SoylentNews

Can't get past the paywall to find out.

I'd go for it...

Looks like all the world's powerful pedophiles are safe once again.

Now, let let the wild speculation begin of how a man under suicide watch can commit "suicide" by hanging. Or, if he's really dead...

This world truly is a gangsters paradise

“MAGA Bomber” Cesar Sayoc was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday for sending 16 mail bombs to 13 people around the United States last year, including leading critics of President Donald Trump such as former President Barack Obama, ex-Vice President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor Robert De Niro and financier George Soros.

“I am beyond so very sorry for what I did,” Sayoc said before he was sentenced in U.S. District Court in Manhattan by Judge Jed Rakoff, according to the Courthouse News service.

“Now that I am a sober man, I know that I a very sick man,” Sayoc reportedly said. “I wish more than anything that I could turn back time and take back what I did ... I feel the pain and suffering of these victims.”

But Rakoff said, “The nature and cirumstances of the instant offenses are, by any measure, horrendous.”

“While none of the devices exploded ... at the very least they were intended to strike fear and terror into the minds of their victims and to intimidate those victims, mostly prominent political figures, from exercising their freedom.”

‘MAGA Bomber’ Cesar Sayoc sentenced to 20 years in prison for trying to kill Trump critics, including Obama, Clinton, Biden, Booker, Harris

Walmart

Just kidding!

Man charged with assault after punching anti-Trump protester outside Cincinnati rally

Can you put Turtle Wax on a tortoise?

I really hate to say it and will probably be downmodded into oblivion, but that essay shows that the problem isn't that their explanations contradict. Instead, it shows that you don't understand what is going on with the science or the claims. And then you make some turn into this being a cultural problem of some kind.

But here is a car analogy for you. You are driving a car towards a "T" intersection and they are saying that if you keep hitting the gas bad things are going to happen. Preferably, you should stop before you hit the white line on the road, to avoid oncoming traffic. But you say, "Ha, you don't even know how much each additional angle of accelerator I add increases my speed. Depending on that I could still stop in time or cross the road completely into that brick wall."

Note that the poster starts with the stark claim that I "don't understand what is going on" and then segues into a shaggy dog story about car analogies. No attempt to show that I didn't understand ever happened. Fortunately, the mod givers were feeling generous and no downmodding into oblivion occurred for posting that tripe.

Moving on, there was the dropping of "radiative forcing" numerous times. Here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing will get you started, but your problem is that you want a "trivial" answer without putting the work in. The experts are telling you what is going on, but you are ignoring that but then complaining that it is too complicated. Its like going to the doctor, they tell you you have cancer, you ask for proof, they show you the X-ray, and then you bitch about how you refuse to accept the evidence because it is too complicated for a non-radiologist to understand.

Here:

Ah, now I see your problem! You don't understand how global temperatures work, nor how to understand the equations you wield. First, the formula is ∆F = α ln(C/C0), where C is the CO2 concentration in ppm, C0 is the baseline concentration in ppm, α is an experimental constant, and ∆F is the radiative forcing in Watts per square meter. You are putting garbage in, namely an arbitrary number in the wrong dimension (Celsius temperature, not a W/m2), so you are getting garbage out. Yes, you can get a function "f" such that f(C) = ∆T, but it isn't the one you gave.

Note the f(C) is still logarithmic to first approximation to changes in variable C. with followup:

Here you go: [https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/08/clip_image0022.jpg - link provided in subsequent reply - khallow] They are a climate skeptic website and you'll notice that even they use the proper dF formula in their formula (and some other things I said you were missing, but that's under the bridge for this discussion). And what is that? A natural logarithm. Even your own allies (not to mention your previous Wikipedia citation to the rocket equation) disagree with you on the kind of logarithm to use. But like I said, anyone can Google it and find multiple sources, but feel free to double down on how you are right about everything again.

And if one looked at the formula provided in the link, one would see the almost linear relationship between dF and global mean temperature.

This also brings up the red herring of the "natural logarithm". I was using log base 2 in some calculation. Apparently, instead I should use log(x)/log(2) instead (where log is the natural logarithm). That happens to be exactly log base 2. Anyway, this ended with a massacre of straw men:

Kids, here is an important lesson for you. Don't deal with people who can't admit their mistakes and can't reexamine their positions. You see, he can't admit that he could be wrong about this because that might mean he was wrong about other things and he has invested quite a bit of effort into being right. Therefore, when presented with facts he pretends that he was right the whole time (usually by shifting the burden or moving the goal posts) and everyone else is wrong. So when flatly presented with the fact that they were wrong, even when presented to him by a source that otherwise agrees with him, he moves the goalpost.

First it was, "my formula that I got out of thin air and with no citation is right but you must provide your own citation for yours."

Then when that is wrong, it becomes the ad hoc:

• no your formula that you and all the scientists use is wrong.
• My formula (which I previously claimed was theirs until shown otherwise) is correct because it is close to your answer.
• My formula is correct because it ignores the whole reason why CO2 increases temperature.
• My formula is correct because it is close enough to your formula but changed for an unspecified reason that renders all of my calculations off by a scalar.
• My formula is correct because it is ok because it meets my goals of showing calculations of the other formula are incorrect.
• My formula is correct because even though there is a difference between ln(2) and log2(2), it is fine because we are doubling, which somehow makes this more "natural."
• My formula is correct because language that implies a change of the value of an independent variable in an equation is the same as changing the operations applied to them.

Seriously, if they were talking about the climate change caused by the quadrupling of CO2, would you still insist that log2(4) would make more sense or would it be log4(4) (I mean you are talking about quadrupling so use base 4 right?), or would you admit that you are wrong based on all the citations elsewhere, even people who take your side, and use ln(4)?

Regardless, at the end, if you aren't using the same formula as the IPCC and everyone else, your imagined value can't be compared to the values created by anyone else.

Notice that not a one of the list of items had actually happened. Finishing with a bogus comparison

Otherwise, my calculation that the acceleration caused by gravity on Earth is 4.9 m/s/s is correct, and everyone else is wrong, and its a huge conspiracy. What's that? Oh, my formula its (G*M/r^2)/2, which is correct because I based it on the real thing, but that real one is actually wrong because we are dealing with 1 falling object, not two, so we want half the acceleration (which is so much simpler because it avoids all the gravity caused by the other object). Yep, that claim is equally valid as your claim, and the fact that all the evidence so far points to you failing to see (or not acknowledging) how the the present situation and the analogy are almost identical speaks volumes.

Moving on to other things, a final red herring was the demand that I come up with certain parameters:

Please give the range of the coefficient of determination you would find acceptable.

Notice they didn't make any suggestions. This is just a transparent troll looking for arguments from ignorance to latch onto. The way out of that trap is not to play the game.

As I see it, the solution is that I don't provide such numbers and thresholds. Instead, the model builders provide evidence well in excess of what I would require. Seems quite reasonable, particularly given the exceptional claims being made (particularly, of urgent danger that requires immediate action) and that it's their job to provide that persuasive evidence.

I'd say that most of the arguments had the same strategy. Assume I'm wrong and then latch onto anything that appears wrong to the poster.

Well, a bit after I posted my journal, I ran across this interesting article which basically does the same math and comes to the same general conclusion.

We actually knew this (no proof but our word) when we made our special climate inertia global temperature graph (that we think still offers a nice visualisation and proper indication of committed warming (at different climate inertia time scales) at various CO2 levels/year!), but chose to ignore it – and drew a linear line instead, between 280 and (3 degrees warming at) 560 ppm. ‘Because how big can the difference be,’ if you zoom out a bit.

Well, that was a bit silly of us. We had a little chat with atmospheric scientist Bart Verheggen (please also read his special blog post about climate inertia!), who pointed out that –because at 400 ppm we are close to the middle between 280 and 560!– the difference between a logarithmic line and a linear one is now relatively large: not 43% of climate sensitivity, but 51% – a difference between 1.29 and 1.53 degrees.

Wow. +0.24 degrees! That is such a big difference that we immediately added the information in a disclaimer as part of the original article (before open publication). But we felt we also needed to do a bit more than that. And that is because 1.53 is more than 1.50 – and that means that at the current CO2 concentration, judging by conventional climate science, we had already passed the target the moment the political promise was made. Odd, considering the fact that at the UN climate summit none of the world leaders mentioned the fact that establishing their 1.5 degrees ambition requires effective lowering of the CO2 concentration. Instead there came pledges to cut some of the emissions, leading to further growth of the CO2 concentration (to 670 ppm CO2/860 ppm CO2eq!) and bringing the world on a path towards 3.5 degrees warming (if all the pledges will in fact be translated to actual (national) energy policies, indeed another risk factor).

Wow. +0.24 degrees! That is such a big difference that we immediately added the information in a disclaimer as part of the original article (before open publication). But we felt we also needed to do a bit more than that. And that is because 1.53 is more than 1.50 – and that means that at the current CO2 concentration, judging by conventional climate science, we had already passed the target the moment the political promise was made. Odd, considering the fact that at the UN climate summit none of the world leaders mentioned the fact that establishing their 1.5 degrees ambition requires effective lowering of the CO2 concentration. Instead there came pledges to cut some of the emissions, leading to further growth of the CO2 concentration (to 670 ppm CO2/860 ppm CO2eq!) and bringing the world on a path towards 3.5 degrees warming (if all the pledges will in fact be translated to actual (national) energy policies, indeed another risk factor).

I dropped various links from the quote above, but you can still get them in the original article above. A final remark from that article:

This article focuses on that second line (Charney climate sensitivity) – what we call ‘conventional climate science’ in our introduction. It’s the stuff that politicians are supposed to base their climate policies on. Conservative, non-alarmist (especially when you go for median value, as we do) and very solid. Yet still they seem to be fully unaware of even this foundation of modern climate science – as it shows we need to lower CO2 concentration to the level of before the big UN climate conference of December 2015 – back to below 396 ppm to be precise (the atmospheric CO2 trend level of mid-2013).

In other words, they not only do the same math (with better justification I might add), they get the same answer to within a year (probably because they use slightly different starting values for CO2 concentration).

So sure, it could just be another person doing the same wrong calculation and getting the same wrong answer. And even if not so, it's still an approximation. Yet it's more eyeballs actually looking at the math.

I think it's telling that no one has actually found serious problems in the first place resorting to criticisms of minutia (some which never happened) rather than of the method or the conclusions.

Once again, here's the conclusion: the IPCC made a very specific policy recommendation on the basis that 1.5 C of warming from the preindustrial age is preventable with drastic action while simultaneously ignoring that their starting assumptions already preclude limiting global warming to 1.5 C rise and that the error bars on those important climate parameters mean that we could be facing anything from a distant climate threat which we only need to worry about in a couple of centuries to a dire need for climate change adaptation right now.

Why push a particular narrative and set of policy recommendations that has such a big chance to be wrong? I think it's because they can't sell the story harder and still retain any credibility.

For the past couple days, the media has been digesting Robert Mueller's testimony before Congress. Once again, we have a fake situation set up for media. Mueller explicitly stated publicly at the announcement of his report that he wasn't going to add anything in future testimony. So, there was absolutely no reason to bring him to "testify."

It's clear (to me, at least, since I think both sides are being ridiculous in this whole fight) that Mueller was doing his best to sit there for a few hours and try not to add anything to what had already been said in the report, while responding to questions from both sides that were baiting him to try to get him to say something more than he had previously stated.

So, it was a failure for the Democrats, who clearly staged this in the hope to galvanize public opinion with a public face and soundbites, as nobody is actually reading the report. It was a mild success for Republicans in that Mueller tried not to go beyond his qualified and legalistic language as used in the report, so few people are going to hear this as a strong attack against Trump.

But the party "score" isn't important to me. I don't care who "won" in a preposterous setup. What shocks me, though, is the way Robert Mueller's "performance" is being analyzed. People are saying he's old, perhaps senile. (He is old -- that's undeniable.) People are saying he was "hesitant" in his answers, perhaps implying that he was unsure or maybe even (again) senile. He asked for questions to be repeated too much. Some are theorizing he might have some sort of illness.

I haven't watched the whole thing, which is a waste of time to see a bunch of Congressmen badgering a witness to get him to say something when he's on the record that his testimony explicitly was intended never to say anything more than already in his written report. But I did watch a bit of it.

And I would like to draw out a couple minutes from near the very beginning -- as the top Republican on the committee takes his first shot asking questions. I'm not even going to start at the beginning, but if you listened to none of the Mueller proceedings, have a listen to the exchange beginning here (and continuing for the next few minutes).

I would challenge ANYONE of any age -- even the most intelligent person in the world at top intellectual performance -- to sit in that environment for hours and deal with questions of that sort. Basically, every single Congressman there was out to get Mueller to say something beyond his report. The Democrats wanted to get him to be more forceful in condemnation of Trump's actions. The Republicans were hoping to trip him up.

And in that clip above is the first instance where it sort of happens. After badgering Mueller with arcane questions referencing multiple pages in the report in a rapid-fire manner (note that this Congressman said at the outset that he'd "talk slowly"), he gets Mueller into a semantic debate over whether "collusion" is a defined legal term that has a "colloquial" meaning equivalent to "conspiracy." Mueller said in his opening statement that "collusion" was not a defined legal term in federal law (which it is not), though in the report he admitted on some page that "collusion" and "conspiracy" are sometimes colloquially understood commonly to be similar.

The Congressman is trying to claim he's "reading the report" back to Mueller and that Mueller was now "adding to his report" by apparently denying that "collusion" and "conspiracy" are the same thing (which they aren't legally, though in some colloquial contexts they might be, which is what the report said), something Mueller claimed he wouldn't do.

This is all absurd. Whether or not the colloquial meaning or understanding of a term is "synonymous" with another term has no bearing on any significant legal question. But here we have a Congressman determined to trip Mueller up in a "lie" by "adding to his report," which Mueller is apparently supposed to have memorized enough to answer rapid-fire questions on this sort of semantic BS that isn't even relevant to an argument. Note that it didn't matter what Mueller said in response to his question, as the Congressman would have claimed he had contradicted his opening statement even if he had said yes, thereby claiming Mueller was unreliable. Even if Mueller had encyclopedic knowledge of every sentence in his report, there was no way to answer this question without the Congressman going on an irrelevant attack.

Now, again, in my opinion, Mueller was doing his best just to sit there and try not to say anything that wasn't in his report. That was his SOLE purpose, which the badgering Congressmen (from both parties) made exceptionally difficult.

To me, Robert Mueller doesn't look tired or ill or confused. He is hesitant because he's trying to avoid the sort of BS shown in this clip, and he knows he's going to be in for hours of it. Hours where he is gradually adding to an oral record that -- in addition to his report -- could then be cited and thrown back at him for any minor contradiction at any time.

If I were in his shoes, I would hesitate too. After a Congressman started acting like that and listed a page number in the report, I'd say, "Hold on... let me look at this..." and then waste three minutes on the page before answering. I doubt I would perform as well as he did at ignoring the flagrant BS spouted at me from both parties and simply adhering to what was already reported. After five minutes of this sort of BS, I would have likely said, "Look, it's in my report. I said I'm not going to add to that in testimony. I will therefore respond to every single other question with -- 'If the question is addressed in my report, the answer is there; if it's not, I have no comment.'" They'd probably try to charge me with Contempt of Congress but I wouldn't care. This was absurd.

And yes, I know from watching Congressional hearings that badgering is common. But both the representatives and Mueller knew this was a high-stakes day. They were trying their best to get him to say anything worthy of a "shocking!" evening news soundbite, but he didn't take their bait.

For that, Mr. Mueller, I applaud your service to the U.S. I'm not sure what to take away from your report, but for putting up with that BS for several hours, you should be praised and not ridiculed for your "performance."

How deeply will this cut into the president's TV ratings?

Are the two in competition, or are they complimentary? Like, is one a condiment for the other?

Na na naaaaaaa...