That is an interesting question. And it can be easily answered in Christianity. The Gospel of Luke (chapter 5, verses 30-32) says:

“But their scribes and Pharisees murmured against his disciples,saying, Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners? And Jesus answering said unto them, They that are whole need not a physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

It seems logical to conclude that, according to the Messiah Himself, ”people who have [Christian] religious convictions” will be “on the whole morally worse than people who lack them“.

If you see strange trackbacks on websites from “Ocasapiens” in Italian after I post a comment, there is this feckless Italian journalist whose main activity appears to be following me on Google in order to post abysmal bullying attempts at her blog.

I would feel proud of being an inspiration of anything, however if a blog is measured by the quality of its content, a blog where I am the content can’t be that good.

Hence it makes no sense to ask that refusal of a word be based on this or that reason. If a friend of mine asks me to stop using the word “negro” in Italian, as it happened >20 years ago, I don’t even try to probe the reasons, even if the dictionary says otherwise. After all I’m talking to a person, not a dictionary.

Likewise in a climate discussion if somebody says they don’t like “denier” or “warmist” or “Minion of the House of Mann and Gore”, all references should be stopped, and all attempts to reintroduce them be considered an attempt at killing communication.

Doesn’t sound too hard to comprehend.

And before anybody complains about my SS jokes, well, I wasn’t exactly trying to communicate with dana1981 and Skeptical Science was I?

Say what you will of Italy and its Prime Minister, there remains one powerful counterpoint to Silvio Berlusconi, resolutely bringing him a large amount of support: the intolerable pseudo-intellectualism that makes Frank Bruni and his (selected) Italian sources believe there is any correlation between “having a higher education” and “voting Left” (see Frank Bruni’s “The Affliction of Comfort”, IHT, 19 Sep 2011 ).

It doesn’t take much really to understand the utter inability to govern of a political side (such as the Italian Leftists) incapable for two decades of overcoming Mr Berlusconi and his supporters. To consistently lose against people despised as mentally inferior, it is the best evidence of being even more intellectually challenged than them.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with eating bluefin tuna.

Bluefin is a delicacy, not usually eaten as steaks. It is usually three small slices, certainly no more than five or six, on a plate containing three or four species of fish.

In the controversies surrounding fishery management and questions of species abundance in the US and Europe, environmental organizations may tend to overstate the issues, and for very good reason: Environmental organizations are essentially lobbyists and mostly depend on public donations for their livelihood. Therefore, they tend to overstate in order to attract the attention of the public to a given issue. And that is precisely how public opinion has been shaped on the issue of bluefin.

Anyone who reads the news knows that these days NOAA is not considered a compliant partner of US fishermen. NOAA’s decision to not place Atlantic bluefin under protection of the Endangered Species Act at the end of May 2011, was not a capitulation to the bluefin fishermen, but an historic decision based upon exhaustive study undertaken over 12 months and involving US and European scientists and fishery management specialists both inside and outside of government. Some of the best minds in bluefin science had input into this exhaustive process. There is no doubt that if NOAA had any way of validating the probability of extinction or even the threat of extinction, they would have listed the bluefin under ESA. The simple fact is that there is no creditable pelagic scientist who will sign their name to a statement saying that Atlantic bluefin is, 1/ endangered with extinction, 2/ threatened with extinction or, 3/ near [or “on the edge of..”] extinction.

As to the issue of commerce driving the bluefin to extinction, we can thank the media for this misunderstanding. There are no US bluefin fishermen who have Mercedes parked in front of their homes. Practically every article written on bluefin never fails to mention that bluefin sells in Tokyo for upwards of $150,000 “for one fish”. It is amazing to me that journalists have never even bothered to check on this. Auction data from Tsukiji Market for bluefin is available every day online. US bluefin fishermen receive approximately $4-8/lb for their fish, less than they would get if they fished for scallops. The US bluefin fishery is a small, artisanal fishery in which the fish are caught sustainably using hand techniques. The Pew has recently validated this statement. No industrialized fishing methods are allowed. Each vessel is a sole proprietorship, owned by its captain. The US bluefin artisanal fishery is the most highly regulated bluefin fishery in the world. The limit per day in season is three fish and the minimum size must be 73”. A fisherman would be very lucky to catch three fish in one day. It is true, however, that once every year or so, usually in Dec or Jan, an Asian restauranteur dramatically bids up the price of one bluefin at Tsukiji Market as a publicity stunt and this is what finds its way into the media.

1. At the BIS British Interplanetary Society in London for Alan Lawrie’s SaturnV presentation. live microblogging 6pm GMT
2. Title is “Saturn V Manufacturing and testing” – room packed
3. Special anniversary of Kennedy’s announcement of the Moon attempt in 1961
4. Lawrie has 30 years of space technology experience
5. Kennedy spoke at around 1.09pm EDT – Also 45th of first full rocket
6. Mastermind was Von Braun – developed in record time, new materials invented
7. Huntsville Al. was a small city when Von Braun went there in the 1950s -
8. Picture of Von Braun team member meeting Korolev’s daughter -
9. Saturn was a military concept for testing rockets at the start -
10. Pictures of Marshall Spaceflight Center test facilities -
11. RL10 h2 / o2 rocket test facility. Neosho rocket production facility in Missouri near Joplin -
12. Details of rocket. First stage S-1C by Boeing and MSF.
13. Welded tanks but bolted intertanks. Manufacturing details. Fairings around external engines blown after separation
14. Pictures of retrorockets firing – heroicrelics.org
15. S-1C firing test at MSF. Walt Disney visiting Huntsville
16. Picture of Saturn V in test stand
17. People measuring rocket’s vibrational modes by pushing it – same happened for Ares -
18. Stage built vertically but engines inserted horizontally -
19. First stage of Apollo 16 caught fire during tests. Engineers forced to look at the failed parts.
20. S-II second stage by NAA in California. Not kerosene but hydrogen. One tank with one bulkhead within
21. Testing at same Mississippi facility still used
22. Story of mistaken loading to explosion due to incorrect procedures
23. First stage o2 not insulated but second h2 had to be. Several attempts up to Apollo 13.
24. Third stage S-IV B similar to second stage but one engine.
25. Tanks hemispherical in 3rd ellipsoidal in 1st and 2nd
26. 2nd stage external insulation strong metal inside. 3rd stage insulation inside by tiles that didn’t fall off.
27. Picture of Skylab being built out of 3rd stage
28. Explosion in Jan 1967 of S-IVB-503 3rd stage one week before Apollo 1.- problem with Helium tanks
29. Problem with welding of He tanks.
30. Pictures comparing sites in 1967 and 2006 -
31. F-1 rocket engines – tested at Edwards
32. J-2 tested near Hollywood
33. Overview of Saturn V flights. Second flight not so well (Apollo 6) with 2 lost engines then Apollo 8
34. Apollo 8 – a major structural failuree in California a day earlier but launched anyway
35. Pictures of test firings of Apollo 11. Lightning striking Apollo 12. Apollo 17 3rd stage never test fired.
36. How did they make it so perfect? Leadership, mindset. Von Braun and other German managers
37. Many things worked by dodging bullets
38. Personally I would not be surprised the programme was stopped before a major accident would kill it and spaceflight

The lecture followed the publication of “Saturn” by Alan Lawrie with Robert Godwin.

Therefore a bunch of experts have decided to warn the public with the non-news. Maybe that’s the “ethical” thing to do.

But if that’s true, then we should warn the public about a far more certain risk. You see, it can be easily established that the one thing in common among people that die, is that they were alive in the first place.

Armed with this incredible revelation, the WHO experts will soon recommend us all not to be born at all.

There are two things going for Sarah Palin. Apart from a following among middle-aged men that is (doesn’t look like the typical grandma, does she).

One, “Sarah Palin” has been portrayed such a mindless idiot, she’ll earn points just by reading the time right, out of a talking clock. There is a great advantage in lowering expectations.

Two, she’ll have a very easy time convincing people that it’s the Press that paints her in a negative light. So during a campaign, if there’ll be a campaign, she will describe all of her faux-pas and gaffes as “don’t listen to that, it’s just the evil Press”. Even the real faux-pas and gaffes, that is.

IOW on all fronts she will be able to say or do anything without fear of losing score with anybody in the electorate (unless she’s photographed kicking a puppy or slapping her mom). Every additional day will be a day with more supporters.

It’s developing in the classical shoo-in…

Today we are going to have a Copernican Gallop. We are going to see how Astronomy has made us absolutely irrelevant. What have Astronomers done to us, in fact? Some say that Astronomy must be the important of all Sciences. Perhaps we wouldn’t even have Modern Science without Astronomy. But think also that…were it not for the extraordinary progress of 400 hundred years of astronomy, we would still believe to be the center of the cosmos…instead. we’re now sure we’re not. Not at all. Not by a long shot. And nothing we do is any special (physically speaking), and we actually are in a nondescript part of the Universe. Worse, the Universe itself might be just one of many.

Less than zilch, that’s what we are. And thanks to whom? Well, thanks to the..Astronomers!! None of the major philosophers and religious leaders in the history of humanity has remotely approached the ruthless efficiency with which the scholars of the cosmos have demonstrated again, and again and again what little piece of nothingness we actually are. Only to be replaced by another generation of astronomers, busying themselves in demonstrating that the previous notion of us being nothing, was actually a gross overstatement.

Who started this descent, or maybe you can call it ascent, an ascent to humility? Why, somebody called Niclas Koppernigk, known to us as Nicolaus Copernicus.

Imagine yourself then at his times. It’s around 1500, it’s the Renaissance, and Man is the center of everything. People are defining themselves as the middle point, like the Earth, the center between the perfection of Heaven and the imperfection of Hell. Everything is theirs for the taking, and now that the ancient philosophers of Greece are being rediscovered, it surely won’t take much before the whole world is understood. There comes Nicolaus, instead, no Santa Claus, him…he toppled Earth from the center, in his posthumous book “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres”. And if the center is not here, we’re not the center either. Bye bye Renaissance men!

Worse, Copernicus played like the first ever giant Angry Birds game. He managed to start an incredible chain reaction that might (or might not) have just ended. First stop in the chain reaction, of course, Galileo Galilei with his observations of Venus in the year 1610 demonstrating that planets orbit the Sun, not the Earth. Then Newton, extraordinarily linking in 1687 the force that pushes us down with the force that keeps planets and satellites in their orbit.

Can you imagine? By this time, the revolutionary idea was taking hold, that Earth and the heavens obey the same laws. Let’s continue: Herschel’s map of the Galaxy in 1785, with the Sun located not exactly at the center. Kirchhoff and Bunsen developing spectroscopy in 1859, thereby helping us understand what the stars are made of, the same stuff as the Sun: in other words, determining that the Sun is just another ordinary star, made of more or less the same elements as any other and with billions of almost identical twins out there.

Move now to Harlow Shapley working on Globular Clusters, clusters of stars that is, showing in 1921 how they are distributed around a point some 15kpc from us, the center of the Galaxy therefore being quite away from our Solar System. Even our modern value of 8kpc between us and the galactic center still means we’re somewhere at the periphery.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1755 and then the scientist Alexander von Humboldt in 1845 already made the point that as the Sun is in no special place in the Galaxy, our Galaxy is itself just one of many. And that’s exactly what a guy called Edwin Hubble demonstrated, in 1924.

But wait…isn’t that the same Hubble that came up with the idea of an expanding universe? Is that not supporting a birth for everything in what we call the “Big Bang”? Doesn’t that make us special, as we’re only 13 billion years away from it, that is next to nothing compared to quadrillions of quadrillions of years until the last photon is emitted?

Not so fast. One of the most popular ideas in contemporary cosmology is in fact the existence of a multiverse, a collection of universes just like ours, a concept that elucidates several issues including why our universe exists at all. Some say the number of universes is in the region of 10 to the 500, a number that is totally alien from all our levels of comprehension. Obviously, even if a minute fraction of that number is the true value for a count of all existing universes, our own universe is just, simply, merely one of several many. End of the story?

No. This humility extravaganza doesn’t only work at giant scales. Consider the consequence of finding as many extrasolar planets as we’ve actually discovered as yet…our own doesn’t appear to be either the strangest, or the most interesting (more or less the only thing keeping Earth apart is the existence of liquid water on its surface:
but I would expect a dramatic announcement about that too, sometimes in the near future).

Everywhere we look, at all times we look, we’re one of many.

Let me speak for the rest – we live on just another planet orbiting just another star in just another orbit around just another galaxy weakly attracted to just another supercluster that is anywhere and nowhere really in one universe out of quadrillions of pentillions of them.

And this is the end of the Copernican Gallop. Or is it? An atom in the whole Jupiter is relatively more important than us in the whole of the Cosmos. To what level of nothingness will next generation of astronomers elevate us?

One final word…please. Don’t feel depressed. It doesn’t count, anyway. And this is just another podcast by Omnologos. Thank you for listening.