Sunday, April 23, 2006

THE SKY IS FALLING---again and again, etc!

Mark Steyn has his usual trenchant analysis on the preposterous blubbering idiot who was VEEP under Clinton and who now has his own TV network. You know, the one the state of Florida should be eternally thanked by the rest of the country for keeping this boring fool out of the White House. Here's Mark on Al Borebot:
Do you worry? You look like you do. Worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an advanced society demonstrates his virtue: He feels good by feeling bad.
But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah, that's just some racket cooked up by the Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about nukes is so '80s. "They make me want to throw up. . . . They make me feel sick to my stomach," wrote the British novelist Martin Amis, who couldn't stop thinking about them 20 years ago. In the intro to a collection of short stories, he worried about the Big One and outlined his own plan for coping with a nuclear winter wonderland:

"Suppose I survive," he fretted. "Suppose my eyes aren't pouring down my face, suppose I am untouched by the hurricane of secondary missiles that all mortar, metal and glass has abruptly become: Suppose all this. I shall be obliged (and it's the last thing I feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousands-miles-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the groveling dead. Then -- God willing, if I still have the strength, and, of course, if they are still alive -- I must find my wife and children and I must kill them."

But the Big One never fell. And instead of killing his wife Martin Amis had to make do with divorcing her. Back then it was just crazies like Reagan and Thatcher who had nukes, so you can understand why everyone was terrified. But now Kim Jong-Il and the ayatollahs have them, so we're all sophisticated and relaxed about it, like the French hearing that their president's acquired a couple more mistresses. Martin Amis hasn't thrown up a word about the subject in years. To the best of my knowledge, he has no plans to kill the present Mrs. Amis.

So what should we worry about? How about -- stop me if you've heard this one before -- "climate change"? That's the subject of Al Gore's new movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth.''

Yes, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Only instead of nukes, it's CO2. Golly! Mark goes on to bring up the new Earth Day sect/cult's ascendancy:
The mullahs won't get a chance to nuke us because, thanks to rising sea levels, Tehran will be under water. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, says the Earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet." The archbishop of Canterbury, in a desperate attempt to cut the Anglican Communion a slice of the Gaia-worship self-flagellation action, demands government "coercion" on everything from reduced speed limits to ending cheap air travel "if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die."

Environmentalism doesn't need the support of the church, it's a church in itself -- and furthermore, one explicitly at odds with Christianity: God sent His son to Earth as a man, not as a three-toed tree sloth or an Antarctic krill. An environmentalist can believe man is no more than a co-equal planet dweller with millions of other species, and that he's taking up more than his fair share and needs to reduce both his profile and his numbers. But that's profoundly hostile to Christianity.

Almost as hostile to Christianity as the Archbishop of Canterbury, or Bishops Spong and Griswold and the fey Bishop Gene Robinson of the angelic Anglican geldings. Steyn points out very inconveniently for the latest faddist and nudist-colony social lepers that from 1940-70, the same insane leftist maniac hysterical hyperbolic morons were talking crazily about "global cooling" and how we were on the cusp of a New Ice Age. The glaciers were poised to come rolling down the fjords and Alpine valleys, until:
Here's an inconvenient truth for "An Inconvenient Truth": Remember what they used to call "climate change"? "Global warming." And what did they call it before that? "Global cooling." That was the big worry in the '70s: the forthcoming ice age. Back then, Lowell Ponte had a huge best seller called The Cooling: Has the new ice age already begun? Can we survive?

The answer to the first question was: Yes, it had begun. From 1940 to 1970, there was very slight global cooling. That's why the doom-mongers decided the big bucks were in the new-ice-age blockbusters.

And yet, amazingly, we've survived. Why? Because in 1970 the planet stopped its very slight global cooling and began to undergo very slight global warming. So in the '80s, the doom-mongers cast off their thermal underwear, climbed into the leopardskin thongs, slathered themselves in sun cream and wired their publishers to change all references to "cooling" to "warming" for the paperback edition. That's why, if you notice, the global-warming crowd begin their scare statistics with "since 1970," an unlikely Year Zero which would not otherwise merit the significance the eco-crowd invest in it.

But then in 1998 the planet stopped its very slight global warming and began to resume very slight global cooling. And this time the doom-mongers said, "Look, do we really want to rewrite the bumper stickers every 30 years? Let's just call it 'climate change.' That pretty much covers it."

So we're still stuck on warming, or rather STUCK ON STUPID, as the trenchant analyst of the New Orleans Katrina aftermath incisively put it. Steyn finally hits on what appears to be a wonderful solution: self-culling.
Given the plummeting birthrates in Europe, Russia, Japan, etc., a large chunk of the world has evidently decided to take preemptive action on climate change and opt for self-extinction. Pace the New Yorker, much of the planet will be uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable. The Belgian climate specialist will be on the endangered species list with the spotted owl. Blue-state eco-bores will be finding the international sustainable-development conferences a lot lonelier.

What are the chattering classes going to worry about after they extinct themselves through abortion and non-sustainability?

Probably the barbarians at the gate; and they will be speaking an Asian language or two or three. And they will carve up the feminized girlie-men prelates and academicides for a nice amuse-guele before carrying off [probably grateful] womenfolk to propagate manly Asiatics who know how to kick girlie-men's asses.

I just wonder what Naomi Wolf would have thought if she survived the takeover.

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