Mann Made Global Warming

It would be easy to be overwhelmed by the problems of this world; there are so many and seem so available. If I were to emphasize one problem as the lynch pin of the many risks facing us I would pick dishonesty and its various guises of insincerity, hypocrisy and half-truths. Drama is filled with dishonest people but usually as objects of ridicule. But that was from a time when truth was esteemed.
Years ago The United States admitted to a war crime, signed the paper and denied it in the same quarter hour at the same table. Did we invade Iraq because we were deceived by erroneous intelligence or did we see the loss of control over their oil as a "bigger picture" risk? A British military officer says the latter: Someone is lying. We have a dangerous deficit but discretionary spending is less than 17% of the budget: We deny we will encroach on the Social Security or Medicare but does anyone believe that? After all, the original plan was to cut 500 billion dollars from Medicare as we were saying we wouldn't. And what are those two entitlements? They are promises. Promises. Taxes were taken with the promise that money would be available for medical insurance and pension benefits. That money was taken from trusting citizens and its return was promised.
Science is often wrong but it doesn't lie. But now scientist do lie. Mann, the creator of the now debunked "hockey stick" graph, is under investigation for ethics violations. Virtually nobody believes these people now, regardless of the merits of their arguments. The American Heart Association came to the conclusion that butter is bad for you--when their main contributor was a margarine company. Now the vaccine/autism fiasco: The Lancet, one of the major medical journals in the world, retracted a report it published by a Dr. Wakefield that linked childhood vaccines and autism. Since that article many parents have been refusing to vaccinate their children; last year noted the first measles death in Britain in decades. The Lancet points to "collective failure" among researchers, government and peer reviewers. They did not mention that the esteemed Dr. Wakefield was, at the time of his "research", in the employ of plaintiff attorneys who were suing pharmaceutical companies over the autism risk inherent in vaccines. Nor did they mention that the good doctor had his own competitive vaccine. That's a lot more than "collective failure". That's falsifying data, a disgraceful breach of trust and, in the eyes of the parents of the child dead from measles I'm sure, a hanging offense.
Let's start right here; if you lie you you will be called on it. We won't call it a "collective failure", or an "ethical hiccup" or a "truth outlier". It will be "a lie" and you will be punished. Eventually we can move on to hypocrisy, deception and what should be said but is not.
What used to be the stuff of Comedy is no longer.