Climate Alarmism vs Real Environmentalism

 

Edward Ring’s column at American Greatness on “Climate Alarmism” offers some facts that might just get through to your climate alarmist friends by making them think about something that motivates them:  guilt.

How Climate Alarmism Killed Real Environmentalism

The environmentalist movement is a political weapon. It unites the most powerful special interests in the world behind an agenda that will further centralize power and wealth, eliminate any hope of financial independence for the vast majority of people, and transition previously free and independent nations into managed, sham democracies that have lost their sovereign agency.

The overwhelming theme of environmentalism today, designed to obscure its true agenda, is the alleged “climate crisis.”

Americans may or may not eventually muster the impertinence to successfully challenge the political power grab masquerading as environmentalism today. But either way, its centerpiece, the “climate crisis,” is responsible for devastating harm both to what was once a legitimate environmentalist movement, as well as to the environment itself.

Policies ostensibly designed to manage the planet’s climate are taking attention and resources away from genuine environmental threats. At the same time, a growing percentage of people are recognizing the fraudulent essence of the “climate crisis” agenda and, as a result, are becoming indifferent to legitimate environmental concerns.

This is a tragedy. 

. . .

Here are just a few of the environmental disasters in progress that nobody talks about either because they’re making too much money pushing the climate change scam, or because they’re thoroughly disgusted with the climate change scam and disregard all environmentalist concerns.

Mr Ring then expands on each of the following bullet point topics:

• Loss of Insect Population
• Aquatic Dead Zones
• Overfishing
• Energy Security in Developing Nations
• The Biofuel Disaster
• Massive Oceanic Garbage Patches
• Population Crash

Mr Ring’s conclusion:

. . . By now, the fraudulent reality of “renewables” that aren’t renewable is well documented, even if that fact receives scant attention in the mainstream press. But this additional fact—that the climate alarmist focus on achieving “net zero” is discrediting environmentalism at large, and taking attention away from other serious environmental threats—is perhaps the saddest chapter in the story of a movement that has lost its way.

Mr Ring’s column is here.

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The Incredible Shrinking Middle Class

 

Edward Ring asks “Why the Middle Class Is Being Destroyed.”  Toward the end of his column, he explores various reasons for the collapse of societal values and priorities that those of us -- of a certain age -- grew up with.  He concludes:

. . . Meanwhile, the ongoing expansion of the custodial state is concurrent with the average IQ of Americans shifting into decline. This shouldn’t be surprising. The so-called Flynn Effect, the theory that social and economic progress caused IQ scores to rise in the early 20th century, has now been thrown into reverse. Many factors could explain this reversal, but because it is happening universally, we might start by implicating a degraded system of public education, a dumbed-down media, the diversions of mindless, endless online rubbish, the collapse of meritocracy, and the replacement of the pursuit of excellence with the quest to acquire status and rewards by defining oneself as a victim.

The controversy over one chapter in [Richard] Herrnstein and [Charles] Murray’s book [The Bell Curve] should not diminish the fact that, way back in 1994, their work anticipated two of the most decisive trends in the world today: The emergence of a cognitive elite, and, for the first time in history, the almost total convergence of intellectuals with the financial elite. The consequence, an apparent consensus among the two groups to destroy the middle class to protect their own interests while claiming they’re saving the planet and promoting “equity,” should surprise nobody.

It’s the easy path. But it’s the wrong path.

Full article at American Greatness is here.

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COVID Propaganda

 

J.B.Shurk breaks down the propaganda wars at AmericanConservativeMovement. Here are his concluding questions:

. . . the global response to the China Virus is so rife with contradictions that ordinary people can see that they are being flooded with government propaganda.  That’s the good news.  The first step to surviving any information war is to recognize that one is actually being waged.  Accepting that you are being lied to prepares you for discovering why.

Is COVID-1984 merely the greatest grift ever perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry and the politicians paid handsomely from its profits?  Is it a continuation of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming scam being used to concentrate global control over all economic relations into the hands of a small number of financial and technocratic elites?

Is it being used to distract the world from an impending debt bomb that will eventually explode into the mother of all economic depressions?  Is it a vehicle for eliminating private ownership and returning the world back to a time when a minuscule number of lords could rule over a global population of serfs?  Is it a mechanism for identifying citizens who will pose problems for the State’s continued authority?

Is it the Davos crowd’s experimentation in population control?  Or was it the only way to prevent President Trump’s re-election and derail his “America First” agenda by providing the necessary cover for political operatives to violate state law and flood the 2020 election with enough anonymous, unsecured, and unverified ballots to make Trump the first president to win more votes than any incumbent in American history, expand his backing among minorities, and increase his overall support by over ten million new voters, yet still find himself somehow short of victory?

As the six-hundred-pound man said to the Swiss chocolatier, “I’ll take one of each.”  Sometimes the answers really are as obvious as they seem.

This is a war for hearts and minds now.  Just as John Brennan and the CIA fed us a diet of Russia collusion for years in order to overturn the 2016 election, COVID-1984 is the smorgasbord of rancidness meant to turn our stomachs and convince us to willingly accept a future of servitude to the State.  With each passing executive order or unconstitutional edict in the name of public health, the government is tightening its noose.  It is a global heist of personal freedom before our eyes.  The only way forward is not to look away; to recognize that “it can happen here”; and to realize that it is, in fact, happening.

A war over information, as we have seen, is as deadly as one with rifles and bayonets.  Propaganda is only as effective as it is invisible.  Lies seen can never be unseen.  One thing remains certain: we are in this conflict whether we like it or not.

Full article is here. 

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The future belongs to those who show up

 

Mark Steyn has been on record for years pointing to demographics and birth rates as the primary issue facing civilization.  In his column today, he revisits the issue, quoting liberally from his 2006 book America Alone.  Mr. Steyn begins:

Happy Whit Monday to my Commonwealth cousins throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific, and to our readers in much of Continental Europe. And of course to my fellow Canadians a happy if locked down Victoria Day. Enjoy it while you can.

Front page news from yesterday's New York Times:

World Is Facing First Long Slide in Its Population

Me in my international bestseller fifteen years ago:

The single most important fact about the early 21st century is the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe and Japan are getting old fast, older than any functioning society has ever been and faster than any has ever aged... These countries – or, more precisely, these people – are going out of business.

The Times front page yesterday:

All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.

Me in 2006:

The salient feature of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia is that they're running out of babies. What's happening in the developed world is one of the fastest demographic evolutions in history... This isn't a projection: It's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: By 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noël Coward remarked in another context, 'Funiculì, funiculà, funic yourself.'

The Times yesterday:

Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can't find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.

Me fifteen years ago:

[In Japan] the shortage of children has led to a shortage of obstetricians...

[China's] population will get old before it's got rich...

The 'experts' of the western world are slower to turn around than an ocean liner, and in Europe they were still yakking about the 'population explosion' even as their 1970s schoolhouses, built in anticipation of traditional Catholic birthrates, were emptying through the Nineties and Oughts...

One can talk airily about being flushed down the toilet of history, but even that's easier said than done. In eastern Germany, rural communities are dying, and one consequence is that village sewer systems are having a tough time adjusting to the lack of use. Populations have fallen so dramatically there are too few people flushing to keep the flow of waste moving...

The Times yesterday:

The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized — around the notion that a surplus of young people will drive economies and help pay for the old. It may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation. Imagine entire regions where everyone is 70 or older...

Me a decade-and-a-half ago:

Speaking for myself... I'd rather date Debbie Reynolds than Angelina Jolie. But even to put it in those terms is to become aware of how our assumptions about a society's health – about its innovative and creative energies - are based on its youthfulness. Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill's closed down and the young people have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have - managing growth or managing decline..?

In theory, those countries will find their population halving every thirty-five years or so. In practice, it will be quicker than that, as the savvier youngsters figure there's no point sticking around a country that's turned into an undertaker's waiting room. Not every pimply burger flipper wants to support entire old folks' homes single-handed...

Everything The New York Times finally got around to yesterday, I said in 2006. My book was an international bestseller, including on the Times' own Top Ten list. Yet it did not bother reviewing America Alone. . .

Read the rest here.

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