Are There Too Many Books?

By Alan Caruba

I am back from walking the many aisles of Book Expo in the cavernous New York City Jacob Javits Exposition Center. For a charter member of the National Book Critics Circle and longtime—very longtime—editor of Bookviews.com, a monthly report on the best in new fiction and non-fiction, Book Expo is the annual equivalent of the hajj to Mecca.

It is filled with booths and the booths are filled with books. Eager publicists, sales people, and even editors can’t wait to show you their latest “titles.” In the book world, all new books are “titles.” In some booths, famous authors sign copies. In others, authors who have achieved a smaller measure of fame or eager to be famous have their new books as well.

There are several genres of books that I try to avoid. I am deeply skeptical of all manner of books that involve any form of “enlightenment” beyond what one can find in the family Bible, Old and New Testament. Books that recommend you meditate while burning incense or candles, sit cross-legged in the middle of the room, et cetera, don’t work for me. Prayer? Pray where you are, any time you need to, which in these times is often.

One is reminded of the way there is no end to cookbooks and, alternatively, books on how to diet. Travel books seem to thrive. Self-improvement and home-improvement books abound. Books on various aspects of health and medicine do well. There are novels, novels, novels.

By mid-morning, the aisles are jammed with people. Book Expo draws bibliophiles and those from the far-flung community of people who make their living selling books. It was quickly becoming difficult to navigate the aisles and I am reminded once again why I receive anywhere from three to five books every day but Sunday. That’s easily a one hundred or more books a month. I have heard estimates of 200,000 new books a year and I have no reason to dispute the figure.

I love to read. My favorite topics are history, politics, biographies, and books on current events. I read almost no fiction nor do I read all of the seventy or so books that are recommended in my monthly Internet site. I read enough of each to make a judgment as to their content, their organization, their documentation, and attention to general literary standards.

Bookviews.com used to attract some 60,000 to 80,000 visits a month, but it is down to half that these days. The book industry is feeling the contraction of the economy too and the book sections that used to grace newspapers like The Washington Post and others are swiftly becoming a thing of the past.

On the first day of Book Expo, however, you would not know that. The place is thronged and, after a transit of its many aisles, the presentation of every kind of book on every kind of subject, one is comforted in knowing that the book industry is soldering on, forever in pursuit of the next bestseller. In our society, authors still have prestige, no matter what they have written.

Indeed, one measure of success in America is to have written a book. Many of our former Presidents wrote memoirs. Ulysses S. Grant wrote his in order to leave some money for his family because he was pretty much broke by the end of his life. When Harry S. Truman went home to Independence, Missouri, all he had to his name was his WWI army pension and the family farm which he was forced to sell. These days, books by former Presidents like Clinton generate big bucks. President Obama, unable to find a more important topic, wrote two memoirs before he even made it into the U.S. Senate.

There is even a vast industry for those who want to self-publish rather than run the gauntlet of getting a publisher to take it on. Writing a really good book requires talent. It requires dedication. Personal vanity is a very bad reason to write a book.

The curmudgeon in me wants to say there are too many books being published these days. The short answer is yes. I can’t say that, though. The reason is that, among the hundred or more books that I receive monthly, I inevitably find several of great merit. They often provide a blazing insight into the minds of people whom I need to understand or events and personalities that left their mark on human history. There are books that explain the science of the Earth and beyond to me.

Books have largely made me the man I am today. Show me someone who does not read books and I will show you someone lost in the fog of propaganda, manipulation, and the lies that pass for the news of the day. Books can tell you who you are, what you believe, and why. They always leave you changed in some fashion.

Green Masters of Propaganda

By Alan Caruba

Have you ever wondered why a former vice president and failed candidate for the presidency merited a Nobel Prize for “peace” which was, in fact, shared by a United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? What does claiming that global warming will destroy the world have to do with peace?

Why do Greens say that the science that they claim supports this hoax is “settled” and not subject to examination? Even Darwin’s Theory of Evolution continues to be challenged to this day. Science has confirmed that the Earth’s average temperature has, since 1998, turned demonstrably cooler. What does that say about Gore’s and other’s cooling claims? It says they are wrong.

Have you wondered why, the same year he garnered a Nobel, Al Gore also received an Oscar for his documentary about global warming and why schools across America required students to watch it? If you think these two events are coincidental, read on.

Have you noticed that Time magazine and other weekly periodicals have their cover stories devoted to Earth Day? Or that, leading up to it, weekly and daily newspaper sections have been suffused with stories about living Green or about Green events in your town or city?

Does it strike you as a coincidence that many television channels are filled with Earth Day related programs or have been airing apocalyptic programs for some time now?

What we have been witnessing is the mastery of propaganda, not just on a national scale, but globally, because Earth Day will evoke an eruption of media-driven stories about all aspects of the Green agenda.

Through a combination of fear, coercion, infiltration of the education system, the acquiescence of politicians, and the supine surrender of the mass media, the environmental movement, tapping billions of dollars from foundations and other sources of funding, has overwhelmed our society and others with the message that we must “save the Earth.”

Implicit and often quite openly, the message is that humans are the Earth’s greatest enemies and despoilers, laying waste to its forests and jungles, poisoning its air and water, causing the extinction of every species, responsible for “urban sprawl”, and, in general consuming too much food, too much energy, to much of everything.

The Greens want to save the Earth from us!

This is why causing global food shortages by the passage of “energy” legislation mandating that 60% of the nation’s corn crop be turned into ethanol, a useless gasoline additive, is nothing less than brilliant…if you want people to die from artificially induced famines.

There’s good propaganda and there’s bad propaganda. The good propaganda encourages people to eat properly, drive safely, and support worthy causes such as eradicating diseases, and such.

Bad propaganda has at is core a deep contempt for those being propagandized. It almost always advocates something that has a harmful outcome. An example is the campaign that banned DDT, a miracle pesticide that could have and still can save the lives of millions of mostly women and children in Africa and elsewhere. It serves just as well against dengue fever, a scourge of South American nations.

In the United States, propaganda about land use often ends up as the seizing and setting aside of millions of acres of land from any development that might contribute to the need to house an ever-increasing population or even providing recreational opportunities. Significantly, it puts off limit the vast natural resources, coal, oil and natural gas, that would reduce our dependence on other nations for these same vital sources of energy.

The Earth does not need to be saved from us. If humans were not part of the Earth's ecological system, we would not exist.

The Earth’s climate, however, is totally beyond human control. We have no control over the Sun, the oceans, volcanoes, the tectonic plates whose shift create earthquakes, or the cycles of warming and cooling etched into the Earth’s surface.

All the propaganda in the world will not change that.

Our task on Earth Day and every day to follow is to shake loose of the lies, the propaganda of the Greens, to reclaim our dominion over the Earth and to proceed to feed, house, and cloth humankind until it can achieve a kinder, more abundant future.

Green Desperation Time

By Alan Caruba

News of a January 31 “teach-in” on more than 1,000 college campuses nationwide strikes me of just one more example of the growing desperation of the environmental movement that has bet its credibility and influence on global warming.

Mark your calendar for any news about a March 2-4 conference in New York that is expected to draw between 400 and 500 global warming skeptics, i.e., scientists, economists, and policy experts. I suspect that print and broadcast journalists will do their best to ignore this event in what is arguably the media capitol of the nation, if not the world.

Organized by the Heartland Institute and co-sponsored by the International Climate Science Coalition, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and the Science & Environmental Policy Project, it should put to rest the very core of the “teach-in”, the notion that there is a consensus among the world’s scientists that global warming is happening or about to happen.

In one way, even the Greens are right. There is global warming and the reason is that it is a perfectly natural phenomenon based entirely on the activity of the Sun. No one disputes that the Earth has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit since the end of the last mini-ice age around 1850. And, as Martha Stewart would say, that’s a good thing.

What is not happening is a huge warming that is melting all the ice at the North and South Poles, causing hurricanes, or any of the several hundred other things attributed to global warming. It is definitely not something that human activity is causing or can “control” in any fashion. Try controlling the Sun, the oceans, clouds, volcanoes, et cetera!

As for the dreaded carbon dioxide, it represents 0.038% of the earth's atmosphere.

Alex Tinker, the public relations director of Focus the Nation, an environmental advocacy group, said that the teach-in would be a day when an entire college or university campus turns its attention to a single issue, global warming.

“The premise behind Focus the Nation is that ‘The Science is in. Global warming is real,” said Tinker. “There’s no longer a meaningful debate about whether or not global warming is caused by human kind—the debate should be about what policy solutions we need to enact to address it.”

This is a lie.

This perfectly articulates the Green’s agenda and the science is in, but it refutes all of the more fanciful claims made about global warming and its affect on, well, everything. The agenda, however, is not about global warming. It’s about doing everything possible to destroy the economy of the United States and all industrialized nations.

Anyone who tells you we can replace coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear power with wind turbines and solar panels is blowing smoke up your skirt. The only way such “alternative” energy sources even exist is with millions in government subsidies, i.e., your tax money being thrown down an indefensible rat hole.

It’s worth noting that Tinker used the word “enact” with regard to the Greens proposed “solutions.”

The environmental movement exists to use legislation to force people to do their bidding. Its entire philosophy is coercive because they know that anyone with any common sense understands their “solutions” are idiotic. As but one example, the State of California recently floated the idea of being able to control the thermostats in private homes and elsewhere so that the decision of how much energy was used no longer would be exercised by the consumer.

In just the United States where our population now tops 300 million, do you really think we need less electricity to meet our needs?

Do you really think that we should not tap the estimated billions of barrels of crude oil in a tiny part of Alaska’s vast national wildlife reserve?

Do you think we should continue to limit exploration of 85% of the nation’s continental shelf?

Do you seriously believe that polar bears that have been around for millennia are “endangered” and will disappear by 2050?

And why have a national teach-in when every single day of the year every one of us is hammered with global warming propaganda? Why take college student’s time to blather away about global warming when they have had this nonsense forced down their throats since they were in pre-school?

I will tell you why. Desperation. Time is running out for the global warming hoax.

Focus the Nation says it wants to create support for the creation of "one million new 'green jobs' – workers who would service America’s infrastructure to be more ecologically friendly.” What the hell does that mean?

The nation’s infrastructure of roads and bridges exists to serve the needs of millions of cars and trucks, and we know the Greens hate them because they run on gasoline and diesel.

The infrastructure includes power generation plants and we know the Greens hate the ones that use coal (providing over half of all the electricity in the nation) and oppose the building of nuclear plants.

I guess people who work for airlines or sea-going cargo lines should find another line of work as well because both use large amounts of energy to function.

Parents and the students who have taken on huge debt in order to attend college should tell Focus the Nation to focus on leaving the faculty to teach something that doesn’t come with an agenda that blames the human race for the climate and does not seek to undermine capitalism and the globalization that is increasing and spreading wealth throughout the world.