Okay, let's get this straight,
right up front: global warming has been totally
and thoroughly discredited as the shameless, heartless
fraud that most of us knew it was from the very
beginning. That's not really what this article
is about, so if you haven't gotten the word, go
to http://tinyurl.com/22u8uy
-- it's a good place to start reading up.
Global warming is a hoax, exactly like the "discovery"
of Piltdown Man in 1912 http://en.wikipedia.net/wiki/Piltdown_man,
but with a tightly-focused political agenda in
mind. It is the last gasp of the Old Left. (Around
here, environmentalists are called "watermelons":
Green on the outside, Red on the inside.) Its
purpose is to fulfill the Marxist imperative to
"seize the means of production", even
if it means, in effect, repealing the Industrial
Revolution. But this time, instead of justice
for workers, the excuse is that we must "save
the Earth".
One of the appeals of the whole environmental
thing is to those unfortunates (and with our Puritanical
history, there are millions of them) who already
hate themselves so badly that it spills over to
their own families, to their country, and to their
species. It's also perfect for people who have
run out of other things to feel guilty about.
The really sad and stupid thing is that most
politicians and their accomplices in the Old Media
are still pushing global warming as if it hadn't
been disproven. They have plenty of motivation:
since we all exhale carbon dioxide, and almost
everything productive that we do produces the
gas as well, their "carbon footprint"
flimflam would give them control over everything
on Earth, and every aspect of living on it.
There is no length, no matter how absurd, punitive,
insane, or evil, to which these latterday Leninists
are not willing to go in the pursuit of power
over their fellow human beings. I've even seen
an article http://tinyurl.com/yvk4rn
attacking solar energy technology, once the very
epitome of political correctness, for the crime
of greedily using up more than humanity's "fair
share" of the sun's energy, depriving animals
and plants they claim have an equal right to it.
As we've already seen, back in the bad old Soviet
Union, and now with privileged left-wing "celebrocrats"
like Ted Turner, Jane Fonda, and Al Gore, the
collectivist nomenklatura would get to
keep their toys and luxuries, because they're
far, far too important ever to be inconvenienced.
But in a surrealistic world where a specimen
like Gore can win a Nobel Prize, among other things
by claiming with a straight face that cigarette
smoking is a cause of global warming, they could
(and would) force peasants like you and me to
switch from our healthy red meat to lentils and
soybeans or something equally insipid. They could
(and would) move entire populations around to
suit them, exactly like Pol Pot did to his fellow
Cambodians (supposedly FEMA has already built
the concentration camps http://tinyurl.com/32jxd4
), murdering about a third of them in the process.
They could (and would) put a swift end to what
they presently call "binge flying",
setting transportation progress back to around
1903. They could (and would) take away our "inefficient"
stand-alone homes, and our "wasteful and
polluting" automobiles.
And above all, our guns.
Yes, that's what I said, our guns. A lot of
otherwise politically savvy gun owners have believed
until now that we have no interest in all of that
global warming malarky. They couldn't be more
mistaken. The individual right to own and carry
weapons is among its primary targets.
Guns emit pollutants, after all -- carbon dioxide
and particles of lead just for beginners -- and
driving our evil, gas-guzzling SUVs out to the
range burns "fossil fuels", creating
even more "greenhouse gases". Hunting,
of course, involves several deplorable human vices,
most of them dating back 100,000 years or so,
to the discovery of fire.
Much more importantly, of course -- although
they're not very likely to mention this in public
-- guns give individuals, including otherwise
helpless children, cripples, and old people like
those who died at Waco in 1993, the means to resist
being treated like farm livestock "for the
duration of the emergency" (however contrived
that emergency happens to be) by an arrogant,
insatiatable collectivist government.
And private ownership of guns engenders the
wrong attitudes toward authority -- just ask the
British government of North America circa 1776.
The scientific truth, of course, is that the
Earth warms and the Earth cools, all by itself,
with lots of help from the sun. It always has
and it always will. Until recently, it has been
warming very slightly -- and so have Mars, Jupiter,
and Saturn. Nobody is going to tell me
that my Dodge Durango and my .45 Grizzly Win Mag
are doing that!
Back in the time of Tyrannosaurus rex, it was
a lot warmer than it is today, and there was at
least half again as much oxygen in the air. (Apparently
the surplus oxygen got used up when the famous
dinosaur- killing asteroid strike set every tree
on Earth on fire.) If they could, herbivorous
dinosaurs like Hadrosaurs might have tried to
use global cooling as an excuse to take the predators'
claws and teeth away. Good thing their brains
were even tinier than the average gun- grabber's.
Yes, the Earth will be around, in perfect working
order, for a long, long time to come. When at
last it isn't, we'll just move on to another planet.
And when the sun burns out, we'll move to another
star. In the meantime, and until we do, what we
need, perhaps, to protect us from intellectual
dinosaurs like Gore, is an addition to the Bill
of Rights requiring the formal separation of science
and state.
That might work out pretty well for medicine,
too. --
=============================================================
Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith
has been writing about guns and gun ownership
for more than 30 years. He is the author of 27
books, the most widely-published and prolific
libertarian novelist in the world, and is considered
an expert on the ethics of self-defense. His writings
may be seen on the following sites:
The Webley Page: http://www.lneilsmith.net
_The Libertarian Enterprise_: http://www.ncc-1776.net
_The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel_,
_Roswell, Texas_, and _TimePeeper_ (August 2007):
http://www.bigheadpress.com
LNS at Random (blog): http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/
LNS at JPFO: http://www.jpfo.net/smith/smith-nra.htm
=============================================================
Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been writing
about guns and gun ownership for more than 30 years. He is the
author of 27 books, the most widely-published and prolific libertarian
novelist in the world, and is considered an expert on the ethics
of self-defense. His writings may be seen on the following sites:
The Webley Page: http://www.lneilsmith.net
The Libertarian Enterprise: http://www.ncc-1776.net
The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel, Roswell,
Texas, and TimePeeper (August 2007): http://www.bigheadpress.com
LNS at Random (blog): http://www.bigheadpress.com/lneilsmith/
LNS at JPFO: http://www.jpfo.net/filegen-a-m/lneilsmith.htm
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