The Terror of Carbon Dioxide Induced Human Extinction and the Dismal Ideology

 Rasmussen Reports and The Heartland Institute conducted a survey of 2,000 likely American voters from 29 April to 3 May 2021 on the issue of climate change.  The poll found that 55% of likely voters believe that climate change is primarily caused by humans, while 45% believed it was primarily caused by long-term planetary trends.

Numerous Democrat politicians, bureaucrats, and media pundits have informed us for several decades that humans or the Earth face an existential threat if mankind does not cease to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere within 10 - 12 years.  To date, this existential threat has proven about as dangerous and catastrophic as a newborn puppy.

The Rasmussen - Heartland poll asked likely voters to identify themselves as Conservative, Moderate, Liberal, or the Not Sure category I hate, since one may be very sure of one's ideology but simply not fit into the other choices.  The poll found that 21% of likely voters who consider themselves to be Moderate and 21% who are Liberal believe that if global carbon dioxide emissions continue at a rate comparable to that of the last decade, then humans will become extinct or nearly extinct due to climate change within 50 years.  For Conservatives, only 12% believe this early demise for humans due to climate change.  OK, that 12% is still an absurd portion of Conservatives.  52% of Liberals believe human extinction or near extinction will occur within the next 100 years.  43% of Moderates agree, while 23% of Conservatives agree.

There are tens of millions of Americans who ascribe to each of these ideologies.  Even 23% of Conservatives are many millions of Americans who face the dismal prospect of human extinction or near extinction within 100 years.  Yet, how much more dismal is the ideology that has 52% of those ascribing to it in a state of terror, presumably, of human extinction within 100 years?  Would such believers want to have children even, or if they did, would they not be irresponsible?  Perhaps this belief is a meaningful factor in the falling birthrate of Americans documented by the last couple of census reports.  If it is, then the reproduction of Liberals should be significantly lower than that of Conservatives!

Further results of the poll show that Liberals are much more likely to exaggerate the amount of warming that has occurred since the late 1800s.  60% of them believe there has been more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit warming.  In comparison, 36% of Conservatives believe warming has exceeded 3 degrees.  Even NOAA's exaggerated warming since the 1880 to 1900 average is only 2.14 degrees Fahrenheit.  Such warming would be far more beneficial than harmful.  More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at the present concentration has virtually no warming effect and is great for plant growth.  This in no catastrophe.

This is only one example of the many ways in which Liberals have a dreary, dismal worldview.  It fits nicely with a belief in other dismal viewpoints such as systemic racism, the belief that some ethnic groups are incompetent to manage their own lives, the denial of the ability of humans to improve their standard of living by living productive lives, and the believe that humans are always a threat to the environment in myriad ways.  It has to make a life miserable to be such an ingrained pessimist.  This goes way beyond seeing a glass as half empty instead of half full.  This is a determination to see the glass which is really full as being almost empty.  It is a consistent denial of reality.

 

I was wrong about the Democratic Party #walkaway

A friend, Tom Wright, directed my attention to a very interesting video of one young woman's story of the toxic culture experienced by a Teach for America teacher in a government-run school and then as a registered nurse in Los Angeles, CA. She had been brought up a Democrat and had long believed that conservatives were simply bad people. She learned that the progressive Democrat program maintained, rather than solved problems. She realized that many Democrats had so identified themselves as heroes fighting the problems of society, whether racism, women's rights, and homophobia, that they could not actually allow the problems to be solved because then their hero status would disappear. Policies that proved ineffective or catastrophic were continued, despite their clear failure.

She realized that many of the Democrats attitudes were grounded on a belief that some minorities simply were incapable of having the character expected of other Americans. In other words, they were bigoted. She came to realize that the main stream media cherry picked facts, dropped the context of events, told stories in a way to misdirect people, and simply ignored stories they could not present in a manner to misdirect their listeners. For some time, she found herself understanding that the Democrat agenda was very bad for people, but she still had a hard time examining the ideas of conservatives. In time she managed to overcome the barrier that she had long believed that Republicans and conservatives were not the evil people the Democrats had portrayed them to be.

The story of her evolution in the development of an independent mind is very fascinating. It is well worth listening to. See Georgia's great video about how she developed an independent mind -- a beautiful mind.

The new TSA full, full, full body search in the context of our individual rights

I just read about the horror of a woman who had undergone the new TSA full body search procedure in which her breasts, buttocks, vagina area and labia were all felt.  This does represent a new way in which we have lost the ownership of our own bodies, but it is not unrelated to many other ways in which the ownership of our bodies and minds has been challenged successfully by government.  I also understand that some will say this trade off of our ownership of our bodies is justified because otherwise the government cannot offer us complete assurance that we will survive a flight.  The decision is not trivial, yet there are reasons why we must draw the line on what the government can do with our bodies, if we are to maintain the ownership of our own bodies.  While I personally would not feel the horror the woman searched in the story did about being so searched, each of us as individuals should have the right to feel or not feel that horror.  Her body is hers.  We must respect that.  And though I do not feel the horror, I do very much resent being searched.  I resented it even more when my 12 year old daughter was searched on 3 legs of 4 legs of a round-trip flight between Baltimore and Tulsa years ago.  Apparently, those searches today would be much more invasive.

The full body search with sexual intimacy is logically consistent with the idea that we as individuals do not own our own bodies and minds.  We are to be forced to buy health insurance approved by elitist bureaucrats, because we are incapable of rationally providing for the care of our own bodies and the state has an interest in the ownership of our bodies.  We are told that we cannot decide when to use a seatbelt, a bike helmet, or whether to use tobacco or marijuana, because the state shares the ownership of our bodies.  We are told in some locales that we cannot eat some foods because some politicians think those foods are not healthy and they own our bodies.  In an earlier day, males were told that they did not own their minds and bodies and that it was appropriate to conscript them and force them to fight in undeclared wars.  We are told that only government-owned or government-approved schools can educate us, because we do not own our own minds, which need to be indoctrinated with ideas beneficial to government control of the People.  For a very long time, government has discouraged people from developing their individual sexuality, once again an infringement upon the individual's right to own their own bodies and minds.

Ideas matter and the direction that many ideas take are often linked.  It is the old story that first they came for the Jews and I was not a Jew so I did not care much.  Then they came for the Gypsies and I was not a Gypsy.  Then they came for the mentally retarded and I was not mentally retarded.  Then they came for the old and the infirm and I was not old and infirm.  Then they came for me and no one else was me, so they did not care.

Our individual rights are many.  They may be summarized as:  every individual has an equal, sovereign right to life, liberty, property, the ownership of their own mind and body, and the pursuit of happiness.  Do not allow any attack on any of our broad rights to succeed because it threatens every other of our rights.  The forceful taking of each of our rights is a preparation for the next assault on the next right.  There can be no compromise on this, because the assaults are never-ending.  Long ago, we allowed the assaults on our property, right to work, right to hire, and income to reduce those rights to sometimes honored privileges.  We lost the right to our minds, when we allowed government to take over education.  We lost our rights to our bodies with the FDA, Medicare, Medicaid, and now ObamaCare.  We can no longer talk about such subjects as racism and affirmative action or the morality of judging people as individuals based upon their individual character on many college campuses run by our governments.  We have never allowed equal expression and equal treatment of people whose sexuality was not both heterosexual and monogamous.

Right after right has been compromised, because few people will defend all of our rights.  The employee does not care about the rights of the employer and thinks it is perfectly fine that the employer must act as an accountant, a tax record keeper, and a tax collector, all unpaid mandates forced upon him by government agents very willing to use force.  The man who earns a living using equipment such as laboratory equipment or that to manufacture goods, is hit hard with property taxes on that equipment, while the lawyer or the accountant is unequally hit with no such devastating tax.  Then the People complain that manufacturing jobs are going overseas and we are only a service economy!  Of course, few of us pay corporation taxes, so why shouldn't the U.S. have the highest corporation taxes in the OECD in 2011?  Of course, we will lament the fact that many U.S. multinationals are expanding operations abroad faster than in the U.S., but does it ever dawn on us that the unequal taxation of corporations is the reason, as well as a violation of the equal rights of the shareholders of that corporation? 

There is a very good reason for a holistic understanding of our rights as individuals and the implied necessity of a government of very limited powers, which our Constitution decreed as the demand of the People.  But the constitutional demand is not very strong when the People have forgotten that they must be the backbone of the Constitution, which by itself can only serve to bridge a momentary lapse of attention by the People.  It is very clear that it is unable to protect the rights of the individual when we pay little attention to them ourselves for a hundred years of determined Progressive attack and not infrequently of Conservative attack!

The Politcal Spectrum and Economic Wrongheadedness

Daniel B. Klein, professor of economics at George Mason University, worked with pollster Zeljka Buturovic to characterize the relative degree of determined wrongheadedness of Americans self-identified as one of the following:

• Very Conservative
• Conservative
• Libertarian
• Moderate
• Liberal
• Progressive/ Very Liberal

They say they were out to measure the relative degree of economic enlightenment, but this is not an accurate a way of stating what they really did.  They rated responses to economic questions based on the responses:

• Strongly agree
• Somewhat agree
• Somewhat disagree
• Strongly disagree
• Not sure

Suppose the correct answer to the question is Strongly Agree.  They counted up the responses that were strongly wrong, namely those responding with Somewhat disagree and Strongly disagree.  The answer Not sure was not considered strongly wrong.  Thus, this was not a test for economic knowledge, which it has been mistakenly characterized as being.  Instead, it is a test for those who do not understand economics and who refuse to recognize that they do not understand it.  It is a test for the pretense of knowledge which does not exist!

What were the statements?  What are the correct answers?

1. Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable.  Answer: Strongly agree
2. Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services.  Answer: Strongly agree.
3. Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago.  Answer: Strongly agree.
4. Rent control leads to housing shortages.  Answer: Strongly agree.
5. A company with the largest market share is a monopoly.  Answer:  Strongly disagree.
6. Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited.  Answer:  Strongly disagree.
7. Free trade leads to unemployment.  Answer: Strongly disagree.
8. Minimum wage laws raise unemployment.  Answer:  Strongly agree.

While it may allow one a faster response to these questions if one has previously thought about them, most of these statements are easy to think through and come to the correct answer.  For instance: restrictions on housing development will mean such things as a local government refusing to allow housing to be built on parcels of land in the county or town.  This must cause those parcels on which housing can be placed to be priced more highly, since the government is putting the restrictions on other land because otherwise housing would be placed on it.  Thus, the demand for housing is greater than the amount of land which will be made available, so the prices of that land will be bid upward.  Housing will be more expensive as a result.  There are other types of restrictions, such as building codes and requirements to use union labor or licensed tradesmen in the building, but all of these restrictions are placed precisely because they must be since they will raise costs.


Question 5 is really just an understanding of a definition, but as such, it requires some knowledge of economics as a study.  Question 3 requires some knowledge of how people lived 30 years ago, so it requires a bit of historical knowledge, which many young people may find challenging to come by.  Since young people are indoctrinated by the public schools and universities to become liberals and commonly have little historical knowledge of 30 years ago, this question may be a bit hard for some of them.

Question 7 is a more abstract question to which the answer is somewhat harder to think through on one's own.  But, Adam Smith and many others long ago figured this out.  It is reasonable to expect that the answer should be common knowledge today.  There are many special interests and political groups which have spread claims that free trade leads to unemployment, at least in the developed countries.  They claim that low-cost-of-labor countries are stealing American jobs.  But their wages are lower because they are less productive or production in their countries is less efficient or involves greater investment risks.  Many Americans only see the company making buggy whips whose product is now more cheaply produced in Kenya, so the American company has laid off workers.  They fail to see that the workers who were once employed making buggy whips are now becoming employed to make biomedical prostheses and infrared sensors and the old buggy whip manufacturing building is now being used to produce Kindles.  Study after study has shown that free trade leads to more jobs in the U.S. and across the world, while raising most people's standard of living.  But, it is clear that it is helpful to know some economics to understand the right answer to this question.  But also remember, one does not need to know the right answer, one only needs to know what one knows and what one does not know.  The answer 'I do not know' is not wrong.  It is not wrongheaded.  It is not a pretense to knowledge one does not have.

So, what are the results of this test for economic wrongheadedness?  Who across the political spectrum is found to be a big-headed pretender to knowledge?  Each very wrongheaded answer adds 1 to the score of each person.  The average for each person in each self-identified part of the political spectrum is given below.

• Very conservative, 1.30
• Libertarian, 1.38
• Conservative, 1.67
• Moderate, 3.67
• Liberal, 4.69
• Progressive/ Very liberal, 5.26

Note the very large jump in wrongheadedness between conservatives and moderates.  Those who are very conservative, libertarian, or conservative do not have a great tendency to pretend to economic knowledge which is in fact wrong.  Moderates are much more like liberals in their tendency to be wrongheaded.  The more liberal one is, the greater the pretense to knowledge in general and the more frequently that knowledge is economically wrong.  Progressives, which Obama and Hilary Clinton are, are very pretentious and very wrongheaded economically as a group.

Progressives answered the monopoly question badly wrong 31% of the time, while conservatives were badly wrong only 13% of the time.  Libertarians were so wrong only 7% of the time.

The Progressives were wrong on the living standard comparison 61% of the time, while conservatives were wrong 13% of the and libertarians were wrong 21% of the time.

Broken down on party lines the results were:

• Libertarians, 1.26
• Republicans, 1.61
• Democrats, 4.59

Another huge leap in economic wrongheadedness is found for Democrats.  So-called conservative Democrats clearly do little to improve the party standing relative to Liberals with the wrongheaded score of 4.69!

Ms. Buturovic noted that men scored better than women, as did married people better compared to those who were single.  She noted that particularly poor scores were earned by those who never shop at Wal-Mart or who consider themselves residents of the 'planet Earth', rather than of America or the city or town where they live.  She says, "It took many centuries for basic economic concepts and principles to be discovered so, in a sense, it is not that surprising that some people are having trouble grasping them."

Of those who have had trouble grasping the principles and concepts of economics, unusual numbers have become politicians, book writers, newspapermen, network news announcers of the mainstream media, public school teachers, and university professors outside of economics departments.  The elitists who believe they should rule America through socialist governments are happily wrongheaded about basic economics concepts and eager to force their mistakes on the rest of us.  We can readily see that in efforts of government to micromanage the economy through long-discredited central planning, the constant meddling in our personal lives, the excessive taxes, the still more excessive government spending, the self-indulgent salaries and benefits of government workers, the claims of government job creation in the private sector, and the many special interest groups chosen as the recipients of income and wealth redistribution thefts.

Mark Lloyd - Obama's Diversity Officer at the FCC

Not infrequently, a politician pretends to be someone he is not. Politicians are actors who do not act a role for a movie or a TV plot, but live their roles most of the hours of their lives. Nonetheless, they generally need some down time and they seek that among their friends, with whom they have permission to be themselves. Obama chose the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, and Valerie Jarrett as friends for many years and they tell us much about whose company makes him comfortable. His friends are commonly committed socialists, bitter critics of America's past history, friends of organized labor unions, and enemies of wealth in the abstract, but frequently inclined to grasp for wealth through the exercise of special interest politics.

One of Obama's recent appointees was Van Jones, the ex-Green Jobs Czar, who was a self-professed Communist and who believed that President Bush had purposely allowed the destruction of the Twin Towers. He did say that he signed the petition saying that Bush was responsible for allowing the Twin Towers' destruction without reading it, but this would seem unlikely on the part of a graduate of Yale Law School.

No....Let me reconsider that. What I just said would be true given the premise that no rational and responsible man would sign a petition without knowing what it said. I must remember that we have come to understand that it is a characteristic of socialists that they do not read the legislative bills they vote for in Congress, so I suppose it is likely that a socialist will not read the petitions he signs either! But, this is also disturbing. It says that Obama put a very irrational and irresponsible man in a position of some considerable power. We also should ask what motivated him to sign the petition he had not read, if this is not a lie. Is he a man who just has to please and say yes to anything a fellow socialist asks him to do? Would this not tell us more about the socialist mindset? And also of that of the man who appointed him to his position?

This brings me back to Mark Lloyd, with a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP), heavily funded by George Soros. While at CAP, he criticized the free market for allowing conservative talk radio shows to become too popular. He suggested a number of schemes for reducing the power of conservative talk show hosts by taxing their radio stations heavily and by forcing more local ownership and ownership diversity. In other words, use the power of government to keep the People from choosing who they listen to! This same man has praised Hugo Chavez and the way in which he realized the power of the broadcast media and then took it over in Venezuela. Clearly, these are just the qualifications Obama was looking for. Obama appointed him Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer at the Federal Communications Commission. Where better to put him to carry out the program he developed at CAP to squelch conservative talk radio hosts? We know Obama by the company he keeps and by his judgment of who should be given control of power in the government. Over and over, he has turned to a cadre of highly committed socialists for such positions.

Over and over, we hear that Obama is a nice guy. He has a nice family we are told. Why how could a man with a wife, children, and a dog be bad or even evil? Hmmm....Didn't Stalin have a wife (at least two), children (at least 3), and a dog (a black Terrier)? To be sure, Stalin was not the loving father that Obama appears to be. Still, loving your family is no guarantee that a politician is genuinely motivated by a desire to seek the General Welfare of the People.

When a politician truly cares about the General Welfare of the People, he cares to severely limit the power of government in recognition of the sovereign right of each individual American to his own life, his own liberty, and his own pursuit of happiness. In Obama's case, he has made it very clear that he is a determined enemy of the rights of the individual. He is constantly talking about Americans serving others and advocating the use of government power to make them do just that. Obama is not a nice guy. We must recognize that fact so we can redouble our determination to fight for the embattled rights of the individual in this fight which the socialists recognize as a desperate fight. We must be as passionate in defense of freedom as they are in taking control of the People.

Charity Stronger Among Republicans

George Will, in a commentary called Conservatives More Liberal Givers, discusses a book by Professor Authur C. Brooks of Syracuse University entitled Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. This author may have been surprised by his results, but I have long argued that this appeared to be the case. Some key findings were:

• Conservative-headed households gave 30% more to charity than liberal families, despite the fact that liberal families had incomes 6% higher.
• Conservatives donate more blood and more time to charities.
• Bush carried 24 of 25 states against Kerry where charitable giving was above average.
• Those who reject the idea that government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality, give 4 times more to charity than those who agree with that idea.

The article then goes into a discussion of the influence of religion and the role of government and how this affects people's charitable giving. On the issue of the role of government, I have long argued that the most people's attitude about that comes from an examination of themselves. It is their own character which is projected onto others or their desire for power that drives them into believing either in a limited role for government or for a broad and activist role for government. Consequently, while a strong correlation with charitable giving exists, the cause and the effect have been interchanged in the discussion in Will's commentary.

Essentially, most conservatives believe in individual rights and that individuals are generally capable of managing their own lives and choosing their own values. They believe that a man can live in liberty and pursue his own happiness without using force to wrest what he wants from his neighbor. He believes that with hard work, rational thinking, and the right values, he will likely be able to define and secure his own happiness. Admittedly, there are some conservatives also who have a low opinion of many of their fellow men, but they are a minority.

Liberals are more bifurcated. Most believe that many of their fellow men are not capable of managing their own lives rationally. Interestingly enough, even though they are better educated and wealthier on average, they have a rather low opinion of themselves. They are rather appalled that they have such materialistic values and feel guilty for their wealth. Some feel guilty because they believe they are the oppressors who hold the poor in subjugation. Some actually feel guilt for using the power of government to shift wealth from others to themselves. Some feel guilty because they have such a low opinion of so many others, which is something that those with a low opinion of themselves are inclined toward. It makes them feel that they are better in comparison. They are especially inclined to have a low opinion of blacks and Hispanics, because they view them as such helpless victims. Those who accept victimhood and those who project it upon others are the worst racists.

Yet despite all this guilt, they are not inclined toward personal acts of charity and this conflicts with their conviction that they should feel more maternally for the many they think are not able to adequately care for themselves. They see many of their neighbors, or at least those living in the poorer neighborhoods, as victims and as helpless. So how do they resolve this conflict between having materialistic values and feeling guilty for doing so little to help the many victims they see around them? Well, they toss this burden onto everyone's shoulders by claiming it is the role of government to care for the needy and the victims. Of course, there are also some liberals who love being victims and using that to put a claim on the products of the hard work of others and using it as an excuse for not having proven to be very productive members of society.

Those in favor of maternalistic government feel very good about themselves, even as they put zoning requirements in place that make it difficult for the poorer folks to own decent homes and as they slap high taxes on gasoline to make it harder for the poorer folks to get to work or to take vacations. Yes they love themselves for being enlightened liberals even as they use eminent domain to take the apartments of the poor and turn them into upscale shopping malls or apartments. They feel the cheap thrill of giving the poor a living wage, even as the minimum wages prices those with poor educations and no work experience out of the market. They love themselves even more as they boost the cost of cars with requirements for higher fuel efficiency and more safety features. They feel so morally superior as they use the force of government to maintain the social security system to transfer wealth from the young to the old, who are usually actually wealthier, despite the popular mythology. They bask in their own sunlight as they dictate to health care professionals how they will deliver health care to those on Medicare. They buy carbon credits as the poor do without energy or pay much more for it than they should in the name of preventing greenhouse gas emissions.

It makes them feel great that they can use their vote, rather more than their own money or time, to alleviate their guilt. It is also very important to them that with their maternalistic or paternalistic desires, they also become the intellectual and caring elite who set the direction of government programs. Since they already suffer from a low self-esteem and have a generally low opinion of others, when they are put in charge of government programs, they find myriad ways to direct the money to other liberals who are already well-off. But little actually goes to those the laws intend it to go to. See for instance the huge sums that go into the Washington, DC public schools for the education of children and how ineffectively the money is used. Or see how effective the huge sums of money directed at government programs for the development of alternative energy sources have been. See how many liberals favor high taxes, but prove to be the best at using deductions so they pay little of the taxes. Isn't it incongruous that those who favor high taxes should be so diligent in seeking to reduce their own tax payments?

The conservative is more likely to have a core respect for other humans and to believe that when someone is briefly down in their luck, that they are worthy of help. But they do not believe in helping people who are chronically down on their luck. They are inclined to believe that that is likely to be due to a defect of character, unless their is a severe illness. The defects of another's character are not their responsibility. Thus, they reject the idea that every black or Hispanic or poor person deserves special help. No, they, like everyone else, are capable of managing their own lives. They deserve to be treated equally before the law, but they are not to be given special condescending privileges. It is reasonable to expect them to think for themselves and to work as hard as anyone else. This expectation is the foundation of the respect for others that limited government presupposes. The conservative does not boost his own self-esteem by looking down on others. He also does not wallow in envy of others.

The modern progressive or liberal is a person of a different character from most conservatives and it is not at all surprising how this relates to how they assess others and any charitable relationships they may have. The conservative gives of himself and does not presume to use force to take from others and then claim that as his act of charity. Unfortunately, the fascist liberals do just that. Charity does not really consist of stealing from some to give the stolen goods to others one does not respect. Charity is the act of voluntarily helping someone that one has reason to believe is worthy of respect as a human being. It is an act directed at those we believe to share our fundamental value of life itself. One cannot share that value if one does not generally use one's rational faculty to identify the nature of reality and one's relationship with it. Man must act purposefully to achieve the value of his life, his liberty, and his pursuit of happiness. When he does these things, he is worthy of respect and worthy of our help when he suffers one of the set-backs that life can bring on unexpectedly. Of course, most such set-backs are handled by the rational individual by himself, but some we can all understand can be overwhelming and we may choose to help when we can. This is a matter of personal choice, however, and not a universal dictate to be imposed by government wielding a gun, as the liberals would have it.