Posts Tagged → science
A Day for Mourning…Doves
Satiricist + pianist + comedian-ist + mathematician-ist + Harvard-ist from a long distant past when a degree from racist + fakist + indoctrinationist Harvard used to mean something Tom Lehrer died the other day. He was 97 years old, and apparently laughing and humor were good for him, gave him longevity. Or maybe long life was due to him not having kids. Or being married…
Tom Lehrer’s silly music was a fixture on a radio show I was fixated on as a kid, from age nine to probably nineteen, called the Doctor Demento Show. This very silly, often demented, and highly entertaining show was the audio version of Mad Magazine, also a fixture of my mis-spent youth. My youth happened at a time when kids did actually read things to entertain ourselves. There were no videos, no constant and endless television shows, or, the horror, mind-evaporating video games. Mad Magazine was low brow humor, and forcefully informed two generations of American boys about the man-eating birds, killer bees, and fake female breasts available for only ninety-nine cents.
Aside from being chock full of hilarious and acidly cruel parody, long before Hollywooders started taking themselves seriously, Mad Magazine also had ads for mail order “variety” stores. For a pittance, these stores would sell kids fake vomit that was sure to make your mom jump sky high when strategically placed on her mother’s Persian rug. Also sold were palm buzzers, whoopie cushions sure to embarrass your mother’s friends over for tea, and toothpicks soaked in nitroglycerin.
Toothpicks soaked in nitroglycerin, you ask?
Yes, America was once such a cool and free country that little kids could buy through the mail from demented strangers things soaked in genuine high explosive in order to terrorize family pets and grandpas smoking their pipes or cigars. These explosive toothpick slivers came in an innocuous, small, round steel tin, and their gist was for demented youngsters to slip one into the end of a cigarette, cigar, or the stem of grandpa’s pipe, and then sit back and mock the unfortunate recipient of the inevitable explosion. Just the touch of a match or lighter flame was needed to set them off. They were truly explosive.
For one summer I did indeed use these things against my dad and my Papa Morris, to my great mirth and to their unforgiving unhappiness. But I also received my just punishment one day as I was running around in our yard, as mindless summer-minded boys used to do, and damned if the mere friction of my leg movement did not set off that whole tin of explosive toothpicks in my pocket. The loud report sounded like a gunshot, and the immediate pain was real. So I dropped to the ground, yelling “I’m hit, I’m hit!”
Not until I realized not another soul was anywhere near me or our home or our twenty-five acres surrounded by unbroken farmland and forest did I begin to explore the perfectly round hole in my pants. I had not received friendly fire from a neighbor kid, nor had my dad finally tried to take me out. So the cause had to be closer to home, like what the hell was I carrying in my pocket.
My thigh skin was badly bruised, already discolored and puffed up from the injury. And then I found it, the bottom half of the steel tin. Lodged halfway through the fabric in the pocket of my dungarees, it had been driven with great force against my body. Its lid had also been blown off with great force, through the fabric of my dungarees, and was lying somewhere out on our “lawn” as war shrapnel.
For decades I kept that little tin bottom in a small cedar box where I kept other childhood keepsakes, like old stone Indian arrowheads and beads I found in the tilled fields around our home. This little round piece of non-descript light-blue metal symbolized to me all that a boyhood in America used to be or could be: Free, foolish, exploratory, mischievous, silly, dumb, and filled with painful and sometimes near-death learning experiences. In a word, awesome.
Poor kids today have no idea how much fun we kids of yesteryear had. Yes, we had the Doctor Demento radio show, Tom Lehrer songs, and the scandalously mature kid reading material, Mad Magazine. But we also had access to small amounts of explosives, and dirt bikes, and often firearms. And whatever we did that did not permanently maim or kill us made us stronger and more interested in chemistry than any kind of textbook or classroom experiment could achieve. (I once blew off my eyebrows and eyelashes, the huge fireball also leaving my face an unnatural and alarming red color. Upon arriving at home late for dinner, my mother merely tossed my plate of food in front of me, wordless and by then immune to frighteneing answers and smart enough to no longer ask what the hell happened to you).
So, back to Mad Magazine, its crazy ads, and the related Doctor Demento Show, described on complete bullsh*t weakipedia as “Barret Eugene Hansen (born April 2, 1941),[1] also known professionally as Dr. Demento, is an American radio broadcaster and record collector specializing in novelty songs, comedy, and unusual recordings from the dawn of the phonograph to present. Hansen created the Demento persona in 1970 while working at KPPC-FM in Pasadena, California.”
From 1971 until, yes, college, I listened to the Doctor Demento Show. As a kid this was done quietly at night with the crusty old 1960s radio in my bedroom, after my parents had declared “lights out.” In high school, I listened to the radio show along with one or two other misfits also disinclined to be serious about homework. We sat there in silence, occasionally laughing hysterically. In college, I was joined by even more misfits, but by then we also had beer, hard alcohol, and would sing along together to our favorite silly songs spun by Doctor Demento.
Songs like Fish Heads, and of course every single song by Tom Lehrer.
Tom Lehrer’s songs were a mainstay of every Doctor Demento show, and sometimes his funny lyrics were woven into a Mad Magazine article. Adults found his song about pollution poignant and timely, as everyone knew by then that just about every summer the Cuyahoga River would actually catch on fire because of the wild amounts of combustible pollution dumped into it by unchecked industry (note to today’s young people: Water is not supposed to burn). Whereas urbanites, already surrounded by pollution, warped by it, dying early from it, creating it, and imagining themselves immune to it, were much more entertained by Lehrer’s song Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
Because who the hell doesn’t hate urban pigeons?
Tom Lehrer, comedian, humorist, satiricist, and core of the beloved Doctor Dementow Show
My Eighth Grade school portrait, alarmingly alike to Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neumann, of What, Me Worry? fame.
Don’t leave your records in the sun and other solid life tips
John Hartford played every instrument I could imagine – fiddle, guitar, banjo, harmonica, spoons, sticks, rocks, fence posts, and he played them all well. He was a 20th century artist from the days of the American frontier, or maybe the 1850s traveling circuses, with his crumpled top hat and tatty clothing. Only occasionally obliquely bawdy, most of his songs were silly and clean fun, done in the folk music style that every American enjoys on a sweaty summer day. Summer time is the time to forget all of your anxieties and frustrations, and let traveling entertainers like John Hartford make you laugh with gusto.
Golly, we are just about in summer time, aren’t we? Time for the Artists’ Fair (or is it the Artisans’ Fairies?) in State College, with non-fraudulent all natural ice cream from PSU’s The Creamery. Hot and sweaty guaranteed in the heart of summer. Time to start planning your summer trips, if you have not already done so. And if you find hotels full or too expensive, there is always the local county fair to fall back on, or The Grange Fair in Centre Hall.
Ahhhh, the Grange Fair in Centre Hall, a family staple of ours….My sister puked on one of those big spinny roundy roundy pill-shaped rides that make me sick just to watch, and her vomit hit everyone locked in the cage with her, as well as the many innocent bystanders running for cover. I have not been back to the Grange Fair since that Great Vomit Assassination On The Grassy Knoll in 1977. But I hear the fair is still great. John Hartford could have written a funny song about that vomit event.
Anyhow, John Hartford performed many silly songs, including my favorite, Don’t Leave Your Records in the Sun. For you young people, a record is a round shiny object we used to listen to for entertainment. Now I think you can find videos online of people eating them for entertainment. But they did make pleasing sounds, including music, and if played slowly backwards you might hear Satan’s voice saying something almost on the tip of your tongue. They sure were a lot more entertaining than the chip embedded in your skull these days. And if you left them in the sun, as John Hartford warned us not to do, they would in fact get warped, and they would skip and repeat and make all kinds of annoying sounds.
I have recently learned another piece of useful folk wisdom that John Hartford should have sung about: Don’t leave your butternut squash anywhere you don’t want them to die and make a mess. Because when a butternut squash dies, it takes the surrounding environment with it.
Some of my prized butternut squash (I grow them in my summer garden and eat them all year long; the Princess of Patience savors the seeds roasted with salt) were stored up high on a pine board shelf in a cold guest bedroom hardly used during the winter. I put them there in January, thinking I would pull one down as needed, but last week, when I went to get one, all I found were these horrible science experiments gone wrong. I think the best thing is to keep your prized squashes on a metal rack in the basement for maybe a month or two at longest, after they are picked in late October. Then you have to skin them and cut them up and freeze them in plastic bags.
Or if you have a warped sense of humor, you can deliberately let your butternut squashes die badly, and make a Rumble video about it. Maybe a video of some circus geek eating these dead squashes with a side of crushed record. You would probably get a million hits and become a famous influencer.
Dear John Hartford, we miss you. I saw him at his last performance in State College, when he was in the throes of cancer. I heard he wanted to write a silly song about that, too. Don’t do that, is my advice.
Don’t leave your records in the sun or your butternut squash on a board, shelf, or really anywhere
Kinda proud to say “I made that!”
No, you cannot even make a tea from this horror. Throw it away
Censoring climate mockers
Guest post, courtesy of Tom Shepstone:
by Vijay Jayaraj
“We have reached the end of the Olympic summer in Paris, comprising of the Olympics and the Paralympics. Though the U.S. finished at the top in the Olympics and in the top three at Paralympics, much of the world’s attention was on the Olympics’ obscene mockery of Christianity in its opening ceremony at Paris.
It also overshadowed some unprecedented events in the city. A few days prior to the games, French authorities fined the country’s second most popular news channel 20,000 euros for challenging the popular narrative about a purported climate crisis.
CNews, a round-the-clock news operation, was charged by the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (ARCOM) with a broadcast’s failing to adequately challenge views skeptical of the global warming scare.
“This is the first time in France and internationally that ARCOM or a regulatory authority has issued a financial sanction for a breach concerning an environmental subject,” said QuotaClimat, an organization that reportedly has complained in the past about the climate reporting of various media.
The case of CNews raises serious concerns about press freedom – a cornerstone of democratic societies — and the public’s access to diverse perspectives on environmental issues. While the regulator argued that the channel failed to provide sufficient context and counterarguments, critics contend that the decision sets a dangerous precedent, effectively requiring media outlets to adhere to a specific ideological position.
The role of journalism in a democracy is not to parrot official viewpoints or consensus opinions but rather to investigate, question and present different perspectives on important issues. By imposing restrictions on how climate issues can be reported, France undermines this crucial function of the media.
This crackdown on climate reporting exemplifies a broader trend of using authorities backed by official powers to curb the expression of views that challenge a government’s preferred narrative, a concerning development for anybody favoring an open society.
The practice has become far too common in academic research as well. Scientists who challenge the crisis narrative are subjected to witch hunts and termination from their professions.
Many climate scientists, influenced heavily by funding sources, are transforming their discipline into something that hardly qualifies as science. While their work has the appearance of scientific research and is conducted by those with scientific credentials, both its methodologies and findings are heavily shaped by the agendas of special interest groups, political figures and international governing bodies.
Researchers and their organizations, in too many cases, have become harvesters of grants rather than seekers of truth. Such scientists are supplicants of governments and wealthy foundations wanting particular findings and willing to pay for them.
Those who champion genuine scientific inquiry must speak out against deliberate efforts by climate alarmists to discredit sceptics, whose questions are manifestations of critical thinking. Inquiry into popular theories should be welcome, not treated as sedition.
From Galileo’s astronomical discoveries to more recent controversies in fields like genetics and nuclear energy, attempts to protect the popular view have often backfired. slowing scientific progress and technological advancement.
In the case of climate change, this is true too. Restrictive energy policies — justified on the basis of addressing a “climate crisis” — already have impeded economic growth and increased prices. Ideologues seek to reverse decades of advancement in clean-coal power generation, oil and gas development and other technologies.
Scientific understanding of Earth’s climate is not furthered by silencing dissent but through rigorous research, peer review and open debate. By allowing a diversity of voices in the media, including those that challenge the so-called “consensus,” opportunities for truth arise.
Isolated intrusions on press freedom are annoying. But actions like that of the French regulator for reporting on a climate story can be replicated by other governments and for other subjects – a certain eventuality without the intervention of honest citizens
For this is the proverbial slippery slope greased by powerful people’s lust for control or money or both. Left alone, only the most ruthless of the politically connected get to say where it ends. Even they can’t say for sure, but history tells us it ends badly.”
This commentary was first published at yourNews on September 10, 2024.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, U.K., and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, U.K.
#France #Climate #Jayaraj #CO2Coalition #FreeSpeech #Censorship
Is “psychology” a real professional field?
After stumbling across the most fake of fake and partisan “science” websites, undergirded by the field of psychology, I just had to ask: Is psychology real and a valuable scientific tool, or is it subjective nonsense that can be whatever people want it to be?
Do you remember Bandy Yee? I do. She was the alleged psychiatrist who declared both her antipathy to President Trump and also her negative faux diagnosis of Trump, despite having never met him in person or having had a chance to do whatever it is that psychiatrists and doctors do when evaluating a patient. Six, seven years ago Bandy Yee started publicly announcing her medical opinion that President Trump was unfit for office and blah blah blah blah blah you can go look up her nonsense for yourself. She sounded shrill and crazy, violated basic medical ethics, and got herself fired.
The point being that this alleged doctor/ psychiatrist Bandy Yee followed none of the elementary rules of medicine or psychiatry, and rather instead wielded her supposed medical talents as a weapon against her political opponent, at that time President Trump. Based on her unprofessional behavior, a lot of Americans viewed Bandy Yee as the kind of “doctor” like Dr. Mengele was a doctor in the Nazi concentration camps.
Or like one of the Soviet Union’s cruel doctors who pronounced perfectly healthy and sane people to be crazy and subject to horrible psychiatric ward incarceration and treatment over simple ideological or values-based disagreements. Which in the Soviet Union was easy to have. All it took was some higher-up Communist Party person to declare you as a bad person, and then in would step a medical doctor psychiatrist to declare you insane and subject to crazy person jail. Where you would be mistreated for the rest of your sad life. This is Bandy Yee.
Bandy Yee behaved like a Nazi or Soviet political doctor, and yet…she is said to be “a doctor.” The pinnacle of science and healthcare, right?
Using Bandy Yee as our baseline highly trained “medical expert” (who cannot control her own feelings and who uses her training to attack innocent people), I really began wondering about the so-called “psychologists” who can also, I guess, maybe heal people and definitely also hurt people with their training.
Today I encountered through sheer accident the website psypost.org, a site that purports to be scientific, but which is in reality the Bandy Yee of websites: 100% politically partisan junk science and fake studies, designed to lend a veneer of scientific credibility to political claims about Republicans, conservatives, white men, gun owners, etc.
I read one of the articles listed at psypost.org, about a purported professor at my alma mater, Penn State University. A claimed “psychologist”, “Dr.” Piazza, wrote the fakest of subjective nonsense studies about how claims of election fraud heighten support for violence among Republicans but not Democrats. His takeaway from his garbage “study” was that discussing overt voting fraud is dangerous to democracy, because conservatives will get angry and commit political violence.
Seriously, Professor Pizza wrote this stuff. In other words, he is asserting that to “protect democracy” we have to restrain Republicans from investigating and talking about blatant voter fraud committed by Democrats. Which violates elementary Free Speech rights and the First Amendment etc. Which means Professor Piazza needs to destroy democracy in order to save democracy. But he’s a “doctor”…so listen to him.
And by the way, of course Democrats won’t get mad or violent about voter fraud…THEY are the fraudsters! They are the beneficiaries of voting fraud. Democrats commit vote fraud like I breathe air with every breath I take. Voter fraud is what Democrats do, or to be fair, it is baked into the DNA of the Democrat Party apparatus, and regular ol’ Democrat voters might not know about it, or might be comfortable thinking about it but not actually doing it themselves. I digress.
Another hint that psypost.org and its supposedly scientific writers and subjects are all completely fake is that while its past week or so is devoted to discussing political violence on the political right using really tenuous and outright dishonest fake studies, there is this really telling gap between an article posted on July 10th and one posted on July 17th…where nothing is written about the actual political violence attempted assassination committed against President Trump by Trump-hating Democrat donor Michael Crooks last Saturday, July 13th.
I also saw nothing about ANTIFA, the radical left Marxist crew and Brown Shirts implementing Democrat Party coercion at the street level. Apparently the crazy hyper violent trans people (well documented by gay journalist Andy Ngo) at ANTIFA are perfectly sane and fine to the writers at psypost.org. Mmmm hmmmmmmm…
In other words, America’s professional psychologists are just fine and dandy writing about the potential and alleged and promised political violence on the right, while completely ignoring the actual political violence (an attempted assassination of a leading presidential candidate) on the left.
I read a bunch of their articles on this website, and came away with the belief that psychology is not a scientific profession. That it is a dive, a fake pseudo-science hideout for the intellectually fraudulent and weak-minded among us, and especially for the ideologically angry left. That it is mis-used to deliberately create misinformation against the political opponents of the political left. That anyone believing this nonsense is a sucker.
If Bandy Yee is at all representative of psychiatrists (despite her unprofessional behavior she is still licensed and acting out as a psychiatrist, which means that her oversight board and fellow psychiatrists nationwide are just as full of shiite as she is), then how much more so are psychologists and the entire field of psychology full of cr@p.
If you don’t like what is being said here, go ahead and disprove the observations that have given rise to this essay. Go to the purveyors of psypost.org’s politically driven pseudo science trash and get them to stop, to tighten up, to behave professionally. Until then, my impression will remain that psychology is junk science populated by angry leftists, who themselves pose very real, substantive risks to the health of America, to our democratic norms, and to us individual citizens.
Photo of a bunch of obviously peaceful protestors said to be “violent” because they support Trump
Oh the irony of this ridiculous headline, because one day before a radical leftist almost killed President Trump
One other thing about the movie Oppenheimer
One other thought about the movie Oppenheimer: Unlike the current political narrative-driven world of politicized science, where complete lies are said to be scientific truth, or at least they are said to have the strength to displace truth, the movie Oppenheimer accurately depicts real scientific competition.
Remember when science was real? Remember when science was analysis, competitive, discussed, debated, respected, valued, and rewarded? Been a while, I know, I know, but it is true that at one time the real scientific method of discovery and progress involved serious disagreement among scientists. But ever since anti-scientific woke PC narratives took over everything being publicly discussed, including real science, science just has not been real, despite the woke bumper stickers proclaiming “Science Is Real.”
That’s the intriguing thing about “science” these days. Actual real proven science about X and Y chromosomes determining a human’s biological sex is not only forbidden in the classroom, but actually saying it as a science teacher will get you immediately fired from your job. And that phony climate change alarmist thing? If you step up as a scientist with real science that demonstrates what a nonsensical hoax and political hatchet job human-caused “climate change” is, you’ll get fired from your job.
Oppenheimer depicts the real scientific method as humans knew it for about a thousand years, up until the brazen lie that “99% of scientists agree that global warming/ climate change is real.” In the movie, we see scientists aggressively debating the then-new nuclear fission science, which was based on the pioneering scientific and mathematical work of Albert Einstein and which resulted in the atom bomb blowing up American military enemies. The movie has scenes of scientists caustically disagreeing with one another, mocking each other, debating one another, until someone provides sufficient proof of their position. And the scientists’ use of tobacco and alcohol to soothe their frazzled nerves is also real history. This is all uncomfortable but very real scientific process.
This historic competitive situation shown in the movie was especially stark between the “old” Einsteinian relativity scientists and the “new” quantum physics scientists. Both theories of how physics works – relativity and quantum – are mutually exclusive of one another, and yet they coexist simultaneously. Both theories have been conclusively proven, despite canceling each other out, and yet scientists continue today to try to figure out how this apparent contradiction can happen.
In a world of lying political propaganda narratives, including modern gender ideology and “climate change,” such scientific debate and dispute and progress are impossible. This is because scientists who disagree with the established political narrative will have their funding taken away, lose their jobs, have their credentials revoked, and will lose their careers, their homes, their families… everything they worked so hard to create and build over years and decades.
All because these real scientists disagree with political activists who want to control us, control our behavior, our choices, our thinking, our conscience, our food, our daily existence.
To me, the political activists here have no credibility. They are just a bunch of mean, sadistic little fascists, trying to brutally shut up real scientists who inconveniently disprove their pet unscientific political narratives.
When someone in the Oppenheimer movie states “That can’t be true,” you just know someone in the next scene is about to show the disbeliever that in fact, it is true. We see Science! From the long established scientific method! So the movie Oppenheimer is useful for at least showing audiences what real scientific debate and progress used to involve, and what it must involve, if we are to have real science about anything.
Oppenheimer reminds us that there is no such thing as “scientific consensus,” which is a made-up faketoid by the climate change alarmism activists to push their political hoax.
For this rare gem of reality from a business sector that constantly deals in deceit and falseness, I award the educational Hollywood movie Oppenheimer a refreshing A+.
Wise words for 2022
One of the positive results of Demedia overreach, lies, dumbing down of “science,” and overt propaganda is the wisening up of Americans. People are catching on to the lies, and they are becoming upset regardless of their political party registration.
Political party used to define many Americans’ identity, and when the political parties once stood for dramatically different ideas and values, that made sense. But today, so many Americans see right through the propaganda emanating from one political party, the current White House, that is aided and abetted by the other political party, and spread by the Demedia. Individuals are hurt by official misinformation and propaganda regardless of what their party registration is, or was. People of all political inclinations want the freedom to choose their health, and to have their health choices be private.
Although YouTube, Google, Fakebook and Snapchat and so many other social media sites have done their best to stomp out debate and dissent about covid, The People are fighting back. If you are interested in seeing what political dissent scratched on a bathroom wall looks like, go to any of the Demedia outlets promoted on YouTube: CNN(LOL), NBC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, ABC etc and click on one of their covid videos. Look at the comments below, and marvel at how the wisdom of The People greatly outweighs and outshines that of fraudulent “experts” like Dr. Mengele Fauci. It shows how politicized science is not really science at all; it is just politics, and everyday people know it. They are not fooled.
While it’s a sad truth that YouTube recently removed the “Dislike” button count because The People greatly downvote the Demedia state propaganda, another battle wages right beneath the headline surface. The comments submitted by random, average, everyday people from around America and around the world often take down and pop the leftist propaganda with just a few wise words.
Below are some comments I copied from several Demedia propaganda videos about covid. These are wise words to begin our new year 2022 with, and hopefully the sentiment in these everyday commonsense comments spreads far and wide among general populations. Freedom and liberty depend upon this happening.
PA’s Forester Jim Finley Enters the Forest Cathedral
Penn State forestry professor emeritus, department head, and all-things-forestry guru Jim Finley died yesterday. I was told that he was either felling a large tree on his property, or he was trying to dislodge a large tree that had been felled but was hung up on another tree. Whatever the actual facts are, Jim died from the tree falling on him. It is a reminder that even the best, most experienced forestry professionals are at grave risk.
As trite and awkward as it sounds to write here, the fact is that Jim Finley died doing what he loved in the environment he considered sacred. I am quite sure that had he been asked about whether he would like to die from a tree falling on him, or some more peaceful and less traumatic way, he would have given us the look he is giving below. It is that knowing “Why are you saying that, you know it is wrong” look. In his mid-70s, Jim was nowhere ready to leave us, and we were nowhere ready to let go of him.
His death is a huge loss.
Jim was a remarkable man, who I admired, and who left a way outsized hand print on Pennsylvania conservation and the practice of forestry in eastern America. He was a force to be reckoned with, an institution in his own right, a political-cultural movement, a gentle soul with a will of iron, kind and easy but also passionate and unrelenting.
He did not suffer fools easily, though he accepted honest debate and earnest dissent exactly the way an academic ought to: His eyes took on this hard laser focus, and you could tell he was actively listening and processing, not always ready to give an answer, either. His response might come tomorrow or next year, and if your argument was good, you could tell it had moderated Jim’s perspective.
Jim Finley was an academic, and sometimes prone to the idealism that academics naturally grow into. However, he also had the ability to be hands-on practical, and even more important, he had the ability to support aggressive, hands-on, totally practical forestry practices. You know, the kinds of visual impacts that most urbanites recoil in horror from, and which many land conservation groups really did not want to see, either, no matter how scientifically they were needed or justified. It is an admirable and rare trait to be able to be honest about unpleasant things, and Jim could look at a heavily cut tract with tree tops lying all over the place, and cheerfully explain all of the wonderful things that were now going to follow on the heels of all that disturbance. Because of Jim, conservation easements in Pennsylvania are now a lot more forestry-friendly than they used to be. And a landowner who is able to manage his or her forest as aggressively as they need to under a conservation easement, is a landowner who is much more likely to sign that easement and protect their land in the first place.
Jim invited me to speak to his classes a couple of times, and we worked together when I was at DCNR and the Conservation Fund. I knew him when I was a kid in State College, I knew him as a professional forester and academic at Penn State, and I knew him as a colleague of land conservation legend and Penn State forester Joe Ibberson, whose PSU forestry department endowment Jim presided over at the end of his formal career. It is always a huge loss when someone of Jim’s high caliber leaves us, but it is even more so when he was just starting to become mature, as he would put it in the terms of a tree.
So long, old friend. Happy travels in your peaceful forest cathedral. We who are left behind mourn your untimely departure and we will miss you greatly. You were a hell of a guy, Jim.
Wooden bowls and a vase turned by Jim Finley. Photo kindly provided by forester Dale G.
Climate Change’s Story, as Told by a Rock
The subject of climate change has been a political issue for about ten years. Before that it was called global warming. Before that it was called global cooling. Despite having dramatically different, even diametrically opposed, oppositional names, this subject of earth’s changing climate has been treated the same by political activists for about 30 years. No matter how different, under all rubrics it has been presented as a result of planet-altering human intervention into Planet Earth’s fundamental forces.
In all of the undocumented claims presented about this subject over the past thirty years, especially the fake junk science claims, the ignored elephant in the room has always been the very well and long-documented evidence of great periods of climate change pre-dating the appearance of humans on Planet Earth. In other words, climate change/ global warming/ global cooling did not automatically appear in 1985 because Al Gore wrote a book about humans emitting too much carbon dioxide. Nope. The scientific elephant in the climate change room was standing here all along, because decades of non-politicized scientific inquiry demonstrated how mile-thick ice glaciers covered northern America, Canada, and northern Europe and Asia many times over the past 100,000 years.
That is, a natural ongoing cycle of climate change, real dramatic alterations to the face of the planet, even without one human being present to contribute one breath of carbon dioxide to it.
Well, here is the short and easy story of actual, real climate change; the long documented climate change that shaped the land you are standing and driving on every day. This big story is told by a simple humble rock. Here is a picture of that rock (below), unearthed the other day. It was unearthed about 600 feet above the Pine Creek stream bed and channel. Until it was unearthed, it was entombed on a hillside way above the existing channel, in mostly clay dirt amid sharp shards of shattered sandstone, all jumbled together like a giant mixer had tossed them around.
Look carefully at this stone.
It is rounded, unlike most of the other rocks around it in the dirt from whence it recently emerged. Someone with a bit of curiosity would ask “Gees, this rock looks totally different from the rocks around it. It is rounded like a typical long water-washed and tumbled river cobble I can find in any stream bed in the world. Now why is this rounded rock sitting hundreds of feet above the Pine Creek river bed? How did it get all the way up here?”
Great question! In most American class rooms, asking this question might get you ejected, or a bad grade from a fake educator who doesn’t want you asking good questions, but instead you are supposed to repeat a mantra of junk science that ignores the actual science represented by this simple little rounded rock.
Pine Creek’s history is retold at Leonard Harrison State Park, in DCNR geology circulars available online, and in many other places and publications. It won’t be reiterated at length here. But we do provide a history lesson in a nutshell.
Essentially it goes like this: Until about 15,000 years ago, Pine Creek flowed northward into the Genesee River watershed. After the last glacial age ended 20,000 years ago, the Laurentide Glacier began to melt, as prior glaciers there before it had melted. As the glacier melted, a pool of water built up against an ice dam, which eventually broke from the weight of the water and the thinning ice. When the ice dam broke, an enormous torrent of water was unleashed southward as a tidal wave. As it raced southward, the tidal wave followed the landscape’s natural contours, including the river bed of north-flowing Pine Creek.
As soon as the tidal wave hit the Pine Creek stream bed, the tidal wave followed that natural channel southward, scooping up hundreds of millions of tons of stream bottom rocks, as well as surrounding ledgerock. We have seen the videos of the Japanese tsunami from several years ago, and this one probably looked similar. Thus, an increasingly muddy tumultuous mess of water, dirt, and rocks flowed southward to the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. Along the way rocks like our little rounded river cobblestone here were picked up and deposited high up on the river channel’s slopes.
Even though the rock had come from deep down in the river bed, it remained in place on the hillside as the roaring water receded to the stream flow we know and love today. The rock is an artifact of climate change, real honest-to-goodness climate change, devoid of any human causation or intervention.
Our pet Pine Creek stream bed rock now in Lycoming County, PA, probably originating due north in Steuben County, New York, 15,000 years ago, already rounded from thousands of years of tumbling in a stream bed
Ever since that melting glacier released that tidal wave and placed our little rock here on the hillside, Pine Creek has flowed south, into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River, and not northward into the Genesee River. And as a result of that huge rushing torrent southward, the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon was cut and shaped.
Climate change, folks. It is as natural as the Sun rising and setting on the Earth’s horizon. It can be real. It was real, and still is real and ongoing, even without human involvement. But you probably won’t find the real climate change science taught any more, because it is contrary to a radical political narrative that tells us modern capitalist societies are evil and destructive and must cease and desist, because we alone are destroying the Earth’s climate.
Which just goes to prove that Marxism really is anti-science, anti-truth, anti-fact, and anti-human. Shame on the Marxism Climate Change fraudsters who represent themselves as guardians of the environment. They are no such thing. They are destroyers of the environment, as every Marxist society’s destroyed environment demonstrates.
Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone you saw this, because the “climate change” activists will have me locked up for disseminating actual science!
All this climate change happened before humans were even present on the planet, let alone before we and our cows began farting so much and creating green house gases…
Be careful showing this glacial map to a New Yorker. They believe that New York City pre-dates all human civilizations and was founded by the gods, who would never let a mile of ice stand on top of their sacred ground.
Showing this image in a modern class on “climate change” is like showing a crucifix to a vampire, and you will probably be ejected from the classroom and declared unfit for indoctrination by the fake teacher. Be careful how you use this science.
Oh no, we did it, we showed New York City under ice. NYC mayor Bill DeBlasio will probably ban me from entering NYC henceforth.
is Penn State for real?
I know, I know, PSU alum are not supposed to criticize our Mother Ship, Penn State University. But the cold hard facts are material, and it is important to at least raise one’s voice about important things.
For the record, I do not hate Penn State, though I have severed my commitment to PSU football because of the brutally unfair way the PSU board treated my hero and universally admired icon coach Joe Paterno. No, the opposite is true, I care very much about PSU. I am grateful for the stellar undergraduate education I received there. In fact, I received as good or better an education at PSU as or than available at supposedly elite Ivy League schools. That is because PSU is so large, has so many facilities and professors, that anyone who really wants to be educated, to talk with their professors, to spend time debating and studying with like-minded students, can spend all their time as a student being educated. If they but want to.
Which is pretty much what I did there. I served on the Student Senate, ran for student body president, engaged in all kinds of political activism, and studied, studied, studied. My professors, notably Art Goldschmidt, Jackson Spielvogel, Jim Eisenstein, and especially Ed Keynes, helped me grow as only a devoted educator can do. I served many of my best professors as a teaching or research assistant. They each studied me, saw my strengths and weaknesses, and challenged me in ways and in areas where I needed to grow the most, and where that growth would matter the most to my eventual debut as an educated adult.
On the other hand, my impression of Ivy League schools is that they are so one-dimensional and politically correct, that one must only gain entry and then spend four years parroting and agreeing with one’s professors to get out with a degree. No growth, no challenge, no self-development at the Ivy league schools, just indoctrination by the staff and parroting back by the students. Where is the value in that?
So what the hell is going on at Penn State with the sky-high tuition? At $38,000 a year IN STATE tuition, PSU ranks right up there with many private schools as well as public universities OUT of state.
Being run now strictly as a profit-loss bottom-line business, as opposed to an educational institution, PSU sets tuition fees that are affordable only to wealthy students, crazy parents, foreign students backed by foreign governments, and the children of PSU employees. Ye olde regular American or Pennsylvanian family simply cannot afford the Pennsylvania STATE university.
This situation is exacerbated by a so-called professional caste of elected officials, state representatives and state senators, who tell us all the time that they are professionals and they know what they are doing. What they are doing with PSU is constantly shoveling into its gaping maw more and more taxpayer money, with zero strings attached. No special scholarships for highly qualifying Pennsylvania students. No accountability to the taxpayers, no service to the Pennsylvania public.
And for those who justify this unfair situation because PSU is a big research station, OK, you name the program and let’s look into it. Some are pretty good, and some are worthless. For example, PSU has its own breeder reactor, so we know the PSU students of nuclear physics are probably getting cutting-edge education from nuclear physics researchers there. On the other hand, fake “climate researcher” Michael Mann was just hugely discredited in a court of law, and ordered to pay big legal fees as a result. Mann could not produce in court the data he used to make his name peddling phony science. As we all know, science is totally about reproducability, the ability to reproduce experiments and outcomes that other scientists have claimed. Mann cannot do that. Mann has been a political activist first and foremost, and has besmirched PSU’s good name as a research institution.
Maybe Mann can be now sued by Pennsylvania taxpayers for his fraud, and compelled to create a scholarship fund with his many ill-gotten gains.
We can call it the “Penn State Real Science Scholarship Fund.” And if it has only five bucks in it, it will still be a hell of a lot more than PSU has so far designated to supporting qualified in-state students who want to study real subjects.