{"id":28446,"date":"2014-07-18T10:38:14","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T00:38:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/billmitchell.org\/blog\/?p=28446"},"modified":"2014-07-18T10:38:14","modified_gmt":"2014-07-18T00:38:14","slug":"friday-lay-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/billmitchell.org\/blog\/?p=28446","title":{"rendered":"Friday lay day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tIts my Friday blog lay day which today means a short blog day. Yesterday, July 17, 2014, the Australian government voted to scrap the Carbon Tax as the climate change denialists proved that the destiny of our nation is in the hands of those who are ignorant of reality. We shouldn’t be surprised by that. The abandonment of respect for knowledge in favour of sham works in favour of the financial and corporate elites who fund the political parties. Society used to value education. Now it rejects the research findings that educated people, who know far more about things in specific areas, in favour of views propagated by morons. I wasn’t a great fan of the Carbon Tax (I prefer regulative approaches aka telling the coal industry it has 20 years to close down, no questions), but Australia now has no official position on combatting global warming. That will make us the pariahs of the world in years to come.
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\nThe Guardian article this week (July 16, 2014) by Robert Manne, the former right-winger who has seen the poverty of that leaning – History will condemn climate change denialists<\/a> – captures what has been going on.<\/p>\n

Manne says:<\/p>\n

1. “For the past 200 years, western culture has granted science pre-eminent cultural authority. A quarter century ago, a consensus formed among contemporary scientists specialising in the study of the climate. The consensus comprised one principal idea: the primary source of energy on which industrial civilisation relied – the burning of fossil fuels – was dangerously increasing the temperature of the earth.”<\/p>\n

2. “Anti-science climate change denialism began with money cynically and strategically supplied by the massive American fossil fuel corporations. From there it spread to the powerful US network of neo-liberal “think-tanks” whose purpose was to produce the ideas helping to make the world safe for the wealthiest members of the society – the so-called 1%. And from the think-tanks climate change denialism steadily spread downwards to American society more generally, thanks to rabid right wing media like Fox News …”<\/p>\n

3. “As a consequence of the spread of climate change denialism, tens of millions of American citizens now base their opinions on the kind of pseudo-knowledge manufactured by the climate change denialist blogs and disseminated daily by the right-wing media.”<\/p>\n

4. “those without any genuine scientific understanding or training” are now considered by politicians etc as being “as qualified to form an opinion as professors who have devoted their lives to one of the disciplines of climate science.”<\/p>\n

5. “The right-wing denialists, now dominant within the Coalition, often call themselves conservatives. They are not. At the heart of true conservatism is the belief that each new generation forms the vital bridge between past and future, and is charged with the responsibility of passing the earth and its cultural treasures to their children and grandchildren in sound order. History will condemn the climate change denialists, here and elsewhere, for their contribution to the coming catastrophe that their cupidity, their arrogance, their myopia and their selfishness have bequeathed to the young and the generations still unborn.”<\/p>\n

Johnny Winter dead<\/strong><\/p>\n

The great US guitar player – Johnny Winter<\/a> – died on Wednesday (July 16, 2014) at the age of 70.<\/p>\n

Here is a great track – I’m yours and I’m hers – from Johnny Winter’s first album in 1969. He often played covers but this was one of his original efforts and is better for it.<\/p>\n