Thursday, November 26, 2015

How to Talk About Global Warming With Your Crazy ISIS Relatives at Thanksgiving Dinner



How to Talk About Global Warming With Your Crazy ISIS Relatives at Thanksgiving Dinner
by John Hayward 26 Nov 2015
It’s become a media tradition for left-wing blogs to publish “survival guides” for liberal youth fated to attend Thanksgiving dinners populated by crazy right-wing relatives, who have grown increasingly skeptical of the accomplishments of our glorious President Obama.

Things are going to be especially rough this year, what with the collapsing enrollment, soaring premiums, agonizing deductibles, and shaky insurance company finances created by ObamaCare – developments those cranky old wingnuts somehow interpret as indications Obama’s genius health care reform is “failing.”

Then you’ve got all the terrorism filling the streets with blood, which nutty Republican uncles are likely to misrepresent as evidence Obama was talking out of his turkey baster when he described ISIS as a thoroughly “contained” junior-varsity squad. Actually, Obama suddenly stopped talking about ISIS that way, just this week – but hey, nobody’s writing survival guides about how to talk to Barack Obama at Thanksgiving dinner.

What we really need is a handy guide for discussing global warming with your crazy ISIS relatives. President Obama just declared his intention to “rebuke” the Totally Not Islamic State by attending a climate change conference in Paris. Hopefully our intelligence community is searching social media and the Dark Net for indications that ISIS militants and sympathizers feel “rebuked” by this, and will publish their Tweets of shame, as soon as they become available.

Crackpot Republican uncles are probably going to give their sensitive liberal family members an earful about the President’s persistent efforts to link climate change to terrorism, or assert that climate change is a worse problem than terrorism. That just shows how stupid that uncle is, because there are many reasons it makes sense to fight global warming instead of terrorism.

1. Global warming doesn’t shoot back. Terrorists are really hard to fight, because they keep popping up and killing people. The failure of Obama’s strategies to restrain ISIS is too obvious. It’s just killing his poll numbers!

On the other hand, global warming is a harmless imaginary threat, based entirely on computer models that must be falsified with increasingly obvious accounting tricks to induce the desired levels of pocket-emptying panic. Nothing makes the climate look warmer than the heat from a pile of well-cooked books!

Even if the climate alarmists are taken seriously, they’re issuing doomsday warnings about minor blips in global temperature that might happen a century from now, and might be harmful if they do. Only your crazy right-wing uncle could fail to understand how fighting an ephemeral threat that might materialize in the 22nd Century is much smarter than doing battle with a real enemy that can make people like Barack Obama look foolish and incompetent by thwarting his plans. Doomsday weather forecasts can be pushed back decade after decade – the Climate Cult has done this many times, and their previous “Eastern Seaboard will disappear by 1999” predictions are instantly forgotten. Good luck convincing the Islamic State to reschedule its bloody massacres until after the next election.

2. Fighting global warming is fun. Terrorism is grim and depressing. It brings up questions about a religion the Left would rather not study, and makes standard liberal “oppression” narratives crash harder than HealthCareDotGov. To be brutally honest, criticizing the people who are worried about terrorism is a lot more fun than dealing with the depredations of ISIS, al-Qaeda, or knife-wielding Palestinians. You get to call everybody you dislike a racist paranoid, and paint yourself as a paragon of boundless tolerance. It’s a gas.

But it’s not as much of a gas as the high-octane thrill of railing against “climate change deniers” and comparing them to Holocaust deniers! The Climate Cult offers total emotional liberation to its members. No tactic for fighting the “deniers” is too low, no insult too extreme, no expression of hatred too savage.

Fighting terrorism calls for real lifestyle changes, from accepting the need for government surveillance to the ultimate “alternative lifestyle” of joining the military. Fighting global warming requires nothing more than yammering about all the changes you want to force other people to make in their lifestyles. The high priests of the climate cult can stamp Godzilla-sized carbon footprints all over the planetary ecosystem, burning more fossil fuel to attend a single climate conference than the average American torches in a decade, and their fans will never stop swooning.  

It can be a bummer to deal with the hassles of purchasing an electric car to show your devotion to the cause, especially if it bursts into flames and burns your garage down, but hardly anyone actually buys those things anyway. You can get a huge rush by telling Uncle Exxon how you think he should be forced to drive an electric car at Thanksgiving dinner, though!

3. Global warming is profitable. To hear the Climate Cult whine about the alleged conflicts of interest plaguing skeptical scientists who get their funds from “impure” sources, you’d never guess the global-warming racket is one of the biggest, richest industries in the world, shoveling around billions of government dollars.  

People, including Al Gore, have gotten stupid rich off global warming, but they’re not treated like fat-cat One Percent of the One Percenters. Left-wing sugar daddies like Tom Steyer are what the Left imagines the Koch Brothers to be, but no one warns about the corrupting influence of Steyer money. Medieval peddlers of papal indulgences would be astounded to learn how much money the Climate Cult rakes in by selling carbon indulgences.

Fighting global warming also reaps a windfall of political power. It lets left-wing politicians do what they wanted to do anyway. Virtually everything on their agenda can be repurposed as a weapon against climate change. The bodice-ripping romantic fantasy of socialism is a society in which people don’t move around so much, a land in which the unwashed masses live where they’re told, travel where the central planners want them, and live their lives at the mercy of the elements – with the free cash they might otherwise use for problematic purposes siphoned away at the gas pump and power plant. Cheap energy, like all other cheap products, is garlic to the socialist vampire, because people don’t need extensive government assistance to purchase inexpensive necessities.

Fighting terrorism, on the other hand, is a huge net loss for left-wingers. It requires beefing up the military they despise, except when they get to use it as a laboratory for social experimentation. The public begins embracing martial values, such as self-reliance, courage, and worst of all, faith. (Yes, faith is a martial value, as the Islamic State will be happy to explain at length.) People start talking about – ugh! – the Second Amendment and the necessity of bearing arms to protect their families and neighbors. How the heck are liberals supposed to push their gun-control agenda when people are looking at the Paris massacre and thinking about how armed citizens might have been able to save lives?

Money spent on the military is money that isn’t available for juicy vote-buying schemes, a point President Obama made brilliantly by trying to block the most recent defense bill, unless it was porked up with loot for his domestic spending programs. Also, when the public starts thinking about national security, it begins wondering why the military was slashed to give liberals money for their wasteful and ineffective social programs, asking hard questions about our porous national borders, and even musing about the proper role of government itself. Look at how hard liberals had to work to lose the Iraq War and break up the post-9/11 sense of national unity and purpose. Who wants to go through that again?

4. Global warming is an ideology liberals feel comfortable defending. ISIS and al-Qaeda present both physical and ideological threats. They think their fusion of religion and politics is far superior than anything offered by the decadent West.

That’s troublesome for good liberals, who feel very uncomfortable defending stuff like capitalism and American history. When ISIS rants about the Crusades, a good liberal like Barack Obama nods thoughtfully and says, “You know, you’ve got a point there. Christians really shouldn’t be getting on their high horses to complain about Islamic terrorism!”

Global warming, on the other hand, is an ideology liberals are ready to defend against the Caliphate all day, every day, and twice on Ramadan. Quite a few on the Left have tried portraying the Paris attack as an ISIS attempt to screw up the climate change conference. President Obama thinks the most effective response to Islamist terror is to proceed with such meetings. Climate alarmism is the one Western belief system liberals will defend from Islamists without hesitation.  

In fact, the whole notion of “rebuking” ISIS by holding a global warming summit is an expression of left-wing arrogance and disdain for any religion except their own. Let’s be honest: Islamists don’t care if people attend global warming summits. They care about preventing people from attending churches, synagogues, temples, and the “wrong” sort of mosque. The Left wants to pretend that eating lobster and sipping wine at a climate confab is a greater act of defiance than the sort of genuine religious service that really would piss ISIS off.

In fact, given the spate of knucklehead theories about how a drought caused by global warming produced the Syrian civil war and accompanying refugee crisis, it looks as if the Left is prepared to evangelize their Church of Global Warming to Islamists. Good luck getting them to display remotely comparable zeal for promoting capitalism or freedom of speech.

So there you have it – a handy Thanksgiving guide for explaining to your wingnut relatives that fighting global warming is far preferable to battling terrorism.  

You might even use this guide as a springboard for convincing any Islamists you meet that global warming is the common foe they should join you in fighting. The hajj pilgrimage is pretty rough as it is – just ask any visitor to Mecca who doesn’t work for the Saudi government. How hard will it be when Mecca is under water, thanks to melting polar ice caps? If you happen to have relatives who belong to ISIS, try that argument over the Thanksgiving table, and hit the comments section this weekend to let us know how it goes.

HealthCareDotGov
CGI Group Inc. was the Obamacare contractor that developed Healthcare.gov web site.

Note: Barack Obama’s signature policy initiative is Obamacare, and was a parishioner at the Trinity United Church of Christ (Chicago).
Trumpeter Newsmagazine is a publication for the Trinity United Church of Christ (Chicago).
Louis Farrakhan was awarded the 2007 Jeremiah Wright Jr. Trumpeter award from the Trumpeter Newsmagazine, is the organizer for the Million Man March, and the acting head for the Nation of Islam.
Obamacare is Barack Obama’s signature policy initiative.           
Donna S. Morea was the EVP for the CGI Group Inc., and a trustee at the Committee for Economic Development.
Foundation to Promote Open Society was a funder for the Committee for Economic Development, the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sundance Institute.
George Soros was the chairman for the Foundation to Promote Open Society.
Albert A. Gore Jr. is the chairman for the Climate Reality Project, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the narrator-host for An Inconvenient Truth, and was a donor for The Climate Project.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was a donor for The Climate Project.
The Climate Project was a merged organization with the Climate Reality Project.
An Inconvenient Truth
An Inconvenient Truth is a 2006 documentary film directed by Davis Guggenheim about former United States Vice President Al Gore's campaign to educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate made in the film, he has given more than a thousand times.
Premiering at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and opening in New York City and Los Angeles on May 24, 2006, the documentary was a critical and box-office success, winning two Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song.
Laurie P. David is the producer for An Inconvenient Truth, and a trustee at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Natural Resources Defense Council is a partner with the Reality Coalition, and a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.
Reality Coalition opposes coal use in the Clean coal debate.
Robert Redford is a trustee at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the founder & president of the Sundance Institute.
Sundance Institute is the sponsor for the Sundance Film Festival.
Kenneth D. Cole is a trustee at the Sundance Institute, and married to Maria Cuomo Cole.
Maria Cuomo Cole is married to Kenneth D. Cole, and a trustee at the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence is a “Gun Safety, Gun Control” group for guns.

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