I have a confession to make: I’ve enjoyed watching the movies of Harrison Ford as he pretended to be tough-as-nails archeologist Indiana Jones and rogue space smuggler Han Solo. He’s a pretty good actor.
Unfortunately, Mr. Ford has also been known to make headlines by saying words that were not scripted for him by a very talented writer. For example, he was recently quoted as saying the human race would soon become extinct unless some form of collective action wasn’t immediately taken to “combat climate change.”
Please stick to your script in the future, Harrison.
Ford’s crashed plane
(from USA Today)
Now I am not the first writer that noticed a man who owns multiple airplanes — a man who is completely unqualified to offer an informed opinion about the potential impact of “climate change” still felt free to lecture those of us who can’t even afford to fly coach. This man is the same actor bragged to a magazine in 2010 that he would “often fly up the coast for a cheeseburger.” Because he could.
Apparently we should all pay higher taxes for energy and drive hybrid vehicles so Mr. Ford won’t feel guilty about flying to Europe on his own private jet.
But if we seriously believed his Chicken Little mentality, why shouldn’t we force people like Mr. Ford to immediately give up their private jets in favor of (gasp) commercial air travel?
This prima donna burns more gas on one flight to get a cheeseburger than I burn in my much more modest form of transportation over an entire year. Please get over yourself, Captain Solo.
Sadly, Mr. Ford is hardly alone with his holier-than-thou attitude. The climate alarmist crowd wants to raise billions, possibly even trillions of dollars in new taxes under the guise of doing something about the problem, but how does a massive transfer of wealth affect the “problem?”
What troubles me so much about the climate change alarmist crowd is their hysterical intolerance of dissent — people who merely ask questions are branded as “climate deniers” and attacked as puppets of Big Oil.
Well, I have news for Al Gore and his ilk — Big Oil has never offered me a penny. My objections to climate hysteria are purely based on observation, logic and reason.
An overwhelming majority of the same people who demand that the world’s population forego the use of fossil fuels also oppose the cleaner alternative, which is nuclear energy. We are told that we should drive electric cars, but from where does the electricity come? Power plants that burn oil or coal, or use nuclear energy.
But we aren’t supposed to think about any possible unpleasant consequences that may come from taking drastic measures to transfer wealth from the poor to the obscenely rich, which can only be done by convincing the poor they should remain poor for the good of the rest of the world.
And like a virus, this malady of muddled thinking has spread to the younger generation, inspiring them to go on hunger strikes and “occupy” everything from a public park to the president’s office at the University of Missouri as they demand utter nonsense such as “safe space” zones where free speech is prohibited.
The world is not a safe place. These people are demanding something that simply doesn’t exist.
Suck it up, buttercup.
If you’re old enough to read this article and comprehend the words, you’re probably too old to be sucking your thumb and wearing a diaper.
Piers Morgan also suffered the consequences of foot-in-mouth disease, when he attacked the credentials of Ben Carson as a medical doctor.
Ouch. Apparently Piers failed to realize there isn’t a safe space on this planet that could protect him from the humorous wrath of Iowa Hawk. Piers Morgan shouldn’t question anyone’s intelligence, except maybe Wolf Blitzer. Maybe.
I should probably admit that I have been accused of being arrogant myself, and I think it’s probably true. Furthermore, I am honest enough to admit that I don’t know everything, and I’m quite honest about admitting the truth when I don’t know something.
I’m also truthful about the things that don’t interest me. Just because something isn’t interesting to me doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the fundamental principles of how it’s supposed to work.
Oh by the way — not only am I a climate denier, I’m an evolution denier, too.
By that I simply mean that I have publicly expressed my doubts and published my questions about the idea that some monkeys became isolated from other monkeys and had sex over a long enough period of time, spanning multiple generations, and slowly “evolved” to become human beings.
I personally began to experience the same sort of obnoxiously aggressive critics and random attacks by rather boorish people shortly after my first book, Divine Evolution, was published.
It seemed that none of them were content with saying “You’re wrong, and here’s why you’re wrong. You forgot about X.”
After my book was published and I began writing online, people who hadn’t even graduated college yet felt compelled to question my intelligence, simply because I didn’t believe what they believe.
Nor am I afraid to ask anybody difficult questions.
Perhaps the anger of these empowered idiots stems from the fact that no one, not even Dr. Ken Miller, has been able to offer a better explanation than sex, isolation, and time to serve as the primary mechanisms that lead to the origin of new species. Eventually. Naturally, the process takes more time than any observer has to witness this secular miracle.
At first, the degree of vitriol coming from my critics shocked me. Certainly, I had expected my opinions would be vigorously challenged, but not to the degree the insults became personal. I learned to develop a thick skin rather quickly. Of course I had anticipated that my lack of credentials as biologist, chemist, or physicist would create concerns in a skeptical audience for my emerging hypothesis that I’d named iterative creation.
However, I believed that iterative creation might develop into an idea that could actually compete fairly well against Darwin’s theory of evolution simply because the most persuasive argument for believing in evolution is well, everyone else does.
That’s about the dumbest reason a person could have for believing in just about anything. The evidence that evolution causes new species to exist fails close scrutiny.
Ironically, evolution denier may have been the nicest insult hurled my way, once it became public knowledge that I dared to question the theory. Liar, narcissist, and moron were some of the favorite aspersions cast in my direction about my character.
Even so, the aggressive bad manners and hubris gleefully demonstrated in public by so many people in modern society never ceases to amaze me.
The younger generation seems to think they know everything, and that any person who doesn’t agree with them must be wrong.
Dissent simply will not be tolerated.
Berkeley Breathed has figured it out, of course. Thank goodness Bloom County has returned, just in time to preserve my sanity.
In this foolish age of political correctness, if you don’t agree with the idea that only black lives matter — for example, if you foolishly suggest that all lives matter, you may literally get booed off the stage and forced to apologize, or have your microphone hijacked by a liberal even more radical than a self-professed Socialist.
The problem is that these very same people who pretend to have such extraordinary concern for the sanctity of select human life is that they only care about certain black lives.
What about the lives of black cops? For all cops, the protestors in Minnesota chanted “Pigs in a blanket/Fry ’em like bacon.”
While I support free speech, inflammatory (hate) speech that literally attempts to incite murder is going WAY too far. But some people have become convinced they can literally say anything anytime, to anyone. I can’t think of a more sure-fire way to shorten one’s life expectancy than by getting in the face of the wrong person and starting to make unreasonable demands.
Of course, being an asshole certainly isn’t justification or any excuse for murder, but that won’t change the fact that the asshole will still be dead.
Arrogance and stupidity make a terrible combination.
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