The Sky Didn't Fall - Again

Did you hear the latest on the great Gulf oil spill? It's gone - the oil, I mean. They can't find any more oil in the Gulf, on beaches, on birds, or anywhere. Even the so-called "plume" of oil that was supposedly lurking deep down in the ocean somewhere can't be found. Nothing, no oil, it's all just gone. Shrimp fishing has resumed; everything is going back to the way it was.

This oil leak was billed by the hysterical alphabet networks and government agencies as the worst ecological disaster ever. Nothing like it had ever occurred before. The Valdez spill was a pittance compared to this. Oil was going to decimate the Gulf beaches, marshes, fishing industries, and tourist industry. That wasn’t going to be all; it was going to get worse. Oil was going to flow into the Gulfstream, come around the Florida peninsula, and foul all the beaches along the East Coast. Nothing would be safe. The world would never be the same.

And now it’s all just gone. There’s no comment on this from all of the former chicken littles; their silence is deafening.

On another front, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) recently announced that the H1N1 swine flu pandemic is officially over. To which I say, “Did it ever start?” Here’s another one where the government and media were hysterical about something that was going to run rampant and kill most of us. I’m sure you remember hearing about that last spring. Once the virus had made the “species jump” to humans, we were told, it would likely mutate, and then we would be defenseless. Hundreds of thousand, if not millions, of people would die. It was going to be the black plague all over again, where every night people threw the dead bodies out into the street, and the next morning carts came around to pick them up to be hauled off to the incinerators. With our swine flu, a barely tested H1N1 vaccine was rushed to doctors and clinics. In an apparent effort to inflate the statistics, government rules were issued requiring that anyone who saw a doctor or nurse with so much as a runny nose was counted as a case of swine flu. Even so, the numbers stayed small. The cataclysm didn’t happen. Once again, it was much ado about nothing. No swine flu pandemic, no disaster, no nothing. By the way, all those vaccines are now being destroyed.

Global warming is another one. It’s the same template: Some occurrence will happen that triggers unstoppable disastrous events resulting in the end of the world as we know it, unless the government intervenes in a massive way to prevent it. There is the same institutional efforts to fudge the numbers to prove that it will or is happening. We heard about the world climate data being fudged and doctored, about anecdotal evidence from extreme environmental groups that have an agenda being touted as accepted scientific fact, about dissenting views being squelched, efforts to gin up hysteria (Al Gore et al), etc. And no matter what the weather is, we’re told it’s due to global warming. The polar icecaps were supposedly melting due to global warming, but last winter when we had a very cold winter all over North America including several blizzards, that too, we were told, was due to global warming. It was upsetting the weather patterns, you see. So no matter what happens weather wise, it’s said to be proof of global warming.

This global warming thing reminds me of the “Pinky And The Brain” episode where, one night, their daily “plan to take over the world” consisted of melting the polar ice caps. First, they would buy up all real estate in the world above the fifteenth story in buildings. Then, they would stow away on a space shuttle flight, make their way to the Hubble space telescope, redirect it so that it acted as a huge reverse magnifying glass, aim it at the Earth’s poles, and melt all the ice. The seas would rise to the fourteenth floor, per their calculations. Then all of their real estate from the fifteenth floor up would be worth a bazillion dollars, and they would control the world.

Global warming is Al Gore’s version of this.

Then there was the prediction a few years ago of a great Y2K (Year Two Thousand) meltdown. You remember that one, don't you? The world as we know it was going to cease to function at midnight on Dec. 31,1999 when the date rolled over to DD/MM/00. This "end of the world" scare was going to happen as a result of all the computers in the world malfunctioning because they wouldn't be able to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000, since they both end in 00. Airplanes would crash, banks would lose track of our money, medical records would be unsearchable, all government functions would come to a grinding halt, etc., etc., etc. Then, year 2000 came, and everything went on as normal without so much as a glitch.

Where are all the oil spill and swine flu doom-sayers now? Have they apologized for their ignorance and promised to be more skeptical and questioning next time, that is, to be real journalist? Are they being laughed off of the public stage? No, they are off to the next scare, which has something to do with hungry bears in Yellowstone Park getting ready to eat people, I think.