Boiling The Shark
By Mitch Berg
I remember thinking at one point that the best way to discredit Algore and his well-heeled global warming panic machine is to expose people to it by force.
I guess I was right; school kids in Canada are seeing the movie over and over again, and finding it wanting.
Some of the story reads like Scrappleface:
“One of the teachers at my kid’s school showed it and he even said ahead of time, ‘There is some propaganda in this,’ ” says Tim Patterson, a Carleton University earth sciences professor. “I said to him, ‘You even knew this was a propaganda film, and you still showed it in your classroom?’ ” The weirdest part: It was the gym teacher.”
But no. It’s real.
First it was his world history class. Then he saw it in his economics class. And his world issues class. And his environment class. In total, 18-year-old McKenzie, a Northern Ontario high schooler, says he has had the film An Inconvenient Truth shown to him by four different teachers this year.
“I really don’t understand why they keep showing it,” says McKenzie (his parents asked that his last name not be used). “I’ve spoken to the principal about it, and he said that teachers are instructed to present it as a debate. But every time we’ve seen it, well, one teacher said this is basically a two-sided debate, but this movie really gives you the best idea of what’s going on.”
Maybe Chad the Elder has the wrong idea. Maybe rather than fight his PC ‘burb’s showing of the movie, he should demand that people be hauled to the community center in trucks.
May 21st, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Public screwls are indoctrinating the yoot?
To use one of Mitch’s lines from Casablanca, shocking, just shocking.
May 21st, 2007 at 2:59 pm
Four teachers relieved of the burden of planning a class for the day. Perhaps they can follow up with The Day After Tomorrow.
May 21st, 2007 at 3:28 pm
This reminds me of one of my most awesome college classes I ever took, by which I mean totally the opposite of most awesome, whatever that is. The subject? The Vietnam War. The Professor? Some old guy who had given up on teaching.
I kid you not, this 400-level class, consisted entirely of showing up and watching a PBS documentary series from the late 1970s or early 1980s. When we finished watching the series. . . we watched the series again, from the beginning. And then. . . we watched the series again. Finally, come the end of the semester, we were tested on information contained within the PBS series. Good thing I took notes.
I still have a hard time believing I paid for that class. Easy “A” though, so there’s that.
May 21st, 2007 at 4:25 pm
Four teachers relieved of the burden of planning a class for the day. Perhaps they can follow up with The Day After Tomorrow.
Good point, this may have had as much to do with laziness on the part of the “teacher” as it does some sort of ideological agenda. Thinking back to my junior high social studies class I remember watching Roots, Lonesome Dove, and a couple of other assorted “historical” movies and miniseries that probably took up 2-3 weeks of otherwise having to come up with a lesson plan (although in his defense, they were usually shown when the teacher was gone).
I do remember one time when my high school science teacher had us watch a documentary on the environmental hazards of lead dumping (I was one of those who took notes) and then several months latter showed the same documentary was shown when he was gone from class. The students, having watched it before, talked during the show and the substitute ended the film about fifteen minutes early and wrote up the class. When the teacher got back he was furious that we cared so little about the topic and wanted to know why we thought to misbehave. I sheepishly raised my hands and said it may not have been that the class didn’t think the topic was important – just that we’d already seen it once before and as proof I showed him my notes from the previous class which contained the ending of the documentary.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I attended West High school in the 70’s. We had one elderly teacher who taped his first class session of the day & then simply replayed the tape for the rest of the day’s classes while he slept. The physics teacher wasted a day showing us slides from his summer vacation trip to Europe. Educational, you say? Not really. He was a terrible photographer, most of the pictures were of the rear bumper of the car ahead of him in traffic.
May 21st, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Ah, Teacher’s unions. providing value to the public for over 75 years!
May 21st, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Kermit-
Yeah, some people may look down on good ol’ west high. But dope was easy to score and for your prandial pleasure there was a diner across the street that served you anything you wanted for about 2 bucks, as long as you wanted it immersed in melted cheese. It was called “Professor Munchies Eating Adventure”. Picture the storefront with a banana yellow surfer’s special pinto wagon parked at the curb.
Lileks is holding back when he describes the aesthetic freakshow we call the 1970’s.
May 21st, 2007 at 11:40 pm
Those damn “well-heeled” global warming bastards. If only, somehow the poor oil and coal industries could, somehow, get their point of view across. Once again, it turns out that the people with buttloads of money and influence are the real victims.
Geez, Mitch, I thought you believed in the capitalist system. To be carrying this much water for people who are already rich and powerful, without somebody putting a couple of bucks in your tip jar – much less a couple hundred on the dresser on their way out – is Anti-American.
May 22nd, 2007 at 6:50 am
Yeah, Mitch, because only people with “buttloads of money and influence” are expected to live like the Amish for the sake of someone else’s religion.
Oh wait, they can buy those “offsets”, can’t they…
May 24th, 2007 at 12:28 am
Over the last 100 years the running 5 year average global temp has increased 1.1 Celsius, with the steepest increase in the last 30 years. The polar ice cap is meltin gand the sea levels are rising. No one with credentials and credibility disputes these measurements (although many blog posters apparently believe thermometers and dataloggers are a liberal conspiracy). Whether this is just a coincidental, cyclical high-rate increase anomoly, or is accelerated by human activity, is a scientifically debatable point. However – it has been debated, rigorously, over the last 20 years. The fact the shreikatoriat does not recognize this does not change the fact. The outcome: 30+ scientific societies and academies have concluded global warming is both real and human-activity accelerated. This includes every single US government agency that has addressed the question, and all the Republican dominated professionals socities including th eACS, AIChe, AWWA etc etc. (Notably, the US is currently the leader in total scientific “weight” and advances, and has been under the administration of two oil millionaires for the last 6 years). One (1) scientific group has concluded the rapid temperature increase is not partially due to the exponential increase of fossil fuels burned on the planet in the last 150 years; the American Society of Petroleum Engineers. They do have allies in science: a handful of aging professors scattered around the globe, 4 of 5 (if there are 5) whom made up their minds about this issue 20 years ago, which means when they were under 60 years of age.
Al Gore’s beliefs, like Dick Cheney and everyone reading this website and, have nothing to do with the scientific debate. Nothing. If you want to know the science, you would study the science. If you want to ignore the science and stroke your sense of political self-righteousness, attack Al Gore.
But, as George Carlin said so appropriately “Drink up, Shriners!”
May 25th, 2007 at 6:25 am
“Whether this is just a coincidental, cyclical high-rate increase anomoly, or is accelerated by human activity, is a scientifically debatable point.”
Yes.
“If you want to know the science, you would study the science.”
Lazy.