Postscript to Climate Change

Climate change isn’t the only judgment problem environmentally and socially speaking. Moral and other issues involving free will to make wrong choices are reflected in the overall decline of the ecosphere, wildlife, mass extinction etc stemming from the failure for political economy to implement ecological economics principals and practices. Perhaps society is too comfortable in habitual dopeyness. The dream world continues… for a while.

I wrote much of this post in various replies to a fellow who was seriously advocating for legalized illegal drugs, against the war on drugs and for the benefits as he saw them of all of the drugs, alcohol and tobacco of society. It is self-standing.

  Decadence has been with societies since the advent of civilization. Doped brains are degraded, deoptimalized brains. Sub-par thought that is currently reinforced socially with illegal drugs may be ubiquitous and endemic in subcultures of America.

 

A list of problems caused by drug and alcohol use could go on for volumes. Consider just a few; 150,000 annual U.S. lung cancer deaths, “Excessive alcohol use led to approximately 88,000 deaths and 2.5 million years of potential life lost (YPLL) each year in the United States from 2006 – 2010, shortening the lives of those who died by an average of 30 years” -quote from CDC., appx. 70,000 annual drug overdose deaths in the U.S.A., liver disease, lost time at work, most people in prison had drug and or alcohol problems when perpetrating crimes costing tens of billions of dollars to society.

https://www.usnews.com/news/at-the-edge/articles/2016-12-19/drug-and-alcohol-abuse-cost-taxpayers-442b-annually-new-surgeon-generals-report-finds

Making the world work well isn’t that difficult yet too many fail the challenges environmentally and politically that turn up in global warming, mass extinction of species, regressive taxation, vast public debt, concentration of wealth and declining morality; humanity needs to do better. Illegal drugs countercyclically support mass corruption. The Presidential candidates of the Democrat party, for example, are a joke. Sanders and Trump may be honest socialists or capitalists, yet no candidate is competent with ecological economics; no not one. Neither has anyone a plan to pay off public debt and transition the political economy to one of ecological economics within a free enterprise paradigm.

Not too much can be said for a society that need be smarter and work together better with sobriety and whatever degree of abstemiousness they can manage without the crutches of dope yet prefer to hang out in the haze of dope, fake highs of catnip like delusions and bottle supplied forgetfulness of cell-killing alcohol. To develop a better political economy founded on principles and practice of ecological economics will require the moral rectitude of Moses in the desert eschewing temptations and for Americans withstanding the perils of indolence inducing prosperity.

 

Human health and brain chemistry are best in a natural state. Some exceptions for the purpose of conserving or restoring health exist of course. Good health is good health. Few have shown that tobacco inhalants improve athletic lung capacity and performance. marijuana uses impairs at least short term memory.. Hallucinogens have not been shown to improve motor skills or increase spatial reasoning. One probably would not like aircraft designers nor other advanced technical production to be much influenced by mind-altering drugs. Maybe 90% of motorcycle fatalities have some alcohol in their blood. The cost to society is very, very high for drug and alcohol use, yet of course some have always supported such things for various reasons.

I talked with a fellow that treated meth addicts once; he mentioned that they seem to be on recovery and failure cycles yet generally return to dependence. They often die young and to a certain extent live degraded lives. I prefer that people be healthy and women not pathetic with arms like twigs.

Like the bell curve it may be that just a minority actual prefer entirely sober lives and most people; the masses, enjoy a dumbed-down existence, I cannot say.

Puritans were actually quite good people; they came from the reformed church movement of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and others and advanced society quite a lot in my opinion. Protestantism was a prime factor in the U.S. Declaration and political ideas of the founders; some people have forgotten or never knew much of western history.

Some regard altered states of the brain as unhealthful. Mass drug use for recreation and addictions have altered the course of history; it is not just a subjective thing personally experienced without effect on others.

For example, the Opium wars of the west to force China to allow opium sales and distribution changed Chinese history. The Chinese were experiencing mass addiction and fought to stop that.

Some have always supported illegal drugs and other illicit substances. That’s just the way it is. Some supported slavery and so forth.

Regarding taxes; if America was really fully dopey wealthy corporations would probably control the dope market and avoid paying taxes. Tax dollars would be used to pay for addiction recovery, crime compensations and so forth.

Legitimate medical uses of controlled substances was something I stipulated was o.k. My point about mind altering drugs, alcohol and tobacco being antipathetic to human and social well being is just what it is. extrapolating various inferences from that regarding other material goods that should be outlawed, or are, such as p.j.s that catch on fire easily, or shoddy electrical cords that cause death too readily, cars that are sold with bad break inspections, office buildings, bridges and dams that collapse because of bad construction material and so forth is a broader field beyond the narrow scope of just illegal drugs and legal libations plus tobacco.

Human health and brain chemistry are best in a natural state. Some exceptions for the purpose of conserving or restoring health exist of course. Good health is good health. Few have shown that tobacco inhalants improve athletic lung capacity and performance. marijuana uses impairs at least short term memory.. Hallucinogens have not been shown to improve motor skills or increase spatial reasoning. One probably would not like aircraft designers nor other advanced technical production to be much influenced by mind-altering drugs. Maybe 90% of motorcycle fatalities have some alcohol in their blood. The cost to society is very, very high for drug and alcohol use, yet of course some have always supported such things for various reasons.

Some don’t know the difference between Pilgrims and Puritans. In England they were quite similar as Calvinists, yet Pilgrims became separatists from the Church of England and some left with the Mayflower to America while Puritans remained loyal to the Church of England and only left for America when they were persecuted by Charles I. An article on the difference notes that Massachusetts Puritans; ”set the intellectual tone of the nation for three-hundred years”.

https://www.newsweek.com/whats-difference-between-pilgrim-and-puritan-397974#:~:text=

The world does not seem boring to me. One can always ind something interesting to do; from reading a book to volunteering for the Peace Corps or helping to treat people with dangerous viruses in Africa, if one has that ability. I liked jumping out of planes; it is exciting and makes the heart pump faster. I was an army reservist at the time so I felt it had some inherent utility value in case of war. Sailing or taking a small power boat (even rowing) in large waves can be white-knuckle exciting. I like motorcycles and only spilled a small one (250 cc) three or four times on ice or wet surfaces yet never found that exciting. Auto insurance is too costly and repairs on cars too high for my budget so I like motorcycles now and then.

Once when an engine seized and the wheels locked while going 60 mph I had a few seconds of exciting suspense waiting for the motorcycle to skid to a stop. Maybe driving a car fast fast is exciting. That could endanger others though. Going head first over bicycle handlebars to scrape one’s chin on the pavement happens so fast it’s hard to describe that as exciting.

Taking a smallish boat i.e 20–25′ can be quite exciting. If one is really in need of excitement one could sail across the Atlantic. Finding a way through the waves can be quite challenging and the penalty for capsizing rather severe,

Scuba diving can be exciting yet I found that calm is harder to achieve and more valuable in many activities than becoming excited. Some times one can be busy and resting between activities is more sought after than excitement. I cannot imagine doing anything under the influence of alcohol or drugs that is normally dangerous.

Recreational use of hills with snow and ice on them can provide exciting hiking opportunities. Hanging by a grip on a shrub on a steep edge after slipping through wet muskeg and bushes can be momentarily exciting. A view from a hike can bring some satisfaction too. Spotting a brown bear that has spotted you too can be interesting.

Writing a book and completing it can be exciting, or winning a bid on ebay etc. Reading science and developing better understanding is somewhat exciting, as is the prospect of eternal life with God and the Son beyond the exciting time of passing. Good luck with things.

Modern-Defense-with-1-e4-2.Bc4-Bg7 Blitz 3M

                                       I played black in this three minute blitz game

Sanders and Trump Each Muddied with Usual Russian/Putin Pawn Label

Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump each have been targets of mud-slinging this election cycle; namely being favored pawns of President Putin. For some reason Democrats at the top find it requisite to associate Russian President Putin with opposition political rivals in order to boost themselves as default genuine American apple pie personnel. After the end of the war against the Soviet reds the left media gave the name red to Republican states and blue to Democrat majority states. Democrat and media leaders were apparently fearful of becoming thought of as residual reds themselves with the demise of communism in the former Soviet Union.

 https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-blasts-cnn-msdnc-for-grouping-sanders-gabbard-as-russian-sympathizers

Bernie Sanders as the sole Democrat candidate to have voted against President Obama's demand to fully approve keeping the Bush II tax cuts is regarded as the only Democrat who could actually make a difference to uni-party, deep state business as usual that is purposed to enrich politicians and concentrate wealth before anything else. Democrat leaders thus hate Sanders and the left media hates Sanders too; not as much as President Trump yet he is up there in the hate rankings.

 https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-russia-isnt-attacking-our-democratic-system-our-own-ruling-class-is

Sanders probably would need to tighten up his border security policy outlook to get elected. The nation and democracy cannot have illegal migrants running amuck over the border and thereby subverting democracy and political self-determination. If Mexico or any other American states wants to join the United States of America; a union of states in the Americas, that would be fine. They can ask Congress for that. What cannot be tolerated is gross corruption of borders and national sovereignty that renders democracy a farce and concentrates wealth and power with the majority becoming peonized.

The entire concept of the Russian President being a meaningful elector of U.S. Presidents is too farcical to be believed. Taking out a few million dollars worth of Facebook ads and more is just a drop in the bucket of the cost of winning a U.S. election.  The deep state media has already made it virtually impossible for large scale formation of political opinion that does not generally follow media preferential opinions; what ever happened to the Green Party menu of non-environmental issues dumped on it that made it disappear.

Bernie Sanders is the first candidate since Ralph Nader ran as a Green or Independent to present the prospect for rectifying American tax rates and making a difference. President Trump was elected for a similar reason in as far as he shared with Bernie Sanders and outside the deep state mainstream relationship. The United States has a real choice this year between environmentally indifferent, wealth concentrating capitalism and socialist leadership dampened capitalism that would in theory concern itself more with ecological economic policies within a free enterprise paradigm while also restoring a meaningful progressive income tax rate in order to pay down the U.S. public debt. With the two opposed dynamic approaches one cannot predict the outcome nor what the actual policy implementation would be if that is the November 2020 card.

The Criterion of Original Sin and Aftermath

Recently I encountered another one of the millions and millions of skeptics and trash-talkers of original sin. I thought I would write a little about the topic for edification of those lost forever unless they were to become saved through the intervening grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Apparently a lot of people haven't given much thought to the book of Genesis. One might need to think about it, especially in the post-Darwinian social environment, for some substantial length of time. There is much to the book of Genesis of course. It was handed down from Abraham to Moses and made into a formal book of the Bible in the Court of David initially, or for a start, and completed perhaps in the court of Solomon or Rehoboam with some minor redactions later. 

I will keep the remarks to the point of the moral failure of Adam and Eve instead of the interesting, preceding cosmological content concerning the order of creation. We know from Genesis that Adam and Eve were a test case. They were created and had a start in time, yet the time may have been open-ended until they were caught perpetrating deceit unto God and corrected. They were cast into the temporal Universe from some unknown eternal paradigm that is guarded against human entry by four cherubim. Maybe those cherubim watch the four-dimensions of space-time of this Universe.

The correction of God was made because Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of knowledge and become 'as one of us' aka sentient. They were willful and disobedient unto God. God realized that Adam and Eve might eat of the tree of life and live forever as immortals disobedient to the will of God. That would be inappropriate for several reasons including the well-being of Adam and Eve and their kind. The entire human race staring with the first two prototypes or archetypes were removed to the temporal Universe with thermodynamics, work, life, death, procreative urges and the unavoidable nature of interacting with others often destructively or manipulatively, because in nature, consuming energy in the form of eating others is endemic.

Original sin thus is like a virus or plague that infects all of humanity from birth unto death. Death limits the uncorrected and incorrigible nature of mankind. Salvation through the atoning grace of the Lord is the sole way that spiritually dead human beings may be saved; God sees the perfect nature of His Son Jesus who has shed his blood for each saved individual, instead of the sinner that is every human being that stands before God in judgment, with a default judgment rendering against him a priori via Adam, Eve and the paradigm of thermodynamic unit being.

Many people wish to regard life simply from the biological, evolutionary angle. In that paradigm people are just meat and the essential purpose for humanity is reproduction. Even in that paradigm it is species survival rather than individual survival that is more meaningful in the meaningless world of evolution; an individual human genome mostly is dispersed and replaced through heterosexual reproduction in individuals so far that their descendants would be complete strangers to their forefathers and mothers. An individual lizard's genes are not important at all in comparison to the survival of a lizard species that is itself of dubious meaning for evolution itself.

Spiritual life is brought through God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. One could compare the relation of the spiritual to the evolutionary Universe of meat and death including spiritual death to the Platonic realm of Forms, the Intelligence and dumb, individual created social units.

 No matter, faith and reason overcome temporal worldliness and faithlessness alone. One has an eternal existence with God and the other, left to its own devices if not corrective design, hell forever. Physicists believe that below absolute zero the temperature may be infinitely hot. That's an illustrative phase change of the potential for willful spiritual death.

Evolution Makes Every Political Circumstance a Winner

Evolution makes every possible circumstance in politics and chess a winner, for every position is equally meaningless and determined with blind, random chance.

Politics evolve, more than dialectically, actually wholistically, in conformity to thermodynamic patterns of the Universe. Human reason works against evolution in that it reorders the orders of nature. Fortunately for the integrity of evolution, scientific reason has stipulated that reason is itself evolving and a product of evolution, therefore reason is meaningless and futile too, so everyone is a winner.  

Reason has allowed faith, that ostensibly surpasses the order of evolution and reason when necessary, however even if so, evolution is a continuum of meaninglessness bringing the best possible circumstance of politics and economics with more than blind, random chance that is a kind of stochastic fallacy in regard to thermodynamics in which evolution coheres.

Evolution is the format of in-line capitalist philosophy of those that have made a philosophy of capitalism the sine qua non of evolutionary political economy. The beauty is that without reason the invisible hand of evolutionary fate brings the market to evolve the best possible circumstance for all that believe.

Original sin is comparable to a Universal virus that infects everyone at birth with the sole remedy being inoculation from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Sanders vs Trump Seems Like the Main Event

The rise of Bernie Sanders to take the 2020 Presidential race nomination of the Democrat Party seems pretty assured considering his primary opposition. Sanders is the sole candidate with principal running in the Democrat Party that means anything. He was the only member of the Democrat side to vote against the Obama renewal of the Bush II tax cuts. All other Democrats were nothing more than goose-stepping followers. The integrity of Senator Sanders is something of a rare item in U.S. politics these days.

If Bernie Sanders is elected he can work one or two good policy changes in his single term of office (Republicans would retake the Presidency in 2024 most likely as they would be very motivated). The main Sanders work would be to return to a substantial progressive tax rate on the upper 10% of U.S. income compilers.

Sanders might be expected to take all of the Democrat Party vote and to bring in large numbers of Obama minority voters that realize that increasing taxes on the most rich can't be a bad thing for them. Sanders would need to steer clear of extremist economic reform plans that are quite half-baked threats to put Americans out of work. A Sanders check-hook would accentuate the positive aspect of limiting solid tax increase to a small minority of the most rich Americans. Sanders vs Trump would be like the Ali vs Frazier thrilla in Manilla over taxes. Sanders with Klobuchar in his corner as VP candidate would present a tough and possibly winning game.

With a separation of powers three-part government it is not really theoretically possible for a one-party socialist government to evolve if the voters don't really support socialism. Sanders as a socialist candidate is not able to install socialism as the U.S. form of government; he is just a candidate that with Presidential powers would be able to advocate for higher taxes to negate the vast concentration of wealth in the U.S.A. that makes it a peer of Mexico.

Over-concentration of wealth destroys the political power of voters to elect adaptive candidates whom would use free enterprise incentives and regulations to develop an ecological economic infrastructure for the U.S.A. It also blocks creative individuals from expressing new ideas and developing alternative business ventures in this age of networked ad hoc racketeering by the repressive and powerful. With so many environmental challenges to human life on Earth over-concentrating wealth to give the generally uncreative so much power to ossify social political-economy is quite unhealthy.

The Sanders vs Trump event is the meeting of two heavyweights fighting over the political philosophy of progressive taxes to stop aristocracy from taking over America versus a model of classical capitalism who believe evolution of capital presents the best possible political economy. It is a battle of egalitarian democracy versus blind predatory capitalism with faith in itself with virtual divine right to rule.

Norway's Planned $47 Billion Dollar Road

Norway has started construction on a forty-seven billion dollar road that crossed several fjords. Costly conventional bridges destroying the purity, such as remains, of fjord wild ecosystem health, probably was planned to be minimal, and for economic reasons the construction is understandable. One wonders if their were alternatives to the mildly invasive of the fjord ecosystem transport technology that might have been used instead.

Different tech that creates electromagnetic field lines to repel electric cars so they can drive over fjords without solid bridges might be a couple dozen billion dollars cheaper. It would be like a surface effects channel skipper with an infrastructure to support passing land vehicles.

Alternatively magnetic field lines could be made and stationary, Meissner effect elevated platforms set for conventional 'primitive' wheeled vehicles to drive upon. Where possible, new technology should be innovated to reduce the cost of conventional infrastructure by at least 50%. The public could better invest in free college education for the poor than use old-style established infrastructure costly to build or maintain.

Norway's new road will enable a certain amount of economic acceleration for free trade with Britain or other non-EU countries, or even the EU should they wish to be better exploited by EU tourism.

https://earther.gizmodo.com/nasa-scientists-have-found-millions-of-arctic-methane-h-1841692970