Wretchard #28:

I have studied history and even written some analyses of it and I concluded that people – even very intelligent and educated people – have the darndest way of wandering off in the wrong direction – in the pursuit of mythologies, is the way I describe it.

As to why this is, I have no idea. And I really have no idea why some people or segments of society seem to do this all the time, one right after the other. You would think they would learn. But I have noted that in each case in which a mythology becomes popular or important, there were constituencies that saw it in their favor. One example of this is the Space Shuttle.

Y2K was a disaster only in terms of the resources wasted on it. There was money to be made, though, and some people pushed it. Russia even told the US that they could not guarantee that some of their non-Y2K compliant ICBMs might not just spontaneously fire on 1 Jan 2000. The result was that much of the Y2K funding allocated for DoD was sent to Russia.

Soon after Y2K came the Planet X threat, which was a real nutball idea, based on telepathic messages a woman received from space aliens. Planet X had nowhere near the impact of Y2K because there was no money to be made.

AGW is accompanied by a vast apparatus to separate people from their money. Did you know that there are county governments in the US that are selling carbon credits as a way to get some income?

There is a shortwave radio station that claimed Y2K was The End. Their answer was to sell handcranked shortwave radios with which you could keep up with their messages after all other forms of communication ceased. It appears those same people are now pushing the idea of a massive Global Cooling era that will cause mass starvation; I don’t know what they are selling now but I’ll bet it’s something.

So it appears that these nutball ideas happen all the time, like viruses and bacteria attacking our bodies, and every once in a while one is seized by people who see an advantage to it. Call it an opportunistic infection.