Matus1976

In particular check out the breeder reactors and the very hight temperature design. The hotter the reactor the more efficient it is.

Baal, you miscontrue a critical point, FAST breeder reactors are more efficient AT BREEDING fissile material the hotter they are. They are not more efficient in the sense that more of the energy is converted into usable electricity (except for the obvious physics principle that the greater the temperature differential the more power can be extracted) Fast Breeders are more 'efficient' because they can actually make much more fuel than they consume (this is how we manufacture plutonium) Since this design has a life span of 5 years, that is clearly not the case here. FAST Breeder reactors need complex cooling systems usually some form of molten metal. Thermal breeders, which breed more fissile fuel from fertile elements need only operate at the temperature of the reaction, and if the neutrons are *too fast* they actually will NOT create more fissile fuel, in other words, Thermal breeders are self regulating. There is nothing scientifically implausible in making a short lived self contained self regulating thermal breeder reactor.

Some more info on nuclear reactors and breeders for those interested. Most of the worlds uranium is Uranium 238. This does not sustain a fission chain reaction. Fissionable Uranium is Uranium 235, and makes up about .07% of the Uranium on earth. Enriched fuel rods are processed until they are made up of about 3% Uranium 235, and Uranium 235 is the isotope needed for a nuclear fission bomb. It's very rare and expensive.

However, if you hit Uranium 238 with a neutron, even one released from the fission event of Uranium 235, it ABSORBS the neutron, and turns into (after two intermediary steps with short half lives) Plutonium 239, which IS fissionable. If you hit Plutonium 239 with a neutron, it fissions and releases, on average 2.5 neutrons. Plutonium 239 can also be used in a nuclear fission bomb. Thus, if you shield a nuclear fission reactor with Uranium 238, which starts out with a supply of Uranium 235, you actually create fissionable Plutonium 239. This is what is referred to as a breeder reactor. Most U235 reactors utilize some of the newly bred plutonium anyway, usually generating a significant portion of their power from the bred fuel. A specifically designed reactor can be made to breed more Pu239 out of U238 than it actually consumes in U235, that is what is conventionally called a 'breeder' reactor (it makes more fuel than it consumes)

Since you can create a fissionable fuel out of Uranium 238, it is called a 'fertile' fuel. There is one other fertile element, Thorium, which exists in at about 10x the quantity that Uranium does. If you hit Thorium with a neutron, it turns into Uranium 233 (not 235) but which is also fissionable.

Thorium is perfect for a self regulating breeder reaction. Start with a small supply of U235 and the excess neutrons from that hit Thorium turning it into U233, which is then fissionable. Later neutrons hit the U233 and contribute to the sustained fission reaction. However, neutrons must be traveling slow enough to be captured by the thorium atom, if they travel too fast they can not be captured, and no new fuel is bred. So if the reactor generates too many reactions by heating up it slows the creation of new breeder fuel, thus creating a negative feedback loop centered on an optimal power output.

Such a reactor could indeed be made small enough to power a single house, though you wouldn't want to go anywhere near it because of the neutron radiation.

US reactors are light water reactors and tend to get about 20% of their power from bred fuel in the enriched rods, but much more of it is left in the rods and not fissioned. It is usually left there and disposed of as 'nuclear waste' which is just as asinine as it sounds. Politically the US moved away from breeder reactors under the Carter administration because it feared the creation of a 'plutonium economy' where nuclear reactors all over the world were generating thousands of tons of weapons grade plutonium and presumably shipping them and selling them to other reactors. Possibly a valid concern, but in most cases the reactor can be tuned to run a self sustaining breeding reaction, it only creates enough fuel to sustain an optimal reaction rate and power output. Also, the longer plutonium 239 is left in a reactor core, the more likely it is to become plutonium 240, which is fissile, but is not suitable for a nuclear bomb (because the fissile event is slower, it creates what is called a 'fizzle')

Since only less than 1% of Uranium is fissile, a breeder reactor could theoretical generate about 100 times as much power as a non breeder (Breeding regular uranium) add thorium into the mix and you are talking another 100 fold increase. Currently the US has about 120 operating nuclear reactors, consider that one single breeder reactor could generate almost as much power as all of those reactors combined, and use only the fuel of one single reactor.

India has some of the largest thorium reserves on the planet and are investing heavily in thermal thorium reactor technology. I wouldn't be surprised to see a small compact reactor like this article is talking about come out of there.

Nuclear waste is a non issue, first of all, much of US nuclear waste is fissionable Plutonium fuel. 2nd of all, conceptually, what is nuclear waste but something which is dangerous because it is radioactive. The question arises, is there anyway to artificially accelerate the radioactive decay rate of an element? Well, that's what a fission reaction is! hitting an element with a neutron, making it more unstable, and accelerating it's decay rate. The same thing can be done with all of the fission fragments. Though they can not sustain a fission chain reaction, all nuclear waste can be processed by hitting it with neutron radiation and forced to go through it's nuclear decay chain, ending up as lead or iron, generating heat in the process which can be used to make more electrical power. France routinely does this transmutation with their nuclear waste. In short, if you shield a nuclear breeder reactor with the waste fission fragments, you turn the waste into harmless elements. The only reason nuclear waste is a problem is because in the US we are forbidden legally and by pressure from moronic environmentalists groups to process waste like this.

There were people who despise Obama as a man and as a Marxist, who nevertheless actually did cry in celebration that a black man (who happens to be, to our dismay, a Marxist) was able to be elected president.

I've never believed the tripe that the US was a nation full of intrinsic racists, the US is probably the LEAST racist nation on the planet, but I found myself hoping it was so that Obama would not be elected. Doing the right thing (not electing a socialist marxist wannabe tyrant) for the wrong reason (because he is half black) is better than doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason. This may be a positive step forward in worldwide race relations, but it is a huge step backward in the well being of man kind. Those Kenyan's cheering Obama won't be so happy with they can no longer afford the food which keeps them alive because Obama's suicidal energy policies skyrocket global food prices.

any presence in any country? Or just presences you disagree with? And what if the military presence is of critical self defense value and voluntarily welcomed by the host nation which is a representative free nation?

I disagree with a military presence in all countries. It's just the same way that I don't ask my neighbor to keep my guns in his house.

Even when it is of strategic value to both you and your neighbor? That is naive. It is the proper function of a government to provide self defense, and it is proper to combine resources with allies who have a harmony of interests to do so. It is murderously stupid to not recognize common values with allies (even if they do not share every single value) and act in co-operation with them against common enemies.

So it should ignore absolutely everything that goes on in every other country, lest it is an 'empire' in your eyes. Shall we build a giant wall, close our borders, and look only inward?

That's a straw man. I have never advocated any such thing. Rand herself understood the connection between foreign trade and peace. I do as well. It means commerce and trade with everyone, just like Jefferson advocated in his first inaugural address. Governments don't trade. Countries don't trade. Individuals and businesses do.

Great, so if I manufacture stinger missiles, as an individual, can I go ahead and sell those to the taliban? If I run a nuclear power plant, can I sell weapons grade uranium or plutonium to the highest bidder, even if it's a murderous tyrant who wants to build a nuclear bomb and attack a major US city?

And it's no straw man, you specifically saw we should 'mind our own business' that means, explicitly, not only not interfereing with the affairs of other nations, but ignoring those affairs.

Free trade with murderous tyrannies?

This is up to the people doing the trading. Individuals and businesses trade.

If it is a proper function of the government to provide self defense, how is enabling the armament of enemies not a violation of that?

Free trade with murderous tyrannies which invade our allies?

I generally don't believe in alliances. I do believe in goodwill. Individuals and businesses engaging in free commerce promotes goodwill. It also promotes our ideals and makes murderous tyrannies less likely.

You form an alliance with your neighbor in paying for police to protect your neighboorhood. Even though a thug didn't mug YOU, your money is still used to apprehend, sequester, and punish him. Why? He didn't attack YOU? he attacked someone else, why should you care! Because it is in your own rational self interest to oppose any violations of rights on your neighbor punish those who commit those crimes. To not do so would mean a thug is free as long as he actually kills his victim. To not do so actually encourages the violent violation of rights by thugs. Similarly, it is in your own long term rational self interest to recognize the harmony of interests you have with neighboring *countries* that share the same earth that you exist on, and allying with the oppose and punish perpetrators of violent crimes, assaults, or wars, is as rational and proper as allying with your neighbor to do so against a thug who never touched you.

If the United States had adopted your 'alliance free' and 'mind your own business' ideas during the cold war we would today be a client state of the soviet union.

Of course, how would we even know if they were a murderous tyranny or invading our allies if we can't 'poke our nose' in other places.

I take my car to a mechanic to get the oil changed. I don't care if the mechanic is male or female, white or non-white, young or old, straight or gay. I only care that the mechanic does the job.

Oh, and maybe your mechanic did a good job on YOUR car, but screws over everyone else. And so we develop as system, with our neighbors, in alliance with them, to rate and judge the competency of your mechanic. Lets say you are jewish, and your mechanic a neo-nazi, every dollar you pay him to fix your car goes into making life for you, and probably many people you care about, more difficult. Who cares though, he doesnt know your jewish, and he fixes your car well! In your alliance free world, I can be a murderous scumbag, rape, molest, and kill your neighbor, then, with blood dripping from my hands, smile and offer to mow your lawn. "How much?" you'll say "Just don't get any blood on my lawn"

Perhaps we should sell nuclear bombs to Islamic terrorists?

Selling munitions automatically makes you an ally in any war. I personally don't sell any nuclear bombs. In this sense, I don't think the US Government should sell munitions to anyone.

So can private US citizens sell nuclear bombs to terrorists and enemies of our nation?

Now, if Joe the Farmer wants to sell or give cabbages and lettuce to Islamic terrorists, I don't care. A food fight would be better than nuclear war anyway. In that same sense, if an American nuclear scientist wants to go to work for them, that's his business.

Sure, but what if he BUILDS nuclear bombs HERE, and sells them to those islamic terrorists. Hey, Free Trade you say.

So does the independent individualist or the productive man of rational self interest, inspire hatred from most everyone else around the world. Does that mean he should not be an independent individualist, or a productive man acting in rational self interest?

Here we go with Objectivist martyrdom. It's a psychological confession. bla bla bla

That's not the point, the point is whether or not people like you is completely irrelevant to whether or not what you are doing is right. You draw no distinction. You can be doing everything right, as a nation, or a person, and many people will still hate you.

So lets imagine ourselves in 1979, and instead of invading Afghanastan, the Soviet Union actually invades Canada.

Let's deal with reality instead. The Soviet Union puts missiles in Cuba. In that isolated context, I do think John F Kennedy acted correctly. The "crisis" was over without firing a shot. More significantly, the Soviets threw out the guy who was responsible for it. Above all, it showed that they really didn't want a war.

Because our "allies" let us put nuclear missiles on the doorstep of the soviet union without our 'allies' which you don't believe we should have, we would have had no bargaining position with which to get the soviet union to remove their nuclear missiles from their allies from our doorstep. In your alliance free isolationist world, the soviet union would have laughed, and said 'ha, what will you do if I do not remove my missiles, not sell me things?'

In the case of an invasion of Canada, it wouldn't work. There is too much land. It actually would have brought down the Soviet Union faster than the invasion of Afghanistan would have. The system couldn't sustain an empire, as it clearly showed. The US wouldn't have had to do anything.

More of that inept libertarian fantasy world which conveniently ignores the historical fact that virtually EVERYWHERE the United States could oppose and contain communism it did so, and THAT more than anything else contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the height of the Vietnam war, fully half of the Soviet Union's GDP was going into that conflict, our's never passed over 6%. Today the areas which make up the former Soviet Union consist of 6% of the worlds population and yet only 3% of it's GDP. The US, at 5% of the worlds population, makes over 20% of the Worlds GDP. Every dollar spent to fight the Soviet Union cost the soviet union over $10 to combat. Same for Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc etc etc. The only reason the US and the USSR avoided an outright war was because they fought them in every other country. Your 'alliance free' dream world would have let the soviet union take over every single other country on the planet (which was it's explicit goal and one of it's founding principles) until the US could pose not threat whatsoever. Not that you would even know that the entire world had become a rights crushing totalitarian regime, because you would be 'minding your own business' and selling them the very goods and weapons they will use to defeat and enslave you.

Communism wasn't productive. The less productive a country is, the less likely it is to succeed in war.

And yet it steamrolled through about 1/4 of the nations on the planet, invaded or instigated revolutions in about 1/2 of them, and killed almost 170 million people during it's reign. The reason it's reign lasted less than 100 years and not 1,000 is because it was actively opposed every step of the way by allies with common interests. Sure it would have collapsed eventually, but the feudal religious tyranny of the middle ages took 1,000 years to collapse. I personally see no reason to sit and wait a few hundred years for communism to collapse because it has killed every productive person and devolved humanity into disgusting nihilistic parasites.

I would advocate some preparedness. Putting troops near the Canadian border would certainly be wise.

And putting a base in Canada, and combining forces with Canada to fight this murderous tyranny, would be even wiser. Your foreign policy and alliance free world is murderously naive and suicidal.

If CO2 is a greenhouse gas, what is water vapor?

--Brant

As I note in the post, many different gases are greenhouse gases, methane is as well, and so is water vapor. However, both of those cycle into and out of the atmosphere rather quickly, so the net level of those greenhouse gases remains relatively level, unless the average ambient air temperature rises, and then the air can sustain a larger fraction of those greenhouse gases as well. So it's a little disingenuous to simple say "oh water vapor is 100 times more effective of a greenhouse gas than CO2" because within a few days any additional H20 beyond what the air at a particular temperature can handle precipitates out. Also water vapor can form cloud cover, which reflects incident light. Methane takes (I think) 7 - 14 years to cycle through the atmosphere. CO2 is light enough to stay in the air indefinitely, and raising the temperature, can enable the atmosphere to hold larger quantities of other, more effective greenhouse gases, for longer periods of time. But can simultaneously enable more cloud formation capacity, I don't think the computer models are accurate enough or enough of the complex atmosphere interaction understood to know either way.

As I understand, it was mostly the few miles of shoreland that were green, which early explorers found, hence the name. But I mention in there it is obvious the vast temperatures changes and cycles have gone on, the counter to that is that the time it takes those changes to take place is usually thousands of years, in this case, if AGW is true to a large extent, the environmentalists claim the rate of change is too fast and the biosphere can't handle it, though I see no evidence supporting that.

CO2 levels are indeed higher than they've ever been, and we are certainly making alot of it, so it's reasonable that it could be slightly raising the temperature. But maybe that's just the price of industrial civilization, I'm willing to pay it. The change if it is happening is small and will cause no serious threats to life or civilization. The massive centralization of power through regulation and controls, however, can be extremely dangerous, and the single minded focus on just this issue and no other is extremely harmful.

I do believe CO2 levels have been higher, but have no reference on hand. I don't see how it can be "reasonable" to assume it's raising temperatures.

--Brant

Probably not for about a half million years, and that was probably due to a caldera eruption which also would have released a large amount of reflective particulates and reflective cloud cover.

CO2 IS a greenhouse gas, it IS higher than it has been for about a half million years, and we ARE producing alot of it. I don't see why it's unreasonable at all to acknowledge the temperature increase might be at least partially caused by it, although the direct causal relationship has not been proven (which the IPCC even acknowledges)

That being said, I don't particularly care, it's not a big deal, no great threat will come from it, it wouldn't be happening at all if environmentalist scare mongers had not scared us away from nuclear power, and it's just a price to pay for industrial and economic growth.

CO2 levels are indeed higher than they've ever been, and we are certainly making alot of it, so it's reasonable that it could be slightly raising the temperature. But maybe that's just the price of industrial civilization, I'm willing to pay it. The change if it is happening is small and will cause no serious threats to life or civilization. The massive centralization of power through regulation and controls, however, can be extremely dangerous, and the single minded focus on just this issue and no other is extremely harmful.

Paleoclimatology studies indicate otherwise.

See

http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/co2/graphics/vostok.co2.gif

Actually it's about about 380 ppm now, significantly higher than the vostok ice cores here show. According to the Wikipedia entry, they haven't been at this level for about 650,000 years (That timing coincides exactly with the last yellowstone caldera eruption, so this high CO2 level was probably due to that which would simultaneously released a tremendous amount of reflective particulates)

When does a country become an empire?

It becomes an empire when it establishes a military presence in other countries.

any presence in any country? Or just presences you disagree with? And what if the military presence is of critical self defense value and voluntarily welcomed by the host nation which is a representative free nation?

It becomes an empire when it hands out foreign aid to other countries

Really, is that government foriegn aide or voluntary foriegn aide from citizens? Do you have to have a military presence AND dole out forieng aide? Canada and Sweeden dole out alot of foriegn aide, are they EMPIRES?

It becomes an empire when it just starts poking its nose into everything else.

So it should ignore absolutely everything that goes on in every other country, lest it is an 'empire' in your eyes. Shall we build a giant wall, close our borders, and look only inward?

The isolationism argument is just a straw man. Actually Rand herself was not too troubled by that term. I believe in free trade with most nations.

So is 'empire' and 'interventionist' Rand certainly had no problem with the later and advocated military intervention in Israel. Free trade with murderous tyrannies? Free trade with murderous tyrannies which invade our allies? Of course, how would we even know if they were a murderous tyranny or invading our allies if we can't 'poke our nose' in other places. You are a military and political isolationist, like an ostrich, but don't care who buys your goods or what they use it for? Perhaps we should sell nuclear bombs to Islamic terrorists?

In fact the imperialist is the true isolationist. The imperialist inspires hatred form most everyone around the world. A hated nation is more isolated than a respected one.

So does the independent individualist or the productive man of rational self interest, inspire hatred from most everyone else around the world. Does that mean he should not be an independent individualist, or a productive man acting in rational self interest? Whether or not the world hate's you is independent of the fact of whether they are RIGHT to hate you, and whether that should alter your behavior.

So lets imagine ourselves in 1979, and instead of invading Afghanastan, the Soviet Union actually invades Canada. They didn't do anything to us, they didnt attack us, or restrict our trade. And what do you propose we do? If Canada asked us to help fight of the communist invaders, are we an 'empire' for doing so? And if in response to a massive build up of forces and intelligence reports which suggest a full scale invasion of canada, they ask us to place a military base there? Are we an 'empire' for doing so, and should we do it?

As I understand, it was mostly the few miles of shoreland that were green, which early explorers found, hence the name. But I mention in there it is obvious the vast temperatures changes and cycles have gone on, the counter to that is that the time it takes those changes to take place is usually thousands of years, in this case, if AGW is true to a large extent, the environmentalists claim the rate of change is too fast and the biosphere can't handle it, though I see no evidence supporting that.

CO2 levels are indeed higher than they've ever been, and we are certainly making alot of it, so it's reasonable that it could be slightly raising the temperature. But maybe that's just the price of industrial civilization, I'm willing to pay it. The change if it is happening is small and will cause no serious threats to life or civilization. The massive centralization of power through regulation and controls, however, can be extremely dangerous, and the single minded focus on just this issue and no other is extremely harmful.

[from my blog, thoughts others might find it interesting]

Global Warming Primer, Solutions and Complications, and My Position.

I haven’t been too vocal on my opinions on Global Warming and the politics surrounding it but I’ve been watching some excellent videos from Berkeley professor Richard Muller on the topic and find them one of the best all around rational primers on the topic I’ve yet seen. A brilliant professor, Muller’s “Physics for Future Presidents” lectures have been skyrocketing in popularity even leading to the publication of a mainstream book. Those who are admirers of Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Isaac Asimov, or Carl Sagan would find a kindred spirit in Muller where his brilliant conceptual presentations of complex topics and routine reduction into concrete examples are on par with those great popularizes of science.

You can download his full course, which I highly recommend, at Berkeley’s web cast site http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details...esid=1906978373

With my near lifelong affair with science, philosophy, and skepticism I think I’ve come to a peculiar opinion on Global Warming. Muller makes every explicit effort to avoid directing your conclusions or barraging you with appeals to authority and instead takes great pains in clearly showing the science and physics and allowing you to form your own informed opinions on the matter, exposing misconceptions and lies from both sides of the debate. Muller’s credentials are impeccable, and his explicit desire to weed through the vagarious interpretations and try to pull out the real, accurate understanding of exactly what’s going on in the world is admirable and precisely what resonates most with me.

I urge everyone to watch through Muller’s videos, which are recorded presentations from his Berkeley class. They are engaging, entertaining, and extremely informative and will give you a great deal of confidence when forming your judgments on such a complex topic.

Part 1 of 12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyuKOtIryis

With that, there is a great deal of skewing on all sides of this issue. The stop global warming advocacy groups have committed their fair share of moral frauds. They have routinely exaggerated temperature increase as explicitly outlined by the IPCC reports and exaggerated the certainty of those reports. Activists routinely cherry pick data, selecting isolated data points that support their hypothesis but ignoring numerous ones that do not, a tactic not readily identifiable to non scientifically trained persons. Egregiously mainstream science has now more than ever come to accept anecdotal evidence in support of a tentative conclusion. We are routinely barraged with observations that there seem to be more armadillos this far north than ever before or there are fewer salmon then in the last 30 years as actual evidence proving drastic climatic consequences, even though the consensus agrees to only a 1 degree Fahrenheit temperature difference which is only discernable from exhaustive statistical studies. A definite publication bias has arisen exploiting the public concern about global warming, publishing a paper on the mating habits of ground squirrels is iffy, but link it to global warming and you get published. The original hockey stick graph which most modern concern about global warming was build on was not just flawed but fraudulent and has exposed the terrible weakness that reliance on computer models brought about. Too often models are used AS evidence, not as tools to find evidence in the real world, the height of hubris. Historically, CO2 increases tend to follow temperature increases, so the global correlation to CO2 and temperature rise is not so clear cut, even though CO2 is a green house gas, it also promotes plant growth and cloud formation, as the entire climate and life cycles are complex enough that centuries more of study will be required to understand it. The presumption that there is ‘state’ which the planet should be in as optimal temperature is ludicrous, and to think that we humans know and can choose what that state ought to be (especially given our terrible track record managing wildlife preserves) is frightening. Give someone a computer and a physics book and he thinks he has the entire world and every complex interaction in it all ready figured out.

Conversely though, the global warming skeptics or deniers (as a skeptic, which merely means a reliance on clear objective data before embracing an interpretation, I am hesitant to use it in this way) have had their fair share of disingenuous or fraudulent assertions. Suggesting that solar output is the sole mechanism for temperature changes is overly simplistic. Suggesting that methane is 25x more potent than co2 ignores the fact that methane cycles through the atmosphere in a few years before it is removed, while CO2 remains virtually indefinitely. Similarly, while ater vapor is some 100 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than CO2, it cycles through the atmosphere in a few weeks and it is only an increase in average air temperatures that could sustain an increase in both H20 and Methane over the long run. The deniers asserting that change is natural and temperatures fluctuate all the time ignore the difference between fluctuations over geographical time scales (thousands of years) and fluctuations over human times scales, and whether it is ultimately a good idea to be creating such fluctuations over short time periods.

With that acknowledgement of issues on both sides (I am sure there are many more) I’d like to point to some of the complexities that arise.

There is a great deal of difficulty weeding out variables in science. The “factoring out variables” stage is complex and factoring has it’s own succession of controversy surrounding it. Consider as an example (there are thousands) that many temperature readings have come from population centers, and these suffer from a natural ‘heat island’ effect, where sunlight heats man made structures more so than the average surrounding area. Scientists try to make reasonable adjustments for these kinds of factors, making educated guesses about what the data would be if it could have been collected in a perfect setting. The problem with this is that even the degree to which variables should be factored out is highly contentious. In a situation like the heat island effect, because of the small real increase in temperatures, different interpretations of factoring can basically make that temperature change disappear and global warming a non-issue. Most papers and graphs presented have already has this ‘factoring’ done on it, a unfair representation at it’s onset.

When we start talking about ways to mitigate CO2 emissions, things are not clear cut at all. For example, most recycling is actually WORSE from a global warming perspective because recycling focuses on conserving material resources, NOT Energy. With the possible exception of aluminum (whose processing is extremely energy intensive) it usually takes more energy re collect material resources like paper and glass, re process them, and then redistribute them then it does to collect them from a centralized location and manufacture / process them in a large centralized plant. In manufacturing, scale typically associates with efficiency, the more you make of something the more efficiently each individual component was made. This is borne out in the fact that most recycling programs are huge money pits and must be subsidized. The utilization of material resources (other than fossil fuels) is an entirely different use than creating greenhouse gases yet they are routinely lumped together.

Further, building more dams for instance actually creates a very large short term increase in the green house effect, because submerged vegetation decays quickly into methane, the long term reduction in CO2 emissions from hydroelectric power might never offset the short term increase because of the methane emissions from decaying vegetation.

Counter intuitively, a large increase in coal burning plants will actually delay the increase in global warming in the near term because of the reflective and cloud precipitating nature of the particulate matter, possibly giving us a chance to implement newer better technologies before those particulates precipitate out. Some scientist have proposed seeding the upper atmosphere with harmless nano particles to precipitate more cloud cover to reflect more incoming lite which will stay suspended indefinitely, putting us on the road to literal climate control.

Environmental Scientists David Keith presents this in his TED Lecture “A surprising idea for "solving" climate change” - http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/david_k...ate_change.html

The bigger question which arises is that if global warming is occurring and is anthropogenic, what should be done about it and how much should we spend doing it.

In that, a person I admire greatly Bjorn Lomborg (a gay atheist vegetarian and so certainly no right wing flunky) assembled a conference of economists to weight this question. Climatologists are appropriate people to appeal to when trying to ascertain a scientific understanding of the climate and where it’s going, but they are not the people who ought to decide how much is spent and on what. You can watch his presentation on the Copenhagen conference at TED here http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bjorn_l...priorities.html where he asks us to rationally prioritize the threats to the world and what should be done about them, and even by the worst IPCC estimates, global warming will be inconvenient and expensive, but pales in comparison to the damage done by malaria or dysentery.

Beyond that though, Lomborg and the Copenhagen conference stopped short of actually identifying existential threats to humanity, civilization, and indeed all life on Earth and instead focused on the general well fare of humanity.

For a summary of all the threats we face see Discover Magazine’s managing editor Stephen Petranek TED Conference presentation on “10 ways the world could end” http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/stephen...armageddon.html

Those of you familiar with me know I am intimately involved with the Lifeboat Foundation, as one of it’s earliest members and current staff member, I spoke on their behalf in front of the Navy War College’s Strategic Studies group. The Lifeboat Foundation seeks to identify, prioritize, and work to mitigate all the existential threats we face. Cumulatively, global warming, even if anthropogenic, barely makes the radar. Yet global warming is almost exclusively the existential threat people are concerned about, and virtually everything proposed to combat global warming will make mitigating all of the other existential threats we face fare more difficult, and expending tremendous resources combating a not so serious problem might very well doom us to a sudden catastrophe from something that was not political expedient to parade around and had no vice presidential candidate building his reputation on scaring people about it. It is my firm opinion that if you are not explicitly aware of the most commonly identified existential threats we face, and make a compelling case as to how they should be prioritized and mitigated; you have no business holding such a series of opinions about global warming.

With all that, my opinion on global warming is currently as follows:

I am no fan of ‘consensus’ science, historically, some of the worst things in the world have come from appeals to a consensus, science is not something which progresses by a popular vote or a consensus. Almost all great scientific and technological advancements have come specifically from disregarding the consensus. When an issue is complex enough that it requires appeals to consensus, then the data is not clear enough to make policy pronouncements on. Conversely, a reasonable scientific investigation does seem to suggest that the Earth has warmed, on average, globally, about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the last 30 years. What’s not clear is that this is explicitly anthropogenic in nature, BUT, we certainly are producing a large quantity of CO2 from previously sequestered sources and CO2 IS a greenhouse gas, so it is reasonable to suspect that if such a warming is occurring, and a large quantity of a gas known to be responsible for a warming like that has been released, that they could be casually related. The reliance however on computer models, the lack of peer review of the data and the programs, and the track record of forgery from these within the advocates of anthropogenic global warming, are something that should cause concern in any rationally minded person and skepticism toward their results.

The solutions usually proposed to alleviate global warming and cut CO2 emissions almost always deal with a curtailment of industrial and economic growth. Global warming, even by it the worst estimates of the IPCC, does not pose a threat to life on earth or human civilization, but the expensive current solutions proposed to delay it (which ultimately will have little effect) might very well doom us to one of the other numerous existential threats we face, which most people are neither aware of nor care to learn about. That asteroid heading toward Earth ready to extinguish all life won’t give a damn what your ‘carbon footprint’ was.

My philosophy of science skepticism and libertarian streaks find many disturbing trends in the modern stop global warming advocacy groups. Global warming is simultaneously tapping into our penchant for original sin, environmentalist scare mongering and an almost religious indoctrination and devotion to some profound ‘purpose’ in life so many people strive for, (especially in the purpose vacuum of modern secular materialistic determinism) all in the name of the ‘greater good’ and for functionally promulgating the centralization of power. This original sin is the nagging guilt many people feel for existing on the planet and consuming resources. Moral parasites are drawn to this penchant ready to try to alleviate you of that guilt by convincing you to do things to ‘earn’ the right to exist, either by giving them money or working toward ‘their’ case, and people are all too ready to expend a little bit of effort in something someone has convinced them will make them feel really good. Often no care is paid to whether they actually DO any good, it is only the intention and attempt that matters. The scare mongering of environmentalist is simply atrocious, from banning effective safe pesticides like DDT, and scaring everyone about nuclear power, their atrocious track record should hang like an ominous black cloud over everything they say, far overshadowing the slight objective good that has come from environmentalism. People in rich western nations, especially ‘educated’ ones, have moved beyond the explicit recognition of classical religious doctrines they consider low brow, but still contain the strong psychological compulsion to adopt a religious form of thought which grants an easy moral righteousness to them, gives them a clear and easily understandable ‘purpose’ in life, promises a heaven for them (or their children - sustainability) and allows them to atone for the guilt of existing which comes from having no clear objective standard of assessing their own self worth. Those moral parasites are all too familiar with these and the modern environmentalism movement has gone through great pains to essentially establish itself as a modern religion filling that vacuum of the educated secular westerner.

The accumulation of power for the greater good that environmentalist so strongly advocate has historically killed almost ten times as many people this century as all wars this century combined. Everyone is well aware that Hitler killed 6 million Jews and probably about 10 – 12 million Germans total. Few know that Stalin intentionally starved to death more than 60 million people, almost 10 times the number of Jews that Hitler killed. The murderously disastrous policies of Mao in China killed nearly 35 million Chinese peasants, forcing most of them to work themselves to death, starving, on their own farms. Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos killed nearly 5 million people intentionally. All of these deaths came at the hands of government officials who had centralized power, removed the liberties of their subjects, and did so in the name of the ‘greater good’. Don’t appeal to global warming skeptics or deniers being stooges of the ‘big energy’ without acknowledging that politicians vying for controls and regulations will put hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of regulators and those politicians and pass arbitrary whims as laws which effect the livelihood, and lives, of untold millions. People who, like Ralph Nader, get to be rich and famous not from inventing great new power generating technologies or efficient safe transportation systems, but merely by attacking everything else productive and good and becoming famous by scaring everyone.

Any centralization of power is dangerous, centralizing control and regulation over all industry is just about the most dangerous thing we can do. The disastrous ethanol subsidies policies all ready fore shadow this in the US, where half of the worlds food supply is produced but industry is forced to use food as fuel which has subsequently raised global food prices and probably caused many hundreds of thousands of people to starve to death. The nations which are freest, both economically and politically, are the ones with the best environmental track records. Yet environmentalist and advocates for acting to stop global warming almost unanimously propose government intervention as the solution. Riding to power on scaring people and a superficial religious like moral certainty, for ‘their own good’ has never turned out well. Where there are those demanding sacrifice, there are always other standing by to collect the proceeds of that sacrifice, be it labor, wealth, or spiritual servitude. These people come off to me as fustrated social tyrants riding on the coat tails of environmentalism, the secular remnants of original sin, and the drive for purpose in all to stagger around clamoring for power any power they can reach.

If Global Warming is a problem, and if it is indeed caused by human activities, then it was caused by environmentalist scare mongering which hijacked that natural technological energy progression trend away from cleaner fuels and ultimately nuclear power and forced societies to rely on coal plants. Many prominent members of the environmental community are now major advocates of Nuclear Power. The only nation which produces less CO2 today than it did 30 years ago is France, and only because 80% of their power is generated by Nuclear Power. Global Warming debates have been hijacked for political purposes by people clamoring for control and power over other people under the most superficial guises. Worldwide focus on it has come only at the expense of ignorance of all other threats we face and solutions proposed for it put us in much more dangerous situations with regard to those threats.

Without an exhaustive study I can’t say for sure that the Earth’s temperature has increased 1 degree Fahrenheit and that this increase was caused by our industries burning fossil fuels but I do think it pretty likely to be the case. Ultimately, it may just have to be the price we pay for industrial civilization until wide scale nuclear or solar power is available. However, global warming is a minor issue on the list of existential threats to humanity and life on earth, and the irrational single minded focus on it at the expense off all other real threats is dangerous and misguided, the proposed solutions are borne not from deep rational investigation but appeals to feelings of guilt and fear in the cowardly populace, and will drive the wealth and power of the world into an ever smaller portion of people who ultimately have control over men’s lives and property and create a dangerous recipe for cataclysmic incompetence. The problem of global warming is best left to the greatest problem solver of all time, the free minds and free exchanges of free people.

Not once does your posting even mention the word WAR. The pre-eminent and most crucial issue of our time.

Both McCain and Obama are committed to supporting the Empire, neither rejecting its demands of theft, slavery, and death.

leftists and isolationists love throwing around the word "Empire" We've been pretty successful in our "Empire building", ya know, because we no longer have representative elections and are a republic, but are in fact a dictatorship (yeah, I'm still waiting for Bush to become a Dictator, elections are just around the corner, he better make his move soon!) And South Korea, Japan, Tawain, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, etc etc etc, are all actually run by the American Empire / Dictatorship!

The Roman Empire was called an EMPIRE when it ceased to be a Republic, and was ruled by an 'emperor' it also maintained complete governmental control over all the territories it conquered, it did not help them become free, assist them in maintaining their freedom, and trade openly with them. It conquered and ruled them, and then traded with them.

To you, empire is apparently anything that is not isolationism.

With a very leftist Obama as president, a very real economic crisis and massive appeals to more regulations and control, and a filibuster proof democratic majority, a move to suspend presidential term limits could actually be successful, and given the liberal paternalistic craving might very well be accepted by the majority. THAT scares me.

Matus,

Awesome 3D work! And Kaneda's bike...wicked! I always hoped that someone would come out with his bike, or even Cloud's from Final Fantasy VII.

~ Shane

Thanks Shane! I can't wait to finish the thing up and take it for a ride. I've been contacted by a few people who say they are interested in building the bike from Final Fantasy, but I've yet to see anyone actually start their projects. That is quite a bike as well.

Are you a mind reader? How exactly do you know that I know or do not know something?

Funny comment from someone who spewed this nonsensical bit of psychologizing

They just love the fact that people who disagree with them are getting killed for the fact that they disagree

and

These people, of course, are cowards. They would never openly initiate an act of violence against a person who disagrees with them. But secretly, deep in their sick minds, they absolutely, positively love the killing. They admire a murderer who acts on feelings that they have repressed. It's partially because they simply have trouble feeling anything. A coward is numb and has trouble feeling anything at all.

I bet they are also child molesters whose mommies didn't pay enough attention to them, right? Or is that just you?

I was way to lazy to search through the forums to see if you guys have done this already, so I will start a new topic B)

I have seen a trend that most objectivists I know tend to be 'crazy' about only a couple of video games or other hobbies. So my (obvious) questions to you:

1)What do you guys do for fun?

2) If applicable what type of video games do you play and why?

I'll take my turn, I do alot of 3D Animation and 3D modeling for fun, using Lightwave. My current big project is the Enterprise D from Star Trek, my 3D model is more detailed than the physical model used in the "Generations" movie. Here's a recent image of it

http://www.matus1976.com/3d/Star_Trek/Ente...erprise_033.jpg

I also created a huge highly detailed 3D model of the Star Destroyer from Star Wars,

http://www.matus1976.com/3d/sd/images/star_destroyer_6.jpg

Naturally, I'm gonna make em duke it out =P

Here's my current work in progress of the 'showdown' this is done with lo res models just as place holders and is basically just an animated storyboard until I get everything worked out.

There are movies of the hi res versions of the models at the end.

This has been a heck of a lot of fun to work on, ultimately I want to build my character modeling and animating skills as well and do an animated version of "Anthem" and make my own movies / stories.

I also love motorcycling, and have been designing and building a motorcycle for a few years now, it's a recumbent motorcycle styled after the bike from the movie "Akira", this is just a prototype right now

http://www.matus1976.com/akira_bike/curren...nov07_small.jpg

but this is alot what it will look like when it's done

http://www.matus1976.com/akira_bike/refere...ges/kbike01.jpg

Just do a google search for "Akira Bike" and my page is usually the top hit. ;)

My favorite fun time is spent designing things, or researching or investigating. Physics and mechanical engineering are my favorite areas of study, followed closely by philosophy. Reading of course, history is my new favorite area in that regard. I particularly like classical greece and roman history right now. I like writing essays, and having healthy intellectual discussions with friends. Big fan of Joss Wheedon shows.

For video games, I was a huge Starcraft fan, I played alot of Battlefield 1942 and Desert Combat, I havent liked Battlefied 2 or 2142 very much though. I'm thinking about giving "spore" a try but given the other projects video game playing has been demoted =( I havent tried WoW yet, but it looks like alot of fun.

I'm not a fan of professional sports, but I like playing soccer, basketball, and tennis.

Every chance I get I invest in becoming more self-sufficient, like a greenhouse, chicken coop, outdoor boiler, backup power, etc. because I have been concerned about the long term sustainability of the economies of Canada and USA and most industrialized countries.

You might be interested in an organization I am extensively involved in, the Lifeboat Foundation, which is working to identify and establish strategies to mitigate the existential threats that civilization faces. Existential threats include man made ones, such as those which advancing technology pose, but also natural ones, like caldera eruptions or asteroid impacts. One of those threats is the economic collapse of a globally intertwined economy, which could very well usher in a new dark age, sealing our final fate when the next cosmic threat hits. A large viral or bacterial pandemic could cause the same global economic crash. I favor redundancy as a strong mitigation strategy, both here on earth for terrestrial threats and in space.

If you are working your way toward planning for such an event, and trying to achieve self sustainability when that happens, you might want to consider also a reliable information archive as well.

http://lifeboat.com/ex/main

The Fed will cut Monday morning or shortly thereafter. You get to look good for a few months. That's not the question. It doesn't matter if interest rates go to zero. I will personally bet $100 to a donut that US private sector employment falls 10% this year and rate cuts won't do a damn bit of good, because the issue is solvency not liquidity.

Two sound investment ideas for the coming crisis: food, uniforms and ordnance.

This post was made in January 2008, can we take that as an official prediction Wolf?

Looking at ADP's national employment reports

http://www.adpemploymentreport.com/

Dec 07 - Jan 08 130,000

Jan - Feb -23,000

Feb - Mar 8,000

Mar - Apr 10,000

Apr - May 40,000

May - Jun -79,000

Jun - July 9,000

July - Aug -33,000

Total Change +62,000

With total private sector employment staying close to 116 million throughout, that makes an average change since Jan 2008 of +.05%

So according to Wolf's predictions we should see about 11 million private sector job losses in the next six months.

For the first half of 2008 the real change has been .5% of Wolf's predicted change, and in the wrong direction. I hope that Wolf takes this as an opportunity to refine his assessments of reality and be a little more skeptical of his own ability to predict the future.

Good post Baal.

I was deeply involved in the skepticism movement before I came to read Rand, and it was actually Shermers excerpt you quoted here on Rand that made me interested in reading her. I still am and have been a huge admirer of Michael Shermer, he is major adovcate of civil liberties and market economies and has routinely stated his admiration for Rand.

The gulf that comes here is that when Shermer uses "Objective" as in an Objective moral code, he's talking about something like a cosmic ten commandments, it's a vestige of a religious epistemology to assert that the rules governing our moral behavior must be inbedded into the fabric of the universe in order to be 'objective', so I dont think this criticism of his is legitimate. It's always the religious theist that claims an objective standard of morality which is something privy only to him and his elite sect of 'interpreters'. This is hardly 'objective' in the scientific sense. In science, the charachteristic of the objective is that it both exists as a part of reality and is easily discoverable by anyone who wishes to investigate the question. In religion, objective is "because I said so"

This is not what Rand's Objective Standard of Morality means, she was not saying she discovered some natural law embedded in space-time, but that if reality exists and man wishes to exist within it, life should be his objective standard of morality. It is not an absolute manifestation of reality that a volitional being must choose life as his standard of value, but it is objective that he must choose some standard, and the only standard which he can live in is life.

Good excerpt From Wikipedia

Ethics: Rational self-interest

Main article: Objectivist ethics

Rand identified morality as principles needed in all contexts, whether one is alone or with others, reserving the term "ethics" for relationships with others. She summarized (see Summary above) that man properly lives "with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life." According to Objectivist epistemology, states of mind, such as happiness, are not primary; they are the consequence of specific facts of existence. Therefore man needs an objective standard, grounded in the facts of reality, to achieve happiness. The human faculty of happiness is a biologically evolved measuring instrument (a "barometer"[11]) that measures how well one is doing in the pursuit of life. Therefore the standard by which one can judge whether or not some action will lead to greater or lesser happiness is, whether or not it promotes one's life. But, as Rand writes,

"To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem."[4]

The morality of Objectivism is based on the observation that one's own choices and actions are instrumental in maintaining and enhancing one's life, and therefore one's happiness. Rand wrote:

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man — by choice; he has to hold his life as a value — by choice; he has to learn to sustain it — by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues — by choice.

"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."[4]

There is a difference, therefore, between rational self-interest as pursuit of one's own life and happiness in reality, and what Ayn Rand called "selfishness without a self" - a range-of-the-moment pseudo-"selfish" whim-worship or "hedonism." A whim-worshipper or "hedonist," according to Rand, is not motivated by a desire to live his own human life, but by a wish to live on a sub-human level. Instead of using "that which promotes my (human) life" as his standard of value, he mistakes "that which I (mindlessly happen to) value" for a standard of value, in contradiction of the fact that, existentially, he is a human and therefore rational organism. The "I value" in whim-worship or hedonism can be replaced with "we value," "he values," "they value," or "God values," and still it would remain dissociated from reality. Rand repudiated the equation of rational selfishness with hedonistic or whim-worshipping "selfishness-without-a-self." She held that the former is good, and the latter evil, and that there is a fundamental difference between them.[11] A corollary to Rand's endorsement of self-interest is her rejection of the ethical doctrine of altruism — which she defined in the sense of August Comte's altruism (he coined the term), as a moral obligation to live for the sake of others.

Rand defined a value as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep." The rational individual's choice of values to pursue is guided by his need, if he chooses to live, to act so as to maintain and promote his own life. Rand did not hold that values proper to human life are "intrinsic" in the sense of being independent of one's choices, or that there are values that an individual must pursue by command or imperative ("reason accepts no commandments"). Neither did Rand consider proper values "subjective," to be pursued just because one has chosen, perhaps arbitrarily, to pursue them. Rather, Rand held that valid values are "objective," in the sense of being identifiable as serving to preserve and enhance one's life. Some values are specific to the nature of each individual, but there are also universal human values, including the preservation of one's own individual rights, which Rand defined as "conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival."[4]

Objectivism holds that morality is a "code of values accepted by choice." According to Leonard Peikoff, Rand held that "man needs [morality] for one reason only: he needs it in order to survive. Moral laws, in this view, are principles that define how to nourish and sustain human life; they are no more than this and no less."[7] Objectivism does not claim that there is a moral requirement to choose to value one's life. As Allan Gotthelf points out, for Rand, "Morality rests on a fundamental, pre-moral choice:"[12] the moral agent's choice to live rather than die, so that the moral "ought" is always contextual and agent-relative. To be moral is to choose that which promotes one's life in one's actual context. There are no "categorical imperatives" (as in Kantianism) that an individual would be obliged to carry out regardless of consequences for his life.

Impressive!

http://tinyurl.com/5r252d

How come there is no architecture forum here?

Such a magnificent building!!! Dubai is a fascinating place, one can only marvel at the potential that could be being built right now in the US or other free western nations without the oppresive economic and building regulations they now face.

This Dubai sky scraper was probably designed and built in less time than it takes the New York city pull peddlers on average to decide on a design for the new WTC and then reject it.

Barbara,

I wonder if you have watched the youtube.com video McCain vs McCain to see the kind of person you are thinking of voting for!

In as much as the USA has no military bases in Dubai, there is no reason for them to be attacked. on the other hand the USA has 826 or so military bases in 130 countries.

My understanding is that Osama bin Laden was horrified to discover years ago that there were US military bases in Saudi Arabia the home of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina which led to his determination to attack America. Presumably the World Trade Center towers would still be standing today if the US did not have an empire of military bases around the world.

In response to the invasion of Georgia, and also in his essay "The Rogue State Roll Back" McCain has explicitly stated that the ultimate long term foriegn policy goal of the United States should be to end murderous tyrannies, and in fact all the Free Western nations (which happen to be the most militarily powerfull) should form an alliance of democracies and actively oppose egregious acts like Russia's invasion of Georgia and in the long term work, with force as a backing, toward the elimination of murderous dictatorships. This is the only long term forieng policy goal of rational self interest. Constitutional liberal democracies do not start wars, they do not kill their own people, and they undermine terrorism. Murderous tyranies create all the social problems of the world, from famines to pandemics (which might wipe out all human life) start all the wars, breed the terrorists, and committ all of the genocides / democides. Allowing any of these kinds of nations, which are nothing more than huge hostage / prison camps, to entrench themselves is a bad idea and will always come back to bite us.

The murderous tyrannies of the middle east are using the most poweful energy reserves on the planet to, not surprisingly, murder people, breed terrorists, and invade other nations. If left alone (along with the abandonment of military basis) the whole of the middle east would degrade into the hands of the most murderous and most vitriolic person, who, now controlling a vast majority of the worlds energy supplies, would insititute their program to bring Islam to the whole world through force.

The murderous tyrants of the middle east also despise western culture, they call the America the great Satan because classically satan was a TEMPTOR and the vast majority of their people if left to their own freedom of choice would adopt the majority of western culture and abandon the majority of the stifling oppressive racist and sexist traditional forms of islam. It is the existence of the west and their material impact on the world that radical islamicists despise. The Taliban banned music, dancing, and even "Leonardio Decaprio haircuts" which were very popular due to smuggled copies of 'Titanic' Even if the US abandoned all military basis and strategic alliance in the middle east (a murderously naive thing to do) just because they worry they might piss some crazy murderer off, other crazy murderers would still despise the US because it tempts their children to eternal damnation. What do you propose we do, BLOCKADE the middle eastern nations ruled by shitty religious tyrants in order to prevent western media products from entering? Create an electromagnetic faraday cage around Iran to block those offensive Britney spears transmissions from making it through?

Guess who intends to bring the troops home?

Only the most idiotic politician would adopt an isolationist stance of foriegn policy in the current age of globalization, international flights, and nuclear and bio terrorism. Only a suicidal individual would adopt such a policy in the coming age of synthetic life and nanotechnology, given that it is an observable law of technological advance that every year it becomes easier and less expensive for fewer people to kill more and more people. If the libertarian isolation policy had been adopted during the cold war, where the US did nothing unless it was directly attacked, the Soviet Union would have merely invaded and conquered every single other nation on the planet, including eventually Canada and Mexico. The US would have been surrounded by a global communist empire and would have been easily eradicated. It is proper, and in the rational long term self interest of any nation, to always deal the best blow it can against it's worst enemy.

I was reading dawkins through most of my high school and college career and admired him a great deal. However, he seems to have become a scientific nihilist or material determinist, and his rebuttals to the Iraq War published in the Skeptical Inquirer were childishly naive. In the God Delusion though, Dawkins clearly wrestled with the moral relativism he was advocating, as he suggested that raising children to religious indoctrination amounted to pyschological torture and that 'something' should be done about it. Edge.org asked many famous scientists what they thought the worlds most dangerous idea was, Dawkins, disgustingly, answered that it is the concept of free will, and that we punish criminals for their crime.

from - http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html#dawkins

RICHARD DAWKINS

Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor's Tale

Let's all stop beating Basil's car

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

Contrast Dawkins with Matt Ridley, evolutionary biologist

MATT RIDLEY

Science Writer; Founding chairman of the International Centre for Life; Author, The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nature

Government is the problem not the solution

In all times and in all places there has been too much government. We now know what prosperity is: it is the gradual extension of the division of labour through the free exchange of goods and ideas, and the consequent introduction of efficiencies by the invention of new technologies. This is the process that has given us health, wealth and wisdom on a scale unimagined by our ancestors. It not only raises material standards of living, it also fuels social integration, fairness and charity. It has never failed yet. No society has grown poorer or more unequal through trade, exchange and invention. Think of pre-Ming as opposed to Ming China, seventeenth century Holland as opposed to imperial Spain, eighteenth century England as opposed to Louis XIV's France, twentieth century America as opposed to Stalin's Russia, or post-war Japan, Hong Kong and Korea as opposed to Ghana, Cuba and Argentina. Think of the Phoenicians as opposed to the Egyptians, Athens as opposed to Sparta, the Hanseatic League as opposed to the Roman Empire. In every case, weak or decentralised government, but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all, whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic decline and usually war.

Take Rome. It prospered because it was a free trade zone. But it repeatedly invested the proceeds of that prosperity in too much government and so wasted it in luxury, war, gladiators and public monuments. The Roman empire's list of innovations is derisory, even compared with that of the 'dark ages' that followed.

In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it. Self-policing standards and rules were developed by free-trading merchants in medieval Europe long before they were taken over and codified as laws (and often corrupted) by monarchs and governments.

Sometimes, they say we need it to protect the weak, the victims of technological change or trade flows. But throughout history such intervention, though well meant, has usually proved misguided — because its progenitors refuse to believe in (or find out about) David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage: even if China is better at making everything than France, there will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say, luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import luxury goods and insurance.

Government is a very dangerous toy. It is used to fight wars, impose ideologies and enrich rulers. True, nowadays, our leaders do not enrich themselves (at least not on the scale of the Sun King), but they enrich their clients: they preside over vast and insatiable parasitic bureaucracies that grow by Parkinson's Law and live off true wealth creators such as traders and inventors.

Sure, it is possible to have too little government. Only, that has not been the world's problem for millennia. After the century of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, can anybody really say that the risk of too little government is greater than the risk of too much? The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be.

Matus, you right about my "talking down" to you about art history, I suppose. Sorry about that. Honestly, though, I think that if you want to argue about abstract art and Kant effectively you need to broaden things. And in my first reply to you I mentioned the late, unlamented Victor. Your comments about car crashes, your refusal to look at Gorky or Rothko or other abstract artists, and so on, do remind me of his approach to things.

Jim, Thanks for your sincere reply. I'll take your suggestion under consideration and I'll look at some of these artists - but honestly things which tend to be considered modern art I mostly dislike. I can appreciate a work of art on many different levels, Pollack's works definately have some fascinating complexity to them, and sometimes some rich variations of color.

A recent article in Scientific American argued that Pollack's work comes close to emulating fractal like repetition of scale, where immitators do not (the author was hoping to use his program to determine if a recently found possible Pollack was actually an original)

Pollock or Not? Can Fractals Spot a Fake Masterpiece?

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=can-fr...ls-spot-genuine

That might have been the 'look' he was striving toward, without explicitly being aware of fractals. If that is true, that is a level of execution I can appreciate his work for. But he has no objectively discernable themes, and I can appreciate a computer generated win amp visualization just as much, or more, than a Pollack work.

I like H.R. Giger's work in it's execution and style, but I hate his themes which seem nihilistic and vile.

Same for many of Dali's works. I find Christus Hypercubus interesting because it captured some the mainstream fascination with hyperdimensional physics at that time. The cross Christ is crucified on is supposed to be a 3D shadow of a four dimensional hypercube.

So one can appreciate and find value in art on many different levels, my list might be (in roughly descending order of importance)

Theme

language that theme is conveyed in (objective / non objective)

artists efficaciousness in conveying that theme

artists technical skill required to make the work

style

complexity (how easily could it be reduced to an algorithm)

richness or diversity in color

originality / uniqueness

scale

historical context

I would be interested in hearing what others judge works of art on. The works of art typically considered 'objectivist' - classical like romantic with exquisite skill and superlative execution conveying good themes objectively with originality, etc - routinely completely capture me and tremendously move me and certainly give me that sublime feeling (without the horror) I recently traveled to San Francisco and visited the Quent Cordair fine art museum, it was my favorite part of the trip and I spent hours in there. I've never experienced anything remotely like that staring at any piece of modern art. If I did, I can only surmise it would require I internalized and embellished a whimsical valuation of 'art' that has little to do with anything I can rationally identify (transcending sense)

With regard to creativity, I remember N Branden saying something like the following in '72 or '73: "It's not particularly difficult to have creative ideas. But, making something of your ideas is very hard." And the great architect, Mies van der Rohe, said, "I don't want to be great, I want to be good." In other words, many, many people can sit around sparking off ideas all day, like the conceptualist/dada piece in your posting, but making something of it and really building your ideas into something is the real job. And that's why Wright concentrated on the Prairie Houses for 25 long years, and Braque and Picasso worked on analytical cubism for 7 years with very little obvious variation.

Jim Shay

I completely agree, as I think anyone involved in a creative endeavor would. That is, unless you embrace a mysical notion of the source of your inspiration. Again, these artists (writers, painters, whatever) immerse themselves in a sort of seance like 'automatic writing' they are not cultivating and productively refining a particular good idea over a long time with expertise which is what tends to resul in a superlatively executed work.

Bill P, Yours was a balanced and correct view of Solzhenitsyn.

Solzhentsyn helped end the Soviet Union. He can make a few mistakes.

And at great personal risk to himself, he had no way to know the regime change would embrace his work in an attempt to distance itself from Stalinism, he would have been justified in expecting to be immediately executed.

By ending the love affair with Soviet Communism in the eyes of western intellectuals and undermining the Soviet State (with Kruschev's help, using The Gulag Archipelligo to distance the regime from Stalinism) Solzhenitsyn probably did more to end the persercution of jews in Russia than any other person in there, no? At the very least he did a lot more good for jews by his contribution to ending soviet tyranny than he surely did bad through his possible anti-semitism which was no doubt of little over all influence.

Matus, I don't think the quote Jonathan presents has anything at all to do with copying verbatim a work of one's own. Do you think that reproducing a painting to 99% accuracy corresponds to inventing "the like at pleasure"? I hope that's not your idea of creativity. I haven't read the entire body of text this comes from, but I believe he's talking about the quality of the inspiration and other somewhat unknowable quantities that propel the creation of comparably great work, rather than making a stale copy. The real "brainstorms".

Any technical master can reproduce any creation he has made to a high degree of accuracy, Michelangelo could sculpt the David again, and he could ALSO sculpt a similar piece with a different theme and different execution but with the same exquisite skill, THAT is what it means to be able to recreate the like at pleasure, I used the example of recreating ones own exact work as an even simpler example which also serves as a clear distinguisher between non-objective art and objective art. An expert objective art based artist can recreate his own work with monumental skill and accuracy, and could certainly create another similar great work, yet most modern artists can not because their work has neither objective theme nor objective purpose, and thus can not have an objective course of execution which can be repeatable. Jackson Pollack is a favorite example of mine because his work is so tremendously absurd, Pollack himself could not recreate any of his own works to any high degree of accuracy because they are non objective, they are inherently too random and too whim worshipping, he might as well go into a séance and do 'automatic writing' as far as he willfully controlled the stroke of his arm. Could Pollack recreate another Pollack like painting, sure, but it's because he paintings are so lacking of any objective measure of skill that this is feasible, not because he has a masterful ability of technical execution of paint dribbling.

In other words, neither Leonardo nor anyone else has the power to, at will, have significant thoughts of genius comparable to those that resulted in their past creations.

You are wrong, genius is neither mystical nor supernatural, but is in fact a superlative integration of a significant degree of skills cultivated over a very long period of training with a particular kind of practice which involves continually pushing oneself past ones own skill level. Leonardo did not sit idly by waiting for inspiration to hit him like a lightning storm, this is an interpretation of creative genius borne explicitly FROM Kant, nobody in the renaissance era embraced this absurd notion. One could hire Leonardo to create a great work of art and he would in fact do exactly that, he would not say 'well, you must wait until I am struck by inspiration!' Far from sitting around waiting for some magical insight, Da Vinci strikes me as a man who was unable to keep up with all the creative inspirations he had.

It is the modern artist today who embraces the mind body dichotomy that roles around in his bedroom wailing and waiting for that mystical divine word of genius to move his brush for him or spew words on his ledger, if they have little technical knowledge of the skill they are trying to tap into, it amounts to hardly anything more than unintelligible automatic writing, if they have a great degree of technical mastery cultivated over time, they will be able to execute their inspiration well, but will attribute it to the mystical or divine, and not thier own integrated long term memory, values, and subconscious processing.

From Wikipedia

Da Vinci was an Italian polymath, having been a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer.

...

Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the "Renaissance man", a man whose seemingly infinite curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention.[1] He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived.[2]

...

Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques [hardly the mark of a man sitting around waiting for divine inspiration]

....

In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to one of the most successful artists of his day, Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio. Verrocchio's workshop was at the centre of the intellectual currents of Florence, assuring the young Leonardo of an education in the humanities. Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi.[7][10] Leonardo would have been exposed to a vast range of technical skills and had the opportunity to learn drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling.

...

At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.

...

Leonardo continued work in Milan between 1482 and 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie.[7]

...

Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack.[7][4]

So I really wonder how often da Vinci told his commissioners and military officers that he must sit around and wait for divine inspiration to hit him.

For example, Picasso and Braque followed their great and astonishing intuitive insights taken from Cezanne for many years, creating many similar works that often looked identical ( similarly to your example) - but no big new and great ideas for many years. Objectivism's favorite architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, went through very long periods of refining each "brainstorm", as did Mozart, Picasso and others, before having and developing new and great ideas.

This is what you consider evidence for divine inspiration? A artistic genius like da Vinci or Wright do not sit around waiting for that flash of sudden significant genuis to hit them, they have many thousands of flashes cultivated by their deep knowledge and interest in that subject, and then pick and choose which they consider of value and cultivate those into the masterpieces we become familiar with. It is the mystic who thinks these things come by magic, and who stares blankly at his canvas waiting and waiting for that muse to sing to him.

When are you going to drop the snide, and also cliched, references to your archnemesis, Pollack?

Never, Pollack sucks, and he was an ass hole who got someone killed.

"When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing." - Pollack

Nuff said

They weaken your remarks considerably.

Don't you have anything better to do than attack someone who is attacking Pollack? It weakens your remarks considerably.

Don't you know anyone else's work that might suffice for your denigration? Do you know anything about Rothko, for instance, or Gorky, a fabulous painter - check him out? (By the way, others who think as you do have called Mark Rothko's paintings "Buddhist tv sets". That is pretty funny! You might use that in another discussion or argument. Sort of like calling Pollack "Jack the Dripper". That's become a cliche, but not the buddhist tv bit.)

I'm not really interested in expanding my intellectual horizon of shitty painters, thanks for the tips on who to avoid though.

When you talk about the Mona Lisa and Pollack, two monstrously big names in art history, things go a little stale and seem unimaginative to me, and I do wonder what you really know about art and have studied and thought about it. Jonathan brings an astonishing well of information to these discussions about art. Check out some of his examples.

Jim Shay

I've certainly no PhD in Art History, but the fact that you imply some technical expertise is required in order to judge the quality of a work of art is Kantianism and post modernism in it's purest form and the exact mentality that has enabled this trash to become considered art, this condescending mentality that you have, and your snide implications that if one can not appreciate spilled dribbled paint or a piece of rubbish bound by horse hair as art that it is some mystical failing on their part and that they are just too narrow minded to see what 'true art' is.

"The Father of Modern Art is Immanual Kant (see his Critique of Judgement)"

- Ayn Rand "The Romantic Manifesto" from "Art and Cognition"

Case Closed!

War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a manner a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude. On the other hand, a prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation.

Actually, there is more about war in the Critique of Judgement:

(§48)

Beautiful art shows its superiority in the beautiful descriptions it gives of things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing. The Furies, diseases, devastations of war, etc., may (as evils) be described as very beautiful, as they are represented in a picture. There is only one kind of ugliness which cannot be represented in accordance with nature and without destroying all aesthetic satisfaction, and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites

disgust

. For, in this singular sensation, which depends purely on the imagination, the object is represented as it were obtruding itself for our enjoyment, while we strive against it with all our might. And the artistic representation of the object is no longer distinguished from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so it cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful. The art of sculpture, again, because in its products art is almost interchangeable with nature, excludes from its creations the direct representation of ugly objects, e.g. it represents death by a beautiful genius, the warlike spirit by Mars, and permits all such things to be represented only by an allegory or attribute that has a pleasing effect, and thus only indirectly and by the aid of the interpretation of reason, and not for the mere aesthetic judgment.

So much for your simplistic theory that "Kant thought that war is good."

I am a great admirer of the political scientist R.J. Rummel, who frequently cites Kant as the originator of the Democratic Peace theory. In that regard, I still like Kant, but this quote on war is absolutely attrocious. Currently I am reading Thucydides's "History of the Pelopension War" and interestingly Pericles, that admirable yet war mongering Hellene made the same argument when attempting to talk the Athenians into launching an ultimately disasterous war against Sparta. War and the strife and communal struggle involved in it raises the best of human spirit, according to Pericles and Kant - but at what cost? Frankly, I find Kant's preference for the difficulties of fighting a war and the comradarie that evolves with it as a preferable state to peace and commercialism abhorantly disgusting. What an attrocious bag of contradictions this man was. (Perhaps Kant was using the Democratic Peace as an argument against democracy)

Jonathan your rebuttal seems so pale - what on earth does your quote actually have to do with War? The only thing this seems to be saying is that some things in nature which might be ugly or displeasing, like war or disease, may be represented in a beautiful way in a picture. This is hardly a refutation of the sublime beauty Kant found in War, as shown by the original quote above!