Riehl World View

"Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism"

We loved twitter friend Dan Collins of POWIP AKA vermontaigne's disagreement with tahDeetz's assertion [above] re Leftists. "I disagree with the 'sane' thing." Exactly. As we twittered back, "To say 'keep sane' implies they ever WERE sane." But speaking of driving leftists over the edge, tahDeetz was spot on with this: Metaphorically WaterBoard your "favorite" Leftist. Make them read this.

By Sissy Willis of sisu

"Sissy Willis uses Darwin to utterly demolish Marxism," twittered tahDeetz this afternoon. We'd sent her a link to one of our uber posts from way back in February of 2005, "Bloggers are 'cracking, popping, drilling and peeling their victims open." Take THAT, you leftists claiming to own Darwin even as your core collectivist beliefs fly in the face of the economic logic of nature and human nature that underlie Darwin's theory of natural selection. A few excerpts from our original post:

February 2005 caption: A "snail link" — an article from the NYT Science Times that caught our politico-philosopho-scientific eye ten years ago.  Not having the option of URL linking in those pioneering days, this protoblogger clipped the thing, underlined important passages, sent xeroxed copies to our small circle of interested parties and then carefully filed it away in a drawer, from which we were able to pull it this afternoon after all these years.

… It took a little longer than we'd thought it would for what turned out to be the Tea Party movement of constitutional conservatism to emerge and start reigniting the lights of the Shining City, but our words back then are standing up pretty well given the reverberations of the Revolution of 2010.

Read full post here.

Dwight D. Eisenhower Smacks Down The NYT's Ross "Doughboy" Douthat

Yes, there is nothing like being "constrained by elite sentiment," which Ross Douthat is, whether he realizes it, or not. Funny, I've always imagined his type more enjoying being constrained by leather, ropes, or even chains, perhaps - far more than sentiment, anyway. But I digress.

The debate over climate change isn’t unusual in this regard. On issues ranging from the death penalty to (at least until recently) immigration, America’s major political parties generally tend to be more responsive to public opinion, and less constrained by elite sentiment, than their counterparts in Europe.

As the nonsense aka anthropomorphic global warming has melted down faster than a would be Tahitian glacier - top scientists resigning posts, 30,000 scientists abandoning it in one clip, and the UN and scientists globally embarrassing themselves in what some call the greatest scientific scandal of our age, would be elite pundits like Ross Douthat are forced to maintain a distorted worldview not much larger than a test tube, as it allows them to always believe that they are still correct and somehow above it all looking down. 

Yet, I'd wager the young man knows relatively little, if anything, of pure science himself. Notice how, in his words, for instance, these self-professed elites have gone from proved, to beyond reasonable doubt, to consensus, to sturdy consensus, or even, apparently, now "pretty sturdy consensus" in Douthat's view. There is no place for statements with so many modifiers in the language of actual science. But Douthat needs to rely on them to, in the end, not say anything the least bit scientific.

He's simply conveying and re-conveying the same misguided and even ignorant, though certainly elitist, sentiment that constrains him. There's no room for words like sentiment in science, either, dammit, Douthat. If you are going to pretend to talk science, you could at least have the courtesy to use the straightforward language of it. But, see, if he did that, he'd trip himself up, having no nice words to dress up and hide his ignorance.

Overall, I much prefer the American approach, populist excesses and all. (It helps in this case, of course, that I’m deeply skeptical about the efficacy of climate change legislation anyway.) But there’s no denying that its left the G.O.P. on the wrong side — and increasingly so — of a pretty sturdy scientific consensus.

Douthat is doing nothing different than what Dwight David Eisenhower knew he would some years ago. Thank God these elites keep most of their prattle amongst themselves, allowing the majority of us to slip by without being forced to pay much, if any, genuine attention to it.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

UN To ET: Take Me To Your Children

Let's hope they do a little better than some of their peace keeping forces have in parts of the world.

THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth’s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting.

Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire.

Judge Blocks Obama On Stem Cells, Curious Decision

I imagine most will focus in on the basic ruling. What intrigued me was the bit in bold below. Causing "actual imminent injury" now includes getting ahead of someone in line in the dash for the federal cash? Who knew? Who's in front of me, I'd like to know!

A federal judge in Washington yesterday temporarily blocked the Obama administration’s efforts to expand stem cell research, ruling in a case brought by a former MIT scientist and others who oppose embryonic stem cell research.

Royce C. Lamberth, chief judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, said in his 15-page decision that regulations designed to expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research violated a law prohibiting destruction of embryos for research purposes.

Additionally, the judge ruled that former MIT researcher Dr. James L. Sherley and other scientists who study less controversial adult stem cells would face “actual, imminent injury’’ because of the competition for federal dollars that would be stoked by expansion of research into embryonic stem cells.

The opiate of the dopamine-dependent blogger

A link to "The Schneider Quote" was lying in wait in our Site Meter stats today. Clicking on over to something called "ClimateSight" (above), we were delighted to see that the true denialists who project their own denialism onto us climate skeptics continue to deny at will (see below).

By Sissy Willis of sisu

Reading the entrails of the Site Meter stats is the opiate of the dopamine-dependent blogger, who can never get enough. Yes, you, Robert Stacy McCain. Mainly you're looking for the instant rush of an Instalanche or at least a Malkin-lanche or precious links from that happy few, that band of sisters and brothers that fought with us upon Saint Fiskin's day. But once in awhile there's an eye-opening outlier that confirms what you've known all along, at least since July of 1990.

Today's find was the deletion of our "[Inflammatory]" comments from a ClimateSite post on "The Schneider Quote," a shameless bit of self-revelatory global-warming — that's what "climate change" was called in those halcyon days of AGW "scientific consensus" — scripture first published in 1988:

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Rahm Emanuel would have been proud. We don't remember exactly what we said, but it was probably similar to the comments we left at one of Pharyngula's pro-Darwin, anti-Intelligent-Design posts last year, where the commenters were so unaccustomed to dissent that they mistook this Darwinian Libertarian for a "wingnut and creationist," as we blogged at the time:

"I just looked at Sissy Willis's blog. The person (I am still not clear what sex/gender the person is) does not seem to be sane," writes commenter Matt Penfold at PZ Myers's science blog Pharyngula in response to an admittedly provocative comment we had left there ourselves this afternoon. We are intrigued with Mr. Penfold's scientifically-challenged powers of research and analysis, not to mention his tenuous grasp of the language: "I also doubt they are calling themselves Sissy with any kind of ironic intent. Which also suggests their grasp of English is as bad as their understanding of climate change, or since they seem to consider the current Pope to be some kind of hero, their grasp of morality." They/themselves/their? Didn't you mean she or he, sir? Had Penfold delved a bit further, he might have been puzzled to learn that along with Pope Benedict XVI, Charles Darwin is one of our intellectual heroes. But then for him, the debate is over, the scientific consensus is in, and Sissy Willis is insane. Talk about parallel lives.

Crossposted at sisu and Liberty Pundits.

Coming To America: The 5 Mornings After Pill? RU-486 Plus 5 Days

I guess this would pretty much 86 the whole truce thing, huh? Certainly puts Obama's FDA on the spot. As I recall, this topic was above Obama's pay grade. So, just who would make the decision isn't clear - not that omni-present Obama's prone to making decisions, or anything.

A French drug company is seeking to offer American women something their European counterparts already have: a pill that works long after "the morning after."

The drug, dubbed ella, would be sold as a contraceptive -- one that could prevent pregnancy for as many as five days after unprotected sex. But the new drug is a close chemical relative of the abortion pill RU-486, raising the possibility that it could also induce abortion by making the womb inhospitable for an embryo.

Atypical: Scientists Discover Famous Worm

This is the first time I'm aware of a famous worm has been discovered not living in Hollywood, or Washington.

SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) -- Two living specimens of the fabled giant Palouse earthworm have been captured for the first time in two decades in what represents a significant discovery of a creature that has achieved a mythic status in the area.

The giant Palouse earthworm has fascinated scientists for decades after long being written off as an extinct creature. Reports suggested that the worms had a penchant for spitting and smelled like lilies, further enhancing the myth of the earthworm in the agricultural Palouse region on the Washington-Idaho border.

"It's a good day for the worm," said University of Idaho soil scientist Jodi Johnson-Maynard in Moscow, Idaho, who has been leading the search

The recent discovery of the worms appeared to dispel the myth about the creature's appearance. They don't spit, or smell like lilies, and aren't even that giant.

"One of my colleagues suggested we rename it the 'larger-than average Palouse earthworm,'" Johnson-Maynard said when the find was announced Tuesday.

Neanderthals And Racism In The NFL

h/t Instapundit. Well, here's a case of two news items meeting in a way one wouldn't expect. Remember when Jimmy the Greek was fired for suggesting there were, um, differences between certain athletes based upon biology?

Depending on how this all plays out, he may of had a point without knowing it at the time. Now, fast forward to Toby Gerhart who sensed racism in the NFL draft because he is white. Food for thought. Do not look for big media to candidly connect these dots.

As humans began fanning out from Africa, between 50 and 100,000 years ago, these markers changed, allowing researchers to determine the relationship between different populations and to estimate when they split from one another.

If humans bred only with other humans, all these markers would create a neat phylogenetic tree, showing that human genetic diversity can be traced to a single population that existed in Africa in the last 100,000 years.

Instead, a team led by Jeffrey Long, at the University of New Mexico, found evidence that some of the markers looked far too old to have come from humans. Inbreeding with other ancient species is the likeliest explanation. "It means Neanderthals didn't completely disappear," he told Nature.

True, Neanderthals are the likeliest contenders for our ancestors' sexual partners, but they aren't the only ones.

Last month, a team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany recovered hominin DNA in Mongolia from a 30-50,000-year-old finger bone that appears to be neither Neanderthal nor human. Its ancestors, or another yet-to-be-discovered kind of archaic hominin, could have bred with humans.

Previous studies of small parts of the Neanderthal genome have found no evidence for interbreeding.

But with a complete Neanderthal genome due to be published any day now, and more DNA from the newly-discovered hominin in the works, scientists will have the best chance yet to determine whether our species shared a bed with any others.

Is Moon Mission Debate Out Of This World?

 I heard this discussed some on Mark Levin's show last night. Not sure I'm getting all of this debate as to whether or not Obama canceling a Moon mission is conservative.

According to Heritage, the NASA budget is going up, not down. And the additional money will be spent on Earth-science projects, aka climate change research.

Today, the Orlando Sentinel reports that President Obama will introduce a budget next week which will cut future exploration funding from NASA, including the planned missions to the Moon and Mars set in motion following the Columbia disaster.  On first glance, this may appear to be a budget cutting move to fall in line with the drop-in-a-bucket spending freeze Obama has proposed. But it isn’t.  In fact, NASA’s budget is increasing.  So if NASA’s budget is increasing, why are exploration plans being put on hold? Obama is halting America’s exploration of the unknown so we can explore…global warming.

According the Sentinel: “…the White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change.” NASA will reportedly receive a budget increase of $200-$300 million over its current $18.7 billion budget.

First Tweet From Space: Hello Twitterverse!

Not actually a step for man, literally. Probably was just floating around, or something.

Tweet at link:

Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?

Credit Expedition 22 Flight Engineer T.J. Creamer with the first Twitter tweet from space, which was made via the newly-configured Crew Support LAN aboard the International Space Station.

Creamer, via his @AstroTJ account, broadcast his tweet a few hours ago: "Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station -- the 1st live tweet from Space! :) More soon, send your ?s"

Creamer has previously posted tweets, as had other astronauts. But the tweets had to be emailed down to ground control, where they could be manually posted to the site.