As IF Times

link Chipotle Warns It Might Stop Serving Guacamole If Climate Change Gets Worse | ThinkProgress.

Of all the spurious reasons to join the march of the Global Warming parade with the deluded idiots, at least this one has the potential for mass outrage.  Whereas for most people, the odd missing penguin, scarce butterfly or dwindling owl population may be somewhat abstract, the thought of missing out on a main food group, Mexican, is unthinkable.

If you removed avocados from the mix in offerings at Mexican restaurants, what would you be left with?  Tomatoes, beans, cheese, beef, chicken and pork.  That may as well be Italian food.  Or if you take out beans and use chopsticks, it’s Chinese food. We can see where this would cause serious social upheaval.  If all of a sudden, the Chipotle restaurant chain loses access to avocados, then they are essentially Olive Garden with corn chips.  Why would anyone go to Chipotle when they can get bottomless bread at Olive Garden?

This isn’t about guacamole, it’s about the very survival of culture.  While it’s one thing to have a melting pot nation, when it comes to food, Americans want a smorgasbord of choices.  Nobody wants McOliveLobsterHut.  Whatever we need to do, however high the tax hikes or however much we have to pay to keep guacamole on the menus, let’s do it. Because it’s not just avocados.  It could be tomatoes that next disappear as a result of  Global Warming.  There goes Pizza Hut; there goes Chef Boyardee and you may as well say goodbye to salsa.

Luckily for Chipotle, the chances of avocados disappearing are as probable as eating a no gas burrito.  Good try though.  What they could do is to put images of missing penguins on their drink cups to raise consciousness of global warming.  Missing penguins cute; avocados, not so much.

link One in four Americans do not know the Earth circles the Sun – Telegraph.

To be fair, judging from the rampant narcissism that’s taken hold of much of American culture, many in the survey, which I suspect included Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, were amazed to find that the earth did not circle around them. 

It’s the greatest of ironies that at a time in history when the tide of information available has never been higher,  somehow the level of the informed is at the opposite low ebb.  It’s as if people were dying of hunger while sitting in a Red Lobster.

The biggest factor in this existing information/misinformed paradox is the acceptance of the widely adopted teaching philosophy propogated by liberal educators of “there is no wrong answer, only different interpretations.”  This ensures that children are not traumatized by giving a wrong answer to a question in school.  Kids are allowed to progress through their formative years without having to endure the shame of being wrong but instead gently consoled that there is an alternate ‘better’ answer.  We know that letter grades have even been eliminated since that would be discriminatory and hurtful to the young egos.  If the kids feel educated, that’s enough.  And spelling doesn’t count.

There is the old chestnut that the reason that little Johnny thinks 2 plus 2 equals 4 is not because of arithmetic logic but rather because the teacher told him it was.  If kids aren’t taught basics at a young age, they default to parroting their teachers for their ‘facts’.

Fast forward to their post teen years when the biggest information sources are their peers, TV and of course the Internet.  Peers may be an iffy source of knowledge, but TV and the Internet are inviolable.  If it’s viewed on YouTube a million times, “liked” on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter or depicted on Saturday Night Live, then it must be true.

Of course it doesn’t help that high profile personalities are spouting bumper sticker science as hard facts. If for example, Eva Longoria, noted scientist and part time actress says that climate change is real, then it must be real.  If Sean Penn, noted historian, philosopher and part time actor dishes on the virtues of communism and socialism, then it must be true.  If John Kerry, noted doppelganger for Lurch of the Addams family fame tells us that Global warming is a bigger threat to mankind than a nuclear Iran, terrorism, disease epidemics and poverty, then it must be.

If people don’t believe the facts as presented by those that are “experts” in their field, they run the risk of being sued, such as the tactic employed by a Penn State University climate scientist in an attempt to silence his critics. It may well turn out that what’s acceptably true as fact is determined not by science but by lawyers.  Whether the rumor that the earth revolves around the sun is true or not is the least of our problems.