To maintain a proper perspective on today’s Fake News, it’s necessary to occasionally re-read yesterday’s:
From the Guardian, February 22, 2004
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
‘Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,’ concludes the Pentagon analysis. ‘Once again, warfare would define human life.’
The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.
Read the whole thing. Read all the dire predictions. Note the credentialed experts who look down their noses at regular folk who refused to believe that Paris and Rome would be underwater unless we turned over control of our lives to them.
Then recognize the signs when they try exactly the same trick on you today.
One of the major weaknesses of our modern, everything-right-now culture is that we lose perspective, we forget yesterday. That’s why the same lies work on us again and again. We fall for the same tricks, because we don’t slow down enough to remember that we’ve seen them before.
When the fake news tells you the lies again, remember that they were liars yesterday.
Then remind yourself that there is no need to pay the slightest attention to the ravings of liars.
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It would be instructive to go through the dire predictions of the last twenty years and see how they have panned out. Al Gore’s award winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth” would surely have assumed that by 2020 we would be living in the Sequel to “Mad Max” and not just giving academy awards to movie versions of it. Compiling the various claims would be instructive.
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