He begins:

“Unusually, I’m having a vocabulary problem. There has to be some word for the kind of person who considers his mild discomfort the equivalent of torture, crippling injury, or death for other people. But I can’t think of it. ….”

Let’s look a bit more closely at the scandulous ‘business’ of Bernie Madoff, confidence games, Ponzi schemes and other financial vehicles for funneling, accumulating and concentrating billions of dollars in unearned wealth into the hands of a tiny minority of people who comprise the top of the global economy.

There are many minions of the wealthy and their bought-and-paid-for politicians who “spread the word” of these schemes. Con men operate pyramid schemes. They assure “plausible deniability” and “legal cover” for all that is said and done.

Only a telling of the truth about what they are doing is forbidden. That is the one and only thing that is verboten. Do not break their vow of silence by telling what is true about the perpetration of the schemes {ie, the only games in town, so they say}, because the “houses of cards” out of which a modern Tower of Babel is constructed immediately is exposed as fraudulent and patently unsustainable. These pyramidal constructions can withstand any force except that which is presented by speaking out loudly and clearly about what is happening in these enterprises. As soon as light of what is true was shed on Bernie’s scheme, the house of cards he had constructed fell.

Bernard Madoff may be the first of my “Not So GREAT GREED GRAB Generation’s” kingpins to find that his “house of cards” has collapsed; but I dare say, Bernie will not be the last. There are other kingpins and many too many minions ready, willing and able to play along in what looks like the greatest self-enrichment scam in human history.

Why not say that greed is not good? Why not assign value to personal honesty, accountability and transparency?

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

A person in pharmacy or history or any other disciple, is far more
concerned with their special problems and expects somebody else to
deal with climate change. This is how it normally works. I don’t think
about pharmaceuticals, that’s their job. I just expect the drugs to
work, just like I expect Barry to solve this climate change problem,
that’s his job. :)

Happy new year Barry — great blog.

Scientists themselves buy in to this framing of the issue, as Hansen has noted in the past, by trying to avoid being seen to be “alarmist”, even when the results of their work are genuinely alarming.

Cranks don’t have to make sense. Their continued noisy existence is enough to achieve the desired effect – and the careful orchestration of the crank chorus by the likes of the Heartland Institute should tell us all we need to know about whose desires are being fulfilled.

I don’t mean to imply in this that the institutional blindness you describe doesn’t exist, just that the cranks provide a context within which it can seem rational.