\nJust starting to collect my thoughts here. I've had a love/hate relationship with elections for awhile now. Time to explore this more and write it all out.\n\n> Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics.\n\n> It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies – think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes. Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition. They’re shameless.\n\nHumankind - Rutger Bregman\n\nI feel like George Carlin would have agreed with Bregman. Here's some gems from Carlin re: politics in America:\n\n> If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.\n\n> The next time they give you all that civic bullshit about voting, keep in mind that Hitler was elected in a full, free democratic election\n\n> Voting is a meaningless exercise. I'm not going to waste my time with it. These parties, these politicians are given to us as a way of making us feel we have freedom of choice. But we don't. Everything is done to you in this country.\n\n> The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, and city halls. They got the judges in their back pocket. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear . . . But I’ll tell you what they don’t want.\n\n> They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. It’s a big club and you ain’t in it. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head all day long.\n\n","H":"md","G":1662995610351,"I":"qKcan/rXg"},{"C":"5o7qtZD\\x","A":"A Moment of Silence","D":"a_moment_of_silence","E":1662995653270,"F":"
Date planted: 9/11/2011 \nDate last tended: 9/11/2011 \n
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Before I begin this poem, I’d like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th, 2001.
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I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence for all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, for the victims in Afghanistan, Iraq, in the U.S., and throughout the world.
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And if I could just add one more thing…
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A full day of silence… for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation.
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Six months of silence… for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of a 12-year U.S. embargo against the country.
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…And now, the drums of war beat again.
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Before I begin this poem, two months of silence… for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, where “homeland security” made them aliens in their own country
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Nine months of silence… for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin, and the survivors went on as if alive.
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A year of silence… for the millions of dead in Viet Nam—a people, not a war—for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
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Two months of silence… for the decades of dead in Colombia, whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues.
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Before I begin this poem, Seven days of silence… for El Salvador A day of silence… for Nicaragua Five days of silence… for the Guatemaltecos None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years. 45 seconds of silence… for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas… 1,933 miles of silence… for every desperate body That burns in the desert sun Drowned in swollen rivers at the pearly gates to the Empire’s underbelly, A gaping wound sutured shut by razor wire and corrugated steel.
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25 years of silence… for the millions of Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky. For those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees In the south… the north… the east… the west… There will be no dna testing or dental records to identify their remains.
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100 years of silence… for the hundreds of millions of indigenous people From this half of right here, Whose land and lives were stolen, In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness…
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From somewhere within the pillars of power You open your mouths to invoke a moment of our silence And we are all left speechless, Our tongues snatched from our mouths, Our eyes stapled shut.
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A moment of silence, And the poets are laid to rest, The drums disintegrate into dust.
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Before I begin this poem, You want a moment of silence… You mourn now as if the world will never be the same And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be. Not like it always has been.
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…Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem This is a 9/10 poem, It is a 9/9 poem, A 9/8 poem, A 9/7 poem… This is a 1492 poem. This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
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And if this is a 9/11 poem, then This is a September 11th 1973 poem for Chile. This is a September 12th 1977 poem for Steven Biko in South Africa. This is a September 13th 1971 poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York. This is a September 14th 1992 poem for the people of Somalia. This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground amidst the ashes of amnesia.
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This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told, The 110 stories that history uprooted from its textbooks The 110 stories that that cnn, bbc, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored. This is a poem for interrupting this program.
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This is not a peace poem, Not a poem for forgiveness. This is a justice poem, A poem for never forgetting. This is a poem to remind us That all that glitters Might just be broken glass.
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And still you want a moment of silence for the dead? We could give you lifetimes of empty: The unmarked graves, The lost languages, The uprooted trees and histories, The dead stares on the faces of nameless children…
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Before I start this poem we could be silent forever Or just long enough to hunger, For the dust to bury us And you would still ask us For more of our silence. So if you want a moment of silence
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Then stop the oil pumps Turn off the engines, the televisions Sink the cruise ships Crash the stock markets Unplug the marquee lights Delete the e-mails and instant messages Derail the trains, ground the planes. If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell And pay the workers for wages lost. Tear down the liquor stores, The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys.
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If you want a moment of silence, Then take it On Super Bowl Sunday, The Fourth of July, During Dayton’s 13 hour sale, The next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful brown people have gathered.
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You want a moment of silence Then take it Now, Before this poem begins. Here, in the echo of my voice, In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand, In the space between bodies in embrace, Here is your silence. Take it. Take it all. But don’t cut in line. Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.
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And we, Tonight, We will keep right on singing For our dead.
","I":"qKcan/rXg","G":1662995734920},{"C":"I=Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n\n
The national anthem taught me I lived in the land of the free and the home of the brave. The pledge of allegiance taught me that the flag stood for liberty and justice for all. The declaration of independence taught me that all men are equal, with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The constitution taught me that it was created to establish justice and secure the blessings of liberty. That was the foundation of my education, my history lessons. I grew up white in a southern state, in areas mostly devoid of color, utterly unaware of my white, male privilege. Being somewhat poor, I could only see that there were many who were better off than we were. I was mostly naive and oblivious to the context of my time and place. I believed all the propaganda, because I really was free and 'equal' and enjoyed all the benefits of this.
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In my school history textbooks, the treatment of the indigenous was presented as a war. Slavery was glossed over while the abolitionists were highlighted. I suffered very little guilt, which was rather the point.
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I was born at the cusp of the 60's and for many years thought of any sort of injustice as something from the past. After all, my only source of information was history textbooks, and if it is 'history' it is, by definition, in the past. I experienced very little integration in school and in the cities where we lived in Texas. My parents never discussed any of this with me.
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It is only in adulthood that I can finally read and research and find out just how fully injustice and racism and violence permeates the history of this so-called great nation. It isn't something perpetrated by a few ignorant people or groups, it is the very foundation on which this nation rests. It was never free or just for people of color, and in many ways this persists. It still isn't great.
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Just for an interesting exercise, I have looked up some historical facts regarding the fight for civil liberties in the year I was born.
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Two days after I was born, the first ever black students were admitted to the University of Georgia, under court order. Riots erupted, fires were set, the KKK joined in and police had to disperse the crowd of over 2,000 people and stop them from throwing rocks through dorm windows.
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A few months later a U.S. Congressman and other Freedom Riders were assaulted for entering the 'whites only' waiting area of a bus terminal in Rock Hill, South Carolina. This is an area very close to where all of the family on my mother's side lived, and I would not be surprised to find that some of them may have been at least sympathetic with the attackers. This violence continued for months throughout the south, most famously in Montgomery, Alabama.
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The pattern was consistent. Protest and challenge the laws, laws are changed, racists resist, judges order compliance, and eventually federal officials have to enforce the laws with a physical presence on the ground. Segregation in schools, restaurants, public facilities, etc. was challenged and defeated over many, many years, and the price and toll was heavy. Much blood was shed. That is the world I was born into, and yet somehow remained oblivious to. Here is a sobering calendar of racial injustice from the Equal Justice Initiative.
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Looking back, it's obvious that things were pretty great and just and free if you were white, especially white and male. For women and especially for people of color, America has never been great or just or free.
I grew up with a southern-skewed perspective on the Civil War. Even in the 60’s and 70’s I occasionally heard it referred to as the War of Northern Aggression. The general idea was that the southern states were attempting to mind their own business and the northern states didn’t like our independence and wanted to quash states’ rights. Something like that.
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The Civil War is a big topic, and I won’t rehash the many things done on both sides that we find distasteful today. But growing up southern was like growing up as a Chicago Cubs fan. No matter how much ‘southern pride’ you might have, we still got our asses kicked. For many years we were treated like the defeated rebels that we were.
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Unlike other civil wars, however, there was no racial or religious divide between north and south. A resident of Alabama was free to move to Maine and start a new life. Many former slaves moved north, only to discover that true abolitionists were few, and that most northerners didn’t mind free slaves as long as they didn’t move in next door.
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The confederate flag eventually included the blue x with stars on a red background in some shape, fashion or form. It was on the flag of the seceding slave states, and it is still used by the KKK and other white supremacist groups. For the average African American, it is a symbol of every form of evil and hate they and their ancestors have suffered through for centuries. To insist that it isn’t racist, and that it is merely a symbol of southern heritage, is to spit on the graves of every slave ever bought and sold here.
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All of this seems simple to me now, but my fellow Texans disappoint me greatly. In the last week I have seen two punk kids riding bicycles with these flags flying from long poles, and a couple of trucks in the Wal-Mart parking lot doing the same. It seems I am destined to hate so many things in my home state and my country.
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Fortunately they will soon be distracted by something else, like maybe the imminent federal invasion of the entire southwest US. (see JadeHelm)
","I":"qKcan/rXg","G":1662997697438},{"C":"QA&;Y0whY","A":"An Atheist's Love for Keith Green","D":"an_atheist-s_love_for_keith_green","E":1662997734970,"F":"
Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n
\nI discovered Keith Green when he was in the middle of what would be a brief but meteoric career as a Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artist and evangelist. As I began looking back at our intersections, I had to wonder how it took me so long to find him. To begin with, I blame it on the radio.\n
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When Keith’s first album For Him Who Has Ears To Hear hit the top of the CCM charts, I was living in an area sometimes referred to as the buckle of the ‘bible belt.’ The other buckle was Nashville. Tennessee had the headquarters of the Southern Baptist Convention, and Dallas had pastor Jim Criswell and his First Baptist Church, the largest in the denomination for many years. Living in the Dallas area, you would think that CCM would have had a natural audience, but we were too conservative for that tawdry ‘modern’ stuff. We liked hymns. CCM was so Hollywood.
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And so it was that the only real burst of CCM airplay in the Dallas/Fort Worth area was a brief six-month span on KDMX - 102.9FM - from March through September of 1977. Keith probably got some airplay during that time, and I may have heard his music, but I don’t recall it. So our first opportunity to meet was missed, for better or worse.
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In the summer after I graduated from high school I attended my final youth retreat with others from our church where my father was pastor. I ‘rededicated’ my life to the Lord and spent the rest of the summer in a haze of evangelical zeal. I moved to the campus of Dallas Baptist University a few weeks before the semester opened so that I could earn some ‘work study’ funds and began my life as a young adult.
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Keith’s second album, the aptly named “No Compromise,” came out in late 1979. I believe it was some time in the spring of 1980 when I was riding in a car with some fellow students when they played a Keith Green 8-track tape. It was just background music to them, but I asked them to turn the music up and heard Keith singing “Asleep In The Light” with the uncompromising lyrics:
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The world is sleeping in the dark,\nThat the church just can’t fight,\n‘cause it’s asleep in the light!\nHow can you be so dead?!\nWhen you’ve been so well fed\nJesus rose from the grave, And you!\nYou can’t even get out of bed!\n
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The message and attraction couldn’t have been any clearer. This was an obvious appeal to fundamentalism, and it definitely appealed to me. It was a ‘moth-to-the-flame’ attraction. Keith railed against complacency and how religion had become compromised. This came out in many of his early songs. And not only was he a singer, but he had a ministry. By the time I discovered Keith he had not only released his second album but his ministry headquarters had moved from California to Texas, less than two hours from the college I was attending. I bought a cassette tape or two and practically wore them out. I began receiving his Last Days Newsletter (later Magazine) and devoured each issue, each article. I bought song books and began playing them all on the piano. I was obviously tackling someone with downright virtuoso skills, both vocally and on the keyboard, but I was that drawn to his music.
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Over the next several years this mentality ruled my life. I was zealous, uncompromising, condescending and a general pain in the neck. Woe be unto any one within earshot if the conversation veered into religion. Of course at the time I considered myself a very reasonable person who just happened to be initiated into something that most people were not. I don’t think I made a total ass out of myself but even my dad didn’t pass muster when it came to my new spiritual guidelines. Not even the local churches, including the huge First Baptist Dallas, could satisfy my hunger for uncompromising religion. I usually just played and sang at a piano somewhere on Sunday mornings rather than attend a church. My relationship with Keith was one of deep passion and emotion which I can still feel thirty forty(!) years later any time I hear his music.
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I spent the summer of 1980 as a staff member of a Baptist ‘encampment’ in the hills above Santa Fe, New Mexico. Glorieta was one of two major places where Baptists spent time during summer vacation. Each week had a special emphasis, either on training for Vacation Bible School, or Sunday School, or music or youth work. As a staff member, we received pay that was below minimum wage but included free room and board.
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There were three primary musicians in my life that summer, as far as music that I listened to goes. One was the surprising discovery that Bob Dylan was now a Christian. I later learned that part of what brought this about was some correspondence and conversation between him and Keith Green. The cassette tape I picked up was Dylan’s “Slow Train Coming” which had been released the previous fall. Unlike much of Christian Music this recording was performed by seasoned music pros and marked a change of heart for one of the premier icons of the rebellious 60’s generation. And I just flat out liked the songs, the beats, the words. It was good stuff. It inspired me.
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Another album was from the old southern gospel group The Imperials. They had a new CCM sound and Russ Taff’s lead vocals were awesome. Probably not a bad song on the whole album, but I always think of New Mexico when I hear the Eagle Song. Lots of synthesized strings and mellow goodness, smooth mellow vocals, and the lyrics “I stood and watched an eagle fly, spread his wings and soar across the sky, so gracefully he flew…” Again, it was an almost perfect match for the majesty of the mountains.
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And, of course, there was Keith Green. I began collecting all of his recordings that I could, and a group of staffers went to see him when he did one of his rare concerts that summer in Albuquerque. Unfortunately his zeal and passion was so intense that it suppressed all possible logical and rational thought and struck as an arrow to the heart, inflaming emotional responses like the best and worst of history’s cult leaders and megalomaniacs. His sincerity and desire to do the right thing was never in question, his belief that he was doing God’s bidding is a given. But it set up a war within my soul, and probably within the souls of many other thousands of youth across the country. He espoused the view that one was called to the mission field by default, and that only upon hearing a definitive opposing calling from the Lord should one do anything else. Like anything theological one can argue both sides of the issue and find plenty of scripture to back up your position, but his message was compelling. Of course most left the auditorium that day and never took any serious action toward becoming a missionary, but that doesn’t mean that the thought leaves the mind. Instead it hangs around the periphery only to pop out with an occasional twang of guilt at appropriate opportunities. Thus, the internal struggle was set in motion.
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I also met Deeanne, my first wife, that summer. At some later point we saw Keith Green in concert in Austin, Texas. The building was normally used for wrestling events, and they actually reinforced the canvas (with plywood, I presume) and put the piano in the ring. Keith used the rather obvious prop as an analogy to spiritual warfare. “And in this corner…” As usual, Keith was intense and evangelized as much as he sang.
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We were probably visiting family in Georgetown, which was fairly frequent for us since we lived at the time in the Dallas area. On one of these trips back home we heard a news break on the radio. A small plane had crashed near Lindale, Texas and it was believed that all on board were dead. Deeanne and I looked at each other. We knew. Keith Green was no more.
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We were stunned. Our only source of information was news from Christian radio stations. The plane was overloaded. There was no other way to look at it. What was difficult was figuring out why God had allowed such a thing to happen. Keith was gone, two of his children were gone. An entire family of seven was gone. And the pilot was gone. But never underestimate the ability of the true believer to find reinforcing answers, no matter how illogical or irrational, to the questions of life. My personal favorite was the idea that perhaps Keith was about to fall into sin and that God had ‘taken him home’ to spare the rest of us from the tragic fallout of such. Most answers that were proposed were some variation on the ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ line of thinking. Of course this begs the question of why God allowed the lemon in the first place.
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Within a week of his death we received our pre-ordered copy of his new album Songs for the Shepherd. I cried as I listened. The next Saturday we drove to Lindale and found the Last Days Ministries headquarters. We drove around and found a nearby church and found the gravesite. It still had memorial wreaths from other ministries and organizations and the dirt mound was still there. We ‘paid our respects’ and probably prayed asking God to make us more like Keith. I wouldn’t see that gravesite again for ten years.
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Within a few years Deeanne and I divorced. Neither of us actually decided and determined that we wanted out, but neither of us could keep it from happening. It just did. The list of incompatibilities was a long one.
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We both spent some time recovering from this. We both did a lot of drugs. A few years later I had finally had enough and got back into church. I buried myself in volunteer work at a local venue which held CCM concerts each weekend. One such weekend, for reasons I don’t remember, Keith’s widow Melody and her two daughters showed up. I saw them in our snack bar area briefly, and I think I may have exchanged a few words, but nothing significant.
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During this time I also met and married Bryn. We recently celebrated our 30th Anniversary, so I guess we did something right. While I attempted to turn her on to Keith Green’s music, I’m not sure she ever quite got the attraction. So much of it was tied up into my own youth, my own fundamentalist childhood and memories intertwined with my first marriage that I just don’t think it translated.
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We frequently enjoyed road trips, something my parents passed on to me, and one weekend I took her to Lindale. We found the Last Days Ministries compound and the church where Keith’s grave was located. As we walked to where I remembered his grave to be, we saw a woman in the vicinity, sitting on a headstone. Out of a sense of respect, we stopped short and wandered around, looking at other grave sites. She soon left, and we made our way to that corner of the cemetery. In fact, we made our way to the very headstone she had been sitting on! I couldn’t believe the timing! What were the odds that I would randomly show up on the same day that Melody was visiting? And then I looked at the headstone: July 28, 1982.
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It was the tenth anniversary of his death.
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My heart sunk! We had chased Keith’s widow away on a day when she should have been able to visit and think and reminisce all she wanted. I felt so bad that when we got back home I promptly emailed Melody to apologize. Surprisingly, she actually responded! She was gracious, and even scolded herself for being out there to begin with. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t a lengthy email exchange back and forth, but I was glad to have been able to apologize and to know that I hadn’t caused any sort of trauma. Up until now, it was my last interaction with anything or anyone related to Keith’s ministry.
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I had loved Keith for all the wrong reasons, and all the right reasons. He was so many things I aspired to be. His tenacity and dedication to perfecting his musical craft was an example, his golden tenor voice was how I sounded in my own head, and his dedication to finding his way to true Christian obedience and perfection was unsurpassed. His personality had always been one of ‘no compromise’ but at the time I was unaware of his history prior to his conversion. I saw his all-or-nothing approach as closely matching my own fundamentalist mindset. To me he wasn’t just being Keith, he was obeying scripture.
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All of these things were truly the wrong reasons to love him. They are in many ways the worst part of fundamentalist Christianity. Given the plasticity of the Bible, any attempt to take one particular interpretation and turn it into absolute law usually results in disaster, with a pile of bodies in its wake. Keith’s personality combined with fundamentalism often hurt those he loved the most.
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But there was good in there. Keith took concepts to their natural conclusions. Even while rising to stardom within the Christian music world he challenged the validity of the system itself. When he headlined the Jesus Northwest festival in 1978 he was so aware of the hypocrisy that it caused him great distress. He viewed himself as somewhat of a prophet because of such inner dialog. His relief valve was to castigate the 35,000 people in attendance. In effect, they wound up paying money to go to a festival so that the main attraction could chastise them and spew Bible verses at them about how much God hated festivals and songs! This couldn’t have pleased the PR people at Sparrow Records, or the festival sponsors, but it endeared him to the fundies, his core audience.
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He also believed in the Gospel challenges of Jesus to “Go” and followed that line of thinking out to its logical conclusion as well. His entire ministry shifted to one of challenging people to do missions work as the default ‘calling’ of God, unless they heard from Him otherwise. Most of the church viewed things the other way around, with the default position being one of slavish servitude and devotion (and tithing) unless you heard from God otherwise. I still enjoy the general thought of Keith ‘sticking it to the man’ in that way, misdirected and misguided though he may have been.
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In conclusion, if that is possible, I find it interesting that I still have such fond memories of someone who was so rabidly Christian. As an atheist, that is pretty rare. I do, however, have fond memories for different things in my life, as does everyone. It’s just human nature to remember certain places and people and periods with fondness. But when I rejected Christianity several years ago it obviously affected the possibility of happy reunions. It is difficult to show up to church or Christian-related gatherings when everyone is talking about their wonderful ministry paths. Ending my story with “and then we stopped going to church and became atheists” is quite a show-stopper. True, I have very little in common with those people any more, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t value those times or laugh at shared memories.
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The same holds true for my love of Keith Green. The emotional ties are strong because religion is such an emotional experience, especially the fundamentalist variety. But I would be quickly unwelcome at a “we love Keith Green” event since I no longer share the religious views. But that’s ok with me. I can still admire and respect his talent and brazen audacity from the outside. I no longer worship him in the way I did, and I no longer value any of his ministry goals, but reading about his life can still make me smile and laugh at his antics, and still make me sad and misty-eyed at the way it all ended.
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So yeah, this atheist still has a very warm place in his heart for one of the most all-out, sold-out Christian music artists of all time. That’s just how I roll.
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A few end notes here…
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First, for those of you who may read this as a believer, I know what you’re thinking! No, seriously, I do! LOL (remember, I was a fundy Christian for over 40 years!) You’re thinking about praying for me. You’re thinking that my fondness for Keith is really the power of the Spirit working on my heart. You’re thinking that I’m ripe for re-conversion. Uh, NO. Hate to burst your bubble and all, but I’m the type of atheist that believes the entire Bible is myth and legend, including the part about an actual historical Jesus. Memories of Keith can’t overcome that.
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Second, I have been trying to remember why I started thinking about Keith to begin with. In my previous post I mentioned Keith’s daughters. The other day it dawned on me that they would be close to thirty years old now! Wow, that made me feel old! So I did some Googling and I found them! Melody was only three months pregnant with Rachel (now Taylor) when Keith died, and she has pretty much turned out like you would expect. She is married to a worship leader and has kids of her own, keeping Melody busy as a grandmother. That’s a happy story.
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Rebekah (now LeBeau) was about one year old when Keith died. She has no memory of him. She and her husband both graduated from Wheaton College, which is a conservative Christian institution. And yet she had been working on a music career, had a couple of potential bites, but all secular. I found that refreshing, and I hope that she feels free to do what she wants without worrying about all of Keith’s fans and their approval.
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Third, and last, during my research for this post I found something utterly glorious - several of Keith’s pre-Christian recordings! There are about 13 songs available on iTunes. Some are from a live concert at a college in Albuquerque, New Mexico when Keith was only 18! Check ‘em out here:
","I":"d*AA%}vDA","G":1662997964969},{"C":"1Fi15I4y8","A":"My Deconversion","D":"my_deconversion","E":1662998021954,"F":"Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n\nI’ve written a much longer version of this on other blogs in the past, but I find it rather tedious, especially the parts before I deconverted. Those deal mostly with leaving the Charismatic realm of wackos. But I did find this quote which will give you an idea of our mindset after about a year of not attending church on a regular basis (circa 2000):\n\n> “The good news is that our faith in God is as strong as ever, even as we rethink our understanding of what a church is/is not. His Word is still our guide and always will be. It is a strange place to be in, but we are not in any sort of emotional trauma”\n\nIt was true that we were not traumatized in any way, and that is key since it is often the assumption people make when they hear you left the church. They can’t imagine any other scenario besides “who hurt you?” It is also true that our faith was still strong, although it was quite presumptuous to proclaim that the bible would ‘always’ be our guide. That part was only true for another three years or so.\n\nI eventually latched on to Preterism as a theology that better explained the whole End Times thing, but then it led me down an unexpected path. Preterism includes an emphasis on literal vs symbolic meanings and interpretations. It is inherent, because they believe that the ‘Second Coming’ of Jesus has already occurred, but that it happened spiritually, not physically. But when you start applying this logic to the whole Bible, it becomes difficult to maintain a fundamentalist view. As one site put it, “Does global language in the Bible always indicate universal or worldwide events?” And that is how I came to doubt the story of Noah and the global flood.\n\nThere were two issues to resolve. The first was the Preterist argument that the flood was local, not global. I found that to be ridiculous on its face. Sure, a few people and animals die in any flood, almost always from a flash flood. But an entire local ecosystem? Picture an area of any size surrounded by mountains. Inside is basically a valley. So what would happen if it rained so hard that within forty days the entire basin was filled until the water spilled out at the low point? What would the inhabitants of the valley do? I’ll tell you what they would do - they would climb the nearest mountain to either side of that low point and walk away! And if you don’t kill all the people and animals, you completely destroy the whole point and motivation of the story of Noah.\n\nThe second issue to resolve came up during my research into the whole flood debate. This one was brought up by scientists - geologists, physicists, mathematicians, etc. All it requires really is some math and geometry. Imagine two spheres. One is the main surface of the earth at sea level. The other is a sphere big enough to contain the top of Mt. Everest. (it would actually need to be bigger, in order to match the account in Genesis) That is the area which you would need to fill in order to have a literal global flood which no human could survive. It is the area which Creationists claim was, in fact, filled according to a literal interpretation of Genesis. Math tells us that this volume of water would require an additional 4.5 trillion cubic kilometers of water! Two questions – first, where did this water come from? The Bible does not state that God just created and then 'disappeared' the water. It claims, very specifically, that it came from underground springs and rain clouds. Second, where did it go? The Bible claims that the water receded for ten months before the tops of the mountains became visible! Neither question has a good answer. On top of that, you have multiple other issues, such as most of our atmosphere boiling off after having been pushed an additional five kilometers away from the surface of the planet.\n\nI was left to conclude that the Genesis flood was neither local nor global – it was simply impossible, improbable even. Most likely a complete myth or legend, at best a cautionary tale presented as real but intended as symbolic. You know, like Aesop’s fables…\n\nAnd who would ever devote their life to following fables as a religion, intentionally? Not me. Soon I could see similar problems with many stories in Genesis. The Exodus? Holy crap, they were describing a freakin’ volcano! Creation? Stolen from other cultures. It wasn’t long before my entire belief system lay in ruins. It was freeing, it was mind-blowing. It was 2003 when I finally realized I had become an atheist.","I":"d*AA%}vDA","H":"md","G":1662998060555},{"C":")[HI>$H'(","A":"Our Former Pastor","D":"our_former_pastor","E":1662998122920,"F":"
Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n
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Our former pastor is this guy:\nJim Garlow. We used to attend his church. My wife and I married there, he and Carol attended our wedding. We have been in his home, even overnight. I can’t say that we were close friends, but I certainly know him.\nOccasionally I see a mention of him in a news article, or see a video clip online. My wife saw something on Facebook today, and it prompted me to check out his timeline. It was a stark reminder of just how far I have come, how much I have changed. But he's changed as well.\nHis timeline is filled to the brim with radical right-wing opinion on gay rights and abortion and politics, and I now vehemently disagree with his position on every single thing he writes.
The link above is interesting because it is about Flip Benham and his two sons speaking at Garlow’s church. We once participated in an abortion protest after Flip Benham spoke at Garlow’s church in Texas (Metroplex Chapel). We protested at the Routh Street clinic in Dallas. I know why I did it, what I sincerely believed at the time, but I cringe at the memory. I know that I was sincere, and I guess Benham and Garlow are sincere as well. But sincerity only speaks to motive, not to veracity.\nAs it turns out, I was sincerely wrong.
I've done a lot of reading, maybe TOO MUCH reading, over the last month. Some of it was pure concpiracy theory rabbit holes, but a lot was good old thought-provoking stuff. Here is today's 'mind-blown' quote:
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\"As long as the majority of infections are among the healthy, the more dangerous variants circulating among some of the bedridden will be outnumbered and will become evolutionary dead ends. But when public health officials intentionally restricted spread among the young, strong, and healthy members of society by imposing lockdowns, they created a set of evolutionary conditions that risked shifting the competitive evolutionary advantage from the least dangerous variants to more dangerous variants. By locking us all up, they risked making the virus more dangerous over time. Evolution doesn’t sit around to wait for you while you develop a vaccine.\"
One more thing before I forget - what is the normal trajectory of a virus? Variants which are increasingly transmissable and decreasingly severe. All respiratory viruses behave this way, always have. But wait, what about the Delta variant? You know, the one that was so deadly that we had to shame all the unvaccinated people publicly, just to drum up compliance? Yeah, that one. This would pretty much violate these normal virus trajectories. So I Googled it. Well FML if I didn't find something right off the bat...
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\"The analysis found no difference in intensive care unit admissions, the need for invasive mechanical ventilation, or deaths in July and August compared with previous months when the Delta variant wasn’t the predominant strain.\"
We both received three shots of Moderna from April to November of 2021. In February of 2022 we were (somewhere?) exposed to COVID, this time the infamous Omicron variant. My wife got symptoms and we both went for tests at a drive-through place run by Embry Health in Yuma, AZ. She was positive, I was negative.
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At some point I've had to realize that my initial thoughts about COVID were ill-informed. I mostly blame myself, but I was definitely influenced by news coverage from major media, and by our polarized political climate as reflected in both traditional and social media. I'll try to break this down into separate chunks here:
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My general understanding of viruses and how they spread was typical. Seasonal flu was the most easily accessible model for what to expect from COVID. Based on that, the panic in the scientific, political and media realms seemed unrealistic. It took some time, but the hype from major media and scientists eventually convinced me that \"this time, it's different.\" I soon shifted my thinking to use the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic as the better metaphor.
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The initial anticipated timeline for vaccines (1.5-2 years) added an ominous sense of foreboding.
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Trump's initial handling of this from a PR perspective did not particularly inspire confidence. Combined with the media's general lambasting of his administration's efforts, the appropriate response was to doubt everything they said and take the opposite viewpoint. This led to the following conclusions:
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Hydroxychloroquine - impossible for it to help, because this would mean Trump might have been correct about something
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Ivermectin - see #1
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Vaccines - the more positive and boastful Trump was about efforts in this area, the less confident we should all be
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Everything else - any other treatments or protocols his administration brought up were suspect. Some were, in fact, outright ridiculous and potentially dangerous. Or just nonsensical. Something about light, blah blah.
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The result was that a public, scientific debate about how best to deal with this (now) pandemic was completely poisoned. Certain topics were forbidden. Discussing them at all resulted in the following sequence of events over time:
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Public shaming.
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Social media cancellation - temporary and/or permanent bans
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Blacklisting
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Possible loss of job, position, career, etc.
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Scientific paper publishing withdrawals
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Censorship in search results, platform bans, etc.
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One result of this was a complete derailment of the very standard practice in the medical community of using off-label prescriptions of existing, safe medicines to treat at least the symptoms of a very new virus where no natural immunity seemed to exist. Some doctors persisted, under the radar, and even performed observational studies.
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Another result was that some of the people in charge of our COVID response focused solely on prevention (via social distancing and lockdowns, and later mask mandates) until vaccines arrived. Treatment guidance was almost non-existent and devolved quickly to lots of ventilators which proved to have high death rates. They did not necessarily cause these deaths, but were at a minimum extremely ineffective at preventing it.
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Once vaccines arrived, off-label treatments were given another round of derision in order to prevent any vaccine hesitation. The cynic in me can only wonder if the 'big pharma' rotating door may have influenced this, as pharma employees, board members, lobbyists and others were on the Operation Warp Speed committees.
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Update: June 27, 2021
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A few things that need to be updated here:
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Many cycles of lockdown, mask requirements, etc. since I wrote this
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Need to examine initial death estimates vs reality. Some were not off by as much as I had initially thought
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Detail the .5 micron/fomite/aerosol issues that proved crucial
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Variants and their impact along with vaccines
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Lab leak hypothesis vs. zoonosis - where are the intermediate animal carriers?
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Initial thoughts: March-April 2020
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We’ve been subject to many claimed threats to human existence. Fun fact: none of them, to date, have proven true. The apocalypse is always close at hand, but never arrives.
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SARS-CoV-2 is the 2nd virus to mobilize the planet to action, the first being the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Flu pandemic. As cases begin to arrive on your shore, the fear becomes palpable. You act. An invisible virus has achieved short-term reductions in CO2 emissions that PR campaigns with scowling children could only dream of. At the same time, it has proven how futile such campaigns are, given our utter reliance on fossil fuels, even as fuel providers have taken enormous hits. In spite of all the solar and wind investments in the last 20 years, shutting down half the world has not yet been detected in CO2 levels.
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We rightly perceive that the climate has been changing for eons, moving as it wills. Our actions have such insignificant effects on it. This year’s drastic reductions will have zero long-term effects on the global climate. But lockdowns and social distancing have brought both COVID-19 and influenza to their knees. The results are immediate and measurable. Less people get sick or die. Right now, not by the end of the century.
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Even those who disagree with the response understand they are choosing between lower or higher death rates, between less over time or more now. We all make the same choices with other threats. We got rid of lead in paint and gasolines. We banned chlorofluorocarbons. We mandated seat belts. Cigarette sales are down 2/3 from their peak. When the threat is perceived as real, we collectively act. We always have. It’s how we’re wired.
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So when we don’t act, either our perception is off or the problem isn’t actually real to us. Scare tactics won’t change that. They will rightly be perceived as chicken little warnings. Even predictive models won’t help. With COVID-19 they gave us curved graphs, paths to choose from. We generally chose the flatter curve. Yet all the models greatly exaggerated the death tolls. They either overestimated the threat or underestimated our response, or both. Even when modeling with lockdowns and distancing they overestimated fatalities. This is with a very tangible, short-term actual threat to life. We have been taught another lesson in the limits of modeling.
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Soon we will be removing lockdowns and travel restrictions. Life will slowly crawl back to something approaching normal, especially after a vaccine arrives. The news media headline writers will struggle to find something new to scare us into paying attention. The 2020 election in the U.S. will be first, but then what? Most people will look at climate change modeling with new eyes, and will rightly give it the attention it deserves, which is very little. Sure, sustainable energy is great, and the more we move in that direction the better. But existential crises based on 100-year models are difficult to sustain, especially after a real crisis. And compared to epidemiological models, climate models are magnitudes of order more complicated. Why should long-range, extremely complex climate models be given more credence than short-term, less complex epidemiological models? Why should we expect anything less than even larger margins of error?
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Personally, I went through an existential crisis based on climate change fears last year, then slowly recovered. I have since come to realize that there are many problems in and around the science of climate change. When combining model issues with journal publishing pressures and issues, one could rightly begin dismissing most modern peer-reviewed science! The appropriate response to most science headlines is probably “Oh, well that’s interesting.” Anything more is unwise and unjustified. One certainly should not take it as anything more than an indication in the direction of possible truth. This may apply to the climate more than any other area. Coral reefs, sea levels, extinction threats and temperatures are all subject to these same publishing pressures and replication problems.
","I":"d-IZYG|Jq","G":1662998634179},{"C":"A]a&CR w!","A":"Consensus as Religion","D":"consensus_as_religion","E":1662998701091,"F":"
Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n
\nRegardless the accuracy of the often stated ‘97%’ scientific consensus on climate change, I think it is safe to say that most climate scientists believe that anthropogenic CO2 is warming the earth faster than it would otherwise warm. The general public is more divided. A core of conservatives disagree on whether or not the earth is even warming at all, but most skeptics merely disagree on either the anthropogenic cause or the degree of the influence. Most all skeptics disagree on the severity of the future impact and political solutions.\n
But consensus shouldn’t matter when it comes to science. As Michael Crichton put it: “There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.” Science Is Never Settled
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Google seems determined to keep me trapped in the bubble I created since 2005 or so. The have demoted much of the skeptic sites in their search results and have now banned ads the 'spread climate misinformation' (as if alarmism isn't misinformation and doesn't massively monetize via ads)
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img/google-bans-ads-climate-skeptics.png
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It’s easy to feel alone as a skeptic. But at least I’m not the only one to have moved from alarmism to skepticism. Some interesting examples:
On a related note, it just dawned on me how much the climate alarmists treat all dissent like religion does. Headlines like “how to talk to a climate skeptic” are exactly the same as religion treats agnostics and atheists. Questions like this drip with presumptuousness and arrogance and condescension!
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Rick Ross has long run a site about cults. From my perspective, most of his ‘warning signs’ apply to almost all religion, but it’s a good starting point for comparison. Here’s how I feel like some of them apply to climate alarmism (hell, I probably should have based this series on this list!):
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No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry. (to question is to deny - ‘the science is settled’)
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Unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe, evil conspiracies and persecutions. (apocalypse has been impending for four decades now!)
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There is no legitimate reason to leave, former followers are always wrong in leaving, negative or even evil. (see every article on climate change ever)
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Former members often relate the same stories of abuse and reflect a similar pattern of grievances. (see Richard Lindzen, Nils-Axel Morner, Peter Ridd, et.)
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Followers feel they can never be “good enough”. (consume less, fly less, eat less)
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The group/leader is always right. (any ‘change’ in climate or weather can be laid at the feet of global warming - which is much easier if you shift all terminology to ‘climate change’ or ‘climate emergency’ instead of warming)
\"Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction.\" - entomofauna paper
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Problems
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Biomass study
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\"In this study, over half (59%) of the trap locations were only surveyed for one year during the 27 year period. And only 26 sites were surveyed in multiple (2, 3 or 4) years – these were not all consecutive years. \" - Insects in decline: why we need more studies like this
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Entomofauna review
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\"From a scientific perspective, there is so much wrong with the paper, it really shouldn’t have been published in its current form: the biased search method, the cherry-picked studies, the absence of any real quantitative data to back up the bizarre 40% extinction rate that appears in the abstract (we don’t even have population data for 40% of the world’s insect species), and the errors in the reference list. And it was presented as a ‘comprehensive review’ and a ‘meta-analysis’, even though it is neither.\" - Moving on from the insect apocalypse to evidence-based conservation
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\"Yet other insects are not declining, and some are increasing in population size or range distribution. New species are being named every year, most of which we still know nothing about. Presenting the global decline narrative as consensus or fact is simply misrepresentation of science.\" - (same article)
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\"Based on current knowledge, it’s actually impossible to predict extinction rates for the 1 million species of insect known to science. This is because the vast majority of them have been left unstudied, some are still in museum drawers waiting to be named. It’s extremely difficult to predict an extinction rate of a species without data on its population distribution, dynamics and ecological interactions.\" - Are 40% of Insects Facing Extinction?\n
Conclusions
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My main source for these contrarian views is Manu Saunders, an ecologist at the U. of New England (Australia, not U.S.). While she intends to set the record straight on what she considers ‘hype’ surrounding some recent insect studies, she truly believes insect populations are threatened by direct human impact as well as indirectly via climate change. She’s no denier.
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In her article about the ‘entomofauna’ paper, she laid out the problems with the study and it’s media hype, but added this caveat:
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\"(N.B. I’m not suggesting the authors intentionally set out to publish flawed science. I think the scientists that built and maintained the apocalypse hype had good intentions and genuinely thought they were helping the insect conservation cause.)\"
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I have a few issues with this. First, she refers to ‘apocalypse hype’ as being built and maintained by scientists - since when is this something scientific? Since when do scientists believe they are tasked with building hype? Second, since when do scientists have causes? I’m not saying this to be naive, but is it now accepted that they should? This is perfectly normal?
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Bottom line on insects, given the current system I am not hopeful that we will ever have more than a glimpse into the actual number of species or their populations. Sampling miniscule slivers of this vast population and extrapolating supposed ‘trends’ from it is ludicrous on its face. I’d be glad to see agriculture and forestry take a more eco-friendly approach, but not at the risk of falling behind in our ongoing battle to feed humans. I think we can do both. That’s the real struggle, and that is where we should be focusing.
The first seeds of doubt in my mind re: the ‘consensus’ view on climate change came about in a rather roundabout way. First, I was reading about yet another dire astronomical number of extinctions that were already under way both now and in the near future (caused, at least in part, by climate change). But this time something snapped and I just couldn’t believe the numbers. So many numbers were being thrown out on a regular basis, and yet no actual newly-extinct species were being named. I dug in.
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Species-Area Relationship
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Research led me to realize that almost all recent articles about mass extinctions were estimates – estimates! – based on the (flawed) concept of ‘species-area relationship’ (SAR) - yet documented habitat loss results in very few extinctions, as species tend to be much more resilient and less dependent on specific habitats than the concept theorizes. They hunker down or find new habitats.
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Extinction from habitat loss is the signature conservation problem of the twenty-first century. Despite its importance, estimating extinction rates is still highly uncertain because no proven direct methods or reliable data exist for verifying extinctions.
Following are two links - the first is the original blog post. Yes, it is on a web site that climate change alarmists scorn, having been firmly branded as 'cLiMaTe DeNiErS'. This does not alter the fact that it contains math and calculations which you can easily check. The second is the resulting white paper. The first is more readable, the second more methodological. I am adding these on Aug. 5, 2021, long after I originally concluded that SAR, as normally applied, is flawed.
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by Willis Eschenbach - Abstract - The record of continental (as opposed to island) bird and mammal extinctions in the last five centuries was analyzed to determine if the “species-area…
We examined historical extinction rates for birds and mammals and...
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Species Over-counting
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Additionally, estimates of existing species are wildly over-counted. Marine species estimates were roughly halved after removing duplicates from the main database at the World Register of Marine Species (228,000 instead of 418,000). This might also reduce the number of other known species from 1.9 million to 1.5 million.
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Is it 150 species a day or 24 a day or far less than that? Prominent scientists cite dramatically different numbers when estimating the rate at which species are going extinct. Why is that?
If you can’t count them, how would you know if they actually went extinct? Furthermore, the vast majority of bird, mammal and reptile extinctions have occurred on isolated islands.
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Throughout 3.8 billion years of evolution on Earth, the inexorable trend has been toward an ever greater variety of species. With the past two mass extinction events there were soon many more species alive after each catastrophe than there were before it.
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The idea that we are edging up to a mass extinction is not just wrong – it’s a recipe for panic and paralysis
Yet species estimates continue to be speculated at insanely large numbers. 100 million 1 Trillion (!) has frequently been cited. Recently that number has been narrowed down considerably. Current estimates are this side of 9 million. But that means that scientists believe that somehow 7 million different species have managed to remain hidden and undiscovered. Almost all of these are microscopic.
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The Rarity of Extinctions
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Then there’s the IUCN. They have a problem. On one hand, they are very much beating the drum about how dire the situation is. They want to make sure the enviro-left knows they are on their side, fighting the good fight, trying to save our planet’s species from imminent extinction. On the other hand, they are the keepers of the ‘official’ numbers of extinct species. 877 extinctions since 1500. That’s 1.68 species per year. While any extinction is bad, it’s hard to get people worried by touting numbers like “almost two species per year go extinct.”
The 2019-2020 bushfires in Australia have produced sensational headlines. The projected animal death toll was 400 million, then half a billion, then 800 million, and finally, predictably, a billion. And then ‘many, many billions.’ (is any estimate too high?) (update: evidently not - now TRILLIONS)
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img/horse-fire.jpeg
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AUSTRALIA’S wildfires could lead to the loss of life of up to a TRILLION species, an expert has alarmingly warned.
On top of that, many species will/may go extinct (depending on which headline you read on which date).
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The WWF says 10,000 - 100,000 species will go extinct each year. This is based on something called the ‘background extinction rate’ - with claims of ‘literally dozens’ of species going extinct every day.
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Given the actual extinction rate, 1.68 per year, it is difficult to make these numbers line up. Dozens would mean a minimum of 8,760 species extinctions per year.
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1.68 vs 8,760.
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Basically the argument seems to be that this estimate must be right and lays the blame on the fact that species and populations are hard to document and count. So, basically, just ‘we’re pretty sure it’s true so trust us.’
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A projected spate of extinctions of animals and plants this century may be less drastic than feared because the most widely used scientific method can exaggerate losses by more than 160 percent, a study said on Wednesday.
I worry how many more years scientists (and reporters) can report catastrophic trendlines that predict little to no life of any sort on the planet within our lifetimes and not have people notice that this isn’t actually happening.
\nSource: Dynamic Ecology blog -\n
So the 2020 version of the Living Planet Report has been released to massive headlines blaring catastrophe. The central claim is that vertebrate (i.e. fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, mammal) local …
All of this reading up on extinction rates and population estimates caused me to see a problem in the so-called ‘science’ around all of this. I still have complete faith in the ‘scientific process.’ But I have begun to lose faith in what we generally call ‘science’ - specifically, the academic community and the peer review system. That shit is just fucked beyond saving! And it is also the source of almost all science that is ever covered by the news media. More on that later. But first, let’s talk about 🌊[[sea_levels]]
Having been born into a fundamentalist Christian household, I am intimately familiar with the apocalyptic mindset. From the beginning, the end of the world has always been nigh. The writers of the so-called ‘gospels’ put apocalypse in Jesus’ mouth frequently. He told his disciples of a time, supposedly before they would die, that the entire temple in Jerusalem would be a pile of rubble. By the time the writer of ‘Revelations’ was finished, Jesus returns and the entire earth would be destroyed and a ‘new heaven and earth’ would be created, along with a 1,000 year reign with Jesus as literal king. After this, Satan would, for unknown reasons, be released from hell and the final war to end all wars would be fought. After this, actual heaven.
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Yes, it is completely wacky from the outside, but on the inside it has consumed a lot of Christianity’s time ever since. The number of people who decided that, in spite of biblical admonitions to the contrary, they had, in fact, determined when Jesus would return to set all of this into motion, is surprisingly large. Once newspapers came into being, almost any headline could be interpreted as a ‘sign’ that the prophecies of Revelations had begun to be fulfilled.
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The most famous recent example of this was Hal Lindsey’s book ‘Late, Great Planet Earth.’ Around the same time, similar books were published in the secular press, such as “Silent Spring” and “The Population Bomb.” All predicted apocalypse, just for different reasons. But they had one common theme – the culprit to blame for the end of the world was humanity.
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In the Bible man was implicated from the start. Or, more accurately, ‘that woman’, Eve. We all inherited our ‘sin nature’ from her desire for a fruit. Again, I know that sounds bonkers from the outside. But Rachel Carlson and Paul Ehrlich touch on similar themes. Man’s hubris, in the form of capitalism and consumption and greed were killing the planet. If we don’t stop (repent) we will all die, and take a lot of wildlife with us.
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Here there is a bit of a disconnect. From a Christian viewpoint, ecology is a bit of a waste of time. If God will destroy and remake the world, why bother saving trees? Better to focus on our immortal, eternal souls. But for the Environmental movement, the earth is everything, and these two books helped launch a movement.
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Carlson’s efforts may or may not have actually saved any birds, but it most definitely cost millions of lives from malaria, especially in more poor countries. Ehrlich’s book(s) have proven ridiculously incorrect, thanks in large part to the ‘green revolution,’ but that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to parrot his original thesis of an eventual tipping point where famine and the resulting chaos will kill much of humanity. Even though the world population has grown massively since Ehrlich’s first book, we continue to think of the earth as over-populated.
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But now we have reached the ultimate apocalypse – for our sins, the planet itself will kill us all.
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Gaia’s Revenge
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Generally speaking, climate change proponents share a belief about the world with environmental apocalyptists: it is fragile! Our man-made chemicals are evil, our very bodies consume more than we can produce, and now even the very act of breathing changes the atmospheric balance in a way that dooms the earth. Our exhalations are pollution.
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Skeptics, on the other hand, believe CO2 is an important but minuscule part of our atmosphere, one which enables us to live by giving life to plants. Any greenhouse impact it may have is negligible and mostly offset by other factors in our extremely complex and chaotic climate system.
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Up until 2005 or so I took the default conservative position of generally laughing and scoffing at climate change/global warming ideas. Once I shifted my politics to the left I eventually ran across Greg Craven’s infamous video series which caused me to change my opinion on climate change.
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I settled into this mindset for many years, but balanced by hope that we would turn the ship around and reduce emissions just in time to save us from the worst case scenario. Then I read a couple of books and basically lost all hope and sunk into despondency. I had a full-on existential crisis!
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One book was The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace Wells. Unfortunately Wells chose to try and provide a little hope in the form of geoengineering, which didn’t sit well with the Doomers who criticized him for wearing rose-colored glasses in this open letter to Wells, published in The Ecologist. The emphasis in the book was on how unlivable the world will be if emissions aren’t reduced.
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The other book was The End of Ice by Dahr Jamail. Jamail basically has zero hope left, and presents none in his book. Basically he talks about living out the rest of his life as a form of wake, bearing witness to the end. He is, evidently, still living on acreage on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state with a community of friends.
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Even though there was still a part of my brain to which this apocalyptic worldview appealed, my thinking had shifted enough that I was able to pull up before it was too late for me. This came as a result of a lot of reading, much of it on the internet, but a couple of books really helped:
\"in every age everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; nobody seems to reckon on any improvement in the next generation ... On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?\". - Thomas Macauley, 1830
Coral reefs regularly go through bleaching episodes, generally tied to ENSO events. For years each one of these bleaching events have been tied to climate change. The reefs have been predicted to die off permanently for decades now.
In the meantime, Peter Ridd had been whistleblowing on this particular group of scientists at James Cook University. He was castigated and fired. He won a wrongful termination lawsuit but it is under appeal. Hopefully this latest revelation of fraud will turn things in his favor. UPDATE: he lost the appeal but gained employment elsewhere
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So what is the actual status of the world’s coral reefs, specifically the Great Barrier Reef?
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Evidently they’re just fine!
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Due to the remarkable mechanisms that corals have developed to adapt to changing temperatures, especially the ability to swap symbionts, corals are perhaps the least endangered of any ecosystem to future climate change – natural or man-made.
Clarification and thoughts from Brian McGill’s Dynamic Ecology blog:
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“they estimate the total number of individuals of each species found in North America (excluding Mexico) from an extrapolation from data covering a fraction of a percent of the US.”
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“Wouldn’t we be much better off to say: a few species have declined drastically, a few have increased drastically many haven’t changed that much? This is a general pattern, not just in these birds.”
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From the comments section:
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“I hope it was clear in my post that I respect what was done by the authors. My main thoughts are what the journalists are going to do with this (not the responsibility of the scientists). We are going to create an impression that birds are on their way out. And 20 years from now when they’re still very much around but differently composed, that is going to bite our credibility.” - Brian McGill
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“if you look closely at the data, the great majority of the decline happened before 2000. Counting habitat groups, 40% are stable or increasing since 2000. Everything declined Pre 2000.” - rccarl
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“migratory songbirds are showing most of the declines – which might be more about their subtropical/tropical winter habitat (or their migratory corridors).” - Brian McGill
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“First, is it even valid to sum up across all bird species? After >65 MY of divergence, do sparrows, hummingbirds, cormorants, and loons really have much in common any more? Do they live in similar habitats, eat the same food, have a common physiology, or share the same habits? If the answer is no, then any changes in the sum can’t be attributed to any general causes. And if they’re the sum of many separate causes that apply to different groups, then a priori the changes in the sum are due to the trends of the most populous species and habitats. Which as you say are just the ones that raise the fewest concerns.” - Joseph Ycas
* Population Estimates\n* WWF Mexico Weird Control of Reserve Areas\n* No unapproved researchers allowed\n* Our trip to Cerro Pelon reserve in early 2020
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“Collaboration with WWF-Mexico is key, however; due to an agreement with the Mexican government, only the organization and employees of Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve are allowed to measure these monarch colonies.”
This quote matches information given to us by the owners of the BnB where we stayed during our visit.
","I":"d-IZYG|Jq","G":1663001736073},{"C":"7FNM|Xc%&","A":"Sea Levels","D":"sea_levels","E":1663001757069,"F":"Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n\nDepending on which coast you look at, the longest-running tide gauges all show the same story - 2-3mm/year or 11 inches per century of sea level rise. This doesn’t change even when you take rising and falling ground levels into account, or GPS being added to the tide gauge station for verification. Accuracy checks and balances don’t change the numbers. The seas have been slowly, inexorably rising ever since we began checking, but there is no evidence of any acceleration of any kind. There is no signal that CO2 has had any effect on sea levels.\n\nSatellites are now measuring greater rates of rise than this, primarily on the open ocean, after many different ‘adjustments’ to the numbers. But this is where I ran into another ‘common sense’ problem.\n\nWhere does sea level rise matter? Simple, obvious answer: THE COAST. If the coastal tide gauges show one number but satellites show another out on the open ocean, which do you care about? You care about the one nearest to your front door. Another thought occurred to me - what about islands? Those would have both issues present - being in the middle of the ocean and having a coastline. I remembered some past discussion about islands being disappeared due to climate change, specifically the Maldives. So I checked on the latest figures….\n\nIt isn’t happening.\n\nFirst, the Maldives seem to be oblivious to their losing battle against the seas since they are building like crazy to capitalize on tourism. Five new airports in 2019, four more in 2020!\n\n[Maldives to Open Five New Airports in 2019](https://maldives.net.mv/31166/maldives-to-open-five-new-airports-in-2019/)\n\n[Maldives to Open Four New Airports in 2020](https://maldives.net.mv/35056/maldives-to-open-four-new-airports-in-2020/)\n\nIn spite of this, the last two presidents of the Maldives have waged PR campaigns aimed at extracting money from Western countries, the source of the CO2.\n\nOther studies show that most Pacific islands are actually growing, not sinking…\n\n[Low-lying Pacific islands ‘growing not sinking’](https://www.bbc.com/news/10222679)\n\nThe Indian Ocean area, including the Maldives and Bangladesh have seen no sea level rise in decades.\n\n[Evidence-based Climate Science - Chapter 7](http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/pdfs/Evid_Based_Climate_Sci/Ev_Based_Climate_Sci_Chap7.pdf)","I":"d-IZYG|Jq","H":"md","G":1663001833706},{"C":"#/N?s;)O0","A":"Temperatures","D":"temperatures","E":1663001879936,"F":"
Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n
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This is perhaps too large a topic for one blog post. I have just finished reading dozens of articles on this topic. Even after correcting for possible motive/bias issues, and after weeding out ad hominems, I am left with the following conclusions:
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The temperature dataset from 1850-1906 or so covers less than 50% of the globe.
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The Southern hemisphere data coverage reached 50% only in 1950.
It is perfectly safe to say that the earth has been warming since the end of the last ice age.
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It is not perfectly safe to say that the last century contains a signature to prove accelerated temperature rises are occurring, or that they are anthropogenic.
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It is not safe to conclude that CO2 at .0415% of the atmosphere is significant of anything.
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It is not safe to conclude that CO2’s correlation with temperature is consistent historically, or predictive.
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It is also not safe to say that any climate model can possibly handle the complexity of forecasting future global temperature averages based on CO2 levels.
Since the greenhouse effect of CO2 declines per unit as the total amount increases (diminishing returns), the expected increase in temperature from growing CO2 emissions by the end of this century is less than 1 ⁰K (C).
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From ‘The Art and Science of Climate Model Tuning’:
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The increase of about one Kelvin of the global mean temperature observed from the beginning of the industrial era, hereafter 20th century warming, is a de facto litmus test for climate models. However, as a test of model quality, it is not without issues because the desired result is known to model developers and therefore becomes a potential target of the development.
To do: Need to explore analogy between markets and climate. Large, chaotic systems. Models backtested and tuned, equally useless for forecasting.
","I":"d-IZYG|Jq","G":1663001931384},{"C":"b\\HGn])sV","A":"The Replication Crisis","D":"the_replication_crisis","E":1663001956622,"F":"Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n\n\nThis one goes beyond just climate.\n\nIt would seem that this would be more of a problem with the ‘soft’ sciences - psychology, etc., where research often depends on more subjective measurements such as whether someone feels better. But even when hard numbers are involved, the misapplication of statistics and biased interpretation can significantly shift things. Below are a series of links both explaining the larger picture and providing examples in medicine, clinical research, economics, sports and hydrology.\n\n[Why Most Published Research Findings Are False](https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124)\n\n[Replication Crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis)\n\n[What is Medicine’s 5 Sigma?](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2815%2960696-1/fulltext?rss%3Dyes)\n\n> The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.\n\n[40% of Economics Experiments Fail Replication](https://www.science.org/content/article/about-40-economics-experiments-fail-replication-survey)\n\n[The Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science](https://glenn.thedixons.net/losing-my-faith-in-science/the-replication-crisis)\n\n[How Shoddy Statistics Found a Home in Sports Research](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-shoddy-statistics-found-a-home-in-sports-research/)\n\n[Hydrology and Water Resources](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6390703/)\n\n> Our findings of low reproducibility of research published in six hydrology and water resources journals in 2017 mirrors low rates of reproducibility previously reported in psychology (100 experiments) Assessing data availability and research reproducibility in hydrology and water resources, computer systems research (613 articles), and articles published in Science (204 articles).","I":"d-IZYG|Jq","H":"md","G":1663001992518},{"C":"7Z2T1Y*(s","A":"My Career In Desktop Support","D":"my_career_in_desktop_support","E":1663002038621,"F":"
Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n
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The benefits of staying off the corporate ladder
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The first time I came even close to having a clue about my 'career' was when I felt 'called' into the ministry. But even then it was just a vague idea - pastor, missionary, music director. It could have been any of those. After marriage and my first child priorities shifted to just paying the bills. I left college and started working. I could type a bit faster than ninety words per minute, so I started doing clerical work, then advanced to word processing. That definitely paid the bills for many years.
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I was once fired from a job where I was trying to basically be an executive secretary. I truly sucked at that. But the man firing me said I seemed more interested in the computer/software end of things and that if he had an opening in that area he would have kept me. It was a light-bulb moment. As soon as I could I transitioned to tech support, then desktop support. I've been doing that ever since.
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For most of my I.T. career I was an hourly employee. I had many opportunities to apply for positions that were salaried: Sys Admin, team lead, etc. I declined to apply, because I could not justify the tradeoffs. Sure, more money! Prestige! Upwards mobility! But I always viewed my job as a means to an end. It paid the bills and provided benefits, but it never gave me a sense of fulfillment or accomplishment. I always understood that I was a maintenance worker. I was facilitating everyone else's jobs, keeping the cogs greased and the wheels rolling. I was never in danger of being awarded a Nobel Prize for anything, or landing an interview in a major magazine. So my search for significance was always outside of work. For most of my life I sought this through church.
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Once I was no longer in church I spent a fair amount of time exploring various adventure sports and hobbies: swing dancing, rock climbing, motorcycles, storm-chasing, genealogy, cigars and pipes, wine-making, antique reselling. I also began work on a memoir, more of a writing exercise than a serious attempt. Later, when we began making serious efforts toward retiring early, I explored multiple means of making money 'online' - drop-shipping, ad and affiliate revenue from traffic, etc.
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Most of my co-workers had little time for such pursuits. I watched them give an extra 10-20 hours to our employers, often for some weak form of compensation that could rarely be used. If you can't get your job done in a 40-hour work week, how can you afford to take vacation, much less any form of 'comp day' you might be given? Soon they maxed out the allowable comp and vacation days. I knew that I would lose much of my time for things I truly enjoyed if I were to be promoted. So I stayed in desktop support, and I'm glad I did.
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In the end, we both left work with pensions and social security, small 401k's and a decent savings account. Just by living minimally and keeping expenses low we were able to save additional money back even while living in one of the more expensive cities in Texas, even on just one salary. I never had an impressive title or made big decisions yet I think we're going to be ok. I hope I live to 100, because it may take me that long to catch up on all of my unfinished projects - writing, genealogy, hiking, pickleball, fitness, travel photos, birding, web sites, etc. I may have technically retired early, but it doesn't really feel like it was early enough.
","I":"Xd(n2yal%","G":1663002084084},{"C":"J4hm#wN[s","A":"Twenty Years of TheDixons.net","D":"twenty_years_of_thedixons-net","E":1663002116035,"F":"
Date planted: \nDate last tended: \n
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I can't believe I have owned a domain name for its entire 20-year history! This main domain (thedixons.net) was first registered 20 years ago as of tomorrow, July 28. Here is a copy of the original domain name registration. $70 for two years! (click to embiggen)
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I have changed the content so many times, it isn't even funny, but the focus was always my family history. Here is one of the earliest screenshots of my home page, courtesy of Archive.org
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Some interesting notes on that early version:
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That's some seriously minimalist html there!
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Yes, my 'blog' was called The Daily Rant - hand-coded w/ vbScript, ASP, served via IIS and MSAccess
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Yes, I had vacation pics and stories.
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Yes, I had a really cheesy web company name (WWW=World Wide Web -> Web Wide Word) - get it, I was 'getting' the 'word' out on the web!!! Genius marketing there
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Oh yes, I totally coded the whole thing using Note Tab Pro.
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Archive.org has grabbed 163 snapshots of the site in 20 years. There were periods where the site was not active as I kept changing my mind on servers, software and the overall focus.
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I'm very proud of this, in a nerdy sort of way, of course. A personal domain was pretty rare back then. But I'm also proud at having the follow-through to still be here, with a renewed enthusiasm for the old days when one crafted their own content. This current Digital Garden concept on this subdomain (glenn.thedixons.net) is one result of that. Who knows, maybe some day this subdomain will have its own twenty-year history?
The Motley Fool used to be a thing, a pretty big thing. Two dudes trying to bring the little guy into the world of investing. They were part of a wave of new investors taking advantage of online brokerages like E-Trade which drastically lowered the barriers to and cost of investing for the masses.
Using their discussion boards I eventually found a board about Mechanical Investing where multiple people were coming up with schemes to constantly and consistenly pick stocks based on multiple criteria with the goal of beating the market average. They seemed to work really well. They possibly kept me above the average, including when the dot com bust hit, but being slightly above a quickly declining average didn't help much. I later determined that these strategies worked only because they were riding a bull market bubble, not because of anything inherent.
As far as I can tell I joined the Motley Fool boards on Jan. 5, 1999. It was a fun time and a good lesson in investing.
The Motley Fool used to be a thing, a pretty big thing. Two dudes trying to bring the little guy into the world of investing. They were part of a wave of new investors taking advantage of online brokerages like E-Trade which drastically lowered the barriers to and cost of investing for the masses.
Using their discussion boards I eventually found a board about Mechanical Investing where multiple people were coming up with schemes to constantly and consistenly pick stocks based on multiple criteria with the goal of beating the market average. They seemed to work really well. They possibly kept me above the average, including when the dot com bust hit, but being slightly above a quickly declining average didn't help much. I later determined that these strategies worked only because they were riding a bull market bubble, not because of anything inherent.
As far as I can tell I joined the Motley Fool boards on Jan. 5, 1999. It was a fun time and a good lesson in investing.