The Stupid Senate

“I felt like it is kind of an insult to be a denier for a long time,” said Sen. Bert Brown, last month at a parliamentary committee studying energy policies. “It feels pretty good this morning.”

What I find particularly disturbing about so many climate change deniers ending up being appointed to the highest levels of government, isn’t just that ignorant, anti-science, Harper cronies are running the country, but that they credit their embarrassing ignorance of science as one of the reasons they got the job! And they are proud of being stupid because stupidity brought them power! What an excellent message to send to children, eh?

You wonder why smart people get bullied for answering questions in class? Blame Conservative Senators, or the Culture of Dumb, that put them in charge of sober second thought. If Conservatives were actually concerned about coddling children, passing them along through school while being illiterate, and awarding them an E for effort (when they should actually get an F for failure), they wouldn’t appoint more than one illiterate jock to the Senate. Useful, illogical, dishonourable idiots should not be deciding our laws.

“I have to admit that what I read tells me that there is not a consensus among scientists,” Greene Raine, (former Olympic alpine skiing champion) another senator appointed by Harper, told the committee when it heard from Environment Minister Peter Kent, earlier last fall. “There are many different points of view and different kinds of research happening out there. One of the things that I am starting to see now is quite a few studies showing that we may be heading into a period of global cooling, which would maybe be a lot more problematic for Canada than global warming. Our country is on the cool side.”

Andrew Weaver, a Canadian climate scientist at the University of Victoria who publishes research in peer-reviewed journals, noted that the skeptics who appeared at the committee in December were all over the map in terms of making arguments about warming, cooling, warming from the sun, or cosmic rays.

“It was like a shotgun of inconsistent arguments,” said Weaver, noting that evidence from research must be proven by science, without opinions involved.

There are many “different points of view” as Greene Raine says. If someone tells you that 2+2=5, that’s a point of view too. Is that point of view correct? Don’t expect an elected or appointed Conservative to give you the correct answer to that question if it suits their purposes to lie or promote a fiction. As Weaver states, these liars will try a shotgun method until one of their lies resonates or sticks for a while. Have you been caught in their blast of stupid?