In Memory of Dr. S. Fred Singer

 

S. FRED SINGER 1924-2020 Memorial comments given by Ken Haapala, President, SEPP, at the Celebration of the Life of S. Fred Singer, September 27, 2020 on the 96th anniversary of his birth Albert Einstein commented: "Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death." That truly applied to Fred Singer. He once commented that he had difficulty understanding Maxwell’s equations. He was 16 at the time. Published in 1861 & 62, Maxwell’s equations helped unify the concepts of magnetism, electricity, light, and radiation – issues which give difficulty to many scientists today. There is no one, simple answer. Even as his body was failing, Fred continued to be mentally alert and put forth the effort to understand the physical world – to learn Though I had met him before, I first got to know Fred when I invited him to speak to the Philosophical Society of Washington, which has been meeting here at the Cosmos Club since the Club acquired the building. I picked Fred up at his home near George Mason University and we chatted at length. After dinner, Fred gave a talk on global warming in which he pointed out that from about 1940 to the mid-1970s, the best global surface temperature measurements available showed a cooling. Then a warming began. Someone in the audience asked why. Fred stated – We don’t know. That impressed me because I had left a field in which many practitioners supplied ready answers – even if they did not have the evidence supporting it. It was remarkable for a speaker to present evidence and admit that there was no satisfactory answer. Years later, at a 2014 meeting with a popular advocate of global warming, someone asked: Why had there been no warming since 1998? This lack of warming was known as the pause. The answer was: It’s hiding in the Southern Oceans. When I ask how does something that occurs in the atmosphere get into the oceans without leaving a trace? The response was: It’s all explained on my web site. Of course, it was not. Later, when Fred and I were discussing the pause, I commented it appears to be disappearing. Fred asked how did I know? I said, Roy Spencer had shown the latest atmospheric temperature trends showing a warming that is approaching the 1998 warming. Fred’s response was that John Christy and Roy Spencer are excellent researchers, so that must be the case. To Fred, evidence trumps personal thoughts and beliefs. On another occasion, Fred described his views on the errors made in the early calculations of the orbits of the satellites used to calculate atmospheric temperature trends. The errors gave the false impression that the atmospheric temperature trend was a cooling. Fred stated that the errors were personally embarrassing, but once the errors were confirmed, they were acknowledged and promptly corrected. The history of science is laden with errors. Scientific knowledge of the physical world advances by acknowledging error and correcting it. It is part of the scientific method. During his life, Fred never stopped learning about the physical world. He was able to separate knowledge, which requires constant testing against physical evidence, from personal beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. Fred Singer was remarkable. Given by Ken Haapala The Cosmos Club, September 27, 2020

Stories

When a person is in a life or death situation, he/she often experiences a guardian angel or a vision they cannot explain or recognize who guides him/her to safety. It is called "the third man." The famous explorer Shackleton experienced this vision when he attempted to rescue his stranded men in the Arctic; a woman with no sailing experience whatsoever successfully sailed her boyfriend's boat to port even though he had drowned very early in the voyage in a terrible storm driven by a hurricane; a scuba diver was guided to the surface with two minutes of oxygen to spare by her dead husband; a highly experienced yachtsman who was attempting to sail around the world solo was caught in a deadly storm around Cape Horn but survived when guided by an apparition.

The third man experience has been replicated in a laboratory setting with robots but subjects could not bear the experience and usually stopped the experiment. In real life or death situation, people are not frightened by this apparition, they are strengthened.

San Francisco's highly expensive real estate, three blocks from the waterfront, sits on created land from the gold rush era when ships and boats were deliberately sunk and dirt fill was added in between. This makes the terrain highly unstable for many buildings.

Some are anchored to the bedrock and are safe but others are anchored eighty feet deep into sand. One such building, the Millennium Tower, built in 2009 has sunk 16 inches already and is leaning two inches.

If a powerful earthquake hits, the soil can liquefy, acting like water, destroying everything in the process.

A classical example of liquefaction is Port Royal which was completely destroyed following an earthquake. Port Royal was the exclusive city of pirates.

Scientists say that San Francisco is due for a major earthquake in the next 30 years.

America an Idea or a Nation Being Transformed

Over the years my students wondered why there are so many different categories of people in our society and why are we not designated as Americans, why the hyphenated Americans? Why is it necessary to classify people into so many categories based on skin color, geographical location, ethnicity, and other subcategories that seem to be useful only to politicians, the census, academia, and to layers of government. They opined that bureaucrats with an agenda, using our own tax dollars, keep Americans divided and at intolerable odds with each other.  

But humans themselves have a desire to self-segregate into groups based on race, ethnicity, and other elements they perceive to have in common with the group or the tribe. Outwardly they declare that they want integration and will go to great lengths to achieve that goal only to reverse it when it is most convenient to them.

Wondering if such an America is worth saving, a conservative radio talk show host recently posed an interesting rhetorical question, “What is America?” His answer gave me serious pause and annoyed me.

He explained that America is an idea that only poets could create, and proceeded to explain the composition of America’s population (race, sex, ethnicity, religion) as part of this idea. He was reluctant to place Americans into distinct race categories, which were constructs invented by academia and politicians to differentiate people of varying skin colors and geographical origins. The host explained that the majority of the American population is still of European descent, but was uneasy about calling them white. Perhaps Caucasian might suffice?

Yes, we are of European descent, but we are not Irish-Americans, German-Americans, or Italian-Americans. The media may describe them as such but Irish, Spanish, German, etc. are nationalities, just like we are all Americans, no hyphenation. They exist because their nations exist.

Let me clarify for him that America is a nation with distinct borders until Democrats and globalists started to erase U.S. borders, reinterpreted immigration rules in the courts and laxed enforcement of borders, claiming that our immigration is broken.  Of course, nothing is broken, politicians are not enforcing existing immigration laws to the benefit of cheap labor and the expansion of Democrat voting rolls.

The citizens living within our borders are called Americans, that is our nationality. Nationality is not watered down just because people from other countries come here legally and become naturalized American citizens. It tends to become less valuable when illegals flood our borders, demand equal rights with American citizens, and have anchor babies who become immediate American citizens, while legal immigrants are patiently waiting far away the dispensation of their legal petitions to become Americans.

Those who come here illegally are not undocumented Americans as the lefties lovingly call them, they are the citizens of their home-countries from which they fled.

American citizens speak American English (although not the official language of the U.S.). We are ethnically diverse and most tolerant of other nationalities and races than any other nation on earth - until recently, that is, when Democrats decided to start a race war and bring back slavery to the 21^st century in order to claim financial reparations they are not entitled to. They claim that America is a racist country and capitalism has failed them miserably therefore they want it replaced with socialism/communism.

It is so easy for liberals to blame their woes on others instead of looking at their Marxist ideology, their lack of personal responsibility, and their disastrous choices in life as their own failings, not the shortcomings of the other side they so profoundly despise.

Humans have tried to segregate from other humans for centuries, using tribal affiliations, geographical location, bizarre concepts, cranium size, skin color, and many skeletal differentiations as revealed in this article. https://www.britannica.com/topic/race-human/Modern-scientific-explanations-of-human-biological-variation

Modern and current race and ethnicity standards were determined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and were published in 1997. The five contemporary race categories, seemingly arbitrary, and their definitions are:

·         American Indian or Alaska Native: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment.

(Where exactly does the Senator from Massachusetts fit in this definition?)

·         Asian: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.

·         Black or African American: A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.

(And if DNA proves that they do not have origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa, what are they?)

·         Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.

(What if persons are born and raised in those areas for generations, but are white? What are they?)

·         White: A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

 

The identified ethnicities by the OMB are:

·         Hispanic or Latino: A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race. The term, "Spanish origin," can be used in addition to "Hispanic or Latino.”

(This definition is curious as Latium was the region of Ancient Rome, the heart of the Roman Empire. What the nationalities listed above have to do with Rome other than Latin language roots, is unclear.)

·         Not Hispanic or Latino

(So other groups of Americans who come from an equally strong ethnic background are just lumped in together for political expediency?)

 

According to a recent article by Daniel Greenfield,  

“Maintaining its proud commitment to printing all the news that will divide Americans by race, sex, and creed, the New York Times published a list of what it claimed were the “922 of the most powerful people in America” while claiming that only 20% of them are people of color.”

Greenfield wrote that “The New York Times’ message is that Muslims are “people of color” and Christians aren’t. It doesn’t matter if their families might have lived some 20 minutes away from each other. Arab Christians are white while Arab Muslims are a minority group.” https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/arab-muslims-are-people-color-arab-christians-are-daniel-greenfield/?fbclid=IwAR2IHSjMscUK-1xiLOQsUyevtN1XgBbh9exqdXzWvPJ1EtbWq1WKIBkWQkg#.X2rcvz990B4.facebook

Given that Americans are so naïve and utterly divided by their own corrupt government, the main stream media, academia, and billionaires with globalist Marxist causes and money to burn, is America likely to survive in its current form?

Will America as a nation morph into a globalist Marxist society in which all American citizens and illegals hiding in plain sight with voting rights and generous welfare become subjects to the whims of the billionaire technocrats who will control everything, including the three branches of the lawless centralized government?

Joe Keller Lived in Romania for Two Years Under Ceausescu's Regime

Joe Keller wrote:

I was on a flight out of Communist Bucharest, Romania on my way to Frankfurt. I was on Lufthansa. It was filled with Romanians who had bought their way to freedom. But, they knew they were not free until they were out of Romanian airspace.

The tension was thick and I could see the fear in their faces.  I had gotten up to stretch legs and looked out the windows. Turning around, I told the nervous faces to relax, we were no longer in Romania and they were safe.

One of them asked me how I could be sure. I told them to look out the windows, all the towns had lights.  The towns in Romania were largely blacked out.

Heads went to the windows and there was a huge cheer and collective sigh of relief with lots of tears and hugging.

-       

America’s Sacred Freedom of Speech on Life Support

If you are a conservative, your sacred freedom of speech is on life support. The tech billionaires in control of various social platforms have become the Soviet-style post office headquarters.

My friend Dr. Mircea and I, when we lived for twenty years behind the Iron Curtain, had all our personal correspondence crudely opened, read, resealed, or confiscated by special KGB commissars, well trained to destroy freedom of speech and to silence any opposition to the communist regime.

When I discovered that, in addition to specific algorithms, Facebook used “fact checkers” hidden and disguised as “friends,” and when I found thousands of such fake friends hiding under variants of fact-checker, fact, factoids, and other spellings, I wrote an article about it describing who these “monitors” for hire were and their lowly $16 per hour pay. These “fact-checkers," who were not necessarily required to have a college education, used as sources of truth opinion articles written in various leftist newspapers and magazine and not scientific journals or scientific facts. Thus, I blocked thousands of such “friends."

The very same day that my article appeared at Canada Free Press, I was restricted for 30 days for a photographic meme which I posted four months before. I could not “go live” for 30 days. Never mind that I never go live at any time, so the punishment was ridiculous on its face. The photograph was an actual photo from WWII and the caption was apropos.

The fact that my account was restricted, and my freedom of speech curtailed on the very same day that my article criticizing Facebook “fact-checkers” appeared, proved my point.  I have never believed in coincidences and I am not about to become a believer now.

After blocking thousands of “fake friends” under Settings/Privacy/Blocking, and finding more and more word search combinations and spellings entered in the rubric Blocking (fakt, fakts, bot, bot check, bot checker, chequ, cheque, fakt-chequers, chequers, facktoid, factors, factoria, fabrica, fabric, fab, fabr), more fact-checkers were assigned to my account each day.

What exactly do I have to say that Facebook finds offensive, threatening, and so in violation of their liberal “community standards?” Is it the fact that I suffered under communism for 20 years, with millions of others, I escaped it, and tried my hardest to expose its tyranny? Is it the fact that the left is trying to install socialism/communism here in America and we, the survivors of such a tyrannical regime, are flies in the globalist ointment?

Is truth now relegated to only what the social media tech giants allow through their Marxist filters?

Must we be submissive to the chicom virus, to the Democrat Party, to the Marxist penetration of public education, social and fake media, and the D.C. swamp who are attempting to transform our shiny city on the hill into a tarnished, rusty urban war zone dominated by fear, corruption, and panic driven non-stop by the supine media and anti-police lawlessness?

How scared and faceless have Americans become if they wear masks for six months now, deep into the woods with few other humans around?

Today, like many other conservative Americans, I have been restricted again on Facebook because I dared to post a video of a nurse who gave testimony as to what happened at the Elmhurst Hospital in New York and how many patients died following placement on ventilators.

How exactly are we endangering anybody by posting a video that people can ignore or delete? And how can we be made responsible for its content when we share it? Since when is social media staffed by medical doctors who can verify that the statements on the video are dangerous and must be suppressed?

And where is my freedom of speech, social media? Are you a social platform protecting select or all individuals of your so-called “community,” or are you a publisher protecting/censoring content?

As my friend Dr. A. Mircea wrote, “For the past few months, my Facebook posting and comments have been severely censored, photos covered, erased, cancelled or outright blocked. Then, in the past few weeks, the censorship commissars informed me officially that my posts and attempts to “wake up America” will be reviewed, eliminated, or prevented from going public.” How is that for communist-style censorship coming from corporations?

America’s sacred freedom of speech is on life support and we must stand up to censors who want conservatives silenced.

Socialized Medicine Drug Dispensing

One example of how ineffective socialized medicine drug dispensing is in the military:

Prior to the Covid-19 lockdown, prescriptions had to be manually carried to the military facility pharmacy to be filled and the wait was on the average one hour.

Now, because of the viral lockdown, doctors can send the prescription to the pharmacy via fax or computer. However, the patient must go to the said pharmacy and personally request that the prescription be activated and wait a couple of hours minimum to have the prescription filled and dispensed if the drug is on their formulary. If it is not on the formulary, the prescription must be transferred to an outside pharmacy and the cost can be expensive or prohibitive especially for retired veterans on a limited income.

Expensive drugs are never on the formulary and the patient must bear the brunt of most of the cost. At least they can get the drug if they have the money.

Some drugs that are taken for a long time can be filled by mail but, in the case of emergency drugs for sudden illness, the drugs must be purchased at the pharmacy.

Socialized medicine worked the same way under the socialist countries ruled by the ineffective Communist Party. The difference was that drugs were ALWAYS in short supply and high demand, or not available to the masses. Those said masses could avoid the shortage by buying on the black market from outside sources, however, most people were too poor and had little resources to buy at such expensive prices. Salaries were relatively equal and small in all professions.

So far, we have avoided that shortage and non-availability fate in this country but for how long?

Huge Berlin, Germany, Rally Against Mask Tyranny

August 29, 2020 – Millions across Germany converged in Berlin to protest the mask-wearing dictates of healthy individuals, six months after the government-imposed lockdown for the good of the ‘collective.’

“Germans are rising up against Bill Gates, demanding humanity wake up and reject the self-styled “world health dictator“, as well as corrupt Big Pharma and the elite who are driving the world towards “global totalitarianism” and “slavery.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke to an enormous crowd in Berlin on Saturday, as tens of thousands of Germans joined forces to protest what Kennedy Jr. referred to as Bill Gates’ “bio-security agenda, the rise of the authoritarian surveillance state and the Big Pharma sponsored coup d’etat against liberal democracy.”

“The pandemic is a crisis of convenience for the elite who are dictating these policies,” said Kennedy Jr., who praised the huge Berlin crowd for being on the frontline of the fight against global totalitarianism.”

My Rant about Millennial Radicals

I would rather sit on a bed of nails than listen to another uninformed, ignorant, brainwashed, never-left the country, lives in mom's basement, unemployed Bolshevik trying to lecture me on the righteousness of his/her fascist ideology cloaked in communist "social justice." Life is too short, I don't want to waste precious minutes on your idiotic ramblings stemming from college professors with an overt global socialism agenda, funding from Soros' non-profits, and based on Saul Alinski's rules for radicals.