About

First of all, posts are welcome, by any and all of you.  If you want to post, contact me at SteveG1309@gmail.com.

My name is Steve Garcia.  I have perhaps as much curiosity as any person you will meet, online or in real life.  Like a lot of you, I do not draw the line on inquiry where establishment science and historians do.  I’ve seen them be wrong too many times.  So often, in fact, that I often wonder if anything accepted as fact today will remain the operative paradigm a century from now.  Very little besides math from 100 years ago is still accepted as it was then.  So why should we expect today’s memes to hold for long or prove to be permanent additions to science?  So I personally doubt much of what they conclude.  And when I do agree, I know why I agree.  When I don’t know one way or the other,  I accept their conclusions tentatively, intending to look into it more thoroughly, later.  I also approach alternative explanations the same way.  Nobody gets a free pass, I guess.  Ha ha ha!  Ask the UEA CRU people involved in Climategate about free passes.  Their Get Out of Jail Free card has been rescinded.

How does one get off  saying such things?  Geez, if at some time in life I don’t get to trusting my own judgement what have I been doing with my mind?  I decide what I agree with and what doesn’t makes sense to me.  At the same time, that is a curse, believe me…

I am fairly ferocious when it comes to pursuing answers to questions.  I am even more ferocious pursuing new questions.  Life is a search for questions.  It starts out with, “Why do stars shine, Daddy?”  And it gets a bit more fun the more you search for them.  I learned along the way that if we don’t ask the right questions, we can’t possibly arrive at the answers we are looking for.  (Asking thw rong questions can take people down dead ends for a long time…)  Sometimes we need to go through several levels of asking – but we can’t arrive at the “next” question if our previous questions sucked.  So careful asking and then discerning reassessing is important.

“In scientific inquiries a crucial step is to ask the right question.  Indeed, each question contains presuppositions, largely implicit.  If these presuppositions are wrong or confused, then the question itself is wrong, in the sense that to try to answer it has no meaning.  One has thus TO INQUIRE INTO THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE QUESTION.”

—  Physicist David Bohm

It is also part of the scientific method for other, competing inquirers to be skeptical about any findings and claims and results by their peers – to hold the original inquirer’s feet to the fire.  It is up to those others to determine if he or she has asked the right question, for if he or she has not, then the results – the answer – will have no meaning.

However, in holding the original inquirer’s feet to the fire, the skeptics themselves must also ask the right questions, and every reader/reviewer must always take on the role of the skeptic.

I presume to be a reviewer, and I will endeavor to do so.  Everyone is welcome here.  Just let’s keep it civil, and let’s do some inquiring and reviewing.

A Richard Feynman bit I like:

“The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think.

When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant.

When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain.

And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt.

We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt.

Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty — some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.”

— Richard Feynman

Goodness, it seems I am into acquiring quotes today.  This will make the third one added here today.

“The question of questions for mankind — the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other —is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature.” 

— Thomas Huxley

That one, I admit, is aimed by me at two groups – Creationists and tree huggers.  The former is obvious to the reader.  The latter may not be.  But in that regard, let me quote Patrick Moore, a Co-founder of Greenpeace, who left that organization 20 years ago because it was taken over by post-Cold-War politicos who in his words hate humans::

“To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalization than with science or ecology…

…There is an unfortunate tendency among environmental activists to characterize the human species as a negative influence on the earth. We are likened to a malignant cancer that is spreading, threatening to destroy biodiversity, upsetting the balance of nature, causing the collapse of the global ecosystem. The great myth of the movement is that humans are not really part of nature, that we are somehow “unnatural” and apart from the “pure” natural world. For some reason this idea, like original sin, appeals to people who feel guilty about their existence.”

— Patrick Moore, Co-Founder of Greenpeace

An economics something I found recently :

“Capitalism is not about free competitive choices among people who are reasonably equal in their buying and selling of economic power, it is about concentrating capital, concentrating economic power in very few hands using that power to trash everyone who gets in their way.” 

— David Korten