Protecting The Faith

clipped from www.americanthinker.com In the 1960s social psychologists studied a doomsday cult which made the big mistake of predicting the day of Armageddon.  When that day came and went without crisping the world, the cult leaders didn't admit they were wrong. Instead, they discovered reasons why doomsday had been postponed. It was a triumph of faith over facts. That's how stock market bubbles and busts work. It's how the jihadi Armageddon cult of Tehran will crumble, if we're all very lucky. How can this super-cold winter happen? It's got all the faithful a little worried. Climate modeling teams all over the world are sweating 24/7 to deal with it. They are producing epicycles for their models, to hang on the warming story. "Epicycles" are cycles on top of cycles.  When traditional astronomy began to collapse in the years before Copernicus, True Believers reacted by adding lots of little cycles on top of the great cycles of the planetary orbits, to protect their faith.