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science and democracy

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New Plains advertised a webcast about fracking from the Union of Concerned Scientists.  See below.

Science.  Scientific method.  Hypothesis, experiment, evidence, contingent proof, repeatability.

Democracy.  Majority rule, the common good, enforced equality, regulatory bureaucratic control.

There’s nothing scientific about democracy.  Democracy is about controlling people.  Science is about understanding nature.  Why link the two?

Because you want to enforce specific outcomes under the pretense of scientific authority.   And what outcomes do the Union of Concerned Scientists want to enforce?  Look at their web site . . .

The list goes on.  No nukes, sustainable this and that, one Pollyanna “solution” after another.  I respect that we all have free speech and we can say whatever we want in America, for the most part.  But the left is just so fundamentally unserious on so many of these issues.

Imagine what problems could be solved in the world if the half of humanity with their heads up their democratic collectives were actually engaged in real solutions.

Imagine what politically correct effluvia they’ll issue about fracking on Thursday.

The hardest part about being a conservative is the constant challenge of countering seductive fantasies with the “opportunity cost” of real accomplishments that could have been made, had they not been crowded out by bovine scatology.

Science and Democracy

myth addicts

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“A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it, in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district than an entire state.”

James Madison, Federalist no. 10.

Examples of what the Founders considered improper or wicked projects have become the norm in America.  The division of interests built into our republic failed to overcome the appeal of beggar-thy-neighbor politics.

Does anyone really think the Republicans will stand up for the people at the 11th hour this Friday by drawing a line in the sand over sequestration?  Based on the evidence that they’ve never drawn such a line yet?

Republicans and Democrats both know that a spending cut, however insignificant, will undermine the central myth of federal necessity that keeps them in business.

Ask the storm survivors in New Orleans and the Jersey shore, the disarmed citizens in the big cities preyed upon by armed criminals, students in failed public schools, patients who rely upon medicaid, any of the supposed beneficiaries of federal spending, how well the myth of federal necessity is working out for them.

I wouldn’t bet on Boehner’s House this Friday.  They’re as addicted as Democrats to the myth.

P.S.  Well bowl me over with a feather.  Let’s see what they do with the CR next month.

Katy bar the door

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Enviros fool themselves over the purported dangers to the environment from oil and gas fracturing.  The only thing this technology puts at risk is their ability to control society through fear.  Environmentalism requires that man pose a continuing threat to the earth.  For them, man is essentially evil, destructive and polluting.  He damages everything he touches.  Enviros built a trillion dollar industry on this myth, and any evidence to the contrary must be ruthlessly suppressed.  No tactics are off limits in this final battle for our very survival—and the protection of their rice bowl.

Oil and gas fracturing pops the balloon of environmental mythology with a pin of proven technology.  Rather than merely promising betterment, fracturing delivers, and this genuinely threatens environmentalists.  In Jonas Nightingale’s words in the movie Leap of Faith, “I know the real thing when I see it.”   When enviros look out above their denial, they know it too.

Meanwhile, science, causation, the direction of time, basic physics, language definitions, human nature–these building blocks of civilization must all bow to the higher objectives of the mission.   Reality must give way to the higher purposes of gaia lovers, busy replacing God with a new supreme being.  They practice new ritual sacrifices in new church buildings full of think tanks and symposiums attended by enviro high priests and their legal staffs. They sanctify their objectives in fervent reliance on metaphysical constructs much like those held in traditional religions.

These modern gnostic practitioners, possessors of true knowledge—not the stuff most people hold as commonly true—lead the Church of Environmentalism.  Most hold high office in the adjunct Church of Social Justice, as well as the Perpetual Church of Totalitarian Light, the Church for Reconstructed Sexuality, the Church for Cultural Equivocation, the Church for Economic Liberation from Capital, the Church for Recreational Mental Adjustment Through Chemistry, the Church for Aliens Spawned Earthly Life, as well as numerous smaller ad hoc conclaves.  Go fishing with one of these worms and you’ll tip over the whole can.

Due to the fluid notions of deterministic causation that all these churches share, symposiums begun under the auspices of one church usually develop into general sessions for the advancement of all related modalities.  Practitioners find this a real benefit—like getting something for nothing—except in these cases it’s getting nothing for nothing.  But that’s okay, inside their klatches they remain a cheerful bunch who practice abundant love and happiness among each other.

Non-initiated skeptics only see the prickly shell that new age cults present to outsiders.  This shell protects insider believers from the intrusion of information that could lead to schisms and defections from the ranks.  An unfortunate side effect of their self-referential domain is a growing disconnection from reality feedback that, over time, might help them improve the efficacy of their belief systems.  But this begs a larger question, already answered through their modifications to many of the informing constructs that normally lead to provable objective knowledge.

In the long run, and not withstanding the fervency of environmentalists’ beliefs, their willful dodges will play out and the rules that govern the universe will hold sway.  In the short run, Katy bar the door because this party is just getting started.  Again.

But let’s not lose sight of the forest for the trees.  It is the enforcement of beliefs through intimidation, coercion and legal compunction to achieve pre-ordained secular outcomes that offends far more than the substance of their conclusions.  A conservative might have no problem arriving at some point in the Left’s universe of acceptable ends, provided they got there from substantiated, proven evidence.

Ironically, while professing unfathomable degrees of faith in their objectives, on the issues the Left have claimed dominion over they grant no faith to mankind.  They do not allow people to voluntarily make up their own minds.  And this is quite odd for a group of people who call themselves humanist.

B_Imperial

Patriotic luddite statist enviro. . .

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. . .Tony Corrado spread his large flag like a blanket over a whole basket of spaghetti-intertwined Leftist mythologies.  To rebut;

  • Conservatives are not parochial, that is, limited in their scope or outlook.
  • No one, and no collection of individuals working together, intend to adversely impact or despoil the environment.
  • Conservatives do not define what it means for a Leftist to be patriotic.
  • No one wants to deplete our energy reserves. In fact, history has shown that as technology improves, reserves of energy and all minerals, including water, go up.
  • Profit, capital formation, innovation, and investment in capital equipment, make the modern world possible: the world where people live longer, happier, safer, more peaceful lives.  Without the necessities for a good life in place, few people would see nature as tranquil and beautiful.
  • Regulatory planning by non-stakeholders gave us suburban sprawl, expensive mass transits to nowhere, and continues to force expensive economic dislocations throughout the country that materially degrade American capacity in countless enterprises, and quality of life.
  • Governments should not intervene in markets.  Law appropriately defines the elemental terms for all economic transactions.  Beyond that, law used to direct the substance of those transactions is a corruption of our Constitution.
  • Trust the outcome of voluntary markets.  Don’t trust people who think they know more than the collected wisdom of free people, each acting in their own best interest.

B_Imperial

condolences

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Critics painted me as a defender of the old guard.  Ha!  The only things I defended in this election cycle were competence, sound management, realistic thinking, and the rule of law.  Tragically, these bedrock principles did not win today in the Elbert County Republican Party primary.  Well, the principles still exist, and it appears I will have plenty more opportunities to defend them in the future.

Come November, commissioner choices will be between agenda driven liberals and, um, agenda driven liberals.  I’m sure this prospect has the New-Plains democrats, populists, and leftists, dancing in their switch grass patches tonight, however, consequences for the county will be grim.

We’ll see ubiquitous zoning and higher taxes.  We’ll see environmentalism and its basket of unfounded mythologies unleashed in a flurry of ersatz relevancy as they consume the public discourse.  We’ll experience these mythologies fail in an expensive protracted drama full of denial and blame.  We’ll see none of these agenda progenitors take responsibility when their no-growth, anti-industrial, country-in-county ideas further impoverish Elbert County.  We’ll see the few of us who use their 1st Am. right to dissent from these prevailing insanities called more names, if that’s even possible at this point.

I never wrote for the sake of the old guard.  I wrote for the sake of limited sound government.  A voting minority of Elbert County voted for bigger more intrusive government.  They made a big mistake, and the county government they’ve chosen for all of us will make us pay dearly for it.  That’s what unbridled government does to people and these people are all about the unbridling of government power.

The left has won.  You’re not going to like these new-strange bedfellows when they start implementing their plans for you.

B_Imperial

Hickenlooper’s SOTS address

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On the subject of county level oil and gas regulations:

“In that same spirit, we intend to work with counties and municipalities to make sure we have appropriate regulation on oil and gas development, but recognize the state can’t have 64 or even more different sets of rules.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/news/2012/01/12/text-hickenloopers-state-of-the.html?page=all

Perhaps the tide of regulatory proliferation of the myth of a perfectable society has turned around on all the would-be czars and county potentates in Colorado’s planning and zoning departments.

Our freedom depends on it.

ACLU Key Issues

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From the ACLU 50-State Survey for January of 2012:

  • Access to abortion and birth control. [Must keep killing babies.]
  • Equal treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered. [Must treat those who display sexual preference the same as those who do not.]
  • Protection against racial profiling and discrimination by law enforcement. [Must not profile those most likely to commit terrorism.]
  • Equal access for eligible residents to vote. [As opposed to citizens.]
  • Non-preferential treatment of any one religion by the government. [Except Islam.]
  • Preventing the teaching of creationism and intelligent design from interfering with the teaching of evolution in public school science classes. [When government sanctions a theory it must be protected.  See global warming.]

Let’s see: infant death and dismemberment, sexual obsession, terrorism, illegal aliens, Sharia, spurious government science.  That’s an impressive series of harmful policies to rack up by one organization in one fund-raising mailer.  How did I get on this nutjob mailing list?  Yeah I’m going to send them a check, where’s my pen?

Thank you American law schools.

Tucson shooting

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We are hyper-legalized and hyper-sensitized.  Every deviation from the norm, large and small, becomes the subject of the 24/7 cable news obsession.  The unscrupulous politicians are the ones who build each new aberration into scripts that feature their political position tied into the aberration in a causal connection.  Could be cause, could be effect, and the script either supports their position, or undercuts their opposition.  Integration of the aberration into political scripts occurs after-the-fact of the aberration, when foresight is no longer necessary.

So let’s call the 24/7 coverage the first level of abstraction from the aberration, and let’s call building the aberration into a political context the second level.  The third level happens when laws are created at the margins of our liberty, criminalizing the aberration and/or regulating the rest of society in a manner to inhibit conditions that permit the aberration to occur.  The legal response tries to protect society, notwithstanding the feasibility of actually accomplishing societal protection.  Whatever the outcomes, the political machinery uses the aberrant grist to feed its mill.  As the gravity of the causal aberration fades in time, the legal response goes on forever, permanently limiting liberty for the remainder of the law abiding.

While the details can be argued about how terrible events filter through political and legal mechanisms to narrow our American liberties, the general model appears to be well-trod ground.  If the exchanges between limiting liberties and public safety were effective, one could argue it’s all worthwhile.  But they aren’t good trade offs.  The reasonable and justifiable legal responses don’t leave us with an outcome of absolute public safety.  They leave us with a myth of safety.

History has shown that there are aberrants in development, waiting in the wings to immortalize their name in the legal record books.  Our legal system provides a mechanism to enable and encourage such fools with a path to immortality of a sort.  We are a constitutional nation of law, but legalities can only do so much to protect us.  Our political and legal system should quit seeking this holy grail.  The answer does not appear to lie in the direction of further limits to liberty, especially since the system itself seems to have become a motive.

Look at the long view.  Do we really want the parameters of our free life and society to be the sum of responses to an endless parade of psychos, zealots and assorted nutjobs?

Thomas Jefferson

"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."

Aristotle

"Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved."

Karl Popper

“A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.”