- Banned
- #1
INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE - NOAM CHOMSKY
October 27, 2012
Noam Chomsky : Who Owns the World? : Information Clearing House: ICH
"***
***humans are somehow trying to fulfill a prediction of great American biologist who died recently, Ernst Mayr.
He argued years ago that intelligence seems to be a lethal mutation. Heand he had some pretty good evidence.
Theres a notion of biological success, which is how many of you are there around. You know, thats biological success.
And he pointed out that if you look at the tens of billions of species in humanin world history, the ones that are very successful are the ones that mutate very quickly, like bacteria, or the ones that have a fixed ecological niche, like beetles. They seem to make out fine.
But as you move up the scale of what we call intelligence, success declines steadily. When you get up to mammals, its very low. There are very few of them around. I mean, theres a lot of cows; its only because we domesticate them. When you get to humans, its the same. 'Til very recently, much too recent a time to show up in any evolutionary accounting, humans were very scattered.
There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.
Anyhow, maybe we're trying to show that humans just fit into the general pattern. We can exterminate ourselves, too, the rest of the world with us, and were hell bent on it right now.
Well, lets turn to the elections. Both political parties demand that we make the problem worse. In 2008, both party platforms devoted some space to how the government should address climate change. Today, thein the Republican platform, the issue has essentially disappeared. But the platform does demand that Congress take quick action
to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency
from regulating greenhouse gases. So lets make re to make it worse.
And it also demands that we open the Alaskas Arctic Refuge to drillingIm quoting nowin order to take "advantage of all of our American God-given resources." You cant disobey God, after all.
On environmental policy, the program says, "We must restore scientific integrity to our public research institutions and remove political incentives from publicly funded research." All thats a code word for climate science: stop funding climate science.
Romney himself says theres no scientific consensus, so we should support more debate and investigation within the scientific community, but no action, except to act to make the problems worse.
Well, what about the Democrats?
They concede that theres a problem and advocate that we should work toward an agreement to set emissions limits in unison with other emerging powers.
But thats it. No action.
And, in fact, as Obama has emphasized, we have to work hard to gain what he calls a hundred years of energy independence by exploiting domestic or Canadian resources by fracking or other elaborate technologies.
Doesnt ask what the world would look like in a hundred years.
So, there are differences.
The differences are basically about how enthusiastically the lemmings should march towards the cliff.
***"
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So there are differences and small as they are they may portend terrible and less terrible consequences,
with a vote for Romney probably tending to support terrible consequences,
and a vote for Obama probably tending to support less terrible consequences.
Because of the attachment of both candidates for an obstreperous war and terror causing Israel,
and because of their own willingness to tolerate our loss of constitutional rights
and a world suffering from murder ranging from assinations to murder by drone attacks on a miscellaenous array of people,
I'll not vote for either candidate.
But, if you feel you need vote, Obama seems to me to be
on the slow side of human extermination
with Romney on the faster.
SHOCKLEY
(re-paragraphing for emphasis)