The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Proving the adage that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes,” and show that posting false information on the inter-web appears to be far more profitable than telling the truth, consider the case of Dr. Joseph Mercola, 67, an osteopathic physician in Cape Coral, Fla.

While Mercola has long been a subject of criticism and government regulatory actions for his promotion of unproven or unapproved alternative medical treatments, over the past year he has become the chief spreader of coronavirus misinformation online, according to The New York Times.

Over the last decade, Dr. Mercola has built a vast operation to push natural health cures, disseminate anti-vaccination content and profit from all of it, according to researchers who have studied his network. At one point he filed an affidavit claiming his net worth was “in excess of $100 million.”

I doubt he pays any taxes either.

Dr. Mercola’s posts do not directly state that vaccines don’t work. He often asks pointed questions about their safety and discusses studies that other doctors have refuted. Facebook and Twitter have allowed some of his posts to remain up with caution labels, and the companies have struggled to create rules to pull down posts that have nuance.

“He has been given new life by social media, which he exploits skillfully and ruthlessly to bring people into his thrall,” said Imran Ahmed, director of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which studies misinformation and hate speech. Its “Disinformation Dozen” report has been cited in congressional hearings and by the White House.

His audience is substantial. Dr. Mercola’s official English-language Facebook page has over 1.7 million followers, while his Spanish-language page has 1 million followers. The Times also found 17 other Facebook pages that appeared to be run by him or were closely connected to his businesses. On Twitter, he has nearly 300,000 followers, plus nearly 400,000 on YouTube.

Clearly we are doing something wrong here, and have been since the 1990s, when I first set out to publish factual news online. Apparently people are far more interested in and willing to spread crazy falsehoods, which clearly is how Donald Trump got himself elected president. His platform of choice was Twitter, but every news organization in the land spread his crazy messaging all day long on every channel.

Oh, well. I refuse to lie or over sensationalize news stories to make a buck. Call me naive, or altruistic rather than selfish. Like the dude, we will abide.

Climate Change

Meanwhile, back to the biggest story in the world next to the global coronavirus pandemic and the spreading Delta variant: Global warming and climate change are dominating the summer news, and probably will for the next couple of months.

You would think there might be a little profit in getting to this story early, but so far many people are still in deep denial.

Back in June of 1988, when scientist James Hansen testified before Congress and uttered his famous quote, I was in Birmingham, Alabama free-lancing as a writer and developing a specialty beat covering the environment.

“The greenhouse effect has been detected,” Hansen said, “and it is changing our climate now.”

It was controversial at the time, but I believed him right away, watching on C-SPAN and reading the story in The New York Times, because we had suffered a drought and heat wave in 1986 in Birmingham that sent me scrambling to find a small air conditioner to fit into the small windows in the Southside apartment building I lived in on 29th Street just off of Highland Avenue.

It took four years, but countries around the globe created the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, in which they agreed to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

Hansen went on tour trying to inform people about the facts. But of course he was attacked for it as a “greenie” and a “cooke” by the oil companies and the Republicans.

According to The Washington Post on Sunday, in the decades since, people have emitted more carbon dioxide than they did in the entire century before this.

“And many of the catastrophes Hansen warned about have come to pass.”

“All of this is happening exactly as we have known it would happen,” said Fredi Otto, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford and co-lead of the World Weather Attribution initiative.

The panicked commuters of Zhengzhou, China, for example, could only stand on seats and cling to poles in a desperate attempt to keep their heads above the muddy torrent this past week, as floodwaters from record-breaking rains inundated the subway system.

On the other side of the planet, in Gresham, Ore., a 61-year-old maker of handcrafted ukuleles slowly died in June as searing temperatures made an oven out of his lifelong home — one of at least 800 victims of what one scientist called “the most anomalous heat event ever observed on Earth.”

Massive floods deluged Central Europe, Nigeria, Uganda and India in recent days, killing hundreds. June’s scorching temperatures, followed by a fast-moving wildfire, erased a Canadian town. More than a million people are close to starvation amid Madagascar’s worst drought in decades. In Siberia, tens of thousands of square miles of forest are ablaze, potentially unleashing carbon stored in the frozen ground below.

In Italy on Friday, a top U.N. climate official once again pleaded for the world to heed the alarm bells, reminding leaders that these catastrophes are simply the latest in a ghastly string of warnings that the planet is hurtling down a treacherous path.

“What more can numbers show us that we cannot already see? What more can statistics say about the flooding, the wildfires, the droughts and hurricanes and other deadly events?” United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa told a gathering of energy and environment ministers from G-20 nations. “Numbers and statistics are invaluable, but what the world requires now, more than anything else, is climate action.”

You would think the reality in front of peoples’ faces would wake them up to see the truth for what it is, and that this sensational message might catch on as well as any end times apocalyptic predictions.

But apparently there is something in the human genome making half the people jump up and down for a false claim, and blithely ignore a true one.

Is it possible that we are genetically programmed to fail, rather than predisposed to evolve for success?

Intriguing questions.

It certainly appears that the novel coronavirus, now the Delta variant mutation, is hellbent on taking a bunch of us out. And it’s finally turning against conservative Trump Republicans and anti-vaxers in a big way.

Let the covid games begin.

The COVID Games in Tokyo, and the Blame Game for the Dying in Red Alabama