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Topics - Body-by-Guinness

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1
We'll start this topic off with a great find by Doug that counts the ways aggragate polls were manipulated to show a closer 2024 race than the more accurate polls predicted, with those more accurate polls STILL underrepresenting likely Republican voters:

https://www.racket.news/p/how-americas-accurate-election-polls

2
Having grown up watching WW II movies, reenacting famous armor battles w/ 1/32 scale model tanks, and reading every book on the topic I could find, a simple form of sabotage that came up regularly in those studies involved a time delay firebomb made of nothing more than a cigarette and a book of matches.

This piece notes a new and improved method of accomplishing similar ends: rather than tossing the cig and matchbook on to German ammo trains, in this instance we have magnesium and lithium batteries being set up in a manner that they start burning in the cargo holds of European passenger and cargo flights. So far no loss of life, and it appears Russian was behind that probe, but these sorts of new takes on old ways to damage any enemy are worth keeping an eye out for, hence this thread:

https://x.com/sentdefender/status/1853497324284129578?s=61

3
With our esteemed Global Moderator's permission I'm beginning this thread meant to examine the chaos and discord some seem to be preparing for, sowing, and otherwise underwriting should Trump indeed win the presidency.

Sunday evening IIRC, for instance, I chanced upon a local newscast showing military helicopters practicing landing on the National Mall should doing so be needed during some sort of unspecified post election civil distrubance. The Democratic Party's flying monkeys ANTIFA, though kept quiet once 2022 midterm polling demonstrated their mostly peaceful arsons, willingness to assault those thought to be political opponents, vandalism, etc. was negatively impacting 2022 electoral prospects, are said to be waiting in the wings to unleash national chaos in blue cities should Trump win, and generally fill the shock troop vacuum left when the KKK and Democrats parted ways.

Meanwhile, as shown below, Obama admin Deep State movers and shakers have met to discuss how best to resist--violently--the claimed threat of a "fascist" Trump, with the hyperbole embraced when comparing his Madison Square Garden rally earlier this week to a Nazi gathering at a previous version of the venue a part of that groundwork, with violent civil division seen as a feature rather than something to be avoided.

The US as currently construed, after all, is evil, doubly so should Trump win.

As such, this is the thread's inaugural, so to speak, piece:

Is the Left Preparing for War If Trump Wins?

By Lee Smith

October 28, 2024

Editor's Note
The destructive Left is a revolutionary movement, which means that its final goal is to establish a new regime and a new way of life in our nation. Before it can do that, however, it must destroy the existing regime and the existing way of life, and it must attain the power necessary for both ends. Once it has gained that power, a revolutionary movement is ill-disposed to give it up without a fight.

Lee Smith explains the coordinated push by left-wing media and political operatives to cast Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator not as an effort to sway the election, but as a plot to prevent the transfer of power in the event of a Trump victory. Most troubling of all, Smith suggests, the Democrats’ wargaming of post-election scenarios seems to indicate an expectation — maybe even a hope — that the anti-Trump sentiment they have stoked will explode into widespread political violence, and that a cold civil war could turn hot overnight.

The propaganda campaign labeling Donald Trump as an aspiring dictator determined to use the military and national security apparatus against his political opponents is designed not to affect the upcoming election but rather to shape the post-election environment. It is the central piece of a narrative that, by characterizing Trump as a tyrant (indeed likening him to Hitler), establishes the conditions for violence — not just another attempt on Trump’s life, but political violence on a massive scale intended to destabilize the country.

As I write in my forthcoming book Disappearing the President, Democratic Party research and media reports show that many senior party officials and operatives are preparing for the possibility of a Trump victory. Accordingly, planning is focused on undermining the incoming president with enough violence to rock his administration. Prominent post-election scenarios forecast such widespread rioting that the newly elected president would be compelled to invoke the Insurrection Act. With some senior military officials refusing to follow Trump’s orders, according to the scenarios, the U.S. Armed Forces would split, leaving America on the edge of the abyss.

By vilifying Trump as a despotic madman who must be stopped before he can commence his reign of terror, the regime’s propaganda apparatus not only slanders Trump but also pre-emptively threatens the reputation, as well as the livelihood and perhaps the liberty, of current military personnel. The point is to push the military against Trump: When the time comes to act, will you stand for democracy or side with a tyrant who sees the military only as an instrument to advance his personal interests?

For instance, last week the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, quoted former Trump administration officials claiming that the Republican candidate is contemptuous of America’s armed forces and, according to Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, wishes he could command the same respect that Hitler commanded from his general officers.

This is not the first time that Trump has been compared to Hitler or that Kelly, a retired Marine general, turned on his former commander-in-chief. Kelly was the key source for a story published before the 2020 election, also in the Atlantic and also by Jeffrey Goldberg, that alleged Trump had called American WWII soldiers buried in French cemeteries “suckers and losers.”

The veracity of Kelly’s latest revelation that Trump admires Hitler must of course be judged against the fact that he waited five years to disclose it, even if it is unlikely to have much effect on the current election cycle. The military, and veterans of the Global War on Terror in particular, overwhelmingly support the candidate opposed to waging endless and strategically pointless foreign wars. Moreover, Trump has weathered far more damaging fabrications — like the false allegations that he had been compromised by Russian intelligence — that only galvanized support for him.

The purpose of the Hitler narrative is not to alter the electoral preferences of left-wing media audiences already solidly in the anti-Trump column, but rather to justify taking extreme measures against the Republican candidate and the America First movement and ensure that the bulk of the military sides with the anti-Trump plot. Thus, it is best understood in the context of recent accounts promising, or urging, violence after the November vote.

For example, last week the New York Times published a long interview with a scholar of fascism who declared that Trump is a fascist. The paper of record followed up with another long article by two Harvard professors calling for mass mobilization in the event of a Trump victory. The proposal suggests that private industry join civil society organizations to ostracize Trump and his supporters and engage in large public protests to provoke a crisis. Kamala Harris herself, commenting on Kelly’s allegations in the Atlantic story, claimed that her opponent “is a fascist” during a CNN town hall.

These stories are only the latest in an ongoing series of media reports warning of a Trump dictatorship. Beltway insider Robert Kagan was out of the gate early, writing even before Trump wrapped up the nomination that, without mounting resistance against the Republican candidate, America is “a few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship.” A January story from NBC claimed that Trump was exploring ways to use the military to assassinate political rivals.

The propaganda meant to establish a predicate to employ violence to stop Trump has been reinforced at the highest levels of the Democratic Party.   

When Joe Biden was asked by a reporter if he was confident that there would be a peaceful transfer of power after the 2024 election, he answered, “If Trump wins, no I’m not confident at all.” Then, seemingly correcting himself, the president said, “I mean if Trump loses, I’m not confident at all. He means what he says, we don’t take him seriously. He means it, all the stuff about,

‘If we lose there will be a bloodbath.’”

Biden was referring to a comment Trump made in March about Chinese efforts to build auto manufacturing plants in Mexico. The export of those cars to America, Trump said, would result in a “bloodbath” for the U.S. auto industry. Naturally, the Biden campaign used the figure of speech to accuse Trump of inciting “political violence.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) advertised a more specific scenario leading to violence when he promised that Congress will remove Trump by invoking Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits anyone “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding federal office. “It’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified,” Raskin has said. “And then we need bodyguards for everybody in civil war conditions.”

But the most significant post-election scenarios were drafted by Rosa Brooks, a former Obama Pentagon official whose 2020 wargaming with the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) has been credited by the left-wing press for its “accuracy.”

Ahead of the last election, Brooks and TIP, according to the Guardian, “imagined the then far-fetched idea that Trump might refuse to concede defeat, and, by claiming widespread fraud in mail-in ballots, unleash dark forces culminating in violence. Every implausible detail of the simulations came to pass in the lead-up to the U.S. Capitol attack on 6 January 2021.”

That’s a fanciful way of obscuring the truth. TIP anticipated that Trump would contest the results because party operatives knew beforehand that election irregularities resulting from new voting procedures, like mass mail-in voting, designed to facilitate fraud would be glaringly obvious. Thus, because of Brooks’s past performance and her central role in a network comprising the media and current and former defense officials, her work is widely acknowledged as the Left’s roadmap for post-election contingency planning.

For the 2024 election, Brooks teamed up with journalist Barton Gellman to run a series of wargames in May and June under the auspices of the Democracy Futures Project (DFP), part of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

As with the 2020 wargames, the two opposing teams were staffed by former government officials from the Republican as well as the Democrat establishment. The results were announced with a mid-summer media rollout to ready other officials and operatives for likely post-election operations. Four articles were published the same day, July 30 — in the New Republic; the Guardian; the Washington Post, which ran a piece by Gellman; and Brooks herself writing for the Bulwark — showing that Brooks and Gellman’s scenarios, at least those disclosed, assume a Trump victory. The play then is to block.

Disruption, destabilization, and violence are legitimized by a narrative driven by self-congratulatory mirror-imaging and projection in which the so-called defenders of democracy face down an authoritarian Trump.

Brooks and her cohort ignore the evidence of Biden and Harris’s abuse of power and assert that it is Trump who will who use the federal government against his opponents. It is Trump’s CIA and DOJ, according to the wargamers, that will cashier national security officials for “raising concerns about the politicization of intelligence and the pressure to launch ideologically motivated investigations.” It is Trump who will use the IRS to go after nonprofits. It is at Trump’s behest that journalists will be targeted and Democrat-aligned media outlets investigated as the FCC revokes broadcast licenses. And, writes Brooks, the Trump administration will force out top military officials on account of their “objecting to Trump’s cozy relationship with Russia.”

The forecasts read like paranoid fantasy, but they’re carefully scripted inversions of reality meant to to rewrite history and obscure the crimes of the Left that have shaken the pillars of the republic.

The most alarming scenario involves political and military officials “resisting efforts to federalize their national guard units and send them to quell anti-Trump protests in major U.S. cities.” That is, the post-election playbook calls for (or takes for granted) widespread violence so intense that the president invokes the Insurrection Act. The forecast posits a split in the senior ranks of the U.S. military after Trump replaces the chiefs of staff with officers who comply with his order and deploy forces to put down the riots.

This is where the political violence cultivated by the destructive Left is leading: blood-soaked streets and a divided military. The purpose of the Hitler narrative is to force members of the military to turn against Trump. After all, loyalty to the constitution means fighting Hitler, not obeying his orders.

With the two recent attempts on Trump’s life, we’ve seen how the regime’s narratives simultaneously create the conditions for violence and explain it away. When Trump was shot at a rally in Butler, PA, Democratic Party officials and the media not only denied any connection between the shooting and their inflammatory rhetoric but even blamed Trump himself. After all, he and his aspiring assassin were cut from the same cloth: “The gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy,” wrote David Frum in, of all places, the Atlantic.

On this view, Trump has polarized the country so profoundly that he is ultimately responsible for the attempt on his own life. But that is another inversion of reality, tailored to suit the bloodlust of a dark regime. It is the logic of terror: It is only the violence of our victims that drove us to slaughter them.

This self-serving logic not only gets the Left off the hook for past depredations; it serves as the pretext for future violence against Trump, his aides, and his supporters. After November 5, this weaponized narrative could be expanded to justify violence on a mass scale designed to break the republic.

Lee Smith is a bestselling author whose newest book, Disappearing the President: Trump, Truth Social, and the Fight for the Republic, was published on October 22.

https://tomklingenstein.com/is-the-left-preparing-for-war-if-trump-wins/

4
Politics & Religion / James O’Keefe
« on: October 26, 2024, 08:16:20 PM »
Given the hyperbolic aggrandizes and such that have their own threads, I figure it’s time to devote one to citizen journalist James O’Keefe, a gent that consistently outs behavior and truths “Progressives” would very much prefer to remain hidden from all but True Believers.

Here he is offering to arm poll watchers with hidden cameras so they can document any malfeasance the encounter. Given O’Keefe’s track record I’m going to bet he and the citizen journalists he recruits will create reporting far more telling than the highly paid talking point regurgitaters masquerading as journalists:

https://x.com/jamesokeefeiii/status/1850288892936626423?s=61

5
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Elite Athletics
« on: August 02, 2024, 03:18:56 AM »
Looks like there was a similar thread that didn’t survive the great Martial Arts/Fire Hydrant cleavage:

The Psychology of Olympians and How They Master Their Minds to Perform

Singularity Hub / by Mike McGreary / Jul 30, 2024 at 2:02 PM

Participating in the Olympic Games is a rare achievement, and the pressures and stressors that come with it are unique. Whether an athlete is battling to win the breaststroke or powering their way to gold in the modern pentathlon, psychology will play a vital role in their success or failure in Paris this summer.

In recent Olympics, we have seen the mental toll that competing at the highest level can have on athletes. US gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from five events at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to protect her mental health, and 23-time gold medal winner Michael Phelps has described the mental crash that hits him after competing in the Games.

When even small errors can cost them a medal, how do athletes use psychological principles to master their minds and perform under pressure?

Resilience

The ability to recover from setbacks, such as disappointing performances or injury is crucial. The role of mental processes and behavior such as emotional regulation (recognizing and controlling emotions such as anxiety) allows Olympians to maintain focus and determination amid the global scrutiny that comes with competing on the world’s biggest stage.

Resilience is not a fixed trait but rather a dynamic process that evolves through an interplay between individual characteristics, such as personality and psychological skills, and environment, such as an athlete’s social support. A 2012 study made in the UK investigating resilience in Olympic champions highlighted that a range of psychological factors such as positive personality, motivation, confidence, and focus as well feeling like they have social support helped to protect athletes from the potential negative stressors caused by competing in the Olympics. These factors helped to increase an athlete’s resilience and the likelihood they would perform at their best.

Social support means that athletes don’t have to feel like they are going it alone. If they can call on strong networks of family, friends, and coaches, it provides them with additional emotional strength and motivation.

Resilience empowers Olympians to draw upon individual skills and traits and protects them from the negative effects of stressors that inevitably come with competing in the Olympics. For example, a rower may need to solve problems such as changing weather conditions. Resilience allows them to maintain composure and adjust to the conditions, for instance by modifying their stroke technique.

Being Present

Staying in the present can help athletes avoid being overwhelmed or consumed by the significance of their event or distracted by the disappointment of past failures and the pressure of high medal expectations.

To help them remain in the present moment, athletes may use a variety of strategies. Mindfulness-based meditation and breathing exercises can help athletes feel calm and focused. They may also use performance visualization to rehearse specific movements or routines. Think of a basketball player visualizing a free-throw shot.

Similarly, many athletes will have well-rehearsed pre-performance routines which can create a sense of normality and control. For example, a tennis player may bounce the ball a certain number of times before serving. Staying in the present will help reduce athletes’ anxiety, maintain focus on the task, and allow them to fully experience (and hopefully enjoy) the atmosphere.

Protecting Their Mental Wellbeing

Failure can be devastating and athletes can have complicated relationships with winning. For example, some athletes experience post-Olympic blues, which is often described as the feeling of emptiness, loss of self-worth, and even depression following an Olympic Games, even if the athlete has won a medal. British cyclist Victoria Pendleton wrote for The Telegraph in 2016 describing this phenomenon: “It’s almost easier to come second because you have something to aim for when you finish. When you win, you suddenly feel lost.”

Olympians may be champions, but like the rest of us, they will need to prioritize the fundamentals such as getting adequate sleep and downtime to recharge mentally. An Australian study conducted in 2020 highlighted the relationship between maintaining mental wellbeing and increased athletic performance. To ensure this, Olympians will be working closely with support staff such as performance nutritionists who will ensure they have a balanced diet which meets the physical needs of their event, helping to protect both physical and mental health.

They will also be working with sport and exercise psychologists throughout their training in preparation for the Olympics to manage challenges as and when they experience them. If an athlete starts struggling with performance anxiety ahead of the Games, they may practice mindfulness or cognitive restructuring, which are techniques that help people to notice and change negative thinking patterns.

Olympians and their support team will need to take care of both the person and the athlete to protect their wellbeing. When they protect their wellbeing, they are offering the best chance of both achieving their best performance during the Games themselves and avoiding the post-Olympic blues when they are over.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Jacob Rice / Unsplash

https://singularityhub.com/2024/07/30/the-psychology-of-olympians-and-how-they-master-their-minds-to-perform/

6
I looked for both “social science” and “statistics” threads before posting this, and indeed think many cultural quagmires resist resolution because each side can’t find trustworthy, verifiable, applicable, and relevant numbers upon which to agree. Indeed, I’ll go further and state there is something more than a cottage industry and less than a vast conspiracy that seemingly goes out of its way to undermine convention via scholarly papers utilizing dense language and opaque statistical tools (often accompanied by statistical sleight of hand that comes off more as numerology than math) to make their claims, often appearing to have penned a conclusion first, and then backward engineered the statistics needed to support that conclusion.

This extensive piece looks at a part of that trend and tendency. I confess at the outset math is far from my strong suite and hence I’m unable to independently verify—or take learned issue with—statistics heavy pieces such as this and the culturally contrarian, usually post modern and all too often embracing overt or closeted Marxism social science essays and papers I encounter. This piece confines itself to looking at statistical habits that overstate certainty and that emphasize weak but attention getting findings rather than strong finding less likely to garner attention among other misuse or misstatements supported by inappropriately applied or emphasized statistical tools.

As I understand it, this is far from uncommon. Indeed, a (late) family member was a biochemist for a well known pharmaceutical company involved in the targeted delivery of cancer drugs. More than once he told me he was a science guy, not a statistics guy, which is why he hired people with major league statics chops to handle that end of his research as he, along with most scientists, were better acquainted with statistical tools than most, but were nowhere near as capable as someone with a graduate-level degree in stats, and indeed felt the required statistics courses of most graduate degree programs provided just enough capability to get into trouble, but not enough to see, or understand, that trouble.

This piece makes a point that medicine demonstrates far more statistical rigor than does social science, not all that surprising considering the stakes and—until relatively recently—little political involvement in medical research. My sense is the misuse of statistical tools is a big issue few have the ability to grasp sufficiently in context, let alone take issue with authoritatively. As such I think this makes for an apt topic, though perhaps one it will be difficult to bring much list member expertise to bear on.

Please note, I’ve only posted the conclusion of this lengthy paper:

5 Conclusion

Romer (2020) has recently documented and lamented the scarcity of standard errors and confidence intervals in the text of economics papers. We find that for headline results, this lack of numerical reporting extends even to point estimates of magnitudes and also that it is even more extreme in other social sciences, namely political science and sociology. The sharp contrast with medicine points out that there is another way.

Our view is that headline results convey what authors see as most important. We are pleased to find how many more numerical magnitudes there are today in economics than there were two decades ago, but sad that sociology and political science do not exhibit a similar trend. At the same time, the distance these social sciences remain behind medicine is disappointing, especially for political science and sociology. So too is the utter absence of precision in headline results.

We find the lack of progress in getting rid of sign results in social science papers particularly perplexing. Apparently the forces that increase numerical reporting (at least in economics) do not diminish sign reporting even though we find little to recommend sign reporting. We suspect that the absence of numerical reporting reflects a culture of empirical analysis that is still largely wedded to hypothesis testing, where satisfying a statistical threshold and rejecting the null hypothesis that β = 0 is considered more important than understanding the magnitude and precision of the estimate.

For those who like us crave social science research that emphasize estimation over hypothesis testing and put magnitudes and precision front and center there are two choices. One is to wait until the trends in economics take hold in sociology and political science and hope they spill over to precision reporting. However, the pace of progress is very slow and there is no evidence of increased emphasis on precision.
The second option is to take a proactive approach. The fact that medicine has made great strides in moving toward a culture of estimation and precision and away from significance and hypothesis testing is not happenstance. Decades ago, scientists and statisticians in medicine undertook the project of articulating best practices for reporting empirical headline results that prioritized transparency and informativeness. Perhaps it is high time for social scientists to consider a similar undertaking, or at the very least for journals to consider adopting guidance for authors along these lines. We provide two sample style guides in the Appendix, one relatively modest and the other more ambitious. Finally, we apologize for any places in this article (and our other work) where we have only sign results. We have tried to practice what we preach, but we are deeply embedded in the very culture we hope to nudge toward a numeric focus.

https://elsevier-ssrn-document-store-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/22/08/20/ssrn_id4195779_code94.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline&X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEM3%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FwEaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIEMMnlGiS%2FS0qprxcbR%2FoILsCpppuR1Wf3ulwTh9W1QsAiEAlngb3Ai3kt7KfBtTB4xxXjUSDrWjk%2BOHjCgghStzz60qvgUIdhAEGgwzMDg0NzUzMDEyNTciDAFx2%2FH71i17W4OcACqbBadetVLCXDjOHypWN2hh2bxchMB1TB1GOobzHqpG4ZBv1Y8XYgGeE3iLcAt8MDroYqf5o%2Fc3VdNkX2%2Fj0XaFy6u5QkOiLquLiLLoKZOkiMTGBfo1C19kEW59WKpRZe5hYN1kRUHMNlwz3bsrbbC%2FPDopmaPbsQ34GMDc1qq1JbQtZX7vKYPQjWXGnWXQ0IU6StSBjyY6lB6DWLX3Ws%2BrUqTlM%2FDX49UVmpv61LRtbiPHlFbVwptDd%2FoR3ASFSzXldl1Ex3EyyZflV%2FTlq6%2BLo3Xl%2Bq1B0oCFJL2n3LoSV9oKqSjLOySmuH4xQq3xMoFkDtZHw2OqZ%2BlR8fwhTaLrFLiN7tg2tkcmY4%2F%2Fhaw6NENRW%2BHfpYw6t7kpAbbgX0q2Xi154vVUtoHW87s9TR6X7DFnHtEUAeaU6WLbZBFGGyk3v%2FgInuC3ppLBCK1wnTL7nmXu4bGx5rShHVO3NZN8e8DDUCkim2rcEF%2FzhpqJFx5foV7qHW81QT0ksaVj46TdiCvYcmePfPELoDswmGtVtrr40pFUOZ%2BSjgXLC8WXo%2FfYQs5Tlr75cbT4dfAMYkfrqzjZYbn1ExJGYk9jxtVxY%2F43aULN2ZqkUf253GZP%2FXYwHWMEJ0aqTKjwad%2BRjgGdXgoN2qg2EUNhJUgFPRzbRXgh3bvT0jRDAXW7hNoVuO9fBAYf4j%2FbWnlG6CR4x4DBT%2FE1bZ9LABDMePXPkbtTi9ralJ39%2B4wX0NMcP5xJXyQZ%2FEUOU6TGK2tvT4pXcJkEc4hfB31G%2BI%2FQNwEef%2FUYLN9CXaZKLBP4XSvHaOJMyN%2FPpcSClW8dKIlkcL4cPajC%2FyvZaPL0P5b4qGuN5Osl2pVEgshxcNhuD8uwhkankKo5KRc%2BWickAd7yG64w3oTbswY6sQEg4mYW31mFe7nswtskjZFfzdGMOq%2BbD0Zav62OJtKDrW%2FqVDragE0a0RAYR%2BToykDDxcNhZNmf4kEsyim9Jm7cgZZeloFBkmLABpNSEZkjWZ9H%2BMMX6CySGkKbV2ylYUJGcUFI6JZj1J5IXafbQdtTM8oUG94PwTcdPoRFrpXt2yNDzcaEylucbmB%2B4jSeaDbAjoycs651XrSi2I7srsoLkXJRdTVoY6gStR7%2F2gD3jws%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20240622T133201Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAUPUUPRWE2ZEW5Y5U%2F20240622%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=74080fe70a214f7197a5628f1a1cabad59b5179df7cc8aaa48dd0786ac312b8b


7
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Archeology
« on: May 31, 2024, 10:28:28 AM »
Couldn’t find an archeology thread so here goes. I have done some drunken skinny dipping in this lake and awoken along its shores with a lass more than a time or two. They’ve found some 4500 year old artifacts in it. The article doesn’t speak to it, but there was a time when it was thought Native Americans arrived in North America about that long ago, something long since dispelled by 10,000 year old finds. However finding signs of well developed civilizations so far inland this long ago is significant, IMO:

https://nypost.com/2024/05/31/us-news/4500-year-old-discovery-in-us-lake-leaves-experts-in-shock-and-awe/?utm_source=facebook_sitebuttons&utm_medium=site%20buttons&utm_campaign=site%20buttons

8
Couldn’t find a good topic to fit this one under—Air Travel & Tourism seemed more about vacationing than the complexities and corporate folly discussed below—and indeed engineering seems a critical and and vast topic deserving a category of it’s own so, gulp, here goes.

I’ve seen various stand along pieces including a PBS Frontline episode re Boeing and the causes of all its horrifying engineering failures, but most those pieces seemed about star’s aligning in a manner leading to catastrophic failure, rather than an astoundingly shortsighted campaign to replace senior staff with burger flippers in search of a better life as corporate leaders wandered the facility asking aloud “will no one rid me of these meddlesome quality engineers?”

Suicide Mission
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

BY MAUREEN TKACIK  MARCH 28, 2024
 
Expand
Tkacik-Boeing 032824.jpg
GAVIN MCINTYRE/THE POST AND COURIER VIA AP
A Boeing Dreamlifter sits on the tarmac at their campus in North Charleston, South Carolina, May 30, 2023.

John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.

“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

More from Maureen Tkacik

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerney’s disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail out—and buy out—the private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.

Boeing was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing.
But after the FAA cleared Boeing to deliver its first 787s to customers around the end of 2011, one of Swampy’s old co-workers says that McNerney’s henchmen began targeting anyone with experience and knowledge for torment and termination. One of Swampy’s closest colleagues, Bill Seitz, took a demotion to go back west. A quality control engineer named John Woods was terminated for insisting inspectors thoroughly document damage and repair performed on composite materials, which were far less resilient than steel. Good machinists and inspectors who wore wristbands in support of a union drive were framed with dubious infractions. “Everyone from Everett started dropping like flies,” remembers a former manager at the plant.

“There’s a form we all had to sign that says you take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, and it states pretty clearly that if something happens to a plane because of something you did wrong, you can face a major fine or jail time for that,” the manager recalled. “The Everett managers took that seriously. Charleston leadership did not.”

The bosses hit Swampy with a new initiative called “Multi-Function Process Performer,” through which quality inspectors were directed to outsource 90 percent of their duties to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising. This was supposed to speed up production and save Boeing millions once it successfully shed the thousands of inspectors it intended to axe. Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter, which explicitly required quality inspectors to document all defects detected, work performed, and parts installed on a commercial airplane in one centralized database. Swampy knew he was caught in a prisoner’s dilemma. If he went along, he was breaking the law; if he didn’t, whistleblowers who complained about unsafe practices were routinely terminated on grounds of violating the same safety protocols they had opposed violating.

Swampy calculated that it would be a bigger pain for Boeing to fire him for doing the right thing than following orders, so he kept his head down and continued managing his inspectors as though he were back in Everett, taking special care to meticulously record every episode of noncompliance (and nonconformance, which is similar but not identical) he encountered. He documented his discovery that machinists installing floor panels had been littering long titanium slivers into wire bundles and electrical boxes between the floorboards and the cargo compartment ceiling panels, where they risked causing an electrical short. A series of mysterious battery fires had already caused the FAA to ground the 787 for a few months just over a year after the first plane had been delivered. He wrote that 75 out of a package of 300 oxygen masks slated for installation on a plane did not actually pump oxygen. His team compiled a list of 300 defects on a fuselage scheduled for delivery, and he discovered that more than 400 nonconforming aircraft parts had gone missing from the defective parts cage and likely been installed on planes illegally and without documentation, by managers and mechanics desperate to get them out the door.

John Barnett worked for Boeing for more than 30 years as a quality inspector and manager.

Few quality managers were as stubborn as Swampy. A Seattle Times story detailed an internal Boeing document boasting that the incidence of manufacturing defects on the 787 had plunged 20 percent in a single year, which inspectors anonymously attributed to the “bullying environment” in which defects had systematically “stopped being documented” by inspectors. They weren’t fooling customers: Qatar Airways had become so disgusted with the state of the planes it received from Charleston that it refused to accept them, and even inspired the Qatar-owned Al Jazeera to produce a withering documentary called Broken Dreams, in which an employee outfitted with a hidden camera chitchatted with mechanics and inspectors about the planes they were producing. “They hire these people off the street, dude … fucking flipping burgers for a living, making sandwiches at Subway,” one mechanic marveled of his colleagues; another regaled the narrator with tales of co-workers who came to work high on “coke and painkillers and weed” because no one had ever had a urine test. Asked if they would fly the 787 Dreamliner; just five of 15 answered yes, and even the positive responses did Boeing no favors: “I probably would, but I have kind of a death wish, too.”

The day after Broken Dreams premiered, Swampy got an email informing him that he’d been put on a 60-day corrective action plan four weeks earlier. His alleged offense constituted using email to communicate about process violations; the HR file noted, fictitiously, that his boss had discussed his “infraction” with him earlier.

Swampy was no fool. “Leadership wants nothing in email so they maintain plausible deniability,” he wrote in the “comments” space on his corrective action plan paperwork. “It is obvious leadership is just looking for items to criticize me on so I stop identifying issues. I will conform!” He immediately applied for a job on the graveyard shift, whose supervisor promised the gig would go to the manager with the most seniority on the Final Assembly team. But the job went to a manager who had transferred to Final Assembly all of a week earlier, which is when Swampy began to realize he’d been institutionally blackballed from the only company he’d ever worked for.

He got two more internal job offers rescinded after that, including one from a group that was literally desperate for someone with Barnett’s breadth of experience. “They didn’t care how bad I wanted him,” the senior manager told one of Swampy’s friends. “They said John Barnett is not going anywhere.”

Finally, in early 2017 Swampy happened upon a printout of a list of 49 “Quality Managers to Fire.” The name John Barnett was number one. Swampy decided to go on a medical leave of absence, which turned into early retirement on March 1. He called a labor lawyer he knew from a colleague’s case, and together they began the seemingly unending process of filing an aviation whistleblower complaint detailing his seven years at the Charleston plant. It made him sick to think that the value of his Boeing shares had tripled over the same period during which he’d watched the company get so comprehensively dismantled. But it was downright surreal to watch the stock price nearly triple once more during the two years after he left the company.

Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nation’s reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.

Swampy had no firsthand experience with the 737 MAX, but it was obvious that the ethos that drove the 787 plant had poisoned that program as well. He began sharing his story in media interviews, and soon the Department of Justice, which had opened a criminal investigation into the MCAS flight control system crashes that quickly widened to encompass the Dreamliner program, came calling as well.

While the criminal probe ultimately shriveled into one of the most pathetic plea bargains in the history of American justice, something shifted within the FAA. Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd, though in practice it probably worked better than being regulated by an agency full of underpaid bureaucrats desperate to ingratiate themselves to Boeing. (Swampy’s best friend and later wife Diane Johnson worked at Boeing as an FAA liaison.) Most of the Boeing employees who worked in quasi-regulatory roles were like Swampy, terrified of anything going wrong on a plane they had inspected and deeply skeptical of their bosses, who seemed unconcerned about the consequences.

Amid the MAX grounding, the FAA began to take a closer look at the 787 program that was the subject of so many complaints from workers and airlines. The company had campaigned the FAA heavily to approve a “random sampling” method of inspecting the precision of the shims it cut to connect various pieces of the plane together; a closer look revealed the shims were not as precisely sized as the company had boasted. Eight planes were immediately grounded, and the agency forced Boeing to halt deliveries pending further investigation. Weeks stretched into years as nonconformances and noncompliances piled up; “Boeing Looked for Flaws in Its Dreamliner and Couldn’t Stop Finding Them,” one headline summarized.

Boeing had quietly assumed many of the roles traditionally played by its primary regulator, an arrangement that was ethically absurd.
In December 2022, Aviation Week produced a helpful diagram mapping what sections of the plane had caused auditors the biggest headaches. Every single section, from the tip of the nose to the horizontal stabilizers, was marked up with red arrows. In 2023, deliveries were halted in January, February, and again in August over problems with the shimming, the horizontal stabilizer, and God knows what else. Swampy, and hundreds of others who had blown the whistle on Boeing’s managerial nihilism, had been thoroughly vindicated. But it was too late. There were no more cleanup crews left at Boeing; too much knowledge had been drained from the company.

“For every new plane you put up into the sky there are about 20,000 problems you need to solve, and for a long time we used to say Boeing’s core competency was piling people and money on top of a problem until they crushed it,” says Stan Sorscher, a longtime Boeing physicist and former officer of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA), the labor union representing Boeing engineers. But those people are gone.

Sorscher has warned Boeing management for decades now of the catastrophic effects of the brain drain inflicted by its war on “brilliance.” He says McDonnell Douglas managers published a statistical analysis in 1997 gauging productivity against the average seniority of managers across various programs that found that greener workforces were substantially less productive, which he found to be a “mirror image” of a kind of “rule of thumb” within Boeing that held that every Boeing employee takes four years to become “fully productive.” But the average employee assigned to the 737 program has been at Boeing just five years, according to a longtime Boeing executive who is involved in various efforts to save the company; for comparison’s sake, he says the average employee assigned to the 777 program had between 15 and 20 years under their belt. The typical engineer or machinist assigned to the task of fixing Boeing’s 20,000 problems has never known a Boeing that wasn’t a five-alarm dumpster fire.

There’s a terrifying visual representation of this: the satellite view of the Moses Lake Municipal Airport in an arid stretch of Washington east of Seattle, or the Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California, where hundreds of Boeing 737 MAXes sit in abandoned parking lots waiting for someone to fix them so they can finally be delivered. Meanwhile, pieces are flying off the Boeing planes actually in use at an alarming rate, criminal investigations are under way, and another in a long line of stock-conscious CEOs is stepping down. Boeing’s largest union, the Machinists, is trying to snag a board seat because, in the words of its local president, “we have to save this company from itself.”

SPEEA has demanded, understandably, that the board choose an aerospace engineer as its next CEO. But there are few signs that will happen: None of the names floated thus far for the spot have been aerospace engineers, and the shoo-in for the position, GE’s Larry Culp, is not an engineer at all.

By now you know what became of Swampy: He was found dead a few weeks ago with a gunshot wound to his right temple, “apparently” self-inflicted, on what was meant to be the third day of a three-day deposition in his whistleblower case against his former employer; his amended complaint, which his lawyer released last week, is the basis for much of this story.

It is worth noting here that Swampy’s former co-workers universally refuse to believe that their old colleague killed himself. One former co-worker who was terrified of speaking publicly went out of their way to tell me that they weren’t suicidal. “If I show up dead anytime soon, even if it’s a car accident or something, I’m a safe driver, please be on the lookout for foul play.” Swampy’s wife Diane, who worked at Boeing for 28 years, died of brain cancer at age 60 in late 2022.

Discussing Swampy’s death and the whistleblower lawsuit he left behind, the longtime former Boeing executive told me, “I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys.” Did that mean he thought Boeing assassinated Swampy? “It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere,” he replied. More importantly, he added, “there is a principle in American law that there is no such thing as an accidental death during the commission of a felony. Let’s say you rob a bank and while traveling at high speed in the getaway you run down a pedestrian and kill them. That’s second-degree murder at the very least.”

TRANSPORTATION AIRLINES BOEING WHISTLEBLOWERS CORPORATE POWER CEOS JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
MAUREEN TKACIK
Maureen Tkacik is investigations editor at the Prospect and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project.

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

9
Politics & Religion / Schadenfreude
« on: March 08, 2024, 10:57:38 AM »
This topic is your own damn fault, Crafty, as you noted a recent post of mine contained its share. In this inaugural post, a gent that demanded concentration camps for those that eschewed The Jab is dead at 33 due to an aneurysm:

https://realclimatescience.com/2024/03/dead-at-33/#gsc.tab=0


10
I couldn’t find anything this piece fit under & think there are numerous materials that fit under this rubric from rare earths to semiconductors to precursor meds to helium as shown here. Happy to move this if there is a place for it, but don’t want to scan 11 or more pages for an appropriate thread.

Yo Doug, would this be your backyard?

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/economically-viable-helium-discovered-in-minnesota/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=economically-viable-helium-discovered-in-minnesota

11
Dear me, two new topics in the same day. Hopefully our esteemed Global Moderator will let me live.  :-D

As noted elsewhere, I’ve fallen down a behavior studies rabbit hole of late, with a YouTube channel called The Behavior Panel being my current focus, but they have lit a fuse: I’ll be seeking other sources to make sure I’m not taking these four behaviorists as gospel.

First up, a three plus year old examination of Joe Biden’s response to sexual harassment claims made before the 2020 election. Suffice to say, he does not fare well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtAISKVrefI

Currently playing in the background here: a Trump deposition being given the same treatment. Standby, I’ll be reporting on it soon.

12
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Outdoor Recreation
« on: February 28, 2024, 09:25:20 AM »
Looked for a germane topic to file this under, but found none. As such we’ll start off with this interesting examination of deaths in national parks:

https://www.backpacker.com/survival/deaths-in-national-parks/

13
This could likely be folded into an existing thread, but I’d like to start cataloging FBI-specific malfeasance as, it seems to me, they have morphed into a champions of the status quo as preferred by the Democratic Party, an organ of the Deep State, and generally an agency that regularly violates constitutional protections to political ends, as this piece demonstrates.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/01/03/the_fbi-tainted_whitmer_kidnap_plot_youve_heard_next_to_nothing_about_1001971.html

If anyone is aware of other posts re FBI malfeasance please pass ‘em on so I can add a link to ‘em here.

14
Politics & Religion / Podcasts Germane to Politics & Religion
« on: October 16, 2023, 08:44:08 AM »
I didn’t find a similar topic/category, and I suppose an argument can be made to put these podcasts in with a related established topic, but thought a single place to post podcasts might make them easier to find and listen to. Happy to relocate if preferred.

List is a report on the current Israel/Gaza element of what these folks call The Long War.

https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2023/10/idf-seizes-efps-rpgs-and-other-weapons-from-hamas.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=idf-seizes-efps-rpgs-and-other-weapons-from-hamas

15
Science, Culture, & Humanities / Pathological Science
« on: November 03, 2007, 07:51:13 PM »
Having read today in an ever so earnest piece the global warming has caused a declining rate of circumcision in an area of Africa, I figured it was time to start a topic where rank foolishness cloaked in the gauze of pseudo "science" is exposed. This piece inaugurates the topic.


November 02, 2007
'Global Warming' as Pathological Science

By James Lewis
Trofimko Lysenko is not a household name; but it should be, because he was the model for all the Politically Correct "science" in the last hundred years. Lysenko was Stalin's favorite agricultural "scientist," peddling the myth that crops could be just trained into growing bigger and better. You didn't have to breed better plants over generations, as farmers have been doing for ages. It was a fantasy of the all-powerful Soviet State. Lysenko sold Stalin on that fraud in plant genetics, and Stalin told Soviet scientists to fall into line --- in spite of the fact that nobody really believed it. Hundreds of thousands of peasants starved during Stalin's famines, in good part because of fraudulent science.

There is such a thing as pathological science. Science becomes unhealthy when its only real question ---  "what is true?" --- is sabotaged by vested interests, by ideological Commissars, or even by grant-swinging scientists. Today's Global Warming campaign is endangering real, honest science. Global Warming superstition has become an international power grab, and good science suffers as a result.

Freeman Dyson, one of the great physicists alive today, put it plainly enough in his autobiography:
"...all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. ... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. ... They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."
When the scientific establishment starts to peddle fraud, we get corrupt science. The Boomer Left came to power in the 1970s harboring a real hatred toward science. They called it "post-modernism," and "deconstructionism" --- and we saw all kinds of damage as a result. Scientific American magazine went so far as to  hire a post-modern "journalist" to write for it. John Horgan became famous for writing a book called The End of Science, but never seemed to learn much about real science. It was a shameful episode.   

The explosive spread of AIDS occurred when the known evidence about HIV transmission among Gay men was suppressed by the media. The medical science establishment did not speak up. HIV is most easily transmitted through anal intercourse, because the anus bleeds far more easily than the vagina. So one Gay man simply passes blood products straight on to the next.  Sexually transmitted plagues have been studied scientifically ever since syphilis arose several centuries ago. We know how to limit their spread, but many Gay men have died as a result of political suppression of scientific medicine. The spread of AIDS was partly a self-inflicted wound.

Pathological science kills people and ruins lives. Such fake science is still peddled by the PC establishment in Europe and America. Global Warming is only the most recent case. Rachel Carson's screed against DDT caused malaria to re-emerge in Africa, killing hundreds of thousands of human beings.  Those human-caused disasters have never been discussed honestly in the media, and rarely if ever in science journals. The DDT scandal is still suppressed.

In Britain, much of the alarmism about Mad Cow disease was never justified scientifically. It was pure, math-model-driven science fiction, just like Global Warming. But it was pushed very vigorously by the British science establishment, which has never confessed to its errors, and is therefore likely to make the same ones again. In politicized science, public hysteria actually builds careers; in real science, it tends to ruin careers. Years after the Brits realized that Mad Cow was a false alarm, the French admitted that Oui, Messieurs, we had ze Mad Cow, naturally, but we are not hysterique, comprenez vous?  Besides, cow brains are a great delicacy, and one only lives once. Vive la France!  Right across the Channel in Britain, farmers were required by law to destroy and bury hundreds of thousands of sheep and cows. It was an economic disaster, and all because of wildly alarmist science.

Britain is even more vulnerable to politicized science than we are, because medicine is controlled by the Left. That is a huge chunk of all science in the age of biomedicine.  But the British Medical Journal and even the venerable Lancet are no longer reliable sources. Their political agenda sticks out like a sore thumb. It was The Lancet that published a plainly fraudulent "survey" of Iraqi civilian casualties a few years ago --- the only "survey" ever taken in the middle of a shooting war. As if you can go around shell-shocked neighborhoods with your little clipboard and expect people to tell the truth about their dead and wounded: Saddam taught Iraqis to lie about such things, just to survive, and the internecine fighting of the last several years did not help. The whole farce was just unbelievable, but the prestigious Lancet put the fake survey into the public domain, just as if it were real science.  It was a classic agitprop move, worthy of Stalin and Lysenko. But it was not worthy of one the great scientific journals. Many scientists will never trust it again.

Pathological science has erupted most often in the last hundred years in the field of education, where "whole-word reading" fraud undermined the reading abilities of whole generations of American kids. Young adults can no longer tell the difference between "it's" and "its," even though their grandparents learned it in grammar school. The field of education is gullible and fad-prone, and is very unhealthy as a result. That's why new teachers are taught to peddle PC --- ideology is all they have.

Pathological science has erupted in fields like psychology and medicine, but not often in the hard sciences. In physics, Cold Fusion claims were discredited very quickly. Now, Global Warming is a fraud simply because climatology is not a hard science. That's what Freeman Dyson, who knows what physics can do, meant by saying that the models "do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."

The climate is not "just basic physics," as some people claim. Basic physics is great for understanding CO2 in lab jars and planets in space, but it has no complete accounting for a wooden kitchen chair, because wood is far too complex a material. Nobody has a complete physical understanding of wood --- there are too many different cellular layers, molecules, and unknown interactions, all produced by a genetic code that is just beginning to be understood. We only know the genomes for a few plants, and we don't know how their genes are expressed in cells and proteins.  So forget about applying basic physics and chemistry to kitchen chairs. Plants and trees are hypercomplex, like the climate.

Modern science fraud seems to come from the Left, which makes it especially weird because the Left claims to be all in favor of science. Marxism itself was a scientific fraud, of course. In 1848 Marx and Engels claimed to have a "scientific" (wissenschaftlich) theory of history. They predicted that communism would first arise in England, because it was the most advanced capitalist nation. (Not) They predicted that centralized planning would work. (Not) They predicted that the peasants and workers would dedicate their lives to the Socialist State, and stop caring about themselves and their families. (Not).  They predicted that sovietization would lead to greater economic performance. (Not). And then, when seventy years of Soviet, Chinese, Eastern European, and North Korean history showed Marx's predictions to be wrong, wrong and wrong again, they still claimed to be "scientific." That's pathological science --- fraud masquerading as science.

(Current Marxists are more anti-scientific, because they've finally figured out that the facts don't support them, but they still haven't given up their fantasy life. Millenarian cults never give up, even when the facts go against them.)

Scientists love to cite the historic "martyrs of science" --- like Galileo Galilei, a great genius who was forced late in life to recant his views on the solar system by Pope Leo X. Or Giordano Bruno, who was actually burned at the stake.   But the scientific establishment itself can be easily seduced by power, just like the Church was in Galileo's time.  Science is just done by human beings. So we get plainly political editorials in magazines like Scientific American and Science. They jumped on Global Warming superstition before the facts were in.

Last year MIT Professor Richard Lindzen published an amazing expose in the Wall Street Journal editorial Page. It is called "Climate of Fear: Global-warming alarmists intimidate dissenting scientists into silence."  Why are real scientists not speaking up enough against the Global Warming fraud? Well, some have been fired from their jobs, and others are keeping their heads down:
"In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions."
If scientists were totally honest, they would memorialize Trofimko Lysenko just like they celebrate Galileo. In some ways, Lysenko's name should be as well-known as Galileo, as a stern warning of what can so easily go wrong.  There are wonderful scientists, who must be honest, or they will fail. And then there are some corrupt scientists who are not honest. It's really that simple. Scientists can be demagogues, too. We should not pretend that all are what they should be. They're not. Fortunately, healthy science has all kinds of built-in checks and balances. Pathological science circumvents those.

Some scientists rationalize this corruption of their vocation by saying that people can lie for a good cause. The record shows otherwise. Fraudulent science and science journalism has led to AIDS going out of control; to DDT being banned and malaria gaining a new lease on life in Africa; to decades of famines in Russia; to children being badly mis-educated on such basics as reading and arithmetic;  to end endless slew of unjustified health scares, like Mad Cow;  and to a worldwide Leftist campaign cynically aiming to gain international power and enormous sums of money, based on a simple, unscientific  fraud.

When the truth-tellers in society begin to sell out and tell lies for some ideological goal, people end up dying.

James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com/

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/11/global_warming_as_pathological.html at November 03, 2007

16
Politics & Religion / Energy Politics & Science
« on: December 05, 2006, 07:24:45 AM »
If hydrocarbons are renewable- then is "Peak Oil" a fraud?
by Joel Bainerman

Are hydrocarbons "renewable"- and if so- what does such a conclusion mean for the future of the world's oil and natural gas supplies?

The question is critical due to the enormous amount of coverage the issue of "Peak Oil" is receiving from the mainstream press. If the supply of hydrocarbons is renewable- then the contrary to the conventional wisdom being touted throughout the mainstream press today- the world is NOT running out of oil.

Unbeknownst to Westerners, there have actually been for quite some time now two competing theories concerning the origins of petroleum. One theory claims that oil is an organic 'fossil fuel' deposited in finite quantities near the planet's surface. The other theory claims that oil is continuously generated by natural processes in the Earth's magma.

One of the world's leading advocates for the theory that hydrocarbons are renewable is Dr. Thomas Gold who contends that oil is not a limited resource, and that oil, natural gas and coal, are not so-called “fossil fuels.”

In his book, The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels, he explains that dinosaurs and plants and the fossils from those living beings are not the origin of oil and natural gas, but rather generated from a chemical substance in the crust of the Earth.

Dr. Gold: "Astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born? That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?"

He continues: "Human skull fossils have been found in anthracite coal in Pennsylvania. The official theory of the development of coal will not accept that reality, since human beings were not around when anthracite coal was formed. Coal was formed millions of years ago. However, you cannot mistake the fact that these are human fossils."

"The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff. It was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved; with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened."

Gold claims that the only thing we find now on the Earth that would do that is petroleum, which gradually becomes stiffer and harder. That is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. So the fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils found in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. Where then does the carbon base come from that produces all of this?

Says Dr. Gold: "Petroleum and coal were made from materials in which heavy hydrocarbons were common components. We know that because the meteorites are the sort of debris left over from the formations of the planets and those contain carbon in unoxidized form as hydrocarbons as oil and coal-like particles. We find that in one large class of meteorites and we find that equally on many of the other planetary bodies in the solar system. So it’s pretty clear that when the Earth formed it contained a lot of carbon material built into it."

Dr. Gold's ideas would lead us to believe that there is so much natural gas in the earth that it is causing earthquakes in trying to escape from the Earth. If you’ll drill deep enough anywhere, you will find natural gas. It may not be in commercial quantities every time, but more than likely it will be.

Is the oil and gas industry reconsidering things in light of his work?

Absolutely not.

"In many other countries they are listening to me: in Russia on a very large scale, and in China also. It is just Western Europe and the United States that are so stuck in the mud that they can’t look at anything else."

What do the Russians know that the West don't?
The roots of Dr. Gold's theories are in Russia where scientists since the end World War II have been researching what is referred to as the "Modern Russian-Ukrainian Theory of Deep, Abiotic Petroleum Origins."

Although the theory was first expounded upon by Professor Nikolai Kudryavtsev in 1951 it is not the work of any one single man but has been developed by hundreds of scientists in the (now former) U.S.S.R..

The theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is not a vague, qualitative hypothesis, but stands as a rigorous analytic theory within the mainstream of the modern physical sciences. In this respect, the modern theory differs fundamentally not only from the previous hypothesis of a biological origin of petroleum but also from all traditional geological hypotheses.

Actually, since the nineteenth century, knowledgeable physicists, chemists, thermodynamicists, and chemical engineers have regarded with grave reservations (if not outright disdain) the suggestion that highly reduced hydrocarbon molecules of high free enthalpy (the constituents of crude oil) might somehow evolve spontaneously from highly oxidized biogenic molecules of low free enthalpy. Beginning in 1964, Soviet scientists carried out extensive theoretical statistical thermodynamic analysis which established explicitly that the hypothesis of evolution of hydrocarbon molecules (except methane) from biogenic ones in the temperature and pressure regime of the Earth's near-surface crust was glaringly in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.

The theory of deep, abiotic petroleum origins is presently applied extensively throughout the former U.S.S.R. as the guiding perspective for petroleum exploration and development projects. There are presently more than 80 oil and gas fields in the Caspian district alone which were explored and developed by applying the perspective of the modern theory and which produce from the crystalline basement rock.

Similarly, such exploration in the western Siberia cratonic-rift sedimentary basin has developed 90 petroleum fields of which 80 produce either partly or entirely from the crystalline basement. The exploration and discoveries of the 11 major and 1 giant fields on the northern flank of the Dneiper-Donets basin have already been noted. There are presently deep drilling exploration projects under way in Azerbaijan, Tatarstan, and Asian Siberia directed to testing potential oil and gas reservoirs in the crystalline basement.

Is "Peak Oil" a fraud?
So why is the western media being inundated with notions of the world running out of oil?

One could point a finger at the multinational oil companies and their vested interest in having the price of a barrel of oil rise substantially- to justify further exploration expenses- and of course- to bolster their bottom line.

Says Dr. J.F. Kenney, a long-time research on the origins of hydrocarbons:

"For almost a century, various predictions have been made that the human race was imminently going to run out of available petroleum. The passing of time has proven all those predictions to have been utterly wrong. It is pointed out here how all such predictions have depended fundamentally upon an archaic hypothesis from the 18th century that petroleum somehow (miraculously) evolved from biological detritus, and was accordingly limited in abundance."

That hypothesis has been replaced during the past forty years by the modern Russian-Ukrainian theory of abyssal, abiotic petroleum origins which has established that petroleum is a primordial material erupted from great depth. Therefore, according to Kenney, petroleum abundances are limited by little more than the quantities of its constituents as were incorporated into the Earth at the time of its formation.

As far back as 1757, in his address at the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, Academician Mikhailo V. Lomonosov, stated:

"Rock oil originates as tiny bodies of animals buried in the sediments which, under the influence of increased temperature and pressure acting during an unimaginably long period of time, transform into rock oil [petroleum , or crude oil]"

More than 200 years later, Professor Emmanuil Chekaliuk told the conference on Petroleum and Petroleum Geology in Moscow that:

"Statistical thermodynamic analysis has established clearly that hydrocarbon molecules which comprise petroleum require very high pressures for their spontaneous formation, comparable to the pressures required for the same of diamond. In that sense, hydrocarbon molecules are the high-pressure polymorphs of the reduced carbon system as is diamond of elemental carbon. Any notion which might suggest that hydrocarbon molecules spontaneously evolve in the regimes of temperature and pressure characterized by the near-surface of the Earth, which are the regimes of methane creation and hydrocarbon destruction, does not even deserve consideration."

Contrarily, the statistics of the international petroleum industry establish that, far from diminishing, the net known recoverable reserves of petroleum have been growing steadily for the past fifty years. Those statistics show that, for every year since about 1946, the international petroleum industry has discovered at least five new tons of recoverable oil for every three which have been consumed.

As Professor P. Odell of the London School of Economics has put it, instead of "running out of oil," the human race by every measure seems to be "running into oil".

Says Dr. Kenney: "There stands no reason to worry about, and even less to plan for, any predicted demise of the petroleum industry based upon a vanishing of petroleum reserves. On the contrary, these considerations compel additional investment and development in the technology and skills of deep drilling, of deep seismic measurement and interpretation, of the reservoir properties of crystalline rock, and of the associated completion and production practices which should be applied in such non-traditional reservoirs"

If Kenney is correct, not only are any predictions that the world is "running out of oil" invalid, so also are suggestions that the petroleum exploration and production industry is a "mature" or "declining" one.

The impact on the planet of the conclusions of this debate
Much research remains to be done on "alternative" theories of the how much hydrocarbons are left in the world- unfortunately- those entities most able to do this research- the western multinational oil conglomerates- have the least interest in arriving at any conclusion other than those that are part of the "Peak Oil" stream of thought. Today the mainstream press has accepted as a given that the world has only a finite amount of oil and natural gas- and thus any decision taken on how to deal with the world's future needs are based on these conclusions. If they are erroneous- then the world is about to embark on a plan to provide for its energy needs for the coming century based on a false notion.

Research geochemist Michael Lewan of the U.S.Geological Survey in Denver, is one of the most knowledgeable advocates of the opposing theory, that petroleum is a "fossil fuel". Yet even Lewan admits:

"I don't think anybody has ever doubted that there is an inorganic source of hydrocarbons. The key question is, 'Do they exist in commercial quantities?'"

We might never know the answer to that question because both sides of this debate are not being heard by the general public. If the Russians have accepted the theory that hydrocarbons are renewable- and over time they will become the leading exporters of oil and gas worldwide- this fact alone requires these alternative theories of how fossil fuels are created- is required.

It behooves western governments to begin taking these alternative theories seriously- and design future energy policies based on possibility that they are correct. Whatever strategies for meeting the world's ferocious appetite for energy are devised today- will impact the planet for decades to come.

In this issue- we simply can't afford to be wrong.

Joel Bainerman

Joel Bainerman has been a writer on economic and Middle East issues since 1983. His published archive can be viewed on his website at www.joelbainerman.com

His new online, multi-lingual alternative newsmagazine for Europeans can be viewed at www.theotherside.org.uk


17
Politics & Religion / Search, Resources and Helpful Links
« on: March 18, 2005, 02:24:23 PM »
As I browse around the 'net I often find interesting and helpful links. Figured I'd start a topic where such info could be posted. For instance, found a quick easy source for biographical data at the following URL:

http://www.nndb.com/

18
Politics & Religion / Geo Political matters
« on: December 10, 2004, 09:27:43 AM »
Russia seems to be at a free market/command driven economy crossroads, with things trending toward command driven. Crafty has posted some pieces about the related Ukrainian election. My sense is that we are at a pivotal moment in Russian relations, with the current climate there having a flavor of 1930's Germany. Also seems to me there is a deafening silence out of China as this geopolitical game unfolds.

This out of today's Investor's Business Daily:

Wrong Answer


INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Russia: Not that long ago, we were rather bullish on the country. That hope has faded. The nation of 144 million has skidded off its once-promising path.

He's not Russia's George Washington. Or even its Vaclav Havel, the writer who led the Czech Republic's escape from its rotting Bolshevik prison. But President Vladimir Putin is no Vladimir Lenin, either.

Which is why we're confounded ? and not a little disappointed ? to see the new Russia starting to act a little too much like the old one from which Soviet expansionism was steered. Putin's KGB background aside, the country seemed to hold real promise.

Three years ago, for example, Putin looked for all the world like a free-market reformer, talking about a privatization of the pension system. He also seemed sincere in wanting to leave behind a closed society and move toward a European openness.

"Russia needs only one thing to develop normally," Putin said while visiting Crawford High School in Texas with President Bush in November 2001. "We need normal standards, conditions and relations with all the leading economies of the world, and primarily with the United States."

Early on, Putin showed a commitment to unshackle the Russian economy. He aligned himself with the late Anatoly Sobchak, then a tough anti-communist and market-leaning mayor of St. Petersburg, and German Gref, his minister of economic development and trade, who prefers markets over central control and planning.

More important, Putin had then, as he has now, a known free-market reformer as chief economic adviser: Andrei Illarionov.

But the Putin of today is dropping a heavy hand on the private sector. VimpelCom, the country's second-biggest cell phone operator, is the latest victim, having been slapped on Wednesday with a tax bill totaling $157 million.


Recall that it was a crushing tax bill from Moscow ? at least $20 billion and perhaps as much as $27 billion ? that forced the breakup of Yukos, Russia's biggest oil company.

Yukos' chief was sent to a gulag, and his company will have been essentially nationalized once the state-owned gas company Gazprom ends up owning it, as expected.

No wonder Exxon Mobil CEO Lee Raymond this week expressed concern about Russia's business and investment climate.

Theories vary on why Yukos and VimpelCom were targeted. Perhaps they were hit with big tax bills for legitimate reasons. But it looks like they have been declared enemies of the state because their executives backed Putin's rivals or criticized the government.

That's no way to liberalize an economy and invigorate a lethargic nation. If Putin is interested in polishing his legacy, he needs to listen more to his chief economic adviser than to the voice of Lenin that he must be hearing. The last 80 years clearly show which one has the right answers.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/issues.asp

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