"I smoked a few Jews but I never got Cancer or caused Global Warming" : Serial Denial

Deny, Deny, Deny

Just what is it about the sight of smoke rising in the air that makes some people want to totally deny it (right in front of many people who have also witnessed the same smoke) and why do they think they can get away with it ?

People have steadfastly denied that any Aktion T4 victims and Holocaust victims were murdered , let alone then burned, even in the very towns where the smoke - and unique odour of human flesh - was evident every day for years for all the residents to see and smell.

People have steadfastly denied that their smoking causes harm to others in Bierpalasts so filled with cigarette smoke that other people in the beer hall can hardly see or breath without coughing, while their eyes and throat burn in pain.

People have denied that their industrial activity caused any harm to others in Ruhr valleys so filled with potent, acidic, smoke that you could hardly see enough to see that it had markedly eroded brand new steel and brick structured in mere days.

So why should we be surprised when people today deny that all our rising smoke (and the carbon in it) is so severely polluting the atmosphere that we will turn this rotating globe into a "shake and bake oven" in a hundred years - with no one left - finally - to deny that human smoke had anything to do with it....

Why are we STILL teaching kids "FLAT EARTH" geometry ?

   Parallel Lines of Longitude : what lines ? Aren't parallel lines supposed to never meet , but don't parallel longitudes actually meet - at our North and South Poles ?
    What in the name of all public school math is going on here?

    Forget public educational authorities bowing to political correctness pressure from those who deny human carbon pollution of the atmosphere and that species evolve over time.
    Most of us believe the world is not flat but a sphere - a blue sphere - we've seen the photos of it taken out in space.
   But the math we teach in school comes across like it was handed down on tablets of stone to Moses.
   (Along with Commandant 11: "Thou shall not claim that fossil fuels will ever run out, though you also deny that fossils ever did run about.")
  It is called Euclidean Geometry and it has the outstanding advantage of being simple to demonstrate on a classroom chalkboard and thus in making even ho-hum mathematicians seem god-like.
   Where it isn't at all simple to demonstrate, is out in the physical world.
  Out there it is not actually correct  or true - at least not true like a law carved out on stone and handed down to you by G.O.D. Himself should be.
  It is actually a 'quick and dirty', 'close enough for the P. Eng', type of rough and ready 'field math'.
  Fail to believe, oh Earthling ?
  Take your bog-ordinary orange -- it looks a lot like the Earth - which it should as both are spheres or balls.
   Score it around the equator and then from North Pole to South Pole and back again - then turn it horizontally 180 degrees and again score it from Pole to Pole and back.
  You now have divided the Earth-cum-orange's surface into 8 equal parts: triangles.
  Or are they ?
   A triangle, as your dimly remembered High School teacher was always quick to remind you, is such that all of its internal angles always add up to180 degrees.
  Measure those 1/8ths of an orange carefully and then reflect.
  Don't add up to 180 degrees do they ?
  Welcome to the incredibly useful world of non-Elucidean math : the math of measuring land for land sales on this sphere we call Earth.
   Well, actually, unless the piece of land is very big indeed we are unlikely to note the error in measurement if we don't use non-Elucidean geometry.
   But it is there and it matters , or should matter, to the two thousand years of mathematicians who failed to even notice the error let alone chose to ignore it.
  Yep, the would-be "Masters of the Universe" turned out to be "The Gang who Couldn't Measure Straight "!
   Elucidean math is incredibly useful --- and long may we ordinary joes and josephines continue to use it in our ordinary daily lives.
   But let us also hear from the world's collected mathematicians a big and sincere apology, a sort of scientific Truth and Reconciliation, over them foisting Euclid's Geometry upon us and upon themselves as the only,the only possible, presentation of  physical reality.
   Yeah - as if that is likely !
    As if highly educated mathematicians are going to admit to us that they didn't notice the math implications of the fact that the world was round, long after even uneducated peasants knew it was round.
   If stuff like this gets around, then where will their pensions and their prestige be ....

Commensality is NATURE's globalization...

   Usually we think of Globalization as a 'hands up' affair.
   "Hands up, are we more opposed or more in favour of further globalization?"
   In this light, globalization is seen strictly as a man-made affair, a choice we decide to make.
   But the really important globalization, the globalization ancient beyond all time, Nature's globalization, isn't a human choice --- it is simply something we are stuck in: Suck it up. Reality Bites. Deal with it.
   Think of it as Global Commensality.
  As all life dining at the only table, on the only lifeboat we have.
   Sure, we humans like to think we are responsible for the fallout from that nuclear test in the South Pacific than ended up falling on the grass the cow ate before we feed its milk to our kids in Northern Norway.
   But actually it was Nature's air currents sweeping around the world that deposited that radioactivity, just as it turns one nation's pollution into acid rain for another country.
  Nature's breezes are the ones that spread the ash and smoke from a southern Asian volcano's explosion's up into the atmosphere around the Northern hemisphere, giving its residents a year without summer---- or good enough harvests to prevent famine.
  Nature's breezes also transport ,willy-nilly, tough hardy tiny bacteria and fungus spores across oceans and continents.
   Birds and insects use those breezeways, to fly as far as from the south pole to the north pole.
   Both sometimes also carry unwanted microbes or chemicals from continent to continent, blithely bypassing any sort of Borders & Customs restrictions that humanity might impose.
   Ocean currents are equally successful at sending not just small creatures and microbes on floating matts of vegetation across vast oceans to new lands - they now send us other nation's plastic wastes
from 4000 miles away.
  Those currents don't just move horizontally across the oceans - we learn in school that they rise and fall vertically from the surface to the deepest depths and vice versa --- creating the great food chain of the ocean by exchanging ocean floor mineral nutrients for surface biological waste nutrients.
  El Nino and El Nina, those regular alternations in ocean surface water temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific (a place where far less than 1% of us have ever even passed through, let alone visited) have the most amazing consequences around the world.
  For some it half a world away, it means dire droughts (or floods) and the real threat of famine.
  As for the rest of us, it means higher or lower rain and snow fall and our local storms rise and fall in intensity and number.
   Every inter-regional wind system from hurricanes to Trade Winds to  Jet Stream are twisted askew.
   To all of us, it means a rise and fall in the price of fish all over the globe as the upwelling of nutrients that feeds fish growth rises or falls --- a clear example of climate globalization affecting economic globalization.
   Tectonic Plate Movements aren't usually thought of as part of globalization - but they are. That volcano in Indonesia that dusted the skies over England was part of the clash and crash of tectonic plates of course.  
  More importantly, those massive plates are anything but equal in shape and size and location.
   They are constantly moving - moving closer to the
warm equator or closer the cold poles - and since land and ocean deal with incoming sunshine differently, that incessant movement constantly , slowly, changes the climate that feeds us all  -----in an unequal and unpredictable fashion.
   Fertile Crescents can become un-fertile deserts in a few thousand years - that is very much Time on a human scale.
  In addition, when those plates move closer to or further from each other, they change the shape of the passages between oceans and part of oceans (seas and bays) and this changes the direction and strengths of the big ocean currents - such as the well known Gulf Stream.
  We can imagine what that might mean !
   But we haven't even got into the biggest globalization processes of them - those great cycling backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, of Life's key nutrients : ,water, oxygen, carbon, useable nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, iron.
   The human crisis caused by our carbon polluting the atmosphere shows us that this one action can affect all life : commensal globalization.
   By way of closing, let us contrast this with one of the central tenets of that great counter-romantic ideology, Modernity.
  In the great 'dance of the dialectic', Modernity never the less took up one of the streams of Romanticism that it sought to oppose: the one that insisted that nation's character emerged in part from the very molecules of the nation's soil incorporated into the nation's food and ultimately the nation's citizens.
   "Blood and Soil" .
  Admittably it was usually coached a little less blatantly than that, but in fact that was its essence.
   Global Commensality insists ,by contrast, that very little of the local topsoil stays actually stays local for  very long - always it is on the way to somewhere else , on its way to becoming something else.
   Credit to Charles Lyell : Reality on Earth is a constant, steady, rapid low grade flux, integrated on top of great extremely slow cycles, ever circling back on themselves.
    Discredit to Lyell as well : each iteration of the great cycles is actually also different from the one before it and after it.
    Complexity on top of complexity on top of complexity.
    Compared to Nature's globalization , human globalization is beginning to look like a piece of cake....

DOOMERS versus DENIERS : they're already killing each other

   Any reader of the media can't help but notice the increasing number of fatal collisions between tiny compact cars and great big pickup trucks.
   We do need pickup trucks filled with tools and supplies to make our economy run - but how many of these like-shiny-brand-new 5 year old pickups are bought just to drive the He-man of the family to and from his desk job ?

   Many of us have friends (we'll call them DOOMERS) who are convinced that carbon pollution is fouling the atmosphere and killing the planet ---- but they still keep on driving a carbon-spewing car instead of walking or taking a bus  --- but to make amends, they buy a car as small as possible.
   Other of our friends (they, we will call DENIERS) are 'scientific libertarians' ---- loudly denying the setting of any limits or restraints on their personal and economic behavior ---- they have responded to the looming carbon pollution disaster by deliberately buying the biggest, heaviest, highest pickup truck they can afford.
   Thumbing their two ton noses at the DOOMERS.
   Unfortunately this means that car accidents, when they occur, are more likely to be fatal - at least to the DOOMERS - the DENIERS usually get away with scratches.
   How many lives would be saved, how many won't lead miserable and expensive lives in a wheelchair the rest of their lives, if only more of us gave up on cars ?
   Does Christianity and Cars ever mix ? Ditto for other ethical religions.
   One car wonder what pickup truck St Luke the Physician drives...

AstroTurfing the upcoming HOLOCAUST

   Front Organizations, Fellow Travelers , Duped Journalists : it is all beginning to sound familiar, in a vaguely 1940s sort of way.

   Your parents might recall all those spontaneous grassroots organizations that grew up overnight like crabgrass, the Popular Front for this or that, but which always turned out to be secretly funded and organized by those "who dare not speak their name".
   The Potemkin Villages set up for easily duped reporters, where everyone was happy, everyone was always smiling.
   Well it's back ---- different whines of course, but in surprisingly old bottles.
   It's the DFHs , the dreaded DENIERS-FOR-HIRES and the LFHs (LIARS-FOR-HIRE).
   And it's all those artificial grassroots (aka astroTurfed) organizations.
   Set up by those who, in popular science terms, are furious someone might deny them their right to deny any possible curbs or limits on their desire to terraform the world and the universe for profit and glory.
   Who says that the WHITES can't learn from the REDS ?
   Massive propaganda campaigns preceded both Hitler and Stalin's efforts to kill tens of millions of their imagined enemies.
   The propaganda stakes are just as high in this century's war, still as yet, Thank God, a shouting war only.
    Citizens who accept that there are limits to humanity's powers over reality will soon be facing off against those citizens who see a technical fix for every problem that they themselves create.
   When the false majority of humanity who say "we believe that human carbon is polluting our atmosphere" starts breaking down ------after seeing the stiff new taxes on carbon required to reduce that "carbon pollution" ---- you can expect to see the emotional debate heat up faster than the atmosphere is ...