The virtues of being a bad student

Although I cannot say what the date and time was, I do remember the incident. For reasons probably having to do with trauma, my brain was in an awakening state. I was reading, but in an unplanned fashion, merely taking in everything I could. I was raised to be a Catholic conservative Republican, and reflected that upbringing.

At a certain point I was sitting on our couch in our living room in our house on Pine Street in Billings, Montana. I had been furiously trying to solve the murder of JFK, to no avail. As designed, that event was fake but meant to grip anyone interested in perpetuity. It would be years before I came up on the information that set me free in that regard, that the event was fake.

Our leaders and influencers enjoy keeping everyone in a state of anxiety. Anxious people cannot think properly.

However, my reading had taken me in unplanned directions and in to uncharted waters. I do not remember what I was reading that day. I only remember looking up from my book and at the entrance to our hallway and bedrooms, and realizing that the Cold War was fake, and that the United States and Soviet Union were not enemies, and had no intent on nuking one another. Later I would learn that there were/are no nuclear bombs. (Nuclear power is real. Another day.)

What I felt was a physical manifestation of an internal release of tension. I physically felt a weight lifted off my shoulders. I had been set free!

Lucy Biggers is a new arrival to the climate skeptic side of things. She’s all over the place these days, as a “content creator” and “influencer”. I find that last term so offensive, as it comes out of the advertising industry and describes people who have the ability to tell subtle lies in a believable way in order to slowly, so slowly, change minds. Lucy did not go the slow-change route, and from appearances more had a Pauline moment where a bolt of lightning knocked her off her horse. I might be wrong about that.

Such people are not to be trusted for a number of reasons: 1) In assessing former beliefs and deciding they were all wrong, she JUMPS to the other side assuming she’s going to find total rightness; and 2) such people are often hired for propaganda purposes to control the opposition.

The video above is 45:57, and is not put up here to entice you to watch it. She talks fast, as if she has so much to say that it forms a backlog in her head that cannot wait to get out. I do not write about her with disrespect, just caution. My own Pauline moment about climate change was in reading a good sampling of the Climategate emails, finding the people behind them to be dishonest, manipulative, corrupt and on a mission to sell a big lie, as if hired to do so. I did NOT have that “The Cold War is fake!” moment then, as I had never truly internalized Climate Change, only observing from a distance and yes, with some anxiety about the future.

The Climate Change movement is big and powerful, a top-down authoritarian machine that disciplines its adherents. There is a price to pay for deviance from dogma. It is based on lies, and, at best,  pseudoscience. No prediction issuing from it has ever come true. None of that matters any more than the nuclear missile silos we lived around in Montana being empty. The movement is directed at kids, and the primary movers are school teachers. It is fear-based indoctrination.

I was perhaps a sophomore in high school when we watched a film one day, which as it turns out was produced by the Soviets for an English-speaking audience. It gave a view of history, and as kids, captive and naive, we thought we were seeing something real. After it was over our teacher, a nun (not that it matters), asked us what we thought, and reviews were generally positive. She let all of that sink in, and then with great dramatic effect, said “It’s propaganda!”

We were embarrassed, of course, and that was the intent, to create awareness of Soviet propaganda so as to insulate us from it. Our teacher did not know that both Americans and Soviets were in the propaganda game, and that the Americans were much better at it. It was about good versus evil. Teachers are there to reinforce the propaganda system, and not to enlighten anyone. Just the opposite.

Well, every school kid in the United States now has seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. I am betting that not one teacher anywhere has said at its conclusion “It’s propaganda!” Teachers reflect the current propaganda system and are paid to advance it. Those who do not, via groupthink and outright sanctions, either shut up or quit.

So now it is easy to see that the Cold War was fake, and designed to create anxiety and depression in everyone, but mostly kids. Climate Change serves the exact same function. It is nothing more than the Cold War for the current generations. Lucy talks quite a bit about Climate Anxiety of our younger generations. I wish for them one thing that worked so well for me: Be a bad student from a crappy family. Don’t keep up, sluff off on homework. Be distracted. Don’t listen. Don’t let the influencers influence.

Sure, you’ll end up uneducated, but you’ll also avoid indoctrination. Over time, as the water we swim in is all about us, you’ll get roped in, as I did to Cold War anxiety. However, you’ll be better prepared to escape. Lucy speaks frequently about her indifference to science and facts while in the movement, merely going along with all of that as part of her groupthink environment. And, she broke free.

There’s something to be said for being a bad student.