Where matter and energy came from
December 23, 2018
How big is the universe?
December 23, 2018
97% of reporters fabricate some part of their stories (probably)
December 21, 2018Claas Relotius at Der Spiegel, Jayson Blair at The New York Times, Johann Hari at The Guardian and Jim Avila at ABC News are only the tip of the iceberg. They are not exceptions but merely examples of the malaise. They are all a part of the general erosion of journalistic ethics. But what was just a decline of ethical standards has now degenerated to the point where every news story has an agenda. The use of fabrication, lying, cherry picking, and omission are standard. A journalistic report which is not skewed and which is not trying to promote a particular viewpoint has become a very rare exception. Journalists today find it perfectly acceptable to be lobbyists and activists and propagandists while purporting to be objective reporters.
The line between advertising and reporting has virtually disappeared. It is not difficult to get media desperate for copy to print pure advertising material as objective reports. It is virtually impossible for some media to report any story which does not reinforce their own biases.
“Journalists” caught lying include Mel Judson, Juan Thompson and Brian Williams among others. Journalists who fabricated include Louis Sebold, Stephen Glass, Jant Cooke, Patricia Smith and Carl Cameron among many others. Cheating is the norm not the exception.
The Media Still Hasn’t Figured Out Why They’re Losing Credibility
The outlook is bad for media credibility. Poll after poll finds public confidence in the press is at historic lows. The AP cites a Pew Research Center report that two-thirds of Americans believe “fabricated news” is causing a “great deal of confusion” about basic facts, and a poll conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago found the percentage of Americans expressing a “great deal of confidence” in the press has fallen from 28 percent in 1976 to just 8 percent in 2016.
The American Press Institute put the percentage at an even lower 6 percent in an April 2016 survey, which also found 85 percent of Americans rate getting the facts right as extremely or very important, and prioritize that metric most highly when deciding which news outlets to trust. “Accuracy is the paramount principle of trust,” the survey noted.
The simple truth is that it is more likely that 97% of all journalists now fabricate some part of their stories, rather than that 97% of journalists are honest reporters.
“Girls were made to love and kiss” – and who are we to interfere with this
December 19, 2018Fertility drops when you can’t tell the boys from the girls.
This is now as politically incorrect as it is possible to be.
Still true though.
“Flirting is jolly, it’s folly, but fun”
I must have first heard this in the 1960s and it was probably the Richard Tauber version I heard on radio. It is still as enjoyable now as it was then. (The second verse has not quite the meaning it once had).
GIRLS WERE MADE TO LOVE AND KISS
From the Operetta “Paganini” (1925) (Franz Lehár)
(Original libretto by Paul Knepler & Béla Jenbach)
(English adaptations by A.P. Herbert & Harry Dexter (1937),
and by David Kram & Dennis Olsen)
As recorded by Richard Tauber:
Girls were made to love and kiss
And who am I to interfere with this?
Is it well? Who can tell?
But I know the good Lord made it so
Am I ashamed to follow nature’s way?
Shall I be blamed if God has made me gay?
Does it pay? Who can say?
I’m a man and kiss her when I can
Yet I have suffered in love’s great deeps
I know the passion that never sleeps
I know the longing and wronging of hearts
The hope that flatters and shatters and smarts
I suffer still but I sleep at nights
Man cannot always be on the heights
And when our aching and breaking is done
Flirting is jolly, it’s folly, but fun
Girls were made to love and kiss
And who am I to interfere with this?
Does it pay? Who can say?
I’m a man and kiss her when I can
Justice always requires discrimination
December 16, 2018Equality is a mirage and justice (fairness) always overrules equality.
And justice always requires the discrimination between good and bad.
Creation Myths
December 7, 2018
Religions have no answer to the question and merely invoke God (or a god among a a pantheon of appropriate gods). Science has no answer either. No physicist or astrophysicist or cosmologist actually has the faintest idea about where energy and matter came from. The disingenuous claim that a smooth nothing suddenly and spontaneously produced clumps of matter and anti-matter (such that the total remained nothing) is just as far-fetched as any creation myth. Energy is handled similarly. The otherwise homogeneous universe is allowed to have clumps of “something” provided that they can be neutralised by equivalent amounts of “negative somethings”. The Big Bang is just a label for a Big Unknown.
Atheists, of course, don’t even try to answer the question. They are satisfied to say that the answer is unknown but they do know that it is not any kind of conception of God.
The other Big Question is : “How did life begin?”
Religions again have no answer and invoke God or gods. Science has no answer either and puts it down to random chemistry which became biochemistry and which, by accident, led to life.
Neither science nor religions nor philosophy have the faintest idea of what time is.
It’s all just Magic.
Fear of political incorrectness is just cowardice
December 4, 2018Every human has a conception of good and bad. It is the most fundamental value that underpins all other values. Not everybody agrees on what should be considered good or what should be labeled bad, but it is pretty clear at the level of the individual.
Taking cowardice to be the subjugation of actions to fears (and bravery then to be the subjugation of fears to necessary actions), it seems to me that since WW2, the discourse about human behaviour is dominated by cowardice. Judgements of good and bad are suspended or ignored for fear of being labeled politically incorrect. Bad behaviour is excused and even encouraged by the failure to hold to one’s own set of values. In fact, the cowardice is rationalised by the idea that bad behaviour is always excusable. It is conveniently forgotten that all so called “human rights” are, in fact, just privileges afforded by human societies to their members. Politically correct rhetoric will have it that these “rights” (actually privileges) are not subject to behaviour – yet there is no society which does not, in practice, sanction members for their behaviour (but not always).
How Political Correctness Protects the Bad Guys
……. Today, police know that criminals’ rights will often be held above victims’ rights. As a result, police must cope with procedures specially designed to prevent criminals from admitting their crimes, with evidence procedures designed to prevent officers from looking where evidence might be, and with a virtual ban on profiling the characteristics of a likely criminal during the search. ……..
The power of political correctness is especially evident in Britain, where a training manual instructed magistrates not to have prejudice against black youths who commit violent crimes but, rather, according to the Salisbury Review, to “think of them as quirky Lenny Henry characters”—referring to a black English comedian. The Sentencing Guidelines Council says teenage muggers should not be jailed. Those who defend themselves when criminals invade their homes, however, are regularly jailed. One woman was ordered to remove barbed wire from the roof of her house because an intruder could be injured. Dr. Ian Stephen gave the following advice at Glasgow Caledonian University: “If you attack the burglar, or react in an over-the-top manner … you will inevitably end up on the receiving end of a prison sentence that will far outstrip that imposed on the intruder in your own home …. Direct contact should be avoided whenever possible. If unavoidable, the victim should adopt a state of active passivity ….” One must show proper respect for the criminal!
A consequence of this cowardice in making judgements is that “bad” is equated to “good” in the name of equality. What is fair and just, which requires a judgement of good or bad, is subjugated to the politically correct notions of “human rights” or “equality” or “discrimination” or “sexism”.
- For fear of being labeled racist, anti-social activities by “ethnic groups” are tolerated and even allowed to flourish.
- For fear of being labeled “anti-religion”, brainwashing of children is permitted and encouraged.
- For fear of violating “human rights”, vicious rapists and murderers are treated better than their victims.
- For fear of violating “human rights”, being bad is privileged.
- For fear of being labeled “discrimination”, the incompetent are equated with the skilled in the job market.
- For fear of being labeled “anti-feminist”, incompetence is equated with experience or skill.
To allow a fear of being labeled “politically incorrect” to subjugate one’s own values is simple cowardice.
Bad is never equal to good.
We cannot keep making excuses for bad behaviour. There may be explanations for bad behaviour, but it must have consequences. An explanation cannot eliminate liability.
Related:
Why is there an ethical problem with capital punishment?
Best optical illusion of 2018
December 2, 2018Follow the circles around.
None intersect.
I have not come across this before and it is the best optical illusion I have come across this year.
(from The Science Scoop)
from The Science Scoop
Elementary but often forgotten: Multilateral depends upon the unilateral
December 2, 2018Maybe some day geographical boundaries will give way to some other way of clustering and organising and administering human societies. Maybe some day the nation state will become obsolete. But not yet. The sovereign nation state is still the basic unit of organising human societies. Without sovereignty within its geographical boundaries, a nation state cannot exist. (A nation state which cannot protect its geographic boundaries and its sovereignty cannot survive).
Without nationalism as the foundation stone, internationalism falls down.
Without the brick of unilateralism as the fundamental building block, no multilateral structure can exist except as a castle in the imagination of mindlessness.
What is often conveniently forgotten with the multinational or multilateral organisations (UN, EU, IMF, WTO, WHO, …..) is that the multilateral (or multinational) is meaningless without maintaining the integrity of the unilateral (or the national). Undermining the unilateral leaves the multilateral floating aimlessly. Multilateral is a service provider to the unilateral. Without a customer a multilateral service is of no consequence.
It is an existential question of identity.
What the EU does not like to accept that its citizens are Germans or French or Swedes first and only Europeans second.
Boundaries of inexplicability
November 22, 2018It is not difficult to imagine a time some 500,000 years ago when the first god was invented by one of our hominid ancestors. I have little doubt that the first god was the God of the Sun. It could be argued that a god of day and a god of night might have come first, but while the distinction between day and night was surely fundamental, the understanding that it is the Sun which causes night and day would have been evident even to most animals (as it is even now). The invention of a god requires an unanswerable question to be posed. Even a modicum of intelligence would find an explanation for day and night in the Sun. It is only when the question of why night would invariably follow day could be posed, that an inexplicable question arose. And the answer was found by invoking the Sun God.
Gods came long before religions. And every god that has ever been invented has been as an answer for an otherwise inexplicable question. Soon after the Sun God was invented came the inexplicable questions which created the need for a Moon God and a Rain God and a Wind God and a God of Thunder. Then came the gods of the seas and the rivers and the plains and the mountains and of earthquakes and of volcanoes. The gods were needed to explain all the easily and often observed, physical realities which surrounded our ancestors and controlled their survival but could not be predicted or explained. Gods were labels for magic. Somewhere along the way came the idea that the gods had discretion to act in a manner favourable or inimical to humans. And then came the giant leap of thought to the idea that human actions could induce the gods to intercede favourably. And so came the invention of prayer and of rain dances and of sacrifices and other ways of attracting first the attention, and then the intercession, of enormously powerful gods. It was then only a little step to praying for the intercession of the gods in matters inimical to enemies. Rationality plays no part, and can play no part, in invoking the irrational.
We need to distinguish between gods and religions. Whereas gods are a product of individual minds and are labels representing explanations for imponderable questions, religions are a societal construct for organising people. Irrational gods were invented by rational minds when faced with inexplicable questions. Religions merely organised these various irrational answers into structures of irrational belief for the “good of the society”. Religions provided lubrication for harnessing the actions of increasingly complex groupings of humans towards the pursuit of desired (sometimes perceived as common) goals. By definition, gods (and religions) operate – and can only operate – in the region of the inexplicable.
As knowledge has grown, some inexplicable questions have found rational explanations but new questions and new boundaries of inexplicability have always been found. In every field of thought humans came across – and continue to come across – boundaries of inexplicability. Knowledge has pushed back these boundaries, but every field of knowledge and thought is constrained within its boundaries of inexplicability. As the perimeter enclosing knowledge has expanded so has the length of the boundary of inexplicability and the volume of the unknown. In fact, every field of thought began – and still begins – with an initial boundary of inexplicability; its initial fundamental assumptions. While the field of operation of the gods (the inexplicable) has receded, it has, paradoxically, grown in volume.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that one cannot use the laws of arithmetic to prove the fundamental axioms that arithmetic is built upon. Hilbert’s attempts to try and show that all the branches of mathematics can be reduced to a single set of consistent (if unprovable) axioms have so far failed and some believe that Gödel’s theorems show that Hilbert’s program is unattainable. Our intuition suggests that no rational system of logic can be used to prove the very assumptions that the logic system is built upon. Equally the assumptions and rules of one system of logic cannot be used to prove the assumptions of a different system of logic. This applies as much to all branches of science as well as to mathematics and philosophy and to all rational thought. There is no branch of the sciences or mathematics or philosophy which can avoid – or will ever be able to avoid – the use of fundamental assumptions. Note that even assumptions which are taken to be self-evident are never proven and cannot be proved. They just are. When things are – without explanation and without being self-explanatory – they represent a boundary of inexplicability. The more we know, the more we know that we don’t know. Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability is sufficient to convince me that the Unknowable exists. The known, the unknown and the unknowable. What lies beyond a boundary of inexplicability may be unknown but knowable, or it may be unknowable.
The gods are irrational because they lie at or beyond the boundaries of inexplicability and all rational thought is bounded to lie within the bounds of inexplicability. No discipline of rational thought has the means with which to illuminate the regions beyond the boundaries of that system of rational thought. The process of science can push back the boundaries of inexplicability, but cannot illuminate the regions beyond. Science can push back the region where the gods operate but science cannot illuminate the operations of its own, or any other, irrational gods. The fundamental assumptions of all rational thought are invocations of “self-evident truths” which are no different to our ancestors invoking the Sun God as a self-evident truth. I dismiss atheism since it attacks the answers of others as being irrational, without ever addressing the questions. Atheism cannot cope with the unknowable.
The known and the unknown are realms that are self-apparent. Science is the process at the interface of these regions which leads to the growth of the region of the known. All beliefs by definition lie in the region of the unknown. Any statement and its negation ( X and not-X) must both either lie in the region of knowledge, or both in the region of the unknown. It is not possible for one to live in the realm of knowledge and its negation to live in the region of the unknown. A belief in gods lies in the unknown. A lack of belief in gods (which is atheism) is not in itself a commentary on that belief. A denial of the belief in gods cannot then be anything other than belief and cannot shift into the realm of knowledge. A denial of a belief – which by definition lies in the unknown – is to claim knowledge of an unknown thing which is self-contradictory.
The God of the Big Bang and the gods of magnetism and gravitation and the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force lie at the edge of current inexplicability. The Religion of Science is replacing the old religions as a social construct for the supposed “common good”. The new gods of science and political correctness have replaced the gods of the sun and the moon and the waves and the wind. Instead of irrational animal gods we have the irrational gods of biodiversity and sustainability. The weather gods have been replaced by the gods of climate in the man-made global warming religion. But they too will be replaced by new gods with new labels when new boundaries of inexplicability are drawn.
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