Pat Robertson, Brendan O'Neill, and looniness of the first water ...

(Above: an old icebox of the kind they had before the war. Just like the crispy bacon they used to eat).

It would be remiss of loon pond not to celebrate Pat Robertson on Haiti and the cause of its earthquake:

"They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal [...] ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other."

In the loony stakes, that's high class looniness, and it brought out all kinds of celebrations of the thoughts of Pat ... and as a site of dedicated to first class loonery, sometimes we just have to follow the herd.

Fortunately we don't have to do any of the hard yards because the Craziest Robertson Quotes Ever can be found here.

So many and so heart warming. Here's a few favourites:

How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshippers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy money changers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers and homosexuals are on top?

The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

I think we ought to close Halloween down. Do you want your children to dress up as witches? The Druids used to dress up like this when they were doing human sacrifice ... (we) are acting out Satantic rituals and participating in it, and don't even realize it.

The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening.

But you know I reckon Pat's on the money, leastwise when you put him up against Brendan O'Neill and How 'Nature's fury' replaced God's fury.

O'Neill manages to sound like those clever dick smart arsed commentators, who want it both ways ... by sending up Pat and at the same time sending up gaia lovers, thereby turning science into yet another religion.

And if climate science is just a religion, then its followers and true believers are madder than Pat Robertson:

Many are slating his stupidity and backwardness. Yet his real mistake, it seems, was to deploy religious language, rather than pseudo-scientific language, to make his poisonous point. Because today, moralising natural disasters, personifying them, imbuing them with sentience and purpose and vengeance, is a popular pursuit amongst secularists, commentators and climate-change alarmists, for whom everything from flooding to almighty gusts of wind reveals the ‘connections between our unsustainable lifestyles and climate change’.

O'Neill's scientific theory? Shit happens:

Throughout human history mankind has had trouble accepting that there is such a thing as natural disaster, a sometimes unpredictable, sometimes unavoidable event, which causes hardship and horror. In earlier eras we described them as ‘acts of God’; later we believed they were brought about by demonic forces; now we say they are payback for our lust for wealth and affluence. The language changes, but the backward idea – that powerful, faceless forces are trying to correct us – remains strikingly similar. And the consequence, then as now, is that we spend more time pointing the finger of blame at greedy mankind than we do offering solidarity to the victims of natural disasters and devising ways to develop and industrialise societies everywhere so that they are better able to withstand nature’s alleged fury. And for that, these societies will need unbridled affluence.

All I can say is that it's handy O'Neill wasn't around doing the science when freon posed a threat to the ozone layer.

Now I love refrigerators as much as the next person - I can remember the time of meat safes dangling on the verandah, and canvas waterbags - really effective and to found hanging off the bumper of every second car back when they had decent bumpers - and ice being delivered to the home for use in the wooden icebox, and kerosene fridges that represented the latest advances in modern scientific food cooling, and such other bush nostrums to try to keep things cool in the heat - but even the dumbest of the dumb might understand that an attachment to chlorofluorocarbons in refrigerants began to have an impact on stratospheric ozone. (Chlorofluorocarbon).

And that talk of unbridled affluence for the nine billion people who might end up inhabiting the planet by 2050 is asinine stupidity. As if ongoing looting and pillaging and raping like a bunch of visigoths can keep going without a thought to sustainability and cleverer technologies.

Thank the lord science didn't just adopt the 'shit happens', stick your head up your fundament attitude of O'Neill, and did something about freons.

But I'm guessing O'Neill would place that kind of freon science in the same category as global warming science, as some kind of gaia crazed nonsense, as if unbridled affluence of can proceed without in any way having an impact on the world. Tell that to the blue fin tuna, and sushi lovers ...

In much the same way as I guess peak oil must mean that oil will be kind of piqued and tired, but never run out. It's the gusher that just keeps on giving.

Well there might be some stupidities in the desire for greens to lead a chaste and eco-pure lifestyle, and surely shit does happen sometimes, it being the way of the world, but I always find it amusing that in the same breath as saying full steam ahead, climate change deniers are usually chastising Al Gore for leading a rich lifestyle. Along with our favourite talking tampon, Prince Charles.

Because surely they're just living out the O'Neill dream of unbridled affluence.

Robertson crankily says the Haiti earthquake was caused by Haitians’ ‘pact with the devil’ – is it really anymore sensible to describe other natural disasters as springing from mankind’s ‘pact with consumerism’?

Put that another way. Is it any more sensible to suggest that all natural disasters are just of the school of 'shit happens' variety, and that there is simply no point in science studying the relationship between people and the planet, even if there might occasionally be signs humans are affecting the planet, and even if it might be a good idea to think about the impact?

And that some of these impacts might be ameliorated or altered in some way so as to keep the environment for organic life on the earth in a tad better shape?

Instead of just ranting at the greenies? And mocking them as just another form of religion.

Because if Pat and the greenies are a religion, then let's make clever dick cynicism another religion and put Brendan O'Neill at its head. Let's hope he remembers to send himself up shitless ...

Because perhaps ... just perhaps ... it might be another kind of simple minded Pat Robertson thinking to suggest that science is in fact just a religion, and religion just another branch of mindless science. And that climate science isn't a science, just a horde of mad Pat Robertson type true believers ...

I guess if you're prone to nihilistic stupidity, one position is as good as another.

Now excuse me, I'm off to do a bit of sun worship.

I always thought Apollo was the neatest of the Roman gods, what with his chariot of fiery horses giving light to the world each day, and with his taste in music and his willingness to play the lyre, and what with his sponsoring the Delphic temple in Greece, so that the priestesses could call the future. In much the same way as Brendan O'Neill can unerringly see the future and it seems it's a planet where nine billion people can have nine billion cars all running on gas, and people devouring whatever else they fancy, in a way that makes a cornucopia sound like more fun than a Greek myth.

At least I know where food and warmth and blazing heat and buckled rail lines and bushfire and skin cancer comes from, and I shall worship accordingly ...

What's that? I'd be better off inhaling the smog from brown coal burning power stations in Gippsland? As a way of developing healthy resistance to nature's alleged fury?

Unbridled affluence for everyone? Infinite economic progress? Eternal materialistic consumeristic bliss?

What on earth will the rich do without the poor to despise and mock? Is O'Neill sounding fair dibs or delusional?Dare we even call unbridled affluence the kind socialistic claptrap and dreaming they used to peddle in Animal Farm and East Germany? And in America in the nineteen fifties.

Time to go suck on a canvas water bag. It'll cool you down.

Oh and in case you missed it, and because there's so many variants on YouTube, it's like another set of Downfall sketches, here's Pat pure and simple, and be pleased that he still makes number 80 in the top 100 conservatives in the United States of America, or at least according to the UK's Daily Telegraph, here, even if he doesn't pack the punch he once did: