C level rising

You loved the book, you raved about the movie, now you can hear the opera! TigerHawk notes that La Scala has commissioned composer Giorgio Battistelli to produce an opera based on An Inconvenient Truth. With judicious use of the forklift, Al Gore might be able to demonstrate that high C level that he likes to talk about.

I have no intention of going to Milan to see this. (Wouldn't it make more sense to stage it in Venice? Scratch that. Make sense of opera? Make sense of An Inconvenient Truth? Unlikelihood squared.) But I do hope it will turn up on YouTube.

Update: Victoria has more, and funnier.

Another update: Battistelli speaks.

And another update: Russell Seitz has more, including video, apparently from a rehearsal.

Yet another update: Roger L. Simon has discovered that William Friedkin will be directing the production.

Planning a newer New Deal and a new Depression to go with it

This is about the "Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act," S. 2191.

In the 1930's the Government needed to control everything because the economy was bad. In the coming years the Government will need to control everything because the environment might be getting bad. I've lately been reading The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, which chronicles ways in which government control of everything during the Great Depression made matters worse. Now here come some very smart people (might one call them a "brain trust?") promising to destroy the economy in the name of saving the environment. This is supposed to be a Good Thing. Power Line links to the WSJ and the Chamber of Commerce. The horrifying chart of the proposed new bureaucracy is even more horrifying viewed full size. (Inline update: That chart is a part of an even larger chart! Thanks to Chris Horner at Planet Gore.) The size of this proposal is like one of those things that Carl Sagan wrote about, incomprehensibly enormous. Billions and billions of billions and billions.

Some of these Congressmen who write these regulations don't seem to realize that every bureaucrat, every regulator, every paper-pusher, is someone who is not doing something constructive, but something obstructive. Or … do they? How can such smart people be so dumb? That's a rhetorical question.

Reducing the carbon footprint (click for bigger):


Update: Similar thinking in the British Parliament.

Are you ready for WW2-style energy rationing?

Environment Minister Hilary Benn again rebuffed calls this week for WW2-style energy rationing to return to the UK. He was responding to a Select Committee report urging ministers to issue 45 million Britons with an energy trading "credit card" - a mammoth techno-bureaucratic exercise costing several billions of pounds a year to operate.

[…]

However prettily the MPs would like to dress up rationing, it's fundamentally a form of social coercion designed to make people less comfortable than they were before. Wartime rationing needs a war-sized scare, and with the climate stubbornly refusing to conform to the computer models (which predict catastrophe) that looks like an impossible prospect.

(via Jerry Pournelle's mail.)

Another update: S. Weasel has posted on this, with a charming graphic.

New book from Václav Klaus is out in English

Blue Planet in Green Shackles.

Luboš Motl has a link to video of Klaus addressing the National Press Club. I could not get it to play; maybe your luck or skill will be better.

Power Line has excerpts from a transcript of the NPC address, including

My today's thinking is fundamentally influenced by the fact that I spent most of my life under the communist regime which ignored and brutally violated human freedom and, as I remember quite well, wanted to command not only the people, but also the nature....

I do not see the future threats to free society coming from the old and old- fashioned communist ideology. The name of the new danger will undoubtedly be different, but its substance will be very similar. Like their predecessors, they will be certain that they have the right to sacrifice man and his freedom to make their idea reality.

In the past, it was in the name of the Marxists or of the proletariat; this time, in the name of the planet. Structurally, it is very similar. The current danger, as I see it, is environmentalism and especially its strongest version, climate alarmism.

More over there.

Memorial Day sidelight on Francis Scott Key

Or, "everything old is new again." While looking around for something for a Memorial Day note elsewhere (I finally settled on "Decoration Day" by Longfellow), I came across an 1805 piece by Francis Scott Key.

Song

WHEN the warrior returns, from the battle afar,
    To the home and the country he nobly defended,
O! warm be the welcome to gladden his ear,
    And loud be the joy that his perils are ended;
In the full tide of song let his fame roll along,
To the feast-flowing board let us gratefully throng,
Where, mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.

Columbians! a band of your brothers behold,
    Who claim the reward of your hearts' warm emotion,
When your cause, when your honor, urged onward the bold,
    In vain frowned the desert, in vain raged the ocean:
To a far distant shore, to the battle's wild roar,
They rushed, your fair fame and your rights to secure:
Then, mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.

In the conflict resistless, each toil they endured,
    'Till their foes fled dismayed from the war's desolation;
And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscured
    By the light of the Star Spangled flag of our nation.
Where each radiant star gleamed a meteor of war,
And the turbaned heads bowed to its terrible glare,
Now, mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.

Our fathers, who stand on the summit of fame,
    Shall exultingly hear of their sons the proud story:
How their young bosoms glow'd with the patriot flame,
    How they fought, how they fell, in the blaze of their glory,
How triumphant they rode o'er the wondering flood,
And stained the blue waters with infidel blood;
How, mixed with the olive, the laurel did wave,
And formed a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.

Then welcome the warrior returned from afar
    To the home and the country he nobly defended;
Let the thanks due to valor now gladden his ear,
    And loud be the joy that his perils are ended.
In the full tide of song let his fame roll along,
To the feast-flowing board let us gratefully throng,
Where, mixed with the olive, the laurel shall wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave.

This one might be due for a revival. Everybody knows the tune.

Stilton and old Port

You eat the cheese, maybe with crackers. Those in the picture are oatcakes. Carr's Wheatmeal biscuits are good for this. You drink the wine. You do not make a paste from the cheese and the wine and then spread it on the biscuits. No, no, you do not do that. Capers and sprats could not do any harm; a gherkin might go well. Click the pic for a recipe for port wine jello! (Oh, all right, jelly.) And another recipe for sake-wasabi-oyster shots. Although with that one, once you know the ingredients, you don't much need the recipe.

States of consciousness

Have you ever wondered: What Does Your Drink Say About You? If I ever hear my drink talking about me, I'm going to obliterate it so fast… The link in this article to "Ten Drinks Men Should Never Order" doesn't work, go here instead. The link to "Ten Things Your Bartender Won't Tell You" is still good. And a commenter there links to Top Ten Myths About Bartenders, which includes

Myth 3: You can out-drink the bartender.

A more wrong statement has never been uttered; you can't, so don't even try. But, if you're buying, I'll certainly entertain the challenge. I don't care how much you think you can drink—any bartender anytime, anywhere can put you under the table, period.

Words to remember.

But then, some bartenders may take a different approach:

Strict Wildness

Music so poignant it wakes the dead,
We passion poets eke it from wine, not bread;
From wonder, not logic; heart, not head,—
But need clear heads to mix your heady brew.
We kitsch it if we swig it too.
Inspired insanity won't do.
Nor thin-lipped sane respectability.
Rigor lone is rigor mortis.
Rigor-plus-wild is the right-bank tortoise
That beats the chic hare of Rive Gaucherie.
Are poems magic? Sure. Till magic
Believes itself. Then it's bunk.
Art, being bartender, is never drunk.

— Peter Viereck

Before I Google'd up that poem, I had remembered that last line as "Art, like the bartender, is never drunk." Now I suppose I'll be the only source for that quote on the whole darn Interweb. Is that actually a different line, from another work? Anyone who can set me straight on this, please do.

All this brings to mind the ancient Persian custom of considering decisions in different states of consciousness:

It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk; and then on the morrow, when they are sober, the decision to which they came the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made; and if it is then approved of, they act on it; if not, they set it aside. Sometimes, however, they are sober at their first deliberation, but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine.

If Iranians would still do this today, they might have a more sensible take on the world. Do MADD and their prohibitionist fellow-travelers ever notice how toxic becomes the worldview of whole societies where drink is prohibited? I suspect not.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden recently linked to a description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She was intending to say that Internet trolls display this syndrome, and I'm sure that many of them do. But as I look through the document, I see Arafat and Ahmadinejad in every paragraph. I wonder if an entire culture can suffer from a personality disorder.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Update, Nov. 2009: Aha! It was Fritz Leiber who misquoted the Viereck line, in The Pale Brown Thing, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in January


and February of 1977. That's where I would have read it. The longer, full version of the novel was later published as Our Lady of Darkness. Cover image swiped from SciFi Buys, an amazing (!) source of vintage magazines, to which I shall be returning, now that I've found it.

McCain drinking the AGW Kool-Aid?

Looks like it. NRO editorial, May 13:

Senator McCain gave a speech in Portland, Oregon Monday reiterating and explaining his longstanding support for a “cap-and-trade” approach to global warming. He proposes that the government require reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions but allow companies to trade emissions credits, supposedly creating an efficient, market-based distribution of the regulatory burden. Support for this policy is the biggest mistake his campaign has made so far.

Holman Jenkins in the WSJ looks for the bright side:

Mr. McCain's virtues are many, but he's a politician. Yet, happily, the spheres are moving and whatever energy boondoggles are coming, they are likely to be less costly than the boondoggles that might have been enacted even a year or two ago when Al Gore was riding high. For this, we will be able to thank the climate gods and no one else.

I fear Jenkins may be overoptimistic.

Bjørn Lomborg has some things to say about McCain in an interview with Kathryn Lopez at NRO. Short excerpt here; full interview here.

John McCain’s daughter recently told GQ magazine that her dad is “freaked out” by climate change.

I think freaking out is the worst thing that any of us can do. There’s a lot of hysteria about this problem, which means that we don’t look at the full picture.

Gleanings

Just another batch of things that caught my eye.

Drug war casualty: "Marie Walsh was the very picture of American suburban respectability. She and her husband, a company executive, lived in a £400,000 house in an affluent area near San Diego, California. But the 53-year-old had a secret that even her husband and three children did not know: she was really Susan Lefevre, a convicted drug dealer who had been on the run for 32 years after escaping from the Detroit House of Corrections."

Fierce comment threads at Althouse and Volokh on Ayers and Dohrn, and Barack Obama's relationship with them. The Althouse thread inspires a post by Blake: Terrorism and Indoctrination vs. Education, which gets some silly comments by yours truly.

Adopted Man Finds Biological Father on Death Row.

Bagpipe bands violate EU noise regulations and must be muted. (via)

PSA from Hungary intended to promote bicycling. Looks pretty persuasive to me.

How'd you like to walk (or cycle) across this footbridge? (via)

Strange But True photos at the L.A. Times.

Great tits cope well with warming. Well, that's good news! (via)

ROFLcon. Sounds like fun. Over, though; it was held the last weekend in April. The blog includes a list of Sleeper Hits of the Internet, a bunch of (mostly) fun videos that you may have missed. And that seems to require a mention of ROFLMAO. "Do-doo-do-do-do."

"Memristor" invented at HP Labs

The approaching Singularity is seen from another angle.

"The memristor is our salvation, because it works better and better as you make it smaller and smaller," said Chua. "The era of nanoscale electronics will be enabled by the memristor. This is not just an invention, it is a basic scientific discovery. It has always been there -- we just had to face these nanoscale problems to realize its importance."

The memristor behaves like a non-linear resistor with memory -- a small, compact and highly energy-efficient means of creating a memory device. But Chua and Williams claim it is also a new type of circuit element that should enable the creation of new devices never before imagined.

Read the whole thing. By way of Jerry Pournelle's mail.

1968

It was a very fraught year.

P.J. O'Rourke gives a commencement speech

One that makes sense, for a change.

My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth's resources of the weird. Weird clothes -- we wore them. Weird beards -- we grew them. Weird words and phrases -- we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.

So now, it's my job to give you advice. But I'm thinking: You're finishing 16 years of education, and you've heard all the conventional good advice you can stand. So, let me offer some relief:

1. Go out and make a bunch of money!

Read the whole thing. But remember, it's comedy, and a magazine article, not an actual commencement speech, and take the last point, number 6, with a grain of salt:

6. Don't listen to your elders!

After all, if the old person standing up here actually knew anything worth telling, he'd be charging you for it.

since commencement speakers may indeed be charging for their services. The most satisfactory charge for some is sheer egoboo, of course. But there may be honors involved, or even large sums of cash.

Lots of comments at Hot Air.

To welcome in the May, oh

Hurray, hurray, the first of May! So, to welcome in the May, Hal-an-Tow. Long version, the song when it's at home:

Shorter version, in a smoky pub, with more careful harmonies:

Hal-an-Tow,
Jolly Rumbelow,
We were up
Long before the day, oh,
To welcome in the Summer,
To welcome in the May, oh …
The Summer is a-comin' in, the Winter's gone away, oh.

Hybrid picking

Flatpick and fingers at the same time. It's tough, but Tommy Emmanuel makes it look like a piece of cake. The piece is called "Angelina."
Some forum discussion on this. Thanks, Charles!

TigerHawk sees a "plague of process"

Or a "cult of procedure," but "plague of process" is better. He has touched a nerve with this post, and commenters are hashing it out. Every time I have tried to write about this, I have been side-tracked by the word "bureaucracy." Get the language right, and the reasoning goes more easily. Kind of like having a better map.

Social history of TV, and where it's headed

Or, why TV is like gin, and what may happen if the world starts metaphorically drinking Red Bull instead.

A while back I put up a post called "Natural History of TV." Here's Clay Shirky taking a look at the social side of the thing that takes up more of the time of more of the people than seems possible, until you look at numbers. Reminds me of the time years ago a friend borrowed a TV set to look at some particular thing, and gave it back a couple of months later, saying, "It's a cute little monster, but I can't afford to feed it."
I think Shirky is seeing, and talking about, the approach of the Singularity. The Singularity, if and when it arrives, is likely to turn out to have been seen coming from many different directions, and to have looked like many different things to different observers. We may not even notice its arrival, but look around one fine day and discover that things have become very different.

This comes from Making Light, where there are comments.

Update: a "lightly edited transcription" can be found at Clay Shirky's blog, Here Comes Everybody. Thanks to Lynn at Violins and Starships for the pointer.

The Rather Difficult Font Game

That's the name of it: The Rather Difficult Font Game. It's a game, with fonts. Faces, actually, but even the pros don't insist on the distinction much any more. At the end you get a score. Mine was 28. If I try it again, it will probably be something different. By way of Making Light.

Messed up climate numbers

Patrick Michaels in the WSJ:

Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess

President George W. Bush has just announced his goal to stabilize greenhouse-gas emissions by 2025. To get there, he proposes new fuel-economy standards for autos, and lower emissions from power plants built in the next 10 to 15 years.

Pending legislation in the Senate from Joe Lieberman and John Warner would cut emissions even further – by 66% by 2050. No one has a clue how to do this. Because there is no substitute technology to achieve these massive reductions, we'll just have to get by with less energy.

We'll get along somehow? Maybe the US can just stop using autos altogether. Everyone on the bus! How communal, uh, communitarian, uh, community-oriented.

There's a lot more politics than there is science in this global-warming business. Now that's it is becoming the unquestioned, assumed background to more legislation that will damage the economy and hence the country, it must be fought. We are overdue for another ice age, if you look at the cycles. So a whole lot more data should be gathered and integrated before major coercive action is taken. The proposed legislation is not going to benefit the country. It's well-intentioned foolishness.

Michaels concludes this article with

the ultimate question: Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues. If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?

But as we face the threat of massive energy taxes – raised by perceptions of increasing rates of warming and the sudden loss of Greenland's ice – we should be talking about reality.

Read the whole thing to see why the perceptions that raise the threat of the taxes are questionable. It's politics and self-interested rent-seeking all the way down.

Here earlier: Energy.

For Earth Day, the Heidelberg Appeal

Background

The Heidelberg Appeal was publicly released at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. By the end of the 1992 summit, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal. Since then, word of mouth has prompted hundreds more scientists to lend their support. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it. In spite of this spontaneous and growing support from the world’s scientific community, the Heidelberg Appeal has received little media attention.

Neither a statement of corporate interests nor a denial of environmental problems, the Heidelberg Appeal is a quiet call for reason and a recognition of scientific progress as the solution to, not the cause of, the health and environmental problems that we face. The Appeal expresses a conviction that modern society is the best equipped in human history to solve the world’s ills, provided that they do not sacrifice science, intellectual honesty, and common sense to political opportunism and irrational fears.

The Heidelberg Appeal

We want to make our full contribution to the preservation of our common heritage, the Earth.

We are, however, worried at the dawn of the twenty-first century, at the emergence of an irrational ideology which is opposed to scientific and industrial progress and impedes economic and social development.

We contend that a Natural State, sometimes idealized by movements with a tendency to look toward the past, does not exist and has probably never existed since man’s first appearance in the biosphere, insofar as humanity has always progressed by increasingly harnessing Nature to its needs and not the reverse. We full subscribe to the objectives of a scientific ecology for a universe whose resources must be taken stock of, monitored and preserved.

But we herewith demand that this stock-taking, monitoring and preservation be founded on scientific criteria and not on irrational preconceptions.

We stress that many essential human activities are carried out either by manipulating hazardous substances or in their proximity, and that progress and development have always involved increasing control over hostile forces, to the benefit of mankind.

We therefore consider that scientific ecology is no more than extension of this continual progress toward the improved life of future generations.

We intend to assert science’s responsibility and duties toward society as a whole.

We do, however, forewarn the authorities in charge of our planet’s destiny against decisions which are supported by pseudoscientific arguments or false and nonrelevant data.

We draw everybody’s attention to the absolute necessity of helping poor countries attain a level of sustainable development which matches that of the rest of the planet, protecting them from troubles and dangers stemming from developed nations, and avoiding their entanglement in a web of unrealistic obligations which would compromise both their independence and their dignity.

The greatest evils which stalk our Earth are ignorance and oppression, and not Science, Technology, and Industry, whose instruments, when adequately managed, are indispensable tools of a future shaped by Humanity, by itself and for itself, overcoming major problems like overpopulation, starvation and worldwide diseases.

More at Michelle Malkin's place.

Oh, and -- Happy Lenin's Birthday.

Latvian smoked sprats

A propos of nothing at all, something very tasty:

You want to look for that round black can. Sometimes available at Shaw's, always at the Russian deli in Ocean City, MD. (That's the OC Party Market, 300 S. Baltimore Ave. , corner of Dorchester St. Also Russian beer, chocolate, many varieties of caviar and smoked fish, and so on.) Also Zabar's, and the Bedford Cheese Shop in Brooklyn. The pic is a link, also. And there's a list, not complete, but better than nothing.

I like to throw them on top of a pile of what the local markets call German potato salad, which has potatoes, onions, parsley, not much else, and microwave the whole thing for about a minute and a half. The potatoes and vinegar help to cut the oiliness. Gosh, do you think that pouring off a little of the oil might help to "cut the oiliness?" Hmm. Something else to think about. Might be even better in the skillet. What a wonderful world, that contains such possibilities.

I have not been paid by any Latvian fish canners for this endorsement. I just ate some a few minutes ago, and was so pleased by the experience that I wanted to say something about it.

Big boats, little boats

So David Geffen's yacht is nearly twice the size of Saddam Hussein's? My word. And him a Democrat. He'll really feel the repeal of the tax cuts. Might have to fire a couple of deckhands or stewards. But they will surely be all right. The Democrats are looking out for them, just as in 1990. Remember the tax bill that the first President Bush signed, the one that got him in such trouble for not remembering his own lip-reading remark? Passed by a Democratic congress: House vote, Senate vote. Including the luxury tax on boats costing over $100,000, which led to this:

According to a recent The Wall Street Journal editorial, the Labor Department estimates that in Florida, the nation's leading boat building state, builders laid off 5,000 out of 18,000 laborers by the end of 1990 and these layoffs are not isolated. Retailers, manufacturers, and services aligned to the boating industry are simultaneously affected. To provide even the slightest justification for these job losses, the government should at least be realizing substantial revenue gains. Nevertheless, according to the same editorial, the Joint Committee of Taxation has released collection estimates of which only $3 million were attributable to boats in 1991. Where is the justification?

This brings to mind Barack Obama's remark last night to the effect that the capital gains tax should be raised "for purposes of fairness," without regard to raising revenue. (Full debate transcript here.) The Law of Unintended Consequences will not be flouted.

In other boating news,

A ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court in California could snare boaters in a bureaucratic net of permits and regulations if a consequent court-ordered deadline is not thrown overboard.

… as of Sept. 30, recreational boaters will no longer be exempt from greywater discharges, including normal discharge from marine engines, laundry, shower and galley sink wastes, or any other discharge incidental to the normal operation of a vessel.

Because the court's decision is not limited to vessels with ballast water tanks, the court order could impact motor boats, sailboats, dinghies, kayaks and even canoes.…

Under current regulations, the state Department of Environmental Management (DEM) requires that all sea going vessels be registered with the state. That means canoes, kayaks, dinghies and paddleboat owners would all be required to obtain an EPA permit.

Paperwork bonanza on the way.

Kristen Byrnes on NPR

I mentioned Kristen Byrnes and her thorough debunking of An Inconvenient Truth here a while back. Now I see that she has been interviewed on the radio by NPR. There is a link to the audio at that page.

This comes by way of a good, newish climate-science blog, Watts Up With That, which goes on the sidebar right now.

Gleanings

Nothin' for a week here, might as well put these up.

Wikipedia is apparently completely unreliable on climate issues. (via)

Ron Bailey reviews Expelled, the movie about "intelligent design" with Ben Stein. Hey, that rhymes! Considering the response that An Inconvenient Truth received, Stein should be in line (another rhyme! Oh, I'm cookin' here) for a Nobel Prize next year. Who needs real science, when the fake stuff is so much more fun? The movie's full title is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Does that mean,"Leave your intelligence in the lobby?" I know I'll have less respect for Ben Stein's intelligence in the future.
Update: Oh, look, a whole website devoted to Expelled, called Expelled Exposed. Thanks Charles. Glenn Reynolds has more on Ben Stein's view of science and scientists, and there's a wild comment thread going at The Volokh Conspiracy.
Another update: now there's a poem from lizard Winslow.
Yet another update: Much more discussion at Winds of Change.
And: John Derbyshire's merciless review: A Blood Libel on Our Civilization.

JFK and drugs. (via)

Professor Dutch's Top Ten No Sympathy Lines. (via)

If you search at Gateway Pundit for "Brrr," you'll get a lot of interesting posts on global whatever-it-is.

PrestoPundit has unearthed a paper by Barack Obama Senior, the father from whom the candidate received the dreams. It's called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." (via)

"Professional courtesy," my eye. You knew this was going on, but those who did it could deny it. Once some documents slip out, it's another story. Special license plates shield officials from traffic tickets. (via)

From CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, comes "the grid." Coming soon: superfast internet. (via)

The Investigative Project on Terrorism's CAIR series is complete. 10 installments.

The war on Sharpies. "We've purged every permanent marker there is in this building," says the proud elementary school principal. [sarcasm] So that's why they call them "magic" markers! [/sarcasm] (via)

Energy

You hardly ever hear someone say, "Gee, I wish I wasn't so energetic. I'm sorry to have so much energy." Energy is the sine qua non of civilization, or even merely taking out the trash. It is not possible to achieve prosperity by conservation. Mind you, I'm strongly in favor of thrift. As we used to say in New England,

Use it up,
Wear it out,
Make it do,
Or do without.

That's just avoiding waste, making the most of what's available. But one of Vernor Vinge's points in Marooned in Realtime was that the further along we get, the more energy we can dispose. Blake at BitMaelstrom has a worthwhile post on this, inspired by this thread at Althouse. It's the same thread referenced below in the Paul Krugman … post; and contains the reference to Dexter cattle, which do well in all climates.

Alex Gregory, at The New Yorker:

Apocalypse? No!

That's the title of a new movie that you will not be seeing at the local Multiplex. The DVD is available from GreatSwindle.com. It's Lord Monckton's contra Al Gore slideshow, filmed live at the Cambridge Union Society, Oct. 8, 2007. I am strongly tempted to transcribe a whole lot of it. But I'll refrain, for now.

I think I'll donate a copy to my local library, if they will promise me that it will go into the collection. Highly recommended.

More Monckton here and here.

In other news from the AGW propaganda front, Morgan Freeberg and Gerard Van der Leun have played a round of blog ping-pong. The serve: The Climate Thugs and the No Balls BBC: Visual Aids. The return: I Made a New Word XV. The volley: Word o' the Day: bo•lus•te•mol•o•gy. All worth reading. The return post by Freeberg incorporates a General Theory of Everything that's wrong with journalism and media. I was just chatting with a reporter/columnist for the local daily who was saying that it's hard times for print media. "The New York Times has just laid off 200 people," he said. I said, "If they weren't a propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party, they might not be on such hard times." At which point, he went into moonbat mode, asking if the Washington Times or Fox News could be taken seriously. Which shows that even in a small town, the journalist swims in liberalism like the fish in the sea, taking it for granted as the normal environment.

Cthulhu has a talk show

He's dead, he's sleeping, he's dreaming, and — he's on the air answering callers! Not just any Old One, a really Great Old One. Now for today's edition of Calls For Cthulhu. Folks, let's hear it for the mighty, unspeakable Cthulhu!

He also has a license plate. Or maybe the license plate belongs to a fan. Oh, yes, it would have to, since Cthulhu dwells in R'lyeh under the sea. Well, maybe not, it's a Virginia plate, and Virginia has a lot of shoreline, maybe R'lyeh is closer to shore than previously thought. It would have to be a fairly short cable run, for the TV show, and if someone, or something, wanted to come ashore, to scout around a little bit, checking on what to eat first, a car would be handy. Then again, too much contemplation of the Great Old Ones is itself dangerous, so it's time to end this now.