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.

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.

Anger! Obscenities!

USA Today headline: "Across USA, wave of anger building over gas prices" (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-02-gas-prices-cover_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA)

Well, I'm starting to get angry too. Not about the prices so much, even though I should be. They're a disgrace. But anyone with half an education could have/should have seen this coming, and getting angry isn't going to change any of the facts. It's not rocket science; it's plain and simple economics. Unfortunately, no one learns economics in school any more -- and for that matter, no one learns critical thinking skills either.

So now we three-dollar-per-gallon gasoline, and people are screaming their heads off about it. The U.S. economy grew at an unbelievable annual rate of 4.8% in the last quarter, factory orders are up far more than anyone expected, and the service sector is booming. While the employment figures are not in yet as of this writing, they are expected to show that about 200,000 new jobs were created in the same period.

And people are screaming their heads off over gasoline that costs, after factoring for inflation, no more than it did in the 1980's. Now politicians are pandering to angry voters, promising what they can't deliver while doing everything they can to make matters worse; journalists and pundits are pointing fingers of blame all over the place (except, predictably, at the actual source of the "problem"); and a whole bunch of ignorant consumers are blaming the oil companies for <gasp> actually [caution: obscene word coming] making a profit!!

And now, to top it off, we now have ten attorneys general -- who apparently don't understand either economics OR the Constitution -- suing the Bush administration for not doing enough to screw things up even worse. In at least one of those states (New York), the AG is currently running for Governor. Hmmm, there can't actually be any pandering to angry voters going on now, can there? Oh, no... I'm sure that Mr. Spitzer is <cough> honestly doing his best to <cough cough> help the poor people of New York. Why, I'm sure he's just as honest as any other Democra... <horrible gagging noise>.

You cannot repeal the laws of science. Pass all of the stupid laws you want, and the Earth will keep spinning on its axis, water will continue to boil at 100° C (at sea level, of course), and, in obstinate defiance of diversity, triangles will continue to contain only straight lines.

Gasoline, and the raw materials from which it comes, is a commodity that is bought and sold in a competitive market. There are many suppliers: no monopoly controls the prices and there is no evidence of any shadowy collusion among the oil companies to control the prices either. Its price is determined by the market. Period.

Now, when you have a commodity that is in short supply, its price goes up. When you have a commodity for which demand increases, its price goes up. If you want prices to go down, you must either reduce demand or increase supply. This is pretty basic stuff.

So, the demand for fuels is up because the economy is doing better. That's not bad news, it's good news. And the supply... well, the same people who have been screaming the loudest about the high prices -- and even blaming the current President for them -- have done everything they can over the last 30 years to LIMIT the supply.

We have oil in Alaska. Lots of it. But the same people who are bashing the President -- for a problem THEY have spent the last 30 years creating -- continuously block every environmentally-sound effort to extract it. We also have oil off the coast of California -- but it's the same story. Environmentalists blocked efforts to drill for it decades ago, and now it's somehow George Bush's fault that we have high gasoline prices.

There hasn't been a new refinery built in this country for more than thirty years. But I don't suppose that has anything to do with the Law of Supply and Demand.

You would think that anyone with an education would be able to figure this stuff out. Instead we have people blaming the oil companies, blaming the President, blaming anyone but themselves -- for a problem that anyone with half a brain could see was going to happen someday.

And the stupidity goes on and on. Any time the oil companies [caution: obscene word coming] make more money than what someone thinks is "appropriate", we have politicians promising to take it away from them. Now, anyone who thinks he has a right to decide for someone else how much money s/he should be allowed to make -- really IS obscene.

But we still have politicians who think that they can persuade the oil companies to find and produce more oil by taking away their money when they make "too much" of it. Jimmy Carter tried that in the late 1970's with his "windfall profits tax" that caused domestic oil production to plummet. And the politicians think that this time around, they'll get different results? Isn't making the same mistake over and over, and expecting different results, the definition of "stupid"?

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?