"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors."

-Jonas Salk

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Warlord of Mars

Thanks to the Baron for noting this article on R-TX31 Congressman John Carter's website.
The Warmers are back.

They were thoroughly discredited just last year in the international "Climategate" scandal. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their pals from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in Great Britain were caught red-handed, through their own email communications, to have intentionally falsified the scientific data on which they claim that human activity is a leading cause of global warming. Further, they were found to have hidden their own research results that showed world temperature not rising, but actually falling over the past several years.

...

Global warming is simply a chicken-little scheme to use mass media and government propaganda to convince the world that destruction of individual liberties and national sovereignty is necessary to save mankind, and that the unwashed masses would destroy themselves without the enlightened global dictatorship of these frauds.

...

Every form of alternate energy should be researched and developed to the fullest extent possible, including solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal sources. We should encourage continued development of hybrid, natural gas, and total electric vehicles.

We don’t have to raise taxes or electric bills to do any of this. We don’t have to pass punitive new regulations on homes or businesses. We don’t have to kill hundreds of thousands of oil or coal industry jobs.

We don’t have to take anybody’s freedoms, or sacrifice one whit of U.S. sovereignty to any global entity to achieve these improvements for our environment or economy.

All of which is why the Warmers have fought against every one of these common-sense solutions for decades.
"Simply." I like that.

Remarkably, this fellow represents the mostly upper-middle class suburbs of Austin in Williamson county (along with a rural fringe heading NNW from there which is not very populated). Are people in Williamson County really so tolerant of this level of fantasy in their public representative?

To my pain and sorrow, an ambitious fellow who works for the Williamson County Republican Party did a presentation at the Austin Python User Group a few months back for his clever get-out-the-vote semi-automated phone call management software. It struck me as a very cynical effort, but the guy knew what he was doing both technically and politically. I suspect he would find nothing to object to in Carter's rant, not because he believes it, but because it apparently attracts more votes than it repels.

Maybe he's from Mars too.

And maybe the people who might think this is unreasonable aren't aware of it.

(Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5swAtWd96)

2 comments:

Toby said...

You can only wonder what these people will say when global warming becomes so obvious that it cannot be denied, except by complete nutcases. Well, ok, we have plenty of those - and the rest can be blamed on the Democrats.

Hank Roberts said...

> what they will say
Oh, they'll attack Michael Mann.
The founder notion (sigh).

Over at another site, perhaps overextending a digression, I posted this:

> Jefferson … Constitution
True, he was out of the country, and didn’t sign the first version.

But look what he did when he got back:
http://www.google.com/search?q=“Thomas+Jefferson”+constitution+amendment

Don’t mistake the first signed text for a foundation cornerstone that, if shaken, would shake everything built afterward.

Important early work gets amended and improved; that’s Jefferson’s explicit contribution there.

Yes, there are people who think a “founder” or a “foundation document” is something to defend unchanged — or to attack. Notice how that same idea comes up in climate, from people who don’t understand science.
-------

Then I read the news today. Ooohboy. Guess whose political platform says this?

"... honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers .... the permanent truths of our founding by keeping faith with the values our nation was founded on .... citing the specific constitutional authority upon which the bill is justified ...."

Yeah. The foundation/founder-is-all-important notion.

I refute it thus:

http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1000.htm

"... together, we shall be sure to cure the evils of our new Constitution, before they do great harm." --Thomas Jefferson to Alexander Donald, 1788. ME 6:426

And thus:

"Those who [advocate] reformation of institutions pari passu with the progress of science [maintain] that no definite limits [can] be assigned to that progress. The enemies of reform, on the other hand, [deny] improvement and [advocate] steady adherence to the principles, practices and institutions of our fathers, which they [represent] as the consummation of wisdom and acme of excellence, beyond which the human mind could never advance." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:254