Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Incompatible
I think the problem goes far deeper. True, we need to account for the increasingly common phenomenon of lying to pollsters for tactical reasons. But more than that, I think the problem is one of epistemology. Those of us who have grown up in the Western tradition formed by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Hume and all the rest make certain assumptions about truth and reality, and it generally doesn’t occur to us to wonder whether those assumptions are universally shared. I don’t think they are.David Strom:
I think that some cultures have a fundamentally different view of reality, of the objectivity of truth, of the importance of truth, and of the need for consistency. Thus, there are people who will say 1) that the Holocaust is a myth, and 2) that Hitler should have finished the job, without seeing any need for explanation or apology. And there are some who celebrate the outrages of October 7, while in the next breath denying that they occurred. Without in the least expecting to be believed.
If that is correct, the difficulties of cultural assimilation are more profound than is generally recognized.
Let's be frank: the flood of Muslim refugees into Europe has not been an unalloyed success.And,
It's not that all Muslims are incapable of integrating into Western cultures. Really, it's not.
It's just that a lot of them can't, especially when they emigrate from medieval societies and are dumped into the modern world. Their reaction is not to adjust to the culture around them; it's to demand the culture reflect their own values.
They emigrate from what Donald Trump inelegantly calls "s**thole countries" and work to recreate the s**thole conditions elsewhere.
Diversity is not our strength. Our culture is our strength, and it's the reason we live in societies to which millions of people flood every year.
To What End?
We are on a collision course with disaster. And to what end? These new rules will do no good whatsoever, except for those who are on the Democratic Party’s “green” gravy train. They will get many billions of dollars, if not trillions, at the American people’s expense.
And,
Biden’s purpose is not to benefit the climate, it is to benefit the vast “green” grift that is one of the Democratic Party’s main constituencies. The greens, but also Communist China. China controls the market for solar panels and wind turbines, and it also controls the raw materials that are necessary to produce solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and the hypothetical batteries that are the magical solution to the fact that weather-dependent sources of energy can never fuel an economy—a primitive economy, let alone a modern one.
Why is Biden destroying our electrical grid and dragging the United States back into the 19th century, to the immense benefit of the Chinese Communist Party? Occam’s Razor suggests that he is doing it on purpose. Even Joe Biden isn’t dumb enough to fail to understand where these policies are leading. I don’t know whether it is sheer, malicious anti-Americanism, or whether the millions of dollars that Biden and his family have gotten from China have made him the Manchurian Candidate. But, one way or another, the disastrous consequences of the Biden administration’s energy policies are obvious to anyone who pays attention.
Incalculable
Then we come to the availability of needed natural resources. Apart from the fact that the Chinese control the current supply, we have the question: how will the vastly increased demand for raw materials be met?And,
And that is just for the U.S. Western European countries are electrifying (or pretending to electrify) their automobile fleets, too. And you could do a comparable calculation for the alleged transition from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy. Even if you assume that the Earth somewhere holds enough raw materials to meet this enormous demand, the mining, manufacturing and transportation effort needed to carry out these mandates would be the greatest since the Industrial Revolution. And how much of that mining do you think would take place in the U.S.? Little or none, under current political conditions.
Electric vehicles are a novelty item and have been for over a century. There is no way that our automobile fleet will be converted from internal combustion to batteries, just as there is no way we can or will replace fossil fuels and nuclear power with wind- and solar-generated electricity. The whole thing is a fantasy. But the damage that will be done to our economy, our livelihoods and our national security, in pursuing that fantasy, is incalculable.
One Way Out: Savage Edition
In the meantime, the Gazans of Rafah still have a choice available to them. They can surrender the city to the IDF and turn over all of the Hamas operatives, if they wish to spare their city from the war that they started and cheered. Otherwise, it's game on, and likely in the next few days.
Saturation
There is no doubt about the fact that various gases have a “greenhouse” effect. They trap radiation leaving the Earth’s surface, thus warming the atmosphere. The chief greenhouse gas, by a wide margin, is water vapor. Carbon dioxide and methane are two more minor greenhouse gases. We owe these substances everything: without the greenhouse effect, there would be no life on Earth. The fact that some gases absorb radiation that bounces back from the Earth, having begun at the Sun, makes the planet that we know possible.
Liberals claim hysterically, but without empirical evidence, that because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, increasing amounts of it in the atmosphere must inevitably make our planet warmer. That is a debatable claim for many reasons, including the fact that any greenhouse gas will reach a point of saturation, beyond which adding more of that gas will not have any perceptible effect on the climate.
Monday, April 29, 2024
Induce Regime Change?
In my view, Israel should not just punish Iran. It should try to secure the overthrow of the Ayatollah and the mullahs. There is considerable evidence that Iran’s theocratic regime is unpopular. Iran’s economy is a disaster, propped up in part by Biden’s largesse. I don’t know what specific attacks might prompt a successful revolt. Presumably population centers like Tehran should be avoided, but strikes against infrastructure so that, for example, there is no electric power, might so discredit the mullahs as to lead to their demise.
Is such a result likely? I don’t know, but I think Israel should take this opportunity to find out. I take it that the mullahs do not yet have nuclear weapons, but if that is the case, they are very close. Their having such weapons could complicate the sort of decisive attack that I think makes sense. In other words, now is the time.
Israel has been under siege by Hamas and Hezbollah for many years. That situation, in my opinion, cannot continue. If that wasn’t already obvious it was made plain by October 7. The best way to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah—probably the only way—is to topple Iran’s genocidal regime. I don’t know whether that can be done, but it is worth a try.
Culture Matters
As to why any scientific fields have been “mainly out of reach for Black folks,” I can only point out that 1) single-parent households are not, on average, conducive to academic achievement; 2) a culture in which kids who get good grades in school are disdained for “acting white” is fatal to academic achievement; and 3) black students who are encouraged to major in Black Studies and similar fields don’t become astronomers. Those factors are evidently more than 50 years of affirmative action have been able to overcome.
Stone Age Science
My first thought was: were there indigenous universities pre-Columbus? Did they do microbiology or physics?
The wheel had yet to be invented in Mesoamerica, so I doubt it. They didn't have the wheel. I doubt that physics was high on their list of pursuits.
Victoria University has put a high focus on bringing the "First Peoples" of Canada onto their campus, which is admirable. But turning the university into a place where members of the science department are teaching the myths of the tribes as modern science doesn't strike me as an advance but a retreat from the mission of a Western university.
People of indigenous origin can certainly be scientists; there is nothing in the genes or the blood to prevent it. But there is no way indigenous "ways of knowing" can coexist with modern Western science. Pretending otherwise is as silly as pretending a man can be a woman or a child can be a cat.
Of course, universities make those claims as well. Absurdity is now a core component of modern education.
Math for Primitives
This movement is so profoundly stupid that the people pushing it don't seem to realize that it emphasizes how backward some societies actually were. There may be many things to admire in indigenous societies, but their grasp of mathematics is generally not one of them. And to the extent that they were mathematically literate, they corresponded well enough with so-called "European" mathematics.
These types of courses have nothing to do with the "math" or "science" they claim to be celebrating. They have everything to do with the growing anti-Westernism pervading our universities and educational institutions.
No doubt, the very same people who push this intellectual mush would turn around and complain if we denied Western medicine to an indigenous person who needed a kidney transplant, and with good reason. No herb or potion could match the efficacy of good ol' colonialist medicine in such cases.
Plenty of wisdom may be buried in indigenous ways of life, but it isn't in their math or science. As blind as Westerners may be to some of the rhythms of life or the wisdom of diets without processed foods, I doubt indigenous math could land a probe on Mars.
Show Your Work
As I have said before, it is extraordinary that Western governments have promised to transition their economies from fossil fuels to intermittent and inefficient “green” energy without ever figuring out what it would take to do that. You might assume that someone, somewhere, has put pencil to paper and calculated the raw materials that would be needed; where those materials would come from; how they would be shipped to manufacturing sites; how and where the necessary equipment would be manufactured, and how it would be transported; what transmission wires would be needed, and where they would come from; and many other obvious elements.
But the fact is that no one has done this. There is no plan, just a fantasy. And it bears repeating that there is not a single demonstration project anywhere in the world—no state or province, no city, no town, no village—that has shown how wind or solar energy, alone, can power modern life.
"Closing" the Gap
Of course, much of this isn't even an ill-considered attempt to pat low performers on the head and assure them they are special flowers. It helps the district by hiding the inability of the public schools to teach lower-performing students to do basic math and reading.
If you graduate everyone with a 'B' average, there is no way to suss out the schools' failure to do their jobs.
The performance gap between White and Asian students and minority students has been a persistent thorn in the side of educators. It makes them look bad. Best to hide the fact behind "equity grading."
Because Democracy
Donald Trump is undergoing a criminal trial in Manhattan. He is charged with filing corporate records that included a false statement; namely, that payments to Michael Cohen that were described as being for legal services were, in fact, to reimburse Cohen for making one or more payments to Stormy Daniels in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement. But those payments to Daniels were perfectly legal, and filing a false corporate document is a misdemeanor on which the statute of limitation has passed.
So in order to charge Trump, District Attorney Alvin Bragg had to allege that the false documents were filed in order to cover up another crime. That would make it a felony. But what is that other crime? Bragg has been coy about it. In truth, there was no other crime, and Bragg’s prosecution is election interference on behalf of the Democratic Party, plain and simple.
One would think that this case could not have gone to trial without a clear specification of that other crime and evidence in support of it. But that appears to be what has happened, courtesy of trial judge Juan Merchan, who is in on the scam.
Awful People
But for the most part, climate alarmism comes from the credentialed class, the transnational elite, and the billionaires with too much money and too little sense. They can afford to be deeply alarmed and really need to be in order to feel alive and useful. If you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you would be looking for a cause too.
The thing is that they are awful people.
The Green Fraud
Wind and solar developments have been sold on the basis of financial claims that are outright fraudulent. We can hope that one of these days, “greens” will be held accountable in court.
Where's the Pressure?
Of course, if Hamas and its supporters in Gaza (the great majority of that population, evidently) actually want a cease fire, they could have one tomorrow. Hamas just needs to surrender. Weird how there is no international pressure on Hamas to do that.
Kamala Knows Basketball
Getting basketball wrong is embarrassing but harmless, but this display of the Vice Presidents [sic] mental capacity and self-awareness is a warning that extends beyond basketball.
It's deeply disturbing, so wouldn't you like to see a comedian copying her vocal mannerisms and gestures and doing a routine making a catchphrase out of "Do you know — okay, a bit of a history lesson..."?
