DUFF & NONSENSE!

Chaos and climate - part1: Linear systems

It's D&N quiz time again!  Let's get straight into it!

Starter for one:  Who said this? ...

“…we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

No?  A rabid climate change denying fossil fuel company CEO?  Me?  Well yes, obviously in my case.  But in the case of the fossil fuel company CEO - and all CEO's for that matter - they'd rather chew their own dicks off than utter a cancel culture provocation like that!  Watch their depots get blockaded by Stinking Rebellion and Isolate Britain?  Get voted off the board by the shareholders?  Not bloody likely.

Astonishing though it may seem, that was the UN's IPCC!  Yes, the doyen of anthropogenic climate change and "carbon causes warming" linear orthodoxy made that statement in their climate pronouncement named "IPCC AR4 WG1".

A series of articles on the WattsUpWithThat site by someone called Kip Hansen brought the claim to my attention, and the implications of it are explained in layman's terms beautifully in those articles, the first of which is linked here and the subject of this post ...

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/15/chaos-climate-part-1-linearity/

I'll overlay my commentary onto those articles one-by-one, per my post title.

So linear systems right, you remember them from school?  You take a range of input values and you mark them up on the x axis.  Then you process them one-by-one through a calculation to produce the output, with the caveat that you do not feed the output back into the input of the calculation in any way.  You plot the output on the y axis.

In their strictest, simplest form, linear systems have their output directly proportionate to their input.  For example: y = 2x.  Take the input on the x-axis and double it, then plot that on the y-axis ... 

Linear system: A system in which alterations of an initial state will result in proportional alterations in any subsequent state.

In mathematics there are lots of linear systems. The multiplication tables are a good example: x times 2 = y. 2 times 2 = 4. If we double the “x”, we get 4 times 2 = 8. 8 is the double of 4, an exactly proportional result.

To help us along, let's use a maths run-book rather than stale graph images shopped by someone else.  Take a hike over to the Desmos site, in particular, click this run-book example ...

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/smufmlkkam

Let's explain what's going on here.

In the body of the chart you can see the x axis going from -10 to 10, and the y axis running from -15 to 15.

Also in the body two linear equations are plotted, one red, one blue, and their crossing point a green dot.

In the run-book steps panel you can see three steps.  Steps 1 and 2 are the formulae of those two equations plotted in the chart.  Don't worry about them yet, we're going to delete them in a sec and do our own anyway.  And the third step is the cross over point:  -1 on the x axis and 3 on the y axis:  (-1,3).

The run-book works its way down the steps plotting the results of the formulae and points that you've "coded" into the steps.

So, click on the "X" on the right of each step and delete the three of them.  Your chart should be blank and the run-book steps empty and waiting for you to input your equation(s).

Click in the step 1 formula field and type: y = 2x .

You'll notice a purple line drawn across the chart from bottom left to top right.  Congratulations!  You've just coded your first linear system equation in the Desmos run-book tool!  Much quicker than plotting the dots on graph paper like we old farts and fartettas used to do at school!

To check it's working, pick a value on the x axis, like 2 for example.  Trace it up to the purple line and then across to the y axis, you get 4.  So y = 2x, putting x = 2 into the formula yields y = 2 times 2 = 4. So y = 4.  Check - the purple line is correct.

Now you can play with the formula - knock yourself out!

Push the line up by adding 3 to the formula ...

y = 2x + 3

The line gradient stays the same but instead of running through the origin (0, 0) it runs through the point (0, 3) higher up the y axis.  That's as complicated as it gets for linear systems: still proportionate but also offset by an amount.

Flatten the line by changing the 2x to 0.5x ...

y = 0.5x + 3

Now the line is flatter with a gradient of only 0.5 but still passes through the offset point (0, 3) instead of the origin (0, 0).

To change the gradient to a downward slope from left to right make the 0.5 negative, so -0.5x.  To pass through a point lower on the y axis change the +3 to -3 ...

y = -0.5x - 3

Congratulations again!  You've just mastered linear mathematics!  You've gone bottom left to top right, top left to bottom right, changed the gradient, and raised and lowered the offset of the line.  There isn't much more that you can do with a straight line on a two dimensional surface!  That's a linear system for you.

Back to Kip's narrative ...

He makes a fantastic observation.  It's one of a plethora of state education brain prepping techniques to turn pupils into linear minded simpleton authoritarian type people ...

Aside: It is this feature of linearity that is taught in the modern schools. School children are made to repeat this process of making a graph of a linear formula many times, over and over, and using it to find other values. This is a feature of linear systems, but becomes a bug in our thinking when we attempt to apply it to real world situations, primarily by encouraging this false idea: that linear trend lines predict future values. When we see a straight line, a “trend” line, drawn on a graph, our minds, remembering our school-days drilling with linear graphs, want to extend those lines beyond the data points and believe that they will tell us future, uncalculated, values. This idea is not true in general application, as you shall learn.

To be continued ...

SoD

What have Egypt, Brexit, and Greta's Holocaust - the murder of 6m Africans over ten years - got in common?

Here's another  brill article from Tomas Pueyo - the guy who did the China article I posted a while ago ...

https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/egypt-part-1

Gotta Love his hard-nut no-nonsense analysis.  No reference to any political philosophy except dictatorship.

So, it's D&N quiz time! ...

(1) Can anyone spot the similarity between Egypt's situation as outlined by Tomas and Brexit?  Clue ...

Lots of poor people and a strong centralized government are two key ingredients for an authoritarian regime. The third one is no alternative its people could escape to.

(2) Can anyone develop Tomas's Egyptian observation below and link it to Brexit and the GH (Greta's Holocaust)? ...

"Have you noticed how the lights in Egypt stop abruptly in the south?"

After changing the water in Mr Fish's fish tank (our one and only pet) and walking around our local lake I shall return with the answers (and yes, there's another clue in this sentence) ...

Answer:

Tomas makes the point that Egypt was a poor country because it could not trade, trade being the bringer of prosperity.  Three quarters of its border were vast and endless sand.  One quarter of its border was sea but only via a delta too shallow for trading ships.  All Egypt could do was eat its own homegrown food, hand-to-mouth subsistence living.

Blighty on the other hand was setup for both trade and homegrown grub.  Trade because Blighty is surrounded on all four quarters by navigable seas; no endless sand or shallow deltas.  And in that sea are squillions of fish to munch on.

However, Brexit has conspired to clobber both of those advantages and so render us like Egypt but without even the grub.

We have fuel shortages in petrol stations, empty shelves in supermarkets, builders without materials, fruit rotting on the vine, pigs being possibly slaughtered and not eaten, all due to Brexit extenuating the post-Covid supply chain recovery.  No other countries have experienced the post-Covid supply chain recovery problems to the point where the actual goods and services are not available to the citizenry,  or left to rot, or destroyed.  We have deliberately diminished our trading potential in goods, services, labour movement and capital, and thereby moved our economy in the direction of Egypt, as if to intentionally silt up our borders.

And the one I haven't mentioned yet is fish.  While enjoying a meal at the super local fish restaurant with my folks in Dorset I remarked how massive the prawns were and how I had to sit the cod diagonally on the plate to get round it.  The chef owner explained, "It's due to Brexit.  We can't get the fish and seafood so they're staying where they are and growing much bigger."

The Gaffer, never one to miss an opportunity to land a blow retorted: "Ha, see, another benefit of Brexit!"  However, the wind was taken out of his sails somewhat when the bill arrived, bloody hellfire, prices are up, up  and away! ...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/seafood-prices-soar-amid-supply-chain-issues-and-worker-shortage-180978369/

When the fishing was done by Brit, French, Dutch and Norge fishermen competitively in the SMFFASAR (Single Market, Four Freedoms  and State Aid Rules) the market was cleared and the stocks levelled.  Now Blighty on her own can't even hook out the critters that surround our island, to add to the fruit, pigs, and fuel we can now add fishing as a failed industry.

And the people worst affected by these primary industries' outputs becoming scarcer and more expensive are low income working people who voted for Brexit that caused it!  The dumbest self-inflicted wound in the history of self-inflicted wounds.  It's like the Egytians pouring salt on their own fertile land!

And there's my first point: Brexit Blighty is like Egypt in that it has reduced its trading potential - through Brexit instead of sand and silt.  But worse, it's also damaged its own domestic productivity and thwarted the harnessing of its resources through Brexit.

My second point is Tomas's remarkable observation of Central and sub-Saharan Africa being dark south of the Aswan dam.  At last CSSA had the chance to develop after thousands of years of powerlessness: with coal powered electricity.  The chance to start manufacturing, and trade its factory and agricultural outputs with Egypt and the wider world, and thereby prosper as Tomas says becomes of trading places.  But no.  Instead, Greta and the Green Blob refused to allow it.  And so Africans continue to live in subsistence poverty, dying at the rate of 600,000 excess deaths a year from lung disease in their smoke filled homes.

Two of the "Four Riders of the Apocalypse": Brexit and Climate Alarmism, doing the do.

Just wish they'd both go walk like an Egyptian ...

SoD

It's OK, I won't say I told you so - part V: Now there's a sentence

But neither Labour nor the Tory wets ever really grasped why Thatcherism worked.

Their attitude to the lady’s economic legacy was like that of savage tribesmen towards an artefact bequeathed by a higher civilization – respectful but uncomprehending.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/10/09/should-classical-liberals-abandon-hope-conservative-party/

God damn it.  What a brilliant one liner that is.  And, to be honest, that article is the most important to have been written in 6 years.  Apart from those written by me that predicted exactly the same 6 years ago.

That Hannan cannot grasp that the Single Market, Four Freedoms, and State Aid Rules was Margaret Thatcher's legacy, invented, designed and implemented by her and her people precisely because she and they knew that the "savage tribesmen" would revert to type and couldn't be trusted with that legacy, is the final plot line twist that seals Blighty's fate, which is, to become the Venezuela of Europe in perpetuity.

She threw the torch of her legacy, that of classical Liberalism and Libertarianism, to Brussels, and Baby Thatcher - Guy Verhofstadt and his mates - picked it up and shone it back on Blighty for 30 years, during which time we have never been so prosperous and free.

Hannan cannot grasp that.  As though the spear tip of one savage tribesman somehow nicked his Achilles heal as he passed it by, and thereby his "higher civilisation" couldn't bear to let Johnny Foreigner uphold the torch of her legacy, his ideology, over us, and so he was instrumental in extinguishing it forever, as much as any fully fledged savage tribesman.

For classical liberals to give up on the conservative coalition would be fundamentally self-indulgent. It would mean removing the last constraints on government, and ensuring that the debt and inflation crises are needlessly exacerbated. It would mean withdrawing into electoral irrelevance.

Perhaps voters are not yet in the mood for liberty. Perhaps we small government types are still at the Keith Joseph rather than the Margaret Thatcher stage. But when we do eventually turn things around, it will be as part of a broad alliance capable of winning and exercising power. We have no right to walk away now.

As I said 6 years ago and ever since: Brexit means we will have to wait for oblivion before any possibility of Thatcherism and a restoration of prosperity and Liberty.

He cheerfully assumes it will be so as soon as we pass through oblivion's door: "But when we do eventually turn things round", he says.

Ha ha, double fool.  There's no-one left but me and him now.  All generations have been de-Thatcherised by the indoctrination of state education and the BBC and pro-state manipulated media, the peeps and pols are all statists now.  There are no Tory ears to bend, and obviously none elsewhere.

The new Dark Age is upon us.  And that Lady's not for turning.

SoD

Dear Lord

330,000 x the prophet Muhammad.  And that's just in France ...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/10/05/least-330000-children-suffered-sex-abuse-hands-french-catholic/ 

France's Catholic Church has covered up sexual abuse by clergymen and lay personnel against more than 330,000 children since 1950, according to an explosive investigation released on Tuesday.

The church for decades drew "a veil of silence" over "systemic" abuse, even sometimes knowingly putting children in touch with predators, said Jean-Marc Sauvé, head of the Independent Commission for Abuse in the Church (Ciase).

Most of the victims were boys, many of them aged between 10 and 13.

After a two-and-a-half-year investigation into alleged sex abuse of minors by priests, deacons and monks, the commission put the number of victims of paedophilia over the past 70 years at 216,000.

When lay members of the Church such as teachers at Catholic schools are included, the number of child abuse victims climbs to 330,000 over the seven-decade period.

Dear Lord, what did we do to deserve the Catholic church?

Or did it come from the other guy?

SoD

It's OK, I won't say I told you so - The Prequel

In addition to the ruinous economics of leaving the SMFFASAR, we can travel back in time to see the political blunder of leaving the EU, kindly supplied by the glorious comedy of the 1970's ...

 

It's been Blighty's time honoured duty to disrupt any hegemony that might develop in continental Europe ever since Blighty existed.

Our forefathers now pushing up the daisies in Flanders handed us a beautiful gift through their sacrifice:  That we might sustain this struggle with merely Jaw-Jaw and not War-War.  The EU came about because of the revulsion to the horrors of industrial-grade modern war in Europe and the desire to never repeat it.  We could replace cold steel with hot air as the means to settle our differences with the Euros and, most importantly, stop any one major player making an empire of continental Europe.

As Sir Humphrey says, "We had to break the whole thing up, so we had to get inside.  We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn't work".

Well, as von Clausewitz said, "War is just the continuation of politics by other means".  Breaking it up from the outside eventually involves cold steel, whereas on the inside it's only hot air that's required.  Although cold steel works sometimes, it's what you might call sub-optimal compared to using hot air to the same effect.  50m dead in WW2, for example.

With Uncle Sam 50 paces right rear, and the Nordics, Baltics, Ost Bloccers, and Balkans now up and running and challenging the Franco-German hegemony with deep whingeing and whining and an infinite begging bowl, the chance for Blighty to Carpe Diem and build a coalition to neutralise the Franks and Hun forever was an absolute sitter.

But no, we threw away our chance, and to use von Clausewitz's "war is politics by other means" adage again:  We did a Dunkirk and left our friends and allies in the do-do, when instead we should have done a D-Day and helped them - and claimed the European crown for Blighty and Uncle Sam into the bargain.

The West would be more united for it, and the Franks and Jerries - "Either at your throat or at your feet" as Winnie said - relegated to eternally licking our boots while we pull the strings in Brussels.

Good call 23rd June 2016.

SoD