Forget The First Amendment - Jail Climate Change Deniers!

More and more, Anthropogenic Climate Change proselytizers are resorting to calling for either death, jail or lawsuits for so-called ACC deniers. Think about that, it is a slippery slope indeed. The latest outcry for "justice" comes in the form of jail time and lawsuits for ACC deniers on the site Gawker in a "rant" penned by Adam Weinstein. He says, "it's time to punish the climate-change liars".

The author of this inflammatory piece relies heavily on an equally disingenuous article written by Lawrence Torcello who attempts to compare ACC deniers to the scientists convicted in Italy following a devastating earthquake. He points out these scientists were not convicted for manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake, but for supposedly signing off on a government official's message that after studying a week's worth of tremors the situation looked favorable. This is a major apples and oranges argument to be sure. The scientists were corrupt as opposed to creating ACC models that don't measure up to observation, or conversely, speaking one's opinion that ACC is unlikely.

As I've mentioned before, this crazed idea about jailing and executions is not a new trend, but it does seem to be picking up more steam lately. There is a caveat to Weinstein's condemning "denialists" to, "face jail. They should face fines. They should face lawsuits from the classes of people whose lives and livelihoods are most threatened by denialist tactics". The caveat includes a crudely drawn character, "I'm not talking about the man on the street who thinks Rush Limbaugh is right, and climate change is a socialist United Nations conspiracy foisted by a Muslim U.S. president on an unwitting public to erode its civil liberties. You all know that man. That man is an idiot." Nor does he want to jail, "scientists who must constantly hypo-test our existing assumptions about the world in order to check their accuracy". No, he wants lawsuits and jail for the corporate run denialists campaigns, but included in that he does list, "I'm talking about public persons...for whom denying a fundamental scientific fact is profitable...". There's that slippery slope, because with that remark he is talking about jailing me, and I don't take to being threatened with jail lightly.

For you see, since I've written a few blog posts on this site in which I make clear I don't believe in ACC, but conversely, do not say we should chuck every environmental law out the window, and my site has accepted donations and even makes a few nickels from advertising, yep, that's a threat of jail against me! That's the long haul when someone so blithely sweeps aside the pesky First Amendment. The author of the "rant" also uses some twisted logic by saying he's not stepping on anyone's First Amendment rights because the First Amendment is not absolute. He misstates the famous "you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" to bolster his jailing ACC deniers argument. Actually, you can't falsely yell 'fire' in a crowded theater. You see the difference?

The final egregious alarmist "statistic" that both he and Torcello use is the over 150,000 people die annually around the world because of ACC. Cripes! That does sound a bit bad. It comes from the reliable folks at the World Health Organization and upon closer examination, the 150,000 people that they claim die annually around the world from "climate change", actually die from weather related causes. Goodness knows I have been on the receiving end of that counter argument, "don't confuse climate with weather" on more than a few occasions. So, here, turnabout is fair play.

Do you really want to go down this slippery slope? Do you really want to jail so-called "deniers" because of what amounts to scientific dogma? Because when you preach the "debate on climate change is over", or the ever popular "97% of all scientists agree" to counteract an opinion or argument against the idea of ACC, you are being dogmatic when you start threatening with the tangibility of lawsuits, jail time and/or executions. If your faith or belief in ACC is so embedded in a bedrock of scientific observation, the notion of someone disagreeing with you should be no more than water rolling off of the duck's back.

Besides, these ranters are also making money off of ACC. So, is Al Gore. They should be thrown in jail using that logic. But they're not "deniers" so it is OK for them make a profit from ACC.
 

Race Hatred: THE Divisive Issue

I am compelled to write this not because of any recent event or publication, but because of the comment section for an article about melting snow in Detroit uncovering the frozen bodies of dogs. As reprehensible as it is to discover dozens of dead dogs, most of which were fighting dogs, dumped in a city's public park, that this story unleashed such a despicable and even more reprehensible tirade of unabashed race hatred is both illuminating and hopefully educational.

It is no secret that I believe America has devolved into a two party dictatorship which serves not the people but the elite. To give the illusion of a choice between two evils on any given ballot, certain "hot button" issues are constantly used to keep the People arguing amongst themselves over seemingly divisive issues. A short list of these issues include: abortion, religious intolerance, gun control, carbon taxes, crime and the greatest divisive issue of all, race hatred.

(Poster for the film, "The Birth Of A Nation")

It's 2014, folks, but reading the comments section of the "dead dogs" piece on the WWJ-TV, CBS affiliate website, will make you believe that it's 1915 and these people have just stepped out of a screening of "The Birth Of A Nation". How a story about dead dogs became a conduit for an outpouring of such vile race hatred I will leave for the reader to decide. Here is a small sampling of the comments (and there are over 500 of them at the time of this writing) because that is all that is necessary in this case. The comments range from the subtle to the explicit.

"It is the damn jungle with snow !!! The North American Pavement Ape is a wild feral animal !!! I'm not gonna say it again. This story would have been excellent if the melting snow revealed hundreds of these FERAL ANIMALS"

"13%. Dark skinned. Dumb. I like the dogs better, poor things. License these people (if indeed they are people); not the dogs."

"There are two types of black people. There are the respectable folks who are, LAW ABIDING, educated, mannerly, considerate, employed and who have legitimate children. This group is called Negros, but they seem to be few and far between. And then, there is the apparent majority of blacks who didn’t even finish high school, think the minimum wage should be a living wage, suck of the welfare system for generations, breed illegitimate children like rabbits, participate in flash mobs, steal, rape, are gang members, own illegal weapons, fight to buy expensive things they can’t afford, are very racist, play the “knockout game”, live in a dump, currently occupy OUR White House, “department of justice” and some seats in Congress.....these are the n i 99 e r s, most of whom never had a “daddy” to provide some guidance in life (includes “obama”)."

"This is Dee-troit. Animal Farm where savage primates murder and cause mayhem. They are the ones who should be "put down", not the dogs."

"Negroes doing what they do best."

We can pretend such vile hatred does not really exist or that it is merely the product of the anonymity that the internet provides, but we would only be fooling ourselves. Aside from the adroit use of this dividing issue on the American electorate by the politicians, we can at least be assured that race hatred is learned and often at a very young age, regardless of color. We can call out the politicians who use this issue and we can also call out the corporations and individuals who contribute to their campaigns as well. We must constantly be aware of such hatred and not hesitate for a moment to not only shame but perhaps educate. That may seem a bit pie-in-the-sky, but as compassionate human beings we have to start somewhere!

 

Remembering My Dad

Facebook pals and kids, you rarely like to be reminded of death. "Oh good grief", you say, "...please show us your latest lunch or dinner plate pix or whatever..."

 

 

Thirteen years ago, my Dad died. I will always remember those hours after I arrived at the hospital. All those memories, for good and bad. On both sides. I often wander into the corridors of my mind about what interesting conversations we would have had about the Bush/Obama regimes. "Oh, Rod!", the reader might think, "why must you always draw politics into such a...bla...bla...bla....". Well, it was politics which we often conversed about. For, how could we not?

 

This was a man who sat me down at the tender age of 13 and said I needed to watch these Watergate hearings on TV (ya know, back when government was actually a bit transparent). Not because it was so much historic, but because it was the exercising of Constitutional government, and he thought that was damn important and I should be a witness to it. And he was right! Although we talked years later about how Watergate was just a cover-up of the bigger cover-up (shhhh, JFK), I never really knew if he felt the same way. The point is, I wouldn't be such a rabble-rouser if it wasn't because of my Dad, even though if some you met him you'd think he be a bit conservative.

 

I was the third boy in the family he had to deal with and so my memories of him, today, deal mostly in that cloudy young adulthood and onto the later parts of my adulthood. As a writer, he was critical of a particular work, I recall. "Why must there be so many cuss words?", he asked. I said, "That's how people talk". And you know...I do not quite remember the rest of that conversation. And because I don't think it matters. He asked a question and that made me think, I remember that. Miss you Dad.