Bryan & Anthony, Seventh Day Adventists… Kinda |404|

Staring at them both on my bookshelf right now. ;;/?
Dr. Mary's Monkey disturbed me greatly, especially Mary Sherman's likely Cyclotron murder.
But I have not yet read Me & Lee - hoping to get to it soon. Been sitting there for years. Agghhh....
I'll be interested to see what you think... the tie-in between these two books is especially chilling as it provides independent corroboration of this horrible history.
 
But even given all this, I still favor AGW as the primary argument.
Are you aware of the situation on Venus?

Venus is usually described as an example of extreme heating due to atmospheric CO2 - the atmosphere is mainly CO2, and the surface temperature is somewhare round 460 C. This sounds like cut and dried evidence, until you realise that the Magellan spacecraft measured the temperature and pressure profiles down through the atmosphere:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180128074727/http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/vel/1918vpt.htm

This shows that the pressure at the surface is 92 atmospheres, and if you interpolate between the two graphs (already done - follow the gray lines) you can see that the temperature in the atmosphere corresonding to 1 atmosphere pressure is just 66 C.

This link was helpfully removed recently, as you can see from the wayback engine.

The planet is about half as far from the sun, so it will receive 4 times the energy per square meter (although this may be offset somewhat by the planet's high albedo).

I'd say those figures imply that any greenhouse gas effect is pretty negligible.

There was a talk about Venus on the radio recently, and the 'fact' that Venus showed the effect of AGW, so I wrote a polite email to one of the scientists involved, and am yet to receive a reply.

David
 
Are you aware of the situation on Venus?

Venus is usually described as an example of extreme heating due to atmospheric CO2 - the atmosphere is mainly CO2, and the surface temperature is somewhare round 460 C. This sounds like cut and dried evidence, until you realise that the Magellan spacecraft measured the temperature and pressure profiles down through the atmosphere:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180128074727/http://www.datasync.com/~rsf1/vel/1918vpt.htm

This shows that the pressure at the surface is 92 atmospheres, and if you interpolate between the two graphs (already done - follow the gray lines) you can see that the temperature in the atmosphere corresonding to 1 atmosphere pressure is just 66 C.

This link was helpfully removed recently, as you can see from the wayback engine.

The planet is about half as far from the sun, so it will receive 4 times the energy per square meter (although this may be offset somewhat by the planet's high albedo).

I'd say those figures imply that any greenhouse gas effect is pretty negligible.

There was a talk about Venus on the radio recently, and the 'fact' that Venus showed the effect of AGW, so I wrote a polite email to one of the scientists involved, and am yet to receive a reply.

David

I don't quite get this, David. I must be missing something. I don't see why you say "any greenhouse gas effect is pretty negligible" -- not challenging your conclusion, just saying I hope you can explain it a little better for me.
 
Are you aware of the situation on Venus?
The planet is about half as far from the sun, so it will receive 4 times the energy per square meter (although this may be offset somewhat by the planet's high albedo).

I'd say those figures imply that any greenhouse gas effect is pretty negligible.

Yes, David and agreed. I remember reading Carl Sagan in 1973. I think it was Cosmic Connection, in which he cited that carbon dioxide had rendered Venus a hell of sorts. 900 degrees Fahrenheit, otherwise it would be another Earth! I remember thinking then that the inverse-square law applied. Now we know that Venus model to be essentially anachronistic politics, and not real science.

The problem I have with Sagan is, that we did not hold the evidence back then, which we do now regarding AGW. How was Sagan so sure that AGW was to blame? And we now know decades later that Sagan was not 100% vested into telling the truth on some key matters of public interest. The evidence was far from conclusive in 1971, when he wrote the book. This hints at a play called a Verdrängung Mechanism - a type of Omega Hypothesis, which I saw at play in the maturation of AGW. They declared the answer back in the 60's. The problem is, that the evidence back then was not that good - and now we use induction to provide more evidence, ex ante - and ex ante induction, especially inductive ex ante modus absens is problematic. Such 'knowledge' can become an Omega Hypothesis (a hypothesis which has become more important to protect, than the integrity of science itself). To wit:
Verdrängung Mechanism – the level of control and idea displacement achieved through skillful employment of the duality between pluralistic ignorance and the Lindy Effect. The longer a control-minded group can sustain an Omega Hypothesis perception by means of the tactics and power protocols of proactive pluralistic ignorance, the greater future acceptability and lifespan that idea will possess. As well, the harder it will to be dethrone as an accepted norm or perception as a ‘proved’ null hypothesis.
The above is exactly what happened. This does bother me. That being said however, I do have a company in the works which promotes negative carbon-contribution energy. Despite my reservations about the form of inference, I still believe the issue to be of grave concern.

But if in the end, I find that I have wasted millions of dollars in useless engineering, recovery, energy and construction projects - when climate change is not stemming primarily from AGW - then I am gonna be seeking censure/prison for its promoters.

Science must always operate inside the public trust. I don't want to intimidate scientists who are just doing their job - but neither should they intimidate and act as lords of the public.

(Your posts are great btw... I read most all of them... ;;/?)
 
The above is exactly what happened. This does bother me. That being said however, I do have a company in the works which promotes negative carbon-contribution energy. Despite my reservations about the form of inference, I still believe the issue to be of grave concern.

But if in the end, I find that I have wasted millions of dollars in useless engineering, recovery, energy and construction projects - when climate change is not stemming primarily from AGW - then I am gonna be seeking censure/prison for its promoters.
I'd say that either there is some important missing factor - after all, Venus is not identical to Earth - for example no clouds of water vapour in its atmosphere (I think), but the sheer fact that it is becoming hard to get at the data, suggests to me that NASA finds that data embarrassing.

I'm not sure exactly what "negative carbon-contribution energy" is, but if it makes money, what could possibly be wrong :)

David
 
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I don't quite get this, David. I must be missing something. I don't see why you say "any greenhouse gas effect is pretty negligible" -- not challenging your conclusion, just saying I hope you can explain it a little better for me.
Well the correct figure to compare with the temperature on the surface of the earth, is 66 C - the temperature at the same atmospheric pressure on Venus. The fact that the surface of Venus is bloody hot, is simply because the pressure is so much greater. When you go up a mountain, or fly in an aircraft equipped with external thermometers, you see how sensitive atmospheric temperature is to its pressure.

66C is hotter than earth's surface temperature, but Venus is so much nearer to the sun! There isn't a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus!

David
 
But if in the end, I find that I have wasted millions of dollars in useless engineering, recovery, energy and construction projects - when climate change is not stemming primarily from AGW - then I am gonna be seeking censure/prison for its promoters.

The most deserving of being locked up are those suppressing the technologies which would make this a non-issue. Unless of course there is a legitimate reason, other than greed, for suppressing "free" energy sources?
 
The most deserving of being locked up are those suppressing the technologies which would make this a non-issue. Unless of course there is a legitimate reason, other than greed, for suppressing "free" energy sources?
Well one of the most promising is 'cold fusion'. This seems to be H+Ni => Cu + heat. It certainly does seem to have been suppressed deliberately. The most charitable explanation for this might be that the reaction could get out of control and create possibilities of a powerful bomb. On the other hand, a good deal of research (under the banner Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR)) has been done by now.

David
 
Well the correct figure to compare with the temperature on the surface of the earth, is 66 C - the temperature at the same atmospheric pressure on Venus. The fact that the surface of Venus is bloody hot, is simply because the pressure is so much greater. When you go up a mountain, or fly in an aircraft equipped with external thermometers, you see how sensitive atmospheric temperature is to its pressure.

66C is hotter than earth's surface temperature, but Venus is so much nearer to the sun! There isn't a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus!

David

Thanks. I get your point now. :)
 
While we are discussing the physics of CAGW, here is something else to ponder.

I first heard this in a side meeting at a UKIP conference. For those who aren't British, UKIP is a party somewhat aligned with Donald Trump. It's members are supposed to be old, uneducated, idiots. Anyway, we had a meeting in which the speaker pointed out something that should have been obvious to everyone who thought about CAGW - even for 5 mins (but it had fooled me too)!

Real greenhouses do not use the 'greenhouse effect'. The greenhouse effect is all about the idea that when heat is radiated up to a layer of CO2, it is absorbed and then re-emitted. However, a real greenhouse works by stopping convection - the warm air in a greenhouse would rise away from the greenhouse, except that the glass is in the way - if you open the doors, the heat escapes.
I have seen this grudgingly acknowledged on a pro-CAGW website. It was buried several paragraphs into some text, and then kind of dismissed. However, we have all been deliberately fooled by that false analogy - after all, surely any impartial climatologist worth his salt would have pointed out immediately that CO2 warming and greenhouses work in totally different ways.

Maybe there are no impartial climatologists?

David
 
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Dieties are made from man's imaginations, they were meant to be used archetypically to over come are lower base animalistic nature to become divine gods and goddesses or in some views become titans.

I think it is better to see that human imagination crafts the divine as it can. The potter will shape the clay as he will, but it will always be clay. Its the substance and not the form that matters. If we imagine the divine poorly what we end up with has limited value. So if we imagine a God with needs and attributes that we desire it to have then they become the filters through which the divine will flow.

However it is not correct to say that "deities are made from man's imaginations". It is better to say that 'deities are formed in man's imaginations' - but, even so, that is still not wholly accurate. There are fundamental aspects of the divine that have their own relative 'wholeness' - they are of the One, not as the One. Their actual nature is beyond the capacity of human imagination - so to the extent that we can know them we can imagine only pale imitations (imaginations) that are crafted from what we know.

And in the absence of 'rational' knowledge of the gods we tell myths so that intuition and inspiration can fuse with imagination to give us something that has meaning - even if scantily comprehended. We aid that weak understanding by making rituals and rites that intensify our engagement. We tell moral tales that denote our idealised engagement with the sacred - and when that goes awry.

The advent of humanistic atheism and materialism disrupted that natural human process. But, now, as scientific thought is progressively recognising a trans-rational component of our reality, we are moving back toward acknowledging mythos as a valid and essential element of our psyches. This is reflected in the themes of movies, for example. We hunger for a medium by which we can know the divine and the sacred.

We need a capacity to imagine the divine in ways that are harmonious with the sacred, rather than reflective of the human ego. But that is always a problem -balancing ego and yearning for the divine. That's why religion has a bad name in our culture - the balance is out of whack. In the abandonment of religion we imagined that there was no higher expression of intelligence than human intellect. Unfortunately that sublime hubris mingled with a native instinct for religion and bred the idiocy that dominates our culture. It will pass, eventually.
 
Is Christianity worth saving? Can Christianity be redeemed? We can forgive it its sins, maybe. But can it become more than it has been?

Let's start by thinking about what is meant by redemption. It means there is a potential to be restored to a state - a sense of separation and the prospect of reunification. The idea has been distorted by the OT rendition of the Eden story in which humans were expelled from paradise for disobedience. A sin was committed and we must seek redemption - atone for the sin. This is a poor and distorted interpretation.

For readers who have had a Christian upbringing the Prodigal Son is a better version of the theme of separation, going away and coming back. It is the story of our evolution as persons - our initiation into adulthood from childhood in a psychospiritual sense. The Biblical serpent is the wisdom seeker in us who tempts us to be disobedient to the safe rules of childhood. We are sent forth into suffering until we gain wisdom and know we have returned. That can take many lifetimes. It is the theme of the human soul's journey.

The core of Christianity is a myth. It really the only thing that matters. There was a time when myth and history were part of the same continuum - as indeed they still are - but no longer recognised as such. Now we are induced to believe that whether an event occurs in history (in the material world) matters as to whether it is 'real' or not. And this from a faith tradition that also says imaging is as bad/good actually physically doing. Which is it?

All acts begin in head or heart - in the metaphysical state - before they are expressed and concretised in the physical. Where is the foundation of the real?

Christianity is also a brand - like Coca Cola - which is really water with crap added to it in my view. Christianity has crap added to it as well. So do we want to save the water plus the crap? Or just the water?

I grew up with biros. I was an adult before I found that Biro was a brand name for a ballpoint pen. Now ballpoint pens come with many other brand names. So there would be 2 questions - save the Biro or save the ballpoint pen?

Beneath the ink delivering technology of the ballpoint pen is the idea of conveying information from brain via hand to hardcopy - or some kind of storage medium. I have a manual disability that means I don't do pens these days -but I can still convey information via the hand to a storage medium. I don't even need a hand in fact.

You can save Christianity as a relic for a museum or a retro modality if the form matters, and the brand name. Or you can save Christianity as an essential theme about spiritual evolution and initiation.
 
awesome! thx.

Let's start by thinking about what is meant by redemption. It means there is a potential to be restored to a state - a sense of separation and the prospect of reunification. The idea has been distorted by the OT rendition of the Eden story in which humans were expelled from paradise for disobedience. A sin was committed and we must seek redemption - atone for the sin. This is a poor and distorted interpretation.
hadn't thought of this picture right the notion of "saving christianity" brings us right back to the garden :-)



The core of Christianity is a myth. It really the only thing that matters.
ok, but this is a little tricky, I mean, we could say the core of every great memes / thought-form / project is a myth... so at that point it loses its meaning. seems to me like the problem with christianity is twofold
1. there's a lot of assumptions about the primacy of the myth... christianity isn't christianity unless one believes they have the best damn myth ever invented
2. christianity has been used as a social engineering / control device from the beginning... and it's been so stunningly effective in this regard that it's sometimes hard to penetrate this layer of archons


Christianity is also a brand - like Coca Cola - which is really water with crap added to it in my view. Christianity has crap added to it as well. So do we want to save the water plus the crap? Or just the water?
great point... this analogy works on many levels. I would suggest that coke is more than just water with other crap. I never drink the stuff but I love those ads :)
 
christianity has been used as a social engineering / control device from the beginning... and it's been so stunningly effective in this regard that it's sometimes hard to penetrate this layer of archons
This seems to emerge as a criticism of religion. And, it would seem, a fair one at that.

However, is it really a diversion, a red herring if you will? It seems to me that any school of thought, any form of social organizing can and usually is used by some as a social engineering / control device. I mean if you replace Christianity with something else, it seems that something else will be just as likely to be perverted by some for nefarious purposes. Does that mean the "something else" is inherently bad?

I think we have to be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
 
. christianity has been used as a social engineering / control device from the beginning... and it's been so stunningly effective in this regard that it's sometimes hard to penetrate this layer of archons

But all religions that operate at a tribal to empire level are part of social engineering - and all mythologies play a similar role. We have to remember that unlike our complex pluralistic culture in which it is possible to disengage from the mass ancient cultures had a need to retain cohesion and compliance to ensure they survive.

The essence of the Christian myth is initiatory - into individual awareness of one's divine nature. But that has been distorted and brutalised by a hierarchy and a theology that asserted the social engineering aspect. Siedentop's Inventing the Individual argues that at the same time Christianity fostered individualism at the same time. Often the individual was tortured and killed and then celebrated as a role model hero. This is the unpalatable contradiction of Christianity that is so hard to swallow.

Christ suffering on the Cross echoes the shamanic initiations we see around the world - being hung on a tree. The paradox of that symbol being cherished by the very people who prevent emulation is not lost on most of us. But we do not know how to resolve it until we grasp what is being transformed.
 
I never drink the stuff but I love those ads :)

But they are intended to get you to drink it. I don't know what ads you see but the Coke ads here are misrepresentations of the truth intended to induce consumption of a product that is neither necessary nor supportive of wellbeing. They are a kind of emotional pornography intended to arouse and act as designed. Clearly you get aroused but are not compliant. Maybe that's a skill I should envy?
 
However, is it really a diversion, a red herring if you will? It seems to me that any school of thought, any form of social organizing can and usually is used by some as a social engineering / control device. I mean if you replace Christianity with something else, it seems that something else will be just as likely to be perverted by some for nefarious purposes. Does that mean the "something else" is inherently bad?

I think we have to be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Such an important idea here. Efforts to replace Christianity with a humanistic religion during the French Revolution did not turn out well. A number of thinkers have observed that political movements have expressed along religious lines - and some are starting to understand that it may be an inherent aspect of human psychology that organise in a pattern we have come to see as religious - but which is actually universal. I touched on this in my thesis - suggesting we may have a native psychological architecture that is rooted in primal animistic sensibilities.

I would argue that every time we organise thought without a connection with the divine we end up with something horrible - the horrific distortions of Marxist thought are a powerful example.

We are trapped in a naive presumption that Christianity should be as perfect as its marketing suggests. I grew up with an idealised Sunday School vision of Jesus that was promptly crapped on when I was hauled into church. I quit the faith because it failed/refused to match the vision it insisted I develop. I was naive. But I kept that baby when I tossed the bathwater. I still have gentle Jesus meek and mild - only now I understand just how much strength and courage has to go into being 'meek and mild'. These words are, by the way, better updated and expressed as 'gentle and gracious'. It takes great personal power to be gentle and gracious.

But I get that, if you think the baby is meek and mild as we understand those words commonly, you wouldn't care if the baby was tossed with the bathwater. That baby should be tossed.

The gospels did not do a good job of showing Jesus as gentle and gracious because there was that other side - passion - that was put through so many filters no coherent picture remained. Of course this all story, but that counts. We treasure Hamlet, which has none of this ambiguity, because then 'fiction' speaks to our souls.

Strangely attempts to update Jesus have not worked well, and that is, I suspect, because there is way too much seemingly secular content that does not need the magical mythic hero in quite that form. In short, you can't modernise Jesus and keep the brand strong. But if your mission is to quench thirst and not sell Jesus Cola that should not matter.
 
Such an important idea here. Efforts to replace Christianity with a humanistic religion during the French Revolution did not turn out well. A number of thinkers have observed that political movements have expressed along religious lines - and some are starting to understand that it may be an inherent aspect of human psychology that organise in a pattern we have come to see as religious - but which is actually universal. I touched on this in my thesis - suggesting we may have a native psychological architecture that is rooted in primal animistic sensibilities.

I would argue that every time we organise thought without a connection with the divine we end up with something horrible - the horrific distortions of Marxist thought are a powerful example.

We are trapped in a naive presumption that Christianity should be as perfect as its marketing suggests. I grew up with an idealised Sunday School vision of Jesus that was promptly crapped on when I was hauled into church. I quit the faith because it failed/refused to match the vision it insisted I develop. I was naive. But I kept that baby when I tossed the bathwater. I still have gentle Jesus meek and mild - only now I understand just how much strength and courage has to go into being 'meek and mild'. These words are, by the way, better updated and expressed as 'gentle and gracious'. It takes great personal power to be gentle and gracious.

But I get that, if you think the baby is meek and mild as we understand those words commonly, you wouldn't care if the baby was tossed with the bathwater. That baby should be tossed.

The gospels did not do a good job of showing Jesus as gentle and gracious because there was that other side - passion - that was put through so many filters no coherent picture remained. Of course this all story, but that counts. We treasure Hamlet, which has none of this ambiguity, because then 'fiction' speaks to our souls.

Strangely attempts to update Jesus have not worked well, and that is, I suspect, because there is way too much seemingly secular content that does not need the magical mythic hero in quite that form. In short, you can't modernise Jesus and keep the brand strong. But if your mission is to quench thirst and not sell Jesus Cola that should not matter.
Maybe we should organize society round a set of stories - such as Hamlet - that tell us something important. The stories would have to have been enjoyed as pieces of fiction - not contrived to make moral points.

Such a collection would be far more mutable than Christianity, which might help it to stay fresh, and avoid dogmatic obsessions.

This would not supply the transcendental content of the religion, but separating the parables from genuine transcendental claims would help.

Like you, I left Christianity early on, and I certainly don't intend to return, but yes - we seem to have lost our way without it. For example, without the authority of Christianity, we have vested enormous authority in science, and a few other institutions, that have proved totally corruptible.

David
 
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This seems to emerge as a criticism of religion. And, it would seem, a fair one at that.

However, is it really a diversion, a red herring if you will? It seems to me that any school of thought, any form of social organizing can and usually is used by some as a social engineering / control device. I mean if you replace Christianity with something else, it seems that something else will be just as likely to be perverted by some for nefarious purposes. Does that mean the "something else" is inherently bad?

I think we have to be careful to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
good point... everything that can be co-opted is co-opted... if yr into that kinda thing :-)

but christianity is an especially interesting case study.
 
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