‘Grabby’ Aliens, A Beautiful Funnel Of Air & A Few Past Links

I tend to be skeptical of guys who, upon their deaths, freeze their heads into perpetuity. Probabilistically, though, I suppose it could be a bet worth taking.

We could use more outside-the-box thinkers with real-world experience making bets on where to fruitfully think.

Our institutions have more rot than usual, and dangerous capture. There are too many prizes, too many piles of old money, and not enough brains and courage.

I’m of a mind to say Nature is beyond value judgment (I judge things all the time, but Nature doesn’t seem to care). The people I love and who love me, do care about me (as long as we’re here).

God? Maybe. The universe: Unclear. The little I know of the laws of the universe suggest more of the same Nature I’ve known here on Earth.

Beauty plays a key part in understanding the world. It can both anchor us into our own bodies and experiences, while keeping us searching for new experiences. Truth has a clear empirical element in my thinking, and refers to a world I believe genuinely exists. Collecting data about the world is a lot like actually referring back to the book you’re quoting, or asking the other person what they’re really thinking…then listening.

Beautiful and dangerous. Maybe the tornado is telling you something? Maybe not.

Roger Scruton At The WSJ: ‘Memo To Hawking: There’s Still Room For God’

Related On This Site: From Darwinian Conservatism: ‘The Evolution of Mind and Mathematics: Dehaene Versus Plantinga and Nagel’

Sunday Quotation: Edmund Burke On The French Revolution

Denis Dutton suggested art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth…the money and the fame) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…

Roger Sandall, Australian critic of romantic primitivism and the Western’s Left’s penchant for the Noble Savage: His home page where his essays can be found. Here’s “The Rise Of The Anthropologues“ and…

Tornadoes, ‘Nine Hours’ Of Beatles Footage & Inflation-Some Links

One minute you’re in bed, the next…

God Bless all the victims.

The conditions for such F4 and F5 monsters to track on the ground for so long, and cause this much destruction, are rare.

This is cold comfort.

Maybe over 100 dead.

Are most of the modern doctrines constantly misunderstanding human nature, contemporizing and politicizing reasons for disagreement into (C)auses and (C)oalitions?

Are committed ideologues a necessary feature to be found in the postmodern fog, and do you trust liberal idealism to protect your property, life and opportunities against such true-believers?

Where shall meaning be found?

Well, in the immortal words of ‘Rasta Dale,’ founder of Peace Pavilion West:

Eat of my body of bug-paste.

Relax your body and mind. Center your heart-space.

Drink with me Gaia’s wine.

Are you ready?

Let’s go out there and give these fuckin’ animals nine hours of Beatles’ footage. $500 for a fuckin’ early release package. Jesus Christ.

Dale gets salty with his language, sometimes.

Another question about which I wonder: Are many secular humanists, liberal idealists, unitarian universalists and progressive do-gooders mostly just former W.A.S.P.’s and good Catholics without the fortitude to preach what they practice?

Some, definitely.

Do you agree with Charles Murray about preaching what you practice?:

Would you rather have the W.A.S.P.’s and good Catholics back in charge?

I believe it’s self-evident we need virtue, honor, and a lot of layers of self-control, as well as proper incentives, to maintain decent leadership. For much of my life, out in the public square, the refrain has been something like ‘freedom is next, this will all work out.

Or maybe, ‘explore your Self and be good to others.

Yeah, well…

As for inflation:

This started around Spring 2020. The debt and deficit problems have been around a lot longer. Maybe you’re comfortable with softly corrupt, fairly incompetent leadership, managing ballooning debt while placating an activist wing. Managed decline. Or maybe you just want to pay more for gas and milk; your time and effort frittered away.

Welcome to the meritocracy, I suppose.

A deeper American idealism may be reforming before our eyes.

Is Trump coming back? Isn’t it really Trump (or something like him) vs Bernie (or something like him)? Is something worse on the horizon?

Something better?

A Link On China, Crazy Days In Seattle & Some Tornadoes-Oh, There Will Be Rules

I imagine maintaining legitimate authority over a civilization with a Han Chinese core, new wealth and a lot of poorer, more traditional, family based ‘units’ (collectivism dies hard) isn’t easy.  Add in a vast, geographical area containing various religious and ethnic groups spread over the boundaries of ancient empires.

Whoever’s in charge will have to deal with a declining birth rate, while still promising rapid economic growth and a lavish lifestyle; a piece of the pie distributed through a lot of top-down private and public control, all led by an currently authoritarian, strong-man Communist apparatus that never really went away.

I could easily see how party messaging enhances Nationalist identity against enemies foreign (Korea, Japan, Russia, the U.S.) and domestic (traitors, the insufficiently loyal).

Belt and road politics is global, and the way many in China view their role in the world is not necessarily how we in the West view the world.

This is a clear potential source of conflict:

Having a lot of people unifying around the ideals of racism (the ‘-Isms) and equality, often with a kind of religious fervor, is pretty common these days, but what if you disagree?  What about violence?  How do these ideals work in the practice of creating or maintaining legitimate authority?

Alas, it’s Seattle.

The price of ‘integrating’ radicals who believe very little in any legitimate authority usually means buying off those radicals (playing the politics game very well) with public monies and shiny new programs.

It’s better to think of radicals as cult members, really.   True-beliving, intolerant, crazed cult members, unable to live a world with different experiences from their own, nor differences of thought, opinion and behavior.

What could go wrong with inmates running the asylum?

Oh, there will be rules-New liberty away from Hobbes…rule-following punishers?: From Public Reason: A Discussion Of Gerald Gaus’s Book ‘The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom And Morality In A Diverse And Bounded World’

That’s about as close as I’ve seen anyone get!

Moving along, are you into tornadoes, and maybe interested in gathering some useful data along the way?

Watch the video below.

Help build better models. The better understood the variables, the better the models become, and the more predictive they become.

Accurate prediction[s] save lives:

Free Speech,The Pink Backs Of Some Psychiatrists And Tornado Modeling-Some Links

From The Chicago Maroon via F.I.R.E (The Foundation For Individual Rights In Education):

Since 2014, the University of Chicago has followed the Chicago Principles, formally titled the University of Chicago Statement of Principles of Free Expression. At the request of President Robert Zimmer and then-Provost Eric Isaacs, the Principles, which follow the guideline that “debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed,” were drafted by a committee led by law professor and former Dean of the Law School Geoffrey Stone.’

Would you rather be righteous than right; comfortably correct rather than uncomfortably true?  Principles, beliefs, heuristics, status, relationships, incentives, money etc. tend to matter much more to most people, most of the time.

The politically Left, radical model seems fast becoming shared sentiment in many quarters of the Western World.

Dear Reader, it’s your problem if you remain skeptical of the Oppression and Grievance Model of History, Religion & Tradition.  Don’t dare publicly question the wisdom of the latest politico-moral movements, nor the sincerity and good intentions of ‘-Ism’ members.

Of course, this doesn’t mean some traditions aren’t dangerously outdated, co-opted by entrenched interests, nor that some people you meet don’t know anything about genuine historical oppression.

It does mean righteousness can easily replace just aiming to be right; an ever growing list of human rights the glue holding many institutions together.

In Britain:

Full piece here by Theodore Dalrymple.

Say it ain’t so:

‘Medical journals have thus gone over to political correctness—admittedly with the zeal of the late convert—comparatively recently. Such correctness, however, is now deeply entrenched. With The New England Journal of Medicine for July 16, 2016 in hand, I compared it with the first edition I came across in a pile of old editions in my slightly disordered study: that for September 13, 2007, as it happened, which is not a historical epoch ago. What started as mild has become strident and absurd.’

An interesting take from Slate Star Codex-‘The APA Meeting: A Photo-Essay:’

There’s a popular narrative that drug companies have stolen the soul of psychiatry. That they’ve reduced everything to chemical imbalances. The people who talk about this usually go on to argue that the true causes of mental illness are capitalism and racism. Have doctors forgotten that the real solution isn’t a pill, but structural change that challenges the systems of exploitation and domination that create suffering in the first place?

No. Nobody has forgotten that. Because the third thing you notice at the American Psychiatric Association meeting is that everyone is very, very woke.

This reminds me of a poem by Robert Pinsky, entitled ‘Essay On Psychiatrists’

V. Physical Comparison With Professors And Others

Pink and a bit soft-bodied, with a somewhat jazzy
Middle-class bathing suit and sandy sideburns, to me
He looked from the back like one more professor.

And from the front, too—the boyish, unformed carriage
Which foreigners always note in American men, combined
As in a professor with that liberal, quizzical,

Articulate gaze so unlike the more focused, more
Tolerant expression worn by a man of action (surgeon,
Salesman, athlete). On closer inspection was there,

Perhaps, a self-satisfied benign air, a too studied
Gentleness toward the child whose hand he held loosely?
Absurd to speculate; but then—the woman saw something.

Moving along, are you into tornadoes, and maybe interested in gathering some useful data along the way?

Watch the video below.

Help build better models.  The better understood the variables, the better the models become, and the more predictive they become.

Accurate prediction[s] save lives:

Tornadoes! Some Links

With so many deadly tornadoes in the news lately, I thought I’d post a few links:

Here’s a link to the How Stuff Works tornado page.

The Tornado Project Online. (Affiliated with How Stuff Works, lots of top-ten lists etc…)

-How to make a tornado box for a science fair.

-Is it a vortex of rising, warm and moist air or cool air dropping downward?   Good models here.  A horizontal column of rotating air that gets lifted with the rising air in the formation of a storm?

-The Red Cross Tornado Preparedness Page.

-You’ve got to check out Tornadovideos.net.

A swedish guy has a small tornado drop down in front of his car (1:15 or so, cool video)A dust-devil here.  If you have time and are a real weather geek, the formation of a supercell here.

See Also: The Greensburg Tornado on Doppler Radar


by Extreme WX Photographer

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