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We’re All Gonna Die!

…not really. But it should get a little exciting around here for a while.

I’m going to blog it as much as I can- I’m sure at one point I’ll find out how well I can blog from my phone. Woohoo!

Actually a Cat 2 is not that big a deal, a messy PITA but not much more than that- and from my experience during Katrina the folks in Alabama and Mississippi are remarkably able to jump in and clean up afterwards quite quickly. So no worries here.

Sorry for the lax posting the last couple of days- my PC decided to make my life more interesting and had a hard-drive take a dump. Fixed now, so back in business.

So bring yo’ bad self on Izzy!

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Eeew

Just when I thought it might be safe to return to my home state,

A lab tech at Georgia Health Sciences University may have engaged in too much monkey business.Officials jailed Coley Mitchell, 32, on August 13 after he was discovered intoxicated with his pants down in a campus locker room.

In the same room: two lab monkeys who had been let out of their cages, the Augusta Chronicle reported.

Mitchell smelled of alcohol,

Well, duhhh!

according to police reports, and became belligerent and combative when asked to leave the room.

Dang, apparently I missed all the fun…

via James Taranto

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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.

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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.