Truth-softeners: Select parties who commit to small lies about inconsequential things between telling advantage-gaining whoppers engage in the former activity as a fulltime practice. Coincidentally this softens up the perceived truth of their audiences, giving these shapers more room to insert their own agenda. The term “antiscience” fell flat with me, at first, because one doesn’t see anyone overtly denouncing science itself. Only after engaging with enough antiscience that’s dressed up to look like science did this truth-scrimmage line being pushed forth and back brighten into view.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith while running for re-election in May apologized for linking COVID-vaccinated people with followers of Hitler1. Smith says her province will be carbon-neutral by 2030 2050. Wrote the Calgary Herald, “Alberta’s energy sector is transforming,” which sounds good, until this oxymoronic pair of goals shows the nonsense behind it, “with oil and gas companies increasing production while preparing for a net-zero future.”2
Hillsborough county’s Republican party voted to make themselves the seventh in Florida to pass a formal resolution calling both a) COVID and b) the COVID vaccine “biological and technical weapons”.3 County authorities are also lobbying to double the amount of drilled gas flowing into their energy stores by constructing new pipeline with a Hillsborough endpoint.4
And to maintain prohibition, via executive order, against employee COVID vaccine mandates even from private business owners, Texas Governor Greg Abbott renewed on May 15 the state’s COVID disaster declaration5, four days after the national COVID Public Health Emergency (PHE) expired for good. Simultaneously the state’s lawmakers are working to supplant wind and solar energy — Texas leads the country in renewables right now — with that from oil and gas flowing along the state’s sole power grid6.
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