Among my vast social circles, I’m often known for expressing an opinion that is alternate to the rest of the crowd. Most likely it’s because I was dropped on my head as a baby. Sometimes I really believe what I say. Sometimes I just like to be difficult. Needless to say, my social circle shrinks every year. I don’t know why it is, but the herd mentality of agreeing with things bothers me. Take lemmings. Everyone knows that lemmings are mindless creatures that will follow their fellow lemmings off a cliff. Except that it’s not true… that footage we all saw as a kid was faked. Boom – mind blown.
In todays age information flows incredibly fast and we consume it voraciously. The problem is, what are we consuming? We’ve become a society of soundbites and opinions. There is no real news or reporting anymore. The news consists of the same six stories everyday, repackaged as though it’s something new, and debated by panels of bloviating experts giving their opinion. What happened to simply being a journalist? A facebook meme pops up, two hours later twitter is exploding with people angrily blocking racist trolls, and that night Rachel Maddow and Megan Kelly are ready to do battle in a steel cage. Meanwhile, the networks are gobbling up advertiser dollars in the billions.
My point? I don’t know, I lost track. How bad has our herd mentality gotten? It now dominates science. Now I’m not the sharpest crayon in the box, but I have taken a couple of those science-type classes. I’ve even read a few of those fancy reports with all big words and citations and stuff (the ones with pictures are the best!). I do remember hearing something about the scientific method. That whole have an idea, do a bunch of fancy experiments, then turn it all over to your peers to see if they can replicate and/or disprove it. You know – like those couple ‘a guys who discovered that whole cold fusion thing. Oh wait, never mind.
Lets say you have a theory. You push it on the world. Movies are made, Oscars and Nobel prizes are won, and industries and government subsidies are created. Meanwhile, back in the Batcave a bunch of other folks say hmmm… let’s think about this for a second.
- All the computer models that predicted gloom and doom have not only been wrong, but spectacularly wrong. By at least 3x.
- A custom filter based upon questionable tree ring data produces a hockey stick graph that nobody else can replicate – and spawns hundreds of peer reviewed papers questioning the data and methodology.
- Despite CO2 levels rising… we have seen no warming for 18+ years.
- The motherf***ing polar bears are snacking on seals like Chex-mix and have significantly larger populations than a ten years ago.
- We’ve had no strong cat 4 or 5 hurricanes here in a decade.
- 97% of everyone agrees. Or, how to lie with statistics.
- And point, after point, after point…
Now if you’re a Hollywood celebrity, I can see how you would fall to your knees and avow to host a gala dinner to fight this injustice. After all, you wouldn’t want someone to think you were some sort of luddite that dropped out of high school and waited tables for 10 years. But if you’ve had even a few science classes, when you read that computer models are wrong and that others can’t replicate your theories – you’d think that you might question things. Even just a little.
But when it’s a cult, you can’t. My god, what if I got voted out of the herd? Does this mean global warming isn’t true? Of course not and no climate scientist would claim so. The earth has warmed slightly in the last 100 years. The only question is, has man caused it?
My theory is yes. And the actual cause was when the real Dr. Evil Ryan Seacrest created the Kardashians. The heat produced by the combined processer power of millions of global iPhones frantically searching for the latest Photoshopped image has tipped the warming balance. It’s true. Thousands of cell phone repetitive stress injuries don’t lie.
We’ve gone too far to stop the Kardashian juggernaut. We just have to wait for the next massive solar eruption to disrupt all electronics and reset the balance. Meanwhile, I’m going to prep for the coming ice age. And check in on that wacky Lamar and Khloe. They’re such a cute couple!
troutdog 
I’ve lost track too…
Sometimes I think I spend most of my day having lost track .
I’m doing my morning reading and came across this post. The problem is overpopulation of burger/BBQ eating humanoids causing large quantities of hot air from bovine and human flatulance. The is exacerbated by the aging population as personally experienced by moi.