Wine is No Panacea

I have my own misgivings about the "health benefits" provided by red wine based on my own experiences in graduate school. I remember discovering that abiotic stress does not significantly increase resveratrol deposition in berries (and hence in the wine) but that significant rises in ethyl carbamates (carcinogens) were detected. It's nice to see someone else punch holes in the research.

The University of Washington has a viticulture program. I was myself surprised a decade ago to learn this. I suppose the eastern portion of the state is much like Nevada's high desert, so I shouldn't have been surprised. In any case, researchers there found that Resveratrol supplements do not seem to show a significant health benefit. The researcher diplomatically concluded that wine must be healthy because resveratrol comes in a cocktail of other secondary metabolites. Very shrewd.

Simply hypothesized, plants do not make things because they are beneficial to us. Despite the supposition that plants are somehow altruistic in their support of humans, it's not necessarily on purpose. That would require sentience. Plants make them because these compounds like resveratrol help them survive. They also help us, but that's a coincidence of chemical compatibility (or evolutionary adaptation to be able to use them) more than it's an active effort on behalf of fruit to help humans. If resveratrol also helps us, that's a happy accident, but he's probably right- it works because it's coupled to other things.

The trouble is, it's also in there with things that are bad for you.

So, do the costs outweigh the benefits? That depends on whom you ask.

Blinded With Science

There are a lot of people out there who place all their faith in science. Science, however, is a slippery devil (pardon the pun). The same science that props up their lifestyle is made in many cases on the backs of things the people who worship at the altar of a lab bench in white robes of a false priesthood would find appalling.

I remember vividly in graduate school a particularly duplicitous bumper sticker I often saw. In the walk from the experimental farm where I often parked to the agriculture building where I worked, I passed a law office. One of these lawyers had a bumper sticker that said, "Thou shalt not kill. Go vegetarian." I was confused. I was studying plants. If they are not alive, was I wrong to feel bad about torturing them with salt water? What a convenient religion this man had!

The liberal religion is very convenient. It sees what it wishes to see. It investigates the obvious and ignores everything else. Consider for example just two products.

"Animal friendly faux leather" is actually plastic. This means it is made from oil, which means that everyone who complains about how oil is bad for the environment and then buys one of these is a hypocrite, having bought a product that props up Big Oil! You see, oil is a mainstay in our world. Without it, people who complain would not be able to do so because they would have no iphones, no internet, and in many cases no clothing. As they save the animals, some other product must compensate to satisfy the desires of a particular demographic.

Many of these people tout the health benefits of tofu over "antiboitic and hormone-laden beef". What they don't seem to realize is that tofu is made from soybeans, most of which, particularly in America, are Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). So, it's ok to add fish genes to a bean (for example) but not to add extra hormones, that a cow makes anyway, to a cow? While feasible that soy might eventually mutate to have those genes anyway, since we use clones in commercial crops, it's unlikely that the soy we consume will vary very much by 3050 from the version we eat today. Eating tofu isn't necessarily any healthier than the foods for which it serves as a substitute.

Most of these things are designed to make people feel better about themselves. They're not obviously involved in something that evokes an emotional response, and so they feel less guilty. You see, liberalism and liberal science are based less on facts and reason than they want you to think. If you face the facts, such as those presented here, their science is based on emotion. Just because something is less bad doesn't make it good, any more than a less rotted corpse is somehow more alive than a completely rotted one.

Plants are also living things. They are easier to catch, less messy when we kill them (except for things like tomatoes), they don't have cute faces, and they don't cry out in pain. However, without living plants there is no life anywhere. Just like animals, which are also there for the use of men, plants are there to be used by us. Human beings are however the only species on the planet of which I am aware who actively contribute to making their own species weaker. We will disenable raw materials for our own benefit to save bugs and weeds. We also prop up the weakest among us through medicine and because of their wealth who then reproduce and ensconce genetic weakness in the population. Humans are just as GMO as corn or soybeans; we just do it in the hospital and the bedroom rather than at the altar of a laboratory.

When I go hiking, people usually follow me. They know that I have probably been there before and that I turn around periodically to look at the trail. You see, it's easy to get lost if you haven't looked at things from any perspective than straight on. People don't recognize truth because they don't look at it from other angles and because they frequently look at it through glasses tinted by their own preconceived notions. As I have said elsewhere for a while now, most people are not really interested in the truth. They secretly hope the truth will corroborate what they already happen to believe. When you blind them with science, usually they just shut their eyes and refuse to see. Some people are wise; these people are otherwise.

O be wise. What can I say more?

Oops, Another Research Error

For most of my life, I have heard all about how evil men are because we're polluting the planet. Ok, so many of us aren't very conscientious about where we put our waste, but then again neither are the Canadian geese that used to defecate EVERYWHERE at my alma mater. However, they talk about these doomsday prophecies and make movies about their predictions when many of their conclusions are founded in bad science.

At the beginning of each semester, I cover the Scientific Method with my students. I point out the pitfalls and problems in an effort to help them pay better attention to scientists, especially as they start prescribing pills produced by piss-poor projects. Lo and behold, today, an article appears less than a day after I discussed this with a colleague about how the polar ice is melting 30% less quickly than projected. The key phrase in this article is as follows:

previous teams had to measure ice loss at "a few easily accessible glaciers" and then extrapolate it to the 200,000 glaciers worldwide

They extrapolated a few to hundreds of thousands. A few technically means three, which is the equivalent of looking at everyone in the city of Linz Austria and saying they are representative of everyone currently living on the planet. This is why some people die from drugs, because everyone reacts differently.

What concerns me is whether the few they analyzed were truly representative of the whole. If they looked at a few outliers, then they will be way off. What made the other glaciers inaccessible? Weather? Money? Laziness of the researchers? Government policy that refused access? There are too many variables to even evaluate that well. They would have been best served to conclude that the data supported a certain level of ice loss in the area surveyed.

I may have mentioned this before, but we did a lot of work with students and standard curves. Intentionally, we gave them an unknown with a concentration outside the standard curve hoping that they would make an error and extrapolate. Outside the curve, you cannot be sure that the behavior remains the same. Even these researchers were smart enough to confess that "it's not clear how far into the future you can project" because too many things affect other things. I find it funny how they claim everything and everyone is related, that we should coexist, etc., and then they blame human activity with which they happen to disagree as a cause for everything. Who knows what the future will bring? Maybe it will bring meteors or Martians or more of the same. Who can say? They like to talk as if they know for sure, and I find that odd.