Climate Change "Deniers"

 Today in C-NET the new CEO of Apple weathered some criticism about his environmentally "friendly" spending by the company.  The headline (probably written by someone other than the writer of the article) says TIM COOK ADVISES CLIMATE DENIERS TO GET OUT OF APPLE STOCK. In other words, fuck off and let Apple continue its environmental left wing agenda in spite of its being a public company.  I guess those stockholders should go off and invest in Fox instead.  You read the article and there is NO MENTION of "climate denial" just that some stockholders are less than happy with the doctrinaire environmentalism of Apple (with heavy emphasis on the "mental".)

Who are "Climate Deniers?"  Basically anyone who takes issue with the hysteria over "climate change" and denies that our climate is changing.  Basically this somehow follows from  the "self evident" fact that the weather is changing.  We are supposed to obediently surrender to the "wisdom" of reducing our "carbon footprint" and stop putting carbon dioxide into the air.  Perhaps he is suggesting we spend more time holding our breath or stop breathing altogether.

.  In other words human activity is causing the climate of the earth to change  from its presumably Eden-like changelessness.  And so we must, to avert the disaster of global warming (as brilliantly envisioned in the science fiction movie "Artificial Intelligence" where it depicted a frozen Manhattan under several hundred feet of water).stop our carbon producing ways, plant more trees, and depend exclusively on wind and solar power.    And of course we should kindly persuade India and China to do the same, which of course they haven't because the atmosphere is kind of an international resource and good luck persuading them to shut down THEIR industrial economies.  Anyone opposed to this kind of lunacy is labelled in the famous words of Al "Liplock" Gore as "Climate Deniers"
in a not-so-subtle equating of his opponents with the manifest goofiness of the "Holocaust deniers" .   Need I add that Gore has a financial interest in the establishment of a market for "carbon credits" so one could say, like the oil and gas companies, his motives are far from "pure".

But of course in the beginning Adam and Eve were in the garden sampling the fruit trees until this snake fucked up their minds and God ordered them out.  Eden was a cool place where everything was okay and nothing unpleasant happened and nothing ever changed.  Animals didn't eat one another but lions and lambs napped happily together.  But humans had to go and screw things up, of course, with the help of course of the snake.  And of course climate never changed in that "Squandered Eden" and life was really good until of course we had the Industrial Revolution and started burning a lot of coal and petroleum. 

Well, I'm not denying climate or that climate is changing, only that there is very little humans can do about it. According to this article, since the polar ice caps have not COMPLETELY melted then it means that actually the previous ice age, which "ended" about 10,000 years ago, hasn't completely ended. Furthermore ice ages have been happening with interglacial warming periods for hundred of millions of years.   Also there is the Milankovich cycle, which postulates that every 41,000 years the precession of the earth goes through a cycle that leads to the warming and then cooling of the planet. Humans in significant numbers haven't been around for more than a few thousand years. What makes us think that we are going to change all this other stuff? 
Climate happens. And frankly it has been happening for a lot longer than humans have been a major force in the climate of the world.  Consider the data that science has regarding the ice ages.  

The fact is, (1)  yes, climate is changing, and (2) some things going on in this planet are beyond human control, and (3) you can't stop climate change by passing laws.  What you can do of course is weaken America's industrial engine until people from all over the world start coming over and taking pieces of it away with them.

I would compare the hysterical climate change-mongers to the masses of people who thought in those more innocent days of the 1910s that you could eliminate the social ills of alcohol by merely outlawing the stuff. The result was Prohibition.   What it proves is that outlawing certain things or practices will just lead to massive civil disobedience and a decay in the respect for law and order.  The climate change-mongers are just a more contemporary manifestation of this kind of lunacy.  It is the sort of thing that the voting public is susceptible to from time to time, alas. 

America is still a deeply racist country?

Arnade

Chris Arnade, writing in the Guardian, claims that, in spite of the fact we have finally elected a president of color, we are still a nation that is "deeply racist".  His evidence for this is overhearing some white guy use the N-word in reference to our newly elected President among other things, such as the persistent poverty of African-Americans.  A bar is a perfect place to get a relatively unguarded opinion about many things, and what better place than a bar to go after a funeral for a loved one. 

His father was a civil rights activist during the 1950s, a time when to do so was to put one's self in physical danger.  It was decidedly an unpleasant time and, yes, there were lots of pointy-headed white morons running around the south taking pot shots at those with the temerity to alter the established legal and electoral landscape that had been in force down there since the end of Reconstruction.  Yes, institutional racism was rampant in this country.  Even in the North there were businesses at which black Americans were not welcome. 

In my native Missouri, I remember a restaurant in Wentzville which was called "The Southern Air" and a truck stop on the long haul from St. Louis to Chicago called "The Dixie Truck Stop", both of which I suspect were veiled attempts by these businesses to keep blacks away.  (Interestingly the black rock and roller Chuck Berry bought the The Southern Air in 1980, then got into legal trouble as owner because of things that had nothing to do with race and more to do with video cameras in bathrooms). 

In any case, in former years, lots of white people did not want to sleep in hotels where black people slept, and did not want to eat in restaurants where black people might also dine, or (god forbid) have their little children go to schools where black children were also present. 

Georgia, 1950s

They did not want to sit on toilet seats previously sat on by blacks, and they did not want to drink from water fountains where a black person might have placed his lips.   Clearly such squeamishness was widespread in the old South and it richly deserved to be swept away.  

Even now there are lots of public restrooms where you are provided with paper seat covers so that in using such necessary devices you might be spared the ordeal of putting your naked white behind on a

seat that had previously been used by God knows whom?  A person of color?  A serial killer?  A child molester?  You never know what unsanitary and morally questionable human being might have used the public facilities.  Indeed some people are reluctant to touch the flush handles and so leave their waste for other people to discover.  (I hope you are not eating while reading this.)

Arnade's article concludes that racism is still omnipresent in America because of (1) the existence of poverty and the fact that unpleasant things still happen to people of color in this country, (2)  there is still a physical separation between white and black people in small towns, where the blacks still live on one side of the tracks and the whites live on the other, and (3)  there are still lots of white folks who will use the N-word in nasty little dive bars.  

Well boo hoo.  There are lots of places in this country where if you are the wrong color, it gets you stared at  as though you were a beast with three horns and five eyes.  America is color-coded still.  Blacks often form a large proportion of the very poorest of Americans.  However among both blacks and non-blacks poverty tends to be a great predictor of future poverty, and racism and ignorance are without question equal opportunity employers.  

 I worked as a math teacher at an all black school for a year on the South Side of Chicago, and while I was not treated badly by everyone, there were enough blatant racism down there to give me a chill. The school was a dumping ground for students other schools did not want.  They needed a body in a classroom to preserve the semblance of the idea that education was going on.  They hired me because there just aren't that many certified math teachers willing to attempt teaching kids in the ghetto.   At the end of year ALL the math teachers were fired, as if the zoo-like non-learning atmosphere there was completely our fault. 

But what was the cause and what was the effect?  In classical liberal fashion, these white northeasterners confuse cause and effect.  Is poverty and crime the result of racism or the cause of racism?  Racism is neither unique to white people nor unique to America, and guilt-mongering by very privileged white people in New York and Boston is not going to change that.

Racism is a many-splendored thing.   It blossoms in the ghetto as well as in white country clubs.  America may be a deeply racist country, but so is every other country in the world. There is nothing special or exceptional about America's version of it.   Get over it.  What I would like to ask one of these liberals holed up in their intellectual and moneyed enclaves in Northeast America is:  At what point would you expect racism to disappear from this country?   Is it the point at which people's differences disappear into unrecognizeable homogeneity and everyone is a medium brown color?  

I expect you would have a very, very long wait. 

 

The Alleged Wage Inequality between Men and Women

 "There are three kinds of falsehoods: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

 

 -Benjamin Disraeli

The use of statistics is a wonderful tool when your goal is to oversimplify and distort the often much more complicated reality of economics and human nature.  Our dear leader spoke once more in support of Lily Ledbetter and the idea that men and women SHOULD be treated equally in terms of pay and compensation and advancement. 

What he said was basically true, that for every dollar a man gets in wages, a woman gets around 71 cents, at least in the United States.  (Personally I don't remember the exact figure but that was the gist of it.)  The assumption is wrong however that (1) this is proof of the inherent sexism of the American workplace, and (2) that that old panacea for all societal ills, MORE LEGISLATION will fix this alleged "problem".  

What I am emphatically NOT saying, of course is that the workplace is fair.  I know this vividly from my own personal experience, and I am sure many of you could come up with examples of the outrageous behavior of managers and others that proves that the average workplace is far from a land of milk and honey where only sweetness and light are experienced. (And in the future I hope to outline my own personal experience with the sorts of crap storms that the poor employees have to endure, being out in the middle of nowhere and without an umbrella when the deluge cuts loose.)

So what do I mean about the fact of wage inequality not proving the inherent sexism of the American workplace? Just this:  Men and women are NOT the same, do not have the same tendencies, skills, or abilities.

   This really should be so obvious I should not have to elaborate, but as H.L. Mencken observed many years ago, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, so I will elaborate.  

Women tend to be smaller and not as physically powerful as men.  Nor do they, as a group tend to do the same sorts of things or enjoy the same sorts of things that men do.  Maybe some of these differences are going away.    


 I am talking about "central tendencies" of the populations of women and men, and in this respect I am not wrong.  You can argue all you want as to the degree to which these differences exist if you want, but my point is that they do in fact exist, and to ignore them is to do reality and justice an injustice.  

Consider, then, if you will, populations of men and women who are measured against certain parameters, like annual income, or IQ, or physical strength, longevity, height or weight.   In terms of these easily measurable things, men make more money, are no more or less intelligent than women, are stronger, don't live as long, are taller and weigh more than women.    However of course not all things are easily measurable.  Are women more rational than men or less rational?  Are they more intuitive than men?  Do they smell better?  Do they care more about their appearance?  Are women kinder to animals and children?  Are they as likely to commit murder and serious crimes?  Do they spend more time taking care of children?  Are men as physically disabled by pregnancy as women are?  Are women better looking than men?   Are their voices more pleasing to the ear than a male voice?  Are they better OB/GYNie's than men?  Better teachers, better parents, better whatever?  Yes and no.  It depends.  It is best not to make categorical statements.  

But getting back to wages, are women discriminated against?  Is there a vast conspiracy to cheat women of 29 cents out of every dollar of wages?  Yes women are discriminated against, and are discriminated in favorable ways too.  In other words, there are certain things women generally do better than men, and other things men do better than women.  Women are better at being women, for one thing.  And men are better at being men (in general I hasten to add).    

There are other things admittedly, where the discrimination is not justified and is wrong.  We are all the prisoners of gender.    The perceptions of employers and society in general, shapes their expectations as to what men and women do in life and in relation to one another.  A generation or more previously women were expected to get married and  have children, take care of those children.  The husband was expected to be the support of the family and the woman was supposed to be his "help-mate" and she still is in those among us who subscribe more thoroughly to the Judeo-Christian tradition.  In a more modern updating of that tradition, both men and women have careers and the care of children is either subcontracted out, or done in the spare time either partner has for the task.  Women however, are still the only ones who can, through their God-given physical and hormonal differences, bear children.  Men are never going to produce much milk, or get pregnant, regardless of how frequently they get screwed.  

In much of the Islamic world, it is even worse for women.   Women are expected to hide their bodies from men, so as not incite in them to unwanted sexual feelings. 

Indeed they are kept in cloisters in some cultures and not allowed out into the world at all.  In Saudi Arabia, for example, women are not allowed to drive automobiles.  And in other cultures things can be even more weird or unjust to men or women, depending on your perspective.    These are attitudes and value judgments that are not amenable to legislative remedies, however.   If you, as a woman choose to ride a bicycle through rural areas in Morocco wearing bermuda shorts and your hair uncovered, don't be surprised if little children pelt you with stones.  

So, in short, what am I saying?  Women and men, even in this country, tend to go into different lines of work, spend more or less time raising children, spend less or more time on their careers, and as  result do not, when summed up and averaged out to means, draw the same amount of money in income. 

An excellent book, read it.

Some fringe benefits of being female or in a relationship are not things you can quantify, and just because you can't assign a dollar value or a number to something does NOT mean it doesn't exist.  And just because some idiot who can use a calculator decides to calculate the mean dollar income of women and men and thus identifies what he or she thinks is a vast wage conspiracy against women, does not mean they know what the fuck are talking about.

Life is not fair, women are not the same as men, and groups have no rights, only individuals do. 

To impose "equality" on situations that are inherently unequal and never will be "equal" is to commit a very large injustice.  Now if only our President understood this.