Don't Believe in Man Made Global Warming? It's your Stone Age Brain

Religious fascists use all sorts of tactics and weird rationales to convince you of their righteousness. The true believers in the Church of Global Warming are no different. Sometimes they just come right out and condemn you to hell, or accuse you of racism, or something. But often they come at you with some high-minded gibberish from a "really smart person:" Here's an example from Helen Camakaris Ph.D.:

 Cognitive dissonance is that uncomfortable feeling we have when we know we should invest in solar panels but the 46″ wide screen TV wins out; we know we should catch the bus but we take the car anyway. It’s that sense of discord that arises when emotion and reason don’t get along. And unfortunately, it’s alive and well, sabotaging the climate change debate....We haven’t evolved to be successful in the modern world. Civilisation arose only 12,000 years ago; in evolutionary terms that’s just the blink of an eye. Ninety-nine per cent of human evolution occurred during the Stone Age, so our evolved instincts, personality traits, and even some of our cognitive “short-cuts” are much better suited to this Pleistocene world.

 Impressed? I know I am. It takes a lot of thought, such as it is, to come up with the notion that the blasphemers are evolutionary throwbacks. When she says 'we', she really means 'you' since Dr. Camakaris and her brethren have apparently raced ahead of us primitives who act and rely on ancient thought processes.

According to Ms. Camakaris, I am an unreasoning beast when I decide to buy a TV rather than 'invest' in a highly inefficient technology that no one - including her - would buy in the absence of government subsidies and force, and even then, it's still a white elephant.

Evidently, the mere questioning of  anyone's ability to predict the future behavior of an enormous and chaotic, non linear system, is to sabotage the debate, which wouldn't even be a debate if us skeptics were advanced enough to know what's good for us. Of course, the 'really smart people' are also immune from confirmation bias, greed, envy or any of the other faults and foibles of the mere stone age mortals who would disagree.

    We need to design a new kind of democracy where many government decisions are made cooperatively, with multi-party representation and the input of experts...Education must produce adults who can think critically and understand what’s at stake and why our judgement is flawed. To counter self-interest, the government should use incentives and disincentives to guide public behaviour. We need to encourage altruism by instituting reciprocal, incremental improvements, and by showing leadership.

So, now the definition of critical thinking is to not trust your own judgment and leave it all to the self-anointed, who will tell us what to think. And for those of you not fluent in fascist bullshit, when they call for cooperation, multi-party representation and the input of experts, it means SHUT UP!

Great News: Sugary Drinks Are Safe!

Well, that's not what the food police want you to believe, but it is what they're actually saying:

 New research presented at the American Heart Association’s Epidemiology and Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity and Metabolism 2013 Scientific Sessions showed that 180,000 deaths worldwide are linked to sugary beverages.

Wow, 180,000! That's a lot, huh? Not so fast. Each year, approximately 60 million people die worldwide, so 180,000 deaths works out to around .03% of the total. Statistically speaking, that's essentially ZERO. Moreover, this propaganda doesn't even claim a causal relationship. That is, it doesn't account for any other contributing factors in these deaths, such as smoking, genetics, physical activity, or any other underlying conditions. And this meme is being pushed by the American Heart Association, no less.

 These agenda driven reports from 'experts',  aren't usually this obvious in their dishonesty, but it illustrates just how much contempt these elitist control freaks have for you. Remember, this is the stuff you need to believe if you don't want to be called anti-science.