Posts Tagged → climate
What happened to Earth Day?
Earth Day began decades ago, in 1970, when I was a kid. I remember it as a distinct point in time where the people around me spoke about raw sewage and chemicals being dumped and piped directly into American waterways. Up until that point, Americans had kind of unhappily or grudgingly accepted environmental degradation and pollution as an unfortunate necessity of economic and technological progress.
But fish kills in what older people then clearly remembered as pristine trout streams, and obvious losses of waterways with once- major fishing and waterfowl hunting to untreated, unfiltered, unmitigated chemical and physical waste dumping bothered most Americans. A great deal of this pollution was out in the open, unsightly, and an obvious reflection on Americans as a people. Then the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because of all the dangerous pollution in it, and that image galvanized Americans to clean up our act.
What was happening then was public waterways and air that were shared publicly were being used as a cheap dumping ground by production facilities of all sorts. The American public was bearing the burden of environmental waste, while the same processes that generated that waste also generated income that was privatized. I am 100% for private income, but I strenuously object to using shared waters and air as a cheap garbage disposal, and so did people of all backgrounds in 1970.
Thus was Earth Day born. Fair enough, understandable enough. And the environmental cleanup and protection movement followed closely on its heels. The US Environmental Protection Agency, where I began my professional career, was created soon after Earth Day to address the obvious problems resulting from carelessness with our shared environment.
But now, after decades of increasingly crushing environmental laws and regulations that ridiculously “protect” us down to parts per trillion of chemicals that already naturally occur at those levels in the natural environment….Earth Day represents something totally different than it did in 1970. Today, Earth Day is a celebration of an all-out assault on Western Civilization by people pursuing a ridiculously impossibly unattainable “Net Zero” goal. Meaning that humans should have zero impact on the planet. None. Which naturally necessitates a complete (and unreasonable, undemocratic, authoritarian) overhaul of our way of life, freedoms, choices, food, etc.
Earth Day is now marked and promoted by people who supposedly “know better” what is right for us. And in fact almost 100% of the environmental and even land conservation organizations are politically partisan and politically extreme, embracing all kinds of cultural and economic Marxism while rejecting American capitalism and individual freedom. This shift away from cleanup to directing us on what to eat and when and where is patently bad, unfair, wrong, and in fact is so egregiously foolish it is hurting the credibility of the environmental quality movement.
When environmental groups like Penn Future and Sierra Club always protect one political party and always attack one political party, they are shown to be about partisan politics and not about environmental quality. They are political shells. And when a local land conservancy embraces evil “Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity” policies that are actually against the founding principles of said conservancy, such as private land ownership and capitalism, then we know that even the once- wonderful land trust movement has been hijacked and turned against America.
So in 2023, Earth Day represented authoritarianism, out of control Big Government, cruel assaults on and corresponding losses of individual personal freedoms and choice, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff. The fact that Earth Day is now openly un-American and anti-America tells us that Earth Day’s promoters are not trying to protect us from pollution, they are trying to take control of our lives and destroy what had been the most free nation on Planet Earth.
Supposedly in the name of saving us from ourselves. To which I and a lot of other Americans say No Thanks.
Today’s “I know what is best for you better than you do” mindset of the environmental movement is what drove me out of working at the USEPA. It is unreasonable, unproven, and every day it is shown to be wrong and wronger.
Instead of all the anti-science climate hysteria sky-is-falling nonsense, Americans should be celebrating the incredible environmental cleanup and success we have had in the past 53 years since Earth Day was first established. Tilting at environmental windmills makes some people feel like they have meaning in their lives, and if they themselves want to take on the burdens they propose for the rest of us, then they can make that choice. But they have no right to try to take away my right of choice, your right of choice. And if there is one clear indication that the loudest voices promoting Earth Day are not serious and do not deserve to be treated seriously, it is the fact that absolutely none of these people do what they say the rest of us must do “to save the planet.”
The Real Crisis at Davos is WEF’s Tidal Wave of Bullsh*t
Some people are addicted to adrenaline, to crisis, and to being always on the move, hopping from one phone call to the next to nonstop meetings, followed by the inevitable “Gosh I am so crazed and busy, I am soooo stressed.” As if they did not do it to themselves, victims of their own bipolar, egomaniacal, or cutthroat competitiveness.
These people may be Michelin Man full of peanuts, but at least they are trying to be productive, in their own way. They may bother everyone around them, try to hijack most projects and processes around them, and be the kind of person you try hard to avoid in the parking garage at the end of the day, but they are probably a net-positive force. Maybe by a slim margin, but they are still on the positive side of the equation.
Then there are people for whom shouting “Crisis!” from the rooftops is a purposeful scam. So they can be in control, of the rest of us. These people use the latest manufactured fake so-called “crisis” to make end-runs around collective decision making processes and procedures that would normally bog down over or outright reject such a claim of “crisis” due to a lack of evidence.
In the past sixty years there have been a bunch of fake crises, most of them some shade of environmental or another. Paul Ehrlich (see below) was predicting the end of the world (really, like the entire world would come to a cataclysmic halt) back in the 1960s and 1970s. And when the world did not end in the 1970s, he predicted its demise in the 1980s, 1990s and even in the 2020s! He is still at it, saying pretty much the same thing.
Obviously, the world has not ended and Paul Ehrlich has been wrong the entire time. His crisis is fake.
Paul Ehrlich may be wrong, but nevertheless he is persistent. To his credit, he is not persistently crazy, but rather consistently smart. Like another “the end of the world is nigh!” false messiah, Al Gore, Ehrlich has learned that a foolish soup of the intellectually gullible and the politically mal-aligned reward him whenever he steps up to a podium to declare that capitalism, Americans, gas stoves, cars, whatever the false issue du jour is, are all going to result in the end of the world.
Today the Neo Nazi League World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland has assembled a who’s-who of villains, career politicians, fakirs, weirdos, sycophants, coelacanths, investors, psychics, and actual real Nazis who want to own your body and your soul. The literal Nazi skinhead of the WTF WEF, Klaus Schwab, has declared 2023 to be a year of “polycrisis.”
According to WTF head Klaus Barbie Schwab, there are now so many crises attacking us all at once that the entire Western democratic system of self-rule and self-decision making and self-problem solving must be ended, so that he and his little cadre of Neo Nazi technocrats can fix everything. Yes, Herr Fuhrer Schwab is sounding the alarm on a whole array of (utterly fake) crises that demand America come to a screeching halt. No more gas cars, no more gas stoves, no more meat…”You will own nothing and you will be happy” he says, meaning it more now than ever before.
Herr Schwab’s fake climate and gas stove and environmental alarmism is obviously fake, but his cadre’s lust for power and control is not fake. It is real. Within the WEF WTF’s tsunami of bullshit crisis is a very serious threat to humanity, and this is a real threat and potential crisis that we have seen over and over before: Mass murderers Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, the Democrat Party in 1860-1865 and again now, Julius Caesar, the Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar, and a thousand other violent tyrants who have claimed the right to govern us absolutely because of some “crisis” or other.
The WTF WEF people may be a bunch of evil thugs who we must resist at all costs, but they do get credit for unabashedly living a pimped out high end lifestyle in broad daylight. Like high and mighty feudal princes of old, they don’t listen to a word of their own demands that they place on the rest of us. They have hundreds of jet airplanes taking individual members to Davos, some of the flights being only twelve miles, with enormous outsized plumes of carbon emissions to each member’s sole ownership and credit. And they have the highest price prostitutes possible (I am not talking about the CNN, NPR, BBC staff, but actual hookers), the best alcohol and the most exotic real meat and shellfish food possible.
There may be a tsunami crisis of BS at the WTF WEF World Economic Forum, but wow, those people nonetheless know how to live high on the hog! Without an apology to anyone…
They must think We, The People are a bunch of idiots.
August 13, 1970 edition of the Orlando Sentinel citing grand environmental fakir Paul Ehrlich. In the intervening fifty three years, none of Ehrlich’s dire predictions have happened. But Herr Klaus Schwab, Al Gore and yes, even Herr Ehrlich are still peddling the same b*llshit
Now Greta Thunberg makes sense: Climate Fuhrer
Not until I had sat under a hemlock tree overlooking a quiet ravine with a flintlock rifle across my knees for two hours in the morning cold did it occur to me: In the context of angry liberals, abrasive hypocrite Greta Thunberg does make sense.
Thunberg is the carefully manufactured Hollywood and mainstream media creation from Norway, or Sweden, whichever it doesn’t matter, whose mental health her wealthy and abusive parents sacrificed on the altar of gaining political advantage and notoriety. She is a 17-year-old high school drop-out, with apparent learning disabilities that normal, loving parents would try to heal, not enhance. Her message continues to be that everyone else in Western Civilization must cease using fossil fuels and abandon capitalism while she flies in jets and other capitalist-created transportation all over the planet making sure that we all feel her rage and judgment, and do as she says. Like some sort of malevolent angel.
And though for the longest time I kept wondering how trying to shame people into submission was really going to work in this day and age, it’s her angry judgmentalism part that turned on the light bulb in my head this morning.
“Yes, we can ride together, but you must not mention The Name That Cannot be Said,” said a long-time dear friend of mine about an east coast fishing trip we were planning. His sore feelings about the 2016 election result were still evident, and the other old friend whom we were planning to see on a certain leftwing island enclave felt the same. Even though we had not discussed the election, no, we avoided it, when we did talk, the anger and judgmentalism were tangible.
No, I would not wear a MAGA hat, I said. No, I would not get drunk on the beach late at night and begin dancing around the campfire “Trump! Trump Trump! USA USA USA!”
“I could not vouch for your safety if you did that,” said the tender islander.
“But I would not do it in any case, knowing that it would bother you. I love you guys, and I do not live to bother my friends,” said I, allowing images of hungry bluefish and striped bass and screaming fishing reels to cloud my thoughts and thereby unwittingly admitting to my support for The Name That Must Not be Said, and then feeling his judgmental words cut deep into a relationship decades old and already tested by many trials together.
So it seems that while Thunberg is probably not necessarily designed to cast a wide net and gain new adherents to the climate religion and big centralized government control thingy she is so angry about, her role is probably more to rally the faithful. To give them a fresh new figurehead. Someone through which today’s young people – totally devoid of life experience – can channel their inner despot and ignorant judgmentalism.
These ever-angrier young people haven’t a clue about life, making a living, paying rent, making an economy run, science, climate, etc., but if there is one thing they will be good for, it’s shock troops. The western equivalent of the cruel and merciless children of the Chinese cultural revolution. Young people to defiantly harm their own parents and elders in the name of some greater good.
And so now Greta Thunberg makes sense to me. She is a deliberately unhappy cheerleader, not searching for solutions, but for sacrificial scapegoats upon whom her anger must justifiably be poured in a cleansing action that will bring holistic stability to all humankind.
She is the climate messiah, the climate Fuhrer, beginning a jihad, bringing unholy fire.
Climateland uber alles
Greta Thunberg holding a Jewish caricature in one hand and the usual puppet in the other. At the bottom of Leftist beliefs there is, ironically, always anti-Jewish hatred
The purposeful comparison is undeniable between ol’ Adolf and child actor Greta Thunberg. She means to emulate him
is Penn State for real?
I know, I know, PSU alum are not supposed to criticize our Mother Ship, Penn State University. But the cold hard facts are material, and it is important to at least raise one’s voice about important things.
For the record, I do not hate Penn State, though I have severed my commitment to PSU football because of the brutally unfair way the PSU board treated my hero and universally admired icon coach Joe Paterno. No, the opposite is true, I care very much about PSU. I am grateful for the stellar undergraduate education I received there. In fact, I received as good or better an education at PSU as or than available at supposedly elite Ivy League schools. That is because PSU is so large, has so many facilities and professors, that anyone who really wants to be educated, to talk with their professors, to spend time debating and studying with like-minded students, can spend all their time as a student being educated. If they but want to.
Which is pretty much what I did there. I served on the Student Senate, ran for student body president, engaged in all kinds of political activism, and studied, studied, studied. My professors, notably Art Goldschmidt, Jackson Spielvogel, Jim Eisenstein, and especially Ed Keynes, helped me grow as only a devoted educator can do. I served many of my best professors as a teaching or research assistant. They each studied me, saw my strengths and weaknesses, and challenged me in ways and in areas where I needed to grow the most, and where that growth would matter the most to my eventual debut as an educated adult.
On the other hand, my impression of Ivy League schools is that they are so one-dimensional and politically correct, that one must only gain entry and then spend four years parroting and agreeing with one’s professors to get out with a degree. No growth, no challenge, no self-development at the Ivy league schools, just indoctrination by the staff and parroting back by the students. Where is the value in that?
So what the hell is going on at Penn State with the sky-high tuition? At $38,000 a year IN STATE tuition, PSU ranks right up there with many private schools as well as public universities OUT of state.
Being run now strictly as a profit-loss bottom-line business, as opposed to an educational institution, PSU sets tuition fees that are affordable only to wealthy students, crazy parents, foreign students backed by foreign governments, and the children of PSU employees. Ye olde regular American or Pennsylvanian family simply cannot afford the Pennsylvania STATE university.
This situation is exacerbated by a so-called professional caste of elected officials, state representatives and state senators, who tell us all the time that they are professionals and they know what they are doing. What they are doing with PSU is constantly shoveling into its gaping maw more and more taxpayer money, with zero strings attached. No special scholarships for highly qualifying Pennsylvania students. No accountability to the taxpayers, no service to the Pennsylvania public.
And for those who justify this unfair situation because PSU is a big research station, OK, you name the program and let’s look into it. Some are pretty good, and some are worthless. For example, PSU has its own breeder reactor, so we know the PSU students of nuclear physics are probably getting cutting-edge education from nuclear physics researchers there. On the other hand, fake “climate researcher” Michael Mann was just hugely discredited in a court of law, and ordered to pay big legal fees as a result. Mann could not produce in court the data he used to make his name peddling phony science. As we all know, science is totally about reproducability, the ability to reproduce experiments and outcomes that other scientists have claimed. Mann cannot do that. Mann has been a political activist first and foremost, and has besmirched PSU’s good name as a research institution.
Maybe Mann can be now sued by Pennsylvania taxpayers for his fraud, and compelled to create a scholarship fund with his many ill-gotten gains.
We can call it the “Penn State Real Science Scholarship Fund.” And if it has only five bucks in it, it will still be a hell of a lot more than PSU has so far designated to supporting qualified in-state students who want to study real subjects.
Science Denier Chuck Todd Declares NBC a Heretic-Free-Zone
In the 1600s, the Catholic Church was on a roll with great momentum. The church’s Great Inquisition was well under way, as a money making venture and as a barbaric instrument of terror, coercing both potentially wayward believers and outright non-believers back into a dark corner, out of fear of physical torture, financial ruin, or burning alive at the stake. Due process and the rule of law were not yet concepts the church embraced outside of a small group of inner circle elitists.
This is the world that early scientists like Galileo and Copernicus stepped into, and where they met with the buzz saw of censorship. This is an old and well-known story from the church’s dark days, and it will not be repeated in detail here. It is mentioned, however, for the benefit of its irony: Today, openly partisan political propagandists like Chuck Todd of NBC “news” have set themselves up as the new church censors, deciding what is truth and what may not be said, for fear of upsetting a political arrangement of things he favors.
Chuck Todd has declared that no heretics will be permitted in his presence. His true goal is to shame and coerce non-believers into submission, out of fear of retribution and ruin.
Like the 1600s church censor before him, Giancito Stefani, the “Master of the Sacred Palace,” Chuck Todd has now declared that no person will be allowed on his NBC television show who defies or questions politically correct dogma, that being human-caused “climate change.”
Not even real scientists who have actually studied climate change are welcome! Really!
Chuck Todd and his coercive brethren today are like the 1630 church fathers; they have the same anti-science goal of control and censorship. In 1630, the church fathers were quite certain that scientists Galileo and Copernicus were way off base, that their ideas were heretical, and that those ideas must be declared haram, off-limits, unwelcome, wrong, banned, and unacceptable. Galileo was to be stopped at any cost. His ideas were dangerous.
To a certain political arrangement of things the church favored.
Similarly, Chuck Todd asserts that climate science is and has been settled, and that is that, he says. It shall not be questioned, he says. Not on his TV show, and, he hopes, not on anyone else’s TV show, either.
Chuck Todd name-calls people who disagree with the idea or claims of human-caused climate change “climate deniers.” This is a fancy name for ‘heretic’. The irony is that Chuck Todd and his co-believers are science deniers, because they deny the scientific refutations of human-caused climate change, and because there is absolutely no science behind the climate change belief Chuck Todd espouses; he and they will permit no actual science to contradict what is essentially a faith belief he and they have.
As if real science is ever settled. The whole point of real science is that it is an ongoing open, transparent enterprise of search and study, curiosity and analysis. Subjects that were once said to be dreamy fairy tales and heresy are today concrete fact.
The problem with human-caused climate science is that it is not transparent, it has been completely politicized, and it is almost 100% built on flawed computer modeling, which is something I know a lot about.
Much of the raw data fed into the computer models has been faked, and the models themselves contain a lot of sloppy methodology (e.g. certain variables are artificially heavily weighted while other variables’ importance are diminished, without any proof of why or how the decision was made).
The East Anglia University scandal is just one example of the complete corruption surrounding climate science.
Recently, Aaron Doering (see his official mugshot below), a purported “climate change expert” professor at the University of Minnesota, was charged with felonious beating the hell out of his girlfriend. Why did this saintly professor strangle his girlfriend? Why, only because she dared to challenge his views. And that right there is the summation of science-denying climate change advocates: Stand them up to scrutiny, and they will lay you down with coercion and violence, because they cannot stand to be challenged or questioned. Bullies, all of them, Doering, Chuck Todd et al.
Pseudo professor Aaron Doering likes beating up women who question “climate change”
An example of how established science changes is how the initial dominance of Einstein’s relativity physics resulted in a rejection of later quantum physics. Because for years the two were considered mutually exclusive, and scientists favored Einstein’s physics, which were already well established (the giant mushroom cloud thingy is pretty persuasive Einstein knew what he was talking about). But as quantum physics began to find its way forward with huge particle accelerators that defied what we thought we knew about atomics, Einstein’s relativity physics had to give way. It isn’t that one or the other is proven right or wrong; it is that both appear to be correct and we do not yet know enough about how that can be true, when both are operating on mutually exclusive rules.
So here is Chuck Todd, not a scientist, picking sides in an ongoing scientific debate without any scientific training himself, and without having held a scientific debate to educate his viewers, and using his position to squash dissent and ideas he does not like. This is because he is most loyal to the politics of human-caused climate change. No surprise there, but hey, let’s just say what needs to be said.
A tattered old bumper sticker my friend John Johnson has on his pickup truck says “Liberal ideas: So good they have to be required.”
The flip side of John’s bumper sticker is that totalitarians like Chuck Todd and Aaron Doering are so insecure about the truth of their views that they must censor all contrary arguments. Like almost all others in his establishment media, Chuck Todd bans his critics because he cannot withstand basic scrutiny.
But if the church is any indication, there is hope for Chuck Todd. Fast forward from the bad old days, and the church became an irreplaceable cornerstone of Western Civilization; without its Biblical values, there would be no universal truths or individual rights that make America so great today. The church just had to look inward and answer some basic questions about freedom, liberty, individual conscience, and then everything else fell into place.
And as unjustifiably confident as Chuck Todd is in public, he must have a spark of curiosity buried somewhere in his conscience. A normal person would.
Chuck Todd and Aaron Doering and all other liberals are envious of the Catholic Grand Inquisition’s ability to burn “heretics” alive
End University Tenure, Now
College professors enjoy employment-for-life called “tenure.”
Long ago tenure was created to attract the best and brightest educators, and to buffer them from the whimsy of changing administrations by ensuring they could remain in their ivory tower and continue to think Big Thoughts.
The tenure process is pretty much an in-house show, where the most senior fellow academicians in the particular department pass judgment upon an applicant’s teaching and publishing history, as well as her personality, professional demeanor, and other considerations that are utterly forbidden in the rest of the hiring process everywhere else in every other line of work.
Once tenured, a college professor is more or less untouchable. Even egregious violations of basic workplace conduct, such as sexual harassment of students and colleagues, are usually swept aside in the interest in of preserving face. Department standing usually trumps actual productivity and usefulness. Toxic cruelty, viciousness, and unprofessional “bomb throwing” by university staff are behaviors now not only expected but nearly de rigeur to establish street cred, irrespective of field.
Galileo comes to mind as someone who could have benefited from tenure. The great ground-breaking Italian philosopher and astronomer was constantly harassed, victimized, physically threatened, and nearly bankrupted by a religious-political establishment unhappy about Galileo’s deviation from the conventional narrative.
Other free thinkers like him in his day were publicly flogged into a screaming bloody pulp before then being burned alive atop a pile of fresh green boughs, which give a low, slow heat that hurts and does not char. Slow-roasting in the public square was a risk Galileo ran to improve science, a benefit we all today enjoy.
Today, many Galileo-type educators and researchers find themselves professionally stranded by a ring of fire commanded by a politically correct band of tenured faculty who behave much like Galileo’s tormentors back in the 1400s.
Real academics and researchers are now trying to understand “global climate change,” but they reach scientific conclusions contrary to the politically acceptable talking points propounded by tenured faculty who themselves are funded by extreme foundations far outside the mainstream. Free thinkers and real scientists today stand much less of a chance of getting their PhD, much less achieving the protection of tenure in which to pursue their scientific research. The careers of intellectuals who do not conform with the left’s narrative about human-caused global climate change find their careers abruptly terminated.
Political orthodoxy trumps actual scientific curiosity. Science has become heavily politicized. This condition marks the end of science. Galileo’s attackers could not have done any better, and in fact just today anti-Trump, anti-democracy agitators from within the Hillary Clinton campaign are publishing personal details and home addresses of professionals who do not toe the Left’s line on the outcome of the election. They have done the same with college professionals who dare to stand alone, to think differently.
This week my daughter received two wild anti-democracy, anti-Trump emails from two of her biology professors at a nationally prominent university. Fearful of being degraded, humiliated, harassed, or literally downgraded for disagreeing with them, she found herself browbeaten and feeling coerced into showing up at a political rally having nothing to do with the subject of microbiology, for which our family is paying a princely sum. She did not show up at the rally her two biology professors urged her to join, and she now anxiously awaits their judgment that she somehow “failed” because she did not join in something she finds detestable.
This is the decayed state of academia today, and this is why tenure must end. Tenure no longer serves its original purpose, and in fact the beneficiaries of tenure have themselves become the very thought police and public executioners they were supposed to be protected from.
Tenure is a liability, and it allows university educations to become an expensive farce. Tenure is a benefit no other employee enjoys in any other line of work, and instead of being the outlaw exception, academia should be exceptional, derived through competition and the rise of excellence.
It is time to put all university faculty on five-year contracts, and judge them objectively: How well their students enjoyed their classes, how useful their publications are to their field and to larger American society. Professors who believe it is their role and right to harass and coerce students into politically correct thinking can be let go to find better work, and actual productive professors can stay on another five years and continue to bring real value to society.
Let’s start with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and set a national trend. Pennsylvania taxpayers deserve their money’s worth, because God knows, I am not getting it at my daughter’s school.