Global warming and global climate change is real and it’s going to happen. We won’t do much to stop it.

I doubt that alone will cause the extinction of humanity. No, if that were to happen in the near future it would probably have to be similar to how the dinosaurs (sans avians) went extinct – a combination of global calamity like an asteroid strike, climate change and contagion. Or this.

We could get that with a nuclear war in combination with climate change, which isn’t too unlikely, but let’s stick to climate change for the moment.

As noted, climate change will happen. Weather patterns will be altered; seas will rise; famines are inevitable.

But other than those for sea level rise, I wouldn’t put too much faith in regional-level models for climate change effects. Those look pretty iffy and contingent to me, especially since never in the history of the planet has carbon dioxide risen so quickly – that we have good records for, anyway.

Which actually makes it worse not better, by the way! It means we don’t know what the fuck is really going to happen, but there’s not a bit of a chance it’s going to be good.

The do-nothing crowd apparently also doesn’t believe in insurance or any other planning for the future, either. I know they are motivated by greed and are influenced by propaganda, but it’s so hard to understand how a group of people can be so resolutely idiotic.

Well, at least be consoled by the fact that most of the people reading this blog will be dead when things really get bad. It’s your children and their children who will be climate refugees, starving to death in Anchorage or St. Petersburg or Stockholm.

I’ve made fun of Nicholas Carr in the past. He has written some of the least-perceptive works about IT I’ve seen.

However this is really the opposite. It’s quite good and makes points many commentators miss or are perhaps afraid of bringing out into the open.

We have had a hard time thinking clearly about companies like Google and Facebook because we have never before had to deal with companies like Google and Facebook. They are something new in the world, and they don’t fit neatly into our existing legal and cultural templates. Because they operate at such unimaginable magnitude, carrying out millions of informational transactions every second, we’ve tended to think of them as vast, faceless, dispassionate computers — as information-processing machines that exist outside the realm of human intention and control. That’s a misperception, and a dangerous one.

Modern computers and computer networks enable human judgment to be automated, to be exercised on a vast scale and at a breathtaking pace. But it’s still human judgment.

Of course tech companies like to pretend they are impartial arbiters of information. This sham is to their benefit. And many people believe them.

But Google removes millions of “piracy” links a month. They manipulate their search algorithm daily. They try to corral and herd you into what makes it easier to serve more specific ads to you with tools like “Suggested Search” and “Instant Search.”

Allowing such an overlord to control what we see – and can see — every day is far more dangerous than anything humans have yet created I think.

In my opinion the Left uses the idea of social conditioning too much.

Well, the Right – let’s not even talk about their crazy ideas. I talk about and criticize my side because it’s the one I care about.

Anyway, it’s an omnipresent idea on the Left that we are only attracted to certain bodies because that’s what we were conditioned with as we matured.

I think this is to some extent true, but the Left stupidly believes this is 99.9% of attraction and I’d guess it’s more like 20% to 30%.

Testing these things is nearly impossible, however.

It’s also probably a sliding scale of social conditions, economic conditions and other factors that are hard to quantify.

This relates to the self-excusing idea that as more Americans become unhealthily fat that men just aren’t attracted to obese women because it’s some sort of social conditioning.

I disagree, for the most part.

Physical attraction (for both sexes) is probably at least partially based on using phenotypical proxies for genotypical health and fitness and is not acculturated. I’d guess 80% or so, but who really knows.

Anecdotally, I’ve always been attracted to thin to very thin women; I had a babysitter when I was no more than four named Anita who was very tall, lithe and athletic.

At the time I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

Nope, even I hadn’t been reading any magazines or consuming all that much television at that point. It had never even occurred to me what sort of girl I liked before I saw her.

Anita however was so lovely to me it was absolutely galvanizing; I could barely talk to her. (This is why I also believe that gay people do know they are gay very early. I certainly knew I was straight that early thanks mainly to Anita.)

I’ve always been attracted physically to thin women. I don’t think is something that was acculturated in me. And nope, for the Freudians, my mom wasn’t thin and neither was anyone else in my family.

The Left has its own fairy stories that aren’t nearly as pernicious nor as harmful as the Right’s, but they exist nonetheless.

That attraction is mostly acculturated is most likely one such story.