Quite A Scientific And Twisted Concept Of Morality

There is nothing worse than someone advocating  doing something to others, against their will, on the basis that doing so is moral.

 

You can certainly twist ethics and morality around to make atrocities become moral imperatives to suit your own worldview.

 

A couple scientists are proposing to do just that in a paper published in the scholarly journal  Bioethics.

 

With a straight series of keystrokes, if not a straight face, the authors Parker Crutchfield and Blake Heret in their article Beneficial Bloodsucking  propose that infecting Americans with  alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition caused by the bite of the lone star tick whose only effect is the creation of a severe but nonfatal red meat allergy would be not just good to do but should be required - because it is morally right, of course.

 

This is, per their world view, that as (per them) eating red meat is morally bad therefore a means to stop it, even if it is literally biological warfare, is not just good, but morally obligatory: 

The bite of the lone star tick spreads alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a condition whose only effect is the creation of a severe but nonfatal red meat allergy. Public health departments warn against lone star ticks and AGS, and scientists are working to develop an inoculation to AGS. Herein, we argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible. After explaining the symptoms of AGS and how they are transmitted via ticks, we argue that tickborne AGS is a moral bioenhancer if and when it motivates people to stop eating meat. We then defend what we call the Convergence Argument: If x-ing prevents the world from becoming a significantly worse place, doesn't violate anyone's rights, and promotes virtuous action or character, then x-ing is strongly pro tanto obligatory; promoting tickborne AGS satisfies each of these conditions. Therefore, promoting tickborne AGS is strongly pro tanto obligatory. It is presently feasible to genetically edit the disease-carrying capacity of ticks. If this practice can be applied to ticks carrying AGS, then promoting the proliferation of tickborne AGS is morally obligatory.

The problem is the underlying assumptions of morality in the Convergence Argument and its “if -- then” statement.

 

Under that sort of logic, anything is permissible, if not mandatory, so long as the person making the statement deems it to be morally required. Note especially how they hand-wave away infecting people with a biological agent to stop them form eating red meat is not considered to violate anyone's rights.

 

C.S.  Lewis really knew what he was talking about when he wrote:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology)

 

Yes, this is a published scientific paper advocating people be "cured" by being infected with an allergy in order to achieve the stated desired end to get people to stop eating red meat – for the best and most moral reasons, of course.

Study - Systemic Racism To Blame For Everything, Even When It Is Not

Even when systemic racism can't be shown to actually exist, it is easy to assign blame to it as an un-falsifiable theory.

One of the great things for progressives about the cant of systemic racism is it deprives Blacks, Browns, what have you, of agency.  Clearly if systemic racism is to blame, it can't be their fault, and AWFLs (Angry Woke Female Liberals) must then come in and save them from themselves while dealing with self-loathing and hating on western civilization.

Systemic racism can be blamed for everything, even when the data shows there are actual and real explanations not linked to the mythical and unproven theory of systemic racism.

Take Covid for example.

The Detroit News: Systemic racism drove higher COVID-19 mortality for Black people study says

Black people are more likely to die of COVID-19 than their White counterparts due to systemic racism, according to a Wayne State University study published in April.

. . .

They found that people were more likely to die from COVID-19 if they lived in environments with high rates of poverty, unemployment and other social determinants of health that often are caused by systemic racism, Chopra said. 

Hmm, sounds bad. But wait, there's more:

The study found no relationship between COVID-19 mortality and the color of a person's skin, Chopra noted. What mattered were the conditions in which they lived. 

Wait a sec, they just said systemic racism is to blame, but then say there is no correlation found between mortality and race.  Is there systemic racism to blame here or not?

"There was no relation between COVID-19 mortality and race," she said. "We found that the Black population in large urban centers — these populations are not inherently at greater risk for higher mortality, but our results supported the possibility that it is the social/economic vulnerability.

So again, the study says it is not race but living in urban centers and making certain lifestyle choices that can be unhealthy? Who knew?

“Systemic racism is implicated because we feel it shapes the circumstances and policies that are responsible for the inequitable distribution of resources across communities of color,” Chopra said.   

Ah, so this determination is based on feelings, not data.  If you assign people no agency, systemic racism must be to blame.  Did they study Blacks and other minorities outside of urban centers for mortality?  Was there any difference form whites in the same areas that would demonstrate systemic racism?  Of course they did not.  

Heck did they compare mortality between comparable poor urban whites and blacks in the study - no, reading the study it shows they did not.   They solely looked at a majority-minority area for their study.

The study actually finds that people in crowded environments, having low socio-economic status and using public transportation make one more likely to be vulnerable to Covid.  The racial aspect is tacked on as they only looked at a poor urban area in Detroit with a 90% Black population and did not control or compare to a similar socio-economic area that is predominantly white. 

The study at most shows that if you are poor, have comorbidities, live in crowded housing, and take public transport, you are more likely to die of (or with) Covid than if you are none of these things. 

In short, the study's conclusion as to systemic racism is abject junk science, but it does get headlines.

Yet Another Crazy Column On Covid: It's Turtles All The Way Down

The Globe and Mail, a pretty prestigious and major nation-wide Canadian newspaper, ran an op-ed that in more sensible times would have never been published in a major paper.

The real cure for COVID is renewing our fractured relationship with the planet

Now behind a paywall, at least some of the time (your access may vary), it's a fun read by:

James Maskalyk is an emergency physician, associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine and author of the forthcoming book Doctor: Heal Thyself.Dave Courchene is the founder of the Turtle Lodge International Centre for Indigenous Education and Wellness and chair of its National Knowledge Keepers’ Council.

Between the title and the description of the authors, you can kinda tell where it is going to go from there, can't you?

If humanity is to endure, the coming months must hold healing, not just of populations across the globe from the coronavirus, but of the Earth herself. As is true of many zoonoses (diseases that jumped from animals), this virus emerged from pressure humans put on a global ecosystem.

Yep, it's the Gaia-worshiping Malthusians to the fore, with their idea that this virus instead of leaking from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is instead caused due to lack of our relationship and healing of the earth.

A lack of healthy, natural habitat weakens the immune systems of animals and the resulting sicknesses pass rapidly through them. Birds, prairie dogs, pigs, bats. With each infection, a chance for a virus to mutate into one that can sicken humans, and sometimes, global livelihoods. As such, a vaccine alone, no matter how effective, will not tip the balance toward health because COVID-19 is not a disease; it is a symptom of an exhausted planet. The renewal of a healthy relationship to our one shared mother, planet Earth, is the cure.

"COVID-19 is not a disease; it is a symptom of an exhausted planet" - What? remember the first-named author is a physician. I thought modern-day doctors had given up on both the sickness is caused by angry earth spirits and the bad humors school of sickness a long time ago.

But, it appears we are regressing.

The article to goes on about how indigenous peoples are much better stewards of the earth and the cure to Covid is being nice to the earth.  Really.

There is good news. We do not need to wait to determine how, because the answer is already here, and has been known for thousands of years. It is in the wisdom and sacred teachings of Indigenous people across the world. They have the deepest connection to the spirit of the Earth and its history, and from this intimacy, healing can occur. 

Puh-leeze.  The indigenous people's intimacy with the earth didn't help with healing Smallpox, nor Ebola, nor other viruses.  Still doesn't today.  Viruses are indeed a natural occurrence, as is the mosquito.   

I might also note this persistent myth of the noble savage is getting rather tiresome.

At least the authors are not yet advocating for adoption of ancient indigenous intimate practices like human sacrifice to ensure a good harvest, heal the earth,  and fend off Covid.  

At least not yet.

Dear I Love Science Folks - That Meme Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

A nice little meme popped up on my Facebook page, courtesy of one of my very liberal Dem friends who is all about "I love science", Orange Man Bad, Vote Blue No Matter Who, etc.

The meme is:

 Yes its an attempt to make fun of people who point out that masks aren't the panacea the proggies proclaim them to be. 

How silly are these people who don't go along with all the various edicts?, and saying cloth masks don't work?, and aren't they just ignorant for not going along - after all, I bet if they were on the Titanic they wouldn't wear a life jacket, hurr durr.

Welp, there's a little problem there.

Those passengers who just wore life jackets died when they were in the water in very short order.  Indeed, most all passengers left the Titanic wearing a life jacket. 

But,  many of those wearing lifejackets on leaving the ship were killed by those same lifejackets by knocking them unconscious or snapping their necks on impact with the water due to the design of the jacket,  The freezing water then killed the rest via hypothermia and the life jacket didn't help with that.

Unless you got on a lifeboat, your chance of survival was between slim and none, with slim rapidly slipping under the waves.  

Life-jackets alone were insufficient to save your life on the Titanic, making the meme rather historically ignorant,  but great for the I Love Science crowd.

In other words, the meme actually points out that cloth masks, just like life-jackets alone are not a panacea and going to save you from Covid19.

I almost have to wonder if this was a brilliant play by 4Chan to get the I Love Science Crowd to beclown themselves.  But more likely its just an I Love Science Crowd type forgetting to love history and facts before making the emotive meme to try and attack their opponents.

Hickory Dickory Dark, The Clock Has Jumped The Shark

Since the fear of an all-out nuclear war has declined since the end of the Cold War, the Bureau of Atomic Scientists are in a desperate search for relevance and craving attention.

With a flourish of the dramatic, and massively overstating reality, they announced that this year Doomsday Clock moves closest to midnight in 73-year history.

Blink.

Yep, right now, according to the BAS we're at this very moment the closest we've come to annihilation ever.

As if.

With the threat of total nuclear annihilation at one of its lowest levels ever, with decent relations between the US and Russia, missiles off alert launch-on-warning status, the Bureau of Atomic scientists chose to advance the clock to the closest it has ever been to scary midnight, past even the highest tensions of the Cold War.

Why? Mission creep.

It's no longer all-out nuclear war they're warning about, but instead they've announced it's due to climate change and governments failing to do what they feel is good policy. Yes really from their FAQ:

In 2020, the Science and Security Board set the time to 100 seconds to midnight, largely because of worldwide governmental dysfunction in dealing with global threats. Before 2020, the closest the hand was set to midnight was two minutes; in 1953, after the United States and the Soviet Union each tested their first thermonuclear weapons within six months of one another, and 2018, largely due to nuclear risk and the rising threat of climate change.

Verily, the Bureau of Atomic Scientists' clock has just officially jumped the shark.

Statistically Insignificant Study On Firearms Is Insignificant

So according to a study, 3 million more guns purchased in a 5 month period after Newtown shooting have a correlation of 60 additional "accidental" deaths.

That's .002% of the 3 million firearms purchased leading to an accidental death, assuming that there even is a causative link between the two events.

That's so small as to be amazingly insignificant. Then add in the fact that there was already about 300 million plus firearms in circulation, the 3 million more would be the proverbial drop on the bucket.

Heck if you added 3 million more cars to the nations roads there would be far more fatalities. But that wouldn't help push the narrative for gun control.

But it got major headlines.

Washington Post: Surge in gun sales after Sandy Hook led to spike in accidental gun deaths, study says

Of course, The Washington Post and other outlets did not report the criticism of the study. Of course, the study's author pushes for more "stringent gun storage laws", rather than for gun safety training that would be an actual and effective solution to reduce accidental firearms-related deaths.

But, But, He's An Expert!

A cautionary tale of what happens when a scientist steps outside of his specialty to pontificate.

The Detroit Free Press: Can giant walls protect the U.S. from tornadoes?

Sounds like a great idea right? But in a word, no.

One scientist thinks we can protect parts of the central United States from ferocious tornadoes by building several gigantic walls across Tornado Alley:

“If we build three east-west great walls in the American Midwest .... one in North Dakota, one along the border between Kansas and Oklahoma to the east, and the third one in south Texas and Louisiana, we will diminish the tornado threats in the Tornado Alley forever,” according to physicist Rongjia Tao of Temple University.

The walls would need to be about 1,000 feet high and 150 feet wide, he said. Tao is presenting his research next week at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver.

Apparently there's a fair bit of healthy skepticism regarding this plan:

Naysayers abound. Aside from the cost of $60 billion per 100 miles (according to Tao’s estimates) and huge engineering challenges, “it wouldn’t work,” tornado researcher Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., said in an e-mail.

Brooks said that China has deadly tornadoes despite the east-west mountain ranges there. In addition, he said, tornadoes still occur in parts of Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri despite the presence there of smaller east-west mountain ranges similar in size to Tao’s proposed walls.

“If his hypothesis was true, we’d already have the thing he wants to build naturally,” Brooks said.

“This is essentially a case of a physicist, who may be very good in his sub-discipline, talking about a subject about which he is abysmally ignorant,” Brooks said.

Another expert, meteorologist Mike Smith of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions, also called the theory “nonsense.”

Global warmists that similarly think they have all the simple answers, take note.

A further reason beyond those given in the article as to why this will never work: Even if it could work, we can't even build a comparatively small wall across our southern border.

Anyone really think we would be able to build a series of 1,000 foot high, 150 foot thick walls stretching for hundreds of miles? The environmental impact stage alone would take decades and the cost overruns would push this into the trillions.

A New Anti-Gun Junk Science Study, For The Children Of Course

Interesting how this Free Press article featuring a study from Pediatrics, a journal with a rather time-worn anti-gun bias just comes along now.

It's a prime example of how to craft a misleading study and article. Expect the antis to start quoting from it root and branch and ignore the obvious faults with the study.

Let's go to the headline -

The Detroit Free Press: Twenty young people a day hospitalized for gun injuries

Oh, that sounds bad, doesn't it? The two leading paragraph makes it sound even worse:

Almost one child or teen an hour is injured by a firearm seriously enough to require hospitalization, a new analysis finds. Six percent of the 7,391 hospitalizations analyzed resulted in a death, says the study in February's Pediatrics, released today.

The damage caused by gun-related injuries rarely gets the same attention as fatalities, "but that every day, 20 of our children are hospitalized for firearms injury, often suffering severe and costly injuries, clearly shows that this is a national public health problem," says Robert Sege, director of the Division of Family and Child Advocacy at Boston Medical Center and a co-author of the study.

Must be an unbiased source, that. With a study like that, whose heart-strings could not be pulled by the thought of 20 children a day being hospitalized for being shot?

It takes reading down to the sixth paragraph to find out the definition of children apparently has a much wider range than in common use:

Researchers analyzed a nationally representative sample of discharge data collected on children and adolescents (up to age 20) in 2009. The data, released in 2011, are the most recent available, Sege says.

Now that's defining childhood upward. Not only can you stay on your parent's Obamacare policy until age 26, but to this study you're still just a wee child at age 20.

Now while any child being unintentionally shot is a tragedy, that isn't the bulk of those studied, as noted in paragraph 10:

Rates were highest for those ages 15 to 19 (27.94 per 100,000.)

Prime no-goodnik age indeed, and two of those five years in that span are old enough to be charged as adults without any special actions by the prosecutor because under the law, THEY ARE ADULTS, NOT CHILDREN.

You can see how well-crafted this study and article is to come to a biased conclusion now can't you?

Indeed, the study shows you're most likely to be a hospitalized "child" victim of a shooting if you're a black male in the 15-19 age range as result of being a victim of an assault, not an accident.

The study detailed a significant racial gap: Black children and adolescents comprised 47% of all hospitalizations, 54% of hospitalizations resulting from assaults, 36% from unintentional injuries and 54% from undetermined causes.

You can draw your own conclusions as to where said teens were and what they were doing at the time, as the study surely does not...

Luckily for the study, no analysis of poverty or indeed criminal activity on the part of those shot was considered:

Noting the significantly higher poverty rate for young black males compared with young white males, Sege says the data did not allow researchers to "separate the effects of poverty from the effects of race."

Nor did the data indicate what types of guns were used or where the injury occurred.

So it's biased stats full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, all the way down.

What is the first conclusion the authors of the study come to? That they need more funding, of course

The findings emphasize "the need for funding for public health research to find the best way to reduce children's access to firearms," he says.

That's findings-speak for "Don't confuse us with the facts, or ask us to look at what the fact sactually might mean, just give us more money so we can fund scientifically sounding junk to press for gun bans."

His second conclusion, that flies in the face of the studies admission that "Nor did the data indicate ..... where the injury occurred." is even more unsupported:

In the absence of such research, Sege says, the best advice is to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics' recommendation that "the safest home for children and teens is one without guns,"

Talk about your non-sequitur. The study by his own admission does not state where the shooting injury occurred, or what the "child" was doing. Indeed, it shows that most of the shootings were due to assaults not accidents, but he confidently states that the safest home is one without guns. What?

Allegedly, Pediatrics is a peer reviewed journal. Draw your own conclusions of the wisdom of the particular peer reviewers approving publishing this dreck as a scientific study rather than an advocacy hit-piece thinly veiled with misleading statistics.

In short yet another example of the peudo-medical establishment with an anti-gun agenda trying to jump on the ever popular funding gravy-train with anti-gun distorted studies. No Thanks.

But did the Fortune Tellers predict this regulation was coming?

The Detroit Free Press: Fortune telling in Warren to get harder

The city is on the verge of passing one of the nation's most stringent regulations for fortune-tellers by requiring licenses, fees, fingerprints, criminal background reports and employment histories for anyone who earns money forecasting the future.

If approved by the City Council on Tuesday, as expected, Warren will join a growing number of communities nationwide to crack down on fraudulent fortune-tellers who prey on the vulnerable. Anyone who violates the ordinance would face up to 90 days in jail and a $500 fine.

Of course its an interesting questions as to how you can tell the difference between a fraudulent fortune teller and a bona fide fortune teller.

"By registering them, we know who they are and where they are working, so hopefully it will discourage any non legitimate fortune-tellers from coming to the area," Councilman Keith Sudowski said. "We also need some enforcement in place to regulate this industry and prosecute anyone who preys on innocent people."

Can the councilman explain the difference between a legitimate fortune teller and an illegitimate one?  Can he also show how this new licensing regime will let you tell the two apart?

I can see a disclaimer being required that fortune telling is for novelty purposes only so that the gullible aren't sucked in but how can you tell a legitimate fake from an illegitimate fake in the?

What's next licenses for legitimate astrologers and phrenologists?

Maybe the Warren City counsel should, in addition to the fingerprinting a licensing fees, require these practitioners to have degrees in pseudoscience - that'll credentialize 'em and thus protect the people of Warren quite adequately.

I predict this licensing regime will fail to fulfill its goal of protecting the gullible of Warren, but I do predict it will raise some revenue for the city coffers.  Do I need a license for that?