Government Zero : No Borders, No Language, No Culture (9781455563517)

by Savage, Michael

  The idea that acquired traits can become hereditary is almost as ludicrous as the theory that man is causing global warming with industrial activity. One of Lamarck’s examples of an acquired trait was the long necks of giraffes. Lamarck theorized that giraffes living in areas where they needed to reach the leaves on high trees stretched their necks in attempting to reach them and somehow this stretching was passed on to their offspring.

  He didn’t say Darwinian natural selection occurred, where over many generations the giraffes with longer necks survived at a higher rate than those with shorter necks and eventually only the long neck trait survived. No, Lamarck believed that when a giraffe stretched its neck, that giraffe itself passed on the newly acquired trait to its own offspring.

  It’s like believing a person with an average physique who changes his body style with intensive weight training can pass on the body builder’s physique he acquired to his children. Today, it sounds so ridiculous that one wouldn’t even require scientific proof to dismiss it. But it was the only acceptable theory in the Soviet Union for decades. This is what happens when science becomes the stepchild of politics.

  Lysenko rejected the theories of evolution based on Gregor Mendel’s work, which is the basis for all modern genetic theory. As I said, Lysenko actually believed genes didn’t exist, a view shared by Stalin. Stalin denounced genetic theory as “idealist,” a pejorative he used often for anything that didn’t please him. It was one of his favorite “snarl words” for anything that didn’t fit into his confused worldview.5

  Stalin also believed the combination of Mendel’s ideas with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection sounded too much like the competition inherent in capitalism. How biological processes can possibly have any relevance to economics is hard to imagine, but Stalin wasn’t the only one who held this view in the Soviet Union back then.

  However, there was a more pressing, practical reason for Stalin to support Lysenko’s crackpot theories: the faster results he promised to deliver in increasing agricultural production. Since Lysenko claimed plants could pass acquired traits to offspring, he could achieve new species of plants, including wheat that would grow in colder temperatures, a lot faster than the real scientists studying genetics. Stalin needed quick results to combat the famine he caused with his disastrous socialist policies.

  Do you see the connection between socialism and pseudoscience? The people were against farm collectivization, just like Americans today are against carbon taxes or open borders. This resistance, along with the inherent problems of socialism itself, combined to destroy agricultural productivity. Stalin needed a miracle from his scientists not only to make agriculture more productive, but to convince the people not to completely revolt against socialism.

  The problem was that real science didn’t promise miracles, any more than it does today. Any improvement to Soviet crops through genetics would take many generations, which was time Stalin didn’t have. He needed immediate gratification. So, just as people suffering from the mental disorder called liberalism ignore economic reality, Stalin threw his support behind a man who ignored scientific reality. What real scientists said would take years or decades, the crackpot Lysenko promised to do in months. As David Joravsky tells us, they even started to believe their own nonsense.

  But Stalinist bosses saw themselves as popular leaders in the creation of an abundant new society; after a few disappointments with agricultural science, they angrily switched their support to pseudoscience. They needed to believe the line they were handing out, that collectivization was creating the most advanced farming system in the world.6

  There was only one problem. It wasn’t true. Regardless of how much Stalin or Lysenko wanted to deny the existence of genes or affirm the theory of acquired traits, any experiments based on those idiotic beliefs were bound to fail, just like everything the academic socialists in Washington do fails.

  They did fail, but Lysenko was either too incompetent or too obstinate to recognize it. Not being a real scientist, Lysenko was able to break all the rules of the scientific method I described to you and not realize, or at least not admit to himself, that anything was wrong.

  It is just like when the unemployment number falls because they stop counting people who have given up looking for work, not because they found jobs. Our Marxist in chief actually believes he’s done something good. That’s part of the mental disorder. Liberals aren’t just stupid. They’re delusional.

  Regardless of the absurdity of his theories, Lysenko rose to become the most powerful scientist in the Soviet Union, all because his crackpot theories fulfilled a political purpose. Science ceased being a search for truth and became a search to validate Stalin’s policies, just as climate science is no longer a search for truth, but a search to validate cap-and-trade and more regulation on businesses.

  While Lysenko never had any support among real scientists, he was passionately supported by government journalists, just like the climate change con artists are supported by the media today. They only wanted to report what the government wanted them to report, that communism was working fine. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

  Purging Scientists Who Dissent

  With Stalin and the press behind Lysenko, anyone in the Soviet Union who stood up to him was publicly denounced, the way Obama denounces people today. They lost Communist Party membership, the way you are thrown out of clubs today if you express conservative views. They lost their jobs, the way you can lose your job if you talk about affirmative action being a disaster for America or about the lie of global warming.

  You didn’t know you could lose your job if you didn’t go along with the global warming con artists? Didn’t your local newspaper carry that, either? Well, it happens all the time in the new Soviet America. It didn’t start with Obama. Mr. Scam Artist himself, Al Gore, was doing it over twenty years ago.

  In 1993, Gore fired physicist William Happer from his job as director of energy research for the U.S. Department of Energy. Happer had testified to Congress that the scientific data didn’t support the alarmist fears being propagated at the time about ozone depletion and global warming. “I was told that science was not going to intrude on public policy,” said Happer. “I did not need the job that badly.”7

  It can get even worse. Just as he purged anyone who resisted his political and economic agenda, Stalin purged scientists who rejected Lysenko’s crackpot hereditary theories. He certainly wasn’t going to let science intrude on public policy, either.

  We don’t have purges yet here in the United States, but only because the radicals promoting climate change know they can’t get away with it. But listen to their rhetoric. They call Tea Partiers “terrorists” and openly call for “climate change deniers” to be jailed. Wrote Adam Weinstein in Gawker:

  Man-made climate change happens. Man-made climate change kills a lot of people. It’s going to kill a lot more. We have laws on the books to punish anyone whose lies contribute to people’s deaths. It’s time to punish the climate-change liars.8

  Don’t be so quick to dismiss people like this as the lunatic fringe. The Nazis and Bolsheviks were fringe right up until the day they took over. This is just how it started with Lysenko. The press just loved him because his dumb theories validated Stalin. The Soviet press played a major role in bolstering Stalin’s persecution of scientists who disagreed with him.

  The same forces that were at work in the Soviet Union under Stalin are attacking scientific truth in America today. This is what Obama has done to science, to medicine, and to reality itself. We are living in a new Soviet era in America.

  How Real Science Works

  Let me speak to you as a scientist for a moment. That’s right: I am a scientist, who has actually done scientific research scientifically. I earned a bachelor’s degree in biology, two master’s degrees in ethnobotany and anthropology, respectively, and a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from the University of California, Berkeley. In order to earn these degrees, I had to not only
collect and analyze data, but draw scientifically valid conclusions that other scientists concurred with.

  When I say I did scientific research scientifically, I mean that I followed the standards commonly referred to as the scientific method. The scientific method has certain rules you have to follow or you’re not doing science. You have to ensure the integrity of your data. You have to make sure your data is representative. You have to control for other possible causes of your results.

  Once you’ve completed your study and published your results, they are subject to what scientists call peer review. That means that other scientists examine your work. They try to confirm you haven’t made any errors in the way you’ve collected data or errors of logic in your conclusions.

  I had to follow all of these principles to earn my Ph.D. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to understand them. They’re common sense. But when the government takes over science, common sense goes out the window.

  Lysenko didn’t follow any of these principles, because he wasn’t a real scientist. He was a political appointee whose crackpot theories were accepted only by politicians and journalists for political reasons, just like the climate change scam is accepted only by politicians and scientists who want more government, more taxes, and more regulations.

  That political action group posing as a scientific community, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), says the debate is over about man-made global warming. That’s how you know they’re not real scientists.

  Real scientists never say “the debate is over” about anything. All scientific knowledge is open to challenge at all times. That’s how all great advances have been made. Imagine if the debate had been over when Isaac Newton had published his theories, meaning Albert Einstein never published his. Imagine if the debate had been over when scientists concluded that man could not fly.

  The IPCC is a collection of politicians and bought-off scientists who are producing junk science for political reasons. It’s Lysenkoism all over again. They’ve broken every rule of the scientific method, just as Lysenko did.

  First, their samples aren’t representative. One of the reasons NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was able to report 2014 as “the hottest year on record” is because of huge increases in part of South America, encompassing parts of Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. Guess what? There are almost no weather stations in the region.9 What few stations there are certainly can’t be representative of such a massive region.

  They also use temperature readings from thermometers located in places that are obviously hotter than the larger surrounding area, like parking lots, concrete buildings, or inside metal beams. Do you think maybe that skews temperature readings a little warmer than they otherwise would be? Meteorologist Anthony Watts saw right through it. He studied the positioning of the so-called weather stations and called out the con artists.

  The question remains as to why they continue to use a polluted mix of well-sited and poorly-sited stations.10

  Just like Lysenko, the bought-and-sold climate scientists consistently fail to control for other causes of temperature changes. In attempting to answer Watts’s questions about the location of weather stations, the fake scientists say satellite data confirms the findings on the ground. Watts called them on that scam, too. It’s a classic case of failure to control for other possible causes.

  I don’t dispute the satellite measurements, but they are measuring temperature of the atmosphere above the Earth, and that includes all cities and populated areas as well as rural open space… My premise is this: if you want to see the effect of CO2 on warming, you need to look in areas that have not been affected by urbanization to find the true signal.11

  No one disputes that temperatures are warmer in and around cities. It’s not because of greenhouse gases. Cities just generate more heat. If man was causing global warming, the temperature should be higher in the country, too. As I said, you don’t have to be a scientist. It’s just common sense.

  A larger percentage of the Earth has been urbanized over the past several decades, so satellite measurements read higher temperatures. Watts was quick to recognize this, as any real scientist would be. It didn’t occur to the climate change pseudoscientists because they aren’t interested in finding the truth. They are interested in promoting their political agenda.

  Global Warming and Cooling Are Natural

  Increased urbanization isn’t even the most significant reason there might be warmer temperatures. The real reason the planet is warmer today is that it’s normal for the Earth to go through warming and cooling periods. It’s been doing so for millions of years, long before man inhabited this planet, much less started building factories.

  Neither temperatures nor CO2 levels are anywhere near their peak over Earth’s history. During the Cretaceous period, approximately 145 to 66 million years ago, mean atmospheric CO2 content was about 1700 ppm. That’s six times what it was just before the industrial revolution. In October 2014 it was 395.93 ppm, still orders of magnitude lower than during the Cretaceous period.

  Mean surface temperature during the Cretaceous period was 18°C, 4°C higher than it is now!

  During this period of significantly higher atmospheric CO2 and temperature levels, life was flourishing. Dinosaurs continued to dominate the land, but new groups of mammals, birds, and flowering plants appeared.12 That’s not a big surprise. Contrary to what fake scientists tell you, higher CO2 levels are good for plants and warmer temperatures are good for life in general.

  As I’ve said before, you don’t have to go back millions of years to find much warmer temperatures than anything we’ve seen during the industrial age. Temperatures were warmer and ice sheets smaller during the Medieval Warm Period, just one thousand years ago. Dr. Reid A. Bryson, universally recognized as the father of modern climatology, confirms that even today the ice in Greenland covers old Viking farms.13

  No one disputes Bryson is a real scientist, not even the climate change hucksters. Do you know what he says about hysterical cries that glaciers in the Alps are receding? He says it’s all happened before.

  What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?… A silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never went.… There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting back to normal.14

  Bryson’s a real climate scientist, the father of the whole discipline, and he doesn’t believe the climate change scam at all. He’s not alone among real scientists. There are actually thirty-one thousand who have signed the following petition to formally register their dissent to this politically motivated hoax:

  We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

  There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.15

  Obviously for these tens of thousands of scientists, the debate is not over. For real scientists, it never is. That means the IPCC’s scientists’ work hasn’t passed peer review at all. The IPCC simply smears or ignores any scientist who doesn’t concur.

  As I’ve said, one of the things peer review helps scientists avoid is basic errors in logic. Well, the fake scientists in the IPCC have made an error so long recognized it actually has a Latin name: cum hoc ergo propter hoc. Literally, it means “with this, therefore because of this.” Sometimes we restate it as “correlation does not necessarily imply causation.�
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  They haven’t just made this classic error, they’ve built their entire house upon it. Here’s what happened. They looked at data that indicates warming periods have been accompanied by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over time. That could mean carbon dioxide causes warming. It could mean warming causes increased levels of carbon dioxide. Or, it could mean neither. Maybe something else caused both temperatures and carbon dioxide levels to rise.

  That’s how a real scientist would think. That’s how I had to think to complete my Ph.D. dissertation. But since the IPCC scientists’ agenda from the beginning was political instead of scientific, they immediately assumed the higher carbon dioxide levels were causing the warming. They never considered the alternatives, because the alternatives wouldn’t support the socialist politicians.

  Inconvenient Research—The Vostok Ice Core Samples

  They got away with it until some very inconvenient research occurred. Many of you have never heard of the Vostok ice core samples. But have you heard about Al Gore’s big lie sample? Well, look up the Vostok ice core sample.

  This research is very important. It’s real data. It’s not created by Al Gore. It’s not created for the pope. It was obtained by drilling down into the ice above Lake Vostok in Antarctica to a depth of ten thousand feet. French and Russian scientists obtained deep core samples allowing them to look at, among other things, the history of temperature and carbon dioxide over the past 420,000 years.