As posted ad nauseum above, the guys inspecting your stuff when you cross the border are not the same guys who make you take off your shoes to get on a plane.
Bruce Schneier's recommendation for this situation is that your company have a secure VPN in place so that once you're across the border you can connect to the office and download any sensitive material you need. Before you return, VPN in again and upload your work back to the office so that the laptop is clean as a whistle when it goes through customs.
See, that's the kind of comment that really trips my bullshit detector. Now, we all know government bureaucrats ain't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, but if you're assuming a massive government conspiracy to pull off a fake terrorist attack and blame Muslims for it, do you really think that the one thing that trips them up is going to be the decision to plant a document that couldn't possibly have survived at the crash site? I mean, that would be like faking the moon landing and forgetting to fake the rocket launch beforehand. I can certainly believe in government stupidity, but still, there are limits.
"GROSS NEGLIGENCE - Failure to use even the slightest amount of care in a way that shows Recklessness or willful disregard for the safety of others." - 'Lectric Law Library.
Yeah, those bastards, the way they used THE SLIGHTEST AMOUNT OF CARE in designing a system that shuts down in response to unexpected data so as to avoid RECKLESSNESS with the SAFETY OF OTHERS.
Come on, do you really think that quote is better than this one?
Mr. Liggett: All right, Lightman. Can you tell us who first suggested the idea of reproduction without sex? David: Um...your wife? Liggett: Get out, Lightman. Get out.
Even before 9/11 planes have traditionally been high value targets. Originally this was probably because jet travel was regarded as sort of symbolic of the wealthy and privileged (the expression 'jet-set' though perhaps a bit dated, is a product of that mentality). So whatever the specific nature of your complaint, targeting a passenger jet was a way of focusing on high value targets, as opposed to, say, hitting a Greyhound bus.
Additionally, factor in some of the tactical benefits of an assault on a plane: you automatically have mobility and hostages, which affords you some protection against police or military who might try to intervene. And if your goal is widespread death, crashing or detonating a plane is pretty surefire, compared to a comparable attack on the ground.
Of course, common sense tells us that if we make planes terrorist-proof, terrorists will just strike elsewhere. There's a diminishing marginal return on airplane security, and products like this facecrime camera are probably WAAAAY out there in terms of cost/benefit.
I can hear Richard Attenborough now. "We have created creatures so astonishing that they will capture the imagination of the entire world...welcome, my friends, to Nordic Park."
Just make sure to keep those electric fences on; last time the berserkers got out they took out an entire tour group from Milaukee.
I always get a kick out of seeing those 20-something boneheads riding rice rockets at 80mph in nothing but shorts and a tank top. Can anyone else say "future skin graft candidate?"
Of course, the difference between a 'terrorist test' (presumably some sort of deep data mining across a variety of databases) and the kind of disease test Doctorow uses for an example is that repeating the terrorist test is unlikely to produce greater accuracy. Let's say you have some combination of factors that, according to the algorithm, makes you a suspect. Running the same search again will uncover the same factors and produce no improvement in your estimation, hence the need for the complementary inspection you mention. But what would that mean for the terrorist test? Probably more invasive investigation, which, apart from the obvious civil liberties issue, means more time, money, and manpower that has to be spent. So when your first screen does a poor job of identifying suspects, you have to spend a fortune disqualifying the false positives in order to root out the true positives. So it isn't really a logic problem when considered in the applicable context.
Did you actually read the review before making a snide, bigoted comment? Title aside, the book isn't of the style "hey, he's got a beard and he prays facing Mecca, shoot him!" but more about describing the mindset, background, and organization of modern terrorist groups. So even if us dumb Americans do manage to read this book, it's unlikely that it would lead to any increase in violence. But hey, don't let reality get in the way of being a gigantic douche.
Ah, excellent question. One of the things Richard Dawkins has been living down for years is his popularization of the term 'selfish gene,' precisely because so many people misunderstand it to mean 'genes promoting selfishness.' The reality is more subtle: genes promoting organism-level behavior which produces more copies of the gene will tend (all else being equal) increase in frequency within a population.
For social creatures, things like fairness and reciprocity are beneficial, because they encourage people to help each other out and to honor commitments. Most species also display punitive behavior--if they catch another 'cheating,' they'll levy punishment against the cheater, even at a cost to themselves. So if being a selfish bastard causes your tribe (or flock, or pack, etc.) to cast you out or kill you, then the genes that produce selfishness will carry a penalty that limits their success. Since cooperation often produces better results (more food, more territory, less violence) than separatism, which in turn lead to more reproduction, it makes sense that genes encouraging cooperative behavior (including justice) would tend to predominate in social creatures.
If you'd like to know more, check out the wikipedia article for 'reciprocal altruism,' or even better, pick up Steve Pinker's 'How the Mind Works,' an outstanding book that considers the possible evolutionary underpinnings of behavior.
...and it's the Thomas Moore Law Center, the self-described sword and shield of Christianity in the US, that's working so hard to force creationism--I mean, intelligent design--down the throats of of those high school kids. In fact, you'll note that the ID movement as a whole probably has more lawyers on its payroll than actual biologists.
Which of course doesn't make lawyers in general evil, but maintain some perspective.
No, I read it fine, I just didn't give it much credence. Nowhere in evolutionary theory is it suggested that you could make a dog from a cat. It is, however, understood that you could have some kind of mammalian precursor which speciates over time to produce two different lineages: one canine, and one feline.
Next, you've got a few things tangled up here. Evolution does not necessarily mean a gradual increase in complexity--no single mutation will take you from a 'simple' life form to a more complex one. However, over incredibly long periods of time, significant mutational variation can develop which, shaped by natural selection (and other forces such as drift, or founder effect) can result in an increase in complexity. As for the effects of a single mutation, well, you might consider sickle cell anemia. A single mutation in the hemoglobin gene that provides carriers with protection against malaria. A fairly minor point, but it's enough so that when you map areas of high prevalence for SC and malaria in Africa they overlap almost perfectly--a clear example of a new phenotype, generated by mutation, which proves adaptive in the environment.
Next, how ridiculous is it for you to call out evolution because you can't see in a human timescale processes that take millions of years? Would you argue that the Grand Canyon couldn't have been formed by erosion because you've never seen any canyons formed that way? Creationists like to use the word 'macroevolution' to try to separate the real meat of evolution from the limited examples we CAN see in our lifetimes--the only difference is scale.
And finally, if you read my post, you'll note that I commented that even Darwin despaired over the value of the fossil record for proving his point; he put much more emphasis on his study of living things in their environments. We are able to draw some broad conclusions from it, but you'll find far more evidence for evolution from molecular biology and biochemistry these days.But then, the book you're touting not only proposes to discredit evolution, but also more or less everything else that science currently accepts about the history of the planet, so I have relatively little hope that you'd be motivated to learn more about the volumes of evidence stacked up against that quack Walt Brown.
I'll grant that you're paraphrasing from this book from memory, but I can tell you that these are all tired creationist arguments that have been thrashed, again and again, and that can easily be debunked by anybody with a bit of biological knowledge.
First, your comment is self-contradictory. You first claim that "Different combinations are formed, not different genes," and then you state "mutations are the only known means by which new genetic material becomes available for evolution." When a mutation occurs in a gene, then a new gene has been created. It may not be a very useful mutation, and it may not be maintained, but it is undeniably new. Further, if you accept common descent, it should be obvious that you and I have genes that, say, hamsters do not. Hell, corn has got about three times as many genes as you or I--are you still claiming recombination is the only difference?
Next, mutation is far more complex than you make it out to be--not the kind of complex whereby a single changed nucleotide in a key geen turns a fruit fly into a blue whale, but the kind of complex that has the potential to introduce all sorts of variation. Changes in regulatory elements, for example, can leave most of the genes unchanged and still have major consequences for the organism's development. A simple example of this is the mutation that causes fruit flies to sprout legs where there antennae should be--granted, not much of an improvement, but it should suggest to you the power of mutation in changing living things.
Lastly, the concept of transitional forms is sticky for a lot of reasons. For one, by definition you'd expect them to be fairly short lived (once an organism starts to develop a useful trait, we'd expect selection to drive it pretty quickly toward a stable phenotype). Next, as you're probably aware, the fossil record is terribly fragmented--even in Darwin's time he wrote that there would probably never be thorough fossil evidence for descent. And finally, 'species' is a fairly digital concept: we see an animal (or its fossils) and we stick it into one category or another. But life forms are analog--there ought to be a whole series of 'transitional species' that show the progression from A to B, but rather than trying to classify them all separately, they often get lumped in on one side or another. So the argument that there are no transitional forms is specious, because A) we have found some, and B) the entire concept is fairly ill-defined and based on a fragmentary record.
So again, I recognize that you're probably not giving a fair accounting of the book, but if those are his most compelling arguments, then he probably ought to sit in on a few college bio classes before he does any more writing.
You seem to be a bit off. Sensitivity to initial conditions is a condition of chaos, but not the whole thing. From wikipedia: "Sensitivity to initial conditions is often confused with chaos in popular accounts. It can also be a subtle property, since it depends on a choice of metric, or the notion of distance in the phase space of the system. For example, consider the simple dynamical system produced by repeatedly doubling an initial value (defined by the mapping on the real line from x to 2x). This system has sensitive dependence on initial conditions everywhere, since any pair of nearby points will eventually become widely separated. However, it has extremely simple behaviour, as all points except 0 tend to infinity. If instead we use the bounded metric on the line obtained by adding the point at infinity and viewing the result as a circle, the system no longer is sensitive to initial conditions. For this reason, in defining chaos, attention is normally restricted to systems with bounded metrics, or closed, bounded invariant subsets of unbounded systems."
Your example isn't particularly material here because it doesn't tell us much about the veracity of ID as a whole. Conventional neo-Darwinism provides a perfectly adequate explanation for your example. First, we do see transitional forms in the fossil record, though obviously because the record is imperfect we don't see all of them. And molecular genetics allows us to see transitions at the genome level--we can see how mutations accumulate over time in conserved genes, and how the number increase as two species diverge. Neo-Darwinism also explains why you'd see such similarities throughout nature: because once a useful mechanism evolves, it gets passed down and spreads. Or, you could have a case of convergent evolution, where similar environments produce similar adaptations without a need for immediate common heritage.
And frankly, even your propose prediction is kind of suspect. If your designer is all knowing and all powerful, why should he be limited to reusing the same techniques over and over? Wouldn't it be more interesting for him to try radically different stuff? And why couldn't he create transitional forms if he wanted to, just for a little variety? In short, your testable prediction is based entirely on how you interpret the designer's motives, making it subjective and untestable.
If a putative 'designer' worked through an evolutionary mechanism, then there's no problem. We can study living things and our theory of evolution will be an increasingly accurate description of what really happened (though it will never be perfect, because we can never be sure we've seen all the facts). In this case, it doesn't really matter if there's a designer or not--we'll see the same mechanisms in play either way.
But most ID proponents actually believe that God takes an active role in creation, i.e., He reaches down and prods that paramecium into becoming something more. This is manifestly supernatural and would be generally inconsistent with a materialistic theory.
But here's the trick: how do you differentiate between things we can't explain because they're supernatural, and things we can't explain because we just don't know enough? The ancient Greeks blamed thunder on cranky gods in the sky, but today we know better. Similarly, many of the examples Mike Behe presented of 'irreducbily complex' (i.e., designed) structures in molecular biology have already had evolutionary explanations developed for them.
And I'm going to assume you haven't actually seen the movie, in which Stein draws a LITERAL connection between evolution and the Holocaust. Scientists are shown juxtaposed with goose-stepping Nazis. So yeah, I do take issue with that, as would most reasonable people.
I have to disagree. In fact, I think 'Chopping Mall' may have been the best of the 'killer security robots stalk heavily armed teens through a shopping mall' movies of the 1980s.
Why shame on them? They're not government, and they're not academics. They wouldn't be doing the research if there wasn't a way to make a buck off of it. If you don't want to shell out for their knowledge or their 'software assets,' then feel free to turn to one of the many other research groups who aren't working for a profit.
What you say may be true, but I can't help but think of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his black swans. He would argue that while your wild fires might fit the existing statistical models, a REAL disaster, the kind with the potential to really knock the country on its ass, would be essentially impossible to predict. I'm not sure I entirely buy into his thinking, but you have to admit, it's usually the unexpected stuff that produces the greatest impact.
It's true that you can't logically conclude the guy is wrong just because his credentials don't match what you might consider an 'ideal' particle physicist. However, given that other people with relevant expertise have already looked into these possibilities and judged them to be incredibly unlikely, I don't see why this guy deserves any special attention. Anyone can make any kind of claim, but if they don't have evidence, and they don't have specialized knowledge of the topic, how are they any different from any other quack?
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As posted ad nauseum above, the guys inspecting your stuff when you cross the border are not the same guys who make you take off your shoes to get on a plane.
Is not problem, comrade! If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear!
Bruce Schneier's recommendation for this situation is that your company have a secure VPN in place so that once you're across the border you can connect to the office and download any sensitive material you need. Before you return, VPN in again and upload your work back to the office so that the laptop is clean as a whistle when it goes through customs.
See, that's the kind of comment that really trips my bullshit detector. Now, we all know government bureaucrats ain't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer, but if you're assuming a massive government conspiracy to pull off a fake terrorist attack and blame Muslims for it, do you really think that the one thing that trips them up is going to be the decision to plant a document that couldn't possibly have survived at the crash site? I mean, that would be like faking the moon landing and forgetting to fake the rocket launch beforehand. I can certainly believe in government stupidity, but still, there are limits.
"GROSS NEGLIGENCE - Failure to use even the slightest amount of care in a way that shows Recklessness or willful disregard for the safety of others." - 'Lectric Law Library.
Yeah, those bastards, the way they used THE SLIGHTEST AMOUNT OF CARE in designing a system that shuts down in response to unexpected data so as to avoid RECKLESSNESS with the SAFETY OF OTHERS.
What exactly do you find frightening about an automatic safety system doing exactly what it's supposed to in response to unusual input?
Come on, do you really think that quote is better than this one?
Mr. Liggett: All right, Lightman. Can you tell us who first suggested the idea of reproduction without sex?
David: Um...your wife?
Liggett: Get out, Lightman. Get out.
"Hi, Navy? It's Bob Ballard. Guess what I just found."
Even before 9/11 planes have traditionally been high value targets. Originally this was probably because jet travel was regarded as sort of symbolic of the wealthy and privileged (the expression 'jet-set' though perhaps a bit dated, is a product of that mentality). So whatever the specific nature of your complaint, targeting a passenger jet was a way of focusing on high value targets, as opposed to, say, hitting a Greyhound bus.
Additionally, factor in some of the tactical benefits of an assault on a plane: you automatically have mobility and hostages, which affords you some protection against police or military who might try to intervene. And if your goal is widespread death, crashing or detonating a plane is pretty surefire, compared to a comparable attack on the ground.
Of course, common sense tells us that if we make planes terrorist-proof, terrorists will just strike elsewhere. There's a diminishing marginal return on airplane security, and products like this facecrime camera are probably WAAAAY out there in terms of cost/benefit.
I can hear Richard Attenborough now. "We have created creatures so astonishing that they will capture the imagination of the entire world...welcome, my friends, to Nordic Park."
Just make sure to keep those electric fences on; last time the berserkers got out they took out an entire tour group from Milaukee.
I always get a kick out of seeing those 20-something boneheads riding rice rockets at 80mph in nothing but shorts and a tank top. Can anyone else say "future skin graft candidate?"
Of course, the difference between a 'terrorist test' (presumably some sort of deep data mining across a variety of databases) and the kind of disease test Doctorow uses for an example is that repeating the terrorist test is unlikely to produce greater accuracy. Let's say you have some combination of factors that, according to the algorithm, makes you a suspect. Running the same search again will uncover the same factors and produce no improvement in your estimation, hence the need for the complementary inspection you mention. But what would that mean for the terrorist test? Probably more invasive investigation, which, apart from the obvious civil liberties issue, means more time, money, and manpower that has to be spent. So when your first screen does a poor job of identifying suspects, you have to spend a fortune disqualifying the false positives in order to root out the true positives. So it isn't really a logic problem when considered in the applicable context.
Did you actually read the review before making a snide, bigoted comment? Title aside, the book isn't of the style "hey, he's got a beard and he prays facing Mecca, shoot him!" but more about describing the mindset, background, and organization of modern terrorist groups. So even if us dumb Americans do manage to read this book, it's unlikely that it would lead to any increase in violence. But hey, don't let reality get in the way of being a gigantic douche.
Ah, excellent question. One of the things Richard Dawkins has been living down for years is his popularization of the term 'selfish gene,' precisely because so many people misunderstand it to mean 'genes promoting selfishness.' The reality is more subtle: genes promoting organism-level behavior which produces more copies of the gene will tend (all else being equal) increase in frequency within a population.
For social creatures, things like fairness and reciprocity are beneficial, because they encourage people to help each other out and to honor commitments. Most species also display punitive behavior--if they catch another 'cheating,' they'll levy punishment against the cheater, even at a cost to themselves. So if being a selfish bastard causes your tribe (or flock, or pack, etc.) to cast you out or kill you, then the genes that produce selfishness will carry a penalty that limits their success. Since cooperation often produces better results (more food, more territory, less violence) than separatism, which in turn lead to more reproduction, it makes sense that genes encouraging cooperative behavior (including justice) would tend to predominate in social creatures.
If you'd like to know more, check out the wikipedia article for 'reciprocal altruism,' or even better, pick up Steve Pinker's 'How the Mind Works,' an outstanding book that considers the possible evolutionary underpinnings of behavior.
...and it's the Thomas Moore Law Center, the self-described sword and shield of Christianity in the US, that's working so hard to force creationism--I mean, intelligent design--down the throats of of those high school kids. In fact, you'll note that the ID movement as a whole probably has more lawyers on its payroll than actual biologists.
Which of course doesn't make lawyers in general evil, but maintain some perspective.
No, I read it fine, I just didn't give it much credence. Nowhere in evolutionary theory is it suggested that you could make a dog from a cat. It is, however, understood that you could have some kind of mammalian precursor which speciates over time to produce two different lineages: one canine, and one feline.
Next, you've got a few things tangled up here. Evolution does not necessarily mean a gradual increase in complexity--no single mutation will take you from a 'simple' life form to a more complex one. However, over incredibly long periods of time, significant mutational variation can develop which, shaped by natural selection (and other forces such as drift, or founder effect) can result in an increase in complexity. As for the effects of a single mutation, well, you might consider sickle cell anemia. A single mutation in the hemoglobin gene that provides carriers with protection against malaria. A fairly minor point, but it's enough so that when you map areas of high prevalence for SC and malaria in Africa they overlap almost perfectly--a clear example of a new phenotype, generated by mutation, which proves adaptive in the environment.
Next, how ridiculous is it for you to call out evolution because you can't see in a human timescale processes that take millions of years? Would you argue that the Grand Canyon couldn't have been formed by erosion because you've never seen any canyons formed that way? Creationists like to use the word 'macroevolution' to try to separate the real meat of evolution from the limited examples we CAN see in our lifetimes--the only difference is scale.
And finally, if you read my post, you'll note that I commented that even Darwin despaired over the value of the fossil record for proving his point; he put much more emphasis on his study of living things in their environments. We are able to draw some broad conclusions from it, but you'll find far more evidence for evolution from molecular biology and biochemistry these days.But then, the book you're touting not only proposes to discredit evolution, but also more or less everything else that science currently accepts about the history of the planet, so I have relatively little hope that you'd be motivated to learn more about the volumes of evidence stacked up against that quack Walt Brown.
I'll grant that you're paraphrasing from this book from memory, but I can tell you that these are all tired creationist arguments that have been thrashed, again and again, and that can easily be debunked by anybody with a bit of biological knowledge.
First, your comment is self-contradictory. You first claim that "Different combinations are formed, not different genes," and then you state "mutations are the only known means by which new genetic material becomes available for evolution." When a mutation occurs in a gene, then a new gene has been created. It may not be a very useful mutation, and it may not be maintained, but it is undeniably new. Further, if you accept common descent, it should be obvious that you and I have genes that, say, hamsters do not. Hell, corn has got about three times as many genes as you or I--are you still claiming recombination is the only difference?
Next, mutation is far more complex than you make it out to be--not the kind of complex whereby a single changed nucleotide in a key geen turns a fruit fly into a blue whale, but the kind of complex that has the potential to introduce all sorts of variation. Changes in regulatory elements, for example, can leave most of the genes unchanged and still have major consequences for the organism's development. A simple example of this is the mutation that causes fruit flies to sprout legs where there antennae should be--granted, not much of an improvement, but it should suggest to you the power of mutation in changing living things.
Lastly, the concept of transitional forms is sticky for a lot of reasons. For one, by definition you'd expect them to be fairly short lived (once an organism starts to develop a useful trait, we'd expect selection to drive it pretty quickly toward a stable phenotype). Next, as you're probably aware, the fossil record is terribly fragmented--even in Darwin's time he wrote that there would probably never be thorough fossil evidence for descent. And finally, 'species' is a fairly digital concept: we see an animal (or its fossils) and we stick it into one category or another. But life forms are analog--there ought to be a whole series of 'transitional species' that show the progression from A to B, but rather than trying to classify them all separately, they often get lumped in on one side or another. So the argument that there are no transitional forms is specious, because A) we have found some, and B) the entire concept is fairly ill-defined and based on a fragmentary record.
So again, I recognize that you're probably not giving a fair accounting of the book, but if those are his most compelling arguments, then he probably ought to sit in on a few college bio classes before he does any more writing.
You seem to be a bit off. Sensitivity to initial conditions is a condition of chaos, but not the whole thing. From wikipedia: "Sensitivity to initial conditions is often confused with chaos in popular accounts. It can also be a subtle property, since it depends on a choice of metric, or the notion of distance in the phase space of the system. For example, consider the simple dynamical system produced by repeatedly doubling an initial value (defined by the mapping on the real line from x to 2x). This system has sensitive dependence on initial conditions everywhere, since any pair of nearby points will eventually become widely separated. However, it has extremely simple behaviour, as all points except 0 tend to infinity. If instead we use the bounded metric on the line obtained by adding the point at infinity and viewing the result as a circle, the system no longer is sensitive to initial conditions. For this reason, in defining chaos, attention is normally restricted to systems with bounded metrics, or closed, bounded invariant subsets of unbounded systems."
Your example isn't particularly material here because it doesn't tell us much about the veracity of ID as a whole. Conventional neo-Darwinism provides a perfectly adequate explanation for your example. First, we do see transitional forms in the fossil record, though obviously because the record is imperfect we don't see all of them. And molecular genetics allows us to see transitions at the genome level--we can see how mutations accumulate over time in conserved genes, and how the number increase as two species diverge. Neo-Darwinism also explains why you'd see such similarities throughout nature: because once a useful mechanism evolves, it gets passed down and spreads. Or, you could have a case of convergent evolution, where similar environments produce similar adaptations without a need for immediate common heritage.
And frankly, even your propose prediction is kind of suspect. If your designer is all knowing and all powerful, why should he be limited to reusing the same techniques over and over? Wouldn't it be more interesting for him to try radically different stuff? And why couldn't he create transitional forms if he wanted to, just for a little variety? In short, your testable prediction is based entirely on how you interpret the designer's motives, making it subjective and untestable.
If a putative 'designer' worked through an evolutionary mechanism, then there's no problem. We can study living things and our theory of evolution will be an increasingly accurate description of what really happened (though it will never be perfect, because we can never be sure we've seen all the facts). In this case, it doesn't really matter if there's a designer or not--we'll see the same mechanisms in play either way.
But most ID proponents actually believe that God takes an active role in creation, i.e., He reaches down and prods that paramecium into becoming something more. This is manifestly supernatural and would be generally inconsistent with a materialistic theory.
But here's the trick: how do you differentiate between things we can't explain because they're supernatural, and things we can't explain because we just don't know enough? The ancient Greeks blamed thunder on cranky gods in the sky, but today we know better. Similarly, many of the examples Mike Behe presented of 'irreducbily complex' (i.e., designed) structures in molecular biology have already had evolutionary explanations developed for them.
And I'm going to assume you haven't actually seen the movie, in which Stein draws a LITERAL connection between evolution and the Holocaust. Scientists are shown juxtaposed with goose-stepping Nazis. So yeah, I do take issue with that, as would most reasonable people.
I have to disagree. In fact, I think 'Chopping Mall' may have been the best of the 'killer security robots stalk heavily armed teens through a shopping mall' movies of the 1980s.
You know how I know calling your armed robots SWORDs is a bad idea? Because I saw this movie, that's how: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112993/
Why shame on them? They're not government, and they're not academics. They wouldn't be doing the research if there wasn't a way to make a buck off of it. If you don't want to shell out for their knowledge or their 'software assets,' then feel free to turn to one of the many other research groups who aren't working for a profit.
What you say may be true, but I can't help but think of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his black swans. He would argue that while your wild fires might fit the existing statistical models, a REAL disaster, the kind with the potential to really knock the country on its ass, would be essentially impossible to predict. I'm not sure I entirely buy into his thinking, but you have to admit, it's usually the unexpected stuff that produces the greatest impact.
It's true that you can't logically conclude the guy is wrong just because his credentials don't match what you might consider an 'ideal' particle physicist. However, given that other people with relevant expertise have already looked into these possibilities and judged them to be incredibly unlikely, I don't see why this guy deserves any special attention. Anyone can make any kind of claim, but if they don't have evidence, and they don't have specialized knowledge of the topic, how are they any different from any other quack?