White'n'Nerdy - When Amy Farrah Fowler channels Pauline Kael

I used to be pretty good at playing 'Trivial Pursuit'.  Not that I really enjoyed winning the game, I've just been blessed -or cursed- with the ability to retain lots of useless information.

Which is why I enjoy Big Bang Theory and why I  really LOVE it when folks who usually write on much more serious stuff raise the curtain on the throwaway lines that probably go over the head of half of BBT's audience. Well, those who identify with Penny, anyway. Though I DO quarrel with the the perception that Penny is shallow and dumb.

Along with the evidence that, yes, geeks and nerds DO get laid.. (how the heck do you think they reproduce?) but that the show is written with many layers of Easter Eggs; references that only nerds of various stripes would know.

And THEN, even political commentators get involved in discussing the nerdy connections to other media, look at Jonah Goldberg at NRO..
Did Indy Matter?

In a recent episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon introduces his girlfriend, Amy, to the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which she’d never seen before. She liked the movie, she explains, despite the big “story problem.” Sheldon is aghast at the suggestion there could be any story problems with the “love child” of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. “What story problem?” he demands to know. She explains that Indiana Jones is absolutely irrelevant to the story. If he’d never gotten involved, the Nazis would have still found the ark of the covenant, they would have still brought it to that island, and they would have still had their faces melted.

And, in the comments on THAT opinion piece, is a link by an obviously nerd commenter to
Pauline Kael at the New Yorker in 1981 deconstructing the Indy epics.  Making in an obtuse manner the same point as Amy does on BBT.

Wherein.. Kael provides her opinion that old cinema serials were clearer and better than Spielberg and Lucas homages to them. 
Ummm.. having seen many of them on TV as a kid.... No!  Most were lots dumber than the Star Wars and Raiders  product.

But back on topic, the whole argument on whether, without Indy, the Ark might have gotten back to Berlin and Adolf might have  gotten back to Berlin and Hitler might have had his face melted off begs the question common to overheated existentialist theory.

The facts being, as it's an instrument of God's will, the innocent somehow manage to evade the terrible effects, and the attempt to harness evil turns against those of evil intent.
Just as we've seen time and time again. And are seeing today in many issues.

But it's not Goldberg or Kael that make the point, it's some commenter in Goldberg's page.   Bringing to mind, Sheldon's Mom..  at once, portrayed as both a 'bible thumper' and the wisest head on practical living in the Big Bang series.  Despite only appearing in a few episodes.

AGW - The New Religion: WASPS in Search of Victimhood

Note: from 1990 First Assessment Report IPCC

First Assessment Report of 1990, page 202

First Assessment Report of 1990, page 2021990

First Assessment Report of 1990, page 202

First Assessment Report of 1990, page 202

Note: WASPS is an old term from since late sixties meaning (Middle Class) White Anglo Saxon Protestants.

Why the science doesn't matter.. it's for the Planet and the Children.

As the near term predictions of sea level rise, and warming to the point of death, of the Warming advocates comes crashing down around them, they become ever more strident in their gloom and doom.
We heard less than a decade ago that temperate climes no longer would see snow or winter weather and the result of the last five years in Europe are the coldest winters in decades with another severe winter forecast for this year.  Yes.  That's WEATHER, not climate.  But climate is the product of years of weather. And it doesn't normally snow in the Mediterranean.

The reason for this is that it's the common cause of the new left who have taken over the environmental crusades.

We were told that very soon arctic ice would disappear in summer. Indeed, 2007 and 2012 had the lowest sea ice cover ever recorded by satellite.  That's 30 years, barely enough to even be part of a 'climate cycle'. The fact is that the ocean currents have changed, not for the first time.. early and mid 20th century are well documented as being 'open water'.
We were told that we would see, starting immediately, more and more severe weather events because of current state of warming.  In, fact the US has had a record low number of both hurricanes and tornados in the last year.
Never mind it was shown that Superstorm Sandy level events had occurred at least twice previously in the same area since the thirties.  Hardly unprecedented.

The IPCC AR5 report, just issued, backs way off the earlier gloom and doom, providing you read INTO the report, ignoring the Summary issued to the press.

But it doesn't matter... 

Who's this unblinking loony?

He's Bill McKibben, described in his own words, part of Stanley Kurtz' The Wannabe Oppressed

McKibben describes his arrival at college in 1978 as a liberal-leaning student with a suburban Protestant background. “My leftism grew more righteous in college,” he says, “but still there was something pro forma about it.” The problem? “Being white, male, straight, and of impeccably middle-class background, I could not realistically claim to be a victim of anything.” At one point, in what he calls a “loony” attempt to claim the mantle of victimhood, McKibben nearly convinced himself that he was part Irish so he could don a black armband as Bobby Sands and fellow members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army died in a hunger strike. Yet even as he failed to persuade himself he was Irish, McKibben continued to enthusiastically support every leftist-approved victim group he could find. Nonetheless, something was missing. None of these causes seemed truly his own. When McKibben almost singlehandedly turned global warming into a public issue in 1989, his problem was solved. Now everyone could be a victim.

Let's look at others who are the activists in this crusade from Grit, one of their own media organs:

The children: Why a generation is putting itself on the line for the climate 

Notice something?  These kids aren't doing 'Climate Science' .. they are doing 'Activism'.

Science is boring and hard. Activism is fun and sorta like Flash Mobbing and sometimes you get to break things.  At the least you piss  someone off.

 Among skeptics, these folks are described as 'Watermelons'.  Green on the outside, Red inside.  A little research will show that most environmental organizations have been taken over by socialists and they dont give a damn about the real science.

Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore: ‘Thank goodness we came along and reversed 150 million-year trend of reduced CO2 levels in global atmosphere. Long live the humans’

 Think the Warming stormtroopers aren't really serious?  Here's the product of some of that British Activism:

Isn't that special!