Item 1: Iraq's Dubious Future. George F. Will has cobbled together an uncharacteristically diffuse and confused hodgepodge of ideas that leaves the reader wondering what the heck his point is. He speaks of the U.S. pacification in 1901 of Philippine "insurgents" (and yes, he does use that word), at huge cost in blood, without speaking to the long-term benefits of the U.S.-Philippine relationship that emerged from that detestable horror. Likewise, he talks about the Mexican War without addressing the stark disparity in social mobility and prosperity today between the areas of Mexico we did annex as against those we left independent. And then he talks about our neither/nor ‘policy' in Iraq.
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If his intent was to show our inability to choose a policy by his inability to choose a topic, he has succeeded. If his intent was to urge Americans to take a stand and stick to it, he failed. The long-term prospects that Bush's hideous war of aggression will turn out well are dismal, unless we take the drastic step of accepting that the only way to make Iraq whole and extend the blessings of liberty to its present population and posterity is to annex it outright and make it into a Middle Eastern California. That would be worth fighting for. What else would? (Responsive to George F. Will column, "Iraq's Crossroads", New York Post, August 20, 2004)
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Item 2: Needless, Media-Induced Worry. When my clockradio went off today, 1010 WINS ("All news, all the time") out of Manhattan (13 miles away) reported the temperature as 70 degrees Fahrenheit, at 12:30pm on August 22nd. (I work swing-shift, so try not to get up too much before the time I have to get ready for work, even on the days I’m not working.) 70 degrees after noon on August 22nd! Have you any idea how COLD that is for the Newark/New York metropolitan area?
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We have had substantially subnormal temperatures, by some 10 degrees a day, most of this “summer”. We went over 90 perhaps twice this year. The most recent temperature reading was 77 degrees, at 4:51pm, 7 degrees below normal. The forecast calls for overnite temperatures to fall into the high 50s — 50s! in August! This isn’t Maine. We’re supposed to average 67 degrees at nite, and many nites in August are usually sweltering. Not anymore they’re not.
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For at least two and a half years the temperatures in this region have been starkly subnormal. Wintry weather began a month early in 2003 and lasted well into spring this year. On one day last summer the temperature was 23 degrees lower than the same date a year earlier.
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And the rain! We’ve had four and five days of rain in a row, several times this season. Jersey Shore businesses are taking a drubbing.
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That would be bad enuf, to suffer thru a miserably cold and wet summer. But what makes it ever worse is the constant, insistent drumbeat of claims by major media that planet Earth is about to burn into a cinder because of “Global Warming”.
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Global Warming is a fraud. It does not exist. What does exist is LOCAL warming and local COOLING. The Tristate New York Metropolitan Area is experiencing an obvious major cooling, of at least two or three years’ duration, and counting. But the major media of this country, headquartered HERE!, keep blaring alarums about Global Warming. Astounding.
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They go to Alaska and Canada’s Northwest Territories to point to shrinking ice sheets and glaciers, as tho that proves something about PLANETARY weather trends. It does not. If the Arctic becomes warmer but heavily populated areas become colder, is that “global” warming? No, it is not.
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Some scientists have speculated, indeed, that there could soon — within a few decades — be a huge drop in temperatures across Northern Europe. The asserted mechanism that would cause this is that "Global Warming" produces a weakening or cessation of the Gulf Stream, which in turn produces a mini-Ice Age in the British Isles and much of the rest of Europe, with temperatures dropping by 19 degrees Fahrenheit or more. (An explanation of the mechanics appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian this past November.)
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“Science” can’t seem to get its story straight. If uninhabited Arctic regions warm but densely populated Europe cools, that’s not Global Warming, is it?
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People who should know better than to talk about “global” warming, media people who are living in this starkly colder region, let “science” about far-away places of which they have no personal experience, overwhelm their own senses to make them think we are getting warmer when in this region we are actually getting colder, so it cannot be true that the entire planet is warming. Yet, rather than adjust the terminology to speak of “Patchwork Warming”, “Regional Warming”, “Arctic Warming” or something else, they continue to tell everyone we are experiencing “Global” Warming, even tho we know from our own skin that that is not true, because WE are COLDER.
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This is what an article in TV Guide decades ago spoke of as media-induced “diplopia”. Also called “double vision”, diplopia is “A disorder of vision in which a single object appears double.” In the TV Guide article, “diplopia” was used figuratively, to suggest that viewers of television are presented an alternative ‘reality’, a second society, that stands alongside a person’s actual reality and competes for belief with what his own senses and experience tell him.
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Sometimes the alternative reality portrayed by media overwhelms a person’s own experience and convinces him that what media tell him is real but what his own experience tells him cannot be relied upon.
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We must never make the mistake of letting someone else’s perceptions substitute for our own. Yes, it is sometimes necessary to check our own perceptions against those of others, but unless we are particularly phobic about something, we should rely upon our own senses and experience OVER what others, and especially MEDIA, tell us. (There are extreme cases in which that doesn’t hold. Some people are delusional, and must not rely upon their own senses over what others tell them. For instance, anorexics at the edge of death from starvation may perceive themselves as fat while all the world sees them as emaciated. But such exceptions are rare and pathological.)
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Check everything you are told by everybody, including even me, against your own perceptions and experience.
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Sometimes media can give you information you cannot otherwise get. Sometimes media distort reality by exaggerating one thing over others. For example, local TV news is filled with violent crime, fires, traffic accidents, and natural disasters. If you take that view of the world as indicative of what your own life holds, you will live a fear-driven, paranoid existence. Yes, crime, fire, accidents, and natural disasters do occur, and they might strike you. But you can’t live EXPECTING disaster. Most of us in fact will NOT be murdered; our house will NOT burn down; we will NOT be killed or maimed in an automobile accident; we will NOT have our house swept away by a flood or tornado or earthquake.
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A friend recently warned me to take measures to keep the neighborhood raccoons from invading my house because rabies had been found on Long Island, dozens of miles from me, across two wide rivers. There hasn’t been a single reported case of rabies in raccoons in New Jersey in at least 23 years! One New Jersey man did die of rabies in 1997 — seven years ago — from a variant of the disease carried by bats, not raccoons. I am not going to worry about rabid raccoons in New Jersey any more than I am about an asteroid plunging from the sky to destroy my city. Or just my house.
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In case you didn’t know, NASA has identified some 602 Near Earth Asteroids of more than 1km in diameter, capable of causing planet-wide damage, and thinks there are probably another 400 they haven’t yet found. NASA even has a website devoted to “Asteroid and Comet Impact Hazards”.
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A few months ago, amateur astronomers detected what they thought was a substantial asteroid that might hit Earth within 36 hours, but didn’t know whom to notify. As it happens, one of them found a break in the clouds large enuf to enable him to establish that no collision would occur. But The Age, a newspaper in Australia, says: “No guidelines exist for who should have been informed and when and what emergency measures should have been taken if the threat had been real.” So an asteroid might plummet from the sky and wipe out all human life on this planet without your hearing so much as a word of warning!
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Now I’ve given you something else to worry about, if you’re so inclined. For my part, I’m not worrying about Global Warming, rabies, or asteroid impacts. You, however, should feel free to worry about anything you like.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:03 PM