Excerpts

The following are ideas simply condensed from longer articles.

From Suzanne Fields in The Politics of Irrational Ideology

Monday, November 19, 2007

[snip]
For many humans, however, the interplay of good and evil isn't as clear as it could be and is often clouded by an intellectual arrogance that keeps otherwise intelligent men and women from seeing what's right in front of their eyes. This was certainly true for the fellow travelers among us during the Stalin years. No matter how many men and women were tortured into false confessions behind the Iron Curtain, no matter how many men and women simply disappeared from life and history, Marxist apologists dismissed the brutality as an aberration, and besides, it was still preferable to bourgeois individualism. Similar irrational defenses are made on behalf of the Islamists in the Middle East who brutalize women, plot the obliteration of Israel and who deprive their own people of the freedoms of speech and movement.

[snip]

In modern times, such blindness proliferates among so-called intellectuals who insist on blaming America first and George W. Bush foremost for everything that goes wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hating the president is as old as the presidency itself, possibly excepting the first one. Blamemongering is particularly virulent today, often preventing rational discussion. "Bush hatred compels its progressive victims -- who pride themselves on their sophistication and sensitivity to nuance -- to reduce complicated events and multilayered issues to simple matters of good and evil," writes Peter Berkowitz, professor at George Mason University School of Law, in the Wall Street Journal. "Like all hatred in politics, Bush-hatred blinds to the other sides of the argument, and constrains the hater to see a monster instead of a political opponent."

And from Timothy Birdnow

Liberals are using the concept of Anthropogenic Global Warming to advance their favorite causes, and that the whole War of the Worlds AGW scare is a tool to that end. This piece in LiveScience.com certainly buttresses that opinion.

The Left has traditionally hated Americans eating red meat and driving their cars, and now we are told that, in order to ``save the planet`` we should eschew both! This from the article:

In a little-noticed scientific paper in 2005, Paul Higgins, a scientist and policy fellow with the American Meteorological Society, calculated specific savings from adopting federal government recommendations for half an hour a day of exercise instead of driving.

The average person walking half an hour a day would lose about 13 pounds a year. And if everyone did that instead of driving the same distance, the nation would burn a total of 10.5 trillion calories, according to the scientist, formerly with the University of California at Berkeley. At the same time, that would cut carbon dioxide emissions by about the same amount New Mexico produces, he said.

"The real bang for the buck in reducing greenhouse gas emissions was from the avoided health expenses of a sedentary lifestyle,'' said Higgins.

But it's not just getting out of the car that's needed, said Dr. Robert Lawrence of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. A diet shift away from heavy meat consumption would also go far, he said, because it takes much more energy and land to produce meat than fruits, vegetables and grains.

Recent studies support that argument. Last year the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported that the meat sector of the global economy is responsible for 18 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Much of that is indirect, including the fertilizer needed to grow massive amounts of feed for livestock, energy use in the whole growing process, methane released from fertilizer and animal manure, and transportation of the cattle and meat products.

So, America`s general lifestyle is to blame for Global Warming-not just our use of fossil fuels, but the way we eat and how we choose to live our lives. Changing our lifestyle seems to be a primary goal:

As for fighting obesity and global warming by walking and cycling, don't expect people to do it easily, said Kristie Ebi. She's a Virginia public health consultant and one of the lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Now, why did the IPCC need a public health consultant, and why was she one of the "leading authors" of the IPCC? Does it not seem obvious that transforming our way of life is the critical point of all this? Can any informed person continue to doubt that this issue is primarily a political power grab?