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The death in prison last week of ecoterrorist Theodore Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber who in the Nineties killed three people and wounded 23 with package-bombs, is an opportunity to review how an environmental movement that started by focusing on improving human well-being––providing clean air and water, and practicing prudent resource management–– has devolved into an irrational cult replete with terrorist fanatics and Disneyesque fantasies about humanity’s relationship with the natural world.
More dangerous is the transformation of global public energy policies into “net-zero carbon” and “green renewable” energy despite being based on incomplete, if not dubious, science. Worse, their trillions in cost are currently endangering the economies of the rich West, and the economic development of poorer underdeveloped Rest, by proscribing the cheap, abundant fossil-fuel energy that powered the West’s creation of the richest, freest, most well-fed human beings who ever existed.
The Nineties were when the “global warming” crisis ramped-up the justifications for these dangerous policies––a few years after the brief apocalyptic fad of an impending new ice age. From well-heeled professors and celebrities, to politicians and disaffected suburbanites, romantic environmentalism began colonizing academic research, school curricula, and government policy, while propagating numerous corporate grifters exploiting government mandates on recycling refuse and developing “alternative energy” to replace icky energy from cheap fossil fuels.
The Unabomber was the most visible expression of this new, dangerous sensibility, by dint of his murders and blackmailing the New York Times and Washington Post into publishing in September, 1995, his 30,000-word manifesto. A rambling, incoherent, cliché-ridden screed typical of autodidactic cranks, the manifesto encapsulates the mashup of romantic nature-myths, Marxism’s hatred of free-market economies, and the utopianism and antihumanism of totalitarian technocrats––all of which define our current environmental received wisdom.
The Unabomber’s core idea was an antihuman primitivism and neo-Luddism: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Life has been “destabilized” and made “unfulfilling,” “remote from the natural pattern of human behavior.” No matter that no people in human history had been as free, rich, well-fed, and, healthy.
The Unabomber’s solution to this alleged “disaster” was “WILD nature; those aspects of the functioning of the Earth and living things that are independent of human management and free of human interference and control. And with wild nature we include human nature . . . those aspects of the functioning . . . that are not subject to regulation by organized society.”
This naïve, back-to-nature fantasy is as ancient as civilization itself. It flourished in the Sixties and that era’s elevation of the “natural” and the primitive into the highest goods, which became a status-marker for the cognitive elite “brights” and their demonization of America. Of course, these domestic critics, rich by global standards, wouldn’t last five seconds without the benefits of modern technology and improvements, and the political structures founded on unalienable rights like freedom and equality.
Moreover, this dissatisfaction with the trade-offs required to create such freedom and prosperity justified murder, as the Unabomber showed, recalling the apologists for communist slaughter and terror based on the antihuman rationalizations about omelets and broken eggs. In short, the antihumanism, the willingness to murder in service to alleged higher principles, that characterized the 20th Century’s tyrannical mass-murderers.
That’s why so few radical or even mainstream environmentalists condemned the Unabomber, a marker of how extreme and antihuman environmentalism was becoming. Kirkpatrick Sale––in the Nineties a successful popularizer of such environmentalism and anti-Western dudgeon––in the Nation wrote of the Unabomber’s manifesto that it was “absolutely crucial for the American public to understand,” and that it “ought to be at the forefront of the nation’s political agenda.” Sale also announced that he shared “a great many of the Unabomber’s” ideas about the Industrial Revolution, “the evils of modern technology,” and the “inevitability of social and environmental catastrophe if the industrial system goes on unchecked.” Sound familiar?
In addition to endorsing the Unabomber’s hodgepodge of bad history and juvenile pique, Sale said that the Unabomber is a “rational and serious man, deeply committed to the cause”––the latter phrase another stock justifier of murder. He faults this “rational” murderer of innocent strangers only for taking a “utilitarian” anthropocentric view of nature. That is, for not going far enough to protect nature at the expense of human life.
Al Gore is another famous evangelical environmentalist and grifter. He published a best-seller in the Nineties, and is still actively sermonizing and proselytizing today. His 1993 Earth in the Balance––a worn copy of which was found in the Unabomber’s remote Montana cabin––has sold over a half a million copies. Like the manifesto, it is a tissue of bad history, unexamined assumptions, and dull clichés, with a big dollop of New Age therapeutic bromides and recycled myths.
Most revealing about Gore’s diatribe is its combination of self-help clichés and evangelical Christian tropes. Gore tells us that he wrote the book during a midlife crisis or “life change” following his son’s near death after being hit by a car: “The search for truths about this ungodly crisis and the search for truths about myself have been the same search all along.” And somehow those vague “truths” are connected to our looming environmental apocalypse: he wrote the book “to fully search my heart and mind about this challenge to which I feel called––and in the process to summon the courage to make a full and unreserved commitment to see it through.”
Notice how New-Age self-help blends with the rhetoric of the “calling” from evangelical Christianity. We see an early manifestation of the “green” cult, a belief system that functions for a secular age as a political religion, one that clearly identifies an absolute good and evil, the latter fair game for calumny and “cancellation” as “deniers” of the global warming gospel.
For example, Bill Deval, founder of “deep ecology” and “ecocentrism,” indulged analogies with Nazism, what historian of environmentalism Charles Rubin has called “a remarkably repulsive . . . moral equivalence between ecological problems and the Holocaust,” such as the common smearing of “climate change” critics as “deniers.” Deval has also said that “students in natural resources and management . . . are much like the guards in the Nazi death camps,” and compares the cost-efficiency of the timber industry to the “cost-effective” calculations the Nazis used to murder millions. So too the “moderate” Al Gore, who has spoken of an “ecological Kristallnacht.”
The irony of these smears is that the actual Nazis were passionate environmentalists. As historian Simon Schama points out, “It is . . . painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscious the most barbaric regime in modern history actually was––exterminating millions of lives wasn’t at all incompatible with passionate protection of millions of trees.” Hitler’s regime in the Thirties passed laws protecting animals and nature in general, and regulating hunting.
The point here is not to play the “woke” game of calling enemies Nazis and fascists. Rather, it’s to highlight the antihumanism the “green” acolytes exhibit in their polices that privilege the environment and nature over the well-being of poorer underdeveloped nations, who are injured by rich-country fads like “zero net carbon” and the war on cheap fossil fuels. This propensity to sacrifice the well-being, opportunities for improvement, and prosperity of flesh-and-blood human beings while pursuing scientifically dubious policies, has been shared by all technocratic, centralized and concentrated powers like Nazism, fascism, and progressivism.
And don’t forget late-Marxism’s tactical alliance with environmentalism, which in Europe has created political “watermelons”––green on the outside, red on the inside. Communist regimes, of course, have been brutal to their environments, poisoning Lake Karachay in Russia, and creating toxic clouds of pollution in Beijing. But “green” ecology nonetheless shares with communism a hatred of the West for its lead in technological development and free-market capitalism, which have improved the lives of billions across the globe.
Next, as Raymond Aron pointed out in 1957, the Left hates capitalism and especially America, “mainly because the latter has succeeded by means which were not laid down in the revolutionary code. Prosperity, power, the tendency toward uniformity of economic conditions––these results have been achieved by private initiative, by competition rather than State intervention.” In other words, by benefitting billions of people rather than sacrificing them to utopian political superstitions.
Finally, we should not forget the opportunities for profit that “green” environmentalism accelerated in the Nineties. Billions and billions of dollars have been spent on “climate change” research grants, and subsidies for “renewable” energy infrastructure and electric vehicles. That’s how Al Gore ended up being worth $300 million and hobnobbing at Davos with fellow “woke” globalist plutocrats.
It’s important that we remember this history of malign ideas currently threatening the health of our economy, which has flourished in part because of cheap, abundant fossil fuels. And not just our economic interests, but our national security is put in danger by “green” energy policies implemented during the Biden administration.
But one thing we know for sure: the new axis of anti-Western nations like Russia, China, and Iran are not going to follow us down the “green energy” rabbit hole.
We are the carbon they want to reduce.
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Remember. The greens have told us the ideal population on earth is around 1 billion people. We sit at 7-8 billion. The greens challenge is how to get to the ideal without arousing suspicion.
We must see all of the green’s initiatives and policies with this ideal population number goal in mind.
Well, the wooFlew seemed like it was going to be able to deliver us to about the halfway point…. then it began to mutate and lost what power it had. Further, the lies about its origin and high mortality with no cure were exposed as frauds pretty quickly. But they “saved the day” by developing those shots, now quite apparently more lethal than the disease they were supposedly going to cure.
So now they’re back to harping in the “unacceptible” results of our activities, suchas breating, eating, heating our homes, moving about thanks to the benefits of the erroneously named fossil fuels. Again that trick is being exposed.for the fraud that it is.
What do climate scientists actually do:
What you might do:
Gather and analyse data from the atmosphere, oceans and land
Create computer models that simulate changes to the environment
Investigate ways of tackling climate change
Monitor sea levels and temperature changes – then compare to the past so we can predict the future
Publish your own research findings, and attend industry conferences
Advise government or corporate policy makers
Basically all they do is justify their own jobs and/or play God
Mad scientists need to be stopped, the geoengineering operations are visible to anyone who could be bothered to look up into the sky, clouds forming in rectangular shapes, `t shaped etc. Those are the people damaging the planet.
When anesthesia was introduced, it was claimed by religious conservatives that it’s use was a violation of God’s will and plan for man. We were intended by God to suffer pain and man was playing God by interfering against God’s will.
Since there is no way to prove the existence of God and even less to objectively confirm his mysterious will, any time mankind rearranges the natural conditions of nature to make human life more enjoyable, pleasurable, and happy any religious conservative can claim that man is trying to play God and God will punish him for trying to make his life better, enjoyable, and happy.
The central moral code of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is altruism, the code of self-sacrifice. In this instance of altruism man must sacrifice his happiness and well-being to God. Whatever God commands man must obey even if it causes him useless, senseless, pain and kills him. Obedience for obedience’s sake, regardless of the requirements of man’s life on Earth. Altruism ultimately demands the sacrifice of your mind and your life. Why? Simply because it’s YOUR mind and YOUR life.
Hey guess what, there is no way to disprove the existence of God, either.
Basically your Objectivism For Dummies course consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Repeat ad inifinitum
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX
There is no way to disprove the existence of leprechauns, mermaids, and unicorns either. Therefore sane and rational people don’t go around praying to leprechauns, unicorns, or mermaids.
You really aren’t in any position to decide who is sane and who isn’t. There is also no way for you to prove your sanity either.
But it is obvious that you are a self-serving, lying, religious bigot who hasn’t made a dent in the ability of people to believe in God, go to church and synagogue, enjoy fellowship, and live fulfilling lives. And your cowardly pussyfooting around Islam has been obvious for a while now.
And that, in a nutshell, is why you get angrier with each passing week. Your childish version of revisionist history has been taken apart by me, and various other commenters here who see through your grift, and your con.
You fascination with Hitler, your pathetic attempts to link today’s Lutherans with Nazism, and your over-arching Jew Hatred is always on display for all to see.
Nice summation!
I can only add that he needs to see a shrink.
Some Lorazepam might help his autism …
you and yours have a great week!
I think he is beyond help.
Hey Dan, haven’t seen you for quite a while! Hope you’ve been well. Have a great weekend.
The ultimate selfish act is suicide, it takes your pain and passes it to the people who love you the most, in other words the altruists in your world. This is what these mad scientists are effectively doing, just on a larger scale.
Nothing to do with religion, and my comment wasn’t meant to refer to a religious belief in anything, it is a well know analogy that’s all.
One must have no gray matter to believe in hardcore evolution. The complexity of the universe speaks clearly to the presence of A Great Designer–let alone the complexity of life.
Spend some time reading the marvelous complexity of the eye or the endocrine system if you still insist it “just evolved” you need to study the complexity of the brain…
The complexity of a single strand of human DNA is enough evidence of VERY intelligent design.
Has this got anything to do with the article at hand, other than your apparent monomaniacal resemblance to Ted Kozinski?
The central moral code of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is altruism, the code of self-sacrifice. In this instance of altruism man must sacrifice his happiness and well-being to God.
Man o man WHO baptised YOU in prune juice and gave you sour lemons to suckle? Don’t know where you foiund “your version ofGod, but its nothing like the God of the old or new covenants.
Jesus, who is both God and man, declared: This is my commandment that you love (that means serve, help, lookafter, care for, help) one another.. so that yur JOY maybe full. That don’t sound like the stingy party-pooping tightwad miery spreading “god” you described.
His very firs cmmandment to mankind was and remains this one: increase and multiply, FILL the earth and SUBDUE it”. that command has never been rescinded.
The core, central, moral code of Environmentalism and Nazism is ALTRUISM. The moral code which claims that man has no right to exist for his own sake but must exist as a sacrificial animal, sacrificing himself for others. Those others can be any and all others including insects, animals, and trees. Or the Fuhrer, the Aryan Race, the Almighty State, Almighty Society,
“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own ego is of no importance in comparison with the existence of the nation, that the position of the individual is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole…. that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and will of an individual… This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture…. The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call — to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness — idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men,” – Adolf Hitler
“Altruism: the Basis of Nazism”
It would seem that you are becoming an acolyte of Josef Goebbels and the Big Lie re: your endless obsession with altruism.
If we all thought like you we would be at each other’s throats 24/7. Thank God no one thinks like you.
Your propaganda is some serious weak sauce.
You have really hit rock bottom with the Hitler quote. He is as unreadable as your repetitive Objectivism spam.
Who are you trying to convince, yourself or the population at large?
Back to anaesthetics, without looking it up, surgeons and such (just from reading British naval history) have been using various forms on anaesthesia since who knows when, including alcohol, and knocking people on the head 🙂
We are under siege by American Marxism in All of its varieties on issues of race gender and climate
An individual doesn’t need a manifesto to be environmentally considerate, caring and responsible: change diapers, keep your house and street clean, do laundry and always clean up after yourself. And smile!
The relationship of mankind to the earth is that he is not separate from the earth; he comes from and was created from, the earth.
This concept is expressed in the hebrew word for man – “adam”- and the hebrew word for earth – “adamah”.
Man is not God. He is but a part of God’s world of matter and energy, fire, earth, wind and water; and he revels in constant discovery and invention. Baking bread. Screwing in a light bulb. Sweetly playing a violin. Caressed by warmth.
Serenely cool.
The challenge is to iron out the wrinkles of invention, not to drain out the life blood of imagination, the joyous heart of human creative existence.
Of course there has to be moral purpose and practice to this ingenuity . That’s one way of describing the foundational meaning of living life.
Supposedly, “it was good” that God created us; but history always attests to our being prone to evil.
Just a minor glitch…….
No, every day of creation was followed by G0d deciding that what He had done was “good” (“tov”). But when man was created He deemed this creation “very good” (“tov m’od”). Man is part of nature and creation, but above it in many ways.
Yes. I know. I realized after I posted that I had left out the ‘very’ but didn’t correct it. I should have but I guess I was thinking it wasn’t very good when I wrote the thought…
Thanks for noticing and pointing it out.
The great economist Thomas Sowell said:
“The important question is not what is good but who decides what is good,”
That is probably the wisest thing anyone has ever said in all of human history,
That quote is the summation of every single thing humankind is going through, not just in our nation, but across the entire world. Very similar is the quote “It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes”, attributed to Stalin. It’s who is deciding the meaning of things, how things work, and what things happen. And those currently in charge of the strings are psychopaths and sociopaths – and many of them anti-humanists – with more power and money than ever before in human history. It’s going to be a bumpy ride…
“environmentalism” … was always eco-terrorism …
A lot of censorship and memory-holing to revise history – both to blame-shift eco-disasters and to erase all of the efforts of communities in the West to protect their environments …
… until the Soviet Comintern became involved and weaponized environmentalism.
So the West really went from the Big Progressives Pollute All They Want and the West has to suck up their pollution …
… to Big Progressives Pollute All They Want – in foreign lands where only the most mass-murder loving dictators rule with an iron fist – and the West can enjoy unemployment and destruction of the Middle Class …
… and the Atheist Dark Age in which we find ourselves now …
Otherwise – an excellent article by Bruce.
Walden Pond,anybody?
We cannot lump all the world religions in one pot. Each is divided into sects and orientations to issues like abortion, just war, whether to kill infidels, whether women can be beaten, honor killings, FGM, suicide attacks, slavery, and numerous other issues, where we can find variants in at least small sects of all the religions, sometimes today, or in the past. Altruism is a range of beliefs, from sacrificing for one’s family, tribe or nation to self sacrifice for humanity in general. And the doctrines of all the world religions vary and sometimes are contradictory.
Nature untouched without man’s influence prevailed for millions or billions of years, so it is hard to decide whether we have to kill off mankind just so that animals can rule the earth. What did they produce when the dinosaurs reigned supreme?
The Unabomber was Inspired by Al Gore when the FBI searched his little shack hey found a well read well worn copy of Earth in the Balance now if it had been a conservative book the M.S. Media would have had a feeding frenzy
TK was most decidedly not an autodidact and mr. thornton should know that. i recall reading the article in the atlantic in the issue it was published in and felt after that he was severely psychologically damaged. wondering how harvard and its professor henry murray did not have the ability to see he was too young and fragile to be involved in such experiments. Murray should have been stripped of tenure and his pension revoked after this info came to light. He held the entire force of the US gov. at bay for years so he was not irrational and I was surprised when he was identified he had no conscience. His polish parents apparently taught him everything except the difference between right and wrong. This worship of intellect at the cost of proper formation of conscience is easily observed in our society and the outcome with so many dysfunctional children.. I believe his brother came to feel regret he turned him in after he was sent to florence an extraconstitutional facility violating the clear proscription against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Medium security prisons in the country are, in many cases, also close to this violation as the BOP and DOJ refuses to segregate prisoners.
Hilariously rush used to read sections of this manifesto with excerpts of gore’s tome asking listeners to identify who was author. I was able to do so but had to think for a minute before deciding. I did not necessarily find what he had to say in the manifesto to be a screed or the rncomprehensible ravings of some lunatic. I just did not agree with the remedy believing as I do to date there are solutions to provision of energy which will not have an adverse environmental impact.
Ted Kazinsky was influenced by Al Gore’s bullshit book “Earth in the Balance”, the same way atheist Adolf Hitler was influenced by Darwin’s “Origin of Species”.
Leftists should read conservative books. (They sell vastly better than the fiction that liberals crank out, so why not.)
While living in Helena, MT years ago, I ran onto the group “Y2Y.” Yellowstone to Yukon. Their premise was to have a 200 mile corridor, from Yellowstone to Yukon, whereby ALL man-made structure would be removed. Roads, power lines, bridges, dams, structures. Nothing man-made was to be left. The idea was to have a corridor for wildlife to traverse without human interference. I believe Harrison Ford was a supporter, but he wanted the Yellowstone part expanded southeast to a location I forgot.
2 years ago, I saw a map from the Idaho DOT on roads in Fremont County, and Island Park City, ID. The map had a watermark on it “Y2Y.”
It should also be pointed out that these rabidly hypocritical eco terrorists demand that everyone else sacrifice their quality of life while the eco terrorists continue to use all the high tech luxuries they are accustomed to.
This so the hypocrites can signal their eco warrior virtuosity….no mention that it is at the expense of others.
One issue is people from a luxurious modern environment projecting their worldview on the primitive lifestyle, in a naive and unsophisticated way.
I read an article recently that similarly identified this trend as the “new colonialism”… That description is entirely apt, as the minerals, and the vast amounts of them needed for the so-called “green” energy technologies & structures, mean vast pillaging of those nations that have such minerals, and allow the mining of such minerals. Which means nations that are not “first world”. Thus, the already dirt-poor, environmentally-ravaged countries and peoples that have totalitarian and other oppressive regimes. This amounts to yet another round of exploitation and abuse of those who have already been experiencing that for well over a hundred years, if not longer. And, the nations that install these “green” energy technologies and structures are left with huge amounts of dangerous and poisonous materials to “dispose of” when these things fail and/or are replaced, which are almost entirely non-recyclable. And, the rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful… with virtually no consequences felt by them – the consequences are felt by everyone else.
Remember one of his victims was Logging Executive Gilbert Murry. And Manson was also into Envirometalism because with when Squeaky Fromme a Manson Follower tried to shoot Gerald Ford she said I DID IT FOR THE TREES