It took almost two years, but the American public is starting to glimpse beneath the cracked veneer of President Obama. Once we get past his pretense of moderation, his abundance of contrived charm, and his pre-formulated intellectual largesse, we see him and his administration as they really are: a legion of crony capitalists who create, shape, and exploit financial crises, a sordid collection of has-been Marxists turned policy wonks, and an ill-prepared captain who finds his copy of Rules for Radicals 1 sorely lacking guidance as the U.S.S. Economy sinks further into debt, despair, and degradation.
But since our fearless leader seems so inured of the philosophical underpinnings of the Marx-Trotsky-Lenin triad, perhaps we could learn something from how Russia once (and possibly still does) handled their propaganda, which was their most potent weapon of mass destruction. According to Anatoly Golitsyn, a former high-level KGB officer who defected to the United Sates in 1961 and author of the book “New Lies for Old,” 2 communism and its adherents used two major patterns of disinformation to dupe the West and control the masses in communist societies. Obama uses these strategies with unmatched precision and cunning.
The first pattern, known as “Weakness and Evolution” uses “calculated ideological moderation” to calm adversaries by understating its ideological tendencies while simultaneously confounding opposition by masking the true intentions of its policies. The unwitting public, caught up in the maelstrom of a carefully crafted media images and sound bites, loses its critical capacity and buys the slogan, seemingly oblivious of the nefarious product lurking beneath.
Thus, we have an administration that claims to be moderate at heart, a proponent of the free market, a trumpeter of transparency, and an advocate of the little people, whilst it concurrently employs and consults with radicals, empowers wall-street “fat-cats,” coerces opposition and cuts backroom deals, and stifles dissent through ad-hominem attacks and charges of racism.
The supposed “weakness,” that Obama’s radical upbringing had been tempered by his love for democracy and newfound regard for capitalism, was to be the foundation for his “evolution,” his emigration toward traditional American values. Both proved to be a clever front, but not clever enough. “Hope and change” morphed into “dope and rearrange.” Yet the American electorate is waking up from its stupor and does not like what it sees, because unlike the Soviets, we don’t need government to validate our views our champion our change; most of us just want them to leave us the hell alone.
To say that Obama specifically, and the Democrats in general, are in crisis, is an understatement. As Obama’s inner circle is sacked, resigns, or finds other career paths, Americans of all stripes are losing faith. But, much like Russian communist regimes, an inner crisis necessitates a strategic change in order to better manage impressions and woo the waning support of voters and potential voters.
So, undeterred, Obama relentlessly presses on, this time using the second pattern of disinformation: “Façade and Strength.” According to Golitsyn, when a “regime is in a state of crisis, if the regime is weak, if its leadership is split or compromised, the logical pattern of disinformation is to conceal the crisis and its dimensions, to attract attention to other areas and problems.”
This portends to the forward trajectory of the Obama administration. Faced with a feckless economic policy, unprecedented debt, and the specter of a savage rollback of his Democrat base in November, Obama has resorted suppressing information that is damaging and exaggerating data that is favorable. This is why information about the scope of damage caused by the BP oil
spill 3 was actively suppressed by the Obama administration. In a similar vein, Obama has targeted Fox News, creating an enemies list that is beginning to rival that of Richard Nixon.
President Obama’s latest tirade against the Chamber of Commerce is a perfect example of the Façade and Strength strategy; what it lacked in fact and substance it made up in hyperbole and hypocrisy. While Obama points the finger of duplicity at the Chamber, his administration neglects to mention how little scrutiny was involved in the contributions his campaign
received. 4 Nor did he ever explain why he broke his promise to remain under public financing. In typical Obama subterfuge, he rails against Republicans for being in the pocket of special interest as he whitewashes the fact that the auto bailouts were little more than payola for the United Auto Workers Union.
In a parallel and grandiose fashion, Obama continues to declare our economy, teetering on the edge of a full-blown depression, to be success story, claiming his stimulus package to have ‘brought us back from the brink of disaster.” Even as we watch the unemployment rate hover near 10%, as houses are foreclosed on at an appalling rate, and more Americans are in poverty than the past 60 years, he only superficially acknowledges this grimness.
Instead, he warns the American public things would have been “far worse” were it not for the swift and decisive action to print and distribute $787 billion in order to appease unions, buy off future votes, and saddle future generations with an onerous debt and ultimately, inflation. Obama’s message for the new millennium: “When the going get’s tough, blame the Republicans, the Tea Party, Wall Street, fill in the blank...” Unfortunately for the President, Americans want jobs and opportunity, not finger pointing and scapegoating.
And even as companies such as McDonalds, Boeing, and Lockheed react negatively against the hastily and poorly crafted health-care legislation, as premiums skyrocket and doctors drop out of Medicare, as a large swath of the American heartland expresses dissatisfaction with Obamacare, our President heralds the Affordable Care Act a triumph for the American public. It is not the case that Obama is “disconnected” from the populace; the ugly reality is that he is engaged in a systemic campaign of disinformation. As Golitsyn points out, “Propaganda plays a leading role to the extent that it becomes in itself the main form of disinformation.” Much like the famous Marshall McLuhan 5 quote, “the medium is the message,” Obama has fashioned a new aphorism appropriately fitting for his regime: “the lie is the truth,” if only we repeat it often enough.
1. http://theunionnews.blogspot.com/2008/10/summary-of-saul-alinskys-rules-for.html
2. http://www.amazon.com/New-Lies-Old-Anatoliy-Golitsyn/dp/0945001134
3. http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/10/07/2526821/report-white-house-suppressed.html
4. http://www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/obama-s-weekend-tirade-accusations-create-political-firestorm
5. http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/main.html
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Monday, September 27, 2010
Freedom’s Just Another Word for Everything to Lose
The United Nations has always been a shining symbol of success for those on the Left and the transnational citizenry that see them as the world’s best hope for civilization. However, once again, the UN finds itself rendered impotent, incompetent, and ultimately corrupt with regard to its core value: human rights. And, much like the leading role it took in the debacle of Climategate, the once bastion of democracy is not only being held hostage by radical elements, but actually enabling these forces to gain power and prominence on the world stage.1
According to its annual report by Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that “supports democratic change, monitors freedom, and advocates for democracy and human rights,” the UN has received “failing grades on its ability to respond to the world’s most pressing human rights issues.”2 Among the key findings of the report:
*The accreditation process for Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) has become appallingly politicized and is dominated by some of the world’s most aggressive opponents of universal standards on human rights, while democracies again fall short.
*The quality and reporting of the UN’s special reporters continue to bring the Council its highest marks, while pressure to eliminate country-specific experts and weaken other thematic mandates continues.
*The Council failed to issue a condemnatory resolution on Iran and on a number of countries with ongoing systematic abuses such as Belarus, China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria. It continued its disproportionate focus on Israel.
*Resolutions that urge countries to prohibit anti-Islamic or blasphemous speech continue to pass.
What emerges from the findings is clear and startling: the UN has become an international bureaucratic cover for political despotism, sacrificing the very individuals it supposedly cares so much about to the fires of political correctness. In its zeal to prove its “tolerance,” the UN has bent over backwards, indeed prostrated and humbled itself at all cost to supplicate the very terror organizations it purports to deplore.
It is not hyperbole to say both the United States and the world is being overrun with radical fundamentals, that we are institutionalizing, validating, and empowering despots and forces whose aim is to supplant rational thought and prosperity and replace it with a modern Caliphate and Sharia law. This radical wave has culminated in our present government and its international analogue embodied by the UN, each playing a new iteration of “useful idiots” in the propagation and dispersion of a twisted version of the Islamic faith. Ironically, it is this internal struggle of Islam the Left has turned blind eye to.3
Let’s put this in context for a moment. Barack Obama began his career as President of the United States by going on a world-wide apology tour, ostensibly to curry good will with the international community, but in reality emasculating our political gravitas and undercutting our leadership role, referring to us as “dismissive, even derisive.” He has bowed, scraped, and deferred both his person and his station to Middle Eastern and Muslim leaders, lest they are encouraged to not restrain terroristic elements in their control, something recently intimated by Imam Rauf of the controversial Park51 Project. 4
This is tantamount to the appeasement we saw during World War II, in which Neville Chamberlain placated Hitler and the Third Reich, thereby ensuring their rise to power. As was with Europe at the time, the whole world is being engulfed in this silent and subtle holocaust of words and ideas. Much like the Shakespearean play “Hamlet,” in which the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pretend to have Hamlet’s best interests at heart while attempting to carry out Claudius’s scheme to kill him, the UN feigns to protect the weak and innocent while they simultaneously install dictators, mollify terrorists, and stifle dissent.
More than 200 years ago, James Madison warned the American Public of the dangers of overlooking those who would seek to overthrow us: “Security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society. It is an avowed and essential object of the American Union. The powers requisite for attaining it must be effectually confided to the federal councils.” (Federalists 41)
Americans and their international democratic counterparts should recoil in horror at this reality. This threat is not only imminent and widespread, but also skillfully concealed from public inspection. Even as it plants the seeds of propaganda for world consumption, the UN’s duplicitous nature is shrouded by a patina of pretentious piety.
It is time for the world media, the academic intellects, and all those who truly love peace and democratic principles to speak out and call the UN’s elite leaders to account for this malfeasance and perversion of truth and justice. It is time for United States citizens to reject Obama’s transparent attempt to destroy our sovereignty, and usurp our position as a global leader. It is time for appeasement of murderers to stop. If not, the proliferation of radicalism will ultimately consume all nations, and we will find ourselves living in a modern global dark age with no United States to provide the way out.
1.http://www.climategate.com/
2. http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=70&release=1243
3. http://www.mzuhdijasser.com/7263/my-fellow-muslims-we-must-wake-up
4. http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/i/19626716
According to its annual report by Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that “supports democratic change, monitors freedom, and advocates for democracy and human rights,” the UN has received “failing grades on its ability to respond to the world’s most pressing human rights issues.”2 Among the key findings of the report:
*The accreditation process for Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) has become appallingly politicized and is dominated by some of the world’s most aggressive opponents of universal standards on human rights, while democracies again fall short.
*The quality and reporting of the UN’s special reporters continue to bring the Council its highest marks, while pressure to eliminate country-specific experts and weaken other thematic mandates continues.
*The Council failed to issue a condemnatory resolution on Iran and on a number of countries with ongoing systematic abuses such as Belarus, China, Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria. It continued its disproportionate focus on Israel.
*Resolutions that urge countries to prohibit anti-Islamic or blasphemous speech continue to pass.
What emerges from the findings is clear and startling: the UN has become an international bureaucratic cover for political despotism, sacrificing the very individuals it supposedly cares so much about to the fires of political correctness. In its zeal to prove its “tolerance,” the UN has bent over backwards, indeed prostrated and humbled itself at all cost to supplicate the very terror organizations it purports to deplore.
It is not hyperbole to say both the United States and the world is being overrun with radical fundamentals, that we are institutionalizing, validating, and empowering despots and forces whose aim is to supplant rational thought and prosperity and replace it with a modern Caliphate and Sharia law. This radical wave has culminated in our present government and its international analogue embodied by the UN, each playing a new iteration of “useful idiots” in the propagation and dispersion of a twisted version of the Islamic faith. Ironically, it is this internal struggle of Islam the Left has turned blind eye to.3
Let’s put this in context for a moment. Barack Obama began his career as President of the United States by going on a world-wide apology tour, ostensibly to curry good will with the international community, but in reality emasculating our political gravitas and undercutting our leadership role, referring to us as “dismissive, even derisive.” He has bowed, scraped, and deferred both his person and his station to Middle Eastern and Muslim leaders, lest they are encouraged to not restrain terroristic elements in their control, something recently intimated by Imam Rauf of the controversial Park51 Project. 4
This is tantamount to the appeasement we saw during World War II, in which Neville Chamberlain placated Hitler and the Third Reich, thereby ensuring their rise to power. As was with Europe at the time, the whole world is being engulfed in this silent and subtle holocaust of words and ideas. Much like the Shakespearean play “Hamlet,” in which the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern pretend to have Hamlet’s best interests at heart while attempting to carry out Claudius’s scheme to kill him, the UN feigns to protect the weak and innocent while they simultaneously install dictators, mollify terrorists, and stifle dissent.
More than 200 years ago, James Madison warned the American Public of the dangers of overlooking those who would seek to overthrow us: “Security against foreign danger is one of the primitive objects of civil society. It is an avowed and essential object of the American Union. The powers requisite for attaining it must be effectually confided to the federal councils.” (Federalists 41)
Americans and their international democratic counterparts should recoil in horror at this reality. This threat is not only imminent and widespread, but also skillfully concealed from public inspection. Even as it plants the seeds of propaganda for world consumption, the UN’s duplicitous nature is shrouded by a patina of pretentious piety.
It is time for the world media, the academic intellects, and all those who truly love peace and democratic principles to speak out and call the UN’s elite leaders to account for this malfeasance and perversion of truth and justice. It is time for United States citizens to reject Obama’s transparent attempt to destroy our sovereignty, and usurp our position as a global leader. It is time for appeasement of murderers to stop. If not, the proliferation of radicalism will ultimately consume all nations, and we will find ourselves living in a modern global dark age with no United States to provide the way out.
1.http://www.climategate.com/
2. http://freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=70&release=1243
3. http://www.mzuhdijasser.com/7263/my-fellow-muslims-we-must-wake-up
4. http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/i/19626716
Saturday, September 11, 2010
America: Don't Lose Your Focus
Focus is the key to just about any successful endeavor. Life, in general takes focus, or we continually lose our way. So it is with great struggles, too. Had Hercules lost focus, his god-like virility would not have been enough to sustain him during his labors. Had Mozart, or da Vinci, or Galileo lacked focus, our world would have had its store of beauty and knowledge incomprehensibly diminished. And had Moses or Christ lost their focus during their trials, what then?
The same is true for politics. There is no doubt that Pastor Jones, the self-proclaimed defender of Christianity and Constitutionalism, is a fool, a whack-job, a nut-case, an extremist (pick your appropriate pejorative). I do not condone his intentions, belief system, or actions. He is a disgrace to mankind in general and Christianity in particular. I stand with true peace-loving Muslims in their outright condemnation of his intent and character.
However, let’s not lose our focus as a country. The assertion that Jones and his ilk are responsible for the animus directed at the U.S. is a pathetic and weak argument. While his action would no doubt stir up animosity and resentment in the Muslim world (and possibly put our troops in peril), the hatred itself was already there, and has been for a very long time. Nor should we take our eyes off Imam Rauf, the controversial Imam of the proposed Park51 project. In comparison to Rauf, an extremist disguised as a “moderate,” Jones is insignificant, a proverbial “blip” on the radar screen of history. Rauf, with his ties to the Moslem Brotherhood and The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is part of a larger stealth network of extremists who underhandedly promote political Islam while simultaneously pretending to be interested in peace and the advancement of democracy. In this context, Jones merely plays a hapless puppet Islamic extremists can use as an excuse to foment terror. However, they would do this regardless of Jones, or Bush, or anyone, in reality, because this is their belief system and their commandment to do so. By preying on our need to undeniably demonstrate tolerance, people such as Rauf and his underground associates create the synergy and façade needed to dupe both their Muslim counterparts as well as liberal Americans bent on proving their need to pay penance for being descendants of “oppressors.”
Unfortunately, you only get the surface level from the media. Radicals, again posing “compassionate moderates” now rule this country, and their figurehead is Obama. If this sound far fetched, consider this: When was the last time we as a country passed nearly 5,000 pages of legislation, but didn’t know its contents, or spent nearly one trillion dollars with absolute no ability to pay for it without enslaving our children and grandchildren with crushing debt? When was the last time we openly prosecuted a state for enforcing border security while turning our back on citizens whose very lives are in danger? Is that radical enough, or do we need more evidence?
Here is the reality:
We are at war with two ideas: one, based on the principles of individual freedom as enshrined in the Constitution, and the other on collective salvation, as enshrined in Das Kapital. There is little compromise here; they are incompatible for the most part.
One path leads to liberty and prosperity, the other to tyranny and oppression. Democracy and capitalism are by no means a perfect system, but therein lies the folly of those who espouse a utopian view of mankind, for neither mankind, nor the political structures he creates, are perfectible, and attempts to fashion such perfection lead to corruption, depravity, and untold suffering. The road of history is littered with the detritus of failed utopian attempts and paved with the bones of its subjects. From Marx and Lenin, to Mao and Castro, to Chavez, how many innocent people must give their lives and liberties to assuage the appetite of dictators promoting "social justice" and "equality" while perpetrating death and mayhem before we understand this system, no matter how noble its aim, is inherently evil in its consequences?
Rauf will gladly trod this path to supremacy, and use our institutions of democracy to achieve his ultimate objective. Jones’s skull and the skeletons of the academic elite will serve as stepping stones to this altar, though they are too blind to see how they are being used. Ironically, Muslim extremists, who have hijacked a religion and are using it to propel their own nightmarish vision, are incompatible with the liberal networks they are manipulating. Religion by its essence is about God and his relationship to his people, and God is antithetical to those who believe government should fill this void. So in the end, those who are bending over backwards to accommodate will put the nails in their own coffins. This is what happens when you focus on the wrong things.
The same is true for politics. There is no doubt that Pastor Jones, the self-proclaimed defender of Christianity and Constitutionalism, is a fool, a whack-job, a nut-case, an extremist (pick your appropriate pejorative). I do not condone his intentions, belief system, or actions. He is a disgrace to mankind in general and Christianity in particular. I stand with true peace-loving Muslims in their outright condemnation of his intent and character.
However, let’s not lose our focus as a country. The assertion that Jones and his ilk are responsible for the animus directed at the U.S. is a pathetic and weak argument. While his action would no doubt stir up animosity and resentment in the Muslim world (and possibly put our troops in peril), the hatred itself was already there, and has been for a very long time. Nor should we take our eyes off Imam Rauf, the controversial Imam of the proposed Park51 project. In comparison to Rauf, an extremist disguised as a “moderate,” Jones is insignificant, a proverbial “blip” on the radar screen of history. Rauf, with his ties to the Moslem Brotherhood and The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is part of a larger stealth network of extremists who underhandedly promote political Islam while simultaneously pretending to be interested in peace and the advancement of democracy. In this context, Jones merely plays a hapless puppet Islamic extremists can use as an excuse to foment terror. However, they would do this regardless of Jones, or Bush, or anyone, in reality, because this is their belief system and their commandment to do so. By preying on our need to undeniably demonstrate tolerance, people such as Rauf and his underground associates create the synergy and façade needed to dupe both their Muslim counterparts as well as liberal Americans bent on proving their need to pay penance for being descendants of “oppressors.”
Unfortunately, you only get the surface level from the media. Radicals, again posing “compassionate moderates” now rule this country, and their figurehead is Obama. If this sound far fetched, consider this: When was the last time we as a country passed nearly 5,000 pages of legislation, but didn’t know its contents, or spent nearly one trillion dollars with absolute no ability to pay for it without enslaving our children and grandchildren with crushing debt? When was the last time we openly prosecuted a state for enforcing border security while turning our back on citizens whose very lives are in danger? Is that radical enough, or do we need more evidence?
Here is the reality:
We are at war with two ideas: one, based on the principles of individual freedom as enshrined in the Constitution, and the other on collective salvation, as enshrined in Das Kapital. There is little compromise here; they are incompatible for the most part.
One path leads to liberty and prosperity, the other to tyranny and oppression. Democracy and capitalism are by no means a perfect system, but therein lies the folly of those who espouse a utopian view of mankind, for neither mankind, nor the political structures he creates, are perfectible, and attempts to fashion such perfection lead to corruption, depravity, and untold suffering. The road of history is littered with the detritus of failed utopian attempts and paved with the bones of its subjects. From Marx and Lenin, to Mao and Castro, to Chavez, how many innocent people must give their lives and liberties to assuage the appetite of dictators promoting "social justice" and "equality" while perpetrating death and mayhem before we understand this system, no matter how noble its aim, is inherently evil in its consequences?
Rauf will gladly trod this path to supremacy, and use our institutions of democracy to achieve his ultimate objective. Jones’s skull and the skeletons of the academic elite will serve as stepping stones to this altar, though they are too blind to see how they are being used. Ironically, Muslim extremists, who have hijacked a religion and are using it to propel their own nightmarish vision, are incompatible with the liberal networks they are manipulating. Religion by its essence is about God and his relationship to his people, and God is antithetical to those who believe government should fill this void. So in the end, those who are bending over backwards to accommodate will put the nails in their own coffins. This is what happens when you focus on the wrong things.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Park 51: A Battle for the Future of Islam
Let me get this out there right from the start: I have serious misgivings about the nature and intentions of the people behind the proposed mosque and cultural center, known as Park 51, to be built near ground zero. Still, as a conservative, I find myself asking for this establishment to be given the green light.
Constitutionally speaking, there is no doubt that a denial of permission to build would be a direct violation of our founding principles of freedom of expression and religious tolerance. Anyone taking this tact is historically, legally, and foundationally under water—it’s simply indefensible. Sensitivity has also been cited as a moral or ethical underpinning. There is some merit here. Families and friends of those who lost their lives in 9-11 should have their voices heard. And if we’re honest, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has shown little evidence of sensitivity thus far on this issue. One cannot both argue vociferously for sensitivity and understanding while demonstrating neither.
However, the argument with the most merit raises questions about ties Rauf has to shadowy individuals and terrorist organizations. This is no small matter. Despite protestations that overall, Islam is a peaceful religion, we are left with the reality that the overwhelming majority of terroristic events have been perpetrated by people acting directly in the name of Islam and in accordance with jihadist creeds. This does not make all Muslims guilty by association; but it is an undeniable correlation we must come to grips with as a society.
However, to fully grasp this situation, we have to understand there is an internal war within the Moslem religion itself. Two faces of Islam are vying for the future of Islamic society, and the outcome of this conflict will decide not only the fate of the Muslim people, but the overall prospects for relative global peace and prosperity. According to Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, M.D., president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), “until anti-Islamist Muslims wage the intellectual battle against Islamism within the Muslim consciousness, we will make no headway against ‘the narrative.’” The narrative Dr. Jasser is referring to is the assumption that the U.S. and its allies are waging war against the Muslim world in general, rather than fighting the same radical elements that have made life unbearable not just in the free world, but for Muslim people in nations such as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, where the Taliban, has a track record of intimidation and violence amongst it own populace.
The other face of the Muslim people, the traditions and tenets that Jasser grew up with, is the genuine deal, a truly tolerant religion that promotes love and the brotherhood of man, much like its modern counterparts: Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism. Our failure to grasp this struggle is tantamount to ultimately sticking the proverbial knife in the back of the Muslims who struggle against this tyranny. Rauf may proclaim he is “moderate” or “tolerant,” but this is nothing but a façade, a clever, yet apparently effective amalgamation of Constitutional principles and political correctness designed to stifle dissent and paint opposition with the broad brush of racism, or more succinctly, Islamaphobia. But as Jasser points out, the term “moderate” has become synonymous with being “non-violent” or anti-terrorism.” Jasser asserts this gross oversimplification blinds people to the very political ideologies — which he identifies as “Islamism” — that are the mechanisms that propel and expand terrorism.
This theme is echoed by Rauf in his advocacy for and promulgation of Shariah law as set forth in his Shariah Index project. The idea that Shariah law somehow dovetails with the American Constitution is preposterous at best, and outright dangerous at worst. Although there are tenants of Sharia theology that aspire to equality and justice, the overall thrust is one of submission to Allah, a fact that is irreconcilable with principle of separation of church and state, so conveniently abandoned by those who are ardently advocating for this building. Moreover, whatever the intent of Shariah law may be, its interpretation has often been malicious, time and again resulting in systematic repression of women’s and children’s rights, domestic brutality, and even honor killings. No, these acts are not the global norm for Muslims; but neither are they an isolated dynamic. They are, however, another indicator of the spiritual and political schism facing Muslims.
Americans would be wise to examine our own history to discover similar themes, for this was the same dynamic the United States found itself in during the late 1940’s and early 1950s, as exemplified by Walter Reuther. Despite being labeled as soft on communism, Reuther worked tirelessly to expunge radical communist elements from American labor unions, and was supportive of America’s role in labor movement specifically, and the Democratic Party in genral. While one path was genuinely concerned with civil rights and creating opportunity for all Americans, the other was moving toward towards full-out Marxism. This same tension, a dichotomy between true moderation and tolerance on one hand, and extremism cloaked in pretentious piety on the other, is now pressing Americans, including our Muslim brothers and sisters, to see the forest beyond the trees.
Moreover, a crucial factor has been left out of the debate. Conservatives need to understand that Muslims, in general, are traditional in their philosophy and behavior. They value family, worship, and are grateful patriotic citizens, many whom have served with honor in our armed forces. Their children tend to be respectful, top-notch students, and parents are typically unabashed supporters of teachers. What they do object to is the same thing non-Muslim conservatives find fault with: the tawdry, selfish, and superficial traits of popular culture that result in, or at the very least are reflective of, broken families, drug addiction, gangs, and the general malaise that colors much of our youth.
Yet, the plans to build Park 51 must go forward. If plans to derail the mosque are successful and our darker beliefs about Rauf are true, then we will end up driving him and his network underground. This portends badly for all of us, especially Muslim Americans who want to assimilate and take part of the American dream. To know the truth means there must be transparency and accountability, and the best guarantee of these democratic principles as well the public good is the vigilance of We the People. It is New Yorkers who must hold Raufe and his associates responsible. They can do this by taking his invitation to multiculturalism seriously. They should gather in masses at the proposed center for fellowship, take classes and attend seminars, actively attend meetings, and even pray in the mosque during regular and inter-faith services. If, as he has stated, he is about bridge building, than Rauf and his colleagues should embrace this approach. Nothing bad can come as a result. Over time, either we will learn that that we have been induced by a consuming and ill-conceived paranoia, or the Imam and his co-leaders will be exposed as the frauds many believe them to be. Regardless, justice will be served, and truth will be known. Our future depends on it.
G.L.
Constitutionally speaking, there is no doubt that a denial of permission to build would be a direct violation of our founding principles of freedom of expression and religious tolerance. Anyone taking this tact is historically, legally, and foundationally under water—it’s simply indefensible. Sensitivity has also been cited as a moral or ethical underpinning. There is some merit here. Families and friends of those who lost their lives in 9-11 should have their voices heard. And if we’re honest, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has shown little evidence of sensitivity thus far on this issue. One cannot both argue vociferously for sensitivity and understanding while demonstrating neither.
However, the argument with the most merit raises questions about ties Rauf has to shadowy individuals and terrorist organizations. This is no small matter. Despite protestations that overall, Islam is a peaceful religion, we are left with the reality that the overwhelming majority of terroristic events have been perpetrated by people acting directly in the name of Islam and in accordance with jihadist creeds. This does not make all Muslims guilty by association; but it is an undeniable correlation we must come to grips with as a society.
However, to fully grasp this situation, we have to understand there is an internal war within the Moslem religion itself. Two faces of Islam are vying for the future of Islamic society, and the outcome of this conflict will decide not only the fate of the Muslim people, but the overall prospects for relative global peace and prosperity. According to Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, M.D., president and founder of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD), “until anti-Islamist Muslims wage the intellectual battle against Islamism within the Muslim consciousness, we will make no headway against ‘the narrative.’” The narrative Dr. Jasser is referring to is the assumption that the U.S. and its allies are waging war against the Muslim world in general, rather than fighting the same radical elements that have made life unbearable not just in the free world, but for Muslim people in nations such as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan, where the Taliban, has a track record of intimidation and violence amongst it own populace.
The other face of the Muslim people, the traditions and tenets that Jasser grew up with, is the genuine deal, a truly tolerant religion that promotes love and the brotherhood of man, much like its modern counterparts: Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism. Our failure to grasp this struggle is tantamount to ultimately sticking the proverbial knife in the back of the Muslims who struggle against this tyranny. Rauf may proclaim he is “moderate” or “tolerant,” but this is nothing but a façade, a clever, yet apparently effective amalgamation of Constitutional principles and political correctness designed to stifle dissent and paint opposition with the broad brush of racism, or more succinctly, Islamaphobia. But as Jasser points out, the term “moderate” has become synonymous with being “non-violent” or anti-terrorism.” Jasser asserts this gross oversimplification blinds people to the very political ideologies — which he identifies as “Islamism” — that are the mechanisms that propel and expand terrorism.
This theme is echoed by Rauf in his advocacy for and promulgation of Shariah law as set forth in his Shariah Index project. The idea that Shariah law somehow dovetails with the American Constitution is preposterous at best, and outright dangerous at worst. Although there are tenants of Sharia theology that aspire to equality and justice, the overall thrust is one of submission to Allah, a fact that is irreconcilable with principle of separation of church and state, so conveniently abandoned by those who are ardently advocating for this building. Moreover, whatever the intent of Shariah law may be, its interpretation has often been malicious, time and again resulting in systematic repression of women’s and children’s rights, domestic brutality, and even honor killings. No, these acts are not the global norm for Muslims; but neither are they an isolated dynamic. They are, however, another indicator of the spiritual and political schism facing Muslims.
Americans would be wise to examine our own history to discover similar themes, for this was the same dynamic the United States found itself in during the late 1940’s and early 1950s, as exemplified by Walter Reuther. Despite being labeled as soft on communism, Reuther worked tirelessly to expunge radical communist elements from American labor unions, and was supportive of America’s role in labor movement specifically, and the Democratic Party in genral. While one path was genuinely concerned with civil rights and creating opportunity for all Americans, the other was moving toward towards full-out Marxism. This same tension, a dichotomy between true moderation and tolerance on one hand, and extremism cloaked in pretentious piety on the other, is now pressing Americans, including our Muslim brothers and sisters, to see the forest beyond the trees.
Moreover, a crucial factor has been left out of the debate. Conservatives need to understand that Muslims, in general, are traditional in their philosophy and behavior. They value family, worship, and are grateful patriotic citizens, many whom have served with honor in our armed forces. Their children tend to be respectful, top-notch students, and parents are typically unabashed supporters of teachers. What they do object to is the same thing non-Muslim conservatives find fault with: the tawdry, selfish, and superficial traits of popular culture that result in, or at the very least are reflective of, broken families, drug addiction, gangs, and the general malaise that colors much of our youth.
Yet, the plans to build Park 51 must go forward. If plans to derail the mosque are successful and our darker beliefs about Rauf are true, then we will end up driving him and his network underground. This portends badly for all of us, especially Muslim Americans who want to assimilate and take part of the American dream. To know the truth means there must be transparency and accountability, and the best guarantee of these democratic principles as well the public good is the vigilance of We the People. It is New Yorkers who must hold Raufe and his associates responsible. They can do this by taking his invitation to multiculturalism seriously. They should gather in masses at the proposed center for fellowship, take classes and attend seminars, actively attend meetings, and even pray in the mosque during regular and inter-faith services. If, as he has stated, he is about bridge building, than Rauf and his colleagues should embrace this approach. Nothing bad can come as a result. Over time, either we will learn that that we have been induced by a consuming and ill-conceived paranoia, or the Imam and his co-leaders will be exposed as the frauds many believe them to be. Regardless, justice will be served, and truth will be known. Our future depends on it.
G.L.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Obama vs. McChrystal: A Dichotomy of Archetypal Proportions
The man who promises everything is sure to fulfill nothing, and everyone who promises too much is in danger of using evil means in order to carry out his promises, and is already on the road to perdition. ~Carl Jung
Our economy remains mired in a deep recession as unemployment swallows the saccharine hope proffered by our President. Oil gushes from the floor of the Gulf while our ill-chosen Nero fiddles 1 and shoots the back nine. Parents shudder as our national debt, compounded manifold by Obama’s failed stimulus 2, compromises their children’s future. We watch as a thin-skinned 3 amateur forces the masses to submit and bend to his will and we ask: “Can this get any worse?” And then it happens, all at once. The commander-in-chief, a fraud who has mocked and betrayed every traditional American institution in his quest to undermine American exceptionalism, has given General Stanely McChrystal his walking papers.
While I understand that General McChrystal’s comments and those of his aides were out of line, and ultimately President Obama was in his rights to hold him accountable, there is something greater at stake than modus operandi: the unyielding dichotomy of character between the general and the commander-in-chief.
Ultimately, this was more than mere observation of military protocol. Rather, this is a deeply symbolic act, an expression of archetypal proportions that resonates on a profoundly spiritual level. Obama is Jung’s shadow 4, “a moral problem that challenges the whole ego personality, for no one can become conscious without considerable moral effort.”1 It is this lack of awareness, his inability to see beyond his own self-imposed concoction of utopia, his unwillingness to admit his fallibility, which defines the President in his megalomaniacal march towards monarchy. And it is the very opposite of these dynamics that characterize General McChrystal. Whereas Obama represents the impulses of political expediency, McChrystal symbolizes constancy of character. Whereas Obama agitates in order to aggrandize his persona and need for hero worship, McChrystal shuns the public light despite being a hero 5.
This list goes on and on. One destroys, while the other builds. One dithers in the face of crises, while the other takes charge of an insurmountable situation. One sacrifices 6 those who no longer serve his needs, while the other makes the daily sacrifice of duty to his country. One apologizes to those who would cut our throats in the night, while the other confronts the Taliban7 head on. One uses his country to advance his career; the other forfeits his career for his country. One is an intellect, an academician who twists reality to fit theory; the other endures a reality of blood and death to prevent us from the same fate. It is a contrast so stark and severe that the dichotomy is unbearable for those who see it, and seemingly oblivious to those who have been duped by our President’s political persona 8.
And although this dichotomy has culminated in McChrystal falling upon the proverbial sword, this drama has been in the works for some time. General Stanley McChrystal was set up for failure by President Obama from the beginning.
First, as history will show, he was given an unwinnable war. Despite slaughtering more than one-half million Afghans in its failed conquests, the Russian military was sent packing by the Mujahideen 9. The same fate befell the British in the late 19th century. Yet, all throughout his presidential campaign, Obama made the distinction between a “war of necessity” (Afghanistan) and a “war of convenience (Iraq),” positioning himself as just warrior, as opposed to John McCain, who supported an “unjust” war.
Moreover, McChrystal was shortchanged in his request 10 of troops, further jeopardizing the overall mission, if there is one any more. Ironically, McChrystal, ostensibly to win approval with the local Afghan populace, hampered his own efforts by embracing rules of engagement 11 that limit our soldiers’ capacity to respond, expose them to greater danger, and cobble their ability to carry out their orders. Finally, the overall tone of ambivalence and half measures 12 has made success in Afghanistan all but impossible.
For Obama, this is a potentially winning situation, for he is able to muster enough jingoism to cast himself as strong military leader, while simultaneously undermining our ability to win. This will allow Obama and his ilk to castigate, eviscerate, and ultimately dismantle the military so he can replace them with some socialistic analogue of “a civilian national security force.” In the end analysis, McChrystal was a pawn in a much larger scheme that has its roots in Harvard and Berkley, rather than West Point and Annapolis.
And so we have reached a low point in the United States. The warrior, a man who has endured pain and hardship, who has always followed rules and put the needs of his own men above his own, has been toppled by the trickster, by the fool, by the community organizer whose disdain for authority and privilege know no bounds, save for the authority and privilege he wields. And behind it all, decisions have been made based upon the claims of a magazine not taken seriously by anyone above the age of 30. God help us all.
1. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/17/capital-capitulation/
2. http://reason.com/archives/2009/02/13/why-the-stimulus-plan-wont-wor
3. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/27/obama-the-thin-skinned-president/
4. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9X2-eXfmGIgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=the+shadow+archetype&ots=fAo43s2Zvu&sig=fxGp0aBmQjxXpXpAdaTixK3jeqM#v=onepage&q=the%20shadow%20archetype&f=true
5. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/gates-and-mullen-on-mcchrystal-and-civilian-control/
6. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37208439/
7. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37244
8. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/09/18/does_he_lie_98363.html
9. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/opinion/29sebestyen.html?_r=2
10. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/06/dont_blame_mcchrystal_blame_ob.html
11. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/mcchrystals-real-offense-96873364.html
12. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-blankley/too-few-troops-too-much-s_b_385852.html
13.
For detailed information about Jung’s theories regarding archetypes, see:
Jung, C.G. (1990). The archetypes of the collective unconscious. Hull, R. F. C. (Trans.). Bollingen Series XX. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, 9 (1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. First published in 1959.
Our economy remains mired in a deep recession as unemployment swallows the saccharine hope proffered by our President. Oil gushes from the floor of the Gulf while our ill-chosen Nero fiddles 1 and shoots the back nine. Parents shudder as our national debt, compounded manifold by Obama’s failed stimulus 2, compromises their children’s future. We watch as a thin-skinned 3 amateur forces the masses to submit and bend to his will and we ask: “Can this get any worse?” And then it happens, all at once. The commander-in-chief, a fraud who has mocked and betrayed every traditional American institution in his quest to undermine American exceptionalism, has given General Stanely McChrystal his walking papers.
While I understand that General McChrystal’s comments and those of his aides were out of line, and ultimately President Obama was in his rights to hold him accountable, there is something greater at stake than modus operandi: the unyielding dichotomy of character between the general and the commander-in-chief.
Ultimately, this was more than mere observation of military protocol. Rather, this is a deeply symbolic act, an expression of archetypal proportions that resonates on a profoundly spiritual level. Obama is Jung’s shadow 4, “a moral problem that challenges the whole ego personality, for no one can become conscious without considerable moral effort.”1 It is this lack of awareness, his inability to see beyond his own self-imposed concoction of utopia, his unwillingness to admit his fallibility, which defines the President in his megalomaniacal march towards monarchy. And it is the very opposite of these dynamics that characterize General McChrystal. Whereas Obama represents the impulses of political expediency, McChrystal symbolizes constancy of character. Whereas Obama agitates in order to aggrandize his persona and need for hero worship, McChrystal shuns the public light despite being a hero 5.
This list goes on and on. One destroys, while the other builds. One dithers in the face of crises, while the other takes charge of an insurmountable situation. One sacrifices 6 those who no longer serve his needs, while the other makes the daily sacrifice of duty to his country. One apologizes to those who would cut our throats in the night, while the other confronts the Taliban7 head on. One uses his country to advance his career; the other forfeits his career for his country. One is an intellect, an academician who twists reality to fit theory; the other endures a reality of blood and death to prevent us from the same fate. It is a contrast so stark and severe that the dichotomy is unbearable for those who see it, and seemingly oblivious to those who have been duped by our President’s political persona 8.
And although this dichotomy has culminated in McChrystal falling upon the proverbial sword, this drama has been in the works for some time. General Stanley McChrystal was set up for failure by President Obama from the beginning.
First, as history will show, he was given an unwinnable war. Despite slaughtering more than one-half million Afghans in its failed conquests, the Russian military was sent packing by the Mujahideen 9. The same fate befell the British in the late 19th century. Yet, all throughout his presidential campaign, Obama made the distinction between a “war of necessity” (Afghanistan) and a “war of convenience (Iraq),” positioning himself as just warrior, as opposed to John McCain, who supported an “unjust” war.
Moreover, McChrystal was shortchanged in his request 10 of troops, further jeopardizing the overall mission, if there is one any more. Ironically, McChrystal, ostensibly to win approval with the local Afghan populace, hampered his own efforts by embracing rules of engagement 11 that limit our soldiers’ capacity to respond, expose them to greater danger, and cobble their ability to carry out their orders. Finally, the overall tone of ambivalence and half measures 12 has made success in Afghanistan all but impossible.
For Obama, this is a potentially winning situation, for he is able to muster enough jingoism to cast himself as strong military leader, while simultaneously undermining our ability to win. This will allow Obama and his ilk to castigate, eviscerate, and ultimately dismantle the military so he can replace them with some socialistic analogue of “a civilian national security force.” In the end analysis, McChrystal was a pawn in a much larger scheme that has its roots in Harvard and Berkley, rather than West Point and Annapolis.
And so we have reached a low point in the United States. The warrior, a man who has endured pain and hardship, who has always followed rules and put the needs of his own men above his own, has been toppled by the trickster, by the fool, by the community organizer whose disdain for authority and privilege know no bounds, save for the authority and privilege he wields. And behind it all, decisions have been made based upon the claims of a magazine not taken seriously by anyone above the age of 30. God help us all.
1. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jun/17/capital-capitulation/
2. http://reason.com/archives/2009/02/13/why-the-stimulus-plan-wont-wor
3. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/05/27/obama-the-thin-skinned-president/
4. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=9X2-eXfmGIgC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=the+shadow+archetype&ots=fAo43s2Zvu&sig=fxGp0aBmQjxXpXpAdaTixK3jeqM#v=onepage&q=the%20shadow%20archetype&f=true
5. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/24/gates-and-mullen-on-mcchrystal-and-civilian-control/
6. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37208439/
7. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37244
8. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/09/18/does_he_lie_98363.html
9. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/opinion/29sebestyen.html?_r=2
10. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/06/dont_blame_mcchrystal_blame_ob.html
11. http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/mcchrystals-real-offense-96873364.html
12. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tony-blankley/too-few-troops-too-much-s_b_385852.html
13.
For detailed information about Jung’s theories regarding archetypes, see:
Jung, C.G. (1990). The archetypes of the collective unconscious. Hull, R. F. C. (Trans.). Bollingen Series XX. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, 9 (1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. First published in 1959.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Cap and Trade: Corporatism at Its Worst
History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance.
~James Madison
As we watch our banks, automobile companies and health-care sectors co-opted by a contemptuous executive branch, an elitist Congress, and parasitic lobbyists, American citizens have to wonder what new trick President Obama has up his sleeve to deprive the taxpayers of their wages. Thanks to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, it appears the President is circling his wagons to launch his next offensive on the free market: climate legislation, also known as “cap and trade,” is looming in the shadows as the next decimator of economic prosperity. It is curious that Obama, whose campaign highlighted the theme that he was above the fray of self-seeking corporate and lobbyists’ interests, is at the epicenter of a form of corporatism that threatens to undermine any sense of fair business practice.
Although Obama’s rhetoric promised to usher in a new era of transparency and responsibility, the President and his charges have become entangled with corporations in a way that fundamentally and irrevocably perverts the relationship of corporate entities and our government. Obama and Congress are using the hazy concept of a “green economy” to push an agenda of political thuggery on par with the Chicago Daley machine or Tammany Hall.
His nomination victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota alluded to his intentions regarding climate change legislation when he said, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Obama’s soaring hyperbole resonated deeply with both environmentalists and the general populace, positioning him as a global prophet sent to save the world from environmental apocalypse. However, his rhetoric ultimately morphed into a cloaked collusion between corporations, lobbyists, and Washington elites who conspire to fleece the American public of their money while simultaneously lining their pockets with the ill-gotten booty. As scientist Bjorn Lomborg, an established and respected environmentalist, pointed out in the Wall Street Journal: “Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.” It is this central piece, the idea of carbon regulation, that is most disturbing, because it is an unholy alliance with the very people that are supposedly polluting our planet to begin with. As Tim Carney, a columnist of the Washington Examiner explains, “cap-and-trade is a corporate welfare porkfest of nearly unprecedented proportions.” 1
What Carney is pointing out is the corporatist nature of the Obama administration. Of course, many Americans point the finger of corporatism directly at Big Oil, and rightfully so. Big Oil has enjoyed a “special” relationship under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike, contributing to campaign funds of various presidential and congressional candidates while extracting tax-payer funded subsidies, and as the oil “spill” in the Gulf would suggest, lax regulations via sympathetic cronies. There is no denying this link. However, according to the Science and Public Policy Institute, which scrutinized government spending records, “The U.S. government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.” The reality is that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), big government, and “pro-environment” big business have formed a muscular juggernaut that flattens its opponents, demonizes its skeptics, and sucks up revenues in the form of subsidies.
Unfortunately, many people labor under the illusion pedaled by Washington that big business has conspired in a concerted effort to hold down wages, fix the market, and rob the individual of his soul while simultaneously destroying the planet. Conversely, people have been propagandized to believe that our government works tirelessly in some abstract, morally superior, selfless manner to uplift the downtrodden and safeguard our civil rights from the rapacious march of corporations. And while corporations are certainly not saints, it is laughable to overlook the 800-pound gorilla. Our government, in conjunction with lobbyists and the supposed malicious corporations, have underwritten each other’s fates and stuffed the profits in their pockets. As Congressman Ron Paul (TX) so aptly states: “…there is an agenda behind this silly comic-book version of history: to make people terrified of the ‘unfettered’ free market, and to condition them to accept the ever-growing burdens that the political class imposes on the private sector as an unchangeable aspect of life that exists for their own good.” 2
As the old maxim goes, if you want to know the truth, just “follow the money.” In the case of cap-and-trade and a “green economy,” the money trail leads directly to Obama and Congress, and to the energy companies decried for causing global warming, including “king coal.”
According to Public Citizen, a social justice and pro-environment watch-dog organization, “the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House in June (and a very similar Senate Environment Committee-passed bill) are cap-and-trade schemes [that] hand billions of dollars to corporate utilities, gift Wall Street with a lucrative $2 trillion derivatives market, relies on offsets to achieve false emission reduction targets and raises costs to working families - while bestowing windfall profits to utilities like Exelon.” So once again, big business along with their attendant lobbyists and government shack up to financially and politically enrich each other, and the American citizen gets stuck with the bill twice: once in the form of hidden taxation, and again through increases in the cost of energy use. Carney also points out that other players have gamed the system as well, including agri-giant Monsanto, Alcoa, and…drum roll please, Goldman-Sachs. The Wall-Street bail-out recipient is waiting with baited breath to jump into the carbon-trading market, a dynamic that will set loose a feeding frenzy as traders swap derivatives in a dizzying rush to cash in before the next inevitable bubble burst, splattering the American public with the economic entrails. 3
And these economic implications are far reaching. As Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and a cofounder of the US Climate Task Force stated in an interview with MotherJones: "We are on the verge of creating a new trillion-dollar market in financial assets that will be securitized, derivatized, and speculated by Wall Street like the mortgage-backed securities market.” Of course, our government, in their predictable hubris, promises regulation to prevent such an occurrence.
However, if the savings and loan bailout of the 80s, the dot.com bust of the 90s, our current housing bust, and the BP fiasco are reliable barometers, government regulation is an impotent tool at best. Impotent, unless you’re a company with a vested economic interests and enough financial heft to lobby the living hell out of Washington, or lucky enough to be the political figure showered with corporate largess. And the deeper you dig, the more grotesque the truth becomes: a conglomeration of shady alliances between corporate pimps, lobbyist pushers and political propagandists rolling in a giant bed of taxpayer money—a menage et trois of Machiavellian proportions. Except the taxpayer is the only one who will be screwed in this sick love affair.
1. Carney, Timothy. Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses. Washington, D.C. Regnery Press, 2009.
2. Paul, Ron. The Revolution: A Manifesto. New York. Grand Central Publishing, 2008.
3. Carney, 2009.
~James Madison
As we watch our banks, automobile companies and health-care sectors co-opted by a contemptuous executive branch, an elitist Congress, and parasitic lobbyists, American citizens have to wonder what new trick President Obama has up his sleeve to deprive the taxpayers of their wages. Thanks to the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, it appears the President is circling his wagons to launch his next offensive on the free market: climate legislation, also known as “cap and trade,” is looming in the shadows as the next decimator of economic prosperity. It is curious that Obama, whose campaign highlighted the theme that he was above the fray of self-seeking corporate and lobbyists’ interests, is at the epicenter of a form of corporatism that threatens to undermine any sense of fair business practice.
Although Obama’s rhetoric promised to usher in a new era of transparency and responsibility, the President and his charges have become entangled with corporations in a way that fundamentally and irrevocably perverts the relationship of corporate entities and our government. Obama and Congress are using the hazy concept of a “green economy” to push an agenda of political thuggery on par with the Chicago Daley machine or Tammany Hall.
His nomination victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota alluded to his intentions regarding climate change legislation when he said, “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Obama’s soaring hyperbole resonated deeply with both environmentalists and the general populace, positioning him as a global prophet sent to save the world from environmental apocalypse. However, his rhetoric ultimately morphed into a cloaked collusion between corporations, lobbyists, and Washington elites who conspire to fleece the American public of their money while simultaneously lining their pockets with the ill-gotten booty. As scientist Bjorn Lomborg, an established and respected environmentalist, pointed out in the Wall Street Journal: “Some business leaders are cozying up with politicians and scientists to demand swift, drastic action on global warming. This is a new twist on a very old practice: companies using public policy to line their own pockets.” It is this central piece, the idea of carbon regulation, that is most disturbing, because it is an unholy alliance with the very people that are supposedly polluting our planet to begin with. As Tim Carney, a columnist of the Washington Examiner explains, “cap-and-trade is a corporate welfare porkfest of nearly unprecedented proportions.” 1
What Carney is pointing out is the corporatist nature of the Obama administration. Of course, many Americans point the finger of corporatism directly at Big Oil, and rightfully so. Big Oil has enjoyed a “special” relationship under both Democratic and Republican administrations alike, contributing to campaign funds of various presidential and congressional candidates while extracting tax-payer funded subsidies, and as the oil “spill” in the Gulf would suggest, lax regulations via sympathetic cronies. There is no denying this link. However, according to the Science and Public Policy Institute, which scrutinized government spending records, “The U.S. government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.” The reality is that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), big government, and “pro-environment” big business have formed a muscular juggernaut that flattens its opponents, demonizes its skeptics, and sucks up revenues in the form of subsidies.
Unfortunately, many people labor under the illusion pedaled by Washington that big business has conspired in a concerted effort to hold down wages, fix the market, and rob the individual of his soul while simultaneously destroying the planet. Conversely, people have been propagandized to believe that our government works tirelessly in some abstract, morally superior, selfless manner to uplift the downtrodden and safeguard our civil rights from the rapacious march of corporations. And while corporations are certainly not saints, it is laughable to overlook the 800-pound gorilla. Our government, in conjunction with lobbyists and the supposed malicious corporations, have underwritten each other’s fates and stuffed the profits in their pockets. As Congressman Ron Paul (TX) so aptly states: “…there is an agenda behind this silly comic-book version of history: to make people terrified of the ‘unfettered’ free market, and to condition them to accept the ever-growing burdens that the political class imposes on the private sector as an unchangeable aspect of life that exists for their own good.” 2
As the old maxim goes, if you want to know the truth, just “follow the money.” In the case of cap-and-trade and a “green economy,” the money trail leads directly to Obama and Congress, and to the energy companies decried for causing global warming, including “king coal.”
According to Public Citizen, a social justice and pro-environment watch-dog organization, “the Waxman-Markey climate bill that passed the House in June (and a very similar Senate Environment Committee-passed bill) are cap-and-trade schemes [that] hand billions of dollars to corporate utilities, gift Wall Street with a lucrative $2 trillion derivatives market, relies on offsets to achieve false emission reduction targets and raises costs to working families - while bestowing windfall profits to utilities like Exelon.” So once again, big business along with their attendant lobbyists and government shack up to financially and politically enrich each other, and the American citizen gets stuck with the bill twice: once in the form of hidden taxation, and again through increases in the cost of energy use. Carney also points out that other players have gamed the system as well, including agri-giant Monsanto, Alcoa, and…drum roll please, Goldman-Sachs. The Wall-Street bail-out recipient is waiting with baited breath to jump into the carbon-trading market, a dynamic that will set loose a feeding frenzy as traders swap derivatives in a dizzying rush to cash in before the next inevitable bubble burst, splattering the American public with the economic entrails. 3
And these economic implications are far reaching. As Robert Shapiro, a former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and a cofounder of the US Climate Task Force stated in an interview with MotherJones: "We are on the verge of creating a new trillion-dollar market in financial assets that will be securitized, derivatized, and speculated by Wall Street like the mortgage-backed securities market.” Of course, our government, in their predictable hubris, promises regulation to prevent such an occurrence.
However, if the savings and loan bailout of the 80s, the dot.com bust of the 90s, our current housing bust, and the BP fiasco are reliable barometers, government regulation is an impotent tool at best. Impotent, unless you’re a company with a vested economic interests and enough financial heft to lobby the living hell out of Washington, or lucky enough to be the political figure showered with corporate largess. And the deeper you dig, the more grotesque the truth becomes: a conglomeration of shady alliances between corporate pimps, lobbyist pushers and political propagandists rolling in a giant bed of taxpayer money—a menage et trois of Machiavellian proportions. Except the taxpayer is the only one who will be screwed in this sick love affair.
1. Carney, Timothy. Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses. Washington, D.C. Regnery Press, 2009.
2. Paul, Ron. The Revolution: A Manifesto. New York. Grand Central Publishing, 2008.
3. Carney, 2009.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Obamanalysis: The Origins of Neurosis and the Unraveling of an Image
President Obama is a psychological mess, and it’s not his fault. Unfortunately, it is his responsibility, and his lack of corrective introspection has led him to be a prisoner of his ideological trappings. This ideological straightjacket is the very phenomenon decried by liberals in their unrelenting assails of President Bush. So much for intellectual consistency. Regardless of the charges of ineptness and deceit of the former administration (some of which are valid), Obama cannot, or will not, escape his troubled youth, nor the psychogenic effects on his attitude and behavior.
So what is behind Obama’s cool and collected exterior? What belies his sense of self-aggrandizement and narcissism? In order to peel back the layers of the psyche and probe the genesis of our President’s belief system, I will use the psychological theory of Karen Horney. Horneyan Theory, which focuses on the dynamics of neurosis by examining inner conflicts, has its roots in Freudian theory. Although Freud has often been dismissed in modern psychiatric circles, his fundamental proposition that humans are inherently in some type of conflict remains germane. If not, the great canons of literature, ranging from the Bible to Shakespeare, to Steinbeck and even popular modern texts, would not have conflict at the center of their literary substrate. It is undeniable that the human condition is rooted in conflict; growth, prosperity, and peace come only when we attempt to resolve this conflict in mature ways. Thus we have gangs, war, terrorism, and domestic violence, even as we strive to make the world safer and more humane. The dichotomy of this struggle is inescapable.
So what does Horneyan theory have to say about President Obama and his behavior? To understand this we have to understand what Horney believed about the basic nature of human beings. Horney posited that people strive to develop our unique potentials, and that pathological behavior occurs when this innate drive is thwarted by external, social forces. Horney believed that “man has the capacity to as well as the desire to develop his potentials and become a decent human being, and that these deteriorate if his relationship to others, and hence himself is, and continues to be, disturbed.” 1
It is not difficult to see how this fits with Obama’s childhood. Early on, Obama was severed from his father, who abandoned him for intellectual pursuits in the name of perpetuating Marxist ideology. This left Frank Marshal Davis to become his psychological paternal surrogate. Davis was indisputably an adamant and radical supporter of communism throughout his career, as evidenced by his writings and actions. Unfortunately for Obama, his mother was an inconsistent force in his life, providing no mechanism for intellectual or psychological counterbalance, ultimately leaving Obama to be raised by his grandparents and, through a sort of mentorship, Davis. This is key, for a underlying communism is the implicit dynamic that government itself is a surrogate for parents, and an appropriate substitute for spirituality. So early on, Obama was “sold out” by the very people who are supposed to build the psychosocial foundation upon which he was to fashion a positive self-concept. In short, he was discarded to the state, establishing the milieu for his personal and socio-political development. Obama himself wrote of his inner conflict in his struggle to find his cultural identify in his book, “Dreams of My Father,” in which he stated:
"It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names." 2
Here, we can see the genesis of Obama’s neurosis, as he is forced to identify who he is while simultaneously rejecting his white heritage. This orphaning, by his biological parents, and his didactical split from his bi-racial origins, left him vulnerable to establish the belief that the State, the all powerful and omnipotent entity, could become the parental force he was so lacking. Davis capitalized and preyed on this vulnerability.
Furthermore, Horney’s premises can explain Obama’s behavior with regard to the causes of his anxiety, which she believed was the central mechanism underlying all neuroses. As Horney expressed: “As a result (of not being loved and accepted as an individual), the child does not develop a feeling of belonging, of “we,” but instead a profound insecurity and vague apprehensiveness…” 3
Again, we see how Obama’s commitment to collectivistic tendencies are driven by his need for self-actualization and acceptance, as the State becomes the stand-in for absent parents. In his own words: “We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.” 4
But how can one feel alienated and abandoned without a resultant insecurity? There are only tow responses to feelings of alienation; utter withdrawal, or a form of lashing out in order to compensate emotionally. Horney believed that people adopt one of three psychological coping mechanisms in response to this alienation: moving toward people, moving against people, or moving away from people. Obama seems to embrace moving towards people as he grapples to establish identity and security.
According to Horney, moving towards people is characterized by seeking safety, protection and affection of others. In moving towards people, individuals seem to care substantially about the welfare of others, to have an abundance of empathy and solicitude toward those perceived as being weak or maligned by others. However, according Horney, this is a mask, a cover for true feelings which in fact represent a callous lack of interest in others, leading to ‘defiance, unconscious parasitic or exploiting tendencies, {and} propensities to control or manipulate others.” 5
This was exhibited quite clearly in policy coming from the Obama administration. The health-care legislation, which any careful and thoughtful research will show was a massive subsidization of the health-care insurance industry, the very entity derided by Obama, as a prima fascia culprit. Early on, Representative Dennis Kucinich, a bastion of liberalism, pointed out the hypocrisies of the health-care legislation, decrying it as give-away to insurance companies and big Pharma, and that the only true reform was to establish universal health-care through a government-run, single payer system. It was not until very late in the hour that Kucinich relented under the pressure from the Obama administration, selling out by voting for an unprecedented corporate entitlement. After strong-arming, or persuading Kucinich through bribery, Obama and his cronies went on a back-door, arm-twisting manipulation rampage, bringing us the likes of the “Cornhusker” deal and the “Louisiana Purchase.” Psychologically, it was at once a pathetic and grandiose attempt to delude the public about his love for mankind, a masquerade of selflessness covering his need to control in order to resolve his feelings of alienation, rejection, and ineffectiveness.
This psychological dynamic is an indisputable corollary of his sociopolitical view: Collectivism is by nature prone to move toward people, as individuals are submerged in the drive to unify society and give up their uniqueness and self-determination in deference to the needs of the masses and it’s statist apparatus. But it is all a ruse, as the leader enervates society, usurps natural law, and grabs and sustains power at the expense of individualism, making the citizen the puppet of the state, thereby satisfying the need to feel effectual despite the gaping holes of inadequacy.
In the end, Horney believed this neurosis to consume individuals as they seek they develop an idealized image, a flattering, yet hollow self-concept that promises “unattainable standards that either bring about eventual defeat, or cause the sufferer to shrink from the acid test of reality.” 6 This is clearly evident in how Obama has dealt with the oil–leak crises in the Gulf. His grandiose rock-star image, so carefully honed during the campaign season, shed its patina of pretension and exposed Obama for what he really is: weak, unresolved, insensitive, and ultimately, incapable of true leadership. Much like when the Wizard, from the movie The Wizard of Oz, was revealed to be a fraud, so Obama has shown himself for the empty suit he is—empty save for a small child whose protestations are growing fainter, no longer aided by the amplification which was also stripped from the Wizard.
1Horney, K. Our inner conflicts: A constructive theory of neurosis. New York: Norton, 1945.
2 Obama, Barack. Dreams for my father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004.
3 Horney, K. Neurosis and human growth: The struggle towards self-realization. New York: Norton, 1950.
4 Obama, Barack, 2004.
5 Horney, K., 1945
6 Ewen, Robert B. An introduction to theories of personality: Third edition. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1988.
So what is behind Obama’s cool and collected exterior? What belies his sense of self-aggrandizement and narcissism? In order to peel back the layers of the psyche and probe the genesis of our President’s belief system, I will use the psychological theory of Karen Horney. Horneyan Theory, which focuses on the dynamics of neurosis by examining inner conflicts, has its roots in Freudian theory. Although Freud has often been dismissed in modern psychiatric circles, his fundamental proposition that humans are inherently in some type of conflict remains germane. If not, the great canons of literature, ranging from the Bible to Shakespeare, to Steinbeck and even popular modern texts, would not have conflict at the center of their literary substrate. It is undeniable that the human condition is rooted in conflict; growth, prosperity, and peace come only when we attempt to resolve this conflict in mature ways. Thus we have gangs, war, terrorism, and domestic violence, even as we strive to make the world safer and more humane. The dichotomy of this struggle is inescapable.
So what does Horneyan theory have to say about President Obama and his behavior? To understand this we have to understand what Horney believed about the basic nature of human beings. Horney posited that people strive to develop our unique potentials, and that pathological behavior occurs when this innate drive is thwarted by external, social forces. Horney believed that “man has the capacity to as well as the desire to develop his potentials and become a decent human being, and that these deteriorate if his relationship to others, and hence himself is, and continues to be, disturbed.” 1
It is not difficult to see how this fits with Obama’s childhood. Early on, Obama was severed from his father, who abandoned him for intellectual pursuits in the name of perpetuating Marxist ideology. This left Frank Marshal Davis to become his psychological paternal surrogate. Davis was indisputably an adamant and radical supporter of communism throughout his career, as evidenced by his writings and actions. Unfortunately for Obama, his mother was an inconsistent force in his life, providing no mechanism for intellectual or psychological counterbalance, ultimately leaving Obama to be raised by his grandparents and, through a sort of mentorship, Davis. This is key, for a underlying communism is the implicit dynamic that government itself is a surrogate for parents, and an appropriate substitute for spirituality. So early on, Obama was “sold out” by the very people who are supposed to build the psychosocial foundation upon which he was to fashion a positive self-concept. In short, he was discarded to the state, establishing the milieu for his personal and socio-political development. Obama himself wrote of his inner conflict in his struggle to find his cultural identify in his book, “Dreams of My Father,” in which he stated:
"It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names." 2
Here, we can see the genesis of Obama’s neurosis, as he is forced to identify who he is while simultaneously rejecting his white heritage. This orphaning, by his biological parents, and his didactical split from his bi-racial origins, left him vulnerable to establish the belief that the State, the all powerful and omnipotent entity, could become the parental force he was so lacking. Davis capitalized and preyed on this vulnerability.
Furthermore, Horney’s premises can explain Obama’s behavior with regard to the causes of his anxiety, which she believed was the central mechanism underlying all neuroses. As Horney expressed: “As a result (of not being loved and accepted as an individual), the child does not develop a feeling of belonging, of “we,” but instead a profound insecurity and vague apprehensiveness…” 3
Again, we see how Obama’s commitment to collectivistic tendencies are driven by his need for self-actualization and acceptance, as the State becomes the stand-in for absent parents. In his own words: “We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.” 4
But how can one feel alienated and abandoned without a resultant insecurity? There are only tow responses to feelings of alienation; utter withdrawal, or a form of lashing out in order to compensate emotionally. Horney believed that people adopt one of three psychological coping mechanisms in response to this alienation: moving toward people, moving against people, or moving away from people. Obama seems to embrace moving towards people as he grapples to establish identity and security.
According to Horney, moving towards people is characterized by seeking safety, protection and affection of others. In moving towards people, individuals seem to care substantially about the welfare of others, to have an abundance of empathy and solicitude toward those perceived as being weak or maligned by others. However, according Horney, this is a mask, a cover for true feelings which in fact represent a callous lack of interest in others, leading to ‘defiance, unconscious parasitic or exploiting tendencies, {and} propensities to control or manipulate others.” 5
This was exhibited quite clearly in policy coming from the Obama administration. The health-care legislation, which any careful and thoughtful research will show was a massive subsidization of the health-care insurance industry, the very entity derided by Obama, as a prima fascia culprit. Early on, Representative Dennis Kucinich, a bastion of liberalism, pointed out the hypocrisies of the health-care legislation, decrying it as give-away to insurance companies and big Pharma, and that the only true reform was to establish universal health-care through a government-run, single payer system. It was not until very late in the hour that Kucinich relented under the pressure from the Obama administration, selling out by voting for an unprecedented corporate entitlement. After strong-arming, or persuading Kucinich through bribery, Obama and his cronies went on a back-door, arm-twisting manipulation rampage, bringing us the likes of the “Cornhusker” deal and the “Louisiana Purchase.” Psychologically, it was at once a pathetic and grandiose attempt to delude the public about his love for mankind, a masquerade of selflessness covering his need to control in order to resolve his feelings of alienation, rejection, and ineffectiveness.
This psychological dynamic is an indisputable corollary of his sociopolitical view: Collectivism is by nature prone to move toward people, as individuals are submerged in the drive to unify society and give up their uniqueness and self-determination in deference to the needs of the masses and it’s statist apparatus. But it is all a ruse, as the leader enervates society, usurps natural law, and grabs and sustains power at the expense of individualism, making the citizen the puppet of the state, thereby satisfying the need to feel effectual despite the gaping holes of inadequacy.
In the end, Horney believed this neurosis to consume individuals as they seek they develop an idealized image, a flattering, yet hollow self-concept that promises “unattainable standards that either bring about eventual defeat, or cause the sufferer to shrink from the acid test of reality.” 6 This is clearly evident in how Obama has dealt with the oil–leak crises in the Gulf. His grandiose rock-star image, so carefully honed during the campaign season, shed its patina of pretension and exposed Obama for what he really is: weak, unresolved, insensitive, and ultimately, incapable of true leadership. Much like when the Wizard, from the movie The Wizard of Oz, was revealed to be a fraud, so Obama has shown himself for the empty suit he is—empty save for a small child whose protestations are growing fainter, no longer aided by the amplification which was also stripped from the Wizard.
1Horney, K. Our inner conflicts: A constructive theory of neurosis. New York: Norton, 1945.
2 Obama, Barack. Dreams for my father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004.
3 Horney, K. Neurosis and human growth: The struggle towards self-realization. New York: Norton, 1950.
4 Obama, Barack, 2004.
5 Horney, K., 1945
6 Ewen, Robert B. An introduction to theories of personality: Third edition. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1988.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Haiti: A Mirror for Our Souls
Recent comments from Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson prove two things: One, ignorance and callousness is alive in America, and two, the equally vitriolic response from liberals to censor these men is myopic and off-target. I won’t delve into First Amendment rights; that corollary seems obvious, because we live in a democracy that guarantees this right, no matter how odious its examples may be. The more important issue is the deeper psychological reality of Haiti and the Haitian people. Long beset by violence and corruption, both from within and without, Haiti is a mirror of our collective dark side. Much like Katrina and its devastation upon New Orleans, the earthquake in Haiti serves as a stark reminder of the lack of prosperity for certain peoples. The reason the earthquake caused such tragedy in Haiti (and correspondingly, Katrina, in New Orleans) is precisely because of the poverty in Haiti, and its resultant lack of infrastructure and human and material resources to handle a natural disaster of such proportion and magnitude. We have sat by and watched the past few decades as Haiti has devolved into lawlessness and a squalor that is unacceptable. Our response has been misguided and intermittent, resulting in little, if any positive, sustainable change. We can no longer just send tax dollars their way, because these monies flow down a drain of corruption and never reach the intended people at the bottom of the economic ladder. We have, however, an unprecedented opportunity, to rebuild Haiti and enable this nation to find a purchase in the 21st century. The antidote, in the long run, is to help them create an economic infrastructure based on their resources. We should re-allocate existing monies in the form of low or no-interest loans, both micro and macro, to budding Haitian entrepreneurs, who are starved for capital. Our business sector can also help out by making future investments in the people of Haiti. This is a win-win situation for Americans, because an economically viable Haiti is more likely to become a free and prosperous Haiti, making them not only feasible trading partner to bolster our own economy, but also ensuring that future Haitians work toward independence and self sustenance rather than the degradation and associated vices. Yes, Limbaugh and Robertson are insensitive, if not potentially cruel blowhards, but ironically, they not only help call attention to and define this catastrophe, but point out our hypocrisy of our failure to use the engine of capitalism to provide the Haitian people with a brighter future.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
NO CLEAR CONSENSUS
(Note: When I create my blogs, I draft them in a word document first in order to facilitate the writing process, and then transfer them to the blog template. Unfortunately, all the embedded hyperlinks are subsequently lost. Anyone interested in the source of a particularly numbered reference may request this source by asking for this information using teh comment feature of this blog.)
Although the mainstream media has consistently taken the side of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming and has correspondingly trumpeted the “unanimous scientific consensus,” nothing could be further from the truth. Many scientists have cast dissenting views, stating the warming trend we are witnessing (and even that can be debated) is a result of a variety of natural phenomenon. It not my intent to get into a comprehensive, point-for-point refutation of all the anthropogenic claims. There are many sources and websites that do so. And although I do analyze several contentious issues, the overriding argument I am presenting is that not only is there a clear lack of consensus among the broader scientific community, but dissent is a vital mechanism that keeps science honest and promotes the supposed diversity that liberals claim is a hallmark of progressive civilization. A good point of departure is the following text is from a petition to Congress signed by 31,478 American scientists:
"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
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. 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.'' 1
Of course, many advocates of the theory for anthropogenic global warming have questioned the credibility of these scientists, and that is a reasonable question. However, consider the following information:
• Nearly one third (9,029) of the scientists have Ph.D.s
• 3,804 of the scientists are trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth.
• 935 scientists are trained in computer and mathematical methods
• 5,812 scientists are trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solids
• 4,821 scientists are trained in the molecular interactions and behaviors of the substances of which the atmosphere and Earth are composed.
• 2,965 scientists are trained in the functional and environmental requirements of living things on the Earth.
• 3,046 scientists are trained in the functional and environmental requirements of human beings on the Earth
• 10,103 scientists are trained primarily in the many engineering specialties required to maintain modern civilization, including environmental programs.2
Surely not all of these nearly 32,000 scientists are frauds, nor could they all be bouhgt and paid for by “Corporate America.”
There are even scientists who have worked inside the very governmental institutions that are advocates of anthropogenic global warming who are now contrarians to eco-fundamentalism. One of the most outspoken scientist is Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologists and former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Dr. Spencer, known for his work on global temperature monitoring work with satellites, states the following on his website:
“…global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.” 3
But to get at the crux of the issue, we have to understand the thrust and philosophical underpinnings of the work that led to the “consensus” among IPCC scientists. The cornerstone of anthropogenic global-warming is the concept of “climate sensitivity.” Dr. Spencer explains this as “the temperature response of the Earth to a given amount of ‘radiative forcing’, of which there are two kinds: a change in either the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth, or in the infrared energy the Earth emits to outer space.” 4 The IPCC is concerned with the amount of sunlight absorbed by earth, and claims that the earth’s climate is very sensitive, and hence carbon emissions create global warming. Yet, as Dr. Spencer points out, satellite data contradicts this assumption: “The resulting picture that emerges is of an IN-sensitive climate system, dominated by negative feedback. And it appears that the reason why most climate models are instead VERY sensitive is due to the illusion of a sensitive climate system that can arise when one is not careful about the physical interpretation of how clouds operate in terms of cause and effect (forcing and feedback).” 5
The point Dr. Spencer is making is that climate systems are inherently complex, and are regulated by a myriad of dynamics and forces that interact with one another in ways we are just beginning to understand. The reality is that the projections made by the IPCC report are inherently flawed because the climate model assumes inordinate climate sensitivity, and then forecast atmospheric and concomitant geological changes using an instrument based on these hypersensitive parameters, producing results that are statistically inflated and, not surprisingly, resultant apocalyptic predictions. Contrast this approach with the approach Dr. Spencer employed using satellite data, which accurate measures atmospheric dynamics: “Instead of the currently popular practice of building immensely complex and expensive climate models and then making only simple comparisons to satellite data, I have done just the opposite: Examine the satellite data in great detail, and then build the simplest model that can explain the observed behavior of the climate system.” 6
This is a profound and keen observation because of the assumption of causation stated by the IPCC. The IPCC approach makes an assumption (CO2 is the cause of global warming), creates a complex model to capture this dynamic, and then makes comparisons to established factual data in order justify their claims. To understand this better, perhaps an analogy would be helpful. Let’s suppose your car is having engine problems and you have a choice of two mechanics. Mechanic A’s approach is to presuppose there is a systemic issue with your car based on a complex theory he has about engine systems. He then proceeds with a number of complex diagnostic tests using a computer programmed with his hyper-sensitive system to confirm his diagnosis: Your engine is inherently flawed and needs to be replaced, which is alarming as well as expensive. Mechanic B, on the other hand, makes no assumptions. Rather, he listens carefully, runs some simple diagnostic tests, and uses his knowledge of basic engine mechanisms to conclude you need to replace a few moderately expensive parts to get your car back in shape. Which mechanic took the most logical path, and which mechanic would you trust? It’s obvious working with data to build a model and hypothesis is inherently superior to building a hypothesis, creating a complex model to capture this hypothesis, and then comparing this model to real data in order to infer your hypotheses.
Nor is Dr. Roy the only credible expert in climatology to offer countering causations to anthropogenic global warming. Dr. Jens Bischof, instructor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, and foremost expert in artic ice drift, puts it aptly: “In science, as in other sectors of public life, outcomes of investigations are very often guided, if not determined, by an a priori idea, a tenet. One could also call it a belief. In the case of global warming, this belief is that, if enormous amounts of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, a temperature rise must occur. This prior assumption has guided scientific thinking and triggered a true deluge of investigations, all desperately trying to prove just that. What has been totally forgotten is the fact that natural climate changes occur as well as manmade ones, and on time scales on the order of decades, in some cases.” 7 Dr. Bischof’s research has led him to conclude that the disappearing of the artic ice cap, one of the most contentious and emotionally charged issues associated with global warming, is mostly the result of “ice drift,” a natural geologic phenomenon in which artic wind patterns push ice sheets unattached to land toward warmer climes. This in turn, causes less ice to reflect sunlight (albedo), and this decreased albedo, or reflection of light, leads to a general warming trend in the artic waters, which further amplifies the phenomenon of ice drift. But it is important to understand it is the natural drift of ice that is leading to decreased albedo, which then leads to warming, rather than global warming leading to accelerated melting. Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federally funded and run organization which has provided data to support anthropogenic global warming theory, had the following commentary on their Arctic NOAA Report Card: “The climate of the Arctic is influenced by repeating patterns of sea level pressure that can either dominate during individual months or represent the overall atmospheric circulation flow for an entire season. The main climate pattern for the Arctic is known as the Arctic Oscillation (AO) with anomalous winds that blow counter-clockwise around the pole when the pattern is in its positive phase. A second wind pattern has been more prevalent in the 21st century and is known as the Arctic Dipole (AD) pattern. 8 NOAA also makes the observation that the Arctic has more ice now than in 2007. Of course, NOAA also observes there has been an overall trend in Artic ice in the past decade. But think about it rationally for a moment. If CO2 emissions are the culprit, and each year we have increased our CO2 output, then there should be no increase in ice gain. Of course, global warming advocates could rightfully point out this is an anomaly and the result of natural perturbations, such as El Nino, La Nina, etc. But that is the same naturalistic argument others and I have been making to begin with. We either have intellectual honesty and consistency, or we don’t.
There has also been great exaggeration about the effects of ice-melt in Greenland. According to Patrick J. Michaels, a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “there's nothing very new going on in Greenland,” pointing out that “[T]he longest record is from Angmagssalik. In the summer (when Greenland's ice melts) the temperature has averaged 43.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 10 summers. There was one very warm summer, in 2003, but the other nine years aren't unusual at all. From 1930 through 1960, the average was 43.7 degrees. In other words, it was warmer for three decades, and there was clearly no large rise in sea level. What happened between 1945 and the mid-1990s was a cooling trend, with 1985-95 being the coldest period in the entire Angmagssalik record, which goes back to the late 19th century. Only in recent years have temperatures begun to look like those that were characteristic of the early 20th century.” 9 This argument is bolstered by Petr Chylek a researcher for Space and Remote Sensing Sciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who recently summarized Greenland's climate history in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Chylek wrote "Although the last decade of 1995-2005 was relatively warm, almost all decades within 1915 to 1965 were even warmer at both the southwestern [Godthab Nuuk] and southeastern [Ammassalik] coasts of Greenland."10
So this begs the question: What is causing the glaciers to melt in Greenland, if recent temperatures have not been out of the ordinary from an expanded geological point of view? According to Professor David Vaughan, a co-author of a recent study on Artic ice thinning, "The majority of the thinning we see is not due to increased melting from higher atmospheric temperatures, but because the glaciers are flowing faster thanks to their interaction with the oceans.” 11 This interaction is a broad geologic occurrence in which oceans cycle through extended periods of warming and cooling (much like the earth as a whole) known as the multidecadal cycle. It is this cycle that is causing the ice melt in Greenland. This is substantiated by the work Willie W.-H. Soon of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon concludes that these “thermal perturbations lead to both natural modulation of the Arctic sea ice and to transport of fresh water through the Bering Straits and from the Arctic through both the Greenland Sea and Denmark Strait and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago pathways to deep water formation sites spread across the North Atlantic from the Greenland–Icelandic–Norwegian (GIN) Seas to the east and at the Labrador Sea to the west.”12 This is particularly compelling when you consider that, according to the IPCC report, the earth has warmed about a degree, something which could never account for the velocity of ice melt we are presently seeing.
Thanks to Al Gore and his penchant for fear mongering using the goblin of anthropogenic global warming, the public has also been simultaneously duped into believing that hurricane frequency and intensity are the cause of our decadent and out of control carbon footprint as we have stepped all over mother nature in our headlong way to enjoy our prosperity. Al Gore stated the following in his thinly veiled “documentary” “An Inconvenient Truth”: “For a long time, the scientists have been telling us global warming increases the temperature of the top layer in the ocean, and that causes the average hurricane to become a lot stronger. So, the fact that the ocean temperatures did go up because of global warming, because of man-made global warming, starting around in the seventies and then we had a string of unusually strong hurricanes outside the boundaries of this multi-decadal cycle that is a real factor; there are scientists who point that out, and they're right, but we're exceeding those boundaries now.” 13 However, you can either believe Al Gore, or you can put your money on NOAA, which had the following to say: “The nation is now wrapping up the 11th year of a new era of heightened Atlantic hurricane activity. This era has been unfolding in the Atlantic since 1995, and is expected to continue for the next decade or perhaps longer. NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator. These cycles, called ‘the tropical multi-decadal signal,’ typically last several decades (20 to 30 years or even longer). As a result, the North Atlantic experiences alternating decades long (20 to 30 year periods or even longer) of above normal or below normal hurricane seasons. NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming.” 14
Whew! That consensus thing seems to be fraying at the edges a bit, doesn’t it?
The idea that natural phenomenon are causative agents of global warming is also corroborated by Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former IPCC scientist. Lindzen has been critical of the catastrophic predictions regarding global warming as well as their false attribution to anthropogenic origins. In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, Dr. Lindzens stated: “The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.” 15 Lindzen also lends support to the idea of guilt and sacrifice explored in my earlier blog posting. To wit: “Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.”16 Of course, to be fair, Lindzen has been purported to have dubious associations with the oil industry, and has received monies for speaking engagements and consulting. Is he a tool of the “evil oil industry?” Possibly, but he, again, is hardly alone in his protestations.
In reality, there is even dissent amongst both current and former IPCC scientists. According to a 2007 U.S. Senate report from the Committee on Environment and Public Works, more than 400 scientists have disputed IPCC anthropogenic global-warming claims. 17 Unfortunately, due to the fundamentalist dynamics I explore in my previous posts, these scientists have been either censored or censured. Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and
Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, made the following observation about this repressiveness: “Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,” Paldor wrote. 18 And this intimidation goes beyond the pale of rationale disagreement, morphing into a form of political bullying. Consider the following email excerpt written by Michael T. Eckhart, president of the environmental group the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), to Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):
“It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on." 19
This perception was also echoed by Chylek, who has stated the following in an open letter to the climate research community: “For me, science is the search for truth, the never-ending path towards finding out how things are arranged in this world so that they can work as they do. That search is never finished. It seems that the climate research community has betrayed that mighty goal in science. They have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view. It seems that some of the most prominent leaders of the climate research community, like prophets of Old Israel, believed that they could see the future of humankind and that the only remaining task was to convince or force all others to accept and follow.” 20
Now amaybe everyone of the scientists I have mentioned are merely charlatans and toadies for Big OIL and Coal (impossible), and maybe Mr. Eckhart is nothing more than a shill for “Corporate America.” Or possibly he is just a citizen concerned about the economic fallout of proposed climate-change legislation. But it really doesn’t matter. Since when did the way we conduct science and communicate it’s myriad findings devolve into a frenzy of punitive retaliation rather than vigorous, healthy dissension and debate? Since when did the meaning of consensus become so meaningless? And since when is an organization such as the IPCC, which has been shrouded in controversy and is also under pressure to capture grant money, so morally superior for those that speak up for the economic interest of companies that could be irreparably damaged by ill-conceived schemes such as cap and trade? The bottom line is we need large, multifaceted long-scale studies based on a multitude of data with no intention of finding a particular cause; rather, the data should speak for itself in the most objective terms possible. This should then be followed by intense analysis and spirited debate. Anything less is a disservice to the public and a blow to the democratic process. And, if we are going to castigate people for their ties to money, then let us do so. But the path does not lead us back to the IPCC, for in reality, they are just a puppet for the puppet masters in Washington D.C. However, these waters are treacherous and deep, so I will defer exploring them in depth on the next installment of my blog.
(Note: When I create my blogs, I draft them in a word document first in order to facilitate the writing process, and then transfer them to the blog template. Unfortunately, all the embedded hyperlinks are subsequently lost. Anyone interested in the source of a particularly numbered reference may request this source by asking for this information using teh comment feature of this blog.)
Although the mainstream media has consistently taken the side of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming and has correspondingly trumpeted the “unanimous scientific consensus,” nothing could be further from the truth. Many scientists have cast dissenting views, stating the warming trend we are witnessing (and even that can be debated) is a result of a variety of natural phenomenon. It not my intent to get into a comprehensive, point-for-point refutation of all the anthropogenic claims. There are many sources and websites that do so. And although I do analyze several contentious issues, the overriding argument I am presenting is that not only is there a clear lack of consensus among the broader scientific community, but dissent is a vital mechanism that keeps science honest and promotes the supposed diversity that liberals claim is a hallmark of progressive civilization. A good point of departure is the following text is from a petition to Congress signed by 31,478 American scientists:
"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
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. 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.'' 1
Of course, many advocates of the theory for anthropogenic global warming have questioned the credibility of these scientists, and that is a reasonable question. However, consider the following information:
• Nearly one third (9,029) of the scientists have Ph.D.s
• 3,804 of the scientists are trained in specialties directly related to the physical environment of the Earth.
• 935 scientists are trained in computer and mathematical methods
• 5,812 scientists are trained in the fundamental physical and molecular properties of gases, liquids, and solids
• 4,821 scientists are trained in the molecular interactions and behaviors of the substances of which the atmosphere and Earth are composed.
• 2,965 scientists are trained in the functional and environmental requirements of living things on the Earth.
• 3,046 scientists are trained in the functional and environmental requirements of human beings on the Earth
• 10,103 scientists are trained primarily in the many engineering specialties required to maintain modern civilization, including environmental programs.2
Surely not all of these nearly 32,000 scientists are frauds, nor could they all be bouhgt and paid for by “Corporate America.”
There are even scientists who have worked inside the very governmental institutions that are advocates of anthropogenic global warming who are now contrarians to eco-fundamentalism. One of the most outspoken scientist is Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologists and former Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Dr. Spencer, known for his work on global temperature monitoring work with satellites, states the following on his website:
“…global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.” 3
But to get at the crux of the issue, we have to understand the thrust and philosophical underpinnings of the work that led to the “consensus” among IPCC scientists. The cornerstone of anthropogenic global-warming is the concept of “climate sensitivity.” Dr. Spencer explains this as “the temperature response of the Earth to a given amount of ‘radiative forcing’, of which there are two kinds: a change in either the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth, or in the infrared energy the Earth emits to outer space.” 4 The IPCC is concerned with the amount of sunlight absorbed by earth, and claims that the earth’s climate is very sensitive, and hence carbon emissions create global warming. Yet, as Dr. Spencer points out, satellite data contradicts this assumption: “The resulting picture that emerges is of an IN-sensitive climate system, dominated by negative feedback. And it appears that the reason why most climate models are instead VERY sensitive is due to the illusion of a sensitive climate system that can arise when one is not careful about the physical interpretation of how clouds operate in terms of cause and effect (forcing and feedback).” 5
The point Dr. Spencer is making is that climate systems are inherently complex, and are regulated by a myriad of dynamics and forces that interact with one another in ways we are just beginning to understand. The reality is that the projections made by the IPCC report are inherently flawed because the climate model assumes inordinate climate sensitivity, and then forecast atmospheric and concomitant geological changes using an instrument based on these hypersensitive parameters, producing results that are statistically inflated and, not surprisingly, resultant apocalyptic predictions. Contrast this approach with the approach Dr. Spencer employed using satellite data, which accurate measures atmospheric dynamics: “Instead of the currently popular practice of building immensely complex and expensive climate models and then making only simple comparisons to satellite data, I have done just the opposite: Examine the satellite data in great detail, and then build the simplest model that can explain the observed behavior of the climate system.” 6
This is a profound and keen observation because of the assumption of causation stated by the IPCC. The IPCC approach makes an assumption (CO2 is the cause of global warming), creates a complex model to capture this dynamic, and then makes comparisons to established factual data in order justify their claims. To understand this better, perhaps an analogy would be helpful. Let’s suppose your car is having engine problems and you have a choice of two mechanics. Mechanic A’s approach is to presuppose there is a systemic issue with your car based on a complex theory he has about engine systems. He then proceeds with a number of complex diagnostic tests using a computer programmed with his hyper-sensitive system to confirm his diagnosis: Your engine is inherently flawed and needs to be replaced, which is alarming as well as expensive. Mechanic B, on the other hand, makes no assumptions. Rather, he listens carefully, runs some simple diagnostic tests, and uses his knowledge of basic engine mechanisms to conclude you need to replace a few moderately expensive parts to get your car back in shape. Which mechanic took the most logical path, and which mechanic would you trust? It’s obvious working with data to build a model and hypothesis is inherently superior to building a hypothesis, creating a complex model to capture this hypothesis, and then comparing this model to real data in order to infer your hypotheses.
Nor is Dr. Roy the only credible expert in climatology to offer countering causations to anthropogenic global warming. Dr. Jens Bischof, instructor in the Department of Ocean, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, and foremost expert in artic ice drift, puts it aptly: “In science, as in other sectors of public life, outcomes of investigations are very often guided, if not determined, by an a priori idea, a tenet. One could also call it a belief. In the case of global warming, this belief is that, if enormous amounts of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, a temperature rise must occur. This prior assumption has guided scientific thinking and triggered a true deluge of investigations, all desperately trying to prove just that. What has been totally forgotten is the fact that natural climate changes occur as well as manmade ones, and on time scales on the order of decades, in some cases.” 7 Dr. Bischof’s research has led him to conclude that the disappearing of the artic ice cap, one of the most contentious and emotionally charged issues associated with global warming, is mostly the result of “ice drift,” a natural geologic phenomenon in which artic wind patterns push ice sheets unattached to land toward warmer climes. This in turn, causes less ice to reflect sunlight (albedo), and this decreased albedo, or reflection of light, leads to a general warming trend in the artic waters, which further amplifies the phenomenon of ice drift. But it is important to understand it is the natural drift of ice that is leading to decreased albedo, which then leads to warming, rather than global warming leading to accelerated melting. Even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federally funded and run organization which has provided data to support anthropogenic global warming theory, had the following commentary on their Arctic NOAA Report Card: “The climate of the Arctic is influenced by repeating patterns of sea level pressure that can either dominate during individual months or represent the overall atmospheric circulation flow for an entire season. The main climate pattern for the Arctic is known as the Arctic Oscillation (AO) with anomalous winds that blow counter-clockwise around the pole when the pattern is in its positive phase. A second wind pattern has been more prevalent in the 21st century and is known as the Arctic Dipole (AD) pattern. 8 NOAA also makes the observation that the Arctic has more ice now than in 2007. Of course, NOAA also observes there has been an overall trend in Artic ice in the past decade. But think about it rationally for a moment. If CO2 emissions are the culprit, and each year we have increased our CO2 output, then there should be no increase in ice gain. Of course, global warming advocates could rightfully point out this is an anomaly and the result of natural perturbations, such as El Nino, La Nina, etc. But that is the same naturalistic argument others and I have been making to begin with. We either have intellectual honesty and consistency, or we don’t.
There has also been great exaggeration about the effects of ice-melt in Greenland. According to Patrick J. Michaels, a Distinguished Senior Fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “there's nothing very new going on in Greenland,” pointing out that “[T]he longest record is from Angmagssalik. In the summer (when Greenland's ice melts) the temperature has averaged 43.1 degrees Fahrenheit over the last 10 summers. There was one very warm summer, in 2003, but the other nine years aren't unusual at all. From 1930 through 1960, the average was 43.7 degrees. In other words, it was warmer for three decades, and there was clearly no large rise in sea level. What happened between 1945 and the mid-1990s was a cooling trend, with 1985-95 being the coldest period in the entire Angmagssalik record, which goes back to the late 19th century. Only in recent years have temperatures begun to look like those that were characteristic of the early 20th century.” 9 This argument is bolstered by Petr Chylek a researcher for Space and Remote Sensing Sciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who recently summarized Greenland's climate history in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Chylek wrote "Although the last decade of 1995-2005 was relatively warm, almost all decades within 1915 to 1965 were even warmer at both the southwestern [Godthab Nuuk] and southeastern [Ammassalik] coasts of Greenland."10
So this begs the question: What is causing the glaciers to melt in Greenland, if recent temperatures have not been out of the ordinary from an expanded geological point of view? According to Professor David Vaughan, a co-author of a recent study on Artic ice thinning, "The majority of the thinning we see is not due to increased melting from higher atmospheric temperatures, but because the glaciers are flowing faster thanks to their interaction with the oceans.” 11 This interaction is a broad geologic occurrence in which oceans cycle through extended periods of warming and cooling (much like the earth as a whole) known as the multidecadal cycle. It is this cycle that is causing the ice melt in Greenland. This is substantiated by the work Willie W.-H. Soon of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Soon concludes that these “thermal perturbations lead to both natural modulation of the Arctic sea ice and to transport of fresh water through the Bering Straits and from the Arctic through both the Greenland Sea and Denmark Strait and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago pathways to deep water formation sites spread across the North Atlantic from the Greenland–Icelandic–Norwegian (GIN) Seas to the east and at the Labrador Sea to the west.”12 This is particularly compelling when you consider that, according to the IPCC report, the earth has warmed about a degree, something which could never account for the velocity of ice melt we are presently seeing.
Thanks to Al Gore and his penchant for fear mongering using the goblin of anthropogenic global warming, the public has also been simultaneously duped into believing that hurricane frequency and intensity are the cause of our decadent and out of control carbon footprint as we have stepped all over mother nature in our headlong way to enjoy our prosperity. Al Gore stated the following in his thinly veiled “documentary” “An Inconvenient Truth”: “For a long time, the scientists have been telling us global warming increases the temperature of the top layer in the ocean, and that causes the average hurricane to become a lot stronger. So, the fact that the ocean temperatures did go up because of global warming, because of man-made global warming, starting around in the seventies and then we had a string of unusually strong hurricanes outside the boundaries of this multi-decadal cycle that is a real factor; there are scientists who point that out, and they're right, but we're exceeding those boundaries now.” 13 However, you can either believe Al Gore, or you can put your money on NOAA, which had the following to say: “The nation is now wrapping up the 11th year of a new era of heightened Atlantic hurricane activity. This era has been unfolding in the Atlantic since 1995, and is expected to continue for the next decade or perhaps longer. NOAA attributes this increased activity to natural occurring cycles in tropical climate patterns near the equator. These cycles, called ‘the tropical multi-decadal signal,’ typically last several decades (20 to 30 years or even longer). As a result, the North Atlantic experiences alternating decades long (20 to 30 year periods or even longer) of above normal or below normal hurricane seasons. NOAA research shows that the tropical multi-decadal signal is causing the increased Atlantic hurricane activity since 1995, and is not related to greenhouse warming.” 14
Whew! That consensus thing seems to be fraying at the edges a bit, doesn’t it?
The idea that natural phenomenon are causative agents of global warming is also corroborated by Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former IPCC scientist. Lindzen has been critical of the catastrophic predictions regarding global warming as well as their false attribution to anthropogenic origins. In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, Dr. Lindzens stated: “The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.” 15 Lindzen also lends support to the idea of guilt and sacrifice explored in my earlier blog posting. To wit: “Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.”16 Of course, to be fair, Lindzen has been purported to have dubious associations with the oil industry, and has received monies for speaking engagements and consulting. Is he a tool of the “evil oil industry?” Possibly, but he, again, is hardly alone in his protestations.
In reality, there is even dissent amongst both current and former IPCC scientists. According to a 2007 U.S. Senate report from the Committee on Environment and Public Works, more than 400 scientists have disputed IPCC anthropogenic global-warming claims. 17 Unfortunately, due to the fundamentalist dynamics I explore in my previous posts, these scientists have been either censored or censured. Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and
Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, made the following observation about this repressiveness: “Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,” Paldor wrote. 18 And this intimidation goes beyond the pale of rationale disagreement, morphing into a form of political bullying. Consider the following email excerpt written by Michael T. Eckhart, president of the environmental group the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), to Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI):
“It is my intention to destroy your career as a liar. If you produce one more editorial against climate change, I will launch a campaign against your professional integrity. I will call you a liar and charlatan to the Harvard community of which you and I are members. I will call you out as a man who has been bought by Corporate America. Go ahead, guy. Take me on." 19
This perception was also echoed by Chylek, who has stated the following in an open letter to the climate research community: “For me, science is the search for truth, the never-ending path towards finding out how things are arranged in this world so that they can work as they do. That search is never finished. It seems that the climate research community has betrayed that mighty goal in science. They have substituted the search for truth with an attempt at proving one point of view. It seems that some of the most prominent leaders of the climate research community, like prophets of Old Israel, believed that they could see the future of humankind and that the only remaining task was to convince or force all others to accept and follow.” 20
Now amaybe everyone of the scientists I have mentioned are merely charlatans and toadies for Big OIL and Coal (impossible), and maybe Mr. Eckhart is nothing more than a shill for “Corporate America.” Or possibly he is just a citizen concerned about the economic fallout of proposed climate-change legislation. But it really doesn’t matter. Since when did the way we conduct science and communicate it’s myriad findings devolve into a frenzy of punitive retaliation rather than vigorous, healthy dissension and debate? Since when did the meaning of consensus become so meaningless? And since when is an organization such as the IPCC, which has been shrouded in controversy and is also under pressure to capture grant money, so morally superior for those that speak up for the economic interest of companies that could be irreparably damaged by ill-conceived schemes such as cap and trade? The bottom line is we need large, multifaceted long-scale studies based on a multitude of data with no intention of finding a particular cause; rather, the data should speak for itself in the most objective terms possible. This should then be followed by intense analysis and spirited debate. Anything less is a disservice to the public and a blow to the democratic process. And, if we are going to castigate people for their ties to money, then let us do so. But the path does not lead us back to the IPCC, for in reality, they are just a puppet for the puppet masters in Washington D.C. However, these waters are treacherous and deep, so I will defer exploring them in depth on the next installment of my blog.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
GLOBAL WARMING IS A FORM OF FUNDAMENTALISM
To understand the psychological dimensions of global warming, it’s important to first take a historical view of the histrionics and the unintended consequences that have been fermented by the so-called scientific establishment regarding environmentalism in general, and climate change, in particular. One of the most pernicious lies ever perpetrated on the unsuspecting public was the vociferous outcry against DDT, an extremely effective insecticide. When DDT was used on a regular basis in Europe and Asia, it’s results were nothing less than miraculous. Not only did the use of DDT result in preventing epidemics of typhus and malaria during World War II, it virtually eliminated these diseases in great portions of Asia and Africa, saving millions of lives. Unfortunately, in 1962, Rachel Carson released Silent Spring, which detailed purported toxic effects of DDT. To Carson’s credit, she never asked for DDT to be banned. She was right to call into question some potential toxic effects of DDT, and brought up a valid concern about the potential for mosquitoes to develop resistance to DDT due to its overuse in management of agricultural pests. However, the controversy she ignited in her work ultimately lead to the banning of DDT in 1972 by the EPA, the same organization that successfully used the Massachusetts court system to have carbon dioxide labeled as a “toxin.” As a result of this ill-conceived embracing of hysteria over rational explication, irrevocable damage occurred. As the American Council on Science and Health report of 2002 pointed out: “Overall, the ban has resulted in the death of millions.” Some believe this number is inflated, and possibly so, but there is no doubt that many needlessly died due to a preventable overreaction. Fortunately, DDT was recently re-authorized and re-legitimized by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO is currently examining other alternatives to control mosquitoes, including the use of pyrethroids, which can others claim are even more toxic than DDT. I am not going to argue the merit of one chemical intervention over another. My point is that cool, rational, objective interpretation of data, trends, and information is more laudable than knee-jerk reactions based on fear and sensationalistic claims.
Another example of unintended consequences is the creation of the energy saving, compact fluorescent light bulb. Touted for its energy efficiency properties that would reduce carbon emissions, and by extension, save the planet from the vagaries of global warming, the light bulb hides behind a veil of benignity. But anyone who cares enough to read the warning on the box will soon discover a much more toxic truth: these bulbs are full of mercury, a well-documented toxin known to cause mental retardation, birth defects, developmental delays in children, and possibly cancer. When these bulbs are deposited and decomposed in land fills, they leach into the soil and end up in water systems, potentially causing deleterious effects on a variety of fauna, and are ultimately passed on to human beings through the food chain. This is something a true environmentalist should be upset about. I am not calling for a ban on mercury nor a prohibition of the new light bulb. My point is, again, that a lack of cool-headed objective analysis of a given situation has led to actions and consequences that end up ironically, damaging the environment. This same pattern of histrionic overreaction has characterized climate change. In the 1970s, on the heels of a NASA report by Dr. Ichtiaque Rasool, we were warned that the result of “fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees.” That’s right: global cooling was going to spell our ruin. This was picked up by a sensationalistic media and was epitomized by a 1974 Time magazine article titled “Another Ice Age?” The unwitting public was warned that: “Telltale signs are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of warmth-loving creatures like the armadillo from the Midwest.” Contrast these sentiments with the words from a 2006 article, also from Time:
“Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us. It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 4 storm with wind bursts that reached 125 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away.”
So which phenomenon will ultimately visit mayhem, famine, and unimagined evils upon our world: global warming or global cooling? But if you are a fundamentalist, it doesn’t matter, because fundamentalism requires strict devotion to a proposition of belief system, regardless of contrary information or circumstances. The same phenomenon of blind adherence characterized the right-wing attack of citizens who protested the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Citizens who questioned the veracity of reports of “weapons of mass destruction” or the ethics of violating the sovereignty of a foreign nation were labeled as “Un-American,” a sad reminder that the vestiges of McCarthyism and it jingoistic parallels still haunt our society. Although many fully backed the war effort and the Bush administration, civil rights remain intact for those in opposition. Once we stifle dissension, we set loose a slow but sure drift toward totalitarianism and a diminution of the individual and his or her conscience. As Euripides warned: “In case of dissension, never dare to judge until you’ve heard the other side.”
Before proceeding, let me acknowledge that most environmentalists have genuine and rational concerns for our ecosystems, and they play a pivotal role in checking unregulated destruction of a variety of habitats. Environmentalists remind of our stewardship role in the preservation of our land and other life forms, and have worked tirelessly to save multiple species from extinction as well as lobbied to clean our waters and air. But these days, many activists seem to be co-opted by the dynamics that embody other forms of fundamentalism, putting us in danger of a one-sidedness that undermines democratic values.
So in order to understand the fervency of many global warming/climate change adherents, let’s explore the characteristics of fundamentalism. Although rooted in religious zealotry, secular “eco-fundamentalism” shares the same underlying principle: the idea of outright certainty and a resulting disdain and contempt for those that dare question its certitudes, impugning those that disagree of having an infirmity of faith. As Dr. Grahame Thompson, professor of sociology and authority on religious fundamentalism states: “In each count, meaning and uncertainty, fundamentalists "cure" this disorder. They neither lack understanding nor remain uncertain.” Dr. Thompson elaborates further by delineating several characteristics of fundamentalists.
The first major characteristic is “sameness,” or a Thompson explains: “They offer a retreat from, or a withdrawal from, difference by insisting that everything should be the same – the same as them (and many of them are prepared to die to achieve this).” This sentiment is repeated by environmentalists, who point out that we share “one world” and so by extension, the way I live my life in Houston, Texas, could have deleterious effects on newborn in sub-Saharan Africa. It is no accident that websites such as us.oneworld.net, earthfirst.com, and earthfirst.net advocate simultaneously for one world cooperation and environmental objectives. Eco-Fundamentalists see no separation between our lands and people, and on a spiritual note, I applaud them. We are surely all brothers and sisters on some humanitarian level, but to use such appeals in order to suffocate opposition to the subordination of the “greater good of humanity” smacks of scientism and has Marxist overtones. Unfortunately, this point-of-view has found credible proponents, such as former French President Jacques Chirac, who said in a speech advocating the Kyoto Protocol: “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.”
Another distinguishing characteristic of fundamentalists is a penchant for extremism. As Thompson states: “Fundamentalists pursuit of an ideal or principles can also promote blind faith as against pragmatic reason, and form a basis for an extreme, exclusive refusal to accommodate perspectives different from their own.” Such is the state of current debate, or lack thereof, concerning global warming. Thousands of scientists and skeptics have been quite vocal in offering countering perspectives and evidence, only to be silenced or labeled as deniers. As Ellen Goodman, a liberal journalist, wrote: “Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.” And like all other movements, whether with real or imagined injustices, global warming followers need a leader, another characteristic of fundamentalism. And who better than the self-chosen prophet of global warming, Al Gore, who compared the need for regulation of carbon emissions to the push for equality and social justice obtained during the civil rights movement. Jews and African Americans should be equally offended at Goodman’s and Gore’s comments, and the public should have no difficulty in de-conflating these specious analogies. The Holocaust resulted in the documented murder of more than 12,000,000 innocent children, women, and adults, while racism and the civil rights movement meant untold suffering, oppression and murder of both African Americans and Caucasians at the hands of racists bent on preserving white supremacy and their attendant institutions. As Thompson states, “when fundamentalists invest these ideals and principles in the figure of a single leader (as they often do), this too can encourage extremism.” And, while the Holocaust and the push for racial equality through the civil-rights movement are cold, hard historical events that are undeniable in their human costs, global warming and its link to carbon emissions are a theory, nothing more. Unlike the ban on DDT, or the toxic effects of mercury, no one has died due to global warming, despite what people might say, because no one, not even Al Gore, can prove a linkage, except to the extreme fanaticism that has become the phenomenon of global warming.
Fundamentalism is also typified by a sacrificial quality, what Thompson describes as “the need to engage in sacrifice: both of the search for meaning that entraps others, and indeed of the "meaning of life" itself. In the words of Tom Brokaw: “I don't think anyone doubts that we have to make some profound changes in this country and make some tough decisions and maybe even suffer some pain…” I will agree that these are not unreasonable words, but we have to be careful, because leading proponents are often radical and incendiary in their pronouncements. Consider the following statements by Bill McKibben, an outspoken environmental activist:
“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet….Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” If you believe that McKibben is a fringe element, then consider the following pronouncement by Thomas Friedman, a liberal, main-stream syndicated columnist and well-known author wrote in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America: ”…our government could get its act together and launch a green revolution with the same persistent focus, stick to the same direction that China does through authoritarian means.” Wow. Do we still live in a democratic republic, or should we sacrifice our civil rights, along with common sense, to the altar of global warming (or cooling, depending on the time period)? I might remind Mr. Friedman that the reason China took draconian measure to control the birthrate was because their socialist policies could not provide for the starving masses. Ironically, their economy began to grow as they opened up markets, ramped up exports, and became a manufacturing superpower. According to Time magazine, “China produces two-thirds of all photocopiers, microwaves and shoes; 60% of cell phones; 55% of DVDs; over half of all digital cameras; 30% of personal computers; and 75% of children’s toys.” This was made possible because they utilized traditional energy resources such as oil and coal, the very fuels that have become harbingers of evil according to environmentalist. There is no doubt that the use of coal has led to health problems in China, including a host of respiratory illnesses and a an unacceptable cancer rate. But compare that to the devastating effects of poverty. According to a United States Department of Health and Human Services report, poverty is associated with higher disease rates, malnutrition, chronic illness, disability, crime, and premature death. The reality is that poverty sickens and kills far more people than any greenhouse gas or coal burning could ever. And this is where the logic of the Copenhagen agreement becomes internally flawed. The agreement allows developing countries, such as China, to be exempt from carbon emissions restrictions, which is a nod to the potentially pernicious economic effects it might have on those countries. But according to all of the so-called experts, global warming has been blamed for or predicted to bring about: famine, flooding, disease, drowning, animal cannibalism, melting of the polar ice caps, and the list of atrocities go on and on, ad nausea. In fact, Dr. john Brignell, an engineer, Research Fellow, and global warming “denier,” has compiled to date over 690 events that have blamed on global warming! It is mind-numbing in scope, but laughable in reality. Yet, if these are true claims, and carbon emissions are in fact bringing “hell to earth,” than we should not have any allowances for third-world countries, especially China, which according to United Nations statistics, emits an a million tons of more CO2 than does the United States. By this logic, we should all be dead in the next 20 years, given China’s rapacious march toward prosperity and their resultant carbon pollution. The reality is that the ultimate sacrifice will be the United States and other developed countries, which seemingly must pay propitiations for their sin of prosperity. Only then will the world be again in some imagined utopian moral and ecological equilibrium. There is only one catch: After the United States has been economically broken by national and international cap and trade, only after we have been materially eviscerated and Americans watch their income redistributed to corrupt governments (including our own), will the world realize the errors of their ways. Even Thomas Friedman agreed when he recently stated: “The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.” Cap and trade flies in the face of this logic.
The final characteristic of fundamentalism is the use of fear. As Thompson explains it, it is the “urge to eliminate what they see as the source of aggression, namely difference. For them the only way to eliminate violence is for us all to be the same.” James Lovelock, a well-known and strident advocate of the global warming apocalypse wrote this: “We misused energy and overpopulated the earth…It is much to late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat.” In other words, we must all be on board with the crises of global warming, or we run the risk of being different and heretical. Boris Johnson, a classically educated journalist and former mayor of London, summarized it best: “Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.” Unfortunately, science, once a bastion for healthy skepticism, is no longer immune. John Maddox, the former editor of the British Journal Nature noted that “these days there seems to also seems to be an underlying cataclysmic sense among people. Scientists don’t seem to be immune to this.” How much longer will we continue to flagellate ourselves in some unresolved attempt to unburden ours selves from our sins of prosperity? We need not feel guilty about technological or scientific progress. What we should do is harness our vast knowledge and leverage our technology to better serve our brothers and sisters in need, much like we did with DDT, the polio vaccine, and a myriad of other creations that have made life better for people. This is the path of rational behavior, one grounded in science, not hysteria, one based on opportunity and economic advancement, not a myopic retreat into some imagined, pristine state that never was. Let us leave with the words of historian Hans Morgenthau:
“Two moods determine the attitude of our civilization to the social world: confidence in the power of reason, as represented by modern science, to solve the problems of the age, and despair at the ever renewed failure pf scientific reason to solve them. The intellectual and moral history of mankind is the story of inner security, of the anticipation of impending doom, of metaphysical anxiety.”
Let us choose reason over fear.
To understand the psychological dimensions of global warming, it’s important to first take a historical view of the histrionics and the unintended consequences that have been fermented by the so-called scientific establishment regarding environmentalism in general, and climate change, in particular. One of the most pernicious lies ever perpetrated on the unsuspecting public was the vociferous outcry against DDT, an extremely effective insecticide. When DDT was used on a regular basis in Europe and Asia, it’s results were nothing less than miraculous. Not only did the use of DDT result in preventing epidemics of typhus and malaria during World War II, it virtually eliminated these diseases in great portions of Asia and Africa, saving millions of lives. Unfortunately, in 1962, Rachel Carson released Silent Spring, which detailed purported toxic effects of DDT. To Carson’s credit, she never asked for DDT to be banned. She was right to call into question some potential toxic effects of DDT, and brought up a valid concern about the potential for mosquitoes to develop resistance to DDT due to its overuse in management of agricultural pests. However, the controversy she ignited in her work ultimately lead to the banning of DDT in 1972 by the EPA, the same organization that successfully used the Massachusetts court system to have carbon dioxide labeled as a “toxin.” As a result of this ill-conceived embracing of hysteria over rational explication, irrevocable damage occurred. As the American Council on Science and Health report of 2002 pointed out: “Overall, the ban has resulted in the death of millions.” Some believe this number is inflated, and possibly so, but there is no doubt that many needlessly died due to a preventable overreaction. Fortunately, DDT was recently re-authorized and re-legitimized by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO is currently examining other alternatives to control mosquitoes, including the use of pyrethroids, which can others claim are even more toxic than DDT. I am not going to argue the merit of one chemical intervention over another. My point is that cool, rational, objective interpretation of data, trends, and information is more laudable than knee-jerk reactions based on fear and sensationalistic claims.
Another example of unintended consequences is the creation of the energy saving, compact fluorescent light bulb. Touted for its energy efficiency properties that would reduce carbon emissions, and by extension, save the planet from the vagaries of global warming, the light bulb hides behind a veil of benignity. But anyone who cares enough to read the warning on the box will soon discover a much more toxic truth: these bulbs are full of mercury, a well-documented toxin known to cause mental retardation, birth defects, developmental delays in children, and possibly cancer. When these bulbs are deposited and decomposed in land fills, they leach into the soil and end up in water systems, potentially causing deleterious effects on a variety of fauna, and are ultimately passed on to human beings through the food chain. This is something a true environmentalist should be upset about. I am not calling for a ban on mercury nor a prohibition of the new light bulb. My point is, again, that a lack of cool-headed objective analysis of a given situation has led to actions and consequences that end up ironically, damaging the environment. This same pattern of histrionic overreaction has characterized climate change. In the 1970s, on the heels of a NASA report by Dr. Ichtiaque Rasool, we were warned that the result of “fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees.” That’s right: global cooling was going to spell our ruin. This was picked up by a sensationalistic media and was epitomized by a 1974 Time magazine article titled “Another Ice Age?” The unwitting public was warned that: “Telltale signs are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of warmth-loving creatures like the armadillo from the Midwest.” Contrast these sentiments with the words from a 2006 article, also from Time:
“Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us. It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 4 storm with wind bursts that reached 125 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away.”
So which phenomenon will ultimately visit mayhem, famine, and unimagined evils upon our world: global warming or global cooling? But if you are a fundamentalist, it doesn’t matter, because fundamentalism requires strict devotion to a proposition of belief system, regardless of contrary information or circumstances. The same phenomenon of blind adherence characterized the right-wing attack of citizens who protested the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Citizens who questioned the veracity of reports of “weapons of mass destruction” or the ethics of violating the sovereignty of a foreign nation were labeled as “Un-American,” a sad reminder that the vestiges of McCarthyism and it jingoistic parallels still haunt our society. Although many fully backed the war effort and the Bush administration, civil rights remain intact for those in opposition. Once we stifle dissension, we set loose a slow but sure drift toward totalitarianism and a diminution of the individual and his or her conscience. As Euripides warned: “In case of dissension, never dare to judge until you’ve heard the other side.”
Before proceeding, let me acknowledge that most environmentalists have genuine and rational concerns for our ecosystems, and they play a pivotal role in checking unregulated destruction of a variety of habitats. Environmentalists remind of our stewardship role in the preservation of our land and other life forms, and have worked tirelessly to save multiple species from extinction as well as lobbied to clean our waters and air. But these days, many activists seem to be co-opted by the dynamics that embody other forms of fundamentalism, putting us in danger of a one-sidedness that undermines democratic values.
So in order to understand the fervency of many global warming/climate change adherents, let’s explore the characteristics of fundamentalism. Although rooted in religious zealotry, secular “eco-fundamentalism” shares the same underlying principle: the idea of outright certainty and a resulting disdain and contempt for those that dare question its certitudes, impugning those that disagree of having an infirmity of faith. As Dr. Grahame Thompson, professor of sociology and authority on religious fundamentalism states: “In each count, meaning and uncertainty, fundamentalists "cure" this disorder. They neither lack understanding nor remain uncertain.” Dr. Thompson elaborates further by delineating several characteristics of fundamentalists.
The first major characteristic is “sameness,” or a Thompson explains: “They offer a retreat from, or a withdrawal from, difference by insisting that everything should be the same – the same as them (and many of them are prepared to die to achieve this).” This sentiment is repeated by environmentalists, who point out that we share “one world” and so by extension, the way I live my life in Houston, Texas, could have deleterious effects on newborn in sub-Saharan Africa. It is no accident that websites such as us.oneworld.net, earthfirst.com, and earthfirst.net advocate simultaneously for one world cooperation and environmental objectives. Eco-Fundamentalists see no separation between our lands and people, and on a spiritual note, I applaud them. We are surely all brothers and sisters on some humanitarian level, but to use such appeals in order to suffocate opposition to the subordination of the “greater good of humanity” smacks of scientism and has Marxist overtones. Unfortunately, this point-of-view has found credible proponents, such as former French President Jacques Chirac, who said in a speech advocating the Kyoto Protocol: “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.”
Another distinguishing characteristic of fundamentalists is a penchant for extremism. As Thompson states: “Fundamentalists pursuit of an ideal or principles can also promote blind faith as against pragmatic reason, and form a basis for an extreme, exclusive refusal to accommodate perspectives different from their own.” Such is the state of current debate, or lack thereof, concerning global warming. Thousands of scientists and skeptics have been quite vocal in offering countering perspectives and evidence, only to be silenced or labeled as deniers. As Ellen Goodman, a liberal journalist, wrote: “Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.” And like all other movements, whether with real or imagined injustices, global warming followers need a leader, another characteristic of fundamentalism. And who better than the self-chosen prophet of global warming, Al Gore, who compared the need for regulation of carbon emissions to the push for equality and social justice obtained during the civil rights movement. Jews and African Americans should be equally offended at Goodman’s and Gore’s comments, and the public should have no difficulty in de-conflating these specious analogies. The Holocaust resulted in the documented murder of more than 12,000,000 innocent children, women, and adults, while racism and the civil rights movement meant untold suffering, oppression and murder of both African Americans and Caucasians at the hands of racists bent on preserving white supremacy and their attendant institutions. As Thompson states, “when fundamentalists invest these ideals and principles in the figure of a single leader (as they often do), this too can encourage extremism.” And, while the Holocaust and the push for racial equality through the civil-rights movement are cold, hard historical events that are undeniable in their human costs, global warming and its link to carbon emissions are a theory, nothing more. Unlike the ban on DDT, or the toxic effects of mercury, no one has died due to global warming, despite what people might say, because no one, not even Al Gore, can prove a linkage, except to the extreme fanaticism that has become the phenomenon of global warming.
Fundamentalism is also typified by a sacrificial quality, what Thompson describes as “the need to engage in sacrifice: both of the search for meaning that entraps others, and indeed of the "meaning of life" itself. In the words of Tom Brokaw: “I don't think anyone doubts that we have to make some profound changes in this country and make some tough decisions and maybe even suffer some pain…” I will agree that these are not unreasonable words, but we have to be careful, because leading proponents are often radical and incendiary in their pronouncements. Consider the following statements by Bill McKibben, an outspoken environmental activist:
“Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet….Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” If you believe that McKibben is a fringe element, then consider the following pronouncement by Thomas Friedman, a liberal, main-stream syndicated columnist and well-known author wrote in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America: ”…our government could get its act together and launch a green revolution with the same persistent focus, stick to the same direction that China does through authoritarian means.” Wow. Do we still live in a democratic republic, or should we sacrifice our civil rights, along with common sense, to the altar of global warming (or cooling, depending on the time period)? I might remind Mr. Friedman that the reason China took draconian measure to control the birthrate was because their socialist policies could not provide for the starving masses. Ironically, their economy began to grow as they opened up markets, ramped up exports, and became a manufacturing superpower. According to Time magazine, “China produces two-thirds of all photocopiers, microwaves and shoes; 60% of cell phones; 55% of DVDs; over half of all digital cameras; 30% of personal computers; and 75% of children’s toys.” This was made possible because they utilized traditional energy resources such as oil and coal, the very fuels that have become harbingers of evil according to environmentalist. There is no doubt that the use of coal has led to health problems in China, including a host of respiratory illnesses and a an unacceptable cancer rate. But compare that to the devastating effects of poverty. According to a United States Department of Health and Human Services report, poverty is associated with higher disease rates, malnutrition, chronic illness, disability, crime, and premature death. The reality is that poverty sickens and kills far more people than any greenhouse gas or coal burning could ever. And this is where the logic of the Copenhagen agreement becomes internally flawed. The agreement allows developing countries, such as China, to be exempt from carbon emissions restrictions, which is a nod to the potentially pernicious economic effects it might have on those countries. But according to all of the so-called experts, global warming has been blamed for or predicted to bring about: famine, flooding, disease, drowning, animal cannibalism, melting of the polar ice caps, and the list of atrocities go on and on, ad nausea. In fact, Dr. john Brignell, an engineer, Research Fellow, and global warming “denier,” has compiled to date over 690 events that have blamed on global warming! It is mind-numbing in scope, but laughable in reality. Yet, if these are true claims, and carbon emissions are in fact bringing “hell to earth,” than we should not have any allowances for third-world countries, especially China, which according to United Nations statistics, emits an a million tons of more CO2 than does the United States. By this logic, we should all be dead in the next 20 years, given China’s rapacious march toward prosperity and their resultant carbon pollution. The reality is that the ultimate sacrifice will be the United States and other developed countries, which seemingly must pay propitiations for their sin of prosperity. Only then will the world be again in some imagined utopian moral and ecological equilibrium. There is only one catch: After the United States has been economically broken by national and international cap and trade, only after we have been materially eviscerated and Americans watch their income redistributed to corrupt governments (including our own), will the world realize the errors of their ways. Even Thomas Friedman agreed when he recently stated: “The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.” Cap and trade flies in the face of this logic.
The final characteristic of fundamentalism is the use of fear. As Thompson explains it, it is the “urge to eliminate what they see as the source of aggression, namely difference. For them the only way to eliminate violence is for us all to be the same.” James Lovelock, a well-known and strident advocate of the global warming apocalypse wrote this: “We misused energy and overpopulated the earth…It is much to late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat.” In other words, we must all be on board with the crises of global warming, or we run the risk of being different and heretical. Boris Johnson, a classically educated journalist and former mayor of London, summarized it best: “Like all the best religions, fear of climate change satisfies our need for guilt, and self-disgust, and that eternal human sense that technological progress must be punished by the gods. And the fear of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery, and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.” Unfortunately, science, once a bastion for healthy skepticism, is no longer immune. John Maddox, the former editor of the British Journal Nature noted that “these days there seems to also seems to be an underlying cataclysmic sense among people. Scientists don’t seem to be immune to this.” How much longer will we continue to flagellate ourselves in some unresolved attempt to unburden ours selves from our sins of prosperity? We need not feel guilty about technological or scientific progress. What we should do is harness our vast knowledge and leverage our technology to better serve our brothers and sisters in need, much like we did with DDT, the polio vaccine, and a myriad of other creations that have made life better for people. This is the path of rational behavior, one grounded in science, not hysteria, one based on opportunity and economic advancement, not a myopic retreat into some imagined, pristine state that never was. Let us leave with the words of historian Hans Morgenthau:
“Two moods determine the attitude of our civilization to the social world: confidence in the power of reason, as represented by modern science, to solve the problems of the age, and despair at the ever renewed failure pf scientific reason to solve them. The intellectual and moral history of mankind is the story of inner security, of the anticipation of impending doom, of metaphysical anxiety.”
Let us choose reason over fear.
Global Warming: An Instrument of Deception, Transformation and Subjugation
Let me state right from the onset I am not an anti-environmentalist bent on allowing industry to poison our air, pollute our waters, degrade our forests, deplete our natural resources, or in general harm our shared planet. I have walked in old-growth forest here in the United States and have been in the rainforests of Honduras, and have a keen appreciation for the role that natural surroundings have on mankind. They are truly a blessing. Nor am I an outright “denier” of global warming/climate change. I do not believe the IPCC to be a pernicious organization bent on the destruction of Western society, nor do I believe the scientists and members of the IPCC to be inherently corrupt people who are intentionally hatching a plan to deceive the whole of humanity. However, I do make the following contentions that I will examine in depth over the course of my next several blogs:
1. The nature, design, and execution of the climate treaty being considered in Copenhagen, as well as cap and trade legislation violate the letter of the Constitution and the sprit of United States sovereignty.
2. The manner in which global warming has been researched, presented and embraced is laced with fundamentalism and uses fear tactics to exploit a gullible and ill-informed public, which is a clear danger to rational thought and exposition and threatens to undermine political dissention and rob science of its objective lens.
3. There is no clear consensus among the scientific community regarding global warming, despite claims to the contrary.
4. There are many more pressing issues the world community needs to address before global warming casing energy, time and resources to be diverted.
5. The use of a cap and trade system will neither: reduce carbon emissions appreciably, modulate global warming, or benefit third-world countries, although it may very likely do harm to both established and fledgling economies, falling disproportionably among the most vulnerable, even as it simultaneously lines the pockets of energy-sector corporate elitists and further disconnects consumers from their energy use.
6. The key to both safeguarding the Earth as well as ensuring prosperity and movement toward economic parity must take into account the motivators of human behaviors or change will never be sustainable.
INTERNATIONAL CAP AND TRADE IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL
As it is presently being conducted, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton being used a diplomatic proxy to negotiate international climate regulations, violates the United States Constitution. According to Article I, Section 8, Congress may “regulate Commerce with foreign nations,” not the President. The President is however, under Article II, Section 2, allowed to make treaties, but only “provided two thirds of the Senators present concur,” which is far different scenario than an ambassador deciding our national fate. As Alexander Hamilton points out in the Federalist Papers: “the qualities elsewhere detailed as indispensable in the management of foreign negotiations, point out the Executive as the most fit agent in those transactions; while the vast importance of the trust, and the operation of treaties as laws, plead strongly for the participation of the whole or a portion of the legislative body in the office of making them.” (Federalist 75). This is a profound and direct example of a robust system of checks and balances purposely interwoven throughout the Constitution and aimed at undermining the excesses of unmitigated power possessed by English monarchy. As James Madison advocated by echoing the words of the prominent social philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu: "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.” (Federalist, 47). This does not mean all branches abdicate all sense of province or authority, but are subject to rational inspection and deliberation. At this point, of course, no such violation has occurred. But should Secretary Clinton be authorized to sign a future agreement of commerce in Copenhagen, we will once again have undermined fundamental tenets of our Constitution. And, even if Congress would approve this treaty, I believe it would be a violation of the public welfare, given the on-going level of suppression endured by those who hold opposing points-of-view. As one of our prominent founding fathers, John Jay noted: “It surely does not follow, that because they have given the power of making laws to the legislature, that therefore they should likewise give them the power to do every other act of sovereignty by which the citizens are to be bound and affected.” (Federalist, 64) When government acts without the consent of the people, we no longer have a true representative democracy. In the case of global warming legislation, government functions as an elitist, self-serving body that foments anger and derision amongst the masses as surreptitiously embraces a pseudo-scientific fundamentalism and runs roughshod over it citizens. More on this in my next installment: Global Warming is a Form of Fundamentalism.
Let me state right from the onset I am not an anti-environmentalist bent on allowing industry to poison our air, pollute our waters, degrade our forests, deplete our natural resources, or in general harm our shared planet. I have walked in old-growth forest here in the United States and have been in the rainforests of Honduras, and have a keen appreciation for the role that natural surroundings have on mankind. They are truly a blessing. Nor am I an outright “denier” of global warming/climate change. I do not believe the IPCC to be a pernicious organization bent on the destruction of Western society, nor do I believe the scientists and members of the IPCC to be inherently corrupt people who are intentionally hatching a plan to deceive the whole of humanity. However, I do make the following contentions that I will examine in depth over the course of my next several blogs:
1. The nature, design, and execution of the climate treaty being considered in Copenhagen, as well as cap and trade legislation violate the letter of the Constitution and the sprit of United States sovereignty.
2. The manner in which global warming has been researched, presented and embraced is laced with fundamentalism and uses fear tactics to exploit a gullible and ill-informed public, which is a clear danger to rational thought and exposition and threatens to undermine political dissention and rob science of its objective lens.
3. There is no clear consensus among the scientific community regarding global warming, despite claims to the contrary.
4. There are many more pressing issues the world community needs to address before global warming casing energy, time and resources to be diverted.
5. The use of a cap and trade system will neither: reduce carbon emissions appreciably, modulate global warming, or benefit third-world countries, although it may very likely do harm to both established and fledgling economies, falling disproportionably among the most vulnerable, even as it simultaneously lines the pockets of energy-sector corporate elitists and further disconnects consumers from their energy use.
6. The key to both safeguarding the Earth as well as ensuring prosperity and movement toward economic parity must take into account the motivators of human behaviors or change will never be sustainable.
INTERNATIONAL CAP AND TRADE IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL
As it is presently being conducted, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton being used a diplomatic proxy to negotiate international climate regulations, violates the United States Constitution. According to Article I, Section 8, Congress may “regulate Commerce with foreign nations,” not the President. The President is however, under Article II, Section 2, allowed to make treaties, but only “provided two thirds of the Senators present concur,” which is far different scenario than an ambassador deciding our national fate. As Alexander Hamilton points out in the Federalist Papers: “the qualities elsewhere detailed as indispensable in the management of foreign negotiations, point out the Executive as the most fit agent in those transactions; while the vast importance of the trust, and the operation of treaties as laws, plead strongly for the participation of the whole or a portion of the legislative body in the office of making them.” (Federalist 75). This is a profound and direct example of a robust system of checks and balances purposely interwoven throughout the Constitution and aimed at undermining the excesses of unmitigated power possessed by English monarchy. As James Madison advocated by echoing the words of the prominent social philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu: "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.” (Federalist, 47). This does not mean all branches abdicate all sense of province or authority, but are subject to rational inspection and deliberation. At this point, of course, no such violation has occurred. But should Secretary Clinton be authorized to sign a future agreement of commerce in Copenhagen, we will once again have undermined fundamental tenets of our Constitution. And, even if Congress would approve this treaty, I believe it would be a violation of the public welfare, given the on-going level of suppression endured by those who hold opposing points-of-view. As one of our prominent founding fathers, John Jay noted: “It surely does not follow, that because they have given the power of making laws to the legislature, that therefore they should likewise give them the power to do every other act of sovereignty by which the citizens are to be bound and affected.” (Federalist, 64) When government acts without the consent of the people, we no longer have a true representative democracy. In the case of global warming legislation, government functions as an elitist, self-serving body that foments anger and derision amongst the masses as surreptitiously embraces a pseudo-scientific fundamentalism and runs roughshod over it citizens. More on this in my next installment: Global Warming is a Form of Fundamentalism.
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