"Wrong said Fred" : how two guys named Fred killed more people than Hitler

Soon to be a blockbuster movie --- or a few more years off ?

I have said before, "just what is it about the sight of smoke that makes certain rigid personality types go so absolutely snakey ?"

(You know : all those serial deniers of Holocaust smoke, acid rain, cigarette smoke, ozone holes, global warming ,industrial pollution, on and on and on.)

I have to come think that it is because, in even in their cases where they have spent a lifetime successfully and rigidly throttled all conscious thought of their individual guilt, smoke is "sin made all too visible".

Ie, it functions as a kind of  industrial stigmata , that severely threatens their normally secure sense of selfness in ways they can't handle - so they lash out in all directions.....

The WICKED Rev Whewell and how the denier Skygods might just be doing us Earthlings a big favour

Breaking Up : for the Sake of the (human) Family...

"Boring" alert : I have been doing some heavy thinking. 

(The result of reading (via the ever-alert Mike at Watching the Deniers) of Graham Readfearn's account of how the deniers will soon be taking over Australia's government and education, from top to bottom.)

Yep,the deniers are breaking up Science: dividing it up into their science and our science.

And yet, in a strange sort of way, that is exactly as it should be - and as it as it should always have been.

The fact that it not, can be laid at the feet of that versatile, if wicked, polymath the Reverend William Whewell.

One of the many privileges of being a minister in the Established Church of England was to the ability to yoke two together, forever.

Between 1833 and 1840, the beastly Whewell did just that : forcing the unholy marriage between Natural Philosophy and Natural History and calling the spawn of this un-natural union by one word : Scientist.

Natural Philosophy goes under many names today, because all these names ( and sciences) contain bits of the core values of natural philosophy.

Theory-oriented science, lab/experimental science, production science, K-selected science , two-bodied science, Newtonian classical science, science of the First Law ( of Thermodynamics), linear (machine) science.

Natural History actually lives on, weakly, but many sciences also contains bits of its original values in their core.

Observation-oriented science, real world science, impact science, r-selected science, three (or multi) bodied science, Quantum science, science of the Second Law (of Thermodynamics), chaotic (garden) science.

Using Leo Marx's extremely useful metaphor of "The Machine in the Garden", we can see how these two original sciences should have worked against each other, for our and Nature's greater good.

Theory science is very good at creating new "machines"  in the laboratory for the betterment of humanity.

They do so at great ultimate cost, though.

By strictly, narrowly, focusing on only the new machine's invention and excluding all thought of the unexpected consequences when it is introduced into a chaotic, dynamic, resource-restrained real world, they merely postpone the inevitable.

Call them eternally cock-eyed optimists..... or deniers*.

(Albeit, only as deniers of material limits to human invention.)

Other kinds of personalities - call them worriers, doubters and yes, even, sceptics and cynics - are needed to discover and warn us about what happens when the shiny new machine leaves the Lily-white walled laboratory and heads out into the great big dirty, noisy, untidy, unpredictable, real world, aka the garden.

Skygod science and Earthling science are meant to clash - we only get their full benefit when they do clash.

Now, I will argue and you are free to disagree, that we earthlings do accept the right of production science to exist (pardon me while I check to see if my latest i-pod touch 4 is fully charged !)

But as well , we fully support the right of impact scientists to fully interrogate production science's impact upon the real world, for good or bad.

Reality ate my homework....

(Think of it this way : we earthlings think every teenage student should have the right to spout off whatever they want on the exam paper. But we also fully support the right of their teachers and parents to fact-check their work afterwards.)

Skygods do not : intellectually they are still the same 16 year old boys at the very back of the classroom who already know everything, and are bored beyond reason with futher schooling --- they see themselves as doers, not thinkers.

Despite this, they paradoxically take their old (pre-1970s) high school science teachers at their word (!).

  That word being there is only one kind of science and it's job is to produce and produce and produce an ever growing cornucopia of stuff : from biological food stuff to nuclear radioactivity stuff.

Deniers tell us that production scientists and their kindly employers can be fully trusted, by us the voter and consumer, to make sure nothing bad ever happens ; we promise -- this is why we are firing all those unnecessary interfering (impact) scientists that work for the government.

Deniers, very much against their own ultimate wishes (be very careful of what you ask for !), are busy taking us back to a pre-Whewell era when two sciences duked it out, with two opposing, alternative, visions of this single planet : skygod vs earthling.

Consider it my life's work to help the deniers tear Science apart : for the betterment of the world......

Modernity's star turn was impoverished Prussia ,not Manhattan's skyscrapers

Historical consensus to the contrary, America, Russia, Canada, China, Brazil, Australia were never full members of Modernity.

At best, they could only be hybrid members.

Modernity and the Enlightenment Project was premised upon Man's mind triumphing over matter ---- more importantly, "lack of matter".

Mind hardly gets a fair workout in vast lands rich in natural resources and with relatively small populations.

In America, it seemed you only had to trace a line in the Ohio soil and up would come corn and pigs.

By contrast, Germany  (Prussia really) and Japan - Germany in particular before WWII and Japan in the 1970s to 1990s - were small, natural resource poor, lands with large hungry populations and no vast overseas colonies ----- unlike the equally small British and French homelands.

Their initial triumph was a tribute to the power of Modernity's thesis.

Their subsequent failure, equally, marked its absolute failure....

CATO vs CASSE : skygod vs earthling , battling thinktanks

Duelling think tanks, on a flatlining planet....

The CATO Institute, spawner of the denier movement and of all mean things Koch-able, is a powerhouse in the think tank business worldwide.

(And man oh man is it ever a business.

 In most think tanks it provides steady, pensionable, profitable employment for wannabe academics who can't get tenure or peer-reviewed publication. A first rate sort of home for the second rate sort of thinker....)

And I can't think of an organization more worthy of being called the skygod of all skygods - the denier of deniers on all the biological and material limits that humanity must face up to and deal with.

By contrast,Brian Czech's  CASSE ,  the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy ,is virtually unknown outside a relatively small circle of friends and supporters ( albeit friends like David Suzuki and Herman Daly !)

I couldn't even seem to find it on Wikipedia, normally a fount of information on all things obscure.

(I might try seeing it I can edit a token bit about CASSE for Wikipedia and rely on the good will and bad bile of regular wikipedia editors to do it up right.)

But CASSE would seem the natural choice for becoming the planet's leading green think tank.

This is because the advocating a steady state economy is the ONLY thing that truly divides real Green parties from the pro-environment 'greenish' wings of the other parties who remain stubbornly and foolheartedly pro-bloat.

Any party or individual that advocates perpetual growth is really preparing mentally to abandon the Earth, once it is raped to resource-exhaustion, for other worlds.

But CASSE really seems to deserve the title of Earthling of the Earthlings.

Please support it - sign its petition and live and think and talk up a steady state economy.

Be 100% green - not 1% green.

Because 1% of anything might make you rich, but it won't make you happy....

The STEADY Party : re-birthing the Greens under a new banner

Greens, yes, but by an accident of history....

The Greens had no idea how vacuous  the term GREEN would become when they set about naming their various parties all those years ago.

And in fact few choose to call themselves Green in the earliest days.

Only after the German Greens' success, did the term get adopted holus bolus by other ecologist parties.

Even deniers claim to be a little bit green today.

Maybe its time then to get at the heart of the green movement and pick a name that no Liberal, Conservative or Socialist will take up, unless they give up 200 hundred years of their party traditions.

A STEADY party is probably swiftboat-proof,by name, anyway

A steady state economy oriented party might as well rename itself the STEADY party : pure and simple.....

Andrew Loog Oldham Svengali to Christine Milne ? Would you let your daughter marry a GREEN ?!

For once, don't blame  Fleet Street : it was they what got took !

To this day, most people think it was a British Tabloid editor at something like the Daily Mail (or worse) who first blared out the screaming 1965 headline, "would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone ?"

If was this headline, reproduced worldwide and then forever after, that most people agreed "made" the Rolling Stones.

Actually, the original tagline was from a series of ads ran by the canny manager of the Stones, youngster Andrew Loog Oldham, in a few music weeklies --- and only later picked up and improved upon by Fleet Street heavies.

Oldham was very young - even younger than the Stones and had never run a band before - was in fact too young to legally get a music agent's license, but he made up in street smarts what he lacked in age, experience, contacts or capital.

He was half Australian which might account for a good bit of his sheer brass. Who knows, maybe he is Down Under, visiting relatives, and offering pro bono advice to our Christine.

Anyway, back to the Stones --- itt was obvious too - in hindsight - that it was a father editor , not a mother editor, who reproduced the headline along with a frantically worried editorial.

No mother would be so daft : mothers - women - in fact know damn well that lots of nice girls love to go out with bad boys.

Particularly bad boys that good old Dad can't stand and forbids them to ever see.

Okay, now cue "The Nasty".

"The Nasty", head of the Australian Liberal (libertarian ) party, is ironically enough less a libertarian on social issues and rather more a wet blanket catholic of the most hair-shirted variety.

So naturally, "The Nasty" has taken the bait that the Green party leader Christine Milne (or someone a lot like her) has so carefully laid out for him .

He and his tame newspapers are off on a tear about all the evils that will prevail upon hapless morally-muddled Aussies if they dare to think of dating a Green.

Its a risky strategy "Nasty" - just listen to ole Rupert . His papers may have gotten a one day blip in circulation out of repeating the headline ,but it was the R. Stones who have been dining out on it ever since.

And frankly, "Nasty", if you have anything left after you tithe, I 'd take it out of shares in News Corpse and put it into Sticky Fingers, PLC.

My bet is that 10 years from now, they'll be worth a lot more than a few newspaper properties filled with rusting Big Iron and no customers.

And if someday, during your watch, the Green Horror ends up in Government or Opposition, prepare to blame yourself.

Voters are a lot like daughters : they don't always like being told what NOT to do ....

Aussie papers ask "Would you let your daughter marry a Green - they drink the blood of children you know"

"Earned Media", by the tonne, for Aussie greens

If a political party sells its soul to the rich and greedy, it can afford to obtain lots of "paid media" , by buying newspaper ads.

If the newspapers talk about your party without you paying for it, then it is called "earned media" .

Normally Green parties worldwide can't get either form of media.

But not for the Australia Greens for last few weeks - or for a few weeks more apparently.

It has been a two party punch-up on the Greens - the Labor party has teamed up with the Coalition-supporting daily media to go at the Greens on every possible point around the compass.

Far more extreme than the Communists, far more loonie than the Tea Party seems the thrust of the hundreds of articles against the Greens.

Millions of Australians are waking up, drinking coffee and reading papers and listening to radio and TV and learning for the very first time that the Greens are one of the serious parties - serious as in "feared".

I think the Coalition and Labor are going to regret this punch-up :
parties that are joked about or ignored, go no where.

Parties feared by the rich and powerful tend to be seen potential governments-in-waiting by the resentful non-rich and the non-powerful.

And there are lots of them about ......