Perpetual ignorance about Perpetua

I watched The Story of All of Us on History Channel and was stunned at what I heard in a couple places.  History is a field where one should have a huge command of details in order to get the story right.  Most of us, myself included, don’t have such skill so they write popularizations for the rest of us.  Story tries to do world history in about 4 hours of documentary, picking and choosing events that seem to capture the times.  In the episode covering the first millennium, they chose a story about Perpetua, a young woman who left a diary in the early third century about her martyrdom. The documentary actually told the story fairly well and swiftly, though they left out the fact that her father was an important official in Carthage.  He pleaded with Perpetua to renounce her Christian faith and avoid the death penalty.  Then the governor, Hilarianus, pleaded with her as well.  But Perpetua remained true blue to her Christian faith and was “condemned to the beasts” of the games, “and we returned to prison in high spirits” at being able to stand for their Lord.  But then the documentary  pronounces that of course Christians could not capitulate “because they would then know that they would go to hell.” 

            I nearly choked.  Fear of Hell is not what motivates Christians.  Loyalty to the One who has saved you from Hell and your sin is what kept Perpetua from ‘pouring out the libations’.  (A toast to the emperor that acknowledges him as a god)  Indeed, Simon Peter denied Jesus and Jesus chose him as the leading disciple.  Fear of Hell is what motivates Muslims to do suicide bombings.  But not Chistians.  I found myself taken aback that the authors of the documentary didn’t know this simple fact about Christianity. Were there no Christians on their staff?  You don’t even have to be orthodox, just born again. Barna says 43% of Americans are born-agains.

            And then the secular liberalism became quite apparent.  Cordoba and Jerusalem were labeled wondrous places of tolerance and peace were it not for Christians trying to re-take them from the Muslims. I find myself amused that among the 138 acts of jihad recognized by the Muslim scholars is one called Promoting the Myth of Andalusia.  Jihad simply means advancing the faith of Islam and not all jihads are violent.  Some can be simply arguing with a Jew or Christian.  Muslims recognize that Westerners have built up a myth of tolerant Andalusia.  But like all Muslim kingdoms it had a prohibitive 20% dhimmi tax on Christians and Jews as an attempt to try to force them to convert.  This is prescribed by the Koran.  

            And where, they opined, would we be without Muslim engineering, science and mathematics?!  Where would we be without the zero? Indeed, I find myself laughing again. Because most historians agree that Islam merely collected technology and managed not to burn quite all of the library of Alexandria.  And those famous Arabic characters and zero were borrowed from India.  They did faithfully preserve things.  What else do you do when an army of a few fanatics conquer a much larger population?

Then Tom Brokaw intones that, of all his vast learning, the Crusades stand out as singular in their senseless violence.  Gosh, I didn’t know Tom Brokaw was that intellectual.  Perhaps he didn’t realize that massacres of entire cities, as a shock-and-awe tactic of the ancients, was done by just about all peoples.  Thus the Assyrians massacred Lacish of the Hebrews—40,000 people.  Genghis Khan and the Muslim, Tamerlane were the worst.  Tamerlane wiped out one city of 150,000, just to show the world how useless it was to resist. The Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70AD and killed about 1 million Jews in Palestine.  They also wiped Carthage off the map.  And of course the Barbarians returned the favor to the Roman Empire. What is singular about the Crusades is that widespread massacres by Christians occurred, a practice that is more than forbidden by the faith.  “Turn the other cheek”, Jesus said.  “Love your enemies. Do good to those who curse you.”

Maybe we could take up a collection to buy a Bible to send to the History Channel.

Simple speak

If Steve has taught me anything, it is to speak simply about things that matter.  If a robber breaks into your house in the middle of the night, shouldn’t you have the right to use a gun?  Well, here’s Boehner negotiating with Obama trying to avoid the fiscal cliff.  Trouble is, Obama doesn’t negotiate.  He won’t put spending cuts on the table and continues to campaign around the country for tax increases on the rich.  Here’s his strategy.  Go over the fiscal cliff and then come back afterwards with a proposal to cut back the tax increases on the middle class 98%.  Makes him look like a white knight, and if he doesn’t get it, he will blame R’s for the tax increase. 

Here’s what R’s should do.  Stop negotiating.  Explain that if we took raise taxes like Obama wants, it will fund  the country for 5 days and cost almost a million jobs. He’s not serious.  Now tell us how you’ll stop overspending, Mr. President. What you propose doesn’t amount to a spit in the Pacific ocean. Keep hammering the point. Make him explain.

Of course the media lap dogs will all come to his rescue about how the R’s don’t have any plan or any proposals.  Bull spit.  It’s the President’s job to write a budget.  Do your job.  And Obama wants to go over the fiscal cliff (which is really not much of a cliff) so he can implement part II of his strategy.  So we’ll probably go over the cliff. 

Now he comes back to Congress with his white knight proposal about eliminating the tax increases on middle class.  Pass it immediately, but pass it along with proposals to kill the death tax and other taxes on the middle class that were snuck into Obamacare.  We Republicans want ALL the tax increases on the middle class removed.  Obamacare and fiscal cliff were just sneak ways of looting the middle class while claiming to soak the rich. 

BO won’t like the smell of this. But if he defends just the income tax cuts, he would be forced to answer for all the tax increases that he’s hit the middle class for.  Chances are good that he would just say, I can’t do anything.  The R’s have killed my proposal.  Meanwhile he secretly is glad for all the tax increases that took place.  Then he can spend all the more.  So the R’s need to keep raising the heat.  Remove all the tax increases on the middle class, Mr. President.

So what happens to government revenue?  It goes up for a couple years as higher taxes take place but then people arrange their affairs to avoid the taxes and true to Laffer curve, revenue actually falls.  This will keep happening as our bond ratings are lowered and deficit spending continues.  R’s have to blame this on Obama’s unbalanced budget.  If you don’t live within your means, the creditors will come after you.  When creditors come after us, there won’t be any business or any jobs. The only way for government to get out from under the debt is inflation. Everybody’s life savings will be become worthless. Or future is in a helluva fix.  We have been elected as the people’s representatives to make sure our future doesn’t go to there.  And we ain’t backing down.

Obama's Jihad against Christianity

I suppose that title sounds alarmist.  Boehner has floated a trial balloon about ending the charitable deduction and you can bet that Obama will accept it, even though protesting feebly today.  That’s because Obama has said that this is what he wants for years.  Ending the charitable deduction would both raise revenue while destroying charities, largely supported by conservatives.  If charities could be annhiliated or at least significantly cut down that makes the state, the only source of benevolence.  Meanwhile since conservatives are prime beneficiaries of the deduction and churches the prime beneficiaries of giving, this would have the effect of eliminating much political opposition. 

Sit back and think about what this year has wrought for Christianity.  First Lutherans were told they had to hire all comers, no discrimination for belief, by the Justice Department.  The JD lost the case 9-0 in the Supreme Court, but has never issued an apology for such wrongheaded thinking.  Next the Catholic Church and many church organizations are being forced to fund morning-after and week-after abortifacients, despite their clearly enunciated beliefs against such things.  Then the Democrat convention got caught taking God out of their platform, tried to re-instate it for appearances sake, and clearly a majority of the floor votes were against God.  Now comes Obama's war on charitable giving. It’s a keen strategy devised by someone who claims Christian faith, but opposes it at every turn.  

Why do this?  Well, the sworn belief of a National Socialist is that the State, not God, is benefactor.  Anyone who questions big government’s “compassion” is called mean-spirited and hateful.   But are government’s entitlement programs ever compassionate? 

Let’s say you are about to give a home to a foster kid, a system kid, a street kid.  Would you say, “Well, they pay me to keep you so you are entitled to that back bedroom.  And every meal feel free to come out and take a plate full back to your room.” 

Or do you say, “We love you and want to make you part of this family. Our home is yours.  We want to connect with you, have a relationship with you.  I know you have been hoarding food in your pockets, but you can trust us.  We want the best for you.”  And then one day the kid ran away.  You found him/her back on the streets eating out of dumpsters. So you said, “Listen, I know how this works.  You did something bad that made you scared we would reject you.  So you rejected us before we could reject you.  You think you are the prodigal son/daughter, be I’m your prodigal mom/dad. I will risk a great deal to come after you, because I love you.  I want to inspire you so that you will aspire to things you never even dreamed.” 

So which is compassionate—entitlements or undeserved kindness?  Entitlements have no obligation, but no forgiveness.  You simply are owed what you get.  Undeserved kindness forgives, loves beyond reason, and pursues you in a relationship.  God brings us the latter, and inspires families and churches to do the same. 

Jesus told a story about a man beaten nearly to death and left on the side of the road.  First came a Priest who passed by uncaringly.  Priests were more than just religious appointees, they were community leaders and powerful men, more like politicians.  Then came a Levite who also passed by uncaringly.  Levites oversaw the social service coffers. So they were like bureaucrats. Finally came a Samaritan, a person hated as a racist, who had true compassion.  A major point of the story is that compassion doesn’t belong to the State but begins in each person’s heart.  Marx and Lenin understood this.  That’s why the Soviets tried to ban the churches, then decided to impoverish them and replace the priesthood with KGB agents.

The National Socialists, like Mussolini, were more subtle, asking churches simply not to speak of their faith outside the church walls.  Don’t “impose” it on anyone else, they demanded.  But Jesus rarely spoke about faith inside a church.  His teachings were almost entirely things to do outside the walls.  Which is precisely the critical point.  To kill Christianity, you  have to kill it’s witness beyond the church buildings.  And then replace this with Stately “compassion” giving away “free stuff”  through government benevolence.  This is why I say that this campaign against Christianity is a very clever, effective jihad.

Climate Change Part II, science

About 1970 with the advent of large computers, scientists could, for the first time, do computer models of the atmosphere.  They could ask how much reflectivity and retention of heat occurred when certain chemicals were added or subtracted to an atmosphere.  So you might ask what happens if I have an atmosphere with a lot more methane as in the early days of the planet? Or before forests, in say, the Devonian age, CO2 was probably 20 times as high, so what would happen in the computer model if we changed that?  The answers were that increasing CO2 makes it warmer and increasing SO2 makes it colder.  Indeed CO2 can be produced by man.  The models predicted rapid temp increases the amount of CO2 could be radically increased.   Perhaps this could be produced by man due to modern activity and machines.  This speculation developed into a political issue since an obvious solution would be to limit CO2 output.  The Left could warn of dire climate changes caused by industrial progress and could attempt to control people (which is their real desire) and their emissions. But were the models correct?  Actual climate observations after CO2 emissions have been much less pronounced.

            The climatologists knew there were other effects.  Among them was cloud cover and haze.  Humidity or haze tends to trap heat while cloud clover tends to cool the climate.  The tops of clouds are 98% reflective—brilliant white.  So the obvious question: what’s the effect of increased clouds and can this be observed.  This is what the atmospheric scientists in conjunction with NASA were doing in flyovers of northern OK in the 90’s and bringing those atmospheric scientists to my hotel. 

            Ocean currents and changes are also important.  The oceans are 14,000-18,000 feet deep and fairly uniform in depth.  But only the upper 500 feet has currents and changes in temperature. Below that the water is uniformly cold. Since water holds 5 times the heat energy per volume as land, the oceans are the climate moderators of the earth.  But what if by some turbulence or other effect, some of the deep cold water is mixed with the surface? This would immediately change climate.  Or vice versa, what if the surface gets more laminar and less mixed?  Then you have more heat. 

            Finally there is solar radiation’s fluctuation .  This is least well-understood since we don’t know how the sun changes. Run models based on just 1% loss of radiation and climate changes disastrously.

            Now comes an important point.  The order of importance of each of these 4 effects (radiation, currents, clouds, chemistry) goes in reverse order.  In other words, we think solar radiation is the biggest effect.  After all it changed the Little Ice Age suddenly and radically.  Next in importance are oceanic effects that are suspected in the Dust Bowl, Younger-Dryas, and Sahara desertifications.  Next in importance are the clouds, finally the chemical content.  So then if CO2 changes are present, they may easily be outdone by the other changes.  Moreover it is not well-known how much man’s emissions of CO2 affect the entire amount.  Estimates of total CO2 in the atmosphere vary enormously, by a factor of ten!  When you see such unknowns in gathered data, it raises a red flag with most thoughtful scientists.  Then what is the amount of CO2 that is manmade?  Estimates vary widely again. You can see how some have concluded that Manmade Global Warming via CO2 emissions is a hoax or a miniscule effect.  And indeed, since about 1980 we have been measuring ocean temperatures.  From 1980 to 2000 about half a degree of warming was observed.  But then since 2000 we have lost about a quarter of a degree.  Something unknown caused the world to cool down.  Couldn’t be man’s activities since much of the 3^rd World has gone from bicycles to autos. So when you see folks like Senator Inhofe calling global warming a hoax, this is why.

Climate Change Part I, History

            I presented this at the Kay County Republican meeting, concerning climate change.  There are two parts, History and Science.  My expertise is not large but I can explain the issue.  When at KSU in the 70’s I was tapped to be temporary Librarian for the Weather Data Library-- oldest continuous weather records in the United.  Years later I ran a hotel and some of the top climate change scientists in the world frequented our area.  Due to some odd circumstances, word spread that a former colleague (not quite true!) ran a nice hotel.  We got lots of reservations and became something of a headquarters for the scientists who descended on Ponca City’s airport and Lamont’s climate station.  Result was a lot of evening discussions in the lobby.  One night Dr. Tim Tooman, Scripps Oceanographic Institute, author of the El Nino theory gave me a renditon of “the big picture” of the whole climate change controversy which will be in the Science section.  But first the History.

            The  largest climate changes are the ice ages that may have begun almost 3 million years ago.  Earth became 30-40 degrees cooler and glaciation covered half of the northern continents.  Oh, by the way, I don’t want to offend anyone’s faith.  If you believe in a 6000 year earth, just realize that if we make a road cut, there are artifacts that bespeak many years of a former history.  Now whether God just put this in the rocks as a virtual history or whether it is real—you decide.  And we can still talk in apparent years.

            Ice ages were 40-60,000 years long and had interludes of typically 140,000 years between when the climate was considerably warmer than today.  What caused them? We think the nutation of the earth (these wobbles occur every 17,000 years) could have been coupled with continental drift that made the poles landlocked is the reason.  Landlocking the Arctic Sea and the Antarctic continent means that poles can grow an ice cap. Then either a solar radiation change or nutation threw the planet into increasing glaciation as the polar caps reflected more and more sunlight back into space and drove temps down. But the jury is still out on some of this theory.  The last ice age ended roughly 20,000 years ago and the earth began to warm.

            About 11,700 years ago the Younger-Dryas era occurred where the warming reversed and became markedly colder.  Many large animals such as mastodons and sloths died during this era, like the ones you have seen as cartoons in the Ice Age movie.  (Younger-Dryas when the Scrat froze just inches from the tantalizing acorn?)  Younger-Dryas was also an era when we believe that Caucasians in N. America were either were killed or absorbed by Mongloid people from Eastern Siberia who became the Indians.  What caused this cold, dry era which lasted 1700 years?  One theory is that glacial melt which originally went down the Mississippi valley was captured by the St. Lawrence Valley and suddenly went north changing the ocean current patterns and causing a very cold era until more warming took over as the polar caps shrank. So was this just a N. American effect?  It seems to have occurred in the Southern hemisphere too, but at not exactly the same time.  There’s about a thousand years of overlap.

            Then about 6000 years ago, the Sahara began to warm and dry up very slowly.  Shortgrass savanna, somewhat like the OK panhandle, turned into a desert like New Mexico.  It drove the hunters and gatherers off the Sahara and into the Nile river valley where they developed agriculture.  Cause of this warming is unknown.  Then another warming which was much more cataclysmic and faster occurred about 4200 years ago.  We think one or more dust bowl warming events happened.  It dryied the Nile so much that the river refused to flood.  But the people of the Nile, at this time weren’t irrigating, just using the annual floods to wet the land. So a 30-yr. Dust Bowl and no floods caused famines.  The sudden disappearance of the Old Kingdom of Egypt and the similar fate of the Akkadian civilization in Asia Minor-Arabia, and several other places in the East all happened at this precise time.  The Sahara went from New Mexico vegetation to sand dunes as it is today.  Cause has been explained as change in ocean currents off Africa but this doesn’t explain Arabia.

            In more modern times, the era from 800 AD to 1300AD was a particularly warm one called the Medieval Warming. This time we have a measurement of the temperature difference.  It became about 5 degrees warmer than in Roman times. Wine grapes were grown in England.  It’s too cold to do that today.  Vikings traveled to Iceland and deforested the island, then Greenland and settled there during better conditions than exist today.  This warm era allowed better crop production and led Europe out of the Dark Ages.  Cause however is not well established.

            From 1309 to 1850 a disastrous era called the Little Ice Age took over.  We know the dates and cause fairly exactly because Chinese monks who studied the sun with lampblacked glass (part of their religion) suddenly recorded that sunspots almost disappeared in 1309.  The scarcity of sunspots continued until 1850.  Climate was about 7-10 degrees cooler and the cold has an obvious cause.  Sunspots are storms on the solar surface.  When they are plentiful it means that the sun is having more radiation output.  So solar radiation went down during the Little Ice Age.  Dickens wrote Christmas Carol with snow on the streets of London.  That is a truly rare occurrence nowadays. Was this climate change worldwide?  The jury is still out somewhat on this point.

            Another climate change was the Dust Bowl which affected N. America only.  From 1931-1938 midcontinent temperatures averaged 10 degrees warmer, and rainfall dropped by half, then returned to normal.  What cause?  Not well understood but one theory is a prolonged La Nina cycle.

            Bottom line of all these events is that climate changes quite a bit and it is natural.  Fred Flintstone didn’t pollute the atmosphere with too much gasoline in his rock car!  There wasn’t enough fossil fuels being burned in any of these eras to cause changes.

Ken Burns Dust Bowl politics

Perhaps the most slanted thing about Ken Burns’ PBS special, “Dust Bowl”, is the politics.  The video has a lot of fascinating stories about survivors of the Dust Bowl complete with old photos and footage.  FDR is a hero of unassailable credits.  But then, one wonders, how did he lose the farmer portion of the Democrat coalition and make NW Oklahoma solidly Republican?  Farmers had voted Democrat since Andrew Jackson.  Part of the answer is found in excerpts from the documentary.  Washington got involved in some incredibly elitist and insulting politics with the dust bowl farmers.  Then, as today, there were a group of environmentalists who thought the entire Great Plains should be depopulated and turned into a national grassland.  Perhaps their greatest contribution was in having the federal government buy out some absentee farmers and return their lands to grass.  But under the Dept. of Agriculture they produced a number of propagandistic films accusing farmers of the failure and advocating collectivism as in the Soviet Union.  Secondly, in order to reduce the surplus of livestock that was depressing prices, emaciated cattle were bought and killed and buried with bulldozers.  The ranchers were chagrinned the way a consultant would be if the company who had hired him, paid him well, then dumped the fruit of his labors and in his report into the trash.  Next FDR fashioned himself a naturalist and proposed several utterly idiotic schemes to fix the West, despite the restraint of his advisors.  One was the ill-fated Shelterbelt Program.  The concept was to plant a 100-mile wide forest through the center of the Great Plains from Dakotas to Texas.  98% of the seedling trees died the first year. In 1935, as a pork barrel program, US 83 highway, was built from Minot, ND  to Childress, TX, going through no town of more than 15,000.  It became jokingly known as the Highway to Nowhere.  It was roundly joked about and became the subject of 3 Country and Western songs. Of all the alphabet soup New Deal programs, the Soil Conservation Program was one of the few that was sound.  Here, a local county-wide district was established and run by farmers on a board.  The district was empowered to buy land-altering equipment that could be borrowed by farmers to correct erosion.  Yet the government experts who advised the farmers were often political hacks and former politicians who knew little about conservation. It was the farmers who made the program work.

Hence when Burns’ “Dust Bowl” shows FDR making a trip to Amarillo to survey the damage in 1936 it was a forced political move to shore up support.  Desperate farmers took help from the government but when the drought broke, became very disgusted with Washington.  The  AAA was the farm program.  It paid farmers to idle land.  Southern landowners took the money and told sharecroppers they weren’t needed any longer. That led to widespread unemployment in the Deep South.  Mississippi had 52% unemployment and Alabama was nearly as high.  These were the pitiful poor who often made their way to the California Great Valley to work as migrant laborers.  Very, very few came from Oklahoma which had 22% unemployment compared to a national average of 25% in 1934.  Yet an opportunistic author, John Steinbeck, wrote a tear-jerker tale of how a broke Oklahoma family went to California only to be mistreated.  Burns slyly inserts a statement about how only 16,000 Oklahomans went to the Valley, but then continues-on about how these “Okies” were abused--as if to disregard his own statistic.  (Californians called the impoverished southerners Okies because they already knew the oil field workers from Oklahoma who had similar accents.) Burns then follows his anecdotal stories of two families who went to LA and San Francisco respectively as if to make the Oklahoma-California fabrication true. What was the truth?  Farmers hung tough during the dust bowl and many managed to eke out a living. Meade County, Kansas (Liberal) actually gained 2% population from the 1930 to 1940 census.

In the end, all the old-timers in “Dust Bowl” tell their stories and express deep misgivings about farming and this new irrigation that is taking place in the Southern Plains.  None were practicing farmers.  All are Democrats to the hilt.  Another dust bowl is surely in our future, they worry.  The drought of the 50’s showed that we learned absolutely nothing.  And so it is as if you were to ask the 1/3 of settlers who failed and returned to the East in the 19^th century, “How was the West Won?” It probably would be only a half-truth.

Ken Burns burns the Dust Bowl

 In the PBS special “Dust Bowl” Ken Burns impresses with his anecdotes and photos, but leaves out so much explanation that we are left wondering how the dust occurred and what the lessons were.  According to the narrative, farmer greed and climate change were the culprits.   Billed as 'one of the Worst Man-made Disasters' the continual insinuation is that the prairies should have never been plowed, and that climate could once again ruin us.  Nice political correctness, but poor facts.

I taught a class about the Dust Bowl for NOC and North Central OK Historic Assoc. a dozen years ago.  Here are some facts that are quite relevant as we go into our third year of drought here in Oklahoma.  Summer-Fall plowing is a time-honored technique farmers use to mellow a seedbed and this was a major fault of the 1930’s dust.  It simply works too well here.  Daily winter freezing and thawing yields a fine dustbed by spring. If it’s too dry for the wheat to grow, the land lies barren and windswept.  Windspeeds in the Great Plains are the highest in N. America.  18 inch annual rainfall, normal for the panhandle, dropped by half in 1931-1938 for reasons that are still under debate.  We know the area is subject to droughts.  All over western Oklahoma and other states are ancient stabilized dune fields of small hummocky hills and no apparent drainage system.  The closest one to Ponca City is between Tonkawa and LaMont on the north side of US 60.  The soils west of Guthrie/Ponca City/Wichita are alkali because the dry climate doesn’t leach organic matter and minerals  much.  This makes a delightfully rich grassland.   But it is also makes a “friable” soil.  Pick up a clod, squeeze, and it turns to dust easily.  The soils of Western Kansas and SW Nebraska are some of the richest in the world, in places with over 30 feet of topsoil—blown-in naturally from the north as the last glaciers retreated.

Why does soil blow?  Soil particles first begin a hopping, fracturing regime called saltation which is enhanced by flat barren dirt.  Saltation creates particles so small they can go airborne. Burns did make a good point about a few speculative farmers who didn’t live on the land, but had the acreage plowed.  These “suitcase farmers” abandoned their lands during the Dust Bowl adding to the problem.  There were others who realized how to fix the farming practices, but  having neighbors who were clueless, they were powerless to stop the havoc.  Contour strip farming was the first attempt to control the dust and it helps a bit.  Emergency contour tillage works temporarily.  In the 40’s the better practice of fallowing became widespread. Land is left in stubble with minimum tillage to control weeds for a year.  This augments soil moisture and stops the blowing. Today, no-till agriculture is practiced.  And with irrigation the Great Plains has become a new world.

 Yet we know that prolonged droughts are likely, where desert threshold rainfall is less than 15”.  Even with modern farming practices, a 20-year drought would lead to a lot of blowing dirt.  We saw it blow one wild windy day in October this year aided by construction west of Blackwell.  But the likelihood of another Dust Bowl is not large. So then what was the dust bowl--man-made disaster, or yet another example of how learning leads to success?  I’d prefer the latter. "Manmade Disaster" is like blaming the first guy who tried to catch petroleum from a seep with a blanket for the oil spills.  Learn how to drill a well!