A Candle For Our Freedom

“Your death amounts to the same as your life, a zero sum!” -Dr. Arnim Zola (Toby Jones) from the (2014) film Captain America: Winter Soldier

I’m kind of feeling that quote right now. No, I’m not dying or anything, but I do feel like everything I believe in is a “zero sum.”

If any of you follow me on twitter or Facebook (and amazingly, I still have active accounts on both, although twitter is restricting me somewhat), you know what I mean.

I’m almost too despondent to write this, but I feel compelled anyway.

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Debates Still Based on “Feels” Not Facts

Last March, I lamented how climate change advocates seem to present their arguments, at least on social media, using feels, not facts. Okay, it’s not that black and white of course, but if you listen to extremist advocates such as Freshman House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she says we’ve got exactly twelve years to cut the United States’ (never mind the rest of the world) carbon emissions in half before unending doom and gloom.

aoc cartoon

Screen capture from twitter

She even produced a seven minute cartoon to “prove” it.

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Using Climate Change to Illustrate Debates Based on Data vs. “Feels”

facts feels

Yes, this is Ben Shapiro appearing with one of his quotes. Don’t panic.

Relax. The point of this blog post isn’t to say that climate change is a hoax or to deny that it’s possible for human beings to damage the environment in any manner. The point is that when you want to convince someone of something, the way NOT to do it is to appeal to their “feels,” at least not when your point is supposed to be based on observable data and repeatable results from scientific experiments.

Case in point: climate change. The most liberal member of my immediate family, one of my sons, says that it’s possible for what we are currently observing to be “human assisted” climate change. He’s pretty smart and reads a lot (okay, reading and podcasts), so even though we don’t always agree, I can depend on him to present his point of view logically.

Now relative to climate change, he agrees with me that it’s not like the Earth has never been hotter than it is right now.  For instance, during the Cretaceous Period, according to LiveScience.com:

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