10. It’s so cold, you have trouble jump-starting your penguin

9. It’s so cold, you’re shivering like Rick Santorum at a Gay Pride parade

8. It’s so cold, when Wall Street investors jumping off buildings hit the sidewalk, they shatter into a million tiny pieces

7. It’s so cold, Osama bin Laden actually saw a snowball where he is

6. It’s so cold, Michele Bachmann’s husband is staying in the closet – for the coats

5. It’s so cold, nobody’s calling the fire department when their house catches on fire

4. It’s so cold, when police tell a robber to freeze, it’s redundant

3. It’s so cold, five rednecks have frozen off their truck nuts

2. It’s so cold, Anthony Weiner is Tweeting pictures of his mukluks

1. It’s so cold, you’re teeth won’t stop chattering – and they’re still in the glass

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Here, in Texas, we have an annual influx of ‘snowbirds’ … large masses of gente norteña fleeing the winter weather ‘up north’ to enjoy a season of clear skies and milder temperatures ‘down south.’ It’s a long and time-honored tradition … for many years, my great-grand-aunt and uncle made their own annual migration from Leisuretown, New Jersey down to the sun and surf of Florida. And it’s also a tremendous economic boon to parts of Texas that enjoy an annual influx of cash in return for all things leisure – goods, services, opportunities, you name it.

Not all snowbirds travel to Texas by R.V. … and it is THEY who provide US an opportunity, a chance to observe something not-often-seen in these parts of the U.S. Here’s a shot I took of two extraordinary snowbirds in Llano County, Texas, this past week. Regular visitors in the process of raising a brood of future snowbirds.

There is a nasty little radio spot airing nationally. It promotes “green” appliances and goods generally; swirly bulbs, “efficient” washers… that sort of thing although the specifics are tactically muddied. The ad pitches to a curiously young demographic. We’ve all met “Timmy”. Like Dickens’ Tiny Tim, Timmy is infectiously cute and contrived to pull at your major arteries. Timmy wants to go to the State Fair! Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he didn’t know there was such a thing as a State Fair but the announcer, whose relation to Timmy is unexplored, asks him breathlessly, “Do you want to go to the State Fair?” Of course he does! Sorry, you can’t. You see, Timmy, your parents are NOT using green, energy efficient doo-dads but the old busted bulbs and machinery, causing them to spend more on utilities and draining their pockets of the gas and ticket money necessary. If only your folks had bought the new, government approved and promoted doohickeys they would have been able to take you there for candy floss and teacup rides, whatever those are. If they get on board today then you can go to next year’s fair. “But I want to go NOW!” Radio Timmy coaches Timmies across the land in whinery to cajole mums and pops into replacing their eight-for-a-dollar earth-warming heat globes with pigtail bulbs at $8 dollars or more a pop. Needless to say, this public service message was paid for by Your Federal Family which draws its budget from you.

The stated aim is to increase the energy efficiency of our homes and NO ONE is against efficiency, are they? Even if you are only concerned with your own bottom line, and the ad equates the health of your bottom line with the state of tranquility at your table, green is the way to go, right? That is what the ad does not imply but declares emphatically; dragooning your children into their chorus with promises of dunking booths and funnel cakes. Only the assertion is false. Check into the performance and price of the competing items and you find that even the manufacturers only claim that their products will pay for their price differentials over time. How much time is variable but lengthy; for the bulbs it is a few years of heavy use. For the appliances it is even more, often the “savings” are not even promised to materialize until the very end of the machine’s service life while their performance is consistently poor. So on its own terms this little bit of green frummery is not only a fraud but is one that will do the exact OPPOSITE of what is promised. If Little Timmy’s parents don’t have the wherewithal to take him to this year’s State Fair they will be in desperate straits indeed spending a thousand dollars on a washer/dryer and hoping for a savings of $200 over a decade. If Timmy is successful in mau-mauing these purchases not only will he miss the State Fair he may have to make his shoes last another season or have his peanut butter switched to generic. And the only way serious “savings” will materialize is if power, gas and water itself radically increase in cost which is unlikely to increase the family entertainment budget. Other than scads of money, what could induce a person, or in this case a public institution, to disseminate such a vicious and transparent lie aimed at children across the public airwaves at public expense? It is possible only because, presumptively, these ads run in the service of Smart.

What is Smart. Hey, what isn’t? There is smartwater, there are smart Cars which are available with smartshift transmissions. Inconistent capitalization is also smart, apparently. On that one, I Agree. But for the most part the assignment of Smart is a simple declaration that is unchallenged. Smartphones are clearly smarter than dumb phones but are the precepts that underly these “green” initiatives and programs as obvioiusly and demonstrably synonymous with Smart? Timmy may feel quite smart, smashing his parents secret hoard of incandescent bulbs; saving money and the polar bears simultaneously but he won’t be going to any State Fairs unless it is in search of work. And when he goes, his clothes will be poorly laundered.

Still, that’s Smart. Green is Smart and the peddlers of Green am Smart. Al Gore is numero one in this department. Long before he was ever saving us dummies from a scorched earth he was saving us from a watery grave. The “high-efficiency” toilet was really the first Smart Product. The great triumph? To lower the average toilet flush from 2.2 gallons to 1.8. This, they certainly do and the Gorelet, as they are now known, has destroyed all its voracious 2.2 gallon competitors. Although it did this through no sort of competition unless it was in the lobbies of Congress and over collusive chats among manufacturers, municipalities and regulators both government and private. So not only MAY you Flush Smarter, you MUST! 2.2 gallon toilets can neither be manufactured or imported. Nor can they legally be installed in new construction. At least we are more efficiently and yet more Smartly moving our bowel contents off to their final reward, yes? No. While the flushes consume less water it takes MORE flushes to do the job as anyone who has lived between the two eras remembers quite well. The ancient, primitve crappers hardly ever needed a re-flushing absent a visit from a freakishly gigantic neighbor while the Gorelet must be played like a billiard table trick shot to get the job done with one handling of the handle. Even if you are some mad, throwback savage you don’t want to waste any precious water, do you? Of course not, so we do not just double flush as a matter of course which would raise our per movement consumption to 3.6. Instead we do nature’s business, loose the flood which sounds like a Dixie cup emptied into a coffee can and closely inspect the process while listening to the tank fill. Why? So we may time the second flush expertly enough to avoid a third spending our not-so-precious time and attention at least once daily. This, friends, is Smart.

But the Smart just keeps on coming! Sweeping California and other Smart locales is the smartgrid. Central to the smartgrid is the Smart Meter; a computer basically with a powerful digital transmitter. And what does it transmit? Your power consumption down to the smallest erg. And to whom is this information transmitted? Why, to the utility so they may charge you MORE for peak consumption and less off-peak as big industrial users are treated. But Average Joes have found in California that somehow the peak charges accumulate as the off-peak discounts evaporate. This while the download from the lurking meter is detailed enough to tell whomever what appliances you are running, what lights you have on, what rooms you are inhabiting and to what temperature you are heating or cooling them. This is all to your benefit, of course, as the utilities and their quasi-governmental golfing buddies cater their communications with you according to this data sheet, helpfully explaining how you may want to do your laundry at three in the morning or think about a sweater or how lingering in an open refrigerator is uncouth. Imagine how Smart you could become especially as the Smart Meters themselves expose you to radio waves of a frequency and strength similar to residing in a tree house built at the top of a cell phone tower. This is an experiment in Smart, one of many, many more.

An even greater blessing than the Smart Gadgets is the endless rain of Smart Guys (and Gals, of course). One who has shined brightly these last few weeks is a fellow named Jon Corzine. Once Governor of New Jersey and before that a Senator, Corzine is the epitome of Smart. The Governorship came to him strictly on his merits as the only Democrat less provably corrupt than the abysmal Bob Torricelli. This was some Smart Planning. But out of public office Corzine has been just as Smart, guiding MF Financials to outrageous gains! Of course he also led them to outrageous losses, including the dissappearance of some $600 million in quarantined funds belonging to investors. Quarantined from what, you might ask? Among other communicable ailments, these funds were to be quarantined from losses MF might incurr from Greek bond defaults. Now, I know what you are thinking: if Corzine bought Greek debt, how smart could he be? But he did no such thing. Only a fool would! Instead the genius play was for MF to sell insurance AGAINST Greek losses to those dummies who DID buy the bonds! So really Governor Corzine (if we may use his highest title) already separated the precious client funds from the raucous and hazardous dealmaking he had to engage in to turn a dollar, even before they were legally “sequestered”. That neither of these practices has kept the loot from walking out the door cannot fairly be laid at this gentleman’s door. After all, he is smart as a whip. Everyone knows.

But there is one Smart Guy who outsmarts them all, just ask him. That fellow is former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, elevated whenever he is spoken of as “the smartest guy in the room” with the implication being that the room is also not so dumb. Is he smarter than Joe Biden? Many claim this is so though they have not directly contested. Like Corzine, Newt is a Renaissance Man. Not merely a public servant he is also a professor of history and he professes with every breath. He is a top-selling author, consultant, public speaker and inspiration to a hungry world. Hungry, that is, for Ideas. Newt is the quintisential Idea Man. Even his political opponents, the devious and hellish Democrats agree that Newt is just full of Ideas and is in any case, Smart. What is meant by Smart is again, a fealty to the sort of smartness above. Newt was against Global Warming back when it was Global Warming, which is not long after it was Global Cooling (and now changed to Change). The carbon exchange which would tax emissions of carbon dioxide, yes, your exhalations, was championed if not contrived by old Newt. Likewise the most abrasive elements of Obamacare, which are identical to those in Romneycare, were just fine and dandy to Newt a half-hour ago. He was a supporter of the loosening of lending restrictions and government under-writing of the risks epitomized by the Community Reinvestment Act that has done so much to bid up the prices of our homes and seen their values cruelly dashed. There is scarcely an issue you could name (excepting abortion) that Newt has not been on both sides of and it is on this that the claims of his smarts are largely based. Even when supposedly acting as a rigid ideologue, close observers find this is only a pose. With Newt, there is always a back door with a coin-box. Coin box? ATM slot. No musty old ‘principle’ or claim to ethics would ever keep him from a dollar or a moment of adulation. This is what makes him the presumptive Smartest Guy in the Room while his true intellect would restrict that claim to his visits to the outhouse, if it is a one-holer. No, the Ideas Man is the empty sack he resembles. The very phrase smacks of Prof Harold Hill, as if we treasure ideas by the bushel or books by the pound. When questions of consistency and principle come up, as when he loudly jumped on this or that bipartisan bandwagon that now offends Republican primary voters, the Smart Guy shows the common touch, explaining how it was “the dumbest thing I ever did!” Or at least was caught at. We have three such superlatives to date, how can each be the dumbest? Well, Newt’s a Smart Guy. I’m sure he knows what he is talking about. And three is nothing anyhow. If he does get the nomination, a prospect all Americans should dread, you can be sure he will accumulate many, many more dumber things; most of which will have been those things he is saying and doing now to nail the Primary that will prove awkward in the general. Now THAT is Smart.

I just finished reading High Desert Barbecue, a novel by When Falls the Coliseum‘s own J.D. Tuccille. It’s a fun and very fast read (many of his chapters are only a couple of pages long). In the novel, wildly and humorously incompetent radical eco-terrorists face off against Rollo, a mountain man; Scott, a business writer with an anarchist attitude and a way with guns; and Scott’s  girlfriend Lani, a schoolteacher who’s no pushover. The trio, along with Scott’s heroic dog, Champ, has stumbled on the ludicrous efforts of the eco-terrorists, who, in cahoots with local authorities, argue among themselves in absurdly rendered dialogue as they try to burn down the forest in order to drive the people away and let nature reign. A violent showdown in the canyon ensues.

The nature, hiking, and firearms scenes are authentically described, full of rich details that bring the setting and story to life. It’s a yarn, for sure — the plot escalates and there’s a good bit of silliness and quite a few funny lines of dialogue and description. Given the political extremes the characters represent, there are, as might be expected, moments of political commentary and conversation from a generally libertarian viewpoint, some blatant, but Tuccille does not preach and doesn’t let politics interfere with the advancing action. His breezy tone and brisk pacing carry the reader along a novel that combines action and satire the whole way through.

Via Jackie Baisa comes something fantastic:

A murmuration of starlings.

I will refresh your memory of this crappy movie without refreshing my own. The Julia Roberts character is a young law clerk who has stumbled on a terrible secret while fulfilling an academic exercise. A Supreme Court Justice has been assassinated. Why? America can only theorize as this fictional jurist was a solid conservative on a panel pretty evenly split and certain to be quickly replaced with another. Now, if he were the swing vote, everyone could understand why he was offed. Whatever the next case coming up, the culprit is whichever party stands to gain from this unexcused absence. QED. How the setting for these events, ostensibly America in the 90s, became a place where political murder was as routine as in Rome, or even on Romulus, we are not informed.  But the baddies are off after a galloping Julia who has discovered that corporate Black Hats were about to do something mean, like drill a nasty hole into the ground and release the black goo within upon the surface world. And the only thing that could stop them, in court anyhow, was the status of a certain indigenous pelican as an endangered species. The late judge, certified Rightwing wanker though he was, apparently had a soft spot for sea-birds or birds altogether. He threatened an upset decision favoring the pelican so he had to die, naturally. Never asked is whether the claims of the pelican to nest and feed undisturbed were clearly superior to our claim to the oil beneath? Also never considered is whether it was quite clear that the oil drilling would be a serious, or indeed even a NOTICEABLE encumbrance to the joyous, omnivorous life of the pelican?

Recently returned from a fact-finding excursion to the Gulf beaches last year soiled by a deep drilling platform spill, I might have some insights. First, although the Deep Horizon leak was in some measures the worst domestic oil spill in history I can attest that the pelican race is not extinct. The object of the brief was a particular breed of pelican. I cannot as yet identify one species from the next too readily but if the pelicans at large were feeling the strain of that oily eruption into their habitat, it sure didn’t show. They were doing what pelicans do; a lot of rather smug gliding punctuated by sudden graceless collapse into the sea and then a gargle, spit and repeat. The pelican is an especially media-friendly “victim” of oil spills. Ungainly at their best, once doused in oil they appear and are helplessly fragile and probably doomed since their usual method of cleaning themselves is to eat whatever is soiling them. They are large, slow to flee humans and have appeared in cartoon shows since the earliest days. If penguins or seals or polar bears are not available the pelican will do well enough. The truly menaced manatee suffers from aesthetics even a personal trainer could not cure so the pelican speaks for nature in the Gulf.

The pelicans abide. Surely that is after their numbers were decimated by the oil spill though, right? As far as the internets can reveal, the total for all identified oiled sea-birds (some rescued and released, most not) is in the few dozens which is less than die from aviation. I know that doesn’t seem possible but if you look at news footage of the day of all the pelicans or gulls video could capture you will see that it is the same sad sack repeated endlessly. His majestic sheening head and his futilely flapping wings are a pathetic sight to behold but as far as the race of pelicans is concerned this is a case of extreme bad luck or extremely poor diving. Most pelicans were able to resist the urge to dive into a stinking oil plume which, in any case, was not hospitable to fish.

The pelicans muddled through alright but they are not the whole story. The news has grown weary of the spill, and that long ago, but you do hear occasional estimates of “damages” in the legal sense. Fishermen have been sorely treated. Huge tracts of the Gulf were made off-limits to fishing during the spill and long after it was plugged. State and federal officials made these calls and they seem to have been powerfully biased in the direction of what they would call “caution”, that is to close fisheries. Aren’t there pretty accurate tests that can be run to detect petroleum or its related toxins in water and in fish? Yes, there certainly are but the officials justify their existence and expense accounts not from serving oysters on the half shell or hauling grouper from sea to plate. Their posts are PR above all. Even if they are sticklers for science-backed policies, and they are not, they still must contend with the fact that someone somewhere is going to get sick from eating the fish if the fish is on the market. Families with lawyers will be quick, and probably successful, in casting the blame and the precious liability onto the nearest deep pocket. This might be the government or, more likely it would mean BP but that entity, like its Green Power cousin, is so intertwined with the Obama Administration that it is fiscally a government department. So the fisheries close for political and legal, not toxicological reasons. Still they are closed. The couchbound fishermen are enticed back onto the water to do, what? Few can say but it is all part of the cleanup so it must be good. They are promised rich compensation for their labors, lost earnings and the hire of their boats. Yet today, you will not find an unconnected individual who took advantage of these offers and was paid per the agreement. No, you will not find him. But you will find estimates of “damages” that reach the stratosphere where spilled oil was never encountered; largely owing to lost catches and depressed markets. Once it was the poor man who ate fish because he could go out and catch it himself. Now that America has forgot how to fish and cultivates a sportsman’s catch-and-release culture for the few anglers that remain, fish has become an exotic entree commanding high margins. But, with all the closures and everything, people are hesitant to maybe eat some oil with their bluefin. That apprehension lingers exacerbating the demand dip from the national economy even now that fishing has resumed. Large measures of the “damages” realized here did not come from oil in the water at all but from a ham-handed over-reaction to the news event by Team Obama who wisely feared the media appearance of an oily pelican.

BP (Barack Petroleum) is still present and active in the Gulf. They have plumped the local economy with massive media buys that solicit damaged parties to submit claims as the number of claims is key to their own claim of having discharged their responsibilities. And they do hire the local fellows for important work. You may recall the scourge of the tarballs. These beasties were found as far away as the OPPOSITE coast of Florida! Certainly this is the mark of migrating oil that is traveling faster than a cruiseliner! As an old sea dog myself, I can tell you that tarballs like this are a permanent fact of shore life. We used to have fights with them; like snowball fights. And they are not so dreadful. The newsies zoom in on a couple of them making you think they are as large as club chairs but they are not. There is a permanent and natural seepage of oil off most coasts including California, the Atlantic and the Gulf. These natural secretions have been producing tarballs the size of eggs and accumulating in dozens, at most, since before man crawled. But policing these little beauties in a media-friendly fashion is much of what the BP billions in “remediation” are going to. When you have your toes in the sand and a drink in your hand and see a couple fellows in long pants, sleeves and with masks and gloves scooping a cup of sand here and there into a hazmat sack, this is what they are doing for about $9 an hour. While children frolic with their castle molds grown men use long-handled snow shovels to plunk a tablespoon of solidified motor oil into their hoard. The absurdity is further revealed when their supervisor in BP polo shirt detects another tarball or three and directs their attentions where a teenage couple lounges in near nudity, apparently unpoisoned.

One would think the market value of good news would be increasing, given its scarcity. That horrible disaster down south? In practical terms, it never happened. Or the electoral gunslingers might advise the President to declare victory and come home from the Gulf. BP has been publicly chastened. Maybe we could just stay clear of them for a couple years? But no, no and no again. The “clean-up” in the Gulf continues and it rages most earnestly where nothing was ever dirtied but where tourists and locals gather. The chief victim of the Deep Horizon blow out (other than those dozens killed in the explosion) was the Obama Administration and its squeaky-clean Green image. This one actually CAN be blamed on Bush, not Bush the man but Bush the media player. Barack’s handlers were not going to let THEIR guy be Katrinaed and they know quite well how it is done. No accusation of “inaction” will adhere to President Obama; you have my word on it, boss! So instead we have a never-ending pantomime like the boy in the bathroom who merely pretends to wash his hands. Whenever a pelican dives there is a collective gasp, fearing he might come up oozing and polluted, winking his sad eye…. S-O-S, S-O-S and harm himself as he struggles against those scrubbing him with Dawn liquid. We can’t have that. Good thing we DON’T have that but it is not good enough. We must continue raking the beaches like giant sandtraps. We must continue the moratorium on any further drilling. We must continue the support to the unoiled locals and continue the policies that harm their trade at a point where the total release from the oil spill is about the same as natural seepage over that time. It is all for the pelicans, you see.

Oh, and the dolphins. They’re cute, too.

Last week, my friend Sandy sent me an email:

“Dan, do you want to come with me to Bastrop? I’m going to shoot some pictures of the ruins.”

Sandy is a photographer who documents disasters, and since Bastrop just suffered the most destructive wildfire in Texas history- a raging inferno laid waste to 1,600 houses and 34,000 acres of land – he was keen to record the aftermath for posterity. As for me, I had never witnessed the effects of Biblical hellfire before, so I was curious. I agreed to go.

Bastrop is a heavily wooded area, but as we approached the town the green trees turned to tall, dead pillars of carbon stuck in the scorched soil. Turning down a road, we found ourselves in a mostly destroyed housing development located inside the ravaged forest.

It was a strange, surreal environment. Outdoor swimming pools and kid’s playgrounds had survived even as the homes they were attached to were reduced to mounds of abused metal, broken brick and ash. The flames had randomly skipped certain homes, while destroying others. Fireplaces and washing machines rose from the ashes, seemingly indestructible. There were few birds, and no woodland creatures. The deer and rabbits and armadillos had all been massacred by Mother Nature.

We stopped the car to walk around a weird complex of ruined outbuildings, ideal for storing car parts and/or sex slaves. The owner had left out cat food in the hope that his pet would return. I found it across the street, jammed in a pipe, surrounded by a halo of flies. It had died trying to escape the fire, which had not even singed its fur.

A young woman came out to talk to us. The flames had passed over her attractive two-storey house, only to destroy the home of the newly wed couple next door. They had lost everything, including priceless family heirlooms. ‘Do you feel guilty that your house survived?’ I asked. ‘Very,’ she replied, and two minutes later showed me a picture on her iPhone of a melted lamp-post two miles down the road. ‘Pretty cool, huh? I mean, it’s sad too, but…‘

Next we stumbled upon a man retrieving the copper from the rubble of his home before thieves sold it to buy meth. A burly Texas Viking, he had already hung up bird feeders as a sign that he was back. He had stayed until the flames were roaring down the street towards him, and was annoyed that the insurance agency hadn’t given him his money yet: ‘I can’t believe we’re not already rebuilding.’ He pointed at the green shoots rising from the black earth. ‘See? The forest is already coming back. I’m not going anywhere, nobody is. Everybody in this neighborhood will rebuild their homes.’

And so we continued, roaming through a landscape of wreckage at once immense and overwhelming. Everywhere, life was resuming – construction teams zipped past, helicopters buzzed overhead, and all manner of builders and constructors had put up signs advertising their services. Some houses still had evacuation notices stuck to their mail boxes; at others there were hand-written messages nailed to the trees warning trespassers that they would be shot. Then, in a poorer neighborhood I stumbled upon a house where somebody had covered what little wall that remained with the spray-painted message:

HOW GREAT IS OUR GOD- WE ALL WON!

Ironic? I wondered. Nah… this is Texas. And just as I was taking a picture, a woman holding a portable oxygen tank rushed towards me. Her name was Cindy Cruz, and this was her house.  ‘I tagged it,’ she said with a smile. She had written other messages, spitting defiance at Satan, but those parts of the house had since collapsed. She too had been present when the fires came rushing down the street, and had only had time to grab her laptop, a few knick-knacks and her pet Chihuahua, Dillinger.

‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘Only two people died- that’s why I wrote “How great is our God!” because it could have been so much worse.’ She had turned down an emergency trailer from the federal government- like many Texans she doesn’t want a handout, only to get on with the rebuilding.

I asked if anything had survived the fire. ‘Not much,’ she said, her lips slowly forming a smile. ‘Only… when my husband came back the first time, he found the urn containing the ashes of our first Chihuahua- Duke. It was cracked, but the ashes were still in there, they hadn’t spilled out. So he poured Duke into a plastic bag and drove away. Later I brought the bag to the funeral home. They remembered me, and gave me a new urn for free. So in spite of the fire I still have two of my beloved Chihuahuas! See? We won!’

We got in the car, and drove on.

To see images from the fire’s aftermath, click here.

Originally published at RIA Novosti, the home of awesomeness.

The Obama administration claims to be concerned about the environment. One need only look at its commitment to green energy subsidies to understand how totally serious they are about taking care of the world in which we all live.

This commitment to the environment is one of the president’s most defining qualities. That’s why I was shocked to learn that the president is seeking to prop up an industry that is directly responsible for devastating environmental impact.

President Obama on Monday unveiled a plan to save the U.S. Postal Service and its employees from insolvency — a plan that includes the possible end of Saturday mail service.

More than half of the mail that the Post Office delivers is what it euphemistically refers to as “advertising mail.” You and I call it “junk mail.”

But perhaps a more appropriate name for it might be “Murder the Earth” mail. According to a group called Do Not Mail, this Murder the Earth mail is murdering the earth:

Junk mail destroys natural resources far out of proportion to the service it provides. 100 million trees a year are sacrificed to produce the 6.5 millions tons of paper that is made into junk mail every year. The greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the manufacture of junk mail are equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 3.7 million cars.

Many of the trees used for junk mail come from Endangered Forests like the Canadian Boreal and Indonesia’s Tropical Forest.

The Canadian Boreal is part of the greater Boreal, which stores more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem on earth, providing a crucial defense against global warming. Deforestation of Indonesia’s Tropical Forest is responsible for 8% of all global carbon emissions. Both the Boreal and Indonesia’s Forests are home to indigenous communities whose culture and livelihoods are threatened. Both provide critical habitat for species such as caribou, tigers and orangutans.

When we elected Barack Obama our president, we thought we were getting a leader who took seriously the horror of climate change. He told us himself that he was going to slow the rise of the oceans and begin to heal the planet.

Instead, he is fighting to funnel more money into an industry that directly profits from the destruction of our natural resources.

Climate change kills an estimated 150,000 people every year. That number is expected to increase over the next 60 years. And yet, our president has presented a plan to “save” an industry that is literally murdering people, and destroying the planet. If Mr. Obama is determined to save the Post Office, then he will have to live with the blood that will inevitably be on his hands.

And now we learn that the Post Office has created commercials that tout its “Murder the Earth” business model as something it’s actually proud of. It’s disgusting enough that the Post Office is making most of its money by helping to kill people all over the world, but do they have to be so brazen about it? What’s next– a commercial featuring Halliburton‘s “The Defense Contractor Next Door Who’s Actually Your Friend, and Not Trying to Profit from the Deaths of People”?

The menace of the Post Office must be stopped at all costs. Our health, our safety, our future depends on it. Please do the right thing, Mr. Obama.

The children are waiting.

As the proprietor of When Falls the Coliseum, I receive lots of press releases. I usually decline to write about the announcements sent to me, but I have decided to reproduce this one in full below. This is not a demonstration of my awesome satire-writing skills. This is an actual press release. I haven’t changed a word.

The subject line of the e-mail I received: “Celebrity Activists to Save the Ocean!”

SIX SENSES WATER/WO/MEN TO CONVENE AND SAVE THE OCEAN

Maldives Resort to Host Eco-Gurus to RaiseFunds for Water Conservation

A recognized innovator in environmental sustainability and the pioneer of intelligent luxury, Six Senses Resorts & Spas will host Six Senses Water/Wo/Men, the Maldives’ first gathering of watersports icons, world’s leading water conservationists such as Fabien Cousteau and celebrity activists including actress Daryl Hannah, Foo Fighters Rami Jaffee and singer Beth Orton from September 30 to October 4, 2011 at the company’s newest resort, Six Senses Laamu.

As a palm-fringed and postcard-perfect destination, the Maldives boasts an array of breaks five degrees north of the Equator and a rich, kaleidoscopic underwater eco-system that have lured international surfers and aquatics for more than 35 years. Global industrial growth, most of it very far away, has brought the Maldives to the frontline in the battle against rising sea levels. What happens to the Maldives and its 400,000 inhabitants may foretell the future of coastal regions around the globe, and for 15 years, the resort company has led the effort to protect these precious 1,190 islands.

From this year forward, Six Senses Water/Wo/Men invites all to participate in an innovative, meaningful opportunity to play in the Indian Ocean among living legends while acting in a unique part to move the global community “from apathy to action,” in the words of Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed and Time magazine Hero of the Environment.

DuringWater/Wo/Men, Sonu Shivdasani, founder and CEO, Six Senses Resorts & Spas and ocean conservationists will lead riveting dialogues and debates on the most pressing marine and drinking water issues facing the planet today. One of Hollywood’s leading film actress Daryl Hannah, noted for her mermaid role in Ron Howard’s Splash and environmental activism, is dedicated to ecological sustainability and will also participate in the panels.

Legendary surfers and divers will offer clinics to guests while renowned musicians jam on the sandbanks. Award-winning chefs will keep guests sustained with ethically sourced gourmet food, best enjoyed with biodynamic wines from Australia’s Margaret River. Hannah along with her partner Rami Jaffe, best known as the keyboardist for the Foo Fighters, and BRIT Award-winner singer-songwriter Beth Orton, whose music has been featured in many American films and television shows, will perform together celebrating the event which will raise funds for the following charities:

• Blue MarineFoundation (www.bluemarinefoundation.com), created by Chris Gorell Barnes, theproducer of “The End of the Line”, the defining documentary about over-fishing. This foundation seeks to raise the area of ocean under protection from 1 % to 10 % by 2020.
• Plant A Fish (www.plantafish.org) is a hands-on marine education and restoration effort led by third generation ocean explorer and filmmaker Fabien Cousteau to engage local communities around the globe through schools, businesses and government agencies to”re-plant” aquatic plants and animals in environmentally stressed areas.
• Water Charity (www.watercharity.org), top ranked non-profit that provides safe drinking water, effective sanitation and health education to those in need. Since 2008, Six Senses contributions and cooperation by banning the importation of plastic water bottles from our properties has given over 350,000 people access to safe drinking water.

Guests looking to participate in this cutting edge environmental protection effort, hosted in one of the most stunning yet precarious aquatic eco-systems on earth, may visit www.sixsenseswaterwomen.com.

How could ANYONE or indeed ANYTHING possibly go out of business just after a straight cash infusion of a half a billion dollars? Somehow Solyndra has managed it. This middle-sized firm with the maudlin name was never Too Big To Fail in its own right but it is exemplary. Solyndra is a “Green” business. You know that. And “Green” is the economic future. Green is clean. Green is keen. Green is nice, unlike those nasty cro-magnon energies like oil, gas and nukes. Even hydro power is in an infamous stink. That’s something of a puzzler, isn’t it? What could be cleaner than washing the whole landscape with cool, fresh creek water? As with so many of our current misapprehensions we suffer from Humpty-Dumpty-itis. Which is to say that the words you are hearing, Alice, do not mean what you presume they mean. Indeed, they are subject to revision or even flat inversion opportunistically by the eggshell sophists. In such an environment your most basic presumptions will fail you.

The bugaboo with this stuff is always CO2, carbon-dioxide. You are sitting in a vile cloud of it right now. Wait! Don’t go fleeing into the street. Out there is a dose of carbon-monoxide! Not an improvement and in any case the CO2 is everywhere on earth; a disgusting state of affairs. Most sadly its source, among others, is your two little nostrils. You breathe in 300-odd parts per million of this toxin and breathe out considerably more. This, the Green Advocates seek to stop. And so they should. A shocked humanity gazes in horror at its exhalations and wonders, what is this poison and how did it get inside my lungs? Was it Monsanto? Dow-Corning or Dow-Jones? Ah, it was Archer-Daniels, wasn’t it? Perhaps a blanket ban on hyphens would solve our crisis.

But what we know of the world of science, even from PBS interposes some questions. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out CO2 no matter how hard we try to stop. Why haven’t we all perished in the toxic cloud then? After all, there are so many people in the world; another disgusting state of affairs. It seems like we would have smothered each other long ago. But you forget that we are not alone on our planet. Not just yet. Our leafy green friends (or even more, our water-born slimy mono-cellular friends) have come to our rescue like the marching battalions of sunflowers in a Disney movie. They see our foolish plight and come with little scrub buckets; possibly microscopic, and take that nasty CO2 away to a safe place. As we know, altruism is the foundation for all natural cycles. Kindness is the fuel of the universe. This is why the polar bears are so grateful to the Prius jockey and the penguin dances a jig for the recycling toddlers. You might remember that poor, misunderstood Hyundai driver, Rodney King and his exasperation at the riots with obscene carbon footprints in his name. “Can’t we all just get along?” he asked the microphone. Of course we can, Mr. King, just as soon as most of us stop exhaling.

The bewildered Mr. King did not start a movement (though the timing is suspicious) but his wail could be dubbed in as the final “argument” in many a controversy. What Rodney meant was, can’t all these people on TV just stop igniting, looting and killing? This after his own team portrayed him as a randomly selected target for racial abuse. The jury didn’t see it that way and the result was as predictable as the dawn except to Rodney King. An identical level of innocence infects our discourse on all matters but on Green ones most of all. Can’t we all just recycle? Can’t we all just drive electric cars? Can’t we all just compost? Can’t we all just have wind and solar power and leave the nasty goo and radioactive metal deep in the earth where we found it? The answer is, yes we CAN, but…

There is always a but. The Green Myrmidons don’t want to hear any ‘buts’. Of course they also don’t want to hear that their electricity is out or lose their wifi; pay what Green groceries cost or understand that Green energy lacks verve, reliability and practicality. And we have indulged these tantrums for a long, long time for the sake of peace in our homes and a spirit of helpfulness in our children. This was foolish, short-sighted and above all in violation of basic facts, some scientific some not, that we all should have learned while in knee pants. Better late than not at all.

A little grammar-school science might leave you with the idea that nothing is “greener” than burning. CO2 is no “pollutant”, no matter that the EPA yearns to declare it such. CO2 is what plants breathe IN. It is one of those fabulous coincidences of nature that it is also what we breathe OUT. This is crucial for that longest word you knew for many a year: photosynthesis. Just to refresh your recall, photosynthesis=good. CO2 is a compound; all CO2 is created equal whether it comes from your baby, from a volcano or from the deep, blue sea. It is all the same stuff. Yes, it blankets the earth preventing the absorbed sunlight from dispersing into space. We like that effect. The moon is no beach resort, children. Except for helium every gas in our atmosphere is a greenhouse gas and folks, believe me, you are better off within the greenhouse than without. We hold in reserve next week’s lesson: why you should not drink seawater. I hope there are no casualties.

Humpty-Dumpty pulled a real fast one a few years back when he substituted “Climate Change” for “Global Warming”. Do not let this pass unremarked. It is the slithiest of elisions. What? Are you not against Climate Change? Actually no, jackass, I am not against Climate Change. The climate is changing constantly, this was known throughout history but you know what? It wouldn’t matter if I was against it or not. The climate is always warming or cooling or moistening or desiccating or SOMETHING. But the term was revised because the climate, as nature often proves, was uncooperative. There has been no warming for fifteen years. Nope. Checking the satellite temps helps knock this one down but really it was never necessary. Once the Warmists became Changists the sleight of hand was apparent to anyone who remembered that these same genii were Coolists back in the Carter years.

Speaking of Carter, he was the first Green President. Do you recall that? “Alternative Energy” was coined in that long-gone era of patchwork jackets and honky afros along with “Alternative Music”; each vapid and futile. The subsidies of solar, wind and other yet more exotic energy sources were born here and in justice should have died here but Reagan and the Republicans that followed him were hardly less susceptible to the charms of “free” energy especially when the oil we were buying from overseas was anything but.

Again no science is required to rubbish this concept. As a fine philosopher doorman was wont to say, there ain’t no “free”. What they mean here is that the INPUTS for solar and wind are free. And yes they are. They are free to come and go as they please. Beware, indeed, the music man who appears in town promising “free”. Freedom, yes. “Free”, no. But the notion of free inputs is what really makes a mash of the whole enterprise. The various theories on solar and wind are based on a very simple and obvious flaw in comparison. When an oil or gas or nuke or even hydro power plant is built they all have one thing in common: there is a big red button somewhere that turns the thing on. As long as there are inputs of fuel or flowing water there is power. Where is the big red button that calls the wind or dispels the clouds? This is what the Green fantasists should really be working on along with unicorn aphrodisiacs and non-inflationary money printing but we should not bet our livelihoods on their success, as we have. And again, it takes no scientific rigor to understand this, one only has to know that a ten megawatt solar power emplacement is considered the output equivalent of a ten megawatt gas fired plant. Even night is not considered when they bandy about their figures that predict we can have “clean” energy for half our needs in a few years time. Dim is the kindergartener who is unfamiliar with night. Then we have the movement of the sun across the sky to contend with and if all these issues are conquered there is a chance of clouds even in Arizona. Where there are few clouds, still there is dust and every speck reduces the amount of sunlight falling on your solar cells while those who advocate for solar burp up figures that assume a blue sky at high noon. Forever. Only in space do these caveats not apply as here there IS eternal noon. We could entertain some investigation of that technology except our spacefleet was recently mothballed.

The wind is also inconstant. Often it does not blow even in that blustery corridor that makes the US “the Saudi-Arabia of wind”; a more crapulent Humpty-ism you will not discover. So we are blessed with mighty winds. But also are we cursed. The modern windmill is a giant construction that requires the erection of thousands of skyscrapers in remote locations. Is there any other ambition of man that the Greens and granolas would say is worth this desecration? And what of the expense? Still it is nothing but a dance of penance because long and hard experience has shown that the windmills produce very little usable power. First off the wind blows with relative consistency in the dead of night when power consumption is at its trough. This is where the electric car boondoggle comes in; we will charge our cars at night, is the riposte. Except the electric car has proven even more useless than Green power and it is as mature a technology as your Cadillac. Even today the savior of Government Motors; the Chevy Volt has a useful range of forty miles. Less with the heat or air on. But even if that were not the case and we had, as has been attempted so gracelessly over and over, a full fleet of economical and practical electric vehicles, still wind would fail because even when it blows, the wind does not blow evenly.

Here we will employ a little science; a soupcon of science but also just simple observation. Whenever the soundness of wind is flaunted they show a broad vista of whirling blades. You can see that this enormous, open-air food processor might pose a hazard to, say, birds of prey or birds of any sort but that’s a granola’s argument we shall not employ. You may also notice that each pinwheel spins to the tune of its own drummer. They do not turn in lockstep but each set their own pace. That’s cool, right? Like a throng of humans, they march at their own cadence yet all arrive at a common, beneficial destination. As a sociology metaphor that has appeal but as a technical reality it is purest crap. In each windmill there is a generator. These are not the simple generators you may have cobbled together for the science fair in sixth grade. These are hi-tech; efficient and computer controlled, requiring some rare and pricey materials to make them light enough to hoist on a giant pole but still they cannot contend with the difficult task of making the electricity they produce at their individual rotational speed jive up with that made by their neighbors. This is called rectification. While the blades spin at the speed of their local breeze the power each generator produces must be synched up with all the others to produce a useable, consistent flow so your vacuum cleaner won’t sound like a slide trombone and act like a bucking bronco. This necessary process absorbs huge amounts of that free energy so it never does come to your house and warm the oven. You may remember a fellow by the name of T. Boone Pickens. His scheme to make wind power viable rested on resolving the problem of rectification. This petro-billionaire, heavily invested in gas, planned to build a wind farm with a gas fired generator at the foot of each pinwheel, so the meticulously controllable gas-derived power could be matched to the crazy-wobbly power coming from gusting winds. The costs would be gigantic but hey, he was the Solyndra of his day promising “free, Green, clean” power in exchange for vast cash infusions, tax abatements, environmental waivers, SEC neglect and of course great control over the gas market. The fact that new, non-Boone controlled gasfields made gas too cheap to beneficially bastardize with wind, even after a $58m PR campaign is the clearest evidence of a benign deity in modern times. And this yet neglects that while sometimes absent and always variable, often wind is destructively powerful. If the soundest trailer park cannot stand against buffeting winds when so low to the ground you can imagine the effect of a decent twister or thunderstorm on a giant whirligig. Very often the windmills are shut down because of excessive winds. We can only presume the engineers deal with this through careful placement. There are no tornadoes in West Texas, are there? But again, neither meteorologic nor financial knowledge was really necessary to understand that this whole project is pointless as its  alleged benefit is reducing the CO2 that surrounds you.

That was the same non-reason Solyndra was ever conceived. Likewise Cash 4 Clunkers and its cousins, train subsidies, ethanol, Green this or that… they all now have the same purpose although many have existed since the earth was calamitously cooling; they seek to curb the Satanic Gasses emanating from your bodily orifices. Yes, farts too. Heck, that is even MORE of a warming gas. What master work would result from billions in subsidies going to fight THAT menace? Stop it all, folks, or we shall find out.