Having said that, can anyone remember the name and author of the science fiction post-apocalyptic short story of a grandfather who tells his grandkids bedtime stories of the old days when we had cars, plumbing, and electricity, and every night he winds up crying, and the kids can’t imagine why? I was reading about our hellbent drive to marxism and a vague memory of this story came to me….

L3 says much of what I was thinking. Being alarmingly innumerate myself, I would never have caught the AGW alarmists except that I have a good grounding in geologic and human history. For those looking for, ahem, a breath of fresh air let me recommend Anthony Watts’ site, wattsupwiththat.com. Lotsa physics for those who understand such things yet friendly to the rest of us. The tide is turning, and we have Old Sol to thank for it. Good science will prevail over cultic swindlers.

Time’s up, is that your final edit?

Keen-shooter, mean-shooter, bean-shooter bugs.

What’s not to like?

now that i think about, it pisses me off too. thanks a mil, just what i needed!

I’m not at all worried about the 12-year-old tunaphobe. Any kid whose parents can afford to take them to a restaurant where seared tuna is on the menu will, by the end of their senior year in high school, be able to read, write, and calculate well enough to enter college and get a degree. These kids will likely enter the workforce, make good money, pay their taxes, and vote. Over time, armed with enough literacy and numeracy, they will come to see that the environmental movement is anti-human; after all, the ecos hardly mask their hostility to homo sapiens sapiens.

Now if they choose to live in a liberal bubble like the West Village or Haight-Asbury, they’ll still believe all this gobbledygook. But, then, that’s the way they’d believe regardless of what they learned in 3rd grade, because those bubbles generally operate on, and attract people to, a collective identity narrative that is impervious to logic, reason, and data. The good news is that these bubbles are small, electorally-speaking.

No, the big danger to our republic is the mass of urban children who either don’t graduate from high school (>50% nationally), or graduate with such minimal skills that they are dependent upon their “betters” in the political world. Without the ability to read, write, figure, and think critically, they are easily manipulated by the latest purveyor of snake-oil.

Since Plato (at least), it has been well-known that a republic relies upon an educated populace. Circumstances and environments change, and it is the ability for the citizen to assess these changes themselves, without the “leadership” of the so-called elite, that allows them to make good decisions as a collective, through the ballot box.

What we are seeing in the AGW movement is an attempt to leverage widespread ignorance into political power through the liberal application of arguments from authority. This style of argumentation is most effective on those who are intimidated by smart people, and it is a lot easier to intimidate the illiterate.

So, at the end of the day, I’m not as concerned that kids are learning the wrong stuff (though this is still a concern). I’m much more concerned that kids are being rendered incapable of learning and thinking on their own, and it is this incapacity that leaves them open to the demagoguery that characterizes the proponents of AGW.

And it is this incapacity that puts our republic at risk.

L3