Truth, Justice, and the American Way
Intellectual activism in defense of the American way of life.
Global Warming Protest
Jan 18th
This is what a global warming protest looks like:
While ironic, this image does not prove anything. Except perhaps, that a weather few degrees below average can have a much more dramatic impact on human life than a few degrees above average.
Do compact fluorescent lights really save energy?
Jan 14th
Earlier this month, Congress passed a law which will essentially force the public to switch to compact fluorescent lights. (CFLs) Environmentalists and light bulb makers joined forces to boost power and profits, and perhaps sue the competition out of existence.Some people object to the narrow light spectrum and toxic Mercury content of CFL lights, but I don’t care about those things. I have replaced most of the incandescent lights in my apartment, and plan to eventually replace the rest. What I question is not the usefulness of CFLs, but the premise that switching to them will “save energy.”
As with most goods and services, the price of a utility influences the quantity I am willing to pay for. When the price of gas doubles, I reconsider taking road trips, and try to be more efficient with my driving. Likewise, when the price of electricity falls, I am more liberal with my power consumption. Compact fluorescent lights lower the cost of lightning in two ways: they use one quarter of the energy, and they last ten times as long. These innovations encourage greater usage of lighting.
I have a spiffy IKEA lamp behind my couch, but because I don’t have a light in my ceiling fan, it needs to be extra bright. Furthermore, the geometry of my living room makes it annoying to walk behind the couch every day to turn it on. By switching to a compact fluorescent light, I was able to get a 100 watt equivalent light in a 60 watt socket, and thanks to its efficiency and long life, I just leave the light permanently on. I am enjoying greater convenience, but I don’t know if I am saving any energy.
If the average consumer’s monthly lightning budget is fixed, they might compensate for the higher efficiency and lifespan of CFLs by increasing their lightning usage to completely offset any energy reduction. This would be especially true if consumers are forced to switch to CFLs by legislators rather than a desire to save energy costs. Much as auto safety regulations can lead to reckless behavior, forcing consumers to switch to more efficient lights might actually increase their energy usage.
Allowing restaurants to make money off hungry people is wrong
Jan 12th
Statism doesn’t sound as great when it comes to other fields, does it?
Mayor Thomas M. Menino embarked on a highly public campaign yesterday to block CVS Corp. and other retailers from opening medical clinics inside their stores… “Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and hygiene. Allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong.”
Did Christianity’s underdog origins allow the success of Western Civilization?
Jan 9th
It’s interesting to note that with the exception of Christianity and some schools of Buddhism, every other major world religion were created as a means for the ruling regime to justify its grip on power as an expression of divine will. The divine hierarchy of the Old Testament’s angelic pantheon reflects and perpetuates the rigid social hierarchy of the ruling elite of its society. The god of the Old Testament demands taxes (sacrifices) accepts no competition (he murders over two million unbelievers) or critical questioning of the law, and presents a facade of voluntary submission (convert or face annihilation).
The New Testament on the other hand, was written before Christianity transformed to an institution of theocratic dictatorship. It presents a personal rather than collective choice (submit or you will burn in hell, as opposed to your tribe/descendants.) This subtle distinction may be responsible for the success of Western civilization, as secular rulers did not feel personally threatened when reason eroded the power of the church. (Of course, that did not stop the church itself from butchering secularists for as long as it could.) This is still not possible in the Islamic and Confucian world, where the secular and divine authority is united in a single institution. The attempt to introduce Aristotelian philosophy by Ibn-Rushd in particular, was wildly successful in the West, but because rational questioning was a threat to current regime, it was snuffed out by the institutionalization of doctrines such as the taqleed.
In Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam, Mahayana Buddhism has allowed a similar erosion of divine authority, creating the “Asian Tigers.” In this light, Communism can be seen as an attempt to preserve the union of divine and secular authority.
Proof most Americans are uneducated
Jan 6th
At least when it comes to biology.
Update: there’s a discussion of this post on ObjectivismOnline.
Forget global warming, there’s a cold spell coming
Jan 3rd
Don’t throw out those fur coats just yet, warns Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Glaciers will one day reach below Moscow.
Is plastic flotsam good for the environment?
Dec 31st
The latest environmental “crisis” is the floating garbage polluting the world’s oceans, which is said to be killing “more than a million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles each year.” But does this number really mean anything? The number of animals killed alone is meaningless without context. Understanding why requires a little ecological intuition.
Suppose that a hunter goes into an isolated forest once a month to kill a deer. What is the hunter’s impact on the deer population? In the short term, after each deer is killed, the population decreases by one deer. In the long term however, the forest is only capable of sustaining a fixed number of grazing animals, and each deer that dies makes room for additional animals. Each dead adult means that there is more food available for the next generation. Whether the deer population remains stable or decreases depends on the adaptive capacity of the species to reproduce fast enough to compensate for the missing deer. If only a small percentage of the population is killed each year, then there will probably not be any change in the population.
Given that there are colonies of sea birds which number over a million and a single sea turtle lays 150-200 eggs, it is far from obvious whether the number of animals killed by garbage has any impact on their population. Animals that survive due to decreased competition may balance the animals killed by plastics. Furthermore, the more drastic the impact on animal populations, the higher the evolutionary pressure for the surviving animals to adapt to their new plastic-rich environment.
It is conceivable that plastic waste has a beneficial impact on the oceans, as it is well known for attracting schools of fish, perhaps because it forms a base for microorganisms. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that environmentalists were dramatically wrong about the impact of a deadly pollutant. In any case, the evolutionary process will certainly maximize the potential of marine species to take advantage of their new environment.
The war on drugs: US vs Netherlands
Dec 27th
| Social Indicator | USA | Netherlands |
| Lifetime prevalence of marijuana use (ages 12+) | 36.9% 1 |
17.0%
2 |
| Past month prevalence of marijuana use (ages 12+) | 5.4% 1 |
3.0%
2 |
| Lifetime prevalence of heroin use (ages 12+) | 1.4% 1 |
0.4%
2 |
| Incarceration Rate per 100,000 population | 701 3 |
100
4 |
| Per capita spending on criminal justice system (in Euros) | €379 5 |
€223
5 |
| Homicide rate per 100,000 population | 5.56 6 |
1.51
6 |
More. Source
First-person video from a radio-controlled airplane
Dec 22nd
I would love to find this under my tree:
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