Good News/Bad News: The Glacial Resist Stance (Part 1)

Hello and welcome to last week’s good news/bad news, the segment where I find something fresh off the press that represents good and something that represents bad, all in my opinion and all without shame.

This week I have the same story from four different sources and I want to make it clear from this why the daily mail should be forced into bankruptcy, and if that’s not possible, for every copy, every building and every website associated with it to burst into flames.

Because this issue deals with issues of climate change, and the daily mail, being the propaganda paper that it is, has pretty much become our bad news for this week.

Let’s go deeper, shall we?

So…

In the blue corner, we have nature – the weekly journal of science!

In the red corner, we have the daily mail – the daily journal of bollocks!

In the yellow corner, we have BBC news – the taxpayer-funded, usually reliable journal of… news?

In the green corner? Well, whatever colour this corner is, we have the guardian, the usually reliable paper that houses Charlie Brooker, Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh on occasion, and therefore a paper which I have to try pretty hard to suppress my bias for.

From that alone, you should get a pretty good idea of how this may turn out, but the most important fact in all of this is the news item.

And that news item deals with the observations of a glacier on the border of Pakistan and China, a glacier that is apparently gaining ice.

Already I can hear you guessing which way the daily mail swung out on this one, and if you’ve already clicked the link you know how bad a job they did with their headlines this time.

‘Forget global warming, scientists discover glaciers in Asia getting BIGGER’ it reads.

And I facepalm so hard my hand practically cracks open my skull.

So, you decide which paper you think won this one out while I prime myself for the second part of this tomorrow, with this unaddressed letter to the daily mail.

Dear Daily Mail,

Here on earth, we have a process that we like to call ‘science’.

It would seem that you don’t quite understand how the process of science works, so let me hit you with some knowledge. One data point does not mean a well-established theory is wrong.

The evidence has to weigh out, and unfortunately for our planet, the fact this Asian glacier may be gaining ice does not overrule the many and more elaborate observations that support the theory that the climate of the earth is changing, and in fact, this glacier growth does not necessarily even dispute this theory.

So before you decide to be sensationalists, get your facts straight.

Because when it comes to matters such as the possible man-made destruction of our planet, we don’t need any more people to be stuffed with the false impression that climate change is pseudoscience.

Please stop publishing and kindly leave your offices to sit and weep in whatever circle of hell you left your intellectual and journalistic integrity in.

Yours sincerely,

Me.

Personal Gain

So there are a couple of tactics people take these days to try and get far in life, tactics that don’t really seem viable to me. That may deem me doomed to ultimately find no success and that saddens me deeply but I cannot change my personality, that would require a lot more than determination, that would involve emotional conditioning or gene therapy or any number of strange things to happen.

I’d much prefer we all got an equal chance, but that’s not the way the world turns apparently and unfortunately.

Because I cannot shun people for my own personal gain (type one)

or brown nose everyone in sight (type two, mostly unobtainable because I have incredible trouble approaching people and by the time I’ve talked to them I’ve come across as sufficiently dull to warrant ignoring)

Does this mean I can never achieve my goals to the degree I wish to?

I hope not, because I’m pretty determined.

But the fact that I never get gigs, have had no attention from literary agents and screwed up my A levels still gets to me a lot.

What do I have to do to get attention for doing the things I enjoy?

It would seem that in some places the well has run dry and my stomach tightens at the thought of giving up on anything.

But I am incredibly worried that I might have to give up on at least one of my dreams, and I’d hate to think of letting go of any of them, not after I’ve worked so hard to achieve them and got so little reward.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I need a little help, not just from people to get my feet off the ground (but that would be lovely) but to actually get some advice from people who know what I can do to take myself further, because for now it would seem that I’m faced with a huge brick wall with only a chisel to break it down with.