Saturday Dissonance …….ODT, RNZ, John Armstrong, Age of Stupid,

Ever see a newspaper half of which says it’s black, the other half says it’s white?  Try today’s ODT. Somewhat  like The Fourth Estate does Cognitive Dissonance. Perhaps they are trying to be all things to all readers, in which case, they might think upon those olde worlde piece in my old man’s office in Zoology. It was on an old yellowed card by the old yellowed clock, and oddly enough, he can’t remember it:

“Who seeks to please all men each way

And not himself offende

He may begin his work today

But god knows where he’ll ende….”

How they equate the John Gibb piece (left-hand tucked as per usual) on Jum Salinger’s lecture, with the Dene McKenzie articles on Growth, with the page on ‘ The Age of Stupid’, with John Armstrong’s usual National rant, I have no idea. Cognitive dissonance. Only answer.

Kim Hill did a reasonable job interviewing Franny Armstrong (Age of Stupid), but she has exactly the western middle-class huff that so many have: sort of a giggle giggle, maybe if we joke our way through kind of thing. I wonder sometimes about that – they almost seem embarrased. For instance, someone re-heads my op.ed pieces in the ODT, from serioos working titles, to lightweight offbase ones. Maybe I’m just paranoidly precious about my babies……

John Armstrong is like Colin James, and several others: good at an ‘eighties journalistic appraisal of politics, with infusion of his personal slant. Kind of like a less-insightful tout for the right, than Tom Scott was for the left. Whether he goes to The Age of Stupid, is doubtful. Whether he understands thaty Climate Change can – almost certainly will – wipe his grandkids out, I don’t know. I’m dead sure, though, that he doesn’t have a clue about exponential growth, doubling time, the fact that we’re into the last doubling time, or about the finite limits we are up against. He almost definitely doesn’t understand that work needs energy, and that we peaked energywise .last year.

While he was tapping out his Key-lite hussle, I was at the Salinger lecture, more importantly, the Q&A afterwards. Bob Lloyd’s comments about fossil fuels, and that if we don’t wean us off them to renewables before we don’t have enough left to lubricate the transition – we will never get back on the wagon again. There is no energy source to kick-start the process, and we are only here because millions of years of stored energy (coal ex trees, oil ex biota) have been underwriting us for a mere two centuries. There is less that one century left, but as previous blogs mention, two or three years see what Fatih Biroh euphemistically calls ‘supply constraints’, and it’s all over rover. Armstrong joins my long list of ‘those who won’t/don’t want to get informed. How on earth folk like him think they can then ‘inform’ us, beats me.