Category Archives: Science

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

An exciting new project arising from Jordan Peterson's ideas, arguments and presentations

It’s called ARC, alluding to Noah’s Ark and the arc of a person’s life – and maybe even to the Ark of the Covenant.

Here is their launch announcement.

Quotes from that announcement:

“New International Alliance Announces Major Conference to Enhance Global Prosperity, Challenge Declinism and Revitalize our Understanding of Human Flourishing”

“The ‘Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’ (ARC) will provide an alternative to “the claim that decline is inevitable.””

“The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) is being established as an international community with a vision for a better world where every citizen can prosper, contribute and flourish.”

The website is here. At the top, it says:

We are seeking answers to some of our day’s most fundamental questions, grounded in our core belief that everyone has intrinsic worth and something to contribute, and humanity has an extraordinary capacity for innovation and ingenuity.

Jordan Peterson presents the reason and ethos of this new organisation in a Youtube podcast. Here’s the main text of what he says in written form in full: My Vision for ARC.

Excerpts:

Despite all this good news, this undeniable progress, a shadow has emerged, an adversarial challenge to this state and process of expanding abundance; an emergent crisis of meaning and purpose. God is dead, or so the story goes, and the future is uncertain. Five centuries of ascendant reductionist Enlightenment rationality have revealed that this starkly objective world lacks all intrinsic meaning. A century and a half or more of corrosive cultural criticism has undermined our understanding of and faith in the traditions necessary to unite and guide us.

In the midst of this existential chaos, the false idol of apocalyptic ideology inevitably beckons.

We find ourselves, in consequence, inundated by a continual onslaught of ominous, demoralizing messages, most particularly in the form of environmental catastrophism; the insistence that we confront a severe and immediately pending emergency of biological destruction, causally associated with our degenerate social structures and their excess and destructive industrial production.

The narrative generating these messages, quasi-religious in its structure and intensity, paints a dismal existential picture: the individual is a rapacious, predatory, parasitical consumer; society—even the little society of the family—an oppressive, tyrannical despoiler; and nature, herself, a hapless, fragile, virginal victim.

[…]

A deep, worldwide, social, economic and environmental revolution is therefore allegedly at hand; those who dare suggest otherwise are blind, if not malevolent, and must be silenced.

The results of such theories? The consequences of such proclamations?

The increasing and increasingly compelled imposition of severe, involuntary limits to material abundance and growth; the resultant artificially-inflated prices, particularly for energy, that most truly punish the poor.

The fraying of our social fabric into a chaos of alienated polarization; simultaneously, and in predictable lockstep, the extension of reach and control over even the most private details of our lives by increasingly gigantic and centralized organizations, governmental and corporate alike.

The spread, particularly among the young, of a demoralizing and socially-divisive doubt and hopelessness.

[…]

We have therefore initiated the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a new movement of hopeful vision, local, national and international in its aim and scope, aimed at the collective, voluntary establishment of a maximally attractive route forward. The ARC will open itself up to widespread public membership, as rapidly and extensively as is practically manageable, at as low a cost as is possible and desirable, so that everyone interested can aid in voluntarily formulating this story and strategy, and to discuss how its implementation might be encouraged.

[…]

The sheer complexity of the world, and the genuine diversity of individual ability and preference means that distributed decision-making is a necessity, not a luxury: no elite technocracy is capable of knowing best and then determining how we should all move forward as individuals and communities.

It follows from this that policy requiring compulsion, let alone force, rather than the voluntary assent of the participants, is bad policy.

We offer for the contemplation of those potentially interested in our invitation six fundamental questions, the answers to which might form the basis for a vision that is voluntarily compelling, motivating, stabilizing and uniting.

  • Vision and Story: What destiny might we envision and pursue, such that we are maximally fortified against anxiety and despair, motivated by faith and hope, and voluntarily united in our pursuit of a flourishing and abundant world?
  • Responsible Citizenship: How might we encourage individuals to reflect and to act so that they adopt full voluntary responsibility for themselves, present and future, as well as their families and communities?
  • Family and Social Fabric: How might we effectively conceptualize, value and reward the sacrificial, long-term, peaceful, child-centered intimate relationships upon which psychological integrity and social stability most fundamentally depend?
  • Free Exchange and Good Governance: How can we continue to gain from the genius of unbridled human innovation and the productive reciprocity of voluntary production and free exchange, while protecting ourselves against the tendency of successful organizations to degenerate into a state of wilfully blind and narrowly self-serving authoritarianism?
  • Energy and Resources: How do we ensure provision of the energy and other resources crucial to our shared security and opportunity in a manner that is inexpensive, reliable, safe, efficient and widely and universally accessible?
  • Environmental Stewardship: How might we properly pursue the environmental stewardship that most truly serves the needs and wants of all individuals today, tomorrow and into the foreseeable future?

Concluding words

We at ARC do not believe that humanity is necessarily and inevitably teetering on the brink of apocalyptic disaster. We do not believe that we are beings primarily motivated by lust for power and desire to dominate. We do not regard ourselves or our fellow citizens as destructive forces, living in an alien relationship to the pristine and pure natural world.

We posit, instead, that men and women of faith and decisiveness, made in the image of God, can arrange their affairs with care and attention so that abundance and opportunity could be available for all.

Those who present a vision of inevitable catastrophe in the absence of severely enforced material privation are not wise seers of the inevitable future, but forlorn prisoners of their own limited, faithless imaginations. Those who scheme to lead using terror as a motivator and force as a cudgel reveal themselves by definition unfit for the job.

We hope to encourage the development of an alternative pathway uphill, out of both tyranny and the desert, stabilizing, unifying and compelling to men and women of sound judgement and free will.

Welcome aboard the ARC.

I intent to formulate my own answers to the above questions, which I will post on the ARC website survey page and on this blog.

Environmentalist Enemies of Human Civilization

Thomas DiLorenzo writes:

In the late 1980s the late Professor Murray Weidenbaum, who was the chairman of President Reagan’s council of economic advisors, invited me to spend a year at his Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis, which I did.  I had no teaching duties and published quite a lot that year, and continued my association with the Center for years afterwards.  Because of that association, and because the Center had published several articles of mine on environmental policy, I was invited to a big conference at the Sundance Institute in Sundance, Utah in January during the early ’90s that was attended by all the big D.C. environmental organizations on one hand, and by a collection of big corporation executives and academics on the other.  On the opening night the Sierra Club/Wilderness Society/etc. crowd presented a video that they said explained their philosophy and their way of thinking of environmental issues.  It was very well done because it was probably produced by Robert Redford’s production people.  It was his Institute, after all, and his pictures were all over the walls.

The most memorable part of the video was a scene of a pathetic looking young boy from the country of India walking barefoot and wearing rags, walking along a dirt road.  Huge dump trucks were blazing by, kicking up dust and stones and spewing pollution.  A deep, ominous voice announces (paraphrasing):  “If you think a billion impoverished Indians is bad, then a billion affluent Indians would be a disaster!”

Human beings are the enemy, in other words, especially “affluent” human beings.  The message of the video was that the solution to this “problem” is twofold:  First, eliminate as many human beings as possible; and second, destroy economic growth and prosperity and return us all to the good ole stone age standard of living.

This has been the primary agenda of the eugenisist American Left for at least the past century, and they have elected as president a senile old pervert and criminal to throw their Hail Mary pass for them.

“BBC accidentally admits COVID Vaccine is to blame for 2022 being Worst Year for Excess Deaths in Half a Century”

"After 'Journalists' choose to lie believing nobody would 'mark their Homework'"

Writes the Exposé:

It was all going so well for the BBC and its reporters until they decided to unequivocally state that in no way shape or form is the Covid-19 vaccine responsible for a record-breaking year of death. They even provided a “source” to prove it and claimed that –

‘Figures up to June 2022 looking at deaths from all causes show unvaccinated people were more likely to die than vaccinated people.’

They then went on to state that –

”If vaccines were driving excess deaths we would expect this to be the other way around.”If vaccines were driving excess deaths we would expect this to be the other way around.

The problem for BBC News and its dishonest reporters is that The Expose has been analysing the source in question, which has been provided by a UK Government institution known as the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for months on end.

And we can reveal that mortality rates per 100,000 in every single age group, even children, in England and Wales were lowest among the unvaccinated in some age groups as early as 2021, and lowest among the unvaccinated in all age groups by May 2022 at the latest.

Therefore, BBC News has not only lied to the public, but they have also admitted in black and white that the Covid-19 injections are to blame for 2022 being the worst year for deaths in half a century by confirming that “if vaccines were driving excess deaths we would expect this to be the other way around (highest mortality rates among the vaccinated)”.

More on this, and the actual data, can be found here.

Evidence of evil among us

The UK's ex-health secretary's publicised WhattApp chats on the lockdowns

Writes Brendan O’Neill:

They were laughing at us. They didn’t only lock us down. They didn’t only suspend virtually every one of our civil liberties, including a right none of us ever expected to lose: the right to leave our own homes. They didn’t only spy on us with drones, and encourage us to snitch on that neighbour going for a sneaky second jog, and fine teenagers life-ruining sums of money for holding house parties. They also chuckled about it. It was funny to them. In one of the most startling WhatsApp chats revealed in the Daily Telegraph’s Lockdown Files, a senior civil servant says the following about Brits returning from trips abroad who were forced to quarantine in a stuffy hotel room for 10 days: ‘Hilarious.’

[…]

We now know that sections of the political elite relished the power lockdown gave them. At points they seemed almost drunk on tyranny.

[…]

A few months later, Hancock was increasingly irate about the Sweden issue, the possibility that this nation that didn’t enforce a sweeping lockdown might be doing quite well. I am sick of the ‘fucking Sweden argument’, he said. ‘Supply three or four bullet [points] of why Sweden is wrong’, he demanded of his aides.

That is extraordinary, no? […] Hancock notably did not ask whether Sweden was wrong but why it was wrong. He wasn’t interested in openly discussing pandemic policy, but rather in insulating his own lockdown ideology from contrasting or contradictory ideas and data. 

[…]

Hancock was resisting advice from chief medical officer Chris Whitty to test everyone entering care homes. According to the leaked texts, Hancock was seemingly concerned that such an endeavour would ‘muddy the waters’ of lockdown messaging. The leaked WhatsApps have led many to conclude that Hancock was especially worried that care-home testing would distract attention from his big, virtuous, legacy-defining effort to ensure that there would be 100,000 Covid tests a day in the broader community. A reminder: 45,000 care-home residents in England and Wales perished from Covid.

[…]

Nothing speaks better to the warped moralism of the Covid era than the fact that sceptics like Heneghan who argued for the elderly and frail to be protected have been demonised as dangerous ‘Covid deniers’, while government officials whose policies had a direct and catastrophic impact on the health of the elderly and frail were, for a period of time at least, treated as unimpeachable voices of moral authority. We need a complete reversal of the Covid narrative. If I see one more angry article in the supposedly liberal media railing against Heneghan or Gupta or any of the others who said ‘Let’s plough our resources into protecting the vulnerable’, now that we know our lockdown elites failed to protect the vulnerable, I will lose it.

[…]

Ms Oakeshott is a backstabber and a money-grubber for revealing these WhatsApp messages, some are saying. Oh stop it. Nothing could be more in the public interest than knowing the thinking behind an ideology and a policy that wrecked civil liberty, suspended democracy, sickened the elderly, hurt the working classes, quarantined the developing world, and led to a suspension of that most key of civilised endeavours: the education of children. A pandemic hit, and the political elite, and the media elite, opted for social tyranny, censorship, non-debate, classism and fearmongering over taking a more rational, liberal, focused approach to the risk of disease. We need to know all about this, so that we might guard against it in the future.

On the Covid lab leak story

It's a rear-guard action by our minders, says Catte Black

The “covid was a lab leak” story was always a back door official narrative that reinforced the reality of the “pandemic” while appearing to be a suppressed “alternative”. You know, one of those “suppressed alternatives” that end up in the WSJ. It’s now going to be used to finally bury any hope that 2020-21 will wake us up to the full modern reality of geopolitics.

Continue reading here.

Zero Carbon Agenda Deconstructed

It's leading us to absolute slavery, says the "Ice Age Farmer"

A vlogger by the name of Christian, who posts under the title “Ice Age Farmer” has posted a 54-minute video (about one year ago) about what zero carbon will really mean for the economy and society. It’s not pretty.

Here’s the video description:

What is a zero-carbon future? What does it look like? To imagine, turn off your heater. No airports. No shipping. No animals. Perfect surveillance state. In this Ice Age Farmer special report, Christian breaks The “Absolute Zero” plan and how governments are actively taking drastic steps every day to meet these dystopian goals for Travel, Transport, Energy, Manufacturing, Recycling, and Food. We must understand the reality underneath their flowery philanthropic language: Absolute Slavery.

The slow death of Europe

Industry is being strangled by sky-high energy bills and mountains of bureaucracy

Article by Ralph Schoellhammer

Excerpts:

The foundations for the modern world were laid in less than a hundred years. Michael Faraday discovered magnetic induction in 1831. Justus von Liebig documented plant metabolism in 1840. James Clerk Maxwell published his description of electromagnetism in 1865. In 30 years, humanity achieved an understanding of the physical world that was necessary for electricity generation, artificial fertilisers and wireless communication.

The West enjoyed a level of societal energy that propelled it to global dominance. This was made possible by extending the lifetime and productive capacity of the most important resource of all – human beings. As medicine and hygiene standards progressed, so did life expectancies and birth rates.

[…]

At a glance, Europe and the US still appear to be the most formidable economies in the world right now. But China also seemed unassailable back in the 16th century, before its decline. Most economic trends are no longer in the West’s favour.

Take energy production. Consumers from California to Copenhagen have to deal with high electricity prices. And to make matters worse, government institutions like the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission are shutting down nuclear power plants wherever they can. Meanwhile last year, the United Arab Emirates, usually thought of as a petrostate, finished constructing its third nuclear reactor in 10 years.

What about renewable energy, so often touted as the solution to both climate change and runaway energy prices? Even putting aside the pitfalls of wind and solar power, such as their inherent intermittency, new plants are not being built at anything like the pace needed to power our societies. In order to build a wind farm off the coast of Norfolk in the UK, developer Boreas had to issue a 13,275-page environmental-impact assessment. This is ‘144 pages longer than the complete works of Tolstoy combined with Proust’s seven-volume opus, In Search of Lost Time’, according to Sam Dumitriu of Britain Remade. For Germany to meet its 2030 energy-transition goals, it would have to install the equivalent of 43 football fields of solar panels and 1,600 heat pumps per day, plus 27 new onshore and four offshore wind farms per week. Needless to say, nothing close to this is happening.

The West is increasingly deluding itself. We are led to believe that Green New Deals and miracle innovations in battery-storage technology will solve all our problems. If our societies still possessed the vitality of their 19th-century predecessors, I could probably be convinced to believe it. But we simply don’t.

There are no perfect moments in any civilisation’s history, only periods that appear as such in hindsight. The central question every nation’s leaders must ask themselves is whether they are managing decline or managing ascent. It’s clear which way much of Europe is heading.

Polar Wildlife Was Thriving in 2022

So says a report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation

Here is the press release in full (my emphases):

In the Polar Wildlife Report 2022, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on International Polar Bear Day, zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford explains that ice-dependent species in the Arctic and Antarctic show no sign of impending population crashes due to lack of sea ice.

Crockford’s report reveals that there were no reports in 2022 that would suggest that polar wildlife is suffering as a result of reduced sea-ice extent: no starving polar bears or walrus, no beach-cast dead seals, no marked declines in great whale numbers, no drowned penguin chicks.

While a few Antarctic penguin species and the Antarctic minke whale appear to have suffered a recent decline in abundance, these were unrelated to sea-ice cover in the Southern Ocean. Similarly, in the Arctic, a recent 27% decline in polar bear numbers in Western Hudson Bay was found to be unrelated to sea-ice conditions over the last five years.

Indeed, contrary to all expectations, critical Antarctic winter sea ice has been increasing since 1979. While sea-ice experts have long voiced concerns that computer models of future Antarctic sea ice coverage are seriously flawed, biologists concerned about the future of ice-dependent emperor penguins and Antarctic krill have continued to use them to justify alarmist predictions.

Crockford concludes: “In both the Arctic and Antarctic, less summer sea ice has meant increased primary productivity, which in turn has meant more food for all animals. This explains in part why polar wildlife continues to thrive, even in areas with much reduced summer sea-ice coverage.”

The Polar Wildlife Report 2022

Key Findings

• There were no reports in 2022 that would suggest polar wildlife is suffering as a result of reduced sea-ice extent; in both the Arctic and Antarctic, less summer sea ice and increased primary productivity over the last two decades has meant more food for all animals, which explains in part why polar wildlife has been thriving.

• Arctic sea ice in summer has declined since 1979, but has had an overall flat trend since 2007; coverage was again well below average in the Barents and Chukchi Seas in 2022, where continued high primary productivity has provided abundant food resources for wildlife; winter ice coverage in 2022 was slightly lower than 2020 but overall has shown a relatively flat trend since 2011.

• Ice-dependent polar bears worldwide probably now number about 32,000, with a wide range of potential error; a survey of Western Hudson Bay polar bears in 2021 generated a population decline of 27% since 2016, but this did not correlate with lack of sea ice. A genetically-distinct subpopulation of polar bears was discovered thriving in SE Greenland, and western Barents Sea bears (Norway) are still doing well despite the most profound summer sea-ice loss of all Arctic regions.

• Atlantic walrus numbers are still low, but recovering in the Barents Sea and eastern North America. A new population estimate of Pacific walrus in 2019 reveals more than 200,000 exist in the Chukchi/Bering Sea area. More killer whales were reported visiting the Eastern Canadian Arctic, and in Alaska and the Western Canadian Arctic, bowhead whales are thriving.

• Antarctic sea ice extent has barely changed since 1979: vital winter ice has slightly increased overall while summer ice has slightly declined (with its lowest extent in December 2022), all while overall primary productivity has increased. A new sea ice predictive model acknowledges previous flaws and does not predict a future decline until 2050 at the earliest.

• Krill are crucial prey for many species of wildlife (especially huge numbers of great whales and penguins) that live or feed in the Southern Ocean. Future intensification of commercial fishing of krill (largely to feed farmed fish) is likely the largest conservation threat to local wildlife, given recent geopolitical tensions over effective fisheries management.

• Numbers of fin, blue, humpback, and southern right whales feeding in Antarctic waters in summer have increased in recent years, and while minke whale numbers appear to have declined, an estimated 500,000 individuals still frequent the region.

• Killer whales (orcas) are the top predator in the Southern Ocean and most populations appear to be thriving. The IUCN lists all ice-dependent seals in Antarctica as ‘least concern’.

• Several albatross and large petrel species are considered ‘vulnerable’ by the IUCN due to deadly interactions with long-line trawlers fishing for Antarctic toothfish (Patagonian sea bass), while over-fishing of this cod-like species and the herring-like Antarctic silverfish is also a concern.

• Emperor penguins, the largest and most ice-dependent penguin species, were classified as ‘Threatened’ on the US Endangered Species List in 2022 but remain ‘Near Threatened’ according to the IUCN Red List because of the large size of their breeding population and the acknowledged uncertainty of future sea-ice predictions.

The Polar Wildlife Report 2022 (pdf)