Don's Tuesday Column

      THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/27/2023

Fun with facts, fancies, fallacies

Writing last Friday, before hitting the road for RV camping, here are some items from the digital “spindle” for readers’ consideration.

“Watchdog group slaps John Kerry with complaint for wildly exaggerated claims” (K. Townsend, hotair.com) draws attention to Protect the Public Trust’s filing of a misinformation charge with the Department of State over Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry’s repeated misrepresentations on climate. He’s stated “that 15 million people are killed every year due to climate issues—specifically, greenhouse gas emissions.” There is no scientific data to support such alarmism.

Reliable reports show deaths attributed to actual climatic conditions and disasters declined by about 95 percent over a century. Odd to attribute deaths to “greenhouse gas emission” when humans exhale the dreaded CO2 with every breath. However, scare-mongering over impending doom has emanated from crackpots seemingly forever: “the end is near,” or “the sky is falling” (said the fabled “Chicken Little”).

Watching decades-worth of hysteria over future calamities—and having lived long enough to see said calamities fail to occur—prompts an “eye roll” and an “I’ll believe it when I see it” over any climate “news” story predicting future catastrophe.

We have charges of “climate crisis” over forest fires, recently in Canada. It turns out their conflagrations pretty much reflect America’s fires in that there’s 1) arson, 2) a century of stamping out fires that could clear overgrown lower-story fuel, and 3) failure to implement controlled burns and forest-thinning logging—it points to human causality, not “climate change.”

Regarding arson, “Democratic Donor Arrested and Charged with Setting Destructive Wildfire That Democrats Blamed on Climate Chante,” cites the arrest of Edward Fredrick Wackerman of Mariposa, CA, for starting the Oak Fire. That Sierra Nevada blaze “injured three firefighters, burned 19,244 acres (30 square mile) of land, and destroyed 127 homes and 66 outbuildings (per Cal fire).” Reminds me of enviros that lobby to prevent cutting any trees anywhere, but the first thing they do to their new hillside home is cut trees for a view.

“Is there a penalty for wrong predictions?” emphasizes the obvious (to climate realists): “Every day we see new predictions of doom due to ‘climate change.’ Of course, we are pretty well inured to such prophecies since we have lived with them for decades and they haven’t come true. All of the current climate hysteria is based not on observation of actual temperatures, which are benign, but on projections from models that are generated by people who make a living by scaring other people into giving them money.”

It's apparently not enough for climate fanatics to demand lifestyles diminished by living with unreliable, intermittent “renewable energy;” limit our mobility to that of an EV’s range and recharging inconvenience; and saddle us with appliances that don’t work like older models. “The Climate Change Cultists Come for Your Pets” exposes the lunacy behind the “zero emissions” despots’ campaign to force you to see Fido and Fluffy as little “emissions” factories requiring unsustainable food production—just stuff it, killjoys, be miserable.

“Star Trek: The Motion Picture” reran on the Comet channel just in time for an Artificial Intelligence news item. In the movie, a massive energy structure entity is determined to annihilate Earth’s population. Called “V’ger,” it logically concludes that “carbon-based units” are a flawed pollutant to be eradicated while searching for its “Creator,” who sent the “Voyager” probe on its mission.

“More than 350 AI (Artificial Intelligence) researchers and engineers recently issued a warning that AI poses risks comparable to those of ‘pandemics and nuclear war.’ In a 2022 survey of AI experts, the median odds they placed on AI causing extinction or the "severe disempowerment of the human species" were 1 in 10.”

Coincidentally, prominent “climate alarmists” recommend earth’s population be halved. Them first.

If I never see another “Pride” flag, especially with the little delta for the “trans,” or sex-change alphabet-ers, it’ll be too soon. How about a “Humility” month? “Pride police insist free speech is ‘unsafe’” by Tim Graham, creators.com, describes blather about “inclusion” and “diversity” as just a hypocritical ruse hiding their real goal for the super-majority of us not on board: agree or vanish. “Cancellers” will target you.

To wit: “Blue state school district won’t let students opt out of ‘Pride’ lessons.” Olympia School District, in Washington state, mandates student participation in LGBT Pride curriculum and activities—part of its “journey toward Gender-Inclusive Schools” (a proclamation). How about proclaiming the dissolution of any schools and systems that have deluded themselves into thinking it’s their place to propagandize sex cults.

From the Boston Herald: “Kids, ‘drugs, sex toys,’ dead man in South Boston apartment: ‘Sickening’”—describes a pedophilic sex ring having a drug-fueled party—things went horribly wrong. These scenes of debauchery were inevitable the moment society’s collective response was not “Hell, no” to normalizing perversion and the sexualizing of children. May they all rot in eternal damnation.

Matt Margolis makes a compelling case in “How Same-Sex Marriage Launched the Trans Movement, and the Warning Signs We Missed.” The evil genie won’t easily go back in the bottle.