Assault on Reason - by Who? Is it Al Gore's Bio?

Al Gore’s assault on democracy

An excerpt from Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason”:

American democracy is now in danger — not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

The assault on democracy began on Nov. 8, 2000. An hour after Gore conceded the election to George W. Bush, Gore called back to renege. Gore was not going to accept that he had been defeated in the closest election ever.

Gore’s assault dragged the electoral process through the mud of litigation that only served to divide the nation. The vote count in Florida was remarkably accurate — better than 99.9% accurate.

To this date, Al Gore has yet to cede the election, much less apologize to the nation for his rash and disturbing behavior.

Instead, he has spent the last 6 years preaching gloom-and-doom about the environment, while personally burning carbon credits on unnecessary flights in gas-guzzling private jets and setting his mansion’s consumption at 10 times the energy use of a normal American.

Oddly enough, President Bush has an eco-friendly home that uses geothermal energy and rainwater. Bush’s consumption is one-quarter that of the average American.

Yet Gore dares to demonize the president.

In fact, that is all one can expect from this child of wealth and privilege who grew up in the nation’s capital. He was a Fortunate One, a senator’s son. I would not be surprised if he were a bully at the Albans School.

More here ....

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/2007/05/17/al-gores-assault-on-democracy/

Gore vs. Corcoran: Climate Change or GORE-bal Swarming?

Gore vs. Corcoran: Climate Change or GORE-bal Swarming?

Saturday, July 28, 2007 - from National Post
Is Gore Right [That's a laugh:he's Left!] or Corcoran?

IS CLIMATE CHANGE A LOOMING CATASTROPHE? OR A LEFT-WING FRAUD?

Terence Corcoran writes in the National Post "Don't believe Al Gore: Global Warming is a Crock!

He says, "Before we get to the climate change chapter of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, we need to know a bit more about the whole book. It helps put the climate stuff in perspective.

When the climate chapter refers to the "massive and well-organized" campaign of "lavishly funded" disinformation on climate change, backed by "wealthy right-wing ideologues," Gore is merely imposing the big theme of his book on the climate issue.

It's not a new theme. It's the same old leftist paranoia Noam Chomsky has been dispensing for decades: the idea that the media are tools of corporate-capitalist control used by power-hungry groups to undermineand destroy American democracy.

The Assault on Reason, now a bestseller, is a tour de force irrational rampage through the U.S. political system, a pseudo-intellectual pastiche of distorted history, context-dropping quotations, bizarre economic theory, and misrepresentations. Climate change is just a side issue to the book's major objective, which is to portray the United States as a country under the heel of power-hungry cabals of corporate and political interests. Gore calls it a "coalition of right-wing religious extremists and exceptionally greedy economic special interests."

The big theme is that Iraq, U.S. energy policy, climate issues, the Bush presidency and all that is wrong with the world can be pinned on the media. The Internet may eventually save us, but until that happens all citizens are at the mercy of electronic corporate power.

It all began, says Gore, with radio. Stalin, Mussolini, Adolf Hitler -- what do these totalitarian dictators have in common? "Each one mobilized support for his malignant, totalitarian ideology by using the powerful new medium for mass communication: radio."

In the United States, however, government "legal constraints" prevented abuse of radio through most of the last century. But "these constraints were removed during the Reagan administration in the name of 'free speech', and the results have been horrendous." Aha! So Ronald Reagan, that old totalitarian, is the culprit. And now radio, along with television, are controlled by the evil coalition. "One of the most obvious and dangerous consolidations of power has formed in the media, where powerful conglomerates have used their wealth to gain more power and consequently more wealth." Whew.

Now the climate chapter falls into place. These same wealthy right-wing ideologues loom over the climate issue. To prove this, Gore rehashes the trivial nonsense stories about ExxonMobil that are now part of the lore and mythical fabric of climate policy debate.

First we have the allegation that "one of the front groups" funded by Exxon had offered US$10,000 to each scientist who would produce a "pseudostudy" disputing climate science. This phony allegation surfaced in the left wing Guardian newspaper last year. It was based on a plan by the American Enterprise Institute to pay a group of scientists and contributors -- as it often does --an honorarium of US$10,000 to examine key climate issues.

Exxon's role? AEI's total revenues over the last seven years exceeded US$160-million, of which Exxon contributed less than 1% as part of its routine funding of foundations and think tanks. Gore's version of the Exxon science payoff is just a lazy rehash of climate activist dirty tricks. (For a full review of the AEI-Exxon story, search Google under "Scenes from the Climate Inquisition.")

Another dirty trick is the Royal Society's alleged role in rapping Exxon. Gore makes it sound like the full force of the society was brought down on the company. In fact, the society itself never really said anything about Exxon.

What happened was this. Bob Ward, then chief flak with the Society, was leaving the organization to take a new job elsewhere. A few weeks before his departure, he personally sent a letter to his corporate affairs counterpart at Esso UK Limited, a man named Nick Thomas. In the letter, flak to flak, Mr. Ward unloaded a lot of his personal concerns and first-person observations on what he viewed as Exxon's climate science failings. Mr. Ward, a clever manipulator if ever there was one, then leaked his own letter, again to the Guardian, the day before he resigned from the Royal Society. This created a sensation and established the now mythic Royal Society put-down of Exxon--even though it amounted to nothing more than a personal screed from a Royal Society employee who was about to jump ship.

Gore also repeats the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) charge that Exxon "funneled" nearly US$16-million over seven years to 43 advocacy organizations. That would include the US$1.6-million to AEI mentioned above. All other organizations would have received an average of US$330,000. Even the UCS described this as a "modest" funding effort -- and a far cry from the "massive" and "well organized" and "lavishly funded" crusade described by Gore. It's also peanuts compared with the billions and billions funnelled by governments to climate change promotion.

The Frank Luntz anecdote is another bit of recycled material from the trivia-laden war chest of climate activists. No doubt Luntz, a political strategist of the highest cynical caliber, actually did urge politicians to emphasize scientific uncertainty. So what? A larger number of strategists likely urged the opposite. Luntz is just another guy with advice on playing public opinion.

Gore's climate chapter -- including its brief notes on hurricanes, polar ice caps and other climate phenomena -- is a sloppy collage of false material and loose summaries of reports and stories.

In a later section of the climate chapter, not reproduced here, climate gets the full Gore treatment. He ties all his themes together in a typical total irrational meltdown. After a review of Hurricane Katrina as a climate event, Gore connects the dots between the unconnectable. "We were warned of an imminent attack by al-Qaeda; we didn't respond. We were warned the levees would break in New Orleans; we didn't respond. Now, the scientific community is warning us of the worst catastrophe in the history of human civilization."

When you think about assaults on reason, it doesn't get any worse than that."

If you wish to write to Terence, use his publicly published email address tcorcoran@nationalpost.com

Cold or Hot, it's Always Our Fault

Lorne Gunter writes in the National Post on Monday, July 23,

"If you haven't been following Lawrence Solomon's brilliant, reader-friendly Financial Post series on the scientists who are skeptical of the coming global warming crisis, you really must check it out. It's called Climate change: The Deniers, and there is a link to the 29 profiles he as written so far on the National Post's homepage. (Go to www.nationalpost.com, and scroll down to the "Current Features" section.)

In one instalment -- Forget warming -beware the new ice age -- published in June, Lawrence reminds readers that as recently as the 1970s, the scientific consensus was that earth was entering a new ice age.

If geological history is any guide, we're long overdue for one. And in the 1970s, the world was in the throws of a 30-year phase of especially cold weather. So naturally, scientists put two and six together and came up with impending disaster.

Politicians appointed high-level international commissions to determine when and how bad the coming peril would be. Extensive reports were funded citing this or that disaster as proof of an approaching deep freeze. The popular press was quick to run alarming stories about the disaster that awaited mankind.

In 1975, Newsweek ran a feature story entitled The Cooling World, the first sentence of which insisted: "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production -- with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth."

Extreme weather would increase. Drought would grip huge regions of the planet. Crops would fail and tens of millions would starve. Wars would be fought over diminishing resources.

And the evidence for all this? Well, according to Newsweek it had "begun to accumulate so massively" there was no denying it. The scientific world had spoken. Don't bother to voice alternative theories.

Sound familiar?

Reading Lawrence's piece, though, I was struck by another similarity between the alarmism then and now: The proof for each was/is almost entirely circumstantial.

In theory, both global cooling and warming are possible. But all we can see are potential effects. We then look backwards to determine if we can discern a cause.

The scientists and activists who believe the globe is currently warming dangerously don't have any direct proof that carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases are the cause. They merely have a stack of potential consequences that they have convinced themselves amount to incontrovertible proof.

Today, effects such as big hurricanes, spring heat waves, rising levels of atmospheric CO2 and melting polar ice are pointed to as proof that a single cause (man-made carbon emissions trapping solar energy in the atmosphere) exists. As Lawrence reminds, in the 1970s the effects that were used to "prove" the cause included a killing winter freeze in 1972-73, followed by a severe summer heat wave in the United States, "anomalously low precipitation in the U.S. Pacific Northwest during the winter of 1972-73," the failure of the Soviet wheat crop in 1972, the failure of the Peruvian anchovy harvest the same year, even changes in Pacific ocean currents that scientists had never before seen.

So why, in the absence of direct proof, is the UN, along with thousands of scientists and environmentalists worldwide, currently so adamant that our activities -- humans' --are causing a climate meltdown?

British filmmaker Martin Durkin, whose documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle has already aired in the U.K. and Australia (and will soon be available here on DVD), thinks it is because "global warming is first and foremost a political theory." [Editor:as we told you here on Windbag-Energy, this is further evidence of what we call "GLOBAL SWARMING" like bees leaving a hive gathering together in a giant swarmball!]

Those who buy into it -- including most scientists who back it -- have a particular worldview that Durkin believes can be "summed up in the oft-repeated phrase 'we consume too much.' " He calls this "backward-looking bigotry," and claims it has "found perfect expression in the idea of man-made climate disaster. It has cohered a bunch of disparate reactionary prejudices (anti-car, anti-supermarkets, anti-globalization) into a single unquestionable truth and cause."

In other words (mine, not Durkin's), global warming has become the new locus for those who believe government is the solution to all ills, and central planning the preferred tool. [Editor: Does this sound familiar? Isn't that what socialism or communism is all about? The idea that inefficient government can decide what is best for you and I?]

When they look back through the stack of global warming consequences, they don't want to see any natural explanations. The sun, cosmic rays, cloud development and so on, cannot be controlled by Ottawa or the UN.

So they have grasped (and cling tenaciously to) a theory that might explain the science and favours their bias toward big-government solutions."


If you wish to communicate with Lorne, used his public email address: lgunter@shaw.ca

[Editor:Ominous stormclouds portending that the old communism and the new socialism are not yet dead! Why do we have so much trouble believing that individuals should make choices about their lives, instead of government? Doesn't this sound strikingly hypocritical considering the mantra "a woman should have the say about her own body" but we cannot choose how to live?

Which do we believe? Individual choice or what is supposedly good for humanity? Can government appeal to our positive sides to work toward being more environmentally-friendly or do they have to FORCE us by legislation to do so? Perhaps we don't have a good side and are too stupid to see "impending disaster"? Isn't it time we expose political hypocrisy? We cannot have it both ways:heavy-handed government intervention in everything or 'encouragement legislation' to reward steps toward being greener. It's time to decide! I can just see it now. The next disaster theory will be that 1/2 of the world is going to be too hot and the other half will be veering toward an ice age. There you have it global swarmists:start finding circumstantial evidence without cause for this GLOBAL CRISIS!]


Please feel free to comment unless you have nothing to say.
Photo by Charles Pedley

WINDBAG-ENERGY AWARD NUMBER THREE goes to MICHAEL MOORE

Welcome to the WINDBAG-ENERGY CLUB MICHAEL!

While Michael Moore produces Mikumentaries masquerading as documentaries, real life goes on outside of his fantasy-land brain. Obviously Michael was born to be a Hollywoodian as his films, fueling the foolish or the hate-deluded, deserve top honours in our WINDBAG-ENERGY AWARDS!!!

You may wonder, "Why did we pick Michael Moore?" Fantasy is what Hollywood knows best and it is clear that Michael deserves HIGH HONOURS for depicting fantasy as reality. In fact if Orson Welles had not done it, then Michael Moore WOULD HAVE! The difference being that Orson Welles was using only sound to herald the destruction of earth, while MM videologs his imaginations and holds them out as fact. The simple and the hate-Bushers, quiver at the very news of another Michael Moore "reduction" [as opposed to PROduction] called "Sicko". NO! NO! I did NOT say it was his autobiography. You jumped the idea gun!

While Michael Moore obviously is in need of prayer or counselling to help him view reality, his latest film, Sicko apparently is already making the internet rounds. I have not seen it. It is reported to have such widely-known "FACTS" as the one in London, Ontario where he notes that NOT A SINGLE PATIENT HAS WAITED more than 45 minutes in a hospital emergency room.

Meanwhile, in real life, Canadian Lindsay McCreith would have to wait FOUR MONTHS JUST TO GET AN MRI and months more to see a neurologist for his MALIGNANT BRAIN TUMOUR. Finally frustrated and ill, the retired auto-body shop owner TRAVELS to BUFFALO, NEW YORK for a life-saving surgery! What ever happened to facts Michael? Remember truth is something that ACTUALLY HAPPENS, Michael!

Michael is using his talents to lobby for a health care system JUST LIKE my native CANADA where ACTUAL WAIT TIMES vary considerably from his film. Apparently the average Toronto patient receives care in an average time of 4 hours while 1 in 10 wait MORE THAN A DOZEN HOURS. It is reported by writer David Gratzer, that a Winnipeg relative nearly died of strangulated bowel while lying on a stretcher for FIVE HOURS, WRITHING IN PAIN.

The truth happens to be that private health care clinics are now opening in Canada at a rate of about ONE PER WEEK! Since Michael will never see this piece, he will continue to live in la-la land, spewing polluted facts into the stream of reality, and hoping that no one will ever subject his mind to a general checkup , where it is rumoured WAIT TIMES can LAST A LIFETIME!

[Charles Pedley, PRESS-for-TRUTH with credit to David Gratzer for his article in the National Post, Friday July 6, 2007]

Al Gore:my favourite Martian by Peter Foster

Windbag-Energy Award NUMBER TWO goes to AL GORE!

Peter Foster in the Financial Post wrote an interesting piece on "Al Gore: my favourite Martian"

It was subtitled, "(AL) GORE: extra-terrestrial in disguise?"

Apparently Al Gore has been using Venus as an example of climate change comparing Venus's 867 degree temp to Mercury which is much closer to the sun and has temperatures one-third that of Venus. The cause? Venus is a cloud-covered planet which Mr. Gore uses an example of greenhouse effect.

Only thing he forgot to mention is how THE VENETIANS GOT THEIR SUV'S AND FACTORIES BELCHING FORTH SMOKE IN AN AVERAGE TEMPERATURE OF OVER 840 degrees! So if Venus has that high a temperature from volcano eruption, then how is getting rid of your SUV and shutting down all our industries going to stop temperatures like that on Earth?

Here is what he says,

"Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids In fact it's cold as hell?" --Elton John, Rocket Man [Hey Elton, WHERE YOU GET YO FACTS MAN?]

Elton John won't be performing at next Saturday's Live Earth series of concerts, reportedly the biggest "charitable" music event ever. However, like his Rocket Man, the concerts' main promoter, Al Gore, has invoked life -- or rather its absence -- on another planet as relevant to our situation on earth.

In a piece in last Sunday's New York Times, Mr. Gore suggested that Venus is a valid reference point for the dangers of the enhanced greenhouse effect. Earth's average temperature is a balmy 59 degrees (Fahrenheit), that of Venus a metal-melting 867 degrees. Is that difference due to being closer to the sun? No, says Mr. Gore. Venus is three times hotter on average than Mercury, which is practically sitting on the sun! The culprit? "It's the carbon dioxide."

We might note, however, that there have been no reports that X-ray surveys of Venus's cloud-enshrouded surface have uncovered the remnants of coal-fired power plants or SUV factories. Venus's carbon dioxide is thought to come entirely from its volcanoes, indicating the awesome power of natural forces. That presumably isn't the conclusion Mr. Gore wants us to draw.

The Venus reference is important for reasons beyond its typical attempt to use scientific factoids to stoke hysteria. I have long maintained that Al Gore is in fact an extra-terrestrial in disguise, and I would suggest that there were too many other-planetary references in his Times piece for this to be any longer in doubt.

One of Mr. Gore's more earthling rhetorical techniques is to marshal the voices of the noble dead to his cause. In last Sunday's column, he elicited the unlikely support of Ronald Reagan, who once said, "I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."

Given that Mr. Gore is a prime example of psychological "projection" (He accuses George Bush of being obsessed with power and world domination!), should we perhaps call in the Men in Black? I have little trouble envisioning a scenario in which Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones confront Mr. Gore, whereupon he transforms into something with an exoskeleton.

Live Earth certainly represents a gathering of space cadets. It might be called An Inconvenient Truth: The Musical. Apart from Mr. Gore, its main organizer is Kevin Wall, an L.A.-based distributor of digital concerts. Mr. Wall, a veteran organizer of awareness-raising shindigs such as Live Aid and Live 8, claims that he was inspired to join Live Earth by seeing Mr. Gore's documentary. He subsequently changed his life by trading in his Mercedes for a Lexus Hybrid. Despite his admiration for Mr. Gore, Mr. Wall refers to him as "Mr. Rhythm," and acknowledges that he is "a little stiff." But then what do you expect when your inner alien is straining to escape?

Another straw in the solar wind: Mr. Gore reportedly wanted to turn out the lights all over Britain for a brief period at the time of the concert. Was this really an attempt to signal to his home planet? As it turned out, the plot was foiled when the operators of the National Grid pointed out that the power surge when the lights were switched back on might disrupt the entire system, possibly flat-lining hospital patients on life-support.

Live Earth's hypocrisy seems a little out of this world, too. Its stars are among the largest consumers of energy on Earth. They are, however, reportedly being given "green counselling."

Those of a Jacobin temperament have an extraordinary urge to consume their own, and sure enough Greater Moralists have rounded on Live Earth's fellow pop poseurs. Saint Bob Geldof raised a discordant note when he suggested the concert was pointless because "We are all f--king conscious of global warming." Roger "Talking 'Bout My Co-Generation" Daltrey, lead singer of The Who, noted that the concert would represent a waste of fuel. Matt Bellamy, front man for a band called Muse, described it as "private jets for climate change." Case in point, Madonna, who will headline the show in London, reportedly used 440 tonnes of CO2 on her Confessions tour last year.

Live Earth has inevitably spawned a welter of "carbon offsets" to compensate for its very existence. Still perhaps all the artists can get together to record inspirational titles such as "Do they know it's the apocalypse?" or "Hybrids are not enough."

While Live Aid and Live 8 perpetuated the notion that the underdeveloped world's problems are rooted in a failure to redistribute wealth generated in the West, we might still believe that its promoters' and participants' hearts were in the right place. Live Earth has much more dubious political underpinnings. One of the less-publicized is its role in boosting another run by Mr. Gore for the White House. Go to AlGore.org and you will find the "2008 Grassroots Draft Campaign," motto: "The People, Not the Powerful '08."

I hope that Will and Tommy Lee are keeping their weapons charged."