Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses

“Al Gore’s Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth brought key players in America’s neo-British establishment ─ Hollywood, Washington, Silicon Valley, and academia ─ to an unreasoning fervor. But the idea of turning over the future of the American economy to U.N. bureaucrats was unsalable even before the economic meltdown of 2008 [driven by liberal meddling, as always]. And for liberals, perhaps that was just as well. In a few years, scientist James Lovelock, the godfather of modern environmentalism, the very man who conceived of Gaia, noted with asperity that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium had not risen as the computer-based climate models had predicted. Referring in part to the limits of projections based on computer modeling, Lovelock explained: “The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew twenty years ago.” The same could have been said of the economy, which, as the computer-driven models demonstrated, was in fine shape right before it collapsed.” ─ The Revolt Against the Masses, copyright © 2013 by Fred Siegel, Encounter Books, Page 193.

***

And, from the Wall Street Journal, 9 November 2015: “Headlines blaring that processed and red meat causes cancer have made this steak-and-bacon-loving nation collectively reach for the Rolaids. Vegans are in full party mode, and the media is in a feeding frenzy. But there is more to this story than meets the (rib) eye.

With United Nations climate talks beginning in a few weeks in Paris, the cancer warning seems particularly well timed. Environmental activists have long sought to tie food to the fight against global warming. Now the doomsayers who want to take on modern agriculture, a considerable source of greenhouse-gas emissions, can employ an additional scare tactic: Meat production sickens the planet; meat consumption sickens people.

Late last month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)—part of the World Health Organization, an arm of the U.N.—concluded that red meat, like beef and pork, is “probably carcinogenic” to humans, and that processed meat is an even greater cancer threat. The IARC placed foods like bacon, sausage and hot dogs in the same carcinogen category as cigarettes and plutonium.” – By JULIE KELLY and JEFF STIER