Stuff below the fold, or why history matters.

The "we're all gonna die" headline of the day: Arctic methane leaks threaten climate 


Headsup Instapundit
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related item: I was listening to the Univ PA Museum lecture on the archeology of King Arthur, and Hodges mentioned the tree ring data of 560 AD showing a major cold spell in the area. (he was arguing how pot shards from the eastern Meditteranean and the tree ring data are rewriting the story and the dates of the Anglo Saxon entry into England)... In other words, if the potshards are right, a theoretical King Arthur lived later than the 500 AD...closer to 560 AD.

There is a lot of arguments about dates in all of this, which was the point of his lecture. Some say that the worldwide cold spell was in 535 AD, not 560 ...and the Justinian plague of the 540's might have depopulated England and led to the migration, which is what the Wikipedia article claims.

Alas, I fell asleep in midlecture so will have to watch it again.

 Similarly, my Univ Houston lecture on the Vikings and the professor suggests Offa's Dyke may not have been built to keep out the Welsh but to keep out the Vikings who were living in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and raiding into England. Yet was Offa's Dyke only repaired by Offa and built earlier? Who knows...

Like the Bronze age of Greece, the history of the Dark Age is being rewritten since I was in school...

and this year, the explanation for the fall of men is no longer "god is punishing your sins of immorality" but Climate change and Global weirding is God's way to punish you for using plastic bags. 

which brings us to this article:


The "boy who cried wolf" story of the day: Lovelock admits overhyping global warming.

“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.

"The climate is doing it's usual tricks? Uh, climate is a concept, not a thinking being... A Christian who said god is punishing you would be rightly ridiculed by the scientific community, yet few questioned his theories even though he personified earth, an inanimate object, as a thinking beings... “Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back"...uh, Gaia is a planet with a molten core and an atmosphere, not a goddess.

This is magical thinking, not science...Professor Raia's course (see previous post) will explain to you the difference, and even trace his thinking to the pre Socratic philosophers.





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Salon reviews a new book on the OKCity bomb...

nothing new here: awhile back, a British reporter found half those involved in the Elohim city commune were paid FBI informants and noted the German Strassmeir connection, and here in the Philippines, they still believe that TerryNichols met the Alqaeda bomb makers who were living in the Philippines.

and one reason that not one but two juries refused to give the death penalty to Nichols is that they wanted someone alive so he would eventually connect the points being overlooked in the "official" explanation.

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Monday was Talk Like Shakespeare day

1. Instead of you, say thou or thee (and instead of y’all,
   say ye).
2. Rhymed couplets are all the rage.
3. Men are Sirrah, ladies are Mistress, and your friends are all called Cousin.
4. Instead of cursing, try calling your tormenters jackanapes or canker-blossoms or poisonous bunch-back’d toads.
5. Don’t waste time saying "it," just use the letter "t" (’tis, t’will, I’ll do’t).
6. Verse for lovers, prose for ruffians, songs for clowns.
7. When in doubt, add the letters "eth" to the end of verbs (he runneth, he trippeth, he falleth).
8. To add weight to your opinions, try starting them with methinks, mayhaps, in sooth or wherefore...

and Father Z has his own parody
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Factoid of the day:

Since Hamas set up shop in Gaza eleven years ago, over 12,000 rockets and mortar shells have been fired from Gaza into southern Israel, killing 40 and wounding several hundred

and although Israel gets headlines if they retaliate (with the papers mourning the "dead civilians") less attention is being paid to this:

April 7, 2012: Hamas executed three people in Gaza, one for being an Israeli spy, the other two for murder. In the last seven years, Hamas has officially executed 32 people, and murdered several hundred more during police or terror operations (usually against political rival Fatah).

Third little reported fact: there is a big field of natural gas off the coast of Israel...the bad news? If you thought the fight over who owns the Spratlys was bad, they point out that there could be a big fight over who owns the gas fields in the Mediteranean shelf: mainly between Greek Cyprus and Turkey.

they also note that the number of weapons stolen from Libya is minimal.

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Fides reports this little known fact: the Hong Kong Catholic diocese ministers to 357,000 locals and 173,000 foreigners.... The Filipino community, made up of 128,000 people, is the largest.

and a report on the large but moderate  "Muhammadiyah" movement in Indonesia on it's 100th anniversary.

in a related item; the kidnapping and forced conversion of Christian (and Hindu) women in Pakistan (and also in Kashmir and Egypt) has been covered in the Cathoic press, but now the LATimes finally noticed the problem.