How baseball ended the world

From Belmont Club’s resident poet, Walt

It’s a little known fact of history, but environmentalists almost nipped the game of baseball in the bud.

I tell you, Abner, this won’t do
Your game will harm a thing or two
Our forests are denuded now
So wooden bats we can’t allow
Removing grass for infields will
Reduce the food for horses till
They become scarce and that’s a fact
So playing ball’s a harmful act
The ball you say is horsehide too
So you can see with horses few
That making balls with scarce resource
Will lead to taking hides by force
Your uniforms are made of wool
And as we know the threads all pull
Resulting in more sheep to shear
And that will lead to what I fear
Is ecologically, alas
A drain upon our dwindling grass
Our corn is finite too as well
So all the popcorn you will sell
And peanuts yes and crackerjack
Will mean that all these things we’ll lack
With people singing Take Me Out
To The Ballgame with a shout
The strain on trolleys will be great
And then we’re in a sorry state
A girl’s game, Rounders, that’s the truth
Your game will lead to boys named Ruth
And if your game becomes a hit
We’ll soon have Mantle, Mays and Schmidt
No Abner this will never do
For all our sakes we order you
To listen to your betters, us
Your players will all spit and cuss
And Goddess Gaia will be pleased
When strain upon her Earth is eased
The Earth is finite in its yields
So we forbid these baseball fields

And as we know, the environmentalists were right. The horses are gone, the corner lots are filled with the ping of aluminum bats, woolen uniforms are no more, and nobody sings Take Me Out To The Ballgame anymore, except Harry Carey in the seventh inning stretch at Wrigley. Everybody else is at home watching on television,drinking beer and wondering what the heck happened to the PhilliesBraves.

Hehe.

Enviros Emily Litella moment

Remember Paul Ehrlich? Remember The Population Bomb? Global Cooling? To think that today’s memes of peak oil and the incipient death of Gaia are not, actually, all that new…

Oh so long ago… er, not so much.

via Richard Hernandez we are reminded-

George Will reviews environmentalism’s track record at predicting the future of the earth by the technique of reviewing the past. Using newspaper archives, Will takes us back to yesteryear where we are confronted by one of environmentalism’s many predictions of doom.  Then he speeds the archival time machine forward to show what actually happened. The depressingly consistent result is that environmentalism has missed the mark by a country mile.

The modern disaster cycle began in 1972, when “when we were warned (by computer models developed at MIT) that we were doomed. We were supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. We are neither. So, what went wrong?”

Well, they were just, ah, mistaken.

That didn’t stop the powers-that-be from capitalizing on the fear. Sadly, that didn’t work out so well…

As to the rest of the prediction, the furnaces of Pittsburgh are indeed cold and the assembly lines of Detroit are in fact still — but not for the reasons the environmentalists imagined. Pittsburgh, once known as “Steel City” has no steel mills left within the city limits. In Detroit the automotive assembly lines are kept fitfully moving only under the impetus of government subsidy. As for the remains of what used to be called Motor City, “the city of Detroit has a very strange, wild appearance, in some parts like a city of ruins many years older than it actually is, where nature reasserts itself in vegetation that spreads over the city’s crumbling structures.”

But the catastrophe which leveled these proud capitals was not due to anything the environmentalists predicted. On the contrary they were due to the failed attempts of the political process itself to manage that future. The combination of suicidal economic policies, a relentless pandering to unions and the special interest meddling of politicians — each undertaken for the ostensible purpose of making things better — succeeded in making things worse to a degree that is wondrous to behold. Surveying the ruins of industrial America Hanson notes elsewhere that “Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit”, raising the interesting possibility that recovering from a nuclear blast may be possible or at least a lot more likely than surviving terminally stupid political projects.

Of course the possibility that the current doomsayers are also not right, regardless of the quite recent track record, is discounted. So we get wind farms, E65 gas, and carbon credits. We get the relentless green drumbeat in the media, designed to make folks happy with their declining lifestyle because we’re doing it for Gaia, don’t you know. We get to choose paper or plastic in the grocery store, never noticing all the plastic packaging safety and health regulations require, and get to feel better about ourselves for picking paper.

The worst thing about political crusades is that they manufacture “facts”. That is to say they mass-produce lies.  As a now-skeptical environmentalist Fritz Varenholt noted, movements to save the world tend to force the data into the narrative. After a while the public, force fed a diet of press releases, come to believe the narrative is the fact.

In other words, calling a spade a spade, we’re being lied to. I folks don’t wake up to this, well, then they can live with the chains they put on their own ankles.
Oh. Never mind.

Poisoning the Well

Althouse: Stirring up rumors that Obama may replace Biden with Hillary Clinton..

It would be a great “game change” — to use the term applied 4 years ago to Sarah Palin.

And — amusingly — it would be Obama taking advice from Sarah Palin, who just a couple days ago said:

[T]he strategists there in the Obama campaign have got to look at a diplomatic way of replacing Joe Biden on the ticket with Hillary. And I don’t want to throw out that suggestion and have them actually accept the suggestion because then an Obama-Hillary Clinton ticket would have a darn good chance of winning.

Don’t you love the role of Sarah Palin in American politics? On the sidelines… looming…

Funniest thing I’ve read today.

 

UPDATE: from the comments-

The only person who despises The Comrade more than Hillary Clinton is Bill Clinton. I’ve had a pet theory for some time that Bill Clinton will bury the fatal dagger when the time comes.

This is great theatre.

Genetically engineering ‘ethical’ babies is a moral obligation, says Oxford professor

Genetically engineering ‘ethical’ babies is a moral obligation, says Oxford professor – Telegraph.

Good intentions? Road to hell? This is Eugenics masquerading as ethics. Who decides what is ‘ethical’?

Ah, it’s an Oxford Professor- my mind boggles thinking of what this aristocrat thinks makes a ‘better’ person. Better soldiers? We can build ’em! Obedient citizens? Coming right up!

Pardon me if the idea of the Saul Alinskys of this world getting ‘hold of this technology is frightening as hell.

via Drudge

TechnoChitlins

I can’t think of a better post to restart this blog-

The Gods of the Copybook Headings


AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

 

Boy-howdy, they certainly are