Tag Archives: Folly

News

New study: long-term marijuana use causes decline in memory in middle age

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

Cool new study reported by Reuters.

It says:

As marijuana becomes more accessible to young and old alike in the U.S., researchers warn that long-term use of the drug may cause lasting harm to at least one type of brain function.

A new study based on following thousands of young adults into middle age finds that long-term marijuana use is linked to poorer performance on verbal memory tests, but other areas of brain function do not appear to be affected.

“We did not expect to find such a consistent association with verbal memory for chronic exposure to marijuana,” especially since the link held even when other factors like cigarette smoking, alcohol use and other behavioral factors associated with marijuana use were accounted for, said lead author Dr. Reto Auer of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland.

Auer and colleagues analyzed data from a 25-year U.S. study of young adults, which included repeated measures of marijuana exposure over time and a standardized test of verbal memory, processing speed and executive function in year 25. Almost 3,500 participants completed the standardized tests.

At the beginning of the study period in the 1980s, participants were 18 to 30 years old and more than 80 percent reported past marijuana use. Just 12 percent continued to use marijuana into middle age, according to the results in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that as past years of marijuana use increased, verbal memory scores decreased. In practical terms, the results meant that for every additional five years of exposure, 50 percent of marijuana users would remember one less word from a list of 15 tested words.

“Recreational marijuana users use it to get high, to benefit from the transient change it produces,” Auer told Reuters Health by email. “But this transient effect might have long term consequences on the way the brain processes information and could also have direct toxic effects on neurons.”

What I am finding out as I age is that I have to keep pushing back the date of my “retirement”. I thought I  could quit working at 30, then 35, then 40. Now I am thinking 45 before I can be more free. The point is that the world is becoming a more difficult place to be independent. A lot of government spending is going on, and a lot of debt is being added to our national debt. I may never be able to stop working. And it’s a good thing that I will have all my faculties intact when I have to keep working. Be careful with exchanging short-term fun and thrills for long-term poverty. Things are not getting easier, you’ll have to work just to get by.

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News

Ten scientific problems with global warming alarmism

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How climate scientists adjust the data to prove they need more grant money
How climate scientists adjust the data to prove they need more grant money (see #10 in the list below)

My friend Bruce posted this article from the the Daily Wire, and I think it’s a good summary of the scientific evidence against global warming alarmism. After we go over this, I’ll take a stab at explaining why so many non-scientists desperately want to believe that global warming is true, and why they try to push everyone else to believe it, too.

First, the list:

  1. Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today’s temperatures are unusual.
  2. Satellite temperature data does not support the assumption that temperatures are rising rapidly
  3. Current temperatures are always compared to the temperatures of the 1980’s, but for many parts of the world the 1980’s was the coldest decade of the last 100+ years
  4. The world experienced a significant cooling trend between 1940 and 1980
  5. Urban heat island effect skews the temperature data of a significant number of weather stations
  6. There is a natural inverse relationship between global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels
  7. The CO2 cannot, from a scientific perspective, be the cause of significant global temperature changes
  8. There have been many periods during our recent history that a warmer climate was prevalent long before the industrial revolution
  9. Glaciers have been melting for more than 150 years
  10. “Data adjustment” is used to continue the perception of global warming

So, we can’t look at all of these in one post. Obviously, the satellite measurements are the best thing to look at, since they cannot be tampered with as easily as the ground measurements, and they show no warming for 18 years.

But let’s look at number 8 instead:

Even in the 1990 IPCC report a chart appeared that showed the medieval warm period as having had warmer temperatures than those currently being experienced.  But it is hard to convince people about global warming with that information, so five years later a new graph was presented, now known as the famous hockey stick graph, which did away with the medieval warm period.  Yet the evidence is overwhelming at so many levels that warmer periods existed on Earth during the medieval warm period as well as during Roman Times and other time periods during the last 10,000 years.  There is plenty of evidence found in the Dutch archives that shows that over the centuries, parts of the Netherlands disappeared beneath the water during these warm periods, only to appear again when the climate turned colder.  The famous Belgian city of Brugge, once known as “Venice of the North,” was a sea port during the warm period that set Europe free from the dark ages (when temperatures were much colder), but when temperatures began to drop with the onset of the little ice age, the ocean receded and now Brugge is ten miles away from the coastline.  Consequently, during the medieval warm period the Vikings settled in Iceland and Greenland and even along the coast of Canada, where they enjoyed the warmer temperatures, until the climate turned cold again, after which they perished from Greenland and Iceland became ice-locked again during the bitter cold winters.  The camps promoting global warming have been systematically erasing mention of these events in order to bolster the notion that today’s climate is unusual compared to our recent history.

That’s right, the world was much warmer than it is now during the Medieval Warming Period… so warm that you could actually farm on Greenland. But now it’s all frozen over.

Bruce also posted this article from Forbes magazine about the so-called consensus about global warming among scientists.

It says:

It is becoming clear that not only do many scientists dispute the asserted global warming crisis, but these skeptical scientists may indeed form a scientific consensus.

[…]Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

According to the newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

[…]Taken together, these four skeptical groups numerically blow away the 36 percent of scientists who believe global warming is human caused and a serious concern.

Many people listen to Obama, who never passed a science class in his life, talk about how most scientists support the idea of man-made global warming. But the truth is that his statements are just more “you can keep your health plan” and “you can keep your doctor”. He says what he wants people to believe so they will like him and rely on him to save them. But he has no knowledge of climate science any more than he has knowledge of health care policy.

Why do people believe weird things?

So why do people believe these things? People believe these things for the same reason that primitive people would sacrifice animals in order to get a bountiful harvest or be spared being struck by lightning. They fear the future, and they want to believe that they are doing something in order to save themselves from doom. There is something credulous in us that seeks to know and control the future. When we are told a noble lie by grant-seeking, attention-craving academics, we believe it because we want to believe it. We want to believe that the future is going to be OK, especially when all we have to do to make it OK is recycle cans and turn off our lights when we are not using them.

This is the real psychological motivation behind the desperate desire to believe in the global warming myth. We are scared, and we want someone to save us from the future. And we jump at the chance of controlling the future, especially when it means recycling cans, rather than having to deal with our own sinfulness. We invent a new morality that justifies us rather than having to comply with the old morality. Freedom to commit adultery, as long as we recycle cans to save the planet. Sanctification through purchasing carbon credits, instead of  sanctification through chastity, sobriety and self-control.

News

CNN: San Bernadino shooter in contact with suspected Islamic terrorists

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This article is from the radically leftist CNN, of all places.

I heard CNN trying to blame the shooting on violent video games (“maybe he played too much Call of Duty”) yesterday. But today they decided to do some journalism for a change:

Syed Rizwan Farook — one-half of the couple behind the San Bernardino shooting massacre — was apparently radicalized and in touch with people being investigated by the FBI for international terrorism, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

Farook’s apparent radicalization contributed to his role in the mass shooting, with his wife Tashfeen Malik, of 14 people on Wednesday during a holiday party for the San Bernardino County health department, where Farook worked, sources said.

[…]Farook traveled to Saudi Arabia for several weeks in 2013 on the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that Muslims are required to take at least once in their lifetime, which didn’t raise red flags, said two government officials. It was during this trip that he met Malik, a native of Pakistan who came to the United States on a “fiancée visa” and later became a lawful permanent resident.

Officials had previously said that neither Farook and Malik were known to the FBI or on a list of potentially radicalized people. Nor had they had any known interactions with police until Wednesday’s deadly shootout that culminated in their deaths.

Yet Farook himself had communicated by phone and via social media with more than one person being investigated for terrorism, law enforcement officials said. A separate U.S. government official said the 28-year-old has “overseas communications and associations.”

Breitbart News reports on Obama’s reaction to these facts:

President Barack Obama says that it’s possible yesterday’s attack in California, where two people killed 14 and injured 17 others, was terrorist related. But he’s also holding out the possibility it was workplace violence.

“It is possible that this is terrorist-related, but we don’t know; it is also possible this was workplace-related,” Obama said, adding, “we don’t know why they did it.”

Obama added that it was important to understand the “nature of the workplace relationship” between the individuals to fully understand the attacks, raising the possibility that it could be “mixed motives” for the attacks.

[…]The president’s remarks show he still hasn’t changed his tone since he first reacted to the event as a another mass shooting in the United States.

Obama thinks it might be “workplace violence” again? That’s what he said about Major Nidal Hasan, who was also in touch with radical Islamic terrorists before his terrorist attack at Fort Hood.

Workplace violence?

Time magazine reports that their house was full of bullets and explosives:

The married couple whose shooting rampage left 14 dead and 21 wounded at a social work centerin San Bernardino, Calif. had filled their home with thousands of bullets and hundreds of tools to make bombs, authorities said Thursday.

Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik had enough ammunition to pose a further threat had they not been killed, according to San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan.

“Clearly they were equipped and they could have done another attack,” Burguan said.

The couple had than 1,400 rifle rounds and 200 9-mm handgun bullets with them as police hunted them down. Authorities found 12 pipe bombs and “hundreds of tools” to make more explosives at their home at Redlands.

Investigators also found nearly 5,000 more bullets and several hundred long-rifle rounds at the home, according to police.

[…]The FBI said it’s investigating whether the suspects’ IED designs came from Al-Qaeda’s “Inspire” magazine.

Workplace violence? What planet is Obama living on? And this isn’t the first time that he’s pulled this stupidity, either.

Remember, the Obama administration describes Islamic terrorism as “senseless violence“. Democrats describe shootings my Muslims at army bases as “workplace violence“. Democrats describe attacks on Israeli civilians as “random violence“. Democrats called shooting at Jews in France “random“. Democrats describe investigations about the Benghazi terrorist attack a “sideshow“, after they lied and tried to say the attack was a spontaneous reaction to a video. And this is the party that more than half of our country votes for at election time. The State Departmentsays that radical Islam’s root cause is that we don’t give them “job opportunities“.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are hard at work protecting us from… global warming?

Barack Obama says that fighting global warming is a rebuke to Islamic terrorism
Barack Obama says that fighting global warming is a rebuke to Islamic terrorism

CNS News explains the Democrat response to Islamic terrorism:

Not radical Muslim terrorism, not an unsecured border, not an ever-growing federal debt that now exceeds $18 trillion, not the fact that 109 million live in households on federal welfare programs. These are not the greatest threats facing us today.

“No challenge–no challenge–poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama declared in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.

[…]President Obama then said that the U.S. military is saying that “climate change” is causing immediate risks to our national security–although he did not explain exactly what this meant or how the “Pentagon” had arrived at this conclusion.

“The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security,” said Obama. “We should act like it.”

As Secretary of State in the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton pledged $100 billion a year of American taxpayer money to help other countries combat global warming. That’s the real priority, you understand.

The cost of political correctness

And lest you think that it is harmless when Democrats call people “racist” for pointing out the links between Islam and terrorism, read this article from CBS News: (H/T Sooper Mexican)

Neighbors in Redlands were shocked that the suspects had ties to their area.

“I was in awe that it was happening four houses down from my property,” one neighbor said.

A man who has been working in the area said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.

“We sat around lunch thinking, ‘What were they doing around the neighborhood?’” he said.  “We’d see them leave where they’re raiding the apartment.”

Should we really be trusting Democrats to keep us safe? Are they really capable of calling evil “evil”, or does their ideology force them to call Americans evil, and America’s enemies good?

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