Krauthammer: Climate change is ‘superstition’ like ‘rain dance of Native Americans’
Often mispronounced “Coke” instead of Koch Brothers, do not be fooled. The brothers have assured me that the surname rhymes with “rock” and that if they wanted it to sound like a soft drink, they would spell it that way.
Author and Time magazine conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said earlier this week the belief in global climate change is a mere “superstition” akin to the “rain dance of Native Americans.”
Talking Points Memo reported on Krauthammer’s Tuesday appearance on the Fox News program “Special Report,” in which he said, “It’s always a result of what is ultimately what we’re talking about here, human sin with pollution of carbon. It’s the oldest superstition around. It was in the Old Testament, it’s in the rain dance of Native Americans — if you sin, the skies will not cooperate.”
The right-leaning pundit also attempted to cast doubt on Tuesday’s White House report stating that catastrophic climate change is already underway it the U.S. by claiming that scientists don’t really know yet if the phenomenon is real or not.
“Ninety-nine percent of physicists were convinced that space and time are fixed, until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not,” Krauthammer said. “I’m not impressed by numbers, I’m not impressed by consensus.”
According to research by NASA, 97 percent of climate scientists agree that the climate is steadily warming and that the pattern is due to human activities that increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Krauthammer then resorted to a popular conservative canard, the conflation of weather and climate. Because the weather is unpredictable, he said, all of the charts and graphs and evidence that points to global climate change can’t be used as predictive models.
“Because in the case of climate,” he said, “the models are changeable and because climate is so complicated, the idea that we who have trouble forecasting what’s going to happen on Saturday in the climate could pretend to be predicting what could happen in 30, 40 years is absurd.”
Watch video about this story, embedded at Raw Story .
Impious Political Analysis
Sometimes you have to step back, take a deep breath, and count to ten before typing. I had to take a few days. It takes a better class of man, I suppose, to weather such a deliberate affront to his intelligence and to remember that this man is your brother, that he is misinformed and that behind the lapse in logic is a weakness common to us all, a cognitive dissonance, our inability to face hard and disturbing facts that challenge our basic world view of what constitutes good and evil, and what side we have fallen on. It takes a better class of man, I suppose, to remember these things, smile, and simply say “It’s okay. I disagree, my friend, but let us just leave it at that.”
You might say I strive to be that man.
You might say that, but you would be wrong.
That said, let me just add, in my own unpolished way, that God damn this is one stupid motherfucker. His mother should have swallowed, or bought the dog a condom. First of all, Krauthammer says “I’m not impressed by numbers, I’m not impressed by consensus.” But let’s see a show of hands: who wants to impress Krauthammer, when one’s first instinct is to ignore him or kick him in the face? On the cognitive and moral level, this is the type of man that will look at the ecological disaster caused by an oil spill and tell you, with a straight face, that it is not man made but an act of God. He might tell you, with a straight face, that a man who killed himself by sitting in his garage with the car running didn’t die from monoxide poisoning but from something else if it risked putting the petroleum industry in a negative light, as this would be proof that vehicle emissions can be deadly at high enough levels. The hole in the ozone layer is superstition to this guy as well, being evidence of a greenhouse effect.
Then there’s his reasoning. If scientific consensus doesn’t impress him, why is he impressed by the consensus that supported Einstein after he introduced his Theory of Relativity? There is actually more proof of global warming as a man-made phenomenon then there is for the more esoteric and as yet untestable or controversial aspects of Einstein’s theory, including the assertion that nothing can travel faster than light.
Speaking of consensus, I suppose his antagonism toward scientific consensus is understandable, given that a vast majority of scientists consider Krauthammer a moron.
In other fields, he fares little better: the consensus among psychologists is that he is at best a semi-articulate sociopath and pathological liar.
The consensus among geneticists is that he is a possible human/chicken hybrid; a Nazi experiment and a crime against humanity.
Even among mad scientists, the same he cites to counter global warming evidence, the consensus among a delegation that went to his summer home on The Island of Dr. Moreau is that “Dr. Moreau just went too fucking far” in breeding Krauthammer, and that his island of mutant “Beast Folk” should be forever quarantined.
Of all the pseudo-intellectuals and corporate apologists, this repugnant Koch-sucker annoys me the most; mostly because he’s insipid but also because, frankly, look at him: he looks like a chicken. To quote a more respectable social commentator, Bender Rodriguez, “He looks like his neck stepped in something.” Like George Will, David Gergen,or any of the glorified copywriters passing off as thinkers on the Koch Brothers’ roster of disinformation whores, the saddest part is that they are never funny, never say anything interesting, deep or inspiring. Their writings have all the originality and compelling insight of a prescription insert.
It’s almost funny how cable news producers expect viewers to look at these guys, and ponder their words with solemnity and gravity simply because they’re on FNC, MSNBC, ABC or CBS. You know who does that? little kids who watch their favorite singers talk about any given subject on television shows. They’re impressionable. They parrot and emulate idols. But the weak link for pundits is that none of them are idols for the erudite and impassioned who change the world, people who are trained to learn by examining empirical evidence and not merely memorizing the opinions of so-called “authority” figures they see on cable news. For the truly educated, pundits are distractions and clown shows. For the former, the most common thing you ever hear in regards to television punditry’s self-important pronouncements is just “who gives a fuck?”
These are propagandists defined, for that is the role of television pundits, and they have to write their own fan letters. If not, they are reduced to having PR agencies hire poor Indonesian kids to write them on the same “click” farms where Facebook manufactures their “like” numbers. The only time you hear about these pedants is when they do something like this; when they say something so stupid and offensive people actually start to talk about them, but for all the wrong reasons.
Proof of their uselessness and waning or absent influence is that you never see them quoted in internet memes because nobody looks up to them, despite an inescapable television presence and countless books and syndicated columns. Nobody looks up to these idiots, nobody worth knowing. As such, I will do Krauthammer a favor, and make a meme for him. Now he has a meme to celebrate his contribution to the national dialogue on climate change.
Here you go, Chicken Lips, your very own internet meme:
You’re welcome, Charles. Now be a dear and make your way to where somebody gives a fuck, take a gallon of fuel with you, and self-immolate. But first, kindly redeem yourself, and put me in your will. I will donate the inheritance (some of it) to poultry rights activists.
KOCH BROTHERS EXPOSED: 2014 EDITION [Full Film]
Here’s the guys Krauthammer diddles himself (itself?) to: the money behind the global warming septic skeptic tanks.
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