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It's Too Big To Fail

That's what the folks pushing the new I-5 light rail project (which will also include some lanes for cars and trucks) are claiming as they ram it through the Oregon legislature.

Seems to be a common refrain, these days.

The New Freedom Fighters

The things they teach in public schools today...

A Texas lawmaker is launching an investigation after a teacher reportedly invited female students to dress up in Islamic garb and then told her classroom they should call Muslim terrorists – freedom fighters.

This was, by the way, a world geography class - not a course on religious studies (which wouldn't be permissible). 

Public Elf 'N' Safety

For years, hunters in Louisiana donated excess meat to a Shreveport rescue mission, and it's been rather a coming together of community: a group was formed, calling themselves Hunters for the Hungry, way back in 1993. The goal was simple: when hunters had filled their freezers, they donated any excess, which a local processing plant then prepared for shelters. The program's been rolling along for twenty years, without a hitch.

Then the bureaucrats (we're from the government, and we're here to help) got involved:

The Dept. of Health and Hospitals ordered the staff at the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission to throw 1,600 pounds of donated venison in garbage bins – and then ordered then to douse the meat with Clorox – so other animals would not eat the meat.

The rescue mission serves up 200,000 meals a year, with no assistance from federal or state entities, and the high-protein, low-cholesterol meat has been used in everything from deer chili to deer spaghetti each year. They figure that 3,200 meals were lost as a result of the action - which the Health Department officials, naturally, defend.

So what brought the bureaucrats into their midst?

The controversy started when someone being fed at the rescue mission complained about being fed deer meat.

Apparently in today's world, beggars can be choosers.

Barky's Manufactured Crises

Here we are again, just days away from another manufactured crisis, and Barky's playing the same tired theme: campaigning here, campaigning there, blaming Republicans as always. It's the only thing he knows how to do, and it must come as something of a shock for him to discover that we just don't give a rip any more.

People are tired of his constant crises; coming one after another as they have been, it just gets old. 

“Here’s yet another deadline, and everyone’s telling us everything will be destroyed if we go past it,” said Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which conducted the poll. “It’s very hard to get the same sense of urgency for a third time in a row, just two months after the last one.”

Amen to that, brother. Even some in the media cheerleading section have become cranky:

The fight is displaying Washington at its worst — all accusations and finger-pointing, no real attempts at problem-solving. Both sides have plans, but the president is spending far more energy explaining why the sequester is the Republicans’ fault, and how bad the consequences of those cuts will be, than he is trying to negotiate something that would stop it.

That's also true, as far as it goes. But realistically, Barky can't negotiate; in order to do that, he'd have to spend time with the Congresscritters - time that he greatly prefers to spend on the links or flying around the country, alternately campaigning and lecturing us about "carbon footprints".

Alternative Electricity

While the grandiose schemes so favored by Barky Obama and other Democratics continue to flame out after costing taxpayers billions (Solyndra, A123, ReVolt, and many others), Fujifilm went after more modest applications, and in conjunction with the Japanese version of DARPA, produced a nano-fabric that's flexible, organic, and produced by printing - rendering it suitable for rapid upscaling. It uses the temperature differences between human skin and ambient air to directly generate electricity. Potential uses include powering phones, medical devices, and other small-scale but ubiquitous applications.

As for the more grandiose efforts, well...let's just say they're not exactly ready for prime-time, as this Fisker owner discovered after powering down his $100,000 car to pick up some groceries:

$100,000 to $0.00 in seconds. That's incredible performance.

Danish windmill purveyor Vestas (U.S. Headquarters in Portland, subsidized by millions in tax dollars, courtesy of former mayor Sammy Adams) is continuing to cut back as well, as they expect 2013 to be "a tough year for the wind industry". At the beginning of last year, the company employed nearly 23,000 people; they expect that number to be around 16,000 by the end of this year.

Snake Oil: The Population Bomb, Nuclear Winter, Man-Made Global Warming

By the 1960's, the devolvement of science into the political and religious realms was well underway in the USA. Although the beginnings of technological innovation were peeking from beneath the covers - our large mainframe computers in 1960 were constructed of ferromagnetic cores, vaccum tubes, miles of wire, and 12k of memory - the devolvement into religion of the less "hard" sciences was kick-started with the popularization of Drake's SETI program. At first, it seemed harmless enough, as after all, who could begrudge the beginnings of a concentrated search for extraterrestrial intelligence?

In hindsight, the problem is clear: there was no science behind the "science", in the sense that nothing related to the project could be proven nor disproven. Notwithstanding, the concepts gained wide public and political acceptance; affording a glimpse into what was to come.

In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb. Paul, a professor at Stanford University, and his wife claimed in their popular tome that global catastrophe would eliminate much of the human population within the coming two decades through famine; a consequence of overpopulation. Their work fanned the flames of then nascent concerns and propelled Paul into the world spotlight for a time. But it was not science - it was nothing more than a religious belief (to which Ehrlich still adheres), and like all famous prophets of our times, the claims brought fortune and fame.

In ensuing years, the conflation of science, religion, and politics evolved with increasing rapidity. By the early 1980's, Carl Sagan and others published a paper on Nuclear Winter, claiming to have calculated that a nuclear exchange would lower planetary temperatures by three and a half times those that had resulted from ice ages, by some 35 degrees Celsius. There were no data to support such a contention, yet widespread support emerged; Sagan, now teamed with Ehrlich, co-chaired a Washington symposium on the subject, and between the two of them, performed over 60 times on late-night talk shows (among other publicity efforts).

At the conference in Washington, during the question period, Ehrlich was reminded that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists were quoted as saying nothing would grow there for 75 years, but in fact melons were growing the next year. So, he was asked, how accurate were these findings now?

 Ehrlich answered by saying "I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists..."

Money poured in. Federal agencies bestowed seemingly endless grants.

Science had morphed into religion; belief unsupported by data, and now religio-science had moved into the political sphere, which was where the big money was to be found. Scientists are not fools. And thus was born the religio-politico-science of Calamity.

Scientists quickly began to identify areas ripe for exploitation; the more complex, the better. By the time grants for evaluating Nuclear Winter began to dry up following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Russian Federation, a new nemisis - and as with the population bomb and nuclear winter, surely and entirely due to human activities - had emerged: man-made global cooling/warming/climate change.

And they employ arguments identical to that deployed by Dr. Ehrlich during the 1984 conference, cited above:

What we are doing here is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists....

The concept of "Consensus" is vitally important in the political sphere, and also in the religious sphere; it is largely irrelevant in science, as the facts either support a given hypothesis, or they don't. The problem with religio-politico-science, then, is clear: the "popular" folks with access to the funding actually impede scientific understanding and hence, progress. It requires considerable time and tenacity to pry them out of the spotlight and away from the purse, but it is necessary to the pursuit of knowledge and the subsequent expansion of human horizons.

And so we see it beginning in the case of "man-made global warming" - or as it is also known, "Anthropogenic Global Warming".

A consensus view in science has always been a fragile thing. Single heretical views have a history of entirely overturning the prevailing consensus. But in the case of AGW, with global warming having been shown conclusively to have slumped to a 16-year halt, the alleged ‘science consensus’ is becoming blatantly exposed. The trenches now are mostly populated by green ideologues, a left-dominated media, and bureaucrats who are usually the last to grasp the realities.

Fortunately, the cycle appears to be nearing completion; unfortunately, as is so often the case, many have endured needless hardship, and will continue to do so long after the last of the pigs have been dragged away from the trough.

Life Under The Flight Path

Sometimes the little things become annoying.

How the media can manipulate your perceptions.

Party Like It's 1969

The clothing, the beads, the hair and all are familiar. But the real eye-opener is that none of them look like hippos. Contrast them with what you see on the street today (or in the store, the mall, wherever). 

Oregon Weekend News Dump

Our hard-working SEIU members want pay raises and more vacation time. They also want managers to quit "bullying" them, and they'd like the state to stop doing business with banks that they believe committed "illegal acts" leading up to the financial crash of 2008. On the latter, they really ought to talk with Barney Frank.

Come on, taxpayers, pony up. Remember, It's For The Children™!

And fresh from the Democrat Lies bin:

Two days after Senate Democrats claimed they would not seek a ban on modern firearms and feeding devices, Democrats in the Oregon House introduced just that.

HB 3200 not only bans most modern guns and magazines, it allows warrantless searches of your home, requires background checks and registration for a firearm you already own and as-of-yet undefined storage requirements. We say “a firearm” because even if you comply with the restrictions in this bill you may still only own one.

(Of course the bill does not apply to “government employees”.)

Naturally, lead players behind this are the idiotic Rep. Mitch Greenlick and Sen. Ginny Burdick. Ginny has a long history of attempting to abrogate the 2nd Amendment rights of Oregonians, while Mitch has largely confined his past activities to efforts to ban children from bicycle trailers and criminalizing tobacco products.

Both, it almost goes without saying, are Portland Democratics.

 

Related articles

Oregon Democrats Push Legislation to Ban Guns and Search Homes Without Warrants

Is Oregon writing the Worst. Gun. Law. Evah?

Oregon SEIU Demands Higher Wages, More Vacation, Unicorn Rides

Turning Food Into Fuel

Effects of the Barky-supported ethanol industry are now being felt across the country. Minnesota's 10,000 lakes and vast aquifers are being unsustainably drained, in part due to increased irrigation by farmers growing feed, much of which is diverted to ethanol production. Feed prices are rising, ranchers have cut herds, and so feedlots and meat-packing plants are shutting down from Texas to Nebraska.

Aside from rising prices at the grocery checkout, the ancillary economic impacts are sobering; some areas in Minnesota have been forced to decline opportunities to host businesses - though their jobs are needed - due to inability to supply sufficient water to meet their needs. Other areas are considering methods for allocating water, which is unprecedented in the land of ten thousand lakes.

And while feedlots themselves employ relatively few workers, they supply the meatpacking plants, which employ thousands.

Cargill Beef, one of the nation's biggest meatpackers, temporarily closed a slaughterhouse in Plainview, Texas, earlier this year, laying off 2,000 workers.

If the trends continue, such closures may not be temporary; unemployment numbers may well rise along with prices for meats and dairy products.  While the recent droughts across the midwest have played a large role, the Barky administration has nonetheless refused to relax its insistence upon increasing ethanol content in fuels; further straining food supplies. Recovery, if it comes at all, will be slow:

When corn prices first spiked to $8 a bushel nearly four years ago, about 70 big feed yards went up for sale in the High Plains feeding area that includes Texas, Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska, Bretz said. Today, there are 10 and 15 feed yards for sale in the region, mostly in Texas. Bretz said he knows of 15 more that are empty, three recently dismantled and two others now being torn down.

In Minnesota, where a combination of factors including increasing population and the doubling of irrigation are reducing water supplies faster than rain and snowfall can replenish them, redirecting runoff and enhanced wastewater treatment options may become necessary in order to revive depleting aquifers, in addition to stricter water allocation rules. Reducing or eliminating ethanol requirements would naturally result in an easing of the impact upon food and water supplies, but the Barky administration has no interest in moving back from conversion of food to fuel; quite the opposite - they're pushing to expand the program.

And while developments such as production of cellulosic ethanol from waste wood and other byproducts are in the pipeline, output from the projects is not. The Barky EPA, having just lost a legal battle over their efforts to sue refiners for millions of dollars over their failure to incorporate cellulosic ethanol into their fuel blends as the bureaucrats had demanded, has nonetheless just increased their mandate to the refiners - despite court findings that cellulosic biofuel is presently nonexistent.

EPA may as well be demanding that refineries incorporate methane from unicorn farts into fuel blends.

 

Related articles

Colo. ethanol producer begins shift from corn to woody biomass

Feedlots, meatpackers closing with fewer US cows

EPA adds to controversial biofuel mandate

EPA's Ethanol Mandates Are Costing Consumers

Ethanol scam drives up food prices and stifles economic recovery