Error Theory

Tom and I just finalized this over the weekend. It is a letter from Tom, asking the American people to please consider signing, and helping to circulate, our petition to stop the crescent memorial from being built.

If you haven't signed yet, please do, and if you participate in any activist mailing lists or websites, please help us distribute the letter by forwarding or posting. (For email, just copy and paste the letter below. For website posting, HTML code can be found here.)


From Tom Burnett Sr: A petition to stop the Flight 93 Memorial

Dear Fellow Americans:

The planned Flight 93 Memorial contains extensive Islamic symbolism. It is an insult to my son Tom, and to the other murdered heroes of Flight 93 who stopped Islamic terrorists from destroying the White House or the Capitol that terrible September day.

Please consider signing this online petition that I and some compatriots have put together. It calls for a new memorial design, and for investigation of the present design. If you want to do more, feel free to forward or post this appeal.

For those who are not familiar, the original “Crescent of Embrace” design was laid out in the crescent and star configuration of an Islamic flag:



Outrage over this overt Islamic symbolism forced the Memorial Project to disguise the original crescent with a few additional trees, but every particle of the original design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign. The giant crescent and star flag is still there!

The Memorial Project assumes that any similarity to an Islamic crescent has to be unintentional. Even if it WERE unintentional it would still be intolerable, but how can anyone look at that crescent and star configuration and think that it CAN’T be intentional? That is like seeing an airliner fly into the World Trade Center and thinking that it CAN’T be intentional. Worst of all, the Memorial Project refuses to confront voluminous evidence that the Islamic symbolism IS intentional.

It turns out that a person facing into the giant crescent will be facing Mecca. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a “mihrab” and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. The crescent memorial will be the world’s largest mosque!

When TWO airplanes fly into the World Trade Center, even the most naïve person has start taking the possibility of intent seriously, but not the Memorial Project. The Islamic symbolism in Flight 93 Memorial goes on and on, but the Park Service refuses to be concerned.

Architect Paul Murdoch says that the crescent shape comes from the hijacked airplane breaking the circle where it crosses the upper crescent tip. The flight path then continues down to between the crescent tips where Flight 93 crashed. (That’s right: the crash site is the star on the crescent and star flag.)

Along the flight path are to be placed 44 translucent blocks, equaling the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists:


Left image: The Memorial Wall, traces flight path just above the point of impact. The white line at eye level is a set of 43 glass blocks, 40 to be inscribed with the names of my son and the other passengers and crew, and three (on the near side of the gap) to be inscribed with 9/11 date. Right image: At the upper crescent tip, at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway, sits a huge glass block, the 44th glass block on the flight path. It marks the spot where, in the architect’s description, the terrorists broke our humanitarian circle, turning it into a giant (Islamic shaped) crescent. Inscription: “A field of honor forever.”

I don’t want to celebrate the terrorist’s circle-breaking crescent-creating feat, and I certainly don’t want my son’s name inscribed on that terrorist memorializing block count.

We need to get the word out: the Flight 93 Memorial has been re-hijacked, and this time the whole nation is aboard. We have to get up out of our seats and stop this abomination!

Sincerely,

Tom Burnett Sr.
Northfield Minnesota, March 2008


P.S. Paper petitions are also available (with mailing instructions, and explanatory information on the back). Just open and print.


Online petition: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/HonorFlight93/

Paper petitions and flyer-petition combinations: http://www.crescentofbetrayal.com/PetitionPage.htm

More information: http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2008/03/petition-for-congressional.html

Full exposé: http://www.crescentofbetrayal.com/

A petition to stop the crescent memorial is now being circulated on the ground in western Pennsylvania. As a complement to this old fashioned canvassing effort, an electronic petition has also been created at ipetitions.com. Please circulate far and wide!

The petitions highlight four cases of apparent Islamic symbolism in the memorial design. Here is the text (electronic):

Call for Congressional investigation of Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 memorial

Many features of the chosen Flight 93 Memorial design are intolerable:

1. THE GIANT CRESCENT. The centerpiece of the original “Crescent of Embrace” design was a giant red Islamic shaped crescent. Every particle of this original crescent design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign, which only added a few irrelevant trees. The giant crescent is still there.

2. IT POINTS TO MECCA. The giant crescent points to Mecca. A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a "mihrab," and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. The Flight 93 Memorial is on track to become the world's largest mosque.

3. THE ISLAMIC SUNDIAL. The minaret-like Tower of Voices is a year-round accurate Islamic prayer-time sundial (one of many typical mosque features that are realized in the crescent design, all on the same epic scale as the half mile wide central crescent).

4. THE 44 BLOCKS. There are 44 glass blocks on the flight path, equaling the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists.

Intentional or not, these features are entirely unacceptable. This travesty must stop and investigations must begin.

1) We the undersigned call on our state and federal legislators to undertake their own thorough and independent investigations of the Flight 93 Memorial design. The truth must come out.
2) We ask that the crescent design be scraped entirely and that it be replaced with a new design that is not tainted by Islamic or terrorist memorializing symbolism.
3) We demand a fitting and proper memorial that HONORS the brave men and women of Flight 93.

Please take a minute to electronically sign this petition. All signatures collected by the end of April will be printed out and delivered to the May 3rd public meeting of the Memorial Project, along with Xeroxes of the hand-signed petitions.

That is just the start. There will be another public meeting in August, where we hope to present a much larger pile of petitions, and all signatures will eventually be delivered to the Pennsylvania state legislature and to Congress. Keep sending until the crescent design is stopped!

In the short term, we have a number of supporters in the Pennsylvania legislature at this point who are working to gain backing for an investigation. A demonstration of public demand should help that effort.


The paper petition

In order to make the paper petition self-sufficient, there is a second page, to be printed on the back of the petition, that provides explanations and graphical documentation of the four highlighted cases of Islamic symbolism. The idea is to have a petition that can circulate virally. Anyone can print it out and have enough information right on the petition itself to know that the objections are legitimate. (Mailing instructions are also included.)

Here are the back-side explanations of the four intolerable features:


1. THE GIANT CRESCENT

The original Crescent of Embrace design was a giant Islamic shaped crescent with the crash site placed between the crescent tips, in the position of the star on an Islamic crescent and star flag:


The redesign was supposed to eliminate these Islamic symbol shapes, but as Congressman Tom Tancredo wrote to the Park Service in November 2007, these features remain completely intact in the so-called redesign, which only disguised the crescent with a few additional trees. Architect Paul Murdoch’s refusal to eliminate the Islamic symbol shapes suggests intent, but intentional or not, these symbol shapes are unacceptable. Congressman Tancredo is now calling for the crescent design to be scrapped in its entirety, and we join in that request.


2. IT POINTS TO MECCA

Several credible analysts have found that a person facing directly into the giant crescent (still present in the redesign) will be facing almost exactly at Mecca:


The green “qibla” circle in the graphic above is from the prayer-direction calculator at Islam.com. It shows the direction to Mecca from Somerset PA (ten miles from the crash site). The red arrow shows that a person standing between the crescent tips and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca.

This Mecca orientation claim must be authoritatively investigated and answered. If it is true that the crescent points to Mecca, and hence can serve as an Islamic prayer direction indicator (the central feature around which every mosque is built), then whether this construct was intentional or not, it indelibly taints the design.


3. THE ISLAMIC SUNDIAL

Anyone can see the overt similarity between a traditional Islamic sundial (left-hand image) and Tower of Voices part of the Flight 93 Memorial (right-hand image):


When the shadow of the traditional sundial reaches the outer curved vertical in this photo, it will be time for Islamic afternoon prayers. Shadow calculations confirm that, on any day of the year, when the shadow of the 93 foot tall crescent shaped Tower of Voices reaches the inner arc of trees, it will also be time for Islamic afternoon prayers.


4. THE FORTY-FOUR BLOCKS

Tom Burnett Sr. does not want Tom Junior’s name inscribed on one of the 44 translucent blocks that are to be emplaced along the flight path. Forty-four is the number of passengers, crew, AND terrorists:



The left side of this graphic shows the Memorial Wall, which follows the path of Flight 93 down to the point of impact. At eye level are 43 glass blocks. Forty are inscribed with the names of the 40 heroes. Three are inscribed with the 9/11 date.

Right-hand image: the 44th glass block sits at the end of the Entry Portal Walkway, where the flight path crosses the upper crescent tip. It marks the spot where, in architect Paul Murdoch’s description, the terrorists broke our humanitarian circle, turning it into a giant (Islamic shaped) crescent. This circle-breaking, crescent-creating feat is memorialized by the inscription: “A field of honor forever.”

The Park Service dismisses the suspicious block count on the grounds that the 44th glass block is much larger than the others. Mr. Burnett is not comforted by the magnificence of the 44th block, and neither are we. This design must be stopped, and investigations must be launched!


Other petition formats

The same four intolerable features are described in the annotated "Map of Betrayal" that was the subject of one of last month's blogbursts. Thus the map makes a perfectly serviceable back side for the petition, providing an alternative petition/flyer combination.

The information on the map is denser than the explanations above, but has its own intrigue, showing how the different terrorist memorializing parts fit together like an elaborate puzzle.

The petition being circulated on the ground now in Pennsylvania is still another variation. It has slightly different wording than the electronic petition, and slightly different explanations of the four points than presented above. All the different formats are interchangeable. They all highlight the same four objectionable features, and they will all be delivered together to state and federal legislators.

Until we get a Congressional investigation, the petition will be an ongoing tool for raising awareness and registering opposition. If you participate in any activist fora or email lists, please forward the text and links along. (The electronic and paper-petition links are collected together on this petition Page at CrescentOfBetrayal.com.)

As the last decade of flat and now cooling global temperatures seeps into the public consciousness, the end of the global warming hoax may be nigh. When the fraud is exposed, many on both sides are going to react by foreswearing climate alarm in general and leaps to convert alarm into policy in particular. This is already the position of many global warming skeptics, and it will become the position of today's global warming alarmists, once they realize the policy implications global cooling: that we should be burning MORE fossil fuels, not less.

This skeptical alliance has to be headed off. Cooling is not something to be skeptical about. The eons-long relationship between between solar activity and global temperature is not about to take a vacation. Cold IS coming, and the dangers are immense. There is no comparison at all to global warming. Alarmist fantasies about a global warming "tipping point" were scientific nonsense. Cooling feedbacks are another matter entirely. They DO reach a tipping point, where they go racing down until we are buried under a mile of ice.

Imagine the devastation of a giant asteroid smashing the earth. That's what an ice age is, but instead of happening once every several hundred million years, it happens like clockwork, and the next one is due any century now. This is the global disaster we need to be preparing to counter, and given that the current solar lull COULD be the one that ends our current interglacial, we damned well better get on with it.


It IS going to get cold

Last month I wrote a lengthy post on how the real and impending danger is global cooling, not global warming, and how every climate scientist in the world has known it for at least several years now. Very briefly, the geologic record proves that, for many millions of years, the primary driver of global temperature has been the intensity of the solar wind (thought to drive temperature indirectly, by sweeping away cloud-inducing cosmic radiation). 20th century warming is consistent with this geologic history. The solar wind was at "grand maximum" levels from 1940-2000.

(The IPCC omits this natural warming effect from its models. As a result, IPCC models misattribute solar warming to CO2. Take away the misattribution, and the warming effect of CO2 is tiny, as in theory it should be.)

From "grand maximum" levels of solar activity, there is nowhere go but down. The present extended lull between solar cycles 23 and 24 may mean that the inevitable fall off in solar activity has already begun, or it may just be an extended lull, with a strong solar cycle 24 still to ensue. What we know for certain is that solar activity WILL again cycle downward (probably sooner than later, with predicted minima in 2030 and 2200), and that when solar activity does fall off, it WILL cause global cooling.

Faced with this looming danger, what should we do? Should we try to mitigate the coming harsh conditions by trying to don a warmer jacket of greenhouse gases? Three primary considerations say "yes."


1. From our current warm-earth conditions, additional greenhouse gases have little capacity to cause additional warming, but substantial capacity to mitigate cooling.

The dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor, which does 90 or 95% the atmosphere's heat trapping work. In our present warm-earth conditions, the atmosphere is full of water vapor, which is already trapping most of the infrared radiation that is available for greenhouse gases to trap. From this starting point, additional greenhouse gases are mostly redundant. The heat that they would trap is already being trapped, so they have little marginal effect.

Not so in the cooling direction. As the earth cools, the atmosphere's water-vapor holding capacity steadily falls, making the other greenhouse gases less redundant.

If the sun "goes cold," human produced greenhouse gases have significant potential to raise the floor on cooling. We won't be able to stop a downward cycle from taking place, but we should be able to stop it from going quite as far down. It is at this bottom stage, where the earth gets as cold as it is going to get, and the water vapor carrying capacity of the atmosphere is at a minimum, where the the warming effect of human produced greenhouse gases will be strongest, many times stronger than it is today.

A little bit of human induced raising of the floor on cooling could be huge. Are we under a half-mile of ice that only covers Canada, or a mile of ice that goes down to Colorado?

Altogether, increased CO2 incurs little danger, because the marginal warming effect is small and getting smaller when the world is warm, but it does a lot to avoid danger when natural cycles move us in a cooling direction. An expected value calculation multiplies the value of each of these effects by its probability. Given that the probability of a cooling phase is high (making the probability of natural warming correspondingly low), we get a high positive value to CO2 on the cooling side, multiplied by a high probability, and a small warming effect on the warming side (which could itself be of positive value), multiplied by a low probability. The result is a high positive external value to human produced CO2.

Other factors also need to be weighed, but they have the same lopsided risk profile, where increased CO2 does a lot to avoid risk while doing little to incur risk:


2. Warming appears to be self-limiting. Cooling is not (at least not until we are buried under mountains of ice).

The more water vapor there is in the atmosphere, the more efficient the rain cycle, meaning that precipitation more completely removes moisture from the air. These efficient cloudbursts open up a column of dry air in the sky through which the heat produced by precipitation (opposite of the cold produced by evaporation) escapes into space. Roy Spencer calls this mechanism "nature's thermostat." The warmer the earth gets, the more efficient the rain cycle, the more heat gets vented through cloudbursts, making warming self-limiting.

Spencer has also found evidence that warming may thin the upper layer of heat trapping cirrus clouds, again tending to make warming self-limiting.

In the cooling direction, the situation is much more dangerous because feedback effects continue to propagate strongly. It might seem that cooling feedback effects should weaken because cooling leaves leaves less and less water vapor in the atmosphere, reducing the amount that can still be squeezed out. On the other hand, the less water vapor there is in the atmosphere, the more heat trapping work each molecule of water vapor will do. It becomes less redundant and hence more powerful.

This allows the cycle of cooling to remain strong, just the opposite of what happens in the warming direction, where the more water vapor there is, the weaker its marginal effect on temperature.

A second "vicious cycle" also acts more powerfully when the earth is cold than when it is warm. Cooling causes increased snow cover, which reflects away more sunlight than bare ground, cooling the earth still further, causing snow and ice to grow still further. In cold times, snow and ice spread down to lower latitudes where there is progressively more territory, receiving sunlight progressively more directly. Thus the colder the earth the stronger the marginal cooling effect, as sunlight starts to get bounced away from large swaths of the earth.

Contrast this to warm times, when the ice caps have already retreated to the poles. Here the marginal albedo effect of additional warming is relativelty small.

The upshot again is a lopsided risk profile, where a warmer jacket of greenhouse gases has little chance of creating run-away warming, but the cooling that it helps to mitigate has a lot of potential to run away and create a 100,000 year ice age, as has happened numerous times in the past.

This same advantageous risk profile also applies to temperature change itself:


3. Warming is benign. Cooling is brutal.

We could stand several more degrees of warming and it would be overwhelmingly positive for flora and fauna. We know this because the earth has been substantially warmer in the past (the "Holocene Optimum," from 5-9 thousand years ago) and the geologic record suggests that the biosphere flourished (hence the adjective "optimum").

Cooling, on the other hand, is a crusher. Even another "little ice age" will drastically diminish growing seasons and food production. With seven billion mouths to feed (compared to less than one billion during THE Little Ice Age) large scale famine becomes a possibility.


All considered, a thicker blanket of greenhouse gases is virtually all reward, with almost no risk

There is simply no doubt that solar activity is going to fall off from recent highs and sooner or later go into an extended down phase. It always has, and mankind is certainly not doing anything to affect the sun.

If we are lucky, solar activity will rebound and there will be some continued warming. The more the better, and if a thicker blanket of greenhouse gases helps a continuing solar high to create a little bit more warming on top of what it otherwise would, that is all to the good too. And this is the WORST that a thicker blanket of greenhouse gases can cause: it would make good times even better.

But the bad times are what we need to worry about. To deal with that looming certainty of global cooling, we need to start raising the floor on cooling as much as we can. This is urgent. Our capacity to affect global temperature is very limited. It will take years of massive production of CO2, Methane, Nitrous Oxide, etcetera, to puff up our greenhouse protection just a little bit. To help ourselves in any significant way, we better get on with it.

Not only should we continue full bore with our exploitation of fossil fuels, we should also be engineering the greenhouse byproducts of fossil energy generation to maximize heat trapping effect. Some wavelengths of infrared are not trapped by water vapor. By tailoring industrial byproducts to trap these un-trapped and under-trapped wavelengths, we can in-effect patch the holes in our greenhouse blanket. If we use our whole fossil fuel industry to target the right byproducts, we might be able to raise the floor on cooling substantially.


We need about a hundred years

We don't need a thicker blanket of greenhouse gases in the long run. In another hundred years (assuming Iran doesn't get nukes and send us all back to the stone age) we should be able to construct giant orbiting reflectors, or moon based reflectors, that can that tune climate by directing additional sunlight our way. We just have to avoid a cooling catastrophe for the next century or two.

Non-fossil energy sources are on the horizon. A few breakthroughs in photovoltaics and battery technology and the denizens of our sunnier climes won't even need the grid anymore. If national security were the only consideration, we should move to nuclear generation immediately. But for the next little while, the need to don a warmer jacket of greenhouse gases calls for continued reliance on fossil fuels.

We can quite aggressive in producing greenhouse gases while still being cautious by minding the atmospheric lifetimes of the greenhouse gases we employ.


Atmospheric lifetime

CO2 has an atmospheric lifetime of 50-200 years. Rarer greenhouse gases (GHGs) have less redundancy, giving them a higher warming effect, or "global warming potential" (GWP). Per molecule, methane has about 20 times the GWP of CO2 and has a lifetime of about 12 years. Nitrous Oxide, with 310 times the warming potential of CO2, has a lifetime of about 120 years.

Then there are the exotic high-GWP GHGs, mostly produced by industrial activity, which can have thousands of times the warming potential of CO2, and much longer atmospheric lifetimes:


Click table for larger image. Shows 1996 IPCC data (presented in this EPA doc). More extensive 2001 IPCC table here. Infrared absorption ranges of different GHGs here.

The modest lifetimes of CO2 and nitrous oxide make them good for being cautious in our approach to donning a warmer jacket of greenhouse gases. To keep these gases at artificially high levels, we have to keep adding them to the atmosphere at a high rate, or they fall off pretty quickly.

The very short lifetime of methane would make it ideal for maintaining short term control, if there were a non-wasteful way to put a lot of it into the atmosphere. (Methane is the main component of natural gas. We could just dump it into the atmosphere, but that seems pretty extravagant.)

But just as the need to rely on greenhouse gases for warming is short term (a century or two), so too is the need to worry about possibly being too aggressive in donning a warmer blanket of greenhouse gases. Just as we will soon enough be able to reflect additional sunlight towards the earth, so too we will be able to reflect sunlight away, giving us complete control over global temperature. All of our climate concerns are strictly short term.


Opportunities to engineer GHGs

Consider Shell’s new technique for extracting fuels from oil shale. They drill a picket-fence like row holes around a square column of oil shale, then pump refrigerant through the holes to create a wall of frozen ground that keeps the surrounding groundwater protected. Then they drill down into the middle of the column and heat the shale to extract fuels without ever mining the rock.

Having all of that released energy to work with, refining engineers could produce a wide variety of byproducts, including GHGs engineered to capture a wide spectrum of infrared. The same could be done with Canadian tar sands, and African and Chinese coal. The question is how far we should go.

The science is not yet in place to figure out the effects of human produced GHGs. Scientists have been pretending to work on this, but all of their estimates are fraudulent, misattributing to GHGs the warming that was caused by the 20th century's hyper-active sun.

Once solar effects are properly accounted, the estimates of anthropogenic warming are going to shrivel up to something relatively small. Very likely, our little lever will not be able to offset with the sun's big lever in any significant way unless we start pumping out high GWP GHGs.

Sulfer hexafluoride (SF6) has about 20,000 times the warming effect per molecule of CO2, and has an atmospheric lifetime of about 3000 years. If an Ice age starts to descend, and these gases are necessary to stop it, we should start belching them out, which means we have start building the capacity to belch them out. Once we are under the ice, it is too late. Humanity will still survive, but in drastically reduced numbers.


The global warming morons have us headed in the wrong direction

Until now, the demonization of CO2 has been all talk and no action. Fossil fuel burning has been decreasing in the U.S. since 2006, but this is an economic reaction to high energy prices, not a result of anti-CO2 policy efforts. Unfortunately, that is now changing. What had been a boom in coal fired electricity generation has now turned into a bust, due to fears of regulatory restriction.

President Bush did good service by delaying this nonsense for eight years. His first major policy statement back in 2001 was to come out against the Kyoto accord, reversing the position of the Clinton administration, which with Vice President Gore as global warming czar had been to back Kyoto as strongly as possible, even in the face of overwhelming congressional opposition. Bush's executive-branch reversal eased worries about Kyoto eventually succeeding, which allowed fossil-based electrical generation to go forward.

No more. Now the Bush administration has succumbed to the global warming hype (over the same time period during which it has been scientifically debunked), so that domestic electricity producers now have to anticipate regulation.

The Canadian tar sands industry is confronting the same problem. They ought to be moving to full scale exploitation of this huge resource, but the Energy Independence and Security Act passed by Congress in 2007 could bar U.S. importing oil from tar sands on the grounds that the extraction process creates longer lived greenhouse effects than conventional sources of oil.

The 2007 act also calls for a 20% reduction in gasoline consumption in ten years, setting the legal basis for who knows what kinds of lawsuits. Eight years ago, lawmakers were not drinking the global-warming Kool-Aid. Now they are swilling it.


Overcoming the anti-capitalist naturalism of the eco-religionists

The warming alarmists are not actually concerned about climate at all. They are eco-religionists who believe that human economic activity is gobbling up the natural world. All they want is an excuse to curtail human activity, and since economic activity is currently powered by fossil fuels, the charge that fossil fuel burning is causing catastrophic warming serves nicely. That is why they are okay with the scientific absurdity of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. They don't care if it makes sense. The climatologists amongst them all KNOW that it does not make sense, and they have known it for years.

Their underlying anti-capitalism is now going to turn the eco-religionists into skeptics and anti-alarmists. "Don't jump on the anti-cooling bandwagon," they will say: "cooling is natural, driven by the fall-off in solar activity, and natural is good" (the other half of their vision of conflict between man and nature in which man is seen as bad).

But natural is not good. Natural is amoral, and the embrace of naturalism is nihilistic. We have a chance to evade epic catastrophe, and we can't let the nihilistic naturalism of the eco-religionists keep us from doing it.

Ordinary people will be glad to hear that industrial activity, and the greenhouse gases it produces, are the solution to climate danger, not the problem. Ramping up greenhouse gases is a win-win policy choice for mankind. "You need me to burn more fuel? Can do!"

But the environmental religionists are not on the side of mankind. In what they see as the contest between human prosperity and the natural world, they are on the side of the natural world. (Typical example here.) The prospect of human economic activity being the solution to climate danger is the eco-religionist's worst nightmare. They are going to do everything they can to obscure the real science, the real problem, and the real solution.

Unfortunately, these people dominate academia and the media, creating a tremendous obstacle to getting the truth out to the broader public that would gladly embrace it. The only thing that is bringing down their hoax of human caused global warming is the sun's current dip into at least a temporary lull. These folks are powerful, and there is no end to the dishonesty they will continue to spew. Let's just not take too long to overcome them, because we might not have a lot of time.

Hopefully the current downturn in solar activity is just a wobble and not the real thing. The only mitigation we have in place now is a little CO2. We are not ready for cold.


Supposedly conservative churches are drinking the left-wing Kool-Aid too

Southern Baptist leaders just signed a "Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change" promising to do more to combat global warming. Hey goofballs: the earth is cooling. Why would anyone believe Al Gore's bought and paid for IPCC?

AP's report on the declaration quotes one student leader who embraces warming alarmism because it appeals to his religious sensibilities. A theology professor told him that destroying God's creation is like "tearing a page out of the Bible." "That struck me, that broke me," the student said, and so he went on to become a warming alarmist.

Destroying God's creation would be a lot worse than tearing a page out of the Bible, but what does that have to do with accepting left-wing propaganda as Gospel? If there is a God, his purpose in bestowing mankind with faculties of reason is so that we can us use them, yet for the Southern Baptists, it is apparently enough to embrace the presumptionthat one is helping the environment, without regard to whether one is actually helping or hurting.

Climate science is a revealing test for religion, but not in the way that the Southern Baptists imagine. At war in conservative Christianity are two incompatible ideas, only one of which can be right. One is the naturalist idea that we should leave God's creation as it is: that natural is right. The other is the statement of Genesis, that God has given mankind dominion over land and beast, to husband, to use, and to preserve as we see best.


Genesis 1:28: …replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The naturalist tendency is evident in the Vatican's recent naming of "pollution" and "genetic engineering" as mortal sins (for which you go to Hell). What nonsense.

Every beneficial thing creates harmful byproducts, i.e. pollution. LIFE creates pollution, as even men in robes must be aware. As for genetic engineering, it has been going on since the first farmers started developing the first crops. Naturalism is a fraud, but one that our churches are for some reason highly susceptible to.

On the issue of global climate, it is crucial that they get back to their Bibles and recognize the concept of dominion as a rejection of naturalism. Global cooling is as natural as can be, but if we fail to mitigate it then we fail in our husbandry of the earth. Instead of protecting ourselves and our eco-system from this natural calamity, we would be letting the Garden of Eden be destroyed by it.

The Biblical grant of dominion is a call to impose our will on nature, to make use of plant, animal and geologic resources in the most productive way. That includes preservation of nature but it but is not limited to it. We are to JUDGE when nature should be left to its "natural" course and when intervention is called for.

Conservative churches are supposed to understand this grant of dominion over nature. But the Southern Baptists clearly do not get it, succumbing instead to the idea that human impact on climate must be disastrous, just based on the gooiest religious feeling, without regard for whether they even know what they are talking about. (Don't confuse the Bible's grant of dominion over nature with what is called "dominion theology," which sees the Bible's grant of dominion as extending not just over nature, but over society. That is, they see it in political terms, as a call to impose Biblical law across the land.)

Climate change ought to be a defining issue for conservative Christianity, a point where Christians step up and distinguish their religion of husbandry and dominion from the naturalist religion of the humanity-hating environmentalists. "Natural" is not a criterion of good or right. Human comprehension of value is the measure, the only measure, for how to abide by the law of love and act for most value. We have the capacity to judge what is best, not perfectly of course, but with understanding that can continually improve.

Naturalism, in contrast is blind. In nature, planets are smashed by asteroids, and by ice ages. Our job is to create and preserve value, as best we can see how. That means taking control (exercising dominion) over nature. Any Christian who wants to save the planet should see the nihilistic naturalism of the anti-capitalist environmentalists for the deadly failure it is.


Further reading
My survey of real vs. phony climate science here.

For a proper survey of the scientific evidence, see Fred Singer’s book Unstoppable Global Warming, every 1500 years, and Henrik Svensmark’s book The Chilling Stars.

To see the environmentalist anti-population ideology writ simple, check out this human hating cartoon, The stork is a bird of war:



My essay on people being the solution, not the problem, here. The stork video states the environmentalist position accurately when it demonizes white suburban babies, tended by SUVs:



It isn't population per se that environmentalists see as the problem, but population weighted by income (which the environmentalists see as a marker for resource consumption). In his 1994 speech "Too many rich people," anti-population zealot Paul Ehrlich condemned population according to energy consumption. By focusing on rich people as the problem, the left is able to square its left-wing brand of anti-capitalist environmentalism with the left's broader anti-white racism.

The truth is that it is not just people in general who are the solution, but in particular "rich people": those who have the resources to do something with their lives. It is educated people who create the technological advance that allows all of us to get more out of scarce resources. In effect, as Julian Simon put it, they expand rather than use up the world's resources.

Thus the population that is most beneficial for the environment is the very population that is most demonized by the environmental movement. Now we can add that "rich people" (i.e. anyone productive enough not to be poor) also benefit the world by putting relatively large amounts of GHG into the atmosphere. How I envy the truly rich, with their big eco-friendly carbon footprints, protecting the planet from global cooling. They really do have it all.

Reader Max K. found another Islamic website with a Mecca-direction calculator. It can be used to construct yet another graphical demonstration that the Flight 93 memorial points to Mecca.

Muslims face Mecca for prayer, with the direction to Mecca calculated by the great circle method. Enter your street address into the search field at QiblaLocator.com and it brings up a Google map with a red line showing the Muslim prayer-direction (or "qibla") from your home.

At the Flight 93 crash site, Skyline Road passes through the center of what is to become the giant central crescent of the planned memorial. Enter "Skyline Rd, Shanksville PA" into the QiblaLocator search box and it generates this map:


Red line points to Mecca. (Azimuth, also in red: 55.19° clockwise from north.)

To see how this direction to Mecca compares with the orientation of the planned memorial, first impose some orientation lines on the Crescent of Embrace design:


The short black line connects the two most protruding tips of the half-mile wide central crescent. The long black arrow shows the orientation of a person standing between the crescent tips and facing into the center of the crescent. (Every particle of this original design remains completely intact in the so-called redesign, which only disguises the giant crescent with a few additional trees.)

Next just lay the site-plan graphic on top of QiblaLocator's Google map:


The red and black lines are almost parallel.

To be precise, the upper crescent tip is the end of the thousand foot long, fifty foot tall, Entry Portal Wall. The bottom crescent tip is the last pair of red maple trees at the bottom end of the crescent walkway. Connect these tips, and the perpendicular bisector (black arrow) points 53.5° clockwise from north (within two degrees of the exact direction to Mecca).

A crescent that Muslims face into to face Mecca is called a mihrab, and is the central feature around which every mosque is built. The Flight 93 Memorial will be the world's largest mosque.


Earlier Mecca direction graphics

In 2005, Sarah Wells constructed a somewhat similar graphic. She used the Mecca direction calculator at Islam.com to get a qibla line that she superimposed onto the memorial site plan:


Green "qibla" circle shows direction to Mecca from nearby Pittsburgh. Again you can see that a person standing between the tips of the crescent and facing into the center of the crescent will be facing almost exactly at Mecca.

Sarah's graphic and the QiblaLocator graphic both demonstrate that the giant crescent points to Mecca in the way that Muslims define the direction to Mecca (by the "great circle" or "shortest distance" method).

The first graphic to show the Mecca orientation of the crescent memorial was posted by the pseudonymous Eaotin Shrdlu on September 10, 2005, two days after the crescent design was unveiled:


The large map projection and the small site-plan inset both have north at the top. Etaoin's graphic shows that the direction to Mecca from crash site (green line) and the direction of a person facing into crescent (red line) are the same.

University of Pennsylvania Professor Tim Baird, a member of the Flight 93 Advisory Commission, says that everyone involved in the Memorial Project is fully aware of the factual accuracy of the Mecca direction claim. Nevertheless, they all stand by as Project spokesmen keep denying the Mecca orientation in the newspapers. The Project even found an academic fraud to tell the press that there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca:

Daniel Griffith, a geospatial information sciences professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, said anything can point toward Mecca, because the earth is round. (Pittsburgh Post Gazette, August 18, 2007.)

Any Muslim would have denied this absurdity, but the Post Gazette does not want Griffith's fraud exposed, because the Gazette itself has been fully complicit in covering up the Mecca orientation of the memorial since 2005. Post Gazette reporter Paula Ward told me in 2006 (download 3, p. 108) that editors and reporters at the Post Gazette saw all of the demonstrations of the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent back in 2005 and made a top level editorial decision not to publish this explosive information. Editor Tom Birdsong thinks it would hurt the Democrats, so he is not going to publish it, and neither are other newspapers.

This shouldn't be a right-left issue, but try telling our newspaper editors that. Which leaves it up to the rest of us to get the word out about Islamic and terrorist memorializing symbolism in the Flight 93 Memorial. This is going to have to be passed person to person.

After seeing the ABC video of Obama's spiritual mentor damning America and celebrating 9/11, I tried to find the text of Jeremiah Wright's "Audacity to Hope" sermon. The end of Obama's Audacity of Hope autobiography describes this sermon in glowing terms as moving him to unconscious tears. Given Wright's stock in trade, there can't be much doubt that it is one long racist screed.

Turns out the text was available for $5 download ten days ago at PreachingTodaySermons.com. Google has a cache of the order page, but the page is no longer available. (Copy of Google cache page here.) Neither does Wright's name any longer appear on the website's "Sermons by African Americans" page. (Wayback shows his name on the page in August of 07, their last update.)

So who is responsible for taking the sermon down? PreachingToday is a business, so I am guessing that the request had to have come from Wright, which would presumably have been in response to a request from Obama. I sent an email asking whether they withdrew this crucial piece of information from the public of their own volition, or whether they were asked by Wright or others to remove it. Will update with any reply.

In the meantime, does anyone know if text or video of this sermon is available from any other source?


UPDATE: I got an answer from Preaching Today. They say they took the Wright sermon down because he has become so controversial. They were not trying to keep the text out of the public eye, but simply did not want to be interpreted as approving or promoting Wright's views by selling his sermons on their site. When I let them know that they seem to be the only source for this important public document, they very graciously made the text available for anyone to view free of charge.

I see that Townhall columnnist Amanda Carpenter was also able to get the text of Wright's sermon from Preaching Today. She even has the audio (also from Preaching Today).

As Carpenter notes, this sermon lacks the racism and hatred of America that permeates Wright's other sermons. There is a suggestion that America is somehow oppressing the third world, but it is passing. The main examples of dispair in this overall bleak sermon all have to do with family relations.

The explanation for this dramatic change in style seems pretty straightforward. It is not Wright's sermon. Wright attributes it almost entirely to "Reverend Frederick G. Sampson of Detroit, Michigan." Wright talks a bit at the end about his own parents, but otherwise it seems that this is Samson's sermon.

Interestingly, this sermon swapping is the purpose of the PreachingTodaySermons.com website. It is a resource for preachers, where they can purchase each other's sermons. When I first inquired about the availability of Wright's sermon, the gal on the line asked me if I needed it for this weekend.

So that's a plus for Wright. His own sermons are abhorrent, but at least the sermon he borrowed from Samson is perfectly decent. Obama's association with Wright is still damning. ("Obama says that rather than advising him on strategy, Wright helps keep his priorities straight and his moral compass calibrated.") But there is nothing wrong with his borrowing the title of his autobiography from Sampson.

They are on the side of the enemy:



Daring attack on Pearl Harbor!

Daring attack on World Trade Center!

Daring attack on classroom at Virginia Tech!

Daring mass murder at Columbine High School!

Daring attack on soccerfield full of Iraqi children!

Daring attack on Iraqi market kills five U.S. soldiers!

In WWII the editors of the Chronicle would have been shot for treason.

Scumbags.

This front page teaser does not appear on-line. For hometown consumption only. They do this garbage all the time.

Do these idiots think there is no such thing as right and wrong in time of war? Earth to Chronicle: every Japanese soldier killed in WWII was a justifiable homicide. Every U.S. serviceman killed was murdered. That is what we were fighting about. The Japanese went on a murder spree and had to be stopped.

Same with al Qaeda. Same with Saddam Hussein. Every time we kill an "insurgent" in Iraq, it is a justifiable homicide. Every time they kill anyone, it is murder. That is why we are at war. We are fighting murderers. War is not beyond right and wrong. It is the most extreme expression of right and wrong.

"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," said Reuters global news chief Steven Jukes after the 9/11 attacks, explaining why Reuters would not call the attacks "terrorist."

No, to be a freedom fighter, you have to be fighting for freedom. You can't be fighting for totalitarian domination, or murdering infidels out of religious ideology.

To not get that, you have to WANT to not get that. Whether they are pro-al-Qaeda or just anti-American is harder to discern, but when their basic modus operandi is a refusal to think straight, it really doesn't matter. The two become the same.

They are on the side of the enemy.

I did a 45 minute interview with Washington D.C talk-radio host Joe Ardinger Saturday night (3-8-08, Segment 3).

It rips. We exposed a lot of the terrorist memorializing parts of the Flight 93 Memorial, and went over the clear proofs of intent that architect Paul Murdoch included in the design.

Joe's interests: "Ghosts, UFO's, The Lizard People from The Hollow Earth, Politics, True Crime, Conspiracies, you get the idea..." If he wants outlandish, the truth about the Flight 93 Memorial is tops, which could just make Joe the man for the Job.

I know nothing about the Lizard People, or Joe's politics, but this issue ought to transcend all domestic divides, and for Joe it certainly does. Very fun interview. Joe is a great host, and he says he wants to keep after this.

That's excellent. Thank you Joemericans!

(If Joe's 3-8-08 Segment 3 link ever disappears, there is a backup copy here.)

Pennsylvanians know about the Islamic symbolism in the Flight 93 Memorial, and have stopped donating. The first indication came last September when State Senator Jane Orie came aboard as a fundraiser. She got a quick education in the growing controversy.

In a 9/11 radio interview with Pittsburgh talker Fred Honsberger, Orie explained why she hoped the Flight 93 families would get back together and revisit their design choice:

Orie: "No matter who it is, and no matter where I went today for 9/11 events, everybody brought up this crescent. Whether it is intentional or not, it is disturbing to people."

Honsberger: "So everyone is bringing it up to you."

Orie: "Absolutely."

At that time, the Memorial Project had collected about $12.5 million, far short of the huge design's anticipated 60 million dollar price tag. Six months later the amount sits at "A little more than $12 million." It is possible that they are actually spending more on their fundraising efforts than they are bringing in.

Bill Steiner, who has been rustling up opposition on the ground in PA, dropped by Somerset recently and had a conversation with Memorial Project Superintendent Joanne Hanley. She appeared beleaguered, and confided that fundraising was sluggish, suggesting that the memorial would probably have to be built in stages. Presumably she meant something other than the normal stages of building, but was anticipating delays.

Now this week the Somerset Daily American has an editorial complaining that the whole state seems to be dumping on Somerset County, bemoaning amongst other things the lack of funding for the Flight 93 Memorial.

This is not the preferred way to stop architect Paul Murdoch's terroist memorial mosque from being built. The damn thing ought to just be stopped by those in government who are in a position to stop it, so that a new and fitting design can be selected. At that point, money will be needed, but for now, with Murdoch in full command of the hijacked memorial, lack of money is what is needed. Starving the engines of fuel is one way to keep the hijacker from reaching his target, and until the hijacker is stopped, nothing else matters.

The people get it, and are voting with their pocketbooks. When are our our elected representatives going to step up and do their part?

Senator Orie is not the only Pennsylvania state legislator who has expressed concern, but Congressman Tancredo is as yet the only politician to actually call for the crescent design to be scrapped. If our representatives can't be leaders, can't they at least be followers?