computer simulations, has utterly collapsed.

But then, Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) was always a political cudgel rather than a serious scientific hypothesis. It was designed to chivvy the semi-free peoples of the West into surrendering what remains of our freedoms, in the name of "combating global warming." That's why whenever one of CAGW's advocates got his face in front of a camera, he'd trumpet repeatedly that "the science is settled," when there was no science at all behind the warmistas' claims.

Back at Eternity Road, I summarized the clinching arguments against the CAGW hypothesis as a scientific contention:

1. A thesis that can't predict is no thesis at all.

A genuine scientist will tell you that knowledge is confirmed by a chain of successful predictions. It's not enough to get it right just once -- that is, to perform a single experiment, get the expected results, and claim that one's hypothesis is verified on that basis alone. Your thesis must be tested repeatedly, by multiple agencies, in objectively reproducible settings, without a single failure of prediction.

Successful predictions by the warmistas, including every "scientist" who's ever signed onto the proposition: NONE.

2. If the data is kept secret, it isn't science.

Warmista "scientists" have repeatedly refused to release their raw data, or to define the mechanisms by which that data was captured, or to commit themselves to an error bar around their measurements. In a handful of cases, these "researchers" have admitted that they can't produce their raw data -- that it's somehow been lost. This is "the dog ate my homework" masquerading as scientific procedure.

It wouldn't fly for Michael Bellesiles, and it won't fly for the warmistas.

3. Heterogeneity in the data.

Heterogeneous data sets are incapable of proving anything.

Two data sets can be unsuitable for combination for a variety of reasons. One such reason is wide variation in the measuring techniques and instruments used. If temperatures were measured in recent years by thermometers placed in locations X with uncertainties E₀, while the measurements from earlier years came from thermometers placed in greatly different locations Y, or with greatly different uncertainties E₁, there is no statistically valid way to use them as inputs to a single computation.

The warmistas' data sets are so heterogeneous that they don't dare to describe them accurately. Deep-past temperature "measurements" are inferred from tree rings. The more recent past "measurements" come from several thousand thermometers of unknown quality. Immediate-past temperature data comes from a much smaller number of thermometers of better quality, but which are nowhere near the sites of earlier measurements, and in a great many cases are situated in or near heat islands such as cities or airports.

To suggest that data that heterogeneous can be made into a basis for long-range inference is to trade in fantasy. It's about like predicting the average and distribution of human foot sizes based on their comparison to a human thumb -- and in every individual case, to some new person's thumb.

4. Deliberate omission of contributing factors.

In part, this hearkens back to the heterogeneous-data-set problem, but it also addresses the deliberate omission of explanatory factors such as solar input. The Earth's energy influx is not constant, because the Sun is not constant. The Sun's output varies by about 4% from its mean, and is also influenced by sunspots and other anomalies in the photosphere. Such variations are neither predictable nor easily accounted for in predictions of Earth climate conditions. But the warmistas refuse to accept that solar input can have a significant effect on global climate.

Also, with the recent increase of sea-bottom exploration and activity, particularly in the Arctic Circle, there have been a number of releases of methane gas from ocean-floor concentrations of disturbed decayed matter. The overall size of these releases is unknown, as facilities for measuring them have only become available very recently. However, since methane is itself a "greenhouse gas," and more potent in that connection than CO₂, these releases introduce additional uncertainty into all studies of heat-trapping by atmospheric gases.

5. Tendentious computer simulations.

A simulation of conditions that cannot be produced deliberately, which is the sort of simulation on which the warmistas rely, can only demonstrate what would come of those conditions if the assumptions and mechanisms built into the simulation were correct. Therefore, it can only be used as an argument for a given hypothesis if:

• All the initial conditions required by the simulation come to pass simultaneously;
• No extra contributors, or factors that would disturb measurements, are introduced by Mother Nature;
• The outcome reached by Nature matches that produced by the simulation.

To this point, those three requirements have never been satisfied -- the warmistas' simulations have yet to attain any standing for climate-change prediction.

6. The importance of deceit and motivation.

Many of the best known warmista "scientists" have been caught red-handed lying about their data, their techniques for "adjusting" it, and the reproducibility of their measurements. Additionally, as the East Anglia CRU documents make plain, these persons are not averse to using bullying tactics to deny dissenters a public voice. As the warmistas are the beneficiaries of large amounts of government funding that would come to a halt if their hypotheses were conclusively refuted, they have powerful reasons to shout down those who disagree. As their opponents have far smaller resources -- no access to public treasuries -- they are fatally hobbled in any contest of volume, despite their considerable numbers and eminence.

That's as thorough a destruction of the CAGW hypothesis as a scientific contention as was possible at that time (February, 2010). The warmistas never improved their methods, their claims, or their ability to predict. Neither did they ever allow that any sort or quantity of evidence could cross-cut their claims. In short, they insisted that we accept CAGW on faith -- faith in them.

Any who invested their faith in the warmistas are now on notice that they've been conned.

The whole episode stands as a lesson to the credulous and the gullible. When the Main Stream Media's drums began to pound out the CAGW march, we should have been especially skeptical, in the best sense of that word: unwilling to commit in the absence of extensive evidence and successful predictions confirmed by multiple disinterested reviewers. Journalists love a "crisis," and the CAGW hypothesis provided them with one they could hardly resist. But journalism is not science, not even at its very best. It's merely a service of variable quality, vended to an audience in the hope of making money. Its claims must always be assessed in that light, especially when it aligns itself with persons and institutions screaming for totalitarian power over every kind and degree of human action.

If You're Already A Reader Of Dustbury...

...then you might have read this specimen of Charles Hill's quotidian brilliance already. But if you haven't, read it now!

Bravo, Charles.

Knowledge, Faith, And Zealotry

Mark Butterworth's piece just below got me thinking about the difficulties involved in distinguishing claims of knowledge from statements of opinion, such that we can distinguish what may be known from what can only be believed or disbelieved. It's a good topic for a quiet Monday morning, all of whose "news" seems to be about the recent White House Correspondents' Dinner.

As with so many other questions over which men dispute, the key to the puzzle is linguistic: the accurate and appropriate use of words.

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Whenever we claim knowledge, we must provide all the following:

1. A compact yet definite statement of what we claim to know;
2. A sufficiently well-defined context to which our knowledge applies;
3. One or more predictions, whether explicit or implicit, that flow from our knowledge.

The first of these should require no explanation. No one can get by with a statement such as "I know everything." Knowledge must be expressed in definite statements that address real-world conditions and the events that occur within them.

The second requirement is actually a consequence of the first. A definite statement is a statement that addresses specific real-world conditions, not some completely unbounded, context-free domain. That's what it means to define, which is merely the English version of the Latin word "to limit."

The third requirement is also integral to any claim of knowledge: it must be testable, and the only possible test is prediction. Given the required context, do the predictions implied by the claim come true? If so, the claim becomes credible; if not, it can and must be dismissed.

Let's look at a couple of statements of knowledge as exercises. First up:

The sum of even numbers will be an even number.

We could test this one all day, creating column after column of even numbers and adding them up. We would never arrive at an odd sum, except by error. Indeed, as everything it refers to is an abstract object within a completely defined and enclosed artificial system, this statement is provable under the laws of that system (mathematics). It constitutes positive knowledge.

Our second trial will be more interesting:

An unsupported object will fall toward the Earth's center.

Hmmm. This one is very weakly supplied with specifics. What sort of "object?" And from where do we start? If a cloud of helium is chosen for our test object, the statement will fail. If we suspend a piece of pumice in water, the pumice will float, for yet another failure. Yet many other cases -- i.e., heavier-than-air objects left unsupported within Earth's atmosphere -- yield the predicted results. So the context for this statement must be refined, at the minimum, to embrace only those objects in those conditions.

Our third trial is the most important of all:

God notes each sparrow that falls.

This statement is not testable, for two reasons above all others:

• We have no agreed-upon identity for God;
• Even the most common conceptions of God put His actions outside verification.

Because the statement is not testable, the person who makes it is barred from claiming knowledge, regardless of how fervently he believes it.

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The three test cases above are examples of three sorts of human conviction:

• Mathematics;
• Science;
• Faith.

Mathematical knowledge -- i.e., a statement pertinent solely to objects within a well-defined formal system -- is the only sort that can be proved conclusively. This is possible specifically because such systems are completely abstract. Though they are sometimes applied to real-world conditions and events, they are capable of being divorced from external reality and manipulated in isolation. Thus, mathematical knowledge is atemporal.

Scientific knowledge -- i.e., a statement pertinent to objects in the physical realm, which have properties that are separable from any abstractions uttered about them -- cannot be proved conclusively, because the range of test cases for any such statement is infinite. However, a claim of scientific knowledge can be disproved: all it takes is one test case that fails to produce the predicted consequences. A series of hundreds or thousands of successfully tested predictions does not prove the claim; it merely allows us to build up confidence in it. Scientific knowledge, being about things that happen in observable reality, is inherently temporal.

Articles of faith are untestable propositions. They involve inherently undelimitable contexts, or contexts within which human powers of observation are nil. Thus, they can neither be proved nor disproved. They ought not to be classified as claims of knowledge...which does not render them uninteresting or irrelevant to the real world.

People don't argue about propositions in mathematics. Scientists sometimes argue over their conflicting claims, but once those claims become testable and are tested, argument will yield to experimental results. The propositional domain that occasions the most argument, despite the inherent impossibility of proving or disproving anything therein, is that of faith.

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He who takes up a cause of any sort will naturally be concerned to spread the underlying convictions to as many other persons as he can. But the convictions behind a cause have a particular place in the partition of claims: nearly all of them are articles of faith.

Convictions about politics and economics are especially important in this regard. The contexts within which statements about these things are made are seldom perfectly well defined. Worse, they're seldom perfectly reproducible. These difficulties make it effectively impossible to prove or disprove such statements. We who have strong political or economic convictions must never imagine that those convictions are permanently beyond disproof. That makes it impossible to argue conclusively that those who reject them are wrong.

Here we come to the distinction between the advocate and the zealot.

He who argues for a proposition beyond proof and disproof can only demonstrate its logical coherence and cite examples of where it has had beneficial effects. He cannot eliminate all doubt about it without providing that perfect definition of context mentioned above. Worse, even causally clear statements about politics or economics can be challenged with a one-word rejoinder: "When?" Politico-economic predictions seldom come with time thresholds -- i.e., the specific time after the stimulus is applied that the predicted effects will manifest -- which frees the skeptic to retain his skepticism about how much we really know.

The advocate will concede all this. He'll be aware of the nature of knowledge and the difficulty of predictions that involve inherently uncontrollable contexts. The zealot will not. He will insist that he's absolutely right despite all counter-arguments. In his frustration, he's likely to resort to distasteful non-arguments, including attacks upon the intelligence and character of those who reject his thesis.

The zealot's error is mistaking faith for knowledge.

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Many Gentle Readers will bridle at the above. We all have faith in certain propositions. Persons who are engaged in political or economic discourse are likely to be passionate about their particular faiths. But no degree of confidence in an idea, or emotional attachment to it, can transform faith into knowledge.

The central irony therein is that we who champion conservative, pro-freedom politico-economic ideas -- limited government, free markets, private arms rights, well-controlled borders, the privacy of the family, the sanctity of unborn life, and so forth -- are, on balance at least, far less likely to behave as zealots than those who oppose us. Leftists' inability to argue persuasively for their propositions evokes far more bad behavior from them than our spokesmen normally exhibit. There may be sin on both sides, but that doesn't mean the ledger of such things is balanced.

As Robert M. Pirsig noted in his classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, no one organizes marches or defames opponents over assertions that the Sun will rise in the east tomorrow. The moral in that observation should be impossible to miss.