Category Archives: Science & Tech

The Future is Null

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For as long as any of us have been alive, the default assumption is that humans are not the only self-aware beings in the universe. Everyone just knows that out in space, there are intelligent life forms that have evolved on some planet somewhere. Libraries of books and countless movies and TV shows have been created around the belief in life beyond earth. Not just bugs and plants either. Intelligent life along with all the stuff that comes with it.

Alien life is almost always imagined to be more intelligent than earthlings. Everyone just knows that the aliens are our intellectual superiors. Most assume that means they have evolved to be our moral superiors. That lets our scolds project onto the aliens features and attributes they wish we possessed. Others go the other way and the aliens are an out-sized version of our worst features. That means the aliens roam the universe consuming natural resources like locusts or enslaving minorities.

I’m not sure where I saw this, but it fits the pattern.

If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds,” written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

The fact that all of this was thought up by science fiction writers a long time ago is lost on all of these folks. I guess when you have letters after your name, dreaming up crazy nonsense is grant worthy, even when it is someone else’s crazy nonsense. Regardless, the Borg was thought up when they rebooted the Star Trek series for TV. That was ripped off from the first Star Trek movie when Voyager returns after having acquired all knowledge in the universe.

People who take a new spin on this bit are always heralded as futurists, people with grand imaginations that think up out-of-the-box scenarios. The reality is it takes little to no imagination or intelligence. What’s tough is imagining a world where we are are the dominant life form. That’s what pushes the envelope of imagination. It’s what made Asimov’s Foundation series so great. Asimov had an uncanny grip on religion and science, without have strong emotions for or against either of them.

It’s why I find the singularity stuff so dull and stupid. It is just a blend of mysticism and science fiction, without a lot creativity. Instead of reaching a higher consciousness, we end up on a hard drive somewhere on a core Internet server. Great. Living out eternity as CPU cycles would cause a truly intelligent being to unplug one’s self from the grid.

That’s the error in the singularity argument. Life is not driven by survival. It is driven by reproduction. Reproduction, even amongst the lower species, is driven by hope. When times are good and the future is bright, we get lots of reproduction. When the opposite is true, we get the opposite. Put another way, if there’s no tomorrow, there’s no need to reproduce. If there’s no need to reproduce, there’s no need to live. The singularity, therefore, is the nullification of life.

James Pethokoukis and Dunning-Kruger

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James Pethokoukis used to post at NRO about the economy and that’s where he first got my attention. He tended to write things that stupid people say when they wish to sound smart. I looked him up and sure enough, I found a journalism major. I look at journalism majors in the same way I look at communications majors. That is, these are people who were not smart enough to real college work or they were simply too lazy to do real college work.

In short order it became clear he was a fake nerd in the Ezra Klein mold, but maybe not as good at working the bit. Klein puts a lot of effort into it. Pethokoukis seems happy to be a clueless lunkhead that thinks he is the smartest guy in the room. Thus, the reference to Dunning-Kruger. As an aside, I love how is called a “fellow” at AEI. These agitprop houses love bestowing scholarly titles on one another.

Anyway, I saw this gem today and thought it was a great excuse to take some cheap shots at someone.

One big difference between America’s K-12 education system and that of other nations is where our teachers come from. McKinsey has found that top-performing nations recruit their teachers from the top third of college students. As one report notes, school systems in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea “recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third” of the academic class vs. just 23% in the US.

The other big difference, the one that makes all the difference, is the schools in Finland, Taiwan and South Korea are full of Finns and East Asians. When you compare US schools to those around the world, you have to make that adjustment. Once you do that, you find out that our Finns do as well as Finns everywhere. Our Koreans do better than those in Korea. Thinking like that is hard and lunkhead can’t be bothered with that.

Free Riders

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An age old problem in human society is the free loader problem. Economists prefer to phrase it as the “Free Rider Problem” so as not to drag in those icky moral and cultural issues. I prefer to use the more appropriate phrase, “free loader” as that’s the real problem. People unable to provide for themselves are not a problem, even for poor human societies. Every society, not matter how rich, is plagued by a slice of humanity that chooses to live off the labor of others, even when alternatives are available to them.

The better term may be the “entitlement problem” but that one has been claimed for other purposes. An example I like to use is the pizza problem. In my youth a friend had a roommate, who was from a very wealthy family. Having grown up unaware of the restraints the rest of us faced, he had a sense of entitlement. He just expected people to wait on him. Whenever we ordered a pizza, this guy would eat more than his share and never chip in for the bill, unless asked. He seemed oblivious to the fact that food cost money and the rest of us had to concern ourselves with the fact we lacked an abundant supply of money.

That’s one side of the entitlement coin. Spend any time around the very rich and you bump into this. When I worked for a Congressman in my youth, he and his family were often stymied by mundane things like buying gas. They never carried cash and did not have credit cards. Someone else was always there to pay the bill so when caught needing to actually pay for something, they would be stumped. The thing about it is there was always someone there to solve the problem for them. A sense of entitlement can carry you a long way in society.

The other side of the coin is the underclass.It is generally assumed by the ruling class that the lower class is just too dumb to do anything other than be poor. That’s often the case. There are a lot of very stupid people in the ghetto. But, they are not so stupid that they cannot provide for themselves. Instead of investing their time into middle-class pursuits, they work the welfare system, learning all the ways to maximize their return, while minimizing their investment. After all, they are entitled.

That’s the thing you see with the under-class. They view themselves as dependent and they can’t imagine things arranged any other way. Government and the rich people who run it owe them free housing, free food, free booze and so forth. In a weird way the under-class is like modern hunter-gatherers. They forage around their environment, in this case the ghetto and the custodial state that supports it, for the necessities to live. Every once in a while, the males engage in violent conflict with males from other tribes. Afterwards, they get high, eat and screw.

The point of all this is humans have been trying to figure out how best to handle the free rider problem since forever and we still struggle with it. The best way we have discovered is to have everyone pay their own way. A radical idea that has been tried in a few places with surprising success. Colonial New England is probably our best example locally. People were expected to pay their own way, take care of their families and not be a burden on their neighbors. Charity existed, but it existed with lots of strings. Those strings were intended to discourage you from needing charity. I used to live near an old almshouse from the 18th century, for example.

All that was considered crazy so we have struggled to come up with better answers. A good example how the struggle is going is Net neutrality. For reasons he most certainly does not understand, President Obama is pushing for the FCC to arbitrarily force ISP’s to treat all traffic the same.

President Obama urged the US government to adopt tighter regulations on broadband service in an effort to preserve “a free and open Internet.”

In a statement released Monday, Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the principle of treating all Internet traffic the same way, known in shorthand as Net neutrality. That means treating broadband services like utilities, the president said, so that Internet service providers would be unable “to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”

Obama wades into a contentious debate that has raged over how to treat Internet traffic, which has only heated up as the FCC works to prepare an official guideline. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015. The debate has centered on whether broadband should be placed under Title II regulation under the Telecommunications Act, which already tightly controls phone services.

Proponents argue that Title II regulation would ensure the free and fair flow of traffic across the Internet. Opponents, however, believe the reorientation would mean onerous rules that would limit investment in the infrastructure and in new services, and that toll roads of sorts would provide better service to companies that can support their higher traffic volumes. But that in turn has created widespread concern that ISPs could throttle service in some instances, intentionally slowing some content streams and speeding others.

The problem is the Internet is not a utility. A utility is a special sort of monopoly that provides a specific product that is the same for all customers. Rich people get the same electricity as poor people. The utility charges by the unit at the same rate for all users. The Internet is a wildly varied service that is valuable only because of a millions of other businesses that sells products and services over the Internet. But, there are loads of companies transferring their costs to people who do not use their service, via the miracle of the cable bill. Facebook is the most obvious example.

The problem we have is a variation on the classic Tragedy of the Commons. The public, through their governments, allowed private industry to use public resources to construct the Internet, including the massive cable TV network. In many cases, these companies were paid to build out infrastructure. All of them rely on free access to public roads and sidewalks to maintain their networks, like any other utility. Unlike the electric grid, the Internet is a virtual market place, The ISP charges rent to anyone who sets up shop and charges access to anyone who wants to buy products offered on-line.

Well, sort of.

I pay much more for Internet service that I probably should, given my usage. I don’t watch movies on-line or listen to music on-line very often. The guy down the road has a bunch of kids who each use ten times the bandwidth I use. Their Internet bill is the same as mine. The costs are socialized so he can get cheap movies and I can get expensive e-mails. Much like the cable bill, we have a inverse of the utility model. Instead of metered billing, everyone pays the same, regardless of usage. The ISP’s want to implement what amounts to metered billing, like a utility, except the government is trying to stop them, because they say they are a utility.

The Germ Theory of Stupid

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The evolutionary biologist Greg Cochran suggested that homosexuality may be the result of an unknown pathogen. The idea that pathogens could be the root cause of things like heart disease and insanity has been kicking around for a while. Like a lot of speculative science, there’s no money in it until someone finds something concrete and then there’s the politics There’s funding available for genetic research. There’s no money for locating the gay germ.

This may change things.

A virus that infects human brains and makes us more stupid has been discovered, according to scientists in the US.

The algae virus, never before observed in healthy people, was found to affect cognitive functions including visual processing and spatial awareness.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska stumbled upon the discovery when they were undertaking an unrelated study into throat microbes.

Surprisingly, the researchers found DNA in the throats of healthy individuals that matched the DNA of a virus known to infect green algae.

Dr Robert Yolken, a virologist who led the original study, said: “This is a striking example showing that the ‘innocuous’ microorganisms we carry can affect behaviour and cognition.

“Many physiological differences between person A and person B are encoded in the set of genes each inherits from parents, yet some of these differences are fuelled by the various microorganisms we harbour and the way they interact with our genes.”

Of the 90 participants in the study, 40 tested positive for the algae virus. Those who tested positive performed worse on tests designed to measure the speed and accuracy of visual processing. They also achieved lower scores in tasks designed to measure attention.

Humans’ bodies contain trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Most are harmless, but the findings of this research show that there some microbes can have a detrimental impact on cognitive functions, while leaving individuals healthy.

The study’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I like how 40 of 90 tested positive for stupidism. At first blush is seems like a blow to the IQ uber alles guys because we have a pretty solid example of environmental factors altering IQ. That would support the argument that improved environment (no stupid germs) will improve IQ. It also means that maybe the Flynn Effect is just the result of better hygiene, not better school. Just as better food supplied results in taller humans, better hygiene results in smarter humans. That would, of course, support many of the claims from the HBD crowd regarding IQ.

I would be curious about the race of the participants. If it turned out that the 40 were all from a certain place I think I would blow a funny fuse.

The Madness of President Ebola

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The suicidal impulse of the Left is unmistakable. At the core, these people want to die and take the rest of us with them. Judicial Watch, which has a really good record of unearthing embarrassing stuff on our rulers, has this:

While the bipartisan voice grows to ban Ebola victims from entering the United States, a new report claims that President Obama is considering a plan to bring the world’s Ebola patients to the United States to be treated.

Judicial Watch, the conservative public watchdog group, says in a shocking report that the president is “actively formulating plans” to admit Ebola-infected non-citizens just to be treated.

“Specifically, the goal of the administration is to bring Ebola patients into the United States for treatment within the first days of diagnosis,” said the group.

Such a plan would likely cause a political outcry throughout the nation, on edge over the spread of the virus.

Judicial Watch, which probes federal spending and uses federal and administration sources to root out corruption, said it is unclear who would pay for transporting and treating non-Americans.

But they have details nobody else has. “The plans include special waivers of laws and regulations that ban the admission of non-citizens with a communicable disease as dangerous as Ebola.”

The organization added, “the Obama administration is keeping this plan secret from Congress. The source is concerned that the proposal is illegal; endangers the public health and welfare; and should require the approval of Congress.”

This is madness for a number of reasons. The least obvious is how this policy further erodes the trust between the citizens and their government. Trust in the political class is at record lows, but most people still think the bureaucrats in the various agencies are at least trying to their jobs. They view them as lazy, but generally honest civil servants run by a collection of political hacks connected to a politician.

Getting new politicians is a simple thing, in the mind of the public, even though that is not our current reality. Getting a new new managerial class, on the other hand, means blood in the streets. Putting the CDC in a position to fail is a dangerous game. When even the aging lefties at the NYTimes think the CDC is incompetent, you already have a serious trust problem.

There’s another layer to the trust issue. When the Bush people allegedly failed to help the looters in New Orleans after Katrina, it was not because they did not know what to do. That was never the claim. The claim was they failed to do what was required for some reason. This, however, looks like the opening scenes of every disaster movie. The people in charge are either too arrogant to admit they are facing a disaster or too stupid to know they don’t know what they are facing. As Greg Cochran points out, arrogant ignorance has a long history in the epidemic game.

In a few weeks, there will be political consequences. When Obama feels the need to quit the golf course and show up for work, you know the politics are more lethal to his cult than Ebola is to Africans. That may be comforting to Red Team partisans, but it is still very bad for the health of the Empire. The near total lack of trust in the political class has made it impossible for them to tackle any of the systemic problems facing the country. Making Red Team less odious than Blue Team is not going to usher in a reform movement.

That’s really not the main concern. As Greg Cochran pointed out in that post, the people in charge of the science of Ebola may be ideologically wedded to ideas that are completely wrong. That’s not without precedent. The Obama administration appears to be acting on the belief, and it is nothing more than belief, that Ebola is mostly a poor African savage problem. In clever, white America we don’t have to worry about witch doctors and strange burial rituals. The two infections in Dallas suggest otherwise.

The column in the Daily News makes a good case for concern, if not panic. We don’t know a lot about Ebola.

As a rule, one should not panic at whatever crisis has momentarily fixed the attention of cable news producers. But the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which has migrated to both Europe and America, may be the exception that proves the rule. There are at least six reasons that a controlled, informed panic might be in order.

(1) Start with what we know, and don’t know, about the virus. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other government agencies claim that contracting Ebola is relatively difficult because the virus is only transmittable by direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person who has become symptomatic. Which means that, in theory, you can’t get Ebola by riding in the elevator with someone who is carrying the virus, because Ebola is not airborne.

This sounds reassuring. Except that it might not be true. There are four strains of the Ebola virus that have caused outbreaks in human populations. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the current outbreak (known as Guinean EBOV, because it originated in Meliandou, Guinea, in late November 2013) is a separate clade “in a sister relationship with other known EBOV strains.” Meaning that this Ebola is related to, but genetically distinct from, previous known strains, and thus may have distinct mechanisms of transmission.

Not everyone is convinced that this Ebola isn’t airborne. Last month, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy published an article arguing that the current Ebola has “unclear modes of transmission” and that “there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.”

The rest of that column is worth reading. Even if the President Ebola thinks the science is settled and Ebola is not that contagious, he clearly knows his apparatus for dealing with public concern is not working. He also knows the people running the CDC are struggling to deal with two, that’s TWO, cases of Ebola. Inviting a plague into the country just to prove some weird political point or spite his political opponents is madness. Given his views on Christianity, it is may be Domitian-level madness.

 

The Cult of Fake Nerdism

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There is a cult like quality to the fake nerd stuff we see in the culture. A lot of these people, particularly the young ones, think they are part of a movement that will make this world like the imaginary one in sci-fi movies. The web site Tech Crunch seems to be one of their propaganda organs. It looks like they are also organizing a hajj for their followers this fall.

Haven’t gotten your tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Europe yet? The hottest tech conference of the year is coming to London this October, and to celebrate we’re giving away another free pair of tickets to the main event. All you have to do is enter to win. We’ll randomly select the winning entry, and the winner will be notified by email.

About TechCrunch Disrupt:

    • Disrupt is one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year.
    • We start each day with panels and one-on-one chats featuring our writers, special guest speakers, leading VCs, and fascinating entrepreneurs.
    • Each afternoon, we host the Startup Battlefield competition which culminates in six finalists taking the stage at the end of the event for a shot at winning the Disrupt Cup.
    • The event takes place from October 20 and 21 at Old Billingsgate, London, UK.

The word “disrupt” is a buzzword borrowed from economics that is very popular in the fake nerd world. Every startup begging for money peppers its prospectus with this word. The reader is supposed to think the new company is a part of the glorious future where we all live in gleaming cities run on rainbow dust, where everyone is happy and there are no poor people. The future for these people is a sanitized San Francisco without the gays.

I’ll note the picture they use. You have two sexless people who possess that innocent, Eloi quality so popular with the fake nerd crowd. The one on the left is slightly Oriental, while the one of the right is Occidental. Maybe they are boys or maybe they are girls. We’re not supposed to know. If someone used this picture for a NAMBLA campaign, no one would be surprised. That’s the creepy part of the glorious future. It’s primary appeal seems to be to men who really like boys.

Gaia is a Fascist

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The climate change cult is very weird. This is a good example.

Climate change could affect the ratio of human males to human females that are born in some countries, a new study from Japan suggests. The researchers found that male fetuses may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Since the 1970s, temperature fluctuations from the norm have become more common in Japan, and at the same time there has been an increase in the deaths of male fetuses relative to the number of deaths of female fetuses in that country, according to the study.

Over this period, the ratio of male to female babies born in the country has been decreasing, meaning there have been fewer and fewer male babies born relative to the number of female babies born.

Got that. Your lawn mower will result in a race of Amazons enslaving men!

There’s one of these “studies” every day it seems. All are intended to add another log to the scare fire these strange sub-cults use to fuel their movement. Smoking used to be like this. Twenty years ago there were scare stories about how smoking was making everyone’s penis small. It is amusing how Mashable puts a pic of a retarded looking kid at the top of the story. Nice touch.

Then this in Maggies Farm last week.

Last week’s People’s Climate March drew 400,000 people onto the streets of Manhattan and a great deal of international attention to a subject of dire urgency. But some were skeptical about the event’s overall significance. “The march slogan was, ‘to change everything, we need everyone,’ which is telling, because it won’t change everything, because it didn’t include everyone,” wrote David Roberts of Grist. “Specifically, it won’t change American politics because it didn’t include conservatives.” True enough.

First off, the picture is classic. Imagine instead of sunflower standards they had eagles clutching a bundle of wooden rods and their shirts were black instead of orange. Same crowd, different uniforms. Second, overstating the crowd size is common with these neo-fascist groups. It’s argumentum ad populum with a lusty “or else” tacked onto it. Notice also the use of the word “conservative” to mean those outside their movement.

If there weren’t such a stark divide between American conservatives and almost everyone else on the question of the existence and importance of climate change — a divide that can approach 40 points on some polling questions — the political situation would be very different. So if any progress on climate change is going to be made through the American political system — apart from executive orders by Democratic presidents — it is going to have to somehow involve convincing a lot of conservatives that yes, climate change is a threat to civilization.

The stark divide between “conservatives and almost everyone else” is another way claiming they are an ascendant movement about to sweep aside the deniers, accept for the recalcitrant conservatives. Hitler used the same phraseology with the Jews. It is a tactic that dates to the dawn of written history. The fact that the deniers are a sizable majority suggests these people are following the path of The Seekers.

How do you do that? The answer has more to do with psychology than politics.

The practice of tailoring a political message to a particular group is commonplace, of course. But the climate activist community has broadly failed to understand just how differently conservatives and liberals see the world on certain issues, and, as a result, just how radically different messages targeting conservatives should look.

The first step would be to recognize “conservative” is a world like capitalism. It is used by the hive minded as a label for those outside the hive. In this case, it simply means non-liberals.

“Although climate scientists update, appropriately, their models after ten years of evidence, climate-science communicators haven’t,” said Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale who studies how people respond to information challenging their beliefs. Luckily, social and political psychologists are on the case. “I think there’s an emerging science of how we should talk about this if we’re going to be effective at getting any sort of movement,” said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford.

They should probably start by talking about the fact global warming has been on a two decade pause. They should also think about why all of their predictions have been wrong.

It’s worth pointing out, of course, that for many conservatives (and liberals), the current debate about climate change isn’t really about competing piles of evidence or about facts at all — it’s about identity. Climate change has come to serve as shorthand for which side you’re on, and conservatives tend to be deeply averse to what climate crusaders represent (or what they think they represent). “The thing most likely to make it hard to sway somebody is that you’re trying to sway them,” said Kahan.

This reminds me of how liberals, when exposed to Eric Hoffer’s True Believer, think he is talking about right-wingers. It is certainly true that most think the warmists are more than a bit nuts. They latched onto to something that is a mix of Old Testament prophesy, new age paganism and political fascism. Facts and evidence are not important to these people. It is about identity. That’s why they are the ones in the uniforms in that picture.

Ebola and You

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I’ve developed an interest in Africa of late. A few books got me going and I find the place endlessly fascinating. The English have always had an obsession with Africa and I’m starting to appreciate why. It is a complex riddle. The Ebola outbreak has therefore caught my attention. An epidemic like this tests a lot of theories popular in population genetics. You get the hardcore HBD’ers jumping in, but also the more nuanced types looking for a way to stay between the lines of acceptable opinion.

The left-wing media outlets are largely oblivious to this growing underground. Instead, they stick with the old time religion and produce articles like this one in the New York Times. There’s nothing terribly wrong with it, but the headline makes people like me chuckle. The near total lack of self-awareness from these folks is amazing. I often wonder if they bother having mirrors in their homes. What would be the point?

More than 5,800 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone have contracted Ebola since March, according to the World Health Organization, making this the biggest outbreak on record. More than 2,800 people have died.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that in a worst-case scenario, cases could reach 1.4 million in four months. The centers’ model is based on data from August and includes cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but not Guinea (where counts have been unreliable).

Estimates are in line with those made by other groups like the World Health Organization, though the C.D.C. has projected further into the future and offered ranges that account for underreporting of cases.

There are roughly 209 million people in the countries affected by this outbreak. Nigeria has a murder rate of 20 per 100,000. The other countries on the list have slightly lower rates, but those are guesses. Even assuming a much lower rate, about 20,000 people are murdered in these countries annually. That does not count warfare, which is a regular feature in places like Sierra Leone.

The point here is to put the numbers in perspective. The best case scenario makes the epidemic something close to a massive spike in violence. The worse case puts it on par with a bloody civil war. The difference is the inevitable refugee problem it brings, along with people carrying the disease to new areas. The people in those areas will most likely respond with force to keep them out. The neighboring countries probably lack the ability to do it peacefully so it will get very ugly.

Another difference is the domino effect. Millions of Africans are moving north in hopes of making their way into Europe. The nations of the Maghreb are being paid to block their path, but how long that lasts is anyone’s guess. It’s one thing to block people carrying their belongings. It is another to block people carrying a deadly virus. It’s not the zombie apocalypse that causes the mayhem; it is the fear of the zombie apocalypse.

Interestingly, no one bothers to ask why Ebola is an African problem. The reason for that is the answers don’t fit into the narrative. Everywhere on earth, except Africa, humans are an invasive species. There are a lot of things different about Africans beyond skin color. They evolved alongside their environment. Everyone else evolved outside their environment, for the most part. But, we are not allowed to think of these things so it is best not to ask.

What are the chances of the disease reaching the West? Unless we take up bat hunting, there’s little to no chance.

Ebola was discovered in 1976, and it was once thought to originate in gorillas, because human outbreaks began after people ate gorilla meat. But scientists have since ruled out that theory, partly because apes that become infected are even more likely to die than humans.

Scientists now believe that bats are the natural reservoir for the virus, and that apes and humans catch it from eating food that bats have drooled or defecated on, or by coming in contact with surfaces covered in infected bat droppings and then touching their eyes or mouths.

The current outbreak seems to have started in a village near Guéckédou, Guinea, where bat hunting is common, according to Doctors Without Borders.

There’s an expression old Africa hands used to use. It is “AWA” and it means Africa Wins Again. The Europeans tried everything they could to turn their colonies into outposts of civilization, but they all failed. No matter what you do, Africa can’t stop being Africa and Africans cannot stop being African. That’s been the lesson in America since the Civil War. You’re not allowed to think that so we think other things.

Bad Time For Fake Nerds

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Looks like one of their icons is a serial fabulist:

Religious fanatics have an odd habit of overreacting when people have the audacity to question their fanaticism. In Iraq, radical Islamic jihadists are systemically murdering and beheading Christians, Jews, and even Muslims who do not pledge fealty to ISIS’s religious tenets. Hundreds of years ago, church authorities and Aristotelian acolytes imprisoned Galileo for having the audacity to reject geocentrism in favor of heliocentrism. The bible recounts how Christians were persecuted and stoned, and Jesus himself was crucified for contradicting the religious dogma of the day.

You will bow to the religious zealots, or you will pay the price.

Which brings us to l’affaire de Tyson. Neil Tyson, a prominent popularizer of science (he even has his own television show) was recently found to have repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years. The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science. Tyson targeted journalists, members of Congress, even former President George W. Bush. And what was their crime? They were guilty of rejecting science, according to Tyson.

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened.

This is a common problem on the Left. No one challenges them so they start making stuff up. Celebrity scientists are a lot like celebrity chefs. They are better at being celebrities than being scientists. They start getting sloppy and before long they are making claims that are ridiculous. It’s why a lot of writers never read the comments of their own stories. They fear they will start writing to please their admirers.

Tyson does not seem like an evil person. He is a bright guy by conventional standards, but one always has to wonder about the elephant in the room. His scientific work is meager and ended more than 20 years ago. He made his name and career as a presenter, PR man and popularizer of science. Nothing wrong with any of it, but he probably should not be passing himself off as a scientist these days.

He is the John Stuart of science. Stuart does comedy, but he is not a comic. He is a preacher, telling the faithful the good news every night. He uses comedy as a tool and a shield. Tyson has the same act, except he uses science instead of comedy. Instead of mocking the benighted with comedy, Tyson tells the chosen that science proves their deepest beliefs. In another age, science would be replaced by the gods and Tyson would be dressed as a shaman.

Data Collection

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It is prudent to be skeptical about any claims from the government, especially those about their capabilities. Scooping up the databases from private companies, for example, is something government can do quite easily. Sorting it into anything useful is quite another. The volume is just too vast. Plus, a security apparatus so good that they can scoop and read everyone’s e-mail is not getting bested by a high school drop out like Snowden.

The reality is probably something a bit more crude. This story the other day in the Washington Post is what I mean.

The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications — a request the company believed was unconstitutional — according to court documents unsealed Thursday that illuminate how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program.

The documents, roughly 1,500 pages worth, outline a secret and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by Yahoo to resist the government’s demands. The company’s loss required Yahoo to become one of the first to begin providing information to PRISM, a program that gave the NSA extensive access to records of online com­munications by users of Yahoo and other U.S.-based technology firms.

The ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review became a key moment in the development of PRISM, helping government officials to convince other Silicon Valley companies that unprecedented data demands had been tested in the courts and found constitutionally sound. Eventually, most major U.S. tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and AOL, complied. Microsoft had joined earlier, before the ruling, NSA documents have shown.

Rather than covertly tapping into the root servers of the Internet or sniffing the world’s firewalls, the Feds are busting down doors and telling the big players to hand over their data. No doubt it is coming over in a digital format and in bulk, but that’s like having tractor trailers full of letters to Santa showing up ever day. Finding the one letter from Mohamed in Detroit is not going to be easy and maybe not even possible. Without a lot of other intelligence, having a big pile of e-mails is a waste of resources.

But, there’s value in letting the world know you can read their e-mail and listen to their calls. Even if it is not entirely true, it tilts the playing field. It forces everyone else to take precautions they otherwise might not take and maybe pushed them into forms of communication that are easier to track. The e-mail and telephone data also has use if you have other intel. If Abdul comes up on the radar and you have Abdul’s cell data, you can begin to put together his circle of friends, as it were.

Still it is important to remember that they have not caught anyone with this data. The Feds run to the nearest TV camera every time they catch some dope trying to join Jihad. If they had something to justify what is a very unpopular program, they would have made it public. It’s like gun registration. It is only useful when you have a lot of other information about the crime. In the case of gun crimes, the registration is useful after you have the gun and the perp. In the case of terrorism, having cell phone data is useful after you have the perp’s identity and location.