Degenerate Generations

In Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius Niccolò Machiavelli went on at some length about how elders have been complaining about the younger generation and younger people have been complaining about the elders for thousands of years. His thought was that the degeneration was exaggerated, because humanity would have fallen into savagery long ago if the generations were progressively that degenerate. Or I might have made that up to try to make Machiavelli look even better. But even the Ancient Greeks complained about younger generations, and such complaints continue, and probably will continue into the far distant future.

My opinion is that both the younger and older generations should have a little more understanding of the other, and all people should have a better understanding of history. While older generations have had more experience, the youngers have the enthusiasm of youth that has not yet been stifled by stark reality. Those of my generation already decided that we "Won't Get Fooled Again", as The Who put it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q But everyone is fooled by someone in some way. Some of us learn to avoid listening to anyone, while others use careful analysis of data and argument before we will accept anything. And most people just go one being fooled time after time. This is another thing that has been known for thousands of years, and no one has found a cure. In Proverbs it was expressed as: "As a dog will return to its vomit, a fool will return to his folly." (Proverbs 26:11) That same idea is contained in the adage about studying history: Those who do know history are doomed to watch in horror as it is repeated.

Perhaps the most substantial difference between the generations is historical perspective. Most people think that anything that happened before their births is ancient history, irrelevant to today's world. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, we are still suffering from the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, and that is true of China, Russia, the Mideast, Europe and Central Asia. And Charlemagne's empire is still relevant to Europe. And just a short time ago, the French were sending Indians to murder, rape, and kidnap people in the British colonies of North America. Even though you may hate and repudiate the past, the present was shaped by the past; the past that you repudiate is yours. If you follow a religion, then it almost certainly has an ancient origin, but that's because we know that the recently founded religions are all frauds. Today's political and economic ideas also have their origins in ancient philosophy.

Alas, there are people who take advantage of the relative innocence of youth, and that has been going on for a long time, but in the 1960's there were songs about young people who discovered that they had been played for fools. In addition to "Won't Get Fooled Again" by the Who; and there was "My Backpages " by Bob Dylan. But everyone has to learn those lessons for himself, learn that the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Eventually, everyone learns that they were fooled, but for some it takes a lifetime, while others learn a little faster. It is sad that the ones doing the fooling are often the ones who were presented as the ones that you should trust. It makes me happier that I am not claiming to have any new or better ideas; I am simply presenting ideas that have been around for a long time in slightly different words. Humans have not changed greatly for a long time; there have been slow, incremental changes, but the underlying motivations and drives are the same for modern humans as they were for humans in ancient times and probably for the great apes even earlier, and I think that people should become comfortable with those earlier times and with humans having been humans even back then.

Most of the time we are fooled by marketing lies, fluff, puffery. Most of the time and most of the lies are used to sell products and services, but they are also used to sell political candidates and programs. The worst part is that I usually disagree with the candidates and programs they are pushing, but other people think that government should make all their decisions for them.

But one can tell a lot about the quality of goods, services, ideas, or whatever by the marketing given to them. Good quality things don't require much marketing, a good description is usually adequate; for example, most foods sell themselves. But low quality goods require marketing to make them appear good, and truly bad products need heavy-handed marketing to move them off the shelves.

Similarly, completely good political ideas only need description to be supported by most people, as is the case with free speech. Low quality ideas like "progressive" income taxes require some marketing to sell them to most people. And truly bad ideas such as anthropogenic climate change require heavy-handed arm twisting to sell them to most people; things along the lines of: If you don't believe this then you are opposed to science.

As has been known for a long time "There's a sucker born every minute." Some people grow out of that and learn how to avoid being taken, but others don't last that long.

Carbon Dioxide Red Herring

I find it annoying to read or hear assertions that human activity is causing climate change especially when the people making the assertions never even heard of the Milkovitch cycles and don’t even know what makes some gases "greenhouse gases" while other gases do not create the greenhouse effect. Many articles on the subject give the impression the the author does not understand what he is writing.

One item that is less prevalent now than it was a few years ago is the matter of whether the recent climate change is unprecedented, as it is sometimes called by authors. In fact, since civilization began about six thousand years ago, there have been three cycles that we can clearly see from written records. Those are the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, and the current warm period. There were cool periods in between, the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age. There certainly have been other warm and cool periods in earlier times, but there is less information about those.

And since the last Ice Age maximum there has been even more warming and cooling, and sea level has risen by about nine hundred feet, but the level hasn't varied by much in the last three thousand years; although there was a rise during the Roman Warm Period and a drop during the Little Ice Age. The change in sea level can be seen in the location of a few cities fairly far up rivers from the mouths, but in some cases, they were located well upstream to avoid pirates, but some cities that failed as seaports because a sand bar grew across the harbor actually suffered from sea level drop. Notable examples of this problem in ancient cities include Ephesus and Pisa. Sea level change is not the only reason why harbors became useless, because subsidence and rebound from glacial periods also change the local sea level. It should be clear that there have been periods that were warmer or cooler that it is at present.

It has been claimed that greenhouse effect caused by increased carbon dioxide has been the main cause of recent warming, but carbon dioxide is not much of a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gas potential of a gas is determined by its dipole moment. Most sources point out that Carbon dioxide has no dipole moment, but some sources give a value of 0.112 for its dipole moment. For comparison, Water has a dipole moment of 1.8546, which is 16.56 times as much as concentration of carbon dioxide. In the atmosphere carbon dioxide has an average concentration of about 400 parts per million, while water vapor has a concentration of from 0.1% to 4% (call it 2% average), or about 48 times the concentration of carbon dioxide to one hundred times the concentration. This means that water vapor in the atmosphere has approximately 800 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

If we apply that to the total amount of greenhouse effect on the atmosphere, and it is thought that the Earth’s atmosphere would have a temperature of about 0 F, if there were no greenhouse effects, versus the average of 59 F at present. The warming that carbon dioxide has caused is less than one tenth of a degree (<.01). Because of the small dipole moment, the concentration would have to rise to more than one half of one percent (5000 ppm) before it would become significant to the Earth’s atmosphere.

To be succinct, the matter of carbon dioxide as a factor in global warming or climate change is a red herring, at best, or a bald-faced lie, if we wish to be blunt.

For those reasons, it appears that the idea of carbon dioxide driving recent warming is extremely unlikely. Consider also that while it has been determined that the average surface temperature of Earth would be about zero degrees Fahrenheit, if there were no greenhouse effect, rather than the present average of fifty-five degrees. water vapor is responsible for about fifty-two degrees of that; carbon dioxide is responsible for about two degrees, and other greenhouse gases are responsible for the other degree.

There has been an increase in warming since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1750 CE, and some people assert that that warming was caused by increased burning of organic fuels, which put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but that ignores that fact that the Earth was still in the Little Ice Age at that time, and it was warming from natural events. The warming that took us out of the Little Ice Age has yet not topped out. If we compare temperatures now with the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warm Period, then we can expect additional warming.

People who assert that human activity has been the cause of warming ignore the effects of the Solar cycles and the Milkovitch cycles in the Earth's orbit and rotation. But more serious is the matter of in earlier periods there was much more atmospheric carbon dioxide during ice ages. While correlation does not show causation, counter examples usually show that there is not a cause-effect relationship. The idea of carbon dioxide causing climate change is a red herring.

If the climate change alarmists had done a good, logical presenting their argument, then the argument would be worthy of serious consideration, but there are major logical fallacies in the climate change argument, and those fallacies bring the whole concept into doubt.

Logical fallacies of climate change alarmists:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/20/the-illogic-of-climate-hysteria/

I do not think that there has been no climate change or global warming. I have no doubt that there has been continued warming as the Earth has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, but the mechanism for warming that has been put forth would not work.

I encourage reader to read the linked websites for more information.

On the lack of relationship between CO2 levels and temperature from prehistoric evidence:

https://www.climatedepot.com/2010/08/10/peerreviewed-study-finds-ancient-earths-climate-similar-to-present-day-despite-co2-levels-5-to-over-20-times-higher-than-today/?fbclid=IwAR3OJDhhHiW4naPsYhK0T1agbm5dPvh-7L4yXD8OgP9OrceFL5MkJhnClu8

cyclical climate change

https://www.pnas.org/content/97/23/12433.short

Climate cycles

https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/climate-basics/climate-primer/natural-climate-cycles

Climate cycles

http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/natural-cycle

Milankovitch Cycles

https://www.livescience.com/64813-milankovitch-cycles.html

Alcohol and Equal Rights for All

Humans have been consuming alcohol for at least as long as there have been humans, and there are good reasons to believe that the desire for more alcohol was the driving force behind the development of agriculture. Humans probably got their first tastes of alcohol from fallen fruit that naturally fermented. There's no way to tell for sure, but there are signs of ale, sort of, having been made from seeds about twenty-five thousand years ago, and it is generally accepted that agriculture developed between five and ten thousand years ago. The some of the earliest known crops were wheat and other grains that could have been used to make ale. Real grape wine appears to have been made about eight thousand years ago in Georgia, which is the homeland or vinifera grapes (see link below)

There has been along running argument about whether bread came first or whether ale did. If a batch of ale fails and stops fermenting, then it can be baked and eaten. And ale can be made from bread dough that accidentally gets soaked. Until I get the time machine running, I won't know which came first. It is also possible that bread was first in some places, while ale was first in other places.

The earliest industrial making of ale was in Mesopotamia, where it was made more than seven thousand years ago; that was before writing or bookkeeping.

We don't know exactly why any particular group of people made ale or wine, but even back then surface water was usually polluted, and it was difficult to dig useful wells, but ale could be started in water that was not good to drink, and the alcohol would end up killing bacteria and making it potable. In addition, there is a mood elevating effect that alcohol has on most people. We also know that wine was used medically in places where it was made, and it is more effective than beer at making spoiled food edible. Scavengers can eat partly spoiled food and adequate wine will prevent sickness from it (that is not something to do if you can avoid it).

Some of the positive effects of alcoholic beverages are obvious, while others are less so. Even ten thousand years ago, people would have noticed that people who drank alcohol were generally healthier than people who drank water. Alcohol drinkers also would have gotten over colds and minor diseases faster, and that would include infections. Over the long run, drinkers had longer runs; they tended to live longer.

These and other common advantages of drinking happen whether one drinks a lot or a little, but there are problems inherent in drinking to the point of inebriation, and clumsiness is just one of those. In ancient times the custom of mixing water with one's wine was practiced in some places, that had the effect of providing a delicious beverage that wouldn't make one sick with limiting the amount of alcohol consumed to avoid inebriation. There were laws against becoming drunk and disorderly, but they were as widely ignored as they are now.

It is ironic that something so healthy is also dangerous when consumed in excess. In excess even some of the positive effects of alcohol are reversed. For example, in moderation alcohol is healthy for the heart and leads to healthy blood vessels also, but in chronic alcoholics heart muscle cells can be damaged, and the same if true of blood vessels. Instead of living long, healthy lives, as moderate drinkers do, heavy drinkers. As a general rule the dividing line comes at the same level of consumption that tends to make one inebriated to the point of being unsteady on one's feet and beginning to speak less than correctly.

Here in the U.S.A. there was a period of more than decade, when alcoholic beverages were outlawed. That taught the country that prohibitions of that sort lead to crime as people evade the law. To eliminate the criminal activity, Prohibition was eliminated, but it wasn't completely eliminated. The states restricted the access of younger people to alcohol, and such an age based ban in clearly discrimination in violation to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Before Prohibition children had bought bottles of liquor when they wanted to and could find the money, but it became more difficult when it was no longer legal. It had been common for parents to give their children beer or wine with meals, but that changed after Prohibition, and that led to changes in attitudes toward drinking. It used to be that drinking was an ordinary part of life, but the prohibition changed beer and wine from being beverages to being intoxicants that were used only for getting drunk. That attitude still exists, and even after they can dink legally many people binge, getting as drunk as they can, and the kind of drinking is not healthy, but the age based prohibition that still exists pushes the young to act that way, and tends to create life-long drunks, rather than people who drink reasonably.

This would be a better place, if everyone could consume alcoholic beverages legally, and if children were shown how to drink responsibly and allowed to do so from any early age, they might develop better attitudes toward alcohol. There still would be people who would drink themselves to death, but restrictions haven't eliminated that problem; they have only made life less convenient for normal people.

Let's all support this. Let's support equality for everyone.



https://www.medicaldaily.com/7-healt...alcohol-247552

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutriti...ol-full-story/

good, bad, and ugly
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition...r-bad#section2


23 benefits of drinking
https://www.eatthis.com/benefits-of-alcohol/

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/...a-archaeology/