The asinine “Stand Up For Science” mug I wrote about earlier today still rankles, and I just realized that a video that surfaced this month is relevant to it. I had seen a recently released TEDTalk given in 2013 by S. Matthew Liao. He is the Director of the Center for Bioethics and Affiliated Professor in the Department of Philosophy at New York University, and has previously been on the faculty of Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, and Princeton. He’s also the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Moral Philosophy. Several conservative commentators had freaked out over the video; naturally, the mainstream media buried it. They did that because it represents the outer limits of a climate change panic whackadoodle, and this guy is unquestionably not just a SCIENTIST of the sort that the mug-makers want us to fall down and worship as the all-knowing, all-seeing societal architects they are, but also an ethicist as well. I considered it as a post topic but decided against using it, because, well, it seemed too silly to have to point out how irresponsible Liao is.

Then came..the mug.

Beginning with the acceptance of the proposition that climate change threatens to turn the Earth into a doomed hellscape—Liao is not a climate scientist—he tells his eager group of TEDdies that the suggestions to re-engineer the globe, like Bill Gates’s plan to spray sulfate chemicals into the air to block the sun’s rays, are too risky and could do more damage than good—you know, like in “Snowpiercer.” The key quote from Liao arrives as he explains why a much better plan than geoengineering is human re-engineering.

“If we eat less meat, we could significantly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Now, some people would be willing to eat less meat, but they lack the willpower. Human engineering could help … We could artificially induce intolerance to meat, and in this way, we can create an aversion to eating eco-unfriendly food,” Liao says.

This, of course, is music to the ears of the climate change hysterics who think re-creating our diets by substituting bugs for meat will help “save the planet.”

That insane suggestion by Liao attracted most of the attention, but his mad scientist brain-storms actually got worse:

“Our ecological footprints are correlated with how big we are. A car uses more fuel to carry a larger person than a smaller person. Larger people also wear out shoes and carpets more quickly than smaller people, so another possibility is to have smaller human beings.”

Naturally, being a scientist, he sees nothing wrong with using abortion to achieve this noble end. Liao thinks we should consider screening embryos for height, and only the short ones would get a chance at life…to save the planet of course, because doom beckons. Governments would then pass draconian laws requiring parents to choose between having one tall child, two medium-sized children, or three Hobbits. Let’s stand up for science, just not as tall as we might have before humanity’s salvation.

Those selfish people, especially in the U.S., who resist giving up their personal liberties and standards of living to save future generations are big roadblocks to the Climate Change Revolution, Liao recognizes (he’s smart!), but he has a solution:

“People given the hormone oxytocin were much more willing to share money with strangers and to behave in more trustworthy ways. Oxytocin also improves our ability to read other people’s emotions which is a key capacity for empathy, so we could use oxytocin in order to increase their willingness to cooperate with other people.”

Science! I’m sure Dr. Fauci would like that; Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, too. But wait, there’s more! Three years after his TED talk—I wonder why it wasn’t made pubic for ten years?— on the Codebreaker podcast in December 2016, Liao revealed a new brilliant idea that non-scientists should take seriously as they drink their coffee:

“Cats can see just as well as we can during the day, but they can see about seven times better than we can at night. This could totally affect our consumption of energy. I mean think of that. Who wouldn’t want to see better …. and see just as well during the day?”

That’s right: this scientist thinks it’s ethical to emulate “The Island of Dr. Moreau.”

Those who applauded that mug on Facebook should be introduced to the career of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. He was a Soviet agronomist whose scientic theories were later called Lysenkoism. When Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics at the USSR’s Academy of Sciences, and he used his influence and power to crush dissenting opinions, discrediting, and marginalizing those who were skeptical of his methods—you know, kind of like calling people “climate change deniers,” like Bobby Kennedy Jr. does. Stabding up for his science, the USSR adopted Lysenko’s theories as fact, and used them to develop policies that triggered famines killing millions of Russians and Ukrainians, and later, Chinese.

The ever-evolving field of science can give us this…

…or give us this…

Blindly treating scientists and what is considered “settled science” at any point in time as beyond skepticism, testing, and verification is a formula for disaster.