We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I don't know who Palin's speechwriter is — and, for all I know, she writes them herself — but whoever it is, he or she is just terrific. Practically every third line in her CPAC speech was like something out of a book of Great Conservative Quotes.
Here Ted Cruz, like a good Texan; he comes to town, he chews barbed wire and spits our rust.
No, it's not about the bad guys, it's all about the lead, like solely that chunk of metal did the crime. That's like saying, solely that fork made me fat.
And background checks? Yeah, I guess, to learn more about a person's thinking and associations and intentions? More background checks? Dandy idea, Mr. President. Shoulda started with yours.
Remember 'No Drama Obama'? If only. Now it's All-Drama Obama. We don't have leadership coming out of Washington. We have reality television.
Whether it's green energy or free Obama phones — or prophylactics — if you don't have a team of lobbyists in D.C. or a cancelled campaign contribution check, well, you're not at the table. You're on the menu.
It was about then that she took a sip from a Big Gulp and brought down the house.
I suppose a lot of politicians use the phrase "we, the people" in their speeches, but the only two politicos who I ever believed actually meant it were Teddy Roosevelt and Sarah Palin.
Man, that article is interesting. Look at the room that thing's in. Linenfold wainscot. Looks like oak. You might already know this, but wainscot means the side of a wagon -- a wain. Pitsawn lumber was hard to come by, so joiners would split green oak to make lumber for everything. Eventually the split wagon sides started getting nailed on the lower half of the walls indoors. They'd carve the panels inside the frames to look like an open book, or a piece of linen, folded up. It was considered barbarous after a while, (gothic) so only the oldest houses in England had it, until it was revived three hundred years later or so. Neato.
Unlike today, if tech companies were generally run by conservatives, the liberal MSM would treat this like the Scandal Of The Decade.
As it stands, I can almost guarantee you this will be the only time you'll hear of it.
Enjoy the moment.
So to speak.
The other day, a commenter in one of my global warming articles (I wouldn't want to mention any names, but his initials are Z.A.C.H.R.I.E.L.) and I were discussing the issue and I asked him if some of the stuff coming out of the AGW debate wasn't just a little bit embarrassing for his side.
Me: How about the EPA declaring your breath is a toxic gas?
Z.A.C.H.R.I.E.L.: Animal respiration is carbon neutral.
Now, I will admit that he's half-right:
The intake part of your breath is carbon neutral.
But the exhalation? As every good-thinking, earth-hugging person knows, your exhalation is a deadly planet-killing toxic gas, verified by the greatest and most impartial collection of scientists on the planet, the respected (some might even say revered) Environmental Protection Agency.
So, wishing to fortify my point with a link, I cruised over to Google and did a search for "your breath is a toxic gas epa".
I came up with zip.
In the first 20 hits, I didn't come up with one article mocking how the EPA had just turned breath into a toxic gas. It was nothing but how bad, bad, bad that evil CO2 is for all living creatures and how the EPA is the only thing standing between you and being boiled alive by an angry rising sea.
Thinking this a tad strange, I went over to Bing and tried the exact same search. In the first 10 hits:
The next 10 hits yielded another three articles along the same lines, which is about what I had originally expected. Given the formidable opposition, getting 3 out of 10 links is probably doing pretty good.
Okay, so what about Google? Would you like to guess how many articles Google displayed before linking to an article that even remotely criticized the EPA's ruling?
It is a mystery as to why Planned Parenthood seems so much in favor of single teens raising children. Seems obvious to me that the "root cause" is kids having sex and not going to Planned Parenthood. One quote from MacDonald:
Even were it the case that poverty indeed causes teen pregnancy, crime, or any of the other destructive behaviors that the advocates claim are economically determined, surely it is better to tell children and teens that they have the power to determine their own fate through hard work and self-control, rather than sending the message that society expects them to fail.
The gun-control activists drew the wrong lesson from Newtown as they drew the wrong lessons from WW2 and September 11. The lesson is not that weapons are bad, the lesson is that people in the grip of evil ideas are capable of unimaginable horrors regardless of the tools at their disposal. A single man can kill a classroom full of children with a gun and a few men can kill thousands with a few box cutters. It isn’t the tool that matters. It’s the man.
Under Obamacare, more and more doctors are becoming employees of large hospitals, where there will be more control over how they practice medicine. Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Dr. Scott Atlas fears this will cause a brain drain in medicine. "Really smart people want autonomy, and when you take that away it's naive to think you're going to get really bright people becoming doctors," says Atlas. "The best doctors could excel at any profession, so why go into medicine if they won't have the opportunity to be their best?"
The people interviewed practice the same way I, and plenty of my colleagues, practice. No insurance, and thus no back office staff and low overhead. No boss, practice exactly the way I want to as I decide with my patients.
The Cruelty of the Hook-Up Culture - At least one Duke University staff member is acutely aware of the problems of casual sex on campus.
First World Financial Problems: Do college or retirement savings come first? How much of my huge cash stockpile should I spend while working on a startup?
Although curbing obesity is the official rationale for restricting beverage servings, the city planned to make exceptions for drinks that have more calories per ounce than soda, such as fruit juices, milk shakes and beer. The exemption for milk-based beverages meant that Starbucks customers could order, say, a Venti White Hot Chocolate with whole milk and whipped cream (640 calories) but not a venti black coffee with four teaspoons of sugar (60 calories). A 20-ounce Coca-Cola, which the city would ban outright from food service establishments, has 243 calories.
“Do you think if you raised people so that you make a school counselor to available to them in cased they’ve been traumatized by someone who was nibbled a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun — do you think if they’re ever called upon to get out those ships and the storm the beaches of Normandy, do you think they’re going to be up to that? ‘Oh no look, the Germans, they’re all holding Pop Tarts! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!’ No society can survive this level of stupidity. These small things are not small. They tell you a lot about the institutionalized stupidity of our institutions.”
Pop tarts worry me because you never know what they might be loaded with. Strawberry jam is dangerous.
Government is failing spectacularly at its core functions, such as budgeting and educating. Yet it continues to multiply its peripheral and esoteric responsibilities, tasks that require it to do things for which it has no aptitude, such as thinking and making common-sense judgments. Government nowadays is not just embarrassing, it is — let us not mince words — inappropriate.
First off, a commenter (I wouldn't want to mention any names but his initials are Z.A.C.H.) made a very good suggestion in my AGW post the other day.
According to him, belching volcanoes lower the earth's temperature. This, despite hearing about the dreaded 'greenhouse effect' for the past 50 years.
This esteemed commenter noted that it's estimated when Mt. Pinatubo blew its stack back in '91, the planetary temperature lowered by 1/4 degree.
By implication, then, he was suggesting that we nuke a number of volcanoes, causing them to belch their mightiest into the atmosphere, thereby saving the planet from immolation because of your neighbor's SUV. At 1/4 degree of cooling apiece, I figure about a dozen of them should hold things off for at least a few decades, then we can set off a few more should the need arise.
The commenter raised the issue of having to breathe all that volcanic dust, but I quickly pointed out that (1) at least volcanic dust was natural and organic, as referred to smog and smoke, and (2) breathing volcanic dust was scientifically proven to be better than melting.
As it turns out, though, we're all wrong on this direst of subjects. Me, I've got 8,144 words spread over twoarticles that's about to get flushed down the toilet because of what I just found out.
Almost every major news site carried this story yesterday, some of them right at the top.
Before we get to the big surprise, though, let's first attack this piece like any AGW screed, just for old time's sake.
It begins:
Global warming has propelled Earth's climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest -- in just one century.
Decades? Decades?? Judging geological climatology by decades is like judging how your day went by evaluating one minute. When you're speaking in global geologic terms, 'decades' are irrelevant.
Ice age? Pardon me? Although it eventually earned the sobriquet Little Ice Age, it only covered a few hundred years, hardly a geologic 'age' by any definition. Slight Cooling Trend Period would be more accurate.
And, if we're admitting the Little Ice Age existed, then doesn't that indicate that the temp must have dropped pretty far for it to have earned such a lofty title? Might this extra-warm period it dropped from be the Medieval Warm Period? But, if so, then why was it missing from Prof. Mann's infamous 'hockey stick' graph that so swayed the Kyoto delegates?
And wait, didn't it say this is just one of the century's hottest decades? You mean, there were other hot decades in the distant past — like the Dust Bowl 30's — but without an SUV or coal plant in sight?
And that was just the first sentence of the article.
But, rather than continue in this vein, let's get right to the facts of the matter.
I guarantee you'll be stunned.
If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according to the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University.
So, to sum up, SUV owners should be thanked for helping to save the planet. Remember, without them, as the article clearly states, it wouldbe getting even colder right now, with Florida projected to be the last state with unfrozen summers by 2060. See accompanying picture for specific details.
As usual, Maggie's Farm has some suggestions on how you, too, can fight the impending menace of Natural Global Cooling:
— Let your car sit there idling whenever you're not using it. This might cost you a few bucks in gas, but what price, saving the planet?
— Buy some cows and feed them lots of baked beans to encourage high methane output. Methane, remember, is 21 times better at saving our planet than mere CO2.
— Start a campaign to bring back the SST. Because of the ultra-high altitudes it flew at, it was estimated that it did hundreds of times more damage to the upper atmosphere than regular commercial airliners. Put another way, and with what we've learned today, the higher up you go, the more help CO2 can offer.
— If the SST project seems a bit daunting, you can do the same thing from the comfort of your own back yard. Merely start a compost pile, then collect the resultant methane, pump up large weather balloons with it and release them. Once they hit max elevation and pop, you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done. While they cost a bit more, get the ones that don't pop until they hit 50,000 feet as they're deemed to be much more effective than the 30,000-foot model when it comes to preventing the current ice age that's threatening to engulf us all.
The latest scientific results are in, folks. We're literally fighting for the survival of the planet and it's up to each and every one of us to do our part in staving off this menace.
If you won't do it for yourself, do it for the children.
As we often mention here, the (eventual but inevitable) global cooling is a far greater threat than any global warming. The most recent glacial insursion had Manhattan Island under a mile of ice.
Jeff Daniels, from the TV show The Newsroom, lists out America's standing in the world in a few choice categories. (language warning in effect)
I loved the comment about angels. One of my sisters-in-law believes in them. (Or is it fairies?)
Of course, all of the above could be easily dismissed as 'So what?'. Okay, friggin' Uganda beat us in math. So what? It doesn't make any difference. The only bottom-line question is, would you rather live here or in Uganda?
And there's one facet of life that America's so good at that there's not even a second place:
Weather.
Because our one big mountain range is placed exactly where it is, slightly off to one side, our continent has the vast Food Belt in the center, and on the outside of the eastern coast runs the Gulf Stream current, protecting that side of the continent with a belt of warmth. On the west coast, the Sierras and Cascades act as a buffer, keeping the worse ravages the Pacific has to offer at bay.
In South America, the mountain range is too near the coast, so you end up with very little habitable land on one side and lots of barren or swampy nothingness on the other.
The Eurasian continent is simply too big and is becluttered by large mountain ranges, and what little 'food belt' there is lies in some of the poorest, most underpopulated, underindustrialized countries on the continent, the ex-Russian -stan states.
So, when it comes to a nation's overall weather — you know, the stuff you actually have to live in — ours is so bountiful that, as I said, there's not even a second place.
Funny how lucky Lefties always get with their investments. Everybody still wonders how Harry Reid has $10 million after a life in "government service."
Of course, since the subject is global warming, I suppose I wax redundant.
As you know, every storm, drought, plague, meteor shower, volcanic eruption and earthquakian upheaval is because of your neighbor's SUV. Curse his ragged hide.
This is especially true with large storms, the perfect example of which would be SuperstormSandy, she of the Category 1 level — the lowest hurricane level — with some meteorologists claiming it had dropped down to Tropical Storm level by the time it actually hit land.
The only reason New York City had all the flooding was because Sandy (1) hit at high tide, (2) hit right as there was an extra-large low pressure area out to sea, allowing the tide to rise even higher than normal, and (3) the fact that NYC had been hit by two storms even larger than Sandy in the previous 100 years, both times the sea wall had been breached with the resultant massive flooding, yet they never did anything about it.
In the meantime, how much money has NYC spent on 'green' measures because of the peril of global warming? True; it, too, is supposed to breach the sea walls, but over the course of a century — not the two hours it took Sandy.
This week's example of global warming run amok was Snowquester, the largest, meanest, baddest storm that global warming run amok has yet produced!
So did all the schools. The AGW advocates, however, were thrilled, and were halfway through writing their next article citing Snowquester as just a sign of things to come when the bad news struck.
What the article doesn't mention is that the popular Indonesian volcano is probably belching more CO2 into the atmosphere every half-hour than mankind has over its entire existence.
There's a fairly interesting documentary out there called Microcosmos. It's a flick on the world of bugs, a subject I've always been interested in. To all the bugs I inadvertently killed by placing them in glass jars to study when I was a kid — sorry about that. Shit happens.
The documentary did, in one way, set itself apart from your usual documentary fare.
Here's what the narrator says at the beginning:
A meadow in early morning, somewhere on earth. Hidden here is a world as vast as our own, where the weeds are like impenetrable jungles, a stone's a mountain, and even the smallest pond becomes an ocean.
Time passes differently here. An hour is like a day, a day is like a season. And the passing of a season is a lifetime.
To observe this world, we must fall silent now, and listen to its murmurs.
Those are the last words spoken for over an hour.
Herewith I present ten of its more magical moments.
That Damned Interdimensional Barrier
At least, if you're a bug.
Here are four scenes dealing with that dreaded interdimensional barrier — at least, if you're a bug — known as adhesion or surface tension. In the first one, while it probably just looks that way, it appears the ant is having trouble penetrating the bead of water. Yet, in the next scene, the ants are lappin' away around the ol' water hole like a herd of buffaloes.
That brings us to the third part and one of everybody's favorite critters, the water skeeter. Now here's an animal that knows how to use adhesion to its advantage.
But the fourth scene poses something of a question. If the water skeeter is using adhesion to its advantage, what are these guys using? Reverse adhesion?
By recreational drugs, I mean everything from pot to crystal meth and heroin.
They are all readily available on most streets in the US (but at far-above free market prices despite being free of sales taxes) and are widely popular. I find it difficult, from a libertarian point of view, to make a continuing argument for our Federal ongoing, attempted but failed prohibition. If some people want to live in a haze for a few hours - or all the time, why not (as long as I do not have to support them)?
In a free country, having things be legal does not mean that you condone them morally, spiritually, or in any other way. Adultery is not illegal, and neither is devil-worship nor alcohol abuse. Recreational drugs used to be legal in the US, and I doubt there were more social problems with them back then. Maybe less, because when they were not illegal they were cheap. Are any of our readers old enough to remember when there was cocaine in Coke?
Funnily enough, now a Large Coke without coke is illegal in New York. Crazy world in which it is easier to buy cocaine in front of the minimart than it is to buy a Big Gulp inside.
What's your opinion?
Just don't make the argument that "It's bad for people." That will not fly, because driving is dangerous too. So is mountain-climbing.
Please review the debate in comments before commenting. Pretty good debate.
Burning fossil fuels is
Unlike today, if tech companies were generally run by conservatives, the liberal MSM would treat this like the Scandal Of The Decade.
Fatal Distraction: Teen Drivers And Passengers Are A Deadly Mix
How to win 
The Obamacare Revolt: 
First off, a commenter (I wouldn't want to mention any names but his initials are Z.A.C.H.) made a very good suggestion in my AGW post the other day.
Some Ivy League Students 
As you know, every storm, drought, plague, meteor shower, volcanic eruption and earthquakian upheaval is because of your neighbor's SUV. Curse his ragged hide.
By recreational drugs, I mean everything from pot to crystal meth and heroin.