Intellect, intelligence and wisdom

"The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining intellect with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all — the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding." (Thomas Sowell, "Intellectuals and Society")

A must read for the New Year. "Intellectuals and Society", by Thomas Sowell.

From Barbara Kay's recommendation:

... Illumination on what makes intellectuals commit to ideas too stupid for ordinary people to believe, and the effect of these ideas on our culture, can be found in the pellucid prose and crisply coherent analysis of conservative sage Thomas Sowell in his book...

The New Year is near

What makes Obama tick?

In his recent book, “The Roots of Obama’s Rage” Dinesh D’Souza proposes a theory that explains Barack Obama’s often perplexing behaviour. Based on Obama’s own words as published in his books, mainly “Dreams from My Father”, and his public speeches as well as the writings of his father and mentors, D’Souza concludes that what drives Obama is an anti-colonial ideology derived from his socialist, anti-colonial Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr.

...Think about what this means. The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s ...

D’Souza shows how Obama’s anti-colonialism accounts for his many apologies for America’s past foreign policies, his Muslim outreach, his bowing and scraping before Saudi royalty, his rudeness towards allies like Britain and France, his deference to America haters like Hugo Chavez, and ........

Mr. D’Souza argues that on balance colonialism has benefitted the world, particularly British colonialism. Furthermore, contrary to Obama’s apparent beliefs, anti-colonialism solves nothing and worse, it is counterproductive - it has been a near complete disaster for most African nations that are indulging in it.

He maintains that Obama, driven by his anti-colonial mentality, is intent on weakening America as a world power and that if he succeeds, America and the world will be much the worse for it:

... I understand Obama, but I don’t sympathize with him. In fact his warped ideology really scares me. His vision for America may be therapeutic for his psyche, but it is a ridiculous one for America in the twenty-first century. The dream of the two Obamas .... is actually an American nightmare.

It’s a highly compelling read.

"... challenging times for climate jihadists"

Gerald Warner: Weathering the true lies of global warming Newspeak:

... The ex cathedra dogma that weather is not climate has the authoritative resonance of similar Orwellian Newspeak maxims such as "War is peace".

... These are challenging times for climate jihadists. Last week the Met Office was forced to issue a press release stating it "categorically denies forecasting a 'mild winter' ". In fact, in October, its long-range probability map predicted an 80 per cent probability of warmer than average temperatures from November to January in Scotland. It claimed Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, the eastern half of England and Cornwall, would experience temperatures above the 3.7°C average, more than 2°C higher than last winter.

... The notorious 2007 [IPCC] report ... claimed up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could be drastically reduced by even a slight decrease in rainfall caused by global warming, replacing trees with tropical grassland. This year a study funded, ironically, by Nasa completely discredited that theory.
 
... The suggestion of a connection between "man-made" global warming and hurricanes has now been rejected by the scientist who first advanced it,...
 
... When Lewis Pugh tried to paddle a kayak to the "ice-free" North Pole he had to stop 600 miles south of his destination and 100 miles short of where a canoeist had reached a century before.
 
Even the IPCC has been forced to revise its forecasts of rises in sea level dramatically downwards.
 
Our MSPs - mostly people who give cretinism a bad name - have gone overboard for a world-leading role in climate crusading. How much energy did Scotland's ice-bound wind turbines generate this month? The regulation director at ScottishPower Renewables has stated: "Thirty gigawatts of wind maybe requires 25 GW of backup." Few Scottish windfarms attain even 28 per cent of capacity. Cutting-edge technology, eh?

But who cares? Hey, this isn't about science - it's about cash. Specifically, $130bn from Western taxpayers ... It will take more than a few tax hikes and power cuts to deflect Civic Scotland from embracing the latest leftist fantasy.

The science is done, the debate is over

Nope and nope ...

Recent paper: On the recovery from the Little Ice Age
Author: Syun-Ichi Akasofu - International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks

... published papers and openly available data on sea level changes, glacier retreat, freezing/break-up dates of rivers, sea ice retreat, tree-ring observations, ice cores and changes of the cosmic-ray intensity, from the year 1000 to the present, are studied ...

... the recovery from the LIA has proceeded continuously, roughly in a linear manner, from 1800-1850 to the present.

... the Earth is still in the process of recovery from the LIA; there is no sign to indicate the end of the recovery before 1900.

... The multi-decadal oscillation of a period of 50 to 60 years was superposed on the linear change; it peaked in 1940 and 2000, causing the halting of warming temporarily after 2000.

... These changes are natural changes, and in order to determine the contribution of the manmade greenhouse effect, there is an urgent need to identify them correctly and accurately and re-move them from the present global warming/cooling trend.

Sea level data, for example:

[Via FOS]

Christmas

'Tis the season ... to pity non-believers

Ian Hunter penned a column this week that was full of pity for those unhappy agnostics:

... Many such people will describe themselves as "religious" or, better, "spiritual"; they are, they will say, "seekers", pilgrims who journey hopefully but somehow never arrive.

...By and large, the appeal of agnosticism is to the spiritually timid. Its attraction is that it gives the illusion of a safe harbour in a roiling sea when, in fact, it offers no harbour, only more seasickness.

... etc.

And today Chris Selley replied ... bollocks.  I'm with Selley on this one, a happy "seeker".