Here’s something I wrote for the Baptist Press about faith healer Todd Bentley. Unlike Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, James Randi, and the skeptical community in general, I don’t throw out all miraculous healings. Indeed, I think they are far more prevalent than we ordinarily imagine. At the same time, we need to guard against wishful thinking.
I wrote a longish reply to someone on an obscure forum about global warming and thought as long as I put the work into it I should reproduce it to a wider audience so here it is:
You didn’t figure out the shoe size/salary correlation. It’s a classic example in why correlation doesn’t equal causation.
On the face of it’s a strong correlation. The reason it’s strong is so many people with small shoes are children who don’t earn any salary at all.
Psychiatrists in Australia have identified “Climate Change Delusion” as the latest mental disorder sure to make it into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). That’s the head shrinker’s bible if you don’t know.
Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change
Andrew Bolt
July 09, 2008 12:00am
For The Herald Sun
PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of “climate change delusion” – and they haven’t even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.
Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children’s Hospital say this delusion was a “previously unreported phenomenon”.
“A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events.”
(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)
“The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies.”
But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What’s scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this “climate change delusion”, too.
Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: “If we do not begin reducing the nation’s levels of carbon pollution, Australia’s economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands.”
And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd’s guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: “Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . .”
Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd’s next campaign slogan?
Of course, we can laugh at this — and must — but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.
Dichloroacetate (DCA) Promising for Endometrial Cancer DCA virtually disappeared from the news about a year ago when it was forced off the open market by the FDA and all research into its efficacy as a cancer therapeutic had to go through officially sanctioned channels. I’ve kept track of it all this time through Google Email Alerts. This is the first bit of news on it in relation to cancer in a long time. To see the history check out the list of articles I wrote here under the sidebar category DCA. I became interested in it because it’s another example of the science establishment exerting undue control over things they believe they “own” including science education in public schools and Read More ›
You know the old saying “If you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas”. It seems Massachusetts has itself a case of sand fleas. I found this article from the Boston Herald linked on the Drudge Report. It’s way off topic but I’m so sure most of our readers will appreciate it I just had to give y’all a heads up. Be sure to read the comments, they’re the best part. 😆
Sorry if this is old news for some of you, but it was new news to me today: www.freerice.com (see also the wikipedia article on it here).
Observing the ongoing collapse of civil liberties in Canada, Bill asked me,
As I recall, Judge Jones in his ruling used the word “disparage” in relation to Darwin and his theory, attempting to put pressure on those who might want to disparage Darwin in the public school context. How soon before it is illegal to disparage Darwin in the U.S.?
Re “disparage” as a cue word, Bill was thinking, of course, of a recent punishment handed out by the Alberta “human rights” commission – one of fourteen shadow tribunals – to a Christian pastor, who had spoken out against the gay lifestyle (more below).
The rapid advance of fascism with a “human” face in Canada only became common knowledge in the United States recently, when popular columnist Mark Steyn was dragged before the BC tribunal.
To bring you up to date swiftly on Canada’s tribunals, I will simply quote Rich Lowry’s “Mark Steyn: Enemy of the State” summary this morning:
The country is dotted with human-rights commissions. At first, they typically heard discrimination suits against businesses. But since that didn’t create much work, the commissions branched out into policing “hate” speech. Initially, they targeted neo-Nazis; then religious figures for their condemnations of homosexuality; and now Maclean’s and Steyn.
The new rallying cry is, “If I hate what you say, I’ll accuse you of hate.” The Canadian Islamic Council got the Human Rights Tribunal in British Columbia and the national Canadian Human Rights Commission (where proceedings are still pending) to agree to hear its complaint. It had to like its odds.
The national commission has never found anyone innocent in 31 years. It is set up for classic Alice-in-Wonderland “verdict first, trial later” justice. Canada’s Human Rights Act defines hate speech as speech “likely to expose a person or persons to hatred or contempt.” The language is so capacious and vague that to be accused is tantamount to being found guilty.
And the remedies can be bizarre, as in this Alberta decision, “the most revolting order I have ever seen in Canada”, according to civil rights lawyer Ezra Levant. Read More ›
HT to Eric Anderson for the link.
How to harvest solar power? Beam it down from space!
By Lara Farrar
For CNN
Story Highlights
-Concept to beam solar power from satellites gains new global momentum
-Massive satellites would beam solar energy back to ground-based receivers
-Pentagon study says could be used for military operations, developing nations
Jyoti is the Hindi word for light. It’s something Pranav Mehta has never had to live without. And he is lucky. Near where he lives in Gujarat — one of the most prosperous states in India — thousands of rural villages lack electricity or struggle with an intermittent supply at best. Read More ›
Repeating what I’ve been saying for a long time – there are better ways to spend money than a preemptive strike on global warming. The UK Times publishes an article about one of those ways. Times Online May 30, 2008 Mark Henderson, Science Editor, Copenhagen ‘Forget climate change, we should spend on nutrition’ Malnutrition should be the world’s major priority for aid and development, a panel of eight leading economists, including five Nobel laureates, declared yesterday. The provision of supplements of vitamin A and zinc to children in developing countries, to prevent avoidable deficiencies that affect hundreds of millions of children, is the most cost-effective way of making the world a better place, the Copenhagen Consensus initiative has found. Three Read More ›
Freeman Dyson (one of our greatest living thinkers IMO) talks about Global Warming in a New York book reviewThe Question of Global Warming . Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe Read More ›
California’s top court legalizes gay marriage Hat Tip to Wesley Elsberry’s message board for homozygous church burnin’ ebola boys After the Bar Closes.
From NOAA here These are annual average temperature (top) and precipitation (bottom) in the United States from 1895 through 2007. The magnitude of change in the trend lines, +1 degree in temperature, +2 inches annual rainfall, is interesting but not nearly as interesting as the slopes being almost identical and straight as an arrow. That’s an amazing correlation for there to be no direct causal factor in common. Warmer, wetter, and more CO2 are good things for agriculture. God help us all if those trend lines go towards colder and drier. If it does we’ll be inventing ways to make global warming happen.
Barry poses the debate topic: A soldier amuses himself by ripping a baby from his mother’s arms and tossing it in the air and catching it on a bayonet. Resolved, it is self-evident that the soldier’s action is wrong in all places and at all times. However, Barry restricts the range of answers by not allowing anyone to assert whether it would be right or wrong if God commanded the killing. As many of us know, God, according to the Old Testament, did indeed command the killing of babies. My position is that in the ordering of baby killing God was wrong and therefore cannot be a trusted source of moral absolutes. If the Old Testament is a true accounting Read More ›
Let’s say that Darwin’s theory of evolution was a necessary factor for the holocaust. Now class, what science journal should we try to publish this in? Anyone? Anyone?