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Scattershooting 230128

January 28, 2023 by tornado Leave a Comment

Happy new year! Several topics have cropped up of late, not demanding a full-form entry, so I’ll resurrect an old category for a 2023 kickoff encore. As usual, topics are highlighted, so you can skip what doesn’t interest you.

Scattershooting while wondering why so many otherwise intelligent ignoranti fall for obvious, textbook conformist cult tactics employed by purveyors of the secular “social justice” ideology…

AMAZING DALLAS FIREWORKS SHOW on NEW YEAR’S NIGHT: Several times, when not setting them off myself, I’d go up Reunion Tower to watch Trinity River fireworks shows and assorted pyros doing their thing around town on July 4 & New Year’s. Now they’re launched from the tower, with lighted drones in formation as accompaniment. Spectacular! I ought to go see and shoot this sometime.

‘TWITTER FILES” REPERCUSSIONS and SO-CALLED PANDEMIC “MISINFORMATION”: Over the past couple months, several independent journalists, with the full cooperation of current Twitter owner Elon Musk, have exposed a hardline left-wing censorship agenda of Twitter users and linked content, by the corporation, in collusion with high-level government bureaucracy (mainly but not entirely FBI). This includes labeling pandemic content, by licensed medical doctors and scientists, as “misinformation”. This also includes information from peer-reviewed studies that was flagged or relegated to sight unseen. Yesterday’s ”conspiracy theories” sometimes do become today’s news. They affirm comments I made to some folks many months ago about non-expert bots and poorly educated basement dwellers—censoring posts from real-life scientists and physicians in fields such as immunology, epidemiology, virology, and general medical practice. Some low-wage tech contractor in the Philippines, nor high-level company executives without medical degrees, have no business censoring degreed, licensed physicians on medical topics! Yet these were the tactics social media employed to limit what you were being told about a crisis situation to Big Brother’s official Party line—even when the line clearly was flawed then or turned very wrong later. Thank God for watchdogs, gadflies and leakers — even if it’s the new owner dishing it out on prior management at great cost to himself.

MATURITY, SELF-RESTRAINT AND DISCIPLINE ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Speaking of Twitter, a libertarian I follow there, Curtis Scoon, posted these wise words: “I don’t want to be the person on social media who has something controversial to say about every headline just for attention. It’s definitely close to being an ambulance chasing personal injury attorney.” (My words now) …or virtue signaling to either spectral extreme. I have huge respect for such self-discipline & maturity. I aim the same. Not every topic needs instant opinion from every person. I’ve expressed my extended thoughts on this before, in this space, with, “Silence is Not Complicity nor Agreement.” I’ll comment on the issues of my choosing, at the time and place of my choice (and nobody else’s). The context was “hot takes” on the Tyre Nichols incident in Memphis. There’s more to it, but next is what I’ll say for now, in this medium of my choice:

DISTILLING the TYRE NICHOLS KILLING to the SIMPLE PLAIN TRUTH: Often, videos like the Tyre Nichols police-brutality footage from Memphis (which I won’t post here) miss crucial “before” context. In this specific case, I don’t think such context matters. I’m having a hard time imagining what “context” would justify treating any handcuffed man with such relentless, 5-on-1 savagery — basically 5 strong dudes tossing the guy back and forth between each other like a medicine ball and taking turns slugging him full force. No excuse for that, whatsoever. Even if he had violently resisted before being restrained (and that info wasn’t available from the video I saw)…once handcuffed, that’s that. His wrists are locked together with steel, behind his back, and he can’t use his arms. That was basically a gang-beating of a helpless man, in this case the gang being cops. These now ex-cops have been charged with murder and official abuse. The justice system is working as it should here. Unfortunately, this incident is being spun every which way and twisted like taffy by people with bigger social agendas. What it is, plain and simple, is homicide, and any and all who commit homicide (including cops on duty, regardless of how they look) must be held responsible.

COMMON GOTCHA AGAINST ECONOMIC LIBERTARIANISM ISN’T a GOTCHA AFTER ALL: I had to laugh recently at a stupid meme some airheaded male celebrity sent out, thinking it was a “gotcha”. The meme implied libertarians are hypocrites because Ayn Rand accepted her Social Security checks. Clearly this wasn’t the product of a critical thinker, or much of a thinker at all. You see, those checks were her money anyway, extorted from her for years before in taxes. So she had no reason (and neither do you) to feel at all guilty about getting some of it back. Too bad she, and you, couldn’t have just kept it in the first place, instead of being forced to process it through a massive, inefficient, distant, detached bureaucracy that skims so much off. And I’m still waiting in futility for anyone, anywhere, to show me where personal entitlement spending of any sort is an enumerated Federal power in the literal, black-and-white words of our Constitution.

DO YOU HAVE STUDENT LOANS? PAY THEM. This entry is brought to you by tough love from a fellow (former) debt holder. And not just any ex-student, but one from poverty: first-generation college graduate here, raised inner-city poor in Dallas with no air conditioning, who remembers with razor-sharp clarity the sounds of wailing sirens and the feel of roaches crawling up sweaty legs many summer nights. There’s not a college student anywhere in this land who has a thing new to say to me about being “economically disadvantaged”. I arrived at university with assets valued in two digits, not counting a beater car that was worth maybe $200, no parental aid whatsoever, and scholarships for which I had busted my tail, but were still woefully insufficient. I left grad school with even less: $16 to my name, and five figures in student loans. Inflation-adjusted, they match magnitudes from many sob stories I hear today. I paid off every last one in under 10 years by working rotating shifts, in a real career, for which my major of choice was chosen specifically to prepare me, using something called foresight and something else called sacrifice. Hint: my major wasn’t “gender studies” or similar useless bullshit. Unless one was targeted by illegally predatory lending, which I do oppose, I have a very hard time feeling sorry for anyone who demands that government (in other words, all of us but not him or her self) pay off debts he/she voluntarily chose to accrue. There’s a word for that, and it’s “freeloading”. My message, therefore, is clear: Yes, it is a loan. Pay it back. I’ve been there. I did, and I’m nothing special. So can you. Make better choices.

THE FED, BRETTON WOODS, GOLD STANDARD, and the RISE of CHINA: Finally, here’s a provocative, yet deeply historically informed, long-form essay by the aforementioned Curtis Scoon on how the Federal Reserve came to be, and its relationship with both American decline and the rise of Red Commie China as an economic and military power. I don’t necessarily buy into every detail he posits, but there’s a lot of basic truth here. This is well worth 15 minutes of time to read carefully and consider critically.

Scattershooting 170513

May 13, 2017 by tornado Leave a Comment

Scattershooting while wondering what happened to the SHIFT key on many Internet users’ keyboards…

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HAZARDOUS-WEATHER FORECASTING and COMMUNICATION:
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of so-called “Impact Based Warning” text statements, given their purely and entirely reactionary origins in the Joplin tornado event, their objectively unproven socioeconomic contribution, and their implementation without thorough and extensive social-science vetting (by that, I mean rooted in a priori formally published research specifically justifying them). Instead IBWs were hurried to use in order to put on a show, yes, a show, that something — anything — was being done about focusing on “impact” as well as the weather itself. Or to put it concisely: reactionary window dressing. Then recently, assorted peanut-gallery commenters in social media whined that a watch in a “high risk” outlook wasn’t buzzed PDS (“Particularly Dangerous Situation”). Obviously such complainers are not cognizant enough of the outlook/watch process to realize that a watch in an outlook area can be (and was) for a different, earlier, not-as-dangerous part of the threat evolution as what was discussed in the outlook for later in the day, despite being over some of the same geographic region. News flash: more than one round of severe weather can happen over the same area, and the threat in each can be a lot different! All that said: Chuck Doswell, thank you for saving me time in ranting about this much further, because you already have expressed essentially the same sentiments, in this BLOG entry: “Wordsmithing the watches and warnings is not the path to improvement .” I won’t even post a comment on Chuck’s site because our thoughts match so closely that I have little, if anything, useful to add. Bravo and applause…

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SECOND-GUESSERS of FORECASTS:
Except on seldom occasions, for the purposes of correction and education, I almost never engage Twitter trolls regarding controversial severe-storms-forecasting topics. It’s largely a waste of time trying to convince non-experts, who vastly overestimate their own understanding, who are clearly ignorant of their level of ignorance. Like it or not, my approach is to apply a credibility filter to “feedback” about severe-weather forecasts, external or within-agency. The more scientific credentials and specialized severe-storms prediction experience on the part of the source, the more value I assign to their feedback. Don’t like that policy? Look in the mirror for the solution. Quite bluntly: gain credibility. This means years and years of dedication, effort, and diligence. Get educated and experienced. Do research. Publish papers. Forecast nationally over many years and many scenarios. If that sounds exclusive, that’s because it is. The ranks of world-class severe-weather prediction experts are exceedingly small, and most work in one office. The farther removed a source of feedback is from that level of expertise, the less and less credibility that source has.

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PUTTING YOUR ACTIONS WHERE YOUR WORDS ARE:
Put your actions where your ideals are, or those ideals are just characters on a computer screen. They mean nothing more. That is a matter of principle, and many examples abound in life. To wit: At least a dozen individuals I know on Facebook, and many more of their sycophantic commenters, have supported allowing young-adult male “refugees” from Islamic-majority nations into America. Some even try to manipulatively lay the “bad Christian” guilt trip on you — as if the cafeteria-Christian left would know diddly-squat about Christian ethics anyway. And yet…and yet…not one of them (Christian, atheist or otherwise) has a combat-age male Muslim “refugee” living in his or her home. In fact, I know of none yet who have housed any Muslim “refugees”, nor personally subsidized their housing elsewhere. There you go. From that alone, and nothing else, we see the deeper truth about the (lack of) authenticity of their conviction. The real test of principle is in actions, not words.

“Alt” and “Rogue” Social Media Accounts are Not Credible

January 26, 2017 by tornado Leave a Comment

The latest pop fad in the (pseudo?)scientific “resistance” movement is to set up “alt” or “rogue” Twitter accounts, then claim scientific credibility in the role of some anonymous knight in shining armor. Well, here was one example, and my open and public response on Twitter.

Muzzling of scientists is wrong, and I have expressed that concern many times on many fora. However, these fake Twitter accounts strike me as misguided (at a minimum) for many reasons, the biggest among them being trust. That is the over-arching issue and here are some specifics behind it:

Hand in hand with trust goes authenticity. A fake EPA, NOAA, NPS or other pseudo-governmental account, by its very nature, is inauthentic!

How do we KNOW that the people behind the accounts are who they say they are? They could be anybody, current or former employee, disgruntled grudge-holder, complete and total poser with no connection, maybe even a false-flag operative (more below). Anonymity undermines credibility.

Many of these accounts are mixing in politics and social issues with science. That also undermines their credibility. Stick to the science if your account claims to be scientific. Otherwise you’re behaving no differently than some dweeb in a basement pretending to be someone else.

Spelling, grammar, usage, and other English writing errors are powerful indicators of questionable credibility or complete inauthenticity.

The snarky attitudes and tangential posts of some of these “alt” and “rogue” accounts only can undermine the causes of the legitimate accounts.

Plenty of degreed, real-world scientists are standing behind their names and saying what they want to say. I always do. So can others. So can you. Therefore these accounts serve little practical purpose but to deliberately annoy and irritate, while satiating some desire to vent, and/or to masturbate one’s own ego to the thrill of sycophantic adulation from the like-minded.

Who is held accountable for inaccurate statements made from these accounts, and how?

What if some of these are false-flag accounts run by people building name lists of opposition? Whoa … … … bet you didn’t think of that possibility, did you? Hmmm…better think twice. In this crazy world, you can’t rule that out either.

Courage necessarily involves taking risk. The following I mention, not to brag, but to establish personal credibility in this subject for those who don’t know me. For over 25 years, I have been speaking out on the Internet about many issues in my science (as well as otherwise), both here in this BLOG since 2005 and in stand-alone HTML web pages before that. I do so on my own time and equipment, not on the job, which keeps it all legal and untouchable under Amendment 1, United States Constitution.

My name is Roger Edwards in Norman, OK, and I take full credit and blame for everything I post, including this. Look for yourself, both in this BLOG’s archives and in those web pages. I have spoken out openly about it all — not hiding behind fake identities in a timorous fashion. I have criticized Republicans and Democrats alike, including our current President, who has been both at various times in his life. All those pages are still there, and so are those BLOG entries. I stand firmly and resolutely behind all of them as they were written based on the insights I had at the time, and get this: with my true identity attached. I have the guts to stand behind my ideals, back down from no one, and suffer no fools. Let that set an example.

If you are a government scientist, and you want to speak your opinions on anything in particular, the solution is clear: keep your opinions off official social-media accounts. That’s not what they’re for anyway. They’re for official business. Do not use official time and equipment to express your concerns — only to express the science itself that’s relevant to that account. If you are punished for doing it by the letter of the rule, fight that through all available legal means!

For opinionated activity: use your own personal accounts and equipment, and do so unfettered. Say what is on your mind. The First Amendment applies to all of us, and does not contain the words, “except” or “unless”. Could you be hated? Sure. Could trolls say mean things? You bet — grow a thick skin and deal with it. Could you be passed up for a grant or promotion? Yes, butt-hurt bureaucrats can and do act like that, and sometimes will retaliate in unprovable ways. I know, I’ve been there. We just have to be ready, even though it’s wrong and we don’t like it. That’s the price we pay for having convictions and the courage to express and act upon them.

If you are a media member, you owe it to journalistic integrity to verify your sources and the information they provide, independently. Journalism 101…never, ever, ever take someone simply at their word. That’s the fastest way to undermine your own credibility and that of your employer, as I also have discussed openly and publicly on this BLOG for the world to see. Vet your sources and their information, thoroughly — and yes, that takes time. So be it. Better to get it right than get it first!

If someone doesn’t have the guts to put their name on the line, to stand behind their claims, that’s just so much cowardice and hollow posturing with no credibility or authenticity to back it up. The greatest measure of the importance of your ideals is in your willingness to stand behind them with your real identity.