Why diss Al Gore?

Lately I've seen "news" talk show guests who deny there is such a thing as global warming or a climate crisis. They say sure, it's a couple degrees warmer, but hey, it's not serious and people are silly for getting so "hysterical" about it.

Then they try discrediting Al Gore personally, accusing him of all sorts, including hypocrisy and manipulating scientific data, then claim there is no scientific evidence to prove there are any problems with our climate. That weather is happening just as it should.

I've not seen them sharing any facts. One anti-Gore spokesman only made generalisations and personal accusations against him without presenting one "fact" or suggesting one place we could verify his statements about what he claimed was Gore twisting scientific data.

It was a personal attack, not an attack on, or correction of, data.

Gore has, for decades, been in the fight to secure and preserve a healthy environment - and he's stepped on a few political and corporate toes along the way.

Here's my question: why would anyone want to diss achieving a healthy environment?

I wondered if multinational corporations selling products they want us to buy that are not in our best environmental interest might be involved.

I've been pretty careful with my resources over the years, I tend to live pretty modestly. I lived with someone who was wasteful for a few years and it nearly drove me crazy. She thought she was "normal," that I was a extreme. Um, I've known people who are extreme environmentalists and I'm not one of them, though I've decided to become even more serious about conserving resources.

At any rate, what I came away with after watching foes who personally attack Al Gore instead of the specific science used by environmentalists to prove we are in a climate crisis - caused by people and animals and an disappearing rain forest presence - is that they look and behave untrustworthy.

Al Gore's been selling his ideas with facts, scientific data and projections determined by people who have been investigating these issues for decades with information we've been tracking more than a century.

Some scientists working with the Bush administration who believe we are in a climate crisis have been fired, told to rewrite their summations or had them rewritten to reflect the lack of a climate crisis.

One detailed example of Bush's Department of the Interior tampering with scientific evidence involving endangered species is reported here. Usually these types of cover ups don't come out until after an administration is out of office because of the power they use to manipulate facts while they hold government employees/scientists in their grip.

So here's a tip to those who try to discredit Al Gore when it comes to environmental causes: you look foolish. You look like you don't know what you're talking about. Even if you might have some credible information.

He normally travels commercial.

His home is "green."

If you honestly believe that the climate crisis is no crisis at all; that the earth really is doing OK; that the loss of rain forests, industrial pollution, oil-burning vehicles, animal gases, chemical dumping and oil spills are not actually seriously affecting the planet in a negative way?

Show us evidence.

Show us pictures.

Speaking of which, here's a snapshot of The Lost City in China blanketed with "imaginary" pollution, which some scientists claim is contributing the "imaginary" climate crisis. If you suffer from asthma or other imagined pulmonary diseases, you are warned not to be outside during actual events of environmental particle poison.

Show us scientific research and reports.

There used to be arguments about the environment that went: well, you can have a clean environment or you can have jobs. One or the other.

People wanted jobs, only to see themselves and their families get sick and die from the pollution that was the byproduct of those jobs. The Asarco smelter in Tacoma, Washington, USA is a perfect example. In addition to all the people and plants its pollution harmed, it exuded a putrid odor for *miles* around, which created the city's slogan, "Tacoma has an aroma."

There used to be arguments by the tobacco companies that smoking tobacco was actually good for us. Seriously. They even used doctors to say so. For decades they swore there was no scientific evidence that smoking tobacco caused lung diseases and discredited people who insisted there was.

In fact there was scientific evidence proving smoking tobacco caused lung diseases in the 1950's in England. It's a famous report now, but it was debunked when it came out. If you're interested in a little history of the fight between the multinational tobacco corporations and those who insisted smoking is bad for our health, you can read it here.

Second hand smoke contributes to pollution and diseases. That smoke doesn't just disappear when people smoke outside.

There's another auspicious aspect to "climate crisis/global warming."

For some reason that will be known in the future, it is not a priority of the US government, particularly of the Bush administration. Perhaps they're upset that someone else is setting a priority for us when they believe they should be setting our priorities.

This doesn't fit their agenda.

Why it would not is very curious, indeed.

I mean, no one has excluded anyone with a different position about the subject of climate crisis. We're all looking for the truth and how to improve our planet - all credible research and data is welcome.

But we're sick to death of being told what - or whom - we should be against. Of the government trying to scare us into doing - or not doing - something.

Being for a clean environment is something that unites, not divides, us. How to make it cleaner, healthier - working together, everyone contributing.

Why wouldn't someone want to contribute to a healthier, cleaner, safer, more beautiful world? Understand that and you'll understand the people who speak against efforts to truthfully clear the air.

Back to Al Gore.

As a human being, I assume he has faults. As a leader who is honestly trying to find what we can do to improve our environment on a global basis, he comes across as truthful, sincere and dedicated to a cause he knows is much bigger than himself.

Because Al Gore is not the Cause. The Cause is the Cause.

Lobbyists who personalize the Cause in the form of Al Gore will only catapult him as a martyr-leader of historical proportions, as well as make the Cause of a healthy planet creating renewable resources as major and influential a Cause as the civil rights movement.

Come to think of it -- you want to diss Al Gore?

Fire away.

Please.

Disinformation

The Bush administration has used disinformation masterfully over the past eight years. Karl Rove is normally the creator of the self-serving fabrications spread to party loyalists, conservative groups, media, churches and others who will spread false information without question until the lie is believed to be the truth.

What exactly is "disinformation?"

It's the deliberate pronouncement of fraudulent statements passed off as "facts."

For example, many Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein, the executed leader of Iraq, was in some way responsible for the attack on the New York City World Trade Center September 11, 2001.

That false statement was made by Bush administration spokespeople so often, many Americans believed the lie when it was initially released, and astonishingly continue to believe it, even though it has been proved a hundred times over to be outrightly and completely false.

If it's possible, Saddam Hussein and Iraq had less than nothing to do with the attack.

Iraq was terrorist-free under Hussein because he was the ultimate dictator - paranoid about outsiders stirring up his carefully controlled population, which he ruled with a near- sadistic hand. He knew if any of the dozens of warring tribal factions in Iraq were armed or felt free to fight again (tribal wars have been going on for centuries, including the conflict between the Sunnis and Shiites), he would lose control of the people and "his" country.

It was not until the US attacked Iraq that terrorists, including al qaeda, found the opening they sought to not only move into the country, but use the deadly debacle created by the US in Iraq to recruit new members because now they had concrete evidence that the US is an aggressor; that it wants to occupy Middle Eastern nations.

Interestingly, the number of terrorists actually needed in Iraq is very few because now so many Iraqis themselves are furious at the US - whom they blame for devastating their country and being the cause of the violent deaths of some 600,000 innocent Iraqis. Their anti-US feelings have fomented them into taking arms against our soldiers in harms way there.

American intelligence sources report that approximately 4% of fighters in Iraq are associated with al qaeda. If that sounds like it's good news, it's not. It only means all the terrorist cells and individuals not fighting in Iraq are free to ply their trades in other nations.

Al Gore's #1 NYT best selling book The Assault on Reason just arrived here; I'll read it this week and review it next week here. I have a feeling these sorts of issues will be discussed there because often, if we're accurately informed about a subject, we can discern truth from lie by using simple reason.

Like, if you knew about how Saddam ran his country - ruling by making people terrified of him while keeping it terrorist-free, never wanting anyone to challenge his autocratic authoritarianism; that he would never tolerate tribal in-fighting because it would detract from his iron-fisted control - you would understand that anyone claiming that terrorists were allowed in Iraq or that Saddam had anything to do with them is simply and outright unreasonable.

Because the US Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on Prewar Intelligence Assessment about Postwar Iraq outlined these and many other facts, it predicted the horrors we face today if Saddam were not only unseated but the nation itself attacked to allow US-backed individuals to take over.

Unfortunately, many US Senators and Representatives believed this misinformation put out by the Bush administration instead of reading the report gathered by some 81 separate intelligence agencies, and voted to give George Bush the authority to invade Iraq - including US Senator Hilary Clinton.

It all comes back to the need for an educated, informed nation to effectively run a democratic republic like the United States.

But between outright disinformation disseminated freely by people who know the truth because they want to manipulate you, and an unquestioning media - that can be hard to come by through "normal" media outlets. US media tend to reproduce whatever they are told by "authoritative" sources without question or perspective - and those "authoritative sources" tend to be the very people who disseminate disinformation these days.

Think of the glib government disinformation on its response to Katrina - that "Brownie's doing a heck of a job," while we saw the massive destruction with our own eyes. The meteorologist who gave President Bush and the US Federal Government the grave warning of the oncoming disaster himself days before the hurricane struck. The response: "We had no idea this would happen."

Disinformers *love* this; they also love how frightened US media are when they are accused of being "unfair" or "one-sided" about their coverage.

Here's how that works:

Mr. X, an authoritative spokesperson, says "10."

US media pass it on, uncensored, unquestioned, unexamined.

Then Mr. C, an authoritative spokesperson who knows that "10" is an outright lie, says, "10 is not true! In fact, here's evidence it's an outright fabrication and harmful to our nation!" And there's the proof that you can see with your own eyes (Iraq's astonishing devastation, Katrina reconstruction is NOT happening as promised, etc.)

Mr. X responds, "There the 'liberal media' goes again - unfairly showing only ONE SIDE of the story!"

The media, terrified of being called "unfair," steps up the quotes by Mr. X and his cohorts, so we keep hearing "10," over and over again, and seldom see Mr. C and the actual evidence of Mr. X's fraudulent statement.

After awhile, "10" sounds like it *should* be true. Thereby becoming part of Stephen Colbert's genius term, "truthiness;" which means something that feels like it should be true.

By the way, I hope you understand that disinformers believe *you* are not only ignorant, but stupid. Stupid enough to buy whatever they sell. They particularly need their own followers to be ignorant of facts and stupid. Who else would believe such overtly ignorant statements and disinformation but people who want to believe them because they are their leaders and trust them blindly.

That's why "believers" whose information is challenged become so emotionally charged and outraged when others tell them anything that disagrees with what they've been told by their leaders. Because if the truth-tellers make those leaders wrong, then they -- the believers -- have to realize how stupid they were to believe them in the first place.

And no one likes to think of themselves as being duped. It's embarrassing. So they fight harder to "prove" the disinformation given them by their leaders.

This happens all the time in extremist religious circles who disperse disinformation, whether it's extreme fundamentalist Muslims or extreme fundamentalist Christians.

Here are more ways Wikipedia finds disinformation (intentional misinformation, lies, misrepresentation) are used: forged documents, manuscripts, photographs; propagation of malicious rumors and fabricated intelligence.

More, "In the context of espionage or military intelligence, it is the deliberate spreading of false information to mislead an enemy as to one's position or course of action. It also includes the distortion of true information in such a way as to render it useless.

"Disinformation techniques may also be found in commerce and government, used by one group to try to undermine the position of a competitor. It in fact is the act of deception and blatant false statements to convince someone of an untruth."

Tomorrow, I'll discuss how disinformation differs from propaganda, misinformation, The Big Lie, and other ways people with specific agendas not only try, but succeed to control your behavior, votes and money with misleading and outright untruthful statements.