crazy

glue

not

working.

i'm going to have to trudge through the blizzard tundra tomorrow to get some epoxy.

well, i found a reasonable workaround.

$1/month.
$0.01/minute.
free voicemail-to-text.
no expiry.

almost free.

but now i have to wait ten or fifteen days for paypal to fail to convince me to give them a credit card number. sometimes it feels like the whole world failed economics 101. incentives? what is it, 1853?

in the long run, i'll hook a broken laptop into a router, install the scary software there and find some kind of budget ip phone on kijiji to hook up to it. for now, i'm happy with the email option.

...and i'm still thinking that i should be able to rout that to an android phone if i ever get one, too. that might make more sense than the broken laptop thing.

you know, all i really want is a local phone number (it has to be local because the primary reason i need the phone in the first place is for the border fascists....this is apparently an impossible process without a phone number....) that routs to a voice mail box and routs those messages to email. that way, i could walk down to a pay phone and call somebody back, if necessary. or respond via email. that's what i always did in the past; somebody would leave me a message, and i'd send them an email.

the system could be fully automated. there's no real justification to pay for it.

google voice can do that, but not in canada. which sort of makes me want to launch a string of terrorist attacks against the communications oligopoly. i know that won't solve anything. but, fuck them. there's ways around it, but not with a local area code. i can't give the border fascists a wyoming area number, they'll think i'm running coke back and forth. so i'm stuck with the whole voip rigmarole, which i'm dreading going through with.

in the end, i'll probably just buy the voip mailbox and never actually go through the process of getting an ip phone or installing the software. then i'll forget to buy minutes and lose my number...

how does it make sense to ask for verification by phone when somebody is signing up for a phone number?

ugh.

independent cd stores. i love what they do for the community, but sometimes i wonder.

i went in to get the new mt. zion disc. i haven't been buying a lot of cds lately, but i try and keep up with those guys. and i've been "saving" a lot of money from not smoking, so i've actually put aside a small amount for a monthly budget. i used to collect those little round discs before real life came around and started demanding i start paying into it. it gave me great enjoyment, so i'd like to get back to doing it. i'm going to be kind of working around my reviews to fill in holes in the collection.

so i thought i'd check to see if there's any belew. they had some of the ones i have and a bunch of the ones i don't really want, as well as one that i have a sort of high-end bootleg of. it was a gift from a friend of my father. my uncle used to do the same thing. so, i have a stack of this stuff - mostly prog-related. i've never really considered them as 'part of the collection'. rather, i've always thought of them more as try-before-you-buy type things, but i'm treating them as though they are for the review site. in actuality, a lot of them are out of print, so those boots are the closest i'm ever going to get. that's the case for this one.

so: $10 for an out of print disc i don't have - collectors jump on that shit. bring it up to the cash...

"geez, this is an old disc."
"yeah."
"i'll mark it down to $6."
"swell."

it's $184, new, on amazon. and i'd be surprised if the disc i got was ever actually played. the insert doesn't look like it's been unraveled before. crisp.

now, that says more about amazon taking advantage of dwindling supply than anything else. it's kind of an asshole price. but, still.

if you collect cds, you have stories like this - and you're glad the indie stores don't do these sorts of rigorous checks. there's not much chance somebody's going to walk into a cd store in windsor and hand over $200 for a decades old out of print adrian belew cd. sure. but, it could conceivably be auctioned for more than $6.

so, i'm happy about this, but i have to wonder....

i live in one of the biggest tomato producing regions in the world, and all the supermarkets are full of beat to shit tomatoes that spent weeks bouncing around in trucks as they were being imported from mexico. i know it's cold out. but you know what the bizarre thing is? the imported mexican tomatoes are hothouse tomatoes. yeah. worse, i know for a fact that the tomatoes in the region i live in are also mostly grown year round and indoors.

i'm new to the area, of course. however, i'm going to have to go out of my way to try and figure out where the local growers are leaving their produce. and, to be honest, that's the kind of thing that calls for some local awareness raising.

i mean, honestly. why are we sorting through moldy tomatoes from thousands of miles away (i haven't actually bought any in weeks), then overpaying for the transportation costs to get them here, when there's a giant surplus 30 miles down the road? stupid, stupid, stupid...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/science/earth/more-bite-left-to-winter-but-it-hasnt-been-as-bad-as-you-think.html

i had a thought walking through the rain: what we need to deal with flooding issues are elephants. if you just let an elephant walk through the streets it would suck all the water up and voila...

....except there are some problems. it's too cold for elephants, and that's not clean water, and it has to find it's way back out eventually.

so, robot elephants. seriously. this is the future of flood control.

i mean, we could maybe deal with the weather issue by genetically engineering mammoths, but it's still not humane to have them out lapping up water on the street.

it's dry in here and not likely to spill over. i don't feel the structure got the test i was expecting it to, but it's not really a needed test, either. i'm not expecting this kind of snow again next year. but the temperature didn't climb to where it threatened it would, and the rain didn't come down nearly as hard, either. really, windsor seems to have completely skipped the system.

that's ok with me. there's still a lot of water to get out of here, but the temperature is going to drop enough to stop the melt and let it drain.

head is also clearing. what a wasted week...

24 hours from now, i will know whether this basement is unusually flood resistant or not.

there's about 20 cm of snow on the ground. it was 7 degrees today, which was warm enough to turn the neighbourhood roads into a series of interconnected ponds. starting around 10 am, we're going to get close to 50 mm of rain (tapering off about midnight tomorrow), around with temperatures rising to around 10 degrees at about the same time. the temperature is then going to drop back to freezing very quickly...

that's kind of an algorithm for flooding, so it seems to be a virtual certainty that there's going to be some water issues in the neighbourhood. the roads are going to flood and the sewers are going to back up. that's very easy to predict, and not really much to care about from my perspective. what i'm worried about is that water seeping in...

i'll find out.

awake, but still not fully alert.

you have to keep in mind that i'm somebody that has historically routinely gone well over 48 hours without sleep, on nothing but coffee and nicotine. nicotine is such a powerful stimulant, for me anyways. i'm well aware of the reality that if i just go buy a pack of smokes i can get some 36 hour days in. but i need to cut the reliance on it.

so i'm not used to this...

i'm hoping the flip of that is that the option for really long days will be there if i want it by just getting a pack.

drugs should be used as drugs, y'know?

producing humans that are naturally wired on caffeine - or that don't form a resistance, at least - strikes me as a worthwhile application of genetic engineering.

personally, i'd love to have that dna flipped...

c'mon, brain. you're supposed to like humidity.

the hypersensitivity is off the wall, but so be it. i think the pollen or whatever may have something to do with it (i've never been checked, but it's something that comes and goes). but, every little change in my surroundings produces these exaggerated responses. the atmospheric pressure changes, i get a stomach ache. the moisture level of the air changes, i get a headache. i'm starting to wonder if i was born with a swim bladder.....

in the end, it's just more proof that i am not a member of homo sapiens. sorry. like i've said - i don't mind being on the same clade. that's ok. but i'm not the same species as the rest of you.....

physically feeling snot harden at the top of your nose might be the weirdest shit ever.

actually, i feel a lot better since i woke up from a nap. weirdness, though.

it's actually the constant napping that's made me rather useless this month. awake for a few hours....zzzzz....again and again...

it's partly the fact that i keep putting myself in nicotine withdrawal. i realize this and realize i just need to make a fucking choice. as i've been stating for years, it's not the cigarettes that are stopping me from quitting altogether, it's the other things we smoke for recreational reasons. which i'm infrequent about. but it's putting me in constant withdrawal....

yet, i'm wondering if it has something to do with the weather, too, given how sensitive i seem to be to it. it's been so cold. and now my sinuses are thawing out.

coffee has stopped working, which scares me. i don't like the stronger options. maybe i'll switch brands.

those moments when you suddenly, without warning, have a "water up the nose" reaction (in error) as a part of the rehydration process that follows turning the heat down (and thereby moistening the inside air) in the spring....

"wait. i can breathe again. woah."

biblical rainfall amounts.

but, goddy, you promised!

http://s2.twnmm.com/images/12/Activewxwarning-12912.png

phil collins warning:

i know there's some articles floating around about the melting waters up north messing with the jet stream, but every article i've seen on the topic actually presents itself as a minority view against the consensus. if you think about it for a second, it doesn't actually make any sense. we've had unusually warm winters for 20 years, then all of a sudden the warming trend results in coldness? i mean, i don't like to make a habit of agreeing with people like rush limbaugh but i think the truth is that the media is jumping on this in ways that demonstrate that most journalists really don't have the slightest understanding of what they're typing about.

you mean teaching people grammar for four years doesn't give them a deeper understanding of climate science? my mind is blown.

anyways, the article itself is interesting but please draw specific attention to the chart published, which points out specifically cold years in 2013, 1993 and 1976. specifically:

1976 -6
1993 -5.5
2013 -5.3

those are the three coldest years in the last 50. it's very interesting because it very clearly demonstrates how two different phenomena - cyclical sunspot activity and increasing greenhouse gas concentration - work together. we see that temperatures at the minimum of each cycle have increased slightly. it's entirely reasonable, based on this data and what we know about these two phenomena, to expect another especially cold year around 2030 - although not quite as cold. -5, perhaps. or perhaps -4.5 or even -4, if the warming picks up.

now, if you zoom out a little further to the last 100 years you see especially cold years in the late 50s, late 30s and late 10s, further corroborating a roughly 20 year cycle. further, the 30s (~-6) and 10s (almost -8) are the coldest - further corroborating the warming trend. this even pulls out the slight cooling trend in the middle of the century (when the bottom of the cycle hit in the late 50s, it was -5.5, a bit warmer than the 30s, so it's actually the 70s bottoming that demonstrates the cooling).

going back to the media, they want to present these ideas as counter to one another. and, certainly, the crackpots that want to write off climate change as all sunspots and no carbon aren't helping to clarify how they work together.

but this simple chart demonstrates it very clearly.

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/has-it-really-been-that-cold-in-southern-ontario/21691/

that's presuming the sun behaves, of course.

my understanding is that this particular relationship is demonstrable across the northern hemisphere (and only the northern hemisphere), and is not localized to toronto. it just happens to really cleanly show the relationship.

there was some murmuring a few months ago that the sun's low activity might be about to throw us into a cold snap for a few years, but my understanding is the sun has come back.

nor is it as simple as just sunlight. of course, i don't understand it down to the precise details. i'm not a climate scientist. but i think the idea is intuitive enough. i mean, it's been cold this year because of the air coming down from the north, which is specifically related to wind. when the wind roars it's way south, it gets cold down here. due to the way the earth is tilted, the amount of sun that hits the northern hemisphere has well known effects that are related to the onset of ice ages (milankovitch cycles).

maybe i should state the argument that convinced me that carbon has an effect. i'm a skeptical person. i was agnostic at first. but, the more i looked into it, the more i realized that "natural conditions" "should" be pushing us into an ice age. that is to say that we are hypothesized to currently exist in an interglacial. i say hypothesized because the future doesn't exist yet. but, based on what we know about the way the climate's been changing for the last really long time, we've been coming in and out of ice ages pretty regularly and seemed to be about on the verge of entering into another one (based on how long past interglacials lasted). that is to say that, based on past climate data, the reasonable conclusion to come to would be that we should expect to be entering an ice age just about any year now.

yet, the data states the climate is warming. therefore, something must be working to counteract the onset of an ice age. the chemistry of carbon works together with the correlation of rising carbon. that's something that requires a terrestrial explanation + correlation + mechanism - enough to convince me.

milankovitch cycles are like 20 some thousand years, though, and has to do with the way the earth orbits as much as it does with the way the earth is tilted. it's not at all the same thing. but the parallel to draw is that both ideas rely on differences in the amount of sun hitting the earth at northern latitudes - very small changes. milankovitch' ideas are based on very small changes making big differences over thousands of years. the sunspot thing is very small changes making relatively small differences over a short period of time. so, it's just a difference of scale.

like i say, that's just an intuitive explanation - the sun's energy hits us on enough of an angle in the north that small variations have the ability to set off chaotic changes. like lightning hitting a pond. that's the cause of most weather on the planet! so, i think that's uncontroversial. the difficulty is working it out in more detail than that. and there's been some studies noting the correlation i'm pulling out; in fact, that's entirely what i'm drawing on (i'm not one to make shit up).

here's my source. again - it's only the northern hemisphere.

http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/11/solar-activity-and-the-so-called-%E2%80%9Clittle-ice-age%E2%80%9D/

as an aside, that brings up an aspect of the climate change discussion that nobody talks about. there's this sort of implicit assumption that if we stop carbon emissions then the climate will be static. of course, that's ridiculous. nobody would actually say that. the climate is in constant flux. yet, it remains implicit. in fact, we have every reason to believe that if we were to erase all the warming we've created with carbon then we'd be headed directly into an ice age. that is to say that the carbon we're dumping into the atmosphere is preventing an ice age.

i don't think we want to enter an ice age anymore than we want to go into a warming feedback cycle.

that doesn't mean we can just let the carbon flow and get away with it. milankovitch cycles or not, we can't just terraform the planet into venus and think we'll be ok. but, i don't think it's something the models take fully into account - and it is something they SHOULD take into account. the question of how much carbon is necessary to offset the milankovitch cycles is a valid one, as is the question of how much is too much. we want some carbon to offset the cooling, but we don't want so much that it melts the permafrost and unleashes all the methane. if the latter happens, it could very well take us out of an "icehouse" and into a "hothouse", and then we're totally lost in the woods without a compass.

i don't think that the numbers that are generally thrown around in the media are created with any of that in mind. like i say: it's just that implicit assumption of stasis that everybody knows is ridiculous. but, the other side of that argument is that ice ages don't happen that rapidly and that it's a lesser thing to be concerned about. yet, is it really? that's an assumption i'm less than comfortable with.

what i'm hoping is that we're going to see some stories in the next few months that point out that it's going to take a few years to thaw all the refreezing that happened this year. of course, that won't buck the trend. it might buy us some more time, though.

....but the flip side of that is when the cycle does it turn it could be worse than we're expecting.

i'm just working out possibilities of the way the models are flawed. we'll have to find out. but if there's something deep to the idea that sun activity does have these cycles in the north,

1) we'll need to recalculate the effect of this minimum
2) we'll need to recalculate the effect of the coming maximum around 2020

i think it probably won't just balance out.

this is more precisely what i'm talking about. as you can see, the amount of energy is very small. it's not enough to have serious climate effects on a short term basis (although the milankovitch theory, which is accepted, states that larger changes occur over thousands of years due to changes in the earth's distance from the sun, how it spins and etc). however, the idea is that the small differences in energy might be enough to set off weather patterns - and specifically that it might have an effect on cyclones raging off the coast of siberia and, by proxy, affect how the air pushes southwards into north america and europe.

i just want to make it clear that nobody is suggesting that less sunspots = less sunlight = cold. that neither makes sense in terms of energy or in terms of the cause of the cold we're experiencing (which is already frigid air moving south, not southern air becoming frigid due to the sun not warming it or something). rather, it's the idea that small changes in the amount of energy hitting northern latitudes can affect weather in the north, and that the weather in the north then affects shit further south.

which is not any different than el nino / la nina. it's just in siberia instead of the pacific, and follows a different pattern of air movement.

http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/Earth8.pdf

lol. there's a whole section in this dude's book. he's a contributor at a prominent climate site (realclimate), fwiw.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=g97ktyTE7LIC&pg=PA157&dq=solar+activity+and+earth%27s+climate+6.5&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R-cCU-vqLoqz2QXksoCwCA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=solar%20activity%20and%20earth%27s%20climate%206.5&f=false

btw, i'm pointing to the 22 year hale cycle of magnetic reversal rather than the 11 year sunspot cycle that all the literature is citing. they're related. it's the same argument, i'm just stretching it out over two cycles. but i should be clear.

the nasty cold is only ~20 years (and sometimes a few times in a down cycle) 'cause there's other stuff besides the sun going on.

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0442%282004%29017%3C0034%3AEOTSCI%3E2.0.CO%3B2

if you're still reading this and can't understand that document, what it says (amongst other things) is that the 11 year solar minimum (not the 22 year one) might create either an extremely cold polar vortex or an extremely warm one depending on whether the wind is easterly or westerly. it works that out by either pulling heat up or down from the atmosphere. this paper was unable to determine a cause or pattern underlying the direction of the wind.

meaning it's not quite the same thing as i'm saying, but it does present evidence that the solar minimum is a cause of extreme polar vortices.

and with that, we have once again derived the immortal words:

the answer, my friend...

</thread>

there's all these ancient cities around the world that are practically buried. consider antioch, which is now in turkey. it was founded as the capital of a greco-syrian empire that one of alexander the great's generals created, around 300 BCE. it was a really important city in the roman empire for the entire time it controlled the levant, even holding one of the most important bishops (patriarchs) in the christian church. it became arab/muslim for a while, then got attacked in the crusades, and is today just a pile of rubble at the mouth of a river.

i could just imagine wandering into the place, though, in the period between when it was destroyed and when it got buried by geological processes. there would have been places to live there, free of rent or labour. i mean, you'd have to figure out how to plant and water some food, but besides that it's just free living. did people do that? i mean, it obviously couldn't have happened on too great a scale, otherwise the place wouldn't be rubble. but i'm interested in knowing who might have lived in these ruins and what kind of a society they may have had.

i guess a modern parallel would be ghost towns out west. i mean, they're called ghost towns because nobody (supposedly) lives in them. but, how empty are they actually? do people (besides the aboriginal inhabitants, but that's a different kind of ownership) actually own these structures? if i walked into an old house in ghost town, saskatchewan and just started fixing it up, is anybody going to charge me rent or demand i pay taxes?

i know there's this common law idea of gaining ownership over a structure by "improving it", but that's something else.

this is an extreme example, the climate's a little much for my tastes, but there must be literally thousands of abandoned houses here:

Uranium City was a thriving town until 1982, with its population approaching the 5,000 threshold required to achieve city status in the province. The closure of the mines on 30 June 1982 led to economic collapse, with most residents of the town leaving. It was later designated as a northern settlement with about 300 people remaining. The local hospital closed in the spring of 2003. The current population is 201,[1] including a number of Métis and First Nations people.[4]

i mean, a place like that, you can't just scatter seeds in your yard. that's far enough north it might even have permafrost.

then again, the permafrost is melting.

this is a little more reasonable. some of the houses may be unliveable, but smashing the doors down on the church might be something like discovering an empty castle.

there's probably ghost towns in southern ontario.

like i say, i believe the common law on this is if you smash the doors down and fix the place up, you take ownership of it.

like, check this abandoned church out. somebody is obviously maintaining the lawn. it's still an interesting possibility.

i'm stable and happy where i am, but it's an idea that crossed my mind and something i'm going to really contemplate should the shit hit the fan. i'll have to check the common law a little more closely, obviously.

http://www.ghosttowns.com/canada/ontario/wesleyville.html

always liked this song, although you'll need to find a translation if your german is rusty.

so, i'm considering setting my clock to cst. i live in the eastern time zone. allow me to explain.

i grew up in ottawa, which is several hundred kilometres east of where i am now, windsor. so, the sun came up earlier there, and set a little earlier as well. yet, i always wanted the sun to come up even earlier, not later. drats. foiled. yet, i feel if i set my clocks to cst, it will overcompensate in the direction i'd prefer.

then i started wondering if maybe everybody was on cst anyways, and it's weird that i'm still on est.

well, you'd have to think that a substantial number of people in the est edge of the midwest live on cst. those boundaries are probably merely a suggestion.

"see, this is why we can't have anarchism - i bet they think they can just pick their own time zones"

jessica amber murray
it's funny, you know. i want to talk about the basic respect that's demanded of people to build a voluntary society with equal distribution, and have tried to surround myself with people that i think demonstrate that respect, but how about something as simple as febreezing after you smoke when you live in an apartment, so as not to affect your neighbours? how many people have the presence of mind to think of that?

that's why i'm really of the opinion that anarchism needs to merge more realistically with biology. and it's important that we are talking about anarchism and not authoritarian socialism - let us make that absolutely clear - in merging left-wing ideas with biology. evolution isn't something that should be guided by a vanguard. but, maybe the "shift in consciousness" that the new age weirdos talk about, if analyzed empirically, is a proposed evolutionary event. maybe it's the real preconditions that socialism requires, rather than something about economic growth.

i've noticed there's a dog that walks around the neighbourhood sometimes. it's a little terrier - one of the cute ones. not quite a lap dog, but not much bigger than a decent sized cat. i've noticed it (for i am unaware of it's gender, and don't want to make assumptions - it's interesting how we can talk of a dog abstractly as an 'it', but would be offensive if we spoke of an ambiguously gendered human as an it, and what's really odd about that is that the argument is actually over grammar, it has to do with what category that object falls into - a fully arbitrary classification done by bored monks or something) always takes the sidewalks. that's an interesting observation for a dog, that you wouldn't think would really care about those kinds of social conventions.

the first time i saw it, i thought it was lost. it just came strolling up the sidewalk, looked at me, and kept on turning up the sidewalk around the corner. i looked around, didn't see anybody, figured i should probably take it home and put up posters or something. so, i started calling it. just, "hey dog" - and it turned around. a dog that spends time with humans picks up more language than i think we realize. so, it knew it was a dog, and turned around to look at who was addressing it. i started doing the thigh pounding and the c'mereing, as well as the hand signals, and, sure enough, it followed me. but it only followed a short way, before it turned off into a yard. it had taken my interest as a signal that it was time to go home, but didn't need any help finding the way.

see, that's a creature that can behave in a society in a way that it's ancestors can't. you could not let a wolf walk down the street in a neighbourhood with children, call it over to you when you see it, and then watch it trot off indifferently. there would be eaten people if we did that. it's a highly artificial selection, but it's a measurable level of evolution in social behaviour. 

Dave K
the problem with applying that kind of rubric to humans, is that human beings don't make decisions in the same way dogs do

jessica amber murray 
well, the dog thing was more an easily understood example of how social evolution can happen. i pointed out it was artificial, and that that's a bad idea with humans. i don't propose that we should be artificially selected by breeders to conform to some idealization of human nature. however, i do think that the biology is relevant in understanding how human societies have organized in the past and may organize in the future.

as to how different it really is? there's certainly some differences, but i think the similarities probably outweigh them. that's less to minimize human intelligence and more to stress dog intelligence.

Dave K
humans tend to draw a lot of influences from culture and intergenerational memory

jessica amber murray 
yeah, i think you may actually be trying to suggest that the genetics are different - that artificial selection for behavioural traits doesn't work on humans. i think that's half right. i think that the genetic situation is too complex to control through selective breeding experiments, but that with more sophisticated tools behaviour could in theory be bred. i don't think we *should*. the question isn't whether culture is more important than genetics; i think the key is understanding them within a fluid context. that is to say that they inform each other in complex ways that maybe aren't worth disentangling, but can be studied more rigorously with chemicals than with shards of pottery.

so, relative to the science of about 1960, you're right, and that would have been the wise conclusion. yet, right now it's more ambiguous and, relative to the science of 2050, it will likely be exactly wrong.

i mean, the selective breeding of dogs is a process that has occurred over a very high number of generations, and has included all kinds of inbreeding. i'd bet the dog genome is just disgusting. that couldn't be replicated in human trials over one generation. it's crazy to draw conclusions from that.

Dave K
What we've learned about genetics since the 1960s is that genes turn on and off based on the conditions that a person is living in, which is heavily dependent on the culture of the other human beings around them

jessica amber murray 
we still don't know to what extent behavioural disposition (or "nature") is hereditary. it could be that it is in complex ways that are only beginning to be unravelled.

meaning that certain attitudes like altruism may have a genetic basis, and moving to full altruism may be a necessarily genetic process.

more generally, i think we're getting to the point where a lot of social sciences and humanities are becoming applied biology in our terms of understanding them. the development of ethics is now understood as a selective process, for example. that's a massive in terms of naturalist explanations. economics has been slowly taken over by psychology, and should probably find it's final home in population ecology. i think this is a sort of paradigm shift in thinking that anarchists should really jump aboard on.

Kardinal ZG
Well this is rather problematic. If we are to understand morality on the basis of biology we toss out free will. Which is nice and dandy, but free agency is intrinsically tied to the enlightenment project and rationalism. Hence notions such as socialism and left wing politics become empty terms. Sloterdjik proposes something similar, although not appealing directly to biology (for obvious reasons, he lives in Germany), he proposed that in the light of the failure of the humanist project, the human sphere should be run more or less like a zoo or an animal reserve. Got into trouble.

jessica amber murray
i think free will has a lot of problems to begin with, but i don't think that understanding the development of morality as a selective process has much to say about it at all. it just means that different moralities are going to flow out of different conditions. a place where food is plentiful will have different ideas about food distribution than a place where food is scarce. both will enforce those moral rules as a way to distribute resources, fairly or not. both perspectives can flow equally well from reason, but they come with different starting conditions.

insofar as that relates to a secular humanism, i actually interpret it as an application of nihilism rather than an appeal to nature. that is to say that moral rules may be arbitrary, but we arbitrarily choose this one because we like the idea of rational deduction. that's actually a process of becoming self-aware of an evolutionary process and deciding to take agency *over* it.

what that says about us is that our modern conclusions about humans and rights may follow from a relative lack of scarcity.

i just read an article about reintroducing lion and tiger species to north america.

like i want to add that to the list of things i have to worry about. are you trying to drive all the schizophrenics into episodes?

but, more seriously, these animals eat people. not opportunistically. we are a part of their natural diets. they kill hundreds or thousands of people a year in some areas.

you want to bring them here? no thanks.

btw, the video is trying to reduce alamarism by talking about "natural prey".

the truth is that's as much us as it is deer. sorry, anthropocentric types. god didn't put us at the top of the food chain everywhere.

i've always found it odd that skeptics cite this to discredit climate science, rather than cite it to discredit newsweek.

....because we should all believe everything we read in newsweek, right?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-global-cooling-story-came-to-be&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

ignoring the mild misrepresentation of the data to make the article more dramatic (warming has not stopped, it's just become linear rather than exponential), variation between 98-02 could be masking the effect of the increase in warfare since 2002. again, i need to ask why nobody has considered that all the bombs dropped in iraq and afghanistan might affect the climate? i mean, we're talking about a lot of very powerful bombs, here. if the second world war is considered to be a cause of the cooling trend after 1940, it's unreasonable to not consider the recent bunch of wars in a similar way. it's certainly at least as valid as chinese pollution. somebody will eventually realize this....

....but, the idea that the ocean is eating the missing heat is not new. it's the dominant narrative, actually. the idea that the sun has had an effect on the general trend is usually not taken seriously (and shouldn't be, despite the sun's possible influence on the recent polar weather).

http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525

nobody would suspect they would, but i'm not convinced they understood the options properly. disbelief is really hard to suspend. i'm sure what you'll hear is "rather than modify the climate, we should reduce emissions". if confronted on the reality that it's already too late, they'll probably say something about optimism, or maybe even cite a supernatural force. even those religious people that acknowledge the science seem to view catastrophe as a test of their faith. they've been conditioned to expect a happy ending.

if you could actually get people to understand that emissions can't be otherwise reversed, there is no optimism and there is no god? well, i think the results might shift. but, people are going to need to have something affect them personally before they'll get to that point...

http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/5939/public-views-on-climate-engineering