Insane Clown Posse is insane and so despite how much they enjoy the miracles¹ of the natural world, the operational mechanics of magnets continue to elude them. But they’re not alone.

It’s easy to say that magnets emit a magnetic field, but when you get down to it, that statement that needs more explanation. What is a magnetic field, and more importantly why does it cause that repulsion and attraction. The strange truth about most things we take as a given is that there are scads of underlying assumptions we ignore because at some point it’s easier to just take it as a given.

That’s not to say there aren’t people out there who truly understand magnetism, but chances are you’re not one of them.

Feynman’s ‘explanation’ of magnetism via a chain of questions running down into more and more general and fundamental truths reminds me of this great bit by Louis CK:

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1. Miracle in this instance meaning things science has explained quite well, but are still ‘magical’ in the poetic sense. [↩]

Yesterday, when I wrote about that Insane Clown Posse song, I said “you can’t deny that they’re right about this one.” Now, obviously that’s not right¹. These guys, and this song, are wrong in many ways about many things. They have a line expressing anger about scientists lying to them about how magnets work²!

But despite their horrible music, and bizarre stances, they got it right that nature is pretty great. Law of averages, I guess.

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1. And the over-the-top title was little more than a lame reference to an awesome show. [↩]
2. Really, I think the line is supposed to invoke some Creationist anger against the scientifically valid theory of Evolution, but if you didn’t know the members of Insane Clown Posse were devout Christians — and who could blame you for not knowing that based on their profuse profanity and bizarre clown make-up — it’s easy to just imagine them hearing a scientist describe the way magnets work and getting super pissed because they the explanation was lame and/or confusing. [↩]

Patrick Appel, filling the void for Andrew Sullivan, questions the usefulness of the new cap-and-trade legislation that squeaked by Congress at the end of last week:

I am eager to spend money to slow global warming. Still, I question whether a crippled cap and trade bill will make it harder to pass decent legislation later on.

But quite frankly, something is better than nothing. Joseph Romm seems to agree with me — put more honestly, I agree with Romm — and offers this useful tidbit:

It is worth noting that the original Clean Air Act — first passed in 1963 — also didn’t do enough and was subsequently strengthened many times.

So let’s do whatever we can get away with, in terms of climate change. Maybe it’s not enough, but if the choice is between something or nothing, that’s a no-brainer.

As much as I’d like the Washington establishment to do an about face simply because a lot of young people were interested in politics last fall, it’s not going to happen that way. We’re going to have to fight for every inch. So let’s start with this. All avalanches start somewhere.

Phil Plait, an excellent skeptical blogger, blogged about a heartbreaking exposé broadcast in Australia about the troubling decrease in childhood vaccinations. Phil Plait has a highly trafficked blog, much more than mine, so I considered not passing this message along, but no matter how few new people get the information, it’s worth it. The anti-vaccination movement is spreading and it’s hurting people. It’s killing people. Don’t let it win. Don’t let the unscientific ramblings of Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey sway you, or anyone you know, from getting childhood vaccinations. Fight back with the truth.

Andrew Sullivan recently pondered the question “Is psychiatry a religion?” In that post, he quoted a retort to the accusation, and the key idea in it that he latched onto was that “the single common feature of all religious is a preoccupation with unseen sentient beings, of which psychiatry says nothing” which Sullivan drying countered with “Two words: Sigmund Freud.”

The only problem with that is that Freud’s stances are outrageously outdated and naive. It is no longer the predominant stance of psychiatrists, nor is it taught as anything more than a historical curiosity in psychiatry classes any longer. Granted, all of this is from my personal experience while working towards a cognitive neuropsychology minor in university (which I sadly abandoned for brevity’s sake), but nearly every aspect of Freud’s work was taught minimally and then a superseding work was introduced that explained all of the things Freud’s work did but better.

Say what you will about the subjectivity of psychiatry and psycho-analysis, but when it comes to Sigmund Freud, neither the man nor his work is sacrosanct.

Three years ago I noticed a bunch of CDs on sale on amazon.ca for 99 cents each. I already had an order that needed a few more dollars to get free shipping and I love music, so I added a few for the sake of curiousity. A few weeks later the order arrived and I immediately started going through the CDs I purchased. The first I opened up to listen to was The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky. Immediately, I knew that I had discovered something amazing. Hidden in this seeming pile of refuse was an album that from its first echoed notes took hold of me and drew me in to a world I had never experienced previously and left me wanting more.

Eight months ago, I walked into a low capacity hall at San Diego Comic-Con for an early morning panel about an upcoming show from NBC called Kings. After a short discussion of the basic premise of the show — an alternate history drama set in a monarchy named Gilboa inspired by the biblical tale of David and Goliath — they screened the first twenty minutes of the pilot episode, and I experienced that same enraptured envelopment into a brand new world that that amazing album had beset upon me. Now, eight months after that initial burst of interest followed by a relative dearth of new information, Kings has finally premiered and my first impression has only been enriched by the complexities I once imagined were possible now made manifest by the remainder of this amazing premiere.

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, they’ve compiled snippets of the many reviews of this show. Some of them are fairly positive, but it seems as though most of them chide the show for having cheesy aspects, or soap opera trappings, comparing it to shows like Dynasty and Dallas. I’m not sure why any show that manages to tell a serious story is immediately a soap opera. Is Battlestar Galactica a soap opera because of its intense dour depiction of life? Of course not. It’s merely a show willing to deal with things seriously, as is Kings. To call the show a soap opera is to call Deadwood, or other such character drama, a soap opera: it’s not disingenuous to do so, but it belittles the show to use such a pejorative. All of the criticisms, though, are not unfounded. But the good, and more importantly the potential for good, more than outweighs what little there is to legitimately criticise.

The main story of the premiere, and likely of the rest of the series, is of David, played by Christopher Egan. Taking his name from the biblical slingshot-wielder, the show begins with David living the rural life as King Silas of Gilboa — Ian McShane in a typically brilliant performance — unveils the shiny new capital, Shiloh, built upon the ashes of the cities destroyed by the years of war that ravaged Gilboa before Silas united the lands in the unification War, a costly conflict that left David fatherless with a disenfranchised mother.

Before the inaugural speech is over, tensions are rising with the neighbour nation Gath and two years later the war carries on with David now at the front lines. When the survivors of an ambushed squad are taken hostage by Gath, David defies the orders and, crossing the front lines, rescues the hostages, including the King’s son. This rescue is no small feat given that the front lines of the war are lined by Gath ‘Goliath’ tanks, a menacing visage to all Gilboan soldiers. And so David returns as the hero who slayed a Goliath and saved the King’s son. That’s the first twenty minutes wrapped up in a few sentences. There’s much more there, but I find that the more I like a show the more I want to detail every nuance of the scene (which is why I rarely write about Lost; I don’t want to end up writing 15,000 words per episode) so I’ll leave the rest to the viewer to relish. I will say however, that those twenty minutes are the best and most effective exercise in world building I’ve ever seen.

This premiere has already established that, while this is an alternate history with kingdoms where America once reigned, this world only diverges from ours in the last two centuries. David’s love of classical piano, and more importantly his playing of a piece by Liszt, underscore an implicit history that will certainly get explored as the series continues. How did the world of Liszt change such that not America but Gilboa and Gath were formed? Hopefully, the writers already know the answer.

Perhaps as impressive as the world building is the character building, with every character having complexity and ambiguities which can be developed and exploited over time. The King’s wife, for example, is a quiet but manipulative woman who publicly expresses a distaste for politics while privately and silently ensuring her family’s skeletons stay in their respective closets. Similarly, his son portrays himself a womanizer to the paparazzi to keep up appearances, despite his homosexuality. His desire for power is clear but he is neither the villain nor the brat in this story. At least not yet.

The King’s brother-in-law, the head of a large corporation, Crossgen, which has bankrolled Silas’ rule for years is the most villainous character introduced thus far. His need for war to ensure quarterly profits impel him to push Silas to war despite peace being offered. It’s not until David, once again defying the will of the King, bravely reaches out to their faceless enemy, as the Goliaths stare him down, and brings about renewed peace talks, that his lust for war is sated. Even then, his plots and machinations continue apace to replace the King and continue the profitable war.

David is the archetypal hero. He is a farm-boy turned war hero who doesn’t understand nor desire the world into which he’s been thrown. He quickly falls for the King’s daughter, herself a passionate supporter of improving the nation’s health care much to the King’s dismay. His star rises precipitously, first due the the rescue of the hostages, then later from his part in the reestablishment of peace talks with Gath.

And of course, King Silas himself, around whom all this intrigue revolves, is one of the great draws of this show. Ian McShane, playing a character as conniving as Al Swearengen in a world much more civilized yet just as brutal as Deadwood, is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale network television environment. Silas is a complicated man, a melange of numerous regal stereotypes. His opening speech, and most likely every speech after that, describes a story from the founding days of Gilboa when a flock of butterflies came upon him and perched upon his head in a ring as if they were a living crown. A sign from God. And yet, he has none of the trappings of the typical religiously driven leaders of our time: he knows full-well that evolution is a truth, and devotes a family breakfast to the topic; he accepts his son’s homosexuality as a part of his nature; he is an eloquent leader, who uses his words for both good and ill; he is a brilliant tactician whose military experience lent itself to the political travails of a King. Of course, his religiosity is tempered by his desire for power, and when the Reverend Samuels disowns Silas near the end of the premiere he is more than willing to abandon God. But despite these two conflicting aspects of his larger-than-life personality, beneath it all is a long dormant desire for a quieter life. He is a tragic yet terrifying hero, one we know will eventually fall away for David to rise.

The two weak points of the premiere are the wartime scenes and the relationship between David and the King’s daughter. That Gath would hold hostages just past the front lines of battle, even temporarily, strain credulity. In addition, David’s impassioned speech to Gath asking for compassion and common ground would have likely ended with David brutally destroyed by the numerous tanks trained on him throughout the speech. But I take both of these points in stride because a) this is a different world, with different alliances and territories, strategies and tactics could be slightly different b) David held a white cloth stained in his brother’s blood as he delivered his speech; had Gath fired upon a white flag, there surely would have been international repercussions and c) it is David’s destiny to become King — the final scene where the butterflies land atop his head to signal his coming reign is a sure sign of that — and so I’m willing to accept a few well-timed mistakes on his enemies’ parts; many of the most successful kings and emperors of the past have had such luck in the ascension to power.

The other weak part, the love story, is weak because it happened too easily. There’s no real conflict there, they both seem to already be smitten with each other and in a relationship. I was hoping for it to take a while for their bond to grow before all that happened, but this is a minor quibble as the show could easily still get those things done over the course of the season by introducing conflict. It’s also very daring that the show took what appears to be the only romantic relationship on the show and resolved it so quickly. It’s like if the writers of The Office got Jim and Pam together in the first episode. So I’m willing to believe, for now, that they’ve thought about this and are subverting the stereotypes again for effect.

It’s been a couple days now and the ratings have been tallied and they’re atrocious. Kings had a horrible opening. Kings has already finished filming for the season and I used to think that networks wouldn’t cancel a show with complete episodes ready to air, but Firefly and Daybreak shattered that misconception, so I have to hope that the word of mouth on Kings spreads fast and the ratings improve week-over-week, because this show is a real adventure. It’s an adventure in storytelling, it’s an adventure in world-building, and perhaps most importantly it’s an adventure in broadcasting. It’s the sort of high concept high drama story that’s been relegated to cable television in recent years, and yet here it is on a Big Three network (admittedly the smallest of the Big Three). If Kings becomes a ratings success, as it deserves to be, it could be a catalyst for the networks to reinvigorate the increasingly conservative and middling television they produce.

I loved the premiere. I’m  deeply impressed with the show so far. It’s an achievement in storytelling, and I’m sure the subsequent episodes will be as good if not better.

Yesterday, I sat down and watched a spectacular lecture about primate sexuality I found through Boing Boing. One thing I learned, among the many many fascinating things I learned over the course of the lecture, was that men produce more testosterone when near women. I also learned that testosterone spurs the growth of facial hair. And that’s why I have virtually no facial hair…

I was over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog reading a post for which I have no context, but one thing in particular caught my eye.

Is the scientist (or anyone else) who refuses a cigarette based on that evidence making a moral judgment?  Yes!  The scientific data say nothing about whether cancer or death are BAD and things to be avoided, only that they are likely to happen.

Refusing a cigarette is not necessarily a moral decision. Not wanting to die is not a moral position. In fact, generally speaking self-preservation is seen as a biological imperative and selfish act. This statement is really taking the false dichotomy logical fallacy to new depths.

I like engineering. I really do. I’ve spent five years training to become one and I rarely find the material uninteresting, despite the progression in difficulty. I love so many aspects of engineering that my career possibilities with it are nearly limitless and yet my whole life I’ve had a subordinate ambition that continually whispers sweet somethings into my ear: writing. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I never decided if it would be scholarly writing or working in sleazy Hollywood or some other path but I always loved to write. In fact, I used to think I was pretty good in high school. I would come up with great ideas for stories or I’d just start writing and something would show up on the page that made me laugh or sigh or even made my eyes well up. I sit down and try to write now and sometimes something happens; it’s so much rarer now and yet I feel like if I really dedicated my efforts to being a writer I could succeed. Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last five years deriving differential equations of second order systems and convoluting signals using hamming windows my create literary muscles wouldn’t have atrophied.

I still feel like this is a delusion I tell myself, but as I am relentlessly meta, I can’t help but feel like the rational, “safe” part of my brain tricks me into thinking that my writing skills were never really there and my creative half is waiting to explode with ideas and let the words fall onto the page the way they did when I was young. I was passionate back then. Even when I first fell in love with the internet and created my own site I used it to display my writings online. I would post poetry, short stories, and anything else I could imagine. Now after all these years, it seems like my infatuation with the internet, which began as a means to the end of letting the world at large read my works, has become the end and the means.

I’ve had a website since grade ten (around 7 or 8 years go by now) and I’ve had a blog for around 5 or 6 years by now (though I tend to write a blog, become disinterested in the whole venture and then a few months later start up a new one ignoring the old) and as much as I hate it I love it. I’m a pain in my own ass because I write so many blog posts that literally never making it out of draft mode either because I can’t find a good way to succinctly and memorably conclude my points or because halfway through, I lose the rhetoric which let me express my thoughts to that point. Unfinished thoughts that if I really tried I could write. Which brings me back to my original point.

I love to write. As much as I love engineering and technological problem solving, the concept or writing works that will move other people and connect with people on a level a face-recognition program never could is painfully tantalizing. Granted, I’m in the middle of procrastinating while trying to study for a midterm for my ongoing engineering education so that may taint my thoughts at the moment, but I feel like when I finally graduate I have to give it an honest shot at writing. In whatever form and medium I can do so, I need to try.

The problem with free will is that it means humans can do shitty stuff. The bigger problem with free will is that when there’s an after-life or there’s reincarnation or something beyond what little time we have here, there isn’t a pressing need to improve the world around you or be a positive member of the community around you; this isn’t universal, many religions teach you to cherish the earth, but with any promise of some form of afterlife there will be people who will just not give a damn.

Enter Religion. Now we’ve got a bunch of guys claiming to know how God wants you to act and most of the time it’s decent but some of the time it’s horrific. Of course, the problem with religion is that most of the big ones are pretty loose about their moral restrictions; Christianity, in particular, allows complete forgiveness and acceptance to heaven for simply asking forgiveness on your death bed. It’s supposed to be sincere, but the priest providing the last rites has no special ability to discern sincerity. So you can do whatever the fuck you want to as long as you feign sincerity long enough to ask forgiveness.

The reason you can do whatever you want is this ephemeral promise of eternity. So what’s a benevolent God to do? Convince people he doesn’t exist! Without the supernatural crutch of God, people would have to get their act together, do unto others and all that good stuff; you’ve only got one life, so you better not fuck it up. So you wanna know my theory? I think that if God existed, he would be working towards an atheist world where they follow his principles because they think it’s best, not because He thinks it’s best.

You want to know the really insidious thing about this? This means, that religion is a creation of the devil. Yeah. I know. It’s fucked. By creating religion, the devil co-opted God’s kick-ass plan. And the best thing about it (that devil is really tricky) is that God can’t interfere. He can’t come down and say “No! There is no God! Do not follow these religions which the devil has created!” because he would then be co-opting his own plan. Some people say that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled, was convincing the world he didn’t exist” but that’s wrong; the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that God does.

Preface

I feel that I must preface this post with a history. This post originated over eight months ago during a sheep brain dissection lab I had for a psychology course. The original question was “do sheep zombies need to eat sheep brains?” and from there the discourse progressed. After the creating the title (which was a solid twenty minutes of dictionary lookups and googling) I pretty much ran out of steam. But then, just a couple weeks ago my interest was renewed for no known reason and I began writing. And boy howdy did I write. Not only is this on the long-winded side of my typical post, but when I initially created this post I put it in the category of “Humour” which I seem to have been left by the wayside in favour of a more serious discussion of the topic. Though I know there are flaws and forgotten topics along the way, I’m sick of seeing it in my list of drafts and so I release it from the black hole that is my perfectionism.

Zombies

Zombies. The black sheep of the supernatural monster world. They’re the youngest of the group and shrouded in mystery. In their origins zombies were simply reanimated dead controlled by a Voodoo master. In fact, they were often used as mindless slaves for manual labour. Over time, the zombie was twisted into its current, more menacing, state: that of an undead creature with no intelligence of its own and a desire only for survival. Zombies represent a fear most people who live in an individualistic culture share: the loss of identity. A zombie is simply another blob in the horde seeking sustenance. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the zombie horde seems to absorb any and all things in their path and in the process lose any semblance of individualism.

Many zombies survive by the eating of living flesh, though their taste for brains is the one proclivity which resonates with movie goers. It’s obvious why brain eating becomes the most noticeable feature of zombies; as humans, we fear the thing which takes away that which we treasure the most. So, while many zombie films do not treat the brain as the most desired part of human anatomy, for our purposes here we will imagine a prototypical zombie for whom this desire is paramount. In particular, we will discuss why homo-chauvinism perpetuates through zombie culture.

So the question we’re going to ask today is whether or not zombies exist in other creatures and if cross-species feeding can occur. Why is it that zombie films never show a cute little puppy dog being gobbled up? Why do we never see a group of fleeing humans come upon a serene farm only to be attacked by zombie sheep? It’s not because these images wouldn’t have an impact on the viewer; they could be terrifying in one instance and hilarious in another. Is there some secret zombie dogma by which all films are compared? Do the creators of these films lack the imagination to shock the viewer with something original? What is it that zombies really require? If it were truly brains, then animal brains would be a hot commodity when humans became scarce. Similarly, zombies never seem to attack each other for what little brain remains after their conversion.

Perhaps it is not the tissue itself but the contents therein; what if zombies eat intelligence? From a purely philosophical point of view, this could very well be. If we take the zombie horde as an analogy for mob mentality, then we can see they are what becomes of us when we sacrifice our intelligence; when caught up in a situation where mob mentality takes over, intelligence has little to do with your actions. This analogy can be seen by noting the origins of zombies. From a human-made virus infecting people with unending rage, to the literal undead raised by some witches curse, almost every reason used to explain the origin of zombies arises from humanity. Additionally, unlike almost every other supernatural monster, the cause is always recent.

Conclusion

After all this discussion what is the ultimate answer? It is my belief that, given the right circumstances surrounding the origin of the zombies, animals could be zombies and, again given the right circumstances, those animal zombies would be free to engage in cross-species feeding. However, zombies have an allegorical representation which the auteur is beholden to respect. Because of this, most zombie movies are not likely to entertain the notion of inter-species postmortem encephalophagia.

You know who’s retarded? Those stupid atheists who get offended whenever God is mentioned. The atheist who refuses “God bless you” because he doesn’t believe in God. Let’s be honest: “God bless you” has become little more than a courtesy in our society. It has no real significant religious connotation. It’s like being offended by the word holiday. Our language and culture is a certain way and if you would prefer to not have that culture and language, live somewhere that doesn’t have them.

You know who else is retarded? Christians who lump all atheists (typically including weak atheists, strong atheists, agnostics, and even non-Christian theists, all of which I will differentiate in a later post) into one single group and treat them accordingly. Not only are there various levels of theistic belief, but there are also assholes at every level.

The atheist who refuses “God bless you” or tries to remove “under God” from the pledge of allegiance is just being an asshole who thinks his personal beliefs should be enforced on the rest of the world. I do understand that the pledge was modified early in the 20^th century to include the God statement and it has no place in a pledge to a nation which claims to have a separation of church and state, but the net effect it has on you is nil. No child, sitting in class as they recite the pledge, is seriously examining it to make sure they follow it religiously: they’re droning on by rote.

The Christian who pities the atheist or condemns the atheist for their “immoral” ways is an asshole who thinks that he must declare to people who disagree with their moral compass that they are wrong. The Christian who tries to place his Christian values into the secular laws of the state is an asshole who thinks his personal beliefs should be enforced on the rest of the world.

Both sides have assholes who should be ignored for being assholes.

When I first saw this picture I was certain that it couldn’t have been Pareidolia, it looked so much like a face. Over the years I heard the explanations of how wind and erosion and similar actions could have made the face but they never truly convinced me. But recently, I’ve been listening to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe podcast and they have, on numerous occasions, derided the Face on Mars as obvious pareidolia; I was amazed by their audacity! This picture was burned into my memory and I was certain that it was indeed a face… then I looked into it. I have to admit that looking back on the picture the shadows concealing half of the face made it easier to see the face but even then it seemed quite clear that it was not an entirely natural formation. Of course then I read those little squiggles below the picture; some people call it text. Anyways, I read this “text” and it informed me that the picture taken in 1976 was from a pretty shitty camera. It then showed a comparison of a picture by said shitty camera and one taken in 2001 by a more advanced space probe. The 1976 picture in the comparison is not the same one as displayed here but it is similar enough to see how, depending on the lighting at the time, they were the same. The newer picture was much a higher quality photo which showed the same hill with higher definition and looking nothing like a face. It actually stunned me that I had to fight to find the structures of the hill that were perceived as a face in the older picture. The real problem was that I was living on old information; I had never seen these new photos which show how obviously it is a natural formation and was oblivious until I investigated. If only people with similar assuredness in their beliefs could look into things before baselessly berating the detractors; I suppose that’s asking too much.

Well it appears that thanks to advanced sound editing software, someone has managed to show that Neil Armstrong did in fact say One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.^[1] Well, this may not make me a hero among the grammarians of the world – or Armstrong himself, who still contests he said a man – but the beautiful parallel structure of the statement as it has stood nigh four decades is what makes the statement iconic. Grammar be damned, removing that a was one of the best audio glitches to grace mankind or man.

Well, I recently went out to the theatres to see ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ which I felt was going to be a Michael Moore biased-as-fuck “Documentary” and my fears were in many ways confirmed and in many ways belied. Ignoring the fear, uncertainty, and doubt flashed about in the movie, I was glad there was research behind the film. Now allow me to put my butt-face on.

Before this movie I had swung back and forth on Global Warming a couple of times and was cautiously optimistic regarding the whole subject. I had read a few articles from either side: some supporting some decrying the alarmist views regarding global warming. First I want to make something clear: Al Gore posits that because of 928 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 928 agree that global warming is happening and, presumably though not explicitly stated, caused by human intervention. While, this sounds very convincing and it does indeed show that some very smart people agree on this topic, it does not state the topics of said articles. Just because an evolutionary biologist thinks global warming is anthropogenic doesn’t make it more credible; a climatologist has drastically more clout on this subject. Before I sound like an evidence ignoring fundamentalist, I have to once again clarify that I am aware this does not invalidate his point: many very smart people agree on the subject. In fact, Michael Shermer (founder of the Skeptics Society) has just recently flipped on his stance regarding global warming in part because of Gore’s slideshow. Some of the things which shocked and scared Shermer don’t have quite the same effect on me. I don’t personally care about the beauty of glaciers so seeing some well known ones receding didn’t have much significance. Not mentioning that these glaciers could be receding from the end of the last ice age; we have limited knowledge of the scope of ice ages and the timeframe under which they work. Granted, seeing the ice atop the Himalayas disappear was a surprise to me and it did indeed make me question what the doubters had been saying. So I took it upon myself to re-examine the doubting statements; time to get angry.

In one of the skeptical articles I read, they stated that 650 thousand years ago the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere was three times higher than the current levels and it was the coldest time in the recorded history we have available as of yet. This is, as far as I can tell, complete bullshit. I found an article which discussed the new core sample (circa Nov 2005) extending our ice history back 650 thousand years. The article confirmed that our current concentrations are an anomoly and that our current concentrations are 27% higher than any previously recorded values. In a different article it was stated that while the Arctic ice shelf is receding in some areas it is actually thickening and growing elsewhere. This is another statement for which I can find no corroborating evidence; all the evidence points points to the shelf thinning and receding fairly quickly. What the fuck?

Being skeptical is one thing but lying to make your “point” is just wrong. So I decided to take a fresh look at the facts. Even without people lying their asses off, there is indeed a healthy dose of reasonable doubt awash on this entire issue. However, as a responsible skeptic, I follow the facts and so I have to admit that I’m leaning toward the global warming argument now. It could be simply anger at the skeptics lying to me but there is also a healthy body of evidence supporting Global Warming whereas every solid disproof I’ve heard of disappears under further scrutiny. It sucks to have to admit to yourself that you were bamboozled into a certain opinion through indirection and lies but if I just continued to deny Global Warming blindly, I’d be no better than the fundamentalist.