Kerry's 97 % had a precedent, TFP!

Here is first a link:

TFP : Kerry's 97 Percent of What?
Created on Friday, 23 May 2014 09:26 Written by Gary J. Isbell
http://www.tfp.org/tfp-home/news-commentary/kerry-s-97-percent-of-what.html

Next a quote from the link:

Is Kerry honestly implying that 97 percent of all scientists support global warming?

Such an attitude frustrates the very purpose of science. The very role of scientific study is to question; it is to be skeptical of outcome allowing for solid evidence, not politics, to form opinions. It comes as no surprise that Kerry is presenting as fact, the idea that there is a real consensus on global warming, but this is not the case. The 97 percent consensus figure he quotes actually represents the opinion of only a small fraction of one sector of the scientific community.

The very notion of a scientific consensus around this issue was created for ideological and political purposes in order to advance the environmental agenda.

Sure.

BUT, the notion of scientific consensus is older than that.

Heard about Scientific Consensus about Heliocentrism and Evolution?

Are there any agendas to those, perhaps?

Getting God our of the game, perhaps.

With Heliocentrism, the turning of the Universe around Earth, giving us day and night, is supposed to be apparent.

Once you assume it is real, you realise that there must be something or someone very powerful turning it around us.

Once you realise the planets and stars are not just attached to the inner wall of a hollow soccer ball, but have some freedom of movement - more apparent in planets moving around the Zodiak, less apparent in stars moving the up 0.76 arc seconds back and forth yearly (α Centauri) with the sun and up to some more than that against the sun - you also realise that the speeds involved and the absense of "train wreck" on a cosmic level, making train wrecks look like ripples on a pond, you realise it is not something, but Someone who moves the universe around.

We Christians think He was made Man, without ceasing to be God, and I suspect He may have asked His human stepfather St Joseph to build the first dreydel. Unless one can show spinning tops were already around earlier, of course.

But scientific consensus has it, watching Universe move and taking it as that is just getting it backwards, because we were placed ... sorry, because we happened to evolve (next scientific consensus) on a place where getting it backwards is inevitable.

Those scientific consensuses are pretty bleak precedents for the 97% (i e 76 scientists, if you read the link) of Kerry. Bleak and dark and illboding ones. Sorry TFP is not often attacking those!

As to the Global Warming issue, I do have a hunch, not as a specialist.

We do have a warmer climate now than back when Swedish kings could ride over the Ice of Big Belt in Denmark, in the War which earned us Scania (my province, my ancestors on that side were thus Danes). We do also know that back then it was colder than some time in the Middle Ages, when wine could be grown in places that are now too cold. I think we are not yet as warm as the 13th C. And that warmth very certainly was not man made.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bibliothèque Parmentier
Saturday after Ascension
31 / V / 2014

When not strident, inaccurate - Dawkins, you cannot spell out information to a linguist.

1) Dawkins NOT Strident?, 2) When not strident, inaccurate - Dawkins, you cannot spell out information to a linguist.

It must be admitted that you have, Dawkins, moments when strident utterings as those cited in previous are easy to forget, because you come forth as thoughtful - for the moment. If you really were, you might have answered some of my criticisms in the past. Here I am making a new one, anyway.*

Redundancy is any part of a message that is not informative, either because the recipient already knows it (is not surprised by it) or because it duplicates other parts of the message. In the sentence “Rover is a poodle dog”, the word “dog” is redundant because “poodle” already tells us that Rover is a dog. An economical telegram would omit it, thereby increasing the informative proportion of the message. “Arr JFK Fri pm pls mt BA Cncrd flt” carries the same information as the much longer, but more redundant, “I’ll be arriving at John F Kennedy airport on Friday evening; please meet the British Airways Concorde flight”. Obviously the brief, telegraphic message is cheaper to send (although the recipient may have to work harder to decipher it — redundancy has its virtues if we forget economics). Shannon wanted to find a mathematical way to capture the idea that any message could be broken into the information (which is worth paying for), the redundancy (which can, with economic advantage, be deleted from the message because, in effect, it can be reconstructed by the recipient) and the noise (which is just random rubbish).

Dawkins, information and redundancy are NOT two different things.

I am in many subjects self taught. In Latin that is NOT the case. The Latin professor who gave me a lesson about redundancy was himself an atheist. You can hardly accuse him for praising redundancy out of a bias in favour of Christianity.

Here is your example of non-redundant versus redundant version of same message:


“Arr JFK Fri pm pls mt BA Cncrd flt”

“I’ll be arriving at John F Kennedy airport on Friday evening; please meet the British Airways Concorde flight”.

Let us subject BOTH versions to extremely bad conditions of transmission, first, namely three letters kept, three letters lost, and so on:

“Arr ... Fri ... ls m... Cnc...lt”

“I’ll ...rri...g at ...n F K...edy ...por... Fri... eve...g; ple... mee...e Bri...h Ai...ys C...ord...ight”.

First version would set you asking yourself where Concordes will be landing on Friday. Supposing you even understood it was about the person. And when. Second version, with much more redundancy will let you restitute the missing letters pretty easily. Even more. Supposing the receiver were replaced by a child or a stranger (as in real foreigner) who did not know BA could mean British Airways or Concord be a plane ...?

Now, speaking of Concorde and of Concord, in Latin - to resume my professor's lesson - precisely concord (without an -e as to English version of the word) is a redundancy feature. Does that mean it is useless? No.

French has considerably reduced audible concord by muting final e:s and s:s. And t:s and z:s too. The price is that it is much more often ambiguous to the ear.

There is actually a gliding scale between noise and redundancy even apart of this ambiguous relation between redundancy and essentials. There is also the question of when noise is part of redundancy.

In Swedish, a word like "hvarje" can have its final unaccented syllable pronounced either like French -eu or like French -é, except for the latter carrying the accent in French. I can hear the difference, but to me it is a difference of noise. Not of information.

In French there are so many words where "eu" or "é" before the tone (thus also unaccented, like in Swedish) is part of the constitution of a word. Not that you would find both "renard" and "rénard", but if meaning vulpes you say "rénard" instead of "renard", you will be marked as a foreigner. Other example why "noise" and "redundance" overlap: the background for Welsh "rhydd". Now, I do not happen to think one can prove there was an Indo-European proto-language. But one can prove with somewhat greater probability word by word there were proto-words. There was one for "rhydd" and "free" probably and "Indo-European" state of it would be reconstructible (and is reconstructed by those believing proto-language) as *prios.

This *prios would give frî in Nordic and Old and Middle High German and frei in Modern High German. For English I presume there was a stage in which *prios was reduced to *priws to give Anglo Saxon freo, of which we get free. That much dialectal variation in pre-Germanic dialects would not have impeded both dialects going through the Germanic sound changes.

Now, for *prios > *priws I presume that there was a stage in which a mere noise - the slight w in *pri^wos - became seen as constitutive.

For Welsh we have a certainty that *prios or later *frios, *rios had another noise, yod in *pri^yos, which became constitutive too. It became the eth sound which Welsh spells with double d in "rhydd". Precisely as *ios ending, like -ius in Latin, for same reason comes out as -edd in Welsh, often enough. In all these cases the original -os part of word or ending is of course lost.

As the word is found only in Germanic and Welsh or perhaps other Celtic as well as far as I know - someone knowing Sanscrit or Hittite may correct me in case I am wrong - we actually do not know if there was ever a stage in which it began with a p. Real indo-european words with real indo-european p, meaning words found in many families and always or usually with a a sound that can be reduced to original p plus preservation or plausible changes thereof do show lack of such consonant in Celtic (rhydd has no consonant previous to rh) but initial f in Germanic (frî, freo, frei ...). But if the word was only there in Celtic and Germanic (which is possible, unless a Sanskritist or expert on Nesili or sth says otherwise, or unless prijateo / przyjaciel as in friend in Croatian, Polish etc is related) we cannot confidently say it had a p. An original f would have been lost in Celtic as an original p was lost via f and h. And in Germanic it would have been preserved, precisely as f from p was preserved.

That is however an aside onto the other question of whether there was an Indo-European proto-language. The thing I wanted to illustrate was that *prios or *frios, if there was such a word, would first get a noise between the vowels - either yod as continuing previous vowel or waw as anticipating the following one would be better than a hacked h - and then the noise would be considered as part of the word and develop to other sounds or sound combinations. In Semitic languages short vowels seem to be sometimes considered as noise in relation to basic word meaning - while carrying a very subsidiary meaning of their own. In most Indo-European ones (not perhaps Sanscrit, totally) they are considered part of the word. This is the distinction between phonetic and phonematic description of a language.

So, a linguist can at once say that it is not an easy task to distinguish noise from meaningful parts of a message. Even more, noise is part of the redundancy and redundancy is part of the message. A kind of safety back up for the information.

And as money does not count for God when He creates us, His use of redundancy or even "apparent noise" in our genome is not quite an argument for information being random. Dawkins has also said himself that genomes are more like recipes than blue prints. This means that there must be markers for "let it take some time, like fifty cell divisions or so, and then ..." as well as markers for "let's make a proteine".

Thoughtful as you were, Dawkins, this time, you were not accurate in your argumentation.

I can give some creds to Royal Truman for linking to Dawkins - though the essay where I discoered him and indirectly the link in another one was a dense and very technical one for someone a linguist rather than a computer scientist - but also great credits for one of his points in it:**

Theorem 2. A CIS can be used to achieve a mental goal.

In the absence of wilful input, the organization of matter can be explained by deterministic laws of nature and statistical principles of randomness. Mental processes, however, are not controlled deterministically or by randomness, and include: making choices; seeking to understand; and developing a strategy.

Suppose you are learning German, and are reflecting on what Unsinn might mean. The intention to translate is surely not deterministic, nor explained by randomness. Perhaps the intention is stored temporarily (physically?) in the brain, with which an immaterial you interacts almost instantly. You know what you wish to do and can easily communicate this to others. This intention is converted somehow into a physical search through the data stored in your neurons. This requires very special mental equipment, since a multitude of kinds of searches are possible: for a discrete telephone number; for how a face looks; for a melody. The list is near endless. In this case we’re searching for a concept which we believe reflects the meaning of Unsinn.

The concept we seek to translate must be encoded in some manner, and the searches directed efficiently. Suitable data must somehow be extracted from the neurons, requiring further mental machinery, and the results must be encoded and transferred somewhere for the mind to evaluate. Another tool then compares a candidate English word, the associations of which get compared with those of Unsinn. It is absurd to argue neurotransmitter concentrations or electrical signals are being ‘compared’ across billions of neurons. The logical processing must involve some kind of compression and high-performance language. Eventually the mind decides whether a potential translation of Unsinn, like nonsense, is correct or not.

All the resources involved in mental processes like these are part of a CIS, and some are not physical. Various resources narrow the range of possibilities, including when the translation is to occur and where.

It is about the same point I have been making of an abacus not understanding itself what the mathematician using it is understanding. I e, the necessity of a substance distinct from matter and mindless energy, which can be conveniently called spirit, in order to explain our experience. This was also brought out by a commenter:

Lachlan W., Australia, 23 May 2014

Congratulations to Royal Truman for his groundbreaking CIS theory. Although I believe the word 'spirit' is not mentioned in these articles, the implication is clearly there that this is where information, and the systems that contain and control information, come from. His breathtakingly simple phrase; "And our world is itself embedded in higher CISs as part of ultimate goals.", was a truly excellent way to sum up why there are any information systems anyway. I hope he will continue to use the Spirit God has given him to bring to light the interaction between the spiritual and physical/material worlds.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
24 / V / 2014

* Australian Skeptics : The Information Challenge
By Richard Dawkins
http://www.skeptics.com.au/publications/articles/the-information-challenge/

** CMI : Information Theory—part 4: fundamental theorems of Coded Information Systems Theory
by Royal Truman
http://creation.com/cis-4

Dawkins NOT Strident?

1) Dawkins NOT Strident?, 2) When not strident, inaccurate - Dawkins, you cannot spell out information to a linguist.

OK, not as strident as PZM back a few years ago, but PZM withdrew the videos.

CMI, on St Robert Bellarmine's normal day of celebration, publishes an article taking into account but refuting Dawkins' claims, like these:

I seem to be perceived as aggressive and strident and I don’t actually think I am strident and aggressive. What I think is that we have all become so accustomed to seeing religion ring-fenced by a wall of special protection that when someone delivers even a mild criticism of religion, it’s heard as aggressive when it isn’t. I like to think I’m more thoughtful and reflective.

CMI : Richard Dawkins upset that public doesn’t like him
God-hater says his attacks on religion are ‘thoughtful and reflective’
by Warren Nunn
Published: 13 May 2014 (GMT+10)
http://creation.com/dawkins-upset

Well, thing is, I have had to deal with some people, one of whom at least is his (Richard's, nnot Warren's) disciple.

HGL's F.B. writings : Attacked on "Evolution of Languages Disproves Tower of Babel" Subject Again
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2014/05/attacked-on-evolution-of-languages.html

Whether Cushla Gery who made herself deliberately obtuse to my points or "Kain Karrion" were his disciples directly or not, I do not know. I do however know that Tony "Hackenslash" Murphy was, since he on his blog a few years ago specifically thanked Dawkins and ... PZM ... for the training. I quote that and link to the source.

I would finally like to extend my gratitude to the following:

Richard Dawkins, for bringing us together.
PZ Myers, for his input and clear head. etc.

Reciprocity: When You Fight Yourself
[title of blog as well as of one message]
http://reciprocity-hackenslash.blogspot.com/2010/02/reciprocity-when-you-fight-yourself.html

Now, has Dawkins and has PZM promoted thoughtfulness and reflectiveness in him? Getting back to my debate with him, I nitpick a little:

My point which he adressed

Tower of Babel does NOT deny that French and Spanish both descend from Latin. One can however ask whether "evolved" is a good description of that descent. Has costume "evolved"? Every time you choose clothes you make voluntary choices. Not comparable to mutations.

His first words in adressing it

Since this seems to be the root of your malfunction, perhaps it's worth addressing it, because it's as wrong as a wrong thing on wrong juice.

A bit later on he said

Neither credentials nor any amount of study are remotely relevant when you're talking shit. Language, fashion, the biosphere; all evolve, and with evolution meaning pretty much the same thing in every case.

My reflection when mirroring the debate on the blog

On his profile it says he is chief cook in a kitchen. Some Dunning Kruger effect, perhaps?

Perhaps some Dunning Kruger effect in the sense of incompetence taking its due in thinking itself more competent (the reverse being also a Dunning Kruger effect, for those who consider Dunning and Kruger as experts). BUT I canot help thinking Dawkins has actually made a contributionn in giving him - along with PZM - a pseudo-competence. One in which making a distinction that the evolutionist misses becomes equivalent to malfunction. Just as for Cushla Geary my criticism of standard evolutionist models comes through only as "religious rant". Even if they hardly mention God, only leave God as the one remaining and obvious option of explanation.

To some people the main thing about philology and linguistics is neither reading old texts nor knowing what "sound laws" (perhaps better understood as sound correspondences between known languages than as now considered each and all as sound changes from an unknown reconstructed one) tie together two languages, but to see philology as a parallel to palaeontology and to see sound laws as a parallel to mutations, which I do not.

I am not very subtly but rather rather broadly reminded of the agressive atheism of the Soviet Union.

Martyred in the USSR : WHAT IS MILITANT ATHEISM:
"In total, the number of Christians who were martyred under the militant state atheism of the USSR is around 12 million."
http://martyredintheussr.com/about.html

I have heard other estimates too (ranging from 1 to 90 million). Some of Dawkins and of Krauss is very reminiscent of the Soviet Psychiatry which served militant atheism by declaring mentally ill and forcefully treating people who were simply Christians. There is more to Soviet system that seems to have survived:

Under the Soviet doctrine of separation of Church and state, detailed in the Constitution of the Soviet Union, churches in the Soviet Union were forbidden to give to the poor or carry on educational activities.

Reminds me of certain cities, like Daytona Beach, where Christians feeding the homeless in a park have been fined.

Moreover, not only was religion banned from the school and university system, but pupils were to be indoctrinated with atheism and antireligious teachings. For example, schoolchildren were asked to convert family members to atheism and memorize antireligious rhymes, songs, and catechisms, while university students who declined to propagate atheism lost their scholarships and were expelled from universities. In addition, scientific theories, such as the Big Bang, which implied a creator God, were suppressed in favor of theories which were thought to support atheistic materialism.

Reminds me of Krauss, if "admitting" Big Bang (not much to "admit" except if you have a Newtonian view of astronomy, but most "admitting" it have some problem not seeing it implies God), at least violently defending himself against any theistic implication.

Lawrence Krauss embarrasses William Lane Craig in this debate
Yon Choi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol-A_SU3m5c

Apart from who embarasses whom, it is clear WLC is pushing Big Bang as a Theistic (but anti-Biblical) argument, and LK is defending himself against that with a multiverse theory. Here are my comments, so far, by the way:

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : When an argument is wrong, that should be proven with refutations ...
http://assortedretorts.blogspot.com/2014/05/when-argument-is-wrong-that-should-be.html

No, the agressive atheism is still alive. And I cannot say that either Dawkins or Onfray are totally outside it.

To me, that gets very much through as strident.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
3 days after St Robert Bellarmine
16/V/2014

CMI's Tas Walker Missing a Point

First off, he writes a very good article here:

CMI : The heritage trail at Siccar Point, Scotland
Commemorating an idea that did not work
by Tas Walker
http://creation.com/siccar-point-trail

At least it seems good enough to me on my limited knowledge of Geology.

Then I read the comments too.

james p H. says on top of his comment, among other things:

"However, as the son of a Presbyterian minister, it is unfortunate that Playfair did not connect his Bible with the world around him"

as always: the biggest problem for Christianity are these sold-out, compromised Christians who still insist on calling them-selves that.....

My answer to that (Ioannes Georgius = Hans Georg since I had overstepped my quota of comments for the year, and I used another email account too so the computer program would not stop it):

Playfair was Presbyterian. Cuvier was Lutheran. Lyell was Anglican. Darwin was Anglican. Hume was Presbyterian. So was pres-hume-ably Hutton.

These men were not compromising away their Christianity with an already existing ideology, they were sacrificing it to their take on what it meant to be a Protestant.

Now, Tas Walker has responded:

Actually they had compromised. They certainly rejected the Bible's history as being true. Just because someone grows up in a church does not mean they are a follower of Christ and accept what He taught. Teillard de Chardin was a Catholic priest but promoted evolution as the great creative force and the truth to which everything should bow. He was clearly not promoting othodox beliefs. Richard Dawkins was confirmed as an Anglican but he rejected that and is now the foremost advocate of atheism.

My point was not that Playfair had not "compromised away" Christianity. But I prefer the word rejected. My point was that, unlike Teilhard de Chardin and Wojtyla and Dawkins, this rejection was not in favour of an already existing Evolutionist Old Age ideology, but that rather, like new heresiarchs, these Protestants (all of them Protestants, none Catholic and none Baptist for that matter) by rejecting more of the Bible than previously were not compromising with Old Age but creating this ideology and its ramification Darwinism.

My other point was that all these creators of the Evolutionist and generally Uniformitarian, Old Age and Antimiraculous ideologies were not only Protestants, but so good Protestants they sacrificed their Christianity to the Protestantism. In other words, they were heresiarchs, more radical than the Reformers, but really in the same direction as the Reformers.

I had expected a challenge on the fact that Cuvier was of a Lutheran family. It is a French name. I underestimated then severely the erudition of Tas Walker. But if anyone of my readers is less knowledgeable than he, I recommend wikipedia. If it be no longer available, I give others the little answer speech I had prepared for Tas.

Cuvier was a French subject. However, he was from Alsatian Lotharingian new provinces of France. Louis XIV has wasted his time exporting Protestants to Holland and England, Scotland and Ireland through the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when it was just to get back other Protestants through conquests at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire. Probably he may have had ancestors named Böttner / Boetnner rather than Cuvier. As I look up "cuvier", disambiguation page, it seems I was wrong, and it should rather be Böttich / Boettich. Or even Bottich. It means a large, open container in either language.

I looked up others mentioned in comments. "Frank (Francis Trevelyan) Buckland was born and brought up in Oxford, where his father was a Canon of Christ Church." And "Jean-André Deluc ... was born in Geneva; his family had come from Lucca, Italy, in the 15th century."

Now, it was put down to Enlightenment, but that only excuses so much, even if R. D. says that was the cause:

Of course, it was not his observations of these rocks which led Dr. Hutton to conclude that the earth (and the entire cosmos) was not made in six days - what led him to conclude this was his deistic mindset which came from the "Enlightenment" which he was a product of. He already disbelieved in the Genesis creation account BEFORE he looked at the rocks.

Joseph Haydn left Freemasonry when it was forbidden, by Emperor Francis (not to be confounded with one Bergoglio character in the Vatican). But he had written Die Schöpfung (The Creation) while still a Freemason and to a libretto by a Freemason, van Swieten. It could be argued that God creating all there is in the beginning (plus parts of the morality) is the only thing certain enlightened Freemasons believed of the Bible. They were known as Deists.

As I just brought up, Deism (which accepts roughly Genesis 1 of all the Bible), Atheism, Liberal Christianity were all parts of an Enlightenment connected to Freemasonry.

And, First Grand Lodge of that treason to Christianity was established 1717, two Centuries after the 95 Theses (and after Zwinglius in Switzerland), two Centuries before the Russian Revolution and the similar Mexican Revolution. And it was established in London, where it was illegal to be at once a Catholic and enjoy one's life.

Freemasonry and thus Enlightenment were products of Protestantism.

The same R. D. mentioned the resistance to Uniformitarianism. Here is his list:

The fact that their geological knowledge was lesser than that which we have today only excuses them so much - as the likes of Kirwan, Young, Fairholme and Penn demonstrate, others saw through this.

The first of these is no doubt Richard Kirwan. He was a former Catholic. He had probably embraced Anglicanism (an act of Apostasy) for wordly reasons. Here is the wikipedian reference:

Richard Kirwan was born at Cloughballymore, Co. Galway, the second son of Marty and Martin Kirwan, thus a descendant of William Ó Ciardhubháin and a member of The Tribes of Galway. Part of his early life was spent abroad, and in 1754 he entered the Jesuit novitiate either at St Omer or at Hesdin, but returned to Ireland in the following year, when he succeeded to the family estates through the death of his brother in a duel. Kirwan married in 1757, but his wife only lived eight more years. The couple had two daughters, Maria Theresa and Eliza.

In 1766, having conformed to the established religion two years previously, Kirwan was called to the Irish bar, but in 1768 abandoned practice in favour of scientific pursuits.

So, though he could get to a religion where the validity of Sacraments was at least highly doubtful from the point of view of the Catholic Theology he abandoned, he would not also on top of that deny the Flood.

I can bet that his Jesuit teachers did not include Pierre Teilhard de Chardin or Georges Lemaître. I can add that the kind of Apostasy that Old Age Uniformitarianism and Evolutionism constitute were of course bound to spread to Catholics once they were common among Protestants. Hence these two other, less ideal, Jesuits. That was what Leo X, St Pius V and Urban VIII as Popes of Rome had tried to avoid when condemning 41 theses in Exsurge, when condemning lots more of Protestantism (Lutheran, Zwinglian, Anabaptist, Socinian, Anglican and Calmvinist heresies) in and with Council of Trent and also when condemning (by confirmation of a verdict the Pope had not been judge in) the Heliocentric theses of Galileo.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
13 / V / 2014