A couple of hours later I was reading a James Patterson book and came across the following sentence: “And that’s today’s narrative, reporters don’t do news stories anymore – they report on the details that reinforce the narrative” – so the actual facts become buried and the story is slanted according to the mindset of the people controlling the media, and the “politically correct” viewpoints of their masters.
Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by the ease with which information is dispersed through the internet, WhatsApp, social media, etc.
This results in totally one-sided and biased stories which are repeated so often that nobody ever questions them.
So the problems of Cape Town’s transport systems get blamed on Metrorail, when the real guilty parties are the people stealing the cables and sabotaging the rolling stock.
It just gets blamed on “white monopoly capital”, “colonialism”, apartheid, or any other number of catch phrases.
You have the ludicrous situation of a snot-nosed Scandinavian school girl parading around the world (at someone else’s expense) babbling on about the earth-threatening effects of carbon dioxide.
However, the facts are never really mentioned.
Check your Google, your Wikipedia, ask your chemistry teacher, and they will tell you that 78% of the world’s atmosphere is made up of nitrogen and 21% of oxygen.
That leaves 1%. Of that 1%, 93% is argon, all the other gases (methane, carbon monoxide, etc) make up 4% (of the 1%), and the remainder is carbon dioxide, that is 0.03% of the world’s atmosphere.
To put this into perspective, if you set off from Johannesburg travelling to Cape Town, you’d be at the Foreshore before you entered the “carbon dioxide” zone.
In actual fact, the last 60 years the level of carbon dioxide has increased – from 310 parts per million to 370 parts per million – that doesn’t sound too catastrophic to me.
But the facts are conveniently ignored – it’s the story that counts.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Josef Goebbels invented and perfected propaganda – he’d have had a field day with today’s resources.
PT Barnum famously said “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time – but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.
But in 2019 it’s a daily occurrence.
