Finally! A “Climate Change” Initiative That Will Be Popular!

This is absolutely hysterical. Using official British government statistics a noted environmentalist, who is a published author on environmental subjects as well as a Green Party parliamentary candidate, has come up with a program that will be good for the earth. Better, in fact, than a lot of the pious, feel-good stuff being pushed by activists. And it is a program that will appeal to a lot of people.

Become a couch potato, drive everywhere and save the planet!

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.

Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.

And we must not forget that using red worms to compost kitchen scraps emits huge quantities of really nasty greenhouse gases. Or that a Prius is actually worse for the overall health of the planet than a Hummer. So, have a seat and save the earth, folks.

Exactly Right

Patrick Ruffini, writing over at Hugh Hewitt's blog, has a masterful analysis of what the right has gotten right - and wrong - on the web.

Who is jealous of who here? YearlyKos, and also the Take Back America Conference, were almost certainly borne of the question “Where is our CPAC?” Some of those covering this act as though the idea of a conference with thousands of grassroots activists and Presidential candidates falling all over themselves to speak is totally unheard of on the right. Um, no. The netroots was built on Xeroxing the Goldwater-Reagan Revolution in the Republican Party. Almost always, it was conservatives who were the initial innovators.

When covering the netroots vs. the rightroots, reporters look at things through a particular frame that by definition excludes the vast majority of grassroots activity on the right. For something to be newsworthy in this space, it must be blog-based, it must have emerged in the last five years, and it must be focused on elections over legislative or policy outcomes.

The problem with this angle is that most of the conservative institutions online emerged in the late Clinton Administration or immediately after 9/11. At their peak, they were larger than Daily Kos, and arguably some still are. And they rarely receive any scrutiny because they don’t fit the frame. From a macro movement-building perspective, the left catching us to us is being covered as a need for us to catch up with something the left has invented anew.

And despite how unfair that narrative is, there’s something to it. The conservative analog to YearlyKos is 30 years old. The 800lb. gorillas of the conservative Web initially went online in the 1995-97 timeframe. And many have failed to innovate. They are still Web 1.0, where the Left jumped directly into Web 2.0 in the Bush years.

Do read it all. It actually gives voice to a few things I have been thinking about recently. Many of us on the right side of the 'sphere tend to act as "pseudo-journalists and commentators" as Ruffini puts it. Not activists but pundits. The traffic, as Ruffini points out, still favors the right, but the activism is over on the left. Mark Tapscott, commenting on Ruffini's post puts it this way:

Having said that, let me also add this: Let's not forget that, despite our handicaps in recent years, the digital Right has compiled some significant victories. Just ask Dan Rather, Ted Stevens and Trent Lott what they think of those conservative bloggers.

We also get a major share of the credit for Coburn-Obama, the bill mandating creation of a Google-like, searchable database on the Internet of most federal spending. True, it was a Left-Right coalition that got that bill through Congress. But most of the Internet advocacy and activism on behalf of Coburn-Obama came from the Right and it was the conservative Tom Coburn who provided the critical legislative energy and recognized the potential power of the Blogosphere as a key to gaining success.

Still, it's like an Indy 500 that never ends - we led the first 10 laps, but while we were waving to the crowd, the Left turned up its turbo boost and blew by us. We better wake up and get back in this race before it's too late.

Interesting, isn't it?

Whitesnake, Black Bear

Everyone is a critic, even in the Animal Uprising™. The lead singer for big hair metal band Whitesnake is under siege by black bears in his Lake Tahoe, Nevada home. David Coverdale has had bear peeping toms, bear burglars and even bear pool guests. And he says it is becoming unbearable.

The British singer, formerly of Deep Purple, said bear attacks had become a "daily worry" and that authorities had warned he may have to move out.

His first face-to-face encounter with a bear came in July, as he was "rinsing a cup or two at the kitchen sink".

"I don't mind telling you I almost succumbed to an involuntary bowel movement," Coverdale told fans online…….

……The most recent incident saw a different bear break into the house though a sliding glass door, which had been left ajar by a guest.

The animal also took the opportunity to swim in the singer's pool.

"We now have a big bear trap in the garden," said Coverdale.

"For some reason, I don't think these guys care for rock!"

The Lake Tahoe area, on the border of California and Nevada, is experiencing a rise in bear home invasions.

And yes, indeed, bears are going bonkers all over the area. In fact, in another incident a black bear burglar was killed by police after it tried to attack an officer.

INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. – A 600-pound bear that wandered into a Lake Tahoe home through an open window early Thursday was shot and killed after lunging at a Washoe County sheriff's deputy.

Authorities said the homeowner called for help after finding the bear in the main part of the Incline Village home around 5:30 a.m., then hid with other family members in a master bedroom.

When Sgt. Erik Frederickson and deputies Jason Wood and Randy Vawters arrived a few minutes later, they first opened the garage door to give the bear an escape route.

Then Frederickson looked through the open dining room window and saw the bear just as the bear spotted him.

The animal growled and charged through the window at the officer, who shot the bear with a shotgun at close range, the sheriff's office said.

The rise in bear problems is being attributed to bears becoming perfectly comfortable with humans. Why? Well, it is at least partly because some dunder-headed idiots insist on feeding the bears - because they "love" them. This in turn virtually ensures that the human-habituated bears will, at some point, need to be killed.

“Damn The Torpedoes! Full Speed Ahead!”

On the morning of August 5, 1864, a fleet of 18 Union warships under command of Admiral David Farragut entered Mobile Bay. Under heavy fire from Fort Morgan and Fort Gaines, the fleet maneuvered through a "torpedo field", what we would call a mine field today, to engage a Confederate fleet of four ships. As the US monitor Tecumseh maneuvered to engage the Confederate flagship, the CSS Tennessee, she struck a torpedo and sank rapidly, taking 94 of her crew with her to the bottom of the bay. Admiral Farragut, faced with the choice of braving the minefield or withdrawing was reported to have said, "Damn the torpedoes! Full Speed ahead!"

The port of Mobile was closed to blockade runners, leaving only Savannah, Georgia as a haven. Savannah would fall later that same year to Union forces commanded by William Tecumseh Sherman.

Admiral David Glasgow Farragut was the first American ever named to the ranks or Rear Admiral, Vice Admiral and Admiral in the United States Navy and had commanded his first captured prize ship safely to port at the age of 12. Iron men and wooden ships, indeed.

The Sick(o) Truth

Liz Mair, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune, takes apart socialized medicine as depicted in Michael Moore's Sicko in an op-ed today. She knows what she is talking about - she lived in Britain under the National Health Service. And she is merciless in hammering Moore's distortions.

“Sicko” depicts a perfect NHS, the answer to all of our prayers, equipped with pristine and beautiful hospitals, friendly doctors, helpful pharmacists and happy patients, all getting the care they need in a timely manner – and all for free. But the image is inaccurate and Americans should be careful not to fall for it when determining our own priorities when it comes to fixing health care in this country.

In creating “Sicko,” Moore must have overlooked some of the major news stories about the NHS from recent years. Stories such as one from the BBC stating that in September 2006 more than 6,000 patients in eastern England had to wait more than 20 weeks to begin treatment already prescribed by their doctors. Or a BBC story, also from 2006, noting that over 40,000 patients in Wales had to wait more than six months between being referred for, and actually having, an outpatient appointment. Or the recent London Times story regarding an admission, by Britain's Department of Health, that some patients will have to wait more than a year for treatment, and that 52 percent of hospital inpatients are currently waiting more than 18 weeks to receive treatment.

Or stories such as those widely publicized in 2006 and 2007 about cancer patients who were denied access to life-saving cancer drugs by the NHS, which had refused to make them available because they were not “cost-effective” (i.e., cheap).

Mair also points to a 2005 study that concluded that 20% of all hospital deaths in Britain resulted from antibiotic-resistant MRSA infections. That is a shockingly high percentage. I have posted a lot about failures in the National Health Service - stories that pop up almost daily in the British press. But I haven't had to survive the system, Mair has. She has personal stories to tell, I'd urge you to read the whole thing.

The socialized medicine schemes are being touted as "free" health care. This is, of course, a flat lie. Wisconsin showed that - their proposed "free" care will more than double the state tax burden on individuals. And the overall quality will decline because cost saving will be realized through rationing of health care, that is by making patients wait long periods of time to get any care. So the choices, despite what the propagandists like Moore say, boil down to a) poor quality "free" care for everyone financed by massive tax increases or b) high quality care for the vast majority with some problems that could be addressed without throwing everyone into low quality care.