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By E. Ralph Hostetter
August 16, 2006
Times were good. The stock market registered an all-time high, well over 10,000 on the Dow Jones. IRAs were growing rapidly in retirement accounts. President William J. (“Bill”) Clinton "miraculously" balanced the budget. The Republicans had taken back control of the House of Representatives after some 45 years. The bulls seemed on a rampage; the bears were in hibernation. The Internet was the place to be. Companies with no asset, never having made a profit, were taking over massive multibillion dollar corporations in "paper" transactions. AOL, one such company, had taken over Time-Warner, a Fortune 500 publication/motion picture empire, forming AOL-Time-Warner. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was cooperating by printing trillions of dollars to fund what would become known as the "Y2K" scare. Hi-tech and the Internet was the place to be.
The change to the year 2000 seemed ominous. Americans had been told several years earlier that, because of the practice of using only the last two digits to enter a year, when the date changed on all computers from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000 the computers would crash. Computers would be confused into thinking the year was actually 1900.
The American public had been told that all computers must be replaced or upgraded if a national catastrophe were to be avoided. The population was led to believe that crashing computers would cause computer-guided aircraft to crash on landing. Added to the panic would be failing power stations and inaccessible bank accounts, with potential loss of all financial records. Americans were urged to hoard cash to carry them over the months the banks would be closed.
The hi-tech race was on. The Federal Reserve's newly printed trillions found their way into the stock exchanges of the nation. The stock market was booming; IRAs were bulging with the hi-tech stocks.
Interestingly, China, India, Russia and the rest of the world did nothing to prepare for the date change. And nothing happened. Y2K was a non-event. It was the greatest hoax of the 20th Century.
How could such a hoax be perpetrated upon one of the best-informed nations on the planet? The United States sets the world example for a free press. And yet the vast majority of Americans were duped into believing that a change of date from December 31, 1999, to January 1, 2000, would cause a near collapse of the nation's infrastructure. When the smoke cleared the Y2K non-event had set the American public up for 4 trillion dollars in stock losses. Individual fortunes disappeared.
Will the unsuspecting public be misled again? The answer is a resounding “Yes!” After several attempts to gain traction with the American public, the global warming movement is back again. Global warming suffered a serious set-back when President George W. Bush refused to sign the United States to the Kyoto Protocol in early 2001.
As with Y2K, a fear factor weighs heavily in the debate. Where fear is a factor, decisions quite often are made on the basis of fear rather than reality. This was particularly true during the Y2K hoax. The direction for the population to resolve the fear factor is inevitably set by the creators of the fear in the first place. Who first advises the public of the issue involving the fear factor? Who perpetuates the dialogue about the fear factor? It certainly is not by word of mouth.
The dominant media of the nation is the major source of all news. If the dominant media ignores the issue completely too few people learn about it to make a difference. The dominant media controlled the Y2K hoax completely. The dominant media will control the global warming hoax as well and it will prove to be far more costly than Y2K.
Likewise, today, the dominant media promotes the likes of Albert A. (“Al”) Gore, Jr. and his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth, and a Discovery Channel television documentary, “Global Warming: What You Need to Know, with Tom Brokaw.” Both the Gore and Brokaw presentations have gone unchallenged in the dominant media and no additional program or news media has offered anything that could be considered balanced. The general public must prepare itself for a massive onslaught of terrifying news of worse-than-ever hurricanes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, 15-foot rises in the ocean level covering one-third of Florida and Long Island, loss of nearly all American seaports and suffocating heat waves. The aforementioned list is nothing more than an over-exaggeration of normal climatic conditions.
Believe it or not, real science and real scientists agree, at present the globe is in a natural warming cycle, neither caused by man nor able to be altered to any extent by man. If the American public is to avoid another Y2K it must look beyond the dominant media. It must seek out real science. An abundance of accurate science is available from many sources today, including the Internet. Nearly every state climatologist has the story right.
Ralph Hostetter, a prominent businessman and agricultural publisher, also is an award-winning columnist and Vice Chairman of the Free Congress Foundation. He welcomes email comments at eralphhostetter@yahoo.com.
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