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The sky is falling, the sky is falling" screamed the non-scientist Chicken Little as he ran all about the stage proclaiming how the world was coming to an end, and how we were all going to burn to soulless cinders in the coming conflagration caused by those evil humans who are just nothing but a plague upon on the earth.
A bright spot it seemed, for him at least ,was that it could ALL be averted if those evil capitalists in the United States would just start doing their farming using drip irrigation as is done in Cuba, and if we would just all run around turning off light bulbs, and driving electric cars.
Well, at least that was the message that came across to many of us attending a recent meeting of the ASFE ( a professional association of geoscience professionals).
I guess some would aver that we, the attendees, were the scientists .. at least much more so than this sociology professor emeritus who,
in his very own words, says that :
- " ..... "sociological practice" should include deliberate intervention. I did not consider research "applied," regardless of how novel, difficult, or esoteric the endeavor, unless and until it resulted in an intervention. I wondered if sociology had room for my activist orientation, and if I could find and study with kindred proactive types."
and when referring to his being vetted by a faculty sociology professor as a condition of being accepted into the Princeton Graduate program, that he was
- " .... delighted to find his open, though empty office over-flowing with untidy piles of various liberal and democratic left magazines and books dear to my heart."
and further tells us that he was a counselor at a youth summer camp where,
- "Unknown to the parents of campers and counselors alike, the camp's administration had been taken over by Soviet- admiring young American communists. Bright, energetic, and "liberated," they saw and took a golden opportunity to expose us to ideologies, practices, and values many of us found very appealing ... and out from under the shadow of which I shall probably never entirely escape. "
As I sat there with my mind, and the minds of my colleagues, being assaulted by the PowerPoint presentation, with its endless parroting of talking points taken out of the politically-correct socialist agenda that has been at play since 1910, I start to feel like one of the little kids we see on YouTube, who woke up and went to school figuring that they were going to be learning to read and do arithmetic, but instead were ambushed by their "Leadership" into standing in line and singing anthems to the Messiah on High, and spouting the wonder of "Hope", Change", "Mother Earth", and the beauty of "The Collective".
At any rate, within 3 minutes, I have taken my pen, and on the notepad sitting before me, I scrawl in big 4-inch letters the characters
V-O-M-I-T
which I then furtively, as would a prisoner clandestinely passing information to others in the gulag, turn over and hold up to show to a colleague sitting across the aisle at another of the indoctrination tables. On seeing it, my colleague, his shoulders slumping, shakes his head and rolls his eyes in agreement.
Now, mind you that few of us, including me, had any idea that this crap was coming ..... well, I take that back - I suspected that it was on the way as I had the night before, looked over the presentation notes/slides that had been included in the meeting agenda booklet - and on looking at them I thought I knew exactly what the agenda was going to be for this block of re-education camp instruction.
Little did I know, however, how much my expectations were going to be exceeded, for the speaker reeked of exactly what it was that he admired - to wit, untidy piles of various liberal and democratic left magazines and books dear to his heart, political activism, social indoctrination, ridicule of reason, and oh, so noble, support for the under privileged people of the world - you know, the under privileged people of the world that in 5000 years have not figured out how to build a water well themselves, nor how to built the societal infrastructure required to sustain it, and who have to have some do-gooder engineers come across their border to built it for them.
Over the next 50 minutes he proceeded to cackle the disconnected and logically incoherent pap as most of the climate normalcy deniers do. Within the first 3 minutes, he cited as proof of "Climate Change" (alias for global warming)
- an article in the Austin paper written by another non-scientist Paul Krugman, conveniently leaving out the fact that immediately underneath was an article by George Will pointing out the folly of the hysteria.
- his uneducated taxi driver's comment that the winters in Texas are warmer than remembered as a kid growing up, and as further proof that we are all going to die,
- that it has been 100 years since South Texas has had temperatures as hot as this summer of 2009, and that the lakes near Austin have not been this low for 50 years, and
- that scientists believe that climate change is going to wreak havoc on the planet, using a report Sustainable Critical Infrastructure Systems: A Framework for Meeting 21st Century Imperatives (2009) to cloak his views with a mantle of respectability, and conveniently leaving out the fact that the report was written and issued by a group having members that can easily be said to have a vested interest in the economic benefits that they or their professional society membership could achieve by jumping on the hysterically screaming and out of control circus wagon of global doom and gloom, conveniently leaving out the fact that others have been saying that there are over 31,000 scientists, over 9,000 of which have PhD degrees , http://www.petitionproject.org/index.php who say that:
- "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."
All this in the first 3 minutes -
Now mind you that it was colder that day in Austin than it was the previous day, and that, using this climate normalcy denier's own logic, that such a fact supports global cooling. Also, consider that the hottest temperature in Texas was not yesterday, but was in 1936, and that again using the same illogic of this presenter, a sociologist, not a scientist, and a sociologist that it is safe to say, believes that sociology without an agenda is not sociology, that this fact of the hottest temp in Texas occurring in 1936 then proves that we are experiencing global cooling!
And let us not leave out the fact that there were more tornadoes in Texas in 1967 than anytime since and that this must be because of all the greenhouse gas moderating and making less severe the weather patterns.
http://web2.airmail.net/danb1/records.htm
Concerning the lakes of Texas, this babbler perhaps should have checked his facts and seen that in the flood of 2002, that Canyon Lake which was built in 1964 and had NEVER used its spillway, had to take advantage of it in that 2002 flood, and that again, using his illogic, must mean that this global warming/climate change sure must be acting pretty darned fast to dry up all the water in Texas over just 7 years. Of course, I am glad that he did not have this factoid as it too, as a nose of wax, could be twisted to use as "proof" that man is dooming the planet because his actions are causing either too much or too little rainfall, and never not just enough. ( How convenient for the climate normalcy deniers. No matter which way Mama slices the cake they get a piece.)
As the indoctrination session continued, I wondered at why the hard sell, and I now see that it was all part of what is called the Pygmalion Effect, or the power of expectations to help decisively shape outcomes. Indeed, this person actually believed that the more outlandish his claims, and the stronger his expectation that we actually believe his pap, that a number of us would succumb. When I later learned that in the speaker's own words the Pygmalion Effect is "... an operating principle pivotal ever since in much of my consulting.", I was vindicated in my awareness that it was all just collectivist pap, and when I recall that the speaker believes in activist sociology-with-an-agenda, I knew for sure.
All the preceding by about minute 6, and then at about minute 15, when I saw Slide # 11 where it/he stated that "A Paradigm Shift Would Fundamentally Change Reality" - I nearly went apoplectic, for reality is reality and a paradigm (which is a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline) cannot change reality, i.e.,
a way of viewing reality cannot change reality.
At Slide # 12 I was nearly prostrate as he puts up the socialist community- organizer talking points conveniently camouflaged so as to make them seem "engineeringy", using buzz words like: "infrastructure" "critical", "working together", "new", etc., and then, after his anesthesia had begun to set in, he proceeded outright to talk about how to bring about "The Change".
What was the way to bring about "The Change"? Simple, all you gotta do is create:
- "voters agreeable to adequate outlays of public funds" and
- " government support for private sector investments" (this Government/Private Partnership is called Fascism folks) ,
Then, the last thing on the list was the REAL socialist agenda , which was stated as:
- "Advocates [sic] for .. K-16 education helping to bring along young recruits to continue the effort", complete with the cartoon of the little tyke dutifully putting the newspaper into the recycling bin where it will thereafter be taken to be buried in a landfill, or taken to be reprocessed by methods (including its collection) that use more energy and resources than it takes to grow the pulpwood tree and process it into new paper from scratch.
He could have easily added another one:
- get invited to speak at an ASFE meeting where he could channel Van Jones under the legitimizing mantle of a professional trade association .. and get paid for it.
It was obvious to me that the speaker was a true believer in the Gray Capitalist vision that the green economy
would start off as a small subset and would be used to push it and push it and push it until it [the green movement] becomes the engine for transforming the whole society. [Google it or click the link to find out who said these very words when he was telling his partisans what the "Green Movement" is all about.]
Much more of all this drivel over the remaining 45 minutes, complete with calls for a global government, electric cars, drip irrigation of crops as they do in Cuba, and the hackneyed "statistic" that the United States comprises 5% of the world population yet creates about 25% of the world's greenhouse gas (
no mention of the amount of the greenhouse gas created by the world's population of methane, N02 & CO2 -farting bovines and that the United Nations has identified "farting cows" as a major source of greenhouse gas). [Google it or click the link to see the report.]
As I sat there and listened to all these items which were intended to make me into a "Winston" clone out of Orwell's 1984, I considered how to involve myself in the question-and-answer session that generally follows. As I paced at the back of the room, I considered how an activist or a community organizer would respond and wondered if I should do the same. Should I run up and throw some urine from a cup holding a cross, should I interrupt his talk with some "
Obama Lies While Our Troops Die" chanting, or perhaps should I just keep the list of items and sedulous omissions and take about 45 minutes of my own to debunk his attempts at the indoctrination.
I also thought that it may be of benefit express my incredulity that he was not disappointed that Van Jones is a self-professed Communist and sees the green movement as the vehicle to transform America (where have we heard that before?), but instead was disappointed only in that Van Jones opened his mouth and let the cat out of the bag!
No, I just decided to recall his attention to that slide that talked about how good "going green" was and how he mentioned the drip irrigation implemented by Cuba as example of what could be done, and to recall to him his mention of those 5% creating 25% of the greenhouse gas. Thereafter seeing him making the mental linkage back to the slide and his previous comments, I asked:
"
So, on that drip irrigation, how's that working out for those Cubans? I mean, how much increase in world gross domestic production (GDP) does Cuba now produce from all that green technology", and I conjoined that rebuke with an observation that while he mentioned the 5/25 split he failed to mention that those 5% of the world's population have a wealth-creation power that end up
creating about 24% of the world's wealth and progress, which is more than double the wealth-creation power of the EU. (with its 12% of world population creating only about 30% world's wealth.)
In reply, he babbled on about how the Cubans use the drip irrigation on small communal village plots and that people here could start growing their own vegetables. Yeah, right ... and they could inflate their tires too and thereby save the world.
V-O-M-I-T
_______________
Editor's Follow-up
And please do not give me pap and try to make light of this unethical behaviour by saying, in defense and justification of a decision to bring this liberal in, using MY dues money, that it was a "
..... thought-provoking presentation" and that if it prompts people to get involved in political issues that it was therefore a "
valuable talk".
Yeah, getting robbed or mugged or raped can provoke some thought too ..... perhaps thoughts about crime prevention, or, as we are being raped, about how we really should not have been wearing such revealing clothing, etc., ......so we should all go out to get some of that valuable education?
Or, perhaps we can get some "thought provoking" going on by inviting some folks from ACORN to come in and talk to us about how to smuggle in some 13 year old girls from Nicaragua so they can do some prostitution, and how that can help the environment and take them out of poverty.
Spare me.
I, and many others I believe, were ambushed and "mind-raped" by our own association, and I, for one will speak out instead of going quietly into the night.
Ed Note 10/09/2009
Digging a bit deeper, I find that the first item in the
Statement of Objectives when the World Future Society, (of which our speaker is a member) was created was:
- To contribute to a reasoned awareness of the future and the importance of its study, without advocating particular ideologies or engaging in political activities. [underlining added]
I'd say that this speaker Shostack must have never read this, or if he did, just decided to ignore it, because the presentation was reeking of advocacy and engagement , and I have come to realize from my swimming a couple laps in the pool of "the movement" is that it is NOT a movement. It is much more. These people are actually engaged in a coordinated effort to shape the future . ... to change the future ... to fundamentally transform America. - exactly via the vehicle of presentations like that which we were subjected to.
Thus it is that all the pieces are falling into place now, and Obama is not just spouting rhetoric.. when he said " ... fundamentally change America" .. when he said "... redistributive justice", when he said " ...spread the wealth", when (today 10/09/2009) he said ".... transformative figures .. and call to action". HE MEANT IT and he knows that there is an army behind him, all busy working, in a coordinated fashion, to bring all that about.
It is not just Obama, and Soros, etc. It goes way deeper and there are a myriad of associations that ALL are working to bring about "The Change".
