If the average American were confined by the carbon footprint of her European counterpart, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by more than half. If the world’s richest 10 percent were limited to that same footprint, global emissions would fall by a third. And why shouldn’t they be?
N.B. A great question. A moral issue. And it does suggest that "the rich" (as the top 10%) are pigs.
The alternative [theory of weight loss], the one that’s based on biology rather than (supposedly) physics, is: All diets that result in weight loss do so on one basis and one basis only: They reduce circulating levels of insulin; they create and prolong the negative stimulus of insulin deficiency.
Evolution occurs not by natural selection alone but mostly as an outcome of the dynamics of self-organization. “Matter’s incessant attempts to organize itself into ever more complex structures,” says Mitchell Waldrop, produces an emergent order that is then honed by natural selection to produce the rich panoply of life, so a “deep, inner creativity … is woven into the very fabric of nature.”
Clearly one thing magicians and politicians are both interested in is power. The power of positive thinking, yes, but also the power over others.
Eric Voegelin, another Austrian émigré, dated the Utopianism of liberal modernity to a wrong turn by idealistic early Christians who thought fallen man redeemable by worldly means. A conservative historian of ideas in Chicago, Richard Weaver, dated humanity’s fated lapse into liberal modernism to scholastic theologians of the fourteenth-century who displaced what is naturally good for people from morality’s driving seat and put there instead whatever people choose to want.
The question remains why so many of the new preachers of violence [e.g., Sartre & "Maoists"] are unaware of their decisive disagreement with Karl Marx’s teachings, or, to put it another way, why they cling with such stubborn tenacity to concepts and doctrines that have not only been refuted by factual developments but are clearly inconsistent with their own politics.
