Al Gore likens fight against climate change to fight against Nazi Germany

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as that from Hitler.

You don’t need to read the rest of the article.  It’s just the same ol’ Al Gore.  But I sympathize.  I suppose it would be difficult to waltz into the UK and persuade the British that climate change is as immediate a threat as German rockets randomly detonating in the city of London.  What a tool.

The House of Representatives today voted by a very thin margin to enact cap and trade legislation that everybody agrees will directly increase costs of electricity and gasoline for every American, and indirectly increase the costs of everything we build, buy, sell, move or do.  The effect of this legislation is that living our lives and pursuing our dreams will get harder. Our unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be harder to enjoy.  Our daily lives will become more expensive.  We’ll have a tougher time giving our kids the opportunities that we’ve had.  We’ll have to work harder and longer in order to retire someday.  We’ll pay more for less.  Our best businesses will have to perform better just to stay competitive, and our marginal businesses will be pushed into failure.  Jobs will be lost.  Our Representatives are building speed bumps for everybody.

Why?  Because some people believe that humans are causing “climate change” by emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses.  The climate on the planet has always changed.  There have been ice ages.  There have been warm periods with massive desertification.  There have been intense solar cycles, and there have been times when the sun is very inactive.  There have been volcanic eruptions that toss so much shit into the air that it cools the entire planet for decades.  The last ten years have been remarkable in the LACK of evidence for a change in global temperature, but for some reason the House had to pass this bill with little debate TODAY.

The skepticism over man-made global warming has been swelling for years. Other countries are backing off on their prior climate change policies.  Other countries have NO plan to limit their own potential by enacting this kind of suicidal regulatory regime.  China’s economy is a fraction of the size of America’s, but they emit massive amounts of carbon.  They have no plan to change that, whereas we are on the road to unilaterally crippling ourselves.

This insanity is not new.  We add corn to our gasoline to protect the environment, when it actually reduces engine efficiency, causes engines to fail early, pits food sources against energy sources and drives up costs, and the increased farming puts more pesticides into water supplies.  We buy ugly cars for more money, and the costs don’t offset until almost a decade after driving them under normal use.  Some people have been terrified into the idea that we’re killing ourselves with carbon dioxide by people who have personal stakes in companies that stand to benefit directly from passing legislation to “prevent” it.  If I told you your tits were going to fall off unless you rubbed them down with my special sauce, you’d call bullshit.  But Al Gore makes himself a PowerPoint presentation and everybody’s bowels explode.

The first motive is money.  Political elites have set up a system in which they control the supply of a commodity THAT DOESN’T EXIST, and then tell you you have to buy it or they’ll fine you and make you buy it anyway.

The second motive is envy.  Pointy-headed intellectuals and politicians who think they’re smarter than everybody else, but who have never created or produced anything in their lives, look at the capitalist system and private sector as cheap and materialistic, but they want a piece of that wealth for themselves.  So they spend their lives tearing them down and enacting public policy that transfers private wealth into their public coffers, so that they can give it to who they believe is more “deserving” of it, people who they “approve” of.

The most important motive is power.  Stripping money and influence and power from individuals and from private organizations and funneling it into community organizations and massive, unaccountable government bureaucracies and labor unions and nationalized industries puts THEM in control of the means of production.  THEY control who gets wealthy, THEY control what gets made, who makes it, how it’s used.

Why are environmentalists and their organizations almost exclusively liberal, if not utterly Marxist?  It’s because they see the environmental cause as a route to the acquisition of power.  They see it as a way to instill fear.  Fear causes people to make bad decisions.  And bad decisions are how free people willingly surrender their individual rights.  If you can get people to believe that the world is coming to an end, that its their fault, that they’re going to lose their jobs and their health care, that bankers and Jews are causing it, and then present them with a clean, articulate, hip black friend who can read a teleprompter like nobody’s business and convince them that he has all the answers to their fears?  It’s like shooting poorly-educated, Obama-voting fish in a barrel.

The only way we can prevent this nightmare scenario from unfolding is to get the Senate to stop it.  If I may be coarse for a moment, call or write your goddamned Senator for once in your life.  They might not listen, particularly if you live in an intellectual wasteland like Washington State, but your conscience will be intact, and you and I can share a beer and a hearty laugh together when the bastards are voted out.

Yours,

kodewords.com

PS  Dave Reichert is a mental midget.  It might have only taken him thirty years to catch the Green River Killer, so kudos for that.  But today we all might as well be dead hookers for all Dave cares.  Screw that guy.

Today’s post was inspired by the following video:

This video, in turn, was probably inspired by Part 1 of The 5000 Year Leap: A Miracle That Changed the World.  The gist of the chapter in the book and the first part of the video is that the common understanding of “left” versus “right” is that it pits Communism and Socialism on one end of the political spectrum versus fascism and dictatorships on the other.  The problem here is that totalitarianism is the end result for both sides.  A more useful spectrum, as both sources point out, would be totalitarianism in all forms on the left versus no government—anarchy—on the right.

Communism, Nazism and Fascism are all authoritarian forms of government

One of the ways the common misunderstanding came about was due to rivalry between Germany and the USSR during World War II.  The Nazis were Socialists.  The Russians were Socialists.  They were both authoritarian, murderous regimes that stripped natural rights from individuals in favor of centralizing power in the state.  Philosophically, they were no different, but they both had the goal of controlling Europe.  The rivalry was about which nation would achieve control, not about how they would rule or the treatment of individual rights.  Casting the Nazis on one end of the political spectrum and the Communists on the other end was a clever way of distorting the issue and presenting a false choice.

The fact is that new deal progressives were fans of both.  They admired the central management, the consolidation of control in the hands of intellectuals, and the power of the cults of personality that were built up around Josef Stalin and Benito “Men are tired of liberty” Moussolini in particular.

Progressives and liberals have used this false interpretation of the spectrum with great success.  They cast big-government Democrats in the US as a happy-face, “were here to help” form of government that’s just looking out for the little guy.  They’re supposedly just left-of-center moderates who want just enough socialism to keep the disaffected and forgotten safe from the greedy capitalists.  On the other end, they cast Republicans as Hitler-like fascists, without bothering to actually define fascism.  Along with that came all the baggage that went along with Nazism:  racism, anti-semitism, and jack-booted thuggery that terrorized people with the idea that government enforcers could break down your doors at night and arrest you if you were doing something that wasn’t approved of.  In fact, this interpretation couldn’t be any further from the truth.

The Founders Were Right Wingers

The spirit of the American revolution was built around the idea that people should be governed not by a centralized authority, but by a diverse, distributed form of government.  (Actually, that’s a massive oversimplification, but it suits the general thinking of the political leadership of the time.)  The first political framework that developed, the Articles of Confederation, clearly was an experiment that erred on the side of implementing as weak of a centralized government as possible—there was a ingrained mistrust of government authority.  Under the Articles, the federal government was able to pass legislation, but had no power to enforce it.  The federal government could not levy taxes, and could only request funding from the states (the states tended to not comply with those requests).  It had no power to regulate interstate commerce, so all lawmaking was left up to the states and there was no process for standardizing anything on a national basis.

The eventual development of the Constitution was basically an acknowledgement that the government set in place under the Articles was completely unworkable, and that the federal government had to be granted some power and authority.  But even then, the founders continued to carefully to limit that authority as much as possible.  The ninth and tenth amendments illustrate the idea that, when in doubt, the government should err on the side of individual rights, and that the federal government should defer to states in all cases except when its power and authority were specifically called out in the Constitution.

“Right Wingers” Are Continuing the Founders’ Legacy

So where does that leave us today?  Today’s leftists bristle at the the restrictions placed on the government by the Constitution.  The New Deal was an all-out assault on our founding principles, and its principle advocates believed that they could deliver a more “efficient” government if elite academic “dictators” (sort of like Barack Obama’s czars) were able to implement policy and “manage” the economy without oversight or approval.  FDR outright rejected the idea of limited government, and launched us down the road to socialism through Social Security.  He set out to undermine and nationalize private industries, particular utility companies.  He enforced price controls, production limits and set up the Federal Reserve System. 

The marginalization of the Constitution continues to this day, with a noble personage no less than Al Gore famously describing the Constitution as a “living, breathing document,” the implication being that nothing that’s written in it is set in stone, and whatever it says should be reinterpreted at the whims and fancies of the political elites of the day.  Barack Obama has whined that the Supreme Court hasn’t broken us free from the “essential constraints in the Constitution” and that issues of redistribution of wealth and “economic justice” haven’t been interpreted into the Constitution yet.  So you have the left wanting to expand the role of the federal government and centralize control of the country in Washington, DC, in spite of the essential Constitutional restrictions.

People on the political right, then, are the ones who believe in the timelessness of the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution, who believe in restoring limited government, and believe in inalienable individual rights as opposed to surrendering personal responsibility to centralize authoritarianism.  The Republican party and its leadership, however, are not the font of conservative thought or the motor behind the advancement of the philosophy, as the Democrat party is for its constituents’ ideas.  Rather, the Republican leadership rarely seems to have a coherent agenda or message.

Instead, the motor of conservative thought and action lies, as it always has, with the people, who to this day still hold certain truths to be self-evident.  People who believe that that we are endowed by our creator with inalienable rights are the ones who must stand up and lead, and not ever consent to being ruled.  The government is simply a body.  We must be its thinking, sensing, acting brain.

His scientists are rocking the boat.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12403

The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science.  The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

Meanwhile, he and his apostles are still assholes:

 

In his speech, Gore said we only have ten years to act before we will not have the ability to recover from environmental crisis.  He also said two and a half years ago that we only have ten years left.  I guess we’ve done something right since 2006 that’s extended our ability to survive.

But this time he means it, and it’s just a matter of time before we start eating each other.

Douchebags.