Travel: The Whitney Plantation outside New Orleans shows the reality of slavery

• June 28, 2023

There are a dozen restored antebellum mansions and plantations along the west bank of the Mississippi River, on the River Road outside of New Orleans, and they are among the most popular tourist day trips from the city.

Most of them spin the same fantasy — allowing visitors to imagine themselves as the master and mistress of the manor, strolling beneath the magnolias in hoop skirts and top hats, and then pulling a cord to summon a slave to bring a mint julep when it’s hot.

Such places are popular wedding venues, where would-be Scarlett O’Hara’s can marry under old oaks, in front of white mansions built with the money from sugar cane, rice and indigo fields worked by enslaved people.

Only one plantation goes out of its way to flip the story entirely.

The “Big House” plantation home built from cypress trees hewn by slaves, at the Whitney Plantation slavery museum near New Orleans, LA. (Photo by Marla Jo Fisher/SCNG)

The Whitney Plantation, also along the River Road, tells the same tale — but from the enslaved people’s point of view. And it’s a fascinating one.

Originally founded in 1752, the plantation went through several owners before being purchased in 1998 by John Cummings, a white former trial lawyer and civil rights activist from New Orleans.

He spent $8 million of his own money and 16 years turning it into America’s most important (and maybe only) museum of slavery. It opened in 2014.

Cummings said that he didn’t know what he was going to do with the property when he first bought it from a petrochemical company that had unsuccessfully sought to build a factory there, but after reading accounts of slaves that lived and worked on such plantations, he was inspired to create a museum.

Historian and author Ibrahima Seck came from Senegal to be the plantation’s director of research and help plan the exhibits.

Property records kept track of the purchase and sale of slaves, as well as their disposition after the owners’ deaths.

The Haydel family, German immigrants who founded the plantation and operated it and adjoining ones until 1867, owned 354 slaves over the years, according to the records.

A memorial on the property pays tribute and lists the names of 107,000 people known to have been enslaved in Louisiana, according to the Louisiana Slave Database. The 1860 U.S. Census, taken right before the Civil War, found nearly 4 million enslaved people living in the United States.

Since the African slave trade and its harsh aftermath are such shameful episodes in American history, people might assume that the plantation tour is grim and painful.

It is emotional — tour guides don’t mince words or hide the hard parts — but this important tour of American history is ultimately satisfying and helps fill in the blanks of many people’s curiosity about slavery and how it was practiced on such plantations.

The movies “Django Unchained” and “12 Years A Slave” were filmed at Whitney.

Like all such restored sites, people coming to Whitney Plantation see the elegant manor known as the “Big House,” but in this case they don’t learn about the master and mistress. No hoop skirts are in evidence.

Instead, visitors learn that the house was built of cypress wood, from trees chopped down and planed by slaves.

They hear about the domestic servants who worked there in the house and adjacent tiny kitchen building, perspiring over the hot pots and fires to feed its inhabitants.

As the museum’s excellent audio guide explains, most people would assume that the life of a domestic in a house like this was much easier than a field hand, but it also had its hardships.

Domestic slaves typically lived together in a small building behind the main house. However, they were on call 24 hours a day, and sometimes required to sleep on a pallet outside the owners’ bedrooms. Obviously, this also made it easier for masters to abuse their servants, who were unable to fight back.

On the other hand, field hands worked brutally hard from sunup until sundown, but they typically had their own small cabins to live in with their families, and the few hours remaining after sundown were theirs to enjoy.

Sugar cane plantations like this one were considered the most deadly places to work, with the types of diseases that haunt swamps, venomous snakes and sometimes fatal heat exhaustion in the high temperatures and humidity.

Legally, enslaved people were property — not human beings — so they could be whipped, tortured, mutilated, imprisoned or even killed with impunity, on the whims of masters.

These are the kinds of insights that Whitney visitors learn as they tour around the remaining 40 acres of the plantation.

At the Whitney Plantation slavery museum near New Orleans, LA. Bronze sugar kettle where slaves made molasses from sugar cane. (Photo by Marla Jo Fisher/SCNG)

In addition to the Big House, it includes a gift shop, a church built by ex-slaves, an iron jail, a blacksmith shop, a mule barn, the kitchen, the overseer’s house,the  garden, commemorative sculptures and actual slave cabins decorated with statues of the children who would have lived there.

The variety of artwork around the property lend a poignant air to the stories of the people who worked there.

At the Whitney Plantation slavery museum near New Orleans, LA. This Baptist church built by former slaves shortly after the war was moved to the plantation. Sculptures from the “Children of Whitney” series created by sculptor Woodrow Nash. (Photo by Marla Jo Fisher/SCNG)

Huge bronze sugar kettles demonstrate the legacy of sugar production, from sugar cane.

Some of the buildings are original, others were moved here or recreated.

Today, the museum is owned by a nonprofit devoted to educating the public about slavery and its legacy.

At this writing, adult visitors pay $25 to enter, depending on time of day and type of tour. Kids and seniors are cheaper. Both guided tours and self-guided audio tours are available. We did the audio tour, since no guided tours were offered the day we visited. The site is mostly wheelchair accessible on gravel pathways.

In the combined visitor center and gift shop, permanent exhibits describe the history of the international slave trade, worldwide and in Louisiana.

The museum is open daily except Tuesdays. The best way to visit is by rental car or by tour bus from New Orleans. Expect to spend about two hours at the museum.

Learn more: The Whitney Plantation, 5099 Louisiana Highway 18, Edgard, LA 70049. 225-265-3300. WhitneyPlantation.org

​ Orange County Register 

Rockin’ in Tustin’s Peppertree Park

• June 28, 2023

Peppertree Park turns into an outdoor concert venue on Wednesdays this summer.

The city of Tustin’s concerts in the park series continues through Aug. 2 with live music, lots of food and other fun for the community to enjoy.

The concerts start at 6 p.m. on Wednesdays. Coming up are:

July 5: Kings of 88

July 12: The Fenians

July 19: OC Groove

July 26: Suave the Band

Aug. 2: Sticks and Stones

Information: tustinca.org

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​ Orange County Register 

At 90, Broadway legend Chita Rivera recalls a life working with Fosse, Sondheim, Bernstein

• June 28, 2023

Chita Rivera originated three of the most iconic roles in Broadway history: Anita in “West Side Story,” Velma in “Chicago,” and the title role in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

She’s been nominated for 10 Tony Awards, winning for “Spider Woman” and “The Rink,” while picking up a lifetime achievement Tony in 2018, too. She was the first Latina to receive a Kennedy Center Honor and she’s got a Presidential Medal of Freedom to wear, too.

Rivera’s co-stars and collaborators have included names such as lyricist Stephen Sondheim and composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Bob Fosse and actor-dancer Gwen Verdon, Dick Van Dyke and Liza Minnelli, the songwriting team of John Kander and Fred Ebb.

As a teenager, she earned a scholarship to study at the School of American Ballet after auditioning for its founder, the dance legend George Balanchine himself.

So why, you might wonder, did Rivera wait until she was 90 this year to publish a memoir of this incredible life she’s led?

“I was so busy living my life that I never did,” Rivera says, laughing, during a recent phone call from her home in a small town about 25 miles north of Times Square. “Besides, I’m a very private person, and I really didn’t think of anybody being interested.”

But then the pandemic hit, and Rivera, who’s never stopped working, had time on her hands.

“Now was the time,” she says. “Now is the time. And it sort of is a memoir to remind myself of the wonderful things that have happened to me.”

As she talked about her life with co-author Patrick Pacheco, Rivera came to see “Chita” not just as the story of her life, but also as a story that might inspire or inform younger artists embarking on careers in song and dance and theater.

“You want to give information to younger students if they wanted to go down this road,” Rivera says. “And the experiences I had, I tell them that they can have if they stick with it and are passionate about it.

“It’s just a lesson in living, really.”

Q: What was it like to revisit the earliest years of your life, when you were a girl growing up on Flagler Place in Washington D.C. in the ’30s and ’40s?

A: It was really remembering what fun it was to be a kid. What fun it was to have brothers and sisters. What fun it was to ride around on your bicycle. Go and climb the pear tree. It’s wonderful to remember what fun you had as a kid.

Q: You’re a kid, jumping on the furniture, and you break your mother’s table. But instead of yelling at you, she signs you up for ballet classes to teach you discipline, and you find your future in that dance school.

A: She was a teacher herself. She was the best mother. And I think, had she not had five kids, she would have wanted to have been a dancer. I just had that feeling. I mean, she was built that way. She had a beautiful figure and gorgeous legs. But she was a mother first.

And she decided to do something constructive with her child. There I was standing in the middle of that coffee table, never knowing that I was off to a career.

Q: A lot of kids are signed up for dance classes and they lose interest eventually. You embraced it.

A: Well, it was just what I needed, and just when I didn’t know what I needed. I wanted to be able to be told to straighten my life out. Well, not straighten my life out, because I was happy. I was having a good time. But I really needed and wanted that kind of authority. And I wanted to learn.

That’s what I want the kids to get from this book. That they want to learn. And you can learn so much from all of these fabulous, gifted people that I was fortunate enough to work with.

Q: Let’s jump ahead to 1957 and “West Side Story.” That’s where you start the book, your first one-on-one meeting with Leonard Bernstein. Take me back to what it was like to be in that show.

A: It was about telling a story. We recognized the talent that Jerome Robbins had, and Stephen Sondheim, because he was Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein. I had a thirst for learning, and I had the best teachers in the world. We all had, those of us lucky enough to have been chosen to dance and learn from the mouths and experience of those amazing people.

Q: What did it feel like to perform ‘West Side Story’ for the first time for an audience?

A: We had our first taste of how different and how stupendous this show was going to be when we had the first run-throughs of the show in front of people who are in the business. That brought us up to, ‘Oh my God, this is really something.’

It moved this group of people and they’re responding; so we’ve got a good story – of course, it was the story of Romeo and Juliet. But to go into the theater during rehearsals, and see Jerry (Robbins) put up a news clipping, saying, “This is your life” – and it was a group of kids down the block that had just been killed.

That was when we realized that we were doing real-life stories and we had something to say.

Q; I laughed when you wrote about how possessive you felt about Anita’s dress in ‘West Side Story’ when you saw Rita Moreno as Anita in it in the film adaptation. Do you know where your dress is today?

A: I think it’s in a museum. Yeah, I think a while ago it was put in. And my one earring, too.

Q: Your first movie was the adaptation of the musical ‘Sweet Charity’ with Shirley MacLaine in 1969. How was that different from all the Broadway you’d been doing?

A: Well, you do the end of the movie before you do the beginning. But the thing that you do have is the companionship of another dancer. That is always the same. And that’s why I say, Dancers need to study. They need the basic training and that way you can make anything work. You can make dancing work in films, you just have to know their rules.

Q; You write that you’ve always considered yourself a dancer at heart, regardless of your singing and acting in musicals and dramas.

A: I think you’re grateful for the first thing that you learn. And that first was being a dancer. Not saying a word, just telling the story with your body. Then, if you’re fortunate enough, which I was, you open your mouth. You get a show and you open your mouth and you find out you can sing or you can speak.

It’s all a part of growing and learning from those people that have been there before.

Q: Let me jump now to Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon and ‘Chicago,’ another highlight of the book and your career. You’re Velma Kelly, Gwen is Roxie Hart, and before it can open Fosse has a major heart attack that delays it all.

A: I remember clearly being much younger and watching Gwen on television in movies, and watching Fosse in movies. And then, all of a sudden, years later, I’m standing next to her and we’re being choreographed by Bob Fosse. He’s choreographing two dancing as one. This is mind-boggling to me. It just feels meant to be.

Q: ‘Chicago,’ thanks to Fosse’s heart attack, also gave you a second career as a cabaret performer, when Kander and Ebb helped you create your first solo act while waiting for him to recover.

A: Fred Ebb and John Kander are really responsible for my career. The show being postponed, they said, ‘Why don’t we do a club act?’ And I said, ‘Well, I can’t talk. I can do a part that’s written for me, but I can’t, like, just be friends with an audience.’ So that’s when Freddie and John wrote this act for me. And everything I said was put in my mouth. But then I learned how to be friends and learned how to trust an audience.

Q: It’s a much more intimate kind of performance, isn’t it?

A: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you don’t have an orchestra pit in front of you. You can see the faces, and boy, am I grateful, because you find out what you’re about, also. You find out more about you and the audience. So it was a trip. It was a fabulous, fabulous experience.

Q: Then you brought that first cabaret act to West Hollywood and people like Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds came out to see it.

A: That came from meeting Liza Minnelli and her husband Jack Haley (who decided to bring the show west). You just keep your mind open and want to experience all of that. So many experiences will come from that.

Q: You write about the living history that theater is, how one generation learns from those that came before, and it flows on. Talk a little bit more about how that is reflected in your work and your life.

A: I think I feel, because I’m not finished yet, that everything touches everything else. I can’t express it. Everything in show business touches your life. And what you learn in the theater is what you learn in life. It affects everything that you do. It’s all connected.

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​ Orange County Register 

Frumpy Mom: Fun at the doctor’s office

• June 28, 2023

You may be shocked to hear this, but I really hate going to the doctor.

Yes, yes, I could write an entire encyclopedia on this subject, and so could you, but I’ll try to limit it to the tiny space that my cruel, uncaring editors give me each week.

The first test of your patience, of course, is sitting in the waiting room. Nowadays, there’s usually someone sniffling or coughing near you without wearing a mask. When you offer them a mask, they look at you like you’d just proffered a live grenade.

“What am I supposed to do with that?”

Then there’s the person sitting across from you, underneath the sign that says, “Please take your cellphone conversation outside.” And of course, she’s talking on her cellphone. Loudly. If you’re lucky, she’s not using her speaker, but you never know.

I really, really do not want to hear about your third cousin Vera’s gynecological problems. I don’t even want to hear about my own gynecological problems.

When people force me to listen to their conversations in a waiting room or a jacuzzi or anywhere else, I always feel free to join in.

I lean in close and say, “Did Cousin Vera try the new lubricant cream? I heard that works very well.”

Whenever I do this, the blabbermouth on the phone always looks at me, shocked, and sometimes says, “How rude!”  As if I’m the one who’s being obnoxious. This is my favorite moment. My attitude is: If you are forcing me to listen to your private phone call, I feel I have the right to chime in. I just give them a great big Cheshire Cat smile.

I’m not kidding. I actually do this. And if everyone did it, maybe rude people would go outside more often. I mean, seriously. Why do you have to talk on the phone in the doctor’s office? Or the line at Target? Or my kid’s school concert? It can’t wait a few minutes?

But I digress. Once the medical professionals have finally called your name and admitted you to the Inner Sanctum, the sadomasochistic rituals start. For starters, they put you on the scale and weigh you.

This is nearly always depressing, because you know you can’t cheat that fancy schmancy industrial strength device, and you don’t want to strip naked in front of the entire office staff to push the numbers down.

Well, it’s depressing for me, because the scale nearly always says that I’m fatter. Maybe if it said, “Marla! What the bleep! Stop eating all that ice cream!” that I’d be humiliated and motivated to change.

Nowadays, they don’t show your weight in pounds, but in kilos. This momentarily gives you the impression that you just dropped half your body weight, but it’s a vicious lie because a kilo is equivalent to 2.2 pounds. I don’t really know why my doctors felt the need to use these kilo measurements.

I mean, hello. We are in the U.S. of A. Not in one of those misguided countries where they use the metric system. I can’t figure out Centigrade and I can’t figure out kilos and I don’t want to learn. I really don’t want to get on the stupid scale at all, but if you are going to make me, I want to get depressed seeing my weight in good old American measurements.

After the scale torture, then of course the nurse makes you sit down to take your blood pressure. I’m one of those people whose pressure soars in the doctor’s office, so they always end up making me stand and raise my arm and then do an Irish jig to make it go down.

I always feel vaguely guilty like I’ve been caught doing something naughty when the reading is too high, even though I know it’s temporary.

Recently, though, things have changed. I’ve been doing guided meditations for health every day for the last four years and, as a result, I can make my blood pressure go down at will. Seriously. I can.

I just sit there and say to myself, “Blood pressure, go down. Blood pressure, go down.” And it actually does. This makes me feel like an Indian yogi who can also levitate and stand on his head (except I can’t). I don’t know why it happens, but I’m glad.

Then, of course, you have to go into the cold little room full of potential torture devices and put on the backless paper gown. I’d like to see a beauty contest where they make all the contestants design a party dress out of one of these paper gowns.

So you sit there awkwardly on the adjustable table thing with butcher paper on it, while you wait for the doctor.

This was always the hardest part when I took my kids to see their pediatrician because they are squirmy and have no patience whatsoever. I always prayed the doctor would come quickly, before the kids made forts out of the tongue depressors and ripped one of the many machines out of the wall. I’d hiss, “Sit down! Be quiet! Put that down!” none of which did a lick of good.

Their blood pressure was fine, but mine was off the charts.

Luckily, these days the kids are old enough to go to the doctor on their own, so I only have to worry about myself.

Eventually, the doctor will come in and ask you what the problem is, even though 2.5 nurses have already asked you that question.

Whatever it is, she will invariably hand you a prescription at the end and tell you to get it filled on your way out. Because pills are the way our medical system works today.

So much fun. Let’s celebrate with a tongue depressor.

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Frumpy Middle-aged Mom: Unexpected phone calls rarely deliver good news
Frumpy Middle-aged Mom: I may have cancer, but you’re not getting rid of me
I can’t have a brain tumor. I’ve got dinner on the stove
Frumpy Middle-aged Mom: Things I’ve learned from my cancer, part one
Frumpy Middle-aged Mom: Cancer isn’t as much fun as you might think it would be

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​ Orange County Register 

Google eliminates jobs at Waze after merging ad services

• June 28, 2023

By Julia Love | Bloomberg

Alphabet Inc.’s Google has cut jobs at mapping service Waze, the tech giant’s latest move to trim its operations amid a drive for efficiency in Silicon Valley.

Some positions focused on advertising at Waze were eliminated after the unit began transitioning to using Google’s advertising technology, a Google spokesperson said Tuesday.

“As part of this update, we’ve reduced those roles focused on Waze Ads monetization and are providing employees with mobility resources and severance options in accordance with local requirements,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

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Google said in December that it would fold Waze into its Geo organization, which includes popular products such as Google Maps and Google Earth. Google declined to provide a number for the jobs lost at Waze.

Google has been moving to reduce costs amid slowing demand last year for digital advertising, which fuels the company’s revenue. In January, Alphabet said it would cut about 12,000 jobs, more than 6% of its global workforce. The company in April reported first-quarter sales that were higher than estimates on stronger-than-expected advertising sales for search and the YouTube video site.

More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com

©2023 Bloomberg L.P.

​ Orange County Register 

Irvine’s plan to take the Great Park Walkable Timeline beyond the 80s

• June 28, 2023

Some key moments in history after 1990 include the Y2K bug, the first iPhone sale, the 9/11 attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the COVID-19 pandemic and the creation of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the social media phenomenon.

The Walkable Historic Timeline in Irvine’s Great Park ends in 1990, leaving those technological advancements and cultural shifts, and more, unaddressed. And the Great Park board, made up of Irvine’s councilmembers and mayor, unanimously wants to change that.

The 2,604-foot walkway starts in 13,000 B.C., chronicling 162 historical milestones along the way, and was last updated in 2013.

Councilmember Larry Agran, spearheading the move to modernize it, said during Tuesday’s Great Park Board meeting that it was time to update the timeline with events from 1990 to the present day.

“There’s been a lot of rich global and regional history in that period,” said Agran.

Located by the Visitor Center, near the Great Park Sports Complex, the timeline is painted on concrete. In addition to adding historical events post-1990, Agran also wants to utilize technological advancements “to bring the timeline to life in new ways, beyond just paint on concrete,” he said in a city memo.

“Interactive technology, linkages to additional online content through use of QR codes, and other possible interactive features can allow for a world of new possibilities with regard to enhancing the Walkable Historic Timeline,” Agran said.

Adding these features, Agran said at Tuesday’s meeting, can make the timeline “serve as a growing educational feature” in the Great Park.

Visitors can borrow a handbook from the Great Park Visitor Center to read about the 162 historical events on the timeline as well as learn why the historical milestones on the timeline were selected. Agran also wants to update that handbook, including the “integration of digital features that might be appropriate,” he said.

City staffers are working on a proposal for the improvement of the Walkable Historical Timeline, including incorporating electronic features as well as updating the handbook. It will be treated as a capital project, where resident tax dollars will go into the project. The plan staffers put together will include costs as well as a proposed timeline.

In 2013, two UC Irvine history professors, Keith L. Nelson and Spencer C. Olin, researched and chose the 162 historical events listed on the timeline, once the Marine Corps Air Station El Toro’s taxiway. Nelson has since died, Agran said.

“Happy to report, however, that Spencer Olin kept working away and he (has) actually prepared draft historic entries that he has indicated that he’s happy to pass on to professional historians that we might hire to take the project forward,” Agran said.

Agran said the presumption is that staff, in formulating a plan of action, will look at “bringing professional historians on to at least review (Olin’s) work and maybe carry it forward a little bit as well.”

Irvine has embarked on a $1 billion development within the Great Park. The 300 acres of amenities set to be developed include the Veteran’s Memorial Park and Gardens, botanical gardens and a 14,000-seat amphitheater in partnership with Live Nation.

Great Park is already home to a 194-acre sports complex that is twice the size of Disneyland with ball fields, a soccer stadium and sand volleyball courts; trails; an arts pavilion; and, most recently, Wild Rivers.

​ Orange County Register 

Gavin Newsom’s 28th Amendment stunt is dead on arrival

• June 28, 2023

The United States Constitution has only been amended twice in the last half century.  The most recent amendment, the twenty-seventh, technically took more than two-hundred years to complete. It was originally approved by Congress in 1789 but not ratified by the states until 1992 following a public campaign led by a college student.  Another way the Constitution can be amended is for two-thirds of state legislatures to call an “Article V convention,” where amendments can be proposed and deliberated.  Then, three-quarters of the states must vote to ratify, formally amending the Constitution. Needless to say, it’s a complex process.

Why the history lesson?  Because California Governor Gavin Newsom recently launched a national campaign aimed at ratifying a “28th Amendment” to the Constitution pushed through the Article V convention method, which has never been successfully used since our nation’s founding.  He announced that he will use political campaign funds to spearhead this effort to get state legislatures behind the amendment.

The objective?  To peel back protections for Americans that our Founding Fathers codified in the Second Amendment.

Governor Newsom’s proposed “28th Amendment” would implement a liberal wish list of gun control policies that have only caught on in a small number of blue states.  It includes banning “assault weapons,” which is an ambiguous term that gun control proponents can never meaningfully define, but is broadly aimed at depriving Americans of some of the popular firearms used to protect their homes and families.

First and foremost – these policies will never become law as a constitutional amendment.  Setting aside their merits for a moment, the political support isn’t there.  In fact, there are already many state legislatures that wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, let alone support them being implemented at the federal level.

It’s not just that the 28th Amendment is an unserious proposal, the specific provisions wouldn’t actually do anything to curb violent crime or reduce the number of heinous killings committed with firearms.  The first “assault weapons” ban passed in 1994 had little to no impact on crime reduction or the number of gun deaths, and rifles were only used in three percent of murders committed with a gun in 2020, according to Pew Research Center.

The other provisions are also extremely flawed.  Is the federal government supposed to tell 18-to-20-year-old adults in the military that they can’t purchase a firearm to defend themselves one day, then send them to war, rifle in hand, the next day?  What duration should a domestic abuse victim be forced to wait before she can purchase a gun to protect herself from a potentially violent partner?  And how would the government plan to enforce universal background checks on criminals purchasing firearms who, by their very definition, don’t follow the law?

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These easily critiqued policies demonstrate the true motivation behind the “28th amendment” campaign, despite what its proponents might tell us.  It’s not to protect innocent lives or curb the epidemic of violent crime across the country, nor does it have any respect for the Second Amendment.  The only other possible motivation is to raise a certain governor’s political profile around the country.  Perhaps that’s why the campaign’s official website is light on details but heavy on platitudes and flattering images.

Politicizing this issue is wrong.  We need to have serious, sober-minded conversations about how to make our communities safer, how to empower law-abiding citizens to protect themselves and their families, and prevent instances of mass violence – all while ensuring we protect our most fundamental constitutional rights.  What we don’t need are pie-in-the-sky political campaigns advocating for unrealistic and ineffective policies.

Katie Pointer Baney serves as the managing director of government affairs for the U.S. Concealed Carry Association and is a senior advisor to the USCCA-For Saving Lives Super PAC.

​ Orange County Register 

John Stossel: Scaremongering over climate change is a First World hobby

• June 28, 2023

For my new video, I asked people on the street, “If you could spend $30 billion trying to solve the world’s problems, how would you spend it?”

“Build houses … address homelessness,” said a few. “Spend on health care,” “redistribution.” The most common answer was “fight climate change.”

Really? Climate change is the world’s most important problem?

“It’s not surprising if you live in the rich world,” says Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.

Lomborg has spent the last 20 years consulting with experts from the United Nations, nongovernmental organizations and 60 teams of economists, seeking consensus on how to address the world’s biggest problems.

“The point is not that climate change is not an issue,” says Lomborg, “but we just need to have a sense of proportion.”

He says that while climate change may cause problems someday, “if you live most other places on the planet, you’re worried that your kids might die from easily curable diseases tonight.”

That’s why, he says, it’s important to ask ourselves, “Where can we spend dollars and do a lot of good versus … just a little good?”

Twenty years ago, the United Nations issued development goals. Surprisingly, Lomberg says they actually helped people.

“They basically said, let’s get people out of poverty, out of hunger, get kids into school, stop moms and kids from dying.”

That effort, plus global capitalism, lifted millions out of poverty.

Unfortunately, now the UN pushes “sustainable” goals that promise everythingto everyone.

“Get rid of poverty, hunger, disease, fix war, corruption, climate change,” says an exasperated Lomborg.

But a Bank of America report estimates that fighting climate change alone would cost trillions. Even that might not affect the climate very much.

“If we spend way too much money ineffectively on climate,” Lomborg points out, “not only are we not fixing climate, but we’re also wasting an enormous amount of money that could have been spent on other things.” Better things.

Lomborg’s new book, “Best Things First,” says “$35 billion could save 4.2 million lives in the poor part of the world each and every year.”

For example, screening people for tuberculosis, giving medicine to people who have it and making sure they complete their treatment would save up to a million lives a year.

“Nobody in rich world countries die from tuberculosis, but in poor countries, they still do,” says Lomborg. “Spend about $5.5 billion, you could save most of those people.”

Hundreds of thousands more die from malaria. Buying bed nets with insecticides that kill mosquitoes would save lots of lives. So would spending on basic vaccines for kids.

These ideas are common sense. They cost much less than what we spend now pretending to manage the climate.

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“You want to help people,” I say to Lomborg, “yet people hate you.”

“Well, some people hate me,” he laughs.

One shoved a pie in his face. Others call him “the devil incarnate,” a “traitor” who “needs to be taken down.” All because he points out that the world has bigger problems than climate change.

“Climate change might kill poor people, too,” I point out.

“It certainly will. And climate change is more damaging for poor people!” Lomborg replies. “But remember, everything is worse for poor people — because they’re poor.”

“Unmitigated scaremongering leads to ineffective political action,” says Lomborg. “We need to have a conversation about where we spend money well, compared to where we just spend money to feel virtuous about ourselves.”

Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.”

​ Orange County Register