Republicans have been making lots of nonsensical remarks in an attempt to refute global warming — based on this week’s northeast snow storm. Opportunist TV douche-bags like Sean Hannity have seized the rough snowstorms to make their STUPID case against climate change, and to bash former president Al Gore for his advocacy on climate change. [ GLOBAL WARMING FALSEHOODS ] [ MORE FALSEHOODS ]
MediaMatters: Right-wing media seize on snow at Copenhagen conference to deem climate change a “fraud” — Right-wing media have highlighted recent snowfall during the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, often suggesting that the winter storm is evidence that climate change is, in Rush Limbaugh’s words, “a fraud.” But climate scientists reject the notion that short-term changes in weather, let alone individual storms, bear any relevance to the global warming debate, and several major climate data centers have said that, thus far, 2009 is one of the warmest years on record. [ READ MORE ]
The tendency to attribute environmental misfortunes to witchcraft and ghosts, and the existence of easily available superstitious solutions to deal with environmental calamities makes protection of the environment difficult, and good policy nearly impossible. Thus in Kenya, where the debate over the eviction of settlers from the environmentally critical Mau Forest has turned nasty, highly educated personages from the Rift Valley have stood up and argued that rain comes from the sky, and forests have absolutely nothing to do with it!
What, no rainmakers in Copenhagen?
[ By: Charles Onyango-Obbo ] It has been heartening to see a once-demoralised Africa becoming increasingly assertive in international affairs in recent years.
A few weeks before the ongoing UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Africa threatened to walk out of the meeting if its demand for $300 billion eco-compensation was rejected by the industrialised world.
Africa is demanding compensation because, though it is the world’s smallest polluter, it suffers the greatest damage from climate change.
Africa may have gone to Copenhagen as the conference’s most self-righteous bloc, but it also has the world’s most contradictory practices where nature is concerned, and complicates campaigns to protect the environment in strange ways.
Generally, we seem to believe that environmental and climate problems can be fixed quickly.
If the rains stay away for a long time, you gather half a dozen white chickens and take them to the local rainmaker.
He will get a powder into which a tiger tooth and lion claws have allegedly been ground, climb to the top of a high hill, blow the powder in the air, flash his miracle-filled backside at the heavens, and frighten the sky into opening up.
If some mysterious insects eat all the village’s crops just before the harvest, the resident diviner shall be asked to investigate.
She will identify a family of “wizards” in the area whose dark arts have brought the pestilence.
In the night, the men will gather with clubs and machetes, attack the “wizards,” kill everyone and burn the house down.
And if a family wakes up one morning to find that all the cows in its kraal have died (after drinking from a poisoned well), in no time an elder will proclaim that it is the avenging ghost of an uncle who died with bitterness in his heart, which needs to be appeased to protect future herds.
This tendency to attribute environmental misfortunes to witchcraft and ghosts, and the existence of easily available superstitious solutions to deal with environmental calamities makes protection of the environment difficult, and good policy nearly impossible.
Thus many of the forests that are still fairly intact in several parts of Africa are safe probably not because our blood is green.
Rather it is because people believe that a dangerous serpent or angry ancestral spirits live in the forest, and if you cut down a tree your children will go mad.
Mau Forest
The effect of all this is that science is not a powerful argument where the environment is concerned.
Thus in Kenya, where the debate over the eviction of settlers from the environmentally critical Mau Forest has turned nasty, highly educated personages from the Rift Valley have stood up and argued that rain comes from the sky, and forests have absolutely nothing to do with it!
Second, long-term policy that seeks, for example, to restore water levels to a water mass like Lake Victoria, sound laughable in places where people believe a rainmaker can end a drought overnight.
There are exceptions like Rwanda, which has had remarkable success fixing environmental damage and with reforestation.
Perhaps it is because in the 1994 genocide in which nearly one million people were slaughtered, many a Rwandese learnt that there are no gods in the forests, or rivers that will fight your wars for you.
That ultimately, man is both his worst enemy — and only saviour.
About The Author: Charles Onyango-Obbo — is Uganda’s leading political commentator. He is Nation Media Group’s managing editor for convergence and new products. Charles writes for The Monitor, Uganda’s only independent daily and most influential newspaper and The East African, a Nation-Media publication. Be sure to check out his Article Archive featuring hundreds of Charles’s greatest publications. More Articles By Mr. Onyango Obbo: [ CLICK HERE ]
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In America Dick FAT Morris Blogs: ” ….Dictators from Beijing to Africa are united in their demand for more “democracy” at the conference and are all deeply disturbed that Copenhagen may not turn out to be payday for which they had all hoped.” “Like anti-poverty storefronts in Harlem that change to drug rehab projects and then morph into stimulus programs, the less developed nations are now hanging out the climate change sign in the hopes of getting aid,” adds Dick Morris.
This is the same hypocrite and political prostitute who has traversed the world from east to west strategizing for “dictators.” For example Dick Morris helped out Raila Odinga of Kenya in his 2008 campaign against the dictatorship of Mwai Kibaki (see video below). An election which exploded into deadly violence.
Although I do not classify Odinga as a dictator, for he has never been president and has a sterling record fighting Kenyan dictatorships, I note here that Republicans have vilified and smeared Odinga and Obama as socialists and communists, and that Odinga plans to introduce SHARIA law in Kenya. Utter rubbish!
Therefore it is hypocritical for Dick Morris to call anyone a dictator; dictators who he has helped enable?
Morris is a twisted LIAR with Zero credibility, therefore his word cannot be trusted. He is always looking to score with lies, inflated figures and innuendo at NewsMax and with his racist goon-friends at Fox News — Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly of the O’GARBAGE FACTOR
From a Kenyan TV Station:November 13, 2007 – ODM Presidential candidate Raila Odinga has recruited “world renowned” political strategist Dick Morris to help shape his campaign. Mr Morris was former US president Bill Clinton’s election “campaign architect.”
The Crude Calculation To Install A Black Man As RNC Chairman To Cover Themselves From #adp01 Blatant Racism Directed At President Obama, is Backfiring on The Faces The GOP Ding-Bats
POLITICO: GOP leaders, in a private meeting last month, delivered a blunt and at times heated message to RNC Chairman Michael Steele: quit meddling in policy.
The plea was made during what was supposed to be a routine discussion about polling matters and other priorities in House Minority Leader John Boehner’s office. But the session devolved into a heated discussion about the roles of congressional leadership and Steele, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting. [ READ MORE ]
Lee Hockstader writes for The Washington Post: Steele, Back to Not Thinking About Policy — GOP leaders told the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, to quit meddling in policy. The story is remarkable not only for its detailed depiction of top congressional Republicans slapping down their own party?s nominal leader, but also for the suggestion that Steele, never one to get his hands too dirty in actual substance, got burned for appearing to have done just that.
Before he got comfortable on the Sunday morning chat shows in his current job, Steele was famous mainly for having said, in the midst of his dismal, substance-averse and losing campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2006, that the race was “not about issues.” Being a senator from Maryland was really more about leadership style, according to Steele, who never met an issue he bothered to master — or even read up on very closely. And now GOP leaders are commanding him to return to what he does best — not thinking about policy.
His comment, in its inadvertent candor, was the most revealing thing Steele said during that campaign, in which he distinguished himself not so much as blindly ignorant about the issues as utterly disdainful of them. Pressed on virtually any subject — energy, the environment, foreign affairs, health care — his stock response was that he would get “all the players in the room” before deciding what to do. As The Post wrote at the time, the man would have made a great meetings coordinator.
As the Republican Party figurehead, however, Steele has attracted attention mainly for his knack for the bizarre remark, the unguarded comment and the wacky observation, all of which he glosses over with a back-slapping bonhomie that Republicans hope translates through the camera as charisma. [ READ MORE ]
BOOK REVIEW: A VETERAN JOURNALIST’S ACIDICALLY FUNNY, RIGHTEOUSLY ANGRY LAMENT ABOUT THE GLORIFICATION OF IGNORANCE IN THE UNITED STATES.
Book Description: The Culture Wars Are Over and the Idiots Have Won.
In the midst of a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, Charles Pierce had a defining moment at the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he observed a dinosaur. Wearing a saddle… But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.
With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.
With Idiot America, Pierce’s thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.
A Q&A with Charles P. Pierce
Question: What inspired, or should I say drove, you to write Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The germ of the idea came as I watched the extended coverage of the death of Terri Schiavo. I wondered how so many people could ally themselves with so much foolishness despite the fact that it was doing them no perceptible good, politically or otherwise. And it looked like the national media simply could not help itself but be swept along. This started me thinking and, when I read a clip in the New York Times about the Creation Museum, I pitched an idea to Mark Warren, my editor at Esquire, that said simply, “Dinosaurs with saddles.” What we determined the theme of the eventual piece–and of the book–would be was “The Consequences Of Believing Nonsense.”
Question: You visited the Creation Museum while writing Idiot America. Describe your experience there. What was your first thought when you saw a dinosaur with a saddle on its back?
Charles P. Pierce: My first thought was that it was hilarious. My second thought was that I was the only person in the place who thought it was, which made me both angry and a little melancholy. Outside of the fact that its “science” is a god-awful parodic stew of paleontology, geology, and epistemology, all of them wholly detached from the actual intellectual method of each of them. The most disappointing thing is that the completed museum is so dreadfully grim and earnest and boring. It even makes dragon myths servant to its fringe biblical interpretations. Who wants to live in a world where dragons are boring?
Question: Is there a specific turning point where, as a country, we moved away from prizing experience to trusting the gut over intellect?
Charles P. Pierce: I don’t know if there’s one point that you can point to and say, “This is when it happened.” The conflict between intellectual expertise and reflexive emotion–often characterized as “good old common sense,” when it is neither common nor sense–has been endemic to American culture and politics since the beginning. I do think that my profession, journalism, went off the tracks when it accepted as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” No. Perception is perception and reality is reality, and if the former doesn’t conform to the latter, then it’s the journalist’s job to hammer and hammer the reality until the perception conforms to it. That’s how “intelligent design” gets treated as “science” simply because a lot of people believe in it.
Question: You delve into Ignatius Donnelly’s life story. In 1880, he published the book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World in an attempt to prove that the lost city existed. Yet, you characterize Donnelly as a lovable crank, and don’t take issue with him as you do with modern eccentrics, like Rush Limbaugh. What’s the difference between a harmless crank and a crank in Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: Cranks are noble because cranks are independent. Cranks do not care if their ideas succeed–they’d like them to do so–but cranks stand apart. Their value comes when, occasionally, their lonely dissents from the commonplace affect the culture, at which point either the culture moves to adopt them and their ideas come to influence the culture. The American crank is not someone with 600 radio stations spewing bilious canards to an audience of “dittoheads.” The concept of a “dittohead” is anathema to the American crank. He is a freethinker addressing an audience of them, whether that audience is made up of one person or a thousand. A charlatan is a crank who sells out.
Question: What is the most dangerous aspect of Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The most dangerous aspect of Idiot America is that it encourages us to abandon our birthright to be informed citizens of a self-governing republic. America cannot function on automatic pilot, and, too often, we don’t notice that it has been until the damage has already been done.
Question: Is there a voice or leader of Idiot America?
Charles P. Pierce: The leaders of Idiot America are those people who abandoned their obligations to the above. There are lots of people making an awful lot of money selling their ideas and their wares to Idiot America. Idiot America is an act of collective will, a product of lassitude and sloth.
Question: What is the difference between stupidity and glorifying ignorance?
Charles P. Pierce: Stupidity is as stupidity does, to quote a uniquely stupid movie. It has been with us always and always will be. But we moved into an era in which stupidity was celebrated if it managed to sell itself well, if it succeeded, if it made people money. That is “glorifying ignorance.” We moved into an era in which the reflexive instincts of the Gut were celebrated at the expense of reasoned, informed opinion. To this day, we have a political party–the Republicans–who, because it embraced a “movement of Conservatism” that celebrated anti-intellectualism is now incapable of conducting itself in any other way. That has profound political and cultural consequences, and the truly foul part about it was that so many people engaged in it knowing full well they were peddling poison.
Question: While writing Idiot America, what story or incident made you the most incensed?
Charles P. Pierce: Without Question, it was talking to the people at Woodside Hospice, who shared with me what it was like to be inside the whirlwind stirred up by people who used the prolonged death of Terri Schiavo as a political and social volleyball to advance their own unpopular and reckless agenda. There are people–Sean Hannity comes to mind–who, if there is a just god in heaven, should be locked in a room for 20 minutes with Annie Santa Maria, the indomitable woman who works with the patients at the hospice. Only one of them would come out, and it wouldn’t be him.
Question: With the election of President Obama, is Idiot America coming to an end? Or, will there always be a place for idiocy in America?
Charles P. Pierce: Look at the political opposition to President Obama. “Socialist!” “Fascist!” “Coming to get your guns.” Hysteria from the hucksters of Idiot America is still at high-tide. People are killing other people and specifically attributing their action to imaginary oppression stoked by radio talk-show stars and television pundits. That Glenn Beck has achieved the prominence he has makes me wonder if there is a just god in heaven.
Question: Are there any positive signs that we are moving away from Idiot America? If you could create a twelve step program to America back on track, what would be your first suggestion?
Charles P. Pierce: Remember that perception is not reality, that opinion, no matter how widely held, is not fact. An old and wise friend of mine said that the only question that any American citizen is required to answer is “Do you govern or are you governed?” It has to be answered in the former, and that answer has to be continuous. We have to get back to that.
From Publishers Weekly:
Journalist Pierce delivers a rapier-sharp rant on how the America of Franklin and Edison, Fulton and Ford has devolved into America the Uninformed, where citizens hostile to science are exchanging fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and glutting themselves on reality TV and conspiracy theories. Pierce makes no apologies for his liberal bias, and some conservatives–notably evolution opponents and Rush Limbaugh–endure a good deal of bashing. Pierce writes that in the U.S., Fact is merely what enough people believe, and truth lies only in how fervently they believe it. He supports his thesis with references to James Madison and other founding fathers, who may have foreseen and rued the emergence of cranks who would threaten the Enlightenment-based nation they were shaping. Although the book is not likely to win any converts from the right wing Pierce so energetically decries, it is an engaging catalogue of those unscientifically verified truths that enthrall and impassion millions of Americans.
It has been heartening to see a once-demoralised Africa becoming increasingly assertive in international affairs in recent years.
