Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
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.”
And don’t forget to climb to the forefront!
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