In which the Nazis, jihads and climate science are once more linked together in the reptile Oz ...

The pond has realised with some alarm that thanks to the white-anting and the back-stabbing and the undermining and the treachery that important issues have been neglected.

Thankfully the lizards of Oz are there to remedy the problem with an important missive promoting the welfare of one of their favourite pets:

Yes, and it's blessed with a most excellent illustration, maintaining the pond's enthusiasm for the y'artz this day:

Thus fortified and inclined to deep thinking, let us move on to a tragic tale of closed minds, which will require the most extensive references to the deepest thinkers to be found around the world:

Ah the tragic Bloom. How did he get into a tale of science? And how did the Bloomians fare?

Too many conservatives deny that the free markets and wars they promote unleash the free morals they decry. But for all their aspirations to virtue - whether the heroic Thucydidean kind or the tea-sipping, Elizabethan, high-church Burkean and American Federalist varieties - far too many are riding crosscurrents that are distort the liberal education they claim to defend. (here)

Ah, but that's entirely another mess, and poor Bloom claimed to have been misrepresented:

"I am not a conservative - neo or paleo. Conservatism is a respectable outlook, and its adherents usually have to have some firmness of character to stick by what is so unpopular in universities. I just do not happen to be that animal. Any superficial reading of my book will show that I differ from both theoretical and practical conservative positions." 
Bloom denounced the obstacles posed to liberal education by commercial or bourgeois society and by religious belief that, "contrary to containing capitalism's propensities ... is now intended to encourage them".

Poor old Bloom was just a hapless delusional romantic of the backward looking kind, but enough of the distractions, it's on with the substance and the fate of that most excellent Bloomian, poor Bjorn Lomborg:

Finally, we get to the nub of the problem. Democracies inhospitable to intellectual dissent and mass teaching institutions of the the non-elite kind.

All those dreadful new students, those yahoos and yobboes, bringing their vulgar, red brick ways to the hallowed ivy halls, dragging their demeaning democratic attitudes with them, and thereby, with their mass political movements, ruining everything for the wondrous 'leets.

Now no doubt the pond can look forward in the third act of this piece in praise of the 'leets - with Lomborg the 'leet of the reptile 'leet - to a savage denunciation of the wretched vulgarians, especially the fundamentalist Christian kind, who have shamelessly set up their very own universities to study creationism and award degrees in same. 

This sort of dangerous democracy clearly can't be tolerated, so please, do go on. 

Oh, and could we possibly have a mention of the Nazis, since breaking Godwin's Law is always handy when wanting to link anyone who dislikes Lomborg's ways with a bowing to the ways of Adolf. When in doubt the pond always likes to mention Orwell and Goebbels and radio, but frankly a reference to Heidegger and Fuhrerprinzip will more than suffice (so much more to the point and so much more relevant when discussing climate science than mentioning that Althusser strangled his wife):

Excellent stuff. Not just the Nazis, but an invocation of a "jihad".

And with just a hint, not an outright declaration, that global warming is just a "hypothesis", and to think otherwise is a declaration of one's determination not to think, because science is always on the move and always changing, and who knows creationism might well turn into a viable solution somewhere down the track ...

Sadly however, this talk of change leads to the pond to contemplate and marvel at a wonder of the ages.

Here's McAllister rabbiting on about how the human brain finds it very hard to cope with uncertainty, and deeming this to be a problem.

And in the very same breath he's urging us all to welcome a "consensus centre" ...

A "consensus centre"!

Talking of Orwell and nonsense ...

There's an irony there, though it would take a John Stuart Mill to work out why McAllister is so contemptuous of the brain-deadening assault of mass political passions, while failing to mention the brain-deadening assault of the Murdochians and the Kochs and all the rest able to use the media as a primitive cudgel designed to produce submission ...

But for that McCallister would need to reverse his very closed mind ... and take a look at the febrile media which favours him by publishing his tosh in the cause and the service of their favourite in-house pet ...

Now back to the truly alarming developments sending a shudder of fear, panic and loathing through the spooked reptiles ....

Yes, but he can't do anything about alarming the barking mad like the Bolter and little Timmie ...

Put it another way Henny Penny ...