The Media's Lying Lips

According to the U.K.’s Met Office, 2022 was the hottest year on record for the U.K. Take me back forty years or so and I would have taken this for gospel. The Met Office might get tomorrow’s weather wrong but you could rely on its expertise and objectivity when it came to reporting temperature records. A similar sentiment applied to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and, no doubt, to the National Weather Service in the U.S., and to other national weather bureaus. Recall, too, if your experience is anywhere near the same as mine, that numbers of mainstream newspapers and broadcasters provided the news in a more-or-less factual way; or, in any event, we thought that they did. And now?

Now, I don’t trust anything I read, hear or see. Sadly, I’m sorry to say, this does not so much reflect on the competence of various government and news organizations; but, instead, on their allegiance to the truth. I believe that they have no compunction about lying to bolster their agendas. This takes two forms. Burying inconvenient facts and presenting fiction as though it were fact. What’s going on?

You might say that lies have always infected the public square. True enough. But this caveat reminds me of passage from the novel No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Sheriff Tom Bell contrasts the reported transgressions of schoolboys in the nineteen-thirties with those of his day (1980). It went from talking in class, chewing gum and running in the hallways to rape, arson, murder, drugs and suicide. He drolly reckons there’s a big difference between rapin' and murderin' people and chewin' gum. I reckon too that lying has taken a big uptick in its prevalence and audacity over recent decades.

The other day, I saw George Santos, the GOP’s congressman-elect for New York’s 3rd district being interviewed by Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News. He had lied egregiously about his background to voters. He squirmed and dissembled rather than admit it. Jason Whitlock, interviewed later, made (for me) the telling point that when God isn’t thought to be around, lying for advantage is no big deal. Various clips were shown of President Biden lying his head off. Simply making things up about his past life, without any apparent shame; bare-faced. This self-proclaimed Catholic clearly doesn’t believe God is listening. Neither today do most of the political, corporate and media class. That’s the world in which we live. It is tailor made for stoking climate change alarmism, as it for stoking Covid hysteria.

Last year, on Friday December 9, Australia recorded its lowest summer temperature on record. Minus 7⁰C in the Perisher Valley in the state of New South Wales. You had to dig out the info. I had to be told about it by a conservative friend. I asked others I know. None knew. Not surprising. It wasn’t emblazoned on the news. They’d all heard of a heat wave hitting the northern part of Australia. Most of my fellow churchgoers watch the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and read the Sydney Morning Herald. They definitely heard about the heatwave; which, of course, was associated with "climate change."

Suppressing inconvenient facts is one reason despots control the media. No need in the West. Enlightened, selective self-censorship dominates the media landscape. The role of the fourth estate to hold governments and the powerful to account is dead. Unless, that is, Donald Trump is in power; and no doubt (hopefully in 2025) Ron DeSantis. The fourth estate is now predominantly an arm of the leftist-green coalition of governments, activists and rent-seeking carpetbaggers. Selective censorship is complemented by the publication of artful misinformation.

Every extreme weather-related event – heatwaves, droughts, floods, cyclones, bushfires – is attributed to "climate change," even though those pushing this tendentious line must know that such events have invariably been equaled or exceeded in their intensity and frequency in the recorded past. Such information is readily available. They simply lie, and blatantly. In Australia, the lie stretches to the persistently-cultivated ludicrous proposition that the bush fires of 2019-20 and the recent floods are attributable to the previous government’s relative inaction on climate change. Yet, Australia could revert to prehistoric times tomorrow and those maniacally monitoring emissions wouldn’t notice.

The only disservice I can recall Ron DeSantis making to public debate was his assurance that there would be “no more noble lies” in the course of dealing with Covid. He was much, much too kind. The so-called noble lies were just plain old despicable lies. Lies about the effectiveness and safety of vaccines in the service of profits for Big Pharma and its lobbyists and hangers on. Lies which created the pretense that the disease put healthy children and people at material risk; and that useless lockdowns and masks were absolutely vital. All in the service of exerting power over populations and punishing dissidents. A practice run for the real plague of communists-cum-fascists who have infiltrated, permeated, saturated, wormed their way into governments, corporations and academia; and for their flag carrier, the World Economic Forum. Their lingua franca: newspeak.

Against the Great Reset

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I want to come back to Christianity. Do the climate and Covid liars feel comfortably lying because they don’t believe in God and therefore put their agenda above all ethical considerations. It must help. But is that all there is to it? A passage in Romans is apropos: Romans 1:28 (NASB version):

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a depraved mind, to do those things that are not proper.

Don’t want to get too theistic. But, under what circumstances would those in positions of power and influence, who are intelligent, who have access to information, set out deliberately to deceive and appear not to have the least qualms about it? If a complete sociopathic absence of integrity is not a sign of abandonment by God, what exactly is it? How else can it be comprehended?

Albo’s Airy-Fairy Electricity Fables

Recall the original message? Green energy is more costly than conventional energy. But, they said, much less costly than the climate catastrophe awaiting if nothing were done. A problem arose. Surveys showed that while people naively went along with the prospect of using green energy, they were unwilling to pay for it. I know what to do, some bright spark probably exclaimed, deep in the bowels of Renewable Energy Inc, we’ll tell them it’s cheaper.

Thus, in a far-off land called Oz, opposition leader Anthony Albanese (Albo) promised voters, no fewer than ninety-seven times, that his green plan would reduce electricity prices for families by an annual $275 by the year 2025. And so it came to pass that Albo and his Labor Party mates were elected to power in May this year.

It’s hard to get a representative national reading on electricity bills, which vary markedly between states. However, a Sydney family (Ma, Pa and two kids) would pay something like $1,800 a year. During the time Albo was campaigning, bills were already rising, putting his fanciful promise in peril. Still, he was resolute; confident in the modelling behind his plan. After all, as he kept on saying, and keeps on saying, renewables are the cheapest form of energy. Ergo, as a matter of unassailable logic, more wind and solar equals cheaper power. And don’t believe your lying eyes, whatever your bills might say.

Albanese and Dishy Rishi yukking it up at the G20 in Bali.

It's not propaganda on Albo’s part. Might have started that way. Now he undoubtedly believes it. I suppose if you tell others a demonstrable lie enough times it becomes your truth. Haven’t tried it personally. Never been a politician or used-car salesman.

But the jig is up. Federal budgets in Australia are usually brought down in early May. The new Labor government couldn’t wait until next year, bringing down an interim October budget. That was probably a mistake. In the budget papers, Treasury projected that electricity prices would rise 20 percent over the balance of 2022-23 and another 30 percent in 2023-24. Yikes, that doesn’t sound like a reduction of $275.

Clever people in the media (the majority caught on eventually) realized that 20 and 30 percent compounded to 56 percent. At that rate an $1,800 bill rises by over $1000; instead of falls by $275. Not an easy discrepancy to explain away, even for practiced snake-oil salesmen. What to do? What would Biden do? Blame Trump and Putin of course. Albo and his mates didn’t disappoint. Years of mismanagement by the previous government is behind this they said, and also that slubberdegullion Putin. They didn’t actually say slubberdegullion; but they might well have, if they’d found the word as I did.

What would they do without Putin? These days, he’s behind the undoing of all the best-laid green schemes. Think aptly of Snowball, George Orwell’s porcine character. Orwell is perhaps too often brought into the frame. Yet his work is so unmissably prescient. The interchangeability of truth and lies in 1984 thrives in real life among those pimping climate-change catastrophe. And then there’s the fall guy Snowball playing Trotsky (yesteryear’s Putin) in Animal Farm, blamed for all ills.

Befitting a leftist government, the new Australian Labor government foresees budget deficits without end; with gross public debt exceeding $1 trillion by the end of June 2024 and progressively rising from there on. That might seem small compared with America’s $31 trillion debt, but you have to multiply it by 13 to get a per-capita comparison and, of course, the USD is the world’s reserve currency – quite an advantage when you owe money. It is glaringly discernible, not disputable; leftist governments incorrigibly spend money they don’t have to buy votes. Democracy would fall without right-of-centre governments periodically repairing the fiscal ship of state. In fact, that now seems to be their only function, having largely ceded away civil society to Marxist mobs.

Spendthrift governments often spend money outside of the budget to disguise their profligacy. In Australia’s budget, $20 billion (more than half the size of the projected deficit for 2022-23) is designated as low-cost finance, and therefore off-budget, to fund 13,200 kms of new transmission lines and pylons. Connecting far-flung wind and solar farms to grids is an expensive exercise. And, in this case, a forlorn one.

Everybody hates Vlad.

First, it can’t be done. There is nowhere near the skilled manpower to the job. To boot, objections are already being made by landowners to having large pylons and wires strewn across their land. Lawfare awaits. And then there’s the little matter of building the many and massive wind and solar farms from which the transmission lines sprout. It’s make-believe.

Second, whatever part is built is bound to be well behind schedule and way above cost. It’s a government project. Take the white elephant, Snowy 2.0-pumped hydro. When will it be built? They said by 2021. Assume 2028 at the earliest; that’s if it’s ever finished at all. And the cost? They said $2 billion. Assume something northwards of $10 billion or, more probably, $15 billion.

There is much else about “cheaper, cleaner energy” in the budget. For example, $157.9 million is provided for a “National Energy Transformation Partnership.” All hat and no cattle, sums it up.

…the Government will work together with state and territory governments on priority actions to support the transformation of Australia’s energy sector. Initial priorities include delivering Australia’s first fully integrated energy and emissions reduction agreement, introducing an emissions reduction objective into the National Energy Objectives, accelerating mechanisms for the uptake of flexible energy supply and progressing a co-designed First Nations Clean Energy Strategy with First Nations communities.

Blah-blah-blah. Lots of taxpayer loot to produce yet more grandiose bumf. Not one kilowatt of power. And, by the way, Australian Aboriginals never constituted Nations. Hundreds of stone-age, hunter-gatherer, thinly populated itinerant tribes were not remotely nations. Part of the lies that now inform Australia’s national life. Fitting in this era of climate hysteria and green-energy boondoggles.