Just in case you were ever tempted to contribute.
Vince Flynn, James Gandolfini
OK, I’m sure I’m not the first to point this out, but who’s number 3?
The First Amendment
An attempt to amend it out of existence.
One of the purposes of the First Amendment is to protect it from these sorts of atrocities, but we have the Second as well, if it comes to that.
The “Ensemble” Of Climate Models
Is completely, statistically, meaningless:
Saying that we need to wait for a certain interval in order to conclude that “the models are wrong” is dangerous and incorrect for two reasons. First — and this is a point that is stunningly ignored — there are a lot of different models out there, all supposedly built on top of physics, and yet no two of them give anywhere near the same results!
This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above, where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge. It is also clearly evident if one publishes a “spaghetti graph” of the individual model projections (as Roy Spencer recently did in another thread) — it looks like the frayed end of a rope, not like a coherent spread around some physics supported result.
This is not science. In many ways, it is the antithesis of it.
Michael Hastings
His chilling final story.
The circumstances of his demise have the potential appearance of someone chilling him. I think that LAPD should investigate it as a possible homicide. We’ll see if they do.
The Spartacus Project
So, now that we know that they’re watching our web visits, web sites, social networks and email, and having seen what the IRS (and other agencies) have been willing to do against what they perceive to be enemies of the state, it might be time to start monkey wrenching them. While it was only a movie, I think we might take a page from the example of the Roman slave revolt.
Imagine if we were to flood the Internet with terms like “Tea Party,” “Benghazi,” “IRS abuse,” etc., to the point at which they’d have so many false leads that it would make it harder for them to track the people who are actually discussing such things? It can’t just be a standard list of the keywords/phrases — that would be easy to spot as a pattern. One could randomly shuffle them around, but that would still be easily detectable. Even generating random subsets of them wouldn’t do the job. What we need is an “enemy of the state” pattern generator, that would throw in a subset of the keywords/phrases, interspersed with a bunch of random English words to make it look to a machine as though they are being discussed in some kind of context, and no two messages alike. I’m imagining a perl (or python, or whatever) script, or whatever. The output might be spammed (OK, that’s the part I don’t like, but I’m not sure how to spread it to enough IPs otherwise — I’m open to alternative suggestions) to the world, and flood the zone to the point that they won’t be able to tell wheat from chaff. We can all be Spartacus, even those of us who had no intention to.
Thoughts?
[Update a couple minutes later]
It’s worth reading the comments at that old blog post, if you haven’t. Particularly this one on how to recognize the end of a Republic.
Brainlessness And Zero Tolerance
“We’ve reached a startling level of [it] when distinguishing pencils from pistols requires an ordinance.”
[Update a while later]
Speaking of brainlessness, Bloomberg’s gun grabber morons have put the Boston Bomber on a list of gunshot victims. I think that most sane people would find that a feature, not a bug.
The Mannsuit
The hearing for dismissal ended a while ago in DC. Now we’re just waiting for a ruling from the judge.
[Update a while later]
Note: it could be weeks before we get a ruling. The law says that it should be prompt, but that’s what it said about the hearing as well, and it’s been months since we filed (today’s hearing was originally scheduled for mid-April). But as long as there is no ruling, the case doesn’t move forward.
Gardening The Universe
A few weeks ago, I was invited to a gathering to hear the latest from Howard Bloom in downtown LA, but I had a conflict. But David Swindle attended, and has a report. (I did talk to Howard briefly a few days later, in San Diego.)
This –>
It became apparent again that I was the odd man out in the room. Most of the questions were phrased in explicitly secular terms.
Afterwards as Howard and a group of us sat around discussing, I raised my objection to the soulless, materialist focus. I drew a parallel between the groups who had sought to explore and settle the North American continent in the 1600s and those who should now seek to place their mark on the Moon, Mars, and the earth’s orbit.
I reminded Howard and the others that people came to the New World for varying reasons — capitalists eager to make money, the Crown eager to maintain power (primordial corporatists), science-minded explorers eager to discover what was out there, and one group unrepresented at the talk tonight, save for yours truly: the fanatical religious radicals wanting to live free of persecution as they built a godly, happy, counterculture community. It was this mix together that enabled the American experiment to begin and succeed.
People of faith — whether they interpret the Bible through Jewish, Christian, or mystic lenses — are called by God to transcend nature and rise upwards. The earth is not holy; it’s not our mother. As I’ve blogged about before, inspired by Glenn Reynolds’s An Army of Davids, the earth is just a rocky death trap. We can grow a better one ourselves.
To the degree that I have a religion, that’s pretty much it.
A 3-D Printer
…that has been demonstrated to work in weightlessness.
This could significantly reduce O&M costs at the ISS (and later, at private orbital facilities). It could also revolutionize the pace of research, if someone on the ground could send up the specs for new experiment hardware without having to wait weeks or months for a launch.