Sketch of a course of chemical philosophy (1858).
I have linked to the PDF version of the article.

Ask a recent chemistry graduate from a university this question: How did scientists prove that matter was made of atoms? How do we really know things are made of atoms?
Tell them that the scientific world basically agreed this was the case in the middle of the 19th century. ie: Long before the invention of our advanced spectroscopy instruments, X-ray diffraction, electron microscopes, nuclear magnetic resonance etc. These instruments would perhaps not have even been developed to their current day levels without atomic theory because there would have probably been less interest in the types of instruments that investigate the behaviour of atoms if people didn’t believe atoms existed.
The human eye sees wavelengths of light as small as about 390 nm. But an atom is over 1000 X smaller than that and obviously cannot be directly perceived with our eyes alone.

When I graduated 9 years ago, I couldn’t have answered this question. Seems like it should be a pretty easy thing to answer doesn’t it? But the way science is taught in Australian schools is a hodge-podge of Constructivist BS which often amounts to nothing more than indoctrination. Students unfortunately don’t learn about how scientists validated atomic theory. I have come across academic pedagogues who dispute the idea that teaching science history necessarily aids in scientific understanding. However a paper like this demonstrates the power of an investigation into the essentials of science history. Because when studying science, the scientific method itself, the method of achieving accurate knowledge of physical reality is far more important than the results themselves. Once you have the method, it can be applied to any area of science. And by investigating the type of work needed, the disagreements that occurred, the errors that were made, students can see for themselves the process of scientific method at work.
They no longer just believe that everything is made of atoms on faith – everyone knows that right? They are encouraged to stop and check this seemingly obvious assumption. They can independently validate the theory for themselves. The process of scientific discovery has been highlighted and they aren’t just required to accept theories from the Oracle of Science. They see what was required to validate atomic theory and can appreciate the brilliance of the great scientists and their intellectual determination and rigor. So without even necessarily focusing on the topic of scientific method, they are nevertheless investigating it and coming to appreciate its importance.

So thank you Cannizzaro!

Cannizzaro’s paper answers the question. It’s very interesting and has inspired me to go look up some of the original work done by Avagadro, Dumas, Ampere, Dalton and Gerhardt.

Bolt also links to another good article: On IPCCs exaggerated climate sensitivity and the emperor’s new clothes

I wish the general public would take much more note of predictions made by authorities and hold them accountable when they fail massively.

There are several areas where mainstream beliefs are demonstrably wrong. Two examples are Keynesian-inspired economic theories and climate change science.

If the public are authority addicted and refuse to look at facts but prefer to suspend their judgment and worship their false political idols, then there’s not much that can be done. And eventually you get a situation like the very sad state of North Korea or Syria or Zimbabwe or any number of examples showing where an authoritarian government leads.

But I believe human beings are not as stupid as their authorities assume them to be. I believe that if more people read articles like this where they are reminded just how delusional and completely off-target many present day authorities are, then most of them are honest enough to look at the facts and realize something’s up.

After all, government action is not something to be taken lightly. This is obvious if you have any knowledge of history but unfortunately most people don’t seem to realize this. Government is the monopoly agency of force. Of course such an entity is necessary to deal with people initiating force on others (eg/ crimes like murder, fraud, theft etc) and as such any country should have a strong police force and legal system. But clearly, government is very different to a business which cannot force you to buy their product or make you do what they want (without government regulation at least, ie: an element of fascism and subsequent cronyism).
So it is quite depressing to see so many in our society who call for ever more government intrusion. And this is the real danger of environmentalism. It’s basically an excuse for socialist or fascist legislation which is always harmful to business and therefore to human life and prosperity. The world-wide trend arguably over the last 200 years has been towards ever increasing fascism and socialism (until countries implode). I am 31 years old and I think most people from my generation don’t know any different. They are confused, ignorant and are conditioned by popular culture and their substandard schools to believe that business, at least “big” business is evil. They have a hard time thinking independently and in their minds their is no alternative except to run like a crying little baby believing in the fantasy that government force can and should fix their problems. A very sad state of affairs that always ends badly.

We need a culture where people stand up for the rights of individuals. And a culture where people are quick to recognize the danger of political movements like environmentalism. Instead most people have gleefully jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon like a herd of sheep jumping on the truck headed to the slaughter house. Meanwhile, our roads get worse, hospitals are more over-crowded than ever, money is thrown down the drain by governments spending on unnecessary desalination plants and illiteracy is on the rise even with technological advances and more education expenditure. The common factor here is government.

What commodity is more important than any other? Arguably food supply. Human starvation is an appalling thing, so shouldn’t the government socialize the food industry to make sure everyone eats? No. Historically every historical instance of significant government intrusion into the food industry resulted in rationing followed by starvation. This observation highlights the principle that socialism and fascism are always economically destructive compared to freer societies. No wonder roads, healthcare and education are suffering so much, they are industries held back by high levels of government ownership and regulation, ie: government interference. No wonder the computer industry has thrived over the last 30 years – an area that has much less government intrusion. No wonder Australian cities are subjected to water restrictions (in Australia, water supply is socialized). The masses suffer unnecessarily.

Unfortunately in our dependent, authority addicted culture, the worse a problem gets due to the legislation of idiot politicians, the more secure their jobs become. The politicians benefit, and the people suffer. A maddening injustice. The useless Tim Flannery is not held accountable for his false claims. He’s been rewarded.

As an ex-research scientist, (I lost my job because I worked for an international company that shut down their Australian operations due to the global financial crises and I have now changed to a more rewarding career). I have observed many scientists with poor intellects who seem to operate on the level of an automaton and would be far better suited to a routine factory job. I’ve seen many scientist who are intellectually helpless when it comes to thinking scientifically and problem solving. Many times, I’ve been appalled by the ineptitude of PhD graduates whom I have had to help deal with very basic problems.
It really sucks that the intellectual standard is so low in current Australian science – Tim Flannery certainly proves my point. I don’t think it has to be this way.

John said: “The moral reason to allow the above sort of rants is that Graeme hasn’t actually directly hurt anybody with his rant, nor has he tried to coerce anybody (by saying “do XYZ, or else””

It’s very easy to conceive of a situation where speech could cause harm. eg/ Fraud.
But John is being careful to say that causing harm while immoral, shouldn’t necessarily be illegal. Agreed? I too agree. Say I tell a perfectly sound of mind person to jump off a tall building and they go all crazy and actually do it with disastrous consequences – this does not mean I should have been censored by the law.

However if the harm was effectively forced onto another without their consent, then it is no longer simply immoral, it should be illegal, eg/ if I pushed the person off the building. Agreed?

John’s position appears to be that speech by it’s nature cannot be an initiation of force. Yes/No?

Where we differ is demonstrated by the classic yelling “fire” in a crowded theater example right?
I think this is an initiation of force and should be illegal – John doesn’t.
Say a mother hears my shout of “fire”, picks up her baby and runs out the theater. But there’s a big crowd pushing and shoving at the door and she drops her baby and its arm breaks.
I believe I have initiated force against the mother. Accordingly the law should make me pay the medical costs for that baby and that I should also be charged for threatening others. Whereas John wouldn’t agree. Perhaps John would argue that the mother shouldn’t believe everything she hears? Feel free to elaborate.
Personally I suspect there’s a mind/body dichotomy here. After all the physical presence of sound waves in the air don’t in of themselves constitute an act of force.

Ideas themselves and speech ie: spoken or written ideas, are linked to physical action. ie: The mind and the body are always interlinked in reality, even though we can separate them as different conceptual categories. Speech involves certain actions and ideas themselves also prompt actions. I think it’s easy to show that speech can effectively be an initiation of physical force.
Eg/ A man approaches me in a dark alley and says, “give me your wallet or else I will kill you”. Say I can’t see if he’s got a weapon or not so as to keep this on a level of speech only. in John’s words, this man “hasn’t actually directly hurt anybody”.
But I’m not going to wait and see if he means it or not. I must take his threat seriously because if I don’t I could be dead. This man has initiated force against me – and this death threat itself should be illegal. My life is the ultimate principle guiding the conditions of freedom, and the limits to free speech should be defined based on the fact that my right to my life the fundamental. Free speech is a necessary condition to a free society, but it is not the most fundamental principle to freedom and it has limits.

It’s worth noting that the ability to speak freely presupposes the physical means and therefore property. If free speech is an absolute right, then logically some psycho should legally be allowed to force his way into my house and crap on about white supremacy for as long as he pleases.

For example/ A noisy left-wing protest at a university which shuts down the talk of an invited guest who advocates capitalism. Say the protestors enter the lecture theater during the speech and start chanting and shouting so no one can hear the talk. Using speech they have shut this guy down.
This would be a property rights violation by the protestors against the university. The protestors do not have the right to do what they please in buildings they do not own or without the owners permission. They have every right to speak publicly with the approval of property owners or to write their objections in publications willing to print their opinion or to start their own publication. They can preach whatever foul, twisted ideas they have which if followed could result in countless deaths – but using their property. Here I am agreeing with John. It would be ridiculous to think that a government is capable of or should control the spread of ideas themselves. This would violate a person’s right to their life because human beings are volitional. Knowledge is not by its nature a matter of authority or force, it is an impossible fantasy to think human beings would be better off with any level of censorship of ideas themselves. However it does not follow from this fact that speech cannot be used to initiate force.

Finally one more example. Say I own a store which has a big window on the the street frontage. This is a busy street (note the street is not my property of course) in the city and all sorts of people walk down this street as part of their daily lives. I think it should be illegal to put up a big poster of a naked, mutilated dead body in the window of my shop, or to have hard-core porn showing on a big TV in my shop window. Even though I should be allowed to purchase and watch this material myself and even though I am using my property to do this – anyone who walks past would have real difficulty in avoiding seeing my displays. I am effectively forcing my “speech” onto passers-by many of whom would be offended. This is a similar principle to justifying laws against making excessive noise forcibly disturbing others on property you don’t own like your neighbours.

Incidentally, I have a brief comment specifically on the Bolt incident. Admittedly I didn’t look into this incident in any detail when it occurred. My understanding is that Bolt was ridiculing people who claim to be Aboriginal when they don’t look Aboriginal. He, like me probably hates the way Aboriginals are treated differently by the law. And I suspect that he thinks that if the law insists on this racism, then shouldn’t there be an objective standard of proof to show you are Aboriginal rather than being able to just assert you are an Aboriginal and receive extra welfare money or be favored in job applications? I don’t know the details or even care – my position is one law for all adult individuals. I think it is immoral and harmful to base legislation on any collective grouping of people above individuals ie: race, sex, class etc.
From the very little information I saw, the result was a clear injustice towards Bolt. And I believe the Victorian Racial Vilification Act violates the right to free speech, and should probably be completely repealed.
The government has failed in its role of protecting freedom and not surprisingly this legislation will and has resulted in immoral, unjust and impractical consequences.

A Critique of the Montessori Method for web

The state of ethics, politics and economics is appalling and it’s so frustrating because the information is out there for us not to be making these mistakes.  Better theories exist and there is heaps of inductive information from history.  For example, the industrial revolution (doubling of life expectancy), we’ve had the dark ages (Christian philosophy’s day in the sun), we’ve had the failed experiments in socialism (an abstract form of collectivism based on demonstrably false theories) and of course there are many other instances of societies dominated by more primitive racial collectivism and the many ancient and modern religious societies where human existence is an absolute misery – unless you’re a pastafarian like me of course
If only I lived in a country where people respected each others’ right to their life, understood why freedom is important and essential to their very survival and where people had a more benevolent view of humanity, things would be much better for everyone.  Some people dismiss me as being utopian.  But of course things wouldn’t be perfect, simply better – to deny that some societies work better than others is ignorance and extreme egalitarianism.

Who gave a rats ass about this issue?  No one I know.  Where’s the human greed and self absorbed behavior the Christians and lefties complain about ?!  People happily gave up plastic bags when shopping.  They were (at least initially) proud to walk around showing off their new polypropylene bags.  The one or two people I bothered to crush who supported this mild but still evil measure (not that they realized) either had no argument or said something feebly pragmatist like “we have to do something”.  They wouldn’t explain what was wrong in the first place ie: what problem needed addressing, and wouldn’t explain how “something” positive was being done.  But clearly it felt good to them.  In one instance the person I was debating with got quite angry with me because they were so sure they were right but couldn’t explain why.  My thinking: this is how interested they are in the truth as opposed to satisfying their own flawed ethical urges.  But then in the same breath I get accused of being an intolerant ideological nut!  People seem to think that being sure of yourself means you must be wrong these days.  Again this doesn’t make any sense – they are sure of many things themselves – but it’s a byproduct of pragmatist epistemology (there are no absolutes and no such thing as binary systems if we happen to talk about ethics/politics/economics etc) and the egalitarian inspired belief that everyone’s opinion is as good as everyone elses – a ridiculous notion leading to an opinionated, non-thinking, loud mouth society. (after all we copy everything else the USA does).

This is an email sent to me on the 8th October 2011 by “Stop Gillard’s Carbon Tax”:

Dear Tim Robinson,

Four thousand, five hundred Australians have just been censored by the Gillard-Brown regime.

I thought I had seen everything. I thought after all the attacks on freedom of speech I have written to you about before, that nothing could surprise me.

I was wrong. 

In a shocking and historically unprecedented suppression of political expression and abuse of democracy, 4,500 Aussies – all opposed to this unnecessary and destructive tax on carbon dioxide – have just been told that they don’t count. That their opinions don’t matter. That their thoughts are not allowed to be heard.

The background: As you will remember, last month, the Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation asked for submissions about the carbon dioxide tax legislation. They specifically stated that they “encourage submissions to its inquiry from a wide range of individuals and organisations”. There were no terms of reference.

Although they only gave us one week, four thousand five hundred of us took the time to write to the committee. Four thousand five hundred Australians took the time to read the over 1000 page legislation. Four thousand five hundred Australians wrote in depth submissions detailing the flaws in this proposed legislation.

Yesterday we discovered that their work will be surpressed. Will be silenced. Will be censored and stripped from the record without a trace.

NEVER IN THE HISTORY OF THE AUSTRALIAN PARLIAMENT HAS THIS OCCURED. 

An Australian Parliamentary Committee has NEVER BEFORE censored submissions to this extent. Nothing has come even close. Ever. There is NO historical precedent for such a mass rejection of submissions.

To rub salt into the wound, the Government was more than happy to accept earlier submissions in favour of the tax that were just two sentences saying, for example, “ “I am writing to express my support for the government to legislate to put a price on carbon. I urge the government to move ahead with the Carbon Tax.” 

Yet lengthy, in-depth submissions opposing the tax on carbon dioxide have been rejected and stripped from the record. 

Julia Gillard and Bob Brown have just officially stuck up their middle finger at us and told us that we don’t count.

Don’t let them get away with it!

Contact as many newspapers, TV stations, Radio Channels, Bloggers as you can and spread the word! (There is a good list of media contacts here you can start with) –  and don’t just email! Phone, fax, and write letters to the editor about! We MUST get the word out! Also, forward this to all your family and friends, share this with your facebook friends by clicking here:   and then post it on twitter by clicking here: 

Do anything you can to spread the word about this disgraceful abuse of democracy and silencing of Australians by the Gillard-Brown Government. 

There is only ONE reason why the Gillard-Brown Government is trying to silence us: they know that we are right and are scared to engage in debate.  Let’s not let them get away with it.

Timothy Andrews
Managing Editor
Menzies House

Good on him.

And nice to see the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is still going strong.

The movie predicted to top the box office is called “Beginning of the Great Revival,” a communist propaganda piece depicting Chairman Mao as a dashing romantic hero.  Ughhhh