Al Gore's Army

Woody, how could you?

"Plug the damn hole"

Yes, Obama said it. What you don't know is that he was actually talking about Biden's mouth.

TRUTH!

Sanity from the Global Warming Crowd

A recent study in Climactic Change offers one of the most hopeful solutions to the production of green-house gases: Bring the Green Revolution to the earth's great deserts.

Unlike many of the half-baked ideas (in both economics and science) for dealing with emissions, this is one that has a feasible pricetag, and is based on achievable methods.

Moreover, we could learn how terraforming changes ecologies, and how to take long-term incremental steps to revamping bioshperes - information that will come in useful when we look to colonize other planets. So this is a win-win: present help, future progress.

Now if only we can keep the greenieweenies from ruining it.

h/t PhDiva

Hobbit House

My wife thinks I'm crazy for wanting to live under the earth. But I think it makes a lot of sense, ecologically and from a security standpoint. Now that I've seen this, I also have the aesthetic argument wrapped up!Some key points of the design and construction:

• Dug into hillside for low visual impact and shelter
• Stone and mud from diggings used for retaining walls, foundations etc.
• Frame of oak thinnings (spare wood) from surrounding woodland
• Reciprocal roof rafters are structurally and aesthaetically fantastic and very easy to do
• Straw bales in floor, walls and roof for super-insulation and easy building
• Plastic sheet and mud/turf roof for low impact and ease
• Lime plaster on walls is breathable and low energy to manufacture (compared to cement)
• Reclaimed (scrap) wood for floors and fittings
• Anything you could possibly want is in a rubbish pile somewhere (windows, burner, plumbing, wiring...)
• Woodburner for heating - renewable and locally plentiful
• Flue goes through big stone/plaster lump to retain and slowly release heat
• Fridge is cooled by air coming underground through foundations
• Skylight in roof lets in natural feeling light
• Solar panels for lighting, music and computing
• Water by gravity from nearby spring
• Compost toilet
• Roof water collects in pond for garden etc.

Obama-approved Green Car

Wind power for everyone!!!!

I wonder when this car goes on sail....

Food and Sex

This is from today's AP:

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – The West Michigan Whitecaps say they have no plans to put a warning label on an enormous new hamburger they're selling this season — despite a vegan advocacy group's request to do just that.

Susan Levin, a staff dietitian for the Washington-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, sent a letter to the Grand Rapids minor-league team on Tuesday. She's asking that the 4,800-calorie burger be labeled a "dietary disaster" that increases the risk of cancer and heart disease.

The 4-pound, $20 burger features five beef patties, five slices of cheese, nearly a cup of chili and liberal doses of salsa and corn chips — all on an 8-inch bun.

Whitecaps spokesman Mickey Graham says the burger is a gimmick that's being promoted as a very unhealthy menu item.

Here's the warning I suggest:

WARNING: May cause people who think that women have a right to kill a baby to say that you don't have a right to know how heart-stoppingly delicious this burger tastes.

What kills me is that we've turned food into the new sex. Can you imagine the outrage they would have if we asked for warnings on miniskirts? Oh the moral indignity they have when we "puritanical prudes" take offense at the sexualization of our daughters when we complain about the toys they make and the clothes they produce. (BTW, modesty is never really out of fashion.)

(Click on that pic to enlarge - or just take my word for it: they are marketing this as appropriate clothing for a 12-18M and 18-24M old girl. And that's not even the "thongs" I've seen in WalMart!)

Think about it. When was the last time you were accosted for a consumer choice (whether it be a car, an item of food, a television from your local big-box chain store, your pharmaceuticals)? Or maybe not accosted, but scolded by the news reports?

Now...when was the last time you heard people being scolded for having serial sex partners? I remember watching Oprah and Jerry Springer one day. On Oprah, Amy Dacyczyn a.k.a. the Frugal Zealot was talking about wearing second-hand bras and socks and shoes. The audience was totally grossed out - gasping at the disgustitude of this woman. Meanwhile, on Jerry Springer, you have a guy who is sleeping with his girlfriend, his girlfriend's sister, and her cousin. Plus he'd just been caught with the neighbor. And nobody found that "gross." (Oh yeah...he was also jobless, but the men in the audience were hooting him up as though he were somehow a male idol. American idle is more like it.)

We're forging a new set of purity laws in this country that will turn us into Pharisees - hypocrites who make a big deal about paying your mint and dill and cumin tithe, but ignoring the weightier matters of the law. Paul - who had been rescued from hypocritical pharisaism - saw the danger and warned Timothy that in the later times, people will devote "themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons" and "forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth."

(Those who are undermining the intimate ties between sex and family life - marriage and procreation of children - are making marriage a burden, and thus forbidding it.)

Priorities are shifting...but this is nothing that we - the Christian Church - have not faced before. Perhaps we are in the last days of the American Empire. So be it. Read St. Augustine's City of God where he talks about what it means to live as the church apart from the Roman Empire. We'll figure it out...and maybe even see a new era of Christendom from our missionary activities.

Global Lukewarming

Hunter and the Hunted

The Daily Mail reported on a harrowing hunt in Barrow, Alaska.


Apparently, Barrow (Alaska's northernmost town) has a history of these critters getting after folks. I'll bet this guy stands behind his governor's approval of the reducing polar bear population.

But he may have a question about why she didn't gun it down, since she can apparently see a lot from her front porch.


h/t PhDiva

You are what you eat

Apparently, researchers at Oxford University have found out that if you are a vegan you're more likely to become a vegetable in later life.

Of course, one look at the proto-vegetotalitarian could tell you that.



Ooh...looks like the effects are starting early for some EarthFirsters.

So what do we do with Romans 14 now?

The Goracle Flubs Again

He apparently has a new House Boat that he calls Bio-Solar One. He says it's environmentally friendly - run on solar and bio-fuels.

Unfortunately, photographers caught him plugged in to not one, but TWO regular outlets at the marina!


Al is shameless.

He also has him a gas-guzzling sea-doo on the back! As Glenn Reynolds often says: I’ll start acting like there’s a climate crisis when Al Gore does.

Glacier Gladness for Global Madness

The BBC recently reported on some archaeological finds from the Alps indicating fluctuating temperatures over the last 7,000 years. Included were paleolithic artifacts, Roman coins, and Medieval clothing.

I really hope people will take time to listen to history before attempting to abandon a way of life that has produced some of the greatest humanitarian advances of all time.

Loquacious Liberals and Progressive Pottymouth Presbyterians

Matthew Sheffield, a writer for the Poli-Tech side of the Washington Post, experimentally confirms what most folks know from first-hand experience.

Progressives are Pottymouths.

What kills me is how they want to regulate our speech to make it as non-offensive to their pet constituency as possible. But when it comes to standards of relatively-common decency, they can fly off the handle with impunity.

What's worse is when you see it tumbling from the lips of those whose speech should be bound to a higher standard than common decency or the Constitution.

Moving off of fossil fuels

If somebody says that their energy policy is to get us off of fossil fuels, make sure they elaborate step two.

Eat this Malthus

I get criticized by some folks for having a large family (4 boys, 1 girl).

23

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

I'm glad to know, however, that I could easily handly 15 more!

(P.S. Click here if the Malthus reference didn't ring a bell.)

(P.P.S. Click here if Malthus and his claims do make sense to you. This is why I'm not an greenieweenie.)

More Bad News for the Climate Clamorers

The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (headed by homeschool champion Dr. Robinson) has released an updated accounting of their research showing that CO2 is not the devil that the greenieweenies are telling us it is. It has already garnered over 31,000 signatures of American scientists - including nearly 4,000 climatologists.* (Wherefore art thou, consensus?) Draconian measures of carbon emission reduction in science, technology, and industry will do nothing to change whatever is happening in the climate - primarily because that is not the initiator, as ice core samples have shown. RealClimate is hard at work telling us that we should trust them when it comes to the recently announced decade cooling trend (based on their analysis of 50 years data). Ironically, they tell us that shortly after they published a warning not to trust short-term trends in the system. In the scientifically approved timescale for earth's climatic history, that's a pretty short stick. Dr. Robinson's work spans recorded history and delves even deeper.

To my readers in the ecotheology movement, (which takes up everyone from ECUSA to Quakers, religious anarchists and anabaptists, and reminds me mostly of the radical anabaptists of the 16th & early 17th c.) whom I've recently taken to affectionately calling the Collared Greens, I say this: why would you advocate for the destruction of the one thing that has shown itself capable of increasing the quality and quantity of human life (viz. energy affluence)? Even if you think we should lay off the fossil fuels (something I would advocate), why not put your energy into advancing nuclear power? If we hadn't had the environuts scaring us witless about it, we could have saved gigatons of carbon being spewed into the atmosphere - and provided electricity to some of the most remote places on the planet. Electricity means refrigerated food, non-dung-cooked food, medical equipment, and information availability for self-improvement. But no...we're too busy denying the real messiah and playing our own hand at taking his place... uggh!

It's a moral issue for "conservative" Christians, too. This falls squarely within our covenantal stewardship. We just tend to agree with the science over the long term than the stuff that comes from the past 20 years.

Come to think of it, we do that with our theology, too.

*The role of relevant scientific expertise is still a hot-topic when it comes to global warming. (Pun intended.)

Precipitous Climate Change

Unfortunately for the greenie-weenies (the ones who want to strip you of your freedoms under the aegis of representing Gaea) that change is coming in the form of a rapid cool-off of the planet. This is in spite of increased levels of carbon in the atmosphere.

Here's a chart showing the rapid drop:

Why? Some want to say that the anomaly is due to La Nina. Well...that might be part of the answer. But if you really want to see something scary, look at the Sun. It looks like a new-born babe. That's bad, folks. The sun should look like a pimply teenager, dotted with sunspots. And as geophysicist, astronautical engineer, and NASA Astronaut Phil Chapman reports, that's extremely bad news indeed.

An old flame of mine who happens to be a PhD astrophysicist specializing in solar physics has told me that she's concerned about her observations of decreasing solar-magnetic activity. While we had been in an expected cyclical upspike (as documented in Dennis Avery's Unstoppable Global Warming), it's now time to get ready for a mini-ice-age. It's that scary, folks.

Raising a Glass to the Methuen Treaty

What in the world is the Methuen Treaty, you ask? Well, if you haven't googled it, let me tell you: It was a treaty between Great Britain and Portugal. Among its lasting effects were the political solvency of Portugal's colony, Brazil. However, I have precious little interest in that. Rather, I want to get to the meat of the matter...port wine.

You see, France and England were having a tiff and so Englishmen couldn't get French wines. (Remember that England hadn't grown many wine-grapes since the end of the Medieval Warming Period which our global warbling friends refuse to acknowledge.) The Portuguese started exporting their wine to Britain. Unfortunately, it would spoil while in transit. Thus, to reduce spoilage, they began "fortifying" it with brandy and other hard liquor. The result? Port, or course!

I admit that I'm an unrepentant Anglophile, and am particularly appreciative of the little rituals that have grown up around the enjoyment of port. So enjoy a glass and join me in toasting the second day of Christmas with a nice tawny port.

True Colors of the Season

The two colors most widely associated with Christmas (in the Western hemisphere, at least) are red and green. Well, as the guys at Acton keep reminding us, Green is the new RED.


Of course, there's plenty of green to be made by going Green. Al is raking it in since being run out of politics. Hey...jet fuel is expensive, gang. More than that, he needs capital for his start-up cap-n-trade system. And he has to have hush money available for when the scientists start finding serious holes in his Armageddon scenarios. (especially when it's contrary to his "established fact of man-made warming in the last century")


Look...Al is a creative guy. I'll bet that if he wasn't trying to save the world or invent the internet, he could have single-handedly scabbed the Screenwriter's Guild walk-out. But his creativity (er...divinity? PRAISE THE GORACLE!!!) needs to cool it. This global warming nonsense is going to cost developing nations their chance at making the earth a suitable habitat for mankind.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I also hate it when corporations try to pander to Christians with crappy products. They hope that making some relationship to Christianity is going to fuel sales. Unfortunately - as is the case for the minute-ecocrusaders - Christians are in lines waiting to hand their green over for the pap as well. sigh....

Getting Hitched to the Greens

Churches around the country spent last Saturday doing what most Rethuglicans would like to do: hanging the Greens. I was out of town, so I didn't get to help. Nevertheless, it's well past time I joined the Green movement. Thus, I've decided to stay married.

It's not that I was thinking about getting unmarried, mind you. It's just that folks have been telling me how awful marriage is for society and and how the number one product of marriage (no, not social stability & financial freedom but children) is so bad for the environment that killing them, then sterilizing yourself is the only moral option left (VERY left).

You see, according to doctors Eunice Yu and Jianguo Liu, divorce is REALLY BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. For instance, divorced households:

• used 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved had household size remained the same as that of married households.
  
• spent more per person per month for electricity compared with a married household, as multiple people can be watching the same television, listening to the same radio, cooking on the same stove and or eating under the same lights.
  
• demanded 38 million extra rooms, with associated costs for heating and lighting (an increase 33 percent to 95 percent greater than in married households).

That means some $6.9 billion in extra utility costs per year, Liu calculated, plus an added $3.6 billion for water, in addition to other costs such as land use. "The research," Liu said, "shows that environmental policy is more complex than one single solution. Governments across the world may need to start factoring in divorce when examining environmental policy." (Read their article here.)

It's long been said that when the scientist reaches the top of the mountain, they'll find that the philosophers and the theologians have been there for quite some time. Thus it should be no surprise to us that God's design for family is consistent with good environmental stewardship. Christians who want to have an impact on society do their best by obeying the great commission, not by licking their fingers and seeing where the winds of change are blowing.

more research here....

Pew Potatoes come from Couch Potatoes

Therapist couches, that is. I was glad to see that I'm not the only one who's had these oddball experiences.