Sondra Mccuin

“  “I am running back my tent to get my sub-machinegun. There are too many Noggies to kill using a pistol!” He then ran to where his scrape was and returned with the weapon.”
― Michael G. Kramer

“I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“According to one recent study [...] the [climate change] denial-espousing think tanks and other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the “climate change counter-movement” are collectively pulling in more than $ 900 million per year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of “dark money”— funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully traced.

This points to the limits of theories like cultural cognition that focus exclusively on individual psychology. The deniers are doing more than protecting their personal worldviews - they are protecting powerful political and economic interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are well known and well documented. Heartland has received more than $ 1 million from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its donors, claiming the information would distract from the “merits of our positions.” Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland’s largest donors is anonymous - a shadowy individual who has given more than $ 8.6 million specifically to support the think tank’s attacks on climate science.

Meanwhile, scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite just two examples, the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels, who gave the 2011 conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company’s income comes from oil companies (Cato itself has received funding from ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations). A Greenpeace investigation into another conference speaker, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that between 2002 and 2010, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel interests.”
― Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate