Dear 'experts': Don't bother auditioning for 'Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?'

Idea for title borrowed from Jimmie Bise, video swiped from The Blog Prof:

For crying out loud! These idiots were urging us to undo two centuries of economic growth on the basis of bug-riddled computer code? I'm convinced that the whole purpose of this climate-change crap was for a bunch of universities to get taxpayer money. "Give us grants so we can buy super-computers and save the world!"

Exit question: What's your over/under on the number of gigabytes of porn on the hard drives of those CRU computers?

'Trust us -- we're scientists!'

As our teachers used to say in math class, "show your work":

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

(Via Memeorandum.) My Catholic friend Pete at Da Tech Guy knows how to push my Protestant buttons:

Q: What do the "Global Warming" people have in common with some forms of Protestantism?
A: Apparently they also are making the argument that the salvation of Global Warming should be a question of faith and not works.

Right, Pete. While we await your Ph.D. dissertation on the physics of transubstantiation -- zing! -- let's agree that there have always been religious overtones to environmentalism. One reason that abortion is such a sacred right to some Baby Boomers is that they were deceived by the "Population Bomb" hoax of the 1960s and '70s, when neo-Malthusians warned that the alternative to draconian population control was a Soylent Green-style dystopia.

For decades, elitists have sneered at those of us who are skeptical toward the claims of what I describe as the Temple Cult of Scientism:

The High Priests perform their statistical rituals and the cultists genuflect reverently before their idol, Science.

The federally-mandated triumph of secularism in public education -- Engel v. Vitale, Abington School District, Epperson v. Arkansas -- has steadily enlarged the credulous congregation of the Temple Cult.

These landmark Supreme Court decisions stigmatized religion as unconstitutionally subversive of the educational process, ensuring that future generations of American youth would be inculcated with a sort of neo-Manichean worldview, wherein traditional religious belief had nothing relevant to say about science, history, psychology or any other realm of human inquiry.

Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver famously observed, and this legally-certified declaration that there was no overlap between Faith and Reason has not merely marginalized Faith, it has also undermined Reason. When we behold the religious fanaticism of the Temple Cult in regard to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), we must understand this irrational fruit as a natural product of the poisoned tree of Scientism.

Philip E. Johnson's Reason in the Balance demonstrated how Darwinism -- one of the bedrock tenets of Scientism -- inevitably perverts not only science but also education, law and many other intellectual endeavors. It is but one step from this sort of Scientism to the revolutionary terror of Jacobinism, for when men jettison the anchor of Faith, the selfish conceit of Reason makes them dangerous fools, as Edmund Burke explained:

A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper, and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who will not look backward to their ancestors. . . .
We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government; nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born, altogether as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity.

This temptation to think that we are morally superior to our ancestors, you see, is the road to hell that Scientism paves. You need not be a Bible-thumping fundamentalist (like me) to notice how the adherents of Darwin tend to smuggle into their arguments a predisposition toward Whig history, wherein humankind is relentlessly struggling upward on the road of Progress. Here it is best to recall the brilliant aphorism of G.K. Chesterton:

"My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."

Exactly. If everything is Progress and Progress is everything, then decline becomes an ontological impossibility and -- by logical extension -- today's Congress is morally superior to the Founders who gathered at Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787.

Anyone who doesn't understand how such a worldview undermines the Rule of Law and puts our rights at the mercy of legislators and bureaucrats has forfeited any claim to intellectual superiority that would qualify them to lecture the rest of us about Science.

Christopher Hitchens is both intelligent and an atheist, but intelligent men who suppose themselves smarter than God are ultimately defeated by their own syllogisms. Man dies and God endures, and if man's conceptions of the eternal and infinite -- the Alpha and Omega -- are sufficiently flawed as to be vulnerable to literary criticism or scientific dispute, then this is merely because, as the Apostle Paul said, "now we see through a glass, darkly."

There are no accidents, you see, and those who seek God earnestly and diligently will not forever be frustrated in the search. In checking my citation just now, I was directed to I Corinthians 13, which rather famously addresses the relationship between faith and works:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Truly there are no accidents, and by his seeming joke about Protestantism, my Catholic friend Pete has directed me by the roundabout route toward the passage that justifies a Protestant creed: Sola Scriptura, Sola Fide, Sola Gratia.

We end, then, with Paul's meditation on love and charity. Considering the season -- especially Mrs. Other McCain's decision to be a one-woman stimulus program on Black Friday -- I am tempted to declare myself a fit object of charity.

However, I am merely a greedy capitalist blogger, and this is a fee-for-service operation, so if you wish to show appreciation for my services in vindicating Faith and Reason, $5 or $10 in the tip jar might do the trick. If your prefer even more shameless capitalism, we'll count this as the latest installment of our second annual Holiday Book Sale. And don't forget: What to Give Your Wife for Christmas.

'Cap and Trade Is Dead'

Well, duh! This is kind of obvious, isn't it? Once the fraudulent "science" behind the global warming scare was exposed, Al Gore became the Piltdown Man of American politics and that whole Kyoto-style agenda was as obsolete as the mullet and parachute pants. Delicious commentary from Eric Raymond:

For those of you who have been stigmatizing AGW skeptics as "deniers" and dismissing their charges that the whole enterprise is fraudulent? Hope you like the taste of crow, because I do believe there’s a buttload of it coming at you. Piping hot.

Unlike crow, schadenfreude is a dish best served cold. And I remind you what I said in June:

The simplest way to define conservatism is this: The belief that liberalism is wrong.

All along, the strongest evidence that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was a hoax was a simple fact: Liberals believed in it.

Kind of like the Obama administration's economic plan, really. It didn't take any prophetic power to declare last December, "It Won't Work." And the emerging obviousness of the failure of Obamanomics is just further confirmation of the fundamental truth that liberalism is always wrong.

Now, if only we can get liberals to agree that Florida will win the SEC championship next Saturday, an Alabama victory is guaranteed.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: G.M. Roper:

The recent exposure of emails, data and software from the pre-eminent global warming organization -- the Climate Research Unit -- shows not only that scientists are human and thus tribal, arrogant and sometimes deceitful, but also the modern process is inadequate and antiquated.
Skeptics have argued that critical data had been "cooked," and scientists had been refusing requests for data. Now we know that not only was the data misused and that the scientists had been engaged in a coverup and suppression of dissent, but also that they are not even able to understand their own data. . . .

Read the whole thing. What we need, I tell you, is a scientific consensus that Florida will win next Saturday. Get the CRU working on it. Roll Tide.

More 'scientific' kookery

Dr. Jones awaits the global-warming gotterdammerung:

If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.

Via Tim Blair, who observes, "Of course, if change doesn’t happen, it won't prove that science was wrong. It'll prove that certain scientists were."

Fanatical certainty among misguided experts is by no means limited to the global-warming cultists. The field of psychology, for example, has been whipsawed by successive eruptions of the "expert consensus." There was the whole Freudian analytical couch-trip trend, pre-frontal lobotomies and eletroshock treatments, deinstitutionalization and so on, until today everything is attributed to neurochemistry. This latest consensus is probably wrong, too.

I'm eagerly awaiting the day when psychiatric practice comes full circle and the expert consensus declares that all mental illness is caused by masturbation, demon possession or both: "Nurse, bring the holy water, it's time for Mr. Sullivan's exorcism."

Shocker: Progressive Catholic 'charity' supports anti-Catholic agenda

As a Protestant, I try to avoid meddling in intra-Catholic feuds, but the American Life League issued a press release today that shocked me:

As thousands of Catholic parishes across the country prepare for the annual Catholic Campaign for Human Development collection Nov. 22, shocking new developments have launched a groundswell of protest from Catholics around the country.
A coalition including American Life League, Human Life International and the Bellarmine Veritas Ministry have spent the last two months exposing CCHD's funding of organizations promoting abortion, homosexual marriage, birth control and sex education.
In the last year alone, CCHD has funneled at least $1.3 million to groups opposing Catholic Church teaching.CCHD describes itself as the "domestic anti-poverty, social justice program of the U.S. Catholic bishops."
The coalition’s latest discovery exposes 31 organizations partnered with Center for Community Change. CCC is a politically radical, anti-life, pro-homosexualist organization whose board members include Heather Booth, former consultant for the National Organization for Women and Sara Gould, President and CEO of pro-abortion Ms. Foundation for Women.
Through their "Generation Change" program CCC trains and develops staff as "community organizers" for their partner groups. CCC provides a resource library with books promoting "reproductive freedom and its "Movement Vision Lab" equates access to abortion and "reproductive justice" with seeking criminal justice. This project aims to build a "progressive movement" with a "coherent, compelling, shared vision — one that represents our values and dreams for society" according to the group. . . .

Well, Catholics can read the rest and decide what to do about it, if anything. Matthew Vadum points out that CCHD "only reluctantly cut off ACORN last year and continues to fund the equally radical community organizing group Industrial Areas Foundation that was founded by Saul Alinsky himself." Furthermore, as Vadum wrote earlier this week:

The charitable arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, CCHD has never provided direct relief to the poor. That's not its purpose.
CCHD is an extreme left-wing political organization that was created to feed and foster radical groups, but most Catholics are blissfully unaware of its true mission.

In other words, CCHD is not a charity. Catholics have been deceived into giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a left-wing group that works directly against the teachings of the church. And the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops defends this political swindle.

Like I said, I'm a Protestant. It's a free country. Catholic readers can do whatever they want about CCHD.

Or do nothing. "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

Lies, damned lies, and 'climate change'

One of the biggest scientific scandals of our age, described in two sentences:

That supposed scientific "consensus" about global warming may actually be a conspiracy. E-mails from a British climate-research organization -- obtained by an Australian magazine, Investigate -- disclose scientists discussing a statistical "trick" to "hide the decline" of global temperatures in their data.

More reaction at Memeorandum.

UPDATE I: Before we go any further, let's understand why this is so important. There have always been scientists who have disputed the "consensus" about global warming. Many of the alleged "experts" whose authority has been cited on behalf of this consensus are not, in fact. especially qualified in the field of meteorology, and some of the most prominent spokesmen on the topic of climate change -- e.g., Al Gore -- are no more qualified than you or I to speak as experts.

With the assistance of a pliant media establishment, the global-warming crowd has created the impression that all qualified experts agree with their theory, and that all skeptics are either biased or unqualified. The consensus-mongers have arrogated to themselves the authority to decide who is or is not an expert, and what does and does not qualify as evidence. Once this was Jedi mind-trick was accomplished, it was predictable that any data contradicting the "consensus" would be ignored or suppressed.

Remember this, the next time you hear some media elitist carping about "anti-intellectualism."

UPDATE II: Ed Morrissey quotes extensively from the Climate Research Unite e-mails, and comments:

Do scientists use data to test theories, or do they use theories to test data? . . . [H]ere we have scientists who cling to the theory so tightly that they reject the data. That’s not science; it’s religious belief.

Kind of like economists who think the Obama/Pelosi agenda will lead to recovery.

Expect further updates . . .

NY23: 'Mischief' by ACORN?

That's what Doug Hoffman says and, while Jude Seymour and Politico are skeptical, I've got a few insights at he American Spectator:

My own source suggested last week that it is unlikely that Hoffman's margin in those absentee ballots would be enough to erase the 3,026-vote gap. However, the need to ensure an accurate count, and to expose any potential illegalities, is still very important. If anyone has committed criminal wrongdoing in this upstate New York district, they need to be identified and prosecuted.
Furthermore, the narrowing of the gap by more than 2,300 votes between the reported results on Election Night and the actual vote tally shows how misreporting can affect political outcomes. If the reported margin had been narrower -- and especially if the tallies in Oswego and Jefferson had been accurately reported -- Hoffman never would have conceded that night.
Most of all, the discovery of the errors (or "mischief") in the vote-count makes it a near-certainty that Hoffman will challenge Owens in NY23 in 2010.

Read the whole thing. (Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)