God loves you . Once again - is this a blog? O, my, no - it's a rant . . . “Victim status equals privileged status in the West.” A socio-political commentator stated this sentence in speaking in an interview about the distracting and bogus notion of ’Islamophobia’. Muslim spokesmen (never a woman, eh, ladies?) use the expression to distract from the facts that they are all too generally 1) intolerantly thuggish, 2) violently against freedom and 3) very, very noticeably immoderate. Bogus, as in fraudulent and misleading; of course, ‘bogus’ is a common trait among issues; think of the bogus idea of Al Gore having an open-and-shut case on global warming and its causes and remediation. The last is related to what got me interested in this line of thought – causes of global warming and other junk-science, and junk-morality issues over the so-called Vatican carbon footprint thing. The whole Vatican enviro-responsibility shtick has a noxious whiff of clueless leadership out of the Vatican coupled with unabashed self promotion by one Planktos/KlimaFa. Planktos/KlimaFa is the provider of services - i.e., a Hungarian re-forest-ation - toward amelioration of the Vatican carbon footprint. Planktos/KlimaFa is strictly commercial with little science to back its for-profit ways; it is often roundly criticized and at least seriously questioned among some qualified environmentalists and scientists.

Oh, yes, that ‘clueless leadership’ . . . such ‘leadership’ is another common thread on the issues. Cluelessness seems to be a world-wide phenomenon among the self-anointed elitist ‘leader’ types. Plus, this carbon footprint issue sounds like more junk science. 'We know how much carbon you give off - for whatever currency, we will do something that offsets (whatever that means here) that carbon.' Right!

To return to the point . . . of ‘victims’, I couldn’t help but think of my ‘retired’ work career. I am – ‘was’, then, at any rate – the white male who could be (and was a couple of times) discriminated against all my working career. Did that qualify me as a ‘victim’? Perhaps so in some sense of justice no longer of any consequence in our culture; and George Orwell might say that I adapted to others being [as accorded to such privileged] ‘more equal’ than me. But, effectively, I was hardly any victim – those who were ‘affirmatively activated’ in my place were more the victims – at minimum, after all, who thought they got there on merit? Those who did merit position were framed in the same ‘token’/politically correct mode of business hiring activities. Just consider that observation: “Victim status equals privileged status in the West.” It is to be credited to our American hierarchy that they have not attempted to be considered ‘the victim’, individually or corporately. ‘Being the victim’ is more actually a version of ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’ – a kind of ‘loud, annoying and whining tantrum for greenbacks’, a la Michael Moore. All in all, ‘victim status’ is perpetrated, perpetuated and popularized via ‘sound-bite harlotry’; one more way the MSM as the pimp squad it has become. Yet, in paying these ‘hookers’ for my purported – bigotry, a priori? – am I not then permitted to retain what is ‘bigotry’ on my part? After all, did I not pay the going price for the ‘whore’? And, back to the Vatican and the carbon footprint . . . footprint and Vatican complaisance, this is just more elitist bunkum, this time starting with yet one more French cardinal. When is the Pope going to stop making even archbishops among these clerics who can’t get but five percent of Frenchmen in for an hour of Mass on Sunday? About whom sixty percent of French folk consider them mere annoyances? Shouldn’t one produce something positively, pastorally valuable to warrant high position?

(Hmmm . . . are the French bishops result of their ‘squeaky-wheel-ness’? Or, are French hierarchs ‘affirmative action’ out of Rome? Is 'being an ordained Frenchman' also a condition of being a victim?)

Remember, I love you, too Reminding that we are all on the same side - His, Pristinus Sapienter (wljewell @catholicexchange.com or ... yahoo.com)

I add to this, it is the facade of victim; once the victim changes to the other side, the victim becomes a victim again.  wolves eat.

Re: P.S.'s post:

RE: "...sources..."

Two global-warming sceptics spoke out the week ending 24 June. "One is R. Timothy Patterson, a Canadian geologist. The other is Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and an economist. People who suspect that the global-warming emperor has no clothes will want to hear both." The Washington Times, 24 June 2007, p. B-2.

Paraphrasing from the cited article to skip over much detail...

Mr. Patterson bases his analysis on several years' study of 3,000 years of fossil evidence found in sedimentary deposits.  These were analyzed in light of solar patterns.

The record correlates with a known cycle of sunspot activity (the Schwabe 11-year cycle).  Solar output varies a mere 0.1% but is adequate to explain the evidence of alternating cold & warm, life- and nutrient-rich warm periods.  In some cases drastic shifts in climate to decades of cold and rain were observed to have occurred in as little as 62 years.

His conclusion: "It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world..."

Read the whole summary as originally published in the Financial Post, a Canadian newspaper, at www.financialpost.com. (As the article I read is over a month old, the original article may no longer be viewable at the site.  You might try www.archive.org to see if it was captured in their "wayback" system.)

A more philosophical examination of the controversy is available at the same web address in an op-ed by Vaclav Klaus.  The format included a question-and-answer session with the readers that might be very interesting to many of the posters here.

Mr. Klaus was asked whether ignoring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was a sound strategy from a risk-management perspective.

His answer:"I think it is very bad risk management strategy to follow the summary report on climate change of the IPCC. To do it would be a giving up of risk management rules and of standard cost-benefit analysis techniques in favour of environmentalist 'precautionary principle' which totally discredits risk management and comparison of costs and benefits."

The entire exchange with readers is available at the same url, www.financialtimes.com.  Again, as more than a month has passed it may be impossible to access the original posting.

Regards,

Old Sigma (Cradle Catholic & generally inveterate amateur)

P.S. There was a follow-up to this article & an interesting letter-to-the-editor with clarification of some detail in later issues of TWT. There is also a separate article in one of the issues describing the discovery of evidence that a lush forest once covered Greenland. The dating of this flora which is impossible today because of the coldness of the climate, makes it likely that this is the forest that led Eric the Red to name the island "Greenland." The point is that the globe was much warmer once & not so long ago as to be lost in the mists of pre-history.  We may have endured a major cooling period in the last eight centuries or so & may be about to have a brief respite before plunging into a real "ice age."