A new diet?

I got an e-mail today advertising for a new “scientific” diet–we should be, of all things, STARCH-eaters, because “all mammals eat basically the same diet. I really wish I had kept the e-mail now, so that I could this stupidity out with contact information attached. Oh, well.
I won’t bother with the fact that fossils demonstrate that there are whole eras (notably during ice ages) where humans ate basically NO plant matter, or that these eras where when we were actually under evolutionary pressure (unlike now). I’ll just ask which “diet” he thinks all mammals (and therefore we) are built for? Perhaps the Aardvark diet (ants and termites)? Or the vampire bat diet (raw blood)? Or the canine diet (raw meat and entrails, including feces)?
This is just another idiotic attempt to push vegetarianism. Folks, we have the brains we do because, unlike our apish ancestors, we started incorporating foods high in omega-3 fatty acids. That means MEAT, and especially seafood. Avoiding animal-based food is bad for brain function (explaining Democrats) and especially DEVELOPMENT in children.

I believe I will dub this the “AGW diet”–because a bunch of people will follow it because they WANT it to be true, and they’ll point out the word “scientific” as justification that anyone who disagrees with them, must not be.

I Was Wrong About Global Warming!

Well, off by a few years.  I understood that Solar Cycle 24 had just peaked, and that we were already entering Solar Cycle 25, predicted to be one of the weakest on record.  Actually, 24 peaks in 2013, and 25 begins in 2019.  However, the peak of Solar Cycle 24 is still predicted to be one of the weakest on record, and Solar Cycle 25 even weaker.

It may reasonably be inferred that these predictions played in with the absolute refusal of the real world to even remotely acknowledge the AGW hypothesis’ predictions in the AGW hypothesis being re-named “Climate Change”.  It may also be reasonably inferred that there are some very cold days ahead of us.

Taking Resposibilty for Your Fellow Man

I was watching an on-the-street interview with one of the “Wall Street Occupiers” yesterday, and he summed up his philosophy by stating that “we just believe that the more fortunate should take responsibility for their fellow man”. This pretence of compassion is one of the most often-repeated appeals of the Socialist, but the problems with it as an ethical foundation are plethora.

The most obvious problem is that one human being cannot determine the moral obligations of another. Beyond the obvious fact that no human being can possibly comply with every moral inclination of every other human being, a free society recognises that no human being holds moral authority over another. Legislative authority, yes–but legislation is not morality, as I’m sure most of the OWS people would agree.

Even if we were to re-define “morality” such that one person can determine another’s, we run into the problem of attaching morality to random chance. How is it valid to demand that the “more fortunate” have a moral burden, when they might very well be the “less fortunate” tomorrow? Obviously, this is a ridiculous demand–the only possible rational statement would be that “everyone should take care of each other”–which of course completely removes any possible action by the government.

Following that thought, we come to the most important problem with this (mis)statement of morality: if YOU want TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for your fellow man (and this fellow took great pains to explain that he wasn’t looking for a handout; he was a “successful businessman” addressing “inequalities”), then YOU have to TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for your fellow man. This is an action known as “charity”. It is practiced around the world by the Christian Church and other groups who TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for their fellow man. Socialism is the ABDICATION of responsibility; not to care for the “less fortunate” fellow man, but to PUNISH the successful. This wrong is compounded in the United States, where Socialism at the Federal level is explicitly contrary to the Constitution. Every time the Federal government acts to deprive one citizen of his earnings and hand them to another citizen, we have undermined the basis of our freedom.

The Tea Partier and the CEO

I have seen an image being passed around several friends’ walls on Facebook, and I’m sure you’ve seen it, too: an evil, grinning man in a suit holding a cookie, next to a joke in which he (a corporate Chief Executive Officer) takes 11 out of 12 cookies on a plate, and then warns the Tea Partier to beware of a Union member trying to steal his cookie.

It may be that you have even considered this cartoon to be funny. Allow me to disillusion you by explaining how this works in real life. As it turns out, the cookie is a better metaphor for wealth than the creator of the cartoon probably understood, because it is something which is both produced and consumed. This is actually at odds with the intention of the image, in which there is just a single plate of cookies, which the CEO is hoarding. This image comes from a confusion between WEALTH, which is created in the value of work produced, and simple CURRENCY, or printed money. If nothing else, the existence of credit cards should make clear that it is possible to access wealth without having any printed currency involved.

That being said, here is what should actually happen in this scenario:

The Tea Partier should also be a cookie maker. On his own, he can produce 100 cookies per day, all of which are his–but he must use those cookies for food, and to purchase the equipment and ingredients he needs to make more cookies. This leaves him with an average of 10 cookies for himself per day. Eventually, he decides to work for the CEO; he only gets to keep 1 out of 10 cookies he makes, but thanks to better equipment and assembly lines, he makes 1200 cookies per day–getting 12 cookies for himself per day with no overhead.

Enter the Union Rep: for a mere 4 cookies per day, he will guarantee the Tea Partier’s employment. Sounds like a good deal–except that the Tea Partier is already protected by Federal law, and, being a good employee, is more likely to be rewarded than fired. So, the Tea Partier (having had his family threatened by SEIU), finds himself taking home only eight cookies per day with benefit to himself. The Union rep DOES protect someone, however; namely, the employee who should be fired. Unproductive and disruptive, this employee causes the Tea Partier’s production to drop, so now he is only taking home six cookies per day–and the CEO can’t fire the disruptive employee because of the union.

In fact, production drops so low that the corporation cannot pay its expenses, and so turns to the government for help. In response, the government raises the funds to bail out the corporation by taxing the cookie-makers, including the Tea Partier, who is now only taking home four cookies per day.

FIFY.

Why Argument from Authority is Invalid

On February 2nd, renowned physicist Michio Kaku (I have several of his books) appeared on the CBS morning show to discuss the relationship of the recent snowstorms to Global Warming.

Dr. Kaku’s argument (basically) was that warmer air caused greater evaporation in the Gulf of Mexico, which increased the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere–thus leading to greater snowfalls. However, water has a very interesting property: it is an incredible heat sink. The ability of water to absorb heat energy is why it the coolant used not only by your own body, but by nuclear reactors; and why you will die of hypothermia much faster in cold water than in air of the same temperature.

It takes a significant amount of thermal energy to cause one molecule of water to break loose of surrounding molecules–to “evaporate” from liquid to gas. This heat must be given up to return to a liquid state, and even more energy must be lost to become a solid–the ice crystals we call snow.

So, if water is evaporating from the Gulf of Mexico and traveling here to become precipitation, it has to give up all of that energy to go from water vapor to snow. The new snow-heavy winters in Missouri should be significantly milder (with the introduction of all this thermal energy handily carried in from down south), than the long history of previous, nearly snow-less winters. Sorry, but I can easily remember winters in Missouri where the temperature rarely dipped below freezing, let alone -18 degrees F.

Furthermore, these sorts of heavy snows are not historically unknown; they are simply associated with a period of history which gets ignored by the Global Warming Crowd. The Pilgrims, who immigrated to North America during the end of the Little Ice Age over two hundred years ago, would easily recognize snowstorms like what we are currently experiencing. Washington’s troops experienced frostbite and hypothermia fighting in the Maunder Minimum with snowfalls much more similar to what we are experiencing today, yet conditions in the Gulf were certainly not as warm as they are today–so the increased snowfall couldn’t have been blamed on increased Pacific evaporation.

My Paper in a Nutshell…

Some time ago, I was unfortunate enough to read Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, a research paper from the University of California, Berkeley, in which a group of liberal professors congratulate themselves on how cool liberals are and how rotten conservatives, while demonstrating absolutely no understanding of the usage of the terms (Adolph Hitler, for instance, is listed as a conservative).

For the capstone project of my BS degree program, I had to write a full APA-style research paper combining two disciplines. In my case, the two topics chosen were science and politics. I saw this as a wonderful chance to do a sort of rebuttal to John Jost’s paper, but I wanted to make very certain that I did not write the same sort of paper–that is, I have no problem starting out with a biased hypothesis, but I took every effort to make certain that my bias did not influence my research or my interpretations.

To begin with, I identified a number of peer-reviewed papers on the topic of Global Warming legislation. Due to the limitations of a college research paper, I had a very small sample, but I discuss that in the paper. My next step was to establish a set of specific criteria by which papers could be identified as “Strongly Socialist” (think Communist), “Socialist,” “Not Socialist,” and “Anti-Socialist.” I then established criteria to divide the papers in each of those categories as “rational,” “non-rational,” and “irrational.”

What I found–as I expected–was that there was an overwhelming majority of pro-Socialist papers in this field (only one anti-socialist paper was identified). Second, there was a 100% correlation between anti-socialist papers and rational papers (one of each–the same paper). None of the socialist papers were rational, and the more strongly socialist they were, the more irrational they became.

Of course, this isn’t just an indictment of people who write about Global Warming legislation–it’s also an indictment of the peer-review process itself, and of the academic community in general.

The High Road

So, the Libertarian Party has been making a stink on Facebook about what a terrible blow for personal liberty it is that California didn’t legalize marijuana this time around. This is one of the several reasons that, although I describe myself as a libertarian, I will never associate myself with the Libertarian Party.
While I don’t have a philosophical issue with people doing whatever they want to their own bodies, marijuana can affect more people than those who actually use it.

But let’s put aside the societal problems. Let’s imagine that I *shudder* move to California–and the way our country has been going since 2006, forced relocation probably wasn’t far off in the agenda. Why would I vote to legalize a whole new toxin for people to put into their systems, when I HAVE TO PAY FOR THEIR MEDICAL EXPENSES?

Seriously; it was bad enough when I was being forced to buy a house for every deadbeat in the country. Now that the Obama administration has destroyed the health insurance industry, only to replace it with a government-regulated medical coverage industry, expenses are skyrocketing and we’re all legally obligated to make those payments. Give me a free market economy, where one can buy a true insurance policy (or choose not to), and I’ll be open to toxic recreation.

The Rationality of Atheism

Talk of bringing atheism into a religious discussion forum brought up the position that atheism “would be the voice of reason waiting to hear what you believe and why.” Disregarding the fact that superiority complexes seldom provide the voice of reason, let us examine some points:

In the presence of positive evidence, the reasonable course of action is to accept the evidence. Skepticism is healthy; denial is not. Also note that not all evidence is empirical.

In the absence of positive evidence, the reasonable positi…on is not atheism, but agnosticism. Atheism is a positive statement (“there is no God”) which cannot rationally be based on no evidence.

Only negative evidence would provide a rational framework for atheism, and negative evidence cannot exist.

To examine this point on a more personal level, let us consider the case of the mathematical-dyslexic in the modern technological world. Constantly surrounded by people who tell him that mathematics provide the underlying basis for everything from skyscrapers to cellular telephones to cellular mitosis, he would nevertheless be unable to render anything beyond meaningless strings of symbols from any mathematical formula.

Since no evidence could be presented to our mathematical-dyslexic for empirical analysis, would it truly be reasonable for him to reject all non-empirical evidence (such as witness testimony from engineers) and claim that mathematics could not possibly exist? Or worse, to group with other mathematical-dyslexics and write books about how people who believe in mathematics were delusional; that mathematics was merely a superstition which only led to evil?

Ethics and Global Climate Change: A Rebuttal

As I mentioned on Facebook, my race to get this to my professor in time for drill weekend led me to fudge some page numbers in the citations. I’ve never had the time since to adequately fix them, so I’ve simply removed the offending citations. The remainder of my paper is below:

Stephen Gardiner, “Ethics and Global Climate Change”
A Rebuttal

Jason C. Diederich
Philosophy 401
Professor Ho
01 October 2010

A Rebuttal to Stephen Gardiner’s “Ethics and Global Climate Change”

Should wealthier nations pay more than poorer nations in addressing the cost of global climate change? Stephen Gardiner believes that they should. Gardiner makes essentially two arguments in support of this view, one scientific (to demonstrate that human-caused carbon dioxide emissions constitute a significant ecological threat) and one economic (to prove that it is just that wealthier nations pay for “adaptation” to climate change). This paper will demonstrate that the first argument is without value, and that the second is not an ethical position, but the motivating agenda behind Gardiner’s essay.

In making his “scientific” argument, Gardiner spends much time on two particular topics: First, he touts the IPCC’s use of computer models to demonstrate the potential for climate change devastation (Gardiner, 365-367). It should be noted that these models have been thoroughly debunked; these are the same models which commercial meteorologists use, obviously barely adequate to predict the weather five days in advance, let alone five centuries. He then spends a lot of time “discrediting” skeptic’s claims of scientific uncertainty in the realm of climatology—of course, this is a straw man to put opponents on the defensive; there is ample evidence to support a rebuttal of the IPCC reports without resorting to mere “scientific uncertainty.” Since these two claims are without merit, they will be dismissed in favor of treating actual claims of the IPCC quoted by Gardiner.

1. “The global average surface temperature has increased over the 20th century by about 0.6 C.”

It has been demonstrated that the data utilized by the IPCC in creating this figure is highly corrupted (McKitrick, 8). This figure was arrived at using only the thermometers in the Automated Surface Observation System—all of which are on land, and almost all of which are centered around cities. Cities being made of concrete and steel, and full of large mammals and internal combustion engines, this produces an overwhelming heat-trap effect, even if we allow for the probability of nearby heat and light sources for the convenience of temperature-readers. The IPCC completely ignores the satellite temperature record in their reports, even though it has proven (in contrast to the ASOS) to be both complete and perfectly accurate—because the satellite data does not support global warming. It should also be noted that subsequent temperature data in a 2008 study has shown temperature dropping at the rate of approximately 1° C/century from 2001-2008 (Monckton, 6). Along those lines, the IPCC (and Gardiner) relies almost entirely upon the production of carbon dioxide in their estimates of global warming impact—yet carbon dioxide comprises less than .003 of the atmosphere, and its effect on radiative absorption is negligible (Kiehl, 13).

2. “Globally, it is very likely that the 1990’s was the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the instrumental record, since 1861.”

The above statement is entirely fraudulent. Subsequent independent investigation into NASA databases discovered that the 1930’s was actually the warmest decade on record (despite human-caused CO2 emissions still being marginal), with several record high temperatures in the U.S. which remain unbroken (McIntyre). It should also be noted that the global temperature fell ≈ .1° C from 1940-1970, despite significant increases in carbon dioxide levels and output (Sussman, 55).

3. “The increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century in the past 1,000 years.”

The original graph published by the IPCC on this topic shows that temperatures were significantly warmer 500 years ago than they are today, and that current warming is consistent with the trend observable in the transition into the Medieval Warm Period (≈1000-1400 AD), then Maunder Minimum (≈1400-1900 AD) and back out. Note that Michael Mann’s “hockey stick graph” in the third IPCC report actually deletes those natural periods of significant temperature fluctuation in order to make the current trend (measured without benefit of satellite data) appear unprecedented.

Economically, Gardiner’s entire argument can be summed up in a single-sentence quotation:
“The third proposal I wish to consider offers a different justification for departing from the per capita principle: namely, that such a departure might maximally (or at least disproportionately) benefit the least well-off.” (Gardiner, 378)

The astute reader will notice that Gardiner has just announced that it is okay for developing countries to continue to increase carbon dioxide production, but that wealthy countries must reduce carbon dioxide production. Why would this be okay if carbon dioxide has such a potentially destructive effect? The statement “maximally benefit the least well-off” is the key: it is almost a direct quote from John Rawls’ collectivist work, Political Liberalism (Rawls, 60). Note that if it is acceptable for some groups to increase their carbon dioxide output, carbon dioxide output can’t be the real problem Gardiner is trying to solve. Gardiner’s true issue is economic: he wants to punish developed countries (inevitably the most free) and force them to subsidize the less-developed countries (usually the most totalitarian). He is using global warming to sell Marxist economics, with “gradual adaptation” to make it easier to swallow (Gardiner, 372).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Gardiner’s paper is his discussion of a “right to subsistence emissions.” By “emissions,” as previously noted, Gardiner intends “carbon dioxide emissions”—and we, as a species, inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. The author has no doubt that the controversy surrounding climate change will continue for as long as there are carbon credits to be sold—but one must ponder the sentiments of a man who considers humanity’s right to exhale to be a debatable point.

References

Gardiner, Stephen. (2004) “Ethics and Global Climate Change” In Morton E. Winston & Ralph Edelbach (Eds) Society, Ethics and Technology (pp. 317-329) Belmont, California: Cengage Publishers

Kiehl, J., & Trenberth, K. E. (1997). Earth’s Annual Global Mean Energy Budget. Retrieved October 01, 2010 from CiteSeerX: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.168.831.

McIntyre, S. (2007). A New Leaderboard at the U. S. Open. Retrieved October 01, 2010 from Climate Audit: http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/08/a-new-leaderboard-at-the-us-open/.

McKitrick, R. R., and P. J. Michaels (2007), Quantifying the influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data, J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S09, doi:10.1029/2007JD008465.

Monckton, C., of Brenchley. (2008). Temperature Change and CO2 Change: A Scientific Briefing. Retrieved October 01, 2010 from Science and Public Policy: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/monckton/temperature_co2_change_scientific_briefing.pdf .

Rawles, J. (1971). Political Liberalism. Chinchester, West Sussex, New York: Columbia University Press.

Sussman, B. (2010). Climategate. Washington, D.C.: WorldNetDaily.

"It’s Just My Scientist Against Your Scientist"

In a recent discussion on the topic of abortion, I linked to a webpage from Princeton illustrating that, scientifically speaking, life begins at conception. The response to this was, “Well, I can pull up scientists who say just the opposite, so you’re really just playing ‘It’s My Scientist Against Your Scientist.”

My response: Go ahead–I triple-dog dare you.

No post has been forthcoming.

The majority of the online pro-abortion opinion against me is that I am somehow seeking to subvert a woman’s right to do what she wants with her own body (and I have been told in no uncertain terms that this means I cannot call myself a libertarian!). However, it should be noted that it is not the woman’s body which is being aborted; an abortion is the killing of the unborn child, with the woman’s body simply an obstacle which must be bypassed.

For those abortion proponents who wish to, there is a related argument you can make to defend a woman’s right to do with her body as she wishes: you should oppose research and public service announcements regarding Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. After all, if you already believe that a fetus has no right to life, then it certainly has no claim at all to good health, and ingesting alcohol is (unlike an abortion surgery) something which the expectant mother really does do to her own body–the fetus is only indirectly affected.