Access To Birth Control Is A Fundamental Component Of Climate Survival

Any morally acceptable pathway to prevent catastrophic global warming includes broad access to affordable birth control for the world’s women. The conservative war on birth control is a war on women’s rights, and thus on the rights of us all. Manmade global warming is one of the most troubling symptoms of economic and social injustice around the planet, and the ”countries in the developing world least responsible for the growing emissions are likely to experience the heaviest impact of climate change, with women bearing the greatest toll.” Researchers have found that empowering women to reduce unplanned pregnancies is one of the most cost-effective ways to combat greenhouse pollution, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson discussed at the Durban climate conference last December:

In addressing climate resilience, Robinson stressed the importance of focusing on health and burden impacts of climate change. One of the keys is access to reproductive health for women.

Good grief. Is there a class Lefties attend to learn to write like that, like Marxist Magniloquence 101? Anyhow, this goes back to one of the Warmist’s biggest issues: reducing the global population. And, interestingly, this ties into what Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted, namely, reducing the number of minorities, which is what happens when birth control is spread around to much of the developing world, particularly places like the African continent. You want racism? That’s racism! Planning based on the doctrine of eugenics.

The more world leaders focus on giving women and girls the tools of empowerment — access to family planning, education, and the political and economic system — the better future all of us will have.

A world where women and girls have more power is a healthier world.

That’s interesting, since Liberals get the vapors when Conservatives talk about liberating women from being 2nd class citizens as they are in much of the Islamic world. But, really, this is all about spreading abortion on demand around the world. Cheaply. Which is where the asterisk in the headline comes in: liberals think contraceptives, sterilization (Sanger loved the thought of sterilizing Blacks and defectives a hoot), and abortions should be free, and, by free, I mean “someone else pays.” Liberals never seem to want to pay for anything themselves. That’s why they loved Obama’s insurance mandate, as Someone Else would pay for their condoms and birth control pills, and screw what the constitution says about religious freedom.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

One of Einstein’s more famous sayings is: “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”. That single experiment would now appear to have been done so is Einstein now old hat? Far from it. Just as Einstein’s relativity subsumed Newton’s mechanics, so the next generation of physics will have to cope with the observations that came from Einstein’s work.

A failure that Einstein himself acknowledged was his failure to devise a “unified field theory”. Einsten was of course Jewish so it is interesting that another brilliant Jewish writer, Nathan Cofnas, HAS attempted a “unified field theory”. But this theory is not about physics. It is about ideology. Nathan has presented us with a theory that accounts for both religion and politics as being from the same rootstock.

And I can even tell you very simply what that theory is. Nathan points something out that seems obvious when you hear it but nobody previously seems to have thought of it. He takes Adam Smith’s famous theory of markets — the invisible hand — and points out that religious people also see an invisible hand in the world about them: The hand of God.

You don’t have to think about that for long, however, to start saying “Yes but …”. And that is why Nathan has written his book. He presents his theory in a much more subtle and careful way than my crude generalization above and proceeds to answer all the “Yes buts ..”. He fleshes out how he believes both conservative thinking and Judeo/Christian thinking arise.

But this is not a book for scholars, philosophers and ideologues only. It does something that anybody interested in modern politics needs badly: It gives an systematic answer to the old Leftist retort to all facts and arguments that they dislike: “There’s no such thing as right and wrong, anyway”. The crazy thing about that assertion of course is that the same Leftists who say that will say in almost the same breath that racism or anything done by George W Bush is wrong. They contradict their own assertion almost as soon as they make it. So it is not only conservatives but Leftists too who need to get their minds clear on what is right/wrong and where that right/wrong comes from. And Nathan helps us greatly with that.

But WHY do Leftist deny right and wrong when it suits them? Doing so makes all their OWN doctrines, policies and beliefs look like empty vapour. It’s a strange thing to do. So: The reason they do it is because most analytical philosophers say the same thing. And as John Maynard Keynes once said: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”.

Analytical philosophers say: “If there is this objective property of “rightness”, how do we detect it and where is it? Do we lift up a stone somewhere and find it there? And that challenge has proved hard to answer. Just what IS rightness and how do we know it is right?

In recent times, however, an answer to that has begun to emerge: We know some things are right because we have rightness instincts. Rightness IS located somewhere. It is located in our long evolution as social beings. It is somewhere in our primitive “reptilian” brain. But the “Yes, buts …” come thick and fast to that proposition, as it is obvious that our higher brain (where “conscience” is located) has a role too and can make some things seem right to one person that another person sees as wrong. So how do we sort THAT mess out? Nathan goes through it systematically for us and leaves even atheists like me confident that there IS such a thing as a real right and wrong.

Nathan’s book will not be the final answer on all the questions it addresses but, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, future discussions in the field will have to take account of his arguments if they are to be well-informed.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

(UK Guardian) The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

Let that sink in for a second: actual scientific research has shown that there was no ice lost in the past 10 years, the decade the Warmist say is the hottest in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world’s icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

Oh, so Warmist are and were wrong on Greenland and Antarctica, too?

The melting of Himalayan glaciers caused controversy in 2009 when a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mistakenly stated that they would disappear by 2035, instead of 2350. However, the scientist who led the new work is clear that while greater uncertainty has been discovered in Asia’s highest mountains, the melting of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern.

This begs the question, why is it a concern? This happens over and over during the warm periods over the last 10,000 years, and, geez, what about the melt from the end of the last glacial period? It also begs the question, why are some glaciers growing and some shrinking? Quite a bit seems to be localized, and doesn’t seem to support the theory hypothesis crystal ball view of anthropogenic global warming, which should mean the entire globe is warming. Which is why the Warmists have latched on to the phrase “climate change”, in order to cover their tracks for their original prognostications, and enfold everything that happens into their cult-like beliefs.

Don Surber: I do not doubt that over time glaciers retreat, or advance. Surface temperatures may even rise. But if man’s production of CO2 were to blame, the glacial meltdown would accelerate, not stop, as the CO2 levels are on the rise (as measured by proponents of the global warming theory). Instead the melt appears to have stopped.

Vox Popoli: Scientists spend an awful lot of time being stunned because they are some of the most naive, credulous, and easily manipulated beings on the planet. That’s why they tend to inordinately fall for every nonsensical philosophical and political ideology that crosses their paths. The average reader of The National Enquirer probably has a better and more-developed sense of skepticism than the average scientist.

Anthony Watts has the graphic of where glaciers are growing based on the Grace data.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(Fox News) The flu virus is thought to thrive in cold weather, so it’s no surprise that during this unseasonably warm winter, we’ve had an equally mild flu season. Doctor visits for the flu have been below average this winter, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

But don’t think you’re in the free and clear.

Typically, flu season peaks in February or March, so it still has time to ramp up—meaning you still have time to get a flu shot—the kingpin of prevention—if you haven’t already.

There’s still time for the flu to ramp up, but, not much so far. I haven’t gotten the flu. Parents, not so much. Friends and co-workers, not so much. Even in South Dakota, the flu is almost nowhere to be seen. There has been a marked decrease in the purchase of flu medicine in Canada.

(Daily Press in Virginia) We’re into February, traditionally when flu season peaks, and there’s been barely a hint of the illness on the Peninsula, statewide or even across the country. “We really haven’t seen much flu yet. I think the important word is yet,” says David Trump, director of the Peninsula Health District.

Trump received the first lab confirmation of a local flu case on Tuesday. “We may be at the very beginning of it finally,” he adds.

As we get into the coldest month of the year, we are seeing a slight increase in flu outbreaks, but, so far, world wide the flu season has been a bust. So, is a warming world really that bad? At the beginning of the Little Ice Age, the Black Death ran rampant, killing 75 million from Europe to Asia. And like today’s warm period, the LIA was natural. Things will happen, some good, some bad. People have still been getting colds this fall/winter, but most have been mild. This mild winter could (there’s that word again, very scientific) cause more Lyme Disease this year. For the Warmists, though, hot cold wet dry is a cause for apoplexy and force 10 moonbattery. They are true Flat Earthers, thinking that nothing should ever change, that the climate and weather should always be the same and entirely predictable.

Tom Nelson asks a good question: I’m not a climatologist, so questions like this confuse me: If the Maldives is described as “paradise” and averages 40 degrees F. warmer than Minneapolis, why should I be afraid that Minneapolis might warm by a couple of degrees? Warmists? Any answer?

The study has however become much celebrated in Green/Left quarters, with the ineffable Monbiot in the vanguard. Monbiot’s entry into the discussion has however energized a few ripostes from conservatives, with the most amusing point being that after Leftists telling us for decades that IQ scores are meaningless they suddenly have done an 180 degree turn and treat them as highly meaningful!

I thought I might add something to what I regard as the two best conservative responses to the original article. The first is in The Telegraph and makes a number of good points, all of which are worth reading.

I want to say more about just one of them: The point that IQ was measured during childhood (10 or 11 years of age) and that such measures are unreliable. That is however a matter of degree and of purpose. They are accurate enough to be a useful guide to who will benefit from a selective (more demanding) education, for instance.

An interesting aspect of scores at that age, however, is what I call the chimpanzee effect. In brief, this effect is that dummies mature faster so a relatively high score in childhood can lead to a relatively low score in adulthood. So it is quite possible that the high scorers in the data used by the Canadian authors became relatively low scorers later on. So if the high scorers in that body of data were later found to be liberals, it is quite possible that the same people were dummies in later life! So the data could be said to show the opposite of what the authors claim. The data could be said to suggest that it was the liberals who were the dummies.

That is all just speculation, however, The truth is that the data are incapable of telling us which way around it went at all.

That little point is really just a bit of fun, however. The second article by statistician Briggs is by far the most pointed. Briggs had a strong enough stomach to read the whole article. And when he did, he basically found that the authors had misrepresented their results. The correlations with IQ were in fact negligible. They were statistically significant but statistical significance is only a correction for small sample size and the sample sizes in the data used by the Canadians were large.

So statistical significance is irrelevant. It is other forms of significance we have to look at. Let me put it this way: What the Canadians found was (roughly) that out of 100 high IQ people, 51 would be liberals and 49 would be conservatives. Such a near-even split means of course that IQ is essentially irrelevant to ideology, or is not a socially or scientifically significant predictor of ideology.

Now we come to “racism”. The correlations between conservatism and racism were more substantial. Briggs rightly detects the flaw in that. The correlation is between WHAT THE AUTHORS SAY is conservatism and racism and there is no external validation of either measure. So all I want to do is draw attention to something I set out long ago: That even eminent Leftist psychologists have NO IDEA what conservatism is. A much noted paper in the field even identified Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro as conservatives! Can you get any madder than that? So it is no wonder that when they use their questionnaires to predict how people will vote, they find that “conservatives” AS IDENTIFIED BY THEM are just as likely to vote Democrat as Republican (for instance). How clueless can you get? What is going on of course is that Leftist psychologists swallow hook line and sinker of Leftist propaganda about conservatives. They believe that conservatives really are as Leftist propaganda describes them. It would appear that they never bother to talk to any actual conservatives to find out what they really think.

By contrast, I am a conservative so a questionnaire that I devised based on a thorough knowledge of what conservatism actually is, did what the Leftist questionnaires could not: Provided a substantial prediction of vote. See here. So once again the arrogance and ignorance of the Left has led them to a false understanding of reality and scientific work that is futile and useless. The work by the two Canadian authors certainly tells us NOTHING about the correlations with conservatism. I have written more extensively elsewhere about the relationship between conservatism and IQ.

For reference, the Canadian study is: “Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact” by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Why climate change will make you love big government

This essay was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom’s kind permission.

Look back on 2011 and you’ll notice a destructive trail of extreme weather slashing through the year. In Texas, it was the driest year ever recorded. An epic drought there killed half a billion trees,  touched off wildfires that burned 4 million acres, and destroyed or  damaged thousands of homes and buildings. The costs to agriculture,  particularly the cotton and cattle businesses, are estimated at $5.2 billion — and keep in mind that, in a winter breaking all sorts  of records for warmth, the Texas drought is not yet over.

That kind of whining about the weather, which is the fault of Barack Obama cruising the country in 17 car convoys, continues on for a bit longer. Because weather never happened before 1980 (until you cruise Real Science, and see the newspaper headlines from the past)

Such calamities, devastating for those affected, have important  implications for how we think about the role of government in our  future. During natural disasters, society regularly turns to the state  for help, which means such immediate crises are a much-needed reminder  of just how important a functional big government turns out to be to our  survival.

In the past, people tended to rely on themselves. And there is nothing wrong with government helping out: it’s one of the reasons we have government. There is no need for a massive central government with a giant bureaucracy. Of course, that’s not the progressive narrative: to them, we need giant over-reaching and all powerful government for when the wind blows, it rains, and it snows….hey, remember when the NYC public sector unions slowed the snow cleanup in 2010?

Anyhow, the author goes on and on about how great big central government is, and why the private sector can’t do anything, ending with

In the face of an unraveling climate system, there is no way that  private enterprise alone will meet the threat. And though small “d”  democracy and “community” may be key parts of a strong, functional, and  fair society, volunteerism and “self-organization” alone will prove as  incapable as private enterprise in responding to the massive challenges  now beginning to unfold.

To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale  and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, big  storms require big government. Who else will save stranded climate  refugees, or protect and rebuild infrastructure, or coordinate rescue  efforts and plan out the flow and allocation of resources?

It will be government that does these tasks or they will not be done at all.

What would we do without Big Centralized Government taking charge? Just because they’ll need to take more and more money while imposing more and more regulations/restrictions on its citizens and businesses is Bo reason to poo poo the idea. Government is just here to help. Despite being incompetent and taking vastly too long to accomplish the most minor and mundane task is no reason to be concerned about Government. Just because the climate change movement is about fascism (for everyone else) is no reason to worry.

Said story: Activists Fight Green Projects, Seeing U.N. Plot

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

They are showing up at planning meetings to denounce bike lanes on public streets and smart meters on home appliances — efforts they equate to a big-government blueprint against individual rights. (snip)

The protests date to 1992 when the United Nations passed a sweeping, but nonbinding, 100-plus-page resolution called Agenda 21 that was designed to encourage nations to use fewer resources and conserve open land by steering development to already dense areas. They have gained momentum in the past two years because of the emergence of the Tea Party movement, harnessing its suspicion about government power and belief that man-made global warming is a hoax.

Some may in fact see it as a UN plot, but, then, the UN has been pushing junk science and all sorts of initiatives, most recently “biodiversity” and “sustainability”, as a means to put more control into the hands of government, as well as people’s hard earned money. As Tom Nelson points out

Is Revkin really sure that Tea Party activisits don’t just see their hard-earned cash being blown on idiotic left-wing bad-weather-preventing projects?

Let me tell you a little tale. Behind my home is a greenway that follows the Neuse River. The stretch in my area, which extends a few miles from the Highway 264 bridge north, is mostly dirt and gravel. Over the last few months they have been paving it. And cutting down trees. Wait, cutting down trees on a greenway? And by “months” they have literally been slapping down a mile or two of pavement perhaps 5 feet wide. I hear their machines every weekday for months. Not quite sure what they are doing, but, I’m pretty sure it’s expensive. Now, I have no problem with the greenway. In fact, I think it’ll be great to rollerblade on (there are no good places in my area to ‘blade). Of course, not many people used it before: most folks either walked the sidewalks or the golf car paths. I’d go for a walk down it beforehand (it’s been closed for about 5 months now) and see no one else. A $13 million bond was voted in back in 2007. Perhaps, in this economy, it isn’t the time to spend the money on a greenway that will barely be used. Total cost for all the greenways is $30 million. Rather expensive, eh? And wasteful. Should have put convicts out there building it.

Similarely, TEA Party activists are tired of the government wasting enormous amounts of money, usually overspending at high levels, on “green” projects that will rarely be used. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes nature projects for the sake of nature are good. But, be responsible with the money. And don’t cut trees down on greenways, for goodness sakes.

A physics education does however seem to have given them some faint attachment to the scientific method, so they go to considerable lengths to substantiate their claims. But do they turn to physics to substantiate their claims? Not at all. Far from offering any comparison of male and female work in physics, they turn to sociology! Like sociologists they have faith that questionnaire surveys will tell them something about reality. I did such surveys for many years and eventually concluded that they don’t.

Their anti-scientific orientation is most clearly revealed by “the dog that didn’t bark”, however. They ignore over a hundred years of research that repeatedly reveals women to have better verbal ability and men to have better mathematical ability. And since physics these days is little more than applied mathematics, that datum could hardly be more relevant. It suggests that not many women have what it takes to be good physicists.

They could of coures disagree with what is one of the most replicated findings in science but instead of disagreeing with it, they simply ignore it — thus violating one of the most fudamental canons of science: That you must have regard for what others before you have written on your subject.

So their own writing suggests one very good reason why there are not many women physicists: They are just not very good scientists. Their own work suggests that hormones take the place of rationality.

And in the end why does it matter that most physicists are men? I can’t see that humanity is badly served by that reality but the case that it does matter is presumably arguable. But they make no attempt to argue it. They just resort to that terminally destructive and totally unrealistic Leftist obsession with “equality”. They are very poor intellects indeed. Procrustes would be proud of them.

For reference, I reproduce below the concluding section of their article:

The global survey follows a body of work that has examined the importance to career success of access to resources and opportunities. The survey found that women are less likely than men to report access to various resources and opportunities that would be helpful in advancing a scientific career. It also confirmed, consistent with cultural norms, that men are more likely than women to have a spouse who will shoulder the burden of housework. We noted the cultural expectation that women are responsible for child care and documented survey results showing that parenting affects the careers of women more than it does the careers of men.

Admittedly, our results are derived from the testimony of survey respondents, and it is conceivable that the sex differences we have found exist not because women are treated differently but because they differ from men in their expectations about work. However, the results reported here will come as no surprise to the researchers who have already found that resources, opportunities, and family responsibilities affect women’s careers.4,6 We believe the results reflect an underlying reality of disadvantage—not differing work expectations—and that all the sex-based differences documented here adversely affect the careers of women physicists.

The low representation of women in physics is a problem the community needs to address, but the community also needs to address inequities in access to resources and opportunities. Cultural expectations about home and family also inhibit the progress of women physicists; those, of course, are much more difficult to change. Nonetheless, we look forward to a future in which science truly means science for all.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Isn’t he cute? Don’t you just want to hug him and kiss him and take him home where you can make Seal Flipper Pie or Seal Meat Hash? Well, sucks to be you, because baby harp seals are apparently being killed off by globull warming

Climate change spares no one. Not even the adorable. Baby harp seals, for instance, can’t catch a break. After centuries of looking over their shoulders to spot folks who plan to eat them or wear them, the cute little critters now have to worry about Mother Nature. As climate change warms the Arctic, it is reducing sea ice to historically low levels. Since stretches of thicker ice are getting harder to come by, baby seals are now more frequently drowning or getting crushed by broken-up chunks of ice. Though harp seal numbers remain strong, the pace of sea ice melt has hindered the survival of pups. Canada saw a 25 percent survival rate in 2007, and virtually no pups survived there in 2010.

Bummer. I wonder how they survived during the previous warmer periods over the last 10,000 years. Unfortunately, this turns them into juvenile delinquents

One can only hope that a recent case of baby seal breaking and entering (BSB & E) will not prove to be the start of a trend: Rogue bands of thug baby seals, driven to lawlessness by the cruel dictates of global warming. Believe it or not, that premise is not as satirical as it sounds. Polar bears, like our cartoon friend Bebbo, find that global warming has decimated their opportunities to hunt, so starvation increasingly forces them into town garbage dumps for survival.

Got that? It’s not a case of an animal doing something silly and cute, but a dire cause of someone like DaTechGuy daring to drive a fossil fueled vehicle. I suggest that all Warmists everywhere disconnect their power (no more TIVOing The Daily Show and Current TV, because TV boxes are huge causes of wasted energy) and water (there’s only so much to go around, ya know), wash their clothes in rivers and streams (with expensive Gaia friendly detergents), dry them on clothes lines (hey, what’s a little bird poo when we are saving Gaia?), and walk to work. No more fossil fueled vehicle trips for you!

Note also that the term “obesity” has now lost all meaning. It is little more than a swear word. The boy below was recently described by Britain’s National Health Service as “obese”

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here