Proud to be Canadian!

CBC: The citation called Canada "the absolute worst country at the talks." (HT: Scaramouche)

I think David Warren's latest column is right on. (I was amazed to see it in print in the Vancouver Sun today, given our local rag's history of David Suzuki worship - they let the man, whom blogs are now calling "Scarezuki", take over editorship of a recent special greenmail edition). Warren:

...The parties are already working on "acidification of the oceans"; there were loose ends from Rio '92 on "biological diversity"; and there will always be fresh water supply issues to play with. The threat from asteroids was briefly considered, then dismissed: too hard to blame that on the free market. But the activists will come up with something, for their livelihoods depend upon it. And as the world's climate is constantly changing, and has been doing for the past 4.54 billion years, "climate change" itself will provide new opportunities.

For this reason, I think we need, after thorough public inquiries, to bring criminal prosecutions against some of the major scientific players exposed by the recent release of e-mails and papers at the centre of the "global warming" scam. The more any percipient reader pours through those "hacked" documents, the clearer he will see the criminal intent behind the massaging of the numbers; for the masseuses in question stood to benefit directly and personally from getting "the right results." This is by its nature an issue for the criminal courts.
[...]
Even before examining, objectively, details of the claims environmentalists are making, the public needs to be put on its guard. A successful representative democracy requires an electorate armed against politicians of any stripe or kind (elected or otherwise) who make claims to personal sanctity: for this is an infallible mark of grave hypocrisy. Genuinely good people do not advertise their goodness; genuinely humble people do not advertise their humility; genuinely truthful people do not claim to be messengers of "settled science," when there is no such thing.
[...]
There are real cultural failures here -- running right through our postmodern societies -- that allow the scare tacticians to flourish. In a sense it is an environmental catastrophe, although the environment in question is a psychic, rather than a physical, landscape. People have become unattuned to the most basic warning signals our ancestors used, to protect themselves against human predators. We are anyway removed by modern technology from the possibility of looking them straight in the eye. (What comes through a television screen is in no way intimate; it is instead a form of "virtual reality.")
[...]
The real environmental problems are solved by inculcating supple cultural traits in the people themselves -- which the State cannot do. It can only be done from parents to children. Individual human beings must be raised to eschew waste, luxury, and personal display. They must be raised to prefer good to evil, truth to falsehood, beauty to ugliness. There are no quick fixes.

What, no donkeys in the new Jerusalem (Copenhagen)?

IsraCast: Dec. 1917 - General Allenby Enters Jerusalem:

On the first day of the Jewish feast of Hanukkah in December 1917, the Battle of Jerusalem resulted in the city of Jerusalem falling to British forces led by General Allenby, after 400 years under Turkish rule.

Allenby was an accomplished horseman and it would have made sense for him to ride triumphantly into the city. However on 11 December Allenby entered on foot out of his great respect for the Holy City, becoming the first Christian to control the city in centuries.

According to Wikipedia:

In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the messiah (Jesus Christ in the later case) was often described as riding on a donkey. As noted, in the context of the Hebrew Bible this connoted wealth and affluence befitting the House of David, as at the time commoners are described as simply going on foot. However, in later times when the aristocracy used horses, depicting the messiah as riding a donkey came to have an opposite connotation, as indicating a simple, sober way of life and avoiding luxury. The same connotation is evident in the description of saints such as Francis of Assisi as riding donkeys.

This is all preface to the latest news on the great religious festival now unfolding in Copenhagen: Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges - Telegraph:

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.
[...]
And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

I'm not sure, but I sense this gives a whole new meaning to allegations of "raping the planet." In any case, we can forgive Bruce Bawer for being confused, in an otherwise first-rate piece of reporting on "Hopenhagen" ("Barf"):

Well, here I am at the Vatican in Rome, where thousands of pilgrims from every corner of the earth crowd St. Peter’s Square, their eyes trained on the glorious basilica within which the College of Cardinals is gathering in secret conclave to settle the all-important question: Who will stand in the shoes of the fisherman?

I despair at what is going in Copehagen, as the left seeks to gain control and put serious breaks on economic freedom and legitimate human aspirations to escape from poverty and the nanny state. Yet as I tell my friends, it's time to get used to this kind of "new" religion. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe much in the religion of AGW, to the extent it is a form of scapegoating Carbon Dioxide in the support of the leftist desire to control and limit economies, instead of seeking, if it proves necessary, other forms of mitigating or adapting to climatic change. And I condemn the many in the "climate science" field who have proven themselves, as the latest CRU scandal further emphasizes, just too keen to corrupt science to religious ends.

But it is the very nature of science that it can't have the final word, that its work is but a series of discrete empirical observations and not complete knowledge of complex systems. These observations well may, and in many cases should, allow us to construct models of larger systems; but it is the nature of science that we realize that these models can never be complete, that we must remain open-minded as to the unending chain of causes and consequences on that which we are now modeling, and not discretely observing.

This means that science cannot enter into political calculations without some element of religion creeping in, for religion is inherently that which mediates the specifically human, self-interest in the meaning of causes and consequences. Ultimately, what the global warming debate teaches us is not science's final word - the religious belief that the "science is settled" is ridiculous - but rather what the various sides in "debate" want to believe of sciences, as a basis for their political and economic desires, be these of a relatively totalitarian or libertarian bent.

We live in a time when the growing number of discrete observations of science are, whatever they may prove to be, only going to add up to more complex models of the interactions of human behaviour and larger geo-physical systems. In turn, these models, one way or another, are inevitably and increasingly going to be used in political and economic arguments.

At the same time, human beings cannot live without something akin to a religion, some kind of shared belief in what we should hold together as sacred. All language, all consciousness, depends on shared scenes of desire, focussed on some central object of desire (hence made "sacred") whether we desire to imagine a world without cars, or without prostitution, etc. etc.

Those of us who would defend science from religious corruption must keep this need for religion in mind: one way or another religion and politics in future is inevitably going to use science to buttress its accounts of humanly-significant causes and consequences. Our task is not to pose facile oppositions of science vs. religion, presuming the twain should never meet: we should reject both the polemics of Richard Dawkins, and the Carbon-Dioxide-Witch Burners, but also some of their polemical opposition, all for similar reasons. Rather, we need to become much more sophisticated about how to relate our understanding of real human religious needs to cool, disinterested, reason. As Eric Gans argues:

The predicted catastrophic consequences of global warming, however distant, are no more or less hypothetical than those of an Iranian nuclear device. Politics exists to adjudicate the respective degree of gravity of such dangers, which cannot be determined in the formal rationality of a judicial procedure but only through the negotiation of personal and collective resentments. What is both fascinating and frustrating about such debates is the impossibility of maintaining the "objective" basis of the issue, that is, the projected significance of global warming for humanity in general, outside the sphere of political debate. The real question at stake is not whether the Earth is getting warmer or even whether human activity is the cause, but how much industrial productivity should be sacrificed for how much reduction in "greenhouse effect." The Left sees global warming as a weapon in its critique of the market system and its values; the Right sees its opponents as mere resenters of a system they consider fully capable of dealing with environmental issues in its normal course of operations. If tomorrow it is discovered that the production of CO2 actually reduces global warming, within a few days all the positions will have switched around, but all the underlying resentments will remain the same.

Although the coming and passing of the postmodern era has posed challenges to the market system, it has not put an end to the modern political dichotomy of Left and Right. On the contrary, the recent evolution of virtually all the major European countries, which were dominated during the Cold War by shapeless "center-right" coalitions as bulwarks against communism, suggests that if anything this opposition has been sharpened--as witness the just-concluded French election. If "politics" is an indispensable feature of the market system, it is because it has proved effective at releasing energy from the deferral of violence into the economy at large. Today, as the modern world confronts its Other [i.e. Islamic Jihad] in what appears to be their "final conflict," it is easy to grow impatient with a political debate that seems so irresolute in the face of the fanaticism of transcendentally guaranteed resentment. And the critique of this lack of resolution is an important element of the debate itself. But whether its outcome be reason or folly, the only alternative to the uncertainty of politics is not the certitude of "science," whether of climatology or of Generative Anthropology, but the dogmatic truth of our enemies.

See also:

Religion is about faith, and faith is about supporting a hypothesis—making a bet. To believe in global warming is to bet on the veracity of a set of hypotheses. More specifically, the kind of faith that deserves even metaphorically to be called a religion is one that is focused on deferring the violence that threatens to destroy the human community. Indeed, the belief in global warming and the catastrophes it is presumed to entail makes explicit that the deferral of violence is the primary object of faith, a truth masked in traditional religion by the mediation of supernatural powers. Global warming is like a divine punishment for our sins of excess energy consumption—sins against "Gaia," if you like, but the divinization is altogether optional because the punishment is the wholly natural consequence of these sins. Global warming is comparable to the self-generated sufferings of a drug addict rather than the externally inflicted punishment of a murderer, except that, as its name implies, it takes place on a global scale, and its cure, assuming this is even possible, will preoccupy all of humanity for decades, not to say centuries, to come.

But this emphasis on the deferral of external violence is not the only, nor even the principal deferral effected by the belief in global warming. Its most important feature is that it provides its believers with an externally-directed goal that can in principle defer human violence. Violence and disaster—même combat. By turning our desires away from what might be thought more pressing dangers—Osama with an H-bomb—toward reduced energy expenditure, we work for the benefit of humanity as a whole. More precisely, by focusing our efforts on global warming, we not only diminish its effects, but we also demonstrate the possibility of action toward a goal that can in principle be shared by all—Osama reducing his "carbon footprint." Like the "Aranda" religious rituals described by Durkheim, the global warming praxis serves to promote solidarity. But where traditional religions, however "universal," have concrete historical roots that, involuntarily or not, exclude others, the science-driven behavior demanded by the fight against global warming obeys no such constraints. It would not be an outrageous exaggeration to claim that global warming is the first global religion—which makes its principal spokesman, independently of all politics, a perfectly fitting candidate for the Peace Prize.

The religion of impending disaster transforms the nature-centered apotropaic rites of "paganism" into rational, goal-directed activity. Instead of sacrificing an animal to appease Neptune or Apollo, one rides a bike to work to lower one’s gasoline consumption. The nonbeliever may scoff, but this activity makes a fully rational appeal to natural forces. Nor is global warming comparable to the Enlightenment-derived secular religions of Communism and its Fascist antithesis, whose worship of unaided human powers leads inevitably to their concentration in a quasi-deified Supreme Leader. Al Gore is closer in spirit to Jesus or the Buddha than to Stalin or Mussolini.

Is the sea level really fated to rise twenty feet? (At its present rate of 3mm per year, this will take place in about 2000 years.) There are moments when the religion of global warming overreaches itself into apocalyptic fantasy not all that different from cultist predictions of the end of the world. One might say in their defense that these extreme possibilities are evoked to dramatize the urgency of conversion. Yet these apocalyptic tendencies reveal in this new embodiment of the sacred a potentially fatal flaw.

The traditional objects of faith are, ultimately, hypotheses concerning the divinely approved forms of human interaction; such hypotheses can be discredited only by the failure of the faithful to maintain a viable society. This is equally true of political religions such as Communism; had Khrushchev really "buried us" under Communist productivity, it would have been the USSR who won the Cold War without firing a shot. In contrast, faith in global warming is adherence to a scientific hypothesis independent of human activity, even if it concerns this activity as an important parameter. This makes global warming vulnerable to disconfirmation independently of the benefits the fight against it may confer on global human society. If next week or next decade the climatologists revise their models of climate change, the common goal that was to have preserved us from the selfish incentives of the Prisoner’s Dilemma will vanish. If they do not, bringing climate change within acceptable limits would have the same result.

Kudos to Jonathan Manthorpe

Discussing his column last week that discussed the Anthropogenic Global Warming "denier", Ian Plimer, Jonathan Manthorpe shows he's not bullied by the high priests of the first global religion:

There was too a healthy crop of letters from scientists who, while quarreling with some of Plimer's arguments, basically agree with him that the Earth warms and cools in natural cycles, and that human activities have little or no impact on these changes.

But the disturbing letters were from the scientist believers in man-man global warming.

I have met a lot of unpleasant people in the course of my life, but I have never seen such a torrent of nasty, arrogant and downright stupid abuse as has been aimed at me this week by people who aggressively sign themselves "PhD" as though it were a mark of divine right that is beyond challenge or question.

If a man can be judged by the character of his enemies, the letters I have received from scientists this week has significantly raised Plimer in my estimation.

Wednesday Wondering

Three stories about denial, how we can't live with it, yet can't live without it, on a grey Wednesday morning.

Heater: Some damaging indictments of the global warming religion, as a new study exposes how compromised much of the warming data has been, and how little blind faith we should put on the extrapolations made from that data:

The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.
During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.
In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.
It gets worse...

Our pollution must be having some negative effect upon our environment. But let's not let our good intentions fall like an acid rain upon reasoned responses to the problem, let's have the humility to accept that we really don't know as much as we think we did about what in the world is going on. [Hat Tip to Vox Day]

Pill-pusher: The doctor who prescribed painkillers by the shovel-full to patients such as homicidal wrestler Chris Benoit, has been sentenced to ten years in prison.

Dr. Phil Astin, 54, had pleaded guilty Jan. 29 to a 175-count federal indictment that accused him of writing illegal prescriptions to known drug abusers, some of them for years.
...
"I take full responsibility," Astin told U.S. District Judge Jack Camp... "I am sorry I hurt so many lives. I was thinking that I was looking after my patients."

Two of Dr. Astin's patients died from drug overdoses, and the prosecution made it clear that it wasn't referring to the high-profile Benoit murder/suicide case. Given that it was that tragic event that triggered the investigation in the first place, it feels like the indictment followed the kind of logic more common to pro wrestling angles by how it avoided the whole issue of steroids altogether, despite a search warrant revealing that Dr. Astin had prescribed Benoit a ten-month supply of steroids every three to four weeks.

Media sensationalism in the aftermath of the Benoit incident notwithstanding, the connection between massive use of steroids and a mind so corrupted as to kill one's wife and 7-year old child is not a slam-dunk case. There's another, stronger link besides 'roid-rage', however, that needs to be pursued, and that's the heavyweight-class degree of denial going on within, and without, the wrestling industry.

The suspension of disbelief that we use to enjoy movies and plays gets tapped into to also appreciate a pro wrestling match, but unlike film and theater, when it comes to wrestling it seems that once engaged that denial of reality can't seem to shut itself off. The result is a deadly dance between diehard wrestling fans and the wrestlers who die hard in order to please them.

In his autobiography, veteran wrestler 'Rowdy' Roddy Piper called this desire to please the fans and be liked by them, "The Sickness", as it led wrestlers to continually act against their own best self-interest, both physically and spiritually.

Where the in-ring pain leaves off, the outside-the-ring lifestyle picks up: "It takes over your life 24/7 and, especially before cellphones and email, no matter how hard I tried, it was impossible not to become distant from my family, my kids. Most, maybe all, the boys suffered the same isolation, and soon strangers became family and family became strangers. Almost all who escaped came back, having no clue how to make it on the outside."

The bandmasters for this waltz of doom are promoters like Vince McMahon, who insist on pushing the stars with the biggest bodies, and try to condition fans to only accept bigger as better. If you don't have the large size, what do you do to make up for it in the eyes of the fans and the promoters? The answer isn't pretty. It's certainly not wrestling, and surely it's not "entertainment"..?

Unfortunately, since no one takes the shows in the ring seriously, few people take the pain outside the ring seriously either. A shroud of denial has fallen upon the wrestling business; even with the publicity in the last few years, the appalling death rate for the young performers in that field is still ignored as a messy, unwelcome needle that could pop the whole illusion. Ignored, especially, by the fans.


Swister: An anonymous tip (from a guilty conscience..?) leads two 56-year old women to the shocking discoverery that they were switched at birth.

Qualls, Bobby Reed and one of their sisters met Shafer at a Kennewick, Wash., clinic last month for DNA testing. A week later, Qualls got the results, learning her likely probability of being related to her brother and sister was zero.
"I cried," she said. "I wanted to be a Reed _ my life wasn't my life." Shafer's DNA report said she had 99.9 percent of being related to Bobby and Dorothy Reed. Now living in Richland, Wash., Shafer said the report only confirmed what she knew after meeting Qualls.
"After seeing Kay Rene, I went home and told my husband, I don't know why she's doing the DNA testing," she said. "I was shocked _ she looked just like my sister's twin."
...

Mid-way through reading this article I paused to discuss the story with my wife, curious to get her take on what it must be like to be faced with a revelation like this. "It must make your life feel almost illegitimate", I suggested; "you would look back and feel like you had lived the 'wrong life'..." My wife had a more positive reaction: "It would be like getting a whole new set of brothers and sisters, an extra family on top of your own!" Oriented toward the past as I am, I hadn't thought of things from that angle... and not for the first time, learned from her forward-thinking attitude, another reminder of the complex nature of faith. It's not about ignoring the doubts, denying the bad; it's about having sufficient imagination, and courage, to be able to see the potential good as well as the obvious bad. I was, therefore, not surprised in the least when I soon reached the concluding paragraph...:

The two have become friends and celebrated their May 3 birthday together. Recently, Qualls introduced Shafer to her work colleagues, calling her "my swister."
"I'm trying to move forward at look at the positive," Shafer said.
"You can't look back. It just drives you crazy."

Putin: The Green Cham'peen!

That Putin. What a guy!

http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3743#comment

He's so concerned about Global Warming! that he's doing more than most to cut back on the hot stuff. Thanks to him the world might survive after all. If Chavez will start fueling his economy with green stuff like cocao leves, then the world is surely headed for Utopia. All these progressive types get condemned for no good reason. Must be a conspiracy.

Left Fascist Control-freaks Want More Power Still: In Your Kitchen

Left religious fanatics want to control what and how much you eat, and they aren't going to be satisfied with merely lecturing you and demanding you conform to their dietary restrictions and food taboos: they want the government to control you at dinner time. The Left fascism extends this far so far, and tomorrow it will go further. There will be no end to the totalitarian longings of these people. They will devour the Earth and all its people in their rampage for the purity of poverty:

People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.

The report, by the Food Climate Research Network, based at the University of Surrey, also says total food consumption should be reduced, especially "low nutritional value" treats such as alcohol, sweets and chocolates.

It urges people to return to habits their mothers or grandmothers would have been familiar with: buying locally in-season products, cooking in bulk and in pots with lids or pressure cookers, avoiding waste and walking to the shops - alongside more modern tips such as using the microwave and internet shopping.

The report goes much further than any previous advice after mounting concern about the impact of the livestock industry on greenhouse gases and rising food prices. It follows a four-year study of the impact of food on climate change and is thought to be the most thorough study of its kind.

Tara Garnett, the report's author, warned that campaigns encouraging people to change their habits voluntarily were doomed to fail and urged the government to use caps on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pricing to ensure changes were made. "Food is important to us in a great many cultural and symbolic ways, and our food choices are affected by cost, time, habit and other influences," the report says. "Study upon study has shown that awareness-raising campaigns alone are unlikely to work, particularly when it comes to more difficult changes."

[....]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/30/food.ethicalliving

This is what we're up against. Sweet Reason? Maybe that won't be allowed under the new food regime.

UK Jury: Global Warming Is "Lawful Excuse" For Committing Crime

Greenpeace vandals cause thousands of pounds of damage to a power station, but are let off the hook by a jury who agreed with their "green agenda":

Jury decides that threat of global warming justifies breaking the law

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of "lawful excuse" under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.

The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain's green agenda and could encourage further direct action. ...

[Hat Tip to this morning's Dennis Prager radio show, where I heard Dennis talking about this all-too-believable story]

The New Reformation

There's quite a thought-provoking article in First Things magazine on the decline of Protestantism in the United States. Joseph Bottum's "The Death of Protestant America: A Political Theory of the Protestant Mainline" chronicles the results of the theological shifts that are reforming the Protestant churches of America.

Reading this article reminded me of the eternal question we wrestle with as we seek a personal relationship with God by learning from the experiences of those who have searched before us: Do you want your church's faith to change you, or do you want to change your church's faith?

Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran—the name hardly matters anymore. It’s true that if you dig through the conservative manifestos and broadsides of the past thirty years, you find one distressed cry after another, each bemoaning the particular path by which this or that denomination lost its intellectual and doctrinal distinctiveness.

After you’ve read a few of these outraged complaints, however, the targets begin to blur together. The names may vary, but the topics remain the same: the uniformity of social class at the church head­quarters, the routine genuflections toward the latest political causes, the feminizing of the clergy, the unimportance of the ecclesial points that once defined the denomination, the substitution of leftist social action for Christian evangelizing, and the disappearance of biblical theology. All the Mainline churches have become essentially the same church: their histories, their theologies, and even much of their practice lost to a uniform vision of social progress. Only the names of the corporations that own their properties seem to differ.

The emptying churches don't necessarily reveal an abandonment of religious faith; in many cases, it seems, believers in absolute truths are merely seceding to new religions, although they may not define their choices that way...:

Look at the fury, for instance, with which environmentalists now attack any disputing of global warming. Such movements seek converts, not supporters, and they respond to objections the way religions respond to heretics and heathens. ...

Wholly Crap!

Launching a spiritual war on global warming

I am often at a loss for words. I want to blog but I don't like being always the angry critic of the non-stop wave of nonsense in our schools, universities and media. I'd like to be able to just grant people their various religious positions in matters existential, and grow wise to the pragmatic goods that can be sustained by all the irrationality of human thinking: the irrational can bond people in ways both useful and evil.(And as for Judeo-Christian orthodoxy, it is full of far more anthropological truth than anything yet offered by the "evolutionary" atheists.) But when the public space is endlessly occupied by people who keep advocating apocalyptic visions and call on all humanity to fall in line in some militaristic mission, I can't stop being outraged.

Is there no one at the Vancouver Sun, let alone the University of British Columbia, with the intelligence to keep this out of the paper? Let's fisk the latest from Sun religion columnist, Douglas Todd:

Does global warming pose a spiritual problem? Those who do not believe in any form of divinity would probably say No.

And even some who believe in a transcendent reality might think global warming basically needs to be fought through political, scientific and economic means.

That a religion columnist does not recognize that "global warming" is necessarily always about a "spiritual question", that the great debate in our world, however much informed by scientific hypotheses and research, which it is, is nonetheless in large part about what we wish to believe about the future of human existence, and not what we can know with any real certainty, gets us off to a bad start. Todd is making a hidden religious claim that "global warming" is a largely scientific phenomenon, and is doing so in order to win our attention for a column that will make a so-called "spiritual" claim on us, as if the spiritual dimension weren't obvious.

And then he suggests that "transcendent reality" is a question of belief. Well, it may be in some sense; I grant there are many people, even in universities, who don't recognize the reality; but there really should be no doubt that humanity is defined by a transcendent reality. Every word, as a meaningful word, and not merely as an association of sounds or letters, is something transcendent (and quite unlike the hard-wired signals of the animal world). Every piece of music, as something more than sound waves, is something transcendent. Every painting is more than a mere collection of paint splotches, because its overall effect is transcendent. Our minds operate in a transcendent domain, which is something different from our material, biological, existence. A serious writer on religion would recognize this as simple scientific fact, in search of some explanation. Todd:

But perhaps a spiritual response is also needed to global warming -- to provide the inner strength necessary to face and combat the worst effects that are to come from the Earth's erratically changing climate. You don't have to go to a church, synagogue or temple to be "spiritual" (although it doesn't often hurt). Spirituality can be broadly defined as the attempt to respond meaningfully to life's existential challenges.

And if you believe last year's Nobel Peace Prize co-winners -- Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the greenhouse gas buildup caused by fossil fuels is definitely one of those existential predicaments.

Those who feel they don't have to do anything about global warming, or are in denial, might have to draw on some deeper resources, including transcendent ones, to help them face the difficult music.

And for those who have accepted scientific arguments the world is growing hotter at the fastest rate in recorded history as a result of human actions, a spiritual stand could help overcome a sense of helplessness and despair.

Well it should go without saying that each and every human challenge requires some spiritual strength to tackle. So to then attack those who listen to "skeptic" scientists, and not the IPCC, as lacking spirituality is just a crude form of saying my enemy is not fully human, to hell with him, the "denier". That's known as scapegoating, a crude form of religious thinking. But Todd adds:

A spiritual response would also include accepting the western world's contribution to environmental disruption -- and not just pointing the finger of blame; scapegoating, say, China, for turning into the planet's newest, biggest reckless polluter.

Todd's now saying that he is not a scapegoat artist, that he has full regard for victims of Western-centred thinking. Victims, eh???.... Well, let's see if the rest of the article bears out the claim to be on the religious high road, helping to maximize human freedom from human violence...

Spiritual wisdom can also be helpful for those who are just old-fashioned afraid.

They've heard the warnings that global warming could lead to themselves, or more likely their children and grandchildren, struggling in a dystopia of global conflict over depleted natural resources. They need help being brave.

I have been re-convinced of the necessity of a spiritual response to environmental problems by the powerful just-released book, A New Climate for Theology: God, the World and Global Warming (Fortress), by B.C.'s Sallie McFague.

"Climate change will demand much of us," writes McFague, who had a prominent career at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Tennessee before coming in 2000 to the Vancouver School of Theology on the UBC campus, where she is considered by many the globe's most important eco-theologian. At a time when Canadians, especially British Columbians, are debating the pros and cons of a new carbon tax, McFague shows she's entirely up to speed on the science of global warming.

She also believes climate change is a more clear and present danger to the globe than Naziism was prior to the Second World War. As such, she picks up an idea philosopher William James would have been suggesting back in 1906 when he wrote his famous essay, The Moral Equivalent of War. It maintained citizens need to muster the dedication, sacrifice and virtue brought to launching a military campaign to fighting peaceful causes, in this case saving the eco-system.

McFague believes we need to adopt a radical war footing against the common enemy of global warming, whose insidious consequences she first noticed 20 years ago while hiking in the Rockies -- in the decline of once-magnificent glaciers.

McFague makes it clear that vigorous legislation, which sets limits on consumption and emphasizes communitarian values over individualistic ones, is necessary to combat global warming.

Well, after calling modern humanity worse than the Nazis, with absolutely no rational argument developed to justify this (so what's there for me to rebut, but shake my head in wonder at the bog of emotional victimology our universities have become), these people naturally have the gall to promote vaguely some war against ourselves. But then to claim this is to be a "military campaign" in a peaceful cause, as if humanity could ever be single-mindedly focussed on a single cause and the results of this would not have all kinds of negative consequences for the level of violence in human society, which is never and can never be nill...? I mean, what kind of mark do these con artists take us for? And then to claim that this is world-leading religious thought, this crude and mindless apocalyptic rhetoric...? To suggest that we need to do away with individualism and embrace "communitarian values", as if telling people to shut up and think alike were a road to peace, is only to display that one has little idea of how the human technologies for deferring human-on-human violence - the threat that has always been and still is the primary threat to human existence - work. To put it all too simply, consumer society is something we have developed as an alternative to the "communitarian" nightmares under which many tens of millions of souls were murdered in the last century. That's not to say we don't need to make sure consumer society is sustainable and, as individuals - as only individuals can - discipline ourselves in various ways against it (we resist consumer society in order to strengthen it, to make it, and us, more sustainable); but to just throw off crap about "communitarian values" and to call this top-rank religious thinking is to abuse readers. It's to call us dumb, literally.

By the way, why aren't the Green Warriors trying to buy up some of that soon-to-be-prime agricultural land in northern Saskatchewan before the evil corporations jack the prices up....? I guess it's a spiritual question... Back to the article:

In making her case, McFague recognizes in a postmodern world influenced by the "deconstructive" philosophy of Jacques Derrida (in which the word "God" is virtually forbidden) she must offer what she calls a "minimalist theology." It should be acceptable to virtually all.

Here we are almost approaching a serious idea - recognition of a need for a global conversation on our shared humanity, on what we all minimally share in common. But the route to a "minimalist theology" cannot be through forbidding words, as if words themselves were full of Gnostic power and needed to be restrained, but to a sober thinking in which words are merely tools to seeing reality, not reality itself.

What we need is to understand why humans cannot forbid words like "God". Even if one day we are all atheists, we will still feel the need to deny the existence of "God". The concept cannot simply fade away. It is unavoidable that we will always understand our humanity in relation to some kind of "god" concept. This is because when we think about "God" we are invoking some unavoidable and originary fact of human existence, whether "God" exists or not. Transcendence, as we've noted, is a simple human fact. Transcendence is what transcends the individual human life, our material existence. All that we attribute to "God" - immortality, omniscience, omnipotence, etc. - are qualities of our human experience of transcendence (of language) whether "God" exists or not. We can deny "God" but not our human experience, no matter how many words we "forbid" like thrilled school girls doing something shocking as they initiate each other into secret post-graduate rites. Since humanity, in transcending the material domain of animals, begins with words that are, at first, simply names of "God" - ways of naming the shared human experience of transcendence - any serious investigation into humanity will talk about "God", whether one is a believer or not.

Her stripped-down theology centres on feeling gratitude for the planet and a sense of interconnectedness with all creatures.

A New Climate for Theology does not define spiritual "salvation" as select individuals obtaining eternal life, but rather, as the early theologian Iraneus put it, "The glory of God is every creature fully alive."

Convinced the flourishing of all living things should be our ultimate spiritual goal, McFague offers an understanding of God that might seem novel to many.

Even though McFague is a Christian, she says she goes beyond "neo-classical" western theology to "evolutionary" theology.

God is not a "being," she says. Instead, God is the source of life, love and hope.

I wouldn't spend all day dwelling on this mysterious distinction. Seems to me that it's just the "source of life, love and hope" that we usually try to invoke when we use the word "Being" to describe God. Someone who accepted transcendence as a simple fact of our humanity would recognize that whatever the irreducible degree of mystery in any account of how a shared human understanding of transcendence emerges from our lived experience, there's no need to take for granted that some maternalist neo-pagan blather is "minimalist" theology. It seems to me like an attempt to re-mystify our capacity for sacrificial violence. This, at least, is what one would expect from anyone calling for some great martial and secular project to save the world. But I admit that Todd may be over-simplifying the work of this scholar.

She sets out a mystical vision of the universe as God's beloved body, even suggesting we all metaphorically exist within "God's womb." And even though humans are beginning to destroy the tiny portion of God's body that is Earth, she maintains the divine is always ready to work with humans to redeem this planet.

Yes, but I think if we stuck to a Judeo-Christian understanding that we are made in God's image, we'd have a clearer sense of what God is, since his purpose in human minds is obviously human-centred, anthropological. No matter how much we invoke the inter-connectedness of all things, McFague, in talking God, is talking to us, and not to pineapples.

Fighting a spiritual war against global warming will demand that we live differently, McFague says. But our motivation for coming together in the military-like campaign should not be fear, or even duty.

It can be gratitude and love.

"We stand with our feet firmly on the earth," she writes, "and exclaim, 'I thank you god for most this amazing day.' And then we get to work."

Oh come on: we are to radically change how we live, and the motivation for doing so won't involve at least some fear or duty, just gratitude and love? People who have such an unreal take on human nature, coupled to a Utopian promise, have, historically, turned out to be agents of great violence.

Having said all this, I would point out that, despite my disbelief in regard to many claims about "climate change", though change is certainly a constant, I am becoming more and more sympathetic to the need for some kind of global "science-based" religion to help shake our dependence on such things as Middle-Eastern oil. I am willing to put up with a fair amount of bullshit to this end, including sundry hypotheses of climate change. This is because pragmatic ends - like becoming less dependent on oil - cannot be simply served by overly-rationalized means of the type sooner or later invoked by those who call on us to start "military campaigns". A potential investor in some new solar technolgy, for example, doesn't need to hear that he is about to be conscripted into Al Gore's Green Berets; he needs a less centralized spirituality than that if he, as an individual (as only free individuals can), is to bother to act on faith. Spirituality, b.s., and reason, need to mix and evolve endlessly in ways that are just not foreseeable and centrally controlled. A truly "minimalist theology" will help sustain this, not a war campaign.

But if anything along the lines of a more advanced form of secular or "science-based" religion is to develop, it will also require a more sophisticated understanding of anthropology and religion than is yet widely on display in the pages of our MSM and academy where basic issues like transcendence are not yet seriously delimited by any "minimalist theology". Judeo-Christian orthodoxy, whatever its baroque, "neo-classical" ornaments, remains a far more sophisticated form of anthropological truth than anything on display in this article. That's not to say we yet have the final word on anything though I can't see present orthodoxy fading away because some pop tarts, afraid of Occidentocentric names, want to forbid the word "God". They're going to have to do much better than that.

Proof of Global Warming

Well, I get chills thinking about it.

Apocalypse Now, Damnit! NOW!

Melanie Phillips’s Diary » The global warming scam is a must-read. Any honest and intelligent person must surely come to the conclusion that there is no scientific consensus on global climate change and that those in control of many taxpayer-subsidized institutions who insist otherwise are motivated less by a grasp of any scientific certainty than by a desire for certainty taking the name of science, in a perverse misunderstanding of what science, a slowly-expanding field of knowledge in an infinitely complex universe, is really all about.

What those who take our tax money and lie to us are really all about is self-interested promotion and worship of another false god for those who have lost faith in humanity and its fundamental existential and transcendent truths. People who cannot live humbly and quietly in coming to terms with humanity's uneasy, uncertain, perhaps pointless, perhaps Divine, existential condition, need to make us and the "incredibly important time in which we live, our last chance to save ourselves," into something more, and less, than we and it actually are.

As we wait the inevitable decades for climate science to mature to the point where we can reasonably ground any sense of a consensus in hard-won facts, we must ask first the human question: why is there such a desire to believe in a coming, rather soon, apocalypse, for which there are no end of human scapegoats to blame? The desire for apocalypse is, like climate change, nothing new. It has always been with us. It is rooted in our existential condition, in the life of a species for whom the greatest threat to peace, mental health, and physical security does not come from mother nature but from our fellow men, as is our fate as highly mimetic and disorderly creatures who get on each other's nerves, to the point where many snap not having the ability to put their trust and faith in something higher, sharing in further truths about our transcendent Being, as the meaning of this tortured life.

In this respect, those who blame humanity as a whole for the apocalpyse that is supposedly soon to come upon us, have grown slightly, intellectually, above those who once blamed the wrath of the gods or the witches, or the Jews, etc. etc. But they have only grown slightly for in blaming all of humanity they are no the less willing to make of any particular person or group a scapegoat as they, in the name of "science", see fit on any given day. The duty of all of us in face of the continuing madness of the human race is to fight against all forms of apocalyptic and utopian thinking, promoting the faith that whatever changes come our way in the global climate, if we work together from love for our fallen humanity, we can find ways to adapt together and we need not put up with fear mongers who would destroy the economy in some hysterical fit of finger pointing, or destroy civilization in deference to a desire to return to some more primitive religion enforced on everyone.

At this blog, we have our Cassandra moments too. At times we suggest that the human future will not be bright, in the short to medium term at least, unless we get a grip on the various hysterias that characterize our age. Ultimately, dear reader, it is up to you to decide who are the true Cassandras. She may not be always right, but sometimes she is, sometimes civilizations and societies do fall apart. So, instead of looking for consensus, keep thinking, and ask yourself who, in the endless human games of criticizing the Other and the others, who is in reality most likely to be promoting the expansion of human freedom at the expense of those fear mongers who would put themselves in charge of whipping humanity for its sins. Have faith that there is a reality greater than any of us.

I sincerely believe that we here want you to be free; we don't want to grab the same centre of attention as, say, a David Suzuki or a BBC reporter pronouncing on the end of any legitimate doubt about climate change, and asking you to pay tribute to their centralizing elitist cause. We want to make the world into shared covenants of many little centres, with no more big taxpayer-subsidized men and women crying Apocalypse Now! We've been there, done that. Time to move on in reason and faith.

Imagining a better world

Those living in fear of the "inevitable" wave of global destruction "caused" by we parasitic human beings living only to suck the limited life out of Mother Earth, may want to read this Technology article on a wholly unexpected and unpredicted source of bounty and creative fulfillment, unimagined 10 years ago.

I take from this piece a reminder that there are two features to the human experience that tend to remain outside the bounds of predictability; one of them will be readily conceded, I think, by the global warmingers, and is our tragic capacity for destruction.

The other, however, is rarely granted equal measure, and that is our undeniable capacity for creativity and innovation. And renewal.

Human ingenuity can be a wonder to behold, and from its undeniable existence, reaffirmed in the article below, I can derive some faint stirrings of comfort that even if we were causing the slow destruction of our atmosphere, we remain an ingenious enough species that it should be possible to imagine us adapting towards a more harmonious balance with nature, through an increase of our prosperity, and not necessarily through the pauperization of our civilization, as the povertarians would demand of us.

Read this and see if you can imagine a positive future, where prosperity grows exponentially. It's easy if you try...:

Companies are flocking to market themselves in virtual worlds, game-like and usually three-dimensional online universes, but the long-term shape of this fledgling industry is far from clear.
"We're pretty much where the Internet was in the mid-90s," said Steve Prentice, a vice president at technology research group Gartner Inc., echoing a view held by other participants Wednesday at the Virtual Worlds conference in Manhattan.
Joe Laszlo, analyst at JupiterKagan Inc., said the virtual worlds are "like the early days of the Victoria's Secret Webcast, where it was crappy, but hot, so everybody went."

MTV executives touted their TV-show spinoffs "Virtual Laguna Beach" and "Virtual Hills," which have attracted 600,000 registered users since they were launched six months ago. Almost like the real Southern California, these 3-D online spaces have perfect weather, but in an improvement on real life, its users are all represented by attractive, slim and young online embodiments known as avatars.
These avatars can interact with each other via text chats and commerce, providing a social element that virtual-world pioneers see as more realistic and engaging than chat rooms and MySpace pages.

"When you get people deep and passionate in a community, money just comes out of it in so many ways," said Matt Bostwick, senior vice president of franchise development at MTV Music Group, which is part of New York-based Viacom Inc.

As an example of the branding opportunities, Bostwick said MTV has sold more than 11,402 virtual cans of Pepsi. The buyers can't drink them,
since they exist only on the screen, but they act as a form of decoration for their avatars.

MTV's "Nicktropolis" is growing even faster, with 2.4 million registered users who have logged 7.5 million visits since its launch two months ago, according to Nickelodeon's executive vice president of digital media, Steve Youngwood.
MTV's endeavors are "closed" virtual worlds, entirely controlled by the company. Every tree, building and piece of clothing is approved by MTV, though the underlying technology for "Virtual Hills/Laguna Beach" comes from another virtual world, "There," which was created by San Mateo, Calif.-based Makena Technologies Inc.
The virtual world "Second Life" represents a dramatically different approach. There, users can create, out of thin virtual air, almost any object they can imagine, if they're skilled enough with 3-D modeling and programming tools.
The freewheeling and in many places sex-oriented spirit of "Second Life" is reminiscent of the early days of the Web. The company behind it, San Francisco-based Linden Research Inc., says its goal is nothing less than a 3-D Internet.

As amazing as all this is, there is still more growth to come:

But given the wide range of uses for online worlds - games, communication within
companies, flirting, self-expression - it's not clear that a single world is going to dominate.
"There is not going to be one metaverse, there's going to be a multitude of them out there," said Corey Bridges, a Netscape veteran and co-founder of The Multiverse Network Inc., based in Mountain View, Calif.
His company is creating a program that will give access to multiple online worlds built using its technology, much like Netscape's browser gave access to multiple Web sites, kickstarting the Internet boom of the 1990s.
The technology will include the option to make avatars portable between different
worlds, providing a middle road between MTV-style walled gardens and a wide-ranging "metaverse" like "Second Life."
"Once you can move from one virtual world to another, the growth we have today is going to look pretty stagnant," said Gartner's Prentice.

Of course, going through this article, one can also conjure up a vision of the future where the outside world grows so distasteful that citizens flock to escape it by immersing themselves within the walls of false fantasies, living out their lives entirely within "second lives". Like most things about our covenant with nature, it can drift towards the bad as easily as it could towards the good, but that this drift comes by choice, not fate. The trick is to hold on to the vision of the good, and work towards it.

That act of commitment to the good, that purposeful act of faith, is a daunting challenge when the weight is carried by one person alone. Therefore the connections we can make with others, starting in the physical neighborhoods we inhabit, and perhaps also now extending to that of the extra-physical worlds we seem to be busily creating throughout the ether of the internet, these connections with others help to turn the ethereal into the physical, into the tangible.

An act of faith is an invisible, parallel action to my getting out of bed in the morning, heading to face a day of grueling labor; an act of faith uplifts the parallel actions of our day-to-day physical movements and behaviors, ennobling it all with a sense of purpose and value.

Maybe these parallel worlds can serve as reminder that when we're off the internet, walking physical footsteps across a physical world, an unseen one exists around us as well.

Inconvenient truths about Al Gore's award-winning documentary

An 8-minute reality check asking some pointed questions about whether Al-gore is spinning facts and figures in his recent documentary..:

Polar trip cancelled by frostbite... and irony

More evidence of climate change, just not the "right kind". From Yahoo:

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.

The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

“Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.
...[The] latest trek got off to a bad start. The day they set off from Ward Hunt Island, a plane landing near the women hit their gear, punching a hole in Bancroft's sled and damaging one of Arnesen's snowshoes.

They repaired the snowshoe with binding from a ski, but Atwood said the patch job created pressure on Arnesen's left foot, which led to blisters that then turned into frostbite.

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.
"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was
that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.
She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen's foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.

The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft's 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.
Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.

"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

~~~~~~~

Oh, tricky global warming..! Like our pagan gods of old, we approach thee on bended knee, contrite and frosbite. We fearful supplicants don our body suits and sweat pants, hoping against hope that this time, you shall accept our sacrifice, and bless us with your mercurial bounty.