I would like to think that most efforts by government derive from some good will, that is, from a motive to help better lives and a motive to achieve noble goals. In truth, I know that many government agencies and expenditures center on control, or on maintaining control: The aim is political power and job preservation. Regardless of an ostensible altruism in government programs, what happens is that pooling common wealth often leads to waste, to quashing dissent, and to fraud perpetrated on the citizenry. * But, lest you accuse me of being an avid DOGER driven by some narrow political view, let me explain.
America has been in the grasp of a neo-Lysenkoism reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s policies initiated by Trofim Lysenko under Stalin’s rule. Lysenko, in case you slept through history class, was an agronomist who melded Lamarckism with Marxism to fashion an alternative to Darwinian and Mendelian evolution. In short, Lysenko said one could take a plant that grew in a warmer clime and force it to grow in a colder clime with properties obtained through hybridization. He thought he could hybridize plants without dealing with their genetic makeup. Stalin loved the idea and essentially forced all Soviet geneticists into recanting their science in favor of Lysenkoism. The result was crop failure and imprisonment or death for scientists who didn’t agree. Imprisonment meant spending time in Sharashkas in the Gulag just as airplane engineers were forced into laboring for the state in those remote prisons.
The Lysenkoism the American government instituted under the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations comes in the form of monistic climate alarmism. Those who disagree have been relegated to virtual Sharashkas, or mental Sharashkas, virtually exiled from mainline academia, journals, and society by vociferous colleagues and an unrelenting media that has taken the climate scare like a fish swallowing hook, line, and sinker. There’s are just two points of view: See the world through the alarmists’ eyes, or else find yourself relegated to the status akin to that of a proponent of a flat Earth. Since the 1990s, American and European society have been propagandized into two blocks: Lysenkoist-like climate alarmists, many of who lie on the periphery of science or within the boundary of laity, and “unscientific” deniers, the latter including scientists who have data that conflicts with the alarmists’ dire pronouncements.
You Know That Expression That Money Is the Source of Evil?
An abundance of money that comes as a gift from taxing the anonymous masses provides temptation too great for some to resist. And that includes not only bureaucrats but also those to whom government agents distribute the money in grants of all kinds and for all purposes. The inefficient and sometimes criminal misuse of money is one reason science has lost its aura of respect. Too many “researchers” have latched onto the wagon of gold that the donkeys pull. Although I know that the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic Party, I also know that Republican elephants have also pulled that wagonload of public money with few safeguards to prevent people along the road from helping themselves to riches they have not earned.
Among the people reaching into the wagon are many academics and scientists who see opportunities to attain both wealth and fame, wealth from those grants that support studies like the infamous shrimp on a treadmill and fame in the hallowed halls of academia’s treasured journals. One needs only to convince some bureaucrat that a study is worth supporting to receive funding that fosters personal aggrandizement through publications and grant money that the hosting academic institution “taxes,” meaning of course garnering “override money” just for hosting. And then, one needs only suggest “further research” of a culturally embedded idea to acquire ongoing funding, like studying ways to keep Earth from looking like burned toast. How many years has it been since Al Gore and the Clinton Administration made studying climate an expensive (for the taxpayer) priority? Thirty? To what measurable effect? We are still spending tax dollars on followup studies and programs that will end up costing from billions to hundreds of billions with no one yet able to give an unequivocal answer about the measurable effects of those studies.
Climate Lysenkoism
Just as Lysenko made claims that his research would result in measurable benefits to the Soviet Union, so the alarmists make a similar claim of measurable benefits to all of humanity. And just as Lysenko’s empty promises devastated an economy, so the alarmists’ have harmed the economies of the West’s developed nations.
I find ironic that those who claim “science” seem to have little understanding of scientific legitimacy as they rely on faulty models and forecasts, link unrelated events to nonexistent trends, and make dissent and inquiry taboo. That many of them wear the mantle of liberalism and humanism while shutting down dissent, ignoring historic data, and simplifying a complex of interrelated physical processes makes the irony more pronounced.
Escaping the Mental Sharashkas
Escaping the mental sharashka is risky. Compliance is easy.
Let’s say that the alarmists are correct: Civilization is doomed because the world will become as warm as it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Maximum. The question of what can be done without prematurely destroying civilization still remains. Is a world population to forego the benefits of fossil fuels for the betterment of a future that might not be as bad as alarmists predict? Is it possible that a carbon free world would be a world sliding back into pre-modern technology and industry? Is it also possible that instead of dire trends toward a warmer world, Earth undergoes a return to a frozen one under control like Milankovich Cycles, super volcano eruptions, collapsing ocean currents, and waxing Sun spots? Is it also possible that since temperature records are absent for large portions of Earth’s surface, are questionable for many regions, and are only a couple of hundred years old for the rest, that any trends are only marginally valid? And if any announced “trends” are dependent on manipulated data, as appears to be the case in extrapolated readings from regional sensors, isn’t the associated alarmism exaggerated or even unwarranted?
In spite of evidence against a claim that hurricanes are more numerous and stronger, that forest fires are more numerous and more extensive, and that droughts follow the same pattern as storms and fires, the alarmists will not concede that their warnings are questionable at best or that they should be scrutinized in the context of Earth’s last 2.5 million years of glacial and interglacial periods, one of the latter ongoing during our lifetimes. Nevertheless thousands will attend the ongoing run of COP, this year marking the thirtieth such conference. The infusion of grant money sufficient to hold yearly conferences attended by tens of thousands of climate change enthusiasts perpetuates the inertia of climate Lysenkoism, ensuring it will continue to control the masses and to ostracize dissenters.
America has been in the grasp of a neo-Lysenkoism reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s policies initiated by Trofim Lysenko under Stalin’s rule. Lysenko, in case you slept through history class, was an agronomist who melded Lamarckism with Marxism to fashion an alternative to Darwinian and Mendelian evolution. In short, Lysenko said one could take a plant that grew in a warmer clime and force it to grow in a colder clime with properties obtained through hybridization. He thought he could hybridize plants without dealing with their genetic makeup. Stalin loved the idea and essentially forced all Soviet geneticists into recanting their science in favor of Lysenkoism. The result was crop failure and imprisonment or death for scientists who didn’t agree. Imprisonment meant spending time in Sharashkas in the Gulag just as airplane engineers were forced into laboring for the state in those remote prisons.
The Lysenkoism the American government instituted under the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations comes in the form of monistic climate alarmism. Those who disagree have been relegated to virtual Sharashkas, or mental Sharashkas, virtually exiled from mainline academia, journals, and society by vociferous colleagues and an unrelenting media that has taken the climate scare like a fish swallowing hook, line, and sinker. There’s are just two points of view: See the world through the alarmists’ eyes, or else find yourself relegated to the status akin to that of a proponent of a flat Earth. Since the 1990s, American and European society have been propagandized into two blocks: Lysenkoist-like climate alarmists, many of who lie on the periphery of science or within the boundary of laity, and “unscientific” deniers, the latter including scientists who have data that conflicts with the alarmists’ dire pronouncements.
You Know That Expression That Money Is the Source of Evil?
An abundance of money that comes as a gift from taxing the anonymous masses provides temptation too great for some to resist. And that includes not only bureaucrats but also those to whom government agents distribute the money in grants of all kinds and for all purposes. The inefficient and sometimes criminal misuse of money is one reason science has lost its aura of respect. Too many “researchers” have latched onto the wagon of gold that the donkeys pull. Although I know that the donkey is the symbol of the Democratic Party, I also know that Republican elephants have also pulled that wagonload of public money with few safeguards to prevent people along the road from helping themselves to riches they have not earned.
Among the people reaching into the wagon are many academics and scientists who see opportunities to attain both wealth and fame, wealth from those grants that support studies like the infamous shrimp on a treadmill and fame in the hallowed halls of academia’s treasured journals. One needs only to convince some bureaucrat that a study is worth supporting to receive funding that fosters personal aggrandizement through publications and grant money that the hosting academic institution “taxes,” meaning of course garnering “override money” just for hosting. And then, one needs only suggest “further research” of a culturally embedded idea to acquire ongoing funding, like studying ways to keep Earth from looking like burned toast. How many years has it been since Al Gore and the Clinton Administration made studying climate an expensive (for the taxpayer) priority? Thirty? To what measurable effect? We are still spending tax dollars on followup studies and programs that will end up costing from billions to hundreds of billions with no one yet able to give an unequivocal answer about the measurable effects of those studies.
Climate Lysenkoism
Just as Lysenko made claims that his research would result in measurable benefits to the Soviet Union, so the alarmists make a similar claim of measurable benefits to all of humanity. And just as Lysenko’s empty promises devastated an economy, so the alarmists’ have harmed the economies of the West’s developed nations.
I find ironic that those who claim “science” seem to have little understanding of scientific legitimacy as they rely on faulty models and forecasts, link unrelated events to nonexistent trends, and make dissent and inquiry taboo. That many of them wear the mantle of liberalism and humanism while shutting down dissent, ignoring historic data, and simplifying a complex of interrelated physical processes makes the irony more pronounced.
Escaping the Mental Sharashkas
Escaping the mental sharashka is risky. Compliance is easy.
Let’s say that the alarmists are correct: Civilization is doomed because the world will become as warm as it was during the Paleocene-Eocene Maximum. The question of what can be done without prematurely destroying civilization still remains. Is a world population to forego the benefits of fossil fuels for the betterment of a future that might not be as bad as alarmists predict? Is it possible that a carbon free world would be a world sliding back into pre-modern technology and industry? Is it also possible that instead of dire trends toward a warmer world, Earth undergoes a return to a frozen one under control like Milankovich Cycles, super volcano eruptions, collapsing ocean currents, and waxing Sun spots? Is it also possible that since temperature records are absent for large portions of Earth’s surface, are questionable for many regions, and are only a couple of hundred years old for the rest, that any trends are only marginally valid? And if any announced “trends” are dependent on manipulated data, as appears to be the case in extrapolated readings from regional sensors, isn’t the associated alarmism exaggerated or even unwarranted?
In spite of evidence against a claim that hurricanes are more numerous and stronger, that forest fires are more numerous and more extensive, and that droughts follow the same pattern as storms and fires, the alarmists will not concede that their warnings are questionable at best or that they should be scrutinized in the context of Earth’s last 2.5 million years of glacial and interglacial periods, one of the latter ongoing during our lifetimes. Nevertheless thousands will attend the ongoing run of COP, this year marking the thirtieth such conference. The infusion of grant money sufficient to hold yearly conferences attended by tens of thousands of climate change enthusiasts perpetuates the inertia of climate Lysenkoism, ensuring it will continue to control the masses and to ostracize dissenters.
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