Journal of No. 118

Long Beach

Sun, 11 May 2025 01:11:51 GMT

Enjoyed a nice half day in Long Beach.

Went to two estate sales. One where Dr. Pookie picked up some more uranium glass. And the other where I got a handful of BCE science fiction books. Maybe should have got more when they gave us a pretty friendly price for the last day. The sign said $5-$10 for HB's and it was supposed to be half off. It was $6 for 4 books and small garden pot.

Then we parked on Ocean, and strolled along the ocean. Dr. Pookie tried out her new sandals, that have FUCK TRUMP etched into the soles. We slowly figured out the right texture and wetness to leave the best impressions.

We got some walking up and down the beach, and then to Gallagher's Irish pub for lunch. Kind of a sleepy 11:30 am vibe there, no doubt it's more animated at night, but they offer tots by the pound and have really fantastic onion rings.

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MAGA infighting, in re skilled worker visas

Sat, 28 Dec 2024 15:38:50 GMT

Definitely a nonzero chance my rant at the Christian Forums will get nuked, so for the benefit of posterity:

A lot of people here seem to be confused about where the lines of division are drawn, and in particular where liberals might stand. Let me try to help explain more directly, at least for my own position, which some people appear to misunderstand.

More importantly, Trump-fans are missing a great opportunity to see me -- me! -- get aboard one car of the Trump train.

I, essentialsaltes, have unfailingly pointed to one particular political sliver as being antithetical to the concept of America. To wit: willfully ignorant and/or xenophobic Christian Nationalist MAGA.

If Trump obeys Elon Musk's directive to open the border (wider) to skilled Indian (and other foreign) workers, those enemies of America will be angry about it (as they have already demonstrated).

Christian xenophobes like Laura Loomer complained that the White House would smell like curry if Kamala won. Loomer apparently chose the lesser of two evils, so that only the Vice President's residence will smell of curry.

Christian xenophobes like Pastor Joel Webber complained that "it’s not that there are [just] different shades of white and brown [in myneighborhood],” he added. “No, it’s like full, straight-up Hindu garb at our neighborhood swimming pool that my daughter is asking [about and] I’m trying to explain.”

If Donald Trump puts a curry shop on every corner, I will feast well and Loomer and Webber will gnash their teeth at ten times the smell of curry and ten times the sight of full, straight-up Hindu garb.

SAFFRON MAN GOOD!

Likewise, the willfully ignorant often shun higher education and dissuade their children from it, thereby reducing the potential supply of educated, skilled workers.

And they chose for their champion: Ivy League educated Donald Trump, who sent most of his kids to his alma mater (sorry, Eric). Barron is not at an Ivy, but is at elite liberal NYU in elite liberal NYC.

And his Ivy League running mate (with an Ivy League wife).

And what prize did the MAGA booboisie win?

A South African atheist techbro scion of wealth reached for the largest megaphone on the face of the planet and called them all r-words!

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Nick of Time / The Voice of the River

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 01:11:48 GMT

The Nick of Time by George Alec Effinger is a rollicking time travel story that does quite a bit of reality bending. Part of it has a bit of the feel of the Jasper Fforde books, as our hero slips into alternate futures. So travelling to 1984 takes him to something a bit like Orwell's version. There's also a touch of 12 Monkeys as our hero from a troubled future goes back to the simpler time of the 1939 World's Fair. Not a great book, and it hasn't aged particularly well (I deem), but some fun ideas and passages.

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The Voice of the River by Melanie Rae Thon

I think I saw this on some best fiction of the year list from way back when. I think the review waxed lyrical about what Wikipedia calls her "work that moves beyond and between genres as it explores diversity from a multitude of human and more-than-human perspectives." Having sampled it, I can appreciate the effort it must take to write like that, but I just don't find it rewarding. COULD NOT FINISH. I rarely give up on books, so this is a rare accolade [?] from me.

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The Glass Hammer / A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 00:33:43 GMT

The Glass Hammer, by KW Jeter, bears the stamp of Jeter's mentor Philip K Dick, both thematically and in a character that seems very much like a stand-in for PKD. There are some thoughtful idea about reality and media scattered throughout the science-fictiony tropes and Dickian paranoia of post-whoops America, psychic computers (or are they?), new religions, and the messiah (or is he?).

A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy

Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead

The book makes the case (pretty well) that what we're seeing now, most notably typified by Trump, but by no means confined to him, is a changing nature of conspiracies in modern political life. And that it is corrosive to democracy and the nation and the very idea of that 'knowledge' and 'expertise' are possible.

The new conspiracism is something different. There is no punctilious demand for proofs,4 no exhaustive amassing of evidence, no dots revealed to form a pattern, no close examination of the operators plotting in the shadows. The new conspiracism dispenses with the burden of explanation. Instead, we have innuendo and verbal gesture: “A lot of people are saying …” Or we have bare assertion: “Rigged!”—a one-word exclamation that evokes fantastic schemes, sinister motives, and the awesome capacity to mobilize three million illegal voters to support Hillary Clinton for president. This is conspiracy without the theory.

For JFK and 9/11 conspiracy theorists, there was always a lot of talk about the evidence. Magic bullets, grassy knolls, the melting point of steel and so on. Now it's just smoke and bluff and bare assertion. Millions of illegal ballots? What's the evidence? At best you get allusions to affidavits that assert millions of illegal ballots. Referencing the claim itself is now tantamount to evidence for the new conspiracists. Obviously, this allows for a free-floating phantasmagoria of fraudulent claims. That lead to people shooting up pizza parlors or storming the Capitol. Anyway, more quotes that resonated with me.

The most striking feature of the new conspiracism is just this—its assault on reality. The new conspiracism strikes at what we think of as truth and the grounds of truth. It strikes at what it means to know something. The new conspiracism seeks to replace evidence, argument, and shared grounds of understanding with convoluted conjurings and bare assertions. Among the threats to democracy, only the new conspiracism does double damage: delegitimation and disorientation.

the new conspiracists call for repeating and spreading their claims—“liking,” tweeting, and forwarding. Repetition takes the place of organized political action. What Trump, for instance, wants is not the architecture of an organized political party or even an organized movement but a throng that assents to his account of reality. “You know what’s important,” he said about his fantasy of illegal Clinton votes, “millions of people agree with me when I say that. Affirmation of his reality is the key act

Representative Bryan Zollinger perfectly capture the ethos of true-enoughness in his suggestion that the Democratic Party might very well have brought white nationalists to Charlottesville in 2017 to create a violent clash: “I am not saying it is true, but I am suggesting that it is completely plausible.” The new conspiracism sets a low bar: if one cannot be certain that a belief is entirely false, with the emphasis on entirely, then it might be true—and that’s true enough.

When it comes to true enough, what matters is not evidence but repetition. Participation in conspiracist social networks triggers assent. Echoing, repeating, sharing, liking, and forwarding a conspiracist claim is a show of affiliation with others who are angry and confident that things are not as they seem. Conspiracist narratives refresh these passions by reminding members of the group of what they feel with renewed energy.

modern democracy depends on expert knowledge. This comes to bear especially in what has come to be called the administrative state, which comprises the myriad agencies staffed by career professionals who rely on specialized knowledge they create or draw on from research institutions and from civil society groups outside government. This is the basis for formulating, implementing, and enforcing public policy touching everything from safe water to consumer protection to interest rates and banking rules. These scientists, statisticians, economists, and ethicists are not elected; they are insulated to a reasonable extent from political controversies and partisan influence. They are “disinterested” as a matter of professional discipline and seek to apply impartial standards in the general interest.

These experts, of course, are the focus of a lot of the ire of the conspiracy-minded. Climate scientists, Dr. Fauci, our intelligence agencies, ivory tower academics

It turns out that conspiracist claims are easy to create, and easy for officials to embellish, endorse, or just allow to play out. What lies behind complicity by insinuation, equivocation, or silence? As we detail in chapter 7, representatives are vulnerable to angry constituents who subscribe to conspiracy. When reelection is in jeopardy, or an official is haunted by the specter of a potential primary challenge, silence or coy encouragement seems a safer posture than correcting the record and offending one’s supporters.

Closed to the world of shared understanding, conspiracism distorts what it means to know something. At a deeper level, the new conspiracists claim to own reality, and in doing so, they assault our common sense of reality. We experience a special form of anxiety and disorientation. We have been unwillingly drafted into a contest over who owns reality.

if the community in which we place our trust gets it wrong or is corrupt, then what we take to be knowledge may be unjustified and erroneous. Some put their trust in a community of scientists and public health officials who affirm that vaccines do not cause autism; others put their trust in an internet community of anonymous conspiracists who affirm that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman is running an international child sex-trafficking ring out of a pizzeria. What is the difference? At the level of the individual who gets his or her knowledge from others, there is not much difference.

The difference is found at another level, in the characteristics that define the community whose authority we accept on trust. In one case, these communities are defined by their commitment to publicize the evidence on which their conclusions are based, and thus to subject them to the scrutiny of others. In the other case, the community is defined by access to private knowledge that is unsharable,

When we decide what community is worthy of epistemic trust, we are implicitly also deciding what it means to know something.

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News Stories Colliding in My Head

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 14:34:29 GMT

Xander Schauffele, citizen of Earth, wins Olympic golf gold

The meaning of this turn of Olympic golf ended up being that the gold medal went to that man for all nations, the polyglot delight from San Diego who stood for one national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but could have stood for several. This 27-year-old with the Californian ease and the Taiwanese mother raised in Japan and the French-German father finally won a big-deal tournament after inveterate contention in golf majors, whereupon he gave an Olympian answer to an Olympian question about the values of multi-nationalism and travel upon this planet.

“I think that I can just use myself as an example,” Xander Schauffele said after one-shot win over Rory Sabbatini, the South Africa-born, 45-year-old multinational playing for Slovakia. “I’m the only natural-born citizen in my family [of four], being born in the United States … I think that being very international, it’s taught me a lot about different cultures and it’s made me very understanding of different cultures. I think that if everyone sort of had the ability to travel more and experience other cultures, they would be more willing to get along, potentially.”

He could look over at the bronze medalist and say, as an American, “Yeah, my fellow countryman right next to me. My mom was born in Taiwan, so actually by blood I’m half-Taiwanese.”

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In Orange County, Anti-Vaccine Activists Attack Top Elected Official For His Vietnamese Heritage

But at this week’s unruly meeting, anti-vax sentiments turned into a torrent of racist and xenophobic tirades against [Republican] Supervisor Andrew Do, the board’s chair, who is of Vietnamese descent. In his role as board chair, he has been directing the county's COVID prevention efforts.

One speaker who identified himself as Tyler Durden, a character from the film Fight Club, blasted Vietnam’s COVID quarantine policies and said to Do: “You come to my country, and you act like one of these communist parasites. I ask you to go the f—k back to Vietnam!”

Do was a refugee whose family fled the communist regime in Vietnam and has lived in the U.S. for 46 years.

Another speaker said: “You have the audacity to come here and try to turn our country, Andrew Do, into a communist country. Shame on you!”

“You talked about escaping communism this morning,” said yet another speaker. “Why are you bringing communism to Orange County? We want our freedoms. We're Americans, we have freedoms.”

Do is an outspoken critic of communism and perhaps the best-known Vietnamese American leader in Southern California. Some critics say his measures to combat COVID have not been aggressive enough compared to neighboring Los Angeles County, and they find it ironic that anti-vaccine activists are focused on him.

"I think most people look at Andrew Do and say he's certainly not at the vanguard of some of these efforts to limit COVID," Min said.

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From Bacteria to Bach and Back ; When the Sleeper Wakes

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 23:50:00 GMT

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, by Daniel Dennett (my spirit animal)

In many ways this book ties together a lot of Dennett's idea from different areas of his interest: primarily evolution and consciousness. I think he tries too hard to smash them together into something that looks like a broader worldview, but I'm not sure he succeeds. I'm definitely on board with much of what he says, but then the intervening spit and glue that holds it together just doesn't come together into a picture for me. My verdict: just go read Consciousness Explained one more time. His best book on his hardest subject.

When the Sleeper Wakes, by HG Wells

One of those ancient SF stories that everyone recognizes and no one reads. And now I know why. Our hero falls into a strange trance and lives on through centuries. His cousin providentially invests his money wisely, and When the Sleeper Awakes, he owns half the planet. The planet is being run, more or less, by a council of capitalist pigs, while The Sleeper has sympathies with the downtrodden people.

Wells gets some things extremely right about the future: windmills for power generation, annoying advertising, capitalist pigs. And of course, many ludicrously wrong things: moving sidewalks instead of streets to carry people around.

Anyway, after the Sleeper Awakes, there is a far too overlong section of tedious chases and alarums as the people and the powers that be fight, while the Sleeper is largely a figurehead or in hiding. And then finally, the powers that be try that one thing -- that last straw to break the camel's back and get the Sleeper to exert his power and influence to overthrow the status quo. The powers that be attempt to use black people as policemen.

“I have been thinking about these negroes. I don’t believe the people intend any hostility to me, and, after all, I am the Master. I do not want any negroes brought to London. It is an archaic prejudice perhaps, but I have peculiar feelings about Europeans and the subject races. Even about Paris—”

Ostrog stood watching him from under his drooping brows. “I am not bringing negroes to London,” he said slowly. “But if—”

“You are not to bring armed negroes to London, whatever happens,” said Graham [the Sleeper - aka the Master]. “In that matter I am quite decided.”

Ostrog, after a pause, decided not to speak, and bowed deferentially.

Guess who orders black policemen despite explicit instructions not to?

“These negroes must not come to London,” said Graham. “I am Master and they shall not come.”

Ostrog glanced at Lincoln, who at once came towards them with his two attendants close behind him. “Why not?” asked Ostrog.

“White men must be mastered by white men.

So the Sleeper puts on his MBGA hat and puts a stop to this nonsense. As long as I'm spoiling this craptastrophic book, he also gets the girl with the goo-goo eyes and trembling lips.

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Entitled White Dude Adventures

Fri, 28 Sep 2018 23:21:13 GMT

DURBIN: I — I’ll just say this: If you, Judge Kavanaugh, turned to Don McGahn and to this committee and say, “For the sake of my reputation, my family name, and to get to the bottom of the truth of this, I am not going to stay — be an obstacle to an FBI investigation,” I would hope that all the members of the committee would join me in saying, “We’re going to abide by your ... wishes, and we will have that investigation.”

KAVANAUGH: I — I welcome whatever the committee wants to do, because I’m telling the truth.

DURBIN: I want to know what you want to do.

KAVANAUGH: I — I’m telling the truth.

DURBIN: I want to know what you want to do, Judge.

KAVANAUGH: I’m innocent. I’m innocent of this charge.

DURBIN: Then you’re prepared for an FBI investigator…

KAVANAUGH: They don’t reach conclusions. You reach the conclusion, Senator.

DURBIN: No, but they do investigate questions.

KAVANAUGH: I’m — I’m innocent.

...

DURBIN: I’m asking about the FBI investigation.

KAVANAUGH: They’re — the committee figures out how to ask the questions, I’ll do whatever. I’ve been on the phone multiple times with committee counsel. I’ll talk to…

DURBIN: Judge Kavanaugh, will you support an FBI investigation…

KAVANAUGH: … I’ll do — I’ll…

DURBIN: … right now?

KAVANAUGH: … I — I will do whatever the committee wants to…

IANAL, and I can hypothetically imagine that this is how a lawyer (or judge) should answer these questions. Nobody idly invites an FBI investigation. But for me, this weaseliness is where Kavanaugh failed the job interview.

<HR>

The whole situation also brought to mind a weird conversation that came up when I was teaching at the girls' high school. Somehow the topic of fraternities and frat parties came up. Now, my vast experience of frat parties amounts to one (perhaps not coincidentally, I was asked by a girl at the dorms, who wanted a male friend along). But having lived in an apartment building next door to a frat house, I had other observations and smellservations to judge from.

Anyway, I cautioned the girls to be wary of fraternities and not to go alone to parties. And I got a lot of pushback. No way! These were exciting boys with nice cars and excellent job prospects. And I soon felt I was just digging a hole -- I was protesting too much, probably couldn't get in, sour grapes.

Anyway, as an entitled white dude, it's easy for me to look at groups of entitled white dudes and recognize them doing entitled white dude things. And nothing in the general description of the party life in Kavanaugh's background is in the least bit surprising or eye-opening. And nothing in Kavanaugh's petulant display is either. Or the treatment he's receiving in the Senate. Not sure where I was going with this. Just venting.

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Educated & Far Cry 5

Sat, 19 May 2018 00:22:26 GMT

Educated , by Tara Westover, is another book pick of the NYT/PBS Now Read This book club.

Westover grew up in Idaho in a strict Mormon family that stands out even among Mormon families in Idaho. Her father was not merely religious, but mistrustful of the government, doctors, vaccinations, medicine, education. Tara (after the fact) diagnoses him with bipolar disorder, but it's hard to separate mental illness from the extremes of conspiratorial antigovernment survivalist thinking. At any rate, while some of her older siblings had some schooling, Tara as the youngest grew up during the most extreme era of dad's thinking. She didn't go to school at all, and it would be charitable to call her home life 'unschooling'. Not only that, but she didn't have a birth certificate until she was 9.

Mom makes herbal remedies and gets training as a midwife. Dad makes a living at scrap dealing. Much of her childhood reminiscences are of horrible industrial accidents caused by willful negligence on her father's part, usually with her or her siblings as the victims. One brother somehow studies enough to go to college, and form a role model for her. She studies enough to get a decent ACT score and get admitted to BYU, where she is soon a fish out of water, even moreso than you or I would be at BYU, but for different reasons.

One significant event is a lecture class where she has to ask what the word "Holocaust" means. That's how profound her ignorance was. And although her ignorance was 'honest', being ignorant of the Holocaust was probably too close to Holocaust-denial, so she faced a certain amount of moral censure from the class.

I wish there were more details like this included, that track the change from ignorance to knowledge, or from false knowledge to true knowledge (as when she slowly comes to understand that aspirin and antibiotics are not, in fact, poisons.)

But while her life story is certainly one of gaining degrees at BYU and Cambridge and Harvard, there is not enough insight (to satisfy me) about how her worldview changes. The actual story she's telling is more about the increasing distance between her and her parents (and the shifting alliances among siblings and other relations).

Perfect segue into Far Cry 5, set in the Mountain West, where a religious cult with doomsday prepper attitudes takes over a county. It's not much of a stretch to cast Tara's family as the bad guys. As a rookie law enforcement agent, you get sent in to arrest the head of the cult. Let's just say it doesn't go well, and pretty soon, you're in Far Cry mode. Hiding in the bushes with a bow and arrow, slowly taking out the bad guys and liberating territory for decent folk.

Now coming from a series which has been justly criticized for regressive attitudes, this entry sends some subliminal prosocial attitudes. Sure, it's violent as fuck as you kill bad guys with bigger and larger explody things (although the bow and arrow combat system is still extremely satisfying). But the bad guys are anti-government forces. And you slowly gather allies among the good honest folk. When you take over an outpost, you literally put up an American flag. Now, if this were set in the Middle East or Africa, it would be jingoistic colonialism (and most of the rest of the Far Cry series has been set in remote parts of the world where it's been easy to see it as white dude versus nonwhite dudes.) But here they've twisted it around, and made the treasonous rebel scum the enemy. America, Fuck Yeah!

Lots of good stuff to flesh out the game. Some good creepy music from the cult. A few hilarious characters ("I've been shot!... In the wiener!"). Recreating the stunts of daredevil Clutch Nixon. And the simple joy of slinking around a compound with Peaches the mountain lion, slaughtering cultists.

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Pervy jerks in (and some out of) the skeptical movement

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 04:59:31 GMT

There's been quite the confluence of events. Buzzfeed (don't laugh) ran a deeply researched article about Lawrence Krauss and a number of sexual allegations against him. None violent, but sleazy. Apparently enough to warrant being banned from a couple campuses where he used to work. While I was dimmmmmly aware, for me it was basically internet gossip about someone I don't really know.

I found the article convincing, and icky enough that it bothered me that I remembered that Krauss was a fellow of CSI (nee CSICOP). And I went to the trouble of checking their page of fellows to be sure.

And there are two things that probably made that association leap to my mind. Number one, another Fellow is Benjamin Radford, and he too has been associated with some similar accusations (starting from incidents after a consensual relationship turned sour). Again, I am not the insider here, but I gather that Barry Karr [or maybe Ron Lindsay -- like I said, I'm not an insider] made an investigation, meted out some punishment, and I don't know the ins and outs, other than to say that Radford is still a Fellow, as is his most noteworthy accuser (from where I sit, not being close to any of this). So I feel confident that something was done with at least some semblance of justice. But the episode also pulled additional anonymous whispers out of the ether.

The second thing that probably kept it fresh in my mind was that the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer noted that Susan Gerbic had been made a Fellow. This was surprising, because most of the Fellows are members of the professoriate in disciplines from physics to psychology. And Susan runs the guerrilla skeptics on wikipedia. I mean, if done right, obviously it's to everyone's benefit for Wikipedia to be accurate, and credulous viewpoints need to be countered by skeptical ones. But...

#1: my brief foray into Wikipedia editing convinced me that it takes a certain kind of person to enjoy and win the Wikipedia editing game. And it isn't me. And I'm vaguely suspicious of the people who find themselves at home in that environment.
#2: Susan's common appearances on the Skepticality podcast did not impress me favorably. In addition to her stated work to push an agenda, it was clear she was also generally a shill for conferences and meetings, etc. Some of the things that pushed me away from greater involvement in organized skepticism (it was not enough that I volunteered to be part of the Independent Investigations Group (an organization I helped name) but to stay in, one would be required to take classes for money -- fuck that).
#3: In short, rather than a skeptic, she strikes me more as a True Believer. Our side is right, and this justifies almost anything.
#4: More recently, I see that Susan is essentially defending Radford on his Wiki page (see the Talk) to keep the page clean of talk of the accusation. Now I don't know that it's notable or meets Wikipedia's standards, but it does bother me that it seems that the truth is less important than defending the people in one's camp.

Anyhoo, this had me thinking about CSI having two fairly well documented pervs among its Fellows (and I wasn't so hot about the merger between CFI and the Dawkins Foundation). And so for a long time (when I only knew of one perv) I was reconsidering the bequest in my will to CSICOP. And now there were (at least) two pervs. Now when you look at the list... there are a lot of people I admire, from Susan Blackmore to Daniel Dennett to EC Krupp to Joe Nickell to Bob Park to Eugenie Scott. Maybe two bad eggs isn't too bad a proportion? On the other hand, there's more than enough star power that I really wish they'd get rid of any bad eggs. After appropriate scrutiny.

And then my stepdad died last week. And I read through his will. And I thought a lot more about my own.

And then a miracle... Lawrence Krauss was (at least temporarily) un-Fellowed from CSI. And I note that between looking at the CSI Fellows page a few days ago and now, Susan Gerbic has also vanished from the list, shortly after arriving. This I assume(?) is at her behest.

So we're back down to one perv (that has come to my attention) who served metaphorical time for one incident. All cool?

(Thank lackofgod that pervy Mike Shermer has an entirely separate Skeptic organization for me to shun. It's true, I shunned him for being dumb long before I knew about any pervy accusations, but every little bit helps. Also a shame that James Randi (who gave his name to yet a third skeptic organization) turned a blind eye to Shermer being 'a bad boy on occasion'.)

Seems like I'm down on all the skeptical organizations, but hey it's just some of the people and the organizations that suck. Not the ideas or the truth of the matter. And possibly CFI/CSI has taken a small step to suck less... and can stay in my will.

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Sisyphus

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 03:51:07 GMT

Tuesday

OldWiseGuy's link: whites are almost TWICE as likely to be killed by police officers.

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, between 1999 and 2011, 2,151 whites died as a result of being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks.

essentialsaltes: The bolded text is a lie. An obvious lie. A childish lie. Only the innumerate would fall for such a transparent lie.

OldWiseGuy: 1.9 times is "almost twice" (unless my math is off).

Iluvatar: Do you know what percentage of the population is made up by blacks? Do you know why that's important to your argument?

OldWiseGuy: So what is the "truth of the matter"?

essentialsaltes: Iluvatar ... and I have been trying to help you find the truth for yourself. Start with iluvatar's questions

Wednesday

OldWiseGuy: I asked for your opinion, not help with mine.

essentialsaltes: Sorry, no. You asked for the truth. The truth is independent of opinion.

You can find it if you go about the process with an honest and unbiased mind. If I just give it to you, you'll just reject it. Go back and answer Iluvatar's questions. You'll find it for yourself.

[TL;DR]

essentialsaltes: Excellent. Do you agree then, that it is not a fact (or a statistic) that "whites are almost TWICE as likely to be killed by police officers."

Thursday

OldWiseGuy: I already conceded that point, in post 29. You're beating a dead horse here.

Saturday

2Timothy2:15: Here are some more stats. Stats clearly show that more white people are killed by police year over year than any other race.

essentialsaltes: Yes, and more right handed people are on death row than left handers. That's not the relevant statistic.

Even our local curmudgeon OldWiseGuy conceded this point. Black people are more likely to be killed by police, year after year. That is the relevant statistic.

2Timothy2:15: If black people are more likely to be killed the numbers would match, which they don't.

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Scientismists exist

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 14:55:48 GMT

Remember when I suggested that scientismists would require Queen Elizabeth to pump out hundreds of eggs a day? That's pretty close to this guy.

given the great demands placed on the female body during homo sapiens’ lengthy gestation and lactation period, would it be wrong for me to suggest that encouraging males to select mates based on characteristics that enable the female to generate wealth independent of a mate rather than on their ability to bear children may have long term negative effects on the species. or is that just the crazy in me talking?

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Everything I needed to know I learned from Merlyn

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 14:51:07 GMT

"I never could stomach these nationalists," he exclaimed. "The destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing, you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees."

"I see what you think you mean," said the magician, "but you are wrong. There is no excuse for war, none whatever, and whatever the wrong which your nation might be doing to mine -- short of war -- my nation would be in the wrong if it started a war so as to redress it. A murderer, for instance, is not allowed to plead that his victim was rich and oppressing him -- so why should a nation be allowed to? Wrongs have to be redressed by reason, not force."

[Sir Kay probes the argument.]

Merlyn was annoyed.

"Only because you want it to seem so," he said. "Obviously Lot would be the aggressor, for making the threat of force. You can always spot the villain, if you keep a fair mind. In the last resort, it is ultimately the man who strikes the first blow ... if there is nothing else to decide by"

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Burnt by Global Warming

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 15:21:32 GMT

It came from the Christian Forums...

Moron: "a single volcanic eruption releases more polution than all of mankind has throughout our history combined"

me: False (provides evidence)

Moron: The problem is that a lot of the data surrounding human CO2 output has been based on lies and misinformation over the years, so there's really no way to affirm they are using reliable and factual data. They may be right. No way for either side to know for sure.

It must be very curious to live in a world of nebulous clouds where nothing can be known.

Luckily we are not in that position. Just as a for instance, "In 2016, about 143.37 billion gallons (or about 3.41 billion barrels1) of finished motor gasoline were consumed2 in the United States"

Very few people are using it to fill their swimming pools, so if it is combusted in motor vehicles, each gallon of fuel produces "About 19.6 pounds of CO2"

(140 billion gallons) times (20 pounds of CO2/gallon) = 2800 billion pounds = more than 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide.

From my first link, "A 2013 review attempted to estimate the annual contribution of CO2 emitted from all volcanoes (active and passive) and other tectonic sources on Earth per year, coming up with a figure of 540 megatons per year" i.e. 0.54 billion tons

So the US consumption of motor fuel alone produces more CO2 than the output of all the world's volcanoes.

This is how we can know that your original statement is just false, and there is a way to know for sure.

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