Quote of the Day: Alhazen - The pioneer of the modern scientific method

The amazing Alhazen (Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham) was one of the fathers of modern science. Some indeed have said that he was "The First Scientist". I thought we might explore his quote in full on the proper scientific method, to give us some insight as to what he might have thought of the Climategate junk science crooks, if had been alive today to see them in action:

"The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the job of the man who investigates the writings of scientist, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency."

Abu Ali Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)

Here's an interesting YouTube on this great man and his invention of the scientific method:

Climategate: Science is not a belief system

I'd like all the eco-tapeworms who may be shadowing this site (and you know who you are) to watch the following video. I think you'll find it instructive, as Lord Monckton puts the boot into your ridiculous religion, built as it is upon lies, fraud, racketeering, junk science, and just plain crookery. It is particularly instructive to watch the last couple of minutes which discusses the draft version of the Treaty of Copenhagen, which is essentially the birth document of the first World Socialist Government:

Lord Monckton on Climategate at the 2nd International Climate Conference from CFACT on Vimeo.

http://allpainnogain.cfact.org/

As well as many wonderful facets to this video, Lord Monckton names and shames the top eight crooks involved in the AGW fraud:

And finally, I thought we might go for today's quote of the day:

UPDATE: Full un-annotated quote, here.

Video first seen on Obo's wonderful blog site, though as Lord Monckton has asked all viewers of it to broadcast it far and wide, it has been my very great pleasure to comply with this request.

General Election due in the UK soon, shock

You can tell there's a General Election coming up soon in the UK, because all of the airwaves and radio waves are now becoming filled with tax-eaters using tax revenue to persuade us of their vital necessity and the benefits of us continuing to hand them untold trillions of pounds both now and in the future for their increasingly useless 'services'.

The British police are now nothing more than the armed wing of the 'social services', and yet I'm now being forced to pay for them to run adverts to tell me how wonderful they are. To hear this bilge on the radio is an outrage.

I now view the public police mafia as more dangerous, and certainly far more expensive, than their brethren in the private criminal class. And if I were to suffer the misfortune of being burgled, I would fully expect the police not to turn up to the house and just to give me an insurance number, and even if they did bother to turn up, I would be more worried about being arrested or at least criticized by the police, for some fallacious breach of their stupid paper fiat laws on my part, than I would be confident in their ability to catch any culprit.

In these new 'spangly' adverts, they tell me that they spend 80% of their time 'on the beat', rather than cooped in their lovely nice warm offices and cars or on EU social diversity awareness courses learning how to be the new Trans-European Stasi.

Well, I tell you what, coppers, I get around Henley On Thames quite a bit. Let's start a clock running. It's now 11:05am on Tuesday, the 15th of December, 2009. I shall be scrupulously honest. I shall report in a follow-up piece, the first moment I see a policeman or policewoman on the beat, in Henley, wherever and whenever it is. Not sitting in a car, but actually on the street.

Just to make it fair on you, I shall go into the centre of Henley every day, at least once, and walk past the Henley police station and your nice shiny police cars, in-between the main Greys road car park and Bell Street.

I reckon it'll take at least three days, probably much longer, for me to see one of you (and I'll bet that this will be seeing one of you walking between your police station and one of your cars).

I won't take any photos, as that will get me arrested for breaching your privacy, but honestly, I don't think I have anything to worry about, because the chances of any of you being seen within three days are remote, at best.

What'd'ya reckon? I know who my money's on.

Four Exoplanets Found Orbiting Nearby Stars

Interesting.

It's grim up north

Bbbbbrrrrr... it's been cold in North America this week, though it looks nice in Florida.

For the full story and a review of that strange red temperature reading in Texas, plus a lot of other good comments, check out the full article:

=> Lots of new cold and snow records in the USA this past week

My favourite comment in the thread, is this one:

It’s one of the paradoxical effects of Global Warming that, as the climate keeps getting warmer and warmer, the weather keeps getting colder and colder.

liberalbiorealist

Mann-made climate change

AGW is a fraud. Even Adolf thinks so:



http://wattsupwiththat.com/

LewRockwell Roundup: December 15th

1. Hockey Puck vs. Ice Core Samples
James Delingpole on the one YouTube Algore doesn’t want you to watch.

(A must-see video outlining the madness of the current eco-hysteria)

2. Why JFK Was Murdered
By the CIA.

(A long piece, but worth ploughing through if you want to understand all of the back stories about why this potential bringer of world peace was shot to death by his own employees)

3. A Glass or Two of Champagne
It really does lift the heart.

(Well, it's Christmas! *<|:-)))

Here's that YouTube from the first pick:

Quote of the day

"Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

Aldous Huxley

Democracy: The God that Succeeded?

I'd like to congratulate X-Factor winner, Joe McElderry, on his victory last night. For five straight weeks I've voted for Joe, as his singing does rather strange things to the hairs on the back of my neck.

Did he out-sing George Michael? I reckon he did, and that we're going to be seeing and hearing a lot more of Mr McElderry, especially if he can successfully squash all of those rumours about batting for the other side and especially if he can elope with Cheryl Cole.

Who cares anyway if he is a secret wearer of the pink carnation? The man's a great singer, and we should be thankful that in these dark times the occasional ray of sunshine is still allowed to break out.

What I think was really interesting about this competition was not just the way Simon Cowell manipulated it to give himself the result he realised he needed, with Danyl Johnson being an unmelodious shouter, but for the way that the result was decided by those who paid to vote.

I've spent £1.75 on voting for Joe in the last few weeks, and that gave me a tiny say over his almost inevitable victory, and certainly gave me more rights over that victory than anyone who didn't vote, because they weren't prepared to pay.

It's all a bit fuzzy in my head at the moment, mixed up with bread and circuses, and I'll need some more time to gestate on this, but this may be the difference between the X-Factor vote, and political democracy.

For in political democracy, everybody gets to vote, including all of those who take from the vote, the millions of tax-eaters in this country who are net beneficiaries of tax (almost all of whom demand higher taxes, remarkably).

This is why the Conservatives will be just as bad as the Labour Party, after the next election, should they win it. Personally, I think they'll flunk it and we'll get some stitch-up between Labour and the Liberals. However, it matters not a monkeys which fig-leaf party claims the ministerial cars, for the British government will have been re-legitimated and re-returned, for another five years of a train wreck horror show, at the end of which we will have been engineered into begging to join the Euro to save what little we have left.

Because with close to a half of the British population being tax-eaters, and with tax-eaters more likely to vote (state pensioners and dozing bureaucrats taking the day off), it is now impossible to win an election here in Britain without kowtowing to the tax-eating class.

No, paid democracy may work in the bread and circuses of X-Factor, but politically, democracy is still a God that has failed.

UPDATE: Some clips from last night. Judge for yourself whether Joe is better than George:



Here's Joe singing my favourite song of his:

LewRockwell Roundup: December 14th

Getting in the Christmas mood yet?

Here's my top three favourites from LRC today:

1. Read Orwell and Huxley
To understand America. Article by James Quinn.

2. The Federal Bureaucracy-Plutocracy
Bob Higgs on the gang of government thieves.

(If any British journos are reading this, perhaps a good story for you to write would be to read the article above, and then transfer it to the UK and work out the numbers of UK tax-eaters on salaries over £200k, £150k, £100k, and so on.)

3. Ushering in the Amero?
Bob Murphy on the Bernanke-Obama plot to destroy the dollar, and why.

No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture

Professor Murray Rothbard on the roof of his parallel universe home
If you get any spare time over Christmas, I recommend that you check out the Coen Brothers' latest film, A Serious Man, which is even better than Fargo, if that's possible.

This is a beautifully funny black comedic film, which had me laughing out loud most of the way through. Alas, only being partially rather than fully Jewish myself, I missed a few of the jokes which the more Yiddish members of my cinema audience got, but don't worry about that. If you're just a goy like me, you'll still get 90% of the references.

What's really strange, for an Austrian, is seeing a parallel universe opening up within the film. The lead character, Professor Larry Gopnik, could almost be the parallel universe twin of Professor Murray N. Rothbard, at his Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, especially if Uncle Murray had stuck with mathematics rather than branching into economics. This outer-body type experience is made even more surreal when Lew Rockwell appears at the door of Larry's home, dressed in the heavyweight appearance of the philandering Sy Ableman.

Honestly, go and see the film and you'll see what I mean.

To complete a trio of weird Austrian Jewish references, the film opens with a short Yiddish scene from the past in the vicinity of Lvov, which is of course the town Ludwig von Mises himself was born in.

Stranger and stranger.

It's a great film; go and see it!

(BTW, if you do, and you can figure out the meaning of the ending with the tornado scene, can you write in and let me know what that was all about?)

Uncle Gary 'Happy' Shock!

I have no idea what impression the reader has of the writer of these pages. Although this impression may occasionally seem grim or even hysterical, generally, as with most Austrians, life is lived at a fairly happy tempo. It will require another article to explain it, but there is something about the Austrian condition which constantly leads you to look for the funny things in life, at least privately, whereas in the public side of life we can seem a little overly serious and worrisome.

This is particularly true in the best of us, such as Uncle Gary North. I'm sure, like me, he is happy enough in his personal life. However, his writings are usually the grimmest of all.

So I was delighted, recently, to see the sun bursting through the gloom of statist oppression, in this wide-ranging piece on Climategate and the end of the MSM. Go, Uncle Gary, go!:

=> What Will John McQuaid Do for a Living After the Washington Post Goes Bankrupt?

If you haven't got time to read the piece, it is still well worth watching a couple of the videos referenced within it. The first is on Professor Stephen Schneider, one of the world's leading man-made 'Global Warming' advocates. It concentrates on Professor Schneider's strong belief, in the 1970s, that we were headed towards an ice age due to man-made 'Global Cooling'. Come on, Professor - Make your mind up!:



In this next interview, the overly sensitive Professor Schneider shuts down a UN press conference with the intervention of an armed UN security guard, to avoid having to answer a perfectly reasonable question about Professor Jones of HadCRUT fame, the data suppressor at the heart of Climategate:



How dare the proles question their masters and betters? They ought to be locked up and shot.

Weather of Mass Destruction

The Southern Avenger claims that where The Right had the Global War on Terror as their unfalsifiable mythology, crushing all dissent with an opposite opinion, The Left have Global War-ming as their unfalsifiable mythology, crushing all dissent with the opposite opinion:

Real Conservatives Must Rethink War

The Southern Avenger asks some interesting questions about the doctrine of My Country, Right or Wrong:



Thanks to Paul

Brown pledges £1.5bn global warming aid

Oh what it is to spend other people's money, with gay abandon, on junk science.

Thanks, Gordon. I look forward with joy to working hard to earn the taxes to pay off your promises for you.

Nice.

Wall Street Unspun, December 9th Edition, with Neeraj Chaudhary

Another great 'Wall Street Unspun' with Neeraj Chaudhary discussing:

-> The latest Obominable stimulus
-> Socialised medicine
-> Nationalised housing
-> The prevention of the necessary recession

=> http://www.europac.net/media/PeterSchiff_12-09-2009.mp3

How does it all work?

Benjamin Weingarten writes one of the best summaries I have seen, in a while, about how the mercantilist state works, and how they have sleepwalked us into a decade of depression. In the article he discusses Obama, as he is the current Sun-God King, but he could be discussing any socialist leader, anywhere in the world, at any point in the last 100 years.

Excellent:

=> Barack Obama Ensures a Long Depression

LewRockwell Roundup: December 12th-13th

1. Stranded in Houston
Fred Reed is rescued by an Italian restaurant.

2. Is Obama Preparing To Attack America?
Chuck Baldwin on plans for civil war.

3. Looternomics
Make that Obamanomics, says Tim Carney.

2BG2FAIL - Discovering Max Keiser

I have never come across Max Keiser before, so when he popped up on Russia Today, last night, in my hotel bedroom, I loved his approach to Goldman Sachs displayed in the first two minutes of this YouTube. Check his intro out, then watch the rest, particularly the great interview with Australian economist, Steve Keen. (Professor Keen, while not being a proper Austrian, is still an extremely sound man - He prefers instead the school of Joseph Schumpeter, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk's "other" main Austrian student in addition to Mises.):



Oh, and while we're at it, check out the car license plate revealed on the show, owned by Morgan Stanley Vice-Chairman Rob Kindler:

You really couldn't make it up.

The idiot Darling and his plan to destroy Britain

What can you say about our idiot Chancellor, Alistair Darling, and his pathetic craven plans to keep pumping wealth into the unproductive maw of his tax-eating clientele, with money stolen from the few remaining wealth producers in this country? Many of these actual tax-payers, as opposed to tax-eaters, will now be working out their own plans to:

1. Work up to the threshold point of the new 50%+ taxes and then disappear into the back garden for the rest of the year to rake up a few leaves

2. Leave the country entirely

To go on borrowing and to actually increase government consumption spending, at a time like this, is simply madness. But that is what it has come to. The dumbed-down population of Britain, too stupid to live without welfare but intelligent enough to decide who our political masters should be, may even fail to see through it, but Britain is becoming a basket case in front of our eyes. Yet still we march into the night, convinced that more debt is the solution to the debt crisis.

Here's a summary of Darling's stupid plans:



Jeff Randall paints a grim picture of where all of this is going:

=> Pre-Budget report: the Treasury won't tell us the true cost of this debt disaster

Fortunately, Daniel Hannan has the words to the speech that Darling should have given this week:

“Some have argued we should continue to borrow and wait for the economy to grow again before tackling the budget deficit. There are three reasons why this is not a viable proposition.
First, we know from the 1980s how large deficits, left unchecked, can lead to a dangerous spiral of mounting debt and ever increasing interest payments. Never again should we return to a position where all of our income taxes go to pay interest on the national debt.
Second, international debt markets have become more crowded and more fragile. If lenders were to lose faith in our ability to restore order to the public finances, the consequences for our economic well being would be profound.
Third, only decisive action will restore confidence. Consumers will only start to spend and business owners will only invest and create jobs if they believe we are tackling our deficit problem now.”

These are of course the words spoken this week by Brian Lenihan, the Irish Finance Minister.

Here are the pertinent thoughts of Benedict Brogan:

=> Pre-Budget report: A shocker in every line

David Hughes is even blunter:

=> Pre-Budget report: Darling puts party before country

Of course, as the cartoon below put it at the last budget, it's not entirely Alistair Darling who is to blame for the state of the British government's dreadful finances:

However, whichever of the two men is in control of HM Treasury, this week really did mark a low-point for this rotten Labour government. The shame is, of course, that the Tories won't be any better.

Time to go, methinks, and then come back in 20 years when the dust has settled.