Reasonable Conclusions

About Me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

FROM	TO	DATE CHANGED

Total Carnivore	Vegan	January 2016
Creationist/anti-intellectual	Science devotee	2000
Fundamentalist Christian	Atheist	2003
Free-market capitalist	Leaning anarcho-syndicalist	2006 (Read Chomsky)
Denied man-made climate change	We’ve killed the planet	2005
Voted straight-ticket Republican	Vote Democrat but anarchist-friendly	2008
Leaning anarcho-syndicalist	Capitalist with strong regulation	2019
We’ve killed the planet	A lot more skeptical these days	2019
Feared and hated Trump	Stopped fearing or hating Trump	2024
Vegan	Total Carnivore	2026

2020 Elections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I am just starting to research this. We all know the narratives. Democrats say it was all a completely normal and fair election. Republicans claim it was rigged and stolen. At this point I’m leaning toward the ‘rigged’ concept, which could be as simple as jerrymandered redistricting or as nefarious as fraudulent ballots. Not sure.

So far all I have is some diagrams I have been drawing to try and figure things out. Those are below. More to come soon, I hope.

An Atheist's Love for Keith Green

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I 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.

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.

Apocalypse Mirage

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Apocalypse, Apocalypse,
I love ya, Apocalypse,
you’re always a day away…
(w/ apologies to Annie)

[last updated June 27, 2021 6:31 AM (MDT)]

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.

Consensus as Religion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Regardless 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.

Coral Reefs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

One recent study that went so far as to project how climate change would separately disable reef fish to the point where they would basically be sitting ducks for predators and be gone quite soon has now failed a replication test and an independent investigation has been launched. One of the authors, Oona Lönnstedt, was first found guilty of misconduct (fabricating tests/data) on a separate paper re: micro-plastic damage in young fish in Dec. 2017 at Uupsala Univ. in Sweden.

COVID-19

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Update: April 17, 2022

I’ve done a lot of reading, maybe TOO MUCH reading, over the last month. Some of it was pure conspiracy theory rabbit holes, but a lot was good old thought-provoking stuff. Here is today’s ‘mind-blown’ quote:

“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.”

Deconversion

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’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):

“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”

Disappearing Birds

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A recent example of ‘speculative extinction’ is the recent study/publicity campaign regarding North American bird population.

Original Paper

3 Billion Birds

Clarification and thoughts from Brian McGill’s Dynamic Ecology blog:

“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.”

“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.”

Elections

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just 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.

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.

Insect Armaggedon

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Threat Headlines

The global ecosystem is rapidly collapsing… insect biomass plummets 75% in one generation… scientists warn of “decimation”… humanity may not survive much longer

Warning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after dramatic plunge in insect numbers

Source

More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers

Claims

“Over 40% of insect species are threatened with extinction.” - entomofauna paper

Losing My Faith in Science

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”

Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption - Marcia Angell

[last updated June 27, 2021 6:31 AM (MDT)]

Monarch Butterflies

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Are Monarch Butterflies Going Extinct?

Things to expand on

Population Estimates
WWF Mexico Weird Control of Reserve Areas
No unapproved researchers allowed
Our trip to Cerro Pelon reserve in early 2020

“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.”

We need a better way to measure monarch populations

My Career In Desktop Support

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The benefits of staying off the corporate ladder

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.

Sea Levels

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Depending 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.

Speculative Extinctions

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

[last updated October 26, 2021 6:26 AM (CDT)]

Seeds of Doubt

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.

Temperatures

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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:

The temperature dataset from 1850-1906 or so covers less than 50% of the globe.

The Southern hemisphere data coverage reached 50% only in 1950.

Source: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data_v3/

The Replication Crisis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This one goes beyond just climate.

It 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.

Twenty Years of TheDixons.net

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t believe I have owned a domain name for its entire 24-year history! This main domain (thedixons.net) was first registered 24 years ago as of July 28, 2024. Here is a copy of the original domain name registration. $70 for two years! (click to embiggen)

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