the question as to what sources of light in the sky are valuable and what are pollution is turned on it's head by the fallacy of naturalism. the light that comes to us from stars is in many cases billions or trillions of years old. it provides us with absolutely no useful information about the current existence of the universe, as those stars are long dead, and whatever exists in the space those stars were once in has no connection to what is there now, in whatever dubious way you're defining space at all. you could never go to those stars. the light they throw into our atmosphere has no utility to anyone or anything and should in truth be rightfully thought of as pollution; if we could clean all the starlight out of the sky, it would allow us to see our direct neighbourhood more clearly. all that the light from these long dead galaxies is really doing is blocking the closest planets out.

but it's not like the mirror eats the light or something. it's not a black hole. that light is still there. you can put a telescope on the moon, or in orbit, you just can't look into the sky from your bedroom. but that's an utterly middle class concern. who gives a fuck.

i might take a position that astronomy isn't going to be very valuable to humans in the near future, until we colonize the area around us. we should be focusing on blocking out the distant past from the night sky and honing in on the areas directly around us, for now. there's not much that we can learn right now, and we have enough data to sort through to last us for centuries anyways.

the applications of the mirrors are more valuable than bourgeois concerns about light pollution, which are in truth backwards anyways. the stars are the ones polluting the sky; let's clean it up by getting rid of the stars.

i'm overwhelmingly in favour of this as it has tremendous potential applications. i don't know where this anti-science streak in society came from all of a sudden, but stupid hippie bullshit should never be listened to, ever. naturalism is exposing itself as the single greatest threat to human progress in our midst. these people that are opposed to ai, to automation, to technology, etc are opposed to human progress. they must be educated and defeated.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/reflect-orbital-approval-fcc-9.7287535

cancelling oil exports - or mineral exports - to the united states would eliminate a tremendous amount of wealth in canada. making ourselves poorer seems like a dumb way to stick it to the man.

it's a better environmental argument to leave it n the ground, and arguably worth supporting on that basis, than it is an economic argument to shoot ourselves in the face. it is abundantly clear that it will not change american behaviour, it will just destroy wealth in canada.

it makes more sense to try to recover losses by levying export taxes on americans. retaliatory import taxes and export blocking are both dumb tactics.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carney-trump-oil-tariffs-negotiations-9.7289518

i have spent a fair amount of time with this and the topic has two notable points of scientific interest, namely (1) it's the only thing you can quote (stephen) jay gould on directly without being pretentious (but don't do it too much) and (2) it's one of a small number of legitimate contributions to science made by richard dawkins, even if he often heavily cites eo wilson. there is something called the dawkins-gould debate about punctuated equilibrium or gradualism, about the nature of natural selection, defining debates about how to interpret the fossil record.

my hegelian synthesis (this argument is really a false dichotomy. gould was a gradualist, too. his supporters misrepresented him.) argues that the error is really in the cladistics model rather than a debate over evolutionary theory. due to linnaeus, and ultimately due to aristotle, who attributed a crude evolutionary theory to the "chaldeans", we've been using the wrong mathematical model to imagine evolution for centuries and centuries. we use something called directed graphs to model evolution - trees. we refer to the tree of life. this is inherently hierarchical and intuitively erects theocratic conclusions that aren't actually supported by the data. in the dna era, the solution to the underlying gould-dawkins debate has increasingly been identified as hybridization, which the models previously rejected as theocratically deviant, but which more and more data has increasingly identified as repeatedly arising naturally in areas where ecological niches overlap. contemporary environmentalists may be surprised to learn that polar bears are on a path towards genetic introgression back into the grizzly population and that it's being increasingly realized that this is a general demonstration of actual natural selection in real life, due to climate change, which happens often. this evolution is normal. the ideal of nature in a fixed state is not science, it's conservative religious ideology.

another example is the interbreeding of coyotes and wolves in eastern canada, which would create a large shift in the fossil record. coyotes all of a sudden are going to increase in size. it's the wolf dna and we know it.

so, the premise of all of these different species in the human fossil record is dubious. every researcher wanted their own species. every minimal change was presented as a novel variation. the question of whether they could fuck or not requires more rigour, and we can assume that they did if they could, and probably tried even if they couldn't.

a better mathematical model for evolution is a complicated graph with crossings that captures hybridization events (often due to climate change), which actually appear to be an extremely common evolutionary mechanism.

the footprints themselves may not hold up to scrutiny but it's not the more important point. the more important point is that the hierarchical spencerian tree model is ignorant and backwards and it's theological implications are consequently wrong. evolution is stochastic, statistical, chaotic. natural selection cannot be assumed, it must be proven that the shifts in population genetics are not genetic drift, which is a null hypothesis. the graph theory is more complex, but it's also a rich and profound theory.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/article/ancient-footprints-offer-rare-glimpse-into-lives-of-extinct-human-relatives/

aimlessly trying to bomb iran into submission is not a reprise of dubya's 00s iraq policy, it's a reprise of the clinton-gore iraq strategy during the 90s. trump is constantly clinton redux. he is aggressively avoiding regime change, when it would be the better strategy in iran (and was the worse strategy in iraq). he's tryng to force an oil for food type program but the iranians won't accept it.

i don't support this policy. it's not going to make the region safer. it's not going to have a pragmatic outcome. the americans will fail to force iran into submission, and somebody else will step in and push through regime change in the end. it's putting off the inevitable at a great waste of time and money. the result will be the same. and the process of regime change in iran is necessary and the outcome will be justice for the people of iran. this is a fascist regime that poses a threat to global stability, regional order and global peace and an ideology that needs to be eradicated. aimlessly attempting to bomb them into submission and failing will cost more money and kill more people than is necessary to get the job done. it's the most inefficient, ineffective approach to the same ultimately necessary solution of regime change in the end, because trump fears the  outcome of an iranian socialist movement on the ground and won't sign off on it.

but, despite realizing that this won't help much, that doesn't mean i have much sympathy for iran right now. they need to get their shit in order and take this decision away from people in washington. this is their future. this is their state to burn down. the decision should be theirs, but they need to make it.

as an openly identifying socialist, my politics are far closer to john fetterman's than they are to aoc's or mamdani's, who both strike me as well to the right of centre. this free groceries for rich kids scheme is about the most bourgeois thing i've ever heard. i would reject it as stupid because i'm a socialist. there's nothing socialist about it at all, it's just a handout for rich kids, and it would get paid for by a hike in union dues. it's a redistribution of wealth from middle age working class union members to upper middle class children of corporate executives. that's not socialism. that's the literal opposite of socialism.

the problem is that, in the united states, all politics is just code for race politics. nothing else matters. you can't be brown and conservative at the same time in the united states, despite the actual reality that the overwhelming majority of brown people are in fact extremely conservative. so everything else has to align around the delusions of archaic race politics that have little to no relevance a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

fetterman's a liberal, which is placing him in conflict with the shift to the far right that is taking place in the democratic party, as it tries to abandon any remnant of it's historical white voting base and fully embrace a religious and brown voting coalition. the new democrats are going to be extremely religious and extremely conservative (and extremely brown), but they're going to call themselves left-wing anyways, and i'm going to be diametrically deadset against them. so, he's being called a conservative, because the country doesn't know how to use language to describe what's happening. but the truth is the opposite.

the democrats have actually historically been the country's conservative party. the republicans have historically been the country's liberal party. the language in the media is orwellian, but the alliances are actually correcting themselves.

i think that john fetterman is actually to the left of his party and that the democrats are in the process of shifting to the extreme right, which is something he is resisting. if i were fetterman, i would probably feel more comfortable sitting as an independent and calling myself a liberal, and making an attempt to explain how liberals are discernibly to the left of progressives, who are really conservatives in disguise. as an adamant openly socialist leftist, i consider these progressives to be a bigger problem than republicans are, as the progressives are actual conservatives, and the republicans generally aren't really conservatives at all. it's the self-styled progressives that want to radically turn the clocks back to the 60s. republicans are broadly status quo. that makes the progressives dramatically worse. we're in the era of orwell, where everything is upside down and backwards, and everything means the opposite of what it claims to mean.