One of my favorite columnists, Walter Williams, quotes H.L. Mencken in today's column on the essence of this year's politics. "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Michael Crichton's State of Fear novel of a couple of years ago made the same point. Williams concludes his column by citing another favorite of mine, Dr. Thomas Sowell, who says that we don't look to arsenists to put out the fires that they have created; neither should we look to Congress to solve the problems they've created.I've lived through a long chain of these scares, mostly rather insubstantial and often poorly or incompletely motivated. I'm currently expecting the global warming stupidity to turn to global cooling stupidity as soon as the latest climate data gets factored in to the mix.
Meanwhile the sunspots are at a minimum and last year's estimates were of global cooling of 0.7 degrees Celsius.
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1 comment:
It's the old, old trick. Manufacture (or allege) a crisis, posit yourself as the messiah and overthrow the democratic government. That's the modus operandi of every dictator in history. And it's easy to identify these people - there's only ever been one messiah, anyone else making such claims is a fraud.
Oh, look, is that manbearpig?
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