The American answer to hurricanes?

I was wondering this hurricane season what a nuclear bomb would do to a hurricane and how the global warming crowd would cry about an attempt at real global management. The answer of the American Empire to an imminent and growing threat could be: "I say that we blow them sky high!" If this were true:

In an effort to combat the devastating effects of category 5 hurricanes, New Tech Spy has learned from well connected DoD sources, that the US Department of Homeland Security has teamed with the US Air Force, in a secret mission called “Operation Dark Sky”. Dark Sky’s purpose is to test the effectiveness of the newly developed MOAB fuel air explosive on the destructive eye wall of selected hurricanes, in an effort to disrupt the central core’s development and diminish its intensity. The program will begin this summer, primarily in the Gulf of Mexico, and extend through the 2006 hurricane season.
---The GBU-43/B (MOAB), “Mother of all bombs” was developed in the run-up to the Iraq war, but was never used in battle. The 21,000 pound fuel air bomb works by first dispersing an aerosol cloud of tritonal, which is then set off by a secondary explosion. The force of the explosion creates a massive pressure wave unlike that of any other conventional bomb, and makes it an ideal platform for US scientists to test on the different types of atmospheric conditions created in a hurricane.

(NewTechSpy)

As for the nuclear option:

During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

Now for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why this would not be an effective hurricane modification technique. [...] To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.

(NOAA)

From there they go on to note that any management of global proportions is basically impossible, including the "Mother of all bombs."

MOAB: "The 21,000 pound fuel air bomb works by first dispersing an aerosol cloud of tritonal, which is then set off by a secondary explosion." ...an aerosol cloud sitting there in 100 mph winds, no less.

I keep up with conspiracy theorists anyway. Good storytelling, it's an art.

Comments...

I've been commenting more than posting lately. Instead of a post today, some comments are here, here (most acerbic), here(interesting local story), here, here, here and here (longest).

And more, I can be prolific if I start focusing on this. Yet I'm not posting on my own blog, things to do.

Daniel Dennett

I was curious about his latest book. From a review:

His theory is that religion has evolved in the human cultural context in much the way human bodies evolved in the biological context. Early religious impulses, he says, have biological explanations -- the placebo effect of shamanistic rituals would likely have contributed to human health, for example. And, because humanity's animal instincts would have programmed humans to be wary of things that moved (such things might be predators), humans were predisposed to attribute agency to moving things. The movements of nature, then, must be attributable to agents we cannot see -- perhaps our dead ancestors, perhaps gods.

(The San Diego Union-Tribune
February 5, 2006 Sunday
BOOKS; Pg. BOOKS-5
Headline: The Crusader; Daniel C. Dennett's `Breaking the Spell' has good stuff -- but the wheat's hard to find in a sea of chaff
Byline: Cyril Jones-Kellett)

Besides the idiotic way that his mythological narrative of naturalism is written, the anthropological theory that spiritism evolved into polytheism and then theism was already advanced by better minds and refuted based on a broad pattern of anthropological evidence that indicates that cultures may have begun with theism and fallen away from the Great Spirit or invisible "Sky-God" rather than beginning with spiritism based on animals and evolving from there. It's a quaint little story that people naturally want to believe is true because they like thinking that they're more evolved but the evidence does not comport to it. The original theory was presented in a better form in Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and Custom (London 1871), by Edward B. Tylor. Perhaps if Darwinists would actually look at the evidence or seek some ways of falsifying their little stories instead of writing yet more narratives about things that suit our vanities then they would not be proposing the same arguments over and over again. Most of their arguments seem to date to around the late 1800s, even the "just like gravity" nonsense. The really pathetic thing about it is that they sometimes still put the same hundred year old frauds in their textbooks even as they throw some sort of hissy fit about how technology and civilization will collapse if their texts are so much as labelled as "theory." Their hypothetical goo hardly rises to the level of a theory that can be falsified. But we can't have students thinking about the mythological narratives of naturalism typical to Darwinists, don't you know, otherwise they might start asking all the questions that Darwinists don't have answers to.

Reading Dennett is like reading a repeat of proto-Nazi times when people took Darwinism deadly seriously, even reviewers in the Old Press seem to see it. They're actually pretty critical of the little fellow. E.g.:

Dennett, who is a lifelong academic, is not really a very good writer for the general reader. He tends to get bogged down. He spends the first 60 pages minutely answering every possible objection that a religious person might have to his taking up the subject. The religious person facing page after page of begging and cajoling for open-mindedness* might fairly ask the writer to just get on with his points.

Second, Dennett is not convincing when he asserts that there is a taboo against the scientific study of religion. Religion has been the subject of "natural" study since at least the time of David Hume. What spell is left to be broken here?
[...]
In later chapters and in the appendices, he makes a startling leap from scientific speculation to social-policy prescriptions. This very nearly scuttles his entire project. It is a mockery of science to propose an admittedly rudimentary theory and then, from this sketch, start extrapolating policy implications. Perhaps a little bit of research first? Let's at least fill the theory [It's an old theory that crumbles in light of evidence drawn from many cultures.] in before we start treating it as a blueprint for our social life.

But Dennett is undeterred, and this is unfortunate, because his policy prescriptions have a frighteningly totalitarian bent. He suggests that government should perhaps forbid parents from passing on religious beliefs to their children unless the parents are willing to teach a government-approved curriculum.

(Ib.) (Emphasis added)

Perhaps next he'll be lecturing about the "fairy tale of the Jews" and the like, it seems to me that Darwinists may as well go ahead and use all the "brutally honest" language of people who took the Darwinian worldview as true, in all their own brutality. They are those who think that the truth is brutal, so they look to brutes for it.

*Did you ever notice how people constantly singing the virtues of keeping an open mind are usually the same people that want you to keep your mind open so that they can put their crap in it?

[Related posts: Evolutionism and Proto-Nazism]

Another comment...

This post apparently wound up on an activist site and now someone seems to be trying to comment on it. Unfortunately they seem to be repeating what passes for gay talking points these days.

A comment from Uncommon Descent...

In quantum cryptography, we can detect the effect of an intelligent intrusion into a crytographic system because someone’s intelligent choice has triggered a collapse. See: Dartmouth.edu

By way of extension, because we see the universe, we are detecting that some agency is collapsing wave functions in the future.

We are being created through the Ultimate Observer’s act of knowing (measurement) in the future. In other words, your question is approaching QM classically (where the past affects the future). But the Quantum idea is the reverse: the future affects the past. The fact we exist is evidence our wave functions are being observed at the end of time and have not yet collapsed in the present. The past and present exist because of what will happen in the future. If our wave functions were already fully collapsed, the world would be at an end.

So to answer your question, observant entities (you and I and everyone) encapsualted inside the Universal wave function would not even exist to make observations in the present world were it not for the Ultimate Observer in the future peering back into time. In a way, our wave functions have collapsed, but in the future. The history of the universe is fixed by a future event.

This rather shocking inference was borne out by experiments in the 1970 with Wheeler’s double-slit-delayed-choice experiment which happened actually in Tipler’s school, the University of Maryland. We were able to demonstrate the future affects the past in small quantum systems. More amazingly, one could even somewhat re-write the past (quantum erasure experiments) and thus make something anew.

Comment under: Peer-Reviewed Stealth ID Classic : The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1987)

Given that I already think that God exists, in fact I know it, I'm not focused on more evidence in that respect. The real question to me is what type of God exists. For instance, a thought may come to my mind about why any type of God or gods would not just go back in time and fix things with respect to Good and Evil. That thought can become a question or a doubt depending on how it is thought about. The interesting thing is that one could will your own ignorance into a whole chain of doubts that undermine faith in God and build faiths in other things like your own will or capacity to sit in judgment on Good and Evil, when there are ultimately answers. Or it may be that there is ultimately knowledge that we may just have to be ignorant of for now or that there are answers that only a few have the intellect to understand anyway. Even knowing such possibilities I may will to weave a little stream of doubt and the like if I choose to oppose God. It is a choice of the will that God allows and seems to keep letting exist, after all.

It seems to me that most of the time that we try to sit in judgment on good and evil in ways that are far beyond us, as in my time travel example or the condemnations of God typical to atheists, that all we're really doing is asking for our own destruction. For instance, in the example above if God had said, "People are evil, so let's go back in time and try creating them again." instead of letting evil exist for a time then I, as a sinful person, would not exist. Why do we ask for our own destruction? It's pretty consistent that we do. Most of the time when we judge we condemn ourselves with our own words.

Interesting to note that according to some sociologists who control for many variables in their studies and the like suicide rates are higher among atheists. Atheists seem to be making manifest a form of self-destructive judgment that is typical to them. Yet have they succeeded in their own destruction in the way that they think they will? After all, the events that brought them into existence were written in the dust of the verses of the universe long ago. It would seem that no one can be certain that their body, brain, form and soul will not be written again in some form given all that could be.

Some people make the mistake of assuming that the soul is some spirit divorced from the physical reality of our bodily form now or is some Platonic form that only exists in the supposed world of the Forms/Heaven. That leads to many things, like thinking that the flesh is always evil while the idealized form is always good; that people who do physical work are lesser than those who work with forms of information; that men who tend to have a sense of the sensuous form are better than women who tend to be the sensuous form, and so on and on. Read Plato, he promoted that type of thinking. Yet such notions actually do not comport with biblical texts, which instead indicate that the soul is a constant marriage of spirit/essence with body/existence, form and being in the physical here and now. In other words this is your soul, existing in your brain events here and now. Yeah. Hi there, little fella...

Plato often seems to speak of many biblical things given his understanding of basic patterns, e.g. the heavenly world of the Forms and coming out of the symbolic cave to be born again with respect to signs and symbols and so on. But that does not mean that the Bible comports with Platonic ideas.

Hate

I suspect that all I'm accomplishing here is stirring up hatred against me, personally. There are some minds that have never read an empirical fact or form of information that they cannot avoid by hiding in their own lil' feelings about it all, such as hatred.

If you fear the Gay© topic then don't click the link. I think it gets the most comments because of the way that people have simplistic emotionally conditioned responses with respect to Gay© these days. They're not thinking, generally they just have emotional motivation based on their conditioning and the buzzwords that they're supposed to repeat and the like. It's interesting because I used to debate Gay© activists at a higher level than the people who seem to just go around repeating the cultural scripts that they're given and they're often a bit more open as to the manipulation that goes on. Going way back to their treatment at the hands of psychologists, who can really blame them?

Yet as I recall, some have warned against maintaining all the language of their reactionary stance against psychologists from which most Gay© terms are drawn. E.g. sexual orientation, etc. To keep this short, if you keep medicalizing yourself and trying to define your "identity" and civil rights medically then you stand at the mercy of the people in white lab coats who tend to be rather economically minded. One day they stoke their moral vanity by making supposed individual civil rights some sort of medical issue while overlooking the collective general welfare or the equal application of standards to all, the next they may well go back to "treatments." They tend to swing rather wildly and quickly from radical individualism to collectivism because they do not base their thought on principles originally.