Several months ago I wrote about my skepticism on the whole Global Warming Anschluss. When someone tells me that everyone agrees, I will be stubbornly skeptical on personal principal. We now find out that the science has been cooked, that the scientists that disagree have been slandered and deliberately kept out of the peer-reviewed literature. The world has been getting significantly colder not warmer over the last twelve years, but the nonsense continues.

This weekend we see the Global Warming groups claim that the cooling of the world over the last twelve years proves their case that Global Warming is real. Their theory actually predicted global cooling all along. Huh! I may be simple but I am not stupid. Apparently, arrogance knows no limits.

I received one of those cluster e-mails last week in which the global oil conspiracy was reconstructed. At least once every six months we all get them and then, because they give our e-mail address to every scammer in the world, we have to fight the spam that results. This one said that Walmart provides only American oil at its service stations, that we are at war with Saudi Arabia, and that Venezuela has us held hostage.

Walmart like any other distributer buys its petroleum products wherever they are cheapest. Saudi Arabia has been our ally through thick and thin for over a hundred years and Venezuela is held hostage to the fact that its weird crude can only be refined at two Exxon Mobil refineries in Texas. If you will recall several years ago, the nutcase who runs the Venezuelan dictatorship was ordered to pay Exxon Mobil $4 billion dollars for expropriating their oil resources in his country. He ranted and railed and threatened to tear the house down but he paid, or Exxon Mobil alone could have shut him down.

Years ago we could count on there being several newspapers-of-record in the world: the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Times of London, Paris Match, and Izvestia. Izvestia is only included since everyone knew that whatever it covered as truth, the opposite was in fact, true.

I remember writing a paper on the Constitution of the Fifth French Republic in the mid-sixties. The New York Times had an article on what it meant, but from the newspaper microfilm archives at Dartmouth’s Baker Library it was also possible to read the original of the French Constitution in both French and English, verbatim and in full. Now if I disagree with the New York Times coverage on a particular subject, there is no way I can read the original material.

These newspapers-of-record not only have eliminated their foreign bureaus but they can no longer afford fact checkers for most of the articles their reporters submit.

What we are left with is Internet myths which spread like wildfire and are almost always false. Now I regard the only newspapers-of-record to be the local papers because they don’t try to cover the world and I know that they have reasonable checks and balances and responsible editors.

Bruce Conrad