Listen to Body Count

The band is called "Body Count," and they are a great band with good riffs and perhaps the funniest lyrics I have ever heard.

Listen some of their crap for free:

Their new album is "Murder 4 Hire," you can listen to some of their songs at their myspace http://www.myspace.com/bodycount

My favorite from that album is "dirty bomb."  The song is about how eveyone should be afraid of all unwhite, unchristian people, because they're terrorists.

"Murder 4 Hire," a jab at paying people to go overseas and just kill people, is another half-political, half joke-song.  For example, one part of the song declares, "I don't care who the fuck you are, cash moves me, MLB, FBI, CIA, gives me money for blood....I'm the type that would kill you with a bloody knife."

Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Major League Baseball are nefarious forces in our society.

The man never takes himself too seriously, and that's the genius of Ice T's Body Count (I don't listen to rap, so I don't really care what his rap is like.)

From earlier albums, I recommend the following good (and hilarious) songs:

Cop Killer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swqzXfQlktc)
Song was banned in 1992, made to be a rocker with a campy feeling.  The plot is about a pissed off black guy who hates cops, and when speeding along the highway with loud music, and when "the pigs stopped" him "for nothing," it was time for revenge.  As Ice T says, "So your mother's grieving?  FUCK 'ER!"

The Winner Loses (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2clAlabH0E)
A satire of an 80s power ballad, the song is a "deep" reflection on the crack crime wave of the 80s.  Of course, it is neither deep, nor is its music video serious.  It's a hilarious (and good soubding) joke.

I Used to Love Her (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw5elipxk4A)
A great song about why OJ killed his wife, and makes fun of how obviously guilty he is.

Born Dead (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-kwNNLmhd8)
A song that takes a serious subject (how hegemony creates poverty and murderous exploitation overseas) and exaggerates it to the tenth degree.  The campyness to the "Born dead! DEAD!!!" part is hilarious.

Most of Body Count's other songs are just repeating the "Body Count" band name, such as "Body Count," "Body Count Anthem," "Don't Fuck with BC," "On with the body count," and etcetera.  Obviously, Body Count is a 15 year, 4 album long running joke.  It's great so get in on it.

A Pretty Convenient Truth

Global warming is crap.  Take an hour out of your life and watch this documentary:

(They keep taking down the video, even though the filmmaker keeps uploading it back up.  See http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/03/great-global-warming-swindle.html for other sources.)

Of course, we don't get things like this in America, but we do have this: http://www.youtube.com/p.swf?video_id=DwlqDIVCy1M&eurl=http%3A//motls.blogspot.com/2007/03/great-global-warming-swindle.html&iurl=http%3A//img.youtube.com/vi/DwlqDIVCy1M/2.jpg&t=OEgsToPDskJUZ5R1xyarVv2JQm4FNiSB.

"There's no debate on global warming."

Anyone who claims there is no debate has no good debating points.

__________________

Swindling the Swindler

The documentary is overall good and sound.  Before I critique its critics, I wish to say the following:

1.  The graphs posed are only decent proof.  Numbers can be manipulated, as made note of in the film.  Their numbers must be regarded with skepticism.

2.  The documentary's filmmaker is very biased and misrepresents certain things, mostly the accreditations of the scientists.  For example, one scientist labeled as the former head of the National Weather Center was really the former head to the National Satellite Weather Center.  Furthermore, he used leading questions and was uncritical of weather data collected over hundreds or thousands of years using in my opinion, questionable methods.  The only sound measurements we have are from statellites since the seventies.  Everything else declines in quality.

Nonetheless, this is not a huge criticism.  After all, the film does not pretend to be balanced, unlike Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine.  Its filmmaker is no more questionable than Al Gore from An Inconvenient Truth.  So, why should we automatically discredit what a lot of scientists say, because the filmmaker is nutty?  We seriously give Al Gore's and Moore's ideas consideration, and ignore the messenger.  Thus, we should care more about the arguments and science given, and not the filmmaker.  The only reasopn people are so critical is because this is a right wing documentary.  Quite frankly, we need to be objective.

Nonetheless, the film still has a lot to teach you.  Furthermore, the arguments used against it from the press amount to ad hominems.  Realclimate.org attempted a scientific refutation.  Their slogan is "Climate science from climate scientists."  I will disprove their counter-arguments, not to show my brilliant understanding of the subject (I am not a climate scientist,) but the very poor understandings being peddled by "talented" scientists.

Their article can be found at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/03/swindled/

1. They try dodging the fact that CO2 does not correlate with temperture:

"CO₂ doesn't match the temperature record over the 20th C. True but not relevant, because it isn't supposed to. The programme spent a long time agonising over what they presented as a sharp temperature fall for 4 decades from 1940 to 1980. . . . They presented this as a major flaw in the theory, which is deeply deceptive, because as they and their interviewees must know, the 40-70 cooling type period is readily explained, in that the GCMs are quite happy to reproduce it, as largely caused by sulphate aerosols."

So, the sulfate aerosoles stopped cancelling out the warming magically between the 40s and the 70s, but not before the 40s or after the 70s?  This is nothing more than adapting the old logic of the disproven global cooling theory of the 70s.  Nevertheless, one need look no further than the fact that there is data (Christy and Spencer's satellite data, balloon data, antarctic temperatures) that show cooling until around 1998.  So, their neat and tidy aerosal explanation is not air-tight.  Quite frankly, neither is the solar only theory (at least using the solar data used in the film.)  Data is easily manipulated and exceptions easily construed.  We should avoid gross simplifications, but I do find it funny that when a skeptic makes such a simplification that they are called out for it, when climatology is chock full of them (and very poor ones.)

2. They claim that the troposphere is warming more than the surface...

"The troposphere should warm faster than the sfc, say the models and basic theory. As indeed it does - unless you're wedded to the multiply-corrected Spencer+Christy version of the MSU series. Christy (naturally enough) features in this section, though he seems to have forgotten the US CCSP report, and the executive summary which he authored says Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human induced global warming. Specifically, surface data showed substantial global-average warming, while early versions of satellite and radiosonde data showed little or no warming above the surface. This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies. See-also previous RC posts."

If you bothered reading the next paragraph of that report it said: "For recent decades, all current amospheric data now show global-average warming that is similar to surface warming. . . . The majority of these datasets show warming at the surface that is greater than the troposphere."  Thus, the troposphere is not warmer "indeed" than the surface.  I hope the rest of their climate research is not as piss poor as misreading the first 2 pages of a 14 page pdf.

3.  They claim that the ice cores, which don't show an increase in CO2 until a change in temperature first, is misleading:

"Temperature leads CO₂ by 800 years in the ice cores. Not quite as true as they said, but basically correct; however they misinterpret it. The way they said this you would have thought that T and CO₂ are anti-correlated; but if you overlay the full 400/800 kyr of ice core record, you can't even see the lag because its so small. The correct interpretation of this is well known: that there is a T-CO₂ feedback: see RC again for more."

They add in an article they link at, "The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO₂ did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO₂, as far as we can tell from this ice core data."

"COULD in fact"???  Yet, this is the "correct interpretation"???  This makes NO sense.  First, whatever made the world warm is STILL happening before the increase in CO2.  Second,  the most they can be claiming is that the world got warm naturally first for 800 years, and then the other 4200 years were caused by a new runaway CO2 warming.  However, this is just guessing and does not explain why the CO2 would stop warming at year 5,001.  What independent force stops the warming then?  The fact is, they are coming up with seemingly logical excuses that do not hold up to even the most unintelligent (mine) scrutiny.

And that's all their counter-arguments.  This does nothing to disprove the effects of super-novae, the lack of increase in sea level, the fact that meterologists claim that warmer weather leads to less severe weather events, and much more.  How climatology is a science is beyond me.

Just to think the documentary did not drag the global-warming crowd into the dirt, exposing their ignorance of Antarctica's increase in ice, the lack of increase in tropical storms--quoting these people word for word and showing how they do not know the most elementary facts on climatology.  Nevertheless, just watch the video!

Government building superhighway from Mexico to Canada

 I am in favor of free trade, but how do you justify the following:

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/04/wroad04.xml)

"If it were built, the road would be one of the engineering wonders of the 21st century -a trade route a quarter of a mile wide, carving a path from Mexico through the heart of America to Canada.

In its most radical form, it would allow lorry drivers to travel hundreds of miles from the Mexican border deep into the US before reaching customs and immigration controls in Kansas."

First, why should we spend tax dollars to make it easier for foreigners to out-compete us economically?  I have no problem with free trade, but it is unfree if we start actually giving people (foreigners) a leg up.

More importantly, isn't America supposedly at war?  I mean, we have to be in Iraq and maybe Iran to stop those terrorists from attacking us here.  So, why on Earth are we proposing building a gigantic highway that allows people to go from Mexico (which does not have tight borders) with a huge truck and cross the border into America, not to be checked until you arrive at Kansas City?  Our borders are not secure now, but you cannot drive a truck full of bombs and guns across it easily.  This highway allows you to take truckloads of munitions, drugs, and everything else we are supposedly trying to keep out of this country and bring them into the middle of America without being checked.

Obviously, the War on Terror is a farce or people are incredibly stupid and not thinking out this highway.  Guys, I am not that smart.  The obvious cons of this highway are evident to everyone who knows about it.  Any vote for a pro-war candidate is simply moronic in an economic sense, purely because we are not pursuing cheaper and obvious homeland defense.

"However, officials of the federal government in Washington deny that there is any transnational plan. A member of the Department of Transport told a congressional committee this month that all the government wanted to was improve existing roads.

Many conservatives disagree. They link the highway to agreements being negotiated behind closed doors between the Mexican, American and Canadian governments that they believe will transform the North American Free Trade Association into an EU-style superstate. They point to an agreement signed by Mr Bush, Vicente Fox, then president of Mexico, and Paul Martin, then Canada's prime minister, in Waco, Texas, in March 2005."

Let us see what happens.  People should take into account that NAFTA and CAFTA are upheld by executive agreement and not the treaty power of two thirds of the Senate as mandated by the Constitution.  Presidents FDR and Clinton have set a precedent by attacking foreign countries without a Congressional declaration of war (granted, FDR attacked Nazi submarines and Clinton attacked Yugoslavia, another genocidal enemy).  Are we going to hand over these obvious unconstitutional extensions of power to Bush or Hillary Clinto after him to declare war on Iran or consolidate the North American economy in obvious disregard of the Constitution?  This Republic has recovered from many unconstitutional power grabs (COINTELPRO for example), but that gives us no reason not to resist the obvious breakdown in the rule of law since the 70s.

A Simpler Argument for God

First, we know that however the universe started, there was a first
cause.  This is the reason why: the universe had to come from something.  It was not always there infinitely back in time.  Think of your life.  You are here, because you are caused by your parents.  They are caused by their's.  So on and so forth, everything has a cause.  So, why cannot there just be infinite causes back in time instead of a first cause?  This is because you cannot have a cause before a cause infinitely back in time to satisfy there being a basis for the present.  Books may pile up on each other to unimaginable heights,
and we can look at Book x is held up by book y, lower on the pile.
However, to assume that the book pile just keeps going lower and
lower forever is absurd.  What makes a pile?  A pile is a
collection of stuff, sitting upon a thing.  So, the pile of books
can only be a pile if there is some basis for it to settle upon.  Thus, piling or the causation of books holding each other is not something inherent in books--it is the result of there being a beginning to the pile, a basis on which everything on top of it rests.  If books in their own right cannot hold each other up, neither can causality.  The present cannot be the result of an infinite amount of preceding causes, because causation cannot satify its own existence any more than books piling on each other, an example of causation, can satisfy the requirements of what makes a pile.  Causes must rest on a basis, a first cause, or causality cannot exist.  All things require a cause--a first cause.

Assuming that there must be a first cause, the question then whether
the cause is "intelligent."

One must simply conclude that it is.  This is because existence is
stable, predictable, and continuous--akin to a running engine.  One
does not walk across a running engine nestled under the hood of a
car and ever entertain that there is the slightest of possibilities
that the engine is a seemingly orderly thing, but arbitrarily made.
Pieces of the engine did not fall together by chance, turn
themselves on, and start going.  This is obviously ridiculous and
so no one ever considers the possibility of such.

Now, existence is like the engine.  It "works" so to say.  Events
occur within it continuously (the engine keeps running), they can
only occur as long as they follow set natural law (an engine can
only run one way), and like an engine, it did not put itself
together nor was it the result of chance.

The third assertion is seemingly the most debatable.  However, I am
at a loss of words concerning how to debate it.  The complexities
of the universe are far greater than an engine, so it is to that
degree we should consider much less the possibility of the universe
being arbitrarily constructed.

Probabilities aside, it is argued that the universe was created by a
finite, unintelligent cause that was fixed so that the universe can
otherwise be orderly and appear intelligent.  However, this is
impossible in two ways.  First, we know the universe was not always
there, because of causality.  Second, it violates the principle that
the universe is far too complicated to be unintelligent.  Something
unintelligent cannot create something with workable moving parts
governed by natural laws.  So, while gravity may unintelligently
exist, gravity's interconnected place with every other working and
moving part/natural law cannot be unintelligently placed, because
no interconnected construction ever was or can be unintelligently made.

Maybe, one can argue from the evolutionary stance to refute God.
Look at the human body--in 4 billion years, randomly coalescing
proteins became DNA strands, then life, and adjusted into something
as thoroughly complicated as the human body.  Humans are more
complicated than engines after all.  However, this reasoning is
also flawed.  Evolution was a fixed process that could not
contradict natural laws.  Natural laws' order cannot be a seeming
perfection as the result of evolution for two reasons.  First,
while we can see things made of mass changing shape (like organisms
evolving, rocks becoming rounded out, etcetera), natural laws are
thoroughly stable.  There is no evidence of them changing.  They
are constant, not getting better or worse.  This sufficiently shows that an unintelligent evolution of natural laws
in existence did not happen.  However, I add one more point.  Not only
is there no evidence of such evolutionary change happening, it is
simply impossible.  Natural laws cannot change, without
contradicting each other, and therefore bringing existence itself
into a chaotic end.  Whenever, existence began, the laws that
governed it then are the same now.

So that leaves us with a workable, continuing, and intelligently
made existence.  Being that existence must have been intelligently
made, the first cause was intelligent--divine--God.

Is the Didache an Authentic Christian Work?