Hating On Planet Earth

Little bit of profanity in here, sorry.









I love how 40% of what gets thrown in eco-pagan recycling bins ends up in landfills anyway.

And I love how when people come to my house, try to dispose of an item, ask me where my "recycling is" and I have the privilege of declaring that "we don't recycle."

Before they can even digest that HERESY, I follow up with a declaration of how much I hate the environment.

Rooting For The Home Team?

Dirt?

Have any of y'all eco-pagans seen this one:

It looks interesting.

Relax! I'm not about to start worshipping Father Nature/Gaia or anything anytime soon.

But I am probably close to getting a Netflix subscription so I can see random motion pictures like this when I feel like it.

Though first I'm going to have to buy a color TV and upgrade my BetaMax player...

Stuff For Dummies?

I think I may have heard of this YouTube/book series - The Story of Stuff - a few years ago.

And I simply don't have time to watch it - BUT my sense is that it makes a few good points but goes overboard with Gaia-ganda. Here's the intro:

While our military budget is big....I don't think *half* of our federal tax revenues go towards it, for starters.

Again, I don't have time to even watch these clips (there's a whole bunch), so in the spirit of energy and resource conservation....I am outsourcing the debunking to the Third World:

Another Eco-Terrorist!

Police found 4 bombs including two made with propane. They're also gathering evidence from when gunman James Lee stormed into the building and took three of 1,900 workers hostage.

During the ordeal.... Lee ended up on the phone with an NBC producer. Lee talked to the producer for about 10 minutes.

But the standoff continued for another four hours until Lee was shot and killed by police.

The gunman was reportedly angry over the Discovery Channel's lack of programming on global warming.

Lee said he experienced an "awakening" when he watched former Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

Too bad for Big Media....that it wasn't an abortion clinic and a guy who had just watched, say, The Passion of the Christ!

For another eco-terrorist example, see - Greenism As Religion.

Book Summary - Omnivore's Dilemma

One of you clowns recommended this book to me in my comment section a while back. So I finally reserved it, picked it up last night, and swallowed it whole in one day!

What's it about? Well the title and subtitle - The Secrets Behind What You Eat - lend a sufficient clue.

It was about *how they make the sausage*. Don't want to know, right? Don't ask, don't tell....whatever you do, don't think too deeply about the *animal Holocaust* that you subsidize.

Except I learned some very interesting things from this book. I had no idea that *corn* dominated almost the entire supermarket. The author, Michael Pollan, goes into great detail as to how and why corn products became and reign supreme. He actually blames Big Government intervention!

But first the corn conspiracy theory. From one of his online articles:

For the great edifice of variety and choice that is an American supermarket rests on a remarkably narrow biological foundation: corn. It’s not merely the feed that the steers and the chickens and the pigs and the turkeys ate; it’s not just the source of the flour and the oil and the leavenings, the glycerides and coloring in the processed foods; it’s not just sweetening the soft drinks or lending a shine to the magazine cover over by the checkout. The supermarket itself–the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built–is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

There are some 45,000 items in the average American supermarket, and more than a quarter of them contain corn. At the same time, the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the 45,000 different items or SKUs (stock keeping units) represent genuine variety rather than the clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.

And from his book, look at the McDonald's breakdown. This his how much of its *carbon* comes from corn:

Soda (100% corn)
Milk shake (78% corn)
Salad dressing (65% corn)
Chicken nuggets (56% corn)
Cheeseburger (52% corn)
French Fries (23% corn)

Not having thought much about the food that I transform into scat....I had no idea before reading this book that chickens and cattle these days were force-fed corn, a food they wouldn't naturally eat. Apparently grain-fed cattle can be slaughtered at only 15 months or so whereas it takes grass-fed cattle 5 years to fatten sufficiently.  Obviously the latter is more profitable to raise.

Pollan talks about what he calls Big Organic or the industrial organic industry. Consider *Rosie* a Whole Foods chicken:

Rosie lives in a shed with twenty thousand other Rosies. Ah, you ask, what about the "free-range" words on Rosie's label. Doesn't that mean they can "freely range" outside? Not exactly. It's true there's a little door in each shed leading out to a narrow grassy yard. But here's the catch: The door remains FIRMLY SHUT until the birds are at least five weeks old. By that time they are so used to the shed that none of them go outside. And then all of them are slaughtered two weeks later.

Rosie and all the other chickens raised at Petaluma are the same breed: Cornish Cross broilers. The Cornish Cross is a a type of chicken bred for the industrial food chain. It is the fastest-growing chicken ever, turning corn into meat faster than any other bird. They go from egg to full size in just seven weeks. In fact, the birds grow so rapidly that their poor legs cannon keep up. Often, by seven weeks, Rosie can no longer walk.

I absolutely love the FIRMLY SHUT door, the 5 week *re-education* regimen, and the fact that the farm's first four letters are P-E-T-A!!!

Compared to conventional chickens, I was told, these organic birds have it pretty good. They get a few more square inches of living space per bird. (It was hard to see how they could be packed together more tightly.) Because there are no hormones or antibiotics in their feed to speed growth, they get to live a few days longer.

...USDA rules say an organic chicken should have "access to the outdoors."

Admittedly, this book opened my eyes to a lot I hadn't known. But by no means did it close my mouth or stomach. I won't be one of the alleged thousands he's converted to vegetarianism or organic foods.

I'm a pretty healthy eater anyway, and have been trending up in this department for some time. Though I can throw them back and enjoy it tremendously, I'm essentially only a *social drinker* these days. I only drink outside of my house and only on somewhat special occasions.  I've reduced my portion size with everything - notably pizza and ice cream - without any suffering.  And it was my wife, some 10+ years ago that set me down this *healthier eating* path.  Back then I had never even looked at a food label! 

So am I on the brink of paying up for organic meat?  I don't think so.  While there's plenty of *meat* behind the food wackos arguments, in terms of toxic pesticides and whatnot, there's also a glaring lack of evidence.  They can prattle on about a single Mad Cow disease outbreak for years but I remain unmoved by the math, by too many standard deviations from the norm.

In a nutshell, that's how I felt about the book.  Pollan's book does a wonderful job of answering the *what* of "what are we eating?" but it doesn't do such a good job proving consequences or of telling us *why* and *how* processed, chemical-laden food is hurting us.  To his credit, he writes humbly and fully self-conscious - and only mentions the inanity of *global warming* three of four times.  As I said to my wife, "I can't hold that against him because 'the environment' gets plugged every 3 pages in a newspaper or magazine!"

I'm just not about to turn eating into a sacred ritual when I can purify myself in so many more pressing ways.  Pollan, from what I can tell, is a native Northeasterner (Long Island?) who has no religion in his life.  For these types, it's almost a 100% given that they will be drawn to eco-paganism, self-centered hedonism, money worship, or religious sports fanaticism.  It's simply human nature to NEED meaning in our lives.

When I first got this book my wife waxed skeptical - warning me not to go down this road; not to over-analyze the crap that I ate.

I snapped back somewhat indignantly at the woman who should know me better.  I told her the last thing I would ever be afraid of on this over-heated planet was *the truth*.  And I boldly asserted that there wasn't a better equipped person in this spontaneously-arisen-out-of-nothing(!) galaxy...to detect and defuse sophistry.

Recall - I Bite Back!

Check it out ↑

Environmentalists Pollute Earth with Socialism

That's the *custom* bumper sticker that I'm about to order and adorn my car with. I believe it will only cost $3 or so.

I thought the color green was a nice touch, no?

The only problem with annoying passers-by with such truth is that surely one of them will key my car or something. These eco-pagans are just seething with hatred. Have you ever met one?

I have to remember to order a couple extra. I can't wait to stick one on my *green* cousin's hybrid car - a vehicle that, even though he makes about 10 international flights each year,...it's a car that he still manages to drive, with no passengers, over 20,000 miles annually!

Windmills - Truth In The ART Of Lying

Nearly two years ago, I wrote:

Point of fact, we were up in Hull [Massachusetts] a couple of weeks ago and the wind was howling. It had to be at least 25 mph. I looked up and noticed the windmill wasn't twirling. Then, twenty minutes later, I noticed that it was *working* - rather rapidly at that.

I said to my wife, "They must have plugged it back in!"

Now check out what I came across in my daughter's book tonight:



Hah!

The preceding page read had Dora exclaiming:

...We need to to TURN OFF the windmill so the kite can fly by.

For more on *bird blenders* see also:

Pagans Blowing It...

Bird-Blender Malfunction!

Green In-Fighting And More On Bird-Blenders

Earth Day Alarmism - An Annual Eco-Pagan Tradition!

I'm sure some of you have already seen these, since they came my way in an email *forward*....But I still found them worth highlighting. They are excerpts from Earth Day in 1970.

• "We have about five more years at the outside to do something." Kenneth Watt, ecologist

• "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." George Wald, Harvard Biologist

• "We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation." Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

• "Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction." New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

• "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years." Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

• "By [1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s." Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

• "It is already too late to avoid mass starvation." Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

• "Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine." Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

• "Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half..." Life Magazine, January 1970

• "At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable." Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

• "Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone." Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

• "We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones." Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

• "By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’" Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

• "Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct." Sen. Gaylord Nelson

• "The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age." Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Sacred Rite Of Trash Disposal

Click image to enlarge.

I believe it's from the United Kingdom.

Only a mindless, lunatic eco-pagan would abide by all those disposal regulations!

We Found Him!

Yep, I do believe that we've found West Coast Tom's runaway, bastard love-child from his Harvard days daze.

Living In Glass Palaces...

Behold NFL star quarterback Tom Brady the environmentalist:



And now behold Tom Brady, the HYPOCRITE:

...along with his wife he's apparently building a 22,000 square foot home in California!

Inverting The Pillars Of Civilization

Hah! That's a snapshot of an article, in the New York Times of course. Yeah, let's have the kids raise the parents!

Don Boudreaux responds...."First, clean your room!" and:

Today’s prattling by young people about how awfully dirty the globe is reflects not kids’ "inherent" tuning-in to the global environment but, instead, their indoctrination – performed by teachers and popular media – into the Church of Gaia.

But let's remember, that parents who *outsource* the mind control of their children to government agents....they aren't innocent here and might even have forfeited their right to complain about said indoctrination.

Of course, I get to complain because I have to pay for it!

Thanks to Taylor for doing the dirty work here - for mining the NYT and forwarding me the link.

Hoofing It On The Homefront

Over the last couple of years I've been experimenting with *self-denial*.

Instead of my normal 5 pieces of pizza....how about 3?

Instead of my normal brimming bowl of ice cream....how about two-thirds as much?

I've whittled down color TV viewing; replaced some golf rounds with practice sessions; skipped daily showers(!); and cut back sundry other little indulgences.

In particular, going to bed at night without the TV was hard - not to do, but to attempt to do. Not long ago I would shudder at the prospect of spending the night in someone's guest room that didn't have a cable hook-up. I'd often choose to sleep on the floor of the living room!

Realizing this intense dependence I actually became scared. Am I just an incipient set-in-their-ways 'old coot'? Surely this is how my father's queer unbreakable routines began.

So here's my latest idea. Try to spend one day a week either entirely at home or at least without using the car.

I gave it a go on Monday AND made it until 5:32pm before folding. I broke down and took the kids to the park at Nantasket Beach.

While I've more than once Marginalized those harried off-dropping parents, I've acknowledged that I too have a dependency on the combustion engine. I am dependent on rapidly eliminating physical distances at a whim. And that describes most of us non-urban dwellers anyway.

Now the last thing in the world I am is GREEN. Heck, I'll idle my 12 mpg Chevy Suburban all day long just to prove it. So this has nothing to do with *climate un-changed*, emissions, or the eco-pagan religion.

I just think that under the surface of all our dependencies and prosperity there lies some suffocated humanity, some unrealized potential. Eating less makes me appreciate food and taste more; hitting golf balls with only my left hand (no right hand bailout!) has improved my golf swing; and less color TV means more productive time web-surfing, blogging, and reading.

Mix it up a little. You're going to turn into a robotic 'old coot' or 'old bag' eventually....but resolve to fight the process as best as you can.

I'm going to try again to stay completely homebound one day next week. Hopefully this new ascetic endeavor will be more successful than my last one.

Punishing My Kids

I just screamed at my kids for the extra-curricular smut I caught them with on my PC.

I took a screenshot of the *game* so y'all can appreciate my anger:



There's no computer for either of them for the rest of the day!

Government Schools, Making Kids Brown

Recall I read up a bit on that *revolutionary* unschool Sudbury Valley in Framingham, Massachusetts. That's the one where there're no classes, no curriculum, chaperones in place of teachers, and the kids aged 5-18 can well do what they please - even if it's playing video games all day long.

One thing that the founder, Daniel Greenberg, of SVS thinks vital to a healthy educational environment is to have decent proximity to, if not outright immersion in nature - trees, trails, bodies of water, and whatnot. His whole shtick is pretty crunchy, pretty hippy so I just figured an outdoors fetish went with the territory.

BUT, as my kids get older, I'm noticing more and more how much they enjoy being outside. From right when they wake up in the morning to late at night, they are continually slipping their shoes on and sneaking outside to hop on their bikes, whack golf balls, poke each other in the eye with sticks, to test the temperature, or just to catch some fresh air for a minute.

I don't think it's merely a reaction to the cabin fever suffered over the past five months; there's definitely something else at work here. Perhaps Greenberg has a not-to-be-dismissed point.

Perhaps locking kids away all day in walled rooms as the *system* does is so unnatural that it stunts *natural mind development* in unforeseen ways?



And so long as my kids keep hacking at bushes, tree limbs, and flowers with baseball bats (the Princess takes the scissors to them!)....I won't be scared of them turning into little eco-pagans!

See also - Sudbury Valley Empricism.

Forget *Green* - Boston is Brown!!!

Is it wrong that I got a big kick out of the overflow of a local water treatment plant amid the flooding of the past few days?

QUINCY — About 15 million gallons of untreated wastewater was diverted into Quincy Bay on Monday in an effort to keep sewage from backing up into homes and flooding the Nut Island sewage facility, Massachusetts Water Resources Authority officials said.

Twice on Monday workers redirected the plant’s surging inflow of rain and sewer water into the ocean through a discharge spout a half-mile off the city’s shore.

Frederick Laskey, executive director of the MWRA, said the first "controlled bypass" was ordered about 1 p.m. after sewage overflowed a pumping station in Houghs Neck and "came over the floorboards" at the Nut Island facility.

"It would have flooded Houghs Neck and Island Avenue," Laskey said. "Eventually, we would have backed up all the way to East Milton Square.”

"This is the storm from hell," he added.

Hah! I love how they call poop soup or raw sewage...."untreated wastewater"!

I wouldn't direct my untreated wastewater on you if you were on fire!



Above is the picturesque Wollaston beach in Quincy. It'd be a nice little beach if it wasn't in the poopy wake of all that untreated wastewater and whatnot. I saw a sign up there this past summer announcing that the *swimming was prohibited* on account of polluted water.

"Wow. That stinks", I said.

Then an adjacent *mom* informed me that the beach had been *closed* for a full decade when she was growing up (1980s?).

They're just soooooo green here in Boston!

Cherrypicking Bogeymen

Three cheers for the NYT!

I say *Thank God for the New York Times* and their muck-raking. It's about time someone took on those depraved Scientologists. Anyone who's been paying attention knows that these people, with all their vast political power, are what's been bringing our great nation down.

Hopefully the Times will expand this great series and tackle the *abuse* of other, albeit LESSER, cults - like the statists and eco-pagans...

Real Life Eco-Pagans!

Might be one of funniest, and most tragic, clips I have ever posted!

It's a slipperly slope you know - they all started out simply *recycling* aluminum cans and paper...

Malpracticing Green Parents

Toyota, the world's top automaker, ran into a *public relations nightmare* a couple of weeks ago with its so-called hybrid car:

And the stock dipped ↑ a bit.

Hah! The way I see it...widespread Prius brake failures might result in a, how should I say it?, they may have an *evolutionary benefit*!

The whiny Jeff Jarvis writes:

Including my parents, we own four Toyotas in my family; over time, we’ve probably owned eight or 10. Will we ever buy another? Depends. Depends on whether we can trust the company given its performance lately.

There’s a reason we bought our Toyotas. They are incredibly reliable. I abuse mine, skipping service calls. But — knock wood — I’ve not had any major problems. So even though I don’t much like Toyota design and — as a professor, can no longer afford to pay for that styling with the Lexus brand — I thought I was pretty much stuck buying them forever. Why fix what’s not broken, eh?

But now we find out our Toyotas are broken. We find out that Toyota has known this for too long and done nothing. We call our dealer and get stonewalled about the problem with brakes in the Prius our son drives.

I don't care....anyone who buys their teenage child a Prius is an UNMITIGATED A-HOLE!!!

I remember seeing teenagers in Newton and Brookline, Massachusetts driving around in Prius's that obviously their parents bought for them. All I could think was, 'Man, I really have to get out of this area!'

Sure, beleaguered *taxi-driving* parents should be permitted to buy their teenage children vehicles. But they should be clunkers (read: *cheap*) and safe - like the ginormous Buick my parents procured for my senior year of high school. It only got 9 miles per gallon!



My parents were quite sure that in the event of the inevitable teenage *accident*, that I'd be safer than I would be in a veritable, golf cart - such as today's collapsible Prius. The fact that its brakes may be faulty is almost beside the point.