“According to them, Earth is sensitive to human influence... “ but apparently not to a massive asteroid strike like the one that created the Grand Canyon. However did the Earth get over its allergic reaction?
Speaking of language and Pandas... there is a book by Lynn Truss, entitled: “Eats, shoots and leaves”. It’s about the importance of punctuation and how it can change meanings. It was published a few years back and caused a stir among many who think using correct grammar and spelling, and pronunciation, is no longer necessary. Being able to speak and write English is dying out in the UK. A vocab of no more than 500 words, not speaking in whole sentences using words of less than one syllable is all that is required... knah’ wot ah meeeen, innit?
Back on topic, slightly, there are some useful French words I use in comments on-line that can replace English words to avoid the prowling censors. I think perhaps ‘they’ just ‘think’ they are misspelled or not real English words.
“... this year’s COP who called for tripling wind and solar capacity by 2030.” We’re getting two more Suns? 😎 Musk launching them on his low carbon rockets?
Perhaps you recall in the 1970s when devastating climate stage was all the rage - except due to global cooling and an impending ice-age, ‘scientists’ recommended covering the ice caps with soot to reduce the albedo effect and help keep temperatures up.
The climate change script of the 1990s onward is exactly the same except ‘warming’ replacing ‘cooling’ - and of course no soot… which is carbon.
Language plus a large audience plus a hot topic is indeed a powerful combination. The Climate Alarmism category received a huge turbo boost four years ago from “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words”. Now that’s an easy bandwagon to jump on. Right?
But take the exact same speech, throw in some salt and pepper, and you get the following. The first time I saw this I couldn’t stop laughing. Many would consider my reaction disgusting behavior:
I have a relative who criticizes me constantly. I say ‘stop criticizing me!’ She says ‘I am not criticizing you. That is your interpretation. I was merely pointing out there was another way of doing that that you might want to consider.’
Probably all my long life, I have played against these word games. Yesterday in a post on another substack I pointed out that I only burn organically grown natural fuel made primarily with solar energy in my large truck. The only part of that fuel that is not organically grown, is the ten percent of biofuel that I am forced to consume by regulations (that would be the ethanol/biodiesel which is grown with man-made fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides). Instead the gasoline and diesel I burn is organically grown. It was produced by solar energy powering photosynthesis in marine plankton, which died, were buried, and with some input from geothermal nuclear energy, were naturally converted to oil and gas. Oil, petroleum, natural gas, hydrocarbons, whatever you want to call it is NATURAL. Oil is as natural as I am, and was produced by life, and is still being produced by life. But the stupidity of language has allowed many to have no understanding of the meaning of words like organic, which they think means some special warm fuzzy type of farm product or hemp clothing, and the word natural, which they attempt to define as to exclude humans and natural organic products such as oil, coal and natural gas. So I insist that my truck, as big as it is, is powered by solar power. Let them chew on that.
I remember from time to time seeing on the news some poor kid who was allergic to everything, having to live in a bubble and wondering just how horrible that would be. These kids who believe and write this drivel about the earth must live in a bubble in front of their computers.
I remember back many moons ago (1980's) writing a "creative" marketing piece for our new business and certainly used much of that flowery drivel that meant really nothing. Now companies have really taken it to the highest level and developed the propaganda to perfection. That is now infecting the rest of the world.
You are right it does take a linguist to decipher just what they are saying. Not much!
As far as the earth is concerned, it's just fine and if I stopped mowing my grass within a few years my home and land would be devoured by trees, weeds and the earth would have reclaimed it's own. I'm glad it shared it with me for a short while!
NYC would be a jungle in twenty years without humans. I had a friend who wrote ad copy for cosmetics. Everything he wrote he said was without question very ‘scientifical’.
A bubble is exactly what it is, and its growing and devouring more and more children.
We consistently underestimate nature because we're so used to the idea that we, as species, have been modifying it for millennia and it can't "fight back". Well, all it takes to remind us nature still beats us is one heavy rain but that's now down to climate change = human activity. Poor, poor nature...
I remember a comedian, who always stayed away from politics in his schtick. He had had a moderately good career so far, but wanted better; wanted to find his way onto the sitcom path, so he spoke the shibboleths.
He damned conservatives in congress; he damned the president at the time; he damned the oil companies.
He gave ‘em hell.
Next thing you know, he had a lead part in a sitcom on NBC, and a 3-part Netflix special.
I always love your analogies, Irina, and this was a particularly good one!
And this? Priceless!: "Nature is a mother and not a helicopter one."
Indeed she is, but while we're talking about our current young(er) generation, allow me to share my observations about the current under-18's in the US.
My son is 17, a senior in high school who will graduate next May. He and his 20-some close friends are actually very grounded and not easily offended like the generation before them, and are also surprisingly conservative! Now, many of them will go off to college next Fall and that may change everything, but the way they see the world as of right now gives me a glimmer of hope.
In the meantime, yes, we are in dire straights, because we're being ruled by complete imbeciles.
The same for my Son who graduates from college this Spring, but he also says the folks outside his friend group are less grounded and more about the current woo.
So it may have more to do with upbringing, than generation.
And you could be right, his mother and I are both conservative, as are most of the rest of our (close) family members.
The pendulum has been artificially kept to the left since 1945, and I keep waiting for the day when the next youth generation rebels against "The Man", IE The left, across the globe.
I think the energy poverty that our "Betters" want for us just might do the trick....
It has A LOT to do with upbringing. My daughter is 12 but since she was 10, she's been increasingly grumbling about people being stupid, throwing their trash everywhere and -- red parental alert -- using all that polluting oil and gas. Luckily, we have the time and energy to educate her and over the past two years a lot has changed as we explained the facts of life. She still grumbles but is much more familiar with why we use all that oil and gas, and why life would be impossible without them and all the plastics. Yes, people are disgusting waste generators but they're not only that and it's not all of them.
That's so good to hear. I always love hearing about or meeting kids who are grounded and not, well, snowflaky. We need more of them. Perhaps this groundedness will make them resilient to university propaganda.
I don't know that it's a BIG thing, but it's a thing nonetheless!
And I think part of it is awareness on their part, meaning that they're aware of the propaganda coming at them, and aren't as enamored with it as the prior generation, to whom the who online experience was new.
This is even better. You're right about the previous generation. I hadn't thought about it but it makes perfect sense. And now that previous generation is raising the new generation and we get a mess...
And I have a rather unique perch to watch this from, as my wife and I were both 41 when our son was born, making us in many cases 2 generations removed compared to our parental peer-group's collective ages.
But I do see at least some of my son's generation, (Born in 2006 in his case), as less caught up in the shiny object of both social media and politics, at least for now.
But yes, I fear for the future greatly, as soft times create soft humans, and things have been soft since the early 1990's.
I wanted to say "Gen X are the best" but I can't overlook the fact that a lot of the most liberal parents are from our generation, too. So much overcompensation, it was bound to boomerang.
Nov 16, 2023·edited Nov 16, 2023Liked by Irina Slav
I've got to say this article of yours spells out just how deep the rot is. We are living in a world that largely considers reality to malleable and is definable by how many people believe a thing. Challenges remain unsolved because few people are prepared to test their beliefs against the real world. Tilting at windmills prevails (sic).
Exacerbating the situation are intellectual and political leader that consider 'stigmatizing' anyone is more traumatic that challenging erroneous thinking, an inevitable derivative from the trend to label harsh words as harmful as a punch in the hose.
As language is our thinking and communicating tool, both are in a steep decline. Few people realize civilization is at stake. Thanks for being someone that does.
Thank you Irina. I now know that I am not alone among the Walking Dead who are trudging off to that great solar farm carved out of the bush, destroying the very thing that nature put there to deal with the rubbish that we put into the air. In fact, in Australia, because it is a big place with few people - and we've given what manufacturing industry that we had to the Chinese - and despite the epic land clearing in the last 200 years, there is still enough forest left to sequester all of Australia's carbon dioxide emissions and more. Yet, we have sufficient walking dead among us to trudge off spending trillions to destroy what was a completely good electricity system, because of those words "fossil fuels". And yet, according to the walking dead in Germany, Australia is not trudging fast enough. Bloody hypocrites! I am definitely not a CC denier. Whereas, we could be doing other things like examining, or even stopping, land clearing (at a world champion rate) for even more cattle, looking at ways to conserve water in drylands cropping soils and so on to help capture even more of our neighbour's CO2! Oops, I may have just offended someone!
You are most definitely not alone. Now that you mentioned land-clearing for cattle, I have to ask: why is this necessary at all? I mean, cattle grazes at a pasture, then moves to another and grass grows again in the first pasture over the course of a year, so they can be rotated, or am I being utterly naive and simplistic? Or is it because more cattle is being grown to feed the growing global population?
Everything is PR now. The corporate world has been perfecting this newspeak nonsense for a long time, but now it is literally everywhere.
I’m just glad my “unchilding” phase was in the 80s and 90s where we in the west started to see how the Soviet Union used all this language policing for control. Sadly we have history again now, so everything must be controlled narrative.
True words, especially when slippery, and we live in slippery times. And since I'm not Jeff, I now have to buy you a shirt because you rechristened me and that's the custom here. :D
The concept of creating a new reality by selecting the approved code, or buzz words, reminds me of a very true saying. With apologies to Swine, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
“According to them, Earth is sensitive to human influence... “ but apparently not to a massive asteroid strike like the one that created the Grand Canyon. However did the Earth get over its allergic reaction?
Speaking of language and Pandas... there is a book by Lynn Truss, entitled: “Eats, shoots and leaves”. It’s about the importance of punctuation and how it can change meanings. It was published a few years back and caused a stir among many who think using correct grammar and spelling, and pronunciation, is no longer necessary. Being able to speak and write English is dying out in the UK. A vocab of no more than 500 words, not speaking in whole sentences using words of less than one syllable is all that is required... knah’ wot ah meeeen, innit?
Back on topic, slightly, there are some useful French words I use in comments on-line that can replace English words to avoid the prowling censors. I think perhaps ‘they’ just ‘think’ they are misspelled or not real English words.
great book,
Yes, linguistic standards are in decline, which is a tragedy in its own right. Thanks for the book recommendation!
“... this year’s COP who called for tripling wind and solar capacity by 2030.” We’re getting two more Suns? 😎 Musk launching them on his low carbon rockets?
And then we'll have to blot them, too, to reduce global boiling. These people really don't think, do they? :D
Perhaps you recall in the 1970s when devastating climate stage was all the rage - except due to global cooling and an impending ice-age, ‘scientists’ recommended covering the ice caps with soot to reduce the albedo effect and help keep temperatures up.
The climate change script of the 1990s onward is exactly the same except ‘warming’ replacing ‘cooling’ - and of course no soot… which is carbon.
Thank you. I can see more clearly now through the fog of idiocy growing around us.
That's great to hear, I'm flattered.
Language plus a large audience plus a hot topic is indeed a powerful combination. The Climate Alarmism category received a huge turbo boost four years ago from “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words”. Now that’s an easy bandwagon to jump on. Right?
But take the exact same speech, throw in some salt and pepper, and you get the following. The first time I saw this I couldn’t stop laughing. Many would consider my reaction disgusting behavior:
https://youtu.be/1kD1zubg3cA?si=Hcn_SffmtVYvf8NV
Thanks - so very funny!
Poor Greta is so disturbed.... no one can steal your dreams unless you let them!!!! Always the victim!
Exactly. Just yesterday I was on the phone with a loved one. At one point they said, “I’m not complaining. I’m just letting you know what’s going on.”
I paused for a second and calmly stated, “Yes, you are not only complaining, but also feeling sorry for yourself. This can ruin people.”
I have a relative who criticizes me constantly. I say ‘stop criticizing me!’ She says ‘I am not criticizing you. That is your interpretation. I was merely pointing out there was another way of doing that that you might want to consider.’
Yep. Classic!
This was hilarious!
Probably all my long life, I have played against these word games. Yesterday in a post on another substack I pointed out that I only burn organically grown natural fuel made primarily with solar energy in my large truck. The only part of that fuel that is not organically grown, is the ten percent of biofuel that I am forced to consume by regulations (that would be the ethanol/biodiesel which is grown with man-made fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides). Instead the gasoline and diesel I burn is organically grown. It was produced by solar energy powering photosynthesis in marine plankton, which died, were buried, and with some input from geothermal nuclear energy, were naturally converted to oil and gas. Oil, petroleum, natural gas, hydrocarbons, whatever you want to call it is NATURAL. Oil is as natural as I am, and was produced by life, and is still being produced by life. But the stupidity of language has allowed many to have no understanding of the meaning of words like organic, which they think means some special warm fuzzy type of farm product or hemp clothing, and the word natural, which they attempt to define as to exclude humans and natural organic products such as oil, coal and natural gas. So I insist that my truck, as big as it is, is powered by solar power. Let them chew on that.
Plus, its main emission according to many is 100% plant food!
I absolutely love this! Give 'em facts!
I remember from time to time seeing on the news some poor kid who was allergic to everything, having to live in a bubble and wondering just how horrible that would be. These kids who believe and write this drivel about the earth must live in a bubble in front of their computers.
I remember back many moons ago (1980's) writing a "creative" marketing piece for our new business and certainly used much of that flowery drivel that meant really nothing. Now companies have really taken it to the highest level and developed the propaganda to perfection. That is now infecting the rest of the world.
You are right it does take a linguist to decipher just what they are saying. Not much!
As far as the earth is concerned, it's just fine and if I stopped mowing my grass within a few years my home and land would be devoured by trees, weeds and the earth would have reclaimed it's own. I'm glad it shared it with me for a short while!
NYC would be a jungle in twenty years without humans. I had a friend who wrote ad copy for cosmetics. Everything he wrote he said was without question very ‘scientifical’.
A bubble is exactly what it is, and its growing and devouring more and more children.
We consistently underestimate nature because we're so used to the idea that we, as species, have been modifying it for millennia and it can't "fight back". Well, all it takes to remind us nature still beats us is one heavy rain but that's now down to climate change = human activity. Poor, poor nature...
BRAVO❗️ Very well said.
I remember a comedian, who always stayed away from politics in his schtick. He had had a moderately good career so far, but wanted better; wanted to find his way onto the sitcom path, so he spoke the shibboleths.
He damned conservatives in congress; he damned the president at the time; he damned the oil companies.
He gave ‘em hell.
Next thing you know, he had a lead part in a sitcom on NBC, and a 3-part Netflix special.
Speak the shibboleths, and advance.
I always love your analogies, Irina, and this was a particularly good one!
And this? Priceless!: "Nature is a mother and not a helicopter one."
Indeed she is, but while we're talking about our current young(er) generation, allow me to share my observations about the current under-18's in the US.
My son is 17, a senior in high school who will graduate next May. He and his 20-some close friends are actually very grounded and not easily offended like the generation before them, and are also surprisingly conservative! Now, many of them will go off to college next Fall and that may change everything, but the way they see the world as of right now gives me a glimmer of hope.
In the meantime, yes, we are in dire straights, because we're being ruled by complete imbeciles.
The same for my Son who graduates from college this Spring, but he also says the folks outside his friend group are less grounded and more about the current woo.
So it may have more to do with upbringing, than generation.
That's comforting to hear, Jeff!
And you could be right, his mother and I are both conservative, as are most of the rest of our (close) family members.
The pendulum has been artificially kept to the left since 1945, and I keep waiting for the day when the next youth generation rebels against "The Man", IE The left, across the globe.
I think the energy poverty that our "Betters" want for us just might do the trick....
It has A LOT to do with upbringing. My daughter is 12 but since she was 10, she's been increasingly grumbling about people being stupid, throwing their trash everywhere and -- red parental alert -- using all that polluting oil and gas. Luckily, we have the time and energy to educate her and over the past two years a lot has changed as we explained the facts of life. She still grumbles but is much more familiar with why we use all that oil and gas, and why life would be impossible without them and all the plastics. Yes, people are disgusting waste generators but they're not only that and it's not all of them.
That's so good to hear. I always love hearing about or meeting kids who are grounded and not, well, snowflaky. We need more of them. Perhaps this groundedness will make them resilient to university propaganda.
I don't know that it's a BIG thing, but it's a thing nonetheless!
And I think part of it is awareness on their part, meaning that they're aware of the propaganda coming at them, and aren't as enamored with it as the prior generation, to whom the who online experience was new.
This is even better. You're right about the previous generation. I hadn't thought about it but it makes perfect sense. And now that previous generation is raising the new generation and we get a mess...
And I have a rather unique perch to watch this from, as my wife and I were both 41 when our son was born, making us in many cases 2 generations removed compared to our parental peer-group's collective ages.
But I do see at least some of my son's generation, (Born in 2006 in his case), as less caught up in the shiny object of both social media and politics, at least for now.
But yes, I fear for the future greatly, as soft times create soft humans, and things have been soft since the early 1990's.
I wanted to say "Gen X are the best" but I can't overlook the fact that a lot of the most liberal parents are from our generation, too. So much overcompensation, it was bound to boomerang.
I've got to say this article of yours spells out just how deep the rot is. We are living in a world that largely considers reality to malleable and is definable by how many people believe a thing. Challenges remain unsolved because few people are prepared to test their beliefs against the real world. Tilting at windmills prevails (sic).
Exacerbating the situation are intellectual and political leader that consider 'stigmatizing' anyone is more traumatic that challenging erroneous thinking, an inevitable derivative from the trend to label harsh words as harmful as a punch in the hose.
As language is our thinking and communicating tool, both are in a steep decline. Few people realize civilization is at stake. Thanks for being someone that does.
Thank you, Garret. None so blind as those who will not see, after all, and there are a lot of people who don't want to see because it's hard work.
“Saving the Planet”
Who will pay damages
to the world’s people,
if “saving the planet”
turns out an enormous
waste of priceless
natural resources and precious capital?
Will the 3.5 billion people
in energy poverty
be able to “sue and settle?”
Legal warfare
against the Green NGOs,
environmental activists,
Over-reaching governments,
bloated federal agencies,
UN-like international groups,
one-eyed major media,
and echo chambers universities…
if they are just plain wrong?
Steve Heins
My Story
So, here is my story, I have
no earthy college degrees,
a couple of French courses short.
I have been a very good golfer,
basketball player, small town boy,
six time winner of greased pig contest,
big city man, businessman,
interstate highway drifter,
high and low plains America adventurer,
self-indulgent, distant father,
auto-didactic, Ivy Leaguer, scholar,
student, lost soul, historian, art historian,
musicologist, poet, poetry aficionado,
business writer, economist, “Blizzard of One” broadband “David” to
high speed Internet “Goliaths,” Internet Open Access champion,
practical environmentalist,
energy efficiency expert, member of Chicago Climate Exchange,
3-times matrimony loser, lobbyist, technology theorist, Bakken Basin podcaster, energy practicality, political advocate pain in the ass
and all around gadfly simply…
because I was self-appointed.
It's so much easier,
now that I confessed.
Steve Heins
Thank you Irina. I now know that I am not alone among the Walking Dead who are trudging off to that great solar farm carved out of the bush, destroying the very thing that nature put there to deal with the rubbish that we put into the air. In fact, in Australia, because it is a big place with few people - and we've given what manufacturing industry that we had to the Chinese - and despite the epic land clearing in the last 200 years, there is still enough forest left to sequester all of Australia's carbon dioxide emissions and more. Yet, we have sufficient walking dead among us to trudge off spending trillions to destroy what was a completely good electricity system, because of those words "fossil fuels". And yet, according to the walking dead in Germany, Australia is not trudging fast enough. Bloody hypocrites! I am definitely not a CC denier. Whereas, we could be doing other things like examining, or even stopping, land clearing (at a world champion rate) for even more cattle, looking at ways to conserve water in drylands cropping soils and so on to help capture even more of our neighbour's CO2! Oops, I may have just offended someone!
You are most definitely not alone. Now that you mentioned land-clearing for cattle, I have to ask: why is this necessary at all? I mean, cattle grazes at a pasture, then moves to another and grass grows again in the first pasture over the course of a year, so they can be rotated, or am I being utterly naive and simplistic? Or is it because more cattle is being grown to feed the growing global population?
Excellent questions. I’m curious as well.
(Note....This is a selfish comment from someone who enjoys all forms of meat and seafood.)
"I have seen the face of G-d." Howard Beale, Network
Great article Irina. Thoughtful, well informed and articulate. Thank you.
Thank you!
Everything is PR now. The corporate world has been perfecting this newspeak nonsense for a long time, but now it is literally everywhere.
I’m just glad my “unchilding” phase was in the 80s and 90s where we in the west started to see how the Soviet Union used all this language policing for control. Sadly we have history again now, so everything must be controlled narrative.
"So much overcompensation, it was bound to boomerang."
Indeed, Jeff, and when you saw the wheel too hard to the left, expect a spin to the right!
True words, especially when slippery, and we live in slippery times. And since I'm not Jeff, I now have to buy you a shirt because you rechristened me and that's the custom here. :D
Whoops! Now how on Earth did I manage to do that?!?
My apologies, Irina! Slip O' the Mind/Fingers, apparently...
No problem at all! And you get a shirt out of it. :D
The concept of creating a new reality by selecting the approved code, or buzz words, reminds me of a very true saying. With apologies to Swine, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
If only more people remembered these wise words.