Thought for the Day

By Rich Kozlovich

Consensus isn’t a scientific concept; it’s a political concept.  It’s merely what everyone believes; however, it isn’t necessarily factual.   Truth is fact based.  Ideology is consensus based.

We are told there was a time when the consensus was the world was flat.  That was wrong!  There was a time when the consensus was that the Piltdown Man was scientific proof of evolution.  That was fraud!  There was a time when the consensus was that eugenics was the answer to preventing genetically inferior people from breeding and became the cause célèbre for people like the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, and....Adolph Hitler.  That generated crimes against humanity!   There were recent times when the consensus was we were heading into another catastrophic Ice Age.  That was wrong!  The scientific consensus regarding the world's total proven oil reserves in 1947 was 68 billion barrels, generating fear we would soon run out.  That was wrong!  We have used hundreds of billions barrels of oil since then and it appears we have unlimited amounts yet available!  There was consensus that we would soon run out of food and millions would be dying in the streets by the 1980's or 90's.  That was wrong!  There was consensus we were destroying the world’s forests.  That was a lie! 

Consensus isn’t a scientific concept; it’s a political concept and that’s why the misfits of environmentalism tout ‘consensus’ as their defining argument for global warming versus the reality commonly known as provable fact. Facts are what they are. Consensus can be manufactured by a really great public relations campaign, but that still doesn’t make ‘consensus' factual, and so very often has left devastation in its wake. The consensus that socialism would create a utopian world was not only wrong, it killed over 100 million people and left hundreds of millions to be enslaved by tyrannical governments that imposed on their citizens hunger, squalor, misery, suffering, disease and early death! The consensus was that socialism would create utopia; the reality was dystopia!