Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Merry Christmas from the Country Store

God rest you merry, gentlemen,
Let nothing you dismay.
For Jesus Christ our Savior,
Was born on Christmas Day;
To save us all from Satan’s power,
When we were gone astray.


Y'all have a Merry Christmas!



(The above snap of a decked out tractor more closely resembles the fanciest displays around here than the computer controlled Christmas lights that seem to be all the rage in other parts of the USA. I guess we're just traditional small town folks - and proud of it.)

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Today's hoot: Jesse Junior G-Man

Jon Kass at the Chicago Tribune says: Got corruption? Get Jesse Junior G-Man:
With so much news on the impeachment of Gov. Rod Blagojevich, I almost missed an incredible aspect of this amazing case:

The Jesse Junior G-Man Task Force to Fight Political Corruption thing.

So I called the federal building in Chicago and asked for the Jesse Junior G-Man Task Force.

"Pardon me?" asked a female federal employee.

Don't be obtuse. It's been all over the national TV news, U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Bud Light) working with the feds to fight corruption. So connect me to the Jesse Junior G-Man headquarters.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

It might not be a formal "task force." Perhaps there's another name for it, like Jesse Junior G-Man Blago Working Group. I'm a reporter. You can tell me.

"Sorry," she said. "No Junior G-Man office here."

Oh, c'mon! Just stop with your little bureaucratic games. The story was on TV. Jackson's been working with the feds, which means he's a good guy.

But she had nothing for me, so I called someone else.

"Jesse Junior G-Man? No," a guy said. "Not on this floor."

Just tell me. The Junior G-Man works in a high-tech complex buried deep underground, right? Behind a series of cool interlocking steel doors, protecting the Cone of Silence, right?
Nope, no trace of Jesse Jr. was to be found, but I did like the later comparison with the Soprano's Big Pussy. It's a good name for the little weasel too.

Where's Al Gore when you really need some hot air?

A picture from a Chicago friend illustrates the sad state of Global Warming alarmism:

Snowbound dog lifts a leg on Al Gore

Anyone who cares to notice knows that the political climate scientists have been cooking the books to try to prove that there actually is any global warming and that the evidence for man made global warming is nonexistent, but the ecoweenies have their propaganda machine ranting at full force so it may well take a really nasty winter in the USA before average folks figure out that they are being conned. Some useful tidbits via Deroy Murdock:

Actually, the odds are rising that snow, ice, and cold will grow increasingly common. As serious scientists repeatedly explain, global cooling is here. It is chilling temperatures and so-called "global-warming."

According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2008 will be America's coldest year since 1997, thanks to La Niña and precipitation in the central and eastern states. Solar quietude also may underlie global cooling. This year's sunspots and solar radiation approach the minimum in the Sun's cycle, corresponding with lower Earth temperatures. This echoes Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Sallie Baliunas' belief that solar variability, much more than CO2, sways global temperatures.
...
"Global Warming is over, and Global Warming Theory has failed. There is no evidence that CO2 drives world temperatures or any consequent climate change," Imperial College London astrophysicist and long-range forecaster Piers Corbyn wrote British Members of Parliament on Oct. 28. "According to official data in every year since 1998, world temperatures have been colder than that year, yet CO2 has been rising rapidly." That evening, as the House of Commons debated legislation on so-called "global-warming," October snow fell in London for the first time since 1922.
...
So, is this all just propaganda concocted by Chevron-funded, right-wing, flat-Earthers? Ask Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a physical chemist and retired Navy meteorologist.

"As a scientist and lifelong liberal Democrat, I find the constant regurgitation of the anecdotal, fear mongering clap-trap about human-caused global warming to be a disservice to science," Hertzberg wrote in Sept. 26's USA Today. "From the El Niño year of 1998 until Jan., 2007, the average temperature of the Earth's atmosphere near its surface decreased some 0.25 C (0.45 F). From Jan., 2007 until the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C (1.35 F)."

As global cooling becomes more widely recognized, Americans from Maine to Malibu should feel comfortable dreaming of a white Christmas.

I certainly am, but I expect that in Castle Gore, the Dark Prince of Climate BS is chewing the carpets. Would you buy carbon credits from anyone, much more that crazed bozo? Of course, no one seems to have mentioned this little cognitive problem to Barack Obama:

When will the "Let us take over and wreck your economy so we can save you from the climate boogey-man" gang admit the earth is cooling again, and when will they admit, "OK, since cooling is worse than warming, and our own theory is that mankind can impact global temperature by what we burn, it's now your duty to hold back the Big Freeze by going out there and burning all the fossil fuels you possibly can, as fast as you can"?

(Don't even get me started on "carbon trading," a weird scam in which the buyer acquires an invisible commodity of no earthly use to him, and both buyer and seller can benefit if they overestimate the amount being "transferred.")

Instead, on Monday, President-Elect Obama ("Delay is no longer an option; denial is no longer an acceptable response") appointed as Secretary of Energy (a position and an office not authorized in the Constitution) Steven Chu, the confirmed global warming lunatic from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who says coal -- the stuff that powered the industrial revolution, cheap coal which will last for centuries and which can be burned more cleanly now than ever before -- "is my worst nightmare."

This gang still intends to effectively ban both coal-fired and nuclear power generation. Do they believe they can meet our current demand with famously costly, unreliable, and toxic wind, solar and geothermal? (Look up the by-products of geothermal energy, some time. Then look up "battery farms.") Of course not. The gap can only be closed by "conservation," they'll admit when you take a pencil and start to work the numbers.

And what does "conservation" mean, precisely?

They'd like us to think they mean just turning out the lights in our empty rooms, that kind of thing. But they don't.

Mr. Obama has said it, straight out. He, the Chosen One, has had it Revealed to Him that we can no longer use 25 percent of the world's energy when we have only 5 percent of the world's population.

This is nonsense. All mankind uses less than 1 percent of the solar energy that streams past us every hour. Is it "unfair" that the Japanese eat "more than their fair per capita share" of the world's fish?

Are we now to be ruled by a depraved schoolchild obsessed with sharing the toys, granted the ability to carry forward that Ding-Dong School philosophy with powers reminiscent of the kid in the old "Twilight Zone" episode who could "wish people into the cornfield"?

We should be proud that we've learned how to capture and harness the lion's share of the available energy in this system. It's not like we refused to share with others "the secret of coal" or "the secret of oil," is it? They saw how good it was; they've been racing to catch up to us ever since; that's the main reason the world has escaped the life expectancies of the Stone Age.

There's a real world out there. Purposely, artificially impoverish the nation, force us to give up our competitive economic advantages, and we'll eventually go the way of the Carthaginians.

I tend to think of the latter days of the Roman Empire, but whatever it is, it only happens if we let these loons do it to us. So - let it snow.