| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Captain Compassion" |
| Date: |
08 Dec 2007 10:14:58 AM |
| Object: |
Whatever you do, don't forget to panic |
Whatever you do, don't forget to panic
By Andrew Bolt
December 07, 2007 09:00am
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22885161-5007146,00.html
NUCLEAR winter, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, bird flu,
death by fluoride, Chernobyl. I've seen it all and nothing scares me
now.
I can't remember exactly what I wrote that was so evil. So much to
choose from.
Was it that I refused to be freaked by this latest panic attack that
global warming was blasting in and . . . Oh, God, WE'RE ALL GOING TO
DIE!
Or was it that I wouldn't listen to that frenzy of activists insisting
the genetically modified canola oil I use to fry my chops would nuke
us all into an explosion of pustulating tumours?
Anyway, one young reader was furious that I'd yet again stood snobbily
apart, while his mob ululated warnings of some fresh horror.
"You'd be on your own," he sneered in an angry email.
True enough, my young critic, I do often feel lonely in this
astonishing age when to panic is a sign of virtue and to reason a sign
of a cold heart.
But you know my problem?
It's not just that I hate mobs, knowing there's no wisdom in them.
It's not even that I'm stubborn by nature, and like the answer Albert
Einstein gave to One Hundred Authors Against Einstein - that all it
took to defeat his Theory of Relativity was not 100 scientists but
just one fact.
My real problem is simply that in my 48 years I've lived through so
many pack-panic attacks over nothing that I won't fall so easily for
the next.
Your parents or grandparents may know what I mean. Go ask if they
remember all those plagues we were told would surely smite us if we
didn't sign some cheque, praise some god, or vote for some politician.
Ask if they remember scares like the nuclear winter, DDT,
mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, Repetitive Strain Injury,
bird flu, the millennium bug, SARS, toxic PVC, poisonous breast
implants, the end of oil, death by fluoride, the Chernobyl doom, the
BSE beef that would eat your brains, and other oldies and mouldies.
It's amazing we're still alive after all that, let alone richer and
healthier.
So, my furious friend, don't try to panic me now about global warming,
GM food, peak oil or ADHD. I've seen too many.
You want to know how they're tricked up? First, you get a possible
problem - preferably with some skerrick of truth.
You then get some expert, or maybe an Al Gore, to make wild
assumptions or faulty extrapolations. You know the kind: that if a
dodgy levee breaks in New Orleans, the whole world is gonna drown.
And then you whistle for the carpetbaggers - journalists keen to sell
a sensation, business keen to sell a cure, and politicians keen to
sell themselves as the solution.
And bang, you have a mass panic, with more people gaining from the
scare than are game to expose it.
I guess you're shocked by my cynicism. Would it help if I gave some
examples of the panics I was once fed?
Here's the very first I remember. When I was a student, too, my
earnest teachers used to tell me the world was running out of food,
and show pictures of starving Indians, which made me worry a lot.
They were repeating the hot theories of people like green guru Prof
Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Explosion sold in the
millions.
"The battle to feed humanity is over," Ehrlich preached. "In the 1970s
and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."
He was wrong, of course. Better crops, better communications, better
transport, better education - and see now. Famines are now virtually
unknown outside of war zones.
But such apocalyptic talk was everywhere then. Take the Club of Rome,
a top think tank, which in 1972 warned the world's economy was about
to hit a wall. We were running out of oil, gas, silver, tin, uranium,
aluminium, copper, lead and zinc, it warned in Limits to Growth, which
sold 30 million copies, becoming the best-selling environmental book
in history.
Panic spread. "We could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the
entire world by the end of the next decade," warned US president Jimmy
Carter.
Except we didn't. Instead, we've now got bigger reserves of all the
things the Club of Rome said would soon be used up, except for tin.
But those panics about resources were nothing compared with the
full-blown hysteria that was now being whipped up over the
environment.
These eco-scares really took off in 1962 after Rachel Carson published
her Silent Spring, using now disputed or discredited evidence to claim
DDT was such a menace in the food chain we had to ban it to save whole
species.
So DDT spraying was largely halted to save birds and fish, even though
that meant killing tens of millions of Third World children, who were
left with no good protection from the malarial mosquitoes against
which the DDT had been used.
Never mind! We were too busy then panicking over a fall (sic) in
global temperatures. In April 1975, for instance, Newsweek ran an
article, The Cooling World, warning of "ominous signs that the Earth's
weather patterns have begun to change", exposing us to floods,
"catastrophic" famines, "the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes
ever recorded" and "drought and desolation".
The panic attacks were now coming in waves. There was "acid rain",
which the United Nations in 1986 blamed for damaging a quarter of
Europe's trees.
Now, of course, we know "acid rain" is hardly harmful, and Europe's
trees are blooming.
There was then the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, also in
1986, that was said to threaten millions of people with death and so
terrified women that the International Atomic Energy Agency said as
many as 200,000 had abortions. Now we know that the true death toll so
far is fewer than 60.
There was the warning by British officials in 1996 that more than
500,000 people faced death by BSE, a brain disease they could catch
from infected beef. Now we know - after eight million cattle were
slaughtered - that the threat was wildly exaggerated, and the 100 or
so victims might not have even got the disease from eating beef.
But don't stop panicking! So we panicked instead about bird flu, with
newspapers running screaming headlines such as: "Pandemic Could Kill
150 Million, UN Warns".
But now we know the UN was just plucking figures from the air, and
there's still no proof this disease, caught from heavy exposure to
sick birds, can leap from human to human.
How many more scares should I describe, each quickly buried in
embarrassment, rather than held up as a warning to be slow to panic?
Remember the fear that the world's computers would crash the second
the clocks ticked over to the year 2000? Planes would fall from the
sky thanks to this Y2K bug, which the world spent an estimated $300
billion "fixing". But what happened at midnight? Tick, tick, tick . .
.. er, tick.
It was in the 1980s that I first declared my personal war against
panic, after thousands of Australians suddenly started to complain of
what they called Repetitive Strain Injury.
The theory was that typing for hours gave them a crippling wrist pain
that would never go away.
So firmly was this believed here that by 1985, RSI was blamed for a
third of all claims for compensation for disease, and every federal
public servant who put out a sore hand was simply paid off.
What struck me, though, was that all the sufferers I knew seemed to be
moaners by nature, or already unhappy. Even odder was that this
disease seemed to hit only Australians and only in some workplaces,
such as Telecom and the Commonwealth Bank - often heavily unionised or
soggy with complaint.
You see, as psychologist Prof Robert Spillane says now, RSI was
actually not a medical problem but a social one, suffered largely by
unhappy people "who chose to become patients" and who had there-theres
murmured to them by compensation lawyers and the new breed of
occupational health therapists.
But who gets RSI now? It's like a magic wind blew it away, overnight.
So that, my young friend, is why I refuse to join your latest panic
party.
Sneer at my loneliness all you like, as your howling, screaming,
gasping mob gibbers in unison with a fear you seem to catch from each
other.
I've learned that if I wait long enough, you'll come to your senses.
Until you panic all over again, that is.
--
If you disagree with the theories and dogmas of Marxism or Scientific Socialism
then you are a tool of Capitalist interests. If you disagree with the theories
or dogmas of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming then you are a tool of
Capitalistic interests. Notice a pattern here? -- Captain Compassion
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
"...the whole world, including the United States, including all that
we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark
Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights
of perverted science." -- Sir Winston Churchill
Joseph R. Darancette
daranc@NOSPAMcharter.net
.
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| User: "Christopher Helms" |
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| Title: Re: Whatever you do, don't forget to panic |
08 Dec 2007 10:19:13 AM |
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On Dec 8, 10:14 am, Captain Compassion <dar...@NOSPAMcharter.net>
wrote:
Whatever you do, don't forget to panic
By Andrew Bolt
December 07, 2007 09:00amhttp://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22885161-5007146,00.html
NUCLEAR winter, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, bird flu,
death by fluoride, Chernobyl. I've seen it all and nothing scares me
now.
I can't remember exactly what I wrote that was so evil. So much to
choose from.
Was it that I refused to be freaked by this latest panic attack that
global warming was blasting in and . . . Oh, God, WE'RE ALL GOING TO
DIE!
Or was it that I wouldn't listen to that frenzy of activists insisting
the genetically modified canola oil I use to fry my chops would nuke
us all into an explosion of pustulating tumours?
Anyway, one young reader was furious that I'd yet again stood snobbily
apart, while his mob ululated warnings of some fresh horror.
"You'd be on your own," he sneered in an angry email.
True enough, my young critic, I do often feel lonely in this
astonishing age when to panic is a sign of virtue and to reason a sign
of a cold heart.
But you know my problem?
It's not just that I hate mobs, knowing there's no wisdom in them.
You don't hate mobs, you just prefer Republican mobs.
.
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| User: "Tom Gardner" |
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| Title: Re: Whatever you do, don't forget to panic |
08 Dec 2007 11:34:26 AM |
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"Christopher Helms" <Chrishelms132@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:9b2c98ce-5524-4a58-8573-55f8d31041d7@e67g2000hsc.googlegroups.com...
On Dec 8, 10:14 am, Captain Compassion <dar...@NOSPAMcharter.net>
wrote:
Whatever you do, don't forget to panic
By Andrew Bolt
December 07, 2007
09:00amhttp://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22885161-5007146,00.html
NUCLEAR winter, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, bird flu,
death by fluoride, Chernobyl. I've seen it all and nothing scares me
now.
I can't remember exactly what I wrote that was so evil. So much to
choose from.
Was it that I refused to be freaked by this latest panic attack that
global warming was blasting in and . . . Oh, God, WE'RE ALL GOING TO
DIE!
Or was it that I wouldn't listen to that frenzy of activists insisting
the genetically modified canola oil I use to fry my chops would nuke
us all into an explosion of pustulating tumours?
Anyway, one young reader was furious that I'd yet again stood snobbily
apart, while his mob ululated warnings of some fresh horror.
"You'd be on your own," he sneered in an angry email.
True enough, my young critic, I do often feel lonely in this
astonishing age when to panic is a sign of virtue and to reason a sign
of a cold heart.
But you know my problem?
It's not just that I hate mobs, knowing there's no wisdom in them.
You don't hate mobs, you just prefer Republican mobs.
Chris, you must be young enough for "Global Warming" to be your first
pending world disaster. Enjoy it, after a dozen or so the novelty wears off
and you too will see the pattern. Oh, and by the way, it's not "for real"
this time either.
.
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| User: "Fact Attack" |
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| Title: Re: Whatever you do, don't forget to panic |
08 Dec 2007 11:35:34 AM |
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all the middle school white girls being fucked by niggers are the
faggots are all worried about global warming. god, please, let a
meteor hit this planet, NOW
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| User: "MasterChief" |
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| Title: Re: Whatever you do, don't forget to panic |
08 Dec 2007 12:57:12 PM |
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AMEN to that!!!!
"Fact Attack" <ilp3003@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:0e6fb28e-60f2-44e0-9340-82dd28cbb0eb@e23g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
all the middle school white girls being fucked by niggers are the
faggots are all worried about global warming. god, please, let a
meteor hit this planet, NOW
.
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| User: "snausages" |
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| Title: Re: Whatever you do, don't forget to panic |
09 Dec 2007 03:52:02 AM |
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On Dec 8, 9:35 am, Fact Attack <ilp3...@yahoo.com> wrote:
all the middle school white girls being fucked by niggers are the
faggots are all worried about global warming. god, please, let a
meteor hit this planet, NOW
Martin Luther King forgives you.
.
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