Have you ever been hiking in the woods, in the mountains at night? A moonless night? Unless you have a compass that is properly working, you will have a tough time figuring out where you are. You will have even more problems being able to navigate to your ultimate destination. Let me offer this as a metaphor for our world today.
One of the recent events that prompted me to think about this was the climate hysteria announced as “science:”
This kind of alarmist bullshit exemplifies the growing delusion gripping, not only our society, but the world.
This piece of propaganda leaves the casual observer or listener with the impression that the ice shelf will be gone in the next year or two and there is nothing we can do. It also is designed to convince the masses that this phenomena is being caused by human activity–specifically, the release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. But careful listeners and readers noted immediately that the dire prediction will not come true for at least 200 years and maybe as long as 1000 years. In layman’s terms, that’s a wild ass guess.
As far as perpetuating the myth that this is the result of human activity and that there is nothing we can do to stop it, the picture is more complicated. One alternative explanation points to an active underwater volcano as the culprit for warming the water current that are flowing under that glacier.
We live in an age of technological immediacy that makes it easier to mislead, misinform and manipulate public opinion. By that I mean, we have immediate access to information via cell phones, radios, televisions and internet. But that does not mean that the information flooding us is accurate or truthful. The traditional means for accessing information–printed newspapers and magazines–is dying out. Al the while, the background noise is swelling to ear busting levels. The absurdities of language George Orwell warned of in Animal Farm and 1984 have become reality.
You can witness one illustration of this kind of absurdity in the defamation lawsuit filed by that goofy Global Warming enthusiast, Michael E. Mann, against the National Review, Mark Steyn and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Charles C.W. Cook’s latest overview of the case is worth your time. Here’s a snippet:
Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, rose to prominence for his “hockey stick,” a graph that purports to depict global temperature trends between the years a.d. 1000 and 2000. The graph takes its name from its shape, which shows a mostly flat line of temperature data from the year 1000 until about 1900 (the handle of the hockey stick), followed by a sharp uptick over the 20th century (the blade). Based on this graph and related research, Mann has built a noisy public career sounding the alarm over global warming — a plague, he argues, that has been visited upon the Earth as a result of mankind’s sinful penchant for fossil fuels.
In the course of his evangelizing, Mann has shown little tolerance for heretics. A recent op-ed he penned for the New York Times is illustrative. “If You See Something, Say Something,” the headline blares, mimicking New York subway warnings and suggesting a not-so-subtle parallel between the dangers of global-warming “denial” and the murderous terrorism that brought down the Twin Towers. In the opening paragraph of the piece, Mann castigates his critics as “a fringe minority of our populace” who “cling[] to an irrational rejection of well-established science.” These aristarchs, Mann contends, represent a “virulent strain of anti-science [that] infects the halls of Congress, the pages of leading newspapers and what we see on TV, leading to the appearance of a debate where none should exist.” Alas, such comparisons are commonplace. In the rough and tumble of debate, climate-change skeptics are routinely recast as climate-change deniers, an insidious echo of the phrase “Holocaust deniers” and one that has been contrived with no purpose other than to exclude the speaker from polite society.
Secure as he appears to be in his convictions, Mann has nonetheless taken it upon himself to try to suppress debate and to silence some of the “irrational” and “virulent” critics, who he claims have nothing of substance to say. To this end, Mann has filed a lawsuit against National Review. Our offense? Daring to publish commentary critical of his hockey-stick graph and disapproving of his hectoring mien.
The hysterical, fascist reaction of Michael Mann in trying to suppress legitimate criticism calls to mind the attacks on Hannah Arendt following the publication in the New Yorker her analysis of the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, evoked white hot criticism of Arendt as a self-hating Jew and protector of Nazis for having the audacity to criticize Jewish leaders who cooperated with Nazis–men such as Chaim Rumkowski.
If you have not seen the film, Hannah Arendt, “a 2012 German-Luxembourgian-French biographical drama about German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt directed by Margarethe von Trotta and starring Barbara Sukowa.” I highly recommend it. It is on Netflix. But this movie, in presenting the challenges Dr. Arendt confronted in trying to present a reasoned argument that rocked the boat of conventional thinking, speaks to us today. The pressure on so-called “climate deniers” is but one example. Similar bullying has been visited on those who called into question the Bush Administration’s use of water boarding on suspected terrorists.
Washington has become an Alice in Wonderland World of political insanity–with Republicans and Democrats taking turns as the demented Queen of Hearts. Hell, some (Nancy Pelosi comes to mind) even come close to looking like the farcical character drawn in the Lewis Carroll original.
Does this give you enough to start with?
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