What Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit" -- the idea that government can know the future's possibilities and can and should control the future's unfolding -- is the left's agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left's hostility to markets. And to automobiles -- people going wherever they want whenever they want.
Today's "green left" is the old "red left" revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history's violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.
The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans' living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything -- carbon.
Environmentalism is, as Lawson writes, an unlimited "license to intrude." "Eco-fundamentalism," which is "the quasi-religion of green alarmism," promises "global salvationism." Onward, green soldiers, into preventive war...
George F. Will
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/21/AR2008052102428.html
I’ve never put much stock in this argumentation for leading a religious life, anyway (nonpunitive theologies would seem to throw a kink in this ordering). Conservative naysayers, however, have begun demonizing the ethics of saving the planet with the same moralizing fervor that often accompanies truly religious fundamentalism. George Will furthers this new line of atttack in an odious column...
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/environmentandenergy/archive/2008/05/24/environmental-fundamental-ism-s.aspx
Well how cruel was that, he shrugged, as they moved through distorted vision into a parallel world, where his own heart broken and diseased psychosis could rally against the tide, overcome all, step into the sunshine. A thousand fresh starts. A rallying cry. A beginning which had no end. He was determined not to make the mistakes of the past; but there was little that could change. He was shocked by what he had seen. IN the depths were different shallows, shadows of former selves and warm hearted addicts. They dribbled on us. WE had had it all confirmed. There was no way the future could be ours. We were deeply psychotic; and the plain Jane world around us could only be of great assistance.
The bars flashed; a sequence of happier days. It's not going to end today, they said. You look like you're carrying the world on your shoulders. It's the pain, he said, it's wearing me down. Into psychosis. Into old age. He wanted comfort of a different form. He was pleased to be greeted at the gate. Exercises in automatic writing produced nothing but gibberish; you couldn't have been more certain. It was the bars, he guessed, that gave him the greatest hearts; all that glory washed away. They were so infinitely proud; and they downed glass after glass. He smoked in the alley out the back; and further down the hill, the pond with the giant gold fish where he used to linger; looking up at the warm glow of electric light that came from the apartments, from people with somewhere to live.
These days had been long and hard, but in retrospect seemed like some enormous adventure. He was pleased at what had happened, the devotion, that proud glory, the creepy hands, the absolute drunkenness. Other times there would be other solutions; but here he could see the only solution was to pretend to be a normal person, to act like everyone else. They didn't have to know his head was splintering with light, the world was dancing in a zillion colours, rivers of ecstasy shivered through him and away, as if all of our destinies were wrapped into these tiny moments. Cruel? Only if you allowed them to hurt you. The timing was all wrong. He was too young to get back into the bar; to drink legally. It all depended on who was behind the bar; and whether the cops had been around.
There's been another police crackdown, this time focusing on the nightclubs around Kings Cross, the city's only real red light district. Any aberrance is pounced upon in a hideous conformity communist in its style. All done, supposedly, for our own good. We fought to be different; gladly paraded our difference, shoved everything in their face, painted the fence multi-coloured, danced till dawn. The last thing we wanted was to be like everybody else, or to act like everybody else. It wasn't right. They represented the worst our society could offer. Nobody wanted to be like them, the mainstream, with their dark suits and conservative attitudes. And now the coating of conformism has become almost total, a think layer of lacquer which made everyone the same. There was no difference. No one stood up and said they were proud not to run with the pack. Think outside the square and be squashed, it was as simple as that.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=64734
By Bob Unruh
© 2008 WorldNetDaily
More than 31,000 scientists across the U.S. – including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields such as atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties – have signed a petition rejecting "global warming," the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth's climate.
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate," the petition states. "Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."
The Petition Project actually was launched nearly 10 years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then, between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign.
But now, a new effort has been conducted because of an "escalation of the claims of 'consensus,' release of the movie 'An Inconvenient Truth' by Mr. Al Gore, and related events," according to officials with the project.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0805/S00122.htm
Global warming hysteria: how the pendulum has swung
It has become commonplace knowledge, and is unchallenged, that global average temperature has not increased since 1998. This corresponds to a 9-year period during which the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast, did increase, and that by almost 5%.
The greenhouse hypothesis - which asserts that carbon dioxide increases of human origin will cause dangerous global warming - is clearly invalidated by these data.
As if that were not enough, a leading computer modelling team has recently published a paper in Nature which acknowledges what climate rationalists (the so-called “sceptics”) have always asserted. Which is that, contrary to IPCC assessments, any human influence on global temperature is so small that it cannot yet be differentiated from natural cycles of climate change. The same modellers have even predicted (after the start of the event, of course) that cooling will now occur for at least the next few years. Mortal strike two against dangerous, human-caused warming.
At this news, the rare balanced commentaries that hitherto have been but a trickle through cracks in the monolithic dam of climate alarmism have coalesced into a steady, fissured flow, and there is an imminent likelihood of total dam collapse. Interestingly, at the same time, the fierce discussion about the pros and cons of dangerous human-caused change that has formerly been conducted almost exclusively on the internet (including particularly blogs and video outlets like YouTube) is starting to spread to the more mainstream press.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/719126/brr-the-climate-cools-for-realitydeniers.thtml
I have previously written about the work of Lawrence Solomon for Canada’s National Post. He has been regularly charting in his column the ever-increasing number of climate scientists around the world who have been either crying foul about the man-made global warming scam or, having initially signed up to it, have been having second thoughts about it. This was a journey of discovery for him, to put it mildly; he had previously been inclined to believe the claims that ‘deniers’ were oil industry stooges, since he himself had worked for an anti-nuclear energy group and so was duly cynical about the way that industry’s scientists could twist the truth to suit their paymasters. But then to his astonishment he discovered that, when it came to MMGW, the scientists who were corrupt weren’t pushing the boat out for big business but for its holier-than-thou green challengers.
Now he has written a book, provocatively entitled The Deniers, in which he shows that not only is the fabled climate change ‘consensus’ itself a sham but the so-called MMGW ‘deniers’ are by far the more accomplished and distinguished scientists than those pushing the theory as a settled and incontrovertible truth. A number of them indeed, are so eminent they were used as experts by the IPCC – but then came to realise that this was an innately corrupted process and that even some of their own work was being abused and distorted in order to promulgate the false doctrine of MMGW.
Among those he cites are Dr Edward Wegman, chairman of the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics and the granddaddy of statisticians, who administered the definitive coup de grace to the ‘hockey stick curve’ research that underpinned the whole IPCC doomsday prognosis by showing that its author Dr Michael Mann (an impressive authority in his own field of paleoclimatology) had made a catastrophic statistical error (and had thus managed to ‘lose’ several hundred years of climate history including the Little Ice Age) which vitiated his entire study;
Major, Estie and Sam on Newport Beach.
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