Science – Page 6 – Barrel Strength

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The history of a fraud

Margaret Wente ‘s column in the Globe today exposes the history of the cholesterol fad/fraud succinctly and comprehensively. After recounting the same family eating habits as mine were: 3.25% butterfat milk, marbled steak (when we could afford it), butter on toast, she writes as follows:

That was in the 1950s. Nobody was fat, except for one lone girl at school who everybody picked on. Most kids ate like horses and were skinny as rakes.

Then the experts came along and declared that all that fat was killing us. Whole milk was banished from children’s diets so that they would not develop clogged arteries and heart disease in later life. To keep our cholesterol in check, we began to ration eggs and treat butter like a toxic substance. We gave up our juicy, marbled steaks and switched to pasta. Ever since the 1960s, the authorities have told us that a healthy diet is a low-fat diet.

The results were not what they had hoped. Obesity rates soared, but heart disease did not subside. And now, a mountain of new evidence says the experts were all wrong. One Harvard study found that people who had consumed the most dairy fat were far less likely to develop heart disease. Researchers at Oxford University discovered that the biggest consumers of saturated fat in Europe – the French – also have the healthiest hearts. Last year, a major review in The BMJ, a leading medical journal, found that “saturated fats are not associated” with mortality, heart disease, strokes or Type 2 diabetes. As Ian Leslie, writing in The Guardian, puts it, “The promotion of low-fat diets was a 40-year fad, with disastrous outcomes, conceived of, authorized, and policed by nutritionists.”

The modern history of nutrition science is fraught with controversy, flawed theory, faulty research, vested interests, suppression of evidence, and vicious battles between the old guard and the insurgents. They’re still fighting. But it’s clear that a lot of what your Food Guide says is flat-out wrong.

My own physician, who is as conscientious and diligent as one could hope for, is still in the grip of the “good” cholesterol/ “bad” cholesterol paradigm. I imagine that many physicians are like him, trying to get people to have less fat in their diets. They got their marching orders decades ago from bad science that was enforced by group think. Does that remind you of a current ideological craze?

If you are interested in the story of cholesterol as a dietary ideology, you may find Nina Teicholz’ Big Fat Surprise just the ticket. If you are still eating margarine, or a “Mediterranean diet”, if you avoid butter fats for any other reason than your taste, or allergies, if you are still concerned that fat in the diet amounts to fat on your body, you are still in the grip of the cholesterol craze.

You know, dear readers, where this is going. If 97% of dietary experts agree that fat in the diet amounts to a health risk, what are you to make of the science of dietary cholesterol? The same thing as you are to make of claims that 97% of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming.

I have written before on the long sad story of cholesterol and its analogy to anthropogenic global warming. Also here.

The analogy is precise and productive. However, in the case of global warming, we are attempting to stop a process which may not be occurring and which has much larger implications. Energy consumption is not part of our lives; it is the basis of everything we do. This is not a change of diet, in the sense of what nutrition we put into our bodies. This is a change of how we power our houses, cars, transport, elevators, buildings. It is a matter not of calories but of terajoules of energy.

Margaret Wente will not be fired for her column. By contrast, Rex Murphy had to leave the Globe and Mail in 2010 after his full scale denunciation of the AGW scare. It has now become safe to observe that dietary scientists and the economic interests it entrained (the vegetable oil industry, in particular) were entirely wrong. The different outcomes illustrate how much the cholesterol fraud has had its day. We will know when the AGW fraud is over when it is dismissed in the same terms and with the same safety as Margaret Wente, to her credit, did to cholesterol today.

New and important: practicable space exploration

Yuri Milner, a Russian zillionaire, is proposing to spend $100 million on light sail driven space probes that could reach Alpha Centauri within about 20 years. He has recruited Stephen Hawking to shill for him and has enlisted Mark Zuckerberg for his board of directors.

Alpha Centauri is the closest star to us, at 4 light-years. The light sails are expected to be accelerated to 1/5th C, the speed of light, by a powerful laser.

At noon [yesterday, in fact] today, Yuri Milner, the Russian tech billionaire, will join Stephen Hawking atop Manhattan’s Freedom Tower, where the pair will announce Starshot, a $100 million dollar research program, the latest of Milner’s “Breakthrough Initiatives.” (Mark Zuckerberg will serve on Starshot’s board, alongside Milner and Hawking.) With the money, Milner hopes to prove that a probe could make the journey to Alpha Centauri in only 20 years.

It was great to hear some hopeful news for a change.

On reflection, it is obvious that our own planet’s system might well have been mapped by tiny invisible cameras carried by light sails from another star system in any age past. Going further afield from our mechanistic 21st century headspace, we might allow ourselves to consider the view held by Terence McKenna. He held that the most practical way to get to distant stars is by spores travelling through the depths of cold, foodless, and irradiated space. His view – or, according to what the psychedelic mushrooms told him – their story, was that the mushrooms he ingested travelled as spores between star systems, and can colonize any carbon based system, and communicate with the minds of those that happen to eat them.

If you think this method of interstellar travel and communication is weirder than micron-thin lightsails being sent by lasers, that is merely a local and chronic (centred on our own time) prejudice. Expand the range of allowed possibilities. There is no reason to consider current human technologies, and human-only communications, as the only ways to get around this galaxy.

McKenna’s True Hallucinations is well worth a read. And if a taste for psychedelics makes me a bad conservative…I offer no apologies. The same taste made me immune to all materialistic doctrines: marxism, materialism, reductionism, freudianism, and any of the nonsense so well described in Roger Scruton’s Fools, Frauds and Firebrands.

Pause in global warming now acknowledged by warmists

Sez the report:

The team did not conclude global warming had completely stopped, but that the rate of increase over the period was lower than in previous decades despite green house gasses increasing throughout the period in question.

The team of experts, including scientist Michael Mann ,who helped draw up the initial figures of how much the earth was likely to heat up by, say they have disproved evidence used by world leaders before the Paris climate change conference in November. Those figures disputed there had been a major slow down in temperature increases in the 17 years from 1997 to 2014.

So, according to warmist scientists, there has been a significant slowdown of global warming, despite massive increases in CO2 in the atmosphere (which is undisputed by anyone).

To the extent that anthropogenic global warming was ever a scientific proposition, it asserts a strong and linear causal relationship between increases in atmospheric CO2 (caused by humans) to global warming.

Not climate change, which is a change of subject to avoid the absence of warming. Warming, and warming alone, is the issue.

The team did not conclude global warming had completely stopped, but that the rate of increase over the period was lower than in previous decades despite green house gasses increasing throughout the period in question.

Remember, this report was produced by warmists, not skeptics.

Not that any of this will reach the minds of Liberal cabinet ministers at an level in Canada. 97% of climate scientists/Liberals/ignorant people agree that one or more of the following is true:

the earth is the centre of the universe
global warming is caused exclusively by man’s burning of fossil fuels
phlogiston is the substance that prevents everything from bursting into flame.

Or is it Cardinals of the Roman Catholic church? I forget. Anyway it is some group heavily invested in dogma.

Life is unfair, chapter 3832

Intelligent people are genetically predisposed to be healthier, sez the Telegraph.

For the first time, scientists have shown that intelligence is linked to good health, so those blessed with brains are also less likely to become sick, develop disease or die early.

The reason is down to genes. An international team, led by the University of Edinburgh, have discovered that the same gene variants which make people smart, also protect them against illness.

Those who performed the best on memory, verbal reasoning and reaction time tests, were less likely to have genes linked to high blood pressure, develop diseases like Alzheimer’s, diabetes or have poor overall health. They were also likely to be taller and have larger brains, the study found.

The only conditions that intelligence appeared to increase were schizophrenia, autism and bipolar disorder.

Which is reasonable considering that those three conditions are misworkings of the mind itself.

When are we going to abandon the notion that we are are equal in anything but a moral sense? Genetics – the instructions that make our bodies and minds – largely determines intelligence, health, personality and character.

Culture is what turns us from savages into citizens, and I am in favour of higher, broader and deeper culture, but it cannot be attained without good genetics.

Otherwise we are in Straight outta Compton. Or 21st century Kandahar. Or 14th century London, in a violent, brutish, impoverished life.

So here’s a toast to culture, self restraint and public order! And three cheers for good genes!

_______________________________________

Another must read for Barrelstrengthians: Norbert Elias’ The Civilizing Process which is worth reading at almost any price. Elias’ book is the basis of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, which debt Pinker freely acknowledges.

Immune deficiency disease

A friend sent me an article asking if Europe was bent on self-destruction, and as you may be sure, answered to the effect that it is. You do not have to look far to find it: decline of faith, decline of mission, Muslim invasion, hatred of Israel,covering up Islamic atrocities, blaming white people for everything are among the symptoms. David Goldman, who blogs as Spengler, is a firm exponent that Germany in particular is spiritually sick and demographically ruined.

Since my time in college, back in the late sixties, an eruption of anti-intellectual, anti-white, anti-male and anti-Christian thought has marched through the learning institutions, such that kids graduating from school are firmly in the grip of Marxian opinions without the bother of actually knowing anything, as it seems. While the economic claptrap of Marx has been abandoned, the mindset inculcated in universities is largely hostile to those institutions, beliefs and customs that make life as rich and free as it is in the West. Spineless self-hatred seems to be the order of the day.

This deduction could be the effect of reading too many conservative blogs, or it could be an actual phenomenon out there in the real world. The Islamic refugee invasion permitted by Chancellor Merkel testifies to the fact that what I am talking about is out there in the real world.

To cite Herbert Marcuse’s seminal article, Repressive Tolerance, from 1965:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance and intolerance: … it would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion and propaganda, of deed as well as of word.

And so forth. The malign effects of the Frankfurt School seems to have gained an impressive victory over everything standing in its path. Its influence is the lasting inheritance of largely German, and almost exclusively Jewish, Marxists or Marxians. (Jürgen Habermas is an exception).

It is not unusual for there to exist powerful alternatives to the dominant ideology in a liberal society. What is unusual these days is that the dominant ideology seeks the destruction of the society that tolerates it in our universities and guardian institutions. Many tenured intellectuals seem to be generating the rot on which they feed, as termites take down the house in which they dwell.

Western self-hatred and self-disgust is not, I would argue, a natural phenomenon, or the waking up to the sins of the past, but is the calculated result of the poison we have allowed to drip into our veins from the writings of Marxists and their successors. But why have we allowed it? And why has it been so successful?

The difference in post World War 2 western societies is that the cultural anti-bodies have been so weakened that we have no longer have sufficient defences against these poisons. In my view, however mistaken it may be, multiculturalism is not in substance tolerance – which is a worthy state of being in certain circumstances – but is used and promoted as an antidote to remedy the whiteness of our civilization, which is a defect that needs fixing. Anyone familiar with a truly multi-cultural society, such as Lebanon, India, or the Balkans, knows that truly different cultures are not a source of strength, but act as much as fissures for sectarian and cultural strife. Look at French and English Canada, Walloon and Flemish Belgium. These are mild compared to serious religious differences. When two cultures in the bosom of one state cannot agree that God is powerless to make 2+2=5, then the differences go to the root of one’s apprehension of reality.

And how did we arrive here?

I blame Adolf Hitler. His poisonous ideology of racial supremacy and his wars of annihilation had to be defeated and stopped, as they duly were. But the reaction against Hitlerism and its associated white supremacism has been endless. In every department of inquiry, the inherent differences between and among people, sexes, races, nations and cultures have been ignored, and discussion of them made too expensive, too risky. Thus for instance, despite all the strong and unequivocal evidence for the predominant influence of genes on intelligence, such findings are systematically discounted. The mention of male-female differences by a Harvard President cost him his job and the possibility of being US Federal Bank Chairman, yet, for example, the most important woman mathematician ranks 140th in the list of the world’s most important mathematicians.

As Charles Murray demonstrates in his Human Accomplishment, the overwhelming preponderance of important scientists, musicians, authors, and artists who have ever lived were white, and came from very specific regions of Europe, which have changed over time, from around Florence to the Low countries and England. Don’t believe me? Read the book. The detail, the maps, the facts will persuade you. As Murray observed, the entire scientific output of Islamic civilization is ranked less by scientific encyclopedias than that of Michael Faraday.

So why then, have our cultural anti-bodies become so weak? Every being in nature is constantly beset and invaded by germs, and would-be parasites. Likewise every society is constantly exposed to ideas hostile to its beliefs,customs, and institutions. What is decadent and abnormal is that we accept the views of ourselves promulgated by our enemies, internal and external. And of the two kinds, the internal are the more serious long term threat.

I know that my liberal friends may think this is nuts; they believe that we are strong because we are so open. I say we are open because we are strong, but that the source of our strength lies not merely in openness, but a belief that we are right. And that belief has been systematically sapped for generations by leftist spiritual termites.

Where is the can of Raid?

Trump?

Skyhookers versus the Up From Belows

There is an immense cosmic Opinion Bowl, the Cosmodome. It seats a hundred million people, most of whom, at a given time, are dead spirits. They shout as lustily as the small minority of the audience who at any given time are living.The game lasts eternally. There are time-outs for civilizational collapses, plagues, and really serious wars. If the Opinion Bowl has been at various times destroyed, it has always been rebuilt. In the Opinion Bowl one fight has gone on since the dawn of civilization. It is a struggle for dominance in explanations, between the Skyhookers and the Up-From-Belows. There are other matches too, besides the Skyhookers versus Up-from- Belows, and sub-fights within the factions. The immense, indeed near infinite audience, forms into factions and tribes at the speed of thought.

Prominent captains of the Skyhookers have included Plato, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Aristotle, Descartes, Pascal and other luminaries of the Western canon. Monotheists tend to be Skyhookers, but not exclusively, nor even to the extent of denying the arguments of the Up-from-belows. Indeed the question of theism – is there an organizing God? – tends to confuse the debate somewhat, because the debate is really about whether matter is sufficiently self-organizing for conscious observers (us) to emerge from the primordial stews, or was there some help – guidance if you will – from the future, from where we will end up, allowing for an overall purpose and direction in history. Such a view – the importance of observation – is consistent with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics.

Unfortunately the two thousand year-long dominance of Plato and Aristotle, two of the greatest skyhookers who ever thought, who were blind to the virtues of evolution, of trade, of self-organization, of growth and development, biased the intellectual life of the West to static thought, to anti-mercantile attitudes, and to the idea of immutable characters and essences. Aquinas’ adoption of Aristotle in the 12th century, and his acceptance by the Church as official orthodoxy, kept Skyhooker attitudes firmly entrenched in the core of official Christianity. It took a Reformation and a scientific revolution to loosen the links between Christianity and Aristotle. It now asserts that faith in Skyhooks is just that, faith, and if you do not believe in the Great Skyhook, you have not understood the Gospels properly.

The Up-from-Belows started out small but in the last few centuries have grown to dominate the game. First it was Epicurus, then Lucretius who set Epicurus’ thought to one long poem, and the near miraculous finding of a lost text of Lucretius in a German monastery at the time of the Renaissance. Lucretius is the first exposition of a materialist world of self-organizing atoms without the need for gods to explain anything. No wonder the Platonists were not anxious to preserve it. Later came Adam Smith, David Hume, Darwin, Friedrich Hayek, economists, and other proponents of the self-organizing capacities of nature and man. Atheists are, in general, up-from-belows, but many proponents of the Skyhook tradition also acknowledge the reality and importance of the self-organizing features of nature, which includes human beings.

Now Skyhook is a term of derision, like Puritan, Tory, Quaker, Whig, Protestant, Grit. The Skyhookers think that the entire universe has been brought into existence by a Mind, and that it is pervaded or organized by something like thought, and that behind the appearances is a Big Thinker, who has brought reality into being. Not just quarks and leptons, the strong force and the weak force, electromagnetism and gravity, but mind itself. They point out that mind is a feature of this universe that has to be explained.

Other skyhookers think that minds in the future are, by the force of their observations in the future, bringing into existence a state of affairs conducive to life, consciousness and intelligence. This view was the basis of the recent science fiction movie, Interstellar.

The Up-from-belows, when they wade into cosmology, get into trouble with mind. Their views are frequently materialist, and their ideas of matter are seen, by Skyhookers, as constricting limitations of the largest kinds on whatever could be real. Daniel Dennett is a prominent example. Extreme materialists end up denying the existence of mind, or denying the particular appearance of qualities (known to the trade as qualia). If everything is self-organizing matter, and we know that matter is dead – so to speak – then mind is found in brains, and dies with brains. Brain generates mind, and not the other way around. This conclusion is an undiscussable reality for the extreme materialist.

The Sky-hookers say that Mind is a feature of this universe that needs explanation, and they rely on the Benign Designer God as their Super Turtle, the explanation that stops the need for an infinite regress of explanations. The Universe rests on the back of an Elephant, and the Elephant stands on the back of a Turtle, and either it’s turtles all the way down (infinite regress), or a Super Turtle ends the regression. That is what I mean by a Super Turtle.

Many Up-from-belows say that the question is absurd: we are here by fluke. Others say that we live in a multiverse, and in this world of infinite possibilities, we just happen to live in the world that generated minds to observe it. So they offer the same explanation as the flukers, only disguise it under the multiplication of universes. Many up-from-belows disparage the idea of an Intellgient Designer, but hold that physical laws are Platonic abstractions that exists outside of time and space. Designer God, fluke, multiverse, the immutable Laws of Nature which exists outside human influence: each is a Super Turtle. The whole issue is explored entertainingly and well by Paul Davies in the Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life?

Just because the Up-from-belows wander into conceptual and metaphysical difficulties when they ponder the origin of everything, and the nature of mind, does not mean that they are wrong about how human institutions have evolved.

Thinkers as different as Darwin and Hayek are in the Up-from-Below camp. It is frequently amazing to me that people who celebrate the process of biological discovery called evolution tend to be squeamish about the process of price and product discovery called capitalism.

The basic idea is that humans create order without thinking about it, and that order causes changes in us, as we adapt to it and develop social customs that allow for greater wealth creation and more complex societies. Such an idea infuses thinkers like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek. In fact Charles Darwin is known to have thoroughly read Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations when he was in university.

This has to be the most long-winded introduction to a wonderful book by Matt Ridley, the Evolution of Everything. I strongly recommend it.

Ridley engages in a thorough exploration that evolution applies to everything: religions, moralities, biology, technology, languages, laws: a complete bottom-up self-organizing explanation of everything.I do not find it necessary to agree with every argument of a writer, especially when they are engaged in a serious romp through vast reaches of important subject matters. For a splendid stimulation of your mind, even as you may argue with it as you read, Ridley’s book makes a great Christmas gift.

He is not the kind of writer who obliges you to agree with him on pain of being cast into outer darkness.

PS:
If you google this book, ignore especially the Guardian’s mean spirited assassination attempt. Kirkus Reviews discusses the actual ideas of Ridley fairly.

Best briefing on global non-warming

The Telegraph contains an excellent briefing today by Christopher Booker on the range of issues gathered under the name of “anthropogenic global warming”. It demolishes one by one the myths and falsehoods behind this modern eruption of mass panic and the scientific equivalent of phlogiston.

On a lesser issue, I find in the Wikipedia article on the “Little Ice Age” the following:

Orbital cycles

Main article: Milankovich cycles

Orbital forcing due to cycles in the earth’s orbit around the sun has, for the past 2,000 years, caused a long-term northern hemisphere cooling trend that continued through the Medieval period and the Little Ice Age. The rate of Arctic cooling is roughly 0.02 degrees Celsius per century.^[67] This trend could be extrapolated to continue into the future, possibly leading to a full ice age, but the twentieth-century instrumental temperature record shows a sudden reversal of this trend, with a rise in global temperatures attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.^[67]

Those interested in the topic of global climate patterns are encouraged to read Brian Fagan’s “The Little Ice Age” and, on an even longer time frame, “The Long Summer”. You will be both educated and entertained. While Fagan is a mild warmist, he is too well learned in the subject matter to be fooled by all the panic.

Stars and planets

This morning I awoke after a long deep sleep and headed outdoors shortly before dawn. The weather was September cool, the sky clear. A huge blazing star caught my attention in the east. Time for the sky map, an app for the handheld which explains every star and planet in the sky.

The Mobius Sky Map solves the problem of light sources. All the old analog star charts had to be read in darkness, and so a light source had to be found by which to read it. The light caused one’s eyes to not be able to see the stars – a vicious circle. Today the star chart is its own source of light.

I walked up the road to a clearing, and there in all their glory were Venus, Mars and Jupiter in a rough vertical line rising from the eastern horizon. My sky map also showed that the sun was below the horizon, with Mercury near it.

The genius of these systems is that they work day and night. You can point them through the earth and they will show you stars you cannot see in the northern hemisphere. They pay no attention to the presence of the earth below your feet, the obstruction of trees or buildings.

The device locates your latitude and longitude via satellites, and from that inertial moment the rest of the stars and planets are displayed in the system according to where they should be, with little labels for constellations and stars. The system is beautiful and adds greatly to one’s enjoyment of the night sky.

Eat meat, ape! (if you want to grow a big brain)

It is always a happy occasion when the newspapers report something both true and, by reason of its truth, annoying to progressives. Thus the article in the Washington Post about the benefits of eating meat for man’s evolution.

The brain absorbs 20% of our food energy. To feed the brain you have find an efficient way to harvest energy. A gorilla chews leaves for 12 hours a day, and to gain the extra calories to feed a brain our size he would have to chew for another 2 hours a day (study shows). Accordingly, the path to getting out of the jungle and reaching all parts of the globe is to start eating meat. Otherwise we would be stuck chewing leaves for 14 hours a day in isolated pockets of African forest.

Which is obviously what happened. During the last ice age, which only ended about 11,000 years ago (9,000 if you live in Canada, and it still is not over in Greenland) the African continent dessicated, opening up savanna grasslands and forcing forests into retreat. Some apes got down out of the trees and ventured into open, dangerous country.

Since our evolutionary path has travelled through hunting in groups and fire making, it can be safely observed that we made it through the evolution-forcing changes. When did we actually begin to cook with fire? Opinion is divided.

But the researchers could not determine when daily cooking began. Was it about 250,000 years ago, when humans were nearly fully evolved with big brains, which is supported by archaeological findings? Or was it about 800,000 years ago, when prehumans began their most dramatic brain-growth spurt, an era for which there is little archaeological evidence of controlled fires for cooking?

Cooking food has been integral to extracting more food value out of roots and tubers, and in shortening our guts, since cooking both alters the food we eat for the better, and allows more speedy digestion as cooking is, in effect, a form of digestion exterior to the body.

A book called Catching Fire, by the British primatologist Richard Wrangham, makes this point. Wrangham’s book is modest, slim, factual and utterly persuasive.

So, what have we learned today?

1) eating meat helped mankind evolve big brains,

2) big brains, meat eating and fire co-evolved

3) eating raw vegetables reduces you to the state of a gorilla.

Don’t eat raw vegetables!

Okay, maybe conclusion 3 is unwarranted, but why risk it?

RIP: The great cholesterol scam (1955 – 2015)

Your doctor still probably believes that cholesterol in the diet translates into cholesterol in the bloodstream, that there is “good” and “bad” cholesterol, and that “bad” cholesterol bears a statistically significant relationship to heart disease. Every one of these propositions is false.

I refer you to an excellent article by Matt Ridley “cholesterol is not bad for you”, who writes:

Cholesterol is not some vile poison but an essential ingredient of life, which makes animal cell membranes flexible and is the raw material for making hormones, like testosterone and oestrogen. Your liver manufactures most of the cholesterol found in your blood from scratch, and adjusts for what you ingest, which is why diet does not determine blood cholesterol levels. Lowering blood cholesterol by changing diet is all but impossible.

Nor is there any good evidence that high blood cholesterol causes atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease or shorter life. It is not even a risk factor in people who have already had heart attacks. In elderly people — ie, those who have the most heart attacks — the lower your blood cholesterol, the greater your risk of death. Likewise in children.

From the very first, the studies that linked the ingestion of cholesterol and saturated animal fats to cardiovascular disease were not just flawed, but tinged with scandal.

It is well worth reading the rest. What I have to say here reflects upon the course of this great fallacy. The cholesterol scam bears a strong relationship to the anthropogenic global warming scam.

1) it is propagated by scientists on a non-scientific mission.

2) it is believed because it plausibly explains an observation (increasing global temperature [for a time], increasing heart attacks from smoking in the 1950s and 60s). It taps into large anxieties about too much wealth, too much happiness, in western societies. There must be sin somewhere, and the public is ready to flog itself in the cause of a secularized idea of God, uh, I mean Good.

3) the causal relationship is weaker than first supposed; the research is found to be sloppy, the facts have been fudged, subsequent studies do not fully support the original claims, nevertheless the orthodoxy is promulgated all the more harshly for being doubted.

4) by now, powerful economic and ideological interests have taken hold. They supply an ongoing source of funds and opinion to ensure the perpetuation of the alarm: in the case of cholesterol, the margarine industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical establishment, and in the case of AGW, the tribe of bureaucrats and leftists who seek to control markets, whose god of Marxism had failed, and who needed a new god (Gaia) to justify their rule.

5) The skeptics who have patiently argued on the basis of facts that the science of each phenomenon was weak, are ostracized by the opinion establishments of medicine and global warming. Cranks, but the cranks are right and the orthodox priests and Levites are wrong.

6) Eventually, after fifty or sixty years, the subject of discussion just changes. In the case of cholesterol, the evidence gets weaker and weaker, and the problems caused by too much sugar consumption (obesity, diabetes), caused in part by people not eating enough fats and meats, reaches a stage where it can no longer be ignored.

7) the retreat of the orthodoxy is covered by a smokescreen of fresh concerns for some other catastrophe. No admissions of error or apologies for wrecked careers and following bad science are ever issued. Time flows on, bringing neither knowledge nor greater understanding of the role of folly in human affairs.

8) stages 6 and 7 have been reached in the cholesterol cycle; they are beginning in the anthropogenic global warming scam. Fifty years from now, there will still be clanking windmills in the North Sea, but whether they will be still linked to a power grid is less likely, and whether anyone will pay attention is doubtful. The lobbies that keep them there, however, will still exist.

These long term fashions in intolerant error should cause all people to question the intelligence and wisdom of the human species. I call these schools of thought and action “phologiston”, after a disproven but thousand-year-old Greek theory of what fire was.

There are two major sources of metaphorical phlogiston in modern society: the climate people and the medical profession.

Phlogiston is the ancient term for a substance that was imputed to exist in all things that prevented combustion. Phlogiston was necessary in a Greek idea of a universe. Without phlogiston, everything would burn, because it was in the nature of all things to seek to rise from the four sub-lunary elements below (earth, air, fire , water) to the empyrean , the zone beyond fire, outside the orbits of the five planets around the earth. This was the hidden metaphysical postulate, which they never questioned. (All summaries of obsolete world views make them look ridiculous; they were not, they were merely in error).

If all things naturally wanted to burn up, then something must prevent combustion, and this substance was called “phlogiston”. From premise to assumed force. No one questioned the premise for more than a thousand years.

So when Priestly and Lavoisier said that combustion was a process of oxygenation, and proved it by showing that certain things gained weight when burned, phlogiston lost credibility to a newer, chemical idea of burning.

Note that phlogiston is an idea predicated on a larger world view, and is introduced to explain the operations of that world view. That things do not normally burn is something that needs explanation in the Greek world view.

Correspondingly, in the modern world view in North America and Europe, the fact that needs explaining – I propose for your consideration – is “why are we so rich?” and the answer we get out of post-Christian secularized guilt is: “We must have done something wrong.”

The assumption of a secularized guilt is the underlying assumption. Heart attacks are punishment for overindulgence in highly nutritious food; global warming is punishment for our thoughtless depredations upon Gaia. A future perspective may laugh at the modern human propensity to consider prosperity and health as occasions for guilt, just as we denigrate the Greeks for assuming all things want to burn their way to the empyrean sphere of a geocentric universe.

I tell you folks, the longer I live, the more truth I see in Chesterton’s remark – attributed to him – that when people cease to believe in God, the more likely they are to believe any nonsense that comes their way. Save your beliefs for absurdities like the Christian religion, and keep your mind clear to detect the bullshit constantly propagated in the material world. It will not lack for targets, I assure you.

Barrel Strength

Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Category: Science