I knew liked her

Gretchen Wilson says, enough with the "animal rights" stuff. Why don't you go protect the humans for a change, hippies!





~

Giant Forehead smack!

I TOTALLY forgot about Earth Hour.

Dang.

I was all ready to douse a tree in gasoline and set it on fire and everything.

Italians don't really do environmentalism. It's kind of an Anglo obsession. Italians are too busy having a great time buying new cell phones to go along with the cynical, self-loathing luddism we so love to indulge in. Or maybe it's just that they aren't yet "sophisticated" enough to start feigning hatred for the wealth, comforts and conveniences we Anglos love to complain about. It's not that long since Italy was basically an agrarian peasant society, so, you know, they're still having fun with all this cool new digital stuff and aren't yet cool enough themselves to pretend they hate it.

Blazing Cat Fur reports that the PC festival of white/western self-loathing is starting to pale a bit, even close to its sources in Tranna.

I wonder how much "earth" was saved by Japan not having basically any electricity, indoor plumbing or infrastructure these days. Someone, maybe Obama, should send them a little thank you note for their contribution to saving the environment by sleeping outdoors in plastic shelters in March and eating tinned food scrounged from the wreckage of their homes, cooked over campfires made of the debris of civilisation.

A model for us all...


Update: Dang, I see Ezra has already made that point.

Mine was funnier though.



~

The Environutters have acquired a new convert

In response to their Go Green or We'll Blow up Your Kids campaign,

Osama bin Laden has expressed concern about global climate change and flooding in Pakistan, in an audiotape aired on the Internet, his first public remarks since March, a monitoring group said Friday.

“The number of victims caused by climate change is very big… bigger than the victims of wars,”...

"...So it looks like I've got some catching up to do..."



~

No pressure

It looks like the Environutters have outed themselves.

Believe it or not, this video was made by an environmental outfit trying to convince people in a "funny" way to get involved in "carbon control".

It has caught quite a bit of flack, with, apparently, people writing in saying they are so horrified by the video that they won't give them any more money.

It's too bad really, because in one of those little fluke things, the video really has revealed what the whole "carbon emission" "global warming" panic attack has really always been about.

But hey, you don't have to take our word for it...



~

I'm afraid you have a dire case of emotional manipulation

Interesting.

I have just been informed that the Population Research Institute has issued another video cartoon explaining their stand that the world is in fact in imminent danger of being seriously underpopulated. I think these videos are a very effective project. They give the facts, the numbers, and encourage people to think about things.

This approach (facts and thinking) seems to contrast sharply with the work of the population control movement/enviro-nutters who tell us that the reason the cute polar bears are falling of those shrinking ice floes is that there are too many (brown) people being born. And no, it doesn't have to make sense. What are you, some kind of thinky person? Don't you have a soul?

Oh, and by the way,

Shut up.

Let's compare, shall we?


We start off with a rather eerie drama in which a husband gives a huge electricity bill to his pregnant wife. She asks, apparently despairing, "Oh no! How will we have enough left to feed the children now?" (all of whom are crying...see, babies cry all the time, right? That's why no one likes them). Then a parade of greyish zombie-babies is crawling along a landscape of ugly new powerplants, which gout smoke and make the world generally nasty. This is followed by a depiction of a crowd of Chinese people on top of the Great Wall. The crowd is so huge, we are led to believe, that there isn't enough room to stand on the Wall, so people are asphixiating and falling off. The scene switches to a picture of penguins falling off calving icebergs and into the hostile freezing cold water (poor little penguins...much cuter than babies!). Then, somewhat inexplicably, a group of people (old people, I note) are locked in a burning house.

Observe also that there is no narration. No explanation or documentation is offered. These are merely images, literally cartoon versions of the propaganda slogans that have been offered by the population/eco-loonies to argue that we should have more abortion and to which we are expected to respond emotionally. But of course, any presentation of the facts of any of the situations being symbolised by the cartoons would be a bit of a problem for the sloganeers.

So let's stop for a moment and examine the claims.

First: "As long as humans keep reproducing, the demand for power will outstrip the supply. We'll have to keep building power plants that cause all kinds of environmental degradation."

Sed Contra, the world's power consumption is being met. People are clever little monkeys and usually solve problems like this without too much trouble. That's why we pay engineers so much money. Power plants that burn coal no longer produce sulfuric acid, for example. Acid rain is a thing of the past. Same goes for the food production problem that so exercised the mind of Thomas Malthus. You will note that, despite the hysterical shrieking of Paul Erlich, the world did not die of hunger in the 1970s. I was there, and I remember eating things just fine. The solution was what we now call the Green Revolution. People thought up clever ways of solving the food production problem.

Second: "See? China is horribly overpopulated and if we don't cut back our baby-making activities, we're going to end up like them."

This one is just silly. In the 1970s, the Chinese Commie government bought the whole "population=poverty" line that was then the favourite slogan of the Malthusians and decided that they would control their population by force 'cause that's the way to get things done in Commiethink, saves so much money and time that would otherwise be wasted trying to convince people to go along. So they instituted the One Child policy. Any woman, in their extremely regulated and watched society, who showed up to work pregnant without a license was, ahem...shall we say "urged" to report quickly to the "family planning agency" to get the problem looked after. Those babies who were born illicitly were often killed by state family planning agents looking to their own careers and necks if they allowed violations to go unaddressed. (This also made it possible for the state to eliminate the problem of Down's syndrome and a few other congenital trouble-spots. A Chinese obstetrician told a visiting American doctor that there really was no problem with Down's in China: "Those ones don't make it out of the delivery room".)

The only trouble, from the Commie point of view, is that now they have gone through 40-odd years of this, there just really aren't that many young people bringing up the rear. Moreover, sex-selection, made possible by ultrasounds, has given the Chinese a much bigger problem. They've killed off quite a significant percentage of the girls. And, barring unforseen advances in artificial reproduction methods, (which, frankly I don't put past them), you still need women to make your population go.

Now, the Chinese government, about one generation too late, is starting to worry. You've got the inverted pyramid in which huge numbers of old people are going to have to be supported by an ever-shrinking number of up-and-coming young workers.

And to add insult to injury, because the Chinese economy has been so successful recently, and because of the social and cultural changes that have been imposed by the economy-minded government, these young folk have learned that it is more fun to work for themselves, buy all the nice new things, and have a fun life than look after their crotchety old relatives.

They've been very successful westernisers over there, in short.

The Chinese "government" (as it is usually referred to in the media) has rather belatedly realised that they need to encourage people to have more children. I don't suppose they ever thought their efforts to change people's minds would be so successful. In Shanghai last year, officials were dismayed that their public pro-child campaign had been met with opposition from young people who feel that they ought to be allowed to enjoy their lives without the burden of looking after mum and dad. The state does that kind of thing right?

Third: The penguin/polar bear thing.

Uh, guys? Penguins can swim, hey? So can polar bears.

You knew that right?

Did you know that everyone knows that?

Fourth: The old people being burned alive in a crowded house thing.

Actually, I got nothin' here. Just doesn't seem to mean anything. So... ummm....


Aaanyway...

the most interesting part comes at the end. The Sun says to the Earth, "I'm afraid you have a dire case of overpopulation."

The Earth asks the question: "Is there anything you can do?"

The question remains unanswered, and the image of the earth fades leaving a diapered baby with the caption, "We can all help prevent this. Make the Green Choice".

Interesting choice of words there, hey?

What, exactly is being proposed here?

Obviously abortion, but what about the people who are already born?

As I always like to say to people who advocate reducing the world's surplus population, "You go first, Indie," we'll be right behind you.


Compare that video with the one below and see if you can spot the difference.

Spot the difference?

(BTW, did you catch the brief flash of the Spinster Cat-Lady? I laughed, but perhaps somewhat hollowly at that one...)

Cut UK Population by Half to Save Planet

“Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”

So, what are you thinking? Snazzy, high-tech disintegration chambers, or something more old-fashioned, more traditional?


Further proof that everything in life can be understood through the lens provided by either Star Trek or Monty Python.

We were wondering about that...

Everyone's wondering what, exactly, has been causing global warming.

Some have said it is that there are now more MPs in the House of Commons than at any other time in British history. But this localised theory has been scoffed at by those who point out that at the same time, there are fewer and fewer Frenchmen around every year.

It's a mystery.

But now, the Optimum Population Trust has the solution, as Mr. Feschuk points out in Maclean's this week.

But now comes a voice of reason. Now comes the Optimum Population Trust, a British group with the courage to confront the real menace in the fight against global warming — tiny, little babies.

That's right: babies. Don't be fooled by their soft skin and angelic demeanour: cute, adorable babies are destroying the earth!

Straight from the womb, infants are an environmental menace. Almost immediately they begin to engage in profoundly selfish and destructive behaviour, such as exhaling. Plus, the Optimum Population Trust has uncovered shocking evidence that some of these so-called "babies" eventually grow larger and go on in life to do irresponsible things like drink water or exist.

Nature

As I have said elsewhere, nature is not nice. It usually only has one thing on its mind: to reproduce. Nature is mostly trying to eat you or reproduce on you. It will crawl on you with its horrible little legs or sting you with its horrible little stingers, or bite you with its horrible little mandibles.

A mosquito will carry the bot fly eggs, and when it bites the skin, will drop the eggs and they burrow under the skin's surface.

They stay just below the surface to breathe, and the most common treatment is to cut off their air supply with vaseline - so they will crawl out.

Untreated, they can burrow too far down and need to be cut out before they develop into flies.

Contracting the condition is highly unlikely, and the only reported cases are from tropical areas, mainly Africa and South America.

Dr Ron Behrens of the London Hospital of Tropical Diseases sees two or three myiasis patients per month at his clinic, all of whom have returned from tropical areas.

He said: 'It can occur in anyone. A mosquito drops the bot fly's eggs onto the skin. The bot fly doesn't come into contact with the person, the mosquito does it, as a third party.

'The pupae then burrow under the skin - often the scalp, legs or groin area - and feed off it, but stay close to the surface so they can breathe.

'Flies can also lay their eggs on clothing hanging out to dry, so we recommend ironing it beforehand, if you're staying in a tropical area.

Or, alternately, you can be sensible and stay home.

Rachel Carson was right about one thing: nature is not our friend, especially the insects. We are at war with the insects. Where she and I differ, is that I look upon my own species as the good guys and intend that we will win.

Environutters, pagans and thieves

Mr. Carriere seems serious about his return to blogging.

Here he gives strict instructions on what to do on Earth Day.

Manichees, Cigarettes and Hung Pheasant

Vegetarianism, as a philosophy and a religion, has always been something of which I have been naturally suspicious. It could be simply its association with the hippie cults of my youth and childhood. It could be that most of the vegetarians I've met (OK, all of them) have been hopelessly self-absorbed neurotics who seem dedicated to their fantasies.

It could be the arrogance implied by the decision to ignore what is plainly ordered by God, and supported by scripture.

It is also nearly always accompanied by a noxious, dripping sentimentality towards animals and a general dislike of human beings.

John Muggeridge told me that vegetarians, like their near-cousins the animal rights activists, are nearly all utilitarians of varying degrees of fanaticism and that obsessiveness over food is a common trait among liberals. (He also noted that they tend to be petty thieves...liberals, I mean, not vegetarians necessarily. cf: Svend Robinson and the ring. Which stands to reason, come to think of it, since they have little concept of private property or moral restraint.) Liberals are materialists, so it makes sense that they would idolize food.

John noted that liberal vegetarianism is often connected in various ways with a highly ritualistic kind of behavior. Some of them will, for example, eat only the whites of eggs. John's father, he said, refused to buy eggs during the war, insisting on keeping chickens and feeding them a special diet. The upshot was, he said, that in 1945, the family was paying the equivalent of a pound an egg. John's mother Kitty, he said, would not let the children eat the eggs since it was only their father's obsession.

John also noted that this sort of faux-ascetic food obsession is a common feature of certain branches of Protestantism and the esoteric cults that grew from it (notably Mormons). He told me that one of the things that put St. Augustine back onto the right track was his meeting with the leader of the Manichees who insisted on some kind of strict dietary practices that were patently absurd, but I have not looked it up.

The closest thing I have seen anywhere among the modern Christian apologists on the vegetarian heresy is C.S. Lewis, writing long before the ascendancy of hippie culture, who wrote about the type of gluttony identified by Thomas as the gluttony of delicacy. As such it falls into a much broader category of vice that would have to include any behavior, such as dieting, that grows to replace and contradict true religion. It is, in short, making an idol of both the body and food. An obsession that will, if allowed to grow, finally encompass every aspect of one's life.

This has largely been effected by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy, not gluttony of Excess. Your patient's mother, as I learn from the dossier and you might have learned from Glubose, is a good example. She would be astonished - one day, I hope, will be - to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the fact that the quantities involved are small.

But what do quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and palate to produce querulousness, impatience, uncharitableness, and self-concern? Glubose has this old woman well in hand. ... She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sigh and a smile "Oh, please, please ... all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast."

You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before he, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is practising temperance ...; in reality ... the particular shade of delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the sight of more food than she happens to want.

The real value of the quiet, unobtrusive work which Glubose has been doing for years on this old woman can be gauged by the way in which her belly now dominates her whole life. ... Meanwhile, the daily disappointment produces daily ill temper: cooks give notice and friendships are cooled. ...

Now your patient is his mother's son. ... Being a male, he is not so likely to be caught by the "All I want" camouflage. Men are best turned into gluttons with the help of their vanity. They ought to be made to think themselves very knowing about food, to pique themselves on having found the only restaurant in the town where steaks are really "properly" cooked. What begins as vanity can then be gradually turned into habit. But, however you approach it, the great thing is to bring him into the state in which the denial of any one indulgence - it matters not which, champagne or tea, sole colbert or cigarettes - "puts him out," for them his charity, justice, and obedience are all at your mercy.

Although Uncle Jack does not specifically mention it, it is easy to see how vegetarianism falls into this category, both with the "all I want" camouflage and the vanity of being a knowing fellow with both superior knowledge and virtue to the ordinary meat-eating run of man. An easy door, come to think of it, into the particularly noisesome vice of gnosticism.

What made me think about it today?

Reading a thin book by Alice Thomas Ellis, Unexplained Laughter, in which one of the characters, Beuno, is studying for the Anglican ministry. He brings the two ladies who are the main characters a pheasant that has been killed by the side of the road.

Betty, the sweet, ordinary and rather silly one who lives in London but dreams of rural idylls and wants to be a vegetarian, takes it and strokes its beautiful plumage and mourns. Lydia, the caustic journalist, wants to hang it for a week then eat it:

"Betty regarded it with a mixture of pity, admiration, mistrust and disgust. 'Poor thing,' she said. 'It was so beautiful. How do you know a car killed it? It might have died of disease.'

Beuno [the real Welsh countryman] swung it up to eye-level. 'It doesn't show much sign of injury,' he said...

Lydia took it from him. 'It doesn't look ill to me,' she said. apart from being dead. Its feathers look remarkably healthy.' She jiggled it up and down. 'Nice and heavy for the time of year.'

...

'I think you should just bury it,' said Betty, and Lydia did see what she meant, for human death was attended with such ritual and dispatch that for an instant it seemed cruelly perverse to deny something similar to this helpless creature.

'If you like, I'll bury his bones,' she said. 'After I've boiled them for stock of course.'

...

'People turn to vegetarianism when the spirit fails,' said Beuno, not to anyone in particular. Nevertheless Betty looked hurt.

'They are in search of purity, perfection,' he continued, '-the perfection of the body - while within the spirit rots and withers from neglect, and without the threat of doom trembles on the edge of possibility. Exercised, massaged, bathed and pampered, carefully fed as a prize marrow, the body is an empty shell flaunted in the face of catastrophe.'

...

Later, discussing Beuno's natural talent for preaching with his beautiful Welsh voice, Lydia suggests that he could "revive revivalism" and that "People might come to hear you from all over the world".

She says Beuno

"can feed he hungry and comfort the oppressed and visit the sick and bury the dead. And give good counsel, and do it all with feeling, and people will be so amazed they'll positively flock to you. Now, as most of the country's vicars are mad, and waste all their time falling demetedly in love with middle-aged lady parishioners...none of them do anything constructive and that's probably why they're all going mad. And all the bishops do is deny the existence of God and fool about trying tosettle stirkes and infurate absolutely everyone...you could have a lovely time bouncing up and down in the pulpit screaming hellfire."

"So could you," Betty reminded her. "You could go into the Church and fight for the ordination of women."

But it is to be remembered, of course, that Alice Thomas Ellis was a Catholic of a particularly choleric disposition.

Save the humans and the whales?

I ask again, is there, can there be, such a thing as a genuine Christian environmentalism? I'm really just asking the questions here in order to think out loud. I invite anyone smarter than I to answer them, or at least to take the questions I put here and apply some more disciplined thought towards them than I can manage and re-frame them.

I ask again, though, because this, clearly isn't it. If this is all environmentalism is and can be, then the question is answered already. No.

Stephen Harper's prayerful posture and traditional words of commemoration for the lost souls of a barbaric era reveal a sensibility noticeably out of sync with the religion of environmentalism that presently dominates our culture.

The contrast was illuminated in the coincidence of Mr. Harper's expression of reverence for human life with the contempt for human life displayed by Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society chief. In reaction to the March 29 maritime deaths of four seal hunters, Watson declared the deaths of seals a "greater tragedy."

Publicly discomfited, Green party leader Elizabeth May resigned from the advisory board of Sea Shepherd, but tellingly (rather like Obama with his racist pastor, Jeremiah White) wouldn't distance herself personally from Paul Watson. As a faithful adherent to their mutual church -- Our Gaia of all that is Non-Human -- to which she remains fully committed, May elected to stand by Watson for the sake of his "good work."

But what "good work" can compensate for Watson's advocacy of a population-decimating cap of one billion people, or calling human beings "the AIDS of the Earth?"

But I am reluctant to just shrug and leave the questions surrounding the proper care and use of the physical natural world up to the thugs, children, pagans and fools who seem to dominate the issue now.

After about ten years, give or take, activity in the pro-life movement in which my working hours have been taken up with close examination and application of questions of Catholic ethics applied to terrifying questions of life and death, I keep wondering in my off hours where the Christian ethicists are on these other, slightly less dire questions.

I'll agree that when the world is engaged in a global determined slaughter of the innocents, a grisly and macabre determination to continue committing this suicidal crime, it is hard to take a moment to look at anything else.

When the entire medical establishment, heavily backed by education, government and media, are engaged in a massive global slaughter of what are now doubtless billions of totally innocent children, questions about whether we ought to expend public funds creating protected habitats for hedgehogs, seems absurd. When it is no longer wise in many places to send your grandparents to the hospital for treatment of pneumonia, one tends to push the fate of the bittern to the back burner.

But pretend for a moment that we are not doing this.

Before I was a Christian, before I was aware of the other problem, I was terribly exercised about what we then called the ecology.

If I have learned one thing about Catholicism, and questions of ethics, it is that everything, every question that ends with "so what ought we to do, then?" is connected to all the others. Are some of the questions about the spotted owl, whaling, the appropriate use of resources, the dependence on oil and the internal combustion engine...all that stuff that environmentalists go on about, connected in some way to the questions we so-called 'social conservatives' ask? Are the two conversations actually one conversation divided artificially (and I suspect malciously) along an unnecessary ideological line?

I am coming to believe more and more that the divide between 'left' and 'right' in ethics is arbitrary and artificial.

The 'extreme left' has stolen the environmental issues, it is clear. They have invented an entire terminology in which to talk about them, a language that makes all sorts of political and ideological assumptions. It is not possible for Christians to use the language of environmentalism without acknowledging its political foundation. It is one of the ways that any other point of view has been locked out of the issue.

Christianity, that is, orthodox Christianity, has rightly concerned itself with the more urgent issues of the vast conspiracy of murder that is abortion, and its related issues of the destruction of family life (another form of murder). Peter Kreeft has recently identified the two sides in the Culture War as those of Christ and the devil. Fair enough, but we are not in heaven and do not have heaven's perspective. The actual battle grounds on earth seem irrevocably laid down. Christians and their very few traditionally minded allies continue to insist that the issues of whether human beings are being killed by our doctors with the collusion of our governments, is more important than those of habitat destruction.

But is there not some counter point to be made that the 'right' has equally stolen the Life Issues, making it impossible for those on the other side of the divide to talk about them?

Now, I'm not drawing an equivalence between 'left' and 'right' as the terms are commonly used, and often misused. I do not believe, for example, that most liberals are so because they have followed any rigorous process of thought. Most 'liberals' of our time are so because they have never closely examined the proposals. In fact, most 'conservatives' I know started out as brainless liberals, and through an often long and painful process came to opposing conclusions, frequently greatly against their personal preferences. Liberalism is not 'an equally valid worldview'.

A couple of days ago, I wrote to a fellow blogger that, having started out in the same condition of unexamined liberalism of most of my generation, the more I dedicated myself to the pursuit of the Real in Catholicism - the more I rejected the absurd and contradictory articles of 'liberal' or cafeteria Catholicism - the more politically 'conservative' I became. I believe that liberalism in politics as well as religion is a system dedicated to the creation and maintenance of comfortable fantasies. Lies. And I have witnessed many times, most painfully in my own family, what dedication to maintaining a comforting fantasy life can do to a person's soul and character.

So, I do not adhere to the belief that 'liberalism' and 'conservatism' are equally 'valid' political points of view with 'equally valuable' things to say about how we ought to live and allocate our political and economic resources. This idea, apart from being inherently self-contradictory, is itself a liberal belief. It sounds nice and comfortable if it is not examined too closely and allows people to carry on in their fantasies. Lotus for the Lotophagi.

But is there something here we are not getting in this divide?

Is anyone asking if the environmental issues are not in fact merely lesser manifestations of the great evil that is more immediately threatening in the life issues?

That is, are we anti-choice extremists and those environutters actually unwittingly fighting the same war?

No, that is too simple, since the theology of Environutterism is directly opposed to Christianity.

But here's Ted Turner saying something absurd, that there are "too many people using too much stuff" and being mocked gleefully for it. Properly so because he has absurdly concluded that the solution is to kill (and eat) the humans in order to save the humans.

But did anyone else notice that he had the second part right? There may not be "too many people" but there is certainly too much stuff.

It is not malice (well, maybe not entirely malice) that inspires the Environutterists to propose the extermination of the human race, or half the human race, to solve the problems we face. It is disnformation. Call me hopelessly romantic, but I don't believe that the sweet-faced hippie girl from Lancs who was handing out pamphlets on behalf of a Save-the-Gorillas campaign in Chester a few weeks ago, was really a genocidal maniac.

I'm not even convinced that Ted Turner is either. He's quite clearly just making String Noises, garbled recordings of slogans written for him by others smarter, and probably more evil, than himself. He's a puppet, albeit, probably a willing one.

No, I'm not ready to believe that the will of the greater number of Environutterists is bad. As I'm not willing to believe that all the will of my fellow Anti-Choice Extremists is all good (don't forget, I've met them).

Something that makes me think this is the experience I had a number of years ago doing the lobbying for the general election. My job was to phone all the candidates running for every party in every riding in the country and ask them what they thought about the life issues.

To my surprise I found that not infrequently the Greens were also moderately on our side on abortion and euthanasia. They were, like nearly everyone else, even those firmly on our side, dismally ignorant of the issues, but the ill will, the kneejerk bigotry we usually encountered from the more dedicated career politicians in the Liberal party (and Conservatives) was mostly absent. I had a conversation with one of them, a nice family man from Saskatchewan, in which I said, "Don't you know that, being a Green, you're on the left, and that being on the left, you are supposed to be wholly in favour of abortion 'rights' and stem cell research and euthanasia and all that?"

"Well, no one told me," he replied.

I would probably have voted for him myself if I had lived in Deepest Darkest Saskatchewan.

More on this later.

"Intoxicating Vanity"

I said it below, but, naturally, he said it better:

...and the accent is a scream

"Mos' of the people would've daahhd...Naahht doin' it is sooicaahhd...stablaaahhz the paahhpulation..when Ah was bowhn..."



Such an articulate exhortation.

"We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff."

You tell 'em.

It's us! We breathe out too damn much.

Global warming is not the fault of "carbon emissions" or cow flatulence or even volcanoes.

It the damn humans.

So, Ted. You going to be the first to volunteer? Come on now. Do the right thing bro.

You go first. We'll be right behind you.

Climate change, sure, but in which direction?

Right now, shipping daffodils to Toronto is like giving cutlery to a starving man. The Centre Of The Universe just broke its all-time February snowfall record (a real problem in that the municipal emergency shovelling squad/Canadian army has gone to Afghanistan, which not only has a milder climate than Toronto, but less gunplay).

In fact, the entire Great White North has endured a winter straight out of The Day After Tomorrow. Easterners will be digging out until November. Manitobans pine for the balmy days of absolute zero. One of the guys at the TC is a farmboy from Block Heater, Saskatchewan, where it was so cold this winter that livestock dropped dead and nails worked their way out of frozen fence rails. Even the Lower Mainland was hammered with a series of snowstorms that just missed us, flicking our hair like passing blizzard bullets before smacking into Burnaby Mountain.

Career Choice Regrets

Someone on a blog I was just reading posed the question, "Why should we all have become climatologists?"

Easy.

Grants, baby! Grants!

What Christian Environmentalism Isn't

Ok look. I'm all Nature Girl and everything, but for Pete sake, aren't there better things to do with our money and scientific knowledge than create and fit a prosthetic flipper on a green turtle?

I mean, you know, plenty more green turtles in the sea.

She's pretty cute, I'll admit, but that's kind of the point hey? The non-Christian kind of environmentalism seems to mostly be motivated by sentimentalism. "We all really loved her" so we're going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on fitting the cute disabled turtle with a specially designed prosthesis.

If it were me, I'd just eat it.

But I guess that's why I couldn't get a job with PETA.

Sentimentalism about animals, BTW, is a characterisitic of middle class white urban dwellers. The kind who march in support of a "woman's right to choose".

John Muggeridge told me once that in his experience, "animal rights" people, as well as vegetarians, are invariably utilitarians who think that the human species is the one that has no right to be here. It turned out to be exactly accurate. Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, was also well known as an advocate of "animal rights". To him, the animals had rights, but the humans none.

Pertinent also, was the fact that he was one of the first advocates of welfarism.

It was a pretty cute turtle though. Have to admit.

TV Culture Environmentalism

or,

How I learned everything I need to know about Climate Change from Saturday Morning Cartoons.

Hey, remember that Twilight Zone episode where the earth was losing its orbit around the sun (or something) and it was getting hotter and in the end, everybody fried and when the guy woke up he discovered it had all just been a bad dream, but it was just the opposite and the world was moving away from the sun and we were all freezing to death?

The 'climate change" thing reminds me of that, cause it seems like they can't make up their minds which way it's going.

Anyone old enough to remember when we were kids and before environmentalism there was "the ecology" and before "global warming" there was "the coming little ice age". 'Cause see, the industrial pollutants were supposed to be pouring into the atmosphere and making a big sort of smoke cloud thingy that would block out all the sun and all the crops and trees and things would die and we would go extinct...oh, hang on, or was that the dinosaurs?

Anyone else remember the big winter of '78 when we all nodded knowingly and said, "yep, this is it, the start of the Big Freeze, just like that Twilight Zone episode."

And remember when the hole in the ozone layer was going to give us all skin cancer? Wasn't that the point of the closing scene of THX 1138?

And remember when DDT was going to kill all the bugs so the birds that ate them were going to die and we would all get to a "silent spring"?

And remember when the Amazon rainforest was going to be wiped out by slash and burn agriculture and the world's oxygen was going to be depleted and we were all going to be on O2 tanks? Yeah, I think that was in Blade Runner, wasn't it?

I swear that the best movie I've ever seen about climate change was that one where they destroyed New York with a GIANT TIDAL WAVE, man that was GREAT! And then there was this big super-freeze and Bilbo Baggins and the Royal Family got caught in it and the guy froze on the spot like that woolly mammoth they found in Alaska?

Now that was cool.

Yep.

I'm an expert.

I really ought to be working, instead of reading Kathy.