“If we were using salt, you’d see patches of bare road because salt is very effective,” Wiggins said. “We decided not to utilize salt because it’s not a healthy addition to Puget Sound.
Last time I checked the Sound was filled with, you know, brine. That’s a fancy word for salt water. So where’s the problem?
There is a bright spot here. We can stop worrying, just a little bit, about the federal government being turned over to the left-wingers. This is, arguably, the benign effect of liberalism, because as articles like this remind us, left-wing politics foment the worst results when they’re implemented at the municipal level.
There is no “liberal” way to clear snow, or collect garbage, or manage traffic lights at a controlled intersection. But there’s no shortage of bureaucrats ready, willing and able to find such a way nevertheless. In Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, DC, PEBO’s hometown of Chicago, Berkeley, Portland, Los Angeles…et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Drive carefully and keep your wits about you, on your way through Seattle. We certainly will.
The worst thing you can do to a flimsy, ramshackle idea, is to take it seriously. And on January 20, we’re going to take the idea that liberalism is the solution to all of life’s problems, very, very seriously.
with the last grownups scheduled to leave Washington next month, Europeans have been forced to drop the sanctimonious posturing and defend sanity.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has been keen to promote herself as a tough actor on climate change, but with a new EU climate deal in the making, she’s issued a new caveat: It must not jeopardize German jobs.
Merkel used to exploit the hoax with the worst of them, even traveling to Greenland to pose with melting ice. But it’s becoming clear that moonbattery has a price.
According to an unpublished report by the economy ministry, Germany risks losing more than 100,000 jobs if the EU were to force industries to pay for pollution rights that are currently free.
Another study by the Muenster-based EEFA research institute pointed to increased costs stemming from reforming pollution rights, making Germany’s key industrial sector less competitive and threatening up to 300,000 jobs by 2020.
Infuriating environmentalists who couldn’t care less about human suffering, Merkel now says of the impending EU climate deal,
It must not take decisions that would endanger jobs or investments in Germany.
Merkel is showing a common human failing here…especially among bosses of things. People in charge tend to be very much in favor of bad ideas, provided they have that all-important protection of virtual anonymity later on. When it all turns to crap. That’s the mediocre boss’ happy-zone right there: It’s kinda-sorta my idea, kinda-sorta not.
That means I get to take all the credit if it succeeds, none of the blame if it turns all soft and brown, and regardless of what happens, I don’t have to do any work.
Well, now that Chosen One is going to be in charge of the United States, a lot of this stuff that wasn’t gonna happen, now has a much more likely chance of happening.
That strips anonymity off. It’s a pretty safe thing to be the Grand Marshal of a parade that isn’t really going anywhere. Now the balloon are going up, the floats are moving…and wow. Some ceremonial positions that weren’t scary before, suddenly are.
So the mediocre bosses are scrambling. Like rats on a sinking ship. Or like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton after Move On Dot Org told ’em what to think about invading Iraq.
Flip.
Flop.
It’s a good time to keep your eyes and ears open, and learn some interesting things about politicians.
I’m linking because I want to keep track of when this happens. It so seldom does. There are very, very few syndicates, coteries or factions that are told to go off somewhere and stick it, less often than the environmentalists. Their ideas turn out to be bad ones…they turn out to be worse…they turn out to destroy jobs and houses and families and humans…then they turn out to be awful. Still, anyone elected or appointed whose judgment is trusted on issues that really matter, caves in to the environmentalists.
Honoring a tradition that dates at least to the Reagan administration, [President George W.] Bush is pushing through a bundle of controversial last-minute changes in federal rules — many of them involving the environment, national parks and public lands in the West.
President Clinton used his final weeks and months in office to strengthen a host of environmental rules and lock up federal lands with wilderness and other protective designations. Bush is using the same window of opportunity to open wilderness for oil and gas drilling, and to loosen safeguards for air, water and wildlife.
In recent days, the Bush administration announced new rules to speed oil shale development across 2 million rocky acres in the West. It scheduled an auction for drilling rights alongside three national parks. It has also set in motion processes to finalize major changes in endangered species protection, allow more mining waste to flow into rivers and streams, and exempt factory farms from air pollution reporting.
Researchers who track “midnight regulations” say Bush pushed 53 of them through the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the last three weeks, nearly double the pace of Clinton at this point in his final year.
Yeah, and this will make people hate him MORE. And kids will cry when they find arsenic in their drinking water.
The regulations Bush is overturning — these do not clean the environment. These regulations obstruct business. That is what they are for, and that is the effect they have. Our tradition is to gum up the works with all of these kinds of anti-business regulations, as many as we can afford to have — plus just a few more.
It’s a great time to roll some of ’em back.
We know the modern enviornmental movement is hostile to private-sector commerce. We know modern socialism has worn environmentalism as a convenient disguise. We know it’s quite often that true environmental protection, and success for the businesses, share interests that are overlapping and not oppositional — and when that happens, what we today call “environmentalism” opposes them both. We know these things. They’ve been proven.
And we know the modern environmental movement’s public-relations techniques work exceptionally well. Better than anyone else’s. Of all the destroyers who crank away on the P.R. machine, laboring tirelessly to convince the public that they’re really preservers and not destroyers, the destroyers who are environmentalists succeed at this more impressively than anyone else. Business after business fails under the crushing heel of their draconian regulations, and they still get to pump out more. Nobody ever tells ’em to stick it. Ever.
So I’m sure this feels like quite a poke in the eye. To them.
That doesn’t mean that’s what this is. It’s simple opposition. Things signed in to law that you happen to not like. Get used to it, environmentalists. Everyone else has to…and some of the people who’ve learned to tolerate this from time to time, actually build things and make life better for people. It’s about time you got some o’ yours coming.
All high civilizations have been built by conservatives. You can’t accumulate the cultural capital needed to build any high civilization if you try to destroy the past, as the Left constantly tries to do. You can’t build a chariot if you have to reinvent the wheel every generation. The batty idea that kids have the real answers in life is just a modern delusion. It is just ignorant.
Conservatism builds. Leftism overthrows. That is the meaning of that pop word “revolution.” The all-destroying revolution is an adolescent fantasy, and the Left hangs on to those fantasies a lot longer than conservatives do.
Not hard to prove at all. Just read some liberal blogs. Aside from the usual “we are poisoning the land and the planet and the environment and the world and this and that and some other thing over there” and America is at fault for this-that-other-stuff…there are the toxic items. Look at this awful commercial. Look at this awful magazine article. Look at this YouTube clip. Here, read this transcript of this terrible thing this guy on the radio said. Help me deplore it.
Thoughts about building versus thoughts about destruction. Yeah, liberals like to trot out some token victim to help justify the destruction, but that doesn’t mean they’re about preserving anything. They’re just in the habit of using certain tools for their public relations needs.
Global warming, for example. It always has, back to Day One, been about forcing humans…particularly Americans…to stop doing something they are currently doing. To destroy an activity. The crisis of the day rotates among the American/human activities, but what they all have in common is that some thing being done must be stopped. The guilt is always directed toward a common target. A bulls-eye the size of a pencil lead.
Nobody knows what a “saved” planet would look like. Nobody knows what the carbon saturation in such a victorious, restored global ecosystem would be — even though we can measure it quite accurately now. We don’t know what the goal is, because it isn’t discussed. That’s because that isn’t what the movement is all about. It’s about destruction.
Destroyer wolf, in protector-sheep clothing. That’s pretty much it.
Halloween can be an especially eco-unfriendly holiday. There’s the single-use plastic of red devil costumes, countless candy wrappers (not to mention the refined sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and artificial color of the candies themselves) and disposable decorations. According to the National Retail Federation’s Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, Americans will spend more than $5 million on Halloween paraphernalia this year. That’s more than $5 million worth of stuff that ultimately ends up impacting the earth.
So this year I’m going to seize the opportunity to right my wrongs. As I get ready to introduce my child to his first Halloween, I’m making sure that I add a bit of earth awareness to the preparations. This is how I plan to make Halloween green:
There follow a whole bunch of helpful tips. Together, we can do this!
Well, the missus and I are going to a green costume party ourselves, so I can’t snicker too hard. And I’ve been riding my bike for all my errands all month long. It’s my way of “protesting” the whole enviro-whacko movement: The best way to devastate a silly idea is to take it seriously, so the notion my car can kill the planet, is one I intend to take one hundred percent seriously. I rode my bike this week and the week before! If I didn’t, the planet would be dead! Yay me!
Like I tell some of my environmentally conscious friends: “You ‘global warming’ people always drive such big cars.”
All this zeal about environmentally-sound tips and tricks, is strangely focused on “coming together.” It’s presented as success in the face of overwhelming odds. But it’s not about success, it’s about togetherness. “I’m on the bandwagon; are YOU on the bandwagon?” A wonderful way to get that deer-in-the-headlights look from an environmentally conscious goo-gooder is to ask — hey, what if we don’t band together on “this thing,” and succeed anyway? In fact, what is the goal exactly?
And if we work together doing all the things like good little ants, and the planet dies out anyway, did we fail?
The enviro-people can’t answer questions like those. They aren’t ready to admit that environmentalism is a way of life…a group-based, anti-individualist way of looking at things, and of living life. It is the replacement of one religion with another.
Last time I saw this going on, it had to do with reducing the size of cars. Here it is thirty years later, and it’s all about the little things…while the environmental zealots go ahead and drive whatever they want. To work. Ten or twenty miles one way. Shuttling back and forth nothing besides their own asses plus a Blackberry or Palm Pilot, maybe a laptop.
But be sure and wear that organic costume once a year.
Via Steven Milloy’s Junk Science website, we learn of a very special WWF junket to go see lemurs. On other continents. On a private jet. Spewing tons and tons of carbon.
Meanwhile, you little people better switch to flourescent bulbs.
“Join us on a remarkable 25-day journey by luxury private jet,” invites the WWF in a brochure for its voyage to “some of the most astonishing places on the planet to see top wildlife, including gorillas, orangutans, rhinos, lemurs and toucans.”
For a price tag that starts at $64,950 per person, travelers will meet at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, Fla. on April 6, 2009 and then fly to “remote corners” of the world on a “specially outfitted jet that carries just 88 passengers in business-class comfort.” “World class experts — including WWF’s director of species conservation — will provide lectures en route, and a professional staff will be devoted to making your global adventure seamless and memorable.” Travelers will visit the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil, Easter Island, Samoa, Borneo, Laos, Nepal, Madagascar, Namibia, Uganda or Rwanda, and finish up at the luxury Dorchester Hotel in London.
This is the very same WWF that says “the current growth in [carbon dioxide] emissions must be stopped as soon as possible” and that blames Americans for emitting 21 percent of global CO2 emissions even though the U.S. accounts for only 5 percent of the global population. In December 2007, the WWF launched its “Earth Hour” campaign, a global initiative in which cities and communities simultaneously turn out their lights for one hour “to symbolize their leadership and commitment to finding solutions for climate change.”
Oh, okay. So they’re not touting their luxurious private-jet world tour in the same breath as saying the CO2 emissions must be stopped as soon as possible.
For a second there, I was worried. Because that, of course, would be silly.
1. I’m glad she brought up the nasty things Biden said about Obama before he was considered as part of the ticket. I wonder why she just whacked that nail once and then left it alone. Doesn’t seem to me Sen. Biden holds any cards there. He looks, on this topic, like exactly what he is: A lifetime beltway fixture who befriends whoever and whatever is good for him at any given moment.
2. The McCain campaign has been listening to us, I think. Gov. Palin was liberated from her talking points. She wasn’t excellent, but she was much better than people thought she would have been.
3. I was right when I said this was a rehash of the Galloway/Hitchens debate. Biden possesses a lot of momentum Palin doesn’t have. She stutters, she stammers, she barely manages to eek a few syllables out, without ever quite hitting her stride. But — what she says, makes a lot more sense. Yin and Yang. People who looked for a reason to support Obama/Biden, found it, and people who looked for a reason to support Palin/McCain, found that. I mean…wait…which one comes first, again?
4. She should’ve used the word “populist.” This is the true weakness of Obama/Biden. The ticket seems to be bound by a consistent philosophical underpinning that if something has a certain effect on nine out of ten of us, then it might as well have that same effect on us all. This talking point about the tax cut for 95% of us, for example. It’s a dinosaur. It’s lumbered on long past the asteroid already. It isn’t even true.
5. Assuming science is all about voting — which it isn’t — when did we lose this vote on cutting carbon emissions? Obama/Biden is for it, McCain/Palin is for it. Doesn’t Sarah Palin understand how this undercuts all her other pro-capitalism positions?
6. I loved it when she made that comment about being for things before you’re against ’em, and how hard it is for her to understand how things work in the beltway. That’s a true Mister Smith Goes To Washington moment right there. If it was some big ol’ Paul Bunyan lookin’ guy in a plaid shirt with a big blue ox and a giant axe in his hand saying that, he’d get voted in in a landslide. Well, that’s exactly what Sarah Palin is. In a skirt.
7. I have to criticize Gov. Palin here. I don’t think she understands how it sounds when she mispronounces “nuclear.” She’d fix that, toot-sweet, if she did.
8. I don’t think Sen. Biden understands how it sounds when he repeatedly uses the name “Bush.” He’d stop.
9. Four years ago John Kerry lost the election by asking us to believe in a dichotomy. He said, I’m brilliant so I can think in nuanced terms, unlike that dolt George Bush who sees the whole world in black-and-white. But I have a serious case of confirmation-bias because George Bush is my perfect reverse-barometer about what to do. If he did something — it must be wrong. Biden left himself wide open by subscribing to this same confirmation-bias: If George Bush did something, it must have been the wrong thing to do. Palin should have struck right there. Stick a javelin right where the armor leaves that gaping hole, and shove it in to the hilt. It would have been a fatal blow to the Obama/Biden campaign, I think. Most Americans understand: If you strive to oppose something at every turn, on some level, you are trying to emulate it. Obama/Biden is failing to deliver something, here, in the very moment it is promising it.
10. Palin was at her best when she quoted Reagan. Americans are glorious and wonderful and deserve everything good that any other country deserves. Credit for being decent, when we are — and we are, quite often — the right and privilege to defend ourselves, to conduct ourselves as a civilized nation as we see fit, and to emit the hell out of everything with our pollution. Okay, that last one I’m just kind of pulling out of my butt. But the point is…fer God’s sake quit apologizing for existing! If you sympathize with that, your choice on Nov. 4 is quite clear, and the An Idea Bomb guys don’t have a lot to do with it.
Update: Ah, I had this one rattling around in my cranium and it leaked out my ears before I hit the “Publish” button. Dang it. It’s probably the most important one out of everything.
11. Comes under the heading of “potentially fatal blows to the Obama/Biden campaign” — another opportunity not taken. It happened when Biden was yelling over and over again, emphatically, and I think (?) pounding his hand on the podium “Obama and I will end this war, we will end it, we will end it.”
His jugular was exposed in that moment. Gov. Palin could have drawn a razor-sharp blade right across it, simply by taking advantage of a dramatic pause and then saying, “You and Barack Obama wouldn’t be able to decide that, Senator. Not unilaterally.”
It’s a critical point to make. That’s really what the election, insofar as foreign affairs go, is all about. When two forces are at war, does one side get to decide unilaterally that the fighting is going to end even though the other side doesn’t have its mind made up to behave-n-play-nice? This year, our liberal democrats insist that the answer is yes. One side can say “Okeedoke! It’s time for some peace!” and all the fighting will come to a stop.
Palin seems insistent on repeating talking points over and over again that help substantiate John McCain is the only decent choice for our nation’s President next year. In this respect, it’s really true. Our democrats think you can end a war just by wishing for it to end. We can’t afford for them to run anything. Not a flower cart, not a veterinary hospital, not a football team, and most certainly, not the country.
The BBC is being investigated by television watchdogs after a leading climate change sceptic claimed his views were deliberately misrepresented.
Lord Monckton, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, says he was made to look like a ‘potty peer’ on a TV programme that ‘was a one-sided polemic for the new religion of global warming’.
Earth: The Climate Wars, which was broadcast on BBC 2, was billed as a definitive guide to the history of global warming, including arguments for and against.
During the series, Dr Iain Stewart, a geologist, interviewed leading climate change sceptics, including Lord Monckton. But the peer complained to Ofcom that the broadcast had been unfairly edited.
‘I very much hope Ofcom will do something about this,’ he said yesterday.
‘The BBC very gravely misrepresented me and several others, as well as the science behind our argument. It is a breach of its code of conduct.
‘I was interviewed for 90 minutes and all my views were backed up by sound scientific data, but this was all omitted. They made it sound as if these were just my personal views, as if I was some potty peer. It was caddish of them.’
You certainly can’t accuse the bloke of having been too Americanized. This yankee barely understands the meaning of “caddish” and he is completely baffled by this “potty peer” thing. What in the hell does that mean?
The article continues…
All their interviews, he claims, were heavily cut so that they appeared as personal views.
‘We do not dispute that there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we do dispute its effects’, he said. ‘The data shows that 2008 is the same temperature as 1980 and that the effects of these changes in the atmosphere are not negative but more likely to be beneficial.’
It’s been said before that 2008 will be recorded by history as the end of the global warming hoax. I predict that will be the case…but nevertheless…the carbon cap-and-trade nonsense will continue, in fact, it will shift from voluntary voucher purchases, to voluntary-with-incentives, to “do it or we’ll withhold your highway funding” or some such.
Things work here pretty much the same way they work in Lord Monckton’s country, after all. Republicans and democrats are both in favor of personal liberties, protection of freedoms and choice, and making it easier to live life. And yet, decade by decade, there are more and more hoops you have to jump through to live that life, fewer decisions you’re allowed to make for yourself, and if you utter a peep of protest about it both Republicans and democrats will accuse you of being a whining little bitch.
Sure you have freedom of speech. You are absolutely allowed to call into question these various nanny-state rules and regulations. But how many of ’em do you recall ever having been rolled back…in your lifetime?
So global warming has been exposed as a complete sham. But the momentum has been built. The regulations are on the way, and once they’re here they’re carved in granite. They’re not going anywhere.
Actually, that’s a bad headline because nowhere in the story does anyone purporting to possess knowledge or authority, say or suggest such a thing. And yet, that is exactly what would have to be inferred in order to imbue this with any importance or relevance whatsoever.
People should have one meat-free day a week if they want to make a personal and effective sacrifice that would help tackle climate change, the world’s leading authority on global warming has told The Observer
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which last year earned a joint share of the Nobel Peace Prize, said that people should then go on to reduce their meat consumption even further.
I’m a funny guy; I have red blood in my veins and I come from a planet called “Earth.” So in my world, if you can’t say “there’s a decent chance we can kick the problem’s ass, for good, if everyone stops eating meat tomorrow” then all the milder offerings represent just so much nonsense and noise.
Anyone wanna give an argument that that somehow might not be the case?
“In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity,” said Pachauri. “Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there,” said the Indian economist, who is a vegetarian.
Heh. Doesn’t that just sum up exactly what the global warming political movement is really all about. “If I’m not doing something, I don’t want anyone anywhere else to do it either.”
I’ve come to be aware of something: There are three different grades of bullshit, each one distinctly different from the other two, both in substance and in purpose. There could be more than three, but a quality personal awareness of just those three would be useful in detecting it. If you think in simpler terms of “bullshit” and “not bullshit,” it is far easier to get snookered by it.
The background is this: I was having a debate with one of the characters over at Cassy’s place during my guest-blogging stint, which is still ongoing until sometime Sunday…and during the debate, we began to wander into the overarching theme of whether private industry exists because of government, or is it the other way around. People keep questioning me about why I do this with these people. It’s not like an obsessive-compulsive disorder or an addiction; contrary to belief, I really am trying to learn something about what makes them tick.
It’s more complicated than it looks. I’ve been arguing on the innernets for over twenty years now, and I’m still learning things. This last epiphany is more practical and useful than most.
First, another few words about bullshit. About three years ago I bought H. G. Frankfurt’s three thousand word hardcover book (yes, you read that right) On Bullshit, in which the following profound point is made:
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar…A [liar is] responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it…For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
So in the bullshitter, we have this sense of apathy about what the truth really is — which is missing altogether from the liar who must know what the truth is so he can misrepresent it.
There is something insidious about the kind of bullshit we’ve been enduring lately, I notice. It has evolved to become sufficiently sophisticated to bullshit people in the twenty-first century. We need to learn about how that works, so that we can fight this new-grade bullshit when it engulfs us. And engulf us it does; often. Without this edification, you don’t really have a mechanism for deflecting bullshit when it comes to consume you, apart from the purely Victorian-era method of cataloging your acquaintances according to whether they’ve been known to bullshit you or not. That’s a nineteenth-century technique that simply isn’t going to work now.
People are presented with a premise A. A is proven by B. Global Warming is proven by “Day After Tomorrow,” or President Bush called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper” because some crappy tabloid says he said it. In cases like this, B is widely acknowledged to be bullshit. Even people who desperately want to believe A, understand B is bullshit.
And yet, they believe in A more fervently with B, than without B.
Stating the reasons why they believe A, they cite B, which they know to be bullshit…this trend lately of reinforcing assumptions that may or may not be true, based on pieces of evidence known to be rancid crap and nothing more — with a straight face no less — is a harbinger of bad times ahead.
Prophetic, no?
So there’s a sultry and subtle seductive quality to the results of this exercise of mixing different grades of bullshit together. This is a sort of epoxy bullshit, if you will. The mixture has a more powerful bond than either of the component agents in isolation. What has merit, is blended together with what lacks it.
You see it in the comments of “Baz,” my sparring partner…
The job stability created by unions enabled mortgages to come into existence. The interstate highway system encouraged car-buying and promoted tourism. The Internet spawned whole segments of the economy. The GI Bill made it possible for many families to have their first college graduate, with all the economic benefits that go with it. Investors demand the safety that government-regulated economies provide. When a government collapses, money is the first thing to flee the borders. Why is there no investment in Mexico? Weak government.
Here are your two grades of bullshit. You have sub-bullshit, which isn’t bullshit at all, it’s absolutely true. Mexico has a weak economy, because Mexico’s government is corrupt. There is a slight skewing of the facts here, sort of a sleight-of-hand. As far as I know, nobody in a position of knowledge is asserting Mexico’s government to be particularly lax. It’s just dirty.
That’s something of a miniscule and insignificant distinction, since Baz’s argument is essentially utopian. Governments should be benevolent, strong and meddling. His vision incorporates all of these things, and I would agree that all three of those attributes would have to be present in any situation that honestly tests his theory.
And then this sub-bullshit is paired up with opti-bullshit, which is the bullshit that is supposed to be carried around and gossipped. Eventually, it will be sold via argumentum ad populum fallacy — everyone believes it, so it must be so. Mexico’s corrupt government is injurious to foreign investments…therefore…an economy rises and falls based on the strength of a country’s government. And here we have our epoxy effect — the mixture of these two layers of bullshit, is much more salable than either one of those layers by itself. It would be silly to contest this by advancing the notion that Mexico’s government is a good one, and this has an intimidating effect on those who would challenge even more vulnerable parts of the argument. Like, for example, that the mortgage owes its existence to labor unions.
This is what we see with global warming. Sub-bullshit, bullshit that exists as bullshit to sell other pieces of bullshit, but by itself isn’t bullshit at all. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere…carbon dioxide is recognized as a greenhouse gas, and in recent years we have a higher concentration of carbon dioxide; human activity contributes to this. All of these things are measurable. From that, we have — human activity is about to push us past a point of no return, and the world will become incapable of supporting life as we know it. That’s silly and absurd. If you can’t bring yourself to dismiss it, you’d certainly have to permit a challenge to it. But the human tendency is to evaluate challenges to this complex argument, as challenges to the single strand of the argument that is most durable.
“Are you denying there is such a thing as global warming?” How many times have you heard that.
But there is a third component to this, the supra-bullshit. This is what I saw Keith Olbermann pumping out tonight as he was giving his softball interview to Paul Krugman. My goodness, the things I learned from that.
– Our high national gas price average is the direct result of “two oilmen in the White House,” and we really should’ve seen it coming.
– All these other countries are years ahead of us; they’re already driving around in cars powered by sugar cane.
– Vice President Cheney is the “Worst Person in the World” because he doesn’t care when people get killed.
As I watched this drivel pour out of the boob tube, it slowly dawned on me what Olbermann’s position is in all this bullshit we’re being sold. He and Paul Krugman bring to the table this third layer of bullshit, which is more important to the process than those other two.
We indulge in “modest” bullshit about why we were late for work; why we aren’t wearing the sweater Grandma gave us for Christmas; that our wives’ asses aren’t fat; being from the Government and being here to help you; that the check is in the mail. But on the subject of dangerous international criminals who would give their very lives to take a few of us down, and on the unrelated subject of good-lookin’ young women in skimpy clothes, logic takes a complete, pure, undiluted, five-star don’t-even-page-me holiday. “Modest” bullshit, on those two subjects, isn’t good enough for us. We wade in neck-deep into triple-A grade, twenty-four-karat, 99+44/100 percent pure platinum bullshit. We use this high-grade quality bullshit, it seems, on no other subject save for those two…and on those two subjects, we haul it out with a reliability and with a punctuality we display nowhere else.
To the list of terrorists and girls in tiny outfits, we should add the subject of our oil men in the White House driving up gas prices.
The job of the supra-bullshit is to be this platinum bullshit; it is there to be doubted. It is there to fail the sale.
It’s exactly like negotiating a salary increase with your boss. You walk into his office wanting a ten percent increase, knowing he wants to give you a four percent increase that will barely keep pace with inflation. The boss is probably expecting to give you a six percent increase anyway, so if you walk in asking ten, six is probably what you’re going to get. So here is what you do: You ask for a twenty-five percent increase you know you’re not going to get. He’ll say no, and demonstrate by his counter-offer just how ludicrous you’re being…seven is as high as he can go. Well hey, you’re not that tough, you could settle for fifteen. And he says aw, shucks, maybe nine. Maybe at this point you bring up another company that has been interested in your talents lately. The negotiations proceed from there.
And that’s all it is, is negotiating.
That’s exactly what the bullshitters are doing with us. You have your sub-bullshit, your opti-bullshit and your supra-bullshit. We get snookered by this blend time and time again, because we have a tendency to say: I know the sub-bullshit is true; I do not agree with the supra-bullshit, but compared to that the opti-bullshit is believable. And so we believe the opti-bullshit, the bullshit calibrated to the optimum degree of self-reproduction. We will repeat the opti-bullshit to people we know. And if anyone dares challenge it, we will treat the challenge as a challenge to the sub-bullshit. Anytime the sub-bullshit is demonstrated to be true, which it will be, we will take that as further proof of the opti-bullshit, and become more convinced of the validity of the opti-bullshit…which we haven’t even tested, or observed anyone else testing.
Through it all, we will think of ourselves as critical, skeptical thinkers simply because we’re showing some ornamental reluctance to agree with the Olbermann brand of supra-bullshit.
“I do not agree that we’re going to lose the oceans in ten years…but…it seems to me there’s definitely global warming going on and that humans are causing it, and if we don’t bring our excesses in check we’ll pass a point of no return.” Good, smart, reasonable, and even critically-thinking people say that every single day. Every single one of them is a convert to the cause, and the poor bastards don’t even know it. I mean, read that aloud as one sentence. Listen to how reasonable it sounds! It certainly comes off sounding responsible. But it isn’t either one. You’re saying humans are about to irreversibly alter the climate of the planet. George Carlin’s monologue makes much more sense.
The moral of the story is what I said at the beginning. You can’t protect yourself from bullshit if you don’t recognize it. You have to know enough to break it down into its component parts, the sub-bullshit, the opti-bullshit and the supra-bullshit.
As a chain, an argument is as strong as its weakest link, not its strongest one. We are not inclined to evaluate complex arguments that way. We tend to treat complex arguments, all complex arguments, even complex arguments to which we’re not necessarily endeared, as sacred cows. We tend to become more hostile to honest challenges to the idea, than to the idea itself. There is no intellectually sound reason for us to behave this way.
Caution urged; it is very dangerous to laugh uncontrollably with vomit in your mouth. And you don’t want too many details on how I know this, but it has to do with this episode.
Update: Meanwhile, via Boortz, we are shocked — shocked! — to find out the democrats have been peddling energy credits to fund a wind turbine that doesn’t work. Well, democrats sell a lot of boondoggles, and we tend to presume their intentions are honorable; this time we know it for a fact, because the innocent folks they were hoodwinking was…them. This was supposed to offset the energy consumption of their own national convention.
Now, I guess they’ll just be unclean pigs, like all the rest of us. Unless…quick, someone get a “labyrinth.”
This one I found out about via Neal Boortz. It must be accurate because it’s got music and you can make your own avatar.
It says if everyone lived like me, we’d need 3 to 5 planet earths to support our lifestyles.
Hmmm…I don’t know. I have one son, my girlfriend has no children. I didn’t see where the quiz asked me that. Somehow, I think if everyone on the planet had one or zero children, that might skew the results toward the positive, y’know?
A couple weeks ago I had noted, again, that the political movement known as “climate change” f.k.a. “global warming” has very little to do with instigating beneficial effects on the environment or culling malevolent effects on the environment, and a WHOLE lot to do with regulating each other. I had made this point by comparing it with another recent disaster, one in which all or most of us have (theoretically) some stake in the problem, and which had been known to really kill people.
…through Mad Cow Disease, we can already analyze our own behavior with regard to real threats to ourselves and to our families. When we understand the danger is real, we leave it to the people whose job it is to understand what’s going on and what to do about it. We do not grab each other by the lapels and shake each other and make nonsensical noises about “everybody coming together.” That is not how we address real dangers, even when those dangers are faced by “all of us.” When we address real dangers, we put the emphasis on FIXING THE FREAKIN’ PROBLEM and the man-across-the-street can behave in whatever manner he chooses to…we don’t care what he does. We don’t even give a rat’s ass whether he believes in it or not.
Throughout the interview, Brokaw talked about the need for Americans to sacrifice in order to fight climate change four times, once implying that everyone believes we must suffer pain for the cause:
I don’t think anyone doubts that we have to make some profound changes in this country and make some tough decisions and maybe even suffer some pain…
He later suggested that people will just have to deal with the problems that would arise:
Is it time for American politicians, Republicans and Democrats and independents alike, to say to the American people, “We’re going to have to go through some pain here; $4 gasoline, it’s a price that you’re paying. We’re going to have to get through this. You can’t expect the government to bail you out. We’re going to have to move to another level in which we can produce alternative energy, and you’re going to have to live with that.”
It’s supposed to be all about cause and effect, but nobody ever puts it that way. As in, “if we make these sacrifices the temperature will go up 0.6 degrees over the next fifty years instead of 8.5 degrees and here is why 0.6 degrees will be manageable…”
In fact, nobody comes out and says we’re going to LIVE if we make these sacrifices. They say “we can do this” all the time. It’s the “this”; nobody says what exactly that is.
Brokaw speaks for perhaps hundreds of well-known luminaries in his prattle. He doesn’t think “anyone doubts that we have to make some profound changes in this country,” and yet he has to throw out his meaningless bromides about self-sacrifice four times. Why repeat it four times if everyone already understands this is the case?
Where is our payoff for this sacrifice? Where’s the view-screen we can all watch, with nervous anticipation, biting our fingernails to the quick, wondering if we’ve sacrificed enough to save the world for our children? When “How’re We Doing?” is the operative question, and we desperately, oh so desperately, want to know what the answer is, we can look for a record of our behavior in…stock prices. If they’re up, we’re up, if they’re down, we’re down. They’re printed in the newspaper every day. Okay then! Where’s the thing we check every day to see how we’re doing in the battle against climate change?
Surely there must be an awful lot of pressure on some panel of experts to produce a regular, validated reading of today’s mean global temperature. Don’t we have the technology to produce that statistic on a daily basis? Well then I would expect there must be a lot of pressure on someone to make that technology possible. We need to know, dammit! Nothing else matters, right?
No, the only “scientific” body I know of that labors under such a burden, even in theory, is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They do not behave in any manner similar to what I have in mind. They do produce regular assessments, but when Assessment X is less alarming than Assessment X-1, I do not see any frenzied analysis of what it is we did that must have worked, so we can do a whole lot more of it. Instead, all I see is a bunch of scientific (?) debate about whether there’s still a “consensus” or not, when there isn’t one.
The climate change political movement endeavors, and endeavors hard, to regulate mindsets and behaviors. This is bound to be a labor running high on effort and low on results, since it seems reasonable to posit in 2008 that most of us have our minds made up on this issue, and we’re not likely to change it — in either direction. And here’s the truly amazing part: This effort to win converts, in which there are few or no potential converts to be won, is not carbon neutral. Quite to the contrary — if you’ve been witness to more than a few debates about Al Gore’s house and lifestyle (see link to Brokaw’s program, above), you know one of the most reliably delivered tropes to be offered in defense of Mr. Gore, is that he has to spew all these greenhouse gases to “get the message out.”
So to recap: What we are trying to do, is not to save the planet but instead to promulgate a self-sacrificial mindset. And we are polluting the environment to get that done.
It’s inherently dishonest, partly because we’re poisoning the environment while demanding all this congratulation from ourselves & strangers for saving it. But also because we’re demonstrating what good people we are, to these strangers, through this virtue of self-sacrifice — NOT by exercising self-sacrifice ourselves, but by telling third parties they have to do it.
Because the truth of it is, not only does nobody want to do the sacrificing; nobody really wants to have anything to do with anybody who has been sacrificing. Changing light bulbs in your house, is about all the “sacrifice” you can make while still working your way up the pyramid by doing it. Nobody thinks you’re being chic when you stand there at the crosswalk waiting for the light to say “walk.” Nobody thinks your car is cool because it’s a two-door that gets lots of miles to the gallon. People respect big cars, with stepladders on the side, with air conditioning. Lots of air conditioning.
Trust me on this: Bicycling doesn’t ratchet up your appeal, in any way. It makes you sweaty, and when people see your spandex ass out there, their thought, first, last & in-between, is “that asshole is in my way.” And it shows. You are not their friend and they don’t want you to be. Bums soaked in their own urine are just as desirable on the social ladder, as bicyclists soaked in their own sweat. Nobody wants to look at sweaty people, and climate change f.k.a. global warming is really all about what we want to look at. It is fashion. We want to see people babbling their platitudes about “we all must be ready to sacrifice,” but we want to see those people immaculately made-up, with every hair in place…beautiful people. The way people look when they tumble out of an enormous SUV with the air conditioning cranked way up.
We do not want to see people making sacrifices. We want to see people telling other people to make sacrifices. It’s that beautiful, beautiful message — which we do not want to take seriously ourselves, and we do not want anyone we know to take that message seriously either. The appeal lies in watching that beautiful message do a lot of flying around, to be absorbed and obeyed by total strangers who aren’t as good as we are.
Whenever someone talks about climate change f.k.a. global warming and tosses around a talking point or two about how we’re all in it together, what they’re stating is the exact opposite of the truth. It is about social stratification. It is about some of us being better than others.
The Morgan Rule of Environmentalism rings true once again: It’s all about showing off for each other. Our actions having a beneficial effect on the environment, our actions having a harmful effect on the environment — anything having an effect on anything, save for new regulations forcing people to do things — is all off-topic. Environmentalism has nothing to do with any of that.
It’s about sending messages to each other and making up new rules. That is all.
Update: Parent site Webloggin has a good, complete write-up of the shenanigans going on here. Go check it out.
* The IPCC’s 2007 climate summary overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
* CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
* Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
* The IPCC’s values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
* The IPCC’s values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
* “Global warming” halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
* Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
* The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists’ draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
* It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;
* Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;
* In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.
Left unexplained: Why has this hoax become a liberal/conservative/Republican/democrat thing?
That deals with psychology, how the human mind works, how some of us are after good results and others of us are just out to portray themselves that way. What this thing we call “guilt” is, and how it is viewed differently amongst us.
Inspected quite often in these pages, and elsewhere. Use yer Mad GoogleSkilz.
a one-page letter from DiCaprio; two pages from Frances Beinecke, president of the NRDC; a flyer for a free Save the Polar Bear! bag; a donation form and petition to have the animals listed as an endangered species; and a return envelope.
3. There’s more…
The star has been criticised for the waste of paper and the hypocrisy of the situation – because he helped to spearhead the national Do Not Mail Registry campaign to ban junk mail earlier this year.
4. A citizens’ watchdog group blows the whistle on DiCaprio by criss-crossing the country in a fleet of SUVs to personally tell everybody what a big hypocrite he is for wasting all that paper.
No, #4 didn’t really happen. I made up #4. But it makes me happy to think about it.
5. Another watchdog group tattles on the first watchdog group, by writing notes about all the gasoline they wasted in their SUVs, sealing the notes up into plastic soda bottles, and throwing ’em by the millions into the Pacific Ocean.
It’s kind of like going into the bathroom with a shaving mirror, holding it in front of the medicine cabinet, and looking into infinity. So the point is, I don’t think you can blame DiCaprio for this. It’s built into the nature of the environmental movement. It’s more about getting attention, smacking the knuckles of other people, tattling, and generally bringing a stop to things — than about actually fixing anything.
So now it’s in an infinite loop. Someone does something, someone else calls shenanigans because by doing something, they’re “polluting” or “emitting greenhouse gases.” But in order to “get the word out” they have to do something, which means someone else is going to talk smack about them. Back and forth it goes.
I wonder if it’ll rip a hole in the space time continuum.
If so, that couldn’t possibly be good for the environment.
Fellow Webloggin contributer Big Dog is going after my Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he’s found a whole mess of contradictions about the Governator T-800. Gov. Schwarzenegger is supposed to be a pretty smart and ambitious guy, but on the global warming thing he’s either fallen for a bunch of hooey, or is pretending to have. The propagandists have now been caught trying to sell us on the canard that “The Science Is Settled” — when it isn’t. They’ve been caught trying to snooker us into thinking science is all about arriving at theory by common consensus and then opposing any assault on it — when that isn’t really what science is. If anything, science is about something more closely resembling the exact opposite of that. It’s a process of gathering and validating information, and figuring out what it means…and it has nothing to do with forming policy. If you’re mind’s made up about that something has to be done, and you’re calling this “science,” yer doin’ it wrong.
The mean-temperature plotting is no longer shaped like something that will help the global warming political movement. It’s now widely understood that 1934 was a hotter year than 1998, which throws that nifty mean-temperature graph in all sorts of disarray. Ross McKitrick has busted the “hockey stick” in two. And what’s even worse than any of that, is that more and more people are recognizing the global warming political movement as a political movement.
It just seems, to me at least, an odd time to surrender to the climate-change dogma. “Throw It In, Or We Just Might Win?”
And then there is the Governatron’s own behavior to consider. His movies, arguably, are more environmentally filthy than the films of most other actors, both in greenhouse gas and other pollutants produced in the making of them, and the themes suggested by them. There had to be a “greener” way to kill the liquid-metal terminator than dunking him in a vat of molten steel; it doesn’t impress me as an environmentally friendly way to rescue your daughter from terrorists on the top floor of a skyscraper, to use a borrowed USMC Harrier jump jet. And then there is his private lifestyle.
Arnold Schwarzenegger scaled to the top of a large heap of candidates to succeed Gov. Gray Davis, partly because of his unapologetic attitude about his own habits. The cigars. The Humvee. Anyone else in California remember that? How Candidate Schwarzenegger worked the Humvee into his debates with Ariana Huffington, et al?
What’s happened since then. A couple movies came out? Is Govenor Ah-nuld really a convert to the cause now?
And what good does it do for California to be “in the forefront” in the fight against global warming — an effort that, if it has any legitimacy at all, is as contrary to any competitive endeavor as could possibly be imagined? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought this was something where if we fail, it’s lights-out for all of us. What’s the vision here? We’ll save the planet, but California did more than it’s share? Or we’ll bollux it up and go bye-bye, but in our dying moments we’ll think “if only everyone had been more like Kah-lee-fo-nya…”
It seems we aren’t even achieving that much. Quoting Big Dog…
California has all those movie studios and sets that blow things up and burn things down. They continue to produce TV shows and movies that emit tons of pollutants into the air. Has anyone shut them down yet? California also has a huge problem with wildfires right now. These were caused by lightning and have been burning for weeks. The amount of pollution [or greenhouse gases if you will] released into the atmosphere is more than some small countries will emit in decades. If one were to believe that man causes global warming where do we put the blame for this?
How exactly is California in the forefront when it blows up and burns stuff to make money and every time one turns around the place is on fire?
I think I might have the answer to all this.
A sensibility has arisen, and there could be something genuine about it — I can’t prove it or disprove it — that the next big economic push for our nation, and especially for California, is something called the “green industry.” I’m not altogether sure what a green industry is. Where I come from, an industry is something that is…
the aggregate of manufacturing or technically productive enterprises in a particular field, often named after its principal product: the automobile industry; the steel industry. [bold mine]
And from what I understand of it, “green” is not “technically productive.” It’s a lot of people coming together and doing something, with a whole lot of folks giving orders to other folks. And money is definitely changing hands; but that thing we call “green” is not supposed to be productive. If anything, by design, it is unproductive.
But as the money changes hands, if the hands taking it in are in California, and the hands letting go of it are elsewhere…say, in the federal government perhaps? Well then I suppose for an economically depressed state that’s all we need to define the “industry” that is of concern to us.
I think what we’re looking at in our Governator is a walking manifestation of the Sinclair Paradigm. Writing in I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935), American author Upton Sinclair observed:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
So let’s give Gov. Schwarzenegger some credit here, especially if you are reading these words in my state of California. He’s probably showing prescience. Climate change is a big scam, probably the biggest one ever successfully perpetrated. But California’s “salary” is about to depend on the folks in charge never, ever figuring that out. Even though, in the hearts-of-hearts, they know it already. Just shut up, take the money, laugh all the way to the bank, and get back to that old grind we call the “green industry.”
MY PLAN….WELL………..of course you know its a combination of all three…….
Take all the plastic garbage and recycle it into a large plastic blanket…….in sections………..put it over the ice, melting ice, former ice at the Artic Pole…….this would create a large pool cover, blocking the sun from melting by insulating it .
This would generate jobs to gather it, create/manufacture it, and maintain it.
Ok….I know it sound silly and simple but……it “could” work……don’t you think…..?
Later Gator
Well, my initial thought had to do with something I’d been noticing for a long time: People in positions of authority, at some time or another, tell just about everyone you care to name to (to be polite about it) FECK OFF. John McCain’s said it to conservatives plenty of times, and Barack Obama just did it to our buddy Glenn Greenwald, to Greenwald’s great annoyance. But never environmentalists. Nope, environmentalists, who exist for the purpose of stopping things and making nothing go (except environmental movements), pretty much get every little thing they want, all the time. Big things, little things, in between things. Nobody in a position of authority ever tells a tree hugger to FECK OFF. With gas up toward five bones a gallon, there is more pressure now to show ’em the heave-ho than there ever has been…it might happen…but it hasn’t just yet.
And so it occurred to me that ignoring environmentalists would, directly or indirectly, address all three of these. Like Samuel L. Jackson said in The Incredibles, why don’t we do what we told our wives we were gonna do, just to shake things up a bit? — Why don’t we tell environmentalists to stick it where the sun don’t shine, just for a change of pace?
Another Item!
Gerard saw the clip we linked of that extraordinarily impressive montage of “I’m Not Here To Make Friends”…and he had an idea very much like Counselor Troi’s…
Could somebody please raise the money and gather the will to put all of these pathetic assholes in one single location and call in an overwhelming napalm strike on it? Please?
We’ll keep that one in mind.
Yet another Item!
Jessica over at Feministing, long an advocate of the hyper-populist “Can I Get An Amen Here” brand of feminism, which is nothing but a long procession of bitter hostile trial balloons sent up by feminist individuals for the endorsement of feminist groups along the lines of “I think this should be screeched at, can I get some help???”
For those of you who haven’t already been following it, here’s what went down.
Moe and Tracie appeared on Lizz’s show drunk. Very drunk, it seems. You can watch the whole video here, and the more controversial clips here and here. I was pretty much appalled by the whole interview. But it was the commentary about rape, abortion and birth control that have garnered the most criticism…The gist of it is Moe and Tracie said some extremely offensive and uninformed things – especially about rape – that they’re now being taken to task for. (They were later said to be jokes, but no one in the audience laughed.)
:
Here’s the short version for those who don’t feel like reading this monster of a post: 1) Whether or not you say you represent feminism, when you write about the subject to a ridiculously large audience, openly identify as a feminist, and make appearances to talk about feminism – you are taking on responsibility for the way feminism is portrayed. 2) It’s awesome to use irony and humor as a tool – but if you’re not using it in a way that hurts women, is it really worth it?
This ties in, because I think Counselor Troi’s concerns about the floating plastic are an apt metaphor for the feminist movement. In the same way you can’t viably entertain any sort of plan that involves sticking a sort of giant pool-cleaner tool into the Pacific Ocean and bundle up all those tiny bits of plastic, you can’t nail down what the feminist movement is all about either. You find a feminist who gets caught unabashedly, unapologetically and unashamedly hating men…you raise the concerns this gives you about the feminist movement to another feminist…and you get back this doe-eyed innocent look, Oh no, I’m not all about that, I just want equal pay for equal worth!
And it is this kind of nail-jello-to-tree-ism that has given the feminist movement enormous benefit throughout the decades. They have been able to advocate the most hardcore, borderline-insane nonsense — like, for example, we need to believe Anita Hill over Clarence Thomas because “women don’t lie about this stuff” (That’s one of the worst examples, but there are others). Patently absurd positions like that one, are owned when it is convenient, and then jettisoned when convenient. The feminist movement ends up being a rather hodge-podge, disjointed, undefined pastiche of floating debris, just like the Great Plastic Soup out in the ocean. It can’t be criticized because it can’t be defined.
And now poor young Jessica has realized it is this lack of a endo- or exo-skeleton that has landed the feminist movement in trouble, so she seeks to lay down some rules about “taking on responsibility for the way feminism is portrayed.” Sorry, sweetie. You’re trying to close the barn door long after the horse has left. Feminism, in 2008, is about intellectual lawlessness. It is about extending the indestructible umbrella of political cover of “Equal Pay For Equal Worth” over the rigid, hardcore extremist types who don’t deserve such cover…the “All Men Are Potential Rapists” brand of feminists. They are, by design, all part of the Great Plastic Amoeba of feminism that has no shape, has no structure, has no rules, and therefore cannot be faulted. What dear Jessica is trying to do, is roughly akin to making a pet out of the world’s largest jellyfish, and trying to saddle it up.
So Counselor Troi…here are my thoughts.
1. Scoop up the Great Plastic Soup for those bits, as best you’re able;
2. Make a giant plastic bulls-eye out of it;
3. Take it to the Arctic where all the ice is supposed to be melting down;
4. Put our drunk feminists on the bulls-eye along with the environmentalists who won’t let us build any power plants or drill for oil;
5. Add to those, all the reality show contestants who “aren’t here to make friends”;
6. Like Gerard said. Napalm the sucker. That takes care of the plastic, the drunk feminists, the enviro-Nazis, and the vapid silly contestants.
7. And the ice.
8. Jessica will be much less stressed-out, too.
9. Plus, the contestants won’t make any friends, which they didn’t want to do anyway.
10. Check back in a year, I’ll betcha there’s plenty of ice, and plenty of polar bears to go with.
11. I got a feeling our population of brain-dead cliche-spouting reality show contestants will also have replenished (although I’m not sure about that).
12. And jobs galore. Especially if we make an annual habit out of it.
A greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride, used to make the TVs, is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, said Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, Irvine.
But no one yet knows how much of it is being released into the atmosphere by industry, a report in Britain’s The Guardian said.
Prather’s research shows production of the gas, which remains in the atmosphere for 550 years, is “exploding”.
It’s only at the end of the article you read that this is all about the possibility of a contaminant, not about the contaminant itself. And this Prather guy clearly belongs to the “all regulation is good and doesn’t cost anything” crowd:
Air Products, which produces the gas for the electronics industry, told New Scientist that very little nitrogen trifluoride is released into the atmosphere.
But Prather raised concerns about companies being careless with the gas, given the lack of a regulatory framework.
Well, he’s right, you know — if this stuff is 17,000 times more potent than CO2, it should be taken very seriously. The first step is to find out what “very little” means in terms of what’s released into the atmosphere. A cubic foot per television set?
Unless it’s zero, I say we should use this to shed some more light on the greenhouse gas debate. We weren’t building flatscreen TV sets in 1934, which has now been revealed to be the warmest year on record, so this would be some sturdy evidence that the “greenhouse effect” isn’t the be-all-end-all. Sorry, but when you make superlative claims like “17,000 times more potent,” this can have unforeseen effects on your argument if your audience is paying attention; we’re spewing this awful gas, and even with that benefit we haven’t managed to get the “mean temperature” up to the levels of 74 years ago.
And, as the propeller-beanie pocket-protector white-coat-wearing regulation-loving geek points out, the production of flatscreens has been “exploding.” Logic would therefore dictate we can stop complaining about carbon for awhile.
…I’ve not seen expressed anywhere else. And I’ll bet you haven’t either. I was noticing a common thread in the global warming…er…I guess I’ll call it the mantra. And the common thread seems to place a great deal more priority on this “coming together” stuff than actually generating the results we say we want or need. It’s like, if we come together and work toward a common goal, and fail at it, we’ve succeeded, but if we fix the whole freakin’ problem forever but most of us sat the effort out, then we must have failed.
Our global warming alarmists insist it’s about saving the earth but it isn’t about socialism. But the goal seems to have a lot to do with altering our mindsets and at times it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with improving the environment, much less saving it.
So here’s my idea.
Why don’t we handle it the way we handle Mad Cow Disease? Think about it. Mad Cow Disease, unlike global warming, has really killed people. It comes, and then it goes…now, how did we do that? Did we “come together to fight Mad Cow Disease”? No, we didn’t. We had people studying it, along with all other types of diseases, and we made it into a sub-discipline of animal husbandry and human/animal medicine. If you worked in that field, or were a cattle farmer, or worked in an agency that regulated the cattle industry, it was your business…otherwise, it wasn’t.
You went home and watched TV. Maybe you winced a little bit when you saw Mad Cow on your evening news, hesitated before tossing that London Broil in your grocery cart.
But you went on with your life, and figured those who worked in the field were doing their jobs right. (By the way, the Government Accounting Office busted the Food and Drug Administration in 2001, finding the proper oversight wasn’t being done; the problem was rectified.) Science figured out how the disease is caused, the authorities came up with the proper standards and guidelines, and the problem was solved.
I never once heard we “all need to come together to fight Mad Cow Disease.”
I never once heard of schoolchildren being sent home with coloring books, bumper stickers for Dad’s car, or other instructional materials relating to fighting Mad Cow Disease.
I have not, to this day, heard of a rock concert to raise public awareness of Mad Cow Disease.
I do not know of an Intergovernmental Panel of Mad Cow Disease (IPMCD).
Nobody was encouraged to change the way their households work to prevent the spread of Mad Cow Disease — other than vegetarians waggling their jaundiced, bony fingers at us to stop eating meat, which is something they’ve always done and always will do.
I’ve yet to hear of an international Mad Cow Disease tax.
Now, don’t ask me why Mad Cow Disease is different from global warming. You people who react differently, are the ones who need to come up with an answer for that one. I think, deep down, people understand that “climate change” or whatever you want to call it has very, very little to do with approaching doom, or climate science, or any reasoned analysis of the facts and what they might mean…and a whole lot more to do with social customs. It’s like a school dance, in which everybody’s supposed to move the same way at the same time.
But through Mad Cow Disease, we can already analyze our own behavior with regard to real threats to ourselves and to our families. When we understand the danger is real, we leave it to the people whose job it is to understand what’s going on and what to do about it. We do not grab each other by the lapels and shake each other and make nonsensical noises about “everybody coming together.” That is not how we address real dangers, even when those dangers are faced by “all of us.” When we address real dangers, we put the emphasis on FIXING THE FREAKIN’ PROBLEM and the man-across-the-street can behave in whatever manner he chooses to…we don’t care what he does. We don’t even give a rat’s ass whether he believes in it or not.
And it’ll just be a matter of time before G.R. swims across the pond and ends up here. OH NOES!!!
Whatever. Bite me, Hulkie. According to the article linked, 20% of single Brits advertising on dating sites are more interested in “GEH (Good Environmental Habits)” than in GSOH (Good Sense of Humor).
‘Green rage’ is also transferring to the workplace with 37 per cent admitting to getting angry with work colleagues for printing out unnecessary documents or leaving computers on overnight.
The figures published by EDF Energy show that more than a third, 35 per cent, of people in the UK are frustrated when someone they know acts disrespectfully towards the environment.
Someone in jolly ol’ Britain didn’t get the memo about environmentalism and other “progressive” causes. One of the most effective ways of promoting this kind of bilge, has been to cast the other side as being full of “rage.” This is, and has been, measurable. What do you have to say, in opposition to an increased minimum wage, affirmative action, tax increases, welfare benefits, sensitivity training, et al, in order to be accused of being “angry.” Hardly anything at all, really. So — it’s going to be a little bit of a rake handle in the bicycle spokes once word gets out that our enviroweenies have an anger problem. Simply mentioning it does enormous damage.
Someone’s gonna get a reprimand.
But there’s more than a grain of truth to it, and it helps to highlight something I’ve discussed in these parts many times before. Enviornmentalism — not just this modern “green” stuff, but classic enviornmentalism, going all the way back to that public service ad with the Indian crying over the piles of junk in the city — isn’t really about the environment. It’s about social status. It’s about the things you do, this “your part” stuff that nobody really honestly thinks will change anything one way or t’other in “the global environment.” And it isn’t even about that — it’s about being seen doing them.
To change all the light bulbs and windows in your house, and keep it a secret, is socially unacceptable. You’re supposed to ramble about it. It’s a fashion statement.
And it’s about relativity. Like Syndrome said in The Incredibles, “When everybody’s super…then NO ONE will be!” The worst nightmare scenario to our modern green movement is for everyone in line-of-sight to comply. It isn’t about reducing the carbon footprint; it’s about scolding.
The kollege kids in Ithaca, NY want a Guiness representative to validate their claim to the largest human peace sign.
The previous largest human peace sign was made by 2,500 people at the University of Michigan. Ithaca is now waiting for Guinness to sanction its new record of 5,814 people.
Organizer Trevor Dougherty, a high school sophomore, says the effort was a show of support for world peace, not just an attempt at a record.
Yay. Yes, the world could use some more peace. We could start with our left-wingers pledging to work more closely with our right-wingers. Compromise a bit more often. Heh…funny how that one item seems to be left out.
You know, it occurs to me that “peace” stands alone as having it’s own simplistic, easily-reproduced sign. It is the one intangible noun that defies a solid definition. Next to “greed” and “hate crime.” “Racism” seems to have slipped a few teeth in the cogs as well; it used to mean a personal belief in the inherent superiority of one race over another, and lately I’m seeing a lot of things that don’t incorporate that being called “racist.”
But I digress.
You show people a peace sign…everyone understands it refers to the word “peace” but we have so little collaboration about what that really means. Stop fighting? Ban guns? Sign a non-proliferation treaty, and just hope the other guys are demolishing their munitions when they say they are? Does it mean start inspections, or call a halt to them? Does it have something to do with Marxism? Why or why not?
I can think of a few other things that could use a simple, internationally-recognized pictogram, to make it easier to promote them. These are things much more worthy of such promotion than the same-ol’, tired old war protest.
Graphics artists, your submissions are solicited. Make ’em simple as possible, and preferably fitting in a circular border. Who knows, maybe one or two of ’em will have ten thousand able-bodied supporters, and before the summer is out we can break the record.
1. Skepticism about global warming. I doubt you can save the planet by unplugging your toaster.
2. Critical thinking, in general. We used to have some. Let’s bring it back.
3. The Wolfowitz Doctrine.
4. The willingness to provide others who are weaker with a terrible, deadly defense. (The U.S. Marines have a nice logo that says exactly this, to some.)
5. The idea that maybe we should keep putting violent criminals in jail until there’s nobody around to commit violent crime anymore. That’s what the “peace symbol” means to me, but that’s open to individual interpretation.
6. Hooray for capitalism.
7. You can have my gun when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
8. Say no to crack: Pull up those pants!
9. Hooters girls, on the other hand, are awesome.
10. So is cold beer.
11. So are buffalo wings.
12. I wish cars were still built so we could tear ’em apart and put them back together again.
13. Commies leave. This country isn’t for you.
14. Nerds are cool.
15. Any country that is our ally only until we take steps to defend ourselves, is an ally we don’t want or need.
16. Thing I Know #70. Courage has very little to do with being outspoken.
17. Drill here now. Sign Newt’s petition.
18. Peer pressure sucks.
19. Canada, shame on you for your Human Rights Commission!
20. Keith Olbermann, go away.
21. Guilt is a useless and nonsensical human emotion.
22. It’s a futile endeavor to try to be better than everyone else when you’re also trying to be exactly like everyone else.
23. Let’s make it easy for young people to find work. There’s nothing wrong with a seventh-grader mowing lawns for money.
24. Rule For Living With Me #2. Show how mature you are. All things do not necessarily have to be said.
25. Go away, Oprah.
26. Thing I Don’t Get #24. Men shouldn’t get piercings in their junk and I don’t know why they’d want to.
27. Teach your child how to drive a stick-shift!
28. Same-sex marriage: It isn’t a human rights story, it’s a human-interest story.
29. Getting your news out of The Daily Show is a bad, bad idea.
30. Thing I Know #52. Angry people who demand things, don’t stop being angry when their demands are met.
Agnosticism seems to me to have something to do with age. In other words, younger atheists tend to be gnostic atheists; they know there’s no God, because they’ve figured it out. There’s no evidence in either direction so the presumption should lean against God, and He should receive no benefit of doubt. They pulled this part out of their asses. They have faith. They achieve a fellowship through this faith, and in that sense achieve cultism of the purest kind.
I was impressed with how fair the linked article is. You look at events today, objectively, with a decent respect to both sides, and then you look at the details as reported by the article — it’s the same thing. You can make the connection either one of two ways: The inquisition represents our global-warming types and Galileo represents our skeptics, or vice-versa. Both sides are making the same mistakes. And that’s true of intelligent design versus evolution and any one of a number of our other hot topics.
There is no doubt the church was in the wrong. A commission formed by Pope John Paul II in the 1980s admitted as much. But was it fully responsible? There were, in fact, two other parties at fault.
One was Galileo himself. His vanity, sarcastic words, contempt for lesser minds and half-truths had earned him fierce enemies among the intellectuals of Europe–especially among the Jesuits. Galileo even fudged at least one experiment.
The second set of culprits were naturalists (the scientists of the day). Advocates of the pagan philsopher Aristotle resisted Galileo’s findings. The pope and cardinals would not have acted if dozens of these “scientists” had not said Galileo was wrong. Some hated Galileo, who had hurt their feelings. Others felt that Aristotle and the Bible should not be overturned without solid evidence. It did not matter that both Kepler and Galileo had shown that the Bible could be interpreted to agree with the new science. Their own eyes showed them that the sun, not the earth moves. Galileo could not provide hard evidence to the contrary. Solid proof for the earth’s movement around the sun was two hundred years away, when tiny shifts in star positions and subtle pendulum motions were finally measured.
Human fallibility, arrogance, and lazy group-think. On both sides.
There’s a lesson there.
There’s at least the hint of a God, too. For who else is there to laugh His ass off at us?
I love this “do-this-do-that-week” stuff. It’s not just green commuting. It’s awareness months, it’s take-your-blank-to-work-day — all that stuff. Of course it’s about getting attention and not engaging any process that operates according to cause-and-effect. And that’s fine. But the people who promote these promotable events, get pretty lippy to the effect that it’s about engaging cause-and-effect. They get pugnacious and combative with anyone who dares to suggest otherwise.
But if it was cause-and-effect, and it was smart, there wouldn’t be a “week.” You’d do it all the time.
Nevertheless, a good argument can be made that there’s no harm in these things. That’s right, isn’t it? Even if my point stands about contrasting the getting of attention, against real human achievement — once we acknowledge that, it remains benign, right? I used to think so…I may have to reconsider now (H/T: Boortz).
One bicyclist was dead and another injured two days into a week promoting safe bicycle commuting in the Chicago area.
A white bicycle on the 900 block of North La Salle stood in tribute Tuesday to Clinton Miceli, the fifth bicyclist killed in a collision with a vehicle in Chicago this year.
Miceli, 22, was cycling in the bike lane on La Salle around 6:45 p.m. Monday when he slammed into an open SUV door, was thrown from his bike, then struck by a second car. The driver of the Nissan Xterra who opened the door into Miceli’s path was cited for opening a car door in traffic, police said.
A second rider collided with a CTA bus around 8:50 a.m. Tuesday at Broadway and Patterson in Lake View. That cyclist was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in serious condition, a Fire Department spokesman said. The CTA driver was cited for failure to yield and suspended without pay, authorities said.
Like a lot of folks who are convinced the global warming thing and the carbon cap-and-trade thing are scams, I have a bike, I keep it in shape, and I ride mine more than most others ride theirs. Yes, you read that right. People who believe in the globular wormening climate-change ManBearPig, don’t ride bikes. They drive big fat cars, and they drive ’em everywhere. Oops, outta milk. The convenience store is 200 feet away, I’ll climb in the Lincoln Navigator.
Anyway, I digress.
I work pretty hard to avoid mingling with cars, if I can. Cars don’t see you. If you’re forced to do a move that depends on the car seeing you, for you to get through it alive, then what you’ve got to do is engage the driver’s attention through his windshield and get an acknowledging nod. And if you’re forced to do that — remember, you only have one shot at this stuff — it’s best just to go somewhere else.
Training is good. Most of us have been walked through this kind of thing in fifth grade or thereabouts, but very few of us have had occasion to practice it since those days. Classes, with reflective tape, bike lamps, vests, helmets, reflector mirrors.
I have an even more effective suggestion though: Don’t have “weeks” for this stuff. If we can come to an agreement that such events are about getting attention and not about actually fixing anything, I would hope we’d come to a consequent agreement that this isn’t what the environment needs, and it certainly isn’t what the climate change — yes, I’ll say it because it’s true — political movement needs. C’mon, get real. Everyone who’s paying it attention, not the sneering eyeball-rolling kind I have ready for it but rather the respectful attention it craves, is already paying it as much attention as they’re gonna.
And a “week” has a starting event. During which time, traffic, both cars and bikes, have to adapt to the intermingling. That means people who don’t know what they need to know, have to learn it the hard way. Clinton Miceli paid the ultimate price to make that happen. It’s no different from computer programming, you know — the screw-ups happen where one process hands the data off to another. Where things change. Where a buffer is flushed to disk and a bunch of counters are accordingly reset. If it’s something that’s just a perpetual thing, you don’t have this. And then, maybe this poor fella would still be around today.
And while I can appreciate that Mr. Miceli has emitted his last pound of carbon and thus saved the environment from his own portion of “human caused climate change,” somehow I don’t think that’s the way this is supposed to work. The climate change movement is not supposed to be a eugenics movement.
Unless maybe it is. Hmmm…human-inducted climate change…gotta save the planet…hmmm.
Carbon offsets — and emissions-trading schemes, their industrial-scale siblings — are the environmental version of subprime mortgages. They both started from some admirable premises. Developing countries like China and India need to be recruited into the fight against greenhouse gases. And markets are a better mechanism for change than command and control. But when those big ideas collide with the real world, the result is hand-waving at best, outright scams at worst. Moreover, they give the illusion that something constructive is being done.
A few fun facts: All the so-called clean development mechanisms authorized by the Kyoto Protocol, designed to keep 175 million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere by 2012, will slow the rise of carbon emissions by … 6.5 days. (That’s according to Roger Pielke at the University of Colorado.) Depressed yet? Kyoto also forces companies in developed countries to pay China for destroying HFC-23 gas, even though Western manufacturers have been scrubbing this industrial byproduct for years without compensation. And where’s the guarantee that the tree planted in Bolivia to offset $10 worth of air travel, for instance, won’t be chopped down long before it absorbs the requisite carbon?
I wish I could go forward in time, to after we’ve gotten tired of this whole thing and people start to say to each other “how was this supposed to work, anyway?” and someone tries to answer.
You drive a big truck to work, I ride my bike…you don’t pay me to ride my bike, so the planet’s in danger…you start giving me some cash, planet saved. Huh. So the question stands. And it will stand. All those who are cheerleading this thing today, and will be stammering for an answer tomorrow, better start cooking one up right about now. Make it good.
Another article on Neal’s reading assignment list, that I missed the first go-round. In defense of CO2. Good points…like…
Unlike the many scientists who welcome CO2 for its benefits, many other scientists and most governments believe carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant that must be removed from the atmosphere at all costs. Governments around the world are now enacting massive programs in an effort to remove as much as 80% of the carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.
If these governments are right, they will have done us all a service. If they are wrong, the service could be all ill, with food production dropping world wide, and the countless ecological niches on which living creatures depend stressed. The second order effects could be dire, too. To bolster food production, humans will likely turn to energy intensive manufactured fertilizers, depleting our store of non-renewable resources. Techniques to remove carbon from the atmosphere also sound alarms. Carbon sequestration, a darling of many who would mitigate climate change, could become a top inducer of earthquakes, according to Christian Klose, a geohazards researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Because the carbon sequestration schemes tend to be located near cities, he notes, carbon-sequestration-caused earthquakes could exact an unusually high toll.
Amazingly, although the risks of action are arguably at least as real as the risks of inaction, Canada and other countries are rushing into Earth-altering carbon schemes with nary a doubt. Environmentalists, who ordinarily would demand a full-fledged environmental assessment before a highway or a power plant can be built, are silent on the need to question proponents or examine alternatives.
I’m linking because I want to keep track of when this happens. It so seldom does. There are very, very few syndicates, coteries or factions that are told to go off somewhere and stick it, less often than the environmentalists. Their ideas turn out to be bad ones…they turn out to be worse…they turn out to destroy jobs and houses and families and humans…then they turn out to be awful. Still, anyone elected or appointed whose judgment is trusted on issues that really matter, caves in to the environmentalists.
So this year I’m going to seize the opportunity to right my wrongs. As I get ready to introduce my child to his first Halloween, I’m making sure that I add a bit of earth awareness to the preparations. This is how I plan to make Halloween green:
6. I loved it when she made that comment about being for things before you’re against ’em, and how hard it is for her to understand how things work in the beltway. That’s a true Mister Smith Goes To Washington moment right there. If it was some big ol’ Paul Bunyan lookin’ guy in a plaid shirt with a big blue ox and a giant axe in his hand saying that, he’d get voted in in a landslide. Well, that’s exactly what Sarah Palin is. In a skirt.
It’s inherently dishonest, partly because we’re poisoning the environment while demanding all this congratulation from ourselves & strangers for saving it. But also because we’re demonstrating what good people we are, to these strangers, through this virtue of self-sacrifice — NOT by exercising self-sacrifice ourselves, but by telling third parties they have to do it.
Fellow Webloggin contributer Big Dog is 
So Counselor Troi…here are my thoughts.
Unless it’s zero, I say we should use this to shed some more light on the greenhouse gas debate. We weren’t building flatscreen TV sets in 1934, which has 
And it’ll just be a matter of time before G.R. swims across the pond and ends up here. OH NOES!!!
The kollege kids in Ithaca, NY want a Guiness representative to validate their claim to the largest human peace sign.