Garbage In, Etc.

Back in the Blogging Dark Ages, when I was still a Junior Blogger, my first online argument came with Steve Appell (I think) from none other than Scientific American  magazine.

I blogged that the data underlying the climate scare was suspect, whereupon he came after me and asked whether I had a degree in climatology.  I replied in the negative, of course, but added that while lacking in that august qualification that my argument was not against the weather, but the data collected thereof — and when it came to predictive modeling, I very much knew what I was talking about, having been a statistician and data analyst pretty much all my working life, and that some of the models I’d been involved in were fantastically accurate — up to 95% accuracy.

Of course, the weather models then (and now) extant were completely hopeless  — not one had ever come close to predicting any kind of reality — and the principle reason was because the data collection methodology was clearly flawed, as the weather / climate measurement station locations had become unrepresentative.

So here we come to today, and nothing has changed — in fact, things have got worse:

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (July 27, 2022) – A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and  uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.

The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link), and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.

“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”

It’s like putting a thermometer in your home to measure the ambient temperature, and then when you buy a wood stove and install it right next to the thermometer, not moving the measuring device to another part of the room.

I’d suggest incompetence, but when the flaws are so obviously designed to support a political theory (which is what modern-day climate “science” has become), we can only call it malfeasance.  As with all things of this nature, the solution is self-evident:

Fantasy World

I present to you all this little epistle of idiocy, with only one comment:

You’ll hate it because we liberals tend to pride ourselves on caring about evidence, science, and accuracy. Being factually right, or at least grounded in reality, is something we value, something meaningful to our self-concept.

Such as your support for the climate change nonsense and gun control (to name but two)?

Emotion over facts — I love the fact that the author is supporting its adoption by the Left now, when it’s been their overriding principle for a hundred years.

Yeah, We Knew That All Along

From this article, the conclusion:

The fake climate catastrophe has spawned a fake energy paradigm – replacing fossil fuels with wind and solar electricity. Wind and solar are claimed to be cheaper than traditional sources of electricity but non-fake accounting reveals that wind or solar electricity costs five or even ten times more than traditional electricity, exclusive, of course, of government subsidies and mandates. The reason it costs so much is that the erratic nature of wind and solar requires maintaining the traditional electricity generating system intact and ready to operate when wind and solar fail. Solar fails every night, every cloudy day, and more often in winter. Wind fails at random times, or somewhat predictable times, and often has a seasonal cycle. If the renewable energy advocates were logical, they would be advocating for nuclear. Nuclear is reliable and does not produce CO2.
Climate change and wind and solar electricity are a snipe hunts, diverting the country from serious problems in favor of imaginary problems with imaginary solutions that enrich the promoters and their political friends with status and money.

So what is that thing we knew all along?   (And by “we”, I mean I and the Readers of this website.)

No climate model — not one, ever — has ever predicted the future reliably, even when the algorithms have been tweaked to the point where random data input yields exactly the same results.  Aggregating (“unifying”) multiple models haven’t done so either.

Now read the article for the complete story.

Implants

No, not fake breasts, sorry.  Via Insty comes this wonderful piece:

The notion that COVID-19 vaccines will be used by governments across the globe to track the human race’s every move has long been a topic of discussion among conspiracy theorists. But now, new ‘evidence’ has emerged from Italian proponents of the idea – only it would be evidence, were it not a reworked schematic for the Boss Metal Zone.
The conspiracy theorists shared the schematic online, claiming it depicted the diagram for the supposed 5G chip. It features a section labelled “5G frequency” – clearly the source of many a theorist’s eureka moment – as well as terms guitarists will find familiar: “MT-2 Gain”, “Footswitch” among the most recognizable.
Mario Fusco, a senior software engineer at Redhat, spotted the misinformation and took to Twitter to flag it.

It’s not often that I read something that causes me to collapse in a fit of helpless laughter, but this was one of those rarities.  Hell, I’m still grinning.

Most conspiracy theorists are complete fucking idiots, but taking a circuit board schematic of a guitar pedal and claiming it’s the tracking /controlling device embedded in a vaccine?  That’s brilliance compounded by stupidity.

Music Geekery Alert:  That said, I could think of far worse things you could have implanted in your system than the BOSS Metal Zone pedal.

This little beauty can make the most awful guitar sound like anything played by Tony Iommi or Kirk Hammett, and it’s probably used by just about every lead guitarist in rock music.

In fact, the only other product of similar effect I’d agree to have implanted in me would be the venerable Ibanez Tube Screamer*, of similar renown and popularity:

I would respectfully suggest, however, that as excellent as these two pedals are, they would be piss-poor as human control devices.


*And yes, I know the difference between distortion (BOSS/transistors) and overdrive (Screamer/diodes).  I may be a bassist (who doesn’t use either), but I’m not ignorant.

The Consequences Of Bad Education And Ignorance

I actually laughed out loud when I read that some idiots are going all outraged-wokey at the fact that Israeli beauty Gal Gadot has been cast to play Cleopatra in yet another remake of the Egyptian queen’s saga.  (Here are the details.)

Actually, it would have been more justified for blondes to get upset about the role going to a brunette, because as a Ptolemy (and therefore of ethnic Greco-Macedonian heritage), Cleopatra was most likely fair-skinned and blonde.

It is, as they say, to LOL.

Here’s the serious part of this.  In their struggle to claim some fragment of cultural worth, Black Africans have always tried to appropriate Egyptian civilization as “African” — specifically, with regard to sub-Saharan Africa, which had no civilization at all to speak of.  In this, of course, they have been abetted by Western “African Studies” academics, who have performed all sorts of intellectual gymnastics to conclude that yes, ancient Egyptians were really just like the Masai, promise.

The plain fact of the matter is that Nilotic people are as different from sub-Saharan Blacks as Scandinavians are from Aztecs.  The fact that Egyptians too have dark skin is a matter of geography, not racial kinship.  And the northern Greek tribes of Macedonia have closer genetic, linguistic and cultural ties with Serbs than with Arabs, let alone Black Africans.

Anyway, I don’t care.  These wokesters have shown their asses yet again and given us yet more reason withal to make fun of their ignorant little wokish philosophy (such as it is).

I’m just curious to see how Gal Gadot measures up to Elizabeth Taylor.  It’ll be a tough job.

Background Books

With the Chinkvirus lockdown and associated Zoom-y nonsense, we’ve all become familiar with people filming themselves with bookcases in the background.  What used to be the standard backdrop for lawyers’ vanity pics (with tomes and tomes of legal texts behind them, as though they’d ever read one, the bastards), now seems to be the norm, especially with politicians.  Here are a couple of examples:  BritPM Boris Johnson:

…and some other BritGov flunky:

Now I’m quite aware that most of the displayed books were probably chosen by assorted political handlers and PR flacks [vast overlap], so their appearance can probably be discounted.

But it gives me an idea for a game entitled:  “Suppose You Were To Appear On A Zoom Live Feed, Which 12 Books Would You Want To be Displayed Behind You?”  (I know, the title may need a little work, but you get my drift.)  Assuming such things were important to you, and you wanted to Send A Message About Yourself (e.g. if you were being interviewed by some Lefty TV show host or similar), which books would you display?

The difference between the above poseurs  and yourselves, O My Readers, is that you can only nominate books that you actually possess, i.e. that are already on your bookshelves (no cheating).

My dozen, in no specific order, are:

           

(The last is:  Leo: A Tribute to Leo Burnett.  It’s handed out to all new employees at Burnett on their first day, and the agency is still run on the same principles.)

Those are mine.  Yours?  (You can select fewer than twelve, but no more.  Multi-volume compendia such as Churchill’s History Of The Second World War  count as a single selection.)