Up until a couple of days ago, I’d never heard of the rare flat-headed cat of Southeast Asia. But to be honest, I haven’t heard of most animals that don’t come with a side of fries and/or hush puppies. That and the fact that the closest I get to Southeast Asia is the Pad Thai lunch truck in the Strip District.
Today, however, I’m so happy to have learned about this elusive creature. because I realize that the flat-headed cat can teach us all a valuable life lesson: namely, that the people orchestrating the green movement are dangerous idiots.
These, of course, are the masquerading Marxists who still prophesy the doom of “global warming” and advocate for draconian energy reduction, even though Phil Jones, former head of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia (from which the warmers got all of their alarmist data) admitted that there has been no global warming in the last 15 years. And that the CRU fudged data. And that they ignored the Medieval Warming Period (500 YEARS of global warming) when depicting how the earth has warmed over the centuries.
Today we learn that their lunacy is about to wipe one critter off the face of the earth. Because, according to nationalgeographic.com, more than half of the flat-headed cat’s lowland habitat is quickly becoming vast biofuels plantations.
You remember biofuels. They’re going to save the planet by replacing fossil fuels, which are the culprit behind the global warming that hasn’t been happening for the last 15 years but actually DID happen for 500 years in Medieval times (which was long before fractional distillation was discovered) no matter how much Phil Jones tries to ignore it.
You remember too, I’m sure, the greens pushing for biofuels like ethanol made from corn. Remember when all of our vegetables went way up in price a couple years ago? That’s because farmers started swapping out other foods to grow corn, the price of which was artificially inflated by new ethanol mandates.
Anyhow, just like compact fluorescent light bulbs, which contain mercury but we all have to start using anyhow because they reduce the use of fossil fuels (but not by nearly as much as once thought, which doesn’t matter because they’re not warming the planet anyway), biofuels have proven to do more harm than good environmentally, given the vast quantities of fossil fuels required to grow, harvest, distill and transport them. To date, however, this has not been enough to dissuade the ecomarxists, who only care about control and money, both of which they’ll get in spades if we adopt their agenda.
Now, given that their nonsense is on the brink of a real and tangible ecological result (the eradication of a species) we’ll see how truly eco-conscious they are. If they do care about the planet, they’ll call for an end to biofuels mandates (but still advocate for research). But don’t hold your breath. Their agenda isn’t environmental. It’s political.
Oh, and just as an aside, if, say, Exxon-Mobile were endangering this cat by drilling in its habitat, do you think the story may have made it to the evening news, the New York Times, NPR and the Washington Post? Yet somehow, this story hasn’t. Interesting.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Latent Anti-Stupid Gene
At some point in your life, you’ll hear (if you haven’t already heard) someone make a crack about the stupidity of the average American. “DFA” (Dumb F*** America) is the slur people often drag out to disparage the great unwashed masses who oppose their latest, greatest idea, opinion, poem, finding, theory, reform or theatrical release.
But Americans aren’t dumb. They may be distracted, misinformed or too busy to get all the facts, But on the whole and as a whole, they’re not dumb. And they recognize dumb eventually. Sometimes, they may even tolerate dumb for a short time. But eventually, they have no time for it and will go to extremes to circumvent it, even if that means breaking the law.
Take Pittsburgh’s West End Circle construction, now in it’s third year. (NOTE: Three years to fix a bottleneck is dumb.) After two-plus years of minor messes in the Circle, City engineers and other geniuses have finally succeeded in creating a mess of impressive proportions. Traffic now backs up an insane distance every day. It’s a design fiasco that is so complete, it could not have been better implemented intentionally.
This has been going on for weeks, and people have been patient. They’ve put up with it for a good long time, even though the magnitude of the mess makes no sense. But at some point, tolerating stupidity is no longer an act of patience or civility or civic duty. Patience becomes an act of stupidity in and of itself.
Today, people lost their patience with stupidity.
Steuben Street heading toward the West End Circle is diverted to one side street that hooks on to the now-lone main drag into the Circle. Problem is, coming up from the West End Valley are at least four other roads that also must now divert onto that same road. Traffic to and on the side street off Steuben backs up for well over a mile. You might expect some police officers there directing traffic to mitigate the morning disaster. There aren’t any. Which is dumb.
This morning, after creeping roughly 100 yards in 30 minutes, people started blowing through a gap in ROAD CLOSED signs on Steuben to find a less congested side road connecting further down the main drag. One car after another after another decided that the designated route was too stupid, too ineffective, too obviously flawed to observe for one more second, traffic laws be damned.
What they did was, technically, break the law – a law that mandates a behavior that is maddening, slow, inefficient and agitating. Some might call that irresponsible, selfish or even dangerous. I call it independent and wholly justified. That fierce streak of independence is in our DNA. It’s the trait brought over by the independent people that founded and built this country. It’s a virtue, a strength, a glaring positive.
It’s good to see that that gene, however latent, can still be awakened. Because with the staggering amount of stupid that’s creeping our way from Grant Street, Harrisburg, Washington and Turtle Bay every day, we’re going to need it.
But Americans aren’t dumb. They may be distracted, misinformed or too busy to get all the facts, But on the whole and as a whole, they’re not dumb. And they recognize dumb eventually. Sometimes, they may even tolerate dumb for a short time. But eventually, they have no time for it and will go to extremes to circumvent it, even if that means breaking the law.
Take Pittsburgh’s West End Circle construction, now in it’s third year. (NOTE: Three years to fix a bottleneck is dumb.) After two-plus years of minor messes in the Circle, City engineers and other geniuses have finally succeeded in creating a mess of impressive proportions. Traffic now backs up an insane distance every day. It’s a design fiasco that is so complete, it could not have been better implemented intentionally.
This has been going on for weeks, and people have been patient. They’ve put up with it for a good long time, even though the magnitude of the mess makes no sense. But at some point, tolerating stupidity is no longer an act of patience or civility or civic duty. Patience becomes an act of stupidity in and of itself.
Today, people lost their patience with stupidity.
Steuben Street heading toward the West End Circle is diverted to one side street that hooks on to the now-lone main drag into the Circle. Problem is, coming up from the West End Valley are at least four other roads that also must now divert onto that same road. Traffic to and on the side street off Steuben backs up for well over a mile. You might expect some police officers there directing traffic to mitigate the morning disaster. There aren’t any. Which is dumb.
This morning, after creeping roughly 100 yards in 30 minutes, people started blowing through a gap in ROAD CLOSED signs on Steuben to find a less congested side road connecting further down the main drag. One car after another after another decided that the designated route was too stupid, too ineffective, too obviously flawed to observe for one more second, traffic laws be damned.
What they did was, technically, break the law – a law that mandates a behavior that is maddening, slow, inefficient and agitating. Some might call that irresponsible, selfish or even dangerous. I call it independent and wholly justified. That fierce streak of independence is in our DNA. It’s the trait brought over by the independent people that founded and built this country. It’s a virtue, a strength, a glaring positive.
It’s good to see that that gene, however latent, can still be awakened. Because with the staggering amount of stupid that’s creeping our way from Grant Street, Harrisburg, Washington and Turtle Bay every day, we’re going to need it.
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