Time Immortal

This comes to me anonymously:

If you run an Islamist, anti-Semitic, terrorist-endorsing, Sharia-desiring blog (Like Rehmat: www.islamunity.com/blogs/), it is probably a bad idea if you set the default administrator account’s password to be the name of the (false) prophet of your religion.

It’s just basic blog security: choose a password that bears little or no topical relationship to the subjects you typically blog about!

Update: Now with sample image! Captain Anonymous does indeed “aim to misbehave.”

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A reader named Graham wrote in what I can only assume was a drive-by attempt at rebuttal in response to…some article I’ve written, although for the life of me I cannot guess which one based on the body of his message. Still the message can be broken up into two distinct parts worthy of two separate responses, so I think I’m going to respond in that fashion.

I’m never quite sure how to react to viewpoint expressions like yours. It’s kind of like reading “The Onion“. News so ridiculous that it has to be a joke (which it is, of course). Only, I think you were serious.

Pretty much everything I write does have a certain quantity of tongue embedded, to some degree of firmness, within a certain area of cheek. Some posts are obviously more serious than others, but I think it’s fair to say that everything I write has at least a small element of hyperbole inherent in its composition.

The fact of the matter is, though, this blog exists not to provide aggregations of news, but as an outlet through which I make commentary about the news, or about events that somehow escape the notice of the major news services, or about trends and fads in society and pressing social issues. That means that it’s just me talking “off the cuff” most of the time, since I rarely invest more than half an hour in writing any post (and usually I invest less than 10 minutes in same).

This is why I asked Graham to specify which article he was referring to in his comments, so I could have an idea which issue he thought “ridiculous.” Something pertaining to the Mark Steyn/HRC fracas, perhaps? Something pertaining to climate change? Something pertaining to Religion?

I recognize that this isn’t your original work, but clearly you wouldn’t have posted it here if you didn’t agree with it. I originally started writing a break down of all the deplorable moral viewpoints expressed here-in, but it was taking up too many pages of text. So, I’ll suggest simply to study the world a little less synchronically. Read an article about the environmental conditions in China without passing it off as what happens to those other people. Read a few history books without passing it off as the way things used to be. If you think a simple organism can’t make any notable change to a planets climate, study some biology; Specifically: Blue green algae.

The contact form allows for approximately 10,000 characters (not a small number by any means). If it’s really worth responding to something I’ve written, I’m sure the average reader would have no qualms about sending the message in parts — I’ve done the same myself on Facebook comment threads in the past, to great effect.

The assertion of synchronic analysis is, I admit, rather puzzling, since my analytical framework has always involved both a study of history and an attempt to understand the present context of events. Especially pertaining to religion, but also to most other topics, I’m only too willing to look at “what has gone before” in my attempts to comment on “what now is.”

Obviously, when the subject is Catholicism, one cannot speak about the subject accurately unless one considers the historical formation and evolution of Catholic teaching, back to the inception of the Church nearly 2,000 years ago. When one is discussing climate change and global warming, one cannot help but framework that discussion in the context not only of present trends in the global average temperature, but also in terms of the rises and falls that can be “observed” (albeit through a double-blind) in history. In fact, it is precisely because of the historical precedent in the case of global warming that I refuse, completely, to buy in to the alarmism that so infuses the present discussion thereof.

And while I can appreciate that individual organisms can have lasting impacts on a planet’s climate, the relationship between “anthropogenic” global warming and blue-green algae is…what, exactly? It’s true that cyanobacteria often play an important role in the nitrogen cycle. But how does this relate to humanity’s contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere? Especially since CO2 really doesn’t do anything statistically significant for the ability of the atmosphere to retain heat (water vapour plays the primary role in that regard)? Humanity could completely stop all CO2 production (we could all even stop breathing the stuff out, just for the sake of this hypothetical situation) and we’d have less than a percent of a percent effect on the average global temperature.

How that compares to the nitrogen fixing effect of cyanobacteria (without which, 75% or more of the world’s rice supply would die out), I have no idea. I think, though, that while it means that I concede the point that individual organisms can have lasting impacts on climate, and while I even concede that humans can do things which will have lasting impacts on climate, CO2 production is not an area of concern.

It’s really a question of scale, and unfortunately the scale of the effect of humanity’s production of CO2 is insignificant, both statistically and as compared to, for example, the scale of the nitrogen fixing effect of a very common type of algae.

I suspect that Graham either didn’t really read anything I’ve actually written, or that he has taken me quite out of context. Of course, he hasn’t written back yet, so I don’t really know what the case honestly is, and will have to content myself with simply posting this little missive, in which one can note that I point out several errors in his assertions.