Category: Politics

Trying not to start the public floggings

When Panic Costs Money

Eco-Crap, Journalist Scum, Watermelons, Weather

The Greatest Living Englishman has turned his ire towards the BBC, and at climate fearmongers in general:

Amazon Prime star has slammed weather forecasters for spreading what he has described as “green propaganda” in his latest column.

The presenter, 63, went on to explain that due to inaccurate weather reports, he and many other farmers and been forced to “take a massive financial hit” for “absolutely no reason”.

Jeremy recalled how earlier this week, weather presenters had claimed “an apocalyptic storm would arrive in Britain on Tuesday night”.

The Former Top Gear host went on to explain how, due to predictions of weeks of “torrential rain and gales”, he had felt forced to harvest his crops even though they weren’t ready because the moisture content was too high.

“Yes, I’d have to pay £10 a ton to dry the grain after it was harvested but better to take that hit than have the whole lot ruined by the storm,” he wrote in his column for the Sun. 

“We worked tirelessly until 11pm and when I finally crawled into bed, utterly exhausted, I noticed that all of my neighbouring farmers were still out here, doing the same thing.”

Here’s what he was talking about:

But:

The ex-BBC star went on to express his outrage when he had expected to see “Armageddon” the next morning only to be greeted by “blue skies and a gentle breeze”.

“So the farmers had brought in their harvest early and taken a massive financial hit that they can’t afford… for absolutely no reason,” Jeremy fumed.

So he lashed out.

“They feel compelled, when it’s warm, to paint their maps dark red and talk about ‘extreme heat’. And similarly, to keep Greta and the snowflake army happy, they need to say when it’s a bit chilly, that we will all soon be buried under a 20-foot snow drift,” he complained.

“They see their weather forecasts now as political weapons. Baseball bats which can be used to beat the oil companies into submission. And they’ll mangle statistics if that’s what’s necessary.”

He then went on to beg weather forecasters to share “the truth” with farmers and to save their “propaganda forecasts” for people who need to “turn the heating down”.

“They think that the constant wrongness doesn’t matter, because a wonky weather forecast only affects people planning barbecues,” he stated. “But to farmers, it bloody well does matter.”

Frankly, if I were a British farmer, I’d subscribe to an actual meteorogical service and learn to interpret the data for myself.

And refuse to pay the BBC license fee, like millions of other Brits are doing.

Too Old To Rock ‘N Roll

Old Age, Politics

…but too young to die, as a wise man once sang.

Now we have the political equivalent:

Former South Carolina Republican Governor Nikki Haley said over the weekend that politicians should have to take mental competency tests once they hit 75 years old to ensure they are fit to serve the public.

“We need to have mental competency tests for anyone over the age of 75,” she said. “And I don’t say that to be disrespectful. I don’t care if you do it for 50 and older. What I’m saying is, these are people in D.C. that are making decisions on our national security.”

Of course, this tin-eared politico uses this argument to score a point off the noticeably-senile Joe Biden, but she does have a point nevertheless.

We don’t let people go into public office when they’re too young, because even among a poulation of ignoramuses, youthful wannabe-politicians are no more than the primordial ooze of society.  Young people, as it’s been said, argue with passion, vigor and conviction;  except that they’re almost inevitably wrong.

So given the inescapable fact that old farts start losing their marbles as they approach senility — forget the numbers, stats and medical studies on this, it’s an inescapable fact of human life — why not set an arbitrary upper limit on public service?  Forget that “testing” bullshit as suggested by Haley et al., that’s just busybody government attitude on display.  Carve it in stone — hell, stick it in the Constitution, why not? — but make it impossible for any Olde Phartte to govern.

Yes, I know:  some old people are commendably active, mentally speaking, and denying them office would have denied us of, to name but one, Ronald Reagan (at least his second term, anyway).  But even in Reagan’s second term, it was apparent that the old boy was losing his marbles.  And taking our cue from that, it’s not really how old a President is when he takes office, it’s how old he’ll be at the end of his first term that’s important.  Think about it:  70 years old on Inauguration Day means 78 towards the end of his Presidency, when he’ll still have his finger on the nuclear trigger and be proposing legislation that may suit the present but be a hopeless long-term proposition. Older than 70?  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:  Joe Biden.

Which brings me to the next issue about senior-citizen politicians:  the “I’ll be dead by then” attitude that is as inescapable a mindset as physical senility.  Oh sure, we’d like to think that our politicians are going to be statesmen like Washington or Jefferson and think of generations to come;  but the most likely scenario is that they’re going to be more like Barack fucking Obama.  (Tangentially, the only reason to allow older men to become president is because they’re more likely to die soon after leaving office, unless they’re named Jimmy Carter in which case they continue to meddle and foist their horrible ideas and opinions on us long after they’ve exceeded their useful date.)

If we think about this logically, politicians and lawmakers in general should have to live with the consequences of their actions, because then the urge to just say “oh fuck it, let the kids deal with it” is a lot less appealing.

Corporations, by the way, recognize this issue quite clearly, which is why we have mandatory-retirement policies in so many professions — airline pilots at 55 65 being the most noteworthy — and why so many people prefer middle-aged doctors to both young and inexperienced doctors and old doctors who may not be up to date with recent advances or do things “because I’ve always done it this way”.  There are limits to experience, of course, and particularly when that experience stands in the way of proper action.  Most corporate boards, by the way, have no age limit but that’s because the proper function of a board is advisory and not executive.

Here’s my suggestion:  all public servants, regardless of position, should be banned from running for public office after the age of 67 — the de facto  “retirement” age of current society.  I know that medical advances are wonderful and have done so much to ensure that the age of Man is no longer just threescore years and ten etc., but allowing much older people to run for office — yes, Trump as much as Biden — is an irresponsible indulgence that in general and in the long term will turn out to be harmful to society.  (Trump, for example, would be 78 were he to win the Presidency in 2024, which means he’d be 82 at the end of his term of office.  You sure you want an octogenarian Trump flailing around the Oval Office for two whole years?  And that’s assuming he’s still got all his marbles now:  by no means an established fact.)

As a bookie might put it:  yeah, there are some senior citizens who would function perfectly well while late into their seventies and even eighties — but that’s not the way to bet.

If we have a lower limit on political life, why not an upper one?

Everybody Panic!!!!!

Eco-Crap, Marxists, Watermelons

If anybody has noticed that the hysteria surrounding Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© is ratcheting up, you’re not alone.  However, the reasons for this increased hysteria — fueled by the spate of summer heatwaves* consuming Yurp and Murka alike — are not surprising.  Why?  Because government and especially the Marxist wing thereof constantly affirm the wisdom of H.L. Mencken:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Now that the dreaded Covid has essentially subsided into a “seasonal flu” category, this eco-nonsense has perforce had to take its place:

There are a lot of religions on this planet, but none so demanding of one’s faith as the Church of Climate Change. It’s a cult whose message is so pervasive in our culture that many take it at its word that mankind is indeed changing the climate of the Earth, but once you start looking at the data you can see pretty quickly that a lot of its claims are based on half-truths or full-on lies.

The dirty secret about the Church of Climate Change is that all things considered, it’s a suicide cult. It wants humanity to die off and stop having so many children. All this to, ironically, save you from yourselves.

Moreover, its goal is to get you to give up on human advancements and regress back to a time when humanity worked with lesser technologies and fewer rights. It wants you to hand power to them, not only in the government but personal freedoms such as your ability to travel freely and eat what you want. It wants to regulate businesses into obeying rules that would cripple and restrict them.

As Jeffrey Tucker points out in the Epoch Times, the media is currently using the fear-inducing models they created for COVID-19 to push the climate change scam. There are orange and red “tracking maps” on major networks following big heat increases in the same way they would highlight COVID-19 outbreaks.

Executive summary:  don’t believe the hysteria, especially because the media is using that to attract eyeballs.  That it happens to coincide with the totalitarians’ aims is in itself no coincidence.

However, there are at least a few signs that this nonsense is finally being recognized for the foolishness that it is — not by us, the public, but by government officials.  Good grief, even squishy BritPM Rishi Sunak is snapping back:

He added: ‘If you or others think that the answer to climate change is getting people to ban everything… I think that’s the absolutely the wrong approach.’

Yeah duh, Rishi old man;  welcome to our party.

But if there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that climate change hysteria is not going to abate, but get more frantic.

*Note that there’s a perfectly good reason for said heatwaves, but blame can’t be laid at the door of airliners, SUVs or Republicans so it’s being ignored by the media:

In the study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, Millán and his colleagues estimate that the Tonga eruption sent around 146 teragrams (1 teragram equals a trillion grams) of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere – equal to 10% of the water already present in that atmospheric layer.

Oh.

Maybe we should ban volcanoes.  What the hell, it makes as much sense (and as much chance of success) as any of the other initiatives proposed by the Greens.

There He Goes Again

Eco-Crap, Watermelons, Weather

…Steve Milloy, that is, using actual data (!) to prove — as he’s being doing pretty much ever since I can remember — that the Eco-Loons are a bunch of lying assholes:

Not a single extreme weather event can be:

1. Factually shown to be unprecedented; or

2. Scientifically shown to be linked to emissions.

This, in the middle of a heatwave both here and in Europe that is nowhere close to what’s happened in the recent past, let alone in the long-ago pre-SUV era when, as he points out, Greenland was once completely ice-free, and had been for centuries.  And even now, as people have been buying more and more large SUVs and trucks:

“No global warming in almost 9 years despite 500 billion tons of emissions.”

You fool, Milloy:  it’s not global warming, it’s Global Cooling Climate Warming Change©.

Maybe at some point some kind of collective — wait, “common”? — sense will kick in, and we’ll stop listening to the climate alarmists and implementing their insane policies.

Just not while we’re being governed by addled fools like Joe Biden and his cabal of watermelons.

Question Asked

Marxists, Politics, RINO/GOPe

Asks some guy:

How Do You Know When It’s Time To Flee A Deep-Blue Hellhole?

Oh, I dunno.  Let me take a stab at it.  Here are what I would call good reasons, not in order but as they occur to me.  When:

  • the state’s legislature and governor’s office is pretty much controlled by the Left (from which, it should be said, all the rest of the catastrophe flows)
  • high taxes, and increasingly more-frequent tax increases and new taxes
  • permissive attitudes on the part of elected officials (such as district attorneys) towards criminal behavior
  • restrictive gun laws pertaining to ownership, possession and use
  • a state education system which fails to educate children, but which is intent on sexualizing them
  • a stifling bureaucracy that operates seemingly without check or censure as it oppresses the public
  • there’s a homeless problem which is apparently encouraged by local regulation and law
  • government is in thrall to whatever current fad is popular, e.g. climate change, LGBTOSTFU or drug decriminalization
  • cities are falling apart in terms of infrastructure (e.g. public transport and roads/bridges)
  • there’s an inability or unwillingness of government to address difficult social problems
  • still more that I can’t think of at the moment, but I’m sure that others can.

Ironically, the original article was written by a guy living in Australia, where leaving one state for another is pretty much akin to choosing to die from slow-acting poison or from cancer.  In U.S. terms, that’s like someone leaving California to live in Massachusetts.

Oh Dear

Bureaucracy, Eco-Crap, Lies and Untruths, Watermelons

We’re always being told how bad Eeeevil Oil is for us, for the environment and of course for the pore likkel beasties in the fields.

First off, we have to stop using oil-powered vehicles and start using Duracell-powered cars and trucks (lol) instead.  Except that it turns out that electric cars are worse for the environment than gasoline-powered ones (see here for the !SCIENCE!).

So if Teslas and Priuses are doubleplusungood after all, then we need to start using “sustainable” eco-fuels like corn-based ethanol because sustainable.  (Even Formula 1 is moving towards using ethanol-only fuel in the next couple of years, the idiots.)

Sounds good, right?  Errrr, nazzo fast, Guido.  Add this little snippet to the “Solution Is Worse Than The Problem” category:

The US biofuel program is probably killing endangered species and harming the environment in a way that negates its benefits, but the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is largely ignoring those problems, a new federal lawsuit charges.

The suit alleges the EPA failed to consider impacts on endangered species, as is required by law, when it set new rules that will expand biofuel use nationwide during the next three years, said Brett Hartl, government affairs director with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which brought the litigation.

Not that we need any further proof that the EPA is to the environment as cancer cells are to the human body, but I digress.

The Clean Air Act requires the EPA to set minimum levels of biofuel usage for the transportation sector. The new rule approved by the agency calls for about 15bn gallons (57bn liters) of conventional corn ethanol for each of the next three years, plus an increase from 5.9bn gallons to 7.3bn gallons of advanced biofuels during the same time period. 

About 40% of all corn grown in the US is used for ethanol production, and nearly half is used as animal feed.

While the fuels are designed to decarbonize the transportation sector, their production eliminates wetlands and prairie land that act as carbon sinks, Hartl noted. The EPA in 2018 estimated that up to 7m acres (2.8m hectares) of land had been converted to grow corn for ethanol fuel. 

Ethanol production also pollutes water. Regulations around pesticides and fertilizers used in corn grown for ethanol fuel are much looser, which means much higher levels of dangerous chemicals run into surface and groundwaters. The pollution probably plays a significant role in dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico after pesticides flow down the Mississippi River, Hartl said. 

Read the rest to see how the EPA is ducking and diving to avoid doing anything that might actually, you know, alleviate the problem.

One by one, every single alternative proposed by the Greens (and their lickspittles in academia and the media) is proving to be a complete fiasco:  wind- and solar power generation instead of nuclear, electric vehicles (EV) instead of internal combustion engines, and now biofuels instead of gasoline.

But Oh No! we have to preserve the Gaia Cult — even if it kills us (and Gaia).

Fucking bastards.