The New Scientist describes 5 “eco crimes we commit every day”; acts of thoughtless decadence that are killing the planet. Are you a climate criminal? Listen to these indictments and decide if you engage in any of these heinous activities.
- Drank coffee. The average cup of black filter coffee is still responsible for 125 grams of CO2 emissions. Of this, two-thirds comes from production and most of the rest from brewing. … The environmental group WWF has calculated that it takes 200 litres of water to produce the coffee, milk, sugar and cup for just one regular takeout latte. So if everyone ditched their pre-work coffee fix that would do wonders for the planet.
- Used toilet paper. The average American gets through 23 toilet rolls each year, adding up to more than 7 billion rolls for the country in total. Of these, just 1 in 50 are from 100 per cent recycled fibres. As Greenpeace pointed out earlier this year, this not only wastes energy and water, it also puts additional logging pressure on old-growth forest in North America, forests which play a vital role in supporting native biodiversity.
- Bought clothes in a store instead of searching through dumpsters for something to wear. This surge in manufacture and consumption has been helped by fast-moving fashion trends and sweatshop price tags. As a result, much of the clothing we buy ends up being discarded long before it has worn out. In the UK, where the average item is worn for less than a third of its useful lifespan, more than a million tonnes of clothing are thrown away each year. The bulk of it ends up buried like woolly lasagne sheets in landfill sites or being used as multicoloured incinerator fodder … Switching to second-hand alternatives could therefore yield some big energy savings and cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
- Washed your clothes. A full load in a washing machine uses around 1.2 kilowatt-hours of electricity per cycle and tumble drying clocks up a further 3.5 kilowatt-hours, resulting in over 2 kilograms of CO2 emissions per wash. … For the largest cuts, simply washing less frequently is the way to go.
- Eaten. US households throw away around 30 per cent of their food, worth $48 billion every year. Similar levels of wastage are seen in Europe. In the UK, some 6.7 million tonnes of food is binned annually. … For almost all the food we buy, the bulk of its greenhouse gas emissions arise here. This is especially true for meat and dairy produce. For example, 40,200 tonnes of milk are wasted each year in the UK, adding up to the equivalent of 40,000 tonnes of CO2. This is comparable to the annual CO2 emissions of 10,000 cars, or of flying 30,000 people from London to New York and back. … Check what you have already got, make a shopping list and, most importantly, don’t do the weekly shop when you are hungry.
In fact, you will probably do the environment the most good if you’re a homeless bum living out of a cardboard box made of recycled short-fiber paper. But even the homeless are not automatically innocent of eco-crime. Even they must be aware of the danger of hurting the planet by say, consuming trans-fatty acids. However sharp the pangs of hunger, even people living on the pavement must never succumb to the temptation to eat unwholesome foods. Fortunately, the authorities are onto this. Metro International describes how New York City regulations now compel the operators of homeless shelters to throw away fried chicken in order to conform to the law.
When a small church comes to the Bowery Mission bearing fried chicken with trans fat, unwittingly breaking the law, they’re told “thank you.” Then workers quietly chuck the food, mission director Tom Bastile said.
“It’s always hard for us to do,” Basile said. “We know we have to do it.”
A Manhattan deli going out of business delivered a pickup truck’s worth of lettuce, sundried tomatoes, hamburgers, sausages and other food to the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen last week.
With 1,400 meals to serve daily, Operations Manager Michael Ottley was extremely grateful. He didn’t check the trans fat content of the food.
There you have it folks. All food providers, including the operators of homeless shelters, are obliged to banish trans-fats. Proof that coffee, toilet paper, clothes, and even food are dangererous substances not to be lightly approached without a prosper political consciousness. Live Green, live clean. How long is another matter for discussion.
embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt
Tip Jar or Subscribe for $5
Well, of course, a soup kitchen will say officially that it rejects gifts of transfat foods, but I hope reality plays out differently.
The zealots run the risk of deadening our sensibilities with overkill. There are some real problems. Why the sudden surge in autism over the last generation. Around here they started spraying for Nile Virus and all the lobsters started disappearing. Connection? Maybe.
I heard an evnironmentalist say he wasn’t sure about global warming, but what a great way to scare Americans awake.
You can cry “wolf” one too many times.
The New Scientist is notorious for being a font of socialist cant and New Age superstition. This kind of lunacy is typical for them.
Of course now that the EPA has ruled CO2 is a pollutant, the people at New Scientist and readers are all traitors to Mother Gaia with every exhale. They should immediately end such an assault.
I will continue to commit these and probably many other “eco-crimes,” especiaaly if the result of the crime is simply production of “excess CO2″ I’m firmly convinced we need MORE, not less, “plant food,” uh, sorry, excess CO2.
This is especially true since the planet is cooling, due to lowered output from Sol. Not a thing any government can do in Copenhagen, to save us from another “little ice age,” if the sun won’t do it’s job properly…
In some religions, members are not allowed to eat pork. In another religion, it is trans-fats.
I believe in fact that as far as they’re concerned if we didnt live we’d do the most good for the environment. But that sort of raises the question about them, doesnt it?
Doing my best to increase my carbon footprint…..
Maybe Al Gore should fly to Kenya and give Obama’s brother an award for living green.
Reads the first line… nearly coughs coffee on keyboard. Yikes! I didn’t have to get far to have my existence ridiculed by some alarmist misanthrope.
In only recent past, being called a “carbonaceous life-form” was considered an insult by the further Alpha-Centarians but less so the nearer ones.
I heard this burbling explanation in the news the other day that “Global Warming” “could” cause increased prostitution because of this enviro-economic chain of events that Rube Goldberg would have to admire. How is it that the “world’s oldest profession” is an emerging man-made catastrophe? Men hold their share of the blame, to be sure, but population trends suggest that it takes two to tango and more to tangle all together.
The news imitates life and grand experiments in squint-eye perception have become mirrors of a collective psyche that is decidedly dark. Could it be that the sermonizers of the right way to think are openly ashamed of their very offspring for the nutrients that they absorb and the chemical processes that they are a part of? Talking about a culture of death, the Climate Cult should get the lifetime nihilist award, I’d rather go bowling.
Who knew the free-speech-movement, do-your-own-thing libertines of the so-called counter-culture would grow up to become such humorless, stick-up-the-butt scolds.
These Luddites are a laughing stock-in-waiting. Ridicule is among our best weapons when confronting these prigs — a relentless, ceaseless towel-snapping at their ludicrous pieties. After all, wasn’t this their approach to dealing with ‘the Establishment’ before they became ‘the Establishment’?
What was it someone once said about having so many rules, so opaquely drafted that one can always be found guilty of something?
It is most remarkable that the AGW nuts, being exposed, have decided to carry on – in effect, to say “Who are you going to believe – me, or your own lyin’ eyes?”
Having had some casual involvement in high-end biology 25 years ago, I’m very interested to see what the editorial boards of Science and Nature are going to do. The implications of this enormous crime against science go far beyond Copenhagen.
It now appears that the computer source code at CRU East Anglia was intentionally constructed to corrupt the output. Although the initial impulse was no worse than other famous frauds like Piltdown Man or the Turk (the chess-playing machine), the ongoing and massive output of fraudulent data, year after year, with the use of top-line journals to publish (and amplify) the fraud takes this beyond anything that has ever happened before.
Leaving aside the political and geopolitical aspects (which are huge), if the lead editors of the involved journals do not demand retraction, an era in science will end. Science cannot continue to exist under a regime of “You have your truth, and I have mine”.
Most of science’s 500-pound gorillas are still sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see what happens. If the warmers are allowed to get away with this, a transformation greater than the Copernican revolution will have occurred. And in our own time!
Like all totalitarian (Fascist) movements, Eco-ism is a social pathology that ultimately gets taken over by sociopaths who use the movement as a cover to commit acts of genocide.
Just another set of examples to illustrate my proposition that post-modern environmentalism is a doomsday cult.
The Christian Millenialists of long ago hated to live in a continent without a universal empire to protect them from advancing Islam (and the more recent ones of the past 140 years hated western decadence), and sought salvation in forms of self-sacrifice to quicken the return of the Christ. Present-day Islamists hate the dominance of western modernism & secularism, and seek salvation in the brutal re-imposition of the Caliphate – and some Shia seek in in the quickening of the return of the Mahdi.
The apocalyptic environmentalist cultists hate the dramatic changes of industrialism and capitalism, follow a mythology and ethical system where humanity’s success over its competition for survival leads to a final karmic doomsday, and seek salvation in the men of science who reveal the sinfulness of our ways and the men of policy who put us in our place alongside the flora and fauna of Gaia.
What has always killed me about the Greenies is their priggish hypocrisy. The feeling that they all seem to have of being entitled to tell the world what to do while failing to do so themselves. AlGore is the most blatant of the crowd but they almost to a man (and woman) are too busy preaching to follow their own precepts.
I am pretty sure that the author of that article isn’t walking around, unwashed, unwiped, hungry and in dirty clothes that he found in a dumpster. In fact I will give five-to-one odds that he works in a heated/air-conditioned, well-lit office that he gets to by driving his car and he probably had a cup of coffee on the way.
Sanctimonious Clap-trap!
I think I will drive my SUV to the coffee shop after I finish washing my clothes and shopping, but hey, it all OK, I have a “Think globally, Act locally” bumper sticker. So I’m cool…..right?
You can have my toilet paper when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Bill
The AGW industry is doubling down. They think you are too stupid to follow the nuance of the story and are counting on the media to continue to carry their water. Gibbs yesterday repeated the same crap about how “everyone” knows that Glowball Warming is happening. The statists have too much invested in the lie to let go now. No scandal or amount of contradictory evidence can convince them that it is all a hoax.
AGW is the Y2K scam, but better. There is no end date.
Are you a climate criminal? Listen to these indictments and decide if you engage in any of these heinous activities.
/Take a bow
“No, no, no. There is no need to thank me for it. Just doing my job (to keep the planet warm).” And to show my extra effort, I will be taking an extra spin or two around town in my suv.
I would warn people to keep away from New Scientist, it is an orthadox leftist rag.
Has covered every base in it’s time, like Scientific American, Science and Nature.
Horror Nucear power eats babies! Man the dreaded destroyer beast, Polution gag, ocean polution double gag and finally the great grand daddy of them all Handsome Al’s Global Warming Three Ring Circus. All the while retaining their insufferable self satisfaction.
Remember how we used to roll our eyes and snort in derision and annoyance at the neurotics and the hyper-sensitive? Well, now these freaks run social policy, lock, stock, & barrell.
As to the whole transfat thing, it was explained — in the NYT no less — that the whole saturated fat health controversy was wildly exaggerated, and was described as being a result of the “cascading effect,” whereby more and more experts would join the bandwagon without vetting the so-called proof. Skeptics were scolded by Congressmen for daring to disagree. As Craig Ferguson would say, “Reeemiiiind yooouuu of ANYONE?”
Throwing away fried chicken meant for the hungry and homeless IS the crime! Those idiots. Oh, and don’t forget that Mega-RINO Michael Bloomberg is the snitty, little-old-lady mayor of that once-proud burgh.
Ancient Pistol Let us condole the knight; for, lambkins we will live.
- Henry V, Act II scene 1
The acolytes of ignorance dance before the idol of their god Moloch to the encouragement of their sleek priests. They tell each other there is intelligence in the stone eyes and they pray that they will be eaten last. Even in that hope they will be disappointed.
The counter campaign is so obvious that it amazes me that the message has not gotten out. Send me the money and I will make posters and plaster them everywhere.
Choose Freedom
Choose to Win
Choose Power
Choose Life
For the bumper sticker: Think Globo, Act Loco
Wretchard,
When I sought building permits for my new country cabin I discovered that the county building department was concerning itself with my home’s energy efficiency. So I asked why. The answer was, basically, to reduce the county’s grid loads in the name of reducing my “carbon footprint.”
My retort was that I am not on the grid. Which suggests at what’s wrong with the globe’s environmental discourse: it presupposes that everyone is “gridded,” and as such, we are all bound unwittingly to some EUrocrat’s collective distribution scheme.
A rural freeman’s option for bypassing the Greens’ presumed overlordism would be to diligently “opt-out” of their collectivized voodoo/sacrifice-scheme by generating his/her own power at home (it’s easy and it’s relatively cheap), and by disclaiming in writing the gub’mint’s role in certifying my private construction.
If you live campused in a blue-state city like Chicago, though, you’re hopelessly trapped in several of these intersecting schemes. Moving will be your best escape.
OT, but…maybe John Kyl can get an “off-grid opt-out” for new home construction thru the Arizona legislature in ’10. Anything that lowers the cost of construction will help spur growth in the building trades. Even the state’s Democrats want that!
Here’s hopin.’
This is so silly. Take one less intercontinental jet trip per year. Trade your Escalade for a Yaris for neighborhood trips, better yet ride a bike or walk. Save 100x the sum of these suggestions.
Take a cold sponge bath instead of a hot shower. Eat cheap gefilte fish instead of whale blubber. Wear recycled cotton clothes instead of sealskin jackets. Sleep on pillows stuffed with shredded newspapers instead of eiderdown.
Multiply anything by five billion people times 365 days, and you get an impressive number, until you put it in context.
Clearly the only answer is to die and somehow not decompose, as decomposing would release greenhouse gases.
Eco-porn:
http://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Us-Alan-Weisman/dp/0312427905/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1259686833&sr=1-1
Politicians everywhere are working feverishly to get documentation of their desire to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING about AGW. They need to act fast!
Why?
So they can take credit for the next upcoming cycle of global cooling!
Whew, that was a close call! THEY almost destroyed the planet!
Politics is such a crapshoot!
I note that one “eco-crime” that New Scientist did not mention was reading magazines. I’m down to only two regular subscriptions and my paper recycling bin is lighter for it.
Ah, Jack Webb. We need you now. “The fact’s ma’am. Just the facts.”
This nonsense reminds me of a long ago article in The New York Review of Books (I’ll look for the exact citation and post it as soon as I find it) entitled, “Man, the Pest.” It argued that everything would be just fine if only mankind could be eliminated.
I’m a psychiatrist by profession and I can’t figure out why humans would want to extinguish humanity with such zeal (unless, of course, they believed that their special elite group would be the only survivors).
Guilty, guilty, guilty on all counts but the last. * pats his spare tire
What a bunch of asshats!
I’m going to consider all this very carefully over a fried chicken lunch, with a nice cup of coffee afterwards.
Personally I find it helps just to sit down for a quiet session of ‘eco visualization’ each day. I just focus my mind on the evil CO2 atoms and imagine them popping and going away like bubbles in the wind. After about 20 minutes of this I can sense the cool breeze whistling through my ears and I feel a burst of joy just knowing that I have helped to heal the planet.
Spindok
@$$wipe puts pressure on old growth forests? HUH?
Old growth forest timber is for lumber. The stuff we use for hygiene is made from recycled paper or from paper derived from skinny red pines developed and planted for rapid growth with this application in mind. No one with any sense would use a saw log (which is what old growth timber is for) for making paper.
I remember reading some commentary by Ayn Rand. In that commentary she points out one of the big breakthroughs in the advancement of civilization is (get ready now) clean underwear. Now the likes of Sheryl Crow want us to get unhygienic? Of course, that request doesn’t apply to her highness.
Coffee is another one of those things that a lot of people point to as spurring the growth of civilization. The people used to drink beer (albeit a short beer) and even though it was a short beer coffee is better for those wanting to be productive. I drink coffee in the morning and if I have been a productive person than I’ll have a couple of short beers with my lunch. Of course, beer would probably be just as offensive if not more so (those yeasts generating carbon dioxide).
Coffee is not just a drink to be trendy in fact after petroleum coffee is the second most traded commodity on the planet.
Back in 2005 Arriana Huffington showed up to a Sierra Club conference chauffeured in a Suburban. Michelle Malkin talked with a Sierra Club spokesman and asked about what they Sierra Club execs drive around in and the answer was (paraphrasing): we don’t know, and presumably they drive the cars they need for their own reasons. Irony at its finest.
Enscout #24,
There’re giga-verbs of paid AGW advocacy already front-loading the info-pipelines, and it’s going to have to find a market – or else the millions paid to produce it must be written off.
(Keeping the project’s financial accounts in an offshore bank-state like Dhubai’d be smart in the event of AGW’s certain default. The gulf “protectorate” would cover Time Warner/GE’s artists’ tabs, and the project’s financial contributors would enjoy “deniability”.)
Me, I expect this media-effluvium will be repackaged and sold as “documentary” programming to an Al Jazeera or a Harvard media department or whatnot. Like so many “newly discovered” Micheal Jackson remixes found in the Pop-Diva’s bankrupt vaults, they’ll need to find a paying buyer.
I’d rather not watch, but I can’t avert my gaze. Observing the ways in which multi-billion dollar media corporations process all this decaying media-effluvium will be both disgusting and enlightening.
Bumper sticker spotted yesterday outside of Sacramento: “My Carbon Footprint is Bigger Than Yours”. It was right next to a “Palin/Coulter 2012″ sticker. They were affixed to what would be described as a late model economy car, driven by a minority male.
Hey gang!
Over at Vanderleun’s American Digest, a devastating list of “Melting Arctic” scare stories from the NYT archives, going all the way back to 1881.
http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/enemies_foreign_domestic/new_york_slimes_1881_this.php
Priceless, and a very useful shortcut to making a quick knockout point about AGW propaganda.
The last three seconds–and then I floated out of my body, like you pull a fine silk handerchief out of your pocket, and floated above the scene, and watched as they worked to free my body from the car, and my mind became razor sharp, and then I floated up, like in The Ascent to the Empyrean by Bosch, and I was met…..
1) Don’t drink coffee — never could get used to the taste, 2)I’m a guy, so I use 1/10′th the toilet paper of the other half of the world, 3) the shirt and slacks I am wearing are “hand-me-downs” from the husband of my wife’s clerical assistant at a “major institution of learning”, 4) the shirt I am wearing to teach a lecture section this afternoon was picked off the “needs washed pile” this morning because I ran out of clean ones as my wife, who works at a “major institution of learning” has work papers stacked on the washer 5) the cheese and veggie slices in my lunch were the fruits of Dumpster diving the uneaten snacks at a seminar last night of the same “major institution of learning.”
Do I get a certificate for this?
New is one of those dishonest adjectives which always seems to pervert the meaning of the noun which follows. I’ve learned that New ia a commie marker. A New Scientist is no scientist. The original New Scientist was Trofim Lysenko.
For the sake of your garden you should bury your local environmnetal activist underneath your compost pile. Mother Gaia will smile.
Great comments.
This is going to be an enormous fight, with a clear dark/Warmist side with powerful minions arrayed against the forces of truth and light.
I would like to mention that the basic CO2 uptrend data from the Keeling Lab at Scripps Institute of Oceanography looks valid. These scientists are not the source of the fraud.
However, CO2 is not temperature. That leap to flooded cities and insect plagues is where the Warmist/Socialists jump the shark.
Freeman Dyson wrote that the computer models were bunk, and he has been proven more than right.
Batman@26.
Actually, they believe that they, in full companionship with Mother Earth, will each be given dominion over vast forests and sufficent numbers of happy peasants to see to their needs, wherein they while away the hours in true bliss.
ta
It is worthy to note that 3 of the five have to do with hygene. Lest we forget, the single largest cause of disease is the fecal-oral route. That is why we have clean water campaigns for the pygmy’s.
We have only in the last 150 years made the realization that hygene matters.
Following the advice will drive health care costs throught the roof.
sigh
In answer to the “list”:
And you want to deal with them without their morning stim? Not this intrepid soul. I would rather wrestle with weasels or Demonrats. (Hmm, come to think of it … same thing.)
BS. Go see the Weyerhauser plots on the coast of Oregon, some in their 4th and 5th planting. That is where most of the pulp comes from.
Yeah, that is why I still have a suit coat that is 12 years old and holey jeans. Maybe this is true for the metro-sexual beta males in NYC & LA but not middle-America.
Now I know why enviro-whackos smell so bad.
Not in my house. We cannot afford waste on that scale.
Like I always say about the drones with a Green obsession – “You First!”
And as per Michael Mann:
[Emphasis mine] IOW, you proles are too stupid to understand the nuances of what we are saying. The brazenness of these people is truly breathtaking.
Like I said in a previous thread, we are long overdue for that witch hunt. Might as well behave as primitively as they expect.
I remember sitting next to a young Californian lady on an airplane. I told her of my new car, one with a V8 engine. She scolded me for wasting energy.
I asked where she was going. She was flying from California to the French Riviera for two weeks to lie on the beach.
She was unaware of any hypocrisy in her flying halfway around the globe when she could find much the same thing 10 miles away in Santa Cruz yet she was disdainful of my choice of automobiles.
Such is the intellectual integrity of environmentalism.
Uh oh.
The New Scientist informs us that throwing meat away is an eco-crime.
The City of New York informs us that it is a social justice crime to give meat cooked in transfats to the homeless and that the meat must be thrown away.
Somewhere somebody commented that eventually someone will personify each and every of Ayn Rand’s villains. Jeez.
For those interested. Scientific American, the Pravda of “science” publications, is counter-punching furiously against ClimateGate. They have published “Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense.”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seven-answers-to-climate-contrarian-nonsense
If any of your benighted acquaintances sends this to you as “proof” that ClimateGate is meaningless, here is an excellent response to Sci American’s spin doctoring.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/12/scientific-american-answers-to.html#more
“You can have my toilet paper when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”
They can have mine when I am done.
“Now the likes of Sheryl Crow want us to get unhygienic? Of course, that request doesn’t apply to her highness.” She could forego her fetid merkin.
“After about 20 minutes of this I can sense the cool breeze whistling through my ears and I feel a burst of joy just knowing that I have helped to heal the planet.” It helps to visualize whorled peas.
“Do I get a certificate for this?” Yes, you are certified.
““What they’ve done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world. Suddenly, all these are subject to cherry picking,”” Transparency; good for you bad for me.
The Wiper’s Motto
One squat,
one square,
no disgust,
my backside.
A while back, Sheryl Crow suggested using only 1 sheet of toiled paper. When I first tried that, it didn’t seem to do a complete job. So now I use both side of the sheet and that seems to work better.
Bill McNutt 14 said:
“You can have my toilet paper when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.”
You can have my toilet paper after I’m finished with it. Then I’ll wash my hands.
CRU Jones [he what faked the data] has stepped down
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
He is the real climate criminal, and he should do time for fakery.
Eggplant,
You can have my toilet paper after I’m finished with it.
They hid that birth certificate and college records someplace. Inspect carefully.
On the other hand IAEA reports have to be good for something.
Batman writes: “I’m a psychiatrist by profession and I can’t figure out why humans would want to extinguish humanity with such zeal (unless, of course, they believed that their special elite group would be the only survivors).”
I think Batman wrote that just to bait the hook and get the amateurs sputtering “But what about Freud!?”
Via Wikipedia: “In classical Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the death drive (”Todestrieb”) is the drive towards death, destruction and forgetfulness. . . . The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency towards cohesion and unity. . . . Organisms, according to this idea, were driven to return to a pre-organic, inanimate state.”
Richard’s title “Fifth Commandment” seems to refer to “Thou shalt not kill,” maybe as in the greens are engaging in activity that is tantamount to sentencing some people to death, e.g., by not allowing for economic growth? At any rate, the title invites a theological reflection:
Radical environmentalists, of the atheistic brand, see human kind as having no justification for living and messing up the environment. They are right for the most part.
The question of justification is at the center of religion. St. Paul writes “There is none righteous, no, not one.” If a person has no righteousness, and the person has nothing or no one to justify his existence, well, I guess the person can always go the green side, give into that death drive, and work with zeal to return everyone “to a pre-organic, inanimate state.”
Insufficiently Sensitive,
Yes
I would accept the compliment of being asked to help but I question the appropriateness of sharing a private communication. If he did not choose to post it as a public invite why should we?
Mark,
The Commandment does not say “Thou Shalt Not Kill” but only “Thou Shalt Not Murder.” There is a world of difference between the two. Self Defense by the religious is NOT hypocrisy.
I saw an article last year in the Nature Conservancy magazine that was hilarious.
They had discovered a horrific new threat to the environment: Recycling!
It turns out that increased recycling of paper products, combined with cheap wood imports, had led major forest products companies to conclude they needed to own a lot less forests. So they were – horror of horrors – Selling their forest lands! And to quote the Nature Conservancy, those lands would be bought by people who wanted to cut down the forests and put up – oh no! Houses, shopping centers, and golf courses! The horror!
It had just hit them for the first time that companies that managed forests LIKED trees and wilderness. The alternative was for them to be owned by people who just wanted to cut them down.
Incredible! Hilarious! Damned evil recycling advocates! What vicious capitalist industrialist came up with that idea?
They had discovered a horrific new threat to the environment: Recycling!
The road to hell, as ever, is paved with good intentions. Though the puppet masters behind the good intentions are invariably driven by intentions that are very, very bad. The rest is a clown show put on for the suckers.
Perhaps we should refer to AGW as “P.T. Barnum science.”
RWE @ 54—
is that article on the intertubes? link?
Sounds like a must-see.
LOTM @ 53
I think I.S. is wondering if that email he got is legit, or will he get infected if he clicks thru
Marty @56 has it right.
Fear of infection caused my addition of those sixes. If the email is legit, ashes on my head for going public, and major public apologies are due to Richard Fernandez.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/why_scientists_lie_and_what_to.html
Apropos
RWE: Amazing that law of unintended consequences
Cobalamin deficiency, Vitamin B12: Sometimes seen in strict vegetarians who because of the lack of meat and dairy products in their diet, do not get enough or get the wrong kind in a supplement. Tofu doesn’t supply it. Some of the symptoms are neurological, they act bat guano crazy using the scientific terms. This could explain a lot of greeny pathologies.
I’m waiting for the head line that trans-fats prevent cancer of the anus in adults and mental dementia in children.
The water melons are starting to make the Scientologists look good.
1) You just know Doctor Feelgood the Climate scientist wrote this list at Starbucks drinking a grande latte mocha frappacino. Do as I say, not as I do. They’ll pry my coffee from my cold dead unproductive hands without it.
2) ah toilet paper! My wife says I go through too many rolls. I denounce myself. Turn me in @ I’m a rat.gov.
3) My wife being a hippie in a former chapter of life routinely shops at thrifts and yardsales so I’m pure here. They bundle up tons of used clothing and dump it in Africa. It is interesting seeing a street urchin in West Africa wearing a ” Peewee Herman for President” t-shirt.
4) unwashed clothes, b.o., natty and nasty dreads, unshaven women’s legs and armpits, ear guages, tats, nose rings, etc. are the mark of leftist losers and public health hazards. Count me out.
5)if we eat the food we’re fat American gluttons, if we throw it away we’re wastrels and planetary outlaws. Can’t win with this crowd.
So Tyrone Shoelaces staggers into the Bowery Mission after a long day working overtime on the crack pipe and Thunderbird bottle. One of the few pleasures in his miserable life is a couple of thighs and legs of Aunt Willie Mae’s prize winning church social fried chicken. But some do-gooder throws it out to save the planet and keep Tyrone’s cholesterol under control and you wonder why there’s revolution in the air.
Marty #56: I have no idea if the article is available electronically. But it was their cover story.
I used to be a member of The Nature Conservancy. They originally had two main objectives:
1. Collect money from private individuals.
2. Use that money to buy up the most environmentally valuable lands and thus make sure they are not developed.
I think it was Jerry Pournelle that recommended the group. Sounded like a sensible Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is approach.
Then they added an Item 2A, which was:
“Ensure that senior management of the organization gets to buy homesites at rock bottom prices right next to the land we bought with Other People’s Money.” This was done without fanfare, by the way…
But the kicker that made me quit was:
3. Sell the lands bought with donation money to the Federal Government and then go buy some more land and Do It All Over Again.
Re: the website and the firefox plugin test. I just whois’ed it and whois reports the site as belonging to a well known and respected poster here.
For those who haven’t seen it, Matt Labash’s article “The Adventures of Low-Impact Man” is a must-read, nicely seasoned with humor. Subtitle: One week that will turn you from a conspicuously consumptive carbon monster into a person fully able to lecture the less virtuous about how they’re destroying the planet.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/244kzbgg.asp
Meanwhile my cats adamantly refuse to be turned into low-impact carbon life forms. Dirty kitty litter? Raw meat instead of Fancy Feast? No way! On the other hand, they aren’t coffee drinkers, don’t need toilet paper, and don’t wear clothes, so I guess that’s gotta count for something.
As in the case of the Unabomber and his “manifesto,” so here: at bottom, the “eco-crime” is the existence of human beings exploiting non-human nature.
I’m wondering how long it’s going to take people to recognize that Ted Kacinski is the patron saint of what is happening now on the “green” front: human beings are evil because their existence disturbs the tranquil balances of the the “natural” (read: non-human) world. Human beings who employ (read: exploit) the resources of the natural world commit eco-crimes. And we all know what should be done with criminals who kill.
The only thing I would require in implementing the obvious program which these “eco-crimes” mongers are peddling is that when the guillotine begins to fall, these scientists be the first to mount the scaffold.
From where I sit, the real issue here is not the environment at all–that is a massive con. The real issue is human hatred of human beings.
We need to “cut to the chase” and get rid of of the whole enviro-scam–it is merely a bait-and-switch diversion. Environmentalists don’t want a living natural world. What they want are dead human beings.
Sounds unlikely and exaggerated? Re-read Wretchard’s essay one more time.
A quick read-through of the article + comments that Wretchard cites makes me wonder just how much of all that blather was intended seriously. Some comments take the suggestions seriously, while other think they are sappy. There’s a third alternative, suggested here because it’s so recherche these days: satire. Some of what the “New Scientist” post says reads like satire–and some of the commentators detect more than a passing smell of someone’s leg being pulled.
I here by nominate this thread and the comments that followed as worthy of a star! Best thread ever. I have not had such a number of pure laugh out loud enough to cause the warden to inquire as this one. Some of you guys should be writing for Mr. Big chin, seriously. ROFLMAO
RWE,
Think outside the box!!
We can still recycle, we just need to have the recycling centers throw everything away.
The incomparable William F. Buckley:
A liberal is someone who wants to reach into your shower and adjust the temperature of the water.
(The guys at Power Line quoted this early in November — a priceless line!
)
Jamie Irons
PA Cat/63
I dunno about kitties and the toilet paper.
Noooooooo! Now this:
Study Finds Ozone Hole Repair Contributes To Global Warming, Sea Ice Melt:
http://www.popsci.com/environment/article/2009-12/study-finds-ozone-hole-repair-contributes-global-warming-sea-level-rise
Time for a draft! Sheryl Crow to be the first drafted with others following her like
lemmings.
Once we get them into an isolated, unheated bivouac with no running water, the Drill sergeant will teach them the Ancient and Honorable Old Army Way of conserving toilet paper.
Hmmm. How come I can’t seem to link to an illustration of same?
obmambus is speaking … what a graceless, clueless, presumptuous boor.
other than blaming bush, he’s not making a lick of sense.
So some environmental poop4brains announces he’s done research proving that owning a dog does the same environmental devastation as driving an SUV.
Makes me want to go out, purchase the biggest damn SUV manufactured, preferably one guaranteed to be visible from SATURN, load all my doggies into it, drive it up the ramp into a damn great jet airplane, and fly around the planet for a couple of years.
These people are idiots if they believe it, muggers if they don’t.
The great thing about the climate scam is that, being based entirely on faked data in the first place promoted by a vast conspiracy of lying bastards, once they’ve confiscated the wealth of the credulous, all they need to do is announce they’ve solved the problems and SAVED THE WORLD, merely by publishing a little more faked data.
Boy, I remember all the “climate experts’” dire predictions back about 1970 telling us we were heading for a new ice age if we didn’t rein in our evil bad hurtful technologies.
Stinking liars.
“so that the great potential of pakistan’s people can be unleashed?”
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
69 2×4
There’s an entire website called “Kitty Goes Potty” with videos and other helpful advice about toilet-training cats. But I don’t think the enviro-Nazis would approve of using the amount of water it takes to flush the john after kitty is finished.
Meanwhile, to quote Abraham Lincoln: “For those who like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing they will like”– http://www.kittygoespotty.com/
At least the cat videos are a useful antidote to listening to Teh Won.
Exhelo #67:
I have been recycling since about 1968. Of course I had to keep the tin cans and stuff I collected for myself since no one wanted them but then again I had no problem finding a container to mix paint in for the next 30 years.
By the way, the can that Hi C and such fruit drinks come in are exactly the right size to serve as a dryer exhaust duct.
Anyway, one day circa 1990 a young man came to my door wanting me to sign a petition. It seems that while stuff was being recycled there was no need for the materials so they were trying to get a law passed to force people to use recycled materials in manufacturing. I declined to sign.
Voltimand #64: The Unabomber read Al Gore’s book and used parts of it in his own work.
Back around 1968 I recall seeing a scientific conference on pollution on TV one Sunday afternoon. Scientist after scientist got up and said the problem was not the nature of the pollution but the quantity of it, and that quantity was directly related to the population. A pretty important finding – but then one guy got up and said they were all wrong. The cause of pollution was the War in Vietnam. People were deliberately despoiling the environment as means of protest against the war. The lunatic anti-war anti-Western fringe got into the “Ecology” movement quite early, and as with so many aspects of the 60’s counterculture, it sounds like they pretty much took over.
“Used toilet paper. The average American gets through 23 toilet rolls each year, adding up to more than 7 billion rolls for the country in total.”
I think someone needs to check their math. I have lived surrounded by women all my life and can attest that they all went through one [large] roll a day or more.”
I know, because I had to buy and bring the large cartons home about every ten days.
Now I can not attest to other cultures. But I hear from our military that we had to school the Iraqis and Afghans on what toilet paper was and it’s use.
Papa Ray
Papa Ray — there are two types of people in the world, washers & wipers and the former type are way more numerous.
Arabs famously only use the one hand to eat with, (Cant remember whether it was the left or right) ’cause the other was used to……
Well, my forebears were well acquainted with an alternative use for the raw material for McArthur’s pipe. Which is either recycling or creative use of an otherwise waste material.
For the record 3Case appeared on the Homogenized thread. Been a while.
Here on the farm we use dem corn cobs fer butt wipin then throw em in a bucket and use em agin fer cookin vittles and heatin the cabin. The secret is letin the cob wether til soft and woo-hee it realy wipes good. Duzat mean us cuntry folk is green?
“Most of science’s 500-pound gorillas are still sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see what happens.”
What total unbelievable cowards. When you think of what scientists risked for the progression of truth in the poast.
What Dan said @ 74.
Why do I have a feeling O’Blarney means something entirely different than we think when he’s talking about “unleashing” the good folk of Pok-e-stahn?
Climate “criminals”? Perhaps the New Scientist should change its name to the New Inquisitor.
This type of government power is typical of Marxist philosophy; it is a rejection of the individual’s God-given unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness – individuals and their so-called happiness will be managed by the Inner Party Priests of Power. Marxism also rejects the individual’s unalienable right to his/her fruits of creative labor; that belongs to the Marxist State as well, and will be obtained through excessive (un-Declarational) taxation; (un-Constitutionally) earmarked for self-serving oligarchic government with leftovers tossed out to the “aggrieved” proletariat class – in return for votes.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others… We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we’re doing… Power is not a means, it is an end… the object of power is power… Always there will be the intoxication of power… We are the priests of power.” George Orwell, 1984
“The individual is only a cell… power is collective. The individual only has power in so far that he ceases to be an individual… If he can make complete utter submission; if he can escape from his identity; if he cam merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all powerful and immortal… Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death; the Party is immortal…You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do, and will turn against us; but we create human nature… If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever.” George Orwell, 1984
herb @ 79:
Left hand for private use and right for public. Since common eating bowls are the de facto standard, using your left hand is considered the worst insult. Also why they take a thief’s right hand for 1st offense. The Turks who did kitchen patrol in West Germany back then would head for their latrine with a can full of warm water and …… a smooth round rock. Needless to say they had their own facilities in garrison.
Listened to The Juan tonight. Just as stupid as I thought he would be. He telegraphed the pitch. Now all al qaeda has to do is hunker down and wait. Have some small and diminishing attacks ongoing to make it look good that stop, oh, around spring of ’11. Then The Juan and Co. can declare success and come home. Immediately upon clearance of the last C-5A from Kabul…………..
You can write the ending(s).
O/T – The Juan cannot really be this stupid. I know the Demonrats are but …….?
76. RWE:
Unless you’re being satirical, I can only say that the Unabomber “Manifesto” predated Al Gore’s stuff.
Obama announces when the U. S. will leave Afghanistan. That’s all the Taliban needs to know. The only thing Democrats know what to do with wars is to lose them. I would suggest that America simply can’t afford to have a Democratic Party as a possible source of its leadership. It needs to disappear. The Democratic Party delenda est. It simply is no longer a viable option. And people who think that it is are no longer viable options either.
Konyok/43: “The New Scientist informs us that throwing meat away is an eco-crime. The City of New York informs us that it is a social justice crime to give meat cooked in transfats to the homeless and that the meat must be thrown away.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them…with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth… Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… If human equality is to be forever averted; if the “high,” as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently; then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.” George Orwell, 1984
“Crimestop… includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc (Socialist principles of Oceania), and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity.” George Orwell, 1984
Under Marxism one has two choices: Intelligent insanity or the sanity of stupidity.
Actually Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln outlined a third alternative.
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Thomas Jefferson
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it… We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” Abraham Lincoln
Phil Jones to step down temporarily:
“I’ll be seeing you in all the old familiar places,
The court house steps, with out shoe laces.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/12/01/climategate-update-internal-investigations-at-cru-penn-state/
“A winging it, a winging it, a winging it,….
By the bungle, the great big bungle,
The lawyers come in sight.”
Wow. Now, these environmentalists have something in common with Mormons. Each group thinks that drinking coffee is a sin.
Alexis: 89: Yes, but at least the Mormons don’t try to shove it down your throats through legislative action.
Let me tell you about my new coffee maker. It is a Cuinsinart 4 cup maker but it only fills up two of the big coffee mugs that I use.
You know if they take away my coffee and deny me Medicare I’ll probably strap on a bomb vest.
How about the known (but not very well known) fact that post-consumer waste paper recycling is actually worse for the environment than new paper? The reason is that huge amounts of very powerful chemicals have to be used to get the ink off, by the way. And such chemicals will get into the water supply. The process also requires huge amounts of energy.
I can see a benefit to recycling waste paper that’s never been used, which means mostly trimmings from production of standardised paper sizes. I don’t believe in recycling newspaper. Perhaps one could use paper with ink on it, recycled, for such things as tissues and toilet paper – but what would it look like, and would anyone buy it?
It ought not to be beyond the wit of engineers to arrange for all dry waste to be incinerated – probably at a high temperature to get rid of the chlorinated plastics in it – and produce useful power that way. Metallic waste could be shredded and separated by such high-tech means as a big magnet. Of course, that doesn’t allow bureaucrats to muck ordinary people about, so that isn’t going to happen.
There was a story in the national Press in the UK yesterday, about a woman who has been ordered by the local council to convert her small front garden (which she has spent 20 years getting the way she wants it) into hard standing on which to place three wheelie-bins imposed on her by the council. Said woman lives on her own, and produces maybe one bin-liner full of rubbish per week. If she doesn’t do what she is told she could be heavily fined and, if the fine is not paid, go to jail.
I believe in some environmental causes; but domestic recycling, the way it’s being done in the UK, is a particularly nasty joke.
I will begin to believe that the environmentalists are sincere in their beliefs when they begin to find low environmental impact ways to kill themselves in order to cut down on their personal contribution to the human impact on mother earth. Until then, if their goal remains only to pass and enforce laws requiring ME and YOU to bend over backwards to diminish our impact on earth to meet the ridiculous, unscientific goals of the green meanies, my response remains for them to go perform unnatural and perverted sex acts upon themselves.
I was taught to use nature gently. I don’t litter, I don’t pollute, I do nothing to excess. But I am not going to hold my breath to prevent CO2, or shop for clothes in a dumpster.
Sod off you busybodies! Get out of my life.
There’s a name for reduced consumption- POVERTY. Gah, the left used to be about letting more people consume more. Now the East German ideal seems to be playing itself out in the West- make everyone equally poor!
Sod off!
Oh yea, let’s not forget The Vehements
At least they promise not to reproduce themselves, though if they could speedup their demise… The world would indeed be a better place without them.
Fletcher #91
According to some TV commercials I have seen there are some hundreds of municipalities in the USA that burn garbage to produce power.
I have been seeing more use of recycled materials. I have a garbage can and some plastic storage bins that are made out of recycled plastic containers. Seem to work fine but they do kinda smell like burnt plastic.
But as for our local county, I read that almost all the recycling either costs money or at best breaks even. They only get a net profit out of aluminum cans and cardboard. And they do not accept cardboard in the recycling, so that is a neat trick.
No coffee!
“Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!”
Patrick Henry
US orator, patriot, & politician in American Revolution (1736 – 1799)
Gentlemen, is it time to take up arms?
Instead of a Tea party, we need a Coffee Bean Rumble.
You can make a coffee substitute out of acorns. Not sure if you’re supposed to grind them, shred them or if running them over with an Abrams will work. I am available for the research project.
OT link to comment on Obama speech sad comment on his to approach to war!
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2009/12/in_and_out_with_groucho.html
Now that it’s proven to be a complete fraud, establishing Cap n’ Trade or anything else based on global warming BS amounts to the government establishing a state religion. Between establishing a state religion and the state promotion of human sacrifice, maybe people will stop believing the “both parties are alike” crap long enough to try finally help totally destroy the democrat party as a national party.
Where’s the ACLU? I guess they’re too busy making sure no one says “Merry Christmas” to worry about the establishment of a state religion.
Regards
Rwe – The quantities of preprocessed cardboard coming out of the super markets and the big box stores fills some of the ships going back to China. The guy who put that deal together is a millionaire many times over. But anyway you put it, recycling is a messy business. I went to the Baja 1000 a few weeks ago and policed up our camp where hundreds of people were the night before. Needles to say, there was a tremendous amount of trash in the area. Too much to try to go more than 10 yards out of our area because it would fill trucks. But you should have seen the looks on peoples faces watching me walk around with trash bags in my hands… like I was f’g crazy. Nobody is going to drive twenty miles to pick up trash for profit. Anyhow, the dogs had a hey day with our trash at the border. Smuggling garbage!
I don’t get you Ricardo Fernandez. You are like Geraldo Rivera on FOX news. ..a liberal/socialist in a conservative camp.
..I suppose that is why your essays always seem compromised to me.
regards
Yes Rash, but science as a religion is still science! Maybe now that science has become the realm of preaching instead of teaching the school yard bullies will improve their math skills too. Get ready for string theory rap. Your actions are legal and sound in this dimension but you are imperiling a parallel universe.
64. Voltimand:
I don’t think it is satire (although you are correct, if it wasn’t serious it would be very funny) Greenies, being Communists of another sort, have no sense of humor at all.
Regarding your post @63, again think Commies, their only significant product were hecatombs. Think about Stalin. Mao, Pol Pot and the rest, they strode to power on a highway of human corpses and never flinched on the way.
Greenies and Commies get along because they have so many attitudes in common and are both looking to set up the same world power structure of a few “learned elites” (a.k.a. themselves) lording it over the great unwashed (in the Greenies case literally unwashed) masses.
“I suppose that is why your essays always seem compromised to me”; this sounds to me like all questions have known outcomes so the inquiry should only ask questions that fit a given framework. Some would call that prejudiced, I’d call it compromised thinking. Mr. Fernandez is no Heraldo Riviera.
Can’t eat, drink coffee, wash, wear clean clothes, purchase new clothes. Hmmmmm…. sounds like serfdom to me. O! That’s right! That’s just what it is! And the envirocommunists are the feudal lords. It doesn’t matter what rock they are hiding behind or what grotesque mask they wear in an attempt to disguise. Everything these “egalitarians” do is to ensure their dominance and wealth over the shackled and impoverished lumpen proletariat. All in the name of “justice” and “equality”.
One day upon coming out of the womb government will has us all handcuffed and muzzled.
It’s all about control. One by one, all our freedoms will be taken away, yet I still do many of the above stated things: I enjoy my Charmin toilet paper & use as many as needed for the job. I use plastic bags. I use bottled water at times. I buy most of my clothes new.
The Statists want to take away everything we have & put us firmly back in the Dark Age; they want us to be serfs to their fiefdoms. The very people who use Class Warfare to preach of unity wants to make classes of separate people for division.
Anyone who is serious about Global Warming needs to stand by their convictions & move to Antarctica ASAP. Or better yet, they can build their own space ship & have it programmed to go into the heart of the Sun. The Global Warming cult is a death cult at best with nothing but nihilism at its core.
The Communists need to be exposed to the sunlight of truth; once exposed, the cultists will be repelled by their own sordid reflection. They cannot stand to see their true selves since they are the monster.
Translation: just die as fast as possible. Especially anyone on the right.
scythe/104
The “social justice” and “equality” rhetoric of the American Marxist is a temporary phenomenon. Once the American middle class is taxed into serfdom there will be only two classes remaining: The oligarchic Marxist ruling class (which never “withers away”) and the great mass of proletarians. At that point there will be no more need for Marxist internal “class struggle” and the rhetoric of “social justice” and “equality;” the Priests of Power will have us by the balls – both economically and legally (but not morally). The American Marxist ruling class will then require external wars of aggression to justify their oligarchic hold on power. Our current proletariat class thinks that money and property grows on trees, an idea planted into their heads by our emerging Marxist ruling class; in truth (as anyone with intelligence knows, but neutralizes with an act of Orwellian Doublethink) the property they both crave comes from the laboring and creative American middle class with its vanguard of entrepreneurs. Our current proletariat class is living on borrowed time, and so is the American middle class which should be re-named the American proto-proletariat class. The downward slope has been gentle; soft under foot, with no visible road signs – the Manifesto is kept close to their vests.
“It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called “abolition of private property”…meant in effect the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before… It had always been assumed that if the Capitalist Class were expropriated Socialism must follow; and unquestionable the Capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport, everything had been taken away from them; and since these things were no longer private property it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist program with the result; foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.” George Orwell, 1984
I guess everybody at New Scientist must smoke. How else could you explain the absence of cigarette-smoking from the list?
Samson/100
Clause 1) I don’t get you Ricardo Fernandez.
Clause 2) You are like Geraldo Rivera on FOX news. ..a liberal/socialist in a conservative camp.
Clause 2 confirms validity of Clause 1.
Its odd how much this begins to resemble Bo & Peep Heaven’s Gate Cult.
From Wikipedia:
Heaven’s Gate members believed that the planet Earth was about to be recycled (wiped clean, renewed, refurbished and rejuvenated), and that the only chance to survive was to leave it immediately. While the group was formally against suicide, they defined “suicide” in their own context to mean “to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered”,[4] and believed that their “human” bodies were only vessels meant to help them on their journey.
The group believed in several paths for a person to leave the Earth and survive before the “recycling”, one of which was hating this world strongly enough: “It is also possible that part of our test of faith is our hating this world, even our flesh body, to the extent to be willing to leave it without any proof of the Next Level’s existence”.
The members of the group added “-ody” to the first names they adopted in lieu of their original given names, which defines “children of the Next Level.” This is mentioned in Applewhite’s final video, “Do’s Final Exit,” that was filmed on March 19, 1997, just days prior to the suicides.
OCBill/109
I bet they are a joint type of crowd.
The Environmental Religion and Heaven’s Gate Cult share a common philosophical underpinning with 1st century gnosticism. A heresy that St. Paul railed against. Even Wikipedia’s description of Gnosticism sounds like gibberish.
From Wikipedia
Gnosticism (Greek: γνῶσις gnōsis, knowledge) refers to diverse, syncretistic religious movements in antiquity consisting of various belief systems generally united in the teaching that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world created by an imperfect god, the demiurge; this being is frequently identified with the Abrahamic god, (as opposed to the Gospel according to the Hebrews) and is contrasted with a superior entity, referred to by several terms including Pleroma and Godhead.[1] Depictions of the demiurge—the term originates with Plato’s Timaeus[2]—vary from being as an embodiment of evil, to being merely imperfect and as benevolent as its inadequacy permits. Gnosticism was a dualistic religion, influenced by and influencing Hellenic philosophy, Judaism (see Notzrim), and Christianity;[3] however, by contrast, later strands of the movement, such as the Valentinians, held a monistic world-view.[4] This, along with the varying treatments of the demiurge, may be seen as indicative of the variety of positions held within the category.
The gnōsis referred to in the term is a form of revealed, esoteric knowledge through which the spiritual elements of humanity are reminded of their true origins within the superior Godhead, being thus permitted to escape materiality.[5] Consequently, within the sects of gnosticism only the pneumatics or psychics obtain gnōsis; the hylic or Somatics, though human, being incapable of perceiving the higher reality, are unlikely to attain the gnōsis deemed by gnostic movements as necessary for salvation.[6][7] Jesus of Nazareth is identified by some Gnostic sects as an embodiment of the supreme being who became incarnate to bring gnōsis to the earth.[8]
At some point, it all gets too complicated. And the complications are accelerated by these campaigns addressing minutia. Minutia however is great, it makes us believe that we all can make a contribution and we all share in the guilt. Just read the kid’s books coming out these days.
We are told everything we eat and touch has some affect on the environment. Everything we eat and touch pretty much affect how we live in our entirety. We must therefore change our entire lives. But in attempting to do it ourselves we only get these logical headaches based on neoscientifc analyses.
There are all these contradictions. If I use paper plates or too much toilet paper, I don’t use up as much precious water, but unfortunately I kill more precious trees. Is nuclear power good or a potential catastrophy? Is it better to use pesticides to grow more crops and curb starvation, or is it better to use no pesticides and have people starve? Is windpower good, or does it kill birds in Martha’s Vinyard? If I buy a Mini-Cooper and follow the trend toward sardine can cars am I exposing myself to destruction by truck, trucks not getting smaller but bigger?
At this point we throw up our hands and the learned elites will make those decisions for us. Victory!
101. Annoy Mouse:
I was just watching a science program on string theory last night. All the scientist were jubilant when they discovered that their string theory math worked as long as the equations started out in a parallel universe.
I’m thinking WTF.
@ paul (36): 1) Don’t drink coffee 2)I use 1/10′th the toilet paper of the other half of the world.. 3) the shirt and slacks…are “hand-me-downs” 4) the shirt I am wearing… was picked off the “needs washed pile” 5) the cheese and veggie slices in my lunch were the fruits of Dumpster diving… “Do I get a certificate for this?”
Paul, as luck would have it, I’ve just started a certification service for individuals such as your self. Amazingly, the five criteria you list above are the same five that I use in my individual audits. Please send me $49.95 at your earliest convenience and I’ll send you a PDF version of that certificate within 24 hours. A hard copy sent by snail mail will cost you an extra $9.95. I accept paypal.
No. 82. Perhaps the New Scientist should change its name to the New Inquisitor.
Did you notice how many of the comments had been deleted? Could it be the negative comments that weren’t found to have breached the terms of use survived only because the sarcasm went over the head of the administrator?
“Used toilet paper. The average American gets through 23 toilet rolls each year, adding up to more than 7 billion rolls for the country in total.”
“I think someone needs to check their math. I have lived surrounded by women all my life and can attest that they all went through one [large] roll a day or more.”
LOL PapaRay! I can confirm your observations!
(and anyone who wants to take my double-ply away from me has got a serious fight on their hands)
95- RWE,
It gets way worse. I worked as a project leader with a consortia of 14 hospitals to expand the existing incineration facilities at one of the hospitals, so they could pool their redbag waste disposal, which must by law be burned at specific temperature and duration.
Essentially, we proposed a same size, but much cleaner technology to replace the exant, but creaky operation. The energy captured was to be used to launder hospital materials for the co-op patrons; ie, this new not-for-profit service was to be a free byproduct, producing 100 permanent jobs. And, much more sterile laundry. Over the intervening 20 years, the cost reductions would have reached tens of millions bottomline savings by now.
Could not get all the permits.
@95. RWE & @Fletcher #91
Back in the late ’80s the county fathers of the place I was living at decided to build a waste to energy plant. Haul the garbage to it burn it and use the heat to spin generators. They may have well been fueling the plant with cash as they eventually found out they could not make it pay.
@116 Charles & @101 Annoy Mouse
Charles,
Don’t be so off-put by that. There is an old joke
A mathematically oriented agronomist excitedly plops a paper on the desk of his colleague. He exclaims he has solved the world’s food crisis. So, he launches into a verbal summary of his paper by starting off: “First, we assume a spherical cow…”.
A funny thing for sure. However, progress is made here by making simplifying assumptions, doing the work, publishing the results. Then the next researcher comes along and does away with an assumption and the process repeats.
Back to the post.
I think the instigating article points in the general direction of a few good things. If I have a competitive alternative to an “earth-destroying” action or item I will seriously consider the alternative. The problem is the alternatives are often more expensive and an implication often lost on the watermelons (or maybe it isn’t) expensive is often directly correlated to the consumption of physical resources.
RE: recycling
from what I’ve read, the only items that are really worth recycling on an environmental or economic basis are aluminum cans, because of the huge energy content entailed in mining bauxite, shipping to a smelter, smelting, making pigs, and shipping to a user.
Clear glass often makes sense if it is already separated from colored. Colored glass is terrible because the end user can’t get the color right from a mixed containerload of glass, even if it’s all “brown” or “green” there are various shades all mixed in.
Some forms of plastic are recycled to make everything from benches to railroad ties, which may make sense, I don’t have any information on that. As for RR ties, creosote is an environmental issue, as would be just about any other chemical preservative, so that is a factor in favor of the plastic.
Newsprint, sometimes, depends on the market.
The rest, almost never worthwhile.
I make a small effort to recycle (bag paper separate from containers and put it all in the blue bin) because my city already has trucks and people running around collecting it and facilities and people dedicating to sorting it and shipping it to users. All that is a sunk cost to me as an individual; as a taxpayer of course I resent paying for it but have no choice. Given that sunk cost, I figure marginal items like paper might make sense, so I play along.
Suggestion for conserving “bathroom tissue”: wipe your butt with an environmentalist.
I reject the concept of “eco crimes” and believe that anyone who would promote such a concept is a.) very stupid; b.) egomanaical; and c.) practicing violence against the rest of us.
I will continue commiting eco-sins for as long as I’m alive. Come and get me, eco-coppers, if you dare!
I recall a bumper sticker in early 70s Silicon Valley, expressing ridicule at the Sierra Club.
Save a tree – don’t wipe.
One point about coffee, at least as I have seen it grown in Guatemala. It is not a monoculture, but exists with trees and other plants growing around it. As it is a perennial, the soil is not dug up every year. IOW, from what I have seen, coffee growing is an ecologically sane way of treating the land, coexisting with grass.
Why don’t these people set a good example for the rest of us and commit suicide for the good of the planet?
Save the forest by shooting yourself and we’ll feed you tot he bears who in turn will fertilize the forest. That would be much more productive than filing lawsuits all the time and lecturing to the rest of us.
Is there anything we mortal humans do that is not harmfull to someone’s God, messiah, religion, race, creed the enviroment or the moon?
Must we devolve into mere animals grazing on grass just to please these lunatics?
Mankind struggled up the food chain for 3 million years just to have some whacko nut job take our coffee away from us to save the planet.
Jesus wept.
Sebastian Shaw @ 106:
True, true. I prefer the “Conan the Barbarian” cult. It only has one creed:
Lawler Nicoteri – Now THAT is funny. Also, since the environmentalists think dogs are a carbon sink, I was planning on feeding my dogs with environmentalists. I caught one but the dogs would not eat it. There are some things even a dog won’t eat.
As soon as Al Gore is in the dock for his envirocrimes, I’ll pay attention. Otherwise, I know its a scam, so leave me alone.
Have the enviro-whackos ever used tree bark for toilet paper? Did they trade Mother Nature’s mud for their wonderful coffee? How about not bathing? I can see them doing that while in a drugged-out haze; that’s easy. Since homes are wasteful, they should just give them up & live one with the land. But that wouldn’t last very long given their hypocritical comforts. These Global Warming nuts are hypocrites. They refuse to live by their own standards. But they want everyone else to live in the Dark Ages. It’s madness.
Sting was on MSNBC yesterday talking about saving the rain forest. However, I’ve seen he lives quite well with multiple homes; regardless how green he thinks he is, he is still hypocrite. If he wants to save the rain forest, he can start by only living in ONE house. That’s a start. And he can cook his own food–not have a personal chef.
How much a carbon footprint does Sting’s houses possess? How about his tours?
RagnarD/131
Dogs are allergic to patchouli and also they know well that brains based on tofu nutrition have acquired sponge like structure (akin to Aero candy bar) and they loathe that texture. A myth amongst dogs is circulation that eating enviro-mentalist transfers the spongeness to the eater and as the Top Dog said in his First Commandment: “You are what you eat.”, they won’t eat it even if on a verge of starvation.
Fungi, though, are quite happy to digest an enviro-mentalist, spongeness is their middle name.
Why aren’t the greenies lining up for castration and neutering?
Where have all the Shakers gone?
I came across this little tidbit that might help explain their madness.
http://www.mercola.com/article/soy/avoid_soy.htm
Read down to the comment about zinc deficiences. Hilarious but true.
J.S. Bach must be smiling at the folly of the coffee prohibitionists: herewith a link to BWV 211, “Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht,” otherwise known as the Coffee Cantata. The Kaffeekantate is in effect a brief comic opera about addiction to coffee. The libretto contains such lines as “If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment, I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzX2LBfVcUg&feature=related
BCers all, enjoy!
You know, when the Medieval Catholics told you that you had to be miserable in this life to be pure, at least they offered you paradise in the next for your efforts.
Modern environmentalism is a direct analogue for apocalyptic Christianity.
Time is getting short and it is coming down to the fact, that soon ( December 7 to December 18 ) I will have to pray to the good Lord to maintain our freedoms and not allow our leaders to sign the Copenhagen Treaty, which will take away our liberties, let go and let God-this being a challenge to our Lord and Saviour? However, while there is still time to prevent the loss of a lifetime, perhaps loss of life it’s self – I will do what I am able to fight for our freedoms! The whole Climate Change agenda is a proven fraud and racketeering, but the United Nations and Globalist governments don’t care as that is just the excuse instrument they have used to ensnare us, they are going to try to push it through anyway! Has everybody out there become a tree hugger? The tree will be standing 100 years from now, but will you be looking at the tree, from inside the fence of a Concentration Camp? Anyone out there want to fight to maintain their freedom anymore? Please do all you can to preserve freedom in North America!
Check out what Government is doing behind your back at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VebOTc-7shU
Canadians: to request that PM Harper doesn’t sign the Copenhagen Treaty, thereby causing Canadians to lose
their Sovereignty and Freedom email the PM at: pm@pm.gc.ca
Any lawyers want to help out by filing this Copenhagen Treaty be classified as an illegal Treaty, in order to, help save Freedom in North America? ( Unlimited Promotion Opportunity Here For a Law firm to Gain a favorable high profile credibility! )
Is it any wonder that one of the bluest areas of the country is the part where the first European settlers were Puritan?
People have mistakenly come to define Puritanism in purely sexual terms, and so they don’t think of Leftists as puritanical. Although spiritual descendants of Calvin and Knox may no longer profess a belief in God, the desire to moralize and scold and ban remains strong.
Class clown: medieval Catholics might have been told life was a vale of tears, but at least they had plenty of saints days and holy days to celebrate (where do you think Mardi Gras comes from?) The puritans didn’t even celebrate Christmas, since they thought of it as a suspiciously Papist (and pagan) custom.
121. Marcus Aurelius
A mathematically oriented agronomist excitedly plops a paper on the desk of his colleague. He exclaims he has solved the world’s food crisis. So, he launches into a verbal summary of his paper by starting off: “First, we assume a spherical cow…”
How now round cow?
I think that Hannibal Lecter may have been on to something.
I mean we could save a huge bunch of carbon by butchering and eating all the eco freaks. That fat bast**d Al Gore has got to be at least as much meat in the freezer as a decent sized deer. Hell, you buy a big coffin-style deep freeze; butcher him, James Hansen, Joy Behar, and Chris Matthews and you could avoid emitting the carbon that at least 3 years worth of meat gathering would expel.
I’d avoid Michael Moore though. That ain’t transfats – that’s trans-WARP fats there kiddies. We’re talking 300 pounds of lard whipped so fast the Iranians would steal the spin motor for their uranium separators!
You might get a few pounds of scrawny beef jerky out of Sheryl Crow but I’m not sure if it would be worth the effort.
131. RagnarD
I know you’re a nice guy and mean well, but..
environmentalists should be placed in the garden compost heap so their funk can replenish the soil. Don’t skin them. If they wriggle and refuse to stay put, you can hit them with the garden rake or a shovel.
Wayne #142, LOL! You have me in tears from the laughter especially when you get to Michael Moore & Sheryl Crow.
Ecology fanatics without respect for scientific method are the cultural equivalent of necrotizing fasciitis.
That’s “flesh-eating bacteria.”
scientific knowledge has to be falsifiable,
it has to be able to be disproven.
knowledge of the future is not falsifiable,
therefore is not science.
man made global warming is based on wild speculations about the future.
Used toilet paper. The average American gets through 23 toilet rolls each year, adding up to more than 7 billion rolls for the country in total.
Yeah, and that toilet paper magically disappears once it goes down the toilet. The water replenishes itself instantly in the aquifers, the city-sized septic tanks that deal with our waste convert it into strawberries and cream, our landfills make better soil, etcetera. I don’t know what your point is, but one of the first thing toddlers waking to sentience in this world realize is that we make a mind-boggling amount of waste. But don’t worry about it, that’s been working like a charm for the last one hundred years.
Mark @ 51: Good one. I am smiling.
Yes, Freud has the only possible explanation. The “Death Instinct” has been neglected or rejected by most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts but you are correct to cite it.
It contains three elements:
1. the “repetition compulsion,” which is the tendency we have to continue to do traumatic things to ourselves (actually it is a bit more complex than that but this will do for now).
2. aggression
3. the pull toward dissociating ourselves from perception, that Freud called “the nirvana principle.”
The first helps explain why mankind fails to learn from history. The second and third explain aspects of war and self-destruction as well as denial.
None of this has the same status as the biological aspects of the neurosciences; it is more a philosophical viewpoint than a proven theory. But I can’t find a better model.
In the final sentences of Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud muses about the eternal battle between life forces and death forces. With World War II on the horizon he wondered, (I paraphrase) “Eros and the death instinct will continue to struggle. But who can foresee to what consequences and to what end?”
Oh man they are even after my toilet paper, is there nothing sacred? Can we at least wash after bare handed wiping? Soap destroys the ecological system ACCCKKKKKK It’s better if I don’t eat, then I won’t….well never mind you get the idea. Save the Polar Bears, wipe your butt with your hand.
I liked the COLD FUSION scam better. At least it didn’t cost billions to us & increase the fortunes of billionaires with jaded ex-scientists playing climate pimps. All for an invention out of nothing called the carbon trade. Or should I call it the air trade?
Billions diverted to crooks. Whole governments planning economies on fairy dust.
All to sate the fantasies of Earth worshiping death cultists.
Who in the end want mankind dead or gone & to suffer the hair shirt. Till his extinction in propitiation to their Nature god.
Reading thru the thread I suddenly realised I lived in “green paradise” already – in the former USSR: You could not find any toilet paper (used newspapers were best bet), big cities had a tendency to turn off hot water from May thru September – not too many showers/baths, meet and new clothes were quite rare and most of the coffee was instant, which does not count, I believe. Good times for the planet, bad for regular people.
140. Donna V. I think you are absolutely correct to call Leftists “puritanical”, although I’m not sure that you could specifically trace it to Massachusetts’ Puritan history. I’ll have to ponder that one.
Your point that “People have mistakenly come to define Puritanism in purely sexual terms, and so they don’t think of Leftists as puritanical” is also dead on, I believe.
It seems to me that the Left has reduced the very concept of “freedom” to be limited strictly to uninhibited sexual license. By emphasizing “sexual freedom”, they distract from their war on actual freedoms, such as speech, religion, and the press. All those can go by the wayside.
Robin/151
A compromise: Wipe your butt with a polar bear paw.
Re: Puritanism
In Eastern commie Europe, the regimes were somewhat sexually repressive, uptight, sex was not talked about in the polite society. However, since there were no other freedoms, it was tolerated–a valve of sorts–that people expressed themselves sexually and it was one big f**kathon there. For hormonally flooded youngsters, that worked, but people after late 20′s were left with that typical grey emptiness of the society, the unbearable greyness of being, that caught up with them.
galinar/153
The wry joke went that the lack of toilet paper was compensated by an increased production of locomotives.
RE: The fatalists and those who would like to see mankind exterminated.
If we understand as a basic philosohy that the universe is trying to kill us from the day we were conceived, the seemingly insane folks who want to wipe out humanity make sense in a wierd sort of way…..
The folks at the top of the eco-nazi religion (such as Algore) have taken advantage of the gullability of folks to make millions (if not billions) of dollars. Its the age-old battle of liberty versus serfdom re-framed. For the 1st time in human history, there are more “free” people in the world than ever before. The genie is out of the bottle, and those who would rule the serfs cannot put it back in. Or can they ?
That is the problem. I mean, how can you argue that you don’t want clean water ? Clean air ? Unfortunately, they get to frame the argument. If you can frame the argument, you’ve got the “debate” such as it is, won.
Us who oppose serfdom do have one weapon on our side that cannot be matched by those who would enslave us. A sense of humor. Laughter will set us free.
And in the end, that may be what the world needs more of anyway…
So, climate “scientists” get to fly to Copenhagen in jet planes, but I have to give up coffee and toilet paper?
Yeah, right.
Each time I read of some of this drivel, I say to myself it cannot get any more screwy.
Then, it does!
I use toilet paper. If they want me to do something about that, I propose they come take it after I use it so they can recycle it somewhere, somehow, on someone!
The Global Warming – Climate Change crowd lost big time when a hacker revealed the principal scientists have been cooking the numbers for years now. They have been promoting their ’cause’ for financing. In short, the more money they can generate, the more ridiculous their claims have become.
Now, since we know the original actual temperature readings have been destroyed, and the numbers they use today are ‘homogenized’ from that data, we all know there is no result they can provide us that is not based on ‘cooked numbers.’