More tremors in the forcefield: George Monbiot has some doubts
There seems to be a lot of this change stuff going around—or at least, potential change.
George Monbiot—the liberal environmentalist Brit who gave his name to “moonbat”—has had what I’ve come to think of as the betrayal experience. But I’ll let him tell it—and you’ll see that he doesn’t pull his punches. The man is reeling:
Over the past fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.
It began innocently enough, in a debate Monbiot was having with one of his idols, Dr. Helen Caldicott. He asked her to produce sources for some statements she’d made about the health effects of radiation, and she obliged by coming up with mostly non-scientific stuff and one lengthy (423-page) report by the US Academy of Sciences, which Monbiot actually read. It turned out it completely contradicted what she’d said.
I wonder if Caldicott herself has ever actually looked at it. Ooops!
Then Monbiot came across the Chernobyl data by UNSCEAR, the same report I referenced here, the one that found few and relatively minor long-term health effects from the worst nuclear power plant accident ever, Chernobyl.
Monbiot goes on to compare Caldicott and her ilk to just about the worst people he can think of, climate change deniers.
Ah well, give him time.
Caldicott lied, people lived.
No… wait!
Holy Moly!!! That is quite a piece he wrote there. Sadly, one that will not likely ever be reported on in any MSM outlet. Thanks for the heads up Neo.
Well, he got a good haddock-slapping* by reality. Hope it’s not too late for him, and hope reality has another good few more lined up for him. Honestly, we need more people who are dealing with reality, not with an unconscious bias.
*an expression of my own invention – meaning, whacked across the face by a large, very wet fish.
Come on over, George. There are many truths for you yet to be discovered…
Is this what you meant, Sgt. Mom?
I had the same experience during Chernobyl disaster and soon after it. At first, Soviet press lied in unison that everything was OK. Than sensorship was abolished as reaction to this fiasco, and a new phenomenon emerged: liberal hype, when every rug tried to compete with each other in apocaliptic prognostication. So I had to turn to scientific literature, mainly in English, to dig out the truth. It was not even remotely as frightening as what became at this point “common knowledge”.
Granted, the Atomic Bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instantaneously killed and maimed many tens of thousands of Japanese; an estimated 99,000-166,000 in Hiroshima and 60,000-80,000 in Nagasaki killed by acute effects, with 50% of the deaths occurring the first day (I note that the number of Japanese killed by our earlier firebomb attacks against Tokyo was higher still, but no similar outrage attaches to them). The causes of the many thousands of remaining deaths in later months in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were estimated to be 15-20% from radiation sickness, 20-30% from flash burns, and 50-60% from other injures compounded by sickness. But it seems to me that beside the very high initial number of deaths–and while some people very close to the epicenters were actually, literally vaporized, leaving outline “shadows” of themselves in carbon etched on nearby buildings, like a photographic image, there was also one couple who survived who had hidden in a deeply buried bunker that was basically right under one of the impact points–and the many thousands who were severely injured and/or exposed to massive doses of radiation who succumbed relatively shortly thereafter, I did not see reports of vast thousands of people who lingered on, and suffered and died from the direct effects of their exposure in the years following the bombings, nor did I notice reports detailing thousands of children born to survivors who suffered all sorts of birth defects and genetic anomalies. Nonetheless, it was from “estimates” made of radiation dosages and their effects, based on these two bombings, that our standards for radiation exposure have been developed.
In the course of spending several decades paying attention to various studies/papers on the effects of atomic radiation on human beings–many predicated on the “estimated” amounts of exposure received by Japanese exposed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki–for, of course, there were no sensors on the ground at the time the bombs detonated to make readings–I was struck by how these various estimated dosages and studies seesawed between low estimates of dosage and accompanying reports that there were relatively few of the horrific and wide-spread, long-term effects that were popularly imagined and/or that they were found in only a small number of exposed individuals, and studies that said, on the other hand, that their estimate of dosages was much higher, and discussed how massively deadly and destructive radiation exposure was to human beings. I also noticed that the reports of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission set up by the U.S. and Japan after WWII in Japan, that subsequently became the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, never seemed to document massive numbers of genetically crippled children produced by survivors.
Pointing this out did not make me popular.
So which is it? Exposure to high doses of radiation in a short period of time, or exposures that are cumulatively very high are admittedly lethal, but who about exposure to less lethal amounts and how much, and what are the effects? I suspect that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the answer to this question has been more of a political answer than a scientific one.
I’ve been reading the Ticker Forum thread about Fukushima Daiichi. It’s up to 290 pages of comments now and still going strong. Several of the commenters seem to be very knowledgeable.
Some of the cast of characters: Analog is a retired nuclear plant worker, Etika is a professor of chemistry or physics (I’m not sure which), and Bigbluffer and Mikek31 seem to know a lot too. Chimichanga lives in Tokyo. I don’t know whether he is Japanese or an American expat, but his English is perfect.
Here is a PDF I found there last night. It appears to be a PowerPoint presentation, and it has more solid information than all of the MSM reports combined. It’s 8 MB, so I recommend downloading it to your computer rather than viewing it online.
The bottom line is that Fukushima Daiichi is far, far worse than Three Mile Island, yet nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl.
Sorry, it should have been “…but what about exposure to less lethal amounts….”
I should also point out that the Japanese government paid periodic compensation to those who were survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so that there was an incentive for as many people as possible to claim exposure, and still no reports of massive numbers of long-term sufferers from radiation exposure and/or genetic anomalies or illness in their descendants.
In Japan, there is still a cultural bias against atomic bomb survivors, called hibakusha, and their descendants. It’s like a form of shunning.
I was in the produce section of my supermarket yesterday, and two women were talking about Fukushima. One seemed quite upset and worried about what food it was safe to buy. The other sympathized and said the only thing they could do was continue to protest. Neither seemed able to figure out that Germany probably doesn’t import much spinach or zucchini from Japan and that they could safely buy the Spanish tomatoes, but they were out of thinking mode. I’m pretty sure that few Germans will have a Monbiot moment. It drives me nuts.
Genetic anomalies are the most frightening, but also the most exagerrated aspect of radiation exposure. First, there is believed to be no treshold effect, that is, any dose can produce mutations. But some human populations live in environments where backround radiation levels are hundreds times more than average without any observable effects! It seems that long term genetic effects are restricted to those who were exposed and do not transfered to their progeny, and among them the main effect is larger frequency of spontaneous abortions.
since everything they do is a inversion… (ie antithesis) of every point they label, like a kids word game. so, if its consciousness raising, then they are actually doing what? consciousness lowering. if they say its liberation, then what does it lead to? slavery. if they say its good, then what does it end up as? bad. if they say that destroying families will make a better future? do i really have to list it?
so, what your seeing is REAL conciousness raising… which is why when your young and your not a socialist, you have no heart… because the heart is what makes us want to help, to make better. but the young have no brain to temper the heart. they are blind to what is effective to give the heart its satisfaction.
so thats why when your older and your still a socialist, you have no brain… you become more concious as you get older. or at least your supposed do. so their telling you that perpetual youth is best is to stunt the growth of real conciousness.
heck… if women had their consciousness raised for real instead of lowered, they would realize that they have value, power, and that providing morons who think the US has 57 states, and donating the money for one baby, was a raw deal at best, and insane at worst. they would realize that if they dont have kids, their is no future. they would not have such self loathing – suffering a form of socially induced gender dysphoria as a norm condition with a huge weight of constant doubt over their heads.
monbiot wants meaning in his life because the only things that have meaning in life he has denied have meaning
because they told him that such thinking is old, and everyone knows that new is always better than old. which is why we pay 300k for a chair from the 1700s, and 39,99 for a new one…
thats what we did to our culture… a collection of the finest best antiques of 10,000 years of interconnected living and familial wisdom gained through experience by all those people that died doing things. were all traded in for a bunch of cool looking easily broken 39,99 wicker lawn chairs. and finding out we were more comfortable, at home, and free in the antique shop… and that this new world is getting to look more and more like a rats cage complete with a treadmill for the lemmings in constant search of a new cliff to fling themselves off of.
rough day.. sorry..
It seems highly probable that us Doubting Thomases are correct the vast majority of the time on any theme pontificated by the Ruling Class. This is merely an echo on Artfldgr’s thesis above. A reflex 180 course is today always the correct one, almost regardless whether one has more facts on hand on the topic at issue or not.
Was it ever thus? I think not, though the Doubters probably batted .500 even back in the day.
Expat: do the Euros live in a state of constant fear?
Tom wrote “Expat: do the Euros live in a state of constant fear?”
And if they do is there anything we can do to add to it?
Tom, you hardly need to ask this. I never been in Europe, but can say with absolute certainty that they, indeed, live in a state of constant fear. Europe is post-Christian now, that is, a land of non-believers. EVERY non-believer ALWAYS lives in a state of constant fear. Religion is the only escape from this existential anxiety. No rational knowledge can provide this. The more a man knows, the more reasons he has to be afraid.
I happened to visit Hiroshima one day after the 63rd anniversary of the bombing of the city. After touring the city we took a trolley into the city to eat diner.
As we were dining at a an out door cafe along the river, it occurred to me that I was in the ‘Forbidden Zone’ so beloved by cheesy post-apocalyptic sci-fi movies. I wondered where the mutants and futuristic punk rockers roaming the world in dune buggies in an endless quest for gasoline were?
Nuclear material is nasty stuff to be sure. However, it is nowhere near as bad as a lot of hysterical folks make it out to be, and there is a price for their over-reactions. Remember the old hubbub over the dangers of irradiating food to kill germs?
I wonder if Caldicott herself has ever actually looked at it. Ooops!
well.. i will tell you that if she is a leader, then she has, and knows you wont.
how many times do i sit here and get all flustered and freaky in that the people wont read. they refuse to learn what they even support by reading anything other than fluff articles by people they like, or entertaining short wit (to maximize the brain juice they are addicted to), or self reinforcing (which is why they like the herd).
i have seen this DOZENS of times. where they claim a paper proves something, and i read the paper, and it says no such thing. in fact it often says the opposite. which would make what they are presenting the antithesis of the paper. 🙂 (they are cargo cult living by formula. Confucians… )
everything is always distorted with the leaders. and a person like monbiot is one of the “useful idiots”, or a member of the “innocents clubs” as a much more apt description!
so monbiot was never on the inside, he was always one of these people who believed that he was working for something when actually now he is discovering he was working against it.
paint exit on the entrances
paint entrance on the exit
and you can steer the good people to dismantle their own home thinking that they are building it up and making it better, and healthier.
if they say its good for children to be in daycare away from family with distant strangers, and say they have studies, then given their rule of antithesis, its harmful.
if they say that a child doesn’t need the father, the father is probably most crucial (he is and the largest linked to outcomes)
the main point is that the vast majority of people are pretty good, and so that goodness can be turned against them, if they are not allowed to develop a mind to temper the foolishness of a blind heart.
it is THIS that is the crucial discovery made by that funny German guy and others. that we can be made to do almost anything if the point is couched right and not countered by reason, but neutralized by emotion. especially ideas of cheating pitted against the impossible to accept fact none of us is the best in the world and have to face that where we end up is where we worked to be to some extent (if not acted upon by external corrective, maladaptive entities)
i keep pointing to key things to read
no one reads them. even the ones who use the promise of doing so to get a shorter post (quite dishonest, no?).
so the left knows that people who dont want to live in reality and who feel entitled will take the shortcut, and if society tells them they are smart for this, they are going to do it EVERY time… a skinnerian world when the conciousness is not allowed to look at itself, a behaviorists dream. for only when we look at ourselves honestly, can we say, why are we doing this repetitive stupid thing…
(like making up problems rather than doing work that really means something. expressed in my recent life by a researcher who would experiment his way through something over weeks when he could have looked up the information and formula and been done in a day. the latter was no longer emotionally satisfying when compared to getting his addictive fix pretending to work a problem. ie, an erudite way to do sudoku puzzles on the publics dime and think that its science)
we look to our community to know what to do, but when the community contains corrupted people we are not allowed to isolate and ostracize, then we live in a world of people who are honest and mean well, and cant tell the difference other than hearing what is sweet, end up being confounded and twisted around to be their own enemies because of the lack of weeding out the corrupt who do not see others thinking as something to be respected.
No rational knowledge can provide this. The more a man knows, the more reasons he has to be afraid.
almost… if you get to a critical point and your open, you may be lucky enough to see the kind of thing that lao tsu did… and that everything is fine it is what it is.. and its how its supposed to be, and the more you learn, the better you navigate…
some people embrace all of reality, including risk, and outcomes… for those people, religion is something else, and life is something to be lived by not fearing death.
while campy, its summed up in the overused missive from the wars, when one man wanted the others to charge into fire…
do you want to live forever?
those that say yes, never live at all…
religion, can hold that anxiety away, but in truth, most of it is fear of living… and religion makes living more accessible to those who would not live, but exist in fear.
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture–education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business. (so who gets blamed for their actions?)
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat]. [CPS thanks to feminists cant take children, but the police need a warrant to look in your living room]
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
Congressional Record–Appendix, pp. A34-A35
January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals
EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Thursday, January 10, 1963
Tom,
I can’t speak about all Europeans, but German Angst can be ratcheted up to hysteria in about a minute. I would say that most of the food (cereals, dried soup mixes, you name it) now advertises that it is not GM or is not Gen food. I can’t understand why the people are so afraid of finding genes in their vegies, but I guess plastic is preferable. The Angst about anything atomic is unbelievable.
In trying to find an identity different from the Nazi one, Germans have gone back to the old identity of being Dichter und Denker (thinkers and poets). Unfortunately, this carries then back to the Romantic era. I have friends who still revere Ludwig II, who sold out Bavaria for his dream castles, because he supported Wagner.
I can only speak from five years experience in Italy, Belgium and France, but Europeans are about as scared, hysterical, etc, as are Americans. In three years I never had a conversation with my Italian or other landlords about nuclear dangers or similar though we did talk family, vacations, food, and all the other normal topics. Now, I agree with expat that the Germans are sometimes a special case. One neighbor, a German army officer, was a great guy though he did give in to a bit of Kaiser-worship. His brother was the German liberal from the movies. He spent most of one of our conversations lecturing me on American failings to which lessons I proved unsympathetic. I’ve had the same conversation, as it turns out, with my brother-in-law.
WOW, Artfldgr. There should be a memorial to Mr. Herlong.
My thanks to you for your research, and your wisdom, borne of both experience (some apparently quite bitter) and thought.
Used to follow the anti-US stuff when the Sovs were funding it.
Caldicott was a really piece of work. It would be interesting to hear some of her zombies.
“A one megaton blast at 4000 feet over Des Moines would cause 200,00 deaths instantly…..”, all recited in a portentous drone.
When it’s pointed out that our missiles are not aimed at Des Moines and that possibly some concern for the other guy might be warranted, the response would be, “A one megaton blast at 4000 feet over Des Moines would cause 200,000 deaths instantly….”
Jeez. What must have been at one point intelligent people had suffered a brainectomy.
Amazing.
Monbiot ==> Moon bat.
A stopped clock that must have been thrown down.
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Helen Caldicott was chicken little before Al Gore was chicken little. She’s been making babies cry, scaring the ignorant, testifying before congress, and raking in speaking fees and publishing garbage for almost 4 decades. She’s just another grifter and charlatan from the left.
Artfldger says, “well.. i will tell you that if she is a leader, then she has, and knows you wont.”
Yes.
(If Mr. Moonbat is waking up and smelling reality, more power to him.)
They say there’s no zealot like a convert. Remains to be seen where Monbiot stands on such issues and what he does to redeem himself.
Just wanted to share this excerpt, from Dr. Lyle Rossiter, who has written a book on liberalism as a mental disorder.
In a nutshell.
“Dr. Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr.,a forensic psychiatrist, explains the madness of liberalism in his new book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. You can read an excerpt below, and read more at his website libertymind.com.
“Like all other human beings, the modern liberal reveals his true character, including his madness, in what he values and devalues, in what he articulates with passion.
“Of special interest, however, are the many values about which the modern liberal mind is not passionate: his agenda does not insist that the individual is the ultimate economic, social and political unit; it does not idealize individual liberty and the structure of law and order essential to it; it does not defend the basic rights of property and contract; it does not aspire to ideals of authentic autonomy and mutuality; it does not preach an ethic of self-reliance and self-determination; it does not praise courage, forbearance or resilience; it does not celebrate the ethics of consent or the blessings of voluntary cooperation.
“It does not advocate moral rectitude or understand the critical role of morality in human relating. The liberal agenda does not comprehend an identity of competence, appreciate its importance, or analyze the developmental conditions and social institutions that promote its achievement. The liberal agenda does not understand or recognize personal sovereignty or impose strict limits on coercion by the state. It does not celebrate the genuine altruism of private charity. It does not learn history’s lessons on the evils of collectivism.
“What the liberal mind is passionate about is a world filled with pity, sorrow, neediness, misfortune, poverty, suspicion, mistrust, anger, exploitation, discrimination, victimization, alienation and injustice. Those who occupy this world are “workers,” “minorities,” “the little guy,” “women,” and the “unemployed.” They are poor, weak, sick, wronged, cheated, oppressed, disenfranchised, exploited and victimized.
“They bear no responsibility for their problems. None of their agonies are attributable to faults or failings of their own: not to poor choices, bad habits, faulty judgment, wishful thinking, lack of ambition, low frustration tolerance, mental illness or defects in character. None of the victims’ plight is caused by failure to plan for the future or learn from experience.
“Instead, the “root causes” of all this pain lie in faulty social conditions: poverty, disease, war, ignorance, unemployment, racial prejudice, ethnic and gender discrimination, modern technology, capitalism, globalization and imperialism. In the radical liberal mind, this suffering is inflicted on the innocent by various predators and persecutors: “Big Business,” “Big Corporations,” “greedy capitalists,” U.S. Imperialists,” “the oppressors,” “the rich,” “the wealthy,” “the powerful” and “the selfish.”
“The liberal cure for this endless malaise is a very large authoritarian government that regulates and manages society through a cradle to grave agenda of redistributive caretaking. It is a government everywhere doing everything for everyone. The liberal motto is “In Government We Trust.”
“To rescue the people from their troubled lives, the agenda recommends denial of personal responsibility, encourages self-pity and other-pity, fosters government dependency, promotes sexual indulgence, rationalizes violence, excuses financial obligation, justifies theft, ignores rudeness, prescribes complaining and blaming, denigrates marriage and the family, legalizes all abortion, defies religious and social tradition, declares inequality unjust, and rebels against the duties of citizenship.
“Through multiple entitlements to unearned goods, services and social status, the liberal politician promises to ensure everyone’s material welfare, provide for everyone’s healthcare, protect everyone’s self-esteem, correct everyone’s social and political disadvantage, educate every citizen, and eliminate all class distinctions.
“With liberal intellectuals sharing the glory, the liberal politician is the hero in this melodrama. He takes credit for providing his constituents with whatever they want or need even though he has not produced by his own effort any of the goods, services or status transferred to them but has instead taken them from others by force.
“It should be apparent by now that these social policies and the passions that drive them contradict all that is rational in human relating, and they are therefore irrational in themselves. But the faulty conceptions that lie behind these passions cannot be viewed as mere cognitive slippage. The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error.
“Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology. So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche.
“The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities.”
I can’t see a thing on any of his lists above that is untrue or inaccurate. But aggregating them like this makes a damning portrait.
“”Over the past fortnight I’ve made a deeply troubling discovery.””
So how many more fortnights will it take before Mr Monbiot discovers AGW is the mother of all deceptions? His outrage is like discovering the wife that he cheats on daily, lied to him about paying the water bill.
Too bad that public perception of everything concerning radiation is shaped by apocalyptic SF with all these mutants, monsters and forbidden zones. Reality depicted by scientific literature is quite different, but who knows it? A concerted efforts in public enlightenment is needed before population becomes informed enough for meaningful discussion about nuclear power and other uses of radiation in everyday life.
It’s really hard to be a lefty. All those guidelines to reconcile:
1. Economic growth for poor
2. Industrial Growth for Unions
3. Old Socialist dogma (Electrification = Socialism)
4. Reliance on Experts (but which ones?)
5. Environmentalism (but really just preserving nice country homes for lefty’s)
6. Nice creature comforts (in the correct style)
7. Salon style thinking (arts, philosophy, etc.)
In the end No’s 6 and 7 trump all the rest. Here in CT
one of our ace legislator wants to put a massive tax on power plants that use nuclear, coal or oil. But she is opposing installation of two wind turbines (tiny) in her town.
1200 highly paid staff work at the local nuclear plant, it produces half the states power at the lowest prices, but she want’s to put it out of business.
“”Too bad that public perception of everything concerning radiation is shaped by apocalyptic SF with all these mutants, monsters and forbidden zones.””
Sergey
Name a subject area where public perception is not purposely targeted by the press for an anti capitalist liberal agenda. And what is a liberal anyway if not a person with such skewed perceptions of the world, that blacks are free when enslaved and spending more money than taxpayers are willing to pay is no problem?
Isn’t this the change we were hoping for? Lefty discovers he’s been lied to and is shocked. He starts to become a little skeptical. That’s change you can appreciate.
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“A one megaton blast at 4000 feet over Des Moines would cause 200,00 deaths instantly…..”, all recited in a portentous drone.
As an experimentalist to the core, I propose experimental verification, namely, detonation of a one megaton device over Berkeley.
Kinda hard to discern an increase in the number of mutants, however.
It’s a pity we learned one set of phony lessons from Hollywood and not another.
In fact, the Japanese could change the narrative and cash in big time. “Come to Hiroshima, where our radiation is high enough to give you super-powers! Hi, I’m Bruce Banner, and since experiencing Hiroshima gamma radiation I’m stronger than ever! I’m Peter Parker, and I much prefer Japanese radioactive spiders to American ones! I’m Dr. Charles Xavier, and my school for mutants takes field trips to Japan all the time; we feel very comfortable here.”
OB,
“Kinda hard to discern an increase in the number of mutants, however.”
Now that’s funny!!
Oh my! Keep a reporting page, but start up a humor blog too. Now, it was on the inside, but I am still laughing my mind off after reading this post. You really can’t make up material that is as good as this. No one but liberals would believe it, and since it isn’t within their paradigm, they would not enjoy it. Thanks for the chuckles… or passing them around.
Although I disagree with almost everything that Monbiot writes (up until this month, at least) I do have a certain amount of respect for him. He actually debated the propriety of his buying an automobile when he and his wife moved out of Oxford and into the wilds of Wales. That argues well for his character – too many environmentalists (see Gore, Al) have no qualms about chartering a private jet themselves and letting the little people do the conserving.
Surellin . . .
He and his wife may have “debated,” but the question is, did they get the car, or not?
Anybody can pretend.
The reported Des Moines population as of the 2000 census is 198,682.
That one megaton blast is going to kill everyone in Des Moines.
“Anybody can pretend.”
Like Bill and Hill when Monica was much in the news. Bill got religion and Hill mused about adopting a child. Then Bill sent Air Force bombers after an African aspirin factory.
The same reason I support nuclear power and tended to dismiss the arguments against it as ignorant is the reason that I dismiss most arguments against climate change as ignorant: the scientists in the relevent fields overwhelmingly supported nuclear power and the scientists in the relevent fields overwhelmingly support global warming.
It takes a special brand of chutzpah to imagine that you know more than experts in fields you’ve never studied or that people who are aligned with the Heartland Institute and other oil/energy sector think tanks are paragons of scientific virtue, but that the average climate researcher in all the different countries all over the globe is a well-paid member of a vast conspiracy of evil scientists.
I had no idea the League of Supervillians really existed.
brad. You presume the scientists in the field of global warming–a nonexistent field so we’ll say in climate science–overwhelmingly agree that AGW is a reality.
Many, many do not. The so-called science behind the IPCC pronouncements is falling apart, chunk by chunk, with some scientists who were supposedly signatories claiming that wasn’t what they said.
Ray. Ref. Des Moines. A one-meg blast is pretty big. Thing is, Caldicott and her mouthpieces had no connection to reality. So if were going to take five meg, or half a meg, no biggie. Point is, when they’re against US missiles and you point out that it’s Sov missiles which would be exploding over Des Moines, they simply repeat the only thing they’ve managed to memorize.
Morons.
Richard Aubrey:
Funny, I think the science behind global warming is stronger and more extensive than ever. You assert otherwise. Neither of us is the expert , so who wins?
Forgive me for going with the expressed opinions of pretty much every major scientific organization in the world on this subject. I think the probability lies that way.
brad.
Actually, not every major scientific organization in the work.
See CRU getting busted. See Watt’s Up With That blog.
However, those who still claim to believe get the subsidies. Grants. Publish.
brad is trying to dialogue to consensus…
ie, convince us that others agree and so we should be ashamed..
its right out of havlock…
the part they DONT tell the morons that do it, is that the people at the table know what they are doing… which is why, when you do this, and you do things like brainstrorming (xfering the success from one to many), the best brains leave.
and guess what?
as my boss is finding out…
stupid is unable, but ignorant is not knowing
she equates the two, and so she wants to believe that her few years of dabbling is programming, and so she can assert things that wont work, put pressure that makes no sense, and then use the fact she is doing this and threatinign a life and family, to justify not having a person who does know present..
the truth is that we are not equal, and she is falling apart and the department is falling apart as thats how she acts,behaves etc..
she has the totalitarian mindset.
power makes things real
and if power orders and it doesnt happen, then we are just being mean and a whip plaited with wire will help.
no matter how much you beat a turnip, it wont bleed.