1580 True News - Global Warming and the Love of Children?
Can we really believe politicians when they talk about their concern for what kind of weather our great grandchildren might experience?
Feb. 11, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
10:54
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| Hi everybody, it's Stephen Molyne from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I would like to touch on a way of approaching the global warming debate without having to delve into all of the minutiae and twists and warrens of the scientific Debate. | |
| And the reason that I would like to do that is that, of course, I've received a lot of emails horrified at the fact that I might be a skeptic about climate change, which is not actually precise. | |
| I'm perfectly comfortable with climate change. | |
| I'm also perfectly comfortable that some part of it may be anthropogenic. | |
| But to me, the idea that it is catastrophic and that the government can solve anything to do with it is entirely ridiculous. | |
| So if... | |
| Somebody is pro-governmental action on the environment for the long term. | |
| You know, whether it's Kyoto or climate change or other kinds of things. | |
| I think it's really, really important to look at the premises. | |
| And I'll give you sort of an example. | |
| And this would be bad comedy in any other context. | |
| So imagine you come across a woman who is pregnant, who is currently smoking like a chimney and drinking alcohol like an inebriated fish. | |
| And then she said, "I'm really concerned, you see, about the health effects of bad air on my children's children's children." *cough* But you would find this to be so insane that you wouldn't even know what to say. | |
| If you're really concerned, oh mother-to-be, about the health effects of bad air on your children's children's children, perhaps you could put down the cigarette and the whiskey at the moment. | |
| It would just be bad comedy. | |
| It would be such an obvious kind of hypocrisy that people would not even remotely take this woman's concerns about. | |
| The health effects three generations down the road of bad air or a negative environment to be at all serious. | |
| Now, for us, or for me at least, to take the idea that the government cares, cares, I tell you so much about the possible negative consequences of rising sea levels three generations from now, is to say that the government has an almost hibiscus-like sensitivity to the effects of its current decisions you see upon future generations. | |
| And that is the principle that is being offered up as support for the government taking action on global warming. | |
| The government is so incredibly sensitive and so committed To creating positive environments for children generations from now. | |
| And of course, if you're really interested in taking care of the children generations from now, you should be even more obsessed and concerned with taking care, you see, of children in the here and now. | |
| If you care an enormous amount about your great-great-grandkids who you will never meet, To the point where you're willing to pass all these laws and restrict people's freedoms and so on, just to make sure that they don't get their toes wet three feet further back from the beach, then you must be completely obsessed with your own children. | |
| Now, if you're not interested in your own children's welfare, or if you're in fact doing things like the woman who's pregnant and smoking, if you're doing things that are negative to your children's health in the moment, in the here and now, then the claim that you are at all concerned With the health of children three generations down the road would be so completely ridiculous that there's not even a way that anybody could rationally respond. | |
| Like, if the woman who's pregnant and smoking doesn't know or doesn't get that the health effects she's inflicting on the children in her womb right now is infinitely worse than anything that could happen a couple of generations from now, she's clearly just insane. | |
| And it would be no particular point engaging her in any kind of rational discussion. | |
| So, why am I saying all of this? | |
| Well, the first thing that occurs to me, and I think it's a reasonable thing to occur to any sane human being, when people say to me, but the government needs to take action to protect the health and the welfare of children three generations from now, my first question is, well, how are they doing with the kids right now? | |
| Because it doesn't make any sense to focus on what might happen in a hundred years to the children if the government obviously Either doesn't care or is actually acting negative to the interests of the children in this generation. | |
| If the government is screwing up the kids of this generation, then the idea that they're so loftily concerned with kids three generations down the road is ridiculous, absurdist, bad comedy might have come out of it. | |
| Might as well have come out of a Pirandello play. | |
| I'm just going to throw out two things, and there could be anything that you pick, but I'm just going to throw out two things which might give us some blinding illumination or even just a little wick light on a mountaintop far away of light, shed some light, on the degree to which governments actually care for children in the here and now. | |
| So, let's have a look at some numbers, shall we? | |
| And this is from a couple of years ago, so I'm sorry I couldn't find more updated figures with GDP. USA, a debt, $8.68 trillion, which is 60.8% of the gross domestic product. | |
| This does not include the hundreds of thousands of dollars per household in the US of unfunded liabilities. | |
| This is just straight on debt, and it's much worse now. | |
| Canada, oh Canada, we don't even have much of a military and very little involvement in running these dictatorships around the world. | |
| We don't have 700 plus military bases around the world like the US, but we have a national debt of 814.26 billion, which is a higher GDP, 62.3% of our GDP. It's a higher percentage of our gross domestic product than even the US. UK, 1.05 trillion, 47.2% of GDP. France, 1.4 trillion. | |
| I know how you all love these list of numbers in the show. | |
| France, 1.4 trillion and 67% of the GDP. Germany, 1.79 trillion dollars. | |
| Debt, 62.6% of the GDP. Italy, 1.89 trillion, 103.7% of the GDP. Greece, which is currently clawing its way. | |
| It's bringing down the entire EU currency with its addiction to debt and fiscal profligacy like a drunken man lurching and pulling off a tablecloth. | |
| Greece, $441 billion, this is more recent, 125% of GDP. India, $2.55 trillion, 78% of GDP. And Japan, Those fiscally conservative Japanese has a national debt of $7.47 trillion, 170% of GDP. So clearly this is never going to be paid off. | |
| And it is really enshackling, enshackling the children today, today, the children now. | |
| These children will not reach middle age before the fiscal collapse of either hyperinflation or vastly reduced standard of livings because of a devalued currency. | |
| And so how concerned are those in power about the welfare and freedom and opportunities and capacities for excellence in the economic sphere of the children now, today? | |
| The goddamn children three generations from now and whether there'll be more rain or snow or sleet for them. | |
| What about the children right now? | |
| Is the government even remotely concerned with the welfare of the children in the here and now? | |
| Well, of course not. They're selling their children into slavery for the sake of passing out a few political bucks to the well-connected. | |
| It is a jackal-fest feeding frenzy on the body politic which is largely composed of the future lives of our children now! | |
| So the idea that the government gives a rat's ass about three generations from now is completely ridiculous, and anybody who says that with a straight face is so propagandized that their brain is simply a government pamphlet and an old banana peel. | |
| How concerned are governments with the protection of the health of children? | |
| Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increase 50% with children in the U.S. And 73% among adults from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May-June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. | |
| Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew by more than 30% over the same 10-year period, with almost all of the increases due to psychiatric drug costs. | |
| April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition total of 8.9 billion dollars by comparison the cost of treating trauma related disorders including fractures sprains burns and other physical injuries with only 6.1 billion dollars this is for ritalin and other kinds of Drugs, | |
| which in my view are fundamentally required because children are traumatized by the disintegration of the family, by the fact that both caregivers are gone for most of the day, and they're raised by virtual strangers, by the fact that schools are crushingly boring and dissociative. | |
| And how much does the government, or even the society as a whole, but we'll just talk about the government. | |
| How much does the government care about the health and welfare of children, where in order to keep them penned up in these hideous Stalin-like state schools, they have to keep them drugged into drooling stupors and run the risk of mental disintegration to the point of school shootings and the number of children Who've been on these drugs, these stimulants, which has resulted in violence is an untold story in the media. | |
| Of course, it has to be. Because the moment that we as a science society reflect and look in the mirror about how much we actually care for our children in the present, collectively, at a time when the graduates of the US school system have about a 20% functional literacy rate after 13 years or 12 years of education, | |
| and a 40% functional mathematics literacy rate, When the greatest resource on the planet, which is the future capacities, minds, intelligence, creativity and wisdom of our children, is being regularly bored into oblivion, traumatized into scar tissue and drugged into neocomatousia, | |
| the degree to which we can say that we give a shit About the weather that children three generations from now are going to be experiencing is such bad comedy that it would be tossed out of a sketch show for being far too obvious. | |
| And yet we see it every day and we don't comment on it every day. | |
| So until... until... | |
| We can look at how we are treating our children in the present. |
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