Sigmund Freud's first patient was called Anna O. (not her real name, to protect her anonymity). When Freud and his mentor Joseph Breuer first encountered young Anna, she was traumatically affected by the traditional family duty of caring for her dying father, who passed away before she asked for help. Her condition could be called obsessive hypochondria, and given her traumatic time nursing a dying father, I have to feel a lot of sympathy for her.

Anna believed she had a variety of illnesses, with symptoms that changed from day to day. There is no doubt that she was sincere, and in the medical thinking of the time, it seemed that she was suffering from deep autosuggestion, a kind of fast-changing self-hypnosis. Freud and Breuer therefore tried to hypnotize her with suggestions to contradict her fixed beliefs about one illness after another.

After decades of watching propaganda scare bombs in the mass media, aided by worried kindergarten teachers and parents who get freaked out by anxiety-provoking headlines, we have a whole population of planetary hypochondriacs. This kind of thing has been known throughout history as "mass hysteria." Children and people living under tyrannical regimes are easily whipped into mass hysterias, which can also turn into murderous mobs. If the Jews poisoned the village well in Pinsk, Russia, a mass hypochondria might be turned against the Jews by mob leaders (AKA politicians and journalists). Or witches would be burned by a frantic mob after children spread rumors about getting the evil eye from an old, solitary woman, walking at night.

Now the weather (not the climate) is a big deal for tribal peoples, because too much rain too soon can kill the crops, and a roasting summer can dry out the grass and chase away the deer and the rabbits.

The anthropologist Donald Brown has produced a long list of "cultural universals," beliefs that are found all over the world.

Attempts to control the weather by magic are human universals. So are beliefs about the end of the world. (Coming soon! Repent!) Climate hysteria gives you both at the same time: The End of the World! (courtesy Al Gore) and We are Guilty of Killing the Planet!

Today we hear that the "carbon budget" of our big world forests are actually positive, meaning they produce more carbon than they consume. Now, nobody knows what the forest carbon budget is supposed to be, because we have barely gotten the technology to make the latest estimates, and the fact is that once it's in the atmosphere, CO2 and all the other carbon molecules are very hard to measure. The atmosphere is a large entity – very few elements of planet earth are larger -- one constantly roiled by solar heating and lunar cooling, volcanoes erupting, ocean plankton beds growing, coal-fired power plants in China, and great oceanic belches of deep sea hydrocarbons bubbling up. On and on and on.

So today it is reported that we might be getting more Carbon than anticipated from rain forests. The good news is that NASA thinks this is good news. The bad news is that Scientific American has been telling us for 10 years that too much carbon can kill ya.

So here is an apparent fact --or is it a "fact"? -- that we are supposed to believe, and NASA says it's good for us, but Scientific American is scared of Armageddon. I'll bet that the scaremongers get more eyeballs than NASA will on this one, because human beings pay attention to fearful things, especially if they've been told about it since the 1970s.

I know a liberal who still believes in Paul Ehrlich's Population Bomb and Carl Sagan’s Nuclear Winter. Another nice person who secretly hopes that all
those bronze peoples with the big families will disappear already.

Liberal superstitions aren't "scientific." The alleged "science" part is mostly Bill Nye the Science Liar, and he has somebody else to write his scripts. Being the official Science Guy is a well-paid job, and money attracts people like that, like cow flies to the rear ends of the herd.

Unusual weather events would often stir up paranoia among our tribal ancestors, and scary rumors amplify easily, because some people like to spread scare stories. Like New York Times journalists, village gossips only care about the number of ears and eyeballs their stories attract.

All this is a kind of mass paranoia spread by brainwashing media. The mass media specialize in confusing the easily confusable. About a quarter of the general population can be hypnotized easily, and like all of us, the most gullible people also get banged upside the head every day by the propaganda machine. A lie told over and over again becomes the truth, according to Josef Goebbels. It takes a lot of mental effort to spot and shut out an endless stream of industrialized lies.

Anyway, poor Anna O didn't benefit from her doctors trying to hypnotize her. What's worse, she fell in love with the senior doctor, Joseph Breuer, and tried to throw herself in his arms one day. Then she developed a false pregnancy, and Joseph Breuer left town to go on vacation with his wife. But Freud stayed with the patient, and learned from her ability to talk out her own worries and despairs, a therapy he later called "the talking cure." Freud attributed the first "talking therapy" to his first patient, Anna O.

Liberals are highly suggestible. They don't need any evidence for their beliefs. Sheer, daily, mechanical repetition is good enough, especially if it's peddled by cute and sonorous talking heads on TV. The rest of us want to see some evidence.

We can feel sympathy for the Anna O's of this world, and try to help them, but a constant diet of superstitious lies runs about a third of the voters in this nation.

Propaganda is now taught in our film and drama departments to students too young and brainwashed to think critically. Even then, "college students" are so fearful, so paranoid and weak, that they can't bear to hear anyone disagreeing with their brainwashing.  Our robotically marching Antifas in the colleges must have some secret seed of doubt about the nonsense they are being taught every day.