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The Fallacy of Wide Brushes

Just as far too many health-related concerns have since mid-2020 been aggressively corralled and crammed haphazardly into the soon-to-be-infamous “covid containment” ideology, so, too, are disparate and conflicting ecological and environmental concerns being relayed to “climate change” (or, green ideology). In both camps, alarmists and experts alike have been saying “the science is settled,” which, of course, it most certainly is not.

Ecological education, protection, conservation, and restoration of land and sea, regenerative development and agriculture, energy production and policy, financial and corporate industrial practices, markets and consumer interests, environmental science, monitoring, manipulation and atmospheric engineering, destructive military practices (atmospheric weapon tests, DUMBS, ocean sonar testing)… These are all important, yet separate issues, and there are certainly others — all of which may contribute to deleterious effects on our planetary system. However, having these issues collectively condensed, compressed, and unjustifiably placed into the same category serves no one but those who seek to profit at the planet’s, and our, expense.

It’s the same as, say, naming carbon dioxide — and by extension, the burning of fossil fuels, eating meat, travel, industry and virtually all commerce — as the singular cause for “warming”, which when “solved” solves all problems. This unscientific, reductionist thinking makes it exceedingly difficult to discern and to tackle the real issues. And, vilifying the very thing we humans exhale with every breath, the very thing that all organic, carbon-based lifeforms rely upon to exist and proliferate, is to make it undeniably personal.

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.

Dr. Roy Spencer

There is plenty of shame, blame, and guilt to go around — and in the modern era, it has become embarrassingly political, superficial, and childish. When every other word or phrase can hurt someone’s feelings, or trigger an emotionally charged argument, we’re moving expediently toward an intractable communications standstill. We need to engage our adult minds, so to arrive at a place where open debate and reasonable, rational and logical discussion may be broached without inflaming egos, and without the need for cheap, artificial, ideological bickering and dogmatic defensiveness.

we need to be people who HAVE ideas, not people who ARE their ideas.

the former can change their minds and/or be pals with those who hold differing views.

the latter take all disagreement as a personal attack. that is no basis for a civil society, much less a sane life.

bad cattitude

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It’s December 2021, and the Covid narrative continues unabated. It has become an unrestrained, yet frustratingly intransigent phenomenon. Containment ideology (a catastrophic failure in every respect) has polluted and occupied nearly every modern sociopolitical arena. Policymakers and bureaucrats are scrambling to double-down, aggressively implementing ill-conceived nonsense, exercising disastrous, unconscionable mandates and restrictions (see New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Austria, Germany, and a growing list of other nations).

The inconvenient truth is that not one measure that health officers the world over have prognosticated about nor blindly promoted has tallied a whit of success. Not one lockdown, travel ban, mask mandate, or “vaccine” has proven effective. The problem seems only to be getting worse (according to the scheme’s perpetrators, anyway), requiring ever more shots, illegal “vaccine passports,” and worse. In reality, these endless emergency measures continue to wreak havoc on the populace, destabilizing our world economies, while dividing and segregating societies. The repercussions and psychological fallout will likely be felt for generations.

We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.

Charles MacKay

What is obvious to me, is that either their premise about a virus and its contagiousness is entirely flawed, or there is another, greater agenda at play. Or, perhaps both.

In this light, I would argue that we simply cannot afford to proceed with all-things-climate in the same ideological, politicized, hurried and hysterical manner that the Covidian Cult and the failed containment fallacy has surfaced and made evident.

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The real risk to banks and the global economy comes from climate policy, not climate change, particularly efforts to make energy more expensive and less reliable through the greater use of renewables, new taxes, and new regulations….Proof of the threat to the economy from climate policy is the worst global energy crisis in 50 years. Shareholder activists played a significant role in creating it, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs, Bloomberg, and The Financial Times, by reducing investment in oil and gas production, and causing nations to over-invest in unreliable solar and wind energies, which has driven up energy prices, and contributed significantly to inflation.

Michael Shellenberger

There are no singular, all-encompassing solutions to a multifaceted, planet-wide collection of environmental concerns. And not all environmental concerns are of unnatural origin, nor events that we need to worry about. While I am in complete support of addressing widespread environmental harms, and seeking justice and reparations for the egregious malpractices that industrial and corporate interests continue to engage in, I do not accept the doomsday, apocalyptic “crisis” or “emergency” narratives. These arguments are as old as the climate alarmist agenda, and reductionist green ideology will not save us from ourselves; it’ll only further fragment, polarize and divide a civilization that desperately needs to realize the inherent power of united efforts, transparent scientific methodology, and rational, critical thinking.

There was a time before the global warming bandwagon got rolling and before Big Pharma controlled medicine, that people could put their trust in scientists. But no longer. Ideology and money shape the world’s perceived scientific knowledge and truth comes at a distant last.

So much that passes for science these days lacks rigor or is unfalsifiable; the minimum requirement for a scientific claim. Rather than enlightenment through rational debate, today’s scientific method relies on critics being silenced.

Maurice Newman

Yes, we have been sloppy, myopic, wasteful and inconsiderate stewards of Earth, by and large. But this has been changing dramatically over the past several decades. Clearly, there is still much work to be done (there always will be), but there is reason to be optimistic regarding genuine environmental policies and practices.

The greater challenge — and perhaps the greatest barrier to positive, unified progress — is fractious, factionalized corporate and financial interests, governmental organizations’ disparity with established (though counter-narrative) data, and the arrogant need to quantify and control the natural world. Multi-trillion-dollar investment deals are in place such that vested interests will benefit, in no small part, by prematurely and aggressively pushing governments and private, national, and multinational corporations away from using, subsidizing or investing in fossil fuels. Given these conditions, is it any wonder that mainstream climate science is suspect at best? More from Maurice:

In climate and medicine, computer models have become the weapon of choice, offering incontrovertible proof of an impending apocalypse. Intended to silence opposition and frighten the populace, the cherry-picked data is frequently kept secret, leaving the models neither verifiable nor refutable.

It is now common for weather bureaus to use computer modeling to adjust historical temperatures to demonstrate a warming bias. It’s why the 23 ‘holy grail’ climate models relied upon by global warming activists are daily proven wrong by millions of weather balloons and satellites.

Unconvinced? It took a whistleblower, one of two ‘principal scientists’ within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to expose that temperatures chosen for a study published in Science six months before the critical Paris climate conference, were ‘adjusted’ to show there had been no slowdown in global warming since 2000.

This was intended ‘to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.’ Subterfuge appears to be the hallmark of climate science.

Fiscal and political gains have for generations been of primary focus, having far outweighed concerns regarding the outright theft and abuse of indigenous lands, and rampant misuse and mismanagement of natural resources worldwide. Only in recent decades have destructive industrial and corporate practices gained any notable consideration for their role in anthropogenic influences on planetary cycles and systems, both macro- and microscopic. While policies and practices are changing and adapting, the foundational principles underpinning environmental protections aren’t yet mature. Reactionary environmental policies serve only to hamper, or even reverse, the steady progress and reforms we’ve been making for decades. More from Michael:

Climate change is punishment for our sins against nature — that’s the basic narrative pushed by journalists, climate activists, and their banker sponsors, for 30 years. It has a supernatural element: the belief that natural disasters are getting worse, killing millions, and threatening the economy, when in reality they are getting better, killing fewer, and costing less. And it offers redemption: to avoid punishment we must align our behavior with the unseen order, namely, a new economy controlled by the U.N., bankers, and climate activists. Unfortunately, as is increasingly obvious, the unseen order is parasitical and destructive.

Our answers will only be found somewhere in the middle, away from extremist, alarmist, hysterical and unscientific notions, and away from the influences, politics, and lobbyists of profit-either-way investment firms and bankers. Neither prospect seems terribly plausible at the moment. I tend to agree with Maurice:

Using climate change to cover everything, not least the manic phasing out of fossil fuels, is being recklessly gambled on a new, authoritarian, social contract, dubbed the Great Reset. There is no Plan B.

This is, to me, the fallacy of the wide brush. We’re leaning toward support for desperate measures and heavily incentivized policymaking, artificially propped up by bad science, cherry-picked data, and ubiquitous climate change propaganda. In the world of 2021, both climate and medicine are at the forefront of nearly every discussion, every political debate. It is at this critical juncture that we must all participate in the discourse, to stand for civil and human rights, to discern the truth and to act with integrity.

To rectify ongoing misdeeds and to create the circumstances and momentum within which we avert cataclysmic, generational failures, we need to rise above the noise, to engage government at all levels, and to decidedly hurt some feelings. We need to break down ill-conceived and malefic paradigms, and shatter lofty, impossible illusions. To be sure, there are innumerable climate issues and concerns of varying scale and immediacy we need to address, everywhere humans and their developments and technologies exist. We need to do it with accurate, unbiased data, with rigorous science, and with an elevated character that is sorely lacking across nearly all academia, industry, finance, politics, TV, film, and news media.

those in power want you to believe that you as an individual are the root cause of all the problems our world is facing. And if you don’t play by their rules, you’ll just have to pay more taxes on everything you do….In reality, the richest 1% of the world’s population are responsible for more than double the carbon pollution of the poorest 3.1 billion people on our planet. This is according to a recent study carried out by Oxfam.

Maybe…it’s not eating a burger that’s the root cause of why our planet is in the state it’s in.

Maybe, it’s because the people who want to tax you for eating said burger, are creating a beautiful illusion to punish you, so life can go on as normal for them.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be taking action to do better for this incredible planet we all call home. But…we don’t need any more taxes on the things that make up a part of our daily lives – especially when those taxes aren’t really producing a net benefit to society.

Leon Hill

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Perhaps our greatest challenge is to realize and understand that there are entities and forces and organizations in the world who are adept at taking advantage of our unique human condition; our emotionality and potential for psychological fragility are forever being used and weaponized against us. We are a psychic, conscious, compassionate, empathic and remarkably adaptable species, constantly striving for a better tomorrow, yet those who seek only gains and profits will stop at nothing to see their aims achieved.

I love this planet/plane/realm. I don’t know nearly enough about it, nor have my eyes seen in person enough of its many splendors. My deepest desire is to see humanity thrive in every way, and I believe we are better, and far more capable, than the media and experts and political forces make us out to be.

Humans are not the problem. We are not the disease. This is our home, and we were designed to live fully and to thrive here. 

The powers-that-be are exercising increasingly authoritarian, technocratic control, and pursuing fascistic methods of governing — which is perhaps a wake-up call that we, the wealthiest, most informed and advanced civilization that may have ever existed, desperately needs.

In this era, there is a great opportunity to remake the systems that have been for decades, and are right now, failing us. We must face squarely the broken and traumatic cycles; they stop here, with us.

Yes! to passionate and heated debate. Absolutely stand for what you believe in. However, cooler heads and reasonable, logical minds are the key. Be willing to be wrong. Be willing to learn, and unlearn. Be willing to unite, not simply with those who agree with you, but with all members of our civilization who are keen to protect what is sacred, to conserve what is irreplaceable, and to sort out the ways and means of moving forward, together…regardless of the sorcery, psychopathy, and greed of the parasites.

Solvitur ambulando