RedStateEclectic

Against Political Biology

Lysenko, one of the masters of political biology.

Following up on my Scientists Not Interested in Science, find below a level-headed reminder of some facts of basic, depoliticised biology.

In his summary, Luboš Motl writes:

The basic theme of the [below] article is simple and most of us learned it as fifth-graders: CO₂ is primarily the plant food while its other implications for nature are negligible in comparison. Humanitarian organizations should work hard to help the mankind to increase the CO₂ concentration and it's surprising that virtually all of them are failing to do so.

Thus, ex-moonwalker Harrison Schmitt and physics professor Will Happer of Princeton argue:

Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity.

The entire brief article.

A Perspective on Europe

Niall Ferguson on the European Union - see also my Another Medal for the EUSSR:

I’m absolutely certain that Lord Mandelson and Daniel Cohn-Bendit will tell you that the European experiment has succeeded because there has been peace in Europe since it began in the 1950s. Can we just knock that on the head? European integration has had absolutely nothing to do with peace in Europe since World War II; that has been the achievement of NATO [the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation]. The creation of the European Union was not about war and peace, otherwise there would have been a European Defence Community, and that was vetoed by the French National Assembly in 1954.

[...]

Europe has to be judged in economic terms, since its own terms have always been economic. And how did it do? In the 1950s the economy of integrated Europe grew at 4 per cent. In the 1960s, it was about the same. In the 1970s, growth was 2.8 per cent; in the 1980s, it slid to 2.1 per cent; in the 1990s, it was only 1.7 per cent: and so on, down to zero.

As European integration has proceeded, its growth has declined. The share of Europe in global GDP has fallen since 1980 from 31 per cent to just 19 per cent. Since 1980 the EU has grown faster than the United States in only nine out of 32 years. Never has its unemployment rate been lower than the US unemployment rate.

Are any of you investors? What were the worst equity markets of the last 10 years? They were Greece, Ireland, Italy, Finland, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Belgium — the worst in the world. And on top of all of this, we have monetary union — the ultimate experiment gone wrong.

We warned them, ladies and gentlemen. We said, if you have a monetary union without labour market integration and without any fiscal federalism, it will blow up. I predicted that in 2000. It is happening in real time, in a chemistry lab, on the other side of the Atlantic.

But this was also a political experiment gone wrong. Do you know what that experiment was? The experiment was to see if Europeans could be forced into an even closer union — despite their wishes — by economic means because the political means failed.

[...]

And when the European peoples voted against further integration, their respective governments were told to try again. It happened to the Danes in 1992, and to the Irish twice: in 2001 and again in 2008. Their citizens gave the wrong answer in the referendum, so the governments just held another one. This tells you something about why this experiment has failed — it has failed because it has lost political legitimacy. And we see this not only in Greece but in government after government across Europe. Thirteen have fallen since this crisis began two years ago, and more will follow in the months to come.

Read the full article here.

Despicable Optimists

For German intellectuals, optimism is a sort of American mental illness.

Read more in this post at NoTricksZone, the blog of an admirable American living in Germany.

Palatine Boors

[W]hy should the Palatine Boors [ie Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

The source.

 I'm asking you, Benjamin, don't let's be beastly to the Germans.

See also A Plea to James.

PS

The above image represents the distribution of German Americans according to the 2000 census.

Solved - Fermat's Last Theorem

I am not much of a mathematician, but I think I do know the indescribable joys of pure thought.

Andrew Wiles, the man who proved Fermat's Last Theorem, is 60 tomorrow. Congratulations.

Writes Luboš Motl;

Wiles' father was a chaplain in Cambridge – and a professor of divinity at Oxford. The program convinced me – without saying it – that this religious background was important for Wiles to know how to get concentrated for the years that were needed to complete the proof. Note that he first presented a proof in 1993, one that was seen to have a gap, and he was able to fill the gap within 15 months.

The source.

 

RIP Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher:

On productiveness and the charitable instinct:“No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions; he had money as well.” On the hostile press: “If my critics saw me walking over the Thames they would say it was because I couldn’t swim.”

Read more at the source.

On Europe:

Thatcher’s basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.

Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. “During my lifetime,” she reminisced, “most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it.”

That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. “The European single currency,” wrote Thatcher in 2002, “is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially.”

Thatcher’s reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro’s newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.

The source.

 

Liberty's Dawn

Writes Emma Griffin, the author of Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution:

Writers and academics often show an interesting ambivalence about industrialization. Today, they regard it as a blessing, the single-most-effective way to lift people out of poverty. But in thinking about Britain’s Industrial Revolution, they have tended to reach the opposite conclusion: The rise of the factory, they argue, caused the end of more “natural” working hours, introduced more exploitative employment patterns and dehumanized the experience of labor. It robbed workers of their autonomy and dignity.

Yet if we turn to the writing of laborers themselves, we find that they didn’t share the historians’ gloomy assessment. Starting in the early 19th century, working people in Britain began to write autobiographies and memoirs in ever greater numbers. Men (and occasionally women) who worked in factories and mines, as shoemakers and carpenters, and on the land, penned their stories, and inevitably touched on the large part of their life devoted to labor. In the process, they produced a remarkable account of the Industrial Revolution from the perspective of those who felt its effects firsthand -- one that looks very different from the standard historical narrative.

Make sure to read the rest.

See also this excellent lecture by Ralph Raico:

 

The Great Deformation

In the below podcast, the always insightful David Stockman talks about some of the topics dealt with in his new book The Great Deformation.

 

See also here.

Egoism, Altruism, and the Welfare State

Jaana Woiceshyn offers an interesting take on the dichotomy of egoism and altruism. In the below article, she makes an observation whose implications I find highly disturbing. If people stop learning (in term of moral discernment) in their "best" years, and if by then the majority are steeped in politically correct altruism, liberty has a naturally restricted target groups, in fact, a tiny one, indeed.

Research shows that most people do not think about ethics explicitly after their late teens or early twenties, implicitly choosing instead to follow cultural norms and the values they were taught at home, if any. The closest they come to choosing an “obvious” moral code is to follow cultural norms—which means subscribing to the moral code dominant around the world: altruism.

The entire article.

David Kelly gives an excellent presentation on the "moral" underpinnings of our radically altruistic welfare state.

 

Hormesis versus Leviathan

Radiation hormesis hypothesis compared with LNT and linear model with threshold. In all 3 graphs, x-axes represent radiation dose and y-axes represent magnitude of health effect. Zero-equivalent point (ZEP) represents level of health effect in absence of radiation. The quadratic model of Figure 1 approximates threshold graph of this figure. A threshold model would imply no effects of radiation up to certain level, after which risk rises linearly with dose. The radiation hormesis model, in contrast, shows beneficial effect at low levels of exposure as it drops below ZEP.

Dr. Calabrese presents his (highly generalisable) findings about the nature of dose response in the low dose zone, discovering that longstanding "scientific" standards underlying regulatory rulings systematically ignore the true reaction pattern, thereby introducing massive bias. The key insight presented by Dr. Calabrese seems to me to consist in the fact that rather than following a linear pattern, dose responses are characterised by two phases such that at low doses they may act in a stimulating way, only to display inhibiting effects at higher doses - (hence the terms "biphase" or "hormetic"). Low doses of radiation for instance may stimulate healthy reactions in the human body, thus actually improving their well-being, while causing harm only at higher doses.

For more on what hormesis is, consult my post Hormesis and Regulation Failure. See also Hiroshima Victims Live Longer.