Re: Thought Provoking: We’re Burning More Coal Than Ever Thanks to China

The author had produced a perfect cassette:
"There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the
detriment of understanding.
One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have
mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though
this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and
views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of
our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of
magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way
from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to
make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of
difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively
that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at
all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like
inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and
“plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has
performed acceptably without having had to think." (How to Read a Book,
2nd Edition)