“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first centuries developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”~ Dr. Richard Lindsen, MIT
The Death of Sanity occurred many years ago. We’re only just realizing how bad it can be. The elppA giB will need to fight this stupidity with small words of precise meaning to reach the hazy brains of it’s primarily somethin’ rich smokin’ sycophants.
Meanwhile, down in Hollyweird, the parade of stupid kids who have stupid parents continues.
The good news is most hot air has a good chance of being just that, Hot Air. And if hot air is good for the islands, maybe it’s not so bad for the rest of us. But people keep screaming that all that hot air is going to be stirring things up over the oceans and drenching all of us with huge and frequent hurricanes. Just how long is our collective memory anyways? 30 seconds?
Coming soon to a Persistent Vegetative Person near you… (and no, that won’t work on your grown son or husband) Yes, we really didn’t have to kill that poor woman. But, speaking of vegetables, have you heard of Vegansexuals? And no, just no… Apparently though, some people have higher aspirations than coupling with a human vegetable.
Moving the battlelines a bit. The war in Iraq is going swimmingly, as wars go. And now we’ve got traditionally liberal pundits saying this whole surge thing just may be working. Some people immediately begin saying those two really were never liberal, others just agree.
And for the final bit of news, which just may be interesting and important, Russia is a boiling pot.
Water conservation has intrigued me for a while. It all began when I asked a colleague why she chose to become a vegetarian. Now I have numbers of friends who are vegetarians, one who even thrived as he went through boot camp. I respect them and have eaten with them countless times. I was simply curious about this colleague’s rational.
“Well,” she said, “What would [this state] look like if we used all the water used to produce beef to water the landscape. It would be so much greener.”
What?!?! How the heck would that work? How would you transport the water? How effective would a state-wide watering campaign be? How would you ensure that no more than 50 percent of the water evaporated before it soaked into the ground? (The best way is to mimic western Washington state’s system; 200+ days a year of rain.)
Further, I thought, trying to comprehend the silliness, “Isn’t water kind of like a renewable resource? There’s no more and no less of it on the earth. It’s just in a different form or location.”
And she seriously defended her reasoning.
That reminded me, what are the values of watering bans? In Texas, where it rains less than 100 days a year and there are few resources in which to store water, controls may be necessary. Even in
But are they necessary in
All that to say, this forum sounds interesting.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE – SO WHY IS THERE A WATERING BAN?
JUNE 19 EVENT TO EXPLORE HOW WATER PRICING COULD AID CONSERVATION
BOSTON – Even though the Commonwealth is blessed with adequate rainfall and full reservoirs, many towns* greet summer with watering bans and other draconian conservation tactics that seem better suited to the desert Southwest. Why? Economists Sheila Olmstead and Robert Stavins, in their new Pioneer Institute study Managing Water Demand, argue that heavy-handed, punitive restrictions on water use are not only expensive, but often ineffective.
Over at the Acton Institute’s Power Blog, Jordan J. Ballor discussed the moral aspects of global warming and his thoughts are intriguing. In The Moral Calculus of Climate Change, he discusses why humans are blamed for global warming when the sun is the source of the heat. Because people are the only moral force in the equation. The sun, the earth, CO2, and a myriad of other objects are amoral objects. Humans are the only force in the equation with a moral aspect.
Hence the equating of pollution with sin.
“[O]nly a finite number of causes [for global warming], perhaps in most cases a single cause, can have any moral relevance. For a cause to be a moral cause, it has to have be related to a moral agent. So, for instance, if the earth is warming, one of the contributing causes is the energy output of the sun. Since the sun isn’t a moral agent (as far as I know), solar activity isn’t a moral cause of climate change.
“But if human activity is changing the makeup of the earth’s atmosphere so that it retains relatively more of the solar output of energy, that’s a cause that has moral relevance. Even though the sun’s activity is a prior cause (both logically and temporally) to any human activity, only human activity has any moral bearing. This might be a major reason why folks in not only policy circles, but also in more popular discourse, tend to focus on what humans are or are not doing that is affecting the climate.”
Definitely a good read.
Dr. Borlaugh disproved global paranoids such as Dr. Ehrlich and saved a billion lives, by most estimates. He has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal, ushering him into the noble company of only five who have been given all three. Arguably, he ought to be better known than Paris Hilton, but such is not the case in this fickle culture we live in. But what did he do?
He was an optimist. While Dr. Ehrlich spent his years arguing that, due to overcrowding and population explosion, starvation would increase proportionate to population growth, Dr. Borlaugh worked to develop new methods of agriculture and new strains of wheat which were heartier, more disease and drought resistant, with greater yield. Because of his work, scientists estimate that a billion people in India, Pakistan, and other third world nations have not starved to death. You can read more about this man who decided that instead of throwing up his hands, defeated as he surveyed the dismal future of fewer fields and far more mouths, he would make those fields grow more.
Global Warming Most Boring Topic
It’s official, the topic of global warming is more boring than Al Gore himself:
The issue of global warming far out-performed other contenders for the title, such as the production of goat cheese, the musical genius of the artist formerly known as P Diddy and media speculation over the likely outcome of the upcoming federal election.
Edwards’ Wife Says He’s A Girl Where It Counts
We all knew it was true, but Presidential Power Puff Contender Edwards’ wife says Hillary is not woman enough to be President, implying, of course, that her husband is.
In Case You’ve Forgotten What Is At Stake
The Democrat Presidential aspirants are tripping over themselves trying to hand out a bigger slice of pie to more people. In this case, the pie is a bloody gruesome mess of severed limbs and contorted faces of children who will never see the light of this the sun or the beauty of this earth.
From The Pachyderms Archives, One For The Ages
Over at the Helvidius Pachyderm blog Theo pulled this jewel out of the depths of memory, a priceless, if slightly linguistically risque, rebuttal to every argument by every liberal everywhere. (apparently the Firefox dictionary does not contain “risque” by default):
That is so f’in hilarious. Who these pantywaists? Lemme shrink their heads real quick: they identify with the deer. Like the deer, they have been allowed to overpopulate because their natural predators have been hunted into extinction by the big, bad, unenlightened conservatives who fight and win wars. But here’s where they show their lack of fitness for survival: in their panicked fear of the “hunters” with guns (equivalent to the big, bad conservatives who are actually their protectors), they would rather see the return of their “natural” predators (Nazis, Communists, Fascists, crazy African warlords, and poor, misunderstood Islamofascists).
Stepping outside the metaphor for a second—does anyone know what has happened where the natural predators of deer (i.e., mountain lions and wolves) have been allowed to breed unmolested? Anyone? Anyone? Thaaaaat’s right! They’ve started attacking and mauling/killing humans in those areas, correctly identifying them as easy prey. That’s the problem with “solutions” offered by liberals—they get everyone else killed along with their dumb asses.
How’d ya like that?
Two ratings are out on the Live Earth program, one for language and another for veiwership.
Rated for Strong Language
I wonder how many parental control programs on family TV’s had to black out the program for inappropriate content. If Live Earth is for the benefit of future generations, shouldn’t it be appropriate for them to watch it?
Veiwer Ratings
Viewership was a dismal failure and couldn’t keep pace with guess what? Tennis! Yea, a real thriller! Ok, it was the Wimbledon Cup, but it’s still tennis.
Viewing figures for the show failed to live up to expectations. The live afternoon television coverage attracted an average of less than 1 million viewers on BBC2, losing out to BBC1′s coverage of the Wimbledon ladies’ singles final.
In the evening, when coverage switched from BBC2 to BBC1, the average audience was around 2.7 million viewers.
The peak audience, for Madonna’s set, was watched by 4.5 million after 10pm.
A sexier spokesperson may have helped. 
Loud noise, large crowds, the unwashed masses of todays’ global-warming zombies all gathered and listened to washed up acts playing washed up noise, all in the name of cooling the earth. Funny thing is, most people there probably thought cooling the earth meant giving it a drag on a reefer, and were hoping the “mouth” of the earth would open near their particular venue, and were vaguely concerned that the even organizers might have trouble finding enough of the precious stuff to give the earth a big enough hit that it would actually make a difference.
What is of particular interest to me is the bureaucratic red tape and restrictions placed by unthinking public entities on the construction of Nuclear power plants. Liberals and their ideology are the primary reason why Nuclear plants are considered taboo today. Nuclear energy is safe, clean, does not salmon runs or kill birds, uses a common natural resource, and have not been built in decades. Chernobyl, the skull and crossbones of the anti-nuclear-idiots society, has not turned out to be the ecological or even medical disaster it was warned of becoming. Three mile island “radiates” less energy than a person gets during a normal day from the sun. Nuclear meltdown is a bugaboo, not a fact. To those who it exists as a fact, there are many other “facts” which have similar import and veracity.
Daily Mail: Live earth a massive, hypocritical fraud
Conversations with Brit & Grit: Live Earth, Early Death
Radioactive Communist Zombies: Live Earth Even Snowed Out?
-also- ContacMusic
Joobo: Just a word on the fraud…
NationalReview: Living Through Live Earth
The Global Warming Heretic: Live Earth: CO2 For Me, But Not For Thee
The Chicago Sun-Times, my new home-town newspaper, published an article recently noting a few of the many claims made against the religious dogma known as Global Warming.
A cooperative and productive discussion of global warming must be open and honest regarding the science. Global warming threats ought to be studied and mitigated, and they should not be deliberately exaggerated as a means of building support for a desired political position.
Read the article and weep, if your name is Al Gore. Otherwise, just read the article.
In the shadow of the landmark decision by the Supreme Court striking down key provisions of Brown v. Board of Education, ideologues, politicos, and public school administrators are struggling to find new policy now that they’re not allowed to be racists any longer. Racism in any form is evil. W.E.B. DuBois was, and his philosophies continue to be, as racist as any other. The idea that by artificially creating “diversity” at any given social strata benefits no one, and harms many, most of all the ones the do-gooders purport to be assisting.
When any person, regardless of any unchangeable characteristic (such as race, gender, etc), is advanced artificially because some higher “level” of society is not “diverse” enough, that one’s most harmed are: first, the individual or individuals being elevated, and second, those they represent symbolically or actually. Role models are important, there are none who can deny this fact. When a whole generation of black Americans are seeing role models in the form of rap stars who are in and out of jail as frequently as they are on and off the stage. When the women the girls look to dress like whores and sluts, selling and subserviating themselves to men and boys. There is no respect or honor here, there will be precious little in the generation who looks up to them.
Rather than elevation there is opportunity. Booker T. Washington, a contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, and promoter of the plight of the black American post Civil War during the reconstruction, espoused the idea that instead of artificially elevating an unready person who would then doubtless fail, adding insult to injury, “proving” the lies believed by the ex slave owners, and damaging the fragile plight of the newly freed humans, we ought to remove any restrictions that hindered the black American any more than the white American. Given opportunity, the strong would succeed, no matter their race. And those black Americans who succeeded because of their own strength would be less likely to fail and far better role models. Out of the Tuskegee Institute and the dreams and visions of Booker T. Washington came such shining examples as George Washington Carver, arguably one of the paramount inventors of America and one of the more prolific of all time. His inventions benefited millions with additional uses of common agricultural products, growing the demand for products common to the extremely poor, depressed post-war south. The Tuskegee Airmen, an all-black American Fighter Squadron formed during WW2 had one of the best records of success for bomber escort missions, to the point where bomber groups would ask for and demand them as escorts for their missions. These are examples of opportunity seized, and any of the Tuskegee Airmen would make excellent role models, several of them are still alive today (I’ve met them). George Washington Carver, were he alive, would make an excellent role model as well, and you can meet him, in books and articles, and every time you eat a peanut butter sandwich.
Racism occurs any time there is any measurement based on race. There is an important distinction between measurements based on race and measurements which take race into account. A measurement based on the incidence of terror propensities would be pointless in todays world if it did not take into account the religion and race of its sample. We need to know who is more LIKELY to be a terrorist. And right now, though it is dreadfully unpopular to say so, radical Muslims and those of Middle-Eastern descent are more LIKELY to be involved in terrorist action. Security is a numbers job. We don’t KNOW when and where and who and how. We can only guess based on when and where and who and how are more LIKELY. This is not a judgment, per se, on any race or creed, merely a statement of fact which happens to be rather sad in it’s results. A measure of crime will show that young black males are more LIKELY to be incarcerated than counterparts of other races. This is another very sad fact, but it does not make a judgment based on race, it merely takes race into account in measuring another, important, metric.
Racism is where you take those who have done no wrong and, because they, inescapably and through no choice of their own, belong to a particular category and either benefit them or cost them. Racism is always evil.
And if you like to read about odd and unethical experiments which nonetheless shed light on burning questions of human nature and vast social evil, the Milgram Experiments are classic cases studying the propensity of normal humans to do harm to other humans in given authority structure situations.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”
Einstein, in a brief essay on his philosophy of life, claims the mysterious is the most beautiful thing we finite beings can experience. And there is plenty mysterious around us to observe. It has been said that man fears what he does not understand, but this cannot be completely true. The sense of the mysterious is not a sense of fear but of smallness, of incompletion. It is a longing for that which is larger, fairer, truer.
Many people study to diminish the impact of the mysterious because they do not appreciate the feeling of being small, utterly insignificant. They become scientists and they observe the mysterious until to them it no longer seems mysterious. It is the hopeless dream of those who hate dreams that they can understand the infinite, or even the colossally finite. I believe that many of the crack-pot claims by egotistical scientists setting dates on the doom of the world, whether the destruction is to be by heat or cold, or wind or rain, or shaking, or melting, are based on their dismissal of the mysterious, their idea that by stint of study and expansion of knowledge they can predict the unpredictable.
The largest computer cannot compute even simple predictions of weather over just one local area with any accuracy at any distance of time or space, yet there are those who believe we can predict such monstrous disasters as planet-wide fatal warming trends at the distance of hundreds of years. We cannot observe a single case of documented cross species evolution, but there are those who know that all organic life has come from single-celled bacteria in some ancient primordial soup. We cannot understand the complexities of life at the bottom of the oceans of the planet some say we’ve inhabited for millions and billions of years, but there are those who claim to have grasped the intricacies of the planetary system and the entire universe.
Every scientist must keep rein on his own ego with a healthy dose of the mysterious. There are things we already understand, thanks to the toil and work of our predecessors. There are things we can understand, by the sweat of our own brows. There are things our children will understand, by standing on our shoulders. And there are things that will never be understood, because we are limited finite creatures.
Instead of chafing over our inability to understand the amazing or plumb the depths of the esoteric, let us be grateful to simply bask in the glow of the mysterious. Look up to the stars and think how small you still are and revel in the fact that you will never run out of things to learn.
It is both amusing and scary to see ideology in motion in blatant and evil ways. Reading Google News this morning I came across three articles on global warming commenting on the same report. One article was published by Time, one by ScienceNow, and one by Fox News.
The ScienceNow article describes a “runaway train of world carbon emissions” and panicked, claims that “greenhouse gas levels are rising even faster than previously feared”.
Time makes similar claims, but avoids the hysterical yuppie soccer mom approach in favor of cold (hot?) hard numbers and factual data, stating that since 1995, worldwide carbon infusion into the atmosphere increased from 6.4 billion tons to 8 billion tons, an increase of 1.6 billion tons or approximately 25%.
Fox News, on the other hand, takes the study and like actual reporters provides the context. In this case, context means everything.
The study authors reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the rate of man-made carbon dioxide emissions was three times greater during 2000 to 2004 than during the 1990s.
Since increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels allegedly are causing global warming, the new study must mean that global temperatures are soaring even faster now than they did during the 1990s, right?
Wrong, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Climatic Data Center.
By overlaying the atmospheric carbon dioxide trend onto graphs of near-surface temperatures, surface temperatures and ocean temperatures, it is readily apparent that ever-changing global temperatures aren’t keeping pace with ever-increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
I would take this even further. In response to the Time article I would ask how much global output increased during the same period. I’m reasonably certain that global output kept reasonably close pace with carbon output in the same period.
The news media preys on fear. People will pay more an accept more intrusion and control of their lives when they are afraid. This makes particularly powerful the claim that Christians have the God has not given them a spirit of fear, but of power, of strength, of a strong mind. With that strong mind we can analyze the data ourselves and see, as Fox News did, the truth is out there and we only have to look to find it. Very often the truth is just what we not supposed to see.
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