Tuesday, March 4, 2008

That's not Global Warming shooting at you...

And just because you're called paranoid, doesn't mean someone isn't really out to get you.

Global warming is presently the scientific equivalent of orthodoxy as enforced by the Inquisition - while we've yet to turn up any torture chambers or executions for those of insufficient orthodoxy, we do see skeptics of global warming targeted for de-funding, calls for criminal prosecution for scientific heresy, and general attempts to discredit skeptics in lieu of refuting their data.

Add this to the common gross exaggeration of what little evidence for climate change exists by a media both desperate for ratings (often most easily acquired by sensationalism, as Hearst showed us so many years ago) and eager to "dumb down" complex scientific issues to the level of the lowest common denominator in the pack.

In general, from what I've read in history, that constitutes a "Galileo Effect" - i.e. when the relatively ignorant media pundits and their unquestioning intellectual peons screech forth some new orthodoxy from which all who blaspheme must be punished - it's usually a fairly good indicator that the orthodoxy in question is a crock of shit, or is at least based on insufficient data and exaggeration.

Thus it is with Global Warming/Climate Change. Was this winter noticeably warmer than the last? (Um, gee, no...it surely wasn't). Similarly, and more fundamentally, given that climactic change significantly predates the appearance of humanity on the scene and seems to have cycled repeatedly, is there any valid indicator that humanities present activities (far cleaner than during the industrial revolution) are bringing about some sort of disastrous climactic change?

I've not seen anything to indicate to me that all the shrill squeaking is anything but the co-conspiracy, conscious or otherwise, of fiscally driven pseudo-scientists and semi-journalists in conjunction with the "true believers" of the environmentalist movement and their liberal co-conspirators in perpetual search for a red herring with which to flail at the ankles of progress and distract from the real issues of the day.

Namely, there are bad folks out there, and they are blowing up our stuff and shooting at our people - and are mightily displeased that they have not had more success on our home shores in similar projects. Further complicating this is the desire of these bad folks to convert all of us pagans to their holy faith, be it islamo-babble or socialist pseudo-thought.

Venezuela's socialist-in-chief Chavez and his cronies in Ecuador have mobilized their troops and sent them to the borders of Columbia, a nation with sufficient troubles of its' own for the horrible crime of bagging a band of terrorists...that coincidentally have been using the territories of both nations as "time out zones" for years, with the active collusion of those governments. All this, funded by more oil money than you can shake a stick at. U.S. intervention seems likely, and I frankly hope a couple of carrier groups are someplace sufficiently convenient to nail everything airworthy in Ecuador and Venezuela to the ground within minutes of the first shot being fired.

Similarly, we have the oil-funded nut-jobs of the Middle East eager to drag us back to medieval understandings of human rights to cope with, and that with a bonus round of a potentially nuclear-armed Iran...all while we have troops on the ground in Iraq in a situation closely approximating post-WWII Germany before the lightning brigades were rooted out (yes, if we go away, we WILL get to fight another day...and probably at much greater human and material expense).

In Iraq we are committed - we must either win, and leave a stable situation behind us we are likely to have to subsidize for decades, or we will end up returning in Gulf War III with the odds against us. Afghanistan, loudly proclaimed to be one of the worlds worst places to fight and the less publicized of our current military efforts, seems largely under control at the moment, but we seem to be locked into a role of shoring up the Afghani government (in a situation oddly similar to the USSR in the 80's) into the foreseeable future with vindictive barbarians lurking under various rocks and in the hillsides, calling themselves Taliban. Again, victory is the only option.

The only upshot of this is that the various conflicts are occurring someplace else and that there is a less than infinite supply of "foreign jihaddi" eager to rush out and get themselves shot up. Sadly, they attack not the Purple Dinosaur and its Minions, but rather ourselves, our allies, and our core values.

Global warming (or what after this last frigid winter winter the dribblers now call "Climate Change", after sufficient ridicule) is not the enemy. Dependence on foreign oil, the empty-headed variant of multi-culturalism (if they say they want to kill you and destroy your way of life - take them seriously!), socialist dogma, and religious nut jobs are...

Especially when the socialist and/or islamic nutjobs are busy shooting at us, and our allies.

No comments: