The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Talmud as an anti-Christian tract


When the Von Brunn murder came to light, so did Von Brunn's opinions, and among these was a polemic against the Bavli Talmud of the Rabbinic Jews. I'm seeing similar opinions among Muslim trolls in MyPetJawa.

At the core of this polemic are the comments the Bavli, and not so much the Yerushalmi, Tosefta etc, levy against Jesus. Christian and Muslim antiSemites agree upon venerating Jesus, or at least upon using Jesus as a wedge between Jews and their Abrahamic cousins.

Peter Schaefer in 2007 published the definitive secular reading of the Jesus references in the Talmud. He found that the Bavli is hostile. There had been an anti-Jesus literature in Judaism for centuries, and Justin Martyr's correspondent Trypho and Origen's foil Celsus reported on their state as of the mid second century AD. The Bavli brought many of these together and canonised them for the Jews in Iraq.

The Bavli's comments on Jesus have been known to American evangelical Protestants since Josh MacDowell's Evidence That Demands A Verdict books. To MacDowell, the Bavli proves that Jesus existed, performed miracles, and was killed in Jerusalem. MacDowell didn't care that the Talmud was a hostile witness; he valued it as a memory of the Pharisaic indictment. MacDowell, author of Christian propaganda against Judaism, had the integrity not to complain about the existence of Jewish propaganda against Jesus.

There is something to be learnt from MacDowell's attitude. The existence of an apologetic, or evangelical, or even polemic literature among a group - here, the Jews - does not alone imply that the group must be wicked. For that the literature would have to recommend wicked means to solve the problem of the polemic's target. The Talmud supports no prescription along the lines of the Qur'an's qital. It just lays out a case against Jesus. It has to, or else it would become a Christian text itself.

In addition, the Talmud is not a Qur'an or even a Torah, and Jews can find a multitude of opinions in it, for and against almost every proposition. The Talmud preserves a second-century case against Jesus and carries it forward to the Talmud's own day in the sixth-century. Jews then were supposed to read that and to compare it to other accounts of Jesus; canonical Christian, gnostic Christian, Josephus's accounts of Jesus and James, and also pagan and Mandaean accounts which are mostly lost now. This is pretty much how Jews look at Jesus today - and it is not entirely a hostile look.

The Muslim / David Duke axis is entirely opportunistic. When the anti-Talmud trolls come into your comment forum, they're not there to make a principled case.

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posted by Zimri on 13:18 | link |

Friday, November 20, 2009

The big global-warming swindle


I heard that the global-warminators' server got pwnzord and that large ZIPs of email are on the loose. The emails have some incriminating stuff on them. That stuff is probably out of context, and I think a 24 hour rule is important here.

But I'm not here to talk about that. I don't even feel like talking about Lizardland. I'm here to talk about the warminators' big problem - that the earth quit warming last decade, despite an increase in CO2.

My intuition is that CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas, and that much of the warming 1982-1998 was driven by methane and chlorofluorocarbons.

CFCs are a nasty bunch of chemicals and the world rightly agreed to ban 'em. Methane on the other hand is more tricky to control. It comes from cows, which taste yummy; but even if you banned herding in Brazil and allowed the rain-forest back, eventually some trees would die and attract termites which... emit the same gas.

The good news about methane is that it (1) is reactive and (2) emits less-harmful gasses when it decomposes. Methane is just carbon and hydrogen; all you'll get from its breakdown is CO2 and water - both also greenhouse, to be sure, but less so. CFCs break down into chlorine compounds. Yikes!

So methane will, if our emissions stay at the same rate, reach an equilibrium. No-one seriously proposes a runaway concentration of methane. Everyone worries instead about the less-reactive CO2, which fuels the hellfire of planet Venus.

CO2 also has an equilibrium under normal conditions at our insolation. It's called the "carbon cycle", whereby high amounts of CO2 end up in carbonate rocks and the aforementioned trees. The new National Geographic analogises it to water entering a bathtub which drains at a steady rate. Currently, more pours in than is coming out. The warminators say this is mostly the result of fossil-fuel burning, therefore that humans are overwhelming this cycle.

Whether this is bad is another question. No-one knows how much CO2 will be necessary to take us to Venus but my thought is, a lot. Like about 10% in the atmosphere would be my guess.

I'm not a climate scientist though. I never was good at socialising with my peers, nor at keeping mum on unethical conduct; both of which are prerequisites to running a cartel like theirs.

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posted by Zimri on 19:34 | link |

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Art is not political


Melissa Anderson also reviewed the movie "(untitled)". That film sends up the "art" world. The review isn't online so, no link, sowwy. Here's the review. The review didn't approve the movie.

I got the vibe from Anderson's take on The Blind Side that she was one of those who enjoys most of all one-upping other people; there, it was over other Liberals on tolerance, and here apparently it's over everybody else on Art Appreciation. The Houston Press, The Village Voice and other such rags serve the urban hipster community, which means they have to show that they Care; when it came time to face down this threat to Art, they picked the right gal.

Anderson is of the opinion that the whole discussion of whether modern art is worth anything is, like, so totes 1998, or 1988 (she's not so sure). She doesn't want to raise the issue because she thinks the issue is decided by politics - naked force - and not by its merits.

On its merits, modern art is a sham. If we demand a standard which can transgress politics and be appreciated by future viewers of alien politics, the standard for art must depend on craftsmanship - and as a craft artwork follows objective rules. In music, a jazz musician may riff on the theme, but can only introduce discord with great care and deliberation. 20th century artwork has always been as ruinous as was that century's politics.

Anderson accepts the rule of her Brahmin caste on what is "art". In that vein, it's only fair we adopt the Brahmin definition of "peace": victory for the right side. Anderson therefore doesn't get to declare the war over. The war ends when the "good guys" say it ends - and in the case of art, the side of tradition - the right wing - makes that call.

Melissa Anderson does not have opinions of her own. If the artwork is Brahmin-approved, it must be good. If the movie offends her politics, it can't be good. She is a slave.

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posted by Zimri on 17:19 | link |

Blind Side'd


The critic Melissa Anderson is saying that the new Julia Roberts movie The Blind Side is racist.

Okay, it's a Sandra Bullock movie. It's a Julia Roberts movie in spirit. She'd pretty much cornered Saintly Meddling Liberal in that abomination Erin Brockovich. I guess Sandra Bullock wants her job.

I tend to agree that The Blind Side is racist (in the Liberal way of racism), but I'm not terribly concerned about that. My thought is that if you're a racist, your movie has a problem if its protagonist is helping a member of the race you despise. Other racists have to ask - why bother?

I gather the target demo is 40-something white females whose "best friends are black" as long as those friends don't live anywhere near them.

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posted by Zimri on 17:05 | link |

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Role models


I watched the Larry King interview with Carrie Prejean. She compared herself to Sarah Palin (and Michelle Bachmann), complained that Conservative women get their feelings hurt by liberals, and then threw a tantrum. I watched the Glenn Beck recap too - whither HotAir had directed me - and it's looking like she's not getting any sympathy from the Right.

She certainly didn't do Palin any favours. The last thing Palin wants people to see is one of her fans whining and then stamping away from a commitment.

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posted by Zimri on 23:29 | link |

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Is SETI a religion?


Here's Michael Crichton back in 2003, on the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (h/t Watts Up):

Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. ... The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

We can handily test Crichton's thesis that there is no proof of alien life. First, forget his invocation of the Drake Equation, which is a misdirection (deliberate or not). The correct starting point is to recognise that life in the galaxy follows inductive logic. (Like the public-option in healthcare, and intelligent-design in biology.) That is, if one planet around a main-sequence, 4.567 billion year old star can support life: it becomes unreasonable to exclude planets of similar surface g and age, with similar insolation from their star.

Thus the question of intelligent life in this galaxy has been solved. This was proven in 200,000 BC by Mitochondrial Eve.

From there SETI ceased to be a religion; and became a search. Either we find life, or else we find a reason for there not to be intelligent life on every planet within radio range. To resolve either hypothesis we need data on the nature of the stars, and solar systems if any, within SETI's sphere of 50 light-years (counting from 1960).

These data just weren't available in 1960 but we are catching up now. Since 1995 we have found that many nearby stars support planets. We will shortly be in position to tell which of these systems is likely to have habitable planets. When we find enough of them (and the SETI net goes out further), we will have our answer.

Even not finding anything is interesting, once the SETI sphere expands to include too many stars. That too is likely the result of (destructive) intelligence. Brian Aldiss in Helliconia Summer, I believe, proposed that sentient beings would always wipe themselves out; but there is also the alternative of Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space.

SETI is testable and does not qualify as a religion. The Drake Equation was a bad start to the affair, true, but that does not invalidate SETI itself.

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posted by Zimri on 16:15 | link |

Monday, November 09, 2009

Did they really say that?


Did Otto von Bismarck really say "let them say what they want; I will do what I want"? Did Robert Heinlein really say "an armed society is a polite society"?

They are beautiful sentiments but I wonder if I am the victim of internet memes.

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posted by Zimri on 22:29 | link |

Proof by bad analogy


I'm always suspicious of parables. I heard a lot of them from Christian evangelists. Whenever I poked holes in one model they would just move on to another model. It got too much for me to bear as of late 1996 or so. I see no reason to be any more tolerant of socialists - in fact, I have more of a problem with socialists, who want to steal from me after they're done preaching. (I can always sleep through a sermon.)

I fully expect "pnrj", who came up with the analogy below, to come up with that other model. It will be just as bad as the first one.

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posted by Zimri on 16:29 | link |

Insidious bad apples


I just read this parable of economic inequality:

There are three men on a desert island. Adam has 2000 apples. Bob has 12 apples. Carl has only 3 apples. There is reason to think that all three men could survive to be rescued, if each has at least 10 apples to feed himself until the rescue arrives. If things remain the same, Adam will obviously survive; Bob would also most likely survive. But Carl would definitely die. Bob could give up 2 of his apples to Carl, but then he'd be at more risk and Carl would still most likely die--or he could give up 7 of his apples and Carl would live but Bob would die.

Here's the author's answer - social democracy:

So, Bob and Carl make a contract: They will take 7 of Adam's apples so that Carl will have 10. Adam resists, saying, "This is coercion! This is socialism! You have no right!" They do it anyway; everyone lives---but Adam is angry.

We see here immediately that social democracy (which Moldbug and I abbreviate, more cynically, to "democracy") creates envy in Carl and anger in Adam. It also demands that no-one recalls how the apples came into Adam's possession in the first place. Lastly, like Dispensational Millenniarianism, it assumes a finite span of time before some future Rapture. As a result no-one on this island asks how this colony might acquire more foodstuffs and other supplies.

Adam could offer some of his apples to Carl (who's clearly the worst at apple husbandry), on condition Carl row out and catch fish. If so, Adam and Carl both could have apples and fish between them.

To save his zero-sum-game model: the author has to fill his ocean with maneating sharks, and to strip his island of everything but those three guys and thousands of apples, and to intervene at the End. His model is entirely detached from reality. He may as well be talking about Robots! - from Spaaaaace!

Because in real life there is ALWAYS someone who has something and someone else who has something else - if only the people have the wit and the drive to produce it. Optimising total wealth and happiness involves free exchange, and restriction of interference to when one side is doing something clearly harmful (pollution, for instance).

The author should take an interest in what Adam really thinks beyond "I got mine". Adam has the hoard to prove that he is the most rational actor in the parable. Adam is wishing that he had refused to pick more than Bob's 12 apples, and pretended not to know how to pick them. Adam could have let Bob bear the wrath of the community while Adam spent his extra time lounging in the sun and playing dominoes with Carl.

Under socialism, those 2000 apples won't be picked and nobody gets protein, either. Everyone works just enough to stay under the radar. (Except maybe for Carl the least productive. Whether it's Carl's own fault or not, Adam and Bob will see him as the weak link. When supplies go low enough those two are likely to ambush Carl in the middle of the night and eat him.)

Socialists aren't that stupid, and if I can figure out the flaw in the above parable then so can they. Something else is at work.

I say that socialism was Bob's insidious plan all along. Bob undercut his own efforts so as to achieve parity with Carl, so that he could get Carl on his side. It wouldn't matter if Carl was poor or not; Bob would have told Carl it was okay not to work all that hard. It's not about justice for socialists; it's about being the one to dispense justice.

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posted by Zimri on 16:27 | link |

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Going wobbly


I'm wondering if we've got the next Andrew Sullivan on our hands.

Rick Moran, on the subject of Nidal Hasan, is looking at what he thinks are egregious comments by Pamela Gellar, Digby (whose blog is so obscure even Moran couldn't spell it right), RS McCain, and (ironically) Sullivan. Of these Gellar is as shrill and wrongheaded as ever; Digby likewise; McCain is right; and Sullivan is fatuous.

I don't know that it's at all worth our time to pay attention to Gellar or Digby (THE Digby? from HULLABALOO?!), much less to hold them up as supreme examples for Teh Blogoweb. Of the other two more prominent bloggers, whose output I can't say I much like either, Moran scores an own goal by citing one of McCain's more lucid opinions.

While Moran was whining about how quick the rush to judgement was on both sides, and passive-aggressively boasting about how much wiser he is: My Pet Jawa was digging into Hasan's mosque. Turns out that the weekly Friday rants were delivered by one Anwar al-Awlaki and that Hasan was bowing down between 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hamzi and Hani Hanjour.

Yes, the Right blogs were right. Yes, Hasan chose to follow extreme Islam. The only missing step is to find if any Salafi imams had given him an agreeable fatwa, but frankly even that step is redundant. Hasan waged a jihad on American unit cohesion and morale, and so far he has won. Rick Moran had best make his peace with that, as he's apparently made his peace with socialism.

UPDATE: The pieces are coming together. Al-Awlaki has praised the act. It hardly takes a genius to guess what al-Awlaki would say; and Hasan knew him better than I do. I don't know if we're going to find a specific fatwa, but everyone in his mosque knew in general what was expected of them.

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posted by Zimri on 22:11 | link |

Trolls trolls trolls


I don't know if it's even worth my time to blog about this...

I'm dealing with a couple of the inmates at Moran's nuthouse. Moran as far as I can tell is saying "meh, we're getting socialised healthcare" and shopping for KY Jelly and condoms. His commenters are more extreme.

Here's one:

“Are you an adult living with muscular dystrophy who can’t get nursing care because the CEO of your health insurer needs a private jet? Well too damned bad, pal, the GOP does not give a damn.”

Or, we could say “Are you an adult living with muscular dystrophy who can’t get nursing care because ‘budgets are tight for everyone’, and Sheila Jackson-Lee needs a private jet?”

What we have here is an appeal to emotion and a not-very-roundabout way of calling libertarians evil. Because the people have the right to the contents of your purse; you, on the other hand, have the duty to sit in line for months. For the chilllldrennnn!

And then there's this:

This bill however flawed, is the only serious one on the table; the GOP had control for decades, and not once made any serious attempt to fix the problem.

What's "the problem"? If we're talking comprehensivity of existent care, George W Bush "fixed" a "problem" of medication not being covered well under Medicare. That effort was pretty "serious", as I recall; Bush had to twist arms all over the place. If the problem is cost and complexity, then Pelosi's monstrosity makes things much much worse.

Then there are the guys who claim that it's all the fault of Beck, Limbaugh, and the extreme right-wing GOP who wouldn't play ball. Another commenter (mannning, 3 n's) refuted that; the GOP did show up to the plate with several amendments which Pelosi struck out. (Trying to keep all the metaphors on point, here.)

You can say the GOP sucks as much as you want. But that doesn't make the Democrats any better - and if you compare the two, the choice is clearly on the (R) side.

I know, it's the internets. But these blustering bullshitters still annoy me.

UPDATE 6 PM ... and they should annoy Progressives. There was another objector in the Nuthouse, by name "busboy33", who had substantive points and a better attitude. He would be tough to debate. But it's easier for me to play whack-a-troll so I just, well, whack those trolls. It fills up the comment thread with an apparently one-sided smackdown of people out of their depth. It makes the argument seem more settled than it is. On a personal level it's not fair to someone who is there for a real argument, like busboy33, who then has to share space with the circus.

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posted by Zimri on 17:24 | link |

Unreasonable forms of atheism


Atheism requires a theory of the Everything without recourse to God. The first of these theories I can find is Greek atomism. This incorporates an Anthropic Principle wherein this universe is here to be measured, because it happens to be lucky. Most universes don't have the physical laws which allow for abstraction-capable intelligence.

The Anthropic Principle doesn't hold any more explanatory power than do appeals to God. Instead of "o Jehovah" the atomists would have us say "o Infinity". That's not good enough.

The atomists need to give us a physically-practical guide to the alternative universes, or else they need to prove that this universe is the only mathematically-possible universe. Until the atomists do that I will classify atomism as a faith.

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posted by Zimri on 13:58 | link |

Friday, November 06, 2009

The moderate Muslim


I was trolling Jawa after they got a visit from a moderate-Muslim.

The moderate admits that mediaeval Islam includes qital (violent jihad). He even admits that Islamophobes are right about it. The moderate reports that moderate Muslims don't know about their faith's inherent ("orthodox") violence. When you get past the tu quoque, the moderate says:

the difference is that this "extremism" is still part of mainstream Muslim theology whereas it has already been pushed to the fringe in many other religious traditions...the saving grace is, the theology is not known to most mainstream muslims in any detail. sounds confusing, but its true

The moderate does not come to non-Muslim sites with a plan for Muslims themselves to "push to the fringe" the "'extremism' ... part of mainstream Muslim theology".

The moderate comes with a plea for "common sense". What is common sense? For the moderate - it's the end of "zionism", and the loss of "permanence" for the Jewish entity in "Palestine". (Yes, this particular moderate hit that theme three times.) He comes with demands.

The moderate is, also, in solidarity with the jihad against the infidel in "Islamic land". The moderate is, ultimately, a Muslim first.

We can commend the moderate for his willingness to present his case. We cannot treat his case as holding merit. And we cannot bargain with him. He is partly tribal, partly in thrall to a faith. He has not reasoned his way into this position.

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posted by Zimri on 19:05 | link |

Jon Stewart is funny to malinformed people


...and AllahPundit thinks Stewart is funny.

What Jon Stewart relies upon, beyond the parody of Glen Beck himself, is the assumption that Beck is unqualified to opine on Constitutional issues and on American history. And what that relies upon is that these fields require a credential from an organisation which is also accredited according to peer review - in accordance with what Stewart states as the analogy of a medical degree from a decent university.

Unfortunately for Stewart, the liberal-arts side of the whole Western university system has been captured by the radical Left decades ago. For recent history, sociology, and political science the accreditation process is dead. Once you get more recent than the 14th Century, or (for the Middle East) 6th century, I do not start with trust in any college graduate, up to PhD or even (or especially) Nobel Prize laureate, over some anonymous character I'd read two weeks of decent posts from in UseNet.

Beck is a Mormon and I would not trust his judgement on North American archaeology up to 400 AD. However he has proven himself astute on American history from 1800 on. I suspect that Stewart knows this too, which is why he's been drawing deliberately false parallels.

Pity that AllahPundit doesn't know it...

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posted by Zimri on 17:43 | link |

Thursday, November 05, 2009

Obama's "shout-out"


President Barack Hussein Obama, you are not a cool cat.

In addition, as "franticflintstone" points out: while we are under attack by existential enemies, it is not the time to opine that America is an illegitimate nation. But then - I've never thought much of your loyalties.

If you want to be seen as Presidential, it's time you started earning it.

UPDATE 4:40 - Upon seeing FFs's comments at Ace's, I posted the latest two parags and then - the comment board immediately went down. Gah.

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posted by Zimri on 16:17 | link |

Saturday, October 31, 2009

On flu shots


I don't distrust the idea of the State saying that influenza vaccines are a good idea. If the State wanted to control us with injections, they could sneak stuff in to the other vaccinations: polio, measles, etc.

As for the hucksters claiming that vaccines cause autism, I see them as enemies. Behind that claim is the assumption that people on the autistic spectrum are diseased. I am on that spectrum myself and I take that talk personally. Beyond that, the claim is bumcombe; autism is genetic. Extreme forms of autism are a problem, but they won't be solved by lies.

(Some disclosure here: I was a regular at LGF's Parachat lounge, whose regulars migrated to Table 9. When LGF went with a pro-vaccine stance - which, I must add, opposed conspiracy-theorists on the Left as well as Right, here - the people in both lounges mounted an insurgency against it. For that, Charles Johnson shut down the former lounge. I am, like Moldbug, a believer in sovereignty. I applauded Johnson's decision and I still support it. I have more mixed feelings about the attendant mass banning since dubbed "The Night Of The Vaccine Needles". But all that is over and done with now.)

I'm more concerned about the State mandating who can get the vaccines. And, yes, there is a concern that the State might force a shortage by its own policies; and to fight the emergency, demand control over the healthcare system. In the Left's history of the past decade, Bush used 9/11 as a pretext to curtail civil liberties. The Left has been casting about for its own emergencies to do the same. The economic crisis has already led to mass takeovers of our industries and banks. Global warming is another supposed crisis, but the people have been losing faith in that.

H1N1 could serve as the next "manbearpig" that we all have to Unite Against. But, so far and touch wood, it's not acted as our generation's 1918 pandemic or even as SARS. H1N1 has just acted like... the flu.

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posted by Zimri on 17:54 | link |

Thursday, October 29, 2009

CAIR package


Someone shot a couple of Jews in a parking lot. The cops don't know why; but given LA, the suspicion is Sudden Jihad Syndrome. The 24 Hour Rule would apply here.

Just in case, though, CAIR have a press release. That much is fair game.

This reminds me of what I was saying earlier about criminal enterprises. You get a group which is inherently criminal, like the Crips. But not all the crimes the criminals do in Crips are what that gang actually wants. Here, CAIR doesn't want the headache of addled Muslims puttin' a jihad on bystanders.

CAIR used to get on TV and say "ofcoursewecondemnthisattack BUT! Palestine, Zionists, al-Aqsa, Jerusalem blah blah". That but-headedness turned off the American people. They're not doing that anymore, which means they've learnt something.

They are still a terrorist organisation though.

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posted by Zimri on 17:36 | link |

Click it or ticket!


Another signboard: On the left hand, a chalkboard with repeated lines, "I will fasten my seatbelt". On the right hand, a plain message: "OR GET A TICKET!"

It's the same mentality as the commercial featuring a flock of tickets, flying toward a car wherein is some hapless middle-aged white man who has not done his Civic Duty.

Or: the commercial wherein a longer-haired white man is stopped at a light, and slowly surrounded by cop cars. He tries quietly to put on his belt. At that point all five, or more, of the cops turn on their lights. He is caught!

This isn't even a public-safety message. This is just the State saying, do what I say or I will punish you. It's the message of the lord to his serfs.

Under Mayor Bill White, Houston doesn't care about fighting real crime. Houston cares only about fighting that perception.

Under White, Houston is all about criminalising the violation of ordinances. They want the cash from "violators". They want the appearance of being strict. Most of all they want to run up the stats for Group A so it doesn't look so bad when, or I should say if, they should arrest a member of Group B who is committing (say) a mugging.

I've already dealt with this. But it's getting worse.

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posted by Zimri on 16:37 | link |

Renewable energy


I mentioned it in passing below, but Understanding E = mc2 bears posting again. What it boils down to, is that "renewable energy" doesn't scale for a population of our size.

Solar energy is good only for dealing with peak daylight usage; and it doesn't solve the problem of the baseline energy we must use when the air-conditioning isn't running and the offices are powered off (at night).

Geothermic, wind, and hydro power together won't make up that difference.

There's another equation to keep in mind here: total energy = number of people x energy use per person.

Environmentalists have a principled case to levy against coal and oil (less so, natural gas). If we find a principled environmentalist, who is fine with our population the way it is, and wouldn't mind lower energy bills: he would then support nuclear power. However we don't see this amongst the Al Gore set. Something Else Must Be At Work.

That Something is that these "environmentalists" are not, in fact, environmentalists. They are simply a coalition of those who would set a ceiling upon the nation. Here, the ceiling is allowable power usage. With total energy capped, the number of people becomes too high, and energy use must be rationed.

The Left wants either fewer people, or a return to the Dark Ages - except for the Left elite.

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posted by Zimri on 00:59 | link |

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The SHOCKING x That y DOES NOT WANT You To See


Are there people who still fall for that? To me it is obviously both an appeal to one's natural curiosity for "forbidden knowledge" ("x"), and an appeal to the hatred the audience has for their common enemy ("y").

It is likely technically true that person y doesn't want to bother with x. On the assumption that y is like most non-sociopaths, and x a pile of crap, then y would prefer that belief in x is minimised. I may not be a good example of a non-sociopath, but even I don't want you to be watching Expelled, dabbling in UFO theories, or hunting down copies of the Protocols. There are enough malinformed lunatics in this nation without adding to the pile of People I Must Avoid.

Or maybe I'm in on it! Oh noes!

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posted by Zimri on 17:06 | link |

Monday, October 26, 2009

Moderation is no virtue


So off I go to Obsidian Wings, where the slogan is "This is the Voice of Moderation".

Moderate ideas for them: equalising homosexual marriage to heterosexual marriage (it's bigotry to think elsewise), National Health By Stealth (to the Left of Obama, note), and punitive taxation.

Take it away, Vitruvius!

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posted by Zimri on 16:33 | link |

Autistic atheists


PZ Myers of Pharyngula thinks that these opinions of Christians are weird:

Over 65% of Christians believe angels really exist. Over 70% think the Bible is the most important book in the world. 75% think Jesus' execution atoned for our sins. Over 50% think the book of Genesis is a true account of our origins. 75% believe Jesus was literally born of a virgin. Over 70% literally believe in a Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

I've bolded the statement that is testable. Unfortunately for PZ Myers that statement is also true.

When we talk about "importance" in a document, we must define that as "influential". That means it has an influence on people and the planet.

I agree that the Jewish scriptures, precursor to the Christian Bible/s (and to the Jewish Tanakh), had negligible influence on classical culture, outside the circles of a few antiquarians (and anti-Semites) like Manetho.

But then the Christians edited the Jewish literature alongside their own literature into "the Bible" (mind you, this would have been the Catholic Bible with the deuterocanonica, but bear with me here). The Bible, as so defined, absolutely became important. If nothing else look at how much it was copied. It remains important today - even to nonbelievers, who are stuck with it as part of their culture (and also it incorporates a not-bad Near Eastern history text, as Baruch Halpern has proven).

Some here are exhibiting the mental trait that when they think something shouldn't be important, that means it objectively isn't. We call that trait "autism" and some of the rest of us have had to work to overcome it. PZ Myers and certain of the commenters on his site ought to give that a try.

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posted by Zimri on 16:32 | link |

Hypocrisy


I have to say that it is a little bit rich of Liberals to complain about the far-right associations of Conservatives now.

For decades Liberals fêted outright Communists as their vanguard and as their literary élite. If anyone like Horowitz pointed out these networks, all the nice moderate people snickered and sneered and called it conspiracy-theorising. ACORN-bashing became a little more respectable last year but the Left still got its sneer on.

But now it's a taint when someone is buds with an extremist.

Sure. Go on, pull the other one.

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posted by Zimri on 16:27 | link |

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Barack Obama: dumbass


Steve Sailer thought that Obama was a genius, and as for his college SATs "he aced them". Sailer based this largely upon two presumptions: that Obama actually wrote Dreams From My Father, and that the book was something other than an extended wank. Sailer took the book seriously enough to write a lengthy tafsir entitled "America's Half Blood Prince".

There's a controversy about Dreams. Some think Obama wrote it, and it's rubbish. Others (myself included) think Ayers wrote most if it. Either theory doesn't reflect well on Obama's verbal skills.

One might then ask Sailer, if Obama is such a brainiac, why is he keeping his college transcripts locked away; well, Sailer responds, because he didn't want people to see how smart he was. That argument may have been tenable last year but I don't think it is anymore.

From energy to green jobs to climate change to healthcare, Obama has evinced a profound lack of interest in objective reality. From what I've seen of humanity, this derives from lack of ability to handle the "hard subjects" like the sciences. In short, he is bad at math.

So were his parents. Barack Senior's economics, I kid you not, was "100% taxation". Ann Dunham's thesis, I kid you not, was entitled "blacksmithing in Indonesia: Surviving and thriving against all odds". The whole point of HBD is that intelligence is an inherent genetic trait, and that such traits are hereditary. Barack's parents were dullards. The chances were very low that these two clowns were going to spawn the next Gauss.

President Barack Obama, Harvard Law alumnus, and Nobel Prize laureate is a certain lefthander on the Bell Curve for g. Also I doubt very much that Obama's math SAT cracked 500.

(Not that there is anything wrong with that; but then, we're not talking about a candidate for the assistant manager at the corner Barnes & Noble, here.)

His verbal skills were probably higher (they might even have to be) so his overall IQ may still be 120+ (and his combined SAT >1000), but when I see him off Teleprompter I have to wonder.

If we're handing out George Armstrong Custer "Kicked Ass!" Awards like we did on UseNet, for the most cocky prediction that then collects the most arrows in its throat, Sailer's "he aced them" would be in serious contention. Somewhat ironic given Sailer's stated views on heredity (and this even without the four letter R tag).

P.S. Obama's temperament stinks too.

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posted by Zimri on 01:45 | link |

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Paging Stephen Cook


If you solved the problem Lazy Sammy Squirrel posed for you below, then congratulations. You've won a Fields Medal in mathematics. More: you've got a million dollars for the Millennium Prize. Your name will go down in history with Galois, Reimann, Perelman. Maybe even Newton.


That is because what Sammy had run into was a form of the NP complete puzzle. Finding a polynomial-time solution, or proving that polynomial-time is impossible, remains open. The NP complete class was defined by Stephen Cook as recently as 1971, and traveling-squirrel is just one member of it.


Anyway I would like to talk, today, about what I think is an equivalent in particle physics.


Particle physicists have a "Standard Model" of quarks, gluons etc which Explains Everything... except for the "Everything" part. Mathematically-minded physicists have attempted to refine the model. I am here picking on a branch of these model refineries: the String Theory. This proposes that underneath the Standard Model is a set of multidimensional vibrating strings.


In order for capital-P Physics to take this theory seriously, and not as a glorified Sudoku puzzle, we demand that String Theorists come up with a means for testing. When String Theorists do, they usually propose something hilarious like a hollow titanium donut the radius of Neptune's orbit. Instead of laughing the String Theorists out of the academy as if they were so many Ptolemaists, though, we're still nowhere decades later, and we're still paying these clowns for playing Sudoku. What's up with that, dawg?


I say, stop their funding cold. Absolute-zero cold. They can shop their theories in listservs and blogs like the rest of us kooks.


We need to be funding Stephen Cook instead. (If he's still alive, that is; if not him, then one of his students.) Physics needs to define a class of intractible problems (let's say it needs >1,000,000,000,000,000 eV to test); and to prove that String Theory belongs in that class.


At that point, we can treat all those String Theory hobbyists like we used to treat the guys who solved traveling-salesman in linear time on UseNet. Or, we can demand that String Theorists come up with their version of "approximation algorithms" = tests that show how likely String Theory is.


Until the Stephen Cook of physics comes along, I'm in agreement that it's intuitively clear that the string-theorists are in Internet kook territory.

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posted by Zimri on 17:43 | link |

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

This better not be a hoax


Superconductors are materials which carry a current with resistance of zero (0) ohms. They're made in a lab, and when I was a kid they were made of something with the science-fictiony name "niobium" and they had to be cooled in liquid helium. Then in 1987ish they were catapulted into liquid nitrogen territory, and they became (barely) usable for industrial applications.


Slashdot is linking to some guy in a "1996 style" website, that they're now at freezer temperatures. 254 Kelvin, as the site points out, means -2 Fahrenheit and -19 C. Another way to look at it - room temperature, if your room is dark and has the window open during a north American winter.


It looks suspicious, but then - Perelman solved the Poincare Conjecture just by uploading some stuff into arXiv.

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posted by Zimri on 13:01 | link |

Sunday, May 05, 2002

Another one bites the dust


Has a Southampton University professor found a proof of the Poincaré Theorem? Paulos has a "layman's terms" version at ABCNews:

Poincare's conjecture says that a certain property of a sphere in space holds for higher-dimensional analogues of a sphere. To understand the property, imagine stretching a rubber band around an orange. We can contract this rubber band slowly, making sure it neither breaks nor loses contact with the surface of the orange. In this way we can shrink the rubber band to a point. We can't do this with a rubber band stretched around a doughnut (either around the hole or around the body).

The orange, but not the doughnut, is said to be "simply connected." Henri Poincaré, who, incidentally, almost discovered relativity theory before Einstein, was aware of the fact that a ball like an orange could be characterized by this property of simple connectivity. He wondered if this held true for balls in higher-dimensional space.


UPDATE 10/13/2009: The short answer was "no he hasn't". I'm enjoying the sweet, sweet irony of this post's title...


I suppose I could have noted the name of the guy who proffered the bogus proof but in retrospect, he's best left to obscurity. I did manage to correct the link at least. The second one. The first dead link, I've deleted.


I do owe an apology: I should have noted Perelman's proof when it happened.

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posted by Zimri on 14:16 | link |

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