Aug. 2, 2023 - Jim Fetzer
10:44
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| When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything like it's a nail. | |
| For at least three years now, if not in fact for a whole lot longer, governments here and elsewhere across the West have kept the hammer always in hand. | |
| During the Covid debacle, they called the hammer The Science, but it was a hammer by any other name. | |
| Calling a hammer The Science doesn't make it so. | |
| You can put a crown on a dog and call him Prince, but that doesn't make him a member of the Royal Family. | |
| Science is supposed to be a conversation without end, an ongoing process of asking questions, whereby someone observes some part of the way the world seems to work, comes up with a potential explanation for what appears to be happening, and then designs experiments to see if that explanation might be proved wrong. | |
| A scientist actively encourages his fellows to come up with experiments of their own, the better to challenge his idea. | |
| For as long as the explanation holds up in the face of the experiment, it gets to stick around. | |
| But the point of the scientific method is that every explanation must always be subject to challenge. | |
| By anyone! | |
| In that respect, science turns out to be a bit like the weather, which is to say, changeable. | |
| As soon as someone puts the word the in front of the word science, you know they've decided the conversation is closed because they have no more to offer the debate. | |
| When a conversation is declared closed, then that process of scientific exploration is dead, as though it had been beaten to death with another hammer. | |
| Lockdown and masks were set in place using a hammer. | |
| For months on end we were told the science said we had to lock down the world and everyone in it. | |
| The brakes were applied and the world, our part of it at least, was brought to a shuddering halt. | |
| Before, during and after the brakes were applied there were many people, people naively thinking science was still a conversation, who said locking down would save no lives and would in fact cause nothing but harm. | |
| More voices were raised to question masks. | |
| People trained in the scientific method who said covering faces with paper and plastic masks would save no one from a respiratory illness like Covid. | |
| As well as being useless in stopping the spread of the illness, they would have negative consequences for millions, especially the young. | |
| Rather than engage those people in conversation, those wielding the hammer merely saw in front of them yet more nails and used the hammer to flatten them. | |
| And here we are now, dealing, or rather not dealing, with all those disastrous consequences for economies, livelihood, mental and physical well-being, the whole kit and caboodle. | |
| The difference between science and this science is the difference between a living plant with roots and a cut flower in a vase. | |
| One is alive with more to give, the other quite dead. | |
| More troublesome voices were heard asking questions about exactly what was going on in Ukraine. | |
| And out came the hammer again. | |
| Anyone asking about the geopolitics, US involvement, Biden family involvement, the politics of the Azov battalion, all silenced. | |
| We were told it was about saving democracy. | |
| They might as well have called it The Democracy. | |
| Democracy is a living thing as well, wherein each political ideology is only a theory, each government only an experiment to test the theory, and always there should be the opportunity to challenge the theory, and when necessary, replace it with one altogether different. | |
| Whatever the hell's happening in Ukraine, it's not about saving democracy. | |
| As much as anything else, it's about making money. | |
| Hundreds of billions of dollars and pounds. | |
| To be more precise, that war is about seeing how quickly the people's money, in fact the money yet to be earned by the people and then taxed by our governments, can be turned into the wealth of arms manufacturers and those who aid and abet them. | |
| Democracy, another fragile flower, has been flattened in the process. | |
| In Ukraine, any voices asking questions, speaking up in opposition to the government, are hammered flat. | |
| In the name of that so-called democracy, a generation of Ukrainians has been harvested. | |
| Hammers and nails, that's all we are now. | |
| The hammer wielders have seized for themselves all the power, and yet some of the nails just won't lie flat. | |
| Right now the hammers are out again. | |
| This time the powers that be, aided and abetted by more of this science, are busy using the summer as an anvil. | |
| For reasons that make sense only when you're in the business of frightening the living daylights out of populations, the palette for colouring the weather maps has been changed from the familiar life-affirming greens and blues to the angriest of oranges, reds, purples and black. | |
| Glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, the most recent maps of the Mediterranean look like pizzas left too long in the oven, all blistered and burnt. | |
| I say it's ludicrous. | |
| Among the most blatant and inexcusable fear-mongering deployed so far, people battered and bruised, not to mention plain old dead, on account of lockdown, followed by land war in Europe, backed up at all times by the threat of global nuclear war, are now being hammered flat by elaborately orchestrated fear of summer. | |
| Dotted throughout the incinerated hellscapes are the numbers predicting daily temperatures. | |
| I think they're missing a trick by not finessing the maps by having those numbers held up by little red devils complete with blackened hooves, horns and white hot flaming pitchforks. | |
| The news reporting has been at least as hysterical as the weather forecasting. | |
| So far the combined desperation of disaster journalists for thermometer bursting record temperatures has not been enough to push the numbers over the line. | |
| But it's only July, and there's a lot of summer still to go. | |
| Having already gone to purple and black, presumably the coverage of any actual new records will have to be accompanied by graphics of cities in flames and boiling oceans. | |
| Feverish has been the reminding of the record temperature set in Sicily in 2021 when the mercury hit 48.8 degrees centigrade, which is 119.4 degrees Fahrenheit. | |
| So vulnerable are the numbers to being manipulated to present any case a person might care to make, I'm reluctant to lean on any myself. | |
| of. | |
| But it's at least worth remembering there's nothing new under the sun, including extreme warmth. | |
| To take but one source, almost at random, Gaillard's medical journal, published in New York all the way back in 1884, carried a story about hot weather. | |
| The piece began, quote, many a man has mocked his brow during the summer months of 1884, declaring it was the hottest weather the world ever knew, which of course would not be true. | |
| The author went on to list extremes recorded as far back as 627 A.D. | |
| when, quote, the heat was so great in France and Germany that all springs dried up. | |
| Water became so scarce that many people died of thirst. | |
| More years were picked out. | |
| 879 when farm workers were struck down within minutes of attempting work. | |
| 993 when the sun's rays were so fierce that vegetation burned up as under the action of fire. | |
| In 1000 AD, quote, rivers ran dry under the protracted heat. | |
| The fish were left dry in heaps and putrefied in a few hours. | |
| Men and animals venturing in the sun in the summer of 1022 fell down dying. | |
| On and on it goes. | |
| 1132, 1139, 1200, 1277. | |
| In 1303 and 1304 the Rhine, Loire and Seine rivers ran completely dry. | |
| In the summer of 1625 in Scotland, men and beasts died in scores. | |
| Meat could be cooked by merely exposing it to the sun. | |
| Remember that record temperature of 119.4 Fahrenheit in Sicily two years ago? | |
| Gaillard's journal item quoted a temperature in Paris on a memorable day in 1846 of 125 degrees Fahrenheit. | |
| More important than watching the numbers and the pizza pie weather maps, consider always who benefits and who pays the price of all this fear. | |
| Listen to the doom-mongers like politicians John Kerry, Al Gore, Barack Obama, celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio, the software salesmen like Bill Gates, and watch their bank balances always rise faster and stay higher than the mercury in any thermometer. | |
| Listen to them describe how you and I must live in the future and watch how they live now and with no signs of changing their ways. | |
| The Kerries, Gores and Obamas grew richer every day. | |
| They preach their disaster sermons about sea levels rising 10 feet, 50 feet, 100 feet and then retire to their beachfront sea level mansions priced in the tens of millions of dollars. | |
| Reassured by the fact banks are still happy to lend money for multi-million dollar construction projects at sea level. | |
| And insurers are still happy to underwrite the loans for decades to come. | |
| A world population made almost 100% safer and our world more livable in the face of weather both hot and cold is being told to give up the cheap, available and reliable fossil fuels that make those better, safer life possible. | |
| John Kerry, bungalow Joe Biden's climate czar, recently testified his indignance at being accused of owning a private jet, then had to listen while the record was made to show his wife sold the family private jet this year in the face of accusations of Kerry climate hypocrisy. | |
| Once again, the hammer that is the science is wielded. | |
| Over and over, we're told, 97% of scientists agree the world is made hotter by humans burning fossil fuels. | |
| Less well-known is the fact that number was conjured into being by having a team read the abstracts, which is to say, just the front pages of nearly 12,000 scientific papers dealing with climate change. | |
| 3,896 were judged as blaming humans for the changes. | |
| 7,930 didn't endorse a position. | |
| 78 exonerated humans altogether and the final 40 were unsure. | |
| This meant 32.6% of the scientists held humans to blame. | |
| Only when the decision was taken to discard, simply to chuck in the bin the nearly 8,000 papers with no position whatsoever, was 32.6% magically transformed into 97%. | |
| 6% magically transformed into 97%. | |
| What a scam. | |
| CO2, a trace gas in our atmosphere, 0.04% of the whole is demonised as a world-killing toxin. | |
| The increase attributed to our species is 4% of that 0.04%. | |
| But a rising volume of CO2 in the atmosphere is a consequence of a warming planet, not the cause of one. | |
| You might as well watch a horse-drawn cart and conclude it's the cart pushing the horse. | |
| And notice, too, that CO2, by boosting plant growth, turns the planet fertile green, not angry red. | |
| Here's the thing. | |
| I say again, when the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything as a nail. | |
| The science says the conversation's closed. | |
| They pound away with the hammer, such a clumsy, inappropriate implement. | |
| Fewer and fewer blows are hitting home. |
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