If your greatest weapon is your brain, how about this fastest computing machine in the world?  It cost $100 million dollars.  It lasts only about 3 years and must be replaced.  Crowds line up vying for its time and computing power to be brought to bear on their problem.  You can imagine the scope of these problems that would drown lesser computers under oceans of data.

And, they are wasting its time.

As always, no matter how big the brain, garbage in = garbage out.  Want to know what occupied an entire month of Jaguar’s computing time?

I listened to Jeff Nichols who sits atop the wizard, pushes its buttons and pulls its levers in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  Fascinating and I do not fault Jeff for the jobs Jaguar gets sent on.  It’s just a machine and he is the operator.  Jeff explains that national boards and committees take applications, hear the arguments, debate and decide whose project is important enough to occupy days, weeks or even a month’s time.

Climate change.  Some committee decided that climate change was so important that it got in front of everything else for a month.  Jeff shills for this silliness, carrying the water for the Marx-infected policy wonks, saying “We have to manage our energy assets,” which he explains really means first, we have to “manage carbon.”  Why do we have to “manage carbon?  Well, of course, because this element that forms the basis of life is the Wicked Witch of Warming!

So, Cray’s Jaguar–still for now the #1 fastest computer in the world–working away there about 30 miles from MJM at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been kidnapped by Al Gore!

Jeff, please don’t get me wrong.  I’m glad you’re here.  Really.  I respect what ORNL and you do.  More than you know.  I consider the scientific method–rigorously adhered to–to be one of the greatest achievements of western civilization.  I realize you work many projects.  Many of the energy related projects are practical, such as running the management science to identify the optimum sites for nuclear power plants.  Indeed, I think what is going to come out of Jaguar (I can see this on a little slip of paper like getting your “fortune.”) is that we have been idiots for stalling nuclear power development in the US for the last 4 decades, thanks to the same environmental movement demanding all that computer time.  What delicious environmental irony!  They–like today’s Islamist movement–set out to dismantle modernity, to turn back the clock, to break up technology’s unholy marriage to commerce and stop the monstrous, modern, munching United States of America in its ravenous tracks.  And what do they “prove” if the Jaguar finds them correct about global warming?  They prove we need nuclear power.  LOL

What do the Islamists prove? They prove that even the sublime rules of the Koran are not enough to medicate and cure man’s most vile urges.  Sigh, can we not accept that there is no utopia on earth, and man knows so, so little?

Jeff gushes that we understand the oceans, the winds, the physical forces of nature.  Now, we just need to collect data and feed it into Jaguar.

Really, Jeff?  We understand the forces of nature?  We understand the physical forces of our world?  Jeff, please!  We don’t even understand gravity.  We can tell you how to wire our house, but our understanding of what electricity is fizzles at the electron level.  Our present means of explaining why the universe does not behave as the “models” predict is to make up “dark matter.” Oooohhh, is that like making up spirit names for all the noises we hear in the jungle at night?

So, paradoxically, when tasked with crunching masses of “climate change data” Jaguar twiddles its thumbs working hard to grind out nothing.  For, instead of working science, it will be working computer models.  Computer models belong in the “hypothesis exploration” phase of the scientific method.  Instead, the little paper slips spit out after running computer models are seen as “results” as if some scientist’s well-formed hypothesis were actually proven.  Then, they march these to Congress and cry for the King to make the sky stop falling.

I am taken aback by the supreme arrogance.

I am proud that my state is the home to two of the top three computers in the world, although the Chinese are in the race.  I am proud of ORNL and, Jeff, believe it or not, I’m proud of you and glad you are here.

But, science is only as good as the rigor applied to the experimental method.  A fancy calculator does not science make.  I am utterly dismayed to learn that the Jaguar is frittered away on global warming.  It’s like the idiocracy has co-opted the Jaguar to try to figure out why their crops won’t grow.

Here’s a premise for you to chunk into Jaguar.  Let’s state it as an hypothesis to prove:

H1: Intelligence is directly proportional to wisdom.

My bet is that the little slip of paper will come out saying, “Sorry, humans!  Trix are for kids and intelligence can set you on the primrose path just as quickly as it landed you on the moon.

The real story is the Bloomberg news spin, comically desperate to convince us all that this is not an Islamic terror plot.

• Sami Samir Hassoun is a Lebanese citizen (living legally in the U.S. but that is another issue).
• He considered a biological attack.
• He planned to blow up a neighborhood with bars, restaurants and clubs to “kill as many people as he could.”
• He hoped to be paid for the bombing: the article conspicuously omits any mention of just who he might have thought would commission such services.
• He actually did plant a backpack device with a twenty minute timer.  It was inert.
• The article weakly suggests motives: anger with Mayor Daley, wanting to “transform” Chicago.

I want to be clear: I do not know his motivations.  I do not know if he is an “Islamic terrorist.”  I do not know this because nowhere in the Bloomberg article is his religion–if any–mentioned.  It is as though by omitting the word “Muslim” or the word “Islamic” the reporters and the city officials can pretend to all of us that the bomb plot does not raise the specter of yet another radicalized young Muslim man, living among us, pretending to be one of us, smiling and taking photos with friends, but secretly determined to kill us.  If he is not a Muslim, then relieve us all and do other Muslims a big favor by saying it.  If he is, well, perhaps you should at least include that fact as having some possible relevance.  All peace-loving Americans–Muslim and non-Muslim alike–are going to have to deal with Islamic terrorism.

Thanks to the undercover informants and operatives who reported this and worked with the FBI to stop him.  At last some of them are probably Muslims covering our back and saving our lives.

Better detail is found here but we will have to wait for the truth to come out about the motives.  This Canadian source is clear about his religion and his jihadi motivation.  See, jihad is now so common I don’t even italicize the foreign word any more.  Jihad has entered the common English lexicon.

I say again: We–Americans who are not out to destroy America–Muslim Americans and visitors included–have a problem.  This problem is that more than just a few Muslims hate our country so much that we deserve utter eradication.  We deserve torture, throat-cutting, beheading, and shooting but the preferred method is one that takes out thousands of us at once.  All of us, if possible.  Americans are less-than-human infidels, and Muslims not waging jihad are apostate, also deserving the same death.  Newsflash to the American left: This is a problem.  You may lie in that same “hate America” bed but they won’t respect you in the morning.  They will cut your throat, too.  Whom will you choose as your ally?

I used to know the Chicago north side neighborhood where this man–shown here by his Facebook photo–wanted to blow thousands of fellow-Chicagoans, out for a good time, to smithereens.