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What Kind of Country is This...

....That Can Treat Muslims Like This?

Two muslims in the wilds of Montana and elsewhere....

Trying to build a mosque in Pennsylvania....

Whipped to a Frenzy by... Something

Recently, the NYTimes reported on a gunman who had taken over the offices of the Discovery Channel.  They Gray Lady described the gunman's motives thusly:

Police officers shot and killed a gunman with a history of protesting against the Discovery Channel, the authorities said, ending a nearly four-hour ordeal on Wednesday at the company’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Md.

Police officials said the company had identified the gunman to them as James J. Lee. A Web site run by Mr. Lee, SaveThePlanetProtest.com, was established in January 2008. The Web site complains that the Discovery Channel produces programs about the environment for profit, not for humanitarian reasons.

Oh, that nasty profit motive.  How dare Discovery try to make money!  But wait....  Here is Lee's manifesto, at least in part...

Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children ... All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it... Also, keep out the fraudulent peace movements. They are liars and fakes and had no real intention of ending the wars. ALL OF THEM ARE FAKE! On one hand, they claim they want the wars to end, on the other, they are demanding the human population increase. World War II had 2 Billion humans and after that war, the people decided that tripling the population would assure peace. WTF??? STUPIDITY! MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!... Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! Programs must be developed to find solutions to stopping ALL immigration pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that. ... Find solutions FOR these countries so they stop sending their breeding populations to the US and the world to seek jobs and therefore breed more unwanted pollution babies. FIND SOLUTIONS FOR THEM TO STOP THEIR HUMAN GROWTH AND THE EXPORTATION OF THAT DISGUSTING FILTH! (The first world is feeding the population growth of the Third World and those human families are going to where the food is! They must stop procreating new humans looking for nonexistant jobs!) Find ways so that people don't build more housing pollution which destroys the environment to make way for more human filth! Find solutions so that people stop breeding

Aside from the inability to hit the "carriage return" can we find some common element running through this screed?  The NYTimes thought it was Discovery Channel making environmental shows for profit.  Maybe a close reading of the text can find a hint, perhaps a trace of some other motive. 

(h/t Mark Shea)

It has been truly said that at the bottom one often finds a deep-seated hatred of children. 

There's a Bimbo on the Cover of the Book

The Forest of Time ebook will include my three poems

1. "The Engineer Discourses on His Love"
2. "Has Poetry a Place in Science Fiction" and the classic
3. "There's a Bimbo on the Cover of the Book."  

Because of this last poem, which is to come first in the book, the publisher proposes the following cover. 

Sometimes, You Wanna Just Have Fun

Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence

A physicist named Victor Stenger seems willing to contribute to the mounting pile of evidence that those trained in the metrical properties of physical bodies can't do metaphysics for dog barf.  We will try to accommodate him.

Yes, it's the auld God-does-not-exist-and-I-can-prove-it foolishness through *Science!* 

Believe it or don't believe it, sez I; but don't believe you don't have to believe it. 

Like many narrowly trained, he extends his own tool kit into domains of discourse for which it is not suited, much like a plumber who comes to counsel your teenager on his anxieties.  In particular, terms are always to be understood in the casual ways in which he understands them.  Dr. Stenger would not tolerate this sort of thing if the subject were physics.  "Dark Matter?  Well, dark means it's not lit up, so if we shine a light on it, we should see it."  This would induce a similar eye-rolling to some of the usages in the essay. 

But in any case, said essay provides a number of tasty tidbits for our intellectual noshing. 

The Adventures of Dark Energy and Lithium Abundance

Sounds like good names for a pair of super-heroes....

1. The Mystery of Dark Energy
Scientists say that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.  The evidence for this is that the most distant supernovas are dimmer (thus, farther away) than they should be, absent acceleration. 

The usual epicycle to explain this away is the mysterious Dark Energy. 

However, Dark Energy apparently violates conservation of energy, which is considered a major faux pas.  Also the usual calculations for vacuum energy are way smaller than that which Dark Energy must have.  Way smaller.  Like 120 times smaller, which is bad. 

2. The Missing Lithium
Big Bang models predict how much Stuff was produced by the Bang.  Hydrogen, deuterium and helium-4 pretty much match these predictions, which is good. 

But there is only about a third the amount of lithium as there "should" be, which is bad. 

Now on the face of it, this "falsifies" the Big Bang, which is not only bad, but worse. 

Fortunately, as Pierre Duhem pointed out, there are always multiple hypotheses being tested and when a prediction doesn't happen like it should, it's not always clear which of the many assumptions have been falsified.  (A classic example is the way heliocentrism was falsified by the lack of stellar parallax.  Turned out, the lack of parallax falsified the distance to the stars, which had been based on apparent relative brightness and diameter.  Seems they are farther than 70 million miles away!  Which is good.) 

3. A Mark of a Promising Theory
A new theory in physics looks promising when it not only explains the problem it was developed to solve, but also solves another problem in some unrelated area. 

Two Cape Town physicists -- Marco Regis and Chris Clarkson -- came up with an explanation for the lithium shortage.  Turns out, it also explains why the farthest supernovas look too dim.  If it pans out, we can explain the latter without any "accelerated expansion" or "dark energy" at all.  Which is good. 

Prof. Regis is the Marco of the promising theory.  You knew I couldn't pass that by. 

But the solution has a problem of its own, which is bad. 

4. Farewell, Nick
To wit: we abandon the Copernican Principle, an a priori metaphysical assumption that states that the universe is the same everywhere and on all scales; i.e., no "privileged place." 

Abandoning this metaphysic makes the supernovae easy to explain: The universe is not homogeneous at the largest scale and the earth is "sitting at the centre of some kind of giant void in a much larger universe." 

By the same token, lithium is not evenly distributed and our "bubble" happens to be a Lithium Desert.

And why should Stuff be evenly distributed?  It's only a metaphysical assumption. Right?  But metaphysical assumptions are harder to abandon than a mere physical theory!  The Big Bang will go on the ash heap of history before we give up Ockham's Razor!  And the Copernican principle is most devoutly held by moderns. 

That stuff is not evenly distributed is one thing.  Big deal.  But that the earth really is at the center of the world is much more difficult to accept.  Modern a priori commitments make it hard to shake the Earth-is-not-special meme.