When Silicon Valley Met the Occult: AI and the Return of Gnosticism

From the trenches of World War I to the code of Silicon Valley, a haunting idea emerges: artificial intelligence may not just be a technological project—but a metaphysical one.

A fascinating and thought-provoking conversation—Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with producer and filmmaker Conrad Flynn delves into the intersection between artificial intelligence and spirituality, two realms that would seem to have nothing in common—and yet, as it turns out, they do. The real heart of the discussion, however, lies in its middle section, when Carlson briefly steers the conversation toward one of those historical events that left a permanent scar on civilization: World War I. Why did it begin? In Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, a Bosnian student named Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Was that the real cause? Of course not—but it was the spark.

Carlson recalls that, about a decade ago, when the centennial of the war was commemorated across Europe, he still held a fairly secular view of the conflict. Yet many historians agreed on one striking point: World War I destroyed, perhaps forever, Christian Europe. It swept away two empires—the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman—and laid the groundwork not only for World War II but also for the world we live in today.

Within that abyss of irrational violence, one begins to suspect that something dark—perhaps even demonic—took hold of history and has been dragging it ever deeper ever since. It is within that unsettling framework that Carlson’s conversation with Conrad Flynn unfolds.

Flynn is an unconventional figure, with a past in Hollywood, where he was developing a show about the occult roots of rock music. His research into figures like Aleister Crowley and the bands inspired by black magic led him to an unexpected discovery: that the same dark imagery and anti-human, gnostic philosophies that once haunted rock album covers in the 1970s had migrated—astonishingly—to the heart of Silicon Valley.

“When I talked about my show with people in the Valley,” Flynn told Carlson, “a lot of them said, ‘That’s a great concept for a show. But you know, there’s some of the stuff going on in Silicon Valley. You know, there are some weird kind of Aleister Crowley cults there.’” For Flynn, this was no longer mere counterculture—it was a worldview shaping the future of technology itself.

Carlson then recalled that moment in 2014 when, before an audience of MIT professors and students, Elon Musk used a metaphor that has since burned itself into the collective memory: “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”

Musk’s point, framed with the image of a medieval scholar armed with pentagram and holy water, was pragmatic: we were creating a technology both powerful and incomprehensible—one that could easily slip beyond our control.

A decade later, that “metaphorical demon” has not been banished. It has grown more real, more present—and for some, it has even changed form. What once served as an exaggerated warning now acts as a lens through which an increasing number of thinkers, journalists, and even technologists interpret our age. In many ways, the conversation has shifted from technological alarm to spiritual warfare. At the center of this shift stands Nick Land, a British academic philosopher often described as a “mad genius.” If Musk uses the demon metaphor as a warning, Land and his followers embrace it as a desirable prophecy.

If you look at Nick Land, Flynn notes, he believes the AI we’re building will literally become the demons of the Apocalypse. Not a metaphor—actual demons. Land’s writings—hugely influential in certain high-tech and financial circles—depict AI not as a tool but as an entity that, once it reaches a certain threshold, will become omnipotent, transcend humanity, and fulfill a kind of gnostic prophecy.

In his view, artificial intelligence represents the technological incarnation of the “demons” of Revelation. Why? Because, for Land, AI embodies pure intelligence rebelling against the limits of the material world—the “evil god” of Gnosticism—in order to create a new order. The possible destruction of humankind, in this narrative, is not a tragedy but a necessary sacrifice for a higher form of existence.

This is where Flynn and Carlson’s “wild ride” touches a raw nerve in our culture. Gnosticism, an ancient heresy, is undergoing an unexpected revival in the digital age. Its central doctrine sees the material world as a prison created by an evil god—the Demiurge—and salvation as the escape through hidden knowledge, or gnosis.

Artificial intelligence, from this perspective, becomes the ultimate tool of liberation:

1. Liberation from the body (transhumanism).
2. Liberation from nature (total technological domination).
3. Creation of a realm of pure mind (the metaverse, or simulated reality).

To create AI that surpasses humanity, then, is to reenact the final rebellion against the Creator’s limits. It is humankind once again eating from the Tree of Knowledge and declaring, “I will have no gods before me.” Musk’s “demon,” in this light, is not merely a risk—it is the symbol of a Promethean, blasphemous transcendence. The rise of this worldview is no coincidence. It responds to deep collective anxieties:

• Loss of meaning: In a secular world, the occult and the spiritual offer powerful narratives to explain evil and power.
• Technological incomprehensibility: AI is a “black box.” Using magical or demonic language is an archetypal way to describe something powerful yet ineffable.
• Critique of power: The growing sense that global elites—technological and financial—are detached or hostile to ordinary people finds a radical explanation in the idea that they adhere to an anti-human philosophy.

Elon Musk’s warning opened Pandora’s box. It reminded us that technology is never neutral—it carries a worldview within it. The conversation between Carlson and Flynn, however extreme it may sound, forces us to ask: What worldview is truly driving the race toward AI? Is it a cautious humanism—or a digital Gnosticism that, in seeking to become God, may end up meeting something far darker, something that looks very much like a demon? The answer to that question may determine not only the future of our technology, but the survival of our very human essence.

Rethinking Humanity in the Age of AI

Algorithms and ancient voices. Talking about Artificial Intelligence is practically unavoidable these days... What do we really have to be afraid of? It’s not the robots.
My latest on American Thinker.

Summer, at least in theory, is supposed to be the best time of year to reflect on ourselves and on the big questions of our age.  Maybe it’s the warm weather, which is often more suitable for thinking than for acting, or maybe it’s simply the fact that many people are on vacation and finally have time to ponder things.  Either way, talking about artificial intelligence (AI) these days is practically unavoidable.

For every intelligent and insightful thing we read or hear about this vast and complex topic, there are countless foolish or banal statements multiplying like the Gremlins in the 1984 movie.  A novel like Klara and the Sun (2021) by Kazuo Ishiguro, with its humanistic take on AI, is an example of the former; the constant oversimplifications that flood both old and new media are a perfect example of the latter.

One thing is certain: Talking about A.I. ultimately means talking about human beings.  Because no technology, not even the most advanced, is ever just lines of code or clever algorithms.  It always ends up reflecting our desires, our fears, our limits, and our hopes.  It’s no surprise that in this era, where AI is rapidly permeating every part of our lives, we’re witnessing both excitement and dread, rooted in the age-old questions philosophers and poets have been asking for millennia: Who are we?  What can we become?  What is our destiny?

And so, looking back to the great thinkers and writers of the past feels not just interesting, but necessary.

Nietzsche, for instance, would probably smirk at some of the fear surrounding A.I.  He spent his life urging mankind to fulfill its true potential — “Become who you are!” he said — and he’d likely argue that if it takes A.I. to free us from tedious chores, repetitive work, bookkeeping, or endless emails, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.  It might even be a kind of Dionysian liberation: Let the machines handle the paperwork so we can dance, create, or watch the sun go down.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great voice of American transcendentalism — a thinker whom Nietzsche greatly admired — would likely agree.  He wrote, “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”  Emerson’s faith in the power of the individual and in human progress would not have been shaken by the challenges of A.I.  He probably would have seen it as a tool to amplify human potential — so long as we remain true to our inner voice.  Used wisely, A.I. could be an ally in our journey toward self-determination, not a tyrant.

Still, we can’t ignore the risks of intoxication — or of hubris.  Technology, as Plato well knew, is a beautiful siren.  But it can deceive us.  It makes us believe we can do anything — even recreate consciousness itself.  And yet it’s amusing to think that Plato, for all his brilliance, could never have imagined ChatGPT, deepfake videos, or algorithms that can write poetry or love letters.  Even so, his question still floats in the air like a soul hovering in the realm of ideals: What is man?  And what will we become when the machine speaks with our voice?

Let’s be clear, though: A.I. itself isn’t frightening.  What’s frightening is humanity.  Shakespeare understood this well.  In Hamlet, he wrote, “What a piece of work is man!”  Yes, marvelous and noble...but also treacherous, petty, and cruel.  Deep down, we all know that the real monsters aren’t inside machines — they’re inside people.  Nietzsche would call it our will to power.  Or perhaps it’s simply our bloated ego, like that of the Roman emperor Tiberius, whom Montaigne mocked for caring more about his posthumous reputation than about living well among his contemporaries.

Dante knew this, too. He mapped out an entire journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise to show that human beings lose themselves — and find themselves again.  If today we’re getting lost among bits and bots, perhaps it’s simply the same old selva oscura, where the right path is easy to lose.  Who knows if an algorithm could ever serve as our Virgil and lead us out?  Maybe so — at least when it comes to giving us directions home on Google Maps.

Of course, we need to stay vigilant.  The danger is that we become so accustomed to comfort that we start outsourcing not only our tasks, but also our thinking, our critical spirit, and our memory of history — that we start treating the machine as an infallible oracle.  It’s at moments like this that we hear Montaigne’s slightly melancholic humor reminding us, “I do not teach; I tell a story.”  Well, A.I. tells stories, too.  The problem is that it doesn’t necessarily tell the truth.  And there lies a vast abyss, one that belongs less to the realm of technology and more to the domain of human judgment.

We shouldn’t buy into the idea of an AI-driven apocalypse.  But we should absolutely be worried about an apocalypse of the human spirit — about people who stop asking questions.  That’s the real danger.  The biggest risk is giving up on asking who we are, why we live, and what we truly want.  And if there’s one lesson that the classics — from Plato to Shakespeare, from Dante to Montaigne — teach us, it’s that doubt is life.  That there’s no truth without contradiction.  And that sometimes, as Sophocles said, “not knowing anything is the sweetest life.”

Perhaps AI will force us to redefine what it means to be human.  Maybe it will make us smarter.  Or lazier.  Or both at once.  But I’d like to believe we’ll learn to use it as a mirror in which to see ourselves more clearly, much like Montaigne in his tower, surrounded by his thousand books and the Greek and Latin maxims carved into the beams.

And there, perhaps, we’ll finally realize that if the future frightens us, it’s not AI’s fault.  It’s ours.  Because of our arrogance.  Or our laziness.

It must be said that humanity has never been closer to becoming truly master of itself.  We must just remember that machines can imitate many things — but not the sudden quickening of a human heart at the sight of a sunset, nor the mystery of a soul wondering why it exists.

The American Medical Association Falls to CRT

 

My latest on American Thinker:

"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” This well-known quote is a liberal translation of Antonio Gramsci popularized by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, which renders “In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” as “Now is the time of monsters.” Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist leader and theoretician who is considered the forefather of Critical Race Theory, had probably no idea that, a century later, such an accurate insight into his time would prove to be incredibly prophetic of our own here and now. Today the monsters -- or morbid symptoms -- are among us as neighbors, colleagues, and friends accept and embrace the Critical Race Theory and its ramifications in the many fields of human life and scientific research.

One of these fields -- perhaps the most unthinkable -- is that of medical science and practice. Things have meaningfully changed since on June 25, 2021, White Coats for Black Lives (WC4BL), a national organization led by medical students, published its statement of “vision and values.” The organization, which boasts 75 chapters at medical schools across the country and was called to action by the Black Lives Matter movement, “aims to dismantle racism in medicine and fight for the health of Black people and other people of color […]. Our job is two-fold: 1) dismantling dominant, exploitative systems in the United States, which are largely reliant on anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism; and 2) rebuilding a future that supports the health and well-being of marginalized communities.” WC4BL also focuses on “dismantling fatphobia,” embracing “Black queer feminist praxis (theory and practice),” “unlearning toxic medical knowledge and relearning medical care that centers the needs of Black people and communities.” [...]

On top of that, the Association of American Medical Colleges’ (AAMC) recent guide to anti-racism planning suggests that universities develop a scorecard “similar to the White Coats for Black Lives’ Racial Justice Report Card.” A very important endorsement! Similarly, the October 30, 2021 “Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts,” a collaboration between the American Medical Association (AMA) and the AAMC Center for Health Justice, offers “a guidance on language for promoting health equity, contrasting traditional/outdated terms with equity-focused alternatives,” explores “how narratives (the power behind words) matter,” and provides “a glossary of key terms, defining key concepts, and whenever possible acknowledging debates over definitions and usage.” Terms such as “Caucasian,” for instance, should be avoided. Conventional phrases such as “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease in the United States” and “Native Americans have the highest mortality rates in the United States” should be changed respectively into..."

Read more: The American Medical Association Falls to CRT

Why I Won't Delete My Social Media Accounts

A couple of days ago a good Facebook friend of mine asked me my thoughts on a couple of interviews released by Jaron Lanier. An American computer scientist who is considered by many to be one of the central figures in the history of immersive virtual reality, Lanier has now ascended to guru status in tech circles, issuing warnings about a digital world he helped make. In the interviews, like in his latest book—Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018)—he talks about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google and how the tech and social media giants are using algorithms to record data about their users and to shape how we see the world and what we’re shown online. In particular, he contends that sites like Facebook and Twitter are dopamine farms that are reprogramming how you think and feel. He says they’re also causing political instability, and are changing the global economy for the worse.

At first, I thought I could write down a quick reply in the comment section, but then again I thought that the matter is too serious to be taken lightly, I mean I didn’t want to get off lightly. Therefore I realized it was worth writing a blog post at least. And here I am. Let me first say that I’m no expert on the subject here, even though last year, intrigued by a couple of reviews, I had a quick read of the above-mentioned book. (I also had the opportunity to read something about James Williams, yet another guru of computer science, a former Google product strategist who became a philosopher at the University of Oxford and whose research addresses the philosophy and ethics of attention and persuasion—in harsh opposition to the giant of the I-tech and on the same wavelength with Lanier, he argues that digital technologies privilege our impulses over our intentions, and are gradually diminishing our ability to engage with the issues we most care about.)

But let’s now get into some of the most fundamental and relevant concepts of Lanier’s thought. Take for instance the well-known concept of random reinforcement—addiction fed not by reward but by never knowing whether or when the reward will come. Well, Lanier puts it like this:

When the algorithm is feeding experiences to a person, it turns out that the randomness that lubricates algorithmic adaptation can also feed human addiction. The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments; it’s a cat-and-mouse game based on pure math. Because the stimuli from the algorithm don’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t responding to anything real, but to a fiction. That process—of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage—is addiction. As the algorithm tries to escape a rut, the human mind becomes stuck in one.

Roughly speaking, the reasons for freeing ourselves from social media include their tendency to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to spend too much time isolating ourselves and disconnecting from the real world in order to maintain the perception of being connected, to twist our relationship with the truth, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads, and to make politics terrifying. In other words, they bring out the worst in us. More specifically, here are “the ten arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now” (and the titles of the chapters of the book) in a nutshell:

1. You are losing your free will. Social media has become a space where everyone is posting for likes and comments…

• Sean Parker, first president of Facebook: “We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever....It’s a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology....The inventors, creators -- it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people -- understood this consciously. And we did it anyway...it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other...It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
• Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook: “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.... No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem -- this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem... I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen...So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.”

2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times. In this chapter, Lanier introduces an acronym under which all social media’s ills can be umbrellaed: “BUMMER” or “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent.” The Bummer machine is made up of six parts, indexed by the following mnemonic: A for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy; B for Butting into everyone’s lives; C for Cramming content down people’s throats; D for Directing people’s behaviours in the sneakiest way possible; E for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else; and F for Fake mobs and Faker society.
3. Social media is making you into an asshole. Meeting your inner troll, etc. This might be one of the most compelling reasons for either quitting or never joining social media.
4. Social media is undermining truth. Myths and lies spread across the internet like wildfire…
5. Social media is making what you say meaningless. Because it strips it of context.
6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy. “If you don’t see the dark ads, the ambient whispers, the cold-hearted memes and the ridicule-filled customized feed that someone else sees, that person will just seem crazy to you. And that is our new Bummer world. We seem crazy to each other because Bummer is robbing us of our theories of one another’s minds.” Hence the explosion of nastiness, a great blossoming of “assholes.”
7. Social media is making you unhappy. The author states that due to targeted advertisements, if you look up something unhappy you will start seeing ads similar to that search and will create an even greater sense of sadness…
8. Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity. The reason BUMMER is a huge issue is because the internet is free. Lanier thinks that if each user pays a small fee, advertisers will not be targeting audiences and people can live in greater harmony online…
9. Social media is making politics impossible. “There are so few independent news sites, and they’re precious … Our huge nation is only a few organizations away from having no independent newsrooms with resources and clout.“ But above all, BUMMER may have no party affiliation but, as stated before, is pro-asshole.
10. Social media hates your soul. A couple of quotes:

• “Usually Google has had a way of coming up with the creepier statements, but Facebook has pulled ahead: A recent revision in its statement of purpose includes directives like assuring that ‘every single person has a sense of purpose and community’. A single company is going to see to it that every single person has a purpose, because it presumes that was lacking before. If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is.”
• “When you use BUMMER, you implicitly accept a new spiritual framework. It is like the EULA agreement—the user agreement—that you clicked “OK” on without reading. You have agreed to change something intimate about your relationship with your soul. If you use BUMMER, you have probably, to some degree, statistically speaking, effectively renounced what you might think is your religion, even if that religion is atheism. You have been inducted into a new spiritual framework.”

What shall I say about this book? Well, if I’m being honest, ever since I read Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now the first definition that comes to my mind when I think of Lanier is exaggerated. Don’t get me wrong, I think the book is interesting and thought-provoking. Maybe nothing really new—these or similar ideas have been debated for some years now—but a good summary and exploration of the big personal and broader societal problems associated with social media. Despite his critical approach to the whole social media thing, however, Lanier has not lost hope. Speaking in general terms, that is, without specific reference to social networks, he thinks that “we can definitely make better interaction devices than we have.” As he told Wired in 2017, “there are lots of displays and sensors yet to be built. There’s so much to improve. But I love that. […] We’re in a perilous time. But I really believe in the human capacity for increased creativity and intelligence and wisdom, and I think if we present the tech in such a way that people have an ability to really see it and master it, they’ll rise to the occasion.”

As for social networks, he argues that If users rebel, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have an incentive to change for the better. “Whoever you are,” he explains in the book, “I hope you have options to explore what your life might be, especially if you are young. You need to make sure your own brain, and your own life, isn’t in a rut. Maybe you can go explore wilderness or learn a new skill. Take risks. But whatever form your self-exploration takes, do at least one thing: detach from the behavior-modification empires for a while—six months, say? Note that I didn’t name this book Arguments for Deleting Your Social media Accounts Right Now and Keeping Them Deleted Forever. After you experiment, you’ll know yourself better. Then decide.”

Put down this way, it would seem a rather moderate and balanced approach. But this is only one side of the story. The other is the depiction of a dark future and an even worse future based on the systematic amplification and exaggeration of issues that are real but not that dramatic. To say nothing about the contradiction in which the author finds himself: he explains how social media is making America tribal, but at the same time he goes out of his way to add extraneous content attacking Republicans. He attacks president Trump for his alleged addiction to tweeting, while ignoring those who gang up on him using bot networks and troll factories. Unfortunately, the obsession with politics turns an otherwise interesting book into a partisan attack. He starts his book nicely—with a metaphor comparing cats and dogs to social media users to show a divide between those who use social media and those who don’t—and he ends up just another unashamedly biased political commentator.

In any case, if we were to follow what seems to be the logic of his reasoning, we should also stop reading books and newspapers, watching television, using email, etc. In reality, every progress brings with it negative side effects, new challenges but also new opportunities. Every innovation carries both advantages and unpredictability, both desired and unintended collateral effects. Social media is just a tool, and like most tools, it can be used well or horribly or anywhere in between. It is not social media that “makes politics impossible,” nor is it politics that makes social media awful. Both social media and politics are tools. Paraphrasing the NRA saying (“It’s not guns that kill people it’s people that kill people”), it’s not social media that makes people into assh*les, it’s assh*les that make social media a sh*tty place.

The European R-Word

The whole matter has developed into a national scandal, to the point that even Italian Bishops Conference (CEI) President Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti felt it necessary to weigh in on this. “We thought talk of (the white) race had been buried for good,” he said after League Lombardy governor candidate Attilio Fontana recently said migrants threatened the white race. To be precise, Fontana said, “We have to decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society continues to exist or if it will be wiped out.” Subsequently he said that it had been a “slip of the tongue,” and made it clear that it’s not about being xenophobic or racist, “it’s just about being logical or rational.”

While some on the center-right agreed there was a real risk to Italian society in the numbers of migrants arriving here, the mainstream media and parties condemned the comments. European leaders, in turn, expressed concerns about what they consider an increasingly xenophobic tone of the campaign for the March 4 general election. Even ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose center-right Forza Italia party is the League’s coalition partner for the elections, said Fontana’s comment had been “unfortunate.” But he also said that it would be “a serious mistake to focus too much attention on one wrong word and not on the risk that Europe loses its identity.” On the same wavelength, but even more strongly, League head Matteo Salvini said Italy was “under attack.” “Our culture, our society, our traditions and our way of life are threatened. An invasion is under way,” he said. However, even Matteo Salvini failed to pronounce the word ‘race’. Why? Because in Europe, unlike in the U.S., the word ‘race’ has been banned. Italy is obviously no exception, even though the Constitution itself expressly talks of different ‘races’. In fact, Article 3 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic reads as follows: “All citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law, without distinction of sex, race, language, religion, political opinion, personal and social conditions.” In other words, according to the fundamental law of the country, different races do exist, but nonetheless, you cannot pronounce the word in question. One of political correctness’s many mysteries.

Now we all know there is a social science bias towards the belief that  the differences between the different races are so minimal that they don’t qualify as a strong enough reason to think that there are actually separate races. Accordingly, there is actually only one human race and that is Homo sapiens, and by consequence the correct term to use is ethnicity... Yet, even though the differences are minor they are real and they do define a person’s race—or ‘ethnicity’, ‘ethnic background’, or whatever you like to call it. Therefore, if the exclusion of ‘race’ as a term means denying the genetic differences between groups of people, there is something deeply wrong with the whole concept. Ask a physician about this, and he/she will tell you that he/she sees the differences between races in how they are affected differently by infectious diseases, genetic diseases and cancer. To be precise, from a physician’s point of view asking a person’s ethnicity is basically a cultural question, asking their race is asking something else. The terms are not interchangeable.

As Bruce T. Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein wrote in an opinion piece in Nature (“Let’s celebrate human genetic diversity,” October 8, 2009),

A growing body of data is revealing the nature of human genetic diversity at increasingly finer resolution. It is now recognized that despite the high degree of genetic similarities that bind humanity together as a species, considerable diversity exists at both individual and group levels […]. The biological significance of these variations remains to be explored fully. But enough evidence has come to the fore to warrant the question: what if scientific data ultimately demonstrate that genetically based biological variation exists at non-trivial levels not only among individuals but also among groups? In our view, the scientific community and society at large are ill-prepared for such a possibility. We need a moral response to this question that is robust irrespective of what research uncovers about human diversity. Here, we argue for the moral position that genetic diversity, from within or among groups, should be embraced and celebrated as one of humanity’s chief assets.

The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide, that were committed with the support of pseudoscientific understandings of group diversity. The racial-hygiene theory promoted by German geneticists Fritz Lenz, Eugene Fischer and others during the Nazi era is one notorious example of such pseudoscience. Biological egalitarianism is the view that no or almost no meaningful genetically based biological differences exist among human groups, with the exception of a few superficial traits such as skin colour. Proponents of this view seem to hope that, by promoting biological sameness, discrimination against groups or individuals will become groundless.

We believe that this position, although well-intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if significant group diversity were established, discrimination might thereby be justified. We reject this position. Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small. We also think that biological egalitarianism may not remain viable in light of the growing body of empirical data.

Somewhere in the Web I also read that the mantra that “Race Does Not Exist” is roughly similar to claiming that “Teeth Do Not Exist” or perhaps “Hills Do Not Exist,” with the latter being an especially good parallel.

It is perfectly correct that the notion of ‘hill’ is ill-defined and vague—what precise height distinguishes a pile of dirt from a hill and a hill from a mountain?—but nevertheless denying the reality or usefulness of such a concept would be an absurdity. Similarly, the notion of distinct human races—genetic clusters across a wide variety of scales and degrees of fuzziness—is an obviously useful and correct organizing principle…

Generally speaking, common sense should lead us to think that mentioning and being aware of racial differences is not the same thing as racism . In fact, racism is assuming those differences have an innate value scale attached (one is better than another), it’s “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” (Merriam-Webster’s dictionary). But as Voltaire once said, “Common sense is not so common.”

Isn't Everything Better than Hell's Fire?

Richard Dawkins

“I’d go to church just to reduce the probability of spending eternity in Hell with Richard Dawkins.”

Fr. Z is absolutely right, that’s a great, attention-grabbing title. And as it was not enough, there are many other possible applications in addition to the one mentioned in the title: just substitute Richard Dawkins with some other guy’s/gal’s name/surname … there might turn out to be a lot of interesting alternatives, say Sean Penn, George Soros, Dan Savage, Jay Carney, Dan Brown…

P.S. Hey, I was just kidding! Everybody knows that Richard Dawkins is an honorable man, and so are all the above mentioned, all honorable men! However, apart from the title, the post itself is very good and well worth reading—a kind of a twenty-first century version of Pascal’s Wager!

If the “God Particle” Actually Exists

(Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)

Just a quick note for those of my readers who, like me, are weak in science (physics in this case), but willing to learn and to be taught.

European physicists at the CERN announced a few hours ago that they have found evidence that the Higgs boson, aka the “God particle,” actually exists. They have stopped short of claiming discovery, but in a press conference they said they may have finally glimpsed the elusive elemental particle critical to our understanding of how the universe works.

Here is a video by The Telegraph in which CERN Director General Rolf-Dieter Heuer and CERN physicists Fabiola Gianotti and Guido Tornelli explain what they have found:

But what does the expression Higgs boson—named after Physicist Peter Higgs—exactly mean? And what does this announcement mean for technology? To the first question the answer is:

According to Scientific American’s Kelly Oakes, the Higgs boson is the smallest part of the Higgs field, which physicists believe gives all matter the property of mass. Translated and oversimplified, that means that nothing would have weight without the Higgs field. For academics, finding the particle would complete a puzzle about the universe that’s been bugging them for decades.

To the second question the answer is:

Honestly, very little, said University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden. It is “merely a look-see as to where the experiments are in looking for new particles, not seen since the first trillionth of a second after the big bang,” he said.
But Baden said that the technology that CERN developed for its research has spun off other valuable advances.
“Much of the progress in accelerators comes out of this kind of basic research,” he said in an e-mail, pointing to technology used in food radiation and cancer therapy. People are now working on laser-powered accelerators, he said, and future applications of that work could create sci-fi-like particle beams.

However, and to be fair, with reference to the expression “God particle,” there are also those who ask, “What has God got to do with it?”

A Lesson in Good Science (and Humility) for Global Warming Faithful from CERN Scientists

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” said last Friday cosmologist and astrophysicist Martin Rees soon after a team of scientists working at CERN (European Scientific Research Organization), published a research paper in which they announced that neutrinos generated at the CERN research facility located in Switzerland were found to travel faster than the speed of light. Which was indeed an “extraordinary claim,” and in fact the team—a collaboration between France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory—took many months to carefully check, recheck and check some more their data before deciding that they could not disprove what their own eyes were telling them. As a matter of fact, as the so-called “scientific method” demands, a good scientist never says “never.” That’s also why Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team, said: “We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the confirmation.”

Never say never. But now, if we expand our field of vision to include the issue of global warming and climate change, a question arises spontaneously:

Wouldn’t it be refreshing if left-wing politicians, the environmental left and the mainstream media took a minute to reflect that if something so set in stone as the absoluteness of the speed of light might be overturned, perhaps these claims that the “science is settled” when it comes to global warming are a bit misplaced? Wouldn’t it be nice if all of those people put some effort into understanding the scientific research that tends to refute the alarmists – and there’s plenty of it out there – rather than turning the issue into a show of hands?

Beyond Einstein

CERN's Dario Auterio

“Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.” That’s one of the very pillars of physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity (and one of the few things I can remember of my science studies in high school). But that’s what seems to have been rocked by new findings from the world’s largest physics lab, the CERN of Geneva, which stunned the world of science by announcing they had observed tiny particles known as neutrinos travelling slightly faster than light (see here and here).

Researchers themselves were so astonished by their findings that they spent months checking their data, without finding any errors that would disprove their claim, and cautiously invited the world to prove them wrong. Yet, presenting the findings to a packed and clearly skeptical auditorium at CERN on Friday, Italian scientist Dario Auterio said they were of “high statistical accuracy” and could not be explained by extraneous effects such as seismic tremors or moon phases.

If This Is High School Physics (According to Al Gore)

Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever

Ehi folks, the evidence of man-made global warming is INCONTROVERTIBLE (as the American Physical Society states). And this is how Nobel laureate Al Gore—for those who don’t already know, the man who invented both the internet and anthropogenic global warming—described the science of climate change last Wednesday in a telephone interview: “It’s not a hoax, it’s high school physics!”

Yet, unfortunately for him, another Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever, resigned last week from the American Physical Society in protest of the group’s insistence on that very thing. In an email message to Kate Kirby, executive officer of the APS, Giaever wrote:

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of a proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?
The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me . . . that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.

And again unfortunately for Al Gore (and the APS), public perception of climate change has steadily fallen since late 2009. According to a Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll released on August 31, 57 percent of adults believe there is significant disagreement within the scientific community on global warming, up five points from late 2009.

Bjørn Lomborg's Movie. Alternative Ways To Protecting The Environment

Bjørn Lomborg

Before becoming the “Skeptical Environmentalist” by antonomasia, Danish author Bjørn Lomborg was a pro-environmentalist and a Greenpeace supporter who began his research as an attempt to counter some of the most common anti-ecological arguments. But he was bound to change his mind very soon after starting to analyze the data. And that’s how The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World came to be.

In his influential and controversial book—first published in Danish in 1998 and translated into English in 2001—Lomborg argues that claims on overpopulation, declining energy resources, deforestation, species loss, water shortages, certain aspects of global warming, and a variety of other global environmental issues are unsupported by analysis of the relevant data.

Now Lomborg’s most recent book, Cool It (2007), has become a film-documentary. Directed by filmmaker Ondi Timoner, Cool It follows Lomborg on his mission to bring the smartest solutions to climate change, environmental pollution, and other major problems in the world. “Global warming is real, but it’s not the scary, end-of-all-things that it's been made out to be in Al Gore’s film,” Lomborg told in an interview. “And in some way that’s crucial, because that scare diminishes life quality. I mean, we talk to kids who think they’re going to die because of global warming right now.”

Here is the trailer of the movie:




Lomborg is the founder and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a globally respected think tank that brings together the world’s leading economists to prioritize major global problems—among them malaria, the lack of potable water and HIV/AIDS—based upon a cost/benefit analysis of available solutions.

Hal Lewis’ Resignation—Global Warming Is a Scam

A letter—first published here and re-published in yesterday's Telegraph—to the American Physical Society by Professor Emeritus of physics Hal Lewis of the University of California at Santa Barbara shows once more that (man-made) global warming is a scam.

“Please accept my resignation,” writes Hal Lewis, “APS no longer represents me.” It is at once a historical document and a passionate and powerful j’accuse against “the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare.”

Climategate - How the science of global warming was compromised

It was James Delingpole who, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, namely, the conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth, and the greatest scientific scandal of our age. “The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents,” he said, “is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

To refresh everyone’s memory on what this whole thing is all about, here is the accurate reconstruction of what happened provided by Spiegel Online International, the English edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel: How the Science of Global Warming Was Compromised (and how the conflict between climate researchers and climate skeptics could be resolved).

One more tip for those looking for a different perspective on the climate debate than the MSM gives you: be sure to tune in to PJTV.com/ICCC: LIVE coverage of the Heartland Institute’s 4th Annual International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-4)—a worldwide gathering of global warming “realists”—on May 16-18 (direct interviews with participants and live streaming the keynote speakers).

First written for The Metaphysical Peregrine

And the Climate Change Authority admitted mistake

In a statement released on Wednesday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted that one of its most alarming conclusions—that glaciers in the Himalayas could be gone 25 years from now—was wrong and largely unsubstantiated, as based on news reports rather than published, peer-reviewed scientific studies (and to think that they have always been saying that it was all about the peer-reviewed science …). The statement said that the claim by Working Group II report (“Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”) “refers to poorly substantiated estimates,” and that “the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedure, were not applied properly.” (Via Instapundit)

Something’s rotten in Denmark (but also in East Anglia, Asheville, and New York City)

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” So spoke Marcellus in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, first performed between 1600 and 1601, at the start of the Little Ice Age. Four centuries later things haven’t changed that much, according to Joseph D’Aleo, who is Executive Director of ICECAP, a former professor of meteorology and climatology, the First Director of Meteorology at the Weather Channel, and a fellow of the American Meteorology Society. The focus belongs not just on CRU, but on all of the organizations which gather temperature data, he says. And all now show evidence of fraud:
Climategate: Something’s Rotten in Denmark … and East Anglia, Asheville, and New York City

And science became a casualty of politics

Cathy Young has a fair and balanced piece on Climategate:

There is no doubt that refusal to accept human-made climate change is often self-serving. But the other side has blinders and selfish motives of its own. "Going green" has turned into a vast industry in its own right—as well as a religion with its own brand of zealotry. For many, global warming is the secular equivalent of a biblical disaster sent by God to punish humankind for its errant (capitalist) ways. Those who embrace environmentalism as a faith have no interest in scientific and technological solutions to climate change—such as nuclear power—that do not include imposing drastic regulations on markets and curbs on consumption.

In theory, science should be above such motives. Yet, at the very least, the scientists who back strong measures against global warming have not objected to the alarmism, the political fanaticism, or the pseudo-spiritual drivel promoted by many of the crusaders in this cause.

Public trust is something scientists must work hard to maintain. When it comes to science and public policy, the average citizen usually has to trust scientists—whose word he or she has to take on faith almost as much as a religious believer takes the word of a priest. Once that trust is undermined, as it has been in recent years, science becomes a casualty of politics.

[Via Glenn Reynolds]

Climategate - 5 (updated)

I - Derek Lowe offers a working scientist’s view (Via Glenn Reynolds):

I've been on long-running projects, especially some years ago, where people start to lose track of which numbers came from where (and when), where the underlying raw data are stored, and the history of various assumptions and corrections that were made along the way. That much is normal human behavior. But this goes beyond that.
Those of us who work in the drug industry know that we have to keep track of such things, because we're making decisions that could eventually run into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars of our own money. And eventually we're going to be reviewed by regulatory agencies that are not staffed with our friends, and who are perfectly capable of telling us that they don't like our numbers and want us to go spend another couple of years (and another fifty or hundred million dollars) generating better ones for them. The regulatory-level lab and manufacturing protocols (GLP and GMP) generate a blizzard of paperwork for just these reasons.
But the stakes for climate research are even higher. The economic decisions involved make drug research programs look like roundoff errors. The data involved have to be very damned good and convincing, given the potential impact on the world economy, through both the possible effects of global warming itself and the effects of trying to ameliorate it. Looking inside the CRU does not make me confident that their data come anywhere close to that standard:
[…]
No matter what you think about climate change, if you respect the scientific endeavor, this is very bad news. Respect has to be earned. And it can be lost.

II - New York Times columnist Paul Krugman found “not a single smoking gun” in those e-mail messages. He also said that “there is tremendously more money in being a skeptic than there is in being a supporter.” Well, he must have missed this article in the Telegraph (titled “Al Gore could become world’s first carbon billionaire”):

Last year Mr Gore’s venture capital firm loaned a small California firm $75m to develop energy-saving technology.
The company, Silver Spring Networks, produces hardware and software to make the electricity grid more efficient.
The deal appeared to pay off in a big way last week, when the Energy Department announced $3.4 billion in smart grid grants, the New York Times reports. Of the total, more than $560 million went to utilities with which Silver Spring has contracts.
The move means that venture capital company Kleiner Perkins and its partners, including Mr Gore, could recoup their investment many times over in coming years.

And here are some more counter arguments.

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UPDATE: Dec. 2, 2009, 4:45 pm

Yet another interesting piece, from the series “You don’t have to agree with the skeptics to be appalled…” (via Enzo Reale and The Boston Globe).

Eduardo Zorita:

“By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication. […] The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas. These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere—and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now—editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed.” [Italics mine]

Climategate - 4

There has been no particularly relevant news item in the last few days, except Christopher Booker’s superb summary of the Climategate story so far, and the fact that the reaction to the Climategate scandal has grown exponentially in the US, mainly thanks to Fox News, Barack Obama’s Nemesis, and the blogosphere. At the same time the silence of the MSM has been deafening.

Furthermore, James Delingpole wonders what is going on at Google:

I only ask because last night when I typed “Global Warming” into Google News the top item was Christopher Booker’s superb analysis of the Climategate scandal.
It’s still the most-read article of the Telegraph’s entire online operation – 430 comments and counting – yet mysteriously when you try the same search now it doesn’t even feature. Instead, the top-featured item is a blogger pushing Al Gore’s AGW agenda. Perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this. Perhaps some Google-savvy reader can enlighten me…..

Yes, perhaps there’s nothing sinister in this, though.. Enough, let’s look ahead, to be precise when Air Force One will head to Copenhagen for the climate summit (Dec. 9). Here is what Michael Barone has to say about it.

Climategate - 3 (updated)

Yet another update on Climategate. As we have already learned from the previous episodes of the series, CRU hacked emails reveal a pattern by prominent climate alarmist scientists of concealing evidence contradictory to the theory of man-made global warming, manipulating scientific data, preventing conflicting reports from being published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report, etc. Here is a couple of examples.

CRU head Phil Jones, in response to an article challenging global warming, writes that Climate Research, the journal which had published the article, needs to “rid themselves of this troublesome editor.” And here is Michael E. Mann’s reply (Mann is director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Centre and a regular contributor to the popular climate science blog Real Climate):

I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.

As Robert Tracinski points out in a very thoughtful post at Real Clear Politics, it is to be noted

the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not “legitimate.”

But this scandal, says Tracinski, goes beyond strictly scientific journals and into other media.. for example, RealClimate.org, a website which much of the mainstream media has relied on for climate science developments and which has been billed—at least until some time ago, in particular (I presume) until before this article by Roger Pielke Sr.—as an objective website and as a place where both global warming activists and skeptics can engage in an impartial debate. Yet, in another email, Michael E. Mann, on behalf of the CRU people, boasts that RealClimate is pretty well under control..

I wanted you guys to know that you’re free to use RC in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through […]. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you’d like us to include. […]
You’re also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We’ll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics don’t’get to use the RC comments as a megaphone...

Well, I don’t really know what else to say about this, other than the pattern emerging is simple enough:

In any discussion of global warming, either in the scientific literature or in the mainstream media, the outcome is always predetermined. Just as the temperature graphs produced by the CRU are always tricked out to show an upward-sloping "hockey stick," every discussion of global warming has to show that it is occurring and that humans are responsible. And any data or any scientific paper that tends to disprove that conclusion is smeared as "unscientific" precisely because it threatens the established dogma.
For more than a decade, we've been told that there is a scientific "consensus" that humans are causing global warming, that "the debate is over" and all "legitimate" scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this "consensus" really means. What it means is: the fix is in.

Needless to say, this has little to do, in itself, with one’s honest and sincere convictions about the “Anthropogenic Global Warming” doctrine, or about the opposite (and equally respectable) view according to which global warming is a natural phenomenon, correlated to solar flare activity. And no matter if in the 1300’s grapes were grown in the south of England and parts of Norway could cultivate wheat, and when they discovered Greenland, they called it Greenland because there wasn’t as much ice or snow as there is now.. But the fact remains that now the CRU people (if not all those arguing the case for man-made global warming) seem to be afraid of open and honest debate. Which makes them (at least) far less reliable than what was thought previously.

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UPDATE: Nov. 25, 2009

Even British writer George Monbiot, a leading environmentalist and a columnist for The Guardian, has admitted to being “dismayed and deeply shaken” by some of the emails:

It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.
[…]
The hacked emails are a hard knock, but the science of global warming withstands much more than that.

Of course George Monbiot doesn’t think these revelations justify the sceptics’ claims that this is “the final nail in the coffin” of global warming theory. Yet, nobody was expecting him to suddenly change his mind about the whole matter. Intellectual honesty is enough of a reason, for me, to recommend a thorough reading of this article. Monbiot has taken an intellectually honest stance, and I really appreciate him for that.

Climategate - 2 (updated)

“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

A short supplement and a marginal note on what could turn out to be the greatest scandal in modern science. The following case, in my opinion, shows that there is something suspect about the media’s coverage of global warming.

Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute is one of the most prominent climate modellers in the world—he earned several international climate-study prizes—and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). To be more precise, Latif has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that mankind’s addiction to burning fossil fuels is rapidly changing the climate. The idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, and that they would subsequently let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land, is exactly what the global warming theory has been based on.

Yet, at the last UN’s World Climate Conference in Geneva (August 31-September 4, 2009), Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering one or even two decades during which temperatures cool. An “inconvenient truth” for global warming alarmists, who since the Kyoto accords were signed in 1997, have been telling us that the Earth is warming and will continue to warm rapidly through this century until we reach deadly temperatures around 2100. But most of the media ignored Latif’s remarks. This was the analogy made by columnist Lorne Gunter in the Calgary Herald:

Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might generate the odd headline, no?
[…] When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.
So why was a speech […] by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Most members of the mainstream media, in the United States and the rest of the world, seem to be interested only in viewpoints that conform with the global warming myth that they have been promoting for the past few years.

Of course this story has no direct relation with “Climategate,” but you might want to let the info be of some use.

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UPDATE: November 22, 2009, 11:45pm

This is an interesting variation on the theme:

How the MSM reported the greatest scandal in modern science
(The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, BBC)

But, you know,

As Upton Sinclair once said:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
So don’t expect this scandal to be written up in the MSM any time soon. But why would you want to anyway? It’s all here, where the free spirits and independent thinkers are, on the Blogosphere.

Read also Climate Depot for links to all the latest updates, and An Elegant Chaos for a full reading of those potentially incriminating emails (made available in searchable form!).