Stupid Effing Hypocrites

Ya know, if you're going to tell me how I'm supposed to live my life you had damned well better set the example. You know, walk the walk if you're going to talk the talk.

We watched the news following Obie-One's blah-blah-blah about the San Bernardino shooting the other evening. I refer to it so dismissively because his address was about a critical subject. Unfortunately, Obie-One offered nothing new, nothing substantive, and even the media who usually fawn were sitting there, looking at one another in blank astonishment. CNN and even MSNBC (what we call MSBS in our household) said it was a pointless exercise that reassured no one.

Anyway. While we were watching the analysis I noticed a blurb on the crawl at the bottom of the screen about Morgan Freeman's private jet making a forced landing in Mississippi.

As a capitalist I have no problem with successful people flaunting their success. You make enough to fly a private jet, knock yourself out. However, if you're going to fly around in a private jet DO NOT preach at me about climate change.

Here's the article from the Mirror: http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/morgan-freeman-plane-crash-scare-6962851

What I find amusing is that when I looked for anything about this on domestic media everyone was bizarrely silent. The story did make it to a plethora of websites - TMZ, Evening Standard, The Sun - but the leftist media in the United States - New York Times, CNN, ABC, NBC - just chose to ignore this story about one of the media's darlings.

Google it: Morgan Freeman's Private Jet - you'll get a boatload of links, but none from CNN or any of the other major media here in the US.

So, Morgan Freeman flies around in a private jet and then the bloody hypocrite has this:

So we're all supposed to stop living our lives with our SUVs and lifestyle choices to save the planet while he generates a huge carbon footprint through the exhaust emissions of a private jet.

Uhhhh, no. Zero credibility to Mr. Freeman and his climate change message. It is, obviously, a pile of horse crap and he knows it. His preaching has no validity because it's a blatant different strokes for different folks double-standard. Not worthy of respect.

Algore is just as bad. Actually, he's worse because he got the widespread "conversation" about global warming started, yet he hasn't given up his private jets or his giant homes. Back in 2006 USA Today - not precisely your right wing publication - called Algore out on his double standard lifestyle:

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. Plenty of businesses and institutions have signed up. Even the Bush administration is using green energy for some federal office buildings, as are thousands of area residents.

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-08-09-gore-green_x.htm

Things hadn't changed significantly for Mr. & Mrs. Gore as of 2013:

http://www.energytribune.com/70283/green-hypocrisy-as-al-gore-sells-out-for-petro-dollars#sthash.ifL4nF9r.dpbs

All right, Mr. & Mrs. America - there's our call to action. Give up the bigger, heavier, safer-in-a-crash vehicle and start driving a little tin can hybrid that will collapse around you in a crash because Algore says you should. That leaves that much more for him and Tipper - hooray.

Put CFL bulbs in your homes, regardless of the risk of mercury poisoning (watch the following video - it's funny if you think CFLs are a pile of horse crap as I do):

Now, with the "bad" incandescent bulbs, I wouldn't open the windows. I wouldn't close off the room for an extended period of time. I wouldn't turn off the central A/C. I wouldn't sacrifice a perfectly good storage container and the rest of it. I wouldn't spend twenty minutes or more - and generate a carbon footprint by driving it to a hazardous waste recycler. All of that to clean up a stupid light bulb. And guess what? Even the people that have these stupid ugly things all through their houses don't clean them up like this. They vacuum, sweep, throw it in the trash and call it a day.

If it was just one or two bulbs, no problem. There's more mercury in the environment than that. However, with their popularity, with incandescents no longer available, everyone has switched to these. That's a helluva lot of CFL bulbs and hazardous waste going into our landfills.

I'm old enough to remember the Superfund Sites of the 1970's, and this is another case of generating a whole bunch of pollution - mercury this time - from our landfills. These things get broken, they aren't handled as hazardous waste as they're supposed to be, they end up in the trash and then in the landfill. Rain water runoff picks up the mercury and carries it downstream into a fishery and you have mercury laced fish. Those fish get eaten and the mercury spreads through the ecosystem. Just like back in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, which led to the Superfund clean-ups of the 1970s.

With the old "bad" bulbs there was no hazardous cloud of mercury dust. It was air and a fine filament of coiled wire - nothing bad in it at all. If one broke, I would get the broom and the dustpan. Period, end of story. Less than two minutes and done.

Which is why I do not and will not have one of these stupid things in my house. Now that the LED technology has developed to create white light, I will have LEDs - they last longer, they're perfectly safe, and I don't have to jump through hoops if one gets broken.

I love when these idiots get outed like this. It's amusing and satisfying because I don't buy into this nonsense. No doubt there are some (perhaps a majority) who think I'm a "flat Earther" because I don't believe it, but I was the victim of a well-publicized hoax once in my life and became a hard core skeptic.

So what should Morgan Freeman and Algore do if they want to fly their private jets around? Bingo! Buy carbon credits. Another bogus scam offshoot of the "green" movement.

After all, what is a "carbon credit"? Well, in a nutshell, you pay Algore or one of the organizations he's behind big bucks so you can do those really environmentally bad things with a soothed conscience. Never mind that the impact on the environment is just what it would have been had you not paid that big fee. Still you get to sleep better after flying your private jet around, the air is just as polluted, the climate is just as impacted, but Algore gets another pile of money. Quite a racket, isn't it?

So what makes me a skeptic? When I was twelve I started hearing news stories and discussion about a massive natural event that was going to devastate California.

All the experts said it was coming on a date certain, there was no avoiding it and nothing to prevent it. It was such prevalent news for so long that news outlets reported that people were buying up land in western Nevada - huge swathes because land was cheap and this event was going to give their investment a tremendous boost.

Being twelve, not yet being a skeptic, I believed it - and I was terrified. I had trouble sleeping. I worried and it was horrible. When we left California for our annual family vacation, I feared for my friends left behind - would I see them again because the "date certain" would occur while we were gone to New Mexico?

So what were these news stories, this tremendous existential threat? It was about a massive earthquake that was going to drop California into the Pacific ocean. Everyone in the state when this event hit was going to die.

Uhhhh, yeah. That was back in 1969 and we're still here.

Here's a link to the one 1969 story that made it to the interweb. This is what fed into the rumors back then:

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/earthquake-california-fears-fear-itself-19690419

This is why I'm a skeptic now, so many years later. After being scared for a period of months, after going on vacation with my family and fearing for my friends left behind and then getting home and finding all was pretty much as I had left it, my skepticism gene kicked in. Now, unless I see it, can taste it, feel it or smell it, I don't believe it.

And with global warming or global cooling or climate change or whatever it will be called next week, I can't see it, feel it, smell it, taste it or touch it, so I don't believe it. Particularly since we're basing all of these changes and declarations on only fifty years worth of hard data. All of the data, proclaimed to go back millions of years, on which we're basing these sweeping decisions are extrapolations from guesses, theories, suppositions and presumed knowledge based on less than hard data. Much of that data has been manipulated so it shows what the people who get their research grant money want it to show so the gravy train keeps on rolling. Remember Climate-gate and East Anglia University - the e-mails that showed they were adding and subtracting to get the results they wanted because the real data they were using wasn't turning out as they wanted it to?

We didn't have weather satellites before fifty years ago. We didn't have sophisticated computers that could crunch the data or model it before fifty years ago. We didn't have any of the technology fifty years ago that we have now and that older data is uselessly inaccurate by today's standards. Fifty years of records is hardly significant in the overall scope of world history.

I figure that in another thirty years some other "global crisis" will rear its ugly head and take the place of "climate change" because we'll have gotten bored with "climate change" as an existential threat. Next generation it will be something else and the generation after it will be something else again. In the meantime the climate will go ahead and do what it's going to do because that's what the planet does.

We're like gnats riding around on an elephant's butt. We can flutter and fly and land and cry and do all the things we're going to do and the elephant is going to go ahead and do whatever it's going to do, taking no heed of the gnats flapping their wings and fussing around.

I think instead of worrying about air quality in California we should try to stop the hurricanes and tropical depressions that devastate wide swathes of the vulnerable regions around the world every year.

I really think we need to focus our energies to stop the formation of F5 tornadoes and typhoons that devastate wide swathes of the planet.

I think we need to do something to spread out the monsoons that cause devastating flooding around the equator each year, to make sure that the rainy season is more evenly spaced so villages don't get washed away or swept away in landslides.

We also need to do something about those blasted plate tectonics that cause humongous earthquakes that wipe out entire portions of our coastal regions, like in Japan a few years back.

What's that? Excuse me? We can't? We can't do those things? Really? What? Al Gore and Morgan Freeman and the other wild greenies with their double-standards don't have answers for those things? Well, damn. There go my illusions.

And, while I'm on this particular hobbyhorse, do you remember yesterday's post about the UN's Agenda 2030? All the discussion of clean air and water and the rest of it? And the recent Paris Climate Summit, remember that? Well, well, well. Among the proponents of the non-pollution / climate change / life restricting regulations is China. They have suddenly leapt with both feet onto the Green Bandwagon (never mind that their air pollution emissions won't peak until 2030). That leading example of talking the talk but not walking the walk is dealing with this:

China Pollution: Beijing Issues First Red Smog Alert

Schools in Beijing are to close and outdoor construction to stop after the Chinese capital issued its first "red alert" over smog levels.

The red alert is the highest possible, and has not been used in the city before, the state-run Xinhua news agency says.

Authorities expect more than three consecutive days of severe smog.

Cars with odd and even number plates will be banned from driving on alternate days.

The alert comes as China, the world's largest polluter, takes part in talks on carbon emissions in Paris.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35026363

Yeahhhhh... right. Is this another example of leading from behind?

Well whatever it is, when you environmentalist nut jobs get your actions to match your words, when you're finally bothered enough to walk that walk you've been talking about, you let me know and then I'll think about it.

In the meantime, I'll keep doing what I do. I'll pay attention to how much water I'm using and try to conserve. I'll take those seven boxes of PET bottles I've collected in the past few weeks up the hill to the recycler so I can turn them in and make sure they're not actually going to end up in the landfill. I'll continue to walk as much as I can and drive as little as I can and not use my heat until the house is really cold and all the other things that I do to be a good steward.

Now, enjoy the clean air and water that we have, be a good steward and I'll see ya around.

Best~
Philippa

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