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

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories

Another Data Point Supporting "You Can't Always Believe the Interweb"

Last night I got home to breathless news about Greece and their on-going debt crisis. Yes, it has fallen off the front page, but the Greeks and the Greek government are still struggling with their sinking ship.

Anyway. I walked in the door and was greeted by "You won't believe this!"

"This" is a declaration that all Greek citizens have to report all of their "under the mattress" assets to the government by January 1, 2016. There's a fifty-six page form on which they have to itemize their jewelry, gemstones, cash not sitting in a bank, gold, silver, anything that is of monetary value. It has to be filed by January 1.

Wow! That's shocking! And scary for many reasons.

First, private matters wouldn't be private. If you happen to have inherited grandpa's gold coin collection, it would have to be reported - even if you have no intent of selling it or using it to purchase goods or services. If, on your wedding day, your parents or inlaws or someone gave you a sterling silver tea set worth tens of thousands, you would have to report it.

Second, that kind of demand smacks of government's intent to seize those assets - at any cost - to use them to pay down the nation's debt. Perhaps it would require that you turn them in for 'safe-keeping' or face criminal penalties. Perhaps even, if you filed the form and didn't turn everything listed in, they would storm your house, turn it upside down in a search and seize those items and anything else with some intrinsic value.

Third, and in its own way, more frightening is that Greece is the civilization on which our Founders in the U.S. relied most heavily for formulating our Bill of Rights and Constitution. If Greece, the bastion of freedom that it once was has devolved to stealing its citizen's assets, where does that leave the rest of us?

 It was fascinating on so many levels that I went searching for more information. Using trusty old Google I tried for more than two hours - entering various search criteria, checking Web and News, refining the timeline to "past month". After all, since this just surfaced yesterday I figured "past month" would capture something.

All that came up was a blogger's website on which the article was posted. I read it there and it was shocking. So I went back to Googling. Nothing, nothing, nothing... then! I found the precise same blog using the precise same language on another blogger's site.

Hmm. So someone threw this inflammatory and, as far as I can tell, false narrative onto the interweb. It got picked up and replayed. Tens of thousands of readers have seen it and are talking about it (including hubby), but it doesn't seem that anyone else has questioned it. Why not?

When I make claims here, I back them up with citations - and not just, "Gee, I read this and..." I go out, find the link and post the text plus the link here so if you want to more reading you can.

After last night, I think I've learned a valuable lesson. I'll add it to my list:

1) Don't take at face value anything you see on the interweb. The world is full of cheats and liars and con wo/men

2) Pay attention to the link - what's the source? If you deem the source slanted, unreliable, or blatantly biased, either dismiss it or do some further research to see if you can substantiate or balance the slant or bias.

3) Do your own research. If it's important enough to catch your attention, find out about it. And don't rely on one or two sources for the background. One or two sources, particularly if they're linked in some way, can be biased. Spreading the burden wider means the data will be more reliable.

4) If you are posting something - on a blog, on Facebook, LinkedIn (Facebook for grups) or any other site - post the citation(s), too. It adds credibility and allows a reader to find for themselves more information that you might not have included.

Now, have I been guilty of lazy research? You betcha. I try hard not to fall into that hammock, but I admit that I do sometimes. But if I think I want to post something, perhaps something exciting or inflammatory, I do research it and if I don't find something to support what I want to say, I don't say it.

So, after all of this I went back to make sure that if you do Google "under the mattress cash" the site I am referring to would come up. It does. It also came up with a news story by CNBC.

My first instinct was that someone at CNBC had read that same blog that got me started on this, and told someone about it, or started their own article. After all, if it was news, why wasn't it reported in the Economist, the Financial Times, or Investor's Business Daily? What about Bloomberg or in the Wall Street Journal yesterday? How about the New York Times or Washington Post? What about the Guardian or Telegraph in Britain? Nothing. Not one word about it except on the blogger's site yesterday, and CNBC this morning.

The CNBC article is pretty much the same language, rehashed to avoid plagiarism, but there is a link to a website. Unfortunately, because I cannot read Greek I cannot verify it's "real", but CNBC says it is (although I do have a VERY healthy suspicion of anything NBC reports because of past research laziness on their part). However, that said, here's the link to the CNBC story and below that is the link to the reporting form - which CNBC and the other site that started me down this path, declare is real.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/02/greeks-tax-mattress-gold-jewelry-greece.html

http://cdn.enikonomia.gr/data/files/c1ab0d4578de77608daa89fb2fd40ead.pdf

Although a fifty-six page declaration form is not that likely to be completed by anyone but a civil servant or policy wonk who gets his rocks off filling out forms.

And why have they targeted just these segments of the population? Granted, of all the workers in Greece, a majority work for the government, so by targeting them, it's probable that they'll capture the majority of the loot. But why journalists? That's a head scratcher, isn't it?

Hmmm. Another dose of healthy skepticism and the plot thickens.

I just went to Wikipedia and searched for enikonomia - the site referenced in the CNBC article. There's no such thing. This is the result that I got:

Search results

• Content pages
• Multimedia
• Everything
• Advanced

The page "Enikonomia" does not exist. You can ask for it to be created.

There were no results matching the query.

Now, doesn't that strike you as strange?

If it's a department of the Greek government - the equivalent of the IRS or something - wouldn't it have a citation?

If it's a tax agency or part of the financial sector - wouldn't it have a citation? Heck, just for grins and chuckles I put H & R Block into Wiki and came up with a list (try it).

If it's a financial publication - like the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal - wouldn't it have a citation?

It just strikes me as more than a little odd. And makes me wonder about the depth of research being done before declarations like "we're all gonna die" or "we're all gonna be robbed" are made. Doesn't seem to me there's much, because I can't do more than turn up a questionable blog post that seems to be spreading through a lack of basic research on the part of the copycats (Bitcoin has just jumped on this bandwagon, too - I found a post / article associated with their site).

Me? I'm gonna go stuff my mattress. Have a lovely day.

Best~
Philippa

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories

And THIS is why I throw that bright red BS flag

Okay, last night was looking at the weather forecast for two weeks from now. We're planning a going-away party for someone at work. While I was there, looking to see if we could plan it for the outdoor patio, I noticed a headline. I snorted in derision because it's promulgating more of the same nonsense we've been hearing for the past thirty years or so.

For decades, what I think of as the Chicken Little Brigade has been running around screaming 'The sky is falling! The sky is falling and we're all gonna die!'

First, in the 1970's, it was because we were all going to freeze to death. There were articles in prominent magazines about the coming ice age in 1974 and 1975. In fact, the first Earth Day was held to bring awareness to global cooling. I kid you not! Do some Google searches on global cooling.

Then, in the 1980's, it did a 180d change. Suddenly the Chicken Littles were declaring that we're all going to cook to death.

Either way, the alarmists have been doing all they can to scare people to death over what has become 'climate change'. That term, Climate Change, is their insurance policy against whatever happens. If it gets warmer or if it gets cooler they can point to it and say, 'See? I told you so!'

Through all of these years, these Chicken Littles have been trying really hard to make all of us afraid of doing anything - even breathing, burping and passing wind - and this is the best they've got:

Ocean and atmospheric conditions over the tropical Pacific Ocean in August 2015 had characteristics of a strong El Niño, according to a report released this week by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

The WMO said the majority of climate models and experts expect that El Niño will continue to strengthen through the rest of 2015, peaking between October and January. At its height, this El Niño could be among the top four strongest events on record since 1950, the WMO said.

The last strong El Niño occurred in 1997-98. Since then, there has been a reduction in the amount of Arctic sea ice and Northern Hemisphere snow cover, which introduces another factor in what to expect.  

David Carlson, director of WMO's World Climate Research program said, “We have had years of record Arctic sea ice minimum. We have lost a massive area of Northern Hemisphere snow cover, probably by more than 1 million square kilometers in the past 15 years. We are working on a different planet and we fully do not understand the new patterns emerging."  

"We have no precedent. Climate change is increasingly going to put us in this situation. We don’t have a previous event like this," he said.

http://www.weather.com/news/climate/news/el-nino-noaa-update-august2015

Excuse my language but I just can't help myself - WTF!???!!!

Are these people seriously suggesting that we all get ourselves knicker-knotted and panic stricken over a lousy sixty-five - 65 years worth of hard, hands-on data? Are you kidding me?

Yeah, well they got one thing right in that article. They are definitely on a different planet.

Hello! McFly!!! Get a clue, here. Of course you don't have a previous event like this, you moron!

The planet is, like, 4.54 BILLION years old and you're looking at 65 years of data and making sweeping, life-changing decisions based on that?

They are talking 65/4,500,000,000 and we're supposed to be worried?

Do these idiots have no idea at all what a pimple on the bacteria on the pimple on a gnat on the pimple of the elephant that is?

And they are shouting from the rooftops that we should all stop living and breathing and eating and doing what we do because of 65 lousy years of data? Really?

Okay, deep breath. Zen movement (hands pushing down, eyes closed, breathing deeply). I'll cut them some slack. I won't consider the age of the planet because it wasn't always as it is now. So... let's say... 175,000,000 years. That's when the Pangaea super-continent broke apart.

Pangaea had animals and plant life on it. We know that because of the dispersal of the fossils and some plants and animals. When Pangaea broke up, the species were carried away from each other and developed into new critters, some with the same characteristics.

Still, as a percentage, 65/175,000,000 = 0.000003714285 years and, based on that, we're supposed to get excited by 65-years worth of hands on data? We're all gonna die because we have 0.0000003714285 year's worth of information?

All I can do is shake my head at that.

So let's bring it closer to home. Let's say the Bronze Age. That's a good place to start. There were people. They'd been around for centuries because the Bronze Age came after the Stone Age and Iron Age, so it's a good place to start if we're going to get excited about this stuff. People were building fires. People were using those fires, pumped with air, to get it hot enough to melt metals into compounds like bronze (why it's call the Bronze Age).  That's about 2,300 B.C. - or 4,300 years ago.

65/4,300 = 0.01511 - so still less than zero year's worth of data. That is one 1/150th of a year.

Do you realize what that means?

It means that we are basing all of our decisions, all of our lives on the equivalent of five days worth of data. That's like planning our lives and our existence for the next one hundred years on the five day forecast from your local news station for crying out loud!

Sure. Good idea. Let's disrupt our lives, our existence for this.

My guess is that either these people smoked too much weed in college or they figure we're all incredibly stupid. And, given the lack of respect the Al Gores and Bobby Kennedy Jrs have for the American people, I go with they think we're all incredibly stupid. And, unfortunately, in many cases they're right, absolutely 100% spot on correct because so many people have swallowed this hook.

You do know why they're promoting this, right? You do understand why they're making these wild declarations on far less than zero information, right? And, for the record, that is not an exaggeration. 0.01511 years is FAR less than zero. It is several decimal points less than zero.

And, as it always is, it's all about the money, honey.

If they were honest with us, as in dead-straight honest that there is no serious threat from global warming or climate change or whatever they'll call it next, their grants, their fees and all of the rest of it would evaporate overnight.

They are running a scam - the biggest freakin' scam ever envisioned by human beings and you and are I the unwitting and, sometimes unwilling, marks.


Now, if you think I'm full of it, fine. Go right on ahead, but I suggest you check out the following on your own:

Follow the link to the Weather.com article and read it. Then do whatever research you want to do to try to debunk what I've said here.

I know the truth because it's right there, right in front of me from their own words.

Ya know... I think I'm gonna fire up that charcoal barbecue this weekend and have a fine ol' time.

Here's wishing you a happy, healthy and safe holiday weekend!

Best~
Philippa

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/PhilippaStories