Unitarian Universalists and the Guidance of Reason

When I joined a brick and mortar UU congregation in 1996, I loved the UU emphasis on reason.  I was especially inspired by the fifth source: “Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.”
In 2007, a fly appeared in the ointment of reason.  UUWorld published “Eating Ethically,” telling UUs to eat organic food.  The article omitted organic farming’s lower yields and the fact that organic food costs more and not all UUs would be able to afford it.  Shades of Calvin, who thought you could discern the worthy because they were rich.
Local food was likewise recommended. Do UUs believe in the interdependent web of existence but not in an interdependent economy?  Don’t out of town people have the same inherent worth and dignity as locals?  Also, the article dismissed the Green Revolution (advances in plant breeding and agricultural technology) as unsustainable. Shouldn’t UUs celebrate a billion people saved from starvation?
The article admonished UUs  to shorten their food miles, yet the food miles concept is  fallacious because the significant variable is not the distance the food travels, but how much fuel is needed per pound of food transported.   I calculated that it’s more efficient in terms of pounds of food transported per gallon of gasoline to ship it long distances in big trucks compared to short trips to a local farmer (which the article recommended) to buy a week’s worth of produce for the family.
The official UU magazine was wrong! What a disillusionment!  If they were wrong about food miles what else would they be wrong about?   However, we haven’t heard much about food miles for the last five years.  Other people besides me must have done the math.
Historical logic likewise flies out the door. According to Susan Frederick Gray, newly elected Unitarian Universalist Association president:  “Global climate disruption is a direct result of the paradigm of dominance that also perpetuates racial, social, and economic inequities,” she writes, “as well as systemic violence of against women, indigenous communities, people of color, and the poor.”  The two other UUA presidential candidates submitted similar statements.
Their reasoning is specious.  The “paradigm of dominance” perpetuating racism, economic and social inequities, enforced by violence, has been around for the last 10,000 years of human history. For instance, the Bible says, “Slaves, obey your masters.” So why has the climate changed only in the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution with its increased carbon dioxide emissions?   Moreover, violence -- against women, indigenous communities, people of color, and the poor -- has been decreasing during the same time the climate has been warming.  In the US, the slaves got freedom, women got the vote, and gays got marriage.
As Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of our Nature 2011, modern communications technology allows people to empathize with each other, thus reducing violence.
When UU leaders make pronouncements, I wish they would follow their own venerable traditions of logic and reason.

The Conservation of Virtue

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right,” said Henry David Thoreau in Resistance to Civil Government 1849.  Ever since Thoreau, who refused to pay a tax supporting slavery, people have continued to break laws in the name of a higher good.
In the late fifties, Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus; African American students held sit-ins at white lunch counters.  These protesters, whose cause was equal treatment for all, broke contemporary laws, but did not endanger anyone.
The Civil Rights movement was followed by the Peace Movement against the Vietnam War.  Most of us can agree that peace is better than war, although some felt the dangers of world Communist domination overrode the evils of war. Most of the protesting was peaceful.
“The nice ways always fail,” sang Malvina Reynolds in1964.  But the data shows they don’t. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan in Why Civil Resistance Works 2012 showed that nonviolent campaigns to be more than twice as effective as violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals.  Nevertheless, some antiwar protesters went so far as to bomb facilities supporting the war, killing innocents who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A statement by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg in How Not to Be Wrong 2015 applies to activists as well as pious people.  “We become like those pious people who, over time, accumulate a sense of their own virtuousness so powerful as to believe the bad things they do are virtuous too,” -- what I call the Conservation of Virtue principle.
A just cause may justify civil disobedience, but does an act of civil disobedience mean the cause is just?  For instance, in 2015, Kim Davis defied a Federal court order and refused to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples.  Correspondingly, in math speak, the fact that all primes greater than two are odd does not imply all odd numbers are prime.
Al Gore understands the value of making a political cause a moral cause: “The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause . . .”  An Inconvenient Truth 2006. Hence, climate activists can presume the conservation of virtue.
In the case of the Valve Turner action in October 2016, climate activists blocked transport of Canadian tar sands oil to US refineries to prevent burning fossil fuels that contributes to climate change.  Never mind their action endangered people at the present time.  Carl Weimer, executive director at the industry watchdog Pipeline Safety Trust, said  "Closing valves on major pipelines can have unexpected consequences endangering people and the environment.” http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-canada-pipelines-idUSKCN12B26O
Other pipeline operators and safety experts said shutting off valves was extremely dangerous and that activists underestimated the risks.  “Pipelines can be heavily pressurized depending on length and altitude variation, and shutting off a valve could cause ruptures that are ‘catastrophic’ for the environment,” said Paul Tullis of Tullis Engineering Consultants.  http://business.financialpost.com/news/energy/bolt-cutters-expose-vulnerability-of-north-americas-oil-pipeline-grid
Valve Turner Leonard Higgins, applying the Conservation of Virtue principle, says his actions were necessitated by the immediate danger that climate change poses to his family, his friends, and every other human on earth.  Given the responsibility to protect innocent people from the ravages of climate change, he had no choice but to take illegal action
"It's an act of desperation," Higgins says. "I don't think that there's a direct cause and effect that my taking this action will carry the day, but it contributes, just as in other acts of civil resistance in other movements in the past.”  Does Higgins see himself taking Rosa Parks’ seat?
So if I truly believe genetically engineered food endangers human health, biodiversity, and the planet’s ecosystems, should I attack Safeway?  Would my Unitarian Univeralist congregation hold a fund raiser for my legal defense as several congregations did for the Valve Turners?  I don’t think so.

Malthus + Thoreau = Green

Two streams of thought have contributed to the modern environmental movement and climate activism. Malthus, cited math and science, Thoreau waxed poetic about nature.
Thomas Robert Malthus originated the math and science arm of modern environmentalism when he stated in 1798 that population grows exponentially while resources to feed the population can only grow arithmetically. Therefore, population will inevitably outstrip the food supply. Doom awaits!
Malthus did not believe in philanthropy. “We are bound to disclaim the right of the poor to support.”  In the meantime, to get rid of the fast multiplying poor, “we should encourage settlements in unwholesome situations.”  Thus the overpopulation threat was used as an excuse to oppress the poor. The British used Malthusian arguments to justify not giving aid to starving Irish during the 19th century potato famine.
Later, in the 20th  century, writers like Paul Ehrlich revived the Malthusian argument. In the same vein as the mid-19th century British authorities, Paul Ehrlich stated that if India didn’t control its population, it “will be one of those we must allow to slip down the drain.”
By the late 20th century, not only was civilization going to end under its own weight as per historians like Arnold Toynbee, the environment, essential to our survival, was being destroyed because of too many people.   Doom continues as a theme of the environmental movement.
Malthus’ hypothesis was plausible; the math was correct, but what actually happened?  World population is now seven times what it was in Malthus’ time, but wealth per person is forty times as high, although it is inequitably distributed. Thanks to Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution, the famines Ehrlich predicted never happened.
Since his predictions didn’t come true, there must have been factors Malthus didn’t account for. First, he left out human ingenuity. By 1844, thinkers like Friedrich Engels, coauthor with Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto, had already asked, “What is impossible for science?”  Ideas feed on each other and thus, like population, grow exponentially.
  Hence, too small or too dispersed a population has disadvantages.  The sparse aboriginal Tasmanians lost technology compared to what their ancestors had brought from Australia.  Once the last tool broke and the last person who knew how to repair it or make a new one died, there were no more such tools.
Malthus didn’t foresee fossil fuels’ gift of energy and the ensuing industrial revolution.  Also, neither he nor Ehrlich expected the Demographic Transition. With increased wealth, fewer babies die, hence women have fewer of them.  They prefer education and careers over motherhood.  In the real world, population growth has been slowing down.
Like Malthus, Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden, contributed to modern environmentalist thought. Unlike Malthus, he didn’t see the world as crowded or overpopulated. “Our horizon is never quite at our elbows.”
Thoreau saw nature in spiritual terms: “A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air.” Unlike Malthus, Thoreau was not of a mathematical mind, though his pronouncements sound like an advance example of mansplaining.   “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  How did he know?  Did he take a survey?  He claimed morning air a panacea for all ills. Where’s the evidence?  It didn’t cure his tuberculosis.  “We do not ride on the railroad, it  rides upon us,” meaning we don’t control technology, but it controls us.  What was his reasoning?
Malthus’ solution to poverty was to get rid of poor people; Thoreau thought they should just want less. “Simplify, simplify,” says Thoreau, hence workers should be content to live in packing boxes. “. .  a large box. . . six feet long by three feet wide . . having drilled a few auger holes in it. . “  while he enjoyed his snug cabin and had a mother a mile away who did his laundry and brought him cookies.  Voluntary simplicity for me; abject poverty for thee.
  Like Malthus, Thoreau rejected  philanthropy.  “Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. I saw it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him.”
What Thoreau ate was very important to him.  He claimed eating meat and more than one meal per day to be self-indulgent.  Did he tell that to the Irish during the potato famine occurring during his voluntary Walden sojourn? Is it a surprise he died of tuberculosis (linked to malnutrition) at age 44?
Thoreau loved nature but he didn’t like much of anything else: not communication, not commerce, nor other people. As Steven Pinker explains in The Better Angels of Our Nature 2011, commerce and communication reduce violence because other people become more valuable alive than dead when you can trade your surplus for their surplus to the benefit of both parties.  Communication allows people to identify with each other, increasing empathy and reducing violence. Since the Middle Ages, a time of self-sufficient local farmers, homicide rates have fallen a hundredfold.
From Civil Disobedience: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’,” yet government keeps people from settling their own disputes in a violent fashion.
Thoreau’s dislike of socializing and his strict routines made me wonder if he suffered from Asperger’s syndrome.  I found many hits on Google, suggesting others had had the same suspicion.  Hence he can be forgiven for his misanthropic views.
One thing we can take away from Walden is the value of retreats, short term opportunities to examine one’s life. In addition, we learn to appreciate nature. We set aside parklands. In the city, Zen gardens give us the serenity of nature.  Thoreau was correct in that spending your life trying to acquire more and more stuff does not bring contentment.
Modern Green climate activists combine ideas from both Malthus and Thoreau.  From Malthus derive the use of math and science and the dangers of overpopulation because the fewer the people, the fewer carbon emissions. From Thoreau come asceticism, moralizing food intake, dislike of technology, the love of nature, as well as the penchant for telling other people what they should do.
In the bash-the-poor tradition of Malthus and Thoreau, climate activists favor a carbon tax. Since the poor spend a greater proportion of their income on fuel than the rich, such a tax is more regressive than a sales tax on food. Picture the impact $10 per gallon gasoline would have on the budget of a struggling single mother who drives a gas hog and lives in a poorly insulated trailer miles away from her minimum wage job!

God rest Unitarian Universalists

         No rest for Unitarians, the world’s in disarray
The climate still is changing, race is here to stay
So work for social justice, with meetings every day.
Loud tidings of passion and zeal, passion and zeal,
Loud tidings of passion and zeal.

With apologies to Christopher Raible
Happy Holidays to all!

Little Boxes

Humming along with Malvina Reynolds’ catchy tune “Little Boxes” on my internet radio, for the first time I really listened to the words. “Little Boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.”   Not only are the boxes identical, but the individuals living in them are identical as well:  “Then [off] to the university where they are put in boxes and they come out all the same.”  But if you went inside the houses, everybody’s would look different because everybody is different – a unique valuable individual with thoughts and feelings.
I imagine the residents of the little boxes as people who have worked their way up from poverty.  Steven Jay Gould’s family is an example.  “Papa Joe, [Gould’s grandfather] who possessed extraordinary artistic talents that remained undeveloped and underutilized, lived an ordinary life as a garment worker in New York City. He enjoyed periods of security and endured bouts of poverty; he and my grandmother raised four children, all imbued with the ordinary values that ennoble our species and nation: fairness, kindness, the need to persevere and rise by one's own efforts. In the standard pattern, his generation struggled to solvency; my parents graduated from high school, fought a war, and moved into the middle classes; the third cohort achieved a university education, and some of us have enjoyed professional success.” “September 11, 1901"  http://hermiene.net/essays-trans/september_11_1901.html
Shouldn’t  those who sing for ordinary people in songs like “This Land is Your Land”  congratulate rather than sneer at the ones who make it into the middle class?

Wheezers, Geezers, and Gimps!

Unitarian Universalist congregations are becoming ever more oriented toward social justice, a trend that has been accelerating since Justice GA in 2012.  This trend is an advantage for the UU movement because being for something unites people more than being against something, such as in the past, traditional religious dogma.  Social justice activism grows congregations and growing congregations make ministers look good.
However, social justice crowds out other concerns.  For instance, some in my congregation want to forego remodeling our building in order to fight climate change.  This group  takes the moral high ground because they claim if energy and resources are focused on the building, the congregation will not have the energy to address the climate emergency. Those in favor of remodeling also take the moral high ground, claiming our current space decreases our ability to live our mission. Meanwhile, there are people in the congregation who are excluded from its programs because they can’t climb stairs or breathe the polluted indoor air.
As Carolyn Zaikoski points out, you have to be able bodied to be a good activist. http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/09/social-justice-activism-ableist/   Activists have to be able to go to events in inaccessible spaces and to participate in public protests.  So why should a congregation expend its limited  resources for the disabled if its mission is to be social activists?
Wheezers, geezers, and gimps!  Who needs ‘em?

Humans Extinct by 1900!

County Cork, Ireland, 1847, in a time of climate change:  Several wet summers in succession have allowed a blight, Phytophthora infestans, to ravage the Irish potato crop. These potatoes, propagated asexually, have low resistance to the blight since they have almost no genetic diversity.  Even though Ireland has continued to export meat, grain, and dairy products, the peasants live almost exclusively on potatoes.  Now that crop is failing and the peasants are starving.
This is just as the Rev Thomas Malthus predicted forty years ago in 1800.  The Irish, ignorant Roman Catholics, multiplied faster than their food supply.   As Malthus commented, “The population should be swept from the soil.”
There could be more far reaching effects.  As plague jumped from rats to people, P. infestans could affect other members of the Solanaceae family: eggplants, tomatoes, and tobacco.  Not only that, in half a century, it could affect all agricultural crops. We just don’t know what kind of Black Swan event might occur.   When world agriculture fails, so will humanity. Human extinction is possible by 1900!

Well, all that could have happened, but how much to worry about something depends on the probability of it happening. An asteroid could fall on my house, my house could burn down, or a tree could fall on it.  I get homeowner’s insurance, but not asteroid insurance, since there’s only an asteroid landing big enough to create a crater only every five thousand years or so.
Be reasonable!

You and Me or Aedes?

In his 2012 book, Merchants of Despair, Robert Zubrin traces the antihumanism movement, beginning with Malthus, who claimed that population grows exponentially while productivity grows arithmetically; on to eugenics; on to the Nazi Holocaust.  These movements advocated getting rid of excess people.  Malthus urged, “We should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases and those benevolent but much mistaken men who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”  The eugenics movement sterilized the surplus population;  the Nazis killed them.  Zubrin then explores antihumanism’s modern incarnations, population control and radical environmentalism.
The current incarnation of antihumanism, the school of thought that the balance of nature must be preserved at the expense of human beings, is alive and well. The June 2016 Smithsonian Magazine has an article detailing how genetic engineering techniques could bring the Aedes aegypti mosquito to near or complete extinction.  Since more than a million people die every year from diseases such as yellow fever, dengue fever, and Zika virus, transmitted by these bugs, it would seem like a no-brainer to get rid of them. Not so fast say those who value the balance of nature over human flourishing.  From the comments to the article:
Vera Gottlieb says: “As pesky as these critters may be, they are part of the chain of life on this planet.  We are all interconnected and we should NOT upset this balance.  We have already messed up enough.”  Does Gottlieb believe that respect for the interdependent web of life takes priority over respect for human beings?
DV says, “Kill all the mosquitoes and we wipe out the bats, frogs, and numerous bird species.  If we don’t, Mother Earth will come up with some other way to quell the human infection.”  Human INFECTION?  Are human beings no better than Zika virus?
The most outrageous of the commenters, Patturk, says, “Eliminate the diseases and instead contribute to an even greater population explosion of humans, leading to more wars over dwindling resources such as fresh water and  more humans killing each other.  Hmm, death by mosquito or by war.  When will we learn that nature knows best?  Why is so much effort put into curing death?  Or, more humans living longer, crowding out other species until all that’s left are people, sheep, pigs, and cows.  Great idea.”
Is it a better idea to let millions of human beings die of preventable diseases?  Shades of Malthus, the original antihumanist, who likewise recommended not treating diseases.

Sexual Dimorphism Denial

The UUWorld Summer 2016 “Families” page suggests that leaving gender specific pronouns out of our speech will ensure fair treatment for all genders. According to the article, girls and boys would not be limited by their gender in such a culture.
Let’s examine a historical example of this thesis.   The Chinese language does not have gender specific pronouns – “he” and “she” translate as “zee.”   Nevertheless, for a thousand years in China, girls were subjected to the cruel and crippling practice of foot binding.  Deliberate disabling is limiting, to say the least. Foot binding was outlawed for the first time in 1912, but continued in the remote provinces.  There are a few surviving elderly women with bound feet, although the last store selling “lotus” shoes closed in 1999.
Due to Western influence, written Chinese began to distinguish pronoun gender in 1917  even as the foot binding custom was decreasing.  It seems gender specific pronouns are not linked to gender-based oppression.
Politically correct or not, a few plants and most animals, including humans, come in male and female, a phenomenon called sexual dimorphism, the technical term for gender binary. The female provides quality gametes; the male provides a quantity of gametes.  The reshuffling of traits at fertilization helps the organism adapt to changing environments.  For instance, bananas, which reproduce asexually, were predicted in 2003 to become extinct in ten years.   https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17723784-800-going-bananas/
Animals have sex; people have sex and gender – the feeling of being masculine or feminine.  Usually sex and gender coincide, but if they don’t, individuals like Ben (trans boy featured in “Families”)  should be treated with kindness and fairness.  Nobody should be forced into doing something because “boys don’t” or “girls have to.”
Many years ago I met a young person whose sex I could not determine.  I felt disconcerted at first.  How should I relate to this person?  Then I realized since I wasn’t dating this person what did it matter?  Maybe at some future time when everyone can be bisexual and attraction depends on the personality of their date, physical sex won’t matter except to get sperm and egg together.
Pronouns are irrelevant, but denial of sexual dimorphism by not using “he” or “she” is as unscientific as climate change denial.

Ten Books that Modified My Thinking

Members of my book group listed the ten books that had modified their thinking.  Here’s my list:

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain 1884. An outcast understood the contradictions of slavery, showing individual conscience can be more discerning than the prevailing mores.
The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 1959.  Darwinian evolution is compatible with Catholic theology and symbolism. Important to me because I was a practicing Catholic when I read it in 1961.
Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor 1984.  Dogs and other animals can be taught without force or violence. Applies to people, too.
Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos 1988.   Innumeracy (lack of facility with numbers and probability) is both widespread and has serious consequences.  Do the math and do it right!
Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond 1997.  Differences in technological advancement among cultures are not because of differences of ability among races.   Before I read this book I thought history was factoids about dead people, but history written by scientists reveals interesting patterns.
Non-Zero by Robert Wright 2001.   Win-win prevails over zero-sum.  IMHO, the Force that drives the Universe and human history.
Authentic Happiness by Martin EP Seligman 2002.  Optimists thrive, building on their strengths.
The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley 2010.  Although pessimists are considered wise, they’ve almost always been wrong.
The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker 2011.  Masses of data demonstrate that humans have become ever less violent over the ten thousand years of our history.
Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin 2012.  Anti-humanist Malthusians, wrong so far, have hijacked environmentalist movements.

I see  all the titles confirm my bias toward bottom-up evolution leading to peace and prosperity for all.  The moral arc is long but it bends towards justice.

Who Has Enough?

Mother used to tell me, “Finish your vegetables because of all those starving children in China and Africa.”  But how were my veggies supposed to get to the Chinese or African children?  Like Jeffrey Lockwood in UU World Spring 2016, I’d had enough.
        Lockwood says, “[we need to] worry about a species that can’t say enough.”  However, he is concerned that, “In a warming world, we’ll run out of [there won’t be enough] ice caps, arable soil, coral reefs, fresh water, coastal cities, livable land, sea walls, and air conditioners.”
Lockwood says planet and life will be OK because it’s survived high CO2 levels before.   However, he says we should stop emitting CO2 so the planet will return to its “original” temperature.  Which original? The original of the Ice Ages when most of Europe and North America was covered by glaciers? Or of the Little Ice Age when the Thames froze over?  If those originals are too cold, what about the Eocene 55 million years ago when Earth was 10° C warmer?
It’s true that some of us have more than we need, but that doesn’t mean we all have more than we need. Nearly half of the world’s population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day. More than 1.3 billion live in extreme poverty — less than $1.25 a day.  One quarter of all humans live without electricity — approximately 1.6 billion people.  80% of the world population lives on less than $10 a day.
Mother could have sent the veggie money overseas to buy food for the poor children. Oxfam estimates that it would take $60 billion annually to end extreme global poverty--that's less than one fourth the income of the top 100 richest billionaires.    However, redistribution of wealth, generally frowned upon by those who already have it, would be only a partial solution. Also, those that already have barely enough wouldn’t accept the redistribution solution.  Would there be enough for everyone to have enough or will everyone be poor after redistribution?
But what if we can produce enough for everyone to have enough? We’ve done it with food.  Despite Malthus’ and Ehrlich’s dire predictions, there’s enough food for everyone on the planet to have an adequate diet.  Let’s continue the work of the Green Revolution (including GMOs) that has already saved hundreds of millions of lives.  Let’s harness energy from the sun, the wind, the water, the nukes, and yes, fossil fuels to free human beings from backbreaking labor and poverty.
Lockwood claims a better legacy would be a world where we learned to say “enough.”
I disagree.  I say there’s not enough until every human being on our planet has enough.

The Great Katamarchism (Jaywalking) Crisis

Looking back, it seems incredible that our whole society was taken in by The Great Jaywalking Crisis of the early 21st century.  Although jaywalking had always been illegal, psychologists realized that the behavior was a symptom of a deeper pathology since almost all sexual predators, sociopaths, and terrorists had a history of jaywalking.  The aberrant behavior of  jaywalking was labeled katamarching.   So now not only was jaywalking wrong, it was the sick behavior of katamarchism.
Those who claimed katamarchism was nothing but ordinary jaywalking were labeled deniers.  Since 97% of psychologists believed in the insidious dangers of katamarching, the science was settled.
As katamarchism became more evident, the media leapt into the fray.  The internet  displayed graphs showing the growth of katamarchism.  Math experts pointed out exponential growth increases forever and ever faster.  Our cities were about to be inundated with katamarchers.  When scientists applied the random walk theory to katamarchism, they showed that the streets would be so filled with katamarchers that straight walkers would no longer be able to cross the streets.  Pedestrian traffic would be a Brownian motion tangle. As Paul Ehrlich said in The Population Bomb, “The streets seemed alive with people . . . People, people, people, people.”
Activists jumped on the katamarchism bandwagon, yet the matter soon divided along liberal versus conservative lines.  Conservatives who favored social order supported the campaign against katamarchism; while liberals who supported fairness and equality for all called the campaign a vendetta against individual liberty.  There were marches, demonstrations, and protests for and against katamarchism.  When jaywalking mothers were seen leading their children across streets, the anti-katamarchists cried, “They recruit, save our children!” Slogans multiplied.  “This is the last year we have to stop katamarchism.”  “Katamarchism threatens the American family,”  “Katamarchism is a human right.”
Those with katamarching tendencies learned to exercise their proclivities in the dark.  However, when a katamarcher was caught, he was held by the police until he named others of his ilk.  It turned out there were more katamarchers than anyone expected.  These deviants were infiltrating American institutions.  They had to be ferreted out and removed.
An obscure Congressman from an obscure state used the campaign against katamarchism to further his political career.  His committee forced people to answer questions such as, “Are you now or have you ever been a jaywalker?”  If they lied, they were liable for prosecution for perjury;  if they told the truth, they were liable for prosecution for katamarchism.
Lives were ruined.  Katamarchers lost their jobs, became poverty stricken.  They congregated in homeless camps where they didn’t use electricity, own much, drive cars, or heat their dwellings.  They used little water because they didn’t flush toilets or wash their clothes or bodies often.
Radical environmentalists understood that the homeless live lightly on the earth.  These elites joined the conservatives in the campaign to rid the world of katamarchers, thus forcing more people into poverty, thereby saving the planet for their own grandchildren.
Eventually, people crossed streets as the situation required, which led to a workable balance of freedom and order.  Fears of katamarchism faded away as did the fears of Y2K, nuclear winter, eugenic degradation, and New York’s and London’s streets being buried  in horse manure.

Recovering Unitarian Universalist

At my congregation, I used to hear, “I’m a recovering Catholic,” spoken with an air of smug condescension, now that the speaker had seen the light of Unitarian Universalism.  Since UUs are called to honor the wisdom in all religions, why would any religion be something to recover from? Nonetheless, I’m recovering from the current local version of Unitarian Universalism.
My mind stands with David Kipp who writes to the UU World Winter 2015, “. . . a person who dares challenge any central tenets of political liberalism, which masquerades as social justice, is openly scorned, mocked, and made unwelcome by UU congregations.”
Some social justice issues prioritize the planet over the people living on it.  Elite UUs driving Priuses to the Co-op can rail against fossil fuels, GMOs, and non-local, non-organic food.  My values lie with people who need low-cost fuel and food.
My journey away from UU green liberalism began when I did the food miles math and discovered long distance semis use less gasoline per pound of food transported than a family Prius going to a local farm because the semis carry so much more freight per trip.  Details in 12/5/15 blog entry: “A Fine Line.”  If they lied about food miles, what else are they lying about?
With the focus outside the congregation, rather than within it, individuals don’t matter much. Turnover is high.  “[People] find comfort and stimulation while here, then move onto something else,” according to the congregation’s newsletter.  Although the writer was describing, not prescribing, there’s a structural reason why congregations are quick to drop people from the rolls; they are taxed for each voting member.  Congregants are only as good as their last pledge.  http://dawncooley.com/2015/05/28/people-are-not-hot-potatoes/
My heart stands with Teresa Soto who blogs,  “I’m going to be angry when people are indifferent to barriers keeping me and people like me out of buildings where they are indifferent to our participation.” UU World Winter 2015.
The air is so polluted inside my home congregation’s building that I cannot enter it without suffering a debilitating cough caused by chemical sensitivity that I acquired due to inadequate safety measures while ameliorating a Superfund site.  No other buildings in town give me trouble. A gas mask will protect me from the bad air, but not the gauntlet of stares and rude remarks.  http://www.uua.org/accessibility/chemical/26972.shtml.
When I offered to help purchase a ventilation system, I was told Board Policy prohibited special contributions.  I appealed to the appropriate committees. The Building Committee was bonding with each other; the Environmental Committee was saving Earth from carbon dioxide; the Accessibility Committee met once.



The irony of a Green Sanctuary in a sick building! The double irony of an organization that professes to be accessible to all but isn’t! The triple irony of an organization that focuses on saving the environment being inaccessible to a person who was injured while improving said environment!

A Fine Line

“There is a fine line between numerator and denominator,” says Math Addict’s post on Facebook and my new sweatshirt from SunFrog.  “Only a fraction of you will understand this.”  An in-joke for math nerds who know that the numerator on top is divided by the denominator on the bottom to define a fraction.
Not only is there a fine line dividing numerator from denominator, there is a line dividing numerator thinking from denominator thinking.  Numerator thinking oversimplifies because it leaves out proportionality and probability that denominator thinking accounts for. In other words, sometimes you can’t just add, subtract, or multiply the given numbers to figure out what’s going on, you have to divide.
People who say, “I don’t want to travel abroad, what with all those terrorists,” lack denominator thinking with its understanding of probability.  For instance, your chance of being killed by a gun in our own country is more than a thousand times greater than being killed by an overseas terrorist.

 From CNN:  http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/02/us/oregon-shooting-terrorism-gun-violence/  
Using numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we found that from 2001 to 2013, 406,496 people died by firearms on U.S. soil. (2013 is the most recent year CDC data for deaths by firearms is available.) This data covered all manners of death, including homicide, accident and suicide.
According to the U.S. State Department, the number of U.S. citizens killed overseas as a result of incidents of terrorism from 2001 to 2013 was 350.
In addition, we compiled all terrorism incidents inside the U.S. and found that between 2001 and 2013, there were 3,030 people killed in domestic acts of terrorism. This brings the total to 3,380.

Another example of numerator thinking is the warning that chocolate is toxic to dogs!  Yes, but how toxic depends on how much the dog eats, how strong is the chocolate is, and how big the dog is.   http://www.petmd.com/dog/chocolate-toxicity   As has been known for 500 years, the dose makes the poison.  Ingesting minuscule amounts of a substance is unlikely to be harmful.
Proponents of a cause can use oversimplified numerator thinking to persuade you of claims that are plausible but not true.  For instance here’s how to “prove” just as many vaccinated people get sick as unvaccinated people do. Let’s say 900 people are vaccinated for a disease and 100 are not vaccinated.  The disease affects 90% of those exposed so 90 unvaccinated people get sick.  If the vaccine is 90% effective, 90 vaccinated people still get sick. Therefore, since both 90 vaccinated and 90 unvaccinated people get sick, vaccination doesn’t work! This anti-vaccination argument conveniently leaves out the 810 people out of the 900 vaccinated who stayed well.
My favorite example of bogus numerator thinking is the food miles fallacy.  Fifty miles is less than 1600 miles so it should save fuel to eat food harvested within a 50 mile radius than from 1600 miles away, says the numerator thinker.  However, a Prius that gets 50 miles to the gallon, drives a 50 mile round trip to a local farm, and carries 50 pounds of food uses three times as much gasoline per pound of food transported (the critical statistic) as a semi that gets four miles to the gallon, drives 1600 miles, but carries 60,000 pounds of food. You have to use denominator thinking and divide by the weight of food carried, in order not to be fooled by this claim that’s plausible but not true.

Border Collie Shopping

It’s catalog season – time to shop like a Border Collie!  Border collies and other herding breeds were bred to complete only part of the hunting sequence.  They stalk and herd, but they don’t pounce and kill like wolves and coyotes do.  Herding dogs use their seeker circuit, the part of the brain that urges to explore. Activating the seeker circuit, according to neuroscientist Jaak Pansepp, is reinforcing (feels good) to the animal and helps an animal survive by finding what it needs.
When I browse the catalogs, happily selecting gadgets, outfits, and tchotchkes, I activate my own seeker circuit.  Even so, I don’t order anything. If I actually purchased these items I’d have to pay for them, get them home, take care of them, store them, and get rid of them at the end of their useful life.  To avoid such hassles, I stop at the enjoyment phase of the sequence. I call it Border Collie shopping.

Who Else is in the Doubt Industry?

According to the film, The Merchants of Doubt are pundits-for-hire who say what their corporate masters wish.  These shill scientists cast doubt on genuine scientists who say the corporations’ products are dangerous. The film cites the tobacco industry, the flame retardant industry, and the fossil fuel industry’s climate change deniers.  By now, mainstream science has established that tobacco smoking is a major risk factor for lung cancer and that human emissions of carbon dioxide are a major factor in the current warming.  

I inferred from the film that corporations hired the scientists in the Doubt Industry to substantiate the conclusions already arrived at by the corporations. However, in at least two cases the scientists arrived at their conclusions first.  Dr W C Hueper published his findings before the tobacco industry hired him.  The same thing is true of eminent statistician Ronald A Fisher (1890-1962) who believed the statistical evidence damning smoking wasn’t strong.  

Fisher postulated there may have been a third factor linking cancer and smoking, the way ice cream eating and drowning are linked to each other, because they share a common cause – summer.  Or the data could even indicate that lung cancer causes smoking because an inflammation that would lead to cancer would make a person want to smoke, says Jordan Ellenberg in How not to be Wrong.   Fisher, as a eugenicist, believed that genes were a strong factor. Turns out he was right; there are genes that increase susceptibility to lung cancer and genes that protect against the disease. 

A pattern emerges.  Corporations deny the danger of their products, hire scientists to establish doubt about these products, but genuine hero scientists refute the corporate line.  

Two new issues have emerged: genetically modified foods and the vaccination-autism link.  If we stick to the same pattern, the 89%  of scientists who say GMOs are safe, would be part of the Doubt Industry for Monsanto and Syngenta, notwithstanding the two thousand global studies confirming the safety of GM foods.  Moreover, a couple of million children die every year because anti-GMO activists fight golden rice that could save them from blindness and death.

Of course, as the Precautionary Principle claims, nothing can be proved absolutely safe for all people and all species under every conceivable circumstance into the indefinite future.  But if we lived by the Precautionary Principle, we wouldn’t drive cars, use antibiotics, or eat anything. 

Big Pharma pushes vaccinations and denies they cause autism.  So are anti-vaccination activists hero scientists against Big Pharma’s Doubt Industry?  I don’t think so; anti-vaxxers advance disease and death. 

Who's in the Doubt Industry?

Dr. Wilhelm C. Hueper, Chief of Environmental Cancer at the National Cancer Institute from 1938-64, believed cigarette smoking was not all that dangerous. Writing in 1955, he claimed, “The data . . . unmistakenly suggest that cigarette smoking is not a major factor in the causation of lung cancer.”
Dr. Hueper allowed the tobacco companies to use his work for their own ends.   According to Oreskes and Conway in Merchants of Doubt: “When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee learned about [Hueper’s talk questioning the tobacco-cancer link], they contacted Hueper who agreed to allow them to promote his work.”  It looks as though Hueper had joined the evil Doubt Industry.
Digging deeper into Hueper’s past we find that he was one of the first scientists to discover the links between pollution, occupational chemicals like asbestos and cancer.  Rachel Carson in her acknowledgments to Silent Spring, the book that launched the modern environmental movement in 1962 says, “I could not have completed the book without the generous help of these specialists: [including] . . . W. C. Hueper MD of the National Cancer Institute . . .”  Now it looks as though Hueper was on the side of the angels.
The discrepancy between Hueper’s support of tobacco and his struggle against the chemical industry is resolved when we learn that Hueper believed that pesticides and occupationally used chemicals, rather than tobacco, were causing the 20th century increase in lung cancer.
Sometimes people and issues are more complex than they appear at first glance.

Being Human Means Overcoming Nature’s Limitations

Scott Gerard Prinster, in his Fall 2015 UU World article “Better Than Human,” discusses the ancient Greek Icarus myth, which asserts that humans deserve punishment for trying to become like gods by overcoming nature’s limitations.  To me, the Icarus myth is just that, a myth, and not one to live by.
In the case of eugenics, the officials who ran the sterilization programs believed they could eliminate hereditary lack of fitness in people to preserve the race.  Since “shiftlessness” was believed to be hereditary, the eugenicists disproportionally targeted the poor and minorities.  Sadly, contemporary Unitarians bought into eugenics with a vengeance. (The UU principle of the inherent worth and dignity of every person wasn’t adopted until many years later.)  Unitarian Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr approved the state sterilization programs in Buck v Bell, saying, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”   Once the Nazis appropriated eugenics and implemented the Holocaust, eugenics “science” got a bad name.
Of course eugenics wasn’t really science because it would have taken several hundred years into the future to gather enough data to test the hypothesis. However, there was a real life experiment happening at the time.  Australia had been settled by convicts and prostitutes, prime material for eugenic sterilization.  By 1900, this riffraff had formed a parliamentary democracy, the Commonwealth of Australia, still thriving.
By the way, a better example than eugenics of earlier lack of scientific ethics is the Tuskegee experiment (1932-72) in which scientists watched the untreated progression of syphilis in African-American men.  
Kalle Lasn, who believes we have too much stuff, says technical developments serve only the interests of corporations and the article says medical advances benefit only the rich.  Both are correct at the time the advances first come out.  For instance, when Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals in the late 18th century, contemporary slaves and servants could not have afforded them.  But as Robert Bryce points out in Smaller, Faster, Lighter, Denser, Cheaper, everything gets smaller, faster, better, and cheaper, for instance televisions, calculators, and computers.  Eventually, nearly everyone has access.  In 2015, reading glasses can be purchased for a few minutes work at minimum wage.
  Although I agree that it takes too long for technological advances to trickle down to the masses. collective technological progress is what separates humans from other species.  We transform nature for our common good.
The article quotes Bill McKibben who says, “Down the path of [technological progress] lies the death of . . . human meaning.” Would McKibben want to keep developmental disabilities like Down syndrome from being prevented or cured in order that the affected families might live more meaningful human lives?  McKibben may be an environmental activist, but I don’t think he is any more of an ethicist than the Rev Thomas Malthus who, in order to prevent overpopulation, denounced “specific remedies for ravaging diseases.”

I Don't Get Vaccinated in the iWorld!

As I drive up to the intersection, a sensor trips the light green and I sail through.   Perfect! I’ve entered the iWorld where I always go to the head of the line, noisy neighbors move away, and roads I want to drive on are never being repaired.
In the iWorld, everybody but me gets vaccinated.  I benefit from herd immunity because everyone else is vaccinated, yet I don’t risk any side effects from the procedure.  It’s only fair.           Wait a minute! What everyone reasoned like that? What about the seven billion other people in the world who are just as worthy as I am?  As Steven Pinker puts it, “I can’t act as if my interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not.”*
We can all win, just not all at the same time.  By waiting our turn we can all go through intersections.  By getting vaccinated we contribute to herd immunity and as a bonus, we’re protected from preventable diseases.  
*Pinker: The Better Angels of Our Nature  p 182

Bigfoot is a GMO!

Bigfoot is a legendary giant humanoid living in the forest of the Pacific Northwest.  There’s no reliable evidence such as skeletal remains that Bigfoot actually exists, only sightings and footprints that could be faked.  Hence Bigfoot is probably a myth, but there’s no way to prove that something doesn’t exist.
I can’t prove Bigfoot doesn’t exist nor anyone can prove GMOs are safe for every individual under every conceivable circumstance.   Twenty years of uneventful GMO use should be sufficient evidence of their safety, but apparently not for some people.  
Maybe Bigfoot is a GMO himself?   Genetic modification with gorilla and Neanderthal genes would explain his great size and strength.