Tag: settled science

Science: Grown-Up Libs Still Have Imaginary Friends REPRINT

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From April 27, 2019

Incredibly rigorous research by Settled Science “R” Us has found that liberals–especially politicians and college professors–have imaginary friends all throughout their adult lives.

“The science is settled, so shut up already!” said Dr. X, who wishes to remain anonymous. “A lot of people have imaginary friends while they’re little kids, but big libs have ’em all their lives.”

Why do grown-up liberals have imaginary friends?

“First, what other kind can they get?” said Dr. X. “But second, and more importantly, who else but an imaginary person is going to provide the liberal with the constant reassurance he needs that he’s really, really smart, infinitely more virtuous than all those people he hates, and much, much nicer than everybody else? No real person is ever going to do that!

“You can’t help feeling kind of sorry for them. They think they’re so terribly smart, but they’re mostly rather stupid. They think they’re good and kind–well, that’s a lie! They think they do everything from the purist motives. That’s a laugh. Really, if they didn’t do so much freakin’ damage to the country, you could almost take up a collection for them. They haven’t got the ghost of a suspicion of how obnoxious they are. And they are appalled and mystified that ordinary people don’t bow down to them and acknowledge their greatness. Ah, me! Being the smartest persons in the world–it’s a thankless job!”

Liberals who do not yet have an imaginary friend, he added, can always get one just by watching CNN or MSNBC. “You’d be surprised how many of them have adopted one of the noozies they see on TV every night,” said Dr. X. “They love getting interviewed on an imaginary Sunday talk show by one of their imaginary friends–and they get a real charge out of it when Rachel Maddow or somebody praises them on international TV. That none of it’s real is something they lose track of rather quickly.”

Is this study saying, then, that the average adult liberal is… crazy?

“As a bedbug,” said Dr. X.

 

A Parade of Tyrannosaurs

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I want to show you some of the various “Tyrannosaurs” that have passed for true and scientifically accurate reconstructions. I’m finding the logistics a bit tricky, so wish me luck.

Megalosaurus, the first ever dinosaur discovery | National ...

This was Settled Science in the 1800s. The statue is supposed to be Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur to be given a scientific name; but it belongs to the same general group as Tyrannosaurus and one could be easily mistaken for the other. This was the monster featured in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.

Marx Toys - Dinosaur Toys Filling a Need and a Toy Box

In the 1940s we had Rudolph Zallinger’s T. rex in his mural at the Peabody Museum, and toy makers stuck to his reconstruction–complete with huge beer-belly. Zallinger’s mural is awe-inspiring. I’m afraid the toy was not.

The Land Unknown - Trailer - YouTube

In the 1950s and 60s, T. rex shed his beer belly and learned to stand bolt-upright like a human being. Here he is in The Land Unknown (1957), one of my absolute favorite movies when I was eight years old.

Jurassic World': See how T. rex has ruled the blockbuster ...

Jurassic Park and its sequels gave us a Tyrannosaurus that was really scary, it could’ve eaten all the earlier models for breakfast. The science kept changing; and movie-making special effects technology changed even fast. However, T. rex was not going to be allowed to rest on these laurels

Marisa is Having Nightmares on X: "Doing some dinosaur research for a commission and DAMN. The new T rex with feathers model is scarier in my opinion. https://t.co/RkOhB1G3rb" / X

I call this the Skid Row Tyrannosaur. To me it looks like a giant wino. Slathering greasy, shabby feathers all over it doesn’t help at all. But if history is any guide, this monstrosity will be superseded–hopefully by something better. Or at least less unsightly.

Yes, He Really Said ‘Screw Your Freedom’

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Horse Rear End Royalty Free Cliparts, Vectors, And Stock Illustration. Image 28337284.

Former movie star, and once the most pathetic jelly-spined governor California ever had, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has weighed in on the COVID mask controversy.

“Screw your freedom,” he explained. “You’re a schmuck,” sez Arnold–his word, not mine–if you don’t wear a mask. Because, he babbles, “The science is unanimous.”

Gee, where have we heard that before? Oh, I know! It’s what leftids always say when they want to force us to do something we don’t want to do. It’s Science! And Science is never, ever wrong.

Not only that–it’s unanimous science. Not a single scientist anywhere has a discouraging word to say about doing us all up in face masks. And you thought there was no such thing as “unanimous science”! You must be a racist.

Well, now we have it straight from the horse’s… er… mouth. Or does it actually come from the horse’s other end?

‘Oops! “Nebraska Man” Was a Pig’ (2018)

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Stop the presses!

Beware, beware, beware of Settled Science doled out to you by Experts! Like this, for instance: “Nebraska Man.”

Oops! ‘Nebraska Man’ Was a Pig

The top men in the field lent their names to this embarrassment. And today we’ve got yard signs (liberals’ yard signs) proclaiming “Science Is Real!” By which they mean Climbit Change. Uh-huh. Just like Nebraska Man was real. The top experts said so.

These top experts at least didn’t lie and use political chicanery to protect the lie.

Ours do.

The Hate Crime that Wiped Out a Planet

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Pluto, as photographed in space in 2015

You wouldn’t think it was possible for one hate crime to wipe out an entire planet, but that’s what the International Astronomical Union did to Pluto in 2006–stroke of the pen, and you ain’t a planet anymore.

Gee, it was a planet when I went to school, and if you said it wasn’t, you’d get an F. Now suddenly you get an F for saying that it is a planet.

Every single inhabitant of Pluto has been depersonalized by this! And without a word of protest. We protest everything else.

Settled science. Hot dog. If you don’t like what the settled science is today, wait till tomorrow. It’ll be different.

Just ask anyone on Pluto.

 

Alas! Poor Trachodon! I Knew Him, Horatio…

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Marx Trachodon Second Type | The revised Trachodon from 1959… | Flickr

Marx Toys’ classic Trachodon

I’m in a retrospective mood today–maybe because 2020 is racing by so fast, even with the Great Quarantine to paralyze it.

Behold the mighty Trachodon, the pre-eminent “duckbill dinosaur,” as faithfully rendered into plastic by the Marx Toy Co. I still have a troop of these in my animal and dinosaur box. Nor was there, when I was acquiring those toys, a dinosaur book that didn’t mention Trachodon.

I don’t wanna hear it, that there never was a Trachodon! I don’t care if all they ever had was a few teeth somebody dug up in 1850–Trachodon was in all the books, I had the toys, I’d even seen the straight-up-standing skeleton in the American Museum of Natural History–and now you want to tell me there was no such thing? Away wi’ ye!

We will never be able to see live dinosaurs, so we will never know just how wrong we were about them. Which icons of today’s Settled Science will follow Trachodon into oblivion?

“I knew him, Horatio: he was a dinosaur of infinite jest. How his broad duck bill would gape with laughter!”

I’d like to know what we’ll be laughing at twenty years from now.

They Weren’t So Stupid, After All

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Oldest art ever? Zigzags on a clam shell are more than 400,000 ...

The scientific world got a shock recently when archaeologists discovered cave art that could only have been made by Neanderthal people. Although their brains were actually a little larger than our own, it was Settled Science that Neanderthals were “primitive.”

But that’s nothing!

Now they’ve got art that was produced by Homo erectus–known as the “Java ape-man” when I was a boy–and it’s knocked a lot of settled theories for a loop (https://www.livescience.com/48991-homo-erectus-shell-tools.html).

What we’ve got is fossil clam shells with abstract designs carved on them, dated to 540,000 to 430,000 years ago. Young Earthers, stay with me: there is not supposed to be any such thing as Homo erectus art, no matter what the age.

So… what was Homo erectus? An ape-man? A missing link? Here’s a skeleton:

Turkana Boy skeleton - Stock Image - C014/7421 - Science Photo Library

This was once a 12-year-old boy in East Africa, now known as “the Lake Turkana boy.” In life he would’ve been on his way to six feet tall–no stooped, crouching ape-man here. From the neck down, only an expert can tell that this is not a modern human skeleton. But the head is shaped differently from ours.

Were these people, or something else? It wasn’t so long ago that Western scientists were debating whether modern Africans were people. It’s like, they’ve gotta look like us or they’re not human. You could find a carved ivory chess set clutched in the skeleton hands of a deceased Homo erectus, and some still wouldn’t accept him as human.

As for, “Well, Homo erectus simply Evolved into more modern forms of pre-humans, until finally the real human threshold was reached”–fap! There were erectus men and women living at the same time as “modern” humans and really “primitive” characters like little-bitty Homo habilis.

So now we’ve got erectus art. Never mind the dating: it makes certain persons uncomfortable.

But I think it’s cool!

Never Existed… then Went Extinct

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Aliwalia | Dinopedia | Fandom

Keeping up with dinosaur discoveries is probably more work than actually making the discoveries.

Back in the Nineties I enjoyed reading about Aliwalia rex, the super-predator of the Triassic Period, already as big as an Allosaurus long before carnivorous dinosaurs had actually sorted themselves out. It lived in South Africa and ate everything.

Imagine my recent disappointment when I learned that Aliwalia rex… is no more. Worse, he never was.

See, they found this great big leg bone, and a jawbone with some sharp teeth in it, and a scattering of other bits and pieces; and acting under the presumption that all these pieces came from the same animal, they cobbled together a super-predator the like of which no one had ever suspected could possibly have lived in the Triassic. Wow! Carnivorous dinosaurs got terrifyingly huge right from the git-go!

Well, they looked again, and now it’s been decided that those pieces don’t belong together, after all: so much for the super-predator. He struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. Except his part got written out of the play before he ever got to play it.

I don’t mean to make fun of paleontologists. Their field of study naturally lends itself to human error. They do the best they can.

But I sometimes think they take too much upon themselves. The Mesozoic Era, the Age of Dinosaurs, scientists have divided into three periods–Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous. These are pretty much arbitrary terms. No dinosaur ever turned to another and said, “Dude, don’t you get tired of living in the Triassic? Why couldn’t we live in the Jurassic?”

The Triassic is fun because nobody’s quite sure what to make of it. The discovery of Triassic pollen was a shock. They repudiated the Triassic bird footprints, so that embarrassment has been dealt with, for now.

But if you can cobble a dinosaur together out of unrelated parts, and call it real, and put it into textbooks–well, how hard can it be to cobble together a Triassic Period? Or even a whole Mesozoic Era? The modern discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils will lead us–where?

Sure, you can find literally hundreds of Centrosaurus fossils, and for that species you don’t have to do much cobbling. But so very many dinosaurs are “known” only from a single bone, a tooth, or a chip of broken bone. It doesn’t stop speculation from running wild. I don’t blame scientists for that. Where’s the fun in paleontology, if you don’t let your imagination loose?

But hard, fast, solid, incontrovertible, settled science… uh-uh. Not even close.

When Settled Science Was Lethal

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We often hear “It’s settled science!” as the argument to shut down any and all discussion about Man-Made Climate Change. Back in the mid-19th century, it shut down the one doctor whose methods were the only methods that could stop the “child-bed fever” that was killing multitudes of pregnant women in hospitals.

Today Dr. Ignaz Semmelweiss, of Hungary, is memorialized on coins and postage stamps, with more than a few hospitals named for him. But in his own time, Semmelweiss was reviled, denounced as a charlatan, rejected, refused permission to carry on his work, and finally died in a mental hospital.

This was because Semmelweiss insisted that doctors under his authority wash their hands before tending their patients. At some hospitals, the mortality rate for women giving birth was around 18%. Women who gave birth in the streets had a lower mortality rate than that! But where Semmelweiss was able to get doctors to wash their hands, the mortality rate plummeted to 2%. In fact, in some months, no patients died of child-bed fever.

So Semmelweiss had the results; but that was all he had, and the scientific community ignored them. This 15-minute video by The History Guy on youtube tells the whole story: watch it before it’s taken down.

Thanks to my wife for impressing me with the importance of this history–to say nothing of its applicability to all eras of history, including our own.

“Settled science” can be fatal.

More Unsettled Science: Neanderthal Art

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Neanderthal cave paintings

In 2018, after studying the matter for three years, European scientists said they’d discovered, at three different sites in Spain, art-work created by… Neanderthals (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02357-8).

It doesn’t look like much–but ask any museum curator what kind of shape any painting would be in, after being neglected for 65,000 years.

Young Earth creationists, please stay with me. The point here is not how old the paintings are, but that they exist at all. For the sake of argument, we provisionally accept the dating of the art, which was accomplished by dating calcium carbonate deposits that formed on top of the images. And the age they came up with was some 65,000 years before the present.

According to the same scientific establishment, modern humans–Homo sapiens, like us– didn’t arrive in Europe until circa 40,000 years ago. The only people there, back then, were Neanderthals. The artists must have been Neanderthals. They painted abstract symbols whose meaning is long since lost, along with stenciled hand prints and a few damaged, but still recognizable, pictures of animals. In the photo above, you can just make out a horse’s head off to the right.

It shouldn’t be too surprising that Neanderthals were able to create art. Their skeletons were sturdier than ours, their heads shaped differently from ours–and their brains were slightly larger than ours. Why shouldn’t they have been capable of creative thought?

Well, because the Settled Science of the past hundred years said they couldn’t. In plain English, the term “Settled Science” translates as “Shut up!”

In real science, the jury’s always out. Whenever it tries to come in with certainties, it turns out to be wrong.

Well, something’s wrong here. Either Neanderthals were not some kind of para-human evolutionary dead end, or Homo sapiens was in Europe way earlier than the established timeline allows.

But it’s an exciting discovery, isn’t it? Maybe the perceived differences between us and Neanderthals are only superficial. Maybe the reason that there aren’t any more of them is only because they were absorbed into the general human population–in which sense they are still here, as part of our own ancestry.

God didn’t create two Adams, but only one–from whom we are all descended.

Neanderthals included.