Earth

Lefties, Greenies, and the current President tout a new “green” economy as a solution to today’s dysfunction. Escaping the carbon cycle will save the polar bears. Eliminating fossil fuels will clear the air and cut the legs out from under “evil regimes” that “don’t like us very much”.

We’re being manipulated and coerced into spending huge sums of borrowed money on a raft of unproven ideas aimed at taking the U.S. toward a vision of blue skies and unicorns.

It sounds beautiful. Until you look into the details behind the technology that will drive the Clean Energy Economy:

From the center ring at the Globalistical Warmening circus in Copenhagen:

Tuvalu, a Pacific island state politically and financially close to Australia, proposed a new protocol which would have the advantage of potentially forcing deeper global emission cuts, but could lead to other developing countries - rather than rich nations - having to make those cuts.

Many developing nations cherish the legally binding commitments that Kyoto places on industrialised nations and fiercely oppose proposals that would change this.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

I regularly mention the illusion of false scarcity. My line usually goes something like, “It’s not a resource problem, it’s a technology problem. The best example is oil. Should Earth ever actually release all its oil for human consumption, any of the several substitues already known could be a viable replacement. Or something new will be found. If we put our minds to it.

What happens when the technology works too well? In Belgium and around the world, milk prices have dropped very low. At the current price, supply exceeds demand. In other words, for $4 per gallon, farmers will make more milk than people are willing to shell out $4 for.

One of Iowa’s greatest sons has died. Usually we raise a glass in memory, but in this case, it seems more appropriate to toast with bread.

Norman Borlaug, the man who saved more human lives than anyone else in history, has died at age 95. Borlaug was the Father of the Green Revolution, the dramatic improvement in agricultural productivity that swept the globe in the 1960s.

Roger Simon (founder of righty Pajamas Media) discovers why I offer Al-Jazeera in the NRR news rack:

This is bad. The fundamental order for our soldiers in Afghanistan is about to be shifted from “attack” to “retreat”:

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who took command of international forces in Afghanistan this month, has said his measure of effectiveness will be the "number of Afghans shielded from violence," and not the number of militants killed.

Egypt is slaughtering hogs to prevent a swine flu outbreak:

The cull was going ahead despite there being no cases of swine flu in Egypt. However, neighbouring Israel has two confirmed cases in humans.

"It is decided to slaughter all swine herds present in Egypt, starting from today," said Health Minister Hatem el-Gabali, according to Mena news agency.

Maybe the target is not a virus:

The pigs in Egypt, a largely Muslim country, are raised by the Coptic Christian community.

Via Maggie’s Farm comes this performance:

Interestingly, it sounds to me much like the music encountered by the Starship Enterprise about 500 years hence.

The current President and much of the Democrat leadership appear to have an affinity for Europe. For example, they insist European healthcare be a model and justification for their meddling in US medical markets. Generally, President Klink’s rhetoric about “what we owe to each other” is founded on the same principles as Europe’s various versions of social democracy.

Unfortunately, facts tarnish the Democrats’ hopey-changey dreams. Their new New Deal socialism is too progressive by European Union standards. Former Obama cabinet nominee Judd Gregg remarked this week:

China has suggested the development of a new world currency. I consider this the first ring on the gong of doom, as it would make everything sold in dollar terms worth significantly less in global markets.

The current President was asked about the issue during his prime-time press conference last Tuesday (snipped for relevance):

Both Secretary of State Clinton and Attorney General Holder have argued that the US must further restrict guns to help Mexico’s fight against drug cartels. Here’s Holder:

"As President Obama indicated during the campaign, there are just a few gun-related changes that we would like to make, and among them would be to re-institute the ban on the sale of assault weapons," Holder said. "I think that will have a positive impact in Mexico, at a minimum."

Holder said reinstating the ban would decrease the flow of guns from the U.S. into Mexico.

And Hillary:

We’ve seen a couple of weeks of rising stock market indexes. Today the DJIA  was up over six percent. The President, the media, and many pundits are talking about having reached a market bottom. They all forget that this recent rise has only brought the indices back to the lows reached before Timmy and Barry made their first set of fumbles. We’ve made it back up to an ordinary recession. Woo hoo.

I suggest the rise is significantly attributable to the continuing value created in the US economy. As I have documented, 142 million people are still at work. No factories have been destroyed, and no skills have been wiped from workers’ memory. The sky was not falling. A dynamic economy was realigning itself, finding its new best allocations of resources.

Emulating bin Laden, this week the current President released a video message to the Iranian people. It offered a customized version of the vacuous rhetoric Barry campaigned on:

In his video appeal, Obama said: "This process will not be advanced by threats. We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect."

With all the talk about China financing the US debt, one would think the Chinese are running a budget surplus. They’re not. The Chinese government appears to be afflicted with neo-Keynesian foolishness, too:

China announced Thursday a fiscal deficit budget of 950 billion yuan (139 billion U.S. dollars) for 2009, a record high in six decades, as the country boosts spending to cushion the impact of the global financial crisis.

The latest research implicates Google as a cause for globalistical warmening:

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7 grams of CO2. Boiling a kettle generates about 15 grams.

Town planners are in the vanguard of the continued attack on our prosperous lifestyle. We are told our detached houses on large lots that extend ever-farther from the urban core are unsustainable. The auto dependency of such arrangements is killing both the planet and our underlying human social network.

First, from today’s headlines:

Somalia's president has resigned after months of political infighting within the UN-backed transitional government.
…
The government has failed to restore security to Somalia, which has been without an effective central government since 1991.

The evidence is mounting that we have not made sufficient sacrifice to Ra, or whichever sun god is in charge:

I have detected  a new crisis that I have named "the daylight change crisis". I first noticed it sometime around the end of June this year. I started paying attention and created computer models and sure enough I was right! We are losing daylight at an astonishing rate. Each day we are losing approximately 2 minutes of day light and my computer models predict total darkness by next July.

Juxtapose this against yesterday’s demo of the house on Polk Street:

Al-Shabab, an armed group fighting transitional government and Ethiopian forces in Somalia, is desecrating religious shrines in the south of the country, Al Jazeera has learned.