Cap and Trade eclipsed by Man In Mirror...or...HELP ME, SPOCK!

June 29, 2009 - 11:23am
Posted by: Robbie Knight

The big story on Friday wasn’t that the Cap and Trade bill passed in the House and is headed for the Senate. The big water-cooler dialogues on Friday were dominated by jokes about Farrah Fawcett’s dying wish (for the children of the world to be safer, in case you missed that one)

The biggest problem in media today isn’t just our fixation on what will bleed best, like celebrity dramas. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is the absence of logic.

So many media “sources” use emotionality of one kind or another and schoolyard tactics to attempt to sway audiences, from name-calling and derision to the “straw man” verbal technique of exaggerating what the opposition says and then attacking the exaggeration. Example: Side 1: “Pancakes can be risky,” Side 2: “You say pancakes are dangerous? Like extreme sports? You are clearly crazy!”

It’s hard to get nice, clean facts. I run into this every day doing Green Reports. Liberals want me to believe one thing, conservatives want me to believe another-they both want me on their side of the fence. Neither seems to be willing to just reveal what they have for substantiated facts. The facts are rarely stated and are almost always swimming in emotionalism.

Since Spock isn’t returning my calls, I decided to just stack up the sources I’m scanning, including the liberal organizations that e-mail me and their challengers in the conservative camp; I’m starting to weed through them to try to filter out a nugget or two of actual fact. Hard as it is to trust ”facts” or “evidence” coming from any source, since the “sources” all seem to have agendas, I still hope that enough “facts” stacked side by side will reveal the doorway to a logical conclusion.

Touting Cap and Trade

Colorado Alternative Energy

Al Gore and Newt Gingrich

From The Plot To Save The Planet

Deriding Cap and Trade

The Wall Street Journal

Greenpeace says it’s not enough

Mother Jones calls it a scheme