Shame and Witches (Nature Climate Change)

I am sure that hacking to death elderly women, even in East Africa, is a felony. If there is any shame, it should be levelled at the authorities for not acting to stop these heineious crimes. Somehow though, in the minds of green zealots, its not the psychos with machetes that are guilty, but the poor schmucks living in western nations.

Mainstream climate science and witchcraft have quite a lot in common.

“What has rainfall got to do with witch killings in Tanzania? Quite a lot, according to … development economist Edward Miguel. …
[O]n his arrival [in East Africa] he was struck by a startling phenomenon: thousands of women, most of them elderly, were being accused of witchcraft by their families and hacked to death with machetes. On further investigation … he found a link between witch killings and drought years …
Even climate change in the opposite direction -cooling- may be responsible for witch killings:
The ‘little ice age’ – a cooling period between 1550 and 1850 – has been accused of spurring on everything from the French revolution to witch hunts in Europe.”
No it appears ignorance is responsible for witch killings.
And maybe if we spent money on educating people, not only would they stop blaming things an witches (and thus stop killing innocent people) but with their education they may even help solve some of the real problems facing the world.

It’s been my contention for some time that liberals, progressives and most environmentalists live in a “shame culture.”
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society)

In cultural anthropology, a shame society is the concept that, in a given society, the primary device for gaining control over children and maintaining social order is the inculcation of shame and the complementary threat of ostracism. A shame society is contrasted with a guilt society in which control is maintained by creating and continually reinforcing the feeling of guilt (and the expectation of punishment now or in the hereafter) for certain condemned behaviors.

In other words, in a shame culture, what others believe or perceive is important. It doesn’t matter whether you actually did anything wrong, only whether or not others believe it. Feelings, not facts, are very important.

I already bear considerable climate shame for Rahmsdorf and his gang in Potsdam, the guys from Bremen with their arctic ice minimum and my government’s unilateral exit from nuclear power.

“It’s been my contention for some time that liberals, progressives and most environmentalists live in a “shame culture.” ”
True, which transforms into a hate culture. We seem them occupying Wall Street, and eating each other for lunch while they point a collective finger at the 1%. From the head count, I’d say they are the 1%.
Desperate people will stop at nothing to survive. Winter is arriving with the price of food and energy skyrocketing. Sad, but some will not make it to spring. Meantime, the “shame culture” will continue to blame everyone but themselves with relentless attacks on everything civil.

[O]n his arrival [in East Africa] he was struck by a startling phenomenon: thousands of women, most of them elderly, were being accused of witchcraft by their families and hacked to death with machetes. On further investigation … he found a link between witch killings and drought years …
That is SO green.
Obviously greenpeace has visited.
They are practicing 21st century population control.
Of course, elderly politicians and their families will be exempt…..

There’s nothing like doing a bit of research on your own. A search for “tanzania drought witchcraft” turned up amongst other things, an article in the NYT that is over three years old but nearly verbatim in some sections to the article above by the same author:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/opinion/13kristof.html
You’d think he’d have had time to rewrite a paragraph or two since then? Astoundingly, the article goes on to blaim climate change (in part) for the conflict in Darfur. A more disgusting misrepresentation of facts I cannot imagine, and using the misery of those poor people to promote climate policy is as bankrupt of morality as possible.
But what is actually going on in Tanzania? Like the root causes of the conflict in Darfur, did this clown make those up too? Here’s an excerpt from one article on the subject that makes clear that in fact, witches are being executed in Tanzania, and that it has little or nothing to do with climate change:
——————–
In one decade alone, (1991 to 2001), Tanzania had 20,000 persons accused of witchcraft, murdered by her citizenry–a disproportionate number of the suspected witches were female octogenarians. Tanzania’s Ministry of Home Affairs claimed that 5,000 victims of witch lynching were murdered between 1994 and 1998, all suspected by fellow Tanzanians of magical high jinks.[7] Red eyes, believed to be the mark of a witch, sparked many of these tragic neighborhood witch-hunts. Apparently, many Tanzanian women possess red eye color due to the smoke of their cooking fires.[8] If the execution of grandmothers isn’t horrific enough; trials by ordeal are making a comeback as the means of identifying a person as either a witch or sorcerer. During the nineteenth century, thousands of Africans were killed in trials by ordeal, by something known as the poison oracle. (From 1828 to 1861, over 200,000 persons were killed in poison ordeals administered by the Medina ruling class of Madagascar.[9] One of the greatest witch slaughters in world history, this witch paranoia depopulated entire Malagasy villages and towns.) Currently, in Eastern Africa, to prove their innocence, accused witches aren’t subjected to the poison ordeal, but the “witch” is given a sporting chance to retrieve a bracelet from a pot of boiling water. The theory behind this practice is that an innocent party won’t receive burn marks on his, or her, arms. The unlucky ones failing the ordeal have a nail driven through their head or they are administered some other form of ghastly execution–usually a death sentence via benzene fire.[10]
——————–
The complete article is here:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_petraitis/witch_killers.html
There were a cosiderable number of other articles and papers that showed up in the search. Half seemed to be climate fear mongering by none other than the self serving Edward Miguel. The balance seem to be ones along the same line as the article by Richard Petraitis (link above). There are people being murdered for witchcraft, it has NOTHING to do with climate change, it has been going on for centuries, and for Edward Miguel to use their plight to advance a completely unrelated agenda shows the complete lack of morals this individual and so many others in the alarmist movement have.

Climate catastrophic change due to CO2 is a form future divination, since there is virtually no empirical evidence supporting it. Divination is witchcraft plain and simple. Africa has misdirected it’s fear at little old ladies. It is the top climate alarmists who should be their target. Machetes and wooden stakes, might become scarce, if such actions were to became wide-spread.
At least it might save a few grandmothers! GK

I’ll bet they made the connection from watching this too many times- So logically, if she weighs the same as a duck, she’s made of wood and therefore .. she’s a witch!

What climate change would this be? It has been mid-summers day in the tropics for the last 5 billion years.

To suffer the wrath of witches is more preferable rather than to suffer the kindness of socialism.

Gail Combs says: November 8, 2011 at 11:32 am
…Among elementary students, 17% of all students and 33% of white boys had been diagnosed with ADHD and the vast majority had been medicated for this condition….
Gail those numbers are horrifying. Can you do a piece on this for WUWT??
I’m interested because I had cause to investigate ADHD etc and it’s an area where spiritual insights are particularly strongly evidenced in what, to me, is the most significant breakthrough work here. It’s an area where cooperation is highly appropriate between straight science and “alternative” approaches that all too often are dismissed by science with ignorance, hand-waving and ad hom. Particularly in healiing, anything that works is important, even if we don’t understand how or why it works – so long as we have checked with reasonable care that it really does work or really does stand a good chance of working.

Lucy Skywalker says:
November 8, 2011 at 5:10 pm
Gail Combs says: November 8, 2011 at 11:32 am
…Among elementary students, 17% of all students and 33% of white boys had been diagnosed with ADHD and the vast majority had been medicated for this condition….
Gail those numbers are horrifying. Can you do a piece on this for WUWT??>>>
Gail, Lucy,
I’ve been studying ADHD for close to 20 years, have coached adults to develop coping skills, organized parents self help group, and back when ADHD was still new (to the public anyway) did interviews on radio talk shows and wrote help guides for local school divisions before they started developing their own internal expertise.
There’s plenty of modern myth running around in regard to both the condition and the medications. Please allow me to make a couple of brief points:
1. In any jurisdiction, ADD and ADHD are either very over diagnosed or very under diagnosed. The notion that children are being drugged due to a misdiagnosis however is (for the most part) a fallacy. The reason is that the medication itself is a diagnostic tool. Using Ritalin as the example, it is a strong stimulent. The typical ADHD boy is very active, can’t sit still in class, has ants in the pants so to speak. Girls are more prone to straight ADD (without the H which stands for hyperactivity). So, for the ADHD person who can’t focus, can’t pay attention, can’t sit still, a dose of Ritalin is, in fact, a diagnostic tool. If the child responds to the strong stimulus effect of Ritalin by becoming MORE active, then what they have is NOT ADHD. If they have ADHD, the effect of the stimulant is to settle them down, and even though their energy level is frequently HIGHER, they become less active, more able to sit still, more able to concentrate. One has to stand back and consider for a moment that someone’s brain has got to be wired oddly when they calm down due to taking a stimulant. If they respond to a stimulant by becoming more active, they don’t have ADD or ADHD!
2. Let’s consider a second common misunderstanding about Ritallin from Gail’s post:
“Now comes news in the August 22, 2001 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association that Ritalin does indeed cause long-term brain damage similar to its chemical relatives cocaine and amphetamine.”
I’d be interested in reading the report if you have a link to it Gail, because the above paragraph is WRONG. Ritalin, as I said above, is a stimulant. As with any stimulant, the effects are no uniform. ADD and ADHD individuals have lower levels of Seratonin in their brain than do “regular” people. Ritalin and its close relative Dexadrine are both valuable in treating ADD and ADHD because they stimulated the brain to produce more Seratonin than it would otherwise. But that’s not what Cocaine does. There are two processes in the brain that keep Seratonin levels regulated. One is the rate of production, the other is a process called “re-uptake” in which the Seratonin is removed from the brain. Cocain, and the bulk of anti-depressants, are called Seratonin Selective Re-Uptake Inhibitors or SSRI’s. So, while both Cocain and Ritalin have the same end result from the perspective of increasing Seratonin levels in the brain, calling them “chemical relatives” is simply wrong. Building a dam increases the level of water in a lake, but so does rainfall. Would it be accurate to suggest that a dam and a rainstorm share the same basic phyics?
The goal of a good treatment program is for the child to learn coping skills that allow him or her to manage their day to day lives without the need for medication. In other words, medication has value as a diagnostic tool, and as one of many treatment options. When parents and teachers treat Ritalin as some sort of magic pill that will instantly fix the problem, they are making a big mistake. But when they take the time and effort to put a long term learning plan in place that includes development of proper coping skills that last into adulthood, Ritalin is one of many tools that may have unique and valuable benefits in the short term and medium term.
As one story I read and relayed to parents many times went and was published in a book called ADD Success Stories, a young boy came home from his first day at school while being treated with Ritalin. He very excitedly told his mother that he’d made his first friend ever that day, participated at recess in games with other kids which he’d never been able to do before, and, best of all, he’d heard and remembered everything that the teacher taught that day. His mother told him to go back the next day, and to “pay attention to what it feels like to pay attention”.
Better advice I could not give, and I speak from personal experience.

I would love to display my carbon footprint. Too bad I don’t have extra money to drive it up a bit. Also, it would be easy to see who you can scam easily just by seeing who have a very low carbon footprint. Not to say everyone with a low carbon footprint would be suckers, but a much higher % would.

davidmhoffer says:
November 8, 2011 at 6:16 pm
David thanks a million. That was enlightening. I’ve bookmarked your reply.

Apologies, I missed a few with that post.

Khwarazimi;
If you want to challenge me on this topic, you’re off to a poor start. In regard to your points above:
1. All the chemicals you listed have varying effects on seratonin, dopamine and others too. I was providing a basic explanation of the most important effects from an ADD and ADHD perspective.
2. Seratonin Selective Re-uptake Inhibitors and called SSRI’s because the selectively inhibit re-uptake of seratonin. If you want to delve into the specifics by all means, but the point I was making is that cocaine and ritalin are completely different approaches to increasing seratonin levels in the brain while the article quotes was suggesting they were similar.
3. You are right, one anecdotal story doesn’t prove much. The story was provided as an example, and was used to make a point about the use of coaching in combination with medication. If you want “proof” then I can suggest that this isn’t the forum for such a discussion, and I will suggest further that attacking freely given advice using half truths suggests an agenda on your part rather than an interest in the facts. May I suggest:
There is a book called “ADD Success Stories” that was compiled years before ADD was a common term. It was the result of an internet forum where people told their personal stories about living with and overcoming ADD. The stories that were inspirational or instructive or presented any other value to those struggling with ADD were compiled into that book. In it, you will find a great number of anecdotal stories, some about Ritalin and some about other treatments, coping skills, and so on. I could point you at many other resources, but as I said, this isn’t the forum. But if you are going to pop off about only one anecedotal story, I can assure you, I haven’t sufficient time in my own life to write up all the anecdotal stories I could compile just from my personal experience alone.
Ritalin has some downsides, they are well known, and I find it odd that Ritalin’s detractors fail to attack the medication on those points and instead make up some new accusations of their own. It tells you something about both their knowledge and their agenda.