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Environmental Insanity The suggestion by singer Sheryl Crow that the Earth could be saved from destruction if everyone used just one square of toilet paper brought howls of derision from all corners, but the environmentalist’s opposition to flush toilets for the very same reason during a United Nations conference evoked very little reaction. In 2002, at the United Nations’ Earth Summit, held in Johannesburg, the delegates, when not dining on lobster and caviar, derided flush toilets. The list of other recommendations these gilded twits had to offer defied reality in a dozen other ways. In the United States, environmentalists got Congress to decrease the capacity of toilet tanks, thus insuring that a lot more flushing would ensue. Just how much more intrusive into our personal lives can environmentalists and our government be than to decide how much toilet paper and water we should use? Just how crazy are environmentalists? I’m not talking about people who love to garden or hike and thus think of themselves as "environmentalists", but rather the hardcore Greens who set and drive the environmental movement’s agenda. Some leaders of the environmental movement are now openly saying that human beings are the real problem for planet Earth. They think having babies should stop or at least be limited. Paul Watson, the founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society says that mankind is "acting like a virus", noting that "We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion." This is the kind of talk that ultimately leads to genocide. The latest lunacy is the assertion that the Earth can be saved from destruction if we all switch from the trusty incandescent light bulb to the use of fluorescent lighting. The theory is that the former use too much electricity. The fact that the latter also include mercury, a highly toxic substance, in its manufacture is conveniently overlooked. Where you get your light from has absolutely nothing to do with climate change. Apparently, though, no Green has thought to suggest that we might actually build more facilities for the generation of electricity and, if most of them were nuclear, there would be fewer alleged greenhouse gas problems. Why coal, the most abundant and cheapest energy resource, has become the bogyman is just one more example of the insanity of the environmentalists who want to reduce the amount of soot in the air to infinitesimal parts per billion. The eastern U.S. gets soot and other "stuff" blown in from as far away as Africa. Just how "clean" can clean ever be? This leads us to the latest insanity, the assertion that carbon dioxide is a "pollutant." Even the U.S. Supreme Court has concluded that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate a gas that it absolutely vital to all life on Earth. It is CO2 that insures the growth of all vegetation on Earth, much of which is feed for the herds of cattle and other livestock we consume daily, as well as all other forms of wildlife. Without CO2 not a single blade of grass grows anywhere. Identifying CO2 as a pollutant or dangerous to the future of the Earth is so stupid that it is truly insane. At this point, some Green is saying, but it is "a greenhouse gas." Yes, but 95% of all greenhouse gas is mostly water vapor. Shall we declare the oceans a pollutant as well? Meanwhile, the European Union announced recently that the Earth is endangered by the farting of cows and sheep saying, "The livestock sector presents the greatest threat to the planet." Another form of insanity is "saving endangered species." Any review of the Endangered Species Act will swiftly reveal what a complete and total failure it has been. Millions have been wasted "saving" creatures that Mother Nature has decided belong in the loser’s list. Most all of the species that ever existed on Earth are extinct. One example of how crazed this environmental effort is the announcement by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that the Spotted Owl of the northwest, famed for having been the reason a huge swath of the timber industry in that part of the nation was destroyed in order to save it, is now being pushed out of its habitat by barred owls, a more aggressive cousin. Listed 17 years ago as endangered, the FWS is actually contemplating spending millions to shoot the barred owls at a cost of $139 million over 30 years. You cannot make up stuff like this. While there is much worthy lamenting about the fate of people in Sudan’s Darfur region where perhaps 200,000 have died at the hands of that nation’s government and another two million displaced, one still does not hear much about the millions of Africans and others who have died from malaria because the United States took the lead in banning the use of DDT that formerly protected them against the mosquitoes that spread the disease. The ban on DDT was advocated by one of the icons of the environmental movement, Rachel Carson. Not long ago, decades into the dying, the World Health Organization decided that maybe DDT was a good idea. One of the dumbest ideas riding high these days is the mandated use of ethanol in all gasoline blends. Ethanol is made mostly from corn and, as a result, the price of corn is soaring as much of the crop is being converted into moonshine presumably to help the environment. I guarantee you that the use of ethanol will be found to endanger the environment in ways we don’t even know about yet. For now, all it does is drive up the cost of every mile and every gallon. Soon enough we will hear it is bad for the environment as well. Does anyone remember the additive, MTMB, found to foul underground water? In the meantime, the cost of every food product that uses corn will rise proportionally thanks to supply and demand. You will feel it in your grocery bill. Another campaign underfoot, literally, these days is to ban the use of fertilizers and pesticides to insure a healthy lawn. Health lawns are Nature’s air conditioners, cleaning the air, and are safer, too, for children to play on. But, no, the environmentalists want to put an end to that, claiming that only "organic" fertilizers should be used, not synthetic ones that do a far better job. "Organic" anything is one of the biggest scams around. Pay more for a potato? Be my guest. The list of invaluable, beneficial forms of technology that contribute to the fact that Americans are living longer, healthier lives than ever before in the history of mankind, is matched only by the list that environmentalists want to ban. There isn’t a single aspect of our lives that they haven’t managed to make more expensive and even more threatened. The subversion of real science is best epitomized by the utterly false claim of global warming. Indeed, any time you hear an environmentalist claim that "science" is on their side, just remind yourself that virtually every such claim put forth in Al Gore’s absurd documentary has been refuted with real science, not the boldfaced lies it offers. Remind yourself, too, that Al Gore wants to eliminate the internal combustion engine! These were the same people back in the 1970s screaming off the front pages of Time and Newsweek magazine that we were all soon to die from an imminent Ice Age. Ten years later, they were screaming about global warming and they still are. The greatest insanity of all is the environmentalist’s belief that mankind has any control over the Earth’s climate or weather systems. This totally ignores the predominant role of the Sun, the Moon’s affect on tides, the oceans, volcanoes, and other the other factors that demonstrate on any given day how much more powerful Nature is compared to anything mankind does. That’s why so many, if not all, of the environmental claims about global warming are entirely based on computer models. Subject to the tinkering of whoever creates a particular model, it can end up telling you that chewing bubblegum affects the rotation of the Earth. How dumb do you have to be at this point to believe anything they say? How crazy do they have to be to keep saying these things? Can you help the Center with a donation? The donations of visitors to this website enable the Center to continue our effort to clarify the complex issues of our times. Your donation is vital to that effort. Fight the Enemy in Iraq or Here? Among my circle of friends, the question of whether to fight on in Iraq is largely settled. They want to fight the jihadists there, reasoning that failure to carry the fight to the enemy will lead inevitably to attacks on the homeland. Taking the long view of things, I am inclined to believe that al Qaeda and like-minded groups have examined the lessons of 9-11 to fashion a plan for a future that fits their belief that America (and Israel) must be destroyed. I don’t think it’s an accident they have not attacked again and I don’t think anyone can truly grasp how certifiably insane these people and the millions of Muslims who support them truly are. Islam has been at war with the world since its inception and has been enjoying a renewed spirit of jihad since as early as the 1920s when the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt. It gained momentum after World War II in the 1950s and burst forth in 1979 as the Iranian revolution that deposed the Shah. Muslims—mostly Arabs—think they have a score to settle since the Crusades. The recent thwarted attack on Fort Dix suggests that the U.S. homeland is vulnerable no matter whether we have 150,000 troops in Iraq or not. Indeed, in a nation with open borders and a million foreigners getting off of airplanes every year as tourists or to conduct business, I can't imagine how much more vulnerable we could be.
Unfortunately, neither President Bush, nor the Congress seems to have understood the danger. Illegal immigration is quite possibly the single greatest threat this nation faces today. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that some members of the jihad cell planning the Fort Dix attack were here illegally. This was true, of course, of the 9-11 hijackers as well. The argument for the invasion of Iraq was based in part on the need to create a democratic government with which to replace Saddam’s horrid regime. I no longer believe we can bring democracy to the region. Other than Turkey where Ataturk imposed a secular government on that nation after WWI with the help of the military, and Israel, there are no democracies functioning in the Middle East. Lebanon had a democracy of sorts but the Palestinians and Syrians destroyed that the minute Muslims outnumbered the Christian population. The recent failed al Qaeda attack on a refinery in Saudi Arabia prompts me to think that this "holy war" is also very much about oil and who controls it. Al Qaeda and similar groups understand that as long as the monarchs control it, they will throw money at and pay lip service to the spread of Islam, but their primary concern is oil wealth. I think, too, that if the U.S. felt that any of those oil nations was in danger, we would come in--as we did in Kuwait--and restore the situation. That's why Vice President Dick Cheney recently was loudly telling the Iranians that any effort to mess around with the sea lanes by which that oil makes its way to the West would be punished. He did so from the deck of a U.S. carrier and his next stop was Saudi Arabia. So the "vulnerability" argument that we must remain in Iraq indefinitely or, in Bush terms, that we must not "cut and run", clashes with the reality of the way jihad is spread these days. For that we can thank the Internet. The FBI counts some 6,000 jihad websites. Some provide detailed instructions on how to build car bombs or become one yourself. Thus, as was the case of the British born-and-bred jihadists who killed people on buses and in subways in 2005, Al Qaeda does not need to maintain camps in places that are hard to reach in order to instruct and encourage attacks. This is not to say they don’t have camps. They do, but more for the purpose of overthrowing Middle Eastern regimes than for a massed army that would attack the U.S. Finally, the need to remain in Iraq seems increasingly futile given that most people in the region appear to be waiting for it to break into three separate areas for the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shiites. The administration keeps warning that the Shiites will ally with Iran, but many of the elected leaders of Iraq have long had strong ties as it is. Many were granted sanctuary in Iran from Saddam Hussein when he was in power. As someone who can recall the debacle in Vietnam as U.S. administrations sought an "honorable" way out, history appears to be telling us to begin preparing for new battles in other places while reducing our presence in Iraq. We have worn out our army there. The Middle East defeats our best efforts because we simply do not understand the way Islam and tribal loyalty totally defines the lives of all who live there. Meanwhile, back at home, we need to salute the FBI’s latest coup—thanks to a sharp-eyed Circuit City employee—and find ways to frustrate future attacks. In Europe, they intend to monitor the mosques. There are surely many American Muslims who are loyal citizens. It’s the ones who are not that worry me. Have you told a friend about this website? If not, share the word and, by doing so, share the information people need to make good decisions as citizens of a nation that too often seems adrift and leaderless.
©
2007 Alan Caruba. |
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A nation that cannot stop, cannot track, and cannot find 12 million illegal aliens in its midst is vulnerable even if we had a policeman or soldier on every street corner. Add in "sanctuary" cities, the vast array of services plus other forms of accommodation, and about the only way the Illegals might head south again is if our cities became Islamic terrorist killing fields.