Weeding The Human Plant From The Garden Of Eden

Move over, Leni Riefenstahl, you now have serious competition indeed, courtesy of the smiling eugenicists at 1010 and their catechism of cataclysm, "No Pressure":



The green thumb of the left hand of environmentalism is soaked with crimson this week, as a British taxpayer-supported group's attempt to bring attention to their upcoming advertising campaign got a little more attention than they bargained for. Against all reason, they packaged their appeal to conservation within a despicable gorefest launched with a preview in the UK-based Guardian newspaper, whose readers were given the first look at this "edgy" ecology lesson last Thursday, reminding us all that we can't expect to make omelettes without first breaking a few eggs:

[W]hy take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask [director Franny Armstrong]: "Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that's not worth jumping up and down about, I don't know what is."
"We 'killed' five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change," she adds.
Jamie Glover, the child-actor who plays the part of Philip and gets blown up, has similarly few qualms: "I was very happy to get blown up to save the world."

Two reactions. One, it's yet another example of how the well-intentioned animists who can successfully see the spark of the divine Creator in slugs and bugs, seem to have exhausted that insight by the time they get around to seeing their fellow human beings. No wonder we can be treated as just so much collateral damage, our tilling is merely part of the toil that goes into preparing the soil of any field for planting, a necessary evil familiar to every hopeful gardener.

Two: is this film really aimed at the increasing number of blaspheming skeptics no longer holding their iron-clad faith in the man-made religion of man-made global warming? My sense is that it's real target audience are the fellow travelers who might be straying from the party line. Tithing must be in serious decline for No Pressure to warrant shot after shot of terrified blood-stained survivors of each explosive purge. Death comes quickly, after all, to the characters in the vignettes who disagree; the terror is reserved for those left behind, haunted by the shocking price to be paid for free will. Beyond the purported conservationist message of the film, isn't it also whispering:

"When you join this club, you never leave."

No pressure, because there's no real freedom to choose in the first place.

The artful photography, the studied realism of the special effects, the impressive acting (is there anything harder to pull off than acting natural..?), all this and more reveal how much thought, labor, and talent must have gone into the creation of this monstrosity. There was just one thing missing: moral judgment. An admission agreed to by the sponsors of the film, who upon seeing it were reported to be "absolutely appalled" at the result of their good faith. Thankfully, the backers have come to their senses, so that the film will no longer be distributed to UK theaters, as originally planned. (!)

"Many people found the resulting film extremely funny", the filmmakers contend in their eventual apology. This is absolutely true, as we may read, with mounting horror, as the initial article in the Guardian fills with reader comments rising to the defense of the indefensible, revealing all the more clearly how far Great Britain has fallen in our lifetime. Where once there were giants like William Wilberforce, capable of seeking justice for people and animals both, now there remains caricatures of his shadow, willing to see people as animals, ready for herding... and culling.

The sickest joke seems to have turned out to be in the apology:

At 10:10 we're all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

"Live and learn"... a priviledge not extended to the heretical characters of their macabre video.

Heil Gaia (because James Lovelock won't do) !

James Lovelock on the value of sceptics and why Copenhagen was doomed | Environment | guardian.co.uk

We need a more authoritative world. We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It's all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can't do that. You've got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it. And they should be very accountable too, of course.

But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

But the interview as a whole reveals Lovelock as intellectually incoherent. He also bewails the corruption of scientific integrity in the Climategate scandal and calls for scientific transparency and openness to criticism. Just how he thinks that is going to be possible in a more authoritarian society, I have no idea (to call for a less democratic society is to call for a more authoritarian society, not a more authoritative) one.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

Of course Lovelock does not stop to ask why a non-religious man has to rely on religious language to make such a point. This reveals his lack of depth in questions anthropological, his inability to grasp the necessarily "religious" nature of human bonding in any shape or form (I'm not saying you have to believe in God or in highly ritualized social life but I am saying there is no conceivable form of social life that is not in some way historically derivative of belief in God/the supernatural and ritual). The secular is just another form of the sacred.

Lovelock doesn't see how his own position is just another form of religion, and given his naivete about religion, he doesn't really understand how humans can be bound by any set of authoritative norms within a democratic or non-dictatorial society. (It's not entirely true that the nations which won the two world wars put democracy on hold - to a degree, yes, but only to a degree and they relied for their wartime resiliency on banked social capital that would eventually have run out if they remained for long non-democratic.) And so he implicitly calls for a dictatoriship of "scientists", without thinking through how good science - free-thinking and self-critical - and dictatorship could ever be compatible. Men are not angels, not even the best scientists.

However, we can be, on occasion, angelic. Lovelock does not appreciate how democratic covenants can come into being to give humans both authoritative norms and freedom in their continual re-iteration, exchange, and modification of shared norms. (No shared norms, no freedom - just the dictatorship of one arbitrary authority or another.) Perhaps it is when we are being angelic that we are most open to the revelatory quality of events, the revelations that if communicated - and accepted/exchanged/changed - can provide a way to a new understanding of shared norms/imperatives and new forms of exchange or reciprocity. In short, the angel, as the messenger between God and man, may bear the promise of a new covenant.

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 truth about Elizabeth May

You may have already seen this

testimony of Czech President Vaclav Klaus to an American Congressional Committee in March. But I just came across it, via Melanie Phillips and was filled with hope to find that there is at least one politician out there who will stand right up to the apocalyptic lunacy of the environmental movement whose delusional resentment of decentralized market society is such that they are hellbent on scaring us into submission to their totalitarian agenda, corrupting scientific professions and credibility on the way, and making sure that the poor masses of the world do not get to join consumer society, but remain destitute, dieing young, and thus provide a romantic postcard relief of colourful "diversity" to "cosmopolitan" travelers, tv viewers, and dreamers consumed with boredom for the unexciting freedom of ordinary lives, and with resentment for a daily life filled with the many personal competitions with "unenlightened" folk that everyone must put up with in a free and wealthy society. Klaus, to my mind, has the "debate" just right:

My ambition is not to bring additional arguments to the scientific climatological debate about this phenomenon. I am convinced, however, that up to now this scientific debate has not been deep and serious enough and has not provided sufficient basis for the policymakers’ reaction. What I am really concerned about is the way the environmental topics have been misused by certain political pressure groups to attack fundamental principles underlying free society. It becomes evident that while discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment but a clash of views about human freedom.

As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. 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.

The environmentalists consider their ideas and arguments to be an undisputable truth and use sophisticated methods of media manipulation and PR campaigns to exert pressure on policymakers to achieve their goals. Their argumentation is based on the spreading of fear and panic by declaring the future of the world to be under serious threat. In such an atmosphere they continue pushing policymakers to adopt illiberal measures, impose arbitrary limits, regulations, prohibitions, and restrictions on everyday human activities and make people subject to omnipotent bureaucratic decision-making. To use the words of Friedrich Hayek, they try to stop free, spontaneous human action and replace it by their own, very doubtful human design.

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.

By concentrating on the human contribution to the climate change the environmentalists ask for immediate political action based on limiting economic growth, consumption, or human behavior they consider hazardous. They do not believe in the future economic expansion of the society, they ignore the technological progress the future generations will enjoy, and they ignore the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society is, the higher is the quality of the environment.

The policymakers are pushed to follow this media-driven hysteria based on speculative and hard evidence lacking theories, and to adopt enormously costly programs which would waste scarce resources in order to stop the probably unstoppable climate changes, caused not by human behavior but by various exogenous and endogenous natural processes (such as fluctuating solar activity).

My answer to your first question, i.e. what should policymakers consider when addressing climate change, is that policymakers should under all circumstances stick to the principles free society is based on, that they should not transfer the right to choose and decide from the people to any advocacy group claiming that it knows better than the rest of the people what is good for them. Policymakers should protect taxpayers’ money and avoid wasting it on doubtful projects which cannot bring positive results.