Ho Ho Ho

Merry Christmas / Solstice / Yule and a happy new year folks…

Hope Saint Nicholas / Chris Kringle brings you what you want for the festive season.

One nation under (Oh My) God!

Not happy.

Not happy at all.

Copenhagen has proven a complete wash-out, with no real result coming from it. At this rate things will only be done to stop the climate change once there is a visible impact, and by then it will be way too late. You know what that means?

No?

It means that we can’t just lock America away in its own little corner of the world while it increasingly grows irrelevant on the world stage and inevitably fractures into its component pieces of United Sates of Canada and JesusLand, possibly with Mexico taking back their land. It’s so not fair, with America deliberately undermining their scientific and industrial advantage on the world stage, they would have been perfect for a plethora of jokes and sarcastic posts.

Oh no.. America isn’t the only place that will be still belching out toxins into the atmosphere, and as such it can’t be sent to the corner by itself with a dunce hat on. It seems the godless communists are just as intent on poisoning the world and drowning their pesky neighbours as the god-fearing bible bashers. That’s right, as long as Jesus is your friend you can keep on ruining the world for the future generations, after all the rapture is just around the corner…again…..or if you’re the Chinese government you can hope the pollution will help cull your population.

So, back at home, in a nation where more than 90% of the population is at least concerned about global warming, where there is almost universal acceptance of Climate Change as a process (if not consensus on the outcome), we’ve not signed anything binding either. Great way to go Rudd, lets follow the lead of these two great leading nations, one built on genocide and apparently trying to reclaim the glory days of the dark ages, the other happy to censor all criticism and assassinate its own people….. and no I’m not sure which is which now that I think about it.

Blood brilliant, scientific ignoramuses, mired in the mindset of their post-retirement age peers, are doing all they can to prevent us actually fixing the world around us. I hope there truly isn’t a God, or at least not one that pays attention to the posturing of this insignificant race in this miniscule corner of the universe, because if there is, she’s going to be awfully pissed off with what we’ve done to our world.

Marriage

Hell of a scary word for a guy, possibly due to the importance placed upon it by the gal.

we don't all skip down the isle

A long time ago I decided that I had a 5 year limit. If I hadn’t gotten down on one knee and popped the question by that point, possibly even been ringed and notarized, then I had to bail. To my mind it seemed that doing anything else was immensely selfish. If you hadn’t sealed the deal by then, it was your duty to get the hell out of the way and make room for someone who would.

Five years is a long time, I figure there isn’t much in the way of serious relationship action before 15 or after 60, so your ‘prime’ time is about 45 years. 5 years is a 1/9 of that, keep someone hanging for a full ninth of their dating years without stepping up to the plate and being a man about it, then you might as well admit you’re a selfish coward and bow out altogether.

Lust made (overly) Legal

I figure there are a couple of different conscious (or subconscious) reasons why you might not get married despite staying with a person.

1. The Cynic: Generations of kids from broken marriages have seen the horrific fallout of a formalized relationship gone wrong. They have no faith in the institute and are actually repelled by the idea.
2. The Realist: Generations that have seen the rising divorce rates, spousal abuse and hypocrisy of cheating couples and have decided that marriage is a needless and unnecessary legal step so that the government (and family) can stick its nose into what is, in essence, a private matter.
3. The Pathetic: Weak, insecure individuals who are too pathetic to strike out on their own, but are staying in the relationship solely because they believe they are needed and wanted even if they don’t necessarily feel they need or want their partner.
4. The Monkey: Folks who are ‘in love’ for now but are always looking to trade up. Of course they’re not happy to let go of the last relationship until they’ve got their grubby paws on the new one…. Can’t be alone now can we?
5. The Unrealistic: Sure I’m with the right person; at least I think I am. Aren’t I? What if Mr or Mrs Right is still out there somewhere, just around the corner? The perfect one, the soul mate who is everything I dream them to be without the minor niggling faults of my current paramour.
6. The Pessimist: In many ways the direct opposite of the Unrealistic, you don’t want to trap them with flawed old you when they could do so much better. (Think Anthony Head’s moving speech in Imagine Me & You).

Of course that doesn’t cover the financially or chronologically challenged, but that’s more circumstance then intent. Now 1 and 2, I can respect, but only as long as the partner shares that view, otherwise you’re denying them what might be a life-long dream. 3, 4, and 5 are just sheer cowardice, and 6 I’m not going to comment on because I wander down that thought process occasionally.

modern marriage

Of, and the No.1 reason guys don’t like weddings? We don’t get to nail the bridesmaids if its our wedding Damn it, that’s why we went to all those other weddings.

Bridesmaids Rock!

Of course this is kind of a lame post, I should be talking about something controversial… gay marriage rights maybe… guess I will do that soon enough.

USA Healthcare

Well….. bugger me gently with a chainsaw…. looks like its going to happen.

America is finally getting off its twinky stuffed arse and trying to actually look after its citizens. Welcome to the 20th century folks (yes I know were past that point, but give ‘em a break their still not over their cold war paranoia yet) and smell the New World Order.

For the uninformed the New World Order looks pretty much like the Old World Order, but with less of America telling everyone else what to do. Oh, and we don’t blame communism for everything bad, and credit Jezuz for everything good. 

On an awesome synergistic point the current recession/depression will probably help to alleviate the transition from a heavily bureaucratic, private accountant run, insurance focused health industry to a heavily bureaucratic, government-run, medical based health industry. …. or at least it would if basic health food options didn’t cost more than fat and sugar stuffed alternatives.

Oh well, its one step towards a better system (at least till the GoP returns to the throne). A massive improvement would be simply to extend senatorial level health care (yes they have it) to the common folks, and put a ceiling on when you’re able to access it based on your income. Earn 6 figures, pay for it yourself.

 

Age & Electronics

I was walking down an obscure, hole-in-the-wall type exit to one of our local malls the other day. It was an ordinary day, the sun was shining, and the weather had dropped below roast into par-broil. Just a Christmas season day like any other, and I was negotiating a series of steps with a new DVD/Sound System balanced on my shoulder.

Right there, mid step, I was hit by an epiphany.

Epiphanies hurt!

I realised that should I misstep and fall then I would sacrifice the electronics to avoid injury if necessary. This was a massive change in my world view.

I had always been of the opinion that electronics were expensive and cellular regeneration cheap. I could afford a bit of healing time, but wasn’t going to let expensive electronics suffer. Now that had changed. Rather then wrap myself around delicate plastic and copper to absorb the fall, that padded box would be cushioning my flesh instead.

I could afford a replacement system, but not the healing time.

I have gotten old.

Darwin inspired the Nazi’s

seen a lot of stuff on this, so here (stolen) in all its glory is a reply that I’d give a HD to.

Extreme Cult: Uniform & Member

Was evolution a significant and essential factor in guiding Nazi thought?

No. First of all, as has already been established courtesy of searching through Mein Kampf in detail, Hitler’s assorted eructations on nature reproduce well-known creationist canards, including the static species fallacy, and Hitler also asserted that fertile, viable hybrids were inpossible, which is manifestly refuted by this scientific paper (among many others):

Speciation By Hybridisation In Heliconius Butterflies, by Jesús Mavárez, Camilo A. Salazar, Eldredge Bermingham, Christian Salcedo, Chris D. Jiggins and Mauricio Linares, Nature, 441: 868-871 (15th June 2006)

Also, even an elementary search of Mein Kampf reveals the following statistics. The number of instances of key words are as follows:

“Darwin” : ZERO

“Almighty” : 6

“God” : 37

“Creator” : 8

Hitler was inspired by the anti-Semitic ravings of one Lanz von Liebenfels, who was a defrocked monk, and whose magnum opus bore the Pythonesque title of Theozoology, Or The Account Of The Sodomite Apelings And The Divine Electron. This was in effect a warped Biblical exegesis, which rewrites the Crucifixion story, and also contains a mediaeval bestiary replete with instances of Liebenfels’ florid imagination.

Additionally, the Nazis placed textbooks on evolutionary biology on their list of seditious books to be burned, as illustrated nicely here, where we learn that in 1935, Nazi guidelines with respect to seditious books included:

6. Schriften weltanschaulichen und lebenskundlichen Charakters, deren Inhalt die falsche naturwissenschaftliche Aufklärung eines primitiven Darwinismus und Monismus ist (Häckel).

Translated into English, this reads:

Writings of a philosophical and social nature whose content deals with the false scientific enlightenment of primitive Darwinism and Monism (Häckel)

The evidence is therefore conclusive. Nazism was not inspired by evolution, and indeed, much of Hitler’s own writings are creationist in tone. The Nazis destroyed evolutionary textbooks as seditious (much as modern day creationists would love to), and the Nazi view of the biosphere is wholly at variance with genuine evolutionary theory, involving fatuous views of race “purification” by the establishment of monocultures that are the very antithesis of genuine evolutionary thought, which relies upon genetic diversity.

….that answer made it onto PZ Meyer’s ‘good answer’ list. The writer posted under Calilasseia and I’ll give full credit as soon as i know where to attribute it.

Tree Rings to measure temperature?

I hadn’t realized that we were using tree growth rings as a guide to understanding global warming, at least not until the “it’s all a hoax” crowd caught on to one of those leaked (or illegally hacked if you prefer that term) emails which apparently talked about the inaccuracy of this method.

Smoking gun? Well no. Not if you know what your talking about, technically CO2 is colorless, so we can’t really call it smoke. The reason temperatures are harder to measure is directly related to the increased volume of CO2 in the air. So tree rings becoming unreliable as measures over the last few decades after massive CO2 concentration increases, to me this is even better evidence for human induced climate change.

People are too focused on a few degrees of warming, a little bit of sea rise. The big issues, the ones that threaten our continued existence are the changes in disease vectors, reduced bio-diversity, and crop failure. I’m going to laugh myself silly when we realize we may have begun the extermination of our species so we can have bigger cars and cheap energy….. its laugh or cry people, those are the only two options left.

This more detail explanation is taken directly from the Morris Sun Tribune and can be found here.  I’ve kept it here to ensure its spread even if the link dies.

Local Commentary: Thoughts on ‘Climate-gate’: Mitigate our impact
By: Pete Wyckoff, Morris Sun Tribune

Is the planet cooling? “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick…to hide the decline,” writes climate scientist Phil Jones in a stolen 1999 e-mail which has caused a frenzy. FoxNews.com tells us that we finally have a ‘smoking gun’—proof that scientists are manufacturing a global warming crisis so that they can… they can…(I’ve never really understood the goals of the evil scientific conspirators).

The planet is warming. The data are unequivocal and based on measured temperatures (corrected for things like the “heat island” effect, so please don’t write an angry response claiming that the thermometers are wrong). What Phil Jones was referring to is something else: past temperatures estimated via tree rings. Since 1960, the rings in trees seem to have lost some of their power to record temperature.

Why should tree rings indicate temperature at all? As most of us learned in childhood, the trunks of trees at our latitude tend to put on a distinct growth ring every year. All other things being equal, when the trees are happy, they put on a large ring. When the going gets tough, the rings get thin. What makes a tree happy? Light, nutrients, lack of disease, and warmth (to a point). What do trees despise? Drought. By careful interpretation of past tree growth patterns, we can learn a lot about past climates.

Scientists have spent many years developing the techniques needed to reconstruct climate via tree rings. The problem is that in the past few decades, the tree ring-climate relationships seem to have become “decoupled” in many areas. Why? The main cause seems to be increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. While carbon dioxide is famously a gas that heats the planet (the greenhouse effect is real and uncontroversial), carbon dioxide also directly impacts plants. Carbon dioxide fuels photosynthesis, and increased carbon dioxide in the air can both speed-up plant growth and make plants less sensitive to drought.

Decreased drought sensitivity is an expected response for plants exposed to high levels of carbon dioxide. All along the underside of a plant’s leaves are little holes called “stomata.” These holes can open and close. A tree must open its stomata to take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Unfortunately, plants lose water out of their open stomata. Plants growing in air that has lots of carbon dioxide can reduce the amount of time their stomata are open, thus making them lose less water and become less susceptible to drought.

Biologists call the concept here “water-use efficiency,” and it is of crucial interest to farmers and foresters alike. Carbon dioxide causes warming that will likely make west central Minnesota a drier place in the future. At the same time, increased carbon dioxide in the air makes plants growing in our region less susceptible to drought. The balance between these two forces will be crucial.

The changing relationship between climate and tree growth is a hot topic of research at your local university. Last Friday, Dr. Chris Cole and Dr. Jon Anderson, of the University of Minnesota, Morris, published a paper in the journal “Global Change Biology” showing that aspen trees in Wisconsin are growing faster than they used to, and much of the increase is attributed to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide. Two weeks ago, a former student and I published a paper in the “Journal of Ecology” showing that oak trees in west central Minnesota became less sensitive to drought during the 20th century. If “dust bowl”-severity droughts come again soon, we project that the local oaks will suffer 50 percent less mortality than they likely did in the 1930s.

So what does this all mean? The relationship between tree rings and climate is becoming muddied by the rapid recent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. For most of the past 10,000 years, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained reasonably stable. Now they are skyrocketing. Modern tree rings are no longer the reliable recorders of temperature they once were. It is a good thing that we now have thermometers.

What does Phil Jones’ stolen e-mail not mean? It does not mean that global warming is a hoax. It does not mean that there are really any cracks in the scientific consensus that humans are causing dangerous alterations to the global climate.

We humans are changing the climate, largely by emitting vast quantities of carbon dioxide via the way we heat our houses, fuel our cars, and generate our electricity. This is unwise. Yes, the future climate, along with the increased carbon dioxide, may be good for some. For most people, however, the downsides of climate change are likely to far outweigh the benefits. Don’t let Fox News mislead you. As a prudent, conservative people, we should take serious steps to mitigate our impact.

Dr. Pete Wyckoff is Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris.

The 'gritty' future

um..

I will write something soon, I promise.

In the mean time here is an ad (and thus a look into the pop culture psyche) from Korea

What sort of Pagan am I?

You would pluck out the heart of my mystery?

Well………. I scored as Zoroastrian Pagan

The Zoroastrian Pagan is a rare breed who follows the teachings of Zoroaster, the religious reformer. He believed that there were no gods, and it was naive to put faith in them and give them names. What one should focus on is merely serving one side of the cosmic duality; work on good or light deeds, and the world would become more good or light. Pagans of this variety are rare, but often feel like they get more done without the hassle and clutter of pantheons and gods. They’re smart, analytical, and occationally cynical.

from http://quizfarm.com/quizzes/new/whitewolfjmi/what-kind-of-pagan-are-you/index.php

Christmas Joy

It’s that time again, the year draws to a close and the old powers stir. December 25th is right around the corner, that day when we celebrate the ‘birthday’ of the sun god Mithras (Deus Sol Invictus Mithras for you more modern folk). I’m prepped and ready for the ancient practice of shared gifts and debauchery, dating way back beyond the foundation of Rome itself. Sadly the debauchery (and its Roman origins) must be somewhat tempered as I’m nearing the 7th year of my monogamous relationship, and the other third may look poorly on a good old-style roman orgy. It’s also a bitch to clean the carpets and I’m usually driven to stupor by excessive eating.

Huginn and Muninn (though and memory) are winging their way across the world, watching as Christians and Atheists everywhere engaging in traditions that predate the current calendar, even while adding new facets to the festivity. We worship at the altar of Hallmark, give praise to the great God consumerism and stuff ourselves with the annual winter sacrifice of roasted meats. So time to string up the magical holly/mistletoe (revered for its ability to stay green in winter despite having no roots), and giving lip-service (pun intended) to Frigga by planting a big juicy kiss on anyone foolish enough to pause under it.

Note to self, put mistletoe over only one doorway and then designate separate entrances for men and women.

Of course down here in the land of the burning sands we look at things a bit differently; no Yule log here its’ too bloody hot already. While the traditional Christmas roast still finds its way to the tables the distinctly Aussie tradition of cold sea food (crabs, lobster, prawns, and seafood salad) will be making it onto my table beside the healthy pork roast (my Jewish friend’s request) this Christmas. I see myself slaving over a hot oven and cold freezer equally, and then it’s out into the sun for cold beers, girly drinks, and sitting in a wading pool to cool down.

Unless you’re Muslim of course, if that’s the case, well….sucks to be you. If I was denied roast pork and alcohol for the festive season, while my neighbours were getting their gluttony on, I’m pretty sure it would shatter my unflinching faith that there really was a God. Not sure even the allowance for jailbait would balance out that divine injustice.

Acceptable under Sharia Law

I hope the corporate sponsoured saint of consumerism in his Coca-Cola themed suit provides you with lots of awesome presents. So in the Christmas spirit, and using the paraphrased word of that champion of socialism Jesus of Nazareth, “be excellent to one another” and share your happiness with those around you.

Santa down under