Both Men and Women Have Periods, Dontcha Know

"Men No Longer Have To Menstruate"

So Says The Atlantic’s ‘Science’ Writer 


The editors at the Atlantic tortured this article beyond any sense of reason to ensure its readers swallow the idea that both men and women have periods and no one should think otherwise.

Glenn T. Stanton
The Federalist

You read that headline precisely right. Editorially, it is a truly bizarre article from a once-great magazine, struggling hard to find its footing in the woke ideological tumult that is cannibalizing The New York Times.

The Atlantic story is an otherwise perfectly fine piece about how, as science writer Marion Renault puts it, “menstruation has now become an elective bodily process” because of interesting and controversial advances in women’s health care. As Sophia Yen, a pediatrics professor at Stanford Medical School cited in the article, put it, “We now have the technology to make periods optional.”

The real story, however, is the way the editors at The Atlantic tortured the piece beyond any sense of reason or logic to ensure its readers swallow the idea that both men and women have periods and no one should think otherwise. But in an ironic twist, The Atlantic conveys that science now says men don’t have to have periods anymore. When you ardently deny the most basic of realities, this is the craziness that follows.

The Atlantic uses “No One” and “Their” because of course it would be wrong to use “her” in reference to people who menstruate. It also employs tinny phrases that pain the ear, such as “people who have periods.” As one might expect, its language game T-bones reality soon enough: “If more people chose to silence their period — or even just dial down the volume — that would mean a decrease in iron deficiency (which women experience at far higher rates than men).”

See what The Atlantic did there?

Perverted Ideology, Not Science

Paediatrician Warns That Medical Pathway For Transgender Children Based On Ideology, Not Science.


Bob McCoskrie
Media Release 19 October 2018
Family First

A new report by an Australian paediatrician is sending a strong warning to New Zealand that allowing children to choose their gender has no scientific evidence in medical literature to support the massive interventions of the medical pathway, and that the most vulnerable of children will be at particular risk.

The report “Children Transitioning: Childhood gender dysphoria - A paediatrician’s warning to New Zealand” is written by Professor John Whitehall who is Foundation Chair and Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Western Sydney. He visited and spoke in New Zealand last year.

The report is based on published literature and considers the epidemiology, the nature of confused children, the stages of the medical pathway, the established effects, and some of the relevant laws. It challenges proponents of the pathway to confront the scientific literature, and acknowledges and seeks to reduce the great suffering of confused children, but is based on the fundamental Hippocratic principle: ‘First, do no harm’.

The Threat Facing Medical Science

The Return of the Witchdoctor

The medical profession stands before the Rubicon.  Either it will defend and stand firm for science-based medicine, or it will not.  If it does not, then the West will progressively return to the witch-doctors.  The latest challenge to the profession comes in the form of trans-genderism.  

Here is what's going down:

Reasonable people would be mystified, if not repelled, by the statements and actions of a leading researcher into transgender treatment. In a study funded by a $5.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), researchers including Dr. Johanna Olson of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles are supposedly evaluating use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on dysphoric children.

As I’ve written with a coauthor, however, the study is fundamentally skewed toward the conclusions transgender activists desire: it contains no control group of subjects who will be spared these drugs, and will expire after five years, long before many negative effects may surface.  [Jane Robbins, The Federalist]

It seems that Dr Olson is more a sales person than a serious scientist.  A fundamental rule of selling is that one must give the client or prospective buyer what they want.  Olson insists that this is the only right way to proceed with transgender teens.

Shibboleths That Kill the Vulnerable

The "War" On Climate Change Is A Curse Upon the Poor

By Bjorn Lomborg


When a “solution” to a problem causes more damage than the problem, policymaking has gone awry. That’s where we often find ourselves with global warming today.

Activist organizations like Worldwatch argue that higher temperatures will make more people hungry, so drastic carbon cuts are needed. But a comprehensive new study published in Nature Climate Change led by researchers from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis has found that strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.

The scientists used eight global-agricultural models to analyze various scenarios between now and 2050. These models suggest, on average, that climate change could put an extra 24 million people at risk of hunger. But a global carbon tax would increase food prices and push 78 million more people into risk of hunger. The areas expected to be most vulnerable are sub-Saharan Africa and India.

Trying to help 24 million people by imperiling 78 million people’s lives is a very poor policy.

We’ve heard similar stories before: In a few short decades, climate policy has often created more damage than the benefits it attempts to deliver.

Ten years ago, a biofuels craze swept rich countries with the full-throated support of green activists who hailed any shift away from fossil fuels. Food crops were replaced to produce ethanol, and the resulting spike in food prices forced at least 30 million people into poverty and 30 million more into hunger, according to UK charity ActionAid.

If we want to eradicate hunger, there are more effective ways.

The Black Magic of Computer Simulations

"Official" Science Soils Its Underwear


The following appeared as a Guest Post on Kiwiblog

A Guest Post by Bryan Leland:

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition have discovered that the Royal Society of New Zealand cannot support its contention that man-made global warming is real and dangerous.

Various exchanges between NZCSC and RSNZ revealed that the Society: has forgotten its roots; makes statements that it cannot support with evidence; is quite happy for its officers and members of the Society to make public statements that are against its own Code of Ethics; agrees that climate science is contentious but will not support open debate on it; wants to change its Code of Ethics to put cultural beliefs on equal footing with scientific evidence.

It all started with a statement by the Chief Executive (CE) and two reports that made it clear that RSNZ supported the belief that that man-made global warming was real and dangerous and urgent action was essential. The NZCSC asked RSNZ to provide convincing evidence based on observational data that supported this belief. The Royal Society were unable to do so and passed the query on to Prof James Renwick who has close links with the IPCC. He too was unable to provide the requested evidence. It seems that the evidence does not exist.

Shock!

Polar Bears Doing Just Fine 

James Delingpole
Breitbart News

Susan Crockford, arguably the world’s greatest polar bear expert, has some really bad news for environmentalists.

Their favorite ursine poster child of climate doom is doing great. Polar bear populations are stable, if not growing. That stuff you read in the liberal media about bears starving to death because thin summer sea ice is pure nonsense. The only evidence we have that polar bears are in any kind of trouble is the fake evidence of activists’ computer models.

Crockford’s full State of the Polar Bear Report 2017, produced for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, can be read here.

Here is a summary of its conclusions:

Doom and Doomsters

Doomsday Climate Scenarios Are a ‘Joke’

Wall Street Journal Article Strips Off the Doomster Facade

Thomas Williams
Breitbart News


Following on last week’s World Ocean Summit in Mexico, the Wall Street Journal published a piece Monday ridiculing apocalyptic scenarios of an overheated future with disastrous impact on the human population as the product of “laughably bad economics.”

One study, writes Oren Cass, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, projects a drop of 20 percent in world GDP by the year 2100, but gigantic economic growth for countries like Iceland and Mongolia. Iceland, in fact, will allegedly reach annual per capita income of $1.5 million by 2100, a conclusion that Cass considers “as preposterous as it is stunning.”

The results of such studies—like much of climate science itself—come from computer models that attempt to extrapolate future costs from present realities that may or may not have anything to do with the state of things 100 years from now. Also like climate science, these economic forecasts try to take into account a nearly infinite number of variables, which makes the likelihood of accuracy almost zero.

Global Warming Junk Science

How Global Warming Became the Biggest #FakeNews Scare of All Time (Part 2)

James Delingpole
Breitbart News

Here is this week’s latest eructations in "Climate Stupid" Groupthink:

Let’s “solve” climate change by halting economic growth, argues a paper from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Vienna, published in Nature Climate Change.

Texas Tech professor Katharine Hayhoe tells a summit in Edmonton, Canada that climate change is “the greatest humanitarian crisis of our times”; confides how shocked she was on discovering, six months into her marriage, that her husband did not believe in global warming. “You have somebody you respect and you also love and you also want to stay married. I said well, ‘Let’s talk about it.’” Apparently it took two years to convince him.

Activists at Cambridge University warn of “large scale disruption” if the university’s £6.3 billion endowment fund ignores their demands that it should divest itself of its fossil fuel investment holdings.

An ex-White-House staffer from the Obama era tells Washingtonian  about the time her date with a man came to a sudden end when he said he didn’t believe in global warming: “I started laughing, because I’m from Colorado and didn’t realize people actually didn’t believe in global warming. But he was serious.”

Climate industrial complex in UK has wasted £100 billion and shut down debate to no useful purpose, warns Peter Lilley – one of Margaret Thatcher’s former ministers.

‘Stop blaming both sides for America’s climate failures’, argues Guardian columnist. ‘The fault lies entirely with the GOP.’

‘Blame consumers not China for climate change‘, warns Clinton-Climate-Initiative-backed pressure group.

I could go on but I wouldn’t want to bore you. Or myself. When you’ve been covering the climate/environment/energy beat for as long as I have, every day is Groundhog Day. Every day it’s the same bunch of troughers, spivs, second-raters, crooks, liars, half-wits, chancers, bottom-feeders and eco-fascists churning out the same old propaganda.

Global Warming Junk Science

How Global Warming Became the Biggest #FakeNews Scare of All Time (Part 1)

James Delingpole
Breitbart News

Why do so many apparently informed, intelligent, educated people still believe in ManBearPig?
For the same reason that the U.S. underestimated the Japanese threat before Pearl Harbor; that General MacArthur stupidly advanced north of the 38th parallel in Korea; that JFK got embroiled in the Bay of Pigs disaster; that LBJ dragged the U.S. deeper and deeper into the Vietnam War.

The reason is a phenomenon known as ‘groupthink’.

Though the name dates back to a 1952 article in Fortune magazine by William H Whyte, it wasn’t popularized for another twenty years when a Yale research psychologist called Irving Janis used it in the title of his influential 1972 Victims of Groupthink.

Little did he know it – Janis was looking to past events like the ones mentioned above, not the future – but his book would anatomize with unerring accuracy the perverse mindset which would lead to the creation of the biggest, most expensive junk science scam the world has ever witnessed: the great global warming scare.

More Junk Science

More Fraud and Deceit

The other day we posted an article demonstrating that climate scientists in the US have been busy cooking temperature data to support their narrative of global warming.  Now, surprise, surprise!  They have been found to be cooking the books on Arctic ice. 

NOAA Caught Lying About Arctic Sea Ice

James Delingpole
Breitbart

The Arctic is melting catastrophically! Sea ice levels are experiencing their most precipitous decline in 1500 years! Something must be done – and fast…

Well, so claims the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and we know by now what that means, don’t we?

Yep: the Arctic sea ice is doing just fine. Yep: yet again, the NOAA is telling porkies.

As usual, Paul Homewood has got its number.

Read the whole expose, here.

Makebelieve

Propaganda and Lies

What does it portray when a scientific establishment is caught out telling lies?  Ah, we hear you say.  Is it a government scientific establishment?  Sadly, yes.  Then, it's not unexpected.  Governments always have an agenda, or something to be reified.  These social goals or objectives have to be baptized by "science", since for many science is worshipped as the arbiter of truth. 

"Global warming" is a propaganda scam.  So pathetic is the evidential case for it that the pollies and Commentariat have had to change the looming apocalypse from "global warming" to "climate change".  Since the climate is always changing, every day the advocates could point to "evidence".  Then, when no-one is paying close attention, in their narratives "climate change" suddenly switches back to "global warming".   Thus we have a situation where Global Warming is aka Climate Change.  Yet Climate Change is very different from Global Warming, in the same way that "weather" is different from "rain".   Which term is used by the climatistas at any particular time depends upon the particular propaganda point to be made.  If the evidence points against the warming of the earth, the narrative morphs into the general threat of Climate Change.  When the evidence points in a different direction, suddenly the threat switches back again to the far more specific, Global Warming".

We have reached down to the bottom of the sewer, however, when government scientific establishments are caught out making up data in order to "prove" Global Warming.  Unfortunately, this has been going on for decades now.  But the "scientists" are still hard at work making up data.

Here is yet another expose:

NOAA Caught Adjusting Big Freeze out of Existence
James Delingpole
Breitbart

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has yet again been caught exaggerating  ‘global warming’ by fiddling with the raw temperature data.  This time, that data concerns the recent record-breaking cold across the northeastern U.S. which NOAA is trying to erase from history.

If you believe NOAA’s charts, there was nothing particularly unusual about this winter’s cold weather which caused sharks to freeze in the ocean and iguanas to drop out of trees.  Here is NOAA’s January 2018 chart for Northeast U.S. – an area which includes New England along with NY, PA, NJ, DE and MD.

You’d never guess from it that those regions had just experienced record-breaking cold, would you?

That’s because, as Paul Homewood has discovered, NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet again – presumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorology – NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.

We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.

Homewood first smelt a rat when he examined the New York data sets.  He was particularly puzzled at NOAA’s treatment of the especially cold winter that ravaged New York in 2013/14, which he describes here:

The cold weather really began on Jan 2nd, when an Arctic front descended across much of the country, and extended well into March.  The NWS wrote at the end of the winter:

The winter of 2013-14 finished as one of the coldest winters in recent memory for New York State.  Snowfall across Western and North Central New York was above normal for many areas, and in some locations well above normal. This winter comes on the heels of two previous mild winters, making the cold and snow this winter feel that much harsher.

Temperatures this winter finished below normal every month, and the January through March timeframe finished at least 4 degrees below normal for the two primary climate stations of Western New York (Buffalo and Rochester)…..  Relentless cold continued through the month of January across the region.

On average the mean temperatures in Jan 2014 were 2.7F less than in 1943. Yet, according to NOAA, the difference was only 0.9F.  Somehow, NOAA has adjusted past temperatures down, relatively, by 1.8F.

So at the three sites of Ithaca, Auburn and Geneva, we find that January 2018 was colder than January 1943 by 1.0, 1.7 and 1.3F respectively.  Yet NOAA say that the division was 2.1F warmer last month. NOAA’s figure makes last month at least 3.1F warmer in comparison with 1943 than the actual station data warrants.

Clearly NOAA’s highly homogenised and adjusted version of the Central Lakes temperature record bears no resemblance at all the the actual station data.  And if this one division is so badly in error, what confidence can there be that the rest of the US is any better?

So why, he wondered, did NOAA have this marked down as only the 30th coldest winter (since 1895) on its New York State charts, with a mean temperature of 16.9F?  Homewood compared the local records for January 1943 and January 2014 – months which, according to NOAA’s charts, had very similar average temperatures.

What he found was that NOAA’s charts were deeply inaccurate. The 2014 local temperatures had been adjusted upwards by NOAA and the 1943 local temperatures downwards.

He concludes:

On average the mean temperatures in Jan 2014 were 2.7F less than in 1943. Yet, according to NOAA, the difference was only 0.9F.

Somehow, NOAA has adjusted past temperatures down, relatively, by 1.8F.

Now, Homewood has given the same treatment to the most recent Big Freeze – the winter of 2017/2018.

Yet again, he has found that NOAA’s arbitrary adjustments tell a lie. They claim that January 2018 was warmer in the New York region than January 1943, when the raw data from local stations tells us this just isn’t true.

He concludes:

So at the three sites of Ithaca, Auburn and Geneva, we find that January 2018 was colder than January 1943 by 1.0, 1.7 and 1.3F respectively.

Yet NOAA say that the division was 2.1F warmer last month. NOAA’s figure makes last month at least 3.1F warmer in comparison with 1943 than the actual station data warrants.  

Clearly NOAA’s highly homogenised and adjusted version of the Central Lakes temperature record bears no resemblance at all the the actual station data.  And if this one division is so badly in error, what confidence can there be that the rest of the US is any better?

Well indeed. The key point here is that while NOAA frequently makes these adjustments to the raw data, it has never offered a convincing explanation as to why they are necessary. Nor yet, how exactly their adjusted data provides a more accurate version of the truth than the original data.

One excuse NOAA’s apologists make is that weather stations are subject to changing environmental conditions. For example, when the station sited at Syracuse in 1929 was located at what was originally just a sparse aerodrome. Since then, however, as Homewood notes, it has grown into a large international airport with two runways servicing two million passengers a year. Its weather station readings therefore will certainly have been corrupted by the Urban Heat Island effect: that is, its temperature readings will have been artificially elevated by the warmth from the surrounding development and aircraft engines.

So you’d think, wouldn’t you, that to compensate for this NOAA would adjust the recent temperatures downwards. Instead, for no obvious reasons, it has adjusted them upwards.  This is a scandal. NOAA’s climate gatekeepers are political activists not honest scientists and the U.S. taxpayer has no business funding their propaganda.

Drain the swamp!

Pseudo-Science

The Myth of the Great Barrier Reef's Parlous State

James Delingpole
Breitbart News

An Australian Professor of Physics is suing his university, which is trying to gag him from telling the truth about the “dying” Great Barrier Reef.

The truth, of course, is that the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) isn’t dying at all. (As we’ve written here and here)  In fact it’s doing just fine and the gagged professor – Peter Ridd of James Cook University – has plenty of solid scientific evidence to prove it.

Ridd has been studying the GBR for 30 years and believes that the oft-heard claims that it is seriously threatened by climate change or pollution are just environmentalist scaremongering. He is also highly critical of those supposedly reputable institutions which have been promoting this alarmist myth, among them the Australian Institute of Marine Science and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

But when Ridd pointed this out in a published essay and a radio interview last year his university accused him of serious misconduct.

Sigmund Freud: Lionised Conman

Sigmund Fraud

A new biography demolishes whatever was left of the Viennese con man’s reputation.

By Kyle Smith
National Review Online

Writing to his close friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess in 1890, Sigmund Freud explained that he couldn’t pay a visit because, in a struggling psychiatric practice that suckered rich society women in Vienna, “My most important client is just now going through a kind of nervous crisis and might get well in my absence.”

No, Freud wasn’t being ironic: He depended on grandes dames to stay in business. On another occasion, referring to a cartoon in which a yawning lion grumbles, “Twelve o’clock and no negroes,” he wrote, “The worries begin again whether some negroes will turn up at the right time to still the lion’s appetite.” That appetite, as Frederick Crews makes clear in his exhaustive, reputation-pulverizing book Freud: The Making of an Illusion, was from an early age for fame and riches, which Freud relentlessly pursued by championing one faddish quack remedy after another, backing away when justified criticism made his position untenable, covering his tracks with misleading or even completely false claims about what he’d been up to, then bustling on to the next gold mine.

In 1884, for instance, in the giddy throes of a fondness for cocaine that Freud would indulge on and off for some 15 years, he had the marvelous idea of treating a brilliant young scientist, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, for a mild morphine addiction (resulting from surgery) by putting the patient on cocaine. Instead, Fleischl became hugely addicted to both morphine and cocaine — sleepless nights, strung-out dozy days — and wasted away into a scarecrow while Freud, writing about the patient under a pseudonym, bragged in a paper about the tremendous success of his experiment. Meanwhile, a colleague of Freud was discovering an actual useful application of cocaine, as a topical anesthetic that opened the door to new kinds of surgery (such as on the eye). This was a truly revolutionary breakthrough and Freud had nothing to do with it. Later he would suggest that he had been on the brink of making the discovery but had been distracted by his fiancée, Martha.

The case for Freud’s misogyny is ludicrously easy to make.

Career Suicide

Did the Obama White House Collude with a Politically Motivated Scientist?

A former scientist at the NOAA has exposed a shoddy report on global warming. Judicial Watch is suing to learn more.

By Julie Kelly
National Review Online

Following allegations of impropriety over the handling of a controversial climate change report, a government watchdog group now wants to know whether there was any collaboration between the report’s lead author and a key Obama adviser. On March 27, Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit seeking “all records of communications between a pair of federal scientists who heavily influenced the Obama administration’s climate change policy and its backing of the Paris Agreement.”

The FOIA specifically requests correspondence between Tom Karl, the former head of the climate-data program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and John Holdren, the director of Obama’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren is from that species of Baby Boomer global catastrophists who make changing predictions each decade about how we will all die. He also happens to be the science guy who had the president’s ear for eight years.

Holdren’s buddy, Tom Karl, authored a report in 2015 attempting to disprove the hiatus in global warming that had been widely acknowledged by many scientific groups, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The warming pause threatened to undermine the justification for a costly climate-change pact that was being negotiated at the time: How could world leaders commit trillions in tax dollars to stop global warming if it wasn’t actually happening?

Karl’s report came to the rescue just months before the Paris Climate Conference. In announcing his findings, Karl said the “new analysis suggests that the apparent hiatus may have been largely the result of limitations in past datasets, and that the rate of warming over the first 15 years of this century has, in fact, been as fast or faster than that seen over the last half of the 20th century.” How convenient. His analysis was eagerly accepted by the international science community, but others were leery about its timing; the House Science Committee has been leading an inquiry into the report for nearly two years.

But a retired top official at NOAA has now confirmed suspicions about the veracity of Karl’s research and about whether politics — not science — were at play.

The Ground Hog Day Of Present Discontent

Unholy Triads

Angelo Codevilla sets forth the secular materialist Confession of Faith:  modern life in the West is

based upon the proposition, self-evident to many, that omnicompetent government as the executor of modern science can be the agent of unprecedented wealth, justice, and happiness.  We err at our peril if by focusing on the bloody show of totalitarian regimes, we imagine that they were wholly extraneous to the great trends of our time or to what is happening among us.  [Angelo Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p.5.]

One cannot help notice how  the policy directions of the modern secular state claim to be "science based".  This tells us not much about science per se, but the general belief that the government becomes more competent to deliver perfection upon earth when it is guided and justified by "science".  The disciplines of science have become equivalent to a sacred text, above and beyond ordinary centres of authority, by which society will be guided and led to health, wealth, and happiness.

And science has delivered what has been asked of it.

Mistakes We Christians Have Made

Calling Out the Dumbcluck

In the conflict between Christian faith and dogmatic secularist science, Christians are often at the mercy of their own credulity.  They are far too willing to believe consensus science to be the truth, based on hard, established fact.  Therefore, when science and the Bible appear to be in conflict, the text of scripture must be adjusted to accommodate hard science.

However, the more one becomes aware of the assumptions and presuppositions of science, the more one becomes familiar with scientific internal debates, the less one is impressed by consensus science.  Science is a helpful servant.  It makes an exceedingly poor master.

The Enlightenment rationalist argued as follows: if a religious doctrine cannot be established by Reason and/or Empirical Inquiry (science) then it must be dismissed as myth or baseless speculation.  On this basis Christianity, the Gospel, and the Bible become discredited and were eventually rejected by Western society in general--which is where we are today.

Unfortunately, far too many of us Christians are willing to concede to the authority of science over the Bible.

Darwinism on the Ropes

A Lesson In What Not to Do

We have argued that the text of the creation account in Genesis 1-3 is pretty straightforward and clear.  But it suddenly became complex and murky when, in the nineteenth century, Christians tried to reconcile the theorising of evolutionists with the plain text of Scripture.  Darwinists claimed to have hard, solid, irrefutable scientific evidence of the world existing for over 150 million years before man appeared here.  What some Christians then attempted was a reconciliation between the text of Genesis and the "evidence" and conjectures of evolutionists.  

The first great attempt at reconciling the two authorities (science and Scripture) was called the Gap Theory.  It posited a vast gap of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.  Douglas Kelly summarises the theory:

Letter From the UK (About Baloney)

Nutrition 'Experts' Are Stuffing Us Full of Low-cal Poison


Peter Hitchens
Mail On Sunday

Whenever I see a ‘low-fat muffin’ in a coffee shop, I have to control an urge to pick it up, jump on it and shout rude words.  I am myself an expert in getting fat, and know that this evil blob of sugar and starch is a rapid route to a bigger waistband.

Fat doesn’t make you fat. Butter is good for you. So is cream. Skimmed milk is a futile punitive measure, not a foodstuff, a way of making ourselves needlessly miserable which has taken over the world on the basis of an illusion.  Fat doesn’t make you fat. Almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong, says Peter Hitchens

This is because almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong. In an unending struggle to get this across, the National Obesity Forum last week made a renewed attack on these mistaken attitudes.  Sugar, not fat, is the menace to our lives. And this has been known since 1972 when a brave scientist, John Yudkin, wrote a book – Pure, White And Deadly – showing it was so.

He and his unfashionable message were buried in abuse.

Science is Anything But Disinterested In The Truth

Hah! We Fooled You

We have spoken of a paradigm shift possibly beginning to occur within the standard materialist view of the universe.  Scientists find themselves at the Osgiliath cross roads, scratching their heads, wondering which way to go.  They remain, however, strongly convinced and adamantly consensual on one quintessentially certain point: there is no way Christian cosmology can, would, or ever be true.

David Berlinski has a sparkling description of the cross roads.

"Scientists," the physicist Paul Davies has observed, "are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth--the universe looks suspiciously like a fix.  The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves.  For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all to convenient 'coincidences' and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist.  Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal."  [Cited in David Berlinksi, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 110f.]

How to account or explain this?  What sophisticated theorems could be devised to confuse the average punter?   Aliens might prove useful.

The Great Petard

Try Harder

It turns out that Clint Eastwood is a profound cosmologist.  The best of the best, one may say.

The real question of the ages for the materialists and secularists is, Why does the universe exist at all?  For the Unbelieving cosmolgist it is a question inside a riddle, wrapped in an enigma.

David Berlinski rings the changes:

Oxford's Peter Atkins has attempted to address this issue.  "If we are to be honest," he argues, "then we have to accept that science will be able to claim success only if it achieves what many might think impossible: accounting for the emergence of everything from absolutely nothing."  Atkins does not seem to recognize that when the human mind encounters the thesis that something has emerged from nothing, it is not encountering a question to which any coherent answer exists.  [The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p.95f.]  

How have the materialist cosmologists fared?  About as expected.  The problem is sufficiently complex that the problem itself defies a simple description.  But we will put our materialist hat on and advance one anyway.  Since we know that all being is some sort of combination of time and space and matter and energy and since we know there is nothing else, how did these come into existence out of nothing?

Berlinski points out that physicist Victor Stenger has had a crack at the problem.