out of John's mind

Aug
15th

Mon

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

— Eric Hoffer “Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements”

Jul
27th

Wed

Perhaps if “climate scientists” were held responsible for their work and a few were to lose their livelihoods, then “climate science” would cease being an oxymoron.

— comment regarding Climategate by Aussie2011 on the sceptic blog Wattsupwiththat.com

Jul
5th

Tue

Intelligence is not the measure of how much we know how to do, but of how we behave when we don´t know what to do.

— John Holt

Jul
1st

Fri

The real problem with the Precautionary Principle in its strongest forms is that it is incoherent; it purports to give guidance, but it fails to do so, because it condemns the very steps that it requires.
The principle threatens to be paralyzing, forbidding regulation, inaction, and every step in between. It provides help only if we blind ourselves to many aspects of risk-related situations and focus on a narrow subset of what is at stake.

— Cass R. Sunstein “The Laws fo Fear” 2005

Jun
21st

Tue

What’s the use of happiness? It can’t buy you money.

— Henny Youngman

Jun
20th

Mon

He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past.

— George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”

Jun
16th

Thu

The time has come to abandon the Kyoto-style folly that reached its apotheosis in Copenhagen last week, and move to plan B. And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.

— former chancellor Lord Nigel Lawsen commenting in the “Wall Street Journal” in late 2009

It is indeed true that future climate change is an important subject that needs to be approached with appropriate public policy-making. Unfortunately, current policy approaches have been formulated from a combustible combination of poor science, special-interest-group pleading and public hysteria, which together distract from, rather than deal with, the very real risks of natural climate change. Indeed, the risks of natural events and change are almost intirely ignored by the IPCC and by the politicians, press and public who participate in the current climate “debate”.

— Professor Robert M. Carter author of “Climate: The Counter Consensus” 2010

Jun
1st

Wed

It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that carbon dioxide, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.

— Ed Ring, 2008 (Eco World, Climate Science)

May
29th

Sun

Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.

— Mark Twain

May
23rd

Mon

The intuitive human mind is not a lonely Stone Age hunter wandering a city it can scarcely comprehend. It is a Stone Age hunter wandering a city it can scarcely comprehend in the company of millions of other confused Stone Age hunters.
The tribe may be a little bigger these days, and there may be more taxis than lions, but the old ways of deciding what to worry about and how to stay alive haven’t changed.

— Daniel Gardner author of ” The Science of Fear”

May
11th

Wed

send a framed picture

Text message from older brother Troels: Could you send us a framed picture of yourself so the new baby can see what her uncle Axel looks like?
Younger brother Axel (8 years old) with confused look and cell phone in hand: Dad, I know how to send text messages and pictures from my mobile but I have no idea how to send a framed picture.

Apr
8th

Fri

In the past, when societies gorged on innovation they soon allowed their babies to grow too numerous for their land. Or they allowed their bureaucrats to write too many rules, their chiefs to wage too many wars, or their priests to build too many monasteries. Or they sank into finance and became parasitic rentiers.

— Matt Ridley, author of ”The Rational Optimist”

Mar
26th

Sat

To argue that human nature has not changed, but human culture has, does not mean rejecting evolution - quite the reverse. Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.

— Matt Ridley “The Rational Optimist”

Mar
19th

Sat

This looks like a great idea, which like similar great innovations from North America absolutely won’t work elsewhere