surviving the world of bought and paid for panic

inverting the grifter gradient and turning lies back upon the liars

in the halcyon days of 2020, certain internet felines were heard to opine that “public health epidemiology is just the global warming scam on 100X fast forward.” and truly, it was.

it’s the same tricks, the same bad models, the same zero-move look ahead sensationalization of anything that happens. it’s the same endless pivots to “the new scary thing” when the last one fails to pan out. it’s the same manipulation of data, the same suppression of dissent and elimination of perspective, and the same interminable repetition of tall tale talking points to frighten, other, and enrage.

it’s all one big program to convince people that they “know” what “isn’t so” using the cognitive carpet bombing of embedding and repetition to take advantage of flaws in human reasoning and perception to substitute ubiquity for rigor and confidence tricks for consensus.

and once you realize that much of the business model of modern media has morphed into pay for play special interest shillery, an awful lot of things start to make sense.

but we will evolve around this.

this endless bag of tricks not only evaporates but inverts once you know what you’re looking at. you not only see the scam for what it is, but you also see the scammers for what they are.

once you have learned to rotate this shape in your head, these attempted attacks just discredit the attacker and make them look absurd and untrustworthy. it’s why they try so hard to suppress such speech.

but it’s not working, is it? covid has exploded like a novelty cigar in the face of “the experts” whose weaksauce woo-woo has been laid plain.

consider:

this was once a scam that worked.

“extra! extra! scary new variant! this time be super duper double secret afraid because we really mean it!”

now it reads like lame, out of date comedy.

funnier still are the reactions of team fear and alarm and their desperate attempts at ascribing their own frailties and misbehavior to those they seek to victimize.

this abject lunacy is not some throwback to early days. perpetual panic poster child taylor lorenz posted this on 9/1/23. she and teflon tony are literally out claiming “it was not us being wrong and posting propaganda, it’s that you have been brainwashed against us! it’s a plot!”

but it just sounds stupid now. it seems ignorant, manipulative, and even outright abusive. it smacks of pathology and grift.

and because we have seen the facts and we are done with this and done with them.

but “grift shift” is the name of the game for this crowd and as the covid horse dies out from under them, many seek to switch to climate for the next leg of the ride to authoritarianville because while these two purported maladies have nothing to do with one another, isn’t it interesting that they always have the same cures: more government power, fewer rights, more collectivism and diktat, and less free speech.

and the way of the watermelon (green on the outside, red on the inside) is by far the more dangerous path. covid is just the annoying little brother of this gang. climate alarmism cum activism is the nasty older sibling who is almost certainly going to kill someone one day.

but it’s actually just as easy to spot as utter nonsense if you take the time to look. the timescales are longer, but the games are the same.

so in the interest of intellectual inoculation, let’s see if we can inject a bit of perspective here as we seek to stifle the weaponization of weather.

“grab something mediagenic and make facile claims about it” or “extend some data point to infinity” are classic gags to fool those whose inspection is cursory. hysterical claims are made and then, before they fail, you’re on to the next one. this is just another “covid variant” shell game. and it’s never going to stop until we stop taking it seriously and render it the object of derision of deserves to be.

let’s start:

the polar bear was the “charismatic megafauna” of choice for “global warning.” but a funny thing happened: they absolutely thrived. a bear on an ice floe looks precarious, but polar bears can swim 10-20 miles without breaking a sweat. they do not drown. it was all a setup by fools who had no idea what they were discussing.

google “polar bear population” and you’ll be assailed by all sorts of iffy “fact checks” about “no, it’s not increasing” but it’s bunk. population has more than doubled since the 1960’s. (source bjorn lomborg)

meanwhile, the whales who look to be threatened by offshore wind farms get short shrift and no coverage and the same people who lied about ursus major are covering up for potential massacres of eubalaena glacialis of whom fewer than 400 likely remain.)

wright whales are likely being done wrong, but wind subsidies thrive. is this environmentalism? because it seems like probably it’s not. it’s media slant to distort perception.

you know who else is currently thriving? reefs. remember “coral bleaching” and “global warming to destroy great barrier reef?” yeah, it was bunk too. it was a natural process, part of cycles humans have just not been watching for long enough to really understand very well. they took a short term trend, ascribed causality to their chosen bugbear without any real basis for doing so, and then, when the data turned against them, they stopped reporting it. (remind you of anything?)

meanwhile, the reefs are at highs.

and how about all the “OMG fires are proof of global warming!” prattle that keeps turning out to be arson or gross mismanagement of forests? (or both)

california, canada, maui, greece. it’s all “we’re all going to expire in fiery infernos unless you stop using plastic straws!”

but the reality fails to conform.

all we hear about in the EU is greece ablaze. oddly, “lowest fire season in decades” (chart on right) goes unreported. curious, that…

remember when the cabinet of the maldives signed the copenhagen climate treaty underwater in 2009? everyone in scuba gear, very mediagenic, please save our little islands from sinking beneath the sea! and then, right on cue, the maldives not only failed to sink, they gained land area.

the “research reports” here have summaries declaiming dire threat of diminishment despite data showing enormous growth.

because they figure you’re not actually going to read it and neither are search engines.

but when you do, oopise…

but you’ll never hear about this. the whole of this green grift/government/media industrial complex is set up to ensure that you don’t.

now, to be sure, some of this is simply emergent phenomenon. crisis sells, reporters have the attention span of 4 year olds that just ate a whole box of captain crunch, and only the most sensational of claims rise to the top of the attention economy fueled by fear, anger, and self righteousness, but make no mistake: a great deal of this is planned and planful. it’s a 100% deliberate and calculated campaign manifest as a system of capture and kickback.

it’s how the embedding gets so thorough. the gold givers of grants will not fund you to study ground squirrels. but add a paragraph about “and climate change threatens them” and here’s your bag of cash. show wind farms harm whales? nope. show they don’t, here’s your paycheck. this stuff makes big tobacco look like pikers. and it’s a MUCH bigger gravy train and one that is entirely, utterly dependent upon crisis. no crisis, no federal funding. half these agencies would dry up and blow away. whole university departments they fund would become tumbleweeds. it’s terrify or die for this gang. same goes for the activist groups that raise so much money and these groups are smart. and they have bought the media lock, stock, and keyboard.

THIS wound up being one of my most popular pieces ever.

it’s really insidious.

the AP newswire, source of countless news stories in 100’s of papers, especially today as newsrooms have shrunk and reporter count plummeted, is not a news wire. it’s a marketing arm for the watermelon war. the newspaper desk is no longer the domain of the doughty muckraker and intrepid investigator, it’s the scupper collecting failed liberal arts majors who could not make it on their own on sites like substack and so become paid shills. this is the new model and it self selects for dogmatic doggerel.

AP hired 20 “climate journalists” with the $8 million grant they got as “philanthropy.”

but this is not philanthropy, it’s crony corporatism dressed up for a charity ball.

and it’s NOT stopping.

the AP news has a whole new business model. they are pay for play. there’s just no money left in being the flailing failure of reputational rot that modern media has become. so they have moved to nascar level sponsorship; they’re just not letting you see the logos.

The news organization last year announced a series of "partnerships" to subsidize reporters covering climate change, race, and democracy. A review of the donor roster shows that the vast majority fund left-wing political causes, while none are supporters of conservative initiatives.

The Ida B. Wells Society, founded by "1619 Project" lightning rod Hannah-Jones, has teamed up with filmmaker Steven Spielberg's Hearthland Foundation, for example, to foster "more inclusive storytelling" at the Associated Press.

and oh how the money rolls in.

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, for example, provided $500,000 in 2022 to the Associated Press's "democracy journalism initiative." The foundation recently blasted the Supreme Court decision to overturn affirmative action, saying the decision "impedes colleges and universities from selecting their own student bodies and fully addressing systemic racial inequalities that persist."

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation spent $2.5 million on the AP's climate and education reporting verticals and sent $400,000 to its democracy journalism initiative. The foundation also funds Planned Parenthood and organizations such as Advocates for Youth, which promotes transgender ideology to kindergartners.

The AP takes in millions more from philanthropies—the Hewlett Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, and others—to fund reporting on climate change, such as stories that this summer's heat wave is due to global warming, that President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act boosted America's "climate credibility," and that climate activists have ramped up protests against the "emissions-spewing lifestyles of the ultrawealthy."

The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the country's largest private philanthropies, in 2021 awarded the Associated Press $750,000 for a climate change initiative to increase reporting "on the increased and urgent need for reliable, renewable electricity in underserved communities worldwide."

you want positive coverage for your issue? buy it. maybe launder it through a “foundation” to keep your hands clean. but this is not news, it’s hucksterism. and this is not “inclusive” it’s crony corporatist aristocratic flex. and this is not an accident, it’s malice aforethought.

and they are just getting warmed up. journalism schools are now teaching “how to sell out as a subsidy serf” as vocational training.

and i’m sure this is going to be a paragon of impartiality, right?

• Hear from newsrooms innovating to meet the moment: How can news outlets everywhere treat climate change as a story for every beat, not just silo it on the weather desk?

• Discuss whether news outlets should still take fossil fuel advertising, and how journalists can grapple with climate disinformation.

• Look ahead to 2024 elections that will have profound implications for global climate action. How can journalists make those implications clear to voters, refute misinformation, and hold candidates accountable?

• Learn from journalists covering and living in frontline communities how to highlight climate justice in our reporting

this is concerted action against we the people by small groups being paid to slant, spin, and lie. it’s not science, it’s zealotry. it’s not journalism, it’s “sham-wow level infomercials.”

the intent is to embed it everywhere so that no story is absent its artifice. every news topic is about climate and race and gender because the people who profit from these scams are paying the piper to play their tune and the music du jour is repetition, embedding, and shabby behavioral econ nudges.

it’s why you cannot get this stupidity to stop even as it implodes the groups that push it and acts like reputational kryptonite upon them. they are caught in a doom loop and cannot adjust. and this is why it’s over for them and why we’re moving on without these prattlers of paid for propaganda.

this is not information, it’s a business model. and it becomes glaringly obvious once you stop trying to follow their science and start following the money.

and this will lose because we will make it lose.

it will lose because it’s obvious and foolish and so blatantly contrary to reality that its proponents are being reduced to arguing against objectivism in favor of “my feels and lived experience” and trying to pass it off as being on the side of science.

it will lose because it’s self defeating and we’re onto the part of the curve where each new fountain of falsehood douses their fires and stokes our own because we have seen through them and infowar inverts once you perceive the shape of their game.

half the battle is knowing that it’s being done to you.

keep perspective, speak your mind, ridicule these fools, and demand better.

this is the way back.