I've Got To Agree With Denninger

They shouldn't be at all surprised when Leviathan turns on them.

Probably Something To It

Fascinating speculative post at A.J. Strata's.

Some Brilliant John Oliver

Don't miss this.

Good Point

Jay Richards:

Here's the whopper. He says:

Just as the findings of Copernicus and the astronomers that followed him revealed that the earth is not the hub of the universe, Steno's revolution dislodged humanity from the center of our planet's history.

This trope functions like a keyboard macro when journalists write about the history of science. But it's pure mythology. In pre-Copernican cosmology, the earth was not seen as the hub of the universe, but as the bottom, the place to which heavy, mutable things fall. The very center of the universe, it was supposed, was Hell -- hardly a place of privilege. This idea that the center must be the place of privilege is modernist misinterpretation of the history of science. Copernicus most assuredly did NOT "dislodge humanity" for the imagined hub of the universe. And neither, of course, did Steno. How exactly does the moment we arrive on the scene settle questions about our importance? If a bride arrives at her wedding in the last hour, even though preparations have been underway for a year, does that mean she's insignificant?

The take home lesson is this: The significance of the earth and humanity, or our insignificance, does not hinge on age or "central" location.

Tear It Down

Denninger tells it straight.

Hear, Hear

Gil Dodgen:

Something that must be kept in mind is that, if proponents of the creative power of the Darwinian mechanism are correct, every aspect of every biological system in every living thing that has ever existed — from functional proteins, to the flagellum, to the human mind — must be approachable in a step-by-tiny-step fashion through the accumulation of random errors. This should strike reasonable people as belief in something that can only be described as a miracle.

InVivoVeritas adds in the comments (in response to a detractor of the original post):

Eigenstate,

Your high priestly sermon on science sounds pompous and at places ridiculous.

For example, it appears that you strongly advocate in one paragraph the usage of random number generators for their creative power in writing program code. So, it might be no surprise that you are a fervent advocate of evolution and its mysterious creative resources.

To summarize your lengthy peroration, I would enumerate only the following three salient points I found worth discussing:

• The intuition is an enemy for the practice of science.

• The usage of common sense for acquiring knowledge and manifesting discernment is a bad and dangerous habit
• You will never hire programmers that do not know how to harness the creative power of random number generators to write code (enough on this topic by now)

You should not be too concerned with the first two points above. It appears our public schools and many of our higher learning institutions comply more or less with your thesis and, I don’t know how much the generations of graduates are marked by these academic practices but definitely a lot of professors were seriously damaged by them.

In contrast with your style, GilDodgen’s text is short, persuasive and ‘on the money’.

Let’s read and simplify one of his main statements:

“… screwing up complex, functionally integrated, information processing systems…” with random changes will always (except in very rare cases) will make such systems less functional or significantly damaged.

Let’s try an exercise and see, if I intentionally ignore your stated “science practice guidelines” enumerated above, we can make some common sense and intuitive inferences about the topic at hand: believing in the miracles and the evolution.

Let’s proceed also by using analogies – which I believe represent a reasonable method of inquiry.

The engineered artifacts are among the few things (if not the only ones) that have certain resemblance with living organisms.

It is well known (here the common sense snake rises his head) that random changes in such engineered systems are in most of the cases reasons for partial or total failure.

Change randomly a line in the source code of a program or a sequence of bytes in the binary code of that program and you will get a “bug” (a program malfunction) with a degree of severity dependent only on your luck.

Make a physical change in a gear of a car transmission system: hit it with a hammer, or drop in a nail or washer, and you will get most probable a gripped transmission and a damaged car.

Add randomly a wire connection between two randomly selected wires in the electrical system of a car or of your house, or just cut randomly a wire in such a system and you have a good chance to get a short circuit, a fire, but never a better car or a more secure house.

All the above are logical, defensible analogies of what someone can expect from a random change (mutation) in a living thing. There might be a difference: the living things may have more sophisticated sub-systems than our engineering artifacts to protect themselves against such random changes and to continue to work somewhat unaffected – by correcting or avoiding the induced change.

This is the logical equivalent of a random mutation or random change in a living organism. It will most likely be detrimental or even compromising for its continued function.

Here is the essence of the myth of evolution and of its “creative power”. It is a religion that requires tremendous amounts of unfounded faith from its adepts or defenders. Such defenders must come with sophisticated thesis like the intuition is anti-scientific and common sense is an enemy of knowledge and understanding to maintain the flame of faith in evolution among the trusting believers.

The simplest single cell organism is machinery with an exceptional degree of autonomy and internal complexity- all at a miniature, nano scale. The “technology” inside the simplest living cell is well beyond the most advanced human engineering artifacts from many points of view: number of interconnected systems, complexity of controls, energy efficiency, scale, speed of manufacturing and autonomy. To BELIEVE that such a complex system was “created” ONLY by a long chain of random changes is TO BELIEVE IN MIRACLES. And this was Gil Dodgen’s thesis.

To believe that macro evolution can create a more sophisticated organism from a simpler one (or from NOTHING) requires the following:

- to abandon your intuition
- to throw away your common sense
- to incessantly praise the unlimited creative powers of random changes

In short, only a miserable religion can ask his believers to obey such dubious commandments.

Self-Refuting Book Title

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Completely Revised and Updated).

Link

Narrative Of Doom

Chilling story of what happened on Air France 447 a couple of years ago. Quite tragic that the other pilot had no mechanical feedback that the other pilot had the stick all the way back the whole way down. If he had, I don't think there is any way the crash could have happened. Why any pilot under any circumstances other than an intentional stall would keep the stick all the way back is beyond me.

Link

Absurd Headline

The MSM is insane (from Yahoo news page):



Here's a link to the article, just to prove it's real.

Excellent Headline

"Multimedia car mirror lets you play games while crashing"

Link

Penny Wise And Pound Foolish

Vox Day:

It's really astonishing that the European Union has refused to recognize that Greece has gone bankrupt. In trying to save the banks holding sovereign Greek debt, they went and destroyed the value of all the trillions in credit default swaps. It's like declaring that corpses aren't really dead, so therefore the insurance companies don't have to pay out on any life insurance policies. That might save a company or two in the short term, but it destroys them all in the intermediate term for the obvious reason that no one is ever going to waste their money on life insurance again.

As Succinctly Put As I Have Ever Seen

Egnor:

The history of contraception and abortion can be stated succinctly: more contraception correlates with more abortion. The reason is obvious: contraceptive culture is promiscuous and inculcates a disrespect for the sanctity of life. Abortion is the last full measure of that disrespect.

"The Collapse of Our Corrupt, Predatory, Pathological Financial System Is Necessary and Positive "

Excellent Charles Hugh Smith piece.

True

From Atheism Analyzed:

Atheist Fallacy

The most egregious Atheist deception is the idea that Atheism is a lack of a belief. While this concept has been addressed elsewhere, it deserves another statement in this article.

Here are the possibilities:

1. The person has not heard of theism and has no position on it. (ignorant)

2. The person has not heard of theism and has rejected it. (impossible)

3. The person has heard of theism and has no position on it. (apathetic)

4. The person has heard of theism and has rejected it. (Atheistic)

5. the person has heard of theism and can't decide, needs more data. (Agnostic)

The idea that an Atheist has no position on theism or God is illogical; it is actually absurd and is a dodge to avoid certain logical arguments...

Declaring that Atheists do NOT reject God and theism is, again, absurd.

Tremendous Essay

John C. Wright at the top of his game.

A Masterful Take Down

Egnor once again annihilates the stupid. Inviting plenty of commentary from those too far gone to know when they have been demolished.

I Laughed Before I Heard This One

Clever:

Making the rounds on the internet:

Bartender: "Sorry pal, we don't allow faster-than-light neutrinos in this bar."

...

A neutrino walks into a bar...

The Swindle Known As Financialization

Superb Denninger post.

Tarkenton Lays It Out

Great analogy:

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player's salary is based on how long he's been in the league. It's about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he's an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player's been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

Let's face the truth about this alternate reality: The on-field product would steadily decline. Why bother playing harder or better and risk getting hurt?

No matter how much money was poured into the league, it wouldn't get better. In fact, in many ways the disincentive to play harder or to try to stand out would be even stronger with more money.

Of course, a few wild-eyed reformers might suggest the whole system was broken and needed revamping to reward better results, but the players union would refuse to budge and then demonize the reform advocates: "They hate football. They hate the players. They hate the fans." The only thing that might get done would be building bigger, more expensive stadiums and installing more state-of-the-art technology. But that just wouldn't help.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the NFL in this alternate reality is the real -life American public education system. Teachers' salaries have no relation to whether teachers are actually good at their job—excellence isn't rewarded, and neither is extra effort. Pay is almost solely determined by how many years they've been teaching. That's it. After a teacher earns tenure, which is often essentially automatic, firing him or her becomes almost impossible, no matter how bad the performance might be. And if you criticize the system, you're demonized for hating teachers and not believing in our nation's children.

...

Quip

I don't know why, but this one-liner (apropos of not much) struck me as pretty hilarious:

"I have Romney Derangement Syndrome."

Seen in comments here.