…showing her that her hysteria is based on lies, bad stats, politicized “science” and hooey?
I admit it, that headline sucked me in to reading “Social Q’s,” a Times advice column that puts wokeness over wisdom, causing me to put it on the EA blacklist.
“My wife has become an eco-warrior,” a married weenie writes. “She has strong feelings about the environment and other people’s carbon footprints. She challenges our friends repeatedly about their lifestyle choices. I agree with her in principle, but I can’t support her moral outrage. …Help!“
Predictably, the column’s proprietor, Phillip Galanes, begins by saying, “I would begin by praising her, rightfully, for her commitment to an important issue.” I’ll fix it for him: “an important issue that nobody really knows much about, especially indoctrinated progressives who are passionate about what their bubble-mates are passionate about regardless of facts.”
Whitehouse is Little Rhodey’s senior U.S. Senator, Democrat of course, and his speech this week on the Senate floor (several members had to be hospitalized after they rolled their eyes too hard) was reflexively praised by “The Nation,” which employs far, far, FAR left lunatic Elie Mystal as an editor.
[Digression: You remember Elie, don’t you? He can only appear in public now on MSNBC without being chased by men in white coats carrying butterfly nets. He was too extreme for the left-biased legal gossip rag “Above the Law,” which published his radical nonsense before he went completely bonkers. Elie has opined that all black jurors should always vote to acquit black defendants no matter hwo guilty they are. Nice. (I wonder what the ABA would say if juries paid any attention to him?) More recently he called for foreign nations to issue sanctions against the U.S.]
Read it. Or at least try. I dare you. I double dare you. First, it is garbled, rambling and incoherent (not unlike this), perhaps not quite Authentic Frontier Gibberish, but too close to be tolerated from a U.S. Senator. Second, and this has always been true of his rants, Whiethouse obviously doesn’t understand climate change science at all, like all hysterics who want the U.S. to spend trillions and cripple the economy based on speculation. This country can’t slow down climate change, whatever it is, without the vast majority of the world joining in and they won’t, don’t and can’t. This includes giant countries India and China. Does Whitehouse really not comprehend this, or is he just pimping for a world dictatorship? Oh, who knows? There is no justification for paying any attention to him, ever.
Whitehouse has, for example, repeatedly said that Americans who oppose the climate change “consensus” should be imprisoned. To this, law professor/pundit Glenn Reynolds responded,
“First, this man should be voted out of office as soon as human possible. His ignorance is dangerous. Second, the state bar should require him to undergo at least 100 hours of mandatory continuing legal education on the subject of constitutional law, with emphasis on the First Amendment. Newsflash: joining together to discuss common interests and even–gasp!–funding research, white papers and lobbying efforts to advance one’s perspectives on an issue isn’t illegal; its free speech.”
It should be no surprise that Whitehouse implies that the Texas flood is the result of evil Republicans and Donald Trump not caring about our planet slowly burning up, though there is no evidence of the tragedy being caused by climate change (or DOGE cuts). [Added] I just saw this…
🚨SHOCK POLL: CNN admits that the American people AREN'T CONCERNED about climate change — Radical activists FAILED to scare citizens.
"Americans AREN'T afraid of climate change!"
"Climate activists have not successfully made the case to the American people!" pic.twitter.com/47u9IzQ8IF
But he has other villains to finger: “dark money” that elects those evil Republicans (funny, getting far more money in donations than Donald Trump didn’t seem to help Kamala Harris any); “creepy billionaires,” and a “captured Supreme Court.” In fact, I can’t let this pass; here is that part of the rant:
Well waddya know! The U.S. is on the verge of setting records for all-time low temperatures in May. That’s funny. I thought humanity was doomed because the world is burning up.
Of course, I don’t think one unseasonally cold month has any more significance than one unseasonably cold day, but that’s not how the climate change cabal has been playing their game. No, every time the temperature seems especially high anywhere in the USA, the activists, most of whom know as much about climate science as I know about fixing a carburetor, start screaming, pointing, and crying out, “See? SEE?” They do the same thing with seasonal wildfires, hurricanes, floods and, at least on The View, earthquakes and eclipses. They get away with it too, because the unscrupulous politicians they elect and the dim-bulb progressive pundits and reporters who work for those politicians always endorse and rationalize the climate change hysterics’ propaganda, even after every prediction, every projection, every deadline to save humanity proves to be hooey.
On the bright side, I guess, it appears to be much stupider across “the pond” than here, which is astounding. However, the fact that anybody has been so addled by the various Woke and Wonderful agenda items as this story indicates has to concern everyone. My reaction to it is barely contained in the catch phrase, “I can’t even…”
Emma Pinchbeck is chief executive of the U.K.’s Climate Change Committee (CCC). She recently announced the group’s conviction that frequent flyers should pay higher taxes so that less affluent Brits can take nicer vacations.
The Billy Bob Thornton star vehicle “Landman,” following the stressful life of a West Texas “landman” and operational executive for an independent oil company in West Texas, has a lot going for it, mostly Thornton, who is one of our most interesting and versatile actors. The Paramount streaming series is already better, in my view, then the last two oil dramas I watched, the over-rated “Giant” and the relentlessly unpleasant “There Will Be Blood,” in great part because as with all of his roles, Thornton brings a great deal of humor to the proceedings.
I have not finished the series’ first season (I sure hope there is a second), but I was struck by the long scene above in which Tommy Norris (that’s Billy Bob) gives a quick primer to his company’s attorney on the facile conventional wisdom of the anti-fossil fuel lobby. The rant begins (at the 57 second mark), as Tommy denies the “cleanness” of wind power, and he takes off from there. It was an instant classic that quickly went viral on social media: as soon as I heard it I knew I could find the speech on YouTube and resolved to post it today.
There are also a lot of rebuttals to the speech on line, and that’s great: the ethics point is that for once Hollywood isn’t stuffing smug 21st Century woke politics into its audience’s brains, but is presenting a dissenting analysis. More more amazing yet, this one comes from a series’ protagonist and an appealing one at that.
Taylor Sheridan, who created “Landman,” cast Thornton and wrote and directed the speech deserves thanks and credit for packaging a provocative point of view that is sure to spark debate. Debate is ethical. What isn’t ethical is cultural indoctrination, which is how Hollywood has mostly been approaching the oil issue for decades.
Not surprisingly, the Wikipedia entry linked above states that the series contains “misinformation about renewable energy… “exposed as common propaganda tropes by Big Oil.” This is why Wikipedia should be considered a member in excellent standing with the Axis of Unethical Conduct. If Democrats had won another term in the White House, we would probably see “Landman” forced to include a disclaimer on Tommy’s speech.
2024 has been a revealing one on Ethics Alarms regarding the climate change debacle. Let’s review, shall we? Here, we discussed the New York Times complaining that an action movie didn’t have enough climate change propaganda. Here, we learned that the Biden administration’s “climate adviser” is a lawyer, not a scientist, and engaged in fanciful, unscientific fearmongering, like claiming that cliamte change was causing the wildfires in Maui and California. Here, we discussed an esteemed British climate scientist who argued that the only way to control global warming sufficiently to save the world is to “cull the human population,” ideally through pandemics. Here, an expert testifying before Congress about the need to spend trillions of dollars that the U.S. doesn’t have to be “carbon neutral” revealed himself as a phony.
The introduction to all of this arrived in September of last year, when Patrick T. Brown, the co-director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute, essentially blew the whistle on his own colleagues, writing in part, “…it is critically important for scientists to be published in high-profile journals…[a]nd the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society. To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change…[This] distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”
Well, 2024 isn’t over yet. Now the BBC has formally admitted that all the hype about climate change killing off the polar bears was a deliberate falsehood. Responding to a reader complaint, the BBC wrote, “The article reported on the death of a worker who was attacked by two polar bears in Canada’s northern Nunavut territory, and said such attacks are rare because “The species is in decline, and scientists attribute it to the loss of sea ice caused by global warming – leading to shrinking of their hunting and breeding grounds.”
Oops! After the challenge, the BBC wrote, “Research carried out by the ECU confirmed scientists agree climate change will cause a reduction in sea ice, which is likely to have a long-term detrimental effect on polar bears and overall population numbers…. However evidence from the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Polar Bear specialist group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature appears to suggest numbers are stable overall at present and not in decline as stated.”
The scientists argue that longer flights could be offset by more efficiently organized airports with fewer holdups. Apparently these people haven’t flown recently. Can distinguished scientists also be deluded morons? It’s a rhetorical question.
I supposed technically Margeret Renkl isn’t a film reviewer for the Times: officially she’s a “contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.” I don’t care: she criticizes an action movie that audiences are enjoying because it doesn’t deliver the progressive agenda propaganda that she thinks good little Big Brotherites should jam into the brains of the trusting public at every opportunity.
Renkle can bite me, and so can the Times for publishing her dreck.
Renkl and the Times concede that “Twisters,” which appears to be the non-superhero hit that Hollywood desperately needs, “ is a humdinger of a summer blockbuster that delivers exactly what theatergoers want in an action film: plenty of explosions, destruction, high-speed chases and heroism, all with a dash of wit and sexual tension thrown in. It is not — and does not aspire to be — high cinematic art.” However, it is, she argues, a missed “golden opportunity to talk about what scientists know and don’t know about how climate change might be affecting the formation, strength, frequency and geographic distribution of tornadoes, or why they now tend to develop in groups.”
No, it’s really not. A movie people want to see for escape and entertainment isn’t a “golden opportunity” for the writers and producers to bombard them with favored and faddish data related to progressive public policy. The Ethics Alarms standard response to the “Why are you talking/writing/singing about what you want to instead of what I want to” is “Write your own blog, direct your own play, produce your own movie or sing your own song.
President Joe Biden’s climate adviser Ali Zaidi continued the intellectual dishonesty of the Biden administration’s climate change pandering, warning this week that that the President’s political rivals are preparing a “U-turn agenda” that would reverse all the administration’s “progress.” He was appealing to young, ignorant, woke climate change cultists who are threatening to refuse to support Biden’s re-election, since he hasn’t sent U.S. business and society back to the stone age.
Zaidi said that a reversal of Biden’s policies “actually puts us on a U-turn trajectory. A U-turn to [a] less competitive economy. A U-turn to unsafe communities, a U-turn on jobs. That’s a really big deal. It’s very problematic.”
He also claimed, ludicrously, that passions of young people on this topic reflects their experiences, with “wildfires turning the skies orange” and policymakers’ actions “failing to meet the urgency their generation believes is needed to keep global temperature increases in check.” He said, however, that the administration is heeding the the “call of science,” with Biden is committed to his goal of slashing U.S. emissions in half this decade.
None of the wildfires of recent years have been credibly connected to climate change. Moreover, who cares what barely-educated life-neophytes “believe”? They don’t actually know anything except what demagogues and partisan scientists dumbing down their rhetoric tell them.
“If I am brutally honest, the only realistic way I see emissions falling as fast as they need to, to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown, is the culling of the human population by a pandemic with a very high fatality rate.”
—British vulcanologist and climate scientist William J. McGuire, “Bill” to his friends, cheering on human death in a tweet he quickly removed after colleagues advised him “Uh, Bill? We’re not supposed to say things like this out loud…”
Of course, the professor might have been saying that the economically disastrous measures being proposed and in some cases adopted by foolish governments like the Biden administration won’t affect the climate sufficiently to make a difference, so the whole movement is futile, irresponsible, based on speculation, and, to be blunt, stupid, but of course he wasn’t. No, this scientist, who is among those we are supposed to trust and obey—you know, like the health “experts” who crippled the economy, our society and the educational development of our children based on guesses about the Wuhan virus that were represented as fact?—believes that the only way to avoid a climate catastrophe (and we all want to do that, right?) is to have millions of people die as soon as possible, one way or another. A plague is a good way! Or we could just execute them, like Mao did. Of course, he shouldn’t be one of those sacrificed for the greater good, because his life is too valuable.
Ethics Alarms 