Belief In The Ignorance Of Experts

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/when-to-trust-the-science/

Whenever I see the term "expert", I think of Richard Feynman's (Feynman is a brilliant Nobel Prize winner in Physics) National Science Teachers speech in 1966: 

We have many studies in teaching, for example, in which people make observations, make lists, do statistics, and so on, but these do not thereby become established science, established knowledge. They are merely an imitative form of science analogous to the South Sea Islanders’ airfields–radio towers, etc., made out of wood. The islanders expect a great airplane to arrive. They even build wooden airplanes of the same shape as they see in the foreigners’ airfields around them, but strangely enough, their wood planes do not fly. The result of this pseudoscientific imitation is to produce experts, which many of you are. [But] you teachers, who are really teaching children at the bottom of the heap, can maybe doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

The linked talks about a tweet by Paul Graham which states: 

If you think you don't trust scientists, you're mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you're unaware of this doesn't mean it's not so.

Well, no. You "trust" engineers, and all the people in the chain that built and tested the many thousands if the components in the aircraft, the mental health and competence of the pilots, ATC, other pilots,  the people that produced the fuel ... a nearly infinite chain of trust. Or, basically you are taking a "leap", that isn't really "faith", because most have not thought about any of this. Nor should you really, because a life that can actually be lived is based on all sorts of unconscious assumptions. 

It would be very good however if many more people were aware that we ALL live by faith, all the time. If more people realized that, we would likely be somewhat kinder to others. 

"Science" is a method. a tool - it makes hypotheses and tests them. Very few of the people in that long chain were "scientists", they were "experts" in some sort of discipline generally blindly following the "rules" (standard procedures") of that discipline.  

In this world, the "experts" are imperfect and often fail. The passengers on the 737 Max trusted the chain of "experts", and the chain failed. The list of "expert failures" is endless ... in these times it often starts with the Titanic. My favorite example is Trofim Lysenko whose "expertise" combined with political ideology resulted in millions of deaths. 

Do the "experts" creating and pushing the new mRNA vaccine know what they are doing? We certainly hope and pray that they do. We DO know that pushing a new technology to millions of people has significant risk. In software, we say "never take the first release". Even in cars, many people want to wait a bit on a new model, because there is a good deal of evidence there will be one or more "recalls", some of which may be significantly dangerous. 

The real world is often harsher to the new technology than the theories, early testing, and politics hoped it would be. 

So before you "trust the science", be aware that what you are trusting is the bureaucratic system that decided on operation "Warp Speed", and decided that they HAD to roll out the vaccine quickly. Fortunately there were only 7 people on the Challenger when it "had to launch" on the cold morning of January 28, 1986.  

Interestingly, Feynman was the person that discovered the technical cause of the Challenger Disaster. 

The root cause was believing in "experts" (rather than understanding their ignorance), and the application of those beliefs by a bureaucracy to the launch decision. 

Death By Democrat Deep State?

Three suicides due to mostly peaceful demonstration.

Many have observed in the past that a fairly large number of people with some association with the Clintons die "by their own hand". I've heard there are actually some people that believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself in a maximum security federal pen on suicide watch. If you believe that, then the level of incompetence in the federal government is maybe even more scary than their malfeasance. 

Not a surprising level of belief though,  when 6-20% of Americans (including Steph Curry)) don't believe we landed on the moon.  

Has the "Clinton Hex" expanded to the Deep State? It is documented our "Justice" department ran an official op called "Crossfire Hurricane" to attempt to overturn the 2016 election. 

As the DOJ Inspector General reported: 

Well, DOJ inspector general Michael Horowitz recently told the Senate that those FISA warrants used to spy on the Trump campaign were “entirely” predicated on information from that dossier. And we now know that virtually every one of those applications to spy on American citizens was rife with errors, misleading information, and “fraudulent” evidence. You know, just some endemic, comprehensive, and highly targeted “sloppiness.”

The Deep State doesn't really need to be that "deep" anymore -- lots of their corruption is openly divulged, not covered by the MSM, and nobody cares. 

So does anyone find it odd that 3 officers that responded to a mostly peaceful demonstration at the capitol have killed themselves?  How many officers killed themselves after responding to BLM riots with massive looting, burning, and violence that resulted in at least 25 people being killed?

Hashida worked for the agency’s Emergency Response Team, an outfit in its Special Operations Division. He’s the third law enforcement officer who responded to the Jan. 6 incident to take his own life.

Washington police officer Jeffrey Smith committed suicide in the aftermath of the breach, officials disclosed later in January. And U.S. Capitol Police officer Howard Liebengood killed himself on Jan. 10.

Of course hardly anybody knows that the one white, female, military veteran with no criminal record that was killed during the mostly peaceful demonstration (Ashli Babbitt) was  murdered by an assailant that is still not named. 

Nearly nobody knows of the three officer "suicides" related to the capital demonstration. We only know what we are told, and increasingly, we are cancelled or worse if we deviate from the approved narrative. 

You believe that "murdered" is too strong? The officer who restrained George Floyd, a physically imposing multiple time felon high to the point of a lethal dose of fentanyl was convicted of MURDER! 

Labels matter. Just try saying "N word".  BLM demonstrations were labeled "mostly peaceful" no matter how much violence and property damage occurred. The Jan 6 demonstration was labeled an "insurrection" ... with no real notice that nobody brought a gun to this "insurrection".

Delta, Epsilon, ...

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/delta-variant-essential-travel-biden-administration/

We seem to be introducing some more Greek into this world that is "Greek to me".  (Epsilon is after Delta)

Naturally, as with all things Covid, it is complicated ... there appear to be a plethora of variants. 

"Gamma" may be the next bogeyman. 

Kimbal starts out with a great Covid "fact". 

The great thing about COVID, I like to quip, is that has abolished death from old age. Also the flu. That malady typically claims 30,000 to 40,000 scalps per annum in the US, many more in a bad year. How many flu deaths were there last season? According to the Scientific American, 700.

Seven HUNDRED? Naturally we don't KNOW that, have you ever been tested for a flu other than Covid?  

Here is a little indication from CDC on how accurate old flu death estimates likely are: 

Why doesn’t CDC base its seasonal flu mortality estimates only on death certificates that specifically list influenza?

Seasonal influenza may lead to death from other causes, such as pneumonia, congestive heart failure, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It has been recognized for many years that influenza is underreported on death certificates. There may be several reasons for underreporting, including that patients aren’t always tested for seasonal influenza virus infection, particularly older adults who are at greatest risk of seasonal influenza complications and death. Even if a patient is tested for influenza, influenza virus infection may not be identified because the influenza virus is only detectable for a limited number of days after infection and many people don’t seek medical care in this interval. Additionally, some deaths – particularly among those 65 years and older – are associated with secondary complications of influenza (including bacterial pneumonias). For these and other reasons, modeling strategies are commonly used to estimate flu-associated deaths. Only counting deaths where influenza was recorded on a death certificate would be a gross underestimation of influenza’s true impact.

In other words, flu is always around, nobody until Covid really tried to figure out how many deaths it "caused", because there was really no reason to. Old age, other underlying conditions, etc. were almost always involved (as they are with Covid). Old people die of SOMETHING, is it that important to identify the specific straw that "broke the camel's back"?

Not unless your purpose is to create a "crisis". 

It’s Rahm Emanuel time now and forever: never let a good crisis go waste, he advised, and rest assured, they — the alphabet-soup pod-people who we put in charge of our lives — they have run with it big time. A couple of days ago, the White House (how long before they change the insulting name of that edifice) announced that because of the ‘Delta variant’ they would not be lifting travel restrictions ‘at this point’. They hope, of course, that they can maintain, and perhaps stiffen, the restriction indefinitely, maybe forever. After all, as the White House press secretary demanded a week or two back, ‘Why do you need to have that information?’

From Fire By Water, Ahmari

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/sohrab-ahmari-from-fire-by-water/

The review is excellent. I made the mistake of reading "The Unbroken Thread" first, and my comments on the "Catholic specific" nature of the final conversion apply here. I recommend that book as superior to this, though both are worthy of attention and enjoyable reads. 

A quote from the book that hit me ... 

"My native land [Iran] smelled of dust mingled with stale rosewater. There was enjoyment in Iran and grandeur of a kind to be sure. But when it wasn't burning with ideological rage, it mainly offered mournful nostalgia. Those were its default modes, rage and nostalgia. I deserved something more."

I'm reminded of the divisions in Wokeistan that used to be America.  Iran remained Iran even though the culture shifted, because Iran is primarily a piece of land. The ideology can change, but the borders remain. Not so America. It was an idea ... that "all men are created equal, endowed by their creator ...", allegiance to a written constitution, etc. For at least half the country, neither the endowing God, nor the rights protected by the Constitution are seen to be truth at all ... let alone "self evident". 

So Wokeistan is much like Ahmari's Iran ... the "red" are filled with "mournful nostalgia", the woke are filled with ideological rage. 

From the review: 

Readers who are historically attuned may recall with a laugh another Iranian who was educated in the West and radicalized by the experience, though in a different direction:

If one allows the infidels to continue playing their role of corrupters on Earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger. Thus, if we kill the infidels in order to put a stop to their [corrupting] activities, we have indeed done them a service. For their eventual punishment will be less. To allow the infidels to stay alive means to let them do more corrupting. [To kill them] is a surgical operation commanded by Allah the Creator.

Those are the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Although, in a sense, Ahmari’s teenager infatuation with Nietzsche and later Marx are not so far apart from the Ayatollah’s reaction. Each disdains bourgeois life in the West. I myself have been accused of the same disdain. But whereas I would seek to re-enchant life in the West — adding something that has been lately subtracted — a nihilist and revolutionary Islamist would seek to negate the modern world which is marked by phoniness, and compromise.

Ah yes, "re enchantment" of the disenchanted West - it pulls at the strings of my heart. "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor gives a glimpse into what the "subtraction story" of the secularists took from us. Our souls for some cell phones and other entertaining baubles. 

Thankfully, as Ahmari discovers, enchantment still exists in the confessional liturgical church of Christ. Is that Church the Catholic Church? Prior to Luther, there was really no other option, Post Luther, I'd argue the LCMS is for the present a more Biblically grounded option. 

 

Teach Your Children Well

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/how-the-west-lost-god/ 

A rather long article, however the message is short and sweet. Statistical evidence is strong that it is secular education is what has reduced religiosity in America rather than scientific/technological advances, wealth, mass media, etc

The article gives a TON of detail as how this conclusion is arrived at. 

It is a good news / bad news story for Christians. On the positive side, **IF** you are able to homeschool, the odds that your children can escape secularization are good. The bad news is that tons of people already through public schooling nearly need a miracle to return to the church, and it will be nigh on impossible to recover the public schools, so the vast majority of children will end up secularized. 

Of course, God can do ANYTHING, so prayer is critical!

Civilization is a process as well as a product, and the school is the place wherein the process of civilization is enacted, yielding its final product in the form of grown men and women inducted into the social order of which they’re a part. If control over schooling is ceded to those who are hostile or even just indifferent to religious faith, how could we expect anything other than a drift toward a less religious society? Whether we are urban or rural, childless or fecund, conservative or liberal in our outlook, well-credentialed or not, the crucial question, empirically as well as morally, is this: What will we teach our children to associate with the true, the good, and the beautiful during their earliest and most impressionable years? The fate of our social order depends much more on how we answer this question than we seem to realize.

American Wrath

 https://spectatorworld.com/topic/old-glory-new-anger-america-rage/

Quoting last paragraph. 

The odd election of 2020 does not sit well with a great many Americans. They are not in the mood to engage in the equivalent theatrics of Ben Cohen’s mockery of Bush or the pussyhat feminists’ sneers against Trump.

President Biden is, in their view, a hollow figure not even worth mention. Their complaint lies far deeper as they see the purposeful destruction of American values by an elite that bullies and derides them.

What will come of this? How might revolt manifest itself? I hope it will be a successful recapture of key institutions, perhaps beginning with the schools. But the political elite that prefers to scorn the common people for wanting a say in their government is playing an awfully risky game. Despair breeds wrath and that fire, once ignited, will engulf us all.

We've come "a long way" from 9-11: 

 We were defiant and confident then. Now we seem to be something different. 

The article says that this is where we are, and it is worthy of consideration.

Toby Keith’s rage at those ‘pissin’ on the red, white and blue’ is undercut by his waking up demoralized and seeing America in the past tense. Aaron Lewis’s ‘thinkin’ somethin’ ain’t right’ sits beside his feeling of being isolated and alone, ‘watchin’ the threads of Old Glory come undone’. These songs capture that borderland between despondency and revolt. They are the opening, dissonant chords of the music of wrath.

I echo the hope for "institutions and schools". But how?  

Fauxi Clarifies Masks

A quick hitter that should clear up "following the science" on masks!

Fauxi on masks

The people that don't believe in masks are simply stupid! 

In The Fullness of Time, Paul L Maier

 The subtitle is "A Historian Looks at Christmas, Easter and the Early Church". 

Looked around the internet for a review I could steal, but none to be found. 

My copy is autographed by the author as he came to our Church in Rochester and spoke. He is intelligent, witty, and fun to listen to and interact with. As a hobby, he acquires and uses heavy equipment including a cat, a crane!, a payloader and who knows what else. Apparently he has a large pond for which the crane is very handy. 

If you like video: 

Maier is able to weave the Bible, ancient historians, and archeology into a narrative that is very informative and also spiritually uplifting. He gives us a glimpse of into what life was like when Christ's ministry was in progress, and some of the personalities involved. The model reconstructions and pictures of the modern sites make one consider a trip to the Holy Land. 

Highly recommended for believers and non-believers alike. 

Objections Overruled

 https://livingapologetics.wordpress.com/2021/01/12/book-review-objections-overruled/

I happen to have a copy that my pastor let me have. I WAS going to get him a return copy since I marked it all up ;-( As the linked blog says, it doesn't look to be easy to get in printed form. 

I found it excellent for a nice concise example of "apologetics" (NOT "apologizing. Defending!)

For those interested in defending the faith in these days of doubt. I also recommend "The Reason For God"

A quote from "reason" ... "If a premise ("there is no God") leads to a conclusion you know isn't true ("Napalming babies is culturally relative") then why not change the premise?" 

Without God, everything is permitted ... it is all relative, and all about power. If the vote says "kill babies", isn't that the end of it? 

Biden On Inflation

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/07/22/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-cnn-town-hall-with-don-lemon/ 

And so, it is — I sincerely mean this: Prices are up now, and they’re up in — for example, you’re in a position where you’re trying to build a house, trying to find two-by-fours and lumber. Well, guess what? People stopped working cutting lumber. They stopped doing it because they — the unemployment was so down. Now, all of a sudden, there’s this need because people are coming back. And guess what? Instead of paying 10 cents, you’re paying 20. But you understand what I’m saying.

Got that? Do you "understand what he is saying? 

I can tell you how the MSM would report that if it was Trump. "Can you believe it? Trump thinks it is no big deal if you pay twice as much because of his insane policies! There you have the billionaire perspective in nutshell!".  

But this is Biden, so basically it doesn't get reported, in the MSM at all, while it would be headline fake news if Trump said the same thing. Certainly there are elements of "fake" in the whe way NR reports it, however compared to the way the MSM would have trimmed  to a misleading meme under Trump,  it is fairly honest, they include more context. 

“Prices are up now. For example, we’re in a position where you’re trying to build a house, trying to find two-by-fours lumber. Well guess what? People stopped working cutting lumber, they stopped doing it because the unemployment was so down. Now all of a sudden there’s this need because people are coming back and guess what? Instead of paying ten cents you’re paying 20,” he said.

That is exactly the  WH transcript of what he said. I bet dollars to donuts that the MSM meme if it was Trump would be; "Trump claims doubling prices not a big deal!". 

How does one parse "Well, guess what? People stopped working cutting lumber. They stopped doing it because they — the unemployment was so down." 

??? 

Was he trying to say they quit cutting lumber because there were a bunch of stimulus payments and unemployment benefit extensions so people quit working? Unemployment was UP, not down ... less people were cutting lumber and pretty much any other sort of work, and the government was pumping money into the economy so spending was up. More money chasing less goods, so inflation is up! Duh. 

Prices are also up because energy is a major foundation of the economy, and doing as much as you can to stop fracking and other energy production  drives prices up. LP here in IA is a $1.50 now vs $1 last year at this time. Earth to Biden! 

The NR link is pretty good. No matter what the cadaver in chief says, printing money is inflationary, and printing more money is even more inflationary! 

If Biden gets what he wants, he will pump ANOTHER $4.4 trillion into a $20 trillion economy! 

Oh, and trust him, that is going to reduct inflation.