Thinking the Unthinkable

Just found an article that seems to bring a whoooole new aspect to the vexed and often ridiculous ‘global warming’ debate.

Here’s the link..

Where the Global Warming Hoax was Born

And here’s  some edited highlights…

“Global Warming” is, and always was, a policy for genocidal reduction of the world’s population. The preposterous claim that human-produced carbon dioxide will broil the Earth, melt the ice caps, and destroy human life, came out of a 1975 conference in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, organized by the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in 1974.

Mead—whose 1928 book on the sex life of South Pacific Islanders was later found to be a fraud—recruited like-minded anti-population hoaxsters to the cause: Sow enough fear of man- caused climate change to force global cutbacks in industrial activity and halt Third World development. Mead’s leading recruits at the 1975 conference were climate scare artist Stephen Schneider, population-freak biologist George Woodwell, and the current AAAS president John Holdren—all three of them disciples of Malthusian fanatic Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.1 Guided by luminaries like these, conference discussion focussed on the absurd choice of either feeding people or “saving the environment.”…

The North Carolina conference, which took place Oct. 26-29, 1975, was co- sponsored by two agencies of the U.S. National Institutes of Health: the John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. (Mead had been a Scholar in Residence at the Fogarty Center in 1973.)

It was at this government- sponsored conference, 32 years ago, that virtually every scare scenario in today’s climate hoax took root. Scientists were charged with coming up with the “science” to back up the scares, so that definitive action could be taken by policy-makers.

Global cooling—the coming of an ice age—had been in the headlines in the 1970s, but it could not easily be used to sell genocide by getting the citizens of industrial nations to cut back on consumption. Something more drastic and more personal was needed.

Eugenics and The Paradigm Shift

Mead’s population-control policy was firmly based in the post-Hitler eugenics movement, which took on the more palatable names of “conservation” and “environmentalism” in the post-World War II period. As Julian Huxley, the vice president of Britain’s Eugenics Society (1937-1944), had announced in 1946, “even though it is quite true that radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable.” Huxley was then director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

You just have to hope this is  conspiracy-theory garbage don’t you. But I have a suspicion it’s possibly not.  As I said in an earlier post, Global Warming, or Climate Change, or AGW, to give it the more fancy name, has always been a very weird ‘minority cause’. And I speak as a former member of CND, which never, ever in its history managed to get the weight of credible media behind it that Global Warming can. CND – a real persecuted minority – only appeared in the media to be denigrated or subtly mocked. Its public profile was a mix of befuddled do-gooder and crazed Leftie Traitor. CND never got sympathetic op-eds  and editorials in the New York Times, or documentaries made about it by ex-Vice Presidents.

It never had half its budget paid by the US State Department either.

And yet this latest Minority Cause is getting all that and more. Even to the point of the US Government funding the IPCC to the tune of $19000000, and  being kinda shy about admitting it too.

Can the article above offer a possible explanation for this? After all when Julian Huxley made his chilling prediction about having to make ‘the unthinkable thinkable’ he was Director General of UNESCO, which is, of course, part of the United Nations. Which of course is presently the heart and soul of the Global Warming movement.

So, is this the plan – terrify the masses into believing the world is about to boil. Suppress all contrary opinion. Persecute those who try and reassure that things are ok. Make people so bludgeoned and bewildered by a fake  ’consensus’ of science and politics that they lose all critical faculties, and  then, when they’re frightened beyond reason,  offer them a ‘solution’.

“It’s ok. There’s still hope. All we need to do is let a few billion people die and the rest of us will be saved. All we need to do is turn out the lights, shut off the power, stop growing food for any but the elite, let all that useless brown and yellow and black and white trash human surplus be sloughed off – and lo! A new day will dawn. The ark of mankind will find the distant shore.   We will be leaner, fitter, cleaner, blonder…“

Is that what’s going on? Huxley would probably approve. It’s a great solution to the problem of persuading decent people to allow indecent things to be done in their name.

A ‘final solution’ if you will.

Believing in Climate Change

…I have a problem with this. I’m a  vaguely hippyish, Greenie type by nature. I used belong to CND. I buy organic and Fair Trade.  I recycled before it was compulsory. I have a brick in my toilet cistern though I don’t really even know why. So, y’know I’m a natural constituent for the Climate Changers.  I  should be buying the books, wearing the tee shirt, there at the demos, calling for Action Now to save the world from boiling to death.

But I’m not. I can’t be. Because to me Climate Change, or  Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming to give it its proper name  looks  at best like an unproven hypothesis in deep need of data, and at best like hysterical, poorly reasoned pseudo-science.

So, I can’t join the party. Which is a shame because it’s a pretty cool one, and everyone who’s anyone is going.

As I see it, CAGW is just a crazy collision of human insanity, venality and political opportunism. The  Hardcore Warmists are pushing their agenda because careers and research grants and reputations are all riding on it. The Greens are pushing it because they see it as the best way of getting their voices heard. The politicians are pushing it because they see it as a way of increasing taxes, increasing social control, and possibly issuing in a whole new era of nuclear power, all of which will make them and their friends richer and more powerful.

These three separate interests have all coincidentally come together to create a cross-party super-lobby so powerful, so pan-demographic that it’s swept all before it.   It’s become a mass movement in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons. And worst of all it’s a mainstream Establishment-backed movement selling itself as marginal and oppressed so that millions of wet liberal, former hippy conscience-stricken idiots  (like me) are conned into thinking they are backing a persecuted minority view.

Stop and think guys. How many persecuted minority views get this much airtime? How many persecuted minority views end up on the front page of the NY Times  or the Independent? How many persecuted minority views have major politicians making movies about them?

None is how many. This is a persecuted minority view in an Armani suit and with a fleet of PR guys behind it. It’s  a slick fake  is what it is. As fake as the fake data that created the hockey stick we’re not supposed to remember any more, as slick as the PR that seamlessly  turned Global Warming into Climate Change as soon as people started noticing the globe wasn’t actually warming any more.

Not because someone conspired to fake it, but because it just kinda happened that way. Because  being a crusader even on a fake crusade offers instant meaning. Climate Change makes eco-heroes out of  all of us without us needing to do anything more strenuous than read a few headlines.  It lets us all belong to the biggest, safest, coziest persecuted minority there has ever been. And that’s pretty seductive. And a whole lot easier than thinking for yourself.

auto da fe

Oh here’s a good one. A bunch of ‘rational thinkers’ cheering the fact homeopathy has been condemned by the British House of Commons. They’re happy because they’re certain homeopathy doesn’t work, and that, therefore, right and justice has been served.

How do they ‘know’ it doesn’t work? Simple, they’ve selected all the data that supports their personal bias and rejected everything that doesn’t, thus turning a blurry, inconclusive situation into one of certitude, comfort and simplicity.

Does homeopathy work? The answer is probably ‘yes, sometimes’. Some people have great results, others none at all, just as with aspirin, or chemo. The difference being, there is some science behind the latter two that justifies us accepting they work (when they do). It may be of course there’s also a science behind homeopathy but we just don’t get it yet (and of course never will if the British Govt has its way and halts further research). Or maybe when it works it’s ‘just’ placebo doing it’s thing. Or maybe it’s all garbage. But, even if garbage is all it is, at least taking a few drops of water on your tongue isn’t going to kill you. The same can’t be said of aspirin or chemo unfortunately. So, you know, couldn’t we have a little humility and grace and allow homeopathy its small and harmless place in this complex universe we are so far from understanding?

Well, no, not according to these ‘rational’ Torquemadas. Anything, however benign, that threatens their particular certitudes just has to be burned. Presumably they’d tell anyone stupid enough to think they were healed by it that they need to be more rational and just accept they’re still sick. And so, homeopathy, which at its worst at least never did any harm, has to be banned because the mere possibility it might work collides with the version of reality these Inquisitors want to impose on us all.

Try opening your minds people. Believe nothing, consider everything possible until proved otherwise, and don’t even be too sure about it then.

Roll on the Enlightenment.

belief is the death of intelligence

Robert Anton Wilson, visionary, loon, whatever you will,  famously said the words above, going on to add “as soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence”.   Quid Sapio agrees with this.  And thinks thinking should be encourage wherever possible. So this isn’t a blog for people who have certitudes about things – any things.  Fairies, capitalism,  chocolate, Loch Ness Monsters,  Creationism, Evolution, spontaneous human combustion, the Pope, pasta – anything.

If you’re sure about anything, go away, this place will just make you mad. You’ve been warned.

Ok, just to kickoff, how about the  Lindbergh Kidnapping?

Well, how about it?

If you don’t already know the background, here’s good place to start.  The almost universally held opinion at the time, and maybe even now, is that Bruno Hauptmann, an impoverished German immigrant, did the dirty, and kidnapped and murdered aviator and all-American hero Charles Lindbergh’s baby son.  Hauptmann was eventually executed for the crime.

The tragic Lindbergh baby

But was he guilty? Well, as ever there is no shortage of certitude on either side.  Some people are sure he was guilty, others are sure he was innocent.  Some people  are sure BH was partially involved but didn’t actually do the kidnapping. Others are sure there was  a ‘gang’  (there’s almost always a ‘gang’ somewhere isn’t there).

But  then  a few years ago, two brave men, Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier,  entered the fray with the suggestion that Charles Lindbergh himself might have dunnit.  In a nutshell they suggested CL might have pretended to kidnap his own kid, as a joke on his wife, accidentally dropped and  killed him and then forged the ransom note to cover himself.

I  say brave, because  Lindbergh was a national hero, after flying his plane across the Atlantic  and all that, so it followed in a large portion of the popular mind that he couldn’t possibly do anything bad  and anyone who suggested otherwise was evil, twisted  and should be lynched.  So, their book got a mauling, and their theory tends to be confined to the kind of websites that don’t use margins and fill their text with multi-colored highlights, which is not  so much  an endorsement as a  DSM diagnostic criteria.  Very few people, therefore, have ever given it much thought or space.

But we might just want to remember a couple of crucial things.

First thing obviously is that in  the real, messy old world even heroes do weird shit sometimes, so that’s no reason for dismissing it out of hand.  

Second thing is, the seemingly nuts theory about CL kidnapping his own child  to scare his wife does have one surprising thing in its favor – Lindbergh had apparently done that very thing a few months earlier:

“Two months earlier Lindbergh pretended the child had been kidnapped and allowed the panic – stricken household to search for half an hour before revealing his prank!

He had hidden his child, age 18 months at that time, in the trash closet! As a joke”

Hmmm… This site carries more about the theory. Try to get beyond those scary multi-colored highlights, because there is  some interesting stuff.

I hope they’re wrong, because it’s a horrible idea. But the real point is – there are always more possibilities than you think.

Which is why certitude is always  wrong.

Probably.