A weeping earth can't speak

So, it's good to be forearmed for people like filmmaker Martin Durkin.

Oceanography professor Carl Wunsch tells The Observer in London today that his contribution to the film to Durkin's new film, "The Great Global Warming Swindle," was "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War II."

I wonder if ExxonMobil paid for Durkin's "work" the way they paid for Michael Crichton's cult novel, "State of Fear."

Last month, the Environmental Law Prof Blog reported ExxonMobil's "nonpartisan" think tank American Enterprise Institute is offering $10,000 bribes to any scientist willing to downplay or criticize U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change findings, that scientists worldwide are virtually unanimous global warming is real, deadly serious and caused by human misbehavior, including burning fossil fuels that are Exxon's livelihood. Deja vu Rep. John Boehner's audacity handing out cash bribes from tobacco lobbyists right on the House floor in 1995 to change votes that already had been cast against Big Tobacco.

But if you want a chuckle, check out this blog Exxon and others fund that masquerades as an "environmental blog" of the (cough cough) "nonpartisan" National Center for Public Policy Research. That's one of 40 so-called conservative (but conserving nothing) think tanks Exxon funds to ride roughshod over the career democracy policy minds in Washington. The blogger, Amy Ridenour, a veteran organizer of the College Republicans, is president of National Center for Public Policy Research and hubby, fellow College Republican David A Ridenour, is its VP. College Republicans = environmental science credentials, in newspeak, that is. Exxon pays the Ridenours $55,000 a year to do its bidding.

The Ridenours were whores for Big Tobacco, too. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a report also making that comparison. So has Crichton, a physician by education, who is known for proclaiming second-hand tobacco smoke never hurt anyone. How ironic that Crichton was caught in college plagiarizing George Orwell, author of "1984" and inventor of the term "newspeak" for intentionally deceptive language.