Peter's bones

While excavating the grave of Pope Pius XI, under the floor in St. Peter’s Basilica the bottom fell out of the hole revealing grave chambers of ancient Romans.  Vatican Hill was once a sort of ancient body dumping grounds for humans without means.  Peter’s post-crucifixion body was dumped there in 66 AD. Pius XII began a quest.  Houston oil tycoon, George Strake, a Catholic philanthropist was asked to secretly fund the dig.  Monsignor Kaas, supervised a young priest named Ferrua who headed an excavation crew.  WW II had started.  It had to be hand dug, secret from Mussolini and the press.

            Ferrua wanted fame.  He egotistically kept results hidden from Kaas and dug fast.  Emperor Constantine had built the original St. Peter’s Basilica (337 AD) over Peter’s grave.  This was the request of his mother Helena, a faithful Christian convert.  But Romans held ancestors in great honor and built family mausoleums which had come to be placed all over the hill.  Most of the families had passed-on so Constantine decided to backfill nearly one million cubic yards of earth onto the hill to make it flat-topped. Much earlier, about 100 AD, a presbyter, Gaius left a letter that explained to a pagan that the graves of Paul along the Appian Way and Peter’s grave, secretly marked on Vatican Hill could be easily visited.  Other writings said that Constantine later put the bones in a bronze burial vessel and placed this in a marble grotto along with a fortune in gold.  The basilica was rebuilt in 1520. So Ferrua, found an older altar under the present one and dug beneath it.   The enormous St. Peter’s basilica had to be buttressed by cement piles so that they could dig out a hollow under the floors.  What was revealed was a necropolis of streets lined with splendid family vaults, frescoes and mosaics from the 2^nd century.  And once in awhile there were also Christian niches, secret and small, lest they gain attention. . Most human bones were discarded and no photographs taken by Ferrua’s team—horrid archeological practices. Kaas objected to the desecration of the dead and each day collected discarded bones and put them in labeled boxes to be stored . One set of bones had been covered by royal purple cloth with dye stains still intact.  Two very old hillside retaining walls were found and for some inexplicable reason, the Roman engineers had left them intact, making the building whose foundation encompassed them assymetrical—very odd for Roman construction. And in a niche at the foot of a red brick wall, beneath the altars, they found bones, surrounded by Christian votives and coins.  Peter was found! The discovery was announced in 1949. And the bones were given to the Pope who kept them in his apartment.

            Emperor Nero had started a runaway fire, July 18-19, 64 AD to clear buildings for a palace.  The implicated ruler blamed the fire on Christians and many were executed. Among them, Paul and Peter who was crucified upside down.

            After Pius XII and his successor, John XXIII had passed on, Giovanni Montini, papal secretary, rose after many ballots to become Pope Paul VI.  He had doubts about the results of the dig because he had seen the internal bickering of the parties involved.  So he brought in a respected archeologist skilled in the new science of forensics, who judged the ‘Peter’ bones to be 2 young men and an elderly woman. Ferrua protested.  The Pope brought in an expert in epigrahy—a skilled linguist who also knows slang, usages, and monument inscriptions of the time.  Margherita Guarducci had deciphered a Minoan language and other unknown Greek.  Her faith was agnostic.  But as she read the hastily scratched words of graffiti on the retaining wall, she was stunned.  Here were written prayers of the early Christians, “Peter, pray for me”, “Spirit, show Severus the gospel,” and finally, “Peter is within.” Plus, it was written in the graffiti code of persecuted Christians. Guarducci said she realized the incredible bravery of these early Christians and it reconnected her to the Christian faith of her youth.  Then she found an officially chiseled Roman inscription, “In Hoc Vince” [In this conquer] the words Constantine heard in his vision of the cross. (as if he’d put his own prayer with that of the saints)  “Peter is within” implies Peter’s bones were buried in the wall. And beneath a section where hundreds of names followed by AΩ [names of deceased Christians], were scratched was a marble niche. No bones? Kaas had stored them, purple-stained with a label.  It was the skeleton of a 60 to 70 year old robust male whose feet had been cut off, common practice of Roman soldiers in removing an inverted body which had been crucified.  Modern DNA Forensics has shown these bones are that of a Jew.  All of this took place after much bickering among Vatican bureaucrats and was not resolved conclusively until 2012. 

            So now we know why Constantine left the old walls, counter to normally good engineering. He read the prayers too. No bronze sarcophagus, just the precious gold of inspired Christians who passed on and were buried around Peter.  One world-renowned archeologist came to know Jesus as her Lord and Savior who was inspired by all the” graffiti” she read.  And Severus?  He’s later listed as SeverusAΩ.

Pilgrims

Stuff I learn about the Pilgrims.  So how did this group come to be?  Why were there 4 voyages from 1620-31? How did they decide to go? Survive?

            After Henry VIII parted the the pope, he told the church leaders he was now head of the church.  He wanted no change in worships, but wanted to adopt reformation beliefs.  Archbishop Cranmer and the bishops conferred and decided he’d never accept Calvinism with its strict behavioral demands, and instead picked Lutheran doctrine.  So the Anglicans were Catholic worship/Luther’s theology. This got mixed reviews but no riots.  90% of English thought of themselves as Catholic.  But after Henry’s son Edward IV ruled only 5 years, sister Mary, born of Katherine of Spain, came to power and tried to force Catholicism back into the church. Bloody Mary went after any reticent Protestant or even someone who wanted to talk it over.  Result: Several thousand forced to flee, often to Netherlands where the English traded.  Holland was the commerce capital and made a vibrant economy by freely allowing refugees to come with their foreign ideas. And the Low Countries were the place for fabric weaving.  Wales and Western England were the place for sheep and wool.  East Anglia (Eastern England) was heavy in ship commerce, and Northern England was getting acquainted with Presbyterianism.  Holland was Calvinist and thus most of the new ideas were Calvinistic that spread to Britain.  When the Low Countries declared independence from Spain, 10,000 Englishmen rushed to help their cause. 

            There was a city in Yorkshire (north) that was blamed for the beheading of Mary Stuart.  She was Elizabeth’s cousin, raised in France and quite Catholic.  When she assumed the throne of Scotland, she clashed with John Knox and the Presbyterians there.  So much so, that about 8 years after she’d become queen, she fled leaving behind her infant son, James. This was a big problem for Elizabeth of England, who secretly ordered her placed on house arrest, because Mary was the rightful heir of the English throne, had Parliament not recinded Elizabeth's bastardness.  But Parliament had seated Elizabeth instead of Mary because Elizabeth was Protestant. A revolt might dethrone Elizabeth. 18 years later, Mary was beheaded way up north at a Yorkshire castle. Elizabeth claimed someone had countered her orders (even though it solved everything.  Nephew James could now become the future Protestant King of England, since she had no heirs) Who dunnit? Calvinists hated Catholics with a passion and the church nearby had a Calvinist (Puritan) pastor.  The scapegoated Scrooby church was exiled in mass to Holland. 

            There, others from Worchestershire (west) and East Anglia, being persecuted, also joined them. Congregation grew to 250 people in Lieden, Netherlands.  And it became a center for printing Puritan/Separatist (Calvinist) books and tracts to be secretly smuggled back to England.  There were writers like William Brewster (former Cambridge professor), Robinson (the pastor), and Edward Winslow.  Some soldiers who had joined the Dutch revolt like Miles Standish, a rich woolens merchant, Thomas Brewer, who bankrolled everything, and a lot of illiterate but devout peasants.  It was tough times.  Most could only do the menial jobs of textile trade and they lived in much poverty.  Dissatisfaction made them want to go elsewhere, even though Holland allowed them precious free speech.  Robert Cushman, a merchant, negotiated with the British Virginia Company to allow a settlement next to Jamestown.  The Government (Privy Council) okayed reluctantly under the reasoning that it was better to have these radicals harass the Spanish in the new world, rather than to stay home and harass us.  Two old rotten boats and some cautious investors were found to fund the project. 

            45 “Pilgrims”(members of Leiden congregation) and 25 other adventurers joined plus a crew to make 102 people.  They encountered rough storms in the western Atlantic and miraculously survived. Landed in November near present day Provincetown, MA as the weather was getting wintery and the crew refused to go south to VA. Too late to build houses, they stayed aboard and went hunting/exploring on land. Wrote the Mayflower Compact. That winter, a mystery disease killed 50 of the 102.  Only six pilgrim women survived. Many of the non-pilgrims were non-believers and ex-cons. Brewster and Brewer held them together while Standish enforced order. 

            They found an abandoned Indian village.  The Pawtuxets had been wiped out by white-man’s disease, contacted from befriending fisherman (offshore area had been fished by English and Irish for 100 years).  There were fields and huts.  The pilgrims found corn (almost unknown in Europe) and the village had several brooks. In the days before pipes, in order to found a town, you had to have a brook to bring fresh water, washing water and carry away waste going through the townsite. And they met one lonely former resident, Squanto, who had been captured into slavery and taken to Europe before his tribe died.  He’d escaped, found his way to the house of a guy who worked for the Virginia company, who hired him as a coastal guide on the next fishing voyage, then let him escape back to his native land. Squanto gave the Pilgrims life-saving advice on poisonous plants and planting corn.

            The Pilgrims were bent on sharing the gospel with the natives, #2 priority after settling.  But they had brought no seed, not enough candles, hardly any livestock but much Dutch cheese.  The women often figured things out.  They observed how Indians would break off a pine branch, wait for sap to bead at the wound, then smear it on the tip of the broken branch. Makes a torch-candle they named “candlewood”.  Fish were phenomenally plentiful and that is how the Pilgrims paid off their investors over the years.  Deer replaced cattle for meat and hides for clothes.  (Rarely did Pilgrims wear those outfits they are portrayed in).  Being English, they tried making shelters of wattle and daub, but the dauby mud kept falling out from the wet climate.  Women observed the Indians had used ‘shingles’ of bark and hide which later evolved into the shingled and clapboard siding of New England.  Making friends with the Wampanoag tribe was key because they wanted the Pilgrims to stay in the “ghost village” to keep the warlike Naragansetts out. Many of the later Pilgrims had been Yorkshire peasants, so they were tough redneck types who could survive.

            Mayflower sailed back in 1623 and other ships followed until most of the Lieden congregaton had a chance to join.  My great..grandfather Solomon Leonard came in 1629 or 1630.  Cousin to Brewster, he and Miles Standish and Bradford founded the town of Bridgeport. His wife, Sarah Chandler, was sister to one of the original 1620 pilgrims.

            Odd stuff I learn.  Pilgrims didn’t celebrate Christmas and thought it was poor taste to rabble-rouse after Advent which was “little Lent” with repentance and watchfulness.  But they drank beer copiously.  The non-drinking of Calvinists in our age are mainly Baptists who have added this.  Some would think Puritans and Separtists don’t like sex, but the opposite was true.  They hated Catholic teaching that celibacy was “higher” and sex was sinful.  They stressed love from Ephesians 5 for couples and shelled out kids like mad.  2 babies were born on the 2-month voyage over.  And virtually all the women were midwives.  It was not a specialty.  Moreover they understood the necessity of clean linens and water at birth.  But the Pilgrims didn’t take baths (believed you should only bathe at certain times of the moon).  Squanto told them they needed to because they “stincked”. So here we have a nice clean American telling the unwashed foreigners they needed clean up their act.

Katarina Von Bora

Katarina Von Bora was a daughter of a nobleman who had lost his land and gone poor in 1499.  The family left her in a convent at age 5 and refused to take her back.  Kate used work to overcome her disappointment and when the opportunity arose she escaped.  (Convents were often women’s prisons in the Middle Ages where deposed ruler’s wives were forced to live bearing no rival heirs.) Secretly she had read Martin Luther and found herself a soul-mate spiritually. With help from some Lutheran former monks, she and a dozen others managed a daring escape from her convent. Many of the girls found their families again or married. Except Kate. At Wittenburg, Luther was trying to arrange a marriage of her to another professor. “No!” she retorted, “But I’d marry you!” And so they did and became a rare couple in that era.  They were very much in love. “Katie, my rib,” Luther called her.  She was everything he wasn’t—household & money manager, hostess, farmer, livestock raiser and mom. Plus she brewed the best bier to be found.  Luther was forever bound to live in Wittenburg, because he was a wanted man in much of Germany.  No problem.  Katie remodeled the old monastery making it a guesthouse for dignitaries from all over Europe who had come to see Luther. Upstairs the men would retreat with their beers.(If you brew it, they will come.)  She would join them for the lively discussion, the only woman to ever do so. She often had much to offer and one of the men once grumbled to Luther, couldn’t he shut his wife down?  He refused.  She had a rich experience in the inner life and a relationship with God.  They had six children.  When their teenage daughter died, Martin went into severe depression and Kate helped him out of it. 

Katarina bought land and hired farm hands to support their “B&B”, sometimes gone for a week to tend it 50 miles away. This is familiar stuff for Oklahomans.  In USA, the women’s suffrage movement took place in the plains states from WY to OK, culminating in the 19^th Amendment, 100 years ago, 1918. 10% of the ranchers have always been women, by widowhood or choice.  “Well, if she’s head of the Chamber, why can’t we let her vote?”  When they asked Will Rogers about this he had this quip, “Some say they don’t trust women with the vote.  Seems a little late to not be trusting them. We’ve been eating their cooking for thousands of years.” But Katarina von Bora would probably have thought more highly of the lyrics Amy Grant sang, “I may not be every mother’s dream for her little girl…/But that’s all right, as long as I can have one wish I pray/ When people look inside my life, I want to hear them say/ She’s got her Father’s eyes…/Eyes that find the good in things/when good is not around/ Eyes that find the source of help/ When help just can’t be found/ Eyes full of compassion/ Seeing every pain/Knowing what you’re going through/And feeling it the same/ She’s got her Father’s eyes.” 

Revolution's motives

I’m reading some Europeans writing about our Revolutionary War. Their interesting perspectives give me some new insights.  Washington was quite angry about how things shook out for tobacco planters in the 1760s.  The system seemed rigged with British merchants raising prices for the tools he needed, Brit bankers raising interest, regulations that were squelching the tobacco market, and of course, taxes—Stamp Act.  He had also incurred enormous debt trying to make his planting biz work. And a land company he had bought shares in to develop Kentucky was nixed by British government policy to restrict colonists to east of the Appalachians.  The reason is that in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, the British government had huge debt which gave place to a debt crisis.  They had no funds to keep law enforcement in America, so they tried to separate the natives from the colonists by boundary.  And they needed to raise money to administer the colonists, hence the Stamp Act.  Washington was caught in the vise of European problems.

            But does that make you into a revolutionary?  Hardly.  In the aftermath of the Stamp Act, the Brits repealed and replaced with another new tax on staples, the Townsend Acts which really made all the colonists mad.  That was repealed by colonial rioting and the Tea Act passed.  Of course that resulted in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Then came the “Intolerable Acts” which brought in marshall law to subdue Boston. Washington decided to forget tobacco and began to use his head to diversify his farming, start  breweries, mills, blacksmithing and half a dozen other enterprises that made him a suddenly rich man. 

            Rich men don’t revolt, lest the ensuing chaos cause loss of property.  And so the angry Americans split into two groups, the elites who wanted a negotiated independence or reconciliation, and the poor who hoped for chaos and spoils.  But Washington and many of our founders were of a third mind, that this revolt was about a popular government.  Where did they get this?  The Europeans speculate that it came from Rene Descartes who promoted the individual through reasoning as opposed to “received wisdom” from church and state that people formerly relied on.  And the Whigs of England who espoused parliamentary rule and wanted a constitutional monarchy.  Two problems with these views.  First, Descartes’ logic would argue for a cognitive elite, not popular rule.  Second, the Whigs weren’t so radical.  They just wanted a strong Parliament in England and still expected a King. Somewhere these Americans had come up with Revolution.  Where?

            Washington, born 1732 was 8-10 years old when a religious revival, the Great Awakening, took place.  The Europeans never mention faith in any of their histories of America.  But nearly all our founders were kids, like Washington when the Great Awakening took place.  As the evangelist, George Whitfield traveled up the coast, newspapers recorded the happening.  Everywhere people reacted the same—huge numbers came to faith or renewed their dedication, well-known scoundrels suddenly changed their ways, church attendance tripled all over the colonies in 20 months, even diests and agnostics began to question what was going on. Newspapers, noting the similarity began to write about “the united states” as opposed to the 13 differing states. We are One People.   And in the aftermath of this revival, the Americans began to read John Locke, the radical whose “Two Treatises on Government” had always been considered too wild and crazy by Europeans. For Locke took his Christianity to mean that if God guides you, who am I to stand in the way you conduct your business?  I might be standing in the way of God!  That defines Locke’s “Liberty” and explains his religious tolerance. The Declaration of Independence quotes Locke twice and his principles all over the place.  In this document, the “no taxation without representation” is only one of the 22 causes of abuse by the crown.  The others are all the rights taken away from the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and rights to property, faith choice, and evangelism to the Indians—Locke!

            Only by understanding the faith dimension can we understand the revolt and why it so inflamed Americans.  This is why Wasington, who owned 20,000 acres and dozens of businesses, would risk it all.  Why Patrick Henry stood up in the back of the gallery and yelled, “Is security so sweet or peace so dear that it must be bought with chains and even slavery?  I know not what course others may take but give me Liberty or give me death!” And it can only explain the result.  One by one the rich Virginia planters of the House of Burgesses stood to give Henry a standing ovation.  That two free Afro-Americans rowed Washington over the Delaware.  That the backwoods rednecks of Carolina, who lived by subsistence, would rise up against the British army at King’s Mountain. That women climbed trees at Saratoga and became snipers.  England and Europe thought the war was about taxes.  Americans understood Liberty was far deeper, your very life.

Analyzing how liberals see it

Frank Rich penned this in New Yorker.  It is a superb example of how an articulate media guy can go totally wrong with bad assumptions.  And it tells us howeven the smartest libs see America.

                “The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. The birthrate is at a record low, and the suicide rate is at a 30-year high; mass shootings and opioid overdoses are ubiquitous. In the aftermath of 9/11, the initial shock and horror soon gave way to a semblance of national unity in support of a president whose electoral legitimacy had been bitterly contested only a year earlier. Today’s America is instead marked by fear and despair more akin to what followed the crash of 1929, when unprecedented millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes after the implosion of businesses ranging in scale from big banks to family farms.”  Wow!  Need a beer to cry into?

                “It’s not hard to pinpoint the dawn of this deep gloom: It arrived in September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers kicked off the Great Recession that proved to be a more lasting existential threat to America than the terrorist attack of seven Septembers earlier... Not just Washington, which failed to prevent the financial catastrophe and has done little to protect us from the next, but also race relations, health care, education, institutional religion, law enforcement, the physical infrastructure, the news media, the bedrock virtues of civility and community. Nearly everything has turned to crap.” Here we spot a lib speaking.  Somehow Big Government was supposed to stop recession—overspeculation is the real culprit in recessions.  Gubmit controls millions of people making bad decisions with their money? Then comes the litany of racism (always first), health care, education, law enforcement (not what a conservative would list) and taking a swipe at ‘institutionalized’ religion.  Because libs often reject Christianity or any other faith, they rationalize that they merely dislike the institution.  But do they pray or read God’s word? Not on your life.

            “That loose civic concept known as the American Dream — initially popularized during the Great Depression by the historian James Truslow Adams in his Epic of America — has been shattered. No longer is lip service paid to the credo, however sentimental, that a vast country, for all its racial and sectarian divides, might somewhere in its DNA have a shared core of values that could pull it out of any mess. Dead and buried as well is the companion assumption that over the long term a rising economic tide would lift all Americans in equal measure. “ Who the dickens is James Truslow Adams you ask? I thought the American Dream was Jefferson, et. al. It was the dream that you could live the life you wanted in this country and own the dream of land, so readily available. It was a bedrock belief intertwined with Liberty.  But of course, the progressives just label it sentimental and all it means to them is to get wealthier.  

                “The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. Millennials, crippled by debt and bereft of Horatio Alger paths out of it, mock the traditional American tenet that each generation will be better off than the one before. At the other end of the actuarial spectrum, boomers have little confidence that they can scrape together the wherewithal needed to negotiate old age. The American workers in the middle have seen their wages remain stagnant as necessities like health care become unaffordable.” Wait.  Obama passed Dodd-Frank which was supposed to not let Wall Street bandits escape punishment.  But then it was just another screw-up which has now been changed.  “actuarial” is poorly used since it refers to insurance risk assessment.  He means “demographic” but the obscure actuarial is designed to “snow job” the reader. Er, wasn’t the Affordable Care Act supposed to make healthcare affordable? Nowhere are prog cures mentioned.  It’s just a bitch narrative.

                “It would be easy to blame the national mood all on Donald J. Trump, but that would be underrating its severity and overrating Trump’s role in creating it (as opposed to exacerbating it). Trump’s genius has been to exploit and weaponize the discontent that has been brewing over decades of globalization and technological upheaval. His diagnosis that the system was “rigged” was not wrong, but his ruse of “fixing” it has been to enrich himself, his family, and his coterie of grifters with the full collaboration of his party’s cynical and avaricious Establishment.” See all the big words? That says, you can’t argue with me.  You’re dumb. And yet, see where Rich’s blind narrative has to take him—that Trump became Prez just to enrich himself. A guy who has $4B has no intent of helping his country get back on  track.

            The article goes on and on and on, eventually describing Obama as heroic in stopping us from worldwide collapse (actually the recession ended in July 2009, just after he took office and before anything was enacted).  And the real reason for “everything turning to crap”?  You.  All you deplorables, you bitter clingers, you smelly Walmart dwellers, were stupid and you bought into capitalism and it only enriched the evil rich.  What is classic about his overview of humanity and politics was that nowhere did he suggest solutions to the original problems he cited.  Racism?  He didn’t suggest intermarriage and adoption and working together in teams.  Those are known solutions.  He didn’t suggest education savings accounts or anything to promote parental choice and teacher freedom to teach.  Nor were increased high-risk pools for healthcare promoted, nor catastrophic-only policies, nor insurance across state lines.  No Nationwide Revival such as the Great Awakening was proposed to solve religious institutions.  Nor were intact families advanced as a way to reduce crime.  What this shows you is that progressive liberalism, democratic socialism just uses problems as an emotional scream with little intent to solve anything—except to restore themselves to power and lord it over us deplorables.   

Studying Kim and Korea

A friend of mine who is Han Chinese explained the East to me years ago and now that I read modern updates on the summit, his words ring truer with each article.  He said this.  Look at the Yellow Sea.  It is entirely encircled by China, Korea and Japan in a small area.  And it was in this area that each country grew from ancient times.  All three different cultures and hold themselves and hold dearly that they are the superior race of the world.  [Hitler!!] China is the big country with many minorities, but dominated by the Han people who look down on the minorities.  Japan differs in language and physically, has a warrior society of great loyalty and is at enmity with the Chinese continurally.  The Koreans are a small country, oft-dominated by the other 2 but have found a niche in being creative and artistic and pugnacious.  They think of the others as dullards.  The Japanese are disciplined and their businesses are always determined to build a better mouse trap—somewhat like the Germans.  The Koreans are like the Hungarians in the middle.  The Chinese who venture overseas are somewhat like Americans in being entrepreneurial.

            Thus Kim Il Sung was a Russian Army volunteer who was installed by the Russians after the War.  They equipped his army heavily and a few years later he tried to take over the democratic South.  Mao intervened to save Kim..  Ever since they look at NK as a buffer state between themselves and the S. Koreans and Japan, backed by USA.  More than anything they want USA to leave.  And they look down on the NK’s as fellow communists but foreigners, like a little step brother.  The Kims and now Kim Jong Un have kept China at arms length as well.  Kim just recently visited China for the first time.  The nukes are part and parcel of Kim showing not just USA but also China and Japan not to mess with him.  China wants him as a satellite in their orbit of control.  So look for Kim to request USA give his country food and business. 

            Yet as this goes on, the NKs do unbelievably pugnacious things.  They have kidnapped about 1500 Japanese and southern Koreans to gain knowledge of the modern world.  Thjey have the world’s 4^th largest military on ready for attack or defense.  They sink foreign ships.  Blast off rockets.  They do nuke tests.  They threaten USA with annihiliation.  There are almost 2 million of the population of 25 million in prisons.  If you do something wrong, your entire family goes to prison with you.  Their population is divided into hostile families, loyal families, and apparatchiks.  The hostile families, about 40% of the people, get menial jobs and starve.  Kim himself is sadistic, roams the countryside with an armored vehicle topped by an antiaircraft machine gun which he uses for sport to kill unsuspecting people for purposes of terrorizing the others. His hackers have shut down Sony, several public utilities in small countries, and could possibly do something similar in USA.  So why hasn’t USA done something about Kim?  It would be the death of Seoul and half of S. Korea.    

            Instead of doing the sanctions as they promised, the Chinese have begun trying to be the supplier of Kim and make him a puppet.  They worry about the summit, being cut out ot the loop. They fear that he goes too far in threats that Trump might just declare war and such a war would not only bring destruction to Korea but also much of China and create an NK refugee problem of 10 million. The Japanese worry that Kim would missile them just as a warning. They swore off war two generations ago but now are warming to the notion of developing their own nukes.  If they do, nobody, even USA can stop them.  They have the expertise   China knows this. And USA knows that the time of dithering and diplomacy has to get serious, very serious, now. And so I pay little attention to all the bullspitters commenting on TV.  Half of them know nothing of the situation. Half are just partisan politics people. 

Climate change numbers

I try to explain climate arguments leaving out numbers.  But they are the lifeblood of any science so here are a few very interesting measures.  The #1 greenhouse gas isn’t CO2 but H2O vapor.  There is 540 times as much water vapor as CO2 (only .00039 of the atmosphere) in the atmosphere and it is 10 times as effective in greenhouse entrapment.  So why aren’t manmade global warming advocates screaming about irrigation and over-forestation? Methane is an even smaller trace element and accounts for less than 1% of greenhouse warming (water =90%, CO2= 3.5%).  Atmospheric composition is roughly 390 parts per million of CO2 up from 270ppm  in 1600AD before the industrial revolution.  Sometime around the year 2100 CO2 will reach double the pre-industrial revolution output.  (These are all numbers from the andogenitive global warming advocates.)  The global warming models are very complex concerning how air of various temperatures and pressures variously absorbs radiation of varying wavelengths.  So if we double CO2 the average computer model says the rate of reduction of Earth’s cooling will be about 3.7 watts per square meter. This compares to satellite measurements of  total lost to space power of 235-245 watts/ sq. m (inexact).  3.7 watts/sq. m. works out to global warming of about a degree Celsius. But atmospheric convection at high altitudes lowers this to about 0.5 degrees.  James Hansen of NASA, a manmade warming advocate also estimates that there are other factors lowering the 3.7W/m2 to about 0.8 W/m2.  That’s just a fraction of a degree, not nearly enough to create the 2 to 4.5 degree estimates of warming they are predicting.

            So how do the modelers get 2 to 4.5 degree temp increases? They propose that the warming amplifies itself. Some propose an almost runaway warming with even larger than 4.5 degree increases.  But no one knows for sure if a little warming leads to a lot.  It’s a problem of estimating the feedback. 

            One of these feedback effects involves glaciation.  If warming melts glaciers, but increases snowfall atop them, they actually will grow during a warm era. Negative feedback. (There has been a huge discussion of this and conclusion is that the expansion or contraction of glaciers, both occurring around the world, is unknown and probably not related to CO2.) Another folly was the hockey stick graph, which showed flat temps for the last 2000 years but then suddenly rising since 1900.  This counters all the old anecdotal evidence of Europe’s Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming.  The hockey stick temperature graph was derived from tree ring data that tried to link tree growth with temperature in arid western N. America.  But we know that desert trees care far less about temp than water.  So it was a bad non-causal correlation.  The hockey stick graph is history. 

            Think of clouds.  If we get less clouds, it is reasoned, the sun beats down the earth warms.  But counter-intuitively this isn’t so.  Think of a cooling of the oceans.  The wind blows and cools the oceans like wind blowing across your wet skin.  But this increases the moisture in the atmosphere which makes clouds and rain, which in turn releases the heat into the atmosphere.  So the earth might seem to have a temp regulator in water vapor—cool the ocean and you get warmer atmosphere.  Warm the ocean and you get a cooler atmosphere.  There are other natural effects.  Some may produce positive feedback while oceans and clouds may produce negative feedback. 

            We know a bit about some big ones.  There is a prominent oscillation of current and wind patterns in the northern Pacific called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, PDO.  The negative cycle produces much more cloud cover worldwide.  Sometimes warm air from the south invades Alaska, sometimes polar air.  And the PDO goes back and forth about every 30 years.  [other oscillations in the Atlantic with hundred year cycles]  The PDO brings different cloud cover and factoring this into a model, it almost perfectly fits the temperature data that suggest 0.7 degree increase since about 1900.  This is especially interesting since there was a big temperature run-up before 1940, then an abatement until the mid seventies.  If you accept standard global warming via CO2, you are forced to ask why was there so much temperature increase prior to 1940 when CO2 emissions were slight but just as they really kicked in about 1945, we got cooling for 30 years?  Recently, there has also been research that proves that increasing CO2 increases upper atmosphere clouds that deflect sunlight in the tropic regions.  This is a huge negative feedback that has the research camps now divided into the CO2 only models versus the scientists who argue that we can’t neglect natural forcings and feedbacks.

            Complicating all this is money.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC, is a big benefactor of research money that has kept the CO2 modelers in vogue, while shutting out the natural effects folks.  This is a rare situation in science, akin to the scholastic school of medieval scholars who shut out Kepler and Galileo.  But ultimately science is about truth and not where government money goes.  We’ll just have to see where truth leads.