13425087:Campeador said:
While I wish I had the same liberty with my time as you seem to have, I was not able to watch the video you posted until now.
It would seem that Tyson seems to agree more with what I'm saying, not necessarily on the initial purpose of NASA (although one could make the case that space exploration was the goal, to explore before the Soviets could do it as a defensive measure). His emphasis is on the importance of the manned-space mission, and his anger at the defunding of NASA in that goal, namely, space exploration. This mirrors almost exactly what I said in my initial post. However, Degrasse Tyson is also a firm believer in the dogma of Global Warming ("Climate Change being the conveniently changed term for when Global Warming turned out to be wrong, who can argue that the climate is "changing"? Quite Orwellian). Of the resources that NASA does have, why not devote it to NASA's real goal, which should be furthering human capabilities in space?
Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye are both celebrity scientists with a political agenda (much more so in the case of Nye), they do not speak for the entire scientific community nor should they. Climate change is wrapped in politics, because it involves increased taxation and overreaching government control based on dubious science at best. And here lies the inherent hypocrisy of climate change as it relates to left-wing ideology. The proposed "solutions" all work to undermine the quality of life of the middle and lowers classes, especially the poor. Unless of course you do not realize that solutions such as "carbon credits" simply mean increased taxation, and taxation on suppliers inevitably falls on consumers. The measures increase the cost of living for those least able to afford it, unless they're already dependent on government, and potentially adds to those rolls.
I'm not sure where you went to school but I'm pretty sure students are being educated in the core disciplines. However, it's not the fault of teachers if they get loser students who refuse to participate. I'm also somewhat confused about how this relates to anything else you wrote. As if being against certain ideas that Degrasse Tyson espouses somehow is the equivalent of being anti-education and pro-meth.
I'm also pretty sure Clint Eastwood has never actually shot anyone in the face, although if he were to actually shoot anyone it would be a left-wing climate change peddler like Michael Moore (which he has actually stated).
And while climate science carried out with funding from the Koch Brothers or Exxon would certainly raise some eye brows, so too should research that is funded by government bureaucracies like the EPA. Or do multimillion dollar government grants never create conflicts of interest?
There are plenty of scientists who have questioned the validity of certain climate studies that form the basis for the theory of climate change. However, you scarcely hear about them because of the extreme backlash they receive from left-wing media and government-funded scientists, as if climate change were a religious doctrine that cannot be questioned.
So you don't have much liberty with your time, yet you had the time to write these long retorts..?
Space exploration may be able to be claimed as the goal in sense - but the motive had nothing to do with 'in the name of science' or anything. It had 100% everything to do with the fact that we were currently entrenched in a state of mutually assured destruction, and the thought in the minds of many dingbats (IE: McCarthyism) was whoever slipped first could get nuked out of existence, and therefore we had to win. So came the military industrial complex era of NASA... which, for all of it's advances - everything from new materials like carbon fiber to pens that worked in zero gravity - ultimately designed methods of destruction like more efficient ICBM's which could carry a handful of MIRV's that would effectively take out 7 or 8 large cities in once launch.
Now, I give you a 2nd video to watch. Note what NGT says about 'discovering earth' and the political after effects - all of which I believe of are positive that our government figured out how to enact during a time of strife and war and shit under the freakin Nixon administration...
Now... as far as the solutions that you speak of that are somehow harming the poor and middle classes... I think you might be misguided here. I have yet to see any taxation levied on the middle and lower classes simply because of the drop in the bucket that federal climate change studies or carbon credits have cost Americans. Rather, I've seen a lot more bitching from old white men who have investments in oil, gas, and other fossil fuel commodities - or at least from the conservative politicians whom they support. If you think that taxing or pressuring large companies for excessive pollution, environmental destruction, and such is harming the middle and lower classes because it increases gas prices or whatever, then you're first of all, short sighted as hell, since gasoline is slowly becoming a thing of the past anyway, and second of all, a believer in the false idea of trickle down economics being something we should be scared of.
I mean, you speak of false dogmas... basically everything you spoke of here conforms to the idea that if we tax the companies, then they're going to have to overcharge for everything and that's going to hurt us at the bottom because of cost of living... yet you fail to think about the quality of living for just one second in that mantra.
I don't know about you, but I'm not going to give a shit about the cost of gasoline or electricity derived from coal power, when there's not enough food on the table nationwide/worldwide because California enters a long, sustained, and serious drought - a very likely direct result of human influenced climate change, and water becomes a more important commodity than does gas. I mean, who knows, that could be the case out here. We might not see an "average" winter for another decade or more. I realize that that could happen naturally, but the severity of such a drought could easily be tied to CO2 emissions from the western pacific, where, the last decade or two has seen an absolute explosion of industrialization, and fossil fuels being burned.
Forget 'global warming' when it comes to ambient air temperatures increasing on average, even more important is how much warmer the ocean has been getting... It's been increasing at an even greater rate than that of the air surface temps, and has created far more massive high pressure zones over the pacific than anyone's ever seen. It's contributed to less moisture, higher snow levels and storms that squeeze out quickly until they settle down over the continent. We've seen increased hurricane/typhoon/cyclone activity worldwide over the last 10-15 years, and though it's been about a decade or so since the atlantic season has gone apeshit, last year was one of the most active years ever for pacific hurricanes, and the year before was potentially the most active typhoon season ever.
Fine, you might believe that this is just natural temperature fluctuation in the earth, because that's what some scientists have questioned... and that's not entirely wrong, as I'm sure some of that could be in play here. I don't feel like anyone's ruling that out at all - but that's not to say that we shouldn't also attempt to stem our own impacts on the climate - which, by all accounts, is absolutely impacted by human activity. This idea that it's one thing or the other - either natural or human caused - isn't really the question. Chances are it's a bit of both - but to just sit on our hands and accept it as an ultimate in either way - whether it's all human caused or all natural - isn't the solution. Simply put, we know we are impacting the environment, and we need to study it's effects in an effort to make sure we don't turn Earth into Venus on our own, and whether or not some warming is happening naturally is part of that study. I believe science is something we should invest in - and who knows what types of cool shit we'd invent, new power alternatives, more effective/efficient power techniques, or perhaps even ways to catch pollution and waste and recycle it, or whateverthefuck. Again, if studying space itself could come up with new materials and ideas, why couldn't a study into our own planet?
Climate change isn't a religious doctrine, because it's based on science. The problem is when dingdongs come out claiming they are scientists and state entirely that it's totally not effected by humans, when overwhelming scientific evidence states that it is. When you say that humans aren't greatly effecting our atmosphere in a negative way, you're dismissing so many findings. Would you believe someone if they dismissed Einstein's theory of relativity completely, without taking in any of the study or math behind it into consideration? that's why there's backlash - it's that jagaloons put their name on papers with titles that claim human activities outright don't effect the climate, and ignore 5 decades worth of study that shows it does.
As for what I said about education... you speak about 'loser students who refuse to participate' in a way of blaming those students for just being shitty and worthless individuals - I on the other hand, believe that education, and how it's structured needs to change to incorporate these people who, might simply just not be inspired enough by school, or perhaps even just be to frustrated with it to overcome the outside pressures of life that may steer them in the wrong direction. If a student sees astronauts being shot into the unknown, who knows how many more kids we might get off the streets to stay in the classroom and learn about it. Go watch October Sky if you want an Idea of what I'm talking about - kid gets inspired by Sputnik, and instead of ending up 'in the mine' like everyone else, where you could get black lung or die in a collapse (think of this in the same sense as 'the streets' where you could get shot in a gang shootout, or die from drugs), dude and his buddies stayed in school and all went to college on scholarship in a day when that wasn't something a couple poor kids from a hick mining town could ever dream of (shit, even today that's not something you could dream of, really). They were inspired and got out of that trap. That's what Tyson's talking about - how space can inspire people at the bottom and take them to the top.
That's the effect that studying 'the great unknown' has on a society, and whether that's directly studying space, or studying earth based on what we've learned from space, none of that is a bad investment as far as I can tell. Case/point - global warming itself wasn't even something we thought of until we realized the atmospheric composition of Venus contained a lot of the same shit we were pumping into our own atmosphere... and then saw it was also like 800 degrees because of it. Studying space made us look into our own planet more, and discover that we might be screwing ourselves and what we need to do to fix things on our own soil.
And that podcast is far from sponsored by any oil or coal companies.
