Amy Ridenour provides a case study of how the legacy media covers global warming:

When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and paper published in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues had removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists -- in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling -- he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg's research less than two weeks after it's publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.

The Stieg paper's release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a noteworthy error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted February 6, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.

Of course, such biased "reporting" followed by much less visible retractions isn't just limited to global warming, but many other pet causes of the left--such as this media meme, to reference but one.

Hey, somebody should do a video about this topic!

A decade's worth of obsession over "global warming" by Sacramento can't prevent a headline such as this--filled with not just eco-doomsday fear mongering, but alliteration you can believe in! "Energy Chief Chu predicts California climate catastrophe."

Gee, now there's a headline that will stop the ongoing outward migration.

That's the headline from the Financial Times, which notes:

The US economy is suffering its steepest downturn since at least the 1970s and could descend into a depression, Jeff Immelt, General Electric's chief executive, warned on Thursday.

Far from warning about a devastating economic slowdown, most of GE's other spokesmen are surprisingly copacetic with the idea.

"Bill Gates just released mosquitos into the audience at TED and said, 'Not only poor people should experience this.'"

As Orrin Judd notes:

Two thoughts occur: (1) hasn't he been responsible for releasing enough bugs already; and, (2) if malaria actually was a disease of wealthy whites DDT wouldn't be banned.

Long before there Al Gore flunked out of Divinity School, this is yet another reminder of the horrors caused by the original junk science poseur, Rachel Carson.

On the other hand, Gates could easily make amends for this asinine stunt by becoming the next spokesman for Raid or Orkin.

Burning Man Festival gets sued--after man attending festival gets burned.

No, really!

(And at the other extreme of Mother Nature's thermostat, "Buffalo State College hosts the national teach-in on Global Warming Situations today -- a day the local temperature bottomed out at minus 6 degrees.")

At least once a season on TV's WKRP In Cincinnati, semi-competent news journalist Les Nessman would win Ohio's Silver Sow Award for his morning farm reports. Robert Kennedy Jr. sounds like he's definitely in the running for the fictitious award's next presentation ceremony, with this quote:

Today during a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Congressman Steve King asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to confirm a quote he made to the Des Moines Register in 2002: "Large-scale hog producers are a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a New York environmental group."

Kennedy responded: "I don't know if that's accurate, but I believe it, and I support it."

He'd face stiff competition from fellow Democrat Joe Biden, who has his own equally unique priorities for what's more important than the War On Terror:



(Oh to be a fly on the wall, if those two ever decided to compare notes on the topic.)

That was then...

"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK," Obama said.

"That's not leadership. That's not going to happen," he added.

This is now:

The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, had cranked up the thermostat.

"He's from Hawaii, O.K.?" said Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod, who occupies the small but strategically located office next door to his boss. "He likes it warm. You could grow orchids in there."

Huh. You know, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things.

A few years ago, John Derbyshire reminisced about a vignette involving Arthur Koestler:

When Arthur Koestler was a Communist in Weimar Germany, he used to have secret meetings with comrades in open public places where a police "tail" would be easy to spot. Once he met with a female comrade in a Berlin park. While discussing necessary business, the woman lost her attention and began staring at the surrounding trees. "Why is it," she suddenly blurted out, "that the leaves die wherever we go?"

I wonder if Al asks why it is that a permanent frost seems to follow wherever he goes?

Al Gore is scheduled before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday morning to once again testify on the 'urgent need' to combat global warming.

But Mother Nature seems ready to freeze the proceedings.

A 'Winter Storm Watch' has been posted for the nation's capitol and there is a potential for significant snow... sleet... or ice accumulations.

"I can't imagine the Democrats would want to showcase Mr. Gore and his new findings on global warming as a winter storm rages outside," a Republican lawmaker emailed the DRUDGE REPORT. "And if the ice really piles up, it will not be safe to travel."

A spokesman for Sen. John Kerry, who chairs the committee, was not immediately available to comment on contingency plans.

Global warming advocates have suggested this year's wild winter spells are proof of climate change.

But then, what isn't?

AP reports:

In a discouraging report for the American economy, General Electric Co. posted a 46 percent drop in fourth-quarter earnings on Friday and warned of a "tough environment" this year as it struggles with its ailing finance business.

To quote Mark Steyn's brilliant essay on previous reports of fresh disaster, "Hey, that's great news, isn't it?"

It is according to what GE's more public representatives have told us.

In November of 2007, one of the conglomerate's television networks urged us to turn off our lights (manufactured by GE) for the environment. Six months later, Barack Obama surely gave a tingle up the collective leg of one of their other television networks when he told told voters:

"We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we'll be fine."

And at the start of 2008, the spouse of his leading opponent in the Democratic primaries was quoted as saying:

We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions 'cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.

Mission accomplished!

It's only Barack-Age Wasteland. As the Ace of Spades blog notes, "Let's not forget - this was touted as the "greenest inauguration in history"--of course, that's not exactly how things worked out:

As Jonah Goldberg writes in the L.A. Times, on the campaign trail, Barack Obama was every candidate you wanted him to be. But that's about to change once he actually takes office and begins to govern:

Presidential inaugurations are in many ways the high-water marks of any presidency because they're so full of hope. All things seem possible. The rivalries and backbiting haven't set in yet, at least not publicly. Even the inevitable disappointments over Cabinet picks and White House staffing are tempered by the wide-eyed dreams of an ambitious agenda. Everyone -- or at least everyone who backed the guy -- has that "we can make this the best yearbook ever!" feeling.

Then comes the letdown. No, I don't mean Barack Obama will be a failed president. But even the most successful presidents bitterly disappoint some people, usually some of their biggest supporters. Indeed, they can only disappoint supporters because disappointment first requires confidence and hope. Those who voted against Obama can either have their low expectations fulfilled or be pleasantly surprised.

Many conservatives, for example, had hoped that George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was simply a marketing slogan. They were dismayed to discover he really meant it. In the 1980s, Republican factions were deeply divided in the "let Reagan be Reagan" debates. Everyone heard what they wanted to hear during the campaign and expected the man's presidency to jibe perfectly with their expectations.

Obama's ideological compass is far more difficult to discern than Reagan's or Bush's were. This is why his conservative detractors often called him a cipher. Obama's supporters rolled their eyes despite producing often-contradictory evidence to rebut the charge.

This raises perhaps the most interesting question of the Obama presidency: "What wasn't Barack Obama lying about?"

I don't mean this to be as harsh as it sounds. I'm not talking about what his conservative critics said he was lying about -- say, the true nature of his relationship with William Ayers. I'm talking about issues where his own supporters seem to have just assumed he had his fingers crossed.

Not the least of which is Obama's infamous statement on bankrupting the coal industry, uttered a year ago in the midst of an hour long conversation the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle and then unnearthed by a blogger in the last weekend of the election; the closest anyone remotely associated with the feckless McCain campaign came to delivering an October surprise. After The One's latest flip-flop on this issue, Ed Morrissey wonders if the freshness dating has expired on that statement--but concludes, don't be too sure.

"Leading climate expert Jim Hansen" (no relation, as far as we can tell, to a deceased but global warmingly remembered Muppet expert) believes "Barack Obama has only four years to save the world."

Of course he does. But we give Mr. Hanson bonus points for eschewing the leisurely and far overdone bourgeois pace of the ten year countdown--four isn't a number that's picked all that often from the proverbial hat for a doomsday countdown. But in any case, file this one way for election time in 2012 if--and we think the odds are somewhat reasonable here--Mr. Hanson is wrong.

In any case, no final countdown is complete without...

Some thoughts from, and about, Camile Paglia at Five Feet of Fury.

The New Jersey Star-Ledger asks, "Are we done with green?"

Now that money is tight, will environmentalism turn out to have been just a passing trend -- the political equivalent of the pet rock?

Probably not, say the experts. While some consumers may have to put their concern for the planet on the back burner for now, they will likely resume their new-found green habits once the economy improves.

"It was all about the environment last year. But it's all about the economy this year. It's like we can't think about more than one thing at a time. It's either one or the other -- almost as if we can't do both," said Ann Mack, who forecasts trends for the advertising firm JWT, formerly J. Walter Thompson.

Actually, the two are remarkably intertwined, as Mark Steyn noted at the end of last year, and Bill Clinton at its start. And presumably these fellows are getting quite a chuckle out the current economy.

"Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea."

Of course, a handful of really greedy buggers triple that impact with each search--and don't even mention the even bigger carbon criminals who dare to perform Google searches on their private Boeing 767s.

On the other hand, enough Google searches and private planes could prevent the new ice age--so have at it, boys and girls!

(H/T: Lileks on Twitter)

150 years of scary headlines on climate ch-ch-changes:

It's the final countdown!

In 2007, it was giant sun shades orbiting the earth to block imaginary global warming. Today, as Tim Blair notes, it's giant mirrors in outer space to block carbon dioxide, as environmentally correct engineers dust off an old chestnut from Arthur C. Clarke.

Meanwhile, here's a massive terraforming project that looks like much more fun.

"Auto sales likely dropped a breathtaking 3 million vehicles in 2008, the largest decline since 1974, said Ford Motor's head of sales analysis Friday", according to Knoxville's WBIR.com.

As Mark Steyn wrote last week, "Hey, that's great news, isn't it?"

What was it that then Senator Obama said on the subject? "We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world's resources with just 4 percent of the world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we'll be fine."

And boy, we took the great man's words to heart. SUV sales have nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home's thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Senator Obama's logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume a fair and reasonable 4 percent of the world's resources. And in these last few months we've made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-Elect Obama doesn't seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the American economy. He's proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar "stimulus" package or whatever it is now to "stimulate" it back into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then Senator Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They're aghast, they're terrified, they're on a one-way express elevator down to Sub-Basement Level 37 of the abyss with no hope of putting on the brakes unless the global economy can restore aggregate demand. What does all that mumbo-jumbo about "aggregate demand" mean? Well, that's a fancy term for you -- yes, you, Joe Lardbutt, the bloated disgusting embodiment of American excess, driving around in your Chevy Behemoth, getting two blocks to the gallon as you shear the roof off the drive-thru lane to pick up your $7.93 decaf gingersnap-mocha-pepperoni-zebra mussel frappuccino, which makes for a wonderful cool refreshing thirst-quencher after you've been working up a sweat watching the plasma TV in your rec room all morning with the thermostat set to 87. The message from the European political class couldn't be more straightforward: If you crass, vulgar Americans don't ramp up the demand, we're kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

Staggeringly, the Huffington Post actually has an essay that begins:

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore.

Al's gaseous rhetoric did much to fuel the calls from Obama and numerous others on the left for fewer cars, higher gas prices and reduced domestic energy production. Along with Democratic tampering with the mortgage laws of the 1990s which also set the current economic slowdown in motion, the environmentally correct left should receive a fair chunk of the blame for today's economic woes.

Eschaton immanentized: Charles Krauthammer once referred to "a predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity"; you can watch it merge with its 21st century successor, in the above video.

More: The end of life meets the end of days--at the first environmentally correct graveyard.

Is it better to give or to receive? Tim Blair spots Bank of America investing tens of billions of dollars in the summer "to make their operation sustainable [and] reduce greenhouse gas emissions"--before receiving $115 billion only a few months later from the ultimate source of gaseous emissions--Congress.

Related: Definition of insanity defined, here.

The Telegraph of England has an article titled, "2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved." (Hey does that mean that the earlier 1970s-version of eco-paranoia, man-made global cooling is now back in style?) If so, one reason why is that the Internet makes it possible to go back in time and compare the predictions of the past with the current reality.

It also allows us to find earlier stories where scientists and journalists suggested that their peers in each profession ditch objectivity and play on the understandable fears of laymen. Flopping Aces has a long blog post written by Dr. Tim Ball, former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg highlighting one example of the latter technique from 1989. This is merely an excerpt:

E. R. Beadle said, "Half the work done in the world is to make things appear what they are not." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does this with purpose and great effect. They built the difference between appearance and reality into their process. Unlike procedure used elsewhere, they produce and release a summary report independently and before the actual technical report is completed. This way the summary gets maximum media attention and becomes the public understanding of what the scientists said. Climate science is made to appear what it is not. Indeed, it is not even what is in their Scientific Report.

The pattern of falsifying appearances began early. Although he works at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Stephen Schneider was heavily employed in the work of the IPCC as this biography notes.

Much of Schneider's time is taken up by what he calls his "pro bono day job" for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II of the IPCC from 1997 to 2001 and a lead author in Working Group I from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he is a Coordinating Lead Author for the controversial chapter on "Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risks from Climate Change," in short, defining "dangerous" climate change." - Pubmedcentral.nih.gov

He continued this work by helping prepare the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released in April 2007.

Schneider, among others, created the appearance that the Summary was representative of the Science Report. However, he provides an early insight into the thinking when speaking about global warming to Discovery magazine (October 1989) he said scientists need, "to get some broader based support, to capture the public's imagination...that, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we may have...each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest." The last sentence is deeply disturbing-there is no decision required.

And that trend very much continues nearly twenty years later--legacy media trade publication Editor & Publisher actually ran an article last year titled, "Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers." My post about it from August of 2007 is found here; for non-subscribers of E&P, the text of the actual article can be read here.

But then, newspapers have gotten over objectivity on virtually all stories, not just climate change--with disastrous consequences.

(Via Maggie's Farm.)

I'm very happy to see that the Salt Nazis ("No salt for you--ever!") haven't banned sodium chloride from South Jersey's roads yet, unlike Seattle.

Allahpundit has a holiday epiphany: "Christmas miracle: Traffic soars on 'shirtless Obama' Internet searches":

Got an e-mail from Ed 20 minutes ago telling me to check SiteMeter. On one of the most gruesomely awful traffic days of the year, with blog readers tuning out in droves to prepare for the holiday, we're ... way above our daily average. Have a look at the referrals to see why. It's not just us, either. It's Internet-wide, per the AP and The One's current standing at Google Trends.

Hours of searching to find interesting Headlines, hours of toil to compose thoughtful posts -- and all America wants is a Barack Obama beefcake pec-tacular. All right then, I won't stand in the way of love. Drink it in. A man-boobs alert has been issued by the boss and Althouse, but I say let he who is without love handles cast the first stone. And don't underestimate his strength: If German media reports are accurate, he's capable of curling 70 lbs. Judging by that photo, I'd have guessed that was half his body weight.

Clearly, our incoming president is the leader of "the American League of Justice Dispensed Shirtlessly", to borrow a Lileksian riff.

In an update to Allah's post, Ed Morrissey adds:

I'm glad AP decided to post this instead of me. I'm above posting phrases like Obama six-pack, Obama shirtless, and especially Obama topless in a vain effort to get Google traffic. You'll never see that from me. No sir-ee.

Seriously, though ... wouldn't you think that people have better things to do two days before Christmas? Thankfully, no.

Ed was kind enough to link to us on Tuesday morning, shortly before I hopped on a cross-country flight from the relatively mild climate of San Jose into bitter wintry, hail-strewn Philadelphia, the latter city yet another victim of global warming at its worst.

As global warming pummels Las Vegas this week, Andrew Bolt lists the "Top 10 dud predictions" from global warming alarmists.

There's only one way to follow all that epic fail--with the ultimate butchered version of "The Final Countdown":

If you enjoyed my Red Queen's Race video last week, Jon Stewart (found via Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds) has a fun clip summing up the newspapers' endgame in about two minutes:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Clusterf#@k to the Poor House - Final Edition Edition

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Meanwhile, Investor's Business Daily notes that "Some journalists out there seem to be actually rooting for a new economic depression--the very thing that will hurt them more than it will hurt many others":

The blogosphere has a name for this syndrome: "depression lust." Virginia Postrel, an Atlantic Monthly columnist who invented the phrase, contributed to a Boston Globe story published in November that collected ideas from various people to (allegedly) give readers some insight into what a 2009 depression would look like.

The conditions "sounded pretty damned good to some people," Postrel writes on her Dynamist blog, "a sure sign of an affluent society, or at least affluent commentators," who, we should add, appear to be operating under the illusion that things would still be rosy for them in a depression because they always have been.

Journalists "seem positively giddy with anticipation at the prospect of a return to '30s-style hardship -- without, of course, the real hardship of the 1930s," Postrel blogs.

Jim Miller, who writes a political blog, has made a similar observation. "I can't count the number of times I read hopeful pieces in the New York Times saying that a recession might be coming soon, so now that one is actually here those people have to be pleased."

Did any of those New York Times stories come from David Carr, whose "Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look" appeared Monday?

"Every modern recession includes a media seance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be," noted Carr, who did a bit of his own communicating with the dead spirits of the Great Depression.

As Postrel notes, journalists, whose industry is teetering and "who are already the equivalent of 1980s steelworkers," should be among the most fearful of a depression.

But they can't help themselves. Their contempt for the capitalism and free markets that have made so many of them comfortable is strong enough to make them wish for economic conditions not in their best interests -- and it comes through loud and clear almost every time they report.

And of course, with the economy slowing, the AP feverishly wishes that Obama will bring it to a stop with tons of business-choking global warming regulations.

Richard Fernandez compares and contrasts conversations with nature, then and now.

(Has anyone talked with the wind lately? It could be jealous for the attention.)

Or, Day By The Day The Earth Stood Still: Cartoonist Chris Muir has some fun with the latest pointless Hollywood remake.

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt has some surprisingly kind words about a new film based on one of his early employers.

Finally, a lesson in tolerance and acceptance of diversity from actress Kate Beckinsale. Wonder if she's a Linda Ronstadt fan?

John Nolte and Christian Toto watch Keanu Reeves's pointless remake of the classic 1951 sci-fi gem, The Day The Earth Stood Still so you don't have to. (Incidentally, when Hollywood makes yet another global warming movie and even the leftwing critics don't like it, you know the celluloid deserves to be cut up into guitar picks.)

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds notes that the producers chose to digitally beam the film into space. If there's life on other planets, how will they respond?

Probably with two messages:

1. Make better movies. Which is what aliens told Woody Allen in his self-indulgent, surrealistic Stardust Memories from 1980.

2. Send more Chuck Berry! To borrow the punchline of an early Saturday Night Live sketch when a Voyager probe from 1977 sent an LP into space that included the classic "Johnny Be Goode" amongst its recordings.

Update: Get a load of the screenshot that accompanies "Klaatu barada crappo" at Protein Wisdom.

Great moments in awareness raising through pneumonia inducement:

About 60 people took a frigid dip into Walden Pond on Dec. 6, 2008 as part of the Polar Bear Plunge. The event was planned to raise awareness on global warming.

As Tim Blair writes, "Let's hope someone pays attention. The handful of previous awareness-raising efforts have barely been noticed."

Hugh Hewitt notes that President Elect Obama's desire to emulate enormous 1930s-style FDR public works projects may be thwarted by very 1970s-style environmental regulations designed to ensure that nothing gets built anywhere--even if it's by the state.

And it looks like the perfect go-between who spans both worlds may not be joining Team Barack.

In Mel Brook's History of the World Part I, there's a scene in which Mel, playing the King of France, has this memorable exchange:

Count de Monet: It is said that the people are revolting.
King Louis XVI: You said it! They stink on ice!

France lost its Ancien Regime in 1789, but Harry Reid (D-NV) sounds like he's been drinking in a little too much from the House of Bourbon for his own good:

Reid
by burghnews

As AllahPundit writes, "Comedy gold from the unerring political instinct that brought us a Congressional approval rating lower than Bush's. Behold, the ultimate Kinsleyan gaffe:"

"My staff tells me not to say this, but I'm going to say it anyway," said Reid in his remarks. "In the summer because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it's true."

But it's no longer going to be true, noted Reid, thanks to the air conditioned, indoor space.

Allah asks, "What did the Senate chamber smell like before A/C?" I have no idea, but it is a reminder that Big Government needs Big Air Conditioning to prosper, as Jonah Goldberg wrote a few years ago:

In the 18th and 19th centuries a congressman wouldn't be caught dead in Washington during July. Well, actually, they might be caught dead, because they wore all those clothes and were so fat that they might have died while trying to get out. The British Embassy, for example, moved the entire kit and caboodle to Maine every summer.

The idea is: Ban air conditioning in Washington and you would cut the "productivity" of the government by more than a third (say from late May to late September) and return the United States to the limited government the Founders intended. D.C. is still full of members of this school of thought.

For such a powerful guy, Harry's an awfully delicate soul. Before he was getting the vapors from having to smell the peasants, he was having other health issues:



Come 2010 when he's up for reelection, the voters of Nevada might want to consider replacing Reid with another senator--if only to give Harry's delicate sinuses a chance to heal up.

Update: Welcome Corner readers!

The celebratory party surrounding the annual anemically rated Oscar awards must go on, even in these trying economic times:

Vanity Fair will hold its annual Oscar Night party at the Sunset Tower Hotel on February 22, 2009, it was announced today by editor Graydon Carter.

"The party will be a much more intimate affair than in years past; we're going to scale back the guest list considerably," Carter says. "We'll celebrate Hollywood's big night the way we did when we first threw the party 15 years ago--it will be a cozier, more understated event. And one with familiar decor--given the current economy, and our dedication to the green movement, we will be recycling many of the elements of years past.

Wardrobe recycling certainly appears to be in vogue with these two ultra-glamorous Hollywood superstars; meanwhile, a veteran television actress is forced to wear what appears to be a Hefty recycling bin liner at her recent photo-op.

Update: I shouldn't be too hard on Judith Light--she attended the same prep school I did, though a few years before me--and the Swedish Chef.

Scroll down to the bottom of IowaHawk's recent "Lemon" post for an unlikely six degrees of environmental separation, as two great Blogospheric satirists exchange notes over one of the first electric cars.

As Mark Steyn noted in his "Happy Warrior" column on the back page of the recent edition of National Review, when choosing between an actual combat veteran and a fellow celebrity to play James Bond, for actor Daniel Craig, the choice is an easy one:

Before we close the book on this election season, let me quote one of the most dispiriting asides on the subject. Daniel Craig, the star of the new James Bond movie The Audacity Of Solace - no, wait, A Quantum Of Hope - was being interviewed by Kevin Sessums for Parade (that supplement thingie that's free in all the local newspapers), and as a final question was asked which of the two candidates would make the better 007:

Craig doesn't hesitate. 'Obama would be the better Bond because--if he's true to his word--he'd be willing to quite literally look the enemy in the eye and go toe-to-toe with them. McCain, because of his long service and experience, would probably be a better M,' he adds, mentioning Bond's boss, played by Dame Judi Dench. 'There is, come to think of it, a kind of Judi Dench quality to McCain.'

Oh, great. John McCain has survived plane crashes, just like Roger Moore in Octopussy. He has escaped death in shipboard infernos, just like Sean Connery in Thunderball. He has endured torture day after day, month after month, without end, just like Pierce Brosnan in the title sequence of Die Another Day. He has done everything 007 has done except get lowered into a shark tank and (as far as we know) bed Britt Ekland and Jill St John.

And yet Daniel Craig gives him the desk job.

On the other hand, Tim Blair notes that that the media's standard for heroism these days is one heck of a lot lower than it used to be.

While I making the expected post-election inspection tour of NRO's Corner, I spotted this sad news from Ian Murray:

Michael Crichton has died "unexpectedly," with reports suggesting a private struggle against cancer. may he rest in peace. He was one of the few people publicly interested in science with the courage to speak out against the direction environmental politics had pushed it. All who want to honor his memory should read his Caltech speech, Aliens cause global warming.

In addition to having the courage to dissent against the near-monolithic global warming orthodoxy, he also managed to do a pretty good job of predicting the future of the legacy media in 1993. As Jack Shafer wrote back in May in Slate:

In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled "Mediasaurus," in which he prophesied the death of the mass media--specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. "Vanished, without a trace," he wrote.

The mediasaurs had about a decade to live, he wrote, before technological advances--"artificial intelligence agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I am interested in, and assembling for me a front page"--swept them under. Shedding no tears, Crichton wrote that the shoddy mass media deserved its deadly fate.

"[T]he American media produce a product of very poor quality," he lectured. "Its information is not reliable, it has too much chrome and glitz, its doors rattle, it breaks down almost immediately, and it's sold without warranty. It's flashy but it's basically junk."

* * *
As we pass his prediction's 15-year anniversary, I've got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It's gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren't going extinct tomorrow, Crichton's original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Call it, "The End of Journalism." That's what Victor Davis Hanson did recently, whom I interviewed on today's edition of PJM Political on XM, about his latest essay, in which he wrote, "Sometime in 2008, journalism as we knew it died, and advocacy media took its place."

All of which were the themes of a June edition of Silicon Graffiti:, which paired my thoughts on Crichton with another pair of futurists, Alvin and Heidi Toffler:

Welcome Mark Steyn and Brothers Judd readers.

He may be columnist to the world (as Hugh Hewitt describes him each week), but Mark Steyn writes, "I'm not a 'journalist' and have never described myself as one":

And, when I give speeches or appear on TV or radio and the organizers or producers send us the biographical intro in advance, my trusty assistants always insist on the removal of the word "journalist". This used to be purely for truth-in-advertising reasons - I wouldn't want audiences to get the false impression that I'd passed rigorous tests and acquired a diploma signed by Professor Miller. But lately it's been for a more basic reason. I had lunch with Ken Whyte, my publisher at Maclean's, the other day, and mentioned en passant that one consequence of a year's worth of thought-police investigations was that it was no longer possible to avoid the painful truth that, for a profession that congratulates itself incessantly on its courage, bravery, fearlessness, etc (far more than, say, firefighters do) and hands out awards all year long for "speaking truth to power", most journalists are total pussies happy to suck up to state power as long as it's in PC clothing. Professor Miller, a J-school ethics bore boldly campaigning for the right of government bureaucrats to censor writers, would seem to be an almost parodic example of the phenomenon.

As Michael Malone wrote last week--and I'm sympathetic on a host of levels--"A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was 'a writer', because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist":

I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Gov. Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the Big Leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play. The few instances where I think the press has gone too far - such as the Times reporter talking to Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends - can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha Bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side - or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for Senators Obama and Biden. If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as President of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography. That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: his job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote McCain's lawyer, haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer - when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Senator Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber. Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a Presidential candidate. So much for the Standing Up for the Little Man, so much for Speaking Truth to Power, so much for Comforting the Afflicted and Afflicting the Comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a manner that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide - especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50:50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes . . .and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do, I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay-out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power . . . only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, ten years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway - all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself: an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career. With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived Fairness Doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe, be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country . . .

Not to mention the environment. If the news industry wasn't a collective Victorian Gentleman, then Obama's quotes on coal would be screamed in 48-point Times Roman Type on every newspaper's front page--if only because it's an incredible story, no matter what your thoughts on the environment.

CBS's Scott Conroy writes:

Seizing on a newly released audio tape picked up by the Drudge Report, Sarah Palin took the opportunity here in coal country to accuse Barack Obama of "talking about bankrupting the coal industry."

But it wasn't "newly released." It's been buried in the middle of an hour-long video uploaded by the San Francisco Chronicle that's been hidden in plain sight on the Brightcove video distribution Website since January, until some enterprising blogger stumbled over it.

In the above quote, Michael Malone writes, "Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal? The editors." And he's right. Check out what the editors at the San Francisco Chronicle signed off on: the Chronicle uploaded the video of their interview with Obama to their Website under the narcoleptic headline of "Obama's straight-ahead style"--meaning they couldn't stumble over anything the senator said that they want to highlight in their headline. Which means either the writers at the Chronicle don't know a killer story when they see one--or they're willing to bury such a story if it helps their man get into office. (See also: media and Edwards, John; note dramatic contrast with Plumber, J.T., and Palin, Sarah.)

When the MSM moans about the gallons of red ink it's spilled since 2001, it needs to ask itself if it's prepared to actually report the news, in a fashion that interests readers, or if it exists as a non-profit ideological support system.

Keep rockin'!

Update: It's all about "context", which CNN is all too happy to provide (business as usual, there), rather than promoting a blockbuster story.

The above headline comes from an interview back in January (you can hear the audio here), in which Obama said:

The problem is not technical, uh, and the problem is not mastery of the legislative intricacies of Washington. The problem is, uh, can you get the American people to say, "This is really important," and force their representatives to do the right thing? That requires mobilizing a citizenry. That requires them understanding what is at stake. Uh, and climate change is a great example.

You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know -- Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I'm capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it -- whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.

Earlier in that same interview, Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that "If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can--it's just that it will bankrupt them.":





Add that to previous utterances from the left on coal:








And of course, Obama's no big fan of cheap gasoline, either:





And the person who popularized "drill baby, drill?" Mama said knock you out.

A year ago, Editor & Publisher ran a story with the above headline, in reference to climate change. (Article text available here)

Sufficed to say, the industry has taken their house organ's advice deeply to heart on a variety of other topics as well--with less than satisfactory results to their collective net worth.

"Joe Biden's RAVE Act of 2002 was a terrible blow against dance-generated alternative energy."

"Terry Tate, Office Linebacker" made his debut in a Super Bowl ad that aired in late January of 2003, pitching Reebok sneakers. And considering the average career length of a real NFL linebacker, I guess Terry should be glad he still has a job. He's a free agent these days, no longer, to the best of my knowledge, associated with Reebok, but considering his national launch, it seems safe to say that Terry and Reeboks will forever be intertwined.

So I wonder what the sneaker manufacturer thinks of their former pitchman's latest video. Here's Terry, with a little digital editing help, brutally shoving a woman onto an unforgiving concrete floor and yelling oddly Freudian epithets at her, while tacitly endorsing high gasoline prices and the liberal media:

Is this funny? As they say in the NFL--you make the call! On the plus side, at least Terry's shown only trying to permanently injure Palin, not kill her, as The Economist and Keith Olbermann metaphorically called for, when Hillary was running.

So in that sense, it's a definite step forward in an election year in which the surprisingly well entrenched sexism of the liberal overculture was none too thrilled at the idea of female politicians from either party running for national office.

Tim Blair looks on the bright side of the financial crisis: "Considering that greenish economic policies would have delivered similar financial setbacks, but over a much longer period, we're ahead here. Just."

Update: If the Green Bubble has burst, the pork bubble is, as always, indestructible. But here's some good news here, more or less.

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Blumer wrote at Pajamas, "Very Different Economic Times in Red vs. Blue States"; certainly the very blue "parentheses states", as Tom Wolfe described them, have been having a tough time making a go of it, as these two headlines on the Drudge Report indicate:

• SCHWARZENEGGER: CALIFORNIA MAY NEED EMERGENCY LOAN...
• New York Deficit Swells...

Or as a recent City Journal article put it, "Houston, New York Has a Problem."

Meanwhile, Jennifer Rubin asks, "What's The Matter With Harry?"

One of the more curious -- but not unprecedented -- incidents in the last couple of weeks involved Harry Reid. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Just as U.S. credit markets this week were close to the edge of the cliff, threatening capital-starved businesses large and small, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stepped in front of reporters and offhandedly announced:

"One of the individuals in the caucus today talked about a major insurance company. A major insurance company -- one with a name that everyone knows that's on the verge of going bankrupt. That's what this is all about." The next day, share prices fell sharply across the insurance industry. Let us stipulate we do not think it necessary for even U.S. Senators to understand the internal mechanics of credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. But if we have learned anything amid the panic over Bear, Lehman, Merrill and adventures in naked short-selling, it is that rumors can obliterate economic value, instantly.

But this wasn't the only such incident:

It calls to mind Senator Chuck Schumer's public suggestion in July that troubled IndyMac Bank "could face collapse." It did, after a deposit run. Senator Schumer said criticizing his action was akin to blaming "the fire on the guy who called 911." The nation's shareholders would sleep better at night if some Members of Congress enrolled in Arsonists Anonymous.

All of this raises the question: are they trying to make things worse in the hopes of furthering their party's election prospects? Similar suspicions were raised when Nancy Pelosi seemed to inflame her partisan opponents and resist any effort to whip her own caucus on the first failed bailout bill vote. Certainly as the financial crisis has intensified their electoral prospects have brightened.

But if we assume that they "meant no harm" we are left with an equally troubling conclusion: they are reckless and ignorant about the ways in which their words and actions may impact a fragile economy. Or to put it differently, their first consideration is invariably "How do we maximize the public's perception that things are rotten?" rather than "What can we do to contain the conflagration?"

While he may lead the self-described "world's greatest deliberative body", anybody who says this...

"Coal makes us sick. Oil makes us sick. It's global warming. It's ruining our country, it's ruining our world. We've got to stop using fossil fuel."

...isn't going to get high scores in the thoughtful rhetoric department.

Related Blue State Blues: Roger Kimball plots "Data points from the Windy City".

Andrew Breitbart has a modest proposal for Hollywood:

Just last week, the Nobel Prize-winning and Academy Award-adjacent ("An Inconvenient Truth") Mr. Gore told students, "The world has lost ground to the climate crisis," and made a dramatic call to action:

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration."

But even if those coal plants are in foreign lands like Ohio and Pennsylvania, it doesn't mean we Southern Californians must stand still and let the planet implode in front of us. That's why I'm taking Al Gore's lead and starting Code Green, a Hollywood organization whose purpose is to use civil disobedience to thwart the unnecessary use of energy in the entertainment industry.

Inspired by Jodie Evans, who started the antiwar group Code Pink, the menopausal performance artists known for interrupting public debate, Code Green will demand oversight over her group because, after all, her tidy little rage club is based in L.A.

No more trips from L.A. to Minneapolis on Northwest Airlines to protest the Republican National Convention. (I saw you wearing that tiara - in first class!) Mother Earth coughed up some smog while you chanted at the GOP, "Not one dollar, not one more, Don't you dare buy Bush's war."

You are now not free to move around the country.

From now on, Jodie and Arianna, too, will be bashing their Bushes from home, telecommuting their unrequited anger by way of solar panels and the Internet.

The days of hoarding electricity and gas are over, including by the truest believers. Carbon credits are now as worthless as Lehman stock.

There are new rules that we will all have to adhere to, whether we like it or not.

Here is the Code Green four-point "Gang Green" mandate:

1.) Directive: Stop film and television production.

This will be the first sentence of the rewrite of the Kyoto Protocol.

Each show or movie leaves a massive carbon footprint that cannot be erased even by the best CGI masters. There will be no more "Grey's Anatomy" spinoffs, nor will there be any more labored attempts to squeeze out lame sentimentality from child actors pretending to be smarter than us. They will now have to work at Pinkberry, where those little saps belong.

Tough to argue with that--since I proposed a very similar tonic for Tinseltown over a year ago.

(However, since Andrew beneficently links to your humble narrator on his mighty and sprawling Breitbart.com Website, I'm more than willing to chalk this up to a case of synchronicity and GMTA, to borrow a little of the secret lingo from the Code Green code book.)

Individuality is fine--as long as we all do it together.

Kathryn Jean Lopez posts an update from Sen. Jim DeMint's office:

We've just been alerted that despite House Democrats relenting on extending bans on offshore drilling and oil shale in the continuing resolution (CR) appropriations bill, Democrat Senate Leader Harry Reid has decided to sneak an extension of the oil shale ban through as Congress fights over the financial bailout. Oil shale in America's West is estimated to hold be between 800 billion and 2 trillion barrels of oil -- that is more than three times the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia alone.

Here is the text of Reid's proposed new ban on oil shale, that he is trying to add as an amendment to the CR or move seperately as a "stimulus" package, or we should say an anti-stimulus package if this is included.

Sec 1602 continues ban on oil shale. The language follows:

SEC. 1602. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, including section 152 of division A of H.R. 2638 (110th Congress), the Consolidated Security, Disaster Assistance, and Continuing Appropriations Act, 2009, the terms and conditions contained in section 433 of division F of Public Law 110-161 shall remain in effect for the 19 fiscal year ending September 30, 2009.

It would be an insult to all Americans if Senate Democrats worked to bailout Wall Street while damaging our future prosperity by banning development of vast energy reserves in oil shale.

Which may help to explain this headline:

Liberal Democrats vow moratorium on offshore drilling to return in '09

Meanwhile, as Glenn Reynolds notes:

AND YOU THOUGHT JOE BIDEN WAS UNFRIENDLY TO COAL: "Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon."

Will he be advising Obama on energy policy?

Certainly in spirit.

The Northeast Corridor is one giant blue state, so presumably they'll be OK with paying high energy prices come the winter.

Sky News: "Singer Bette Midler Quits Touring To Help Save The Planet."

Glad to see that at least one celebrity has taken my advice after Al Gore's Live Earth concert last year:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

As Daltry told the The Sun, "I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel". Each concert will require massive transportation efforts involving jet planes and tractor-trailers, hundreds of thousands of watts of electricity to power the lighting and sound gear, and the deforestation required to print at least couple of hundred thousand souvenir programs (and many more no doubt, for sale afterwards). And heck, just think of all of the methane emissions coming from the stadiums' rest rooms, where, no matter how much the audience promises, the Sheryl Crow Rule is incredibly difficult to enforce.

But in the minds of its participants, a cause like Live Earth is worth it. But a generic, everyday, run of the mill concert shouldn't be. So go out with a bang, rock stars--and then, don't be hypocritical puritans; take the sort of pledge that even the Goracle won't.

More news regarding energy and an even bigger celebrity, here.

Stephen Spruiell reminds us that "While all eyes are diverted to the mess on Wall Street, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are attempting to extend the ban on offshore drilling, which is set to expire October 1."

From the Obama's campaign's latest email to his supporters:

More than 600,000 Americans have lost their jobs since January. Home foreclosures are skyrocketing, and home values are plunging. Gas prices are at an all-time high, and we're still spending more than $10 billion every month on a war in Iraq that should never have been waged.

Obama, back in June:

CNBC's John Harwood: So could the (high) oil prices help us?

Barack Obama: I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money in their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more rapidly, particularly U.S. automakers...

Or as the president of Fredonia once said, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

(Video of Obama being foregainst high gas prices, here.)

Watch this short video; your next episode will then write itself in about five minutes.

(Need I even mention how the above clip fits perfectly into these categories?)

Update: "I so wanted the clip to end with Sarahcuda firing on a moose that wandered into their drum circle."

Hey, she only shoots things that needed killin'...

As Richard Miniter recently wrote, "In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles", and that hectoring puritanism has seeped into its celebrity culture in a massive scale.

Fortunately, whenever such Hollywood hypocrisy occurs, the opportunity for satire is rife, and Cracked.com riotously pushes back with "The 7 Most Retarded Ways Celebrities Have Tried to Go Green." I can't argue at all with their number one choice; I would have found a way to work this item into the list somewhere as well though.

(Found via Dirty Harry, and definitely one for Orrin Judd's "All Comedy Is Conservative" files.)

One for the "I'll believe global warming is a crisis when the people who tell me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis" files:

Here's another photo of the V'Ger set from Star Trek the main stage of the Democratic convention in Denver. For a party that won't allow additional energy production, that wants to ban light bulbs, and whose house organ did a TV broadcast last year in the dark to promote the eeeeevils of global warming, they sure do love their megawatt Hollywood sets. But then, this is all just a warm-up for the ultimate in carbon consumption for entertainment purposes when the party moves to Mile High Stadium for the Obama-coronation. And--of course!--look's who'll be burning all that carbon, electricity and fossil fuel alongside him!

It's too bad the MSM networks are all in the tank, and thus won't be asking any inconvenient questions--it would have been fun to watch the convention's Director of Greening turn red when she's asked what's she's signed off on.

As a man of the Great Indoors, air conditioning has been my life-long friend, one whose reputation I will fight long and hard to protect. But it's curious the partisan rancor it brings out in others: back in 1999, Jonah Goldberg quipped that it's responsible for Big Government:

In the 18th and 19th centuries a congressman wouldn't be caught dead in Washington during July. Well, actually, they might be caught dead, because they wore all those clothes and were so fat that they might have died while trying to get out. The British Embassy, for example, moved the entire kit and caboodle to Maine every summer.

The idea is: Ban air conditioning in Washington and you would cut the "productivity" of the government by more than a third (say from late May to late September) and return the United States to the limited government the Founders intended. D.C. is still full of members of this school of thought.

In Salon, on the other side of the political spectrum, Edward (no relation) McClelland writes, "I blame A/C for the decline of the labor movement and for decimating the Midwest's population. Mostly, I blame it for the election of George W. Bush."

And speaking of propeller-driven machines, Mayor Bloomberg spins back from the ledge, slowly:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is backing off his suggestion to put windmills on city bridges and rooftops after newspapers mocked the idea with photo illustrations of turbines on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building.

"There are aesthetic considerations," Bloomberg said. "No. 2, I have absolutely no idea whether that makes any sense from a scientific, from a practical point of view."

Imagine the howls of derision from the media if a Republican--or at least one who wasn't temporarily one in name only solely for electoral expediency said that.

Having read this article on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's loony return-of-the primitive proposal to put wind turbines on top of apparently everything in Manhattan, I was about to post the usual bloggerific snark, though Rush and GlobalWarming.org have you well served in that department.

But when I looked up Bloomberg's Wikipedia page, I came across this truly bizarre passage:

Bloomberg has on numerous occasions been accused of sexually harassing men under his employment, which he has denied.[24][25] T. Dan Winger sued Mr. Bloomberg for sexual harassment, alleging that he had made explicit comments about his body and encouraged him to spend time alone with him. The lawsuit was withdrawn in 1999.[26] In 1997, a former Bloomberg L.P. employee who became pregnant while employed filed a lawsuit accusing Bloomberg of saying "Kill it!" and "great, No. 16," a reference to the number of pregnant women in the company.[24] The lawsuit was settled the same year for an undisclosed amount of money.

Somebody clearly has gone in and hacked the genders of those in that passage. "T. Dan Winger" is in all likelihood "T. Diane Winger" with a quick, err snip. I took a screen cap to record the weirdness, which will probably be reversed in the not too distant future.

Just another day at the faith-based encyclopedia.

I gave NBC a lot of grief last fall for their global warming stunt of turning a handful of overhead lights off in their studio as some sort of sophomoric global warming cheerleading when covering a Cowboys/Eagles NFL game, which itself burned megawatts of power from the stadium lights, the video electronics, and the satellite hookups. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel spent by those driving to the game, the network equipment trucks, the corporate charter flights, etc.

But NBC made up for it big time with this:

WTHR, the NBC affiliate for Indianapolis, reported from Beijing and described the NBC set used for the network's two highest rated news broadcasts, "NBC Nightly News" and "Today," as air conditioned - even though it is outdoors.

"The set is outside, but air conditioning vents make the weather bearable," Anne Marie Tiernon wrote for WTHR Eyewitness News on August 14.

Thanks, fellas. Everyone has that brief embarrassing fling with the teenage nostalgie de la boue Rousseauvian primitiveness of environmentalism, but it's good to have you back with the rest of us.

One Al Gore clubhouse inside of another, as Ted Kaczynski's cabin is on display now at the News mausoleum in Washington, DC.

As Jaime Sneider of the Weekly Standard writes:

So I guess the question is does the "hands on" experience of the Newseum allow visitors to handle the contents of Kaczynski's cabin? Do recall among his only possessions was an underlined copy of Al Gore's Earth in the Balance.

For our Silicon Graffiti segment on the Newseum, click here.

(Headline explanation here.)

What's in your Water? Rainbows, man! But what's in your video? Apparently several unnecessary apostrophes, and spelling errors prodominatly on display in the titles at the beginning of the video--always a sure sign that crack research scientists are hard at work!

In England's Times Online, Alice Thomson writes:

Julie Burchill can't stand them. According to her new book, Not in my Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, she thinks all environmentalists are po-faced, unsexy, public school alumni who drivel on about the end of the world because they don't want the working classes to have any fun, go on foreign holidays or buy cheap clothes.

Michael O'Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, agrees. In an interview with Rachel Sylvester and me, he told us that the "nutbag ecologists" are the overindulged rich who have nothing better to do with their lives than talk about hot air and beans.

So the salad days are over; it's the end of the greens. Where only a year ago the smart new eco-warriors were revered, wormeries and unbleached cashmere jeans are now seen as a middle-class indulgence.

But the problem for the green lobby isn't that it has been overrun by "toffs": it's the chilly economic climate that has frozen the shoots of environmentalism. Espousing the green life, with its misshapen vegetables and non-disposable nappies, is increasingly being seen as a luxury by everyone.

In addition to the deliberate misery that green policies cause (seen most obviously every time you fill up your car), the seeds of its destruction are sewn by the same people who espouse its beliefs. Environmentalism is a substitute religion, but a religion nonetheless, and the left, historically, works to undermine religious faith, quickly pointing out any sign of hypocrisy. Al Gore will tell an audience...

"This is not a political issue," Gore told a crowd of approximately 2,500 paying attendees. "It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue."

...Before floating away on the Goretanic. If that was Jerry Falwell using similar rhetoric but living such a lavish lifestyle, the hoots of derision from the chattering classes would be palpable.

Or, look at this way: everybody admires Mother Teresa's sacrifices, because nobody wants to actually live that way himself.

Update: Related thoughts from Robert Bidinotto.

Michelle Malkin: "Name Al Gore's hugetastic boat!"

Jeff Greenfield:

And the idea that Obama is on a premature victory tour fits perfectly with the way Dewey carried himself in 1948--as a candidate who'd already won and did not need to bother asking voters for their support.

Allison O'Keefe:

Barack Obama's new campaign plane is nothing short of grand. Well, for the candidate that is.

Obama's section of the plane rivals that of any first class. Recently the front cabin of the Boeing 757 was retrofitted to install four individual chairs that resemble La-Z-Boys. They are free-standing and made of plush leather with pockets on the sides. There is also a booth which seats four for a meeting or a meal.

His chair has his name and campaign logo embroidered on the back top -- "Obama '08" on one line and "President" underneath.

John Kerry's plane in 2004 was emblazoned with similar language, as I recall.

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds adds, "I don't want to hear any greenhouse talk from Obama as long as he's flying this airplane."

I sort of assumed that went out the window with this previous aviation-based gesture back in June.

"Hi, Nancy! Do you really want to play chicken over energy policy?"

Let me just note something here, Madam Speaker: you have twenty or so seats that were ours in 2006. Every single one of those seats is held by a freshman Representative who will have to go home in August and campaign. Do you really want to send them out there to explain to their constituents why gas prices have doubled under their watch? Because we're planning to bring up the topic, in precisely the ways that you really, really don't want us to. And there's no reason whatsoever to assume that the above 20 point deficit can't be shrunk. A lot.

So let's dance.

Moe Lane

Nancy's response--at least for the moment--is summarized by this bumper sticker.

House Republican Leader John Boehner on Fox News: "All We're Asking is for Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama to Allow Congress to Vote."

Actual Rocky Mountain News headline: "DNCC's Director of Greening experience questioned."

I hope she's up to the task:

Only three state delegations have agreed to eliminate entirely their carbon footprints by purchasing travel offsets, despite the pleas of convention organizers.

The heavily vegetarian "Lean 'N Green" menu has touched off a slew of gripes, ranging from caterers who can't find enough Colorado-grown organic vegetables to Denver City Council member Charlie Brown calling menu planners "the food police."

The biggest environmental disaster to befall the convention hit two weeks ago, when the Barack Obama campaign announced that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee would make his acceptance speech at Invesco Field at Mile High stadium.

The decision to move to the stadium threw a Chernobyl-sized wrench into the sustainability plan. Switching the venue from the Pepsi Center, which seats fewer than 20,000, to Invesco, which holds 78,000, threatens to saddle the convention with the Shaquille O'Neal of carbon footprints.

Democratic officials have remained tight-lipped on the environmental impact of the move, saying they're still crunching the kilowatt numbers.

As Orrin Judd notes, "The telecast of his speech will be eco-porn!"

Your must see eco-hypocrisy video of the day, via Americans for Prosperity:

Al was recently quoted in the New York Times (sure, but for the sake of argument, assume they got it right) as saying that:

"The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk," Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. "The future of human civilization is at stake."

As Glenn Reynolds likes to say, I'll believe there's a crisis when the people who tell me there's a crisis start acting like there's one themselves.

"Rep. and House Energy Chairman Ed Markey: Somalia, Black Hawk Down Incident Caused by Global Warming."

Time to update this ever-growing list; as Ace writes, "Remember those superstitious, irrational, anti-scientific yahoos during the Middle Ages who blamed every phenomenon on the Devil?"

In his latest op-ed, Hugh Hewitt writes:

The environmental lobby owns Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and Barack Obama –the brave new leader—doesn’t dare take it or them on. That lobby is applauding the deindustrialization underway, and their attitude is that a depression wouldn’t be such a bad thing as a lesson in learning how to live within our environmental means. Their jobs aren’t on the line, after all, and their disdain for the impacted industries is complete.

What they and the Triple D Democrats hasn’t counted on, though, was America making the connection between the deteriorating economy and their anti-energy agenda.

Energy is freedom. Energy is prosperity. Every Democrat on the fall ballot is part of the anti-energy party which is wrecking havoc on the economy and every family’s budget. A vote for any Democrat is a vote for shortages, rising gas prices, rising unemployment, and falling production. A vote for any democrat is a vote for failing airlines and collapsing financial institutions and for the shuttering of car plants and large manufacturing.

A growing, vibrant economy needs energy. The Democrats are anti-energy.

It is that simple.

Read the whole thing, then sign the petition.

Update: Found via Instapundit, Jack Kelly writes, "it takes mighty, repeated blows" to knock through the general public's inattention and apathy towards politics. Kelly adds, "As Ronald Reagan put it, a successful candidate must paint 'with bold colors, not pale pastels'":

But Mr. McCain has been Hamlet when he needs to be Henry V. He is discarding a strong hand through mixed messages and equivocation. He supports drilling on the outer continental shelf, but opposes it in ANWR. He backs a "cap and trade" program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that would devastate our economy. Nuance is important in policy-making, but can be disastrous in political campaigning. If the trumpet be uncertain …

Mr. McCain needs to decide, pronto, which is more important to him: Winning the election or receiving an occasional kind word from liberal pundits who will vote against him.

If he wants to win, Mr. McCain needs to demonstrate in a dramatic way he'll take every reasonable step to increase energy supplies - including drilling in ANWR.

And he needs to do it soon. The No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin, who is from Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, said Wednesday: "I'm open to drilling and responsible production." Mr. Obama has altered his position on virtually every issue he campaigned on during the primaries. Could another flip-flop be in the offing?

"Durbin's comment may be a signal that Obama will pivot soon," said the Wall Street Journal's Jim Taranto.

As I wrote last month, the first man who stands up on a podium in the middle of America's Vast Pestilential Wasteland and says the equivalent of this post's headline wins the election.

Around 1969 and '70, when The Who's Tommy was a pop culture phenomenon, Pete Townshend and his manager, Kit Lambert were culturally aware enough to know that when they booked their self-described rock "opera" into real opera houses, they were veering dangerously close to camp. It was only The Who's sledgehammer live stage show (and Townshend's often great songwriting) that saved them--at least until Ken Russell arrived on the scene to direct the movie version a few years later.

Flash-forward to nearly 40 years on, and we find two prominent cinematic auteurs also seeking to enter the rarefied world of opera. But are they self-aware enough to know that the joke will be on them if their choice of venues actually comes to pass?

"California is making it mandatory for cars to be labeled with global warming scores, figures that take into account emissions from vehicle use and fuel production."

"I remember watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential race on TV. A friend of mine who spoke German and English translated for me. I heard Humphrey saying things that sounded like socialism, which I had just left."

Ed Morrissey writes:

The Weather Channel has been a major advocate for global-warming policies. Combining it with the Keith Olbermann/Chris Matthews network will probably result in a major release of greenhouse gases on its own. Given NBC’s inability to impose even a modicum of balance and objectivity at MS-NBC, we can expect Jeff Zucker to use this new outfit as a platform on which to push even harder for statist policies on energy production and use.

But will the lights stay on in the studio?

Stop Global Warming...before it turns you into Admiral Akbar!

(Who looks a lot like Mary Steenburgen these days! It's certainly only one step removed from being turned into a zombie, which is enough to make one want to mix one of these in response.)

Related, If Exceedingly Tangentially: "Arugula causes global warming"!

Jenifer Rubin asks Hollywood to put its carbon credits where its mouth is:

There is no group more susceptible to Obama’s vision and rhetoric than the Hollywood elite. And given their exalted status in our society, their influence on others if they take up the challenge to improve our country might be profound.

So in that spirit we offer a pledge, the Pledge We Can Believe In, which Obama can present to all of his Hollywood admirers. Indeed, he might inscribe the Pledge We Can Believe In on all financial donor forms and on all requests for tickets to his campaign events. The time for idle chatter is over and the fierce urgency of now demands that those who support Obama and his vision for a new America take the Pledge We Can Believe In:

I'm sure they'll sign--the minute this prominent Oscar-winning Hollywood documentarian signs off on the first draft of the pledge.

It's official--everything does indeed cause global warming. But before we ban flat panel TVs and monitors, we might want to ask this fan of conspicuous digital consumption what he thinks about the idea:

P.J. Gladnick flashes back to 1968 and Apocalypse Then:

Today is the official publication date of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. The release of this book was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the publication of Paul Ehrlich's once exceedingly popular "The Population Bomb" in 1968. If you expect to see much about either of these books in the mainstream media, you are in for a big disappointment. The MSM is avoiding the whole subject of Paul Ehrlich and his apocalyptic "The Population Bomb" like the plague nowadays. The reason is probably because it might draw embarrassing attention to the fact that apocalyptic visions, despite their popularity at one time such as the current global warming alarmism, are usually proven to be flat out wrong. Such was the case with Paul Ehrlich's "The Population Bomb" which the Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked as one of the 50 Worst Books of the 20th century due to its many errors.

Gladnick quotes from a Brothers Judd review of Ehrlich's book that's also well worth your time.

It's yet another not-so-final countdown!

Pixar's new Wall-E certainly looked incredible in its trailer, but it left Kyle Smith with quite a sour aftertaste:

A more advanced flying probe-bot sent to Earth for reasons unknown has feminine curves and lovely blue eyes that leave WALL-E smitten, though except for her habit of laser-zapping any suspicious object she could be one of those white bullet-shaped trash canisters you’d see at a snack bar.

When she and WALL-E start to beep sweet nothings at each other, she has a higher-pitched tone than he does and says her name is Eva, so WALL-E is confirmed to be a heterobot. The two of them wind up at a space station that houses the remnants of the human race. At this point the film, previously dingy and dark, goes matte black.

The earthlings — or maybe Americans, as none of them have any other kind of accent — are brain-dead blobs perpetually stuffed to the gills with entertainment. They never leave their spotless flying barcaloungers — and never could, since their bones have shrunk to useless twigs inside their Shrek-like masses. They float through their troglodyte lives as unquestioning subjects of the master corporation (the same one that ruined the Earth) that houses them, distracts them and feeds them. All foods are made to be sucked down like milkshakes for maximum convenience.

It’s hard to see how a Disney-certified happy ending can result from this, and the answer is it really can’t. This is perhaps the most cynical and darkest big-budget Disney film ever, and an artistic gamble on the scale of Fantasia, which initially flopped despite critical acclaim. Pixar is now acting like Disney’s senior partner. Perhaps never before has any corporation spent so much money on insulting its customers — WALL-E is expected to be the year’s most heavily promoted film.

The meatball humans in WALL-E are like customers passively being served up a fake existence at the Magic Kingdom (which readily provides wheelchairs for not merely the afflicted but also the obese and the simply lazy), snorfling up the latest wows in an entirely artificial setting where every beverage and hotel room brings profits to the same corporation. And Disney paved over a few thousand acres of Florida wetlands to build Walt Disney World in the first place.

How paying customers will react to being told they’re porky slobs, or are headed in that direction (WALL-E is set 800 years in the future) will depend on how closely the people in the audience ignore the people on screen and concentrate on WALL-E and Eva.

Speaking of Disneyworld, Kyle's description of the schizophrenia of Disney's current cinematic product is of a piece their in-person entertainment. Here's James Lileks' description of his recent visit to Disney World's EPCOT Center:

Since we were here to do things we had not done before, we decided to take in “The Circle of Life,” a show about the interconnectedness of man, nature, and anthropomorphic cartoon characters. I hate to be a killjoy grump about these things, but oy, what a load of sanctimonious rubbish. The actual Circle of Life, as applied to animals, consists of birth, killing, consumption, excretion, copulation, and solitary death from small predators in the blood or nasty ones with big teeth. Sometimes there’s death by fire, for variety’s sake. It takes consciousness on the human level to extract the metaphorical weight in the whole Circle of Life thing, and while I think it’s wonderful to appreciate and marvel at the intricate ecosystems of the planet, and tread as lightly as necessary, wordless choirs voicing ecstatic vowels over footage of wildebeest herds does not really equal a High Mass for spiritual impact or depth. All of which I kept to myself, of course. But I felt like the village atheist.

The plot was hugely ironical: Timon and Roomba or whatever the warthog is named were building a resort in the jungle, and damning a stream to create a water feature. Simba showed up to demonstrate the error of their ways. The hilarity of any manifestation of the Disneyverse criticizing an artificial lake to build a resort goes without saying. And it did go without saying, of course. Simba said that Timon and Roomba or whatever were acting like another creature that did not behave in tune with nature, and that creature was . . . man.

BOO HISS, I guess. Jaysus, I tire of this. Big evil stupid man had done many stupid evil bad things, like pile abandoned cars in the river, dump chemicals into blue streams, and build factories that vomited great dark clouds into the sky. Like the People’s State Lead Paint and Licensed Mickey Merchandise Factory in Shanghai Province, perhaps? Simba gave us a lecture about materialism and how it hurt the earth – cue the shot of trees actually being chopped down, and I’m surprised the sap didn’t spurt like blood in a Peckinpah movie – and other horrors, like forests on fire because . . . well, because it was National Toss Glowing Coals Out the Car Window Month, I guess. I swear the footage all came from the mid-70s; it was grainy and cracked and the cars were all late-60s models. Because I’m pretty sure we’re not dumping cars into the rivers as a matter of course any more. You’re welcome to try to leave your car on the riverbank and see how that turns out for you.

As I mentioned to Tammy Bruce on Tuesday when discussing the envirohectoring subtext of The Happening, Hollywood likes to think of itself as a wild and crazy Sodom and Gomorrah on the Pacific--an endless orgy of hedonistic abandon. But like much of the left in general, lurking just behind its hipster artifice, modern Hollywood has a surprisingly puritanical, we know what's best for you streak. And just as last year's anti-war message was piledriven into the ground by Hollywood, there's lots more eco-lectures to come!

Nobody wanted to be lectured by their parents as a kid; so how long will grown-up audiences voluntarily shell out hard-earned money to replenish the coffers of an industry that's rapidly becoming one giant digital nag?

As Mark Steyn wrote last year, "The ecochondriacs mean it: This'd be a pretty nice planet if we didn't live here."

Which is the theme of M. Night Shyamalan's new film, The Happening. The center-left New Republic and center-right Wall Street Journal don't always agree on the issues of the day, but neither publication is in doubt about how the repugnant that theme looks when it's played out on a 30-foot high screen at the local shopping mall's multiplex.

In TNR, James Kirchick, the author of headline quoted above writes, "the mere existence of the human race is a cause for great shame" in Shyamalan's film:

As with most of Shyamalan's films, The Happening has an intriguing plot: centuries of human pollution has prompted nature to retaliate against us by form of a noxious gas released from trees, plants, grass -- it's never really clear. The toxin is first emitted in Central Park, smack dab in the middle of one of the most densly populated places in the United States. First, victims lose their critical faculties. Then they freeze. Then they killl themselves. From New York City "The Happening" spreads all along the east coast, from Boston to Washington. Shyamalan leaves little to the imagination in depicting man's nature-inflicted suicide. We see a woman stab herself in the neck with a hair pin. A man runs himself over with a lawnmower. On can't help but leave the theater thinking that Shyamalan derives a sick, masochistic pleasure in showing the deaths of all his bit characters, hopeless rubes are these human beings. They drove their SUVs for too long and had a big carbon footprint and now they're going to pay.

After 90 minutes of this, the culling of humanity ends. We catch a brief television news segment in which a scientist warns us that what the Northeast just experienced was akin to a terrestrial occurrence of oceanic "red tides." The earth warned us, but thankfully we get another chance to amend the errors of our ways. Like the end of An Inconvenient Truth, we're left with some hope that environmental catastrophe is not a foregone conclusion. Buy a plug-in car. Use public transportation when available. Turn off the light when you leave a room. An unoffensive, and indeed positive message. The second to last scene depicts the female lead waiting nervously in her bathroom to read the results of a home pregnancy test. To her delight, she is with child. Her husband comes home, they embrace. Humanity soldiers on. What a warm feeling after so many scenes of horrific death.

But Shyamalan is obsessed with conceits at the expense of every other aspect -- the script, character development, and most importantly, good taste. He lives by the conceit, and, in this case, dies by it. After the pregnancy scene, the screen goes dark and we find ourselves in Paris, the Jardin des Tuileries to be exact. It's eerily reminiscent of the film's opening, with two men walking, engaged in pleasant conversation about their plans for the evening. A gust of wind! One of the men starts to stutter. People freeze. Screams. Mon Dieu!. Roll credits.

This isn't just radical environemntalist fare; it's perverse and anti-human. Shyamalan cuts immediately from the natural joy of pregnancy to its consequence: mass, nature-inflicted murder. It's not carbon output, styrofoam cups or the clearing of the rain forests that so angers Mother Earth and, thus, her self-appointed human spokesman. It's us.

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, (found via Dirty Harry's new film blog) Joseph Rago notes, "We have arrived at a strange moment in American pop culture when movie-goers spend two hours in the theater being informed that we all deserve to die":

In a recent interview, Mr. Shyamalan, best known for "The Sixth Sense" (1999), said that "The Happening" is intended to "wake everybody up" and "get back to the correct relationship with nature."

Obviously it isn't Hollywood's first environmental disaster flick. Think of 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," where all it takes is the CO2-induced obliteration of the East Coast for Dennis Quaid to learn how to be a better dad. But catastrophic climate change in that movie was a simple plot device that could be replaced easily enough with, say, space aliens. "The Happening" is honest-to-Gaia green agitprop: Like the Lorax, Mr. Shyamalan is speaking for the trees.

Environmentalism's seam of misanthropy traces back to John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and probably to Thoreau. We're just another species, the thinking goes, or would be had our iniquities not made us unworthy of a place in the ecosystem. The existence of Homo sapiens is an affliction and cause for profound shame.

Today the position persists along the fringes of the "deep ecology" movement, where adherents can still be found chanting, "Four legs good! Two legs bad!" But the message also has some mainstream appeal: A best-selling book last summer was "The World Without Us," in which science journalist Alan Weisman gleefully imagined how nature would respond if man abruptly went extinct and how great it would be for the planet. "The Happening" merely takes this misanthropy to its logical extreme.

Of course, most mainstream greens limit themselves to nagging on behalf of Mommy Nature. Yet amid the much ado about global warming, the people problem is asserting itself with a neo-Malthusian vengeance. Almost every element of modern life is reducible to carbon. Like it or not, a higher population leads inexorably to more anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ranks demographic proliferation as a "driver for emissions." British environmental minister Hilary Benn -- most recently spotted endorsing carbon rationing cards as a set of new sumptuary laws -- notes with approval that "family planning is the ultimate carbon offsetting scheme." Even though Paul Ehrlich's "population bomb" has been defused again and again, Jeffrey Sachs, Jared Diamond, Bill McKibben and others have come to similar conclusions.

Since population control led to such PR disasters of the late 20th century as mass forced sterilizations under Indira Gandhi and China's one-child policy, it makes people queasy. Instead, the greens, when not plumping for massive carbon tax-and-regulation schemes, focus on behavioral alterations -- like taking public transit or installing the correct light bulbs. The weight given to consumer-driven change, however, means that the people problem can't help but seep out into the culture at large. Having kids is the most carbon-intensive choice most people will ever make.

Not surprisingly, more than a few of the recent handbooks for "green living" recommend thinking seriously about children. The Sierra Club says that the ideal number is two. Messrs. Weisman and McKibben say it's one. Mr. Shyamalan seems to think it's zero. It can't be long before we're being offered another helpful "tip": Kill yourself.

But that's already occurred. In mid-2006, Tammy Bruce, amongst other pundits and bloggers, reported a speech given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, a University of Texas evolutionary ecologist named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist by the Texas Academy of Science. In mid-2006, the academy enthusiastically cheered upon the conclusion of this speech:

Professor Pianka said the Earth as we know it will not survive without drastic measures. Then, and without presenting any data to justify this number, he asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

Pianka then displayed a slide showing rows of human skulls, one of which had red lights flashing from its eye sockets.

AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

After praising the Ebola virus for its efficiency at killing, Pianka paused, leaned over the lectern, looked at us and carefully said, “We've got airborne 90 percent mortality in humans. Killing humans. Think about that.”

With his slide of human skulls towering on the screen behind him, Professor Pianka was deadly serious. The audience that had been applauding some of his statements now sat silent.

After a dramatic pause, Pianka returned to politics and environmentalism. But he revisited his call for mass death when he reflected on the oil situation.

“And the fossil fuels are running out,” he said, “so I think we may have to cut back to two billion, which would be about one-third as many people.” So the oil crisis alone may require eliminating two-third's of the world's population.

How soon must the mass dying begin if Earth is to be saved? Apparently fairly soon, for Pianka suggested he might be around when the killer disease goes to work. He was born in 1939, and his lengthy obituary appears on his web site.

When Pianka finished his remarks, the audience applauded. It wasn't merely a smattering of polite clapping that audiences diplomatically reserve for poor or boring speakers. It was a loud, vigorous and enthusiastic applause.

Pianka's Wikipedia entry notes:

The host of the speech, the Texas Academy of Sciences, has released a statement stating that "many of Dr. Pianka's statements have been severely misconstrued and sensationalized."

Much like Reverend Wright would later be, it seems. This is a variation on the "botched joke" do-over the left claims for themselves whenever a Kinsley-esque gaffe of an unusually potent nature occurs. But as Tammy Bruce noted at the time, two years before Shyamalan's new movie, such eco-doomsday thinking isn't all that unusual:

I have been arguing for years now that the destruction of humanity, literally, is the actual agenda, conscious and unconscious, of Leftists worldwide. They have become progressively ugly and hateful politically and otherwise because they hate themselves and consequently project that hate, as Malignant Narcissists do, back onto humanity as a whole. Their frustration at the rejection of their agenda (history at least has taught us something) that they bother less and less with sugar-coating their nihilistic rage.

Now playing at a theater near you!

Related: "Phil Bowermaster On Fear Of The Future." And Rand Simberg adds:

Hey, how about if we save the earth by migrating into space?

Somehow, I don't think they'll like that, either.

Maybe that explains this.

Back in the summer of 2001, Jonah Goldberg did something that almost no one who utters the acronym ANWR in hushed, reverent tones has actually done. He visited there:

I suspect that the majority of Americans who oppose oil exploration in ANWR would agree with me if they saw it firsthand. Indeed, they would probably agree that if America had to be struck by an asteroid, this would be the ideal impact point. Of course, I am not talking about ANWR's beautiful mountain vistas, the ones cooed over by cable-news hostesses. Not only is that stuff legally protected from oil exploration, it is far, far away from anywhere the oil companies want to drill-i.e., the thousands of football fields' worth of bog and marsh.

Today, he reminds us that it's still waiting to be put to use:

Sen. John McCain said this week he would not drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the same reason he “would not drill in the Grand Canyon ... I believe this area should be kept pristine.”

Pristine means unspoiled, virginal, in an original state.

One wonders how pristine the Grand Canyon can be if it has roughly 5 million visitors every year, rafting, hiking, picnicking, and riding mules up one side and down the other. Campfires, RVs, and motels that do not conjure the word “virginal” ring around large swaths of it.

This isn’t to say that the Grand Canyon isn’t a beautiful place; it inspires awe among those who visit it. ANWR (pronounced “AN-wahr”) inspires awe almost entirely in those who haven’t been there. It is an environmental Brigadoon or Shangri-La, a fabled land almost no one will ever see. That is its appeal. People like the idea that there are still Edens “out there” even if they will never, ever see them.

Indeed, if Americans could visit the north coast of Alaska, as I have, as easily as they can visit the Grand Canyon, the oil would be flowing by now.

ANWR is roughly the size of South Carolina, and it is spectacular. However, the area where, according to Department of Interior estimates, some 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil reside is much smaller and not necessarily as awe-inspiring. It would amount to the size of Dulles airport.

Question for McCain: Has South Carolina been ruined because it has an airport?

Most of the images of the proposed drilling area that people see on the evening news are misleading precisely because they tend to show the glorious parts of ANWR, even though that’s not where the drilling would take place. Even when they position their cameras in the right location, producers tend to point them in the wrong direction. They point them south, toward the Brooks mountain range, rather than north, across the coastal plain where the drilling would be.

As James Lileks notes, who'd have thought that, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that America would remain in such stasis when it comes to energy independence:

It’s not that we cannot produce any more oil; you suspect that some are motivated by the belief, perverse as it sounds, that we should not. We should not drill 50 miles off shore on the chance someone in Malibu takes a hot-air balloon up 1000 feet and uses a telephoto lens to scan the horizon for oil platforms. Also, there are ecological concerns. (The ocean is a wee place, easily disturbed.) There’s something else that may well be my imagination, but I can’t quite shake the feeling: high gas prices and shortages of oil make some people feel good. This is the way it has to be. Oil is bad. Cars are bad. Cars make suburbs possible. Suburbs are the antithesis of the way we should live, which is stacked upon one another in dense blocks tied together by happy whirring trains. So some guy who drives to work alone has to spend more money for the privilege of being alone in his car listening to hate radio?

Good.

Yes, I know, projection and demonizaton and oversimplification. But this is true: there’s a side of the domestic political structure that opposes expansion of domestic energy production, be it drilling or nukes or more refineries.

And speaking of that "hate radio":

[The MSM] called you the maverick! But guess what? Now you're not a maverick. Why, you're Bush 3! That's like the worst thing a maverick could be called, is Bush 3. Get ready, Senator. This is only the tip of the iceberg of all the ammo they have aimed and trained on you. Here's what I'm hoping, ladies and gentlemen. I'm hoping at some point relatively soon McCain gets ticked off enough about this that he comes to his senses on the issue of energy independence in this country. Do you realize that if you look at any poll out there taken of the American people, they want energy independence? They want drilling for our own energy supplies. They want nuclear. They don't want all of this Kyoto stuff. They don't want taxes to go up. They don't want the price of gas to go up even a penny by 60 some odd percent, if the purpose of the increase is to fight global warming. They want cheaper gasoline, and they know how to get it. This is an issue. It is an issue made to order.
Now, McCain has changed his mind on a couple things. This would be a goody. This would be a huge one. Somebody could get to Senator McCain and say, Senator, you want to win this election? You want to contrast who you are with Senator Obama and the leftists in the Democrat Party? Here's your issue. "Drill here. Drill now. Energy independence." Start now and get on this, and I'm telling you, he would see a miraculous thing happen in his campaign. But I don't know who can tell him these things. It's just a sitting duck.

And it's one that another senator, who may be looking to overcome what Ace accurately described as a Kinsley-esque gaffe of the first order might also be looking to exploit if he wanted to (a) get to the right of McCain on one key issue very quickly, JFK-style (Mr. President, we cannot afford a domestic oil gap!), and (b) simultaneously generate a pretty nifty Sister Souljah moment with his enviro-stasis base.

Will it happen? Probably not, but the first man who heads north to Alaska and hops on a podium in front of a phalanx of legacy journalists and an armada of cable and network cameramen in the middle of that Vast Pestilential Wasteland and does an about-face on the issue has a damn good chance of winning it all in November.*

Who wants it bad enough that he's actually willing to accede to the wishes of the American public?

Read More »

As Jim Geraghty suggested a month ago, John Steele Gordon urges John McCain to exploit the Pelosi Premium--the $4.00 a gallon gasoline price--to his advantage:

This would seem to be an opening the size of the Grand Canyon for McCain, and Republican candidates for Congress, to exploit this year. To be sure, McCain has always opposed drilling in ANWAR, but he can simply say that four-dollar gasoline has changed the situation, showing a flexibility he has not always shown. Then he just hammers the Democrats as the party of four-dollar gasoline in TV ad after TV ad.

Would it work? Well, that ever-reliable barometer of public opinion, the late-night TV talk shows, indicate that it will. Jay Leno recently noted that the Democrats say it would take ten years to get oil from ANWAR. He also noted that ten years ago, Bill Clinton vetoed a Republican bill that would have permitted it, and if he hadn’t, the oil would now be on line and we could sure use it. The audience roared.

Between the flat stock market, the recent rise in unemployment, rising gas prices, and the ever-strangling eco-insanity, GOP congressional candidates ought to be able to easily craft some sort of nationalized message of Hope and Change, highlighting gasoline prices (lower) and stock prices (higher) when they were in office.

Update: Who am I kidding? There's only one man who can restore America's energy independence--if only because there's only one man whose presidential limousine would be a 1972 hemi-powered Dodge Charger with slotted Cragar mags: Vote Burge '08!

"Seattle may ban beach bonfires", because, as IowaHawk predicted a few years ago (on target as usual) "Top Scientists Warn: Fire Make Sea Gods Angry!"

George Will quotes H.L. Mencken's timeless quip that "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." Particularly at the gas pump:

Rising in the Senate on May 13, Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, explained: "I rise to discuss rising energy prices." The president was heading to Saudi Arabia to seek an increase in its oil production, and Schumer's gorge was rising.

Saudi Arabia, he said, "holds the key to reducing gasoline prices at home in the short term." Therefore arms sales to that kingdom should be blocked unless it "increases its oil production by one million barrels per day," which would cause the price of gasoline to fall "50 cents a gallon almost immediately."

Can a senator, with so many things on his mind, know so precisely how the price of gasoline would respond to that increase in the oil supply? Schumer does know that if you increase the supply of something, the price of it probably will fall. That is why he and 96 other senators recently voted to increase the supply of oil on the market by stopping the flow of oil into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which protects against major physical interruptions. Seventy-one of the 97 senators who voted to stop filling the reserve also oppose drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

One million barrels is what might today be flowing from ANWR if in 1995 President Bill Clinton had not vetoed legislation to permit drilling there. One million barrels produce 27 million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel. Seventy-two of today's senators -- including Schumer, of course, and 38 other Democrats, including Barack Obama, and 33 Republicans, including John McCain -- have voted to keep ANWR's estimated 10.4 billion barrels of oil off the market.

So Schumer, according to Schumer, is complicit in taking $10 away from every American who buys 20 gallons of gasoline. "Democracy," said H.L. Mencken, "is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." The common people of New York want Schumer to be their senator, so they should pipe down about gasoline prices, which are a predictable consequence of their political choice.

The same is true of liberal Californians, who've given America the Pelosi Premium, not to mention the rest of the state's own Potemkin Environmentalism.

In contrast, the bitter clinging people in the heartland of Elk Point, South Dakota know the solution.

Except for a single very powerful radio emission aimed at Jupiter, the four-million year old black monolith has remained completely inert. Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery.

Much like his lyrics, Dave Matthews puts a typically goofy ironic spin on what numerous conservatives--and even some musicians--said last year: "The whole joke of Live Earth was how wasteful it was":

The May 29 edition of Rolling Stone looks ahead to the summer concert season, and the rock-music mag is praising the Dave Matthews Band for their use of biodiesel for buses and "biodegradable goods for catering." But this exchange was interesting, about Al Gore's "Live Earth" concerts.

ROLLING STONE: Some people argue that the live experience is sort of inherently "un-green."

DAVE MATTHEWS: There’s no doubt that it is. The whole joke of Live Earth was how wasteful it was. But the idea that touring will end is sad. I’d like to think that the traveling minstrel is not a thing of the past, but the methods of travel have to be improved.

As I wrote last year, right around this time:

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with Live Earth if it really were The Last Rock Concert by those who participated in it. It takes an enormous amount of cognitive dissonance to simultaneously believe that the planet's ecosphere is soon to be doomed, but the solution is a blowout concert in two different football stadiums.

Or as Glenn Reynolds said at the time, "I'll start acting as if it's a crisis when the people who are telling me it's a crisis start acting as if it's a crisis."

Noel Sheppard catches an interesting flip-flop from Chuck Schumer:

As the oil executives hearings on Capitol Hill received great media attention given soaring gasoline prices, supposedly impartial press members missed a classic gaffe by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) as it pertains to the benefits of OPEC raising production quotas versus America drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

On Wednesday, Schumer once again claimed "if [Saudi Arabia] did a million barrels of oil a day increase from today, it would go down about -- the translation to gasoline would be about $.50 a gallon, maybe $.62."

Yet, on May 7, Schumer felt a likely similar increase from drilling in ANWR would "reduce the price of oil by a penny."

In City Journal, Max Schulz has a great piece titled "California’s Potemkin Environmentalism", but as Schumer's hypocrisy illustrates, it's a nationwide phenomenon of post-Biblical proportions.

Update: More here.

Related: "Speaking Truth to Horsepower".

With apologies to Jack Benny for the above headline; while I'm not in the market for a new car at the moment, the timing of Honda's new sales pitch makes it an awfully appealing proposition...

Certainly better than this gaffe (at least I hope it's a gaffe--never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity) by Dunkin' Donuts' latest spokesperson. In any case, mister, they could use a pitchman like Michael Vale again!

Here's a winning whining message:

“We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

In addition to his off-the-rack Burberry suits and Neville Chamberlain's umbrella, it sounds like Obama's all set to don Jimmy Carter's cardigan as well.

Update: Roger Kimball also has a strong sense of Carter redux.

Newspapers are an industry that has done the most to spread fear of global warming, and have heavily donated to "green" causes. And now it's time for them to the pay the bill, or risk appearing even more hypocritical than they're currently thought of:

A prototypical publisher selling 250,000 newspapers on each of the 365 days of the year adds nearly 28,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, according to calculations we’ll explain in a moment. That’s roughly equivalent to the CO2 spewed by almost 3,700 Ford Explorers being driven 10,000 miles apiece per year. (Disclosure: I own a 12-year-old Ford Explorer. Anyone want to buy it?)

CO2 matters, because a dangerous buildup of the gas in the atmosphere – caused by the growing consumption of fossil fuels and the decimation of our forests – is causing the earth to warm to such dangerous and unprecedented levels that the health of the planet and its inhabitants are imperiled.

The problem for even the most environmentally sensitive print publisher is that every aspect of the business does uncontestable violence to the environment.

As the Insta-Man likes to say, I'll consider believing that there's a crisis when the people who complain the loudest start acting like there's a crisis.

Besides, isn't it time that Pinch thinks of the polar bears!?

(H/T for Nelson Muntz.)

Last year, there were 409 tornadoes:

"So far some 730 tornadoes have touched down this year, more than double the number for all of last year."

—ABC's Bill Weir on yesterday's Good Morning America, who--of course--blames the "more than double" increase on global warming.

I doubt Cindy Crawford would argue with those calculations.

(Nor would this fellow, but for different reasons.)

Keeping wide swatches of nearby sources of oil off-limits to drilling only ensures that Americans will be paying the Pelosi Premium for some time to come.

As Jim Geraghty writes, this would be a slam-dunk issue for John McCain to exploit--so naturally, don't hold your breath waiting for him to take it on.

Travis Kavulla notes that last night, "Apparently a laser light show – or, rather, a piece of 'illumination art' – was projected onto the National Cathedral" in Washington, DC:

Last night, [Gerry Hofstetter, a 45-year-old artist from Zurich] ran a series of glass plates through a 6,000-volt projector and said artisty things like "Light is hope, fire is energy. These colors mean hope and energy."

Light is hope? I only wish more in the artistic class still believed that.

Elsewhere, Cindy Crawford discovers her inner General Jack D. Ripper:

According to Crawford and the “Thirsty for Change” Web site, Americans use 50 billion water bottles a year.

“Fifty billion in America and only 50 percent are recycled,” Crawford said. “So that’s like 38 billion that aren’t recycled.”

The Exurban League explores the new math:

Let's see... 50 Billion x 50% = 25 Billion, subtract the loss factor, add in the safety margin, carry the missing supermodel brain cells... yep, 38 billion!

Do we know if Cindy has any thoughts on fluoridation?

(And don't even ask her about toilet paper...)

Update: Liberty Peak Lodge crosses the streams: check out the caption on the photo above this post.

Given how easy it now is to find previous Final Countdowns, just once, I'd love to see the next Final Countdown met with some skepticism from the press: Mr. Gore/Erlich/Danson/DiCaprio, etc., why should we believe you, when there have been so many earlier doomsday predictions that have never come to pass?

(H/T: TB)

Related: Via Small Dead Animals, Canada's Lorrie Goldstein opens up an even more recent memory hole:

Dear Globe and Mail and Toronto Star:

For 15 months, I've been saving your respective front pages from the glorious weekend of January 27-28, 2007, when you simultaneously declared your mutual jihads against man-made global warming.

I knew they'd come in handy some day and now, they have.

Indeed, it seems like only yesterday I awoke to my Saturday, January 27, 2007 Globe to be greeted by the hysterical, front-page headline "Welcome to the new climate," under a politically correct green masthead, declaring at the bottom: "We want action. We're ready for sacrifices."

Not to be outdone, the Star a day later had its own World War III, front-page headline, "State of denial: Do the skeptics of global warming have a hidden agenda?" -- in the finest traditions of "do you deny beating your wife?" journalism.

And now, here we are, just 15 months later and isn't it great you both have exactly what you wanted -- skyrocketing gasoline prices and about-to-skyrocket food prices -- since as we both know, hitting energy-hogging Canadians in their pocketbooks is the only way to make them reduce their evil greenhouse gas emissions hard and fast.

Or as it's been dubbed in States, the Pelosi Premium.

Howard Kurtz interviews military analyst and retired Army colonel, Ken Allard:

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: Last year, you quit NBC and MSNBC...

COL. KEN ALLARD: That's correct.

KURTZ: ...after a ten-year relationship. You indicated you thought they were moving to the left.

ALLARD: I thought they really had moved very slowly to the left, and I also thought that when they had the chance to clarify to the fact that they were not moving to the left, they didn't do so.

Allard left the networks in early 2007. Particularly in the case of MSNBC (and tacitly, with stunts such as this at NBC), the two affiliates of GE aren't exactly hiding their position on the ideological spectrum these days.

Curiously though, as I've written previously, for such a savvy media critic, Howard never seems to notice these things.

As I noted as soon as I saw it, that recent Time magazine global-warming as Iwo Jima cover is straight out of the "moral equivalent of war" playbook that as been a staple of the left since World War I that Jonah Goldberg described in Liberal Fascism. So it's not surprising that Jonah writes about that cover in his latest syndicated column:

Even if Walsh and his bosses at Time were merely trying to be descriptive of American attitudes, they’d still be flat-out wrong. If Americans saw environmentalism as the purest expression of patriotic sentiment — like, say, buying Liberty Bonds during WWI — Time’s declaration might be defensible. But Americans don’t think any such thing.

The latest Gallup environmental survey shows that only 37 percent of Americans worry about global warming “a great deal,” a drop from 41 percent last year. Indeed, the share of Americans greatly concerned with climate change is about the same as it was a decade ago, which still sounds a bit high since the globe pretty much stopped getting warmer in 1998. Even among environmental concerns, climate change isn’t priority No. 1 for most Americans.

The editors of Time surely know this, which explains their real motive: They want to persuade Americans otherwise. And they are honest about it. Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor, who recently admitted that he doesn’t much care about “objective” journalism, insists that “there needs to be an effort along the lines of preparing for World War II to combat global warming and climate change.”

Just as "the moral equivalent of war" traces its roots to WWI, so too does the desire for an "objective" media, as Steve Boriss recently noted.

As I've written before, journalism, but big and small, has definitely entered into its post-objective phase. Which is both long overdue and much more akin to a return to its pre-20th century roots than some sort of breakthrough development.

David Freddoso writes, "Republicans are jumping on Nancy Pelosi for getting the price of gasoline wrong by nearly a dollar in an interview":

I argue today that this is less significant than the fact that her promise to bring down gas prices was already a lie the moment she first uttered it. Pelosi isn't failing to do something about gasoline for lack of leadership or a plan, but because lower gas prices undercut a hugely important plank in the Democratic platform.

Higher gas prices are an essential part of creating economic disincentives against carbon pollution — that's the entire point of cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other proposed Global Warming fixes. In fact, today's high prices are already leading to greater conservation. Democratic complaints about gas prices are for election years — that's all they ever were.

Unlike Mrs. Pelosi, the more honest San Francisco Democrats will actually admit to that.

Couldn't he have have simply let it keep growing naturally to demonstrate the importance of sustained old growth forestry?

Back in the April of 2004, Steve Green of VodkaPundit dubbed The Day After Tomorrow, "The Passion of the Christ for the anti-globalization crowd."

We had no idea at the time how right he was, since at least one of its special effects shots has gone full circle, finding its way into a modern-day messiah's cinematic production.

Rich Lowry writes, "Just Imagine":

Regarding that Time global warming cover, just imagine if the mainstream media were as exercised about the war on terror and as devoted to crusading to win it. How different would the political environment look?

Freud called it displacement...

As Jonah Goldberg has noted in several places in Liberal Fascism, and reiterated to Salon magazine:

What appealed to the Progressives about militarism was what William James calls this moral equivalent of war. It was that war brought out the best in society, as James put it, that it was the best tool then known for mobilization ... That is what is fascistic about militarism, its utility as a mechanism for galvanizing society to join together, to drop their partisan differences, to move beyond ideology and get with the program. And liberalism today is, strictly speaking, pretty pacifistic. They're not the ones who want to go to war all that much. But they're still deeply enamored with this concept of the moral equivalent of war, that we should unite around common purposes. Listen to the rhetoric of Barack Obama, it's all about unity, unity, unity, that we have to move beyond our particular differences and unite around common things, all of that kind of stuff. That remains at the heart of American liberalism, and that's what I'm getting at.

See also, the cover of the latest edition of Time magazine, which takes Jimmy Carter's 1977 speech that explicitly equaled the reduction of foreign energy reliance with, as Carter said in his speech, "the moral equivalent of war", and puts the now-expected green spin on it. Sadly, it's probably not a belated April Fools' Edition.

(Note that Time probably doesn't call for this particular scheme, which would no doubt save quite a bit of power and resources.)

Update: "Imagine the designs that were rejected"!

Michael Goldfarb writes:

Last night's episode of Bill Maher's Real Time featured evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins (the very poor man's version of Christopher Hitchens), explaining why scientists can't be certain of much of anything:

I think any scientist would be unwise to commit himself to saying there definitely is not anything. I mean, I can’t definitely commit myself to saying there are no fairies. I’m pretty sure there are no fairies. [laughter] But, I think it would be unscientific to do what the extreme religious people do and say, “I know there is a god.”

It's an interesting contrast to comments by NASA scientist James Hansen earlier this week complaining about a high school textbook that didn't portray global warming as a fact rather than a theory:

Hansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain."

So Hansen is certain that global warming is real and the greenhouse gases are the cause. As are Bill Maher, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and every other luminary of the left. Immediately following his interview with Dawkins last night, Maher proceeded to mock Christians for their skepticism of global warming (or indifference, as he would have it), explaining it as a result of their belief in the Rapture. But hasn't the left embraced global warming as their own version of the Rapture? They do not harbor any doubt, but believe with the fervor of religious conviction that the end of civilization will come as a result of consumerism. And they seem completely unaware that in believing this, they have shed the very skepticism that is supposed to define the secular left.

I don't think you can really dub them secular these days, now that they've found an alternative religion to embrace wholeheartedly.

David Bowie's mid-1970s song "Heroes" was about two people personally fighting back against a monumental communist evil. The Berlin wall namechecked in the song is happily gone now (I have a tiny piece of it on a shelf in my study), but the freedom-crushing spirit behind it lives on, in smaller but still sadly pervasive forms, from people who should know better. And so does the spirit of rebellion, because, after all, dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

As Tim Blair writes, "Remember these examples when next confronted by epic stupidity in your own world. We can be heroes, too."

Brent Bozell writes that PBS is a bit like Criswell--it wants to forecast the future (and making things up just as wildly), but with no accountability when reality fails to materialize as forecast:

Ted Turner was not only interviewed, but celebrated on PBS – on April Fool’s Day. The prank was apparently on PBS. It was as if Turner had a subversive mission, to prove that PBS isn’t just for smart people. True to form, Turner walked off a cliff of rhetorical excess on the “Charlie Rose” show, charging that global warming was going to grow so severe, that in a few decades, most of humanity would be extinct. “We'll be eight degrees hotter in ten -- not ten, but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals.”

Charlie Rose should have been embarrassed, but wasn’t. When Turner said during the show “It’s been a long time since anybody caught me saying something stupid,” he should have administered a Breathalyzer test. Instead, at show’s end, he delivered an hommage to Turner’s humanitarianism. Rose was still seated, but the tone sounded like he was bowing deeply to his guest’s expansive intellect. “You’re a remarkable man,” he declared.

The global warming disaster-movie pushers always try to intimidate their opponents by insisting the finest scientific minds are all on their side. But Ted Turner is not one of the finest scientific minds in America. All you have to do is express the politically correct opinion, and PBS will treat you as one of the world’s great sages.

PBS is a natural habitat for this kind of wild-eyed lunacy. The taxpayer-funded network has a well-worn reputation for providing gloomy – and wholly inaccurate – predictions from environmental extremists. In 1990, the PBS documentary series “Race to Save the Planet” featured another one of those lesser scientific minds, actress Meryl Streep: “By the year 2000 -- that's less than 10 years away -- the earth's climate will be warmer than it's been in over 100,000 years. If we don't do something, there'll be enormous calamities in a very short time.”

Doesn’t everyone remember the massive human die-off of 2000? [Sure--it happened concurrently with the great leftwing migration to Canada and Europe that December...--Ed]

Al Gore went to Harvard with Erich Segal, the author of “Love Story,” so he knows that being in love with the planet Earth means never having to say you’re sorry when your doomsday pitches are massively, dreadfully wrong. But shouldn’t PBS and other media outlets be held accountable when doomsday predictions they’ve facilitated from 15 or 20 years ago fail to materialize?

Why should old media, which never met a far left hustler it didn't like, be expected to start policing itself now?

Update: The BBC holds itself accountable on its global warming stories, in its own, sadly not-so-unique fashion.

Only a true satiric master can beat the nigh-impossible odds that Muggeridge's Law imposes, especially when one of the participants is the nutty grandparent in cable television's attic. (Alongside Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite, Helen Thomas, Phil Donahue, and...hmmm: Whom The Gods Destroy, they first build lionizing PBS specials around.)

Add nutty Ted's latest mutterings to this one from a quarter of century ago, and it's yet another example of the Not So Final Countdown.

(Which is still probably better than this Final Countdown!)

I have no idea what the calendrical significance of the current date is, but wow, even Michelle Malkin's Website is going dark today...

All you need to know about the state of Google these days is summed up by comparing two concurrent weekends of splash pages: the transnational search engine couldn't be bothered to create a customized page last week for the traditional Christian holiday of Easter, but could create one for the gnostic "Earth Hour" festival to pay homage to Gaia. (In a blackout design which ironically uses more power than their usual white page!) And speaking of "Earth Hour", Tim Blair writes:

The University of Sydney isn't taking any chances. "Campus Infrastructure Services will be switching off as many non-essential lights as possible, while ensuring that safety and security on our campuses is maintained," said an administration email sent last week. "There will be some street and path closures to allow as many lights as possible to be switched off."

So they're closing streets to protect students from dangerous unlit areas. Sounds like the university needs to work on its definition of "non-essential."

That's one thing about light; it makes dangerous places safe. Light is emblematic of civilisation. Nobody would visit Paris if it were known as the City of Dark. Likewise, we rarely invoke the Dark Ages to describe a pleasant situation. Bruce Springsteen possibly wasn't in the happiest frame of mind when he wrote "Darkness On The Edge of Town."

Supporters of Earth Hour like to talk about the important symbolism of the event in terms of climate change and suchlike. The deeper symbolism is of a rejection of progress - of the centuries of research and innovation that culminates in us being able to bring light by flicking a few grams of plastic.

That's an excellent point. During the 1996 election Bill Clinton promised that his administration would build a bridge to the 21st century. But followers of his vice president seem to want to build a bridge back into the 11th century, particularly when you add their rejection of mechanical and engineering progress with a rejection of centuries of hygienic advancements as well. The hippies of the 1960s wanted to Start From Zero; their successors are determined to return there, dragging the rest of us back to Year Zero with them whether we want to reprimitivize or not.

(Incidentally, I wonder how they'd react if a hospital told them a loved one suffering a heart attack couldn't have electrical defibrillation because the juice in the emergency room was off for Earth Hour?)

Update: Found via Mark Steyn, Darrell Epp suggests, "Forget ‘Global Warming’ and Start Worrying About ‘Demographic Winter’."

A new and chilling video from The National Center for Public Policy Research asks, can we really trust a consummate Washington insider with the support of Al Gore, who lives in an exclusive northern whites-only community?

"A rented sports utility vehicle is apparently involved in the November shooting of Washington Redskins star Sean Taylor at his Miami home."

Last year, the Orlando Sentinel actually ran a headline that read "SUV crashes into store, perhaps in attempt to steal guns".

Having gotten a taste for larceny, clearly, the killer cars have moved on to even more heinous crimes.

As Glenn Reynolds would say, I'll believe global warming is a crisis when those who believe that it is a crisis act that way:

Meanwhile, even as American Airlines is given grief simply for maintaining its published schedule, Private Jet Progressives are given a pass by their fellow elitists for their own individual "binge flying".

Update: Here's a beast that brings new meaning to the phrase "commuter jet!"

If, as the New York Times and PBS keep hectoring us, global warming requires everyone to make sacrifices, think of the greenhouse emissions and biased omissions that would be saved by the voluntary retirement of these two wasteful corporations.

Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters catches USA Today's claim that global warming will cause giant snakes to start roaming the fruited plains.

Curiously, only a couple of weeks ago, we were told that global warming killed oversized reptiles.

"You want to save the earth? Here’s a little hint. Don’t. Buy. S***."

That's pretty much Bill's plan.

A couple of years ago, Julia Gorin wrote:

It's a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming - at least that's what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

And no one conflates the two like the Ultimate Nanny Stater, Nurse Bloomberg.

Baptist Press quotes the Goracle on his namesake issue, Goreball Worming:

"This is not a political issue," Gore told a crowd of approximately 2,500 paying attendees. "It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue. It is a spiritual issue."

As its name implies, Baptist Press frequently reports on topics important to the "predecessor religion to environmentalism called Christianity", to borrow a prescient line from Charles Krauthammer.

I guess I'm strictly an old school kind of guy: unlike Al, I can't say I'm too comfortable with most post-Christian religions. They often end rather badly for all concerned.

Update: And as Jonah Goldberg notes in Liberal Fascism, they often end-up attempting to eliminate or modify into incoherence the holidays named by their predecessor faith.

Fox has wisely ruled that the Super Bowl will be a politics-free zone.

Unfortunately, someone didn't get the message, it seems.

In his recent videotaped interview with Pajamas' Richard Miniter, Tom DeLay quipped that he heard John McCain "was running as a Republican this year."

Guess again, Tom...

Cinnamon Stillwell encounters "Apocalyptic Environmentalism on the Streets of San Francisco":

Weather used to be the only safe subject for those trying artfully to avoid the twin topics of discord: religion and politics. But, these days, merely remarking that "it's a nice day" or "stormy weather we've been having lately, eh?" is enough to elicit a tidal wave of doom and gloom. And it matters not whether it's hot or cold outside. All variations in temperature, I'm told by these self-described experts, stem from "global warming."

Where once it was the crazy homeless guys standing on Market Street (or whatever main drag is at hand in one's respective urban environment) with signs reading, "The End is Near," now it's your average, everyday citizen who, upon the slightest provocation, launches into a diatribe about how the end of the world is imminent.

Such a creature wanders my neighborhood looking for potential converts and a friend and I once had the unfortunate experience of running into her. It was Christmas Day and in the spirit of the season we wished her a "Merry Christmas" (not a "Happy Holidays," mind you) in passing. She took this as an opening to start rambling, in a glassy-eyed manner, about how strange the weather had been lately, which soon morphed into dead polar bears, melting ice caps and, you guessed it, the end of the world.

Having lived in the Bay Area all my life and grown accustomed to the ever-changing weather ("Always wear layers," I tell visitors), I took issue with her contention that "We haven't had normal weather in the Bay Area in twenty years!" "What's normal weather?" I asked her, and then proceeded to note that local weather has always varied and that certainly hadn't changed over the past twenty years.

My companion chimed in with a few facts to contradict the global warming alarmism on display and concluded with the statement, "I'm not buying it." Ms. Prophet of Doom looked confused and, glazed expression intact, soon wandered off in search of a more gullible audience. Undoubtedly, she'd never encountered anyone who didn't agree with her apocalyptic scenario and cognitive dissonance set in.

The Care Bear Stare strikes again!

Theodore Dalrymple writes, "Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale":

One of the interesting questions that this little piece of research poses is whether the environmentalist lobby will now throw itself behind the cause of family values. Will it, for example, push for the tightening of divorce laws, and for financial penalties—in the form, say, of higher taxes—to be imposed on those who insist upon divorcing, and therefore upon using 46 percent more electricity and 52 percent more water per person than married couples who stay together? Will environmentalists march down the streets with banners reading SAVE THE PLANET: STAY WITH THE HUSBAND YOU HATE?

For myself, I doubt it. Yet these figures, if true, are certainly suggestive. The fact that there will be no demonstrations against environmentally destructive divorcees, who probably emit as much extra carbon dioxide as the average SUV, suggests that the desire to save the planet is not nearly as powerful as the desire to destroy a way of life.

Well, yeah.

"Make Global Warming A Priority": Indeed--this poor frozen soul looks like he needs all the help he can get!

Hey, maybe there's a fair amount of truth to the cartoon that Tigerhawk posted after all!

As I wrote on Thursday:

This International Herald-Tribune article titled, "In Italy, a winter of discontent" sounds very much like a micro-version of Mark Steyn's opus "It's The Demography, Stupid", which originally appeared in The New Criterion before running in Opinion Journal.

Mark expands upon the Herald-Tribune's article himself, in his latest weekly op-ed:

So in post-Catholic Italy there is no miracle of a child this Christmas – unless you count the 70 percent of Italians between the ages of 20 and 30 who still live at home, the world's oldest teenagers still trudging up the stairs to the room they slept in as a child even as they approach their fourth decade. That's worth bearing in mind if you're an American gal heading to Rome on vacation: When that cool 29-year-old with the Mediterranean charm in the singles bar asks you back to his pad for a nightcap, it'll be his mom and dad's place.

I'm often told that my demographics-is-destiny argument is anachronistic: Countries needed manpower in the Industrial Age, when we worked in mills and factories. But now advanced societies are "knowledge economies," and they require fewer working stiffs. Oddly enough, the Lisbon Council's European Human Capital Index, released in October, thinks precisely the opposite – that the calamitous decline in population will prevent Eastern and Central Europe from being able to function as "innovation economies." A "knowledge economy" will be as smart as the brains it can call on.

Meanwhile, a few Europeans are still having children: The British government just announced that Muhammad is now the most popular boy's name in the United Kingdom.

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable.

And that usually works out just swell for all concerned.

(For more Steyn, catch archives of him on the Laura Ingraham Show, and Pajamas' PJM Political show.)

Dan Riehl catches Carolyn Washburn, the editor of the Des Moines Register and the moderator for both parties debates in Iowa earlier this week pulling a fast one:

Carolyn Washburn takes a shot at Republicans with an obviously false statement in her piece summarizing the recent Iowa debates which she moderated:

By and large, the Republicans say they can get us to smaller government and lower taxes with economic growth and government efficiency. They don't ask Americans to make terrible sacrifices. About half wanted to tackle global warming and about half chose not to talk about it. They want local control and choice in education.

Chose not to talk about it!?! Not only did one Republican ask to talk about it, as opposed to raising his hand, Washburn wouldn't let them talk about anything other than what she had pre-scripted in her mind. From the transcript: see rest of pertinent part below the fold. Everyone there that was permitted to, talked about it until she changed the subject.

Read the rest for a transcription of the candidates' remarks on the topic.

The benefits of modern high-speed photography? It's fast enough to capture a whole herd of RINOs as they charge into the green.

Coming this summer to a multiplex near you, to satisfy the inner five year old in all of us....Speed Racer: The Motion Picture!

But isn't there a disconnect in Hollywood promoting The New Holocaust yet again?

(HT: SG)

Then: Tulip Mania.

Now: "What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism?"

We report, you decide:

The Brutally Honest Weblog believes that "Jason Whilock, a black columnist writing for The Kansas City Star" is being brutally honest in a way that will "piss off the modern day civil rights movement. He's provocatively telling the truth."

On the other hand, Jason Cole, who contributes to Yahoo's NFL coverage, praises Whilock's earlier efforts, but demurs at his latest column: "It's powerful, it's strong, it makes you think. But if it's wrong, it's dangerous."

Tim Blair writes:

It’s not often one happens upon a story combining issues of architecture, environmentalism, institutes of higher learning and accidental avian windowcide, let alone such a story written in a manner joyously suggestive of B-grade horror movie previews. For this, we thank the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and journalist Andrea Jones.

As Tim adds, in full Monster Chiller Horror Theater Mode, "Read on. If you dare!"

Return with us now to the era of Woodrow Wilson, Carrie Nation and Margaret Sanger, as "Progressive" New Puritans continue their sweep through government, devouring your freedoms.

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post and the author of Nanny State writes that it's the return of the most obvious form of puritanism--prohibition:

Drinking is under attack these days in ways we haven't seen since the failed experiment with national alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Indeed, for many neoprohibitionists, that experiment wasn't a failure at all, since it did cut alcohol consumption, which is all that matters. We can see that mentality today in policies that go beyond preventing drunk driving or punishing drunk drivers and aim to discourage drinking per se.

But food is also under attack; in San Francisco, where the progressive dream can be seen in the US in its full glory: out-of-control vagrants harrass an otherwise shrinking but ever-so-environmentally correct population, fireplaces could soon be banned. (And they may already be banished in some Bay Area suburbs.)

And then of course, there's the story making the rounds on the starboard side of the Blogosphere and cable TV this week:

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to “protect the planet”…

“Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35.

“Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.”

Where it all ends only knows Gaia, but here are three examples of taking environmental absurdity to its most absurd destinations.

It's time to thaw McLean Stevenson out of cryogenic suspension--because Fred Silverman's back, and he's running NBC again. That's the only way to explain these two mind-numbingly stupid peacock network fumbles occurring back-to-back.

Well, it's not the only way, but it is the only explanation that makes some sense, isn't it?

20 years ago, Ted Danson told us that we had only ten years to save the world's oceans.

And he was right!

Update: Meanwhile, back on land, the radical cloning program on the Island of Dr. Moreau proceeds apace...

J.D. Johannes explores the "End of the War Hero", at least in nihilistic Hollywood:

In the latest round of war movies the heroes are not the Soldiers and Marines who every day fight and defeat a vicious and barbaric enemy--the heroes are reporters, lawyers and activists.

And since every story requires a villain, the real enemy--Mohammedan Jihadists--are replaced by neo-cons, politicians, Soldiers and Marines.

This substitution of the traditional mono-myth away from a hero who faces physical danger and conquers an enemy is a result of cowardice of the modern story tellers.

The human mind craves the same narrative--this was illustrated by Joseph Campbell...also, we all want to be the hero.

But when confronted with a real life situation--like the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and larger war on terror few will step up to be heroes.

The many who do not have the ability to step up fall into two categories--those who acknowledge their inability to be heroes and those who do not.

Being a hero is not a job for everyone, many accept this and give credit to those who are willing to take the challenge.

But there is another group for who the sting of their own cowardice is too much to bear. They are not willing to accept that they cannot be heroes.

They cannot accept that, even if they were younger or had the physical ability to confront a violent villain, they would shrink from the challenge.

To alleviate their guilt they invent a new villain--Halliburton, Cheney, neo-cons, politicians, military officers, Soldiers, Marines--in short, anyone who will not physically harm them.

Not the least of which is this imaginary terror.

More at Power Line, which references Richard Lester's Cuba, "one of Sean Connery's least-seen films", and one of a series of pro-Castro movies that Hollywood seems to alternate each year with an anti-McCarthy and/or anti-blacklist movie. (Sense a theme?)

To be fair though, Cuba at least had for eye-candy a gorgeous-looking young Brooke Adams, thus making it somewhat passable entertainment with the sound down and fast-forward button at the ready.

Back when I was a kid, the only thing I recall being able to build out of Legos were lame-looking toy houses. But these days, their catalog is filled with surprisingly complex toys promoting very un-PC concepts, not the least of which are Gaia-defiling construction equipment, dispensaries of Big Oil, and race cars, which the left holds in utter contempt due to their goreball worming connotations, as Tim Blair would say. And Lego also produces a whole line of toys promoting the violent destructive fantasies of a raaaaacist Hollywood filmmaker. But as James S. Robbins notes, Lego as a corporation is as reactionary and politically correct as they come:

A few days ago I posted a bleg asking for ways to reach out to Lego Systems, Inc. to see if they would donate Lego sets to wounded warriors at Walter Reed who use the sets for therapy. Quick response from Lego — forget it. Now we learn that Lego has awarded $5000.00 to eight year old Kelsie Kimberlin, as part of their first annual Creativity Awards. Her entry — a 5 minute anti-Bush video set to an altered John Lennon tune ("Happy Springtime/Bush is Over").

Problem: the video was actually produced by her father, Brett, who runs Justice Through Music, a civic engagement nonprofit. Brett is also noteworthy for being a convicted bomber (aka terrorist), and for having claimed to have sold pot to Dan Quayle in 1988. Just the kind of person you want associated with your child's favorite toy. Some free advice to Lego — want to fix this PR nightmare? Do the right thing and help the wounded warriors already.

Further thoughts on postmodern corporate hypocrisy here.

Somebody's seen Waterworld and A.I. one too many times:

On Monday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Harry Smith interviewed New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg. The liberal mayor has followed in the footsteps of Al Gore and implored the government to take action to address an impending environmental crisis, saying "We need to do something now." To match Bloomberg’s alarmist rhetoric, Smith added "Manhattan will be underwater by 2050." Amusingly, even Bloomberg thought that assertion went too far, "There's a -- I don't know that Manhattan will be underwater, but certainly the environment's going to be a lot worse that we leave our children."

Hey, I love Steven Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick as much as the next guy, but I do know that A.I.'s only a movie.

Still though--for those who are true believers, it might be time to buy property in Trenton or Paramus. Could be prime beachfront real estate by 2050!

Video of a dim NBC Sunday night broadcast, here.

When George Bush was elected president, I was told he would usher in the new dark ages. And they were right!

As exciting a game on the field as the first half of tonight's Cowboys at the Eagles was, the program that NBC built around it sure did have its moments of strangeness:

NBC's "Sunday Night Football" officially will become a "green" show this weekend, as it kicks off an initiative that will see the broadcaster televise 150 hours of environmentally-themed content this week across its broadcast and cable networks, online sites and mobile platforms.

Green week will start one hour into "Football Night in America," at 8:00pm ET. That's when studio host Bob Costas will explain the initiative.

About 90 seconds before the end of the pre-game show, NBC literally plans to turn the lights out, having the pregame crew finish the show in the dark. The studio lights will stay off through the halftime and post-game shows.

I had to not see it to believe it. Whenever I've done videos, I've spent hours getting the lights just so. Who knew it all you had to do was say, "Hey man, we're going dark to be green", and no lights at all are necessary.

Television: It's like radio without pictures!

Seriously though, all religions have their rituals which seem strange, old-fashioned, and just downright rococco to outsiders, and this is yet another example. (But wouldn't turning off the 90 babillion kilowatts of power that light-up a night game at the "Linc" have saved a helluva lot more energy than turning off a handful of Lowel Omnis back at the studio?)

For decades conservatives have complained endlessly about the big three TV networks' biases, only to be rebuffed by television journalists and producers who would respond with a shrug, "Biased? Us? Huh--sorry, I just can't see it, myself." (CBS's Dan Rather, not surprisingly, was a master at this technique.)

But lately, NBC has really let it all hang out, even on a show as mainstream as Sunday Night Football. Pink, the rockerette who screamed the show's theme song last year is a PETA spokeshumanoid. (Happily, this year she was replaced.) Keith Olbermann, who routinely compares conservatives to Nazis on NBC's MSNBC cable outlet appears on the pregame show and at halftime. This week show featured ads for Al Gore's upcoming appearance on 30 Rock, beyond Obama's appearance last night on Saturday Night Live. And elsewhere on NBC, their flagship Nightly News show is hosted by a man who has compared America's founding fathers to terrorists.

Earlier this year, retired Army Col. Ken Allard, then a regular contributor to NBC, had enough:

It is, therefore, possible to argue that NBC is merely undergoing a delicate arabesque in anticipation of changing audience preferences and the long- hoped-for Democratic restoration (although journalists generally seem reluctant to raise the tough questions that should punctuate the 2008 campaign).

But has anyone else noticed the network's precipitous retreat from journalistic and ethical standards? Not only were no apologies given and no pink slips issued for Arkin's outburst, but on his MSNBC show last week, Keith Olberman went out of his way to defend this "valid criticism" of our military.

In January, Conan O'Brien was allowed to escape without apology after airing a particularly tasteless gay skit deriding Christianity: "Oh, Jesus, I love you, but only as a friend." (Just try doing that sometime using Mohammad's name!)

And only this week, questions have been raised about the cozy relationships between CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo and the companies she covers as a supposedly objective journalist. The response by Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE and godfather of the NBC family: "Substantially, I don't think she did anything wrong."

Fine: Let's hope he's right. But sometimes the only way to show where you really stand is to vote with your feet. And so with great reluctance and best wishes to my former colleagues, with this column I am severing my 10-year relationship with NBC News.

At the end of the 2004 presidential election, Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote:

A political party is dying before our eyes--and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the "mainstream media," which is being destroyed by the opposition (or worse, the casual disdain) of George Bush's Republican Party; by competition from other news outlets (led by the internet and Fox's canny Roger Ailes); and by its own fraying journalistic standards.

And if anything, that trend has only accelerated.

So thank you, NBC, for letting viewers know where you stand. After after 80 long years of pretending otherwise, doesn't it feel good to finally come clean with your audience?

You can read related thoughts from Sister Toldjah--asuming the lights are still on in your den. And The Sundries Shack would like NBC to disclose each show's carbon footprint--"so I can determine whether they have any grounds on which to criticize me for my lifestyle."

Finally, "I notice they didn't turn off the bright lighted Toyota sign." Heh.^TM

"How many peaceniks who compulsively quote one sentence out of Ike's farewell address, warning about the 'military industrial complex', have read the whole speech?"

Frank Martin explains why Harry Reid's poll numbers in Nevada are so low, even the crack forensic scientists of CSI: Las Vegas couldn't find them.

Truth be told, I don't think that Reid actually believes any of this stuff, but when you're a spokesman for an ideology that's headed far, far to the left in recent years, you've got to toe the party line.

Two quick technology updates:

Found via Steve Green, I hadn't planned to buy an Apple iPhone, but I'm starting to change my mind...

And while I often have sushi while sitting in front of my PC's twin LCD monitors, apparently the in-thing amongst the really hip members of the digerati is preparing the sushi right on them. That sounds good to me, but aren't they worried that the wasabi will melt the plastic?

To understand how organizations like the Nobel Prize began to slowly go off the rails, it's worth flashing back to the tremendous opening shot of Paul Johnson's opus Modern Times:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: 'Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.' Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.

He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.

The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

On the other hand, we certainly can't fault the Nobel Committee's clear American bias, though...

At the beginning of the Steven Hayward article we linked to a couple of posts back, he wrote:

It used to be that the [Nobel] award went to people of genuine humanitarian or diplomatic accomplishment, like Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer or Doctors Without Borders.

As further proof of the immutability of Conquest's Second Law, Scott Johnson of Power Line explores some of the more dubious milestones along the Nobel Prize's paths of glory.

Scott asks, "How about some recognition for the scientists of Laputa discovered by Gulliver in the course of his travels?" Laputa's good deeds were significantly punished in 1963, as fans of Dr. Strangelove will recall.

As Allah writes, "Look on the bright side: after Arafat, Carter, and Iranian marionette Mohammed ElBaradei, the award couldn’t possibly be more degraded."

Steve Hayward has some additional thoughts on Al Gore's Nobel prize, and a bold prediction: "In 20 years Gore or his climate alarmist successors will be lucky to appear on cable access TV, and Gore’s Peace Prize will take its place alongside Le Duc Tho’s 1973 award as a Nobel embarrassment". If that sounds harsh, simply compare Gore with Paul Ehrlich, the most prominent Malthusian of the 1970s, when modern eco-hysteria began:

It’s never a good sign when politicians declare a scientific matter settled; we all remember how well that worked out for the Vatican when they told Galileo 400 years ago that astronomy was settled. It is even more problematic to suggest that climate change is not a political issue, but a moral issue, but then to demand massive political interventions in the economy to fix the problem.

The adrenaline rush of the Nobel is likely to prove evanescent, however, and will probably turn out to be the high water mark of climate hysteria. Increasingly, climate catastrophe is coming more and more to resemble the hysteria over the “population bomb” of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those days, Paul Ehrlich was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, and there were government commissions launched here and abroad to ponder whether we needed an aggressive anti-natalist policy. The effort to develop a population policy in the U.S. collapsed quickly and quietly when someone pointed out that any anti-natalist policy would disproportionately affect racial and ethnic minorities. Oops.

Population pressures were and remain a genuine environmental concern, but it gradually became clear that Ehrlich and other alarmists had way overestimated the problem, and it looks very different today. (Indeed, the great social problem of the end of this century may be population that is falling too rapidly.) And while Ehrlich is still peddling the same Malthusian gloom, he never turns up on the Tonight Show any more; in fact, he doesn’t even make it on Hardball or Countdown with Krazy Keith.

Likewise, climate change is a real phenomenon, but the catastrophic scenario of Gore and his fellow climate campaigners is steadily fraying around the edges if you follow the scientific literature closely. Has anyone noticed, for example, that global temperature has been flat for the last decade, after two decades of slow and steady increase from 1980 to 1998?

Read the whole thing.

Tim Blair has "Possibly the ultimate leftist slogan of 2007"; no that's not it in Tim's headline above, click on over to see it for yourself printed on--where else?--a t-shirt.

Charlie Rangel would no doubt approve, as would the authors of this book.

"Oh sure, they're environmentally conscious and cost-efficient, but there's a dark side to those zippy Toyota Priuses: They can be lethal to the blind."

Emergency medical technicians aren't that crazy about them either, considering their electrical cables can generate quite a shock when cut into.

Tech Central Station's Andrew Och discusses America's tech and real estate bubbles of the last decade with Daniel Gross, the author of Pop: Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, and asks what next bubble is likely to burst:

GROSS: When you look back at history, you can see these early stages to a bubble. People say there's a new technology and a new set of economic assumptions behind it. You tend to get government subsidies behind a new sector. You tend to get investor enthusiasm.

TCS: And where do you see those things happening now?

GROSS: We are seeing all those elements right now in alternative energy. People are saying that there are a new set of economic assumptions surrounding energy use. Oil prices are very high. There's all the concern about global warming. Therefore, they say, we need to invest more in this area.

There's been fantastic growth in wind, solar, ethanol. We have government subsidies for all of these things, which encourages people to invest in them even at high levels. And you can see it crossing over into the popular culture. It's not just business publications. It's everywhere you look - TV, radio, newspapers, company's websites. Everybody is talking about producing alternative energy, using alternative energy.

So, I think the stars are aligning for a bubble in alternative energy.

It will be fun to watch the media report--or not--on that when and if it happens.

The lamps already went off in Sydney earlier this year for an hour; San Francisco and Los Angeles will be joining them soon. Recently, Variey described this L.A. incident, which foreshadows the event rather nicely:

Some 300 people gathered on Tuesday night at the Brentwood home of CAA's David O'Connor and his wife, Lona Williams, anxious to see the guest of honor, Bill Clinton.

Then the power went out --- in the entire neighborhood --- putting this Hillary Clinton fund-raiser into near total darkness.

The only light came from candles and some battery operated lanterns, which were shined on Clinton when he spoke in the backyard pool area. That helped, but it was still hard to see guests. And with no electricity, and therefore no microphone, it wasn't always easy to hear, according to a guest.

"There are a lot of great things about the modern world," Clinton said, according to the guest. "Predictable electricity may not be one of them."

At least this hour of darkness will be predictible, on oh, so many levels.

Reuters: "Gore: Bush should follow Reagan's lead on climate".

Bush should propose a compromise with Gore: he'll begin to act more like a conservative president from the 1980s, if Gore will resume acting like the more conservative southern Democrat senator he was during the same time period, before his meltdown occured.

Two of the recurring themes on our blog is the flattening of history where the modern left seems endlessly trapped in the early 1970s, along with the concurrent return of the Rousseauvian primitive who probably thinks of himself as politically "progressive", and yet would like to see society move far, far backwards in time. Or as Pete Seeger once told the New York Times:

I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.

Reading James Lileks' Tuesday Bleat and then Mark Steyn's Maclean's article on Hollywood's, err, new golden age (as he puts it) back to back illustrates--in spades--how little the themes they address have changed amongst the left in nearly forty years. Not to mention Tom Wolfe's "Starting From Zero" motif.

It really does happen like clockwork--first Al drops into L.A. to pick up his Emmy, then this. Incredible!

The week is far from over, but it's already been filled with deja vu all over again. And again.

Or as to paraphrase those parodies of 1930s-era Time magazine, Backwards ran the flashbacks until reeled the mind...

Want to relive 1945? The Washington Post makes Gerald Ford look like a brilliant Cold War historian.

Or maybe you'd like to revisit 1994? OJ's back in the police blotter once again.

How 'bout 1997? Matt Drudge has the dinosaur media p.o.ed all over again.

Or, why not something as recent as 2004! On National Talk Like A Pirate Day, avast maties, for the return of the Captain Dan the Newsman, swashbuckling his way back into the Blogosphere's hearts with a $70 million lawsuit against his former employer.

Or we can set the Wayback Machine back to the new Ice Age predicted by NASA in 1971; and way, way back--to 1492.

...Where it all will end, knows God!

Update: speaking of "a couple of week links", welcome readers of Jules Crittenden and Don Surber!

It's Clinton By Candlelight (which is far, far less fun than Playboy After Dark):

Some 300 people gathered on Tuesday night at the Brentwood home of CAA's David O'Connor and his wife, Lona Williams, anxious to see the guest of honor, Bill Clinton.

Then the power went out --- in the entire neighborhood --- putting this Hillary Clinton fund-raiser into near total darkness.

The only light came from candles and some battery operated lanterns, which were shined on Clinton when he spoke in the backyard pool area. That helped, but it was still hard to see guests. And with no electricity, and therefore no microphone, it wasn't always easy to hear, according to a guest.

"There are a lot of great things about the modern world," Clinton said, according to the guest. "Predictable electricity may not be one of them."

Actually, let's rephrase that. There are a lot of great things about California. Predictable electricity is definitely not one of them.

No matter how silly Hollywood gets, there's always going to be a topper. Always.

Texas Rainmaker, rather appropriately named to fluidly comment on this story, suggests in a stream of consciousness that "Yellow is the New Green". I'll simply note that between Cate Blanchett, and Laurie David and Sheryl Crow, Hollywood sure knows how to put the focus on the business end of global warming's root causes, huh?

Glenn Reynolds notes, "In the New York Times: Global warming is Jane Fonda's fault. Well, yeah", as the Times identifies The Fonda Effect:

“The China Syndrome” opened on March 16, 1979. With the no-nukes protest movement in full swing, the movie was attacked by the nuclear industry as an irresponsible act of leftist fear-mongering. Twelve days later, an accident occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in south-central Pennsylvania.

Michael Douglas, a producer and co-star of the film — he played Fonda’s cameraman — watched the T.M.I. accident play out on the real TV news, which interspersed live shots from Pennsylvania with eerily similar scenes from “The China Syndrome.” While Fonda was firmly anti-nuke before making the film, Douglas wasn’t so dogmatic. Now he was converted on the spot. “It was a religious awakening,” he recalled in a recent phone interview. “I felt it was God’s hand.”

Fonda, meanwhile, became a full-fledged crusader. In a retrospective interview on the DVD edition of “The China Syndrome,” she notes with satisfaction that the film helped persuade at least two other men — the father of her then-husband, Tom Hayden, and her future husband, Ted Turner — to turn anti-nuke.

Proving that Pete Townshend was more right than he could have possibly known in 1980:

I’m for nuclear power, but I haven’t told anyone because I am still hoping to f*** Jane Fonda, like everybody dreams of doing who’s involved in the No Nuke movement.

Me? Like the cast of The Pepsi Syndrome, I'll stick with Barbarella.

Update: Welcome readers of the Professor, who in linking to our post, adds that "Pete Townshend's perspicacity...may explain why the anti-nuclear movement isn't doing as well as it was in the 1970s." But the anti-energy movement as a whole isn't suffering all that much, as Noel Sheppard notes, bringing things full circle with the present day.

Related: The dreaded Pepsi Syndrome seems to be attacking Blue Crab Boulevard's nuclear reactor, even as we speak.

To build on our post from Monday night, while the leftwing BBC clearly has issues these days, one could say that the Tories are overreacting, just slightly, to the increasingly global issue of Kultursmog.

While William F. Buckley's slogan was the original rallying cry for post-War conservatives, as Jonah Goldberg and Radley Balko have each noted, it's become the unconscious catchphrase of the post-JFK left, who've lost confidence in both themselves and western civilization as a whole.

Standing athwart history is the thread that ties together two otherwise very different stories in this Roger Friedman article. As the lead discusses, Leonardo DiCaprio's environmental religious beliefs are designed primarily to greatly hinder the expansion of technology and business (presumably not his, of course, but no critic will ever ask him that, lest he be dropped from the Hollywood gravy train).

And at the tail-end of Friedman's article, woe betide the man who seeks to modernize Manhattan, he notes:

New Yorkers don't like it when you mess with our history.

Donald Trump, for example, went into the record books when he secretly destroyed the front doors of Bonwit Teller to make room for Trump Tower in 1990.

New York University is reviled by some alumni as it has devoured Greenwich Village and stamped it with concrete and glass. Killing The Bottom Line nightclub was the cherry on the top of that sundae.

Last week, CBGB's founder Hilly Kristal died at age 75 from lung cancer. But last year, a person named Muzzy Rosenblatt and a group called the Bowery Residents Committee cracked Kristal when they determined to close the legendary Lower East Side rock club and replace it with something more profitable. Appropriately, they still haven't found a tenant. Rosenblatt and friends must be so proud.

Iggy Pop threw up there once in 1977--it must be worth saving!

"Ono blasts eco-friendly cars":

Yoko Ono will never use an environmentally friendly car--because they are not as comfortable as her Bentley. The wife of late Beatle John Lennon has snubbed the Hybrid car--which is popular with Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz and Leonardo Di Caprio for its low pollution levels - in favour of travelling in luxury. She says, "Can someone make Hybrid cars as comfortable as a Bentley, please?"

Say, whatever happened to "imagine no possessions"? [It died right around the same time as "nothing to kill or die for"--Ed]

Heh:

Incidentally, three squares? I'll bet Laurie gave Larry hell for that line. Which would explain the bright idea he eventually had to celebrate their breakup.

That's the headline of this essay in industry bible Editor & Publisher. And why not? The media have gotten over objectivity on every other topic ages ago. Of course, given the organizations that big media donates to (or in NBC's case, the business that's their parent company), it's a pretty safe bet that they've long gotten over what ever "objectivity" they once had on environmentalism as well.

(H/T: RC)

This sounds absolutely horrific:

When Detroiters began to die on the first day, the list was easily contained on the front page of the paper. Dora Brady, 89, in her home on Sanford. Nathan Derby, 97, in his home on West Philadelphia. A worker at Dodge Main, collapsing on the line. A man working in a laundry, another in a restaurant downtown. A night watchman found dead when the office was opened. An elderly man found in a field at Telegraph and Ann Arbor Trail. Another beneath the street sign at Burlingame and 14th.

Edison Fountain in Grand Circus Park was a popular cooling off spot for city youngsters.

There were 10 in all on the first day. No one could have known that it was only the beginning of one of the greatest and deadliest disasters in the history of Detroit.

* * *

Healthy men and women would start off for work in the morning and never come home, falling in the streets or at work when they were overcome by the sun and heat. Weeping relatives besieged Receiving Hospital and the morgue, where the dead were lined up in corridors since no space remained on the slabs. Doctors and nurses collapsed at their stations, overcome by heat and fatigue. "It's as if Detroit has been attacked by a plague out of the Middle Ages," one observer wrote.

It happened in 1936, not this year or 1998.

(Via Small Dead Animals.)

Time to go hunting, boys:

The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of methane a year -- equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey.

Global warming--it's a Second Ammendment issue!

(With apologies to Groucho and Jonathan Klein for the above headline.)

Last summer, in the Christian Science Monitor, Julia Gorin wrote:

It's a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming - at least that's what some would have us believe.

Tough language is borrowed from the war on terror and applied to the war on weather. "I really consider this a national security issue," says celebrity activist and "An Inconvenient Truth" producer Laurie David. "Truth" star Al Gore calls global warming a "planetary emergency." Bill Clinton's first worry is climate change: "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it."

Freud called it displacement. People fixate on the environment when they can't deal with real threats. Combating the climate gives nonhawks a chance to look tough. They can flex their muscle for Mother Nature, take a preemptive strike at an SUV. Forget the Patriot Act, it's Kyoto that'll save you.

Reuters brings it all back home, by bringing their displacement full circle: "Climate Change a Security Issue Like Cold War".

"Summer's Fall: NYC Faces Record-Breaking Cold".

"It is the nature of civilization to use energy and it's the nature of liberalism to feel bad about it."

--Robert Bryce of the Austin Chronicle. Read the rest, here.