Commentator's Disease

[Master Shake]

I haven't read Fred Reed in a while. My loss.

Commentator's Disease
Letting Them Eat Cake


When I read columnists or listen to talking heads on the lobotomy box, they strike me as delusional. What are these decapitated crania prattling about? From what morgue did they escape? What country are they from? Certainly not the America I grew up in.

I conclude that they suffer from Commentator’s Disease, which consists in the confluence of several disabilities, the first being high intelligence. Washington, being a center of power, politics, graft, and corruption, attracts the very bright. An acquaintance once said, “Inside the Beltway, you assume that everyone is in the ninety-ninth percentile.” She meant that in the circles in which she moved, this was true. The city is rife with the very bright, most of them being invisible: campaign planners, pollsters, lawyers, scientists from NIH. The class includes many of the talking heads, the Pat Buchanans and Charles Krathammrs. They may be liberal or conservative, depending on their individual defects of character, but they are way smart.

The exceedingly intelligent form a social class seldom mentioned but inordinately influential. They are not recognized as what they are because they do not append IQs to their by-lines. As a quite ordinary example, consider the magazine The American Conservative, with many of whose writers I have some familiarity. The publisher, Ron Unz, studied theoretical physics at Stanford after graduating from Harvard. Bill Lind, Pat Buchanan, Taki, Steve Sailer, Kara Hopkins, John Derbyshire—I doubt that there is an IQ below 140 in the bunch. The same could be said of many other political slicks, left or right.

These people are not intellectual snobs. In the crowd they run with, they are average. The problem with them is that they hang out together. People tend to associate with those with whom they have things in common. At a hole-in-the-wall in DC like the Zoo Bar on upper Connecticut you may find a table of eight people in jeans and running shoes—Washington is about power, not style—consisting of a biochemist, an editor of a technical newsletter, a talking head you’ve seen, and so on, all highly educated. This clustering together by intelligence is sometimes called “cognitive stratification.” It exists, big time. The clusterers are by and large decent people, not full of themselves, and mean well.

But.

But they don’t know what they are talking about in important respects. They think the Beltway contains America.

The second symptom of Commentator’s Disease is relative prosperity. The nature of Washington is that the very bright usually do well financially. I don’t mean that they are rich, though some are, but that they manage to find secure jobs in government or with law firms or they invest wisely or, in the case of commentators, angle for well-paid gigs with syndicates or networks. Usually there is nothing crooked in this. They are simply smart enough to work the system, and they live where the system is.

The aggregate effect of their brains, security, and isolation is that they are out of touch with the country as it really is. They do not know the bleak strip-development of Route 1 South toward Fredericksburg, red dirt and franchised cholesterol chutes and roaring traffic. Here the diabetic veteran lives in a decayed residential motel and makes his way on crutches to the down-scale diner where he drinks beer and waits to die because he hasn’t got anything else to wait for. (The example is not hypothetical.) Here the aging waitress gets to the diner somehow, aching with arthritis. “Too tired to work, too poor to stop.” I knew this woman. She is much of America. You don’t see her at the Zoo Bar. She has never been to such a place.

I often see victims of Commentator’s Disease arguing against the minimum wage on abstract grounds of economic theory. It is what commentators do—bandy abstractions, railing for or against Keynes, assaulting their ideological opponents with pointed phrases. They have never had to do the arithmetic of forty times the minimum wage minus taxes minus bus fare minus rent and gotta pay the cable because it is the only thing they have after work. They have never had to choose between the electric bill and a new coat as winter comes on.

The commentators don’t realize that not everybody is like them. Those with IQs of 140 and up (130 gets you into Mensa, I think) unconsciously believe that anything is possible. Denizens of this class know that if they decided to learn, say, classical Greek, they could. You get the book and go at it. It would take work, yes, and time, but the outcome would be certain.

They don’t understand that the waitress has an IQ of 85 and can’t learn much of anything.

Conservatives think in terms of merciless abstractions and liberals insist that everyone is equal. Not even close. Further, people with barely a high-school education and low-voltage minds regard any intellectual task with utter discouragement.

Some commentators urge letting people invest their Social Security taxes in the stock market. To them it is a question of abstract freedom and probably the Federalist papers. The commentators are smart enough to invest money. I’ll guess that at least half the population isn’t. Go into the tit bar (does it still exist) in Waldorf, Maryland, and ask the dump-truck drivers and nail-pounders what NASDAQ is.

Liberal commentators want everyone to go to college, when about a fifth of people have the brains. Conservatives think that people can rise by hard work and sacrifice as certainly many people have. Thing is, most people can’t. Commentators only see those who made it.


The tendency of the Beltway 99th to live in an imaginary world, of conservatives to think that everybody can be a Horatio Alger, of liberals to believe that inequality arises from discrimination, guarantees wretched policy. Those who can do almost anything need to recognize the existence of those who can do almost nothing. Few of the latter are parasites. The waitress has worked all her life, as has the truck driver. They ended up with nothing.

Which is easy to do. A girl marries her high-school sweetheart in Busted Hump, Tennessee and he goes to work for the local pickle-bottling plant, which switches to hiring people as independent contractors to avoid paying benefits. Neither of the pair is real bright, just ordinary Americans trying to make a living. They live paycheck to paycheck because they don’t know how not to. Neither is lazy. They just don’t know how to start the next Microsoft. He dies of a heart attack at 45, she can’t make the mortgage, and…she is well and truly screwed.

At the Zoo Bar, they have great wings and some really good walk-in blues bands, and what you have to understand about Keynes is….

Commentator’s Disease.


http://fredoneverything.net/Commentators.shtml

[don]

Re: Commentator's Disease

A more comprehensive opinion....

Some Big Lies of Science

by Dr. Denis G. Rancourt

“[T]he majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.”– Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture (Literature), 2005

The maintenance of the hierarchical structures that control our lives depends on Pinter’s “vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed.” Therefore the main institutions that embed us into the hierarchy, such as schools, universities, and mass media and entertainment corporations, have a primary function to create and maintain this tapestry. This includes establishment scientists and all service intellectuals in charge of “interpreting” reality.

In fact, the scientists and “experts” define reality in order to bring it into conformation with the always-adapting dominant mental tapestry of the moment. They also invent and build new branches of the tapestry that serve specific power groups by providing new avenues of exploitation. These high priests are rewarded with high class status.

The Money Lie

The economists are a most significant example. It is probably not an accident that in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century the economists were the first professional analysts to be “broken in,” in a battle that defined the limits of academic freedom in universities. The academic system would from that point on impose a strict operational separation between inquiry and theorizing as acceptable and social reform as unacceptable [1].

Any academic wishing to preserve her position understood what this meant. As a side product, academics became virtuosos at nurturing a self-image of importance despite this fatal limitation on their societal relevance, with verbiage such as: The truth is our most powerful weapon, the pen is mightier than the sword, a good idea can change the world, reason will take us out of darkness, etc.

So the enterprise of economics became devoted to masking the lie about money. Bad lending practice, price fixing and monopolistic controls were the main threats to the natural justice of a free market, and occurred only as errors in a mostly self-regulating system that could be moderated via adjustments of interest rates and other “safeguards.”

Meanwhile no mainstream economic theory makes any mention of the fact that money itself is created wholesale in a fractional reserve banking system owned by secret private interests given a licence to fabricate and deliver debt that must be paid back (with interest) from the real economy, thereby continuously concentrating ownership and power over all local and regional economies.

The rest of us have to earn money rather than simply fabricate it and we never own more when we die. The middle class either pays rent or a mortgage. Wage slavery is perpetuated and degraded in stable areas and installed in its most vicious varieties in all newly conquered territories.

It is quite remarkable that the largest exploitation scam (private money creation as debt) ever enacted and applied to the entire planet does not figure in economic theories.

Economists are so busy modeling the ups and downs of profits, returns, employment figures, stock values, and the benefits of mergers for mid-level exploiters that they don’t notice their avoidance of the foundational elements. They model the construction schedule while refusing to acknowledge that the terrain is an earthquake zone with vultures circling overhead.

Meanwhile the financiers write and re-write the rules themselves and again this process does not figure in macroeconomic theories. The only human element that economists consider in their “predictive” mathematical models is low-level consumer behaviour, not high-level system manipulation. Corruption is the norm yet it does not figure. The economies, cultures and infrastructures of nations are wilfully destroyed in order to enslave via new and larger national debts for generations into the future while economists forecast alleged catastrophic consequences of defaulting on these debts…

Management tools for the bosses and smoke and mirrors for the rest of us – thank you expert economists.

The Medicine is Health Lie

We’ve all heard some MD (medical doctor) interviewed on the radio gratuitously make the bold proposal that life expectancy has increased thanks to modern medicine. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Life expectancy has increased in First World countries thanks to a historical absence of civil and territorial wars, better and more accessible food, less work and non-work accidents, and better overall living and working conditions. The single strongest indicator of personal health within and between countries is economy status, irrespective of access to medical technology and pharmaceuticals.

It’s worse than that because medicine actually has a negative impact on health. Medical errors (not counting misattributed deaths from correctly administered “treatments”) are the third leading cause of death in the US, after heart disease and cancer, and there is a large gap between this conservative underestimate in the number of medical error deaths and the fourth leading cause of death [2]. Since medicine can do little for heart disease and cancer and since medicine has only a small statistical positive impact in the area of trauma interventions, we conclude that public health would increase if all MDs simply disappeared. And think of all the time loss and stress that sick people would save…

One of the most dangerous places in society is the hospital. Medical errors include misdiagnoses, bad prescriptions, prescriptions of medications that should not be combined, unnecessary surgery, unnecessary or badly administered treatments including chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and corrective surgeries.

The lie extends to the myth that MDs anywhere near understand the human body. And this well guarded lie encourages us to put our faith in doctors, thereby opening the door to a well orchestrated profit bonanza for big pharma.

The first thing that Doctors Without Borders (MSF) volunteers need to do in order to contribute significantly in disaster zones is to “forget their medical training” and get to work on the priority tasks at hand: water, food, shelter, and disease propagation prevention; not vaccinating, or operating, or prescribing medication… Public health comes from safety, stability, social justice, and economic buying power, not MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) units and prescription drugs.

These bone heads routinely apply unproven “recommended treatments” and prescribe dangerous drugs for everything from high blood pressure from a sedentary lifestyle and bad nutrition, to apathy at school, to anxiety in public places, to post-adolescence erectile function, to non-conventional sleep patterns, and to all the side effects from the latter drugs.

In professional yet nonetheless remarkable reversals of logic, doctors prescribe drugs to remove symptoms that are risk indicators rather than address the causes of the risks, thereby only adding to the assault on the body.

It’s unbelievable the number that medicine has done on us: Just one more way to keep us stupid (ignorant about our own bodies) and artificially dependent on the control hierarchy. Economically disadvantaged people don’t die from not having access to medical “care” – They die from the life constraints and liabilities directly resulting from poverty. How many MDs have stated this obvious truth on the radio?

Environmental Science Lies

Exploitation via resource extraction, land use expropriation, and wage slavery creation and maintenance are devastating to indigenous populations and to the environment on continental scales. It is therefore vital to cover up the crimes under a veil of expert analysis and policy development diversion. A valued class of service intellectuals here is composed of the environmental scientists and consultants.

Environmental scientists naively and knowingly work hand in hand with finance-corporate shysters, mainstream media, politicians, and state and international bureaucrats to mask real problems and to create profit opportunities for select power elites. Here are notable examples of specific cases.

Freon and Ozone

Do you know of anyone who has been killed by the ozone hole?

The 1987 Montreal Protocol banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) is considered a textbook case where science and responsible governance lead to a landmark treaty for the benefit of the Earth and all its inhabitants. How often does that happen?

At about the time that the DuPont patent on Freon(TM), the most widely used CFC refrigerant in the world, was expiring the mainstream media picked up on otherwise arcane scientific observations and hypotheses about ozone concentration in the upper atmosphere near the poles.

There resulted an international mobilization to criminalize CFCs and DuPont developed and patented a replacement refrigerant that was promptly certified for use.

A Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded in 1995 for a laboratory demonstration that CFCs could deplete ozone in simulated atmospheric conditions. In 2007 it was shown that the latter work may have been seriously flawed by overestimating the depletion rate by an order of magnitude, thereby invalidating the proposed mechanism for CFC-driven ozone depletion [3]. Not to mention that any laboratory experiment is somewhat different from the actual upper atmosphere... Is the Nobel tainted by media and special interest lobbying?

It gets better. It turns out that the Dupont replacement refrigerant is, not surprisingly, not as inert as was Freon. As a result it corrodes refrigerator cycle components at a much faster rate. Where home refrigerators and freezers lasted forever, they now burn out in eight years or so. This has caused catastrophic increases in major appliance contributions to land fill sites across North America; spurred on by the green propaganda for obscenely efficient electrical consumptions of the new appliances under closed door (zero use) conditions.

In addition, we have been frenzied into avoiding the sun, the UV index keeps our fear of cancer and our dependence on the medical establishment alive, and a new sun block industry a la vampire protection league has been spawned. And of course star university chemists are looking for that perfect sun block molecule that can be patented by big pharma. And as soon as it is, I predict a surge in media interviews with skin cancer experts…

Acid Rain on the Boreal Forest

In the seventies it was acid rain. Thousands of scientists from around the world (Northern Hemisphere) studied this “most pressing environmental problem on the planet.” The boreal forest is the largest ecosystem on Earth and its millions of lakes were reportedly being killed by acid from the sky.

Coal burning plants spewed out sulphides into the atmosphere causing the rain to be acidic. The acid rain was postulated to acidify the soils and lakes in the boreal forest but the acidification was virtually impossible to detect. Pristine lakes in the hearts of national parks had to be studied for decades in attempts to detect a statistically significant acidification.

Meanwhile the lakes and their watersheds were being destroyed by the cottage industry, agriculture, forestry, mining, over fishing and tourism. None of the local and regional destruction was studied or exposed. Instead, scientists turned their gaze to distant coal burning plants, atmospheric distribution, and postulated chemical reactions occurring in rain droplets. One study found that the spawning in aquarium of one fish species was extremely sensitive to acidity (pH). Long treatises about cation charge balance and transport were written and attention was diverted away from the destruction on the ground towards a sanitized problem of atmospheric chemistry that was the result of industrialization and progress rather than being caused by identifiable exploiters.

As a physicist and Earth scientist turned environmental scientist, I personally read virtually every single scientific paper written about acid rain and could not find an example of a demonstrated negative impact on lakes or forests from acid rain. In my opinion, contrary to the repeated claims of the scientist authors, the research on acid rain demonstrates that acid rain could not possibly have been the problem.

This model of elite-forces-coordinated exploiter whitewashing was to play itself out on an even grander scale only decades later with global warming.

Global Warming as a Threat to Humankind

In 2005 and 2006, several years before the November 2009 Climategate scandal burst the media bubble that buoyed public opinion towards acceptance of carbon credits, cap and trade, and the associated trillion dollar finance bonanza that may still come to pass, I exposed the global warming cooptation scam in an essay that Alexander Cockburn writing in The Nation called "one of the best essays on greenhouse myth-making from a left perspective" [4][5][6].

My essay prompted David F. Noble to research the question and write The Corporate Climate Coup to expose how the media embrace followed the finance sector’s realization of the unprecedented potential for revenues that going green could represent [7].

Introductory paragraphs from Global Warming: Truth or Dare? are as follows [4]:

“I also advance that there are strong societal, institutional, and psychological motivations for having constructed and for continuing to maintain the myth of a global warming dominant threat (global warming myth, for short). I describe these motivations in terms of the workings of the scientific profession and of the global corporate and finance network and its government shadows.”

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized.”

Other passages read this way [4]:

“Environmental scientists and government agencies get funding to study and monitor problems that do not threaten corporate and financial interests. It is therefore no surprise that they would attack continental-scale devastation from resource extraction via the CO2 back door. The main drawback with this strategy is that you cannot control a hungry monster by asking it not to shit as much.”

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass. Nobody else cares about global warming. Exploited factory workers in the Third World don’t care about global warming. Depleted uranium genetically mutilated children in Iraq don’t care about global warming. Devastated aboriginal populations the world over also can’t relate to global warming, except maybe as representing the only solidarity that we might volunteer.”

“It’s not about limited resources. [“The amount of money spent on pet food in the US and Europe each year equals the additional amount needed to provide basic food and health care for all the people in poor countries, with a sizeable amount left over.” (UN Human Development Report, 1999)] It’s about exploitation, oppression, racism, power, and greed. Economic, human, and animal justice brings economic sustainability which in turn is always based on renewable practices. Recognizing the basic rights of native people automatically moderates resource extraction and preserves natural habitats. Not permitting imperialist wars and interventions automatically quenches nation-scale exploitation. True democratic control over monetary policy goes a long way in removing debt-based extortion. Etc.”

And there is a thorough critique of the science as band wagon trumpeting and interested self-deception [4]. Climategate only confirms what should be obvious to any practicing scientist: That science is a mafia when it’s not simply a sleeping pill.

Conclusion

It just goes on and on. What is not a lie?

Look at the recent H1N1 scam – another textbook example. It’s farcical how far these circuses go: Antiseptic gels in every doorway at the blink of an eye; high school students getting high from drinking the alcohol in the gels; out datedness of the viral strain before the pre-paid vaccine can be mass produced; unproven effectiveness; no requirement to prove effectiveness; government guarantees to corporate manufacturers against client lawsuits; university safety officers teaching students how to cough; etc.

Pure madness. Has something triggered our genetically ingrained First World stupidity reflex? Is this part of our march towards fascism [8]?

Here is another one. Educators promote the lie that we learn because we are taught. This lie of education is squarely denounced by radical educators [9][10].

University professors design curricula as though the students actually learn every element that is delivered whereas the truth is that students don’t learn the delivered material and everyone only learns what they learn. One could dramatically change the order in which courses are delivered and it would make no measurable difference in how much students learn. Students deliver nonsense and professors don’t care. Obedience and indoctrination are all that matter so the only required skill is bluffing. Students know this and those that don’t don’t know what they know, don’t know themselves [8][9][10].

Pick any expert opinion or dominant paradigm: It’s part of a racket.

We can’t know the truth because the truth is brutal.

Denis G. Rancourt was a tenured and full professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He was trained as a physicist and practiced physics, Earth sciences, and environmental science, areas in which he was funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals.

[ASH]

Re: Commentator's Disease

A more comprehensive opinion....

Sounds crazy to me.

[ASH]

Re: Commentator's Disease

I haven't read Fred Reed in a while. My loss.

...

"Conservatives think in terms of merciless abstractions and liberals insist that everyone is equal.

...

The tendency of the Beltway 99th to live in an imaginary world, of conservatives to think that everybody can be a Horatio Alger, of liberals to believe that inequality arises from discrimination, guarantees wretched policy."

Some brilliant observations. Thanks for posting.

[metalman]

Re: Commentator's Disease

Sounds crazy to me.

you won't find info to contradict your impression of rancourt if you read the wikipedia entry on him... Denis G. Rancourt

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Commentator's Disease

It used to be, on the farms, ships, and trains and in the kitchens, mines and factories of Western culture sometime ago, that we needed the manual and simple mental labor of everyone over the age of ten who could get out of bed.

No we don't.

In a world where one's "worth" is increasingly weighed by one's "contribution", this presents a quandary. In small tribes, of say a hundred or fewer people, it is natural to spread the labor around. If an hour or two of labor by the more able bodied people is sufficient for everyone to have adequate food, clothing and shelter, than that's good. No more labor need be done.

Larger communities, in our present case much larger (over six billion) communities, cannot work this way. It is not clear to me how they can work, at least in any way that respects either the humans or other life involved.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Commentator's Disease

Sounds crazy to me.

Reed's article sounds spot on to me.

[vinoveri]

Re: Commentator's Disease

Sounds crazy to me.

The part on money lie was right on IMO.

"That science is a mafia when it’s not simply a sleeping pill." well OK ... kinda crazy ... I think he means though that science can be used like a mafia or sleeping pill though which again is right on imo.

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: Commentator's Disease

I haven't read Fred Reed in a while. My loss.

I have no idea who he is, but he is beyond delusional and is clearly afraid of the gaining momentum of non-progressive and non-liberal ideals. Most likely, he is a shill like the Southern Poverty Law Center that seeks to provide "street cred" to liberal tyranny.

This was the most amusing quote:

The exceedingly intelligent form a social class seldom mentioned but inordinately influential. They are not recognized as what they are because they do not append IQs to their by-lines. As a quite ordinary example, consider the magazine The American Conservative, with many of whose writers I have some familiarity. The publisher, Ron Unz, studied theoretical physics at Stanford after graduating from Harvard. Bill Lind, Pat Buchanan, Taki, Steve Sailer, Kara Hopkins, John Derbyshire—I doubt that there is an IQ below 140 in the bunch. The same could be said of many other political slicks, left or right.

The men mentioned in this paragraph are all ardently opposed to the political structure that presently infects the West. They are all as about far outside the mainstream as you can get and in many cases would be guilty of hate crimes in countries which have such laws. Further, with the exception of Taki, none of these men are remotely wealthy by the Bankster comparison. Half of them intentionally avoid Washington. None of them have any political connection what so ever and are routinely mocked by neoconservatives in a similar manner as this author. Half I consider friends.

Nearly every sentence in this piece do not apply to the men he mentions. His consistent discussion of IQ is most comical because these men are the few who are willing to break with the egalitarian fantasy that all men are literally born equal in ability and potential.

Pieces like this encourage me that just as liberalism is quickly being swept away in a dying Europe, it is only a matter of time for this country. These kinds of vociferous attacks are nothing more than desperate smears of a dying ideology.

[Master Shake]

Re: Commentator's Disease

I have no idea who is, but he is beyond delusional and is clearly afraid of the gaining momentum of non-progressive and non-liberal ideals. Most likely, he is a shill like the Southern Poverty Law Center that seeks to provide "street cred" to liberal tyranny.

Serge, you could not be further from the truth. In fact, it's laughably wrong. I encourage you to visit Fred's website and read his older articles. Fred is no liberal or neo-con. He is iconoclastic, politically incorrect, and an honest observer of the post-modern world.

[Diarmuid]

Re: Commentator's Disease

Thanks Don, comprehensive article indeed imo, echoes of some of Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidals views from an overall thesis point of view rather then a detail one per se, I think.

[jtabeb]

Re: Commentator's Disease

Sounds Spot-On to me. (Global Warming= Carbon Credit SCAM, please see Global Cooling circa 1970's).

Peak Cheap Oil -> Yes,
Global Warming due to anthropogenic causes-> No

(ASH can correct me if I wrong on this, but from everything I've seen, it seems to be an easier way to sell Peak Cheap Oil policy measures to the public).

I agree with the call on economics and monetary policy. (Where is Adam Smith or David Ricardo when you need them. Mises? Hayek? The One True Keynes?) No, we get freaking Milton Friedman. (And Beny "I wanna bubble" Bernanke) Krugman? Yeah, let's not go there. At least Stiglitz has half a clue. Neo- anything seems to be junk everything.

To a certain extent I also agree with the critique on the "conformity of opinion" issue in education/policy making, especially when it comes to academic "schools of thought" and policy making "schools of thought".

(but I have had some damn fine teachers too, so it possess all the characteristics of a sterotype, a grain of truth that gets overgeneralized to describe the entire group)

[jtabeb]

Re: Commentator's Disease

There is this proposal that I have on that subject (I think you've read it). What do you think would should do policy wise to address this?

[ASH]

Re: Commentator's Disease

Sounds Spot-On to me. (Global Warming= Carbon Credit SCAM, please see Global Cooling circa 1970's).

Peak Cheap Oil -> Yes,
Global Warming due to anthropogenic causes-> No

(ASH can correct me if I wrong on this, but from everything I've seen, it seems to be an easier way to sell Peak Cheap Oil policy measures to the public).

This is going to quickly turn into yet another iTulip debate of global warming, where the same points are made repeatedly. I apologize for that.

My opinion -- and it's only an opinion -- is that recent global warming might or might not be primarily due to anthropogenic causes. I do not understand from a technical perspective how climate models can possibly produce useful long-range forecasts, given the complex and nonlinear nature of the system, and I think the models give the appearance rather than the substance of scientific rigor. I think that the basic greenhouse warming effect and tie to carbon dioxide is incontrovertible, but that we are flying blind when it comes to the magnitude of the climate impact relative to other factors, the rate of onset, and the strength of various feedback mechanisms. But then, I'm not a climate scientist nor a hard core computer modeler. (I've coded a lot of my own computer models to simulate semiconductor device physics, but I don't have the level of expertise that would qualify me as an "expert" for the purposes of this discussion.) However, given what little I know about the science, I disagree strongly both with those who are certain of dire consequences, and also with those who are certain this is a red herring or non-issue.

I can't "correct" you about the Peak Cheap Oil PR angle, because this comes down to our respective assessments of what is likely. I can see how anthropogenic global warming could turn out to be one of the periodic fads that sweep through the outlands of quantitative science, where controlled experiments are difficult to perform, the system is too complex to calculate with accuracy, and theory can outpace evidence for a long time. I can also see how AGW might be used and promoted opportunistically by any number of interests (government or financial) for the purpose of leading opinion or developing business opportunities. However, I don't think it is plausible that AGW was invented for these cynical purposes, nor that any significant portion of the scientistis studying AGW are participants in such cynical schemes. But that's just my take on what is "likely" -- and that has about as much weight in an objective debate as my opinion on blondes versus brunettes.

There are several reasons Rancourt strikes me as crazy. It's not that some of his assertions aren't true or reasonable -- the section on the "money lie" isn't bad, as vinoveri notes. Rather, it's the combination of too many 'red flags': a lot of absolute and sweeping statements (including several with which I disagree -- did you know I regard anyone who doesn't agree with me as crazy ), paranoia, assigning to coordinated conspiracy what can be more simply explained as opportunism after the fact, adoption of minority positions on too many scientific issues without adequate factual basis, and a single socially-charged theme that "explains" everything in terms of the ethical and professional failings of the community (science/education) from which he was ejected for being a nutter.

As an aside, I notice that most cases where I have a different take on something than you or Cow have the following characteristic: It seems to me that you guys are apt to deem something plausible if it fits well into an overall big picture, but don't look too far under the hood; for my part, I think a lot about the big picture, but I have great difficulty believing any given big picture proposition unless I have inspected all the micro-steps leading up to the conclusion and decided they make sense. This habitual "sanity check" is something I apply to engineering calculations, and most everything else I do -- I like to check my work. But I'm not saying my way is better -- I have been known to conclude that something isn't possible because certain details don't make sense (to me), only to later discover that it is possible, and I simply didn't understand the steps. (One trivial example was my conclusion a few years ago that my stainless steel fork at a restaurant ought not to be ferromagnetic; it was. At least I changed my conclusion in the face of empirical evidence.) Regardless, I think that when our respective impressions of plausibility differ, it is often over something where I see the big picture logic of your proposition, but don't think the details make sense. For instance, carbon credits create a whole new class of 'security' that can be traded, spun into ever more complicated financial instruments, and speculated upon. We know this is the game that FIRE plays, with the apparent collusion of their government regulators, and with the collapse of the housing bubble, both FIRE and the government ought to be on the lookout for something to replace housing. We also know that peak cheap oil is coming, and will require a significant societal and economic adjustment, and government will have one hell of a time getting in front of this, because it requires belt-tightening. Therefore, if inclined to skepticism over the official version of climate science (and as I have noted, I think there is room for some skepticism) and seeking a reason WHY, this puzzle piece fits neatly into place. My impression is that you guys stop there, because the big picture makes a lot of sense to you. I think about who the "foot soldiers" are supposed to be, what they're like, and conclude they are unlikely to be witting participants in such a fraud; I look at government -- its short-term incentives, its fragmented nature, and its limited competence, and conclude it is unlikely to be pursuing such a project, either; I look at FIRE, and conclude they are most likely trying to create and profit from a trade in carbon credits, but that when global warming theory was starting out and developing, FIRE's eye was on a very different ball.

[jtabeb]

Re: Commentator's Disease

"As an aside, I notice that most cases where I have a different take on something than you or Cow have the following characteristic: It seems to me that you guys are apt to deem something plausible if it fits well into an overall big picture, but don't look too far under the hood; for my part, I think a lot about the big picture, but I have great difficulty believing any given big picture proposition unless I have inspected all the micro-steps leading up to the conclusion and decided they make sense. This habitual "sanity check" is something I apply to engineering calculations, and most everything else I do -- I like to check my work. But I'm not saying my way is better -- I have been known to conclude that something isn't possible because certain details don't make sense (to me), only to later discover that it is possible, and I simply didn't understand the steps."

Which is why I appreciate your feedback. (And hope you appreciate Cow's and my own).

The one thing that the pursuit of knowledge actually teaches you is "how much you don't know".