Southern-Fried Stupid

Last month I packed my worldly goods, moved into my motorhome, and left the South for good. I'm sure they're glad to be rid of me; I am certainly glad to not be around Southerners any more.

I spent three years in Nashville, Tennessee working in the IT department of a small non-profit known as Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI). Never in my life have I worked among so much laziness, ignorance and incompetence.

Yes, you can run into stupid, lazy, incompetent people anywhere. Most of them end up "working" (I'm using that word very lightly here) for some branch of Government, and the rest are sprinkled throughout society to be albatrosses about the necks of the productive.

Except in the South. In the South, ignorance, laziness and incompetence are institutionalized. Those people -- the white ones, anyway -- are actually proud of being lazy and stupid.

Do you remember the TV show Hee Haw? Remember the segment of the show where everyone (everyone white, that is) was lying around on a barn floor telling jokes about being lazy? Well, that show was written, filmed and produced in Nashville. And that's the way those people really are.

The white people, that is. The only people I saw doing any actual work were blacks. And Mexicans, who are universally hated. Anyone who looks Hispanic is automatically assumed to be in the country illegally.

So when I rant about Southerners, I specifically mean white Southerners. Now onward with my tale.

BMI is a nonprofit corporation with headquarters in New York City but its operations center, with the bulk of its employees, is in Nashville. I have no beef with the corporation itself, or any of its people working in the New York office: I worked regularly with two of the New Yorkers and always found them pleasant -- and, more importantly, competent. Not so with my co-workers, and bosses, in Nashville. Never in my life have I worked among so much incompetence.

I think everyone who reads this blog already knows what I do, but allow me to spell it out for anyone who stumbles across this post: I am a Linux sysadmin. And I am good at it. Not because of any intrinsic good within myself, but purely because I work at being the best I can be. John Galt wouldn't have it any other way.

So, I keep Linux servers running, which is a much easier job (and much less aggravating) than keeping Windows servers running. One of the differences between the two operating systems is that to be successful at running Linux, one has to actually know something about computers and how they work (Windows sysadmins typically don't know much more than how to point at something with a mouse, click on it, and drool while they wait... and wait... and wait for Windows to complete the job). Linux people are almost universally geeks; Windows people are a more diverse mixture but the bright ones tend to migrate away from working with Windows as soon as they can.

So I was a Linux admin, responsible for about fifty servers, in a shop where most of the hardware was running Windows. This is usually not a problem as long as the Windows people know what they are doing. But the IT department at BMI does not believe in hiring people who know what they are doing. Neither do they give any support to employees who want to learn: when the subject of training and certification came up one day in a meeting, my immediate boss flat-out stated that BMI would not support it "because the only reason to get a cert is so you can look for a job somewhere else."

He didn't want people who actually know what they are doing; he only wanted people who would stay with the company until they retire -- and that's exactly what he had working for him: a bunch of people who do as little work as possible, shifting the blame for problems onto someone else and loading up their 401K while they count the days until they can laze around at home instead of lazing around at work.

And shifting the blame was about the only work that my co-workers did, except for one person who actually knew what he was doing (they treated him as a god, thinking he was exceptionally brilliant -- he wasn't; he was merely competent: I've worked with many folks through the years who were his equal). A few weeks after I started there, the email server (Microsoft Exchange -- of course) started doing weird things with my mail. I reported it, and the answer I got was that I was the only one having this problem and therefore it must be because I was running Linux! That, without any effort being put forth to troubleshoot the issue. In spite of the fact that the data I had included in the ticket clearly pointed to a problem with the server.

So I set up a packet sniffer and captured the packets coming to my workstation from the Exchange Server. There was the proof right there, but when I showed the packet trace to the Windows people they STILL blamed my Linux workstation! This was the kind of incompetence and laziness I dealt with every day on that job. No one with whom I interacted (save the one person, and he died) had any concept of how the machines s/he administered actually worked. But getting MY job done relied on them getting THEIR jobs done, and none of them knew anything about how to do their jobs.

In the end, my bosses blamed -- ME. And fired me for having an "attitude." The clueless idiots never thought about trying to find out what was CAUSING my little "attitude" problem.

This isn't just the corporate culture at BMI; it's the culture all over the South. Everywhere you go, everything you try to get done, you encounter people who aren't just ignorant, but take actual pride in being ignorant, and lazy, and incompetent. None of the maintenance done on our apartment was ever done correctly. And therein hangs a large number of tales.

We had a plumbing problem under the kitchen sink. There was a gaping hole in the side of the garbage disposer, and it was leaking water.... It took them four trips to figure out what was wrong. After one of the maintenance visits, my lady asked the maintenance man if he was going to clean up the water he'd left on the floor. "Oh, no, maam," he answered. "The air conditionin' will take care of that," and he left.

There was a spot on the bedroom ceiling from water damage caused by a roof leak. They "fixed" it by painting over it -- with a spray can of automotive paint! You see, the automotive paint, unlike normal indoor paint, is waterproof....

The company that owns the apartments had all of the HVAC units in the complex replaced. They hired a contractor from Atlanta. The indoor units were oversized, meaning, among other things, that they couldn't properly remove humidity from the indoor air. SURPRISE, we started getting mold growing all over the place. Maintenance came in to look at the problem, and found that the contractor had never bothered to re-connect the apartment's ductwork to the new indoor unit when they installed it.

The property management also replaced a bunch of front doors. Ours wasn't done right, and leaked a lot of air. I lost track of the number of visits that maintenance made from our complaints about the door leaking. It still leaked when we moved out; they never actually fixed it.

On its maiden voyage home from the dealer in Utah, I noticed that the headlights on my new motorhome were misaligned. The procedure for aligning headlights is well-known; the vehicle is parked a certain distance from a wall with marks on it at certain places, and the measurements for these marks are well-documented in garage manuals. Since my motorhome is built on a Ford truck chassis, I thought that these measurements might be different than the ones for passenger cars. So I took it to the one Ford truck dealer in Nashville to get the lights aligned. They drove the motorhome into their shop, shone the lights onto a local TV station's news van that was parked crossways at the front of the bay, and proceeded to adjust the headlights.

March 8, 2010 was our last night in Tennessee. We spent it in Memphis and crossed over the Mississippi the next morning, leaving Tennessee for good. As we were approaching Memphis that evening, we called 911 to report a U-Haul truck being driven erratically. The conversation with the operator was a perfect ending to our life in the South.

We told the operator we were on Interstate 40 westbound, and gave the milepost number. The operator could not figure out our location. "Well, what exit are y'all nearby?"

"We're not near any exit, Ma'am. We're at milepost [number]."

"Well then, what's the cross-street?"

Cross-street? We were still thirty-some miles away from Memphis, out in the country. There is no cross-street!

The call ended without the 911 operator ever getting a clue as to where we were. But that's all right, I'm sure that the driver of that U-Haul truck was a good ol' boy and that's all that really matters in the South.

Fuel-ish

Yesterday I received the following email from a nice lady I know:

There is an email going around about not buying gas on May 15. That is all well and good, but the gas companies know that we will buy gas the day before and the day after and use their fuel like we do everyday.

To really hit them in their pockets, like they are hitting us in our pockets, we need to not use their fuel period! That means, do not drive your rig to the beach, to the movie, out to dinner, in to town for that thing you think you just have to have right now. Stay home and do not drive. If you have to go to work, try mass transit, ride your bike, walk, car pool. Of course if there is an emergency you will have to drive. But, if we really want to send them a message that we do not like the cost of fuel right now and the fact that the oil companies are having record profits, not gross but profits, then let's hit them where it hurts. Do not use their fuel. Do not drive May 19 & 20.

Is this worth forwarding on to everyone in your address book? I hope so.

We seem to go through this every year at this time. Indeed, I blogged on the subject precisely one year ago today (see "Anger! Obscenities!" in the sidebar) when the media was whipping up their usual feeding frenzy over rising gasoline prices, which happens every year at about this time. Of course, last fall when prices dropped -- as they always do at that time of year -- it was all George Bush's doing; he was manipulating prices so the Republicans would get re-elected in November.

Last year I had a co-worker who would complain ad infinitum over fuel prices, the oil companies, and their "record" profits (which, as I recall, were a lower ROI than the average shoe store). This man owned one of those huge motor homes that cost half a million dollars that gets, what, about five gallons to the mile or something? And he couldn't understand that it was all of these people driving those huge things around the country every summer that's tweaking the demand side of the Law of Supply and Demand. Hell, no, he wasn't causing any scarcity by sucking the resource pool dry! It was all those damn Big Evil Oil Companies, by God!

Sometimes the human capacity for stupidity is just breathtaking.

At least our Nice Lady had the right idea: when prices rise, consume less. Now, THAT is a rational response as far as it goes -- and, of course, it's what rational people do anyway. Her mistake was in thinking that this would send the oil companies a "message" and "hit them in their pockets".

So, I composed a reply to her and 200 of her closest friends (yes, she put everyone's email address in the "To:" field, where the whole world could read them!):

> Is this worth forwarding on to everyone in your address book?

No, it isn't worth forwarding to anyone.

And here's why: Gasoline prices aren't set by the oil companies.

It is common for people who don't understand economics to look for a scapegoat when prices for a scarce commodity start rising. And they also invariably try pointing the finger of blame at "record profits", as if profits are some kind of evil thing.

Briefly, the price of a commodity is set by the Law Of Supply And Demand. In a market in which there is competition and no collusion, the price of that commodity is always the lowest, and fairest, price possible. It may or may not be a price you like, but it is the lowest price that is possible at that point in time.

If you want to affect gasoline prices, you'll need to look to the factors that are limiting the supply and/or increasing the demand for it. But the bottom line is that prices ALWAYS rise at this time of the year as the summer vacation season approaches and members of the supply chain begin buying more stocks to meet the increased demand.

At this point in time, probably the biggest obstacle to low gasoline prices is the United States' critical lack of refinery capacity. When supply cannot keep pace with increased demand, prices rise... a lot more than they otherwise would.

Your proposal will make the same difference that two days of dieting will make: none, and for the same reason.

A little bit later, a reply to this hit my inbox. It was from a man with the same first name as my former co-worker, and just as ignorant:

Gas companies do not DIRECTLY set the prices, but they do control the refineries. When I hear the statement "There is an unexpected shortage of refined gasoline in the supply chain and noone [sic] knows why" I just want to barf. How can someone running a multi-billion dollar operation not know why the supply is suddenly short. [sic] They manage the supply to keep it artificially short in order to jack up prices. If you don't believe this, ask why this situation exists - When crude goes up, gasoline at the pump almost immediately goes up due to the new raw material cost. But, when the price of crude drops, the pump price takes a long time to drop, due to 'the length of time it takes to get the new lower-cost crude through the system'" [sic]. If it takes a long time for the lower priced stuff, it should take the same time to process the higher priced stuff.

Why are refineries in the southwest still producing winter heating oil? Why did California send a large percentage of their gasoline to Arizona and New Mexico to cover their pipeline break, and penalize all of the west coast, rather than just let those two states have higher costs? Could it be that they make more money by having a big state like California short of gas rather than a small state like Arizona?

Sorry, gasoline prices are one of the few consumer items that are NOT driven by supply and demand. If it were, supply (refinery capacity) would increase to keep pace with demand. They are short on gasoline EVERY summer and are short on heating oil EVERY winter. That is not just coincidence, it is planned.

Hoo boy, here we go again. "They manage the supply to keep it artificially short in order to jack up prices." "Gasoline prices are not driven by supply and demand." Don't you just love it when some nutcase contradicts himself? At least he's right about the shortages not being a coincidence. They definitely are planned, which we'll get to below.

Still, I didn't want to start a flame war. Let's face it: None of us were taught economics in High School. You cannot expect people to automatically know this stuff. Hell, I didn't understand it until just a few years ago. The guy's just ignorant; he's not being an ass about it, he just reads the papers and believes whatever they tell him.

So I composed this nice non-flammable reply to him:

[Y]ou're free to believe whatever you want. However, problems only get solved when we deal with things the way they actually are, rather than according to what we want to believe.

I can prove to you that the idea you expressed -- that petroleum companies are artificially limiting refinery output to keep prices high -- is not only wrong, but ridiculous.

Each refinery owner will do what is in his own rational self-interest. If he cuts back production, he will make less money. Prices will rise by a tiny amount, but it's his competitors -- not he -- who will reap the benefit.

On the other hand, if he increases production he will make more money. Prices will drop a little bit, but not enough to offset the increased profit from increased production. However, his competitors will earn a little bit less because of the decreased prices.

When refinery capacity is scarce (as it is in the US), competition ensures that refineries will always be running at maximum capacity.

And they are. Check the petroleum industry reports. There are no artificial cutbacks in production anywhere in this country.

It didn't help. All I got back from him was more of the same, which isn't worth squandering the electrons to quote. Except for this one little gem:

Ask yourself one question. If, as you believe, increasing production increases profits, why aren't the oil companies builing new refineries?

Un-fucking-believable. The depth of human stupidity truly knows no bounds. The only reply I could muster, with mouth agape, was "Do you honestly mean that you don't know why the oil companies aren't building new refineries?" I am still incredulous over that one.

Back to the Nice Lady. Her next email to me was a heartbreaker:

Some very good points, thank you. One thing you do say is "supply and demand". Just about everyone I know, and I am sure you hear it too, complains about the cost of fuel but are not willing to do anything about it. The demand for the fuel can only be cut if we are willing to curb our driving. Is anyone really committed enough to do that? We can complain all we want, but unless we are willing to be a part of the solution, nothing will change and the price of fuel will keep increasing.

Yes, it does always go up this time of year because we all go on vacations. So, we are going to continue taking our vacations, pay $4 at the pumps and keep complaining? I am not willing to do that. Not only not willing, but not able. I am a 53 year old widow, raising her granddaughter. I work, but do not even come close to making enough to keep up with the rising cost of fuel.

We will not be able to go anywhere or do anything besides go back and forth to work and school. My $125 a month fuel budget has now jumped to $225 a month. That money has to come from somewhere, so part of it comes out of our meager $125 a month food budget and the rest comes out of our entertainment budget, leaving us with no entertainment budget now.

Sit back and accept this? No, I can't. Something has to be done. Any other ideas or suggestions?

I resisted the temptation to suggest shooting a certain man whose $500,000 motor home was, all by itself, going to erase all of her efforts to conserve.

The reality is, of course, that people will do all of the things she suggested in her original letter. It's how the market adjusts. Some will buy smaller cars, some will move closer to work, some will find alternative transportation, some will try to get a better-paying job. She will do some of these herself.

And Mister Half-Million-Dollar Motor Home will make adjustments too as he makes the hard decisions on how best to use the money he has available. Thus will motor fuel continue to be allocated in the fairest way possible.

And Left-wing politicians (and their lapdogs in the Press) will continue blaming the Big Evil Oil Companies for the high prices that they, the politicians themselves, created. Some things never change.

In the end, I never had the cojones to tell the Nice Lady the one thing that she can do: quit voting for politicians who pander to the environmental movement, and vote only for those who understand the nature of wealth, where wealth comes from, how it's created, and civilization's vital need for energy. I just didn't want to wade into the Alligator Pit of Politics with her.

Perhaps I should have told her that her predicament is the logical, natural outcome of politicians who refuse to allow drilling in the ANWR and in several other places right here in the United States where we have oil -- lots of oil -- and enough of it to make a real difference in domestic fuel prices.

The environmental movement has been working tirelessly for nearly a half-century to deny America that which is most vital to her freedom -- energy -- and their efforts are beginning to bear fruit. Among that fruit is a fifty-three-year-old widow who is being forced to choose between food and transportation.

Pretty rotten fruit, if you ask me.

Ken
What Would John [Galt] Do?

Gore-ball warning

OK, I've been avoiding the Great Global Warming Hoax since I began this blog, referring to it only obliquely. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to wade into it now.

I've had to wade into a lot of shit in my day and now that I'm not living on a farm any more I was hoping that my barn-cleaning days were over. But here I am, shoveling shit again, except that this time it's bullshit instead of cow shit or chicken shit or (gawd forbid, the most vile of 'em all) pig shit.

I've been reluctant to wade into this particular cesspool of environmental myths, half-truths and outright lies because I am not a Real Scientist. I don't feel qualified to read the scientific journals and papers, and grasp the nuances therein. However, very few of the dogs in this fight are Real Scientists -- and most of the ones that are real are definitely not in the global warming alarmists' camp.

However, I grew up during the Space Race when science education was actually considered important in the public schools, and as such I have a better science education than most college graduates do today. We were also taught Critical Thinking skills in those days -- another area that is clearly no longer considered important in today's academe. As a perennial winner at science fairs (for doing Real Science rather than a rehash of what was already known), I suppose I might even qualify as an amateur scientist. Maybe. In any event, I do have a solid foundation in science education and know damn well what the difference is between Real Science and propaganda.

I wish everyone had such an education. All of us would be a lot better off without billions of dollars' worth of our productivity going down the toilet because of the environmentalists' fraud.

So, if you disagree with me, keep it to yourself. I'm not interested in engaging anyone in debate over this subject; I do not feel that I am well-enough informed to be able to do that (even though I am vastly better informed than you are). Don't bitch to me about a lack of references; this is a blog, not something I'm writing for publication. I can back up every statement I make here, but I'm not going to spend time looking up references when I'm not getting paid to write. If you really cannot find corroboration of my points below with an Internet search engine, then I'll be happy to do the research for you at the low rate of $40 per hour.

But there shouldn't be any need for that. Others far more knowledgeable about climate science than I am have already done the research and proved all of my points below.

Let us proceed.

The global warming alarmists are making three claims. In order for them to be right, all three must be true. Further, the claims are independent: proof of one does not prove either of the other two. This is important, because they want to be able to prove one of them and have us accept the remainder on faith.

Their three statements are:

1. Planet Earth is getting warmer (true, but not as much as they want you to believe);
2. Earth's warming is caused by burning fossil fuels (could be partially true -- maybe);
3. If it isn't stopped, this warming will have catastophic effects on Earth's ecosystems (pure speculation).

This issue is the worst case of Abuse of Science in the history of the human race. The Left quickly made this brainchild of a lone nutcase working at NASA their cause celebre (or should it be cause macabre?) because of its enormous potential to destroy Capitalism forever. The fact that adopting their "solution" to this non-problem will mean agonizing death to billions of people through starvation and disease means nothing to them: after all, one hundred million were slaughtered in the name of Communism in the 20th Century alone.

Now let's look at some facts:

• The Earth has warmed slightly in the last 100 years. Sort of. Actually it has warmed, and then cooled, and then warmed some more. The total net warming over the entire hundred years amounts to about half of one degree -- 0.6° C to be exact.
  
• There is no way to reliably predict how much more the Earth will warm, or how fast. Or for how much longer. The computer models being cited by the alarmists cannot even accurately predict the past (i.e., when fed historical data); therefore, they have no meaning or worth outside of the branch of science that deals with using computers to predict things.
  
• There is no "scientific consensus" on global warming -- or on anything else, for that matter: the term itself is an oxymoron. A consensus isn't science, and science does not use consensus to do its work.
  
• There are no "thousands of UN scientists" who believe in global warming. There is a UN bureaucracy -- the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that has assembled the work of various climatologists around the world into various Reports. None of these climatologists actually works for, or is funded by, the UN.
  
• The "thousands of UN scientists agree" statement comes from the summary of one of the reports. That summary, written by a bureaucrat, makes a number of alarmist statements that are not in the report itself. Few journalists have ever read the actual report; they simply quoted the summary. While the summary says that global warming is real and it is definitely human-caused (points one and two of the alarmists' three-point claim); the report itself says that not enough is known to draw any conclusions about whether the warming is human-caused.
• Recent data suggests that part of the current warming period might be human-caused -- up to a maximum of somewhere around 25-30%. Using the worst-case numbers, that means that at most about one-tenth of a degree (of the 0.4 degrees that the planet has warmed since the last cooling period ended about 35 years ago) can be attributed to the carbon dioxide that humans have returned to the atmosphere.
• There are other explanations for the data immediately above, but the data ARE consistent with what we know (which isn't much) of CO₂'s role in "climate forcing". That is not proof of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW); it merely means that it could be possible.
  
• This is not the first time in human history that the planet has warmed. There was no global apocalypse then, and there won't be any environmental meltdowns this time either. In fact, the 200-year-long Medieval Warming Period (MWP) -- during which the Earth warmed considerably more than it has (so far) during the current warming period -- ushered in a time that was remarkably free of wars and famine. The period is also known for significant advances in human rights, exploration and mathematics.
• Real scientists do not release their findings to the Press before they have published in peer-reviewed journals and/or presented papers at symposia. And real scientists rarely, if ever, inject themselves into the political arena.
  
• Facts do not matter to True Believers.

OK. Those are the facts. You can not argue with them; if they're "inconvenient truths" standing in the way of what you want to believe, I'm sorry. If you don't like them, don't argue with me; I don't have the time (unless you want to pay me). Go do the research and you'll find that I'm right and you're wrong.

Now, here is my rant. This is opinion. Unlike most opinion, it is rational and fact-based. But you can argue against it if you wish, especially if you see holes in my logic. If you see holes anwhere else, you're looking at porn -- be sure to send me a link. Unless it's a photo of Gore's balls warming -- I don't wanna see that. Too much information.

So, according to the global warming alarmists, an environmental doomsday is coming soon because humans have returned some of the carbon dioxide that was once in the atmosphere, back to the atmosphere. Conveniently for them, the Earth actually IS warming a little bit, but only since about 1970. Before that, the planet had been cooling for a few decades. If you're paying attention, you will notice that they never show you the data from about 1939 to about 1970. This is called "cherry-picking" one's data, and real scientists don't do it.

They have ensured that the voting population has been barraged in every even-numbered year (which, purely by coincidence I'm sure, just happens to coincide with national elections in the United States) with news reports "proving" that the planet is getting warmer, and that the doomsayers have been right all along. Notice, if you will, how disingenuously this is being finessed: because it is well established that the planet actually is getting warmer, then we are definitely going to have a global apocalypse. No one is allowed to examine that these are separate issues, and that proof of one has absolutely no connection to the other. And anyone who raises skepticism about the Apocalypse (i.e., alarmist point #3 above) is a "flat-earther" (some even go to the extreme of saying "holocaust denier") who refuses to accept the FACT that the Earth is warming!

This isn't science, folks. It's propaganda that has a certain goal in mind (NOT saving the Earth!). And because so few people (and, apparently, even fewer journalists) have been trained in critical thinking, the alarmists are getting away with it.

So, as we build toward another election in the United States, the propaganda has been growing more intense (and more absurd). We've had stories about polar bears facing extinction because ONE polar bear was spotted on an ice floe, stranded at sea -- and now it's a given that the entire Arctic is in trouble. Much ink was spilled over the smaller of the two Antarctic ice caps shrinking, while news that the larger ice cap is growing was ignored. Greenland is called "Green Land" for a reason -- it had no ice cap when the Vikings discovered it -- but you'll never hear about that in the alarmist stories about how the Greenland ice cap is "melting". No, it isn't melting. Well, maybe; we don't actually know. Parts of it are RECEDING, but the interior appears to be getting thicker. No one knows what the actual net change is. Frankly, no one should care. Greenland was once GREEN, and it wasn't a global environmental disaster. Unless having Vikings going around discovering places is a disaster. Uff Da!

The most ridiculous global warming alarmist story to hit the press (so far; I'm sure it will get worse) was a week or so ago, when thousands of news outlets breathlessly reported that -- GASP! -- Poison Ivy grows faster when there is more carbon dioxide in the air! Imagine that! A PLANT, for the love of gawd, actually growing FASTER when there is more CO₂ in the atmosphere! What is this world coming to??

Proof, I guess, that the global environmental Apocalypse is upon us, just as the doomsayers predicted.

Ever wonder WHY they picked poison ivy instead of, say, rhubarb? Or any of the precious little Amazon rainforest plants? Hmmmm?

This is what we're dealing with, folks. It's a concerted propaganda campaign, and the worst fraud (so far) ever to be perpetrated upon the human race. Al Gore has now replaced Joseph Smith (founder of the Mormons) as the most successful liar in U.S. history ("successful" being defined in terms of how many people he has duped, and continues to dupe).

I am picking on Al Gore here not because of his recent rise in popularity, but because he, more than anyone else, is responsible for this hysteria which has already cost us billions in lost productivity. It was he who invited James Hansen -- the abovementioned "lone nutcase working for NASA" -- to speak to the Senate committee that Gore chaired in 1988, and he who went out of his way to exclude other scientists whose work disputed Hansen's findings. And it was there, in Gore's committee, during yet another bitterly partisan Presidential election year in which the Democrats claim that the opposition won unfairly, that the global warming hoax was born.

I shudder to think that that man almost became President.

We are not dealing with reasonable people in a rational debate here; we are dealing with radicals, in the dictionary sense of the word, who will stop at nothing to remake the world in their image.

Though there are many avenues open to the human race to deal with global warming (after all, humans dealt with it just fine the last time it happened), Gore and his little friends have a monomaniacal obsession with a single course of action: eliminating man-made carbon dioxide emissions. There is only one way that this can be accomplished: roll back human progress to the state existing before the Industrial Revolution.

Having no man-made CO₂ in the atmosphere means having NO cars, NO aircraft, NO factories and NO electricity. Without manufacturing, and the energy it requires, most of modern medicine will also disappear. It also means mass starvation, because it is simply impossible to feed the current world population with pre-Industrial-age agricultural technology -- because, you see, there will also be NO farm tractors, very little irrigation and (most importantly) NO artificial fertilizer. It was the invention of the latter that prevented the mass die-off predicted by Malthus.

All of this, to save the world from warming up one-tenth of one degree. This is radical -- in the dictionary meaning of the word. It would rip our culture out by its roots.

And that is exactly what these people desire. Maurice Strong, organizer of the first "earth summit", is on record wistfully pining for "the collapse of civilization." Others are on record calling for the elimination of 90% of the Earth's population. If you will get busy with an Internet search engine, you will find many, many more examples.

Many years ago I noted (and horrified one of my students in doing so) that "if you want to destroy an economic system, there is no better way to do it than to deny it access to its own energy, and its own natural resources." That was before global warming had become an issue; I was referring to the environmentalists' opposition to nuclear power, and their then-recent escapades to shut down logging in the US' most productive forests (the Pacific Northwest). They succeeded at both. Now they're going after all of our other sources of energy. Do you think that is a coincidence?

I do not.

Ken

What Would John Galt Do? Well, consider these words from Ayn Rand:

Ecology as a social principle ... condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men's return to "nature," to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.

--"The Lessons of Vietnam," Ayn Rand Letter, III, 25, 1

John Galt's creator had it figured out a LONG time ago.

They're at it again

This morning, I got the (dis)pleasure of waking up to what NPR calls "news." It's always good to listen to what both ends of the political spectrum are saying; there are things going on that one side won't tell you about, but the other side will.

So that's why I occasionally endure Rush Limbaugh as well as NPR. Most of the news I get is slanted to the Left, because most news outlets swing that way. So I generally don't have to seek out the Left's viewpoint, because we're all deluged with it. Unfortunately, the stuff coming from the Left is getting less and less credible: they just cannot constrain themselves to stick with facts any more. For instance look at the extreme bias in the so-called "global warming" issue: most people aren't even aware that there is a very vigorous ongoing debate in the scientific community over whether it's human-caused. Most people think that the science is "settled," whatever that means, or that there's a "scientific consensus," whatever that is.

A great many of the Right's outlets make me sick (not Limbaugh, at least he's entertaining but I just don't consider him worth my time) but I have to force myself to go to their outlets sometimes to get the parts of the stories that the Left-biased mainstream media won't tell us. Most of the time, the Right doesn't flat-out lie and make stuff up, as the Lefties do, but they're so steeped in their shame-based religious nonsense that they still wouldn't recognize good critical thinking if it walked up and spread its legs right in front of them.

Thank His Noodliness (that's equivalent to "thank god" to you heathens who still haven't received the gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) for Reason Magazine. They're about the only daily voice of sanity in a world that is "perishing in an orgy of self-sacrifice" [Ayn Rand].

So, what was the item in the News of the People's Republic (NPR) that so upset me? More Wal-Mart bashing. They just can't leave Wal-Mart alone -- or any other business, for that matter, that doesn't pay them their "protection" money. By all that's right and holy, the entire Democratic Party should be indicted under the RICO act* because they've become nothing more than an organized crime ring of thugs that go around the country shaking down successful businesses for "donations" with the threat of destroying them if they don't pay up. Remember the "sweatshop" propaganda campaign against Nike? That happened because some Democrat tried to shake them down, and they refused to pay. Well, now they're doing it to Wal-Mart.

Ever wonder why they don't go after Costco? Ever wonder why Costco never gets any oppostion to putting up THEIR "big-box" stores? Why Costco never gets accused of driving local mom-and-pop operations out of business with prices against which a smaller store cannot compete?

Here's why: the executives at Costco donate heavily to the Democratic Party and to so-called "liberal" causes. And, if memory serves me correctly, Costco is a union shop. The Walton family donates to Republicans and their causes -- and, of course, the unions have been unable to convince Wal-Mart's employees that they're miserable and unhappy and that they should organize. And that's it, pure and simple.

The arguments against Wal-Mart are to the field of economics what Intelligent Design is to the field of biology: junk science. If you need a primer in economics to understand this, surf on over to reason.com and do a search for articles about Wal-Mart.

Remember that this is not about the poor Wal-Mart employees (because they're perfectly happy). It is not about all of the poor mom-and-pops that are being driven out of business (because there aren't any). It is about politics. And politics is about power, and the money that buys power. And that's ALL that it's ever about.

And by the way, I shop at both Wal-Mart and Costco. What their executives do with their own money is their business.

Ken
WWJD -- What Would John [Galt] Do?

* Unfortunately, if they were all indicted and sent to prison, that would leave Republicans in charge. And without any restraints on THEM.... <shudder>

I feel sick... just sick

"It's deja vu all over again" -- some famous baseball guy

"Why must I be surrounded by fricking idiots?" -- Dr. Evil, in the first Austin Powers movie

It's happened before, but it's been quite a while since the last time. I just found out that a group I joined is not what they claim to be.

I think the first time was when I became disillusioned with the environmental movement, and realized that their goals had nothing to do with the environment. Sadly, I walked away.

And then there was the Republican Party. I was a Party official, for the luvva gawd. And then realized that I'd gotten into bed (politically speaking, of course) with idiots. I walked, but I made damn sure to ruffle some feathers on my way out.

This time, it's a four-wheel-drive club. They call themselves the Oregon Bush Hackers. Not "whackers," but "hackers". You see, they were originally a bunch of geeks at Intel Corporation who like to wheel. Get it? "hackers." I thought it was pretty clever. The club exists only in cyberspace, as a Yahoo! group. That's enough info for you to find them if you're really curious.

So, these people CLAIM to follow the principles of the Tread Lightly organization. But NOBODY in the group seems to be able to figure out what's wrong with this picture:
Here we have some idiot on an OBH run who decides that the approved 4WD trails aren't good enough for him; he has to make his own. So he's churning up a bunch of mud during a high-runoff period, destroying the vegetation that is under the water, and increasing the siltation downstream (which happens to be a blue-ribbon trout stream).

Can anyone see what's wrong with this picture? Jeez, I didn't think it was rocket science.

So, the person who took this picture puts it on her web site, and gets a NASTY email from a forestry official a few months later that basically rips her a new asshole. She claims to be a member of Tread Lightly. In fact, I think she's claiming to be some kind of an offical. AND SHE CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHAT'S PISSING OFF THE FORESTRY GUY!

Jesus Christ.

So a bunch of the Bush Hackers, none of whom seem to have Clue One about "what's wrong with this picture," start sending emails to this forestry guy and his superiors, griping about his "unprofessional behavior" and trying to get him to tell them just which photos on the above-referenced Web site he finds offensive.

Jesus Fucking Christ.

He never replied to any of them. Neither did any of his superiors. Now they've got their panties all in a wad about how the Forestry officials are having to close roads and reduce other services because so much of their budget is going to repair the kind of damage shown in the photo above.

Jesus Tittyfucking Christ.

And I'm sitting here wondering just what kind of an organization I really joined, in which no one seems to be able to figure out what the hell's wrong with the picture.

I thought they were nice people. I actually believed the bullshit about the Tread Lightly thing. But they don't have Clue One what Tread Lightly actually MEANS: they only give it lip service because it makes them LOOK good.

I've gotten in trouble for this before, and I'm sure I'll get in trouble for it again, but I don't give a tinker's dam what something LOOKS like. I care what actually IS. And these people are phonys.

Tread Lightly my ass. I wonder what the Tread Lightly officials would think of this if they saw it?

Ken
WWJD -- What Would John [Galt] Do?