Global Warming

Here's something weird I noticed a little while ago:

I was out at my local supermarket and noticed Complete Idiot's Guide to Global Warming on the magazine rack by the checkout. It wasn't a single copy-- not a random copy that had been left there from another part of the store-- but a bunch of copies, set up for sale at a number of the checkout lines.

This was weird for two reasons:

(1) They don't usually sell Complete Idiot's guides in the magazine racks of the checkouts in that grocery store, on in any grocery store I go to

(2) Although there may be a bigger, book-bound edition of Complete Idiot's Guide to Global Warming, this was a little pamphlet-bound book, like a Reader's Digest.

Conclusion: I think it's propaganda. I didn't check it out to see which side it was propaganda for, for I can't say for sure. But my guess would be that it's written to convince people that global warming is real. Global warming and the Iraq war are two things I think the conservatives have, at a high level of leadership, decided to reverse course about, but are not coming out overtly about the change yet (it's a hard change to overtly make- they've been pushing so hard in the other direction for so long, so they have to be changing their minds out of a belief in the absolute necessity of it- for poor personalities like the Republicans', just biting the bullet and changing their stance in the most definite and assertive way possible must be very tough). The conservatives just want liberals and cities to be the ones to start agitating for work on global warming first, and to adopt trends of using reusable shopping bags at food stores first, so red state hicks can play the role of not being the type who are overly concerned about things like that, but more concerned with competitive sports and being tough-looking SUV drivers.

Circumstantial evidence of this is the fact that conservative pastors / ministers (shameless hacks who work as conservative propaganda pieces, rather than sincerely being concerned with religion, just as much as journalists do) have changed their tune on global warming recently, deciding that their God-given expertise on global warming now requires them to proselytize from the pulpit in the other direction about that issue.

Since all mass-marketed media in America (not just TV news and newspapers, but book publishers) seem to be heavily infiltrated by conservative activists and propagandists, it seems possible that this could be what happened. The biggest shame is that we don't get more done on our own to agitate for change on emissions standards, etc., until the situation is so far gone that the Republicans (i.e., the dumb people) realize that it's a necessity to change our country's practices.

In sum, the pamphlet is the latest evidence that the Republicans are working to undermine the results they already obtained by way of their own misinformation campaign.