Monthly Archives: October 2009

And they’re wor­ried about a lit­tle global warm­ing. Pfui!

TCM — 60 — Sat, 10/31, 2:00 AM 1 hr 45 min

1972, Hor­ror

An evil marine biol­o­gist dis­cov­ers a for­mula to turn humans into giant sea crea­tures, so he trans­forms him­self into a mutated walk­ing cat­fish and starts kid­nap­ping nubile young women in an attempt to start a new race of super beings.

And then, after he un–bar­bels them, they have to worry about CRABS!

A dozen lemons and 10 pounds of butter

Happy Hal­loween!

“Peo­ple will need to turn veg­e­tar­ian if the world is to con­quer cli­mate change, accord­ing to a lead­ing author­ity on global warm­ing” is the quote begin­ning Fausta’s blog post enti­tled “Stern Has a Cow.” She then pro­ceeds to make the arti­cle from which the quote is drawn appear hope­lessly unse­ri­ous with her trade­mark sassy asides, as when fol­low­ing the Times lugubri­ous tolling of the cli­mate change dooms­day bell — “Methane is 23 times more pow­er­ful than car­bon diox­ide as a global warm­ing gas” — she chimes in with “Espe­cially if you’re down­wind from the cows.” It’s pretty funny. The whole post is here.

In her post Fausta also points out that the afore­men­tioned “lead­ing author­ity” appar­ently became one by mak­ing pro­nounce­ments, not by fol­low­ing them, not­ing Stern “said that he was not a strict veg­e­tar­ian himself .”

Funny word, that. Strict. I have known veg­e­tar­i­ans who main­tained their morally supe­rior sta­tus by going all Latin – lacto/ovo/quo vadis veg­e­tar­i­ans. Once you start pars­ing punc­tilio the sky’s the limit. For awhile cer­tain dietary des­per­a­does were grasp­ing at the moral supe­ri­or­ity claimed by veg­e­tar­i­ans by earnestly announc­ing to all and sundry that they DIDN’T EAT RED MEAT at which point the pork pro­duc­ers started putting out ads which began, “Pork: The Other White Meat.”

The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. I’m sure some of us know peo­ple who will dip a spoon into honey and put it all over an Eng­lish muf­fin, think­ing them­selves supe­rior because there aren’t Cana­dian bacon, poached egg, and Hol­landaise sauce on it, never stop­ping to think that they’re rip­ping the stuff of life from the mouths of baby bees, with­out whom those plants we’re all sup­posed to be eat­ing wouldn’t exist!

Hey! Come to think of it, the same is true of car­bon dioxide. But I digress.

While this Lord Stern char­ac­ter prob­a­bly wouldn’t admit it, this isn’t the first time the Brits have gone down this path, where their upper crust indulged itself by exco­ri­at­ing their own peo­ple as self­ish know-nothings who would be fit to live only if they would start think­ing like they would be think­ing were they as with-it as the peo­ple who were think­ing such bad thoughts about them.

Hey! This isn’t the first time we’ve done it, either! And OH! There I go again. Sorry. Now… oh yeah, any­way, one of their last episodes of enforced denial was delight­fully chron­i­cled in the book 84, Char­ing Cross Road.  About, among other things, how British rulers pun­ished the British for their boor­ish­ness by not let­ting them eat things they liked to eat.

Now, I know you think I’m get­ting all snarky and any minute I’m going to type the word “elit­ist.” OK. Never let it be said Nolan­im­rod isn’t accom­mo­dat­ing. Elit­ist. There. And this is elit­ism with a dark side.

Lately the British press has been writ­ing glow­ing pro­files of peo­ple who are get­ting abor­tions because they don’t want to bring a CO2-generating mon­ster into exis­tence because this “crea­ture” will want to, you know, eat and breathe and pos­si­bly flip on a light switch or two. I can’t find the ref­er­ence, but I read about one such broad-minded altru­ist mus­ing that by not hav­ing a baby she and her equally-responsible spouse were bal­anc­ing out the jet travel they liked to take to the South Seas. If you think I’m kid­ding here’s one arti­cle I found.

This is why I brought up the E-word. Elit­ists never lis­ten to them­selves. They just go on pon­tif­i­cat­ing to the great unwashed – aka (and I can get away with say­ing this, because I’m not say­ing it to a cop) “the peo­ple who pay their salaries” — never dream­ing that some troglodyte in their audi­ence might have access to a snatch of logic here and there. Like the peo­ple who go to Cuba, where peo­ple risk their lives in leaky boats to get off the island, and come back and tell us we should be so lucky to live there.

Aren’t the peo­ple who are so all-fired wor­ried about what the human scourge is doing to the planet aware that lead­ing by exam­ple is the most effec­tive way? Why put the onus of sav­ing the planet on some­body else? Why not dis­robe, hop into the tiger cage at some zoo, pick the biggest tiger, and yank on his tail? That would not only guar­an­tee that they won’t be adding to the prob­lem by get­ting, say, cre­mated, but it might keep some­body from rais­ing a methane-producing rumi­nant to feed the tiger.

Per­haps it is now time for the self-appointed arbiters of every­thing, the spir­i­tual heirs of the sages of Laputa, to cease think­ing of and refer­ring to their fel­low humans as a big blob of toxic waste and engage in some con­struc­tive think­ing that doesn’t take the removal of most of human­ity as a start­ing point.

There is, by the way, a bright spot to this rant. I know some­body who wants to give Lord Stern a big, long kiss, a real tonsil-tickler, although she wishes his veg­e­tar­i­an­ism were just a lee­tle bit stricter.

Kiss me, you fool.

One of the spook­i­est things I have ever seen and I don’t know why.  A video of a jet engine sus­pended in space, slowly rotat­ing, mak­ing that muted whine they do when they’re idling.

Also a lit­tle weird is that I saw this ad in the first place.  Why did I even see it?  Granted,  one of these babies would look good mounted on a bicy­cle but I think the engi­neer­ing is a lit­tle beyond me and I prob­a­bly couldn’t man­age the price.

This ad wasn’t in Engi­neer­ing Age or Publisher’s Clear­ing­house “Build-a Jet Sweep­stakes.”  It was embed­ded in the home screen of Real Clear Pol­i­tics, which is a polit­i­cal fact sheet and opin­ion piece smörgås­bord.  So I don’t get the mar­ket­ing.  Is this like one of those ads on TV where a new drug is touted, only they don’t tell you any­thing about it, just that you need it, and then you’re sup­posed to go off and demand it from your doc­tor, who’ll give it to you just to shut you up?  On the off chance that you run into the chair­man of Boeing?

Excuse me.  Hi, there.  I couldn’t help over­hear­ing you talk­ing about air­craft design with that odd-looking man wear­ing the alu­minum hat.  Well, let me tell you about this jet engine I just saw advertised…

So — I usu­ally don’t talk pol­i­tics in a cock­tail lounge, but I couldn’t help over­hear­ing that you’re against fur­ther deten­tion of pris­on­ers at Guan­tanamo.  OH!  Did you hear about G.E.‘s lat­est jet engine?

No, I guess cre­at­ing buzz amongst the hoi pol­loi isn’t the idea.  Can’t imag­ine what was.  Per­haps just tout­ing the indi­vid­u­als who worked on it, as their sig­na­tures are fea­tured.  Maybe just for Hal­loween, because, for some rea­son, the ad is really spooky.

In any case, it’s cool to watch.  A lit­tle hyp­notic.  Maybe its pur­pose is to make impres­sion­able teenagers hit the cal­cu­lus books.

Here t’is.

Ques­tion 2:  What do we do with the cadre of folks who are con­vinced that they were born to direct our every move (if we don’t want them to do it)?

Today Kather­ine Jean Lopez, writ­ing in National Review Online, reminds us … in which he sup­ported Barry Gold­wa­ter as the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­date in the 1964 race. Rea­gan said, “This is the issue of this elec­tion: Whether we believe in our capac­ity for self-government or whether we aban­don the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and con­fess that a lit­tle intel­lec­tual élite in a far-distant cap­i­tal can plan our lives for us bet­ter than we can plan them ourselves.

Uh, let’s have that again:

This is the issue of this elec­tion:  whether we aban­don the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and con­fess that a lit­tle intel­lec­tual élite in a far-distant cap­i­tal can plan our lives for us bet­ter than we can plan them ourselves.

These lead­er­ship things seem to be get­ting a lit­tle bol­lixed up.  In New Orleans when a young man of good fam­ily is unfit for seri­ous endeav­ors they used to make him a branch man­ager of one of the estab­lish­ment banks because there peo­ple took care of him and kept him from doing too much damage.

I applaud the prin­ci­ple, but I think Con­gress and the White House are prob­a­bly bad places to park snobby elit­ists.  They can do some dam­age.  And they can be supremely annoy­ing on their way to doing it.

I use the “snobby elit­ists” thing advis­edly.  Lately there have been galax­ies of words expended in defense of  “elites” and against the clue­less Yahoos who would take their name in vain.

The snobby peo­ple I’m talk­ing about need no defense.  They are in con­trol. They achieved this posi­tion by going to an élite uni­ver­sity, where they learned how naughty the US was, and that peo­ple they have never met, read, or heard should be taken out and shot for offend­ing them with their poi­so­nous views about pol­i­tics and society.

So, there­fore, they are dis­tin­guish­able with a lit­tle effort.

mean­while, back at the ranch,

dare we insist that we be con­sulted about laws gov­ern­ing us before they become laws?