Some people who are wrong can gain tremendous support, as you know. Some who are right can gain very little.

You and I value rational discourse and action taken on rational grounds., Alas, the human race is ploitically Neanderthal in this respect. It mostly is led by emotions of the irrational kind.

It is hard for a man who reasons well and is cleverer than most if the world’s population, and more expert, such as yourself, to stoop to operating on the animalistic level, but that is what you have to do in politics.

In this respect your oratory should be positive and uplifting, I believe, yet urge action in the face of the threat. This is a hard trick. Perhaps it is worth studying Gibbon on the history of Rome.

Perhaps Machiavelli?

Here amongst adults, we have just ordinary displays of lacking rationality. That a given proof is more than the opinion of those who refuse to look at it, is not new as we all know. But that in a situation where the proof forebodes doom unless falsified, humanity as a whole and I have to say in the hope you can forgive me — your own profession in the first place — are unable to do their duty, is without historical precedent.

Killing Bruno for being right is one thing, committing collective suicide as a punishment for Bruno is a billion times more stupid.

You are saying that they are exploiting what is a beautiful human trait, trust and empathy in older people?

If so it is difficult not to agree with you. How undignified for senior people to light the house we live in to “see what happens”, and risk making a funeral pyre of the entire plent we live on.

But that is the modern group blunder of the huge organization or field, a trait of modern life. We need heretics like yourself to point this out. But Alas, like Giordano Bruno, you are liable to be burned at the stake rather than thanked. Just ask the estimable Peter Duesberg, who for 25 years has pointed out in peer reviewed articles on the highest level that HIV/AIDS is an ill founded scientific nonsense, and been successfully ostracised for it.

The fate of the whistleblower is not kind.

But I still think this un-disproved state of affairs needs to be dismantled before the third percent can be allowed.

Every person on the planet is on my side, only they are not allowed up until now, to know.

The past will soon need to be changed in the Orwellian sense if this goes on for 4 more weeks. The story is, unfortunately, not over when it is over. Why is no one intelligent enough among those in charge in science and politics to see this?

This is the last chance for the rehabilitation of science and Europe.

As for theodicy, why assume that “Mr. Goodness” is an interventionist? Even if omnipotent, it’s obvious that His interventions are at best sporadic in this world. As the atheistic humanists have shown, one does not need to be religious — merely humane — in order to abhor a slaughter of the innocents, such as an LHC black hole might cause.

This apart from humans, only wolves (and relatives) possess towards selected other adults. (In brood care, most mammals and many other animals show it unilaterally toward the young.)

The symmetric case — that the young can be moved by the felicity of the adult (Mom, say) — is known about humans, but whether it has ever been observed in a dog while in principle conceivable since tailwagging is both friendly and a sign of pleasure (like the happy sniling face in humans) I do not know.

But in humans we do find this. This one 18-months old I observed before the wolves’ cage putting a sweety into his father’s mouth asking “good?!”

This just proves that humans belong to the unique species of parent-feeders (Pongo goneotrophicus). If wolves should be found to do so too, they will be called Lupus goneotrophicus. This still would be not alarming since they are not mirror competent.

But there was this palpable question mark in that toddler’s voice. This element of something adults call benevolence. This event is a “catastrophe “in the sense of catastrophe theory, René Thom’s mathematical theory. For it reflects the invention of the suspicion of benevolence by the human toddler. For the smile not only rewards him — there is also this high-performance universal simulator (VR) built into the brain of us pongids (and other highly brained animals). But here, in the combination with delectatio in felicitate parentis (of the father), a grandiose suspicion arises out of nothing in the toddler: that the other might be delighted internally — and might just as well want you to be delighted in the next case.

This suspicion of benevolenc eis the attribution of a person property by a non-person, a pongid intelligence. But by attributing a person property to another, you (the toddler) became a person yourself.

This is the most dramatic event in the cosmos. A holy invention. Personogenesis. Only from the point of view of biologigy is it pathological since it stops natural selection. At the same time, however, it amounts to a jump towards the end point of evolution, the point Omega, the Avicenna-Teilhard attractor.

This is the unique invention of humanity in the cosmos — infinite trust and love. In the still young and stupid, but never surpassed when it first arises there. We should treasure this lethal factor and export it, Hawking style, before it is too late.

One word on CERN: They deny personhod to me and everyone else if they do not at long last come up with an answer to the genocide theorem — subito. Humankind will otherwise never forgive them.

Professor, which trap is that? Did you mean to write it, or the opposite? Empathetic humans have genuine joy in one another’s pleasure do they not? And why shouldn’t animals feel it, since they are so similar to us.

Are not animals generally nicer than we are, if they are tame? I think they set a very good example.

Dear me, is this the correct tone of civil discourse for which Lifeboat is renowned?

As we have often privately observed in the past, Houston, it may be that you have difficulty with fundamental logic, is this so? Is that why your posts are distinguished for filling in facts and quoting references, but when they attempt even elementary mathematical reasoning, only excite the CERN defense squad here to ridicule your “private algebra”? I sincerely hope this is not the case.

In this instance it seems that your defense of theo-idiocy rests first on saying that my pointing out its lack of logic is somehow disrespect in a juvenile vein. But I merely point out the internal inconsistency of the concept human loving all powerful interventionist God, which if you knew anything about modern philosophy you would know was a given in all modern discussion. One reference to peruse might be Simon Blackburn’s little volume “Think” , in which that most distinguished Oxford scholar explains this point to the confused lay crowd (p175) . But then you don’t need Blackburn since you have already concluded that theodicy has to abandon the concept of the omnipotent God.

This is all rather surprising, since your defensive emotion seems rather group think in flavor, where you feel it is wrong to undermine social shibboleths of the religious or moral kind as “juvenile” trolling, when in fact it is merely applying elementary logic. You are not against applying reason to the claims of CERN’s religious faith in its spurious safety claims, are you?

Why then object to undermining belief in a Deity who is both all powerful and uninterested in intervening in human life to the extent of saving us all from the LHC potential of generating mBHs and strangelets to swallow us all?

“Theodicy is a challenge only if one assumes that goodness/divinity is necessarily omnipotent.” — Houston

Your second reason is that the Deity — let’s call it Mr Goodness — is not necessarily omnipotent. Very true, as noted above. But this is a spurious out. Most of the overwhelming portion of humanity who believe in Mr Goodness — extending to some older scientists, unfortunately, who abandon their professional principles later in life as their existential terror rises and their spine weakens — believe he is omnipotent and will even answer prayers if they are sufficiently urgent. They believe this even though there is not one indication yet that the chances of their prayers being answered is more than 50–50.

Actually I don’t think that the willingness to tackle fundamental questions is juvenile at all. On the contrary it indicates that in the service of enlightenment one is willing to question world wide assumptions. This ability is especially important in reviewing the behavior of CERN, for example. I am sorry you won’t extend your practiced ability in this area to an equally fat headed group-think, the rationalization of the religious impulse, especially since this as I have pointed out above is actually the very political problem we have with CERN and the LHC. Given their faith nothing will go wrong, which flouts their own safety reasoning, if you look closely, as you have pointed out , it is a religious impulse, and it is not juvenile to question a religious impulse. On the contrary, it is the first sign of true adulthood.

This applies even to your other apparent Deity, Dr Rossler. This principled scientist is the only scientific theorist on the planet willing to step up to the plate in public and fend off the brickbats of the ignorant and the CERN bots for the sake of the future of humanity as he sees it, and he stands out in this regard as a man of uniquely stiff spine. Unlike most other scientists who seem to reliably turn into jelly as they approach their existentialist deadline, as mentioned above.

But he is a human and it is perfectly well to ask if he is in good health and even to urge him to get his theorems in order so that they and his cause may win the respect he deserves. He is not a God, Houston, even if he proves as impotent as God to change the course of human affairs as they rush lemming like to the precipice.

He is a human being, which is the basis on which he asks for consideration for the nearly 7 billion other humans on this planet who live outside the financial structure of CERN and the LHC.

As to your objecting to my unusually frank speculation that most of these 7 billion humans do not particularly care for the other 7 billion humans beyond their immediate family and friends, other than those they see on TV or read about in a desperate plight, where they can put faces to the crises concerned, I am not saying that your or Professor Rossler’s concern for humanity in general is a bad thing, or even false.

I am saying it is an imaginative act, and not one emotionally based on the reality of your life experience. For example, I doubt if you would easily put up with any but a tiny few for long if they were to move into your apartment or house.

Even the most attractive young females among them. This is, of course, assuming you are a bachelor scholar, which is the flavor of your posts.

Let’s hope that in such a case you do not have the same difficulty with birth control as do most of the human race.

“Population control is responsibly addressed through birth control, not genocides or genocide”. — Houston

Given that difficulty, and the fact we face the appalling prospect of 12 billion mostly surplus people on this planet if we escape the LHC unscathed, I was only suggesting that a mBH could be the solution if it could be operated for a limited time in a limited way, to vacuum up maybe 6 billion of the current nearly 7 billion.

What is your objection to this, if Dr Rossler can pronounce it feasible? It would be a lot more painless than starvation, which is the current solution we are promised by current trends.

What I never understood for 3 1/2 years is the special hostility shown by the Greens on the planet against my attempts to help their most tangible cause.

For those who may be confused, Pinky and the Brain are murine scientists (genetically enhanced, highly intelligent mice) at “Acme Labs”, who were so renowned as to be the subject of an animated TV show in the 1990s. The Brain uses his gifts to plot world domination, usually foiled by the bumbling of his amiable pal Pinky.

Admittedly, some of their comments at Lifeboat have been quite amusing, especially the bits about making cheesecake and calling a safety conference with Dr. Rossler and their mouse friends. “The Brain” is an acronym for Biological Recombinant Algorithmic Intelligence Nexus. Meet him in person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ7NoIz0Zc&feature=related

Their claim of a terminal “os” is true of the Greek but not the English spelling of “Telemachus”. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemachus .