Image above and at top, doing the email rounds. Provenance unknown...

See also: improving well-being with magic mushrooms... in the carrot cakes versus the nuclear bombs...

Note in regard to strippers. Nothing sexist being said here. Only the image dictated the slant. I could have done it with truck drivers... And yes we need truck drivers and strippers, but we need more scientists... Go away.

As scientists, we tend to operate under an unspoken assumption – that our job is to provide the world with factual information, and if we do so our leaders will use it to make wise decisions. But what if that assumption is wrong? For decades, conservation scientists like us have been telling the world that species and ecosystems are disappearing, and that their loss will have devastating impacts on humanity. Meanwhile, climate scientists have been warning that the continued burning of fossil fuels and destruction of natural carbon sinks, such as forests and peatlands, will lead to catastrophic planetary heating.

We have collectively written tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers, and shared our findings with policymakers and the public. And, on the face of it, we seem to have done a pretty good job: after all, we all know about the environmental and climate crises, don’t we?

But while we’re now well informed, we haven’t actually changed course. Biodiversity loss proceeds apace, to the extent that a million species face extinction in the coming decades, and we continue to pump carbon into the atmosphere at ever faster rates. We have emitted more greenhouse gases since 1990, in full awareness of its impacts, than we ever did in ignorance. It seems that knowledge alone cannot trigger the radical global changes we so urgently need.

It was this realisation that incited us both to embrace activism, and to take to the streets and engage in non-violent civil disobedience as members of Extinction Rebellion. The refusal to obey certain laws has a long and glorious history: from the suffragettes to Rosa Parks and Gandhi, many of the 20th century’s greatest heroes engaged in non-violent civil disobedience to win their rights.

Today, civil disobedience is again on the rise. And it is working. The protests that shut down four sites in London in April raised the climate crisis rapidly up the political agenda, and into the public consciousness. The environment is now the third most pressing issue for British voters, above the economy, crime and immigration: the UK parliament and half the country’s local councils have declared a climate emergency, and a zero-carbon target has been enshrined into law. We don’t know what policy change will follow, but it is an encouraging start.

Alongside this are the Greta Thunberg-inspired school strikes and our sister movements worldwide. This is what we have been waiting for. And yet, the reaction within the scientific community has been strangely muted. In conversation, our conservationist colleagues (and we imagine climate scientists, too) have long bemoaned the fact that environmental issues remain so marginal in the public consciousness. “If only conservation was mainstream,” we lament, “and if only people would take action to fight for our world.” Well, now they are, yet few of us seem to have joined them.

Young people have embraced the movement, and grandparents, too. So have doctors and lawyers, farmers and unemployed people. But not many scientists, which is odd given we probably know more about the severity of the problems we face than anybody. Perhaps it’s related to an unspoken assumption that if our job is to provide information, then adopting a position will weaken our authority. In fact, research shows it doesn’t.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/06/scientists-climate...

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I do not have fears about the machines controlling us. We are not there yet. However, who will control this, who will use this? What remains of our freedom? Private companies, like Google or Facebook, are already developing similar technologies.

Not everybody will be controlled in the same way. That’s the first problem, who will control the game and who will be excommunicated?

The greatness of [the] human mind is not in knowing all the details but in picking out from the multitude of data to catch the essence and simplify it.

…

In the Protestant’s eyes, there’s no real fix to be found in implementing a religious state, because that would give untrustworthy man [no woman?] far too much power. Whether it’s a pope, a bishop, or a certain New York Post editor [take this Sohrab Ahmari — Becoming a Catholic “has brought tremendous order and metaphysical direction to my life,” says Ahmari, author of From Fire by Water. “Life was harder before I had faith.”] with an ever-present look of scorn, all that power would do is corrupt them, because no man [no woman?] is truly incorruptible. 

Yes, the culture war is utterly exhausting. The fact that children have been made to participate in drag queen readings is a tragedy so weighty that it should break our hearts in two. The number of human beings killed in the womb makes me mourn. Protestants are tired, too. It’s why a great number of us voted for Donald Trump. But we can’t see the Ahmari answer as a good one, even if it makes sense for a Catholic to buy into it.

When he was closing up the debate, Douthat asked French and Ahmari if they thought this disagreement was spurred by their theological differences. French hesitated, then resisted the idea. Ahmari, for his part, said yes, noting that Catholics are more contented in accepting societal infrastructure than Protestants. It was probably the first thing he said all evening that was totally correct. Even so, he’s undoubtedly going to continue with his tireless push for a Catholic state—as a means of kicking the elites from their spots at the top, returning a moral order to the common good, and helping the little guy find meaning once more. But it won’t work, because, for a writer so hung up on not losing sight of the little guys, he forgets that a great many of us are Protestants.

Sometime in the 12th century B.C., a family in the ancient port city of Ashkelon, in what is today Israel, mourned the loss of a child. But they didn’t go to the city’s cemetery. Instead, they dug a small pit in the dirt floor of their home and buried the infant right in the place where they lived.

That child’s DNA is now helping scholars trace the origins of the Philistines, a long-standing, somewhat contentious mystery. In accounts from the Hebrew Bible, the Philistines appear mostly as villainous enemies of the Israelites. They sent Delilah to cut the hair of the Israelite leader Samson and thus stripped him of his power. Goliath, the giant slain by David, was a Philistine. The Philistines’ reputation as a hostile, war-mongering, hedonistic tribe became so pervasive that “philistine” is still sometimes lobbed as an insult for an uncultured or crass person.

But who were the Philistines, exactly? In the Bible, ancient cities like Ashkelon, Ashdod and Ekron were mentioned as Philistine strongholds. In the 19th and 20th centuries, scholars finally started to piece together a distinct archaeological record of Philistine culture. Excavations revealed that these cities saw the emergence of new architecture and artifacts at the beginning of the Iron Age, around 1200 B.C., signaling the arrival of the Philistines. Pottery found at Philistine archaeological sites, for example, appeared to have been made locally, but looked strikingly like wares created by Aegean cultures such as the Mycenaeans, who built their civilization in what is now mainland Greece. And the Bible mentions “Caphtor,” or Crete, as the origin place of the Philistines.

Historians also know that, around the time these changes occur in the archaeological record, civilizations in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean were collapsing. The Philistines are written about in Egyptian hieroglyphs, where they are referred to as the Peleset, among the tribes of “Sea Peoples” said to have battled against Pharaoh Ramses III around 1180 B.C. Meanwhile, other scholars have suggested that the Philistines were in fact a local tribe, or one that came from present-day Turkey or Syria.

Now, researchers have extracted DNA from the remains of 10 individuals, including four infants, who were buried at Ashkelon during the Bronze Age and Iron Age. The results, which were published today in the journal Science Advances, suggest the Philistines indeed migrated to the Middle East from southern Europe.

“This is an excellent example of a case where advances in science have helped us answer a question that has been long debated by archaeologists and ancient historians,” says Eric Cline, a professor at George Washington University and director of the Capitol Archaeology Institute, who was not involved in the study.

...

There was a curious entry to these pages on Monday. Emma Ayers, managing editor of the libertarian outfit Young Voices, offered her two cents on last Thursday’s debate between the New York Post’s Sohrab Ahmari and National Review’s David French, cleverly coined the “Melee at CUA” by the latter. As Matthew Walther has observed over at The Week, most normal Americans spent their Thursday evening watching a dominating performance by the Green Bay Packers’ defense in the NFL opener. But the CUA event has nonetheless sparked strong and varied reaction across the conservative commentariat. That’s because, contrary to Ayers’ contention that it was a “pointless display,” it got to the fundamental question for the future of the political right in the Trump era.

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-sohrab-ahmari-got-...

 Gus: Ayers "called it right": It was a pointless display of old boys who don't know what to do with their brains...

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