<< BEST OPTION SHUNNED ~ MAIN ~ FLOOD SURVIVED >>
FACTS NEGLECTED, IGNORED
Czech President Vaclav Klaus on modern totalitarianism:
The environmentalist paradigm of thinking is absolutely static. They neglect the fact that both nature and human society are in a process of permanent change, that there is and has been no ideal state of the world as regards natural conditions, climate, distribution of species on earth, etc.
They neglect the fact that the climate has been changing fundamentally throughout the existence of our planet and that there are proofs of substantial climate fluctuations even in known and documented history.
Their reasoning is based on historically short and incomplete observations and data series which cannot justify the catastrophic conclusions they draw.
They neglect the complexity of factors that determine the evolution of the climate and blame contemporary mankind and the whole industrial civilization for being the decisive factors responsible for climate change and other environmental risks.
It’s unusual to read something so absolutely correct. Read on.
(Via Garth Godsman)
UPDATE. According to Kevin Rudd:
The science of this is pretty basic. All the scientists around the world agree that we have got to reach a point whereby we actually bring total emissions down.
So he’ll be embracing nuclear power for Australia any day now.
(Via Alan R.M. Jones)
Food for Thought When Thinking About Food
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 06 10 at 12:12 PM • permalink#2: Spot on, Richard. I’ve read similar sentiments from other Africans, and as someone who is involved in the financing of international trade, I would say it’s almost impossible to understate the effects of corruption at all levels of political and economic activity. And the African bankers and businessmen I talk to are not at all shy about lamenting what they’re up against in dealing with kleptocrats in their own countries.
#2, good point about AIDS, too, and how the unrelenting press it gets has siphoned off research money from other diseases that kill millions more people yearly than AIDS ever will.
Their reasoning is based on historically short and incomplete observations and data series which cannot justify the catastrophic conclusions they draw.
So Mr. Klaus could read: “Their reasoning is based on historically short and incomplete observations and data series, and their heartless political self-interest...”Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism. This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning of the whole world.
President Klaus is my hero for life.
Re #2, richard, that is precisely why I stopped donating to international charities long ago. I am extremely finicky on who gets my spare cash. Anything promoted by elderly celebrities has two strikes against them.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 06 10 at 03:10 PM • permalinkFirst: Vaclav Klaus is a politician. Politicians are supposed to be clueless idiots. How can anyone take this guy seriously as a President of a nation is he keeps showing that he actually understands the issues?
Second: On the whole commie-rat-bastard = ecotard thing…
Well duh. Deep Ecology and Social Ecology, the primary militant political systems underpinning misanthropic environmentalism were both founded by moronites that found rabid radical revolutionary marxism to be too tame.
Thank to all for the links. What a joy to read sense in the midst of what seems to be a permanent state of mass hysteria.
I wonder why these things are not being said by the supposed leader of the free world, and proponent of Capitalism.
I wonder, too, how long Africa will continue to act as a mule carrying the burden of the West’s altruistic virtue.
My 15 year old daughter rented An Inconvenient Truth yesterday and I watched it last night.
I reccomend it for its sheer awfulness. Science for morons combined with it’s all about Al Gore.
How this piece of vacuous rubbish could persuade anyone is beyond me. Or maybe the reason they are showing it to primary school kids is that anyone educated beyond that level would recognize it for the drivel it is.
BTW, my daughter agreed with my science for morons assesment.
I would be far less suspicious of greenhouse science if its proponents gave the adaptation policy response (i.e. live with the warming, rather than avoid it) fair consideration.
A purely scientific argument would consider both policy responses (avoidance and adaptation) and try to assess the costs and benefits of each.
But its not about the science, its about about “illiberal measures” as Klaus puts it. With an adaptation policy, everyone looks after their own stuff. It doesn’t give the environmentalists the control they crave, so it is never spoken of.
Vaclav Havel should have become the new UN Secretary General. Boy, would that have caused a bunching of the shorts among many.
And, phil_b, people get convinced by this crap because they *want* to be convinced. Just like they believe Gore won in 2000 and buy ‘carbon offsets’ will save the world. I.e., they’re morons.
Posted by JorgXMcKie on 2007 06 10 at 05:16 PM • permalink#11, phil_b:
How this piece of vacuous rubbish could persuade anyone is beyond me. Or maybe the reason they are showing it to primary school kids is that anyone educated beyond that level would recognize it for the drivel it is.
Other indicators taken from various presentations, seminars and speeches quoted at Sigmund Carl and Alfred tend to support your supposition.
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future”- Dr. Chester M. Pierce, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973
Is but the first sample of the degeneracy caused by intellectual inbreeding that has always bound itself to some degree with the ideals of comprehensive public education.
Dr. Sanity’s site has some interesting things to say on the subject too. One of the quotes she highlights also backs up your position:
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are ‘obstructive’ and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ... It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
Bertrand Russell quoting Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810SiggyCarl&Alfred; and Dr. Sanity are both interesting sites. NeoNeoCon and ShrinkWrapped are also worth visits.
Additional note: I realize the above quotes are psycho field oriented and not specific to professional educators but the psycho/socialists have long held disproportionate influence on the entire endeavor of comprehensive public education and the damage they do grows exponentially from generation to generation.
There is now the beginnings of a movement in CA, USA to make all public school sites to also serve as comprehensive mental hygiene facilities for all students, their families and the remainder of the community within each school site’s boundaries.
Right now it’s only showing up in competitive grants but the writing is on the wall. Schools will have to provide office space and budget for psych staff to equal or exceed their teaching and site maintenance staff combined.
I reckon that Rudd has backed himself into a corner with this position and ridiculous “science is pretty basic” statements
Posted by Jack Lacton on 2007 06 10 at 06:33 PM • permalinkI believe in tangible, practical science, the kind that gave me a great idea for a 30th wedding anniversary present for Mrs. Paco next year: Behold, tater mitts!
Actually, those look like a neat invention. Though I do pretty good with a standard vegetable peeler.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2007 06 10 at 08:01 PM • permalinkI was left with one nagging question after watching An Inconvenient Truth.
Normally, such displays of deep ignorance and shallow self-absorbtion make me cringe with embarassment for the person.
Nary a cringe, and I wondered why?
It was the flagrant hucksterism aimed squarely at the suckers out there that did it.
ALL the scientists? Every one of them? In every field of science? Agrees totally on the issue of AGW?
Why can’t someone call him on this rubbish at his next glad-handing doorstop.
‘Mr Rudd, this list of several thousand climatologists disagreeing with your assessment, indicates that you may have been dismissive and telling porkie pies about your ‘ALL the scientists’ claim. What do you say to those who think you are a fucking moron?’
It is instructive to read someone like Mr. Klaus, and then to read someone like Rudd or Gore. The contrast is not only stark, but the respect—or lack thereof—shown for the listener is a study in the speaker’s fundamental view of man. Gore sounds like he is speaking to children. Mr. Klaus assumes his audience is made up of thinking adults.
O/T But heres an inconvenient truth of another kind.
“Studies Say Death Penalty Deters Crime”
Can we expect Krudd to jump on the pro excution side of the arguement now??
//crickets
Posted by thefrollickingmole on 2007 06 11 at 02:04 AM • permalink#18 Paco
I believe in tangible, practical science, the kind that gave me a great idea for a 30th wedding anniversary present for Mrs. Paco next year: Behold, tater mitts!
You’ve been married this long and still don’t know the cardinal rule for staying happy and surviving at least until next anniversary?? Here it is, for your enlightenment (and continued existence): Kitchen tools are NOT gifts!!
Posted by AlburyShifton on 2007 06 11 at 04:38 AM • permalinkWe should take notice of a Czech, experienced in the disinformation and subordination required by a totalitarian power. There’s a useful idiot born every minute: then you’ve got trouble, right here in River City.
But there remain unanswered questions. Every time there is an IED explosion in Iraq, should there not be (at least) a Predator drone firing a Hellfire missile at some troublemakers in Iran?
USA - cat got your nerve?
This administration’s ranks are thinning. Rumsfeld’s gone, many are gone. Gates might stick, but will he stick it to them? Colin Powell gone and wimping out, and his understudy going the soft power route in the State Department, where are the people who will hold Iran to account?#31: Nah, I was just kiddin’, Albury. But Tater Mitts was just too funny a product name not to work into a comment, somehow.
#32: I’m with you, blogstop. Jules Crittenden posed the same strategy a while back, and I agree that we’re making it more difficult for ourselves in Iraq by letting the Iranians interfere with impunity.
paco,
you sir, are a hopeless romantic, the little lady must consider herself pretty darn lucky….. It’s gonna be tough to type with a cast on though.
blogstrop,
Why is it when anyone goes to the State Department they must have their spine removed?? You left out the POTUS now talking about gerbil warmongering solutions too…..
Posted by Old Tanker on 2007 06 11 at 08:03 AM • permalinkBTW,
I’m writing in Vaclav Klaus for the next election but alas, he has far too much common sense to win an election in the U.S.
Posted by Old Tanker on 2007 06 11 at 08:05 AM • permalink#18: Whew. I thought I would have to give Paco the keys to the Tardis again to get himself out of another scrape with the better half!
Elizabeth
Imperial KeeperPosted by Elizabeth Imperial Keeper on 2007 06 11 at 12:49 PM • permalinkIf you like Czech common sense on global warming, try Lubos Motl’s blog
#15 Grimmy, thanks for the links. I only occasionally pop onto these places of sane thinking.
I can’t believe that the people who wrote this Orwellian Crap, that your links are reporting, were Americans in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I guess communist propagandists took the long view. Trouble was, communism fell and left the acolites naked in the Great Sandy Desert.
Their lives were saved by a parsing ecologist and tout-a-coup their “West/Capitalism/Whitey/Imperialist” mantra is rejustified.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2007 06 11 at 07:42 PM • permalink#32 blogstrop, I haven’t seen a Secretary of State NOT be absorbed by the FGB (Foggy bottom Borg). I was somewhat disheartened to see they had even absoprbed Condi - a rally cute and strong and smart chick.
What is it? Something in the water around there - or soma?
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2007 06 11 at 07:48 PM • permalink#37: That’s good. One of the reasons I’m divorced is that the ex would purposefully start a fight, usually 3 days before a specific event such as a birthday or anniversary, and then use that as an excuse for not getting a gift or taking me out to dinner.
And then act surprised when I called him on it. Mr. Romantic, he wasn’t.
Elizabeth
Imperial KeeperPosted by Elizabeth Imperial Keeper on 2007 06 12 at 10:58 AM • permalinkWarminger: “All the scientists of the world agree…”
Skeptic: “Um, here’s a list of some scientists that don’t agree.”
Warminger: “stop moving the goalposts! Of course you can’t get 100% agreement!”(courtesy of the Hoofnagle denialism blog. apologies for paraphrasing)
Posted by daddy dave on 2007 06 12 at 11:31 AM • permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages
Members:
Login | Register
| Member List
More of the wisdom of Vaclav Klaus available at his web site:
http://www.vaclavklaus.cz/klaus2/asp/default.asp?lang=EN&CatID=YJrRHRsP