I quite agree that the controversy corrupted the images. Some parents who photographed their naked young children (not as art, but just as casual photo-documenting) have been subject to very unfriendly and IMHO, unreasonable scrutiny. I haven't seen Mann's photos recently, but they struck me as perfectly acceptable.

the Piss Christ could be that small chink in the moral armor that could eventually widen into a big gaping hole through which all forms of immoral acts can be introduced, even rape and murder, in the name of art. Of course this seems to require the artist to be an idiot to try a stunt like that but there was a case of an artist, name forgotten, who put 3 goldfish in a blender and asked the audience if they'd like to turn on the devices. I believe one person did and the result was well-blended goldfish. Police arrived on the scene and arrested the artist for cruelty to animals. This, to me, is a first small step to greater acts of cruelty/evil in the name of art. — TheMadFool

You may remember that in the 1980s there were a series of kerfuffles over Robert Maplethorpe's photography of gay men, some dressed, some not. Piss Christ and the Blessed Virgin painting with elephant dung pieces attached were another installment in the saga. There were also uproars over performance artist Karen Finley rubbing chocolate all over her naked self (at Lincoln Center, not at an avant garde gallery), another artist who cut himself on stage at the tony Walker Art Center, soaked up the blood on thin towels, and then waved the towels over the audience (it had something to do with AIDS), and the case of a band that threw feces at the audience (literally, not their crappy music). And the liquified goldfish. (But then, oysters are still alive when they are opened and eaten, and they are related to the brainy octopi, and lobsters are alive when dropped in boiling water.)

Back in the day when artists were carving large blocks of marble, or meticulously painting large canvases, one has to assume that they were serious about A R T. I am suspicious that people who do things like Finley's chocolate bit, the act with the bloody towels, or the goldfish are using provocation in place of artistic technique and skill.

We have to maintain some sort of standard of what art is, or go with Marcel Duchamp and just accept that anything people call art is art. I'll grant that artists who have followed Duchamp and used "found objects" in art have sometimes been successful. "Urinal" (it was a bathroom fixture) was deliberately and self-knowingly provocative--aimed at the A R T establishment of the day. But Duchamp's view that if somebody thinks something is art, then it is art is just resigning the effort to have a critical opinion that is worth hearing.

Provocation has a place in the world; I've enjoyed some provocations quite a bit. But we don't have to get all confused about whether someone provoking a strong reaction (for whatever reason) is producing A R T just because they say so. John Water's movie Pink Flamingos is a deliberately provocative scatty comedy. It's well done comic provocation; I loved it. But nobody is comparing Waters with Fellini or Bergman.

So, an artist may feel justified in displaying a crucifix in a vat of urine, because it's art, a communication between aesthetic agents. — Gnomon

It was just a glass of his own urine, not quite a vat; the crucifix was not very big--which is neither here nor there.

When New York artist Andres Serrano plunged a plastic crucifix into a glass of his own urine and photographed it in 1987 under the title Piss Christ, he said he was making a statement on the misuse of religion.

Controversy has followed the work ever since, but reached an unprecedented peak on Palm Sunday when it was attacked with hammers and destroyed after an "anti-blasphemy" campaign by French Catholic fundamentalists in the southern city of Avignon.

The violent slashing of the picture, and another Serrano photograph of a meditating nun, has plunged secular France into soul-searching about Christian fundamentalism and Nicolas Sarkozy's use of religious populism in his bid for re-election next year.

. The Guardian

The Right probably wouldn't like Smokey's song "I wanna be your piss slave" either.

I don't know who said it but I'm reminded of the assertion that if god doesn't exist anything is permissible: — TheMadFool

Dostoyevsky sort of said: if God is dead, then everything is permitted. The literal quote from The Brothers Karamazov, (where Dmitri speaks first) is

"But,' I asked, 'how will man be after that? Without God and the future life?

"It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?' 'Didn't you know?' he said. And he laughed. 'Everything is permitted to the intelligent man,' he said."

Is autonomism "Art for art's sake?" Oscar Wilde (as a critic) takes the 'art for art's sake' view.

Take two art works that depict an event in Roman mythology -- the Rape (or more properly, abduction) of the Sabine Women -- an event where Roman men went woman-hunting. The ME TOO movement does not approve, I'm pretty sure.

In the presumably mythic event, Romulus led a band of Roman men into the Sabine cities near Rome to acquire wives. The Sabines didn't want to feed Rome (who they correctly thought would become a disruptive rival), so the Romans just walked in and grabbed a batch of wives and took them back to Rome. It seems highly unlikely that the women consented to their abduction.

An ideologue literalist looks at the painting or sculpture and sees propaganda encouraging violence against women. Literalist ideologues are why security in museums has been beefed up. The artists wanted to produce a representation of the event, whether it was morally good, bad, or indifferent.

The sculpture is from around 1580, a complex 3-figure composition carved from marble. The painting is by David (the 'official painter of the French Revolution')

Jesus prophesied that "the poor you will always have with you". That may have been more of an indictment than a prophecy, but it seems to have come true.

It doesn't matter if climate change is a complete lie! — Lif3r

It does matter because lie-based policy involves a lot of screwing with one's mind, and everybody else's. "let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay." Speak truly, honestly, in other words.

[\quote="ernestm;368834"]People in the USA are particularly susceptible to 'self evident' fallacies.[/quote]

I disagree for two reasons: #1, no country anywhere on the planet is inconveniencing themselves very much on behalf of global warming (which is adding to the tragedy). It is not the case that the people in the USA or any other country are stupid and deluded. What IS the case is the global economy is based on fossil fuels. Take away coal, oil, and gas and the world economy (local and global) would crash and burn. Shifting from fossil to renewable energy is not at all simple, quick, convenient, or free.

Reason #2 is that fossil fuels are by no means a US monopoly. Many countries mine coal, pump up petroleum, or utilize natural gas. Granted, the USA has been and is one of the largest producers and users of fossil fuels. Granted, the fossil fuel and allied industries (transportation, electric generation, construction/building heating and cooling) have propagandized intensely on their own behalf. For some odd reason they are not just sitting there and letting eco-green meanies put them out of business. But its a world-wide business, and everybody participates in it--whether they want to or not.

I am 100% in favor of converting to renewable energy with haste--if it isn't already too late--but doing so will not entail severe consequences (but better consequences then continuing to burn every last pound of fossil fuel we can get our hands on).

Yes, and then again, no.

The issue of identity and permanence vs. transience which Heraclitus raised remains, and will remain. For practical purposes, I am confident of my identity and think the world is stable and remains the same from minute to minute. If I step away from practicality, however, I can see that the world isn't entirely stable (it really is changing all the time, from the sub-atomic scale to the macro scale of the universe, though usually in an orderly and more or less predictable way). Whether my identity is stable or not is a more complicated matter than I want to get into right now.

Pick a river, any river. Yesterday you swam in the river. Today the water you splashed around in someplace else. The water you swim in today is not the same water you swam in yesterday -- quite literally. The water is moving past you even as you dive in. The shores of the river remain; the name of the river remains; the water which composes the river (without which it would be a dry gulch) moves, mixes, becomes more or less turgid and turbid from time to time, increases and decreases in volume, is more or less pure--depending on how much crap we dump into it.

Pick some thing: Any thing. It is changing as you look at, even if you can not see the change. Take the window through which you are looking. Glass is an extremely slow-moving liquid. Five hundred years from now, the window will be thicker at the bottom than it is at the top. But it will be "the same window". Chances are that the view you see through your window will also change -- is changing so rapidly you can see it. A bird lands on a branch: a change. A car goes by: a change. The neighbor's dog barks: a change.

You have an identity. Whoever you are, masquerading as aRealidealist, you probably think you remain the same from day to day. Obviously you are, and are not. You have some new skin today that you didn't have yesterday. You have new memories in your brain you didn't have yesterday. You are older today than you were yesterday--a day closer to the grave. But still, your name didn't change; your address probably didn't change; your social security number didn't change; your shoe size didn't change (since yesterday, anyway, unless you feet swelled up and you can't fit into your shoes). We are all a bit impermanent beings living (temporarily) in a changing universe.

That things remain the same is a construct we use for convenience--until some change happens that reveals to us that, lo and behold, nothing is the same.

Very interesting so far. I would have expected nuclear weapons to come up higher! — Xtrix

Nuclear bombs could be the end of all our problems, so it's hard to rate it.

I voted for Climate Change, and would liked to have chosen overpopulation as well -- not as #2, but as a draw with global warming.

Political corruption smells bad, is ugly, causes other serious problems, kills people, and so on -- but corruption just goes with the human territory. Like fresh fish, we spoil quickly.

Inequality and poverty? Endemic. Epidemics? See overpopulation. Biological weapons? Are they worse than nuclear weapons? Terrorism? Nah. Bad people do bad stuff. Calling it terrorism doesn't make it worse, really. War? "War is the health of the state" Randolph Bourne said during WWI. He wasn't recommending war, btw.

You've heard of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse... Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death?

The 'Simple Living' movement, generally active in churches, attempts to get people to, you know, consume less -- much less -- crap. Those who cite spending habits as a significant contributing factor to money problems are, of course, spot on. It's not buying a better brand of canned tomatoes that gets people in trouble, it's the bigger, better car, the increased square-feet per person homes, the expensive cosmetic orthodontics for children, high end clothing (for whatever niche one is in), and so on.

"The average size of new homes built in the United States grew 62 percent from 1,660 square feet in 1973 to 2,687 square feet in 2015, an increase of 1,027 square feet, according to the U.S. Census Bureau." The 1918 house I live in was built for 2 adults, 1 child, more or less) and has about 900 square feet of main floor space. And, it seems to me, meals away from home are a major expense for many people. Live entertainment and alcohol (never mind recreational drugs) are another layer of expense.

The death of God? I agree it's not a government failing. However, I've observed more than a few people who think God is as alive as ever engage in the same nonsensical spending that the godless riffraff engage in.

If you want to blame somebody, blame Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew, who did so much to sharpen the practice of public opinion shaping and propaganda. The "desire manufacturing industry of advertising" deserves a lot of blame for the vast waste of money in the land.

Just a suggestion -- for ease of reading, break up very long paragraphs into shorter one.

there is the mandatory charity — alcontali

As there is in Christianity. Matthew 25:31-40, which lays out the basis of God's judgement. Many churches ask for (and receive) a 10% tithe from members.

I am quite sure that within Islam there are believers who follow the Quran faithfully, and there are those who do not. In all religions there are people who don't give a rat's ass about anything but taking care of Number One--themselves.

As nations progress down the road, many are going to find that over the long run, capitalism erodes all of the familial and sacred bonds that compose the warmth and security that people require to live well together. Maybe some developing countries will be able to avoid the fate which capitalism tends to deal out, but I wouldn't count on it.

"Millennial" is not a very substantive term; I wish people would stop using these "generation" labels. They might be useful as marketing concepts; not much more.

In the long run, the economy matters way less than generally perceived. — alcontali

"In the long run we are all dead", as one famous economist remarked. You are a social conservative, apparently, given your "It could also be handled by solidarity at the level of the extended family, along with charity at the level of the religious community" statement. It could be, but that hasn't been the case in the United States (and other industrialized countries) for a long time. By the 1920s multigenerational arrangements were pretty much history. Working class houses were too small to accommodate 3 generations. In addition, women began entering the workforce en masse (by necessityP) in 1941, and have stayed there, in varying numbers since. Welfare a la religious and secular charity has been practiced in the United States, but it was meagre. Further, private charity buckled during the great depression. 25% employment (a minimum estimate), widespread foreclosures, farm failures, business failures, and more pretty much shot the capacity of private charity out of the water.

Further more, the United States (in particular) could, can, and would be able to afford very satisfactory publicly financed welfare programs, if so much money wasn't sequestered by the richest 1%.

Thinking that the economy matters less than perceived is an extremely flawed idea. It's not even wrong, actually. What individuals, families, and societies are able to do depends on the economy--and that includes everything from private charity, to pre-school programs, to abstract expressionism, to sending mobile robot labs to Mars.

In fact, the population could even make do with less than half their current income — alcontali

What would your life be like if you "made do" with 50% of your current income?

Sure, people do waste an appreciable percentage of their income. Buying complicated cups of coffee and meals away from home (which many people do every day) is very expensive. A thermos and a bag lunch would save lots of money. (I brought my lunch to work for many years.). Impulse purchases at stores (I'm guilty), buying a big new car, frequent vacations away from home, lavishing care and feeding on dogs (which I love) but I never forced a dog to endure a long illness by buying expensive canine health care to keep it alive). Dearly beloved dog, you're very old, you're sick, and I love you enough to give you a painless and peaceful death. Maybe somebody will be kind enough to do the same for me, someday.

I have practiced thrift all my life -- not because I am virtuous, but because I grew up poor, and thrift was a necessity at home. The downside of poor folk's thrift is that we are usually not very knowledgeable about finances. I knew how to save, I didn't learn how to prudently invest what I saved (until late in the game). As an unmarried man with no huge expenses, thrift worked well for me. Had I added a wife and 1 or 2 children, a house payment or much higher rent, even an old car, etc. I would have gone broke in short order.

I attend a church with a reasonably well off congregation; there are a few there who are very well off. Giving to the church is quite respectable. How much charity could this church actually disburse? Maybe we could support 2 or 3 small families. If you take all of the churches in Minneapolis that are financially sound, (let's say there are 100) that's 2 or 3 hundred families--let's say, 600 to 900 people. There are about 90,000 poor people in Minneapolis. Let's say the churches really stretched themselves and decided to spend enough to support 3600 people, instead of 900. Even if my fairly well-off church spent for charity instead of its other discretionary spending, we could take care of only a few people (total support) over the long run.

That still leaves 86.400 people to care for. Who's going to do that, in your privatized scheme?

Things that go Trump in the night at the White House haunted by insane policy

Wait a minute, your take on family composition is way, way off: According to the US census and Bureau of Labor Statistics, 69% of children (<18) live in families with both parents present. Among married-couple families with children, 96.8 percent had at least one employed parent, and 61.1 percent had both parents employed.Apr 27, 2017. During the last 20 years, the percent of families with both parents present has not declined.

Evidence shows that raising children without a partner is an option with some negative consequences, poverty among them. Single parent families have more instability because of poverty, work demands, shortage of day care and pre-school care, and so on. Life becomes more precarious with only one parent and one income.

Government benefits are intended to be insufficient -- part of the "end welfare as we know it" neoliberal scheme.

Granted, there is a higher percentage of single men and single women now than in the past two generations. The current trend started in the 1960s. I would agree that single men are doing better financially than single women with children. The reason is obvious. I also agree that single men who are not in a long term relationship of some kind (gay or straight) tend to have poorer outcomes over the long run, in terms of physical and mental health. Some men, though, are better at self-care than others.

Two points: #1, reproduction rates are dropping in many countries--most of Europe, China, the US, Japan, and so on. Dropping reproductive rates produces the 'mushroom' problem of too many old supported by too few working people. It isn't just a question of money, though. There are not enough younger people to supply the kind of assistance older people need toward the end of their lives.

#2, over the long run, there have been periods where demography changed dramatically without sinking a given society. In the United States, there have been several episodes of high immigration (like from Ireland in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s) where large numbers of single men and women arrived. Yes, as the natives suspected they would be, large numbers of single people were kind of disruptive to their orderly life, and it took a substantial period of time for that wave (among them my maternal ancestors) to become integrated into society--roughly a generation.

Consider the radical disruptions that occurred in Europe between 1914 and 1945: two devastating wars, economic depression, occupation, death camps, displaced populations all over creation. Bad. Twenty to thirty years after WWII, recovery was (more or less) in place. Europe is certainly not the same place now that it was on the eve of WWI, but it isn't remotely the shit hole one might expect after so severe a 30-year beating. Look at all the turmoil over the same period of time in Asia. People tend to reconstruct orderly society.

On the long run, it is the diseased social structure that will sink the economy and the living standards. — alcontali

The current capitalist economic derangement is a critical part of the diseased social structure.

In my impression, the decline in living standards has only started. We have arrived in the long term of lots of past, misguided, short-term decisions. It is time to pay the bill now. — alcontali

This is probably true. I started working in 1968 and stopped in 2008; over that time I witnessed the decline in living standards that one could have at a given income. I didn't suffer very much, but many people have been stuck in jobs where income did not keep pace with inflation, and where rising expenses required a continual paring away of necessary and discretionary spending. It isn't that millions of Americans are starving, but many millions are living paycheck to paycheck, not because they are spendthrifts, but because their income simply doesn't cover the necessities of a family (adults and children).

Still, there is room for things to get much worse--not for the 10% -15% who are the poorest Americans, but for the the broad part of working population called "middle class" and for the "working class", immiseration will take a while. The thing is, it hasn't been happening so abruptly that people feel the hit most of the time. They are gradually sinking, and adjust themselves to slightly less as time goes on.

Only a narrow range of the upper middle classes and upper classes, the professionals and successful entrepreneurs, have avoided the agonizing reappraisals of their shrinking budgets--"What will we have to do without this month, this year, that we used to take for granted?" (And this isn't a question of which luxury items to give up; its small pleasures and necessities.)

Income per capita is today a multiple of what it was in the golden era of the 1950ies — alcontali

Thanks to inflation, yes. But inflation erodes purchasing power, and inflation, stagnant wages, a rising cost of living, and new products becoming "essentials" has left most of the working class significantly worse off now than their working class parents were in 1955 or 1960.

Alexander the Great's Macedonian infantery — alcontali

I don't believe the gilets jaunes set out to conquer the world, and besides they were no one's infantry. They were angry working class people fed up with a decline in their living standards, and they weren't out to crush the state. The French have a laudable tradition of highly vigorous public demonstrations. O, that the American Working Class were half as militant!

guys now say things like they want to masturbate when someone gets their face blown off — ernestm

On social media, claiming sexual arousal when faces get blown off is a very low cost move. What do you actually know about the people making these statements? My guess is that they are a mix of acne-faced adolescents, adults displaying arrested juvenile development, and (probably) a small number of psychopathic misfits incapable of operating effectively in normal, adult society.

In so characterizing these people I'm not dismissing them. Some of them likely have, are, or will cause trouble. Living in an echo chamber aggravates their deteriorating condition.

When the economy flips, how big will the blood bath be? — ernestm

Well, Ernie, the economy is already in very bad shape for a good share of the population. In a very real way, it has already "flipped". Things will continue to gradually worsen for many people. The
Gotterdammerung may fail to appear when the next major depression hits (one worse than 2007-8).

The bloodbath will happen, if it happens, because something sets it off, and that "something" is probably not foreseeable. It could be the economy, or the economy + something else, or just something else altogether. Maybe terrorists will blow up the Internet; that would probably cause many people to become unhinged and resort to cannibalism, initially not from hunger, but from total discombobulation. Roasting your cousin because there's nothing else left to eat will come a bit later. Or maybe the North Koreans will kill communications in the US with an EMP high over head. People will be punching their telephone screens until their fingers bleed, tears streaming down their faces as they mourn the death of Twitter, FB, and Instagram.

Or, maybe one day 100 million people will simultaneously discover that they have been sold a worthless bill of goods. They'll be mad when they realize they've been had. They will march on the headquarters of the institutions that sold them the Big Lie, and CEOs, Senators, Governors, Bishops, Deans, Publishers, Presidents, Priests, Police, et al will be swept away.

Trump IS something of an outlier; he is decidedly worse than Nixon. I didn't like Nixon at all, but in some ways he deserves to be in the plus column (albeit a low number). Johnson was more likable than Nixon, and if you hated Nixon's Vietnam's policies, they weren't worse than Johnson's. I would rate Reagan very low. He wasn't a crook (per Nixon), but his domestic policies were terrible. His Star Wars Initiative was ruinously expensive for us, as well as the soviets.

I don't think the first few presidents were all that hot either. Had I been around back then, I would have been a Federalist. Jackson? Quite disagreeable. Lincoln deserves a 5.

I can't remember enough about the presidents after Johnson (Lincoln's vice prez) but what I do remember was that they were not all that bad.

Harding maybe deserves a -2 or -3. When Dorothy Parker heard that Calvin Coolidge had died, she asked, "How could they tell?"

Hoover's reputation may be underrated. He was a very competent executive, so I have heard. True, his austerity program at the onset of the Great depression (which at the time wasn't yet called the Great Depression) failed, when a perhaps non-intuitive generous increase in spending was called for. Everyone wasn't a Keynesian yet.

Kennedy probably deserves a 2 instead of a 1; he was at least inspiring, and the press back then had the decency not to tell us about his exceptionally active sex life. Eisenhower a 1 or 2 instead of a 3. Carter deserves more than a 1. Had the Iran embassy rescue not blow up in his face (and dragged into the very inauguration of Reagan) he'd have a much better reputation. In fact, he might have served 2 terms.

The bushes both deserve a zero -0- at most.

Franklin Roosevelt deserves a 5.

In summary: Were we to rank congress as well as the president, we would find that many sessions of Congress were awful.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614917/our-pathetically-slow-shift-to-clean-energy-in-five-charts/

click on "READ THE WHOLE STORY"

How and when do we demand complete overhaul of entire corporations and infrastructures such as oil production, plastic production, and other unnecessary wasteful pollutants? — Lif3r

How: Through the overthrow of the existing economic structure by revolution, not necessarily violent, but certainly uncomfortable for those who own the means of production. There are people who have described methods that would, most likely work were they implemented (People like DeLeon, Miller, various socialists). They involve intensive and extensive labor and political organizing toward the revolutionary ends of dispossessing the dispossessors (aka the uber rich, 1/10 of 1% to 1 or 2% of the population).

When? As soon as possible, or yesterday, which ever comes first.

Revolutionary change is in order because fossil fuels are the basis of the world economy and have been for over a century (for coal, maybe 150-200 years).

Beware, however: Abandoning fossil fuels will NOT be easy. There is no substitute for oil, in terms of molecules that are energy-rich and the basis of a vast amount of chemistry that composes the feedstock of many types of production. The world economy is organized dependence on fossil fuels.

Chances of success: slightly better than a snowball in hell.

People aren't convinced and aren't educated to the data, and furthermore many who might be simply do not care. People mistrust decades of research because humans are shady and greedy bastards. And as a result well... here we are. — Lif3r

All that may be true, especially we all being shady greedy bastards. But remember, whether we continued using oil and coal was never something about which 99% of the people ever had a choice. Property rights trump good sense, every time. Those who own oil wells and coal mines have decided that coal and oil will continue to be used until it is gone.

This is quite interesting -- not something I have read about.

Like the Deccan traps for example, which has been considered as a possible cause for the demise of the dinosaurs. — Punshhh

More recently in 1815, 13,000 ft volcanic Mount Tambora in Indonesia exploded, blasting away 12 cubic miles of rock, dust, and gas into the atmosphere. The blast was 10 x the power of Krakatoa in 1883. Tambora causes "the year without summer" in North America and parts of Europe. In Massachusetts, for instance, it snowed in June, July, and August (the warmest months of course) of 1816, and there was widespread crop failure followed by a period of famine (in the United States!) There were epidemics in Europe.

There is an interesting problem about the Yucatan meteorite strike, the possible cause of the demise of the Dinosaurs. First, they didn't all die that day, or in the years following. It took quite some time for the dinosaurs to disappear. Secondly, it didn't wipe out the winged dinosaur, the descendants of which are eating at your bird feeder. Third, it didn't wipe out the mammals. That's why we are here, feeding the birds. Ditto for the amphibians and fish.

Here is a picture of a site in North Dakota created on the same day as the Chicxulub strike. The tidal wave crossed the Caribbean and raced up the center of North America. Meanwhile, debris fell from the sky. It isn't very often that we can see a 66 million old event frozen in time on or about the same day.

The Deccan Traps are less familiar to me than Chicxulub.

Ironic — TheMadFool

Ironic; and utterly appalling.

If the most well-informed of all nations behaves in such a callous manner what can we expect from other countries whose economic engines run on fossil fuel? — TheMadFool

cause apparently that's all that matters to people — Mr Bee

Just because the US is the country that produces alot of significant scientific breakthroughs doesn't mean that the US population, and the elected officials chosen by that population, are the most well informed. — Mr Bee

We can, not enough are prepared to make that effort. — xwyhzol

"The People" (you, me, and most others) are not in a position to effect the critical changes such as: very rapid cessation of fossil fuel use, crash program to implement wind and solar energy, immediate minimization of unnecessary production (like SUVs, private jets, McMansions, etc.), rapid transition from private auto to mass transit, and so on. The small percentage of the population who actually own the mines, oil wells, refineries, factories, and so on refuse to give up the source of their great wealth.

The American People didn't pull out of the Paris Accords, one idiot named Donald Trump did that, and he, moron, is doing many other very bad things as well.

A very interesting piece of climatological/theological prestidigitation.

There are, indeed, more atheists than every before -- maybe as many as 1 in 7, but that's just an off the cuff guess. That still leaves 6 billion plus believers in various sorts of supreme beans.

Are you familiar with secular humanism?

Secular humanism posits that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or belief in a deity. ... Many secular humanists derive their moral codes from a philosophy of utilitarianism, ethical naturalism, or evolutionary ethics, and some advocate a science of morality.***

Crises, any big crisis, pick one -- that one over there, for instance -- stir up the human heart. Unfortunately, some people are brought together, and others are driven apart. The hot mess of planetary warming is going to stir things up big time -- it already has started.

You seem to have a bright streak of mystical romantic idealism. That's just a guess, and not meant to be critical of you. Am I way off?

Also such developments could affect the temperature conditions of the earths crust resulting in seismic and volcanic activity. — Punshhh

Where did you hear this? I don't know whether that's possible or not, and if so, how severe the seismic activity would be. But then, pumping water out of aquifers or pumping fracking crap into rocks has caused seismic activity -- not terrible yet, but still... I don't quite see a connection between ocean currents and volcanic activity. How would that work?

*** This is not a recommendation. I don't find secular humanism all that attractive. We are crazy naked apes and are not altogether trustworthy or reliable. Religion has the function of providing we lunatic spasmodic primates with an additional control system. We need all the help we can get.

To be fair the level of drought and fires is the result of lack of rain. I think the balance of nature in Australia is exactly what’s happening now and always has been. — Brett

Silly we, thinking that drought might be caused by something other than a lack of rain!

Somewhere in the United States there is almost always a drought (lack of rain) in progress. These droughts usually begin and end within 6 to 9 months and affect relatively small areas. During the last decade the world has seen remarkably more severe and widespread droughts than would normally be expected. The dry periods have lasted for several years, and as a result there have been severe forest fires -- in Russia, on the west coast of the US, and in Australia.

The reverse, extremely heavy rainfall producing floods of unprecedented severity, have also become more common. The mammoth rainfall on Houston from Hurricane Harvey, was up to 60 inches--more than Houston normally would receive over a year's time. This was the heaviest rainfall in American history -- unprecedented -- and cost 125 billion dollars.

What produced all this rain in Houston, and in other hurricanes recently, is that the atmospheric conveyor belt that normally moves storms along at a brisk clip has slowed down -- a prediction from global warming scientists.

However, you do know, since much has been said of it, that a theory to count as scientific there must be a way to disprove it. I don't hear climatologists making strong enough claims that can be tested against observation in a way that permits of refutation. — TheMadFool

How often do you hear any scientist announce at a press conference that his theory is falsifiable? Isn't falsifiability an entry level condition for a good scientific theory, rather than something that rates a major announcement?

All the evidence for global warming is based on temperature trends over the past few or so decades and even if there is an upward trend we can always ask if it could be cherry-picking — TheMadFool

As it happens, the evidence for global warming is not based just on a few decades of temperature trends. Geologists, 'ice'ologists, oceanographers, and various other specialties have been studying the past few million years for evidence of the relationship between CO2 in the atmosphere and climate. Take ice cores: What they find in very old ice are tiny bubbles of the then existing atmosphere. When the climate at the time is compared to the levels of CO2 in the ice, the correlation is strongly in favor of more CO2 = warmer climate. The same relationship is found in ocean floor mud, tree rings, cores of soils which go back thousands of years in time. Conversely, when CO2 levels are lower than average, the climate is cold. It isn't a correlation between CO2 and temperature: It's a causative relationship. CO2 absorbs and radiates solar energy more than other normal gases in the atmosphere. The more CO2, the hotter the climate.

In itself, global warming is neither a good nor a bad thing. At one time both ice caps had melted, and millions of years later, here we all are. The difference between past gyrations in climate (and there have been a few) is that they were slow. Plants and animals were able to adjust because they had many years in which to adapt to new conditions: Thousands of years, not 50 to 100 years.

That the climate should warm fast enough to melt the Arctic ice cap during a human lifetime, is unprecedented. That the average temperature should rise 2 or 3 degrees F in a human lifetime is unprecedented. That the 70% of the earth that is ocean has warmed up and become more acidic as a result of human activity in a one or two human lifetimes is astounding.

We participate in The Philosophy Forum because we like to collaborate at least to some extent. This site is, by its nature, collaborative. Solitary people who want to spout whatever philosophy or stupid nonsense they believe in, solo, can do so in the comfort of their own homes. Just open your mouth and start blathering away. Or they can open a blog on Tumblr and just scribble into the abyss.

As it happens, collaboration is one of the more successful ways of doing business in the world, whether it is feeding the poor and hungry, working for Exxon, or serving in the Mafia, Camorra, Cosa Nostra, or whatever criminal enterprise one is employed by.

Some individuals don't collaborate. Social isolates who live under bridges on rural freeways don't collaborate, for instance. Isolated monks and nuns who live solitary lives in prayer don't collaborate. Rattlesnakes don't collaborate. Mad dogs don't collaborate.

Are Do-gooders any different than mafia hitmen, as far as collaboration is concerned? Probably not.

Regarding fusion, for interested parties, there is a big international project, funded by the USA, China and the EU, among others, called ITER. It is a project which will, hopefully, prove the viability of industrial fusion, being scheduled for operation in 2025. — Solipsist

And it would really be wonderful if it works even moderately well. I would be ecstatic if ITER works really well. Pollution free energy would be a huge help. Just remember, though, even if ITER works as intended, it won't be a "production reactor". The routine production reactors will follow, and will take 40 to 50 years (possibly a low ball guess) to be installed around the world. Meantime, CO2 will continue to be dumped into the atmosphere.

Also, Tokamak reactors (and associated equipment) are heavy duty industrial equipment which will require a lot of energy and matériel to build.

Well, TMF, relativity has been worked on for a century, and it doesn't have to be proved against the behavior of the oceans, atmosphere, plants, animals, land masses, ice flows, industrially produced gases, and so on. Astronomical observations providing a major proof of relativity, but we didn't have to arrange that event. The problem with climate science is two-fold: First, it is difficult to collect densely distributed data points from the planet surface and secondly, it is difficult to process the masses of data that go into climate models. It takes a lot of big brute force computers, which have not been available since the first signs of climate change were discovered.

Climate science is solid science, like most areas of science. Climate science is not the equivalent of chiropractic medicine and astrology. It is NOT controversial because it hasn't been done well; it is controversial because the consequences of events revealed by the science are so catastrophic. Standard Oil scientists were the first to reveal the connection between fossil fuels, CO2, and climate change. Once the implications of their findings became clear to the company, the PR department took over and buried their results. That would make a good movie -- something like the one about Karen Silkwood. Bearers of bad tidings often end up without honor, if they survive.

there are two routes to carbon sequestration: The first is pumping it deep into the ground and filling the tap pipe with concrete. The second is combining CO2 with calcium, for instance, to make calcium carbonate. Both of these methods work, as far as we can tell, but both take energy to achieve and neither is designed to work with diluted atmospheric CO2. These are "carbon capture in the chimney and then sequestration"programs.

Both of these are technically feasible (as far as I know) but again, they haven't been scaled up, so we don't know whether they will work on a very large and permanent basis. Planting a trillion trees (and more) would be another way to capture CO2, and produce a lot of O in the process. A sprouted tree may take 20 years to get big enough to make a difference, but that's a workable time scale. A trillion trees, though, means less land for agriculture. In 50 to 80 years we would have a lot of mature trees to cut down to make room or more, NOT burn them, and replant.

retention is shot this year thanks to anxiety — Pfhorrest

I appreciate that. I've had some bad years of anxiety and depression and between the disease and the medication I couldn't absorb much, let alone remember it. Fortunately, that proved transitory. Once I retired I had a return of mental clarity. It wasn't instant but it was pretty fast. Now I feel like I'm function (mentally) like a young man, instead of the old guy I am.

Best wishes for your mental health in the coming New Year, which I also hope will be happy. But let's not hold our breath. There's that election, for instance.

I do what I can personally, I don't fly, I heat my house mostly with wood I have grown myself and am researching an appropriate ground source heat pump to install... — Punshhh

All good. Please continue.

Unfortunately (and it really is a misfortune) the problem can not be solved by virtuous individual efforts. That doesn't mean your efforts are wasted, however. You are following the course we all could follow, and if we all did, the world would be much better off. Anyone who shows that reduced consumption is not only possible but perfectly satisfactory is doing good work.

The petrochemical/metal/auto/consumer industrial establishment is the problem, and all that is under the ownership and control of a fairly small group of very wealthy, very powerful people--maybe 10 to 15 million stockholders who make up the planet's economic elite. They are calling the shots, and they do not intend to abandon their extremely remunerative oil, coal, and manufacturing assets. They will extract the last dollar's worth of value, and the devil can take the hindmost.

One day we'll have fusion power. The US gave up on researching it because it was politically unpopular. I'm guessing the Chinese will do it eventually. — frank

As I recollect, it wasn't so politically unpopular as technically unsuccessful. It isn't dangerous, but it is extraordinarily difficult to achieve sustained fusion inside a 'force field'. If all the powerful physical forces are not perfectly arranged, then nothing much happens.

Fusion is a great disappointment; I really wish we had been successful by now.

But energy isn't the only issue. Suppose we figure out how to make fusion power work. It will still take a good long time to build out the necessary units. Time is an issue here, an asset we are running out of. By the time fusion provides all this power too cheap to meter (dream on) we will be late in this century when the fecal matter has hit the fan.

Energy and time are not the only issues. There is also the issue of raw material processing. Making steel from ore without the chemical and physical properties of coke and limestone is an unknown technology. There will still be no substitute for the hydrocarbon molecules that are at the center of so much of our technology. 9 or 10 billion people, or 13 billion--whatever it turns out to be by the end of the century--will still exceed the sustainable fecundity of the oceans and soils. (We are already doing that, actually.).

We are pinning hope on what James Howard Kunstler called (in the title of the book) "Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation".

Where does this all leave us? I expect that there will be a large die off of the human population along with many other species, and down the road a few centuries, that our species will survive in a diminished world.

We still have an emergency brake available (the abrupt abandonment of the fossil-fuel-based economy, world wide). The brake will not be engaged because the immediate consequence would be horrendous economic, social, agricultural, cultural, industrial, and demographic decomposition. While probably saving the climate and many species, it would paradoxically produce much of the disaster we'd like to avoid.

A sensible plan. How long do you think that will last? (I'm counting on the same thing -- heating and AC for at least the next 10 years. Beyond that... given my age, probably the grave.)

Gad, these are corny; one could fatten pigs on them. Thanks for posting them.

I'm not sure what percentage of mankind are assholes, but it certainly could be as high as 90%. Clearly you and me are superior beings.

The problem here is that the role of evolution and genes in determining complex behaviors is by no means clearly or well understood. My view is that homosexuality is genetically determined, but perhaps indirectly. Rather than genes acting directly on males, it may involve genes acting in the female to produce a sequence and timing of hormones during early pregnancy that results in males being homosexual. Your description sounds like another indirect mechanism, But again, we really don't know.

We have 46 chromosomes (23 pairs) but we have a huge number of genes, some of which operate indirectly. A given gene may have a significant effect on development by turning another gene off or on. A lot of genes have direct effects, and many genes have effects by turning others on and off.

our behaviors don't track back to many specific genes, so far anyway. I'm gay. There are most likely a whole set of genes that operate directly and indirectly that result in my finding a particular guy irresistible, and making the necessary moves to have sex with him, and perhaps live him for decades - just like there would be for heterosexual attraction.

Qmeri, human behavior has ALWAYS bounced back and forth between laudable and lamentable. The Internet is, indeed, a tremendously useful amalgam of technologies. Inventing it was laudable. Donald Trump's narcissistic self-infatuation is lamentable, and he'd be that way with or without the Internet. Ditto for whatever ails Elon Musk.

There is a lot of excellent information made available through the Internet, but there is also a lot of slop. Libraries didn't have the problem of accumulating slop because laudable librarians didn't let it happen. There is a lamentable lack of librarians looking after the Internet.

Just a note, you are part of mankind, so... whatever ails mankind probably ails you too. Me as well.