Science/Knowledge; Good or Bad for Earth?

Science is knowledge. Badly applied science is destructive.

Science enabled the population to expand beyond a billion people, create nuclear weapons, global warming, modern militaries, defoliation, pcbs, Auschwitz, the Interstate highway system, three billion cows, high Arctic pollution, industrial disease, microwave weapons, Dr. Moreau, Dr. Frankenstein...

Painting humanity into an existential-environmental corner is largely the application of science to technology and mass production. One can imagine a humanity that evolved differently as intelligent beings bright enough to start with to not conflict with the environment much while yet inventing new constructions. A zero net loss of biospheric health principle is still fundamental and an inference one must make with all applications of science to the world-sphere-ecology.

Science' has a meaning, strictly; 'knowledge'. Science is a word-meaning unit obviously. One must start somewhere epistemologically speaking. Perhaps you can evolve your communication beyond pettyfoggery. The etymology of the word science is 'knowledge'. That's a definition not a tautology, and the issue of 'is science good for the planet', is not fundamentally a linguistic issue.

Popper wrote that 'rationality can't be proved-that you just know what it is'. Thats a point worth recollecting when denying the validity of basic points of communication.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_etymology_the_word_science

Knowledge is something a human has or does with their brain. Science is not an reflexive behavior such as coyotes do when running under the moonlight in arroyos howling for happiness.

example A of 'Scientific progress does not make the world a better place...

example A; Humans with knowledge can apply it or not. A genius might know how to turn the Pacific Ocean into concrete with some special additive, yet it would be harmful if the knowledge(science) were applied in such a way.

example B: Tilly knows through research how to prevent birth defects. Tilly applies the knowledge and halts all birth defects and makes all voters Republicans, therefor the world is a better place.

One may discern that the application of science can be good or bad, and that too is knowledge as wisdom.

One can readily make categorical confusions or errors in language. Science means knowledge as an historical use of the term. Obviously linguistic philosophical descriptions of the meaning of words is a field for itself. One may readily circumlocute away from reasonably simply empirical concerns into intentional concepts.


It is fair enough to rephrase propositions in order to better answer them.

Substituting 'science' with 'knowledge' we may put the statement of this thread as 'Knowledge progress does not make the world a better place'.

There-we have achieved our point from which to make scathing jokes and reposts such as with the further reductio and contrapositive'Advancing ignorance makes the world a better place'.

Then we may thus generate aphorisms such as 'ignorance must make the world a better place because it is incapable of recognizing anything wrong'.

Discretion in applying knowledge however so technical it may be is the beneficial wit of science.

On the point that knowledge depends on what one does with it--I do not agree. Knowledge is self-standing so far as thought is locally independent in space-time continua in human sentience.

On the further point clarified, that what one does with knowledge is trivial-that is absurd. What one does is the essential variable in the world being made 'better' or not by knowledge/science.

It would be useful to define a list of things that would make the world better if they were made to occur by an application of knowledge/science. Relocating the planet to a better neighborhood in the galaxy with more earth-like planets might make the world better yet that is not within the knowledge base of scientific method right now.

The first rule of medicine in treating a patient is 'don't make the condition worse'. Mindless economic applications of knowledge/science discoveries would certainly fail consequentialist varieties of utilitarian philosophy. Act and rule based utilitarianism applied to science-knowledge a priori in order to determine the effects on the world for good or bad often are not made at all politically or individually. Historically the fundamental criteria for scientific applications are fiduciary and that state certainly is prevalent today.

On the question of is science more efficient or knowledge acquisition more efficient if the methods cohere within a bureaucracy, and do bureaucratic scientific procedures make the world a better place (accomplish goals on the list of things to do that make the world a better place) perhaps versus individualistic scientific efforts, perhaps that is a trivial question if there are no objective parameters for describing making the world better.

It is plain though that scientific applications ares the basic parameter for determining if science a good or bad effect upon world improvement.

Intellectually Weak, Spoilt Congress, Drifts Toward Tax Cuts & Deeper Public Debt

Never do today what you can put off for a year or two is contemporary Congressional thought on balancing the budget. An intellectually weak Congress appears set to succumb to fiscal relativism once again and deepen the public debt. A bad hillbilly ethos (the good ones have balanced budgets) makes putting the poor to work and keeping out cheap foreign immigrant labor priority last. The Bush era tax cuts and military spending increases created the present high unemployment rate. Wall Street and the rich are prospering. Extending tax cuts is McConnelnomics of royal advantage for the rich while the nation rots. Molly coddling supremacist dissimulation is weak dogocratic party policy choose letting America degrade.

. Better democratic leaders would have made short work of the McConnell palaver and the fatuous war against terror methodology as well. Let the tax cuts expire and negotiate from a position of strength. Party extremists may actually believe their kookonomic debt deepening will employ the poor right away or simply wish to sell out the U.S.A. to global rule.

Give the middle class its money back through rebates if they too are unwilling to help the nation recover economically. Give just 50% of benefits for extended unemployment payments.

President Obama and the lame duck Congress appear ready to cave in to Republican demands that wealth be concentrated and historically low taxes continue for the ultra-rich. The Congress may sign off on across the board tax cuts without correspondingly cutting spending significantly in order to help Wall Street continue to rise and let Scrooge plan his global strategies better.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/04/obamas-leadership-scrutiny-amid-negotiations-gop/

Extending unemployment benefits again-going on 18 months is unprecedented -another charge it to those for the decline and fall period of American history. Tax cuts, a jobless recovery and rising unemployment (9.8%) with more free trade pacts (S. Korea) and a public debt today

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

President Obama's Leadership Crisis; Pro-Homo Blue Dog Faces Tough Issues/Let Tax Cuts Expire

President Obama and the lame duck Congress appear ready to cave in to the regal sounding litigious Mitch McConnell class Republican demands that wealth be concentrated and historically low taxes continue for the ultra-rich. The Congress may sign off on across the board tax cuts without correspondingly cutting spending significantly in order to help Wall Street continue to rise and let Scrooge plan his global strategies better. Just let the tax cuts expire and find some way to rebate those earning less than $100,000 annually.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/12/04/obamas-leadership-scrutiny-amid-negotiations-gop/

Extending unemployment benefits again-going on 18 months is unprecedented -another charge it to those for the decline and fall period of American history. Tax cuts, a jobless recovery and rising unemployment (9.8%) with more free trade pacts (S. Korea) and a public debt today of...
$13 trillion, 849 billion, 512 million and some change...

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

One wonders how long this can continue?

I believe the secret lay within monetary theory and a theory of capital.

Von Mises and the Austrian school of economists began an investigation into the nature of capital and money around the turn of the 20th century. For about eighty years right unto Milton Freedman monetary and capital theory pondered the deep question of the relationship of money to material wealth asking such questions, as is the capital in the goods producing capability of a factory or in the goods themselves?

The market disequilibria between capital, money and bad investing that precipitated the 1929-30 stock market collapse brought the theories of John Maynard Keynes as well as the pragmatism of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the fore. Laugher and supply side economics with a neo-Keynesianism deficit spending pump priming of the post Vietnam era economic readjustment and slump set the United States onto a course of economic growth fueled by federal military spending and energy development. There was a critical event in the Nixon administration though that allowed the Reagan economic revolution to proceed; the dollar was taken off the gold standard.

Detaching the dollar from any material direct value association meant that the Federal Reserve had no responsibility to value dollars in relation to gold supply in federal possession. If the Federal Reserve hitherto had printed new dollars it diluted the value of the dollars in relation to the gold. From the Nixon administration on the value of a dollar was just in the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government and in its exclusive right to print dollars that cannot be counterfeited.

Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke's decision to quantitatively ease money supply and print 800 billion dollars of new money in effect to buy U.S. debt (bonds) simultaneously devalues the relative value of the public debt. Perhaps that is the secret elixir of solvency in the voodoo economic policy of the U.S.A.

On the gold standard money supply could not be increased without deflating the value of the dollar. Now, money supply can be increased locally without creating any measurable equanimity between holders of the dollar objectively. The dollar is simply one exclusive though universal currency that has value so long as the traders in dollars honor it against other currencies. It is entirely possible that the dollar one day might be regarded as worthless as confederate dollars if dollar holders defect en mass to another currency through the minting of new exchange paper while the dollar is destroyed.

When the dollar entered the realm of fiscal relativism during the Clinton and Bush II administrations a variety of financial schemes were perpetrated- often enabled by federal economic policy-that paid off in the eventual 2008 economic debacle and present shadow of the past recession. Fiscal relativism is somewhat equivalent to moral relativism and has an essential origin in conflicts in value theory or what philosophers sometimes call axiology.

Moral values do have a true role in value theory. A society may regard full employment and the well being of all citizens and the environment as a high value. A society may consider that a stable monetary policy and enterprise market is no more important than a stable labor market; the working class should not have perennial uncertainty regarding labor supply from legal and illegal foreign immigrants. The producer class should have reduced uncertainty regarding tax rates. Tax rates should be such that wealth is not concentrated to such extent that democratic parameters and national self-interest of the citizen majority are defeated. Taxation creating surpluses can be spent on environmental reconstruction and space habitation, for example.

Dollars may be tied to any given material or existential thing that can be quantified. Historically these things were rare minerals or metals yet the choice is circumstantial and historical. Economic development and methods of exchanging definite value units should function to positively reinforce democratically defined social goals, or at least to proscribe select activities from value unit reinforcement.

The federal policy today of a high entropy global economic phenomenon serviced with dollars valued in fiscal relativism and a large U.S. public debt of phenomenal and uncertain value is evidently an unstable economy best suited to mal-develop the developing nations into ecologically harmful high consumption, non-renewable economic activity. Nationally the policy has permitted the degradation of millions of Americans displaced from real opportunity from meaningful employment such that they could afford to pursue their own preferred self-interests. Work for wages enables citizens to afford graduate education and to become educators instead of being unemployed, collecting food stamps and experiencing their lifetime trickle away in futility.

The Obama administration and national democratic party should let all the tax cuts expire and develop alternative means to reinforce those out of work and drawing unemployment benefits-the benefits should at least be cut in half if extended. New ecological economic reform actions and far better ecologically innovative Mexican border control of illegal migrant labor needs to be advanced strait away. Specific policy actions to identify and put to work all those out of work can be made-yet traditional economic logic detached from pragmatic functionality is what F.D.R. was able to overcome while others would go stand out on an office ledge.

Winning With Winter in Anchorage Alaska

Winter is the tipping point for the return of longer days in the northern hemisphere. With the winter solstice on December 21st the shortest day of the year has arrived, the fall of the days is over and things start looking up.

As the frost accumulates on the ceiling of the tent this month,and when the wind chill turns that 9 degree temperature into minus thirty and fine snow dusts the inside of the tent through the vents one knows that if the nose turning purple doesn't become necrotic that it won't be necessary to promote a Liberty Valance chic propaganda campaign next year.

We look forward to the arrival of winter when each day a few minutes of additional sunlight promise the basking days of February. If the homeless of Anchorage have bus passes during the winter provided by the municipal government for free we are sure that the effect of saving many from hypothermia will warm the hearts of bureaucrats collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars of cold compensation. While such a program does not yet exist, it is almost inevitable that the prevailing compassionate conservativism will soon create such relief for the poor finding their way into being stranded in Anchorage from outlying villages.

Studying my tent fora few hours or more, I realized that it is a good model for a solid tempoerary shelter universally. One needs a steel multi-pipe connector at the top and several steel pipes to insert and fasten into it. A shelter roughly like a bell shaped tent wood be structured with insulated panels attached with pipe clamp fasteners. The seem covering would be attached with wing nuts on the left and right. The floor would also be several pipes off the ground level connect the also bracing the side struts. chunks of wood could be tossed under the floor pipe joists before the insulated floor panels are put down.

The shelter could be assembled in two hours or less. The panels could be made of plywood with fiberglass resin rolled on to repel water, and they would be the bread over a one inch blue foam insulation panel.

Since I am writing a little here about the homeless problem in Anchorage Alaska there is one additional point about surviving the winter here I ought to mention.

The City is fairly sprawling and there aren't many places where the homeless or stranded might legally camp. It is a hard thing to be able to build a quality shelter on a day or two from natural wood and instead be compelled for social reasons to spend a winter sleeping on the ground under a bit of nylon cloth without a fire or propane to heat coffee and raise the internal body temperature. All of these comfortable insiders obviously have other priorities and are content enough to write off those not winning at social musical chairs as inebriates and mentals.

As the City outlawed camping in city parks last winter they should create camping facilities for the homeless that could be screened for genuine need such as are food stamp eligibility and as should be social security and medicare are. Quality camp sites just for the screened homelss ought to be made available seasonally.

I cannot create a business here manufacturing those solid temporary dome homeless structures easy to assemble and disassemble. Perhaps the top 2% of income earnings can find another trickle up from the concept and create a local producer who would provide surplus or demo units for the use of the homeless campers seasonally.

There is one shelter in Anchorage Alaska is a cold part of town that is reportedly (see O'Malley's article in the Anchorage Daily News Dec. 2nd) full and over flowing these cold nights with the homeless sleeping packed with more than 200 each night. 16 homeless people perished from hypothermia this year. This week three were rescued in cold weather incoherence and taken to hospital. A better system of realistically affording opportunities for human beings to help themselves in cold weather without being warehoused in communal ad hoc shleters should be made.

40% of the people at a homeless shelter have mental illness issues. The shelters are a first stop for people out of jail. Drug users and alcohol abuse find the shelter a phenomenal stop. Needless too say, such a synergy of social dysfunction is not conducive to personal security or positioning for advancement of personal interest; it is just another challenge for survival in addition to the winter. It is also a source of stress as a stop for rural Alaskans that visit the city of Anchorage and become stranded here for whatever reason-perhaps they missed the last flight to Kodiak for work.

Gay Soldier Wikilea'd in the Obama Year of Trying to End Don't Ask, Don't Tell-Espionage for Political Leverage

When PFC Bradley Manning stole classified government information and sent it to wikileaks enabling the present global diplomatic mess, he personified the new era of espionage wherein spies or one-off traitors steal and send classified information to Internet sources rather than a foreign nation-or in addition to foreign governments.

http://www.washingtonblade.com/2010/08/05/gay-soldier-accused-of-leaking-classified-files/

PFC Manning is allegedly homosexual and speculation has been given that he stole the information and sent it to the machination of Julian Assange in order to pressure the public into gaying up the military of the United States. There may be a third column hostile homosexual force within society attacking heterosexual norms-yet that is a perennial phenomena and one the government should recognize and take steps to defend against.

Manning said in an interview with Wired; "Hillary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public."

Sec Defense Gates has supported a transition to an openly homosexual military, and also failed to provide security for the State Department and military cables that were sent to Wikileaks. The Justice Department and Congress seem to have dropped the ball on recognizing the threat to U.S. security created by allowing Internet store fronts some sort of status whereby they should be free to receive stolen intellectual capital public o rprivate and publish it without legal penalty.

In this new era of Internet communications espionage shops may be set up by anyone from Al Qa'eda to Wikileaks to express a willingness to receieve stolen information and publish it. Such agencies may be stateless entities willing to redact classified data or not, they may even be free to offer the information for sale per data unit or auction it on ebay. Internet information brokers should be subject to the same legal reprisals that any receiver of stolen goods is. Reseller or publisher of stolen goods, with advertising or not, the acquisition of political and social power through espionage transfers of classified public or private date to Internet Infoormation Agencies requires new legislation or provide meaningful and effective legal deteerrence tosuch crimes.

SecDef gates should be fiired, Janet Napolitano returned to Arizona for instrumentally grouping the public at airports instead of advocating more intelligent, alternative security methods, and the war on heterosexual America stopped by the Obama Administration straight way.

Ending 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' would not stop disgruntled homosexuals from leaking classified information. One might compare PFC Manning with Aldrich Aimes for most harmful to U.S. national interests, yet it is certain that they put themselves in service before their duties to the nation.

Ground Breaking Life Extension Find (in worms)

Life extension researches in worms has provided insights into how these vital creatures of the animal kingdom can live longer and prosper with increased metabolic efficiency.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101201102603.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+sciencedaily+(ScienceDaily:+Latest+Science+News)&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Human beings may learn from these worms’ methods to extend their own life spans in order to have more time for the drive through window line at McDonalds.

The key to extending life in elite worm classes is to increase metabolic efficiency and reduce waste. Waste products may be harmful to the human and worm environments simultaneously. Depleted uranium shells, PCBs, oil spills, land mines, booze and caffeine products; such items have been found dangerous to the health of worms and people.

A myriad of studies have found that worms deprived of smell live longer. Stench avoidance coincides with residence in non-foul locales with French perfumes and such. Worms without smell expend less effort on metabolic processing energy-a metabolic rate is the energy production from food processing of a bioformality. Humans paradoxically may be better off stopping to smell real rather than plastic roses because of the chemical cocktails in manufactured products.

The key to the life extension of worms maneuvering through the cold underground may be the cool, efficient and restricted dietary intake allowing the body to completely process minimal quantities of food with a streamlined energy intake. Too much localized energy overstresses a bioform and accelerates its cellular aging.

As in the wild kingdom, so it is in macroeconomics. A nation that wastes natural resources accelerates the aging or depletion of its natural endowment and begins importing cheap foreign labor and products from China. Wasting human resources domestically it depletes the health of the environment and is conspicuously inefficient maladapted to optimalization of human potential. That society in a terminal condition risks economic H.I.V. as its financial class concentrates wealth devastating the health of the body politic.

SecDef Gates Disparages Russia in Cable Leak Espionage

Prime Minister Putin of Russian replied to the disparaging comments made by SecDef Gates about Russia..

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/world/europe/02putin.html?_r=1&src=mv

Sect. Gates said that democracy has disappeared, and Prime Minister Putin said that Russia may resume building nuclear weapons if the New Start treaty is not signed.

While Russia may be going through a Boris Godonov sorting out era, we have hope that in time all of the people of Russia will experience freedom and liberty better than that in corporatist America today.

Republican Congressional leaders and the Obama Administration should demand the resignation of Sect Gates for making the statements and allowing the leaks through military channels then sign the damn treaty and move on as if they were capable of competence.

The Obama Administration should also put together a crack diplomatic apology team to travel to offended countries with entertainment and gifts for our friends.