Through a link of a link of a link, I came across an article written back in 2000 by the founder and former director of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore. Moore does a great job debunking the current enviro-nazi rhetoric and defacing 21st century environmentalist movement.

I now look at the mainstream environmental movement that I loved and can barely recognize it. Why? Because it has abandoned science to follow agendas that have little to do with saving the earth.
…
We have an environmental movement that is run by people who want to fight – not to win.

Please read the complete article here.

(via TenNapel)

<sarcasm>
Thanks to the vigilant efforts for earth-loving folk and the Marine Mammal Protection Act that our caring federal government enacted in 1972, the California Sea Lion has been saved from extinction. Imagine what your great grandchildren could have missed out on if the green minds had not prevailed! Now the population of sea lions on the west coast is nearly half a million! Oh, praise Gia.

To show their appreciation of the benevolence of mankind, hundreds of thousands of these two to eight hundred pound balls of love have descended on various harbors along the west coast. Marinas seem to be their favorite hang out now, where they can be close the good-souled people who put conservationism above capitalism in order to save these cute little critters.

Sea lions are now showing love to their sapien counterparts the only way they know how; “trapping people aboard boats, attacking city workers and defecating and vomiting on docks.” Those crazy rascals have also “attacked swimmers, chomped boogie boards and even yanked people off boats.” They also spend the wee hours of the night serenading area residents with their songs of thanks. One resident described the melody: “A barking dog doesn’t hold a candle to this. It’s like 40 barking dogs – in SurroundSound.”

Over a dozen sea lions gathering on the deck of a 37 foot sailboat in Newport Harbor actually swamped the boat and sank it. But that was just their way of giving us a little reminder of how conservation is more important that capitalism. It’s just boat, after all.
</sarcasm>

You can read more at the LA Times.

Once again, I find myself five posts behind and several days late on the latest news. Jeez, this information age keeps burying me in information!

So, today, I am forced to do another bulk post to get myself caught up. I now present this week’s Non-News Update! <Big Fanfare />

The pundits that be continue to butt heads regarding the tragedy du jour, Hurricane Katrina. In one of the saddest displays of unbrained journalism I’ve ever read, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Bruce Babbitt in which Mr. Babbitt insists that Congress must determine whether or not to rebuild New Orleans. He states, “New Orleans will survive only as an island surrounded by miles of open water.” I don’t even know where to begin debunking this pile of monkey hurlage.

First, Congress (as in the legislative branch of the federal government) should have absolutely no say in the future of New Orleans. New Orleans has its own city and county governments, not to mention the State of Louisiana, all of which are rightly in charge of their own jurisdiction. You would think Mr. Babbitt, who did time on President Clinton’s cabinet, would understand that we live in a federal republic where state’s rights are held sacred… most of the time.

Second, New Orleans is still there. Yes, there is much damage and muck to be dealt with, but Mr. Babbitt makes it sound as if the city had been scraped into the sea.

Third, Mr. Babbitt bases his hypothesis on the scare-tactic rhetoric of tree-hugging, global warming, fear mongers (of which he is a shining example) who have been proven wrong scientifically over and over again. The theory that “sea levels are likely to rise two to three feet in this century.” is based entirely on the fuzzy math of ice cap depletion.

None of this should come as any surprise given Mr. Babbitt’s track record (which you can see more of here). This guy is an A-1 eco-nazi nut-job.

Now, allow your gaze to drift to the right were the other end of the political spectrum has discovered some striking evidence in defense of our good Mr. Bush.

As you may know, President Gee-Dub, speaking the press, accepted responsibility for the quality of the response to victims of Katrina. What you may not know is that the quality of the response was, in fact, better than that of previous hurricanes. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an opinion piece which includes a remarkable quote from an Army National Guardsman who has been deployed in many similar disaster relief efforts:

“The federal response here was faster than Hugo, faster than Andrew, faster than Iniki, faster than Francine and Jeanne.”

The article goes on to point out that, after Hurricane Andrew, it took five days for the National Guard to organize and arrive on the scene in Florida. In Louisiana, however, the guard was there in only three days. So, if the government was racist in its Katrina recover effort, then the 2002 government must have really had it in for all those poor, elderly, caucasian retirees in Florida!

A former Air Force logistics officer is also quoted with regard to the MSM‘s false charges:

“We do not yet have teleporter or replicator technology like you saw on ‘star Trek’ in college between hookah hits and waiting to pick up your worthless communications degree… You cannot just snap your fingers and make the military appear somewhere.

Strangely, the media has not made much of the roughly 2,000 municipal and school buses in New Orleans which were not utilized to take people out of the city before Katrina struck.

The Mexican Army is on American soil for the first time 150 years, but this time it has nothing to do with the Alamo.

45 trucks crossed the border last Friday carrying about 200 military personel (and about 800 “undocumented volunteers”… Juuuust kidding!). Fifteen trucks are loaded with water, which, of course, hurricane victims have been warned not to drink. (Pah-dum-tshh) Click here to see exclusive pictures of the convoy just before crossing the border.

The Mexican government also announced that it had dispatched a Mexican Navy cruiser to the Mississippi coast, pictured here.

In a follow-up to several previous posts, the woman who claimed to have found a human finger in her Wendy’s chili, along with her co-conspirator husband, pled guilty to attempted grand theft and other charges relating to her false claim.

David Boyd, from the District Attorney’s office, said, “Thankfully, law enforcement thwarted their successful efforts at theft.” Uhhhh, right. I think he means that the cops discovered the plot before it succeeded. Anyway…

Anna Ayala faces up to ten years in prison for her failed fast food finger finding fraud. (Oooh! Impressive alliteration!) Several employees of the San Jose Wendy’s franchise were laid off after sales dropped 70% in the wake of Ayala’s false claim.

Her attorney voiced her remorse. “There are a lot of people that work for Wendy’s that were harmed. She always felt a lot of remorse about that.” Umm… “She always felt a lot…” Googly moogly, don’t you have to take a couple of English classes to get a law degree?

Richard Hatch, the openly homosexual winner of Survivor’s $1 million prize, has learned that, even if you survive Survivor, you can’t survive the IRS.

Hatch got slammed with a 10-count federal indictment for tax evasion and mail, wire, and bank fraud. The fed offered him a plea deal back in January for lesser charges, but he reneged on that deal. Free advice of the day: When the fed offers you a plea deal, take it!

You can read the full indictment over at The Smoking Gun.

Turns out the harmless gay millionaire hired an accounting firm to do his 2000 taxes in 2002 (just a wee bit late). The firm gave Hatch the return form which said he owed Uncle Sam over $400,000 in taxes and fees. Naturally, he wanted a second opinion, so he hired an independent accountant to crunch the numbers. Only problem is, he forgot to mention to this accountant several sources of income. This accountant figured that Hatch owed over $200,000. Better, but not good enough for Hatch.

He asked the accountant to draw up a return not including the $1 mil from Survivor. The accountant did this only after Hatch signed an agreement that the return form was for informational purposes only. This last return was more what Hatch was looking for: a tax return of $4400. Much better. Hatch signed the fraudulent return form and mailed it in.

Now, ripping off Uncle Sam is one thing, but American’s most famous “snake” didn’t stop there. Ripping off charitable donations is so much more fun!!

He was invited to be on a pilot episode of a reality show about giving money to charities. Naturally, a show about giving to charity doesn’t want to pay a millionaire to be on the show. Instead, they agreed to pay Hatch’s share to a charity of his choice. Hatch gave them the name of his favorite charity, Horizon Bound, which at that point did not exist. Hatch then ran down to the town hall and shuffled the paperwork to create his very own non-profit organization named… you guessed it… Horizon Bound. The $25,000 check to Horizon Bound landed in Hatch’s mail box. Not satisfied with mail fraud, Hatch decided to add bank fraud to the list when he altered the check to include his own name. Then he deposited the check in his personal account and, naturally, failed to declare any of this on his taxes.

All of this was in 2000, after Hatch’s Survivor claim to fame. I won’t even go into his 2001 tax evasion (where he failed to claim over $360,000 in income and several thousand dollars of “contributions” to Hatch’s favorite charity… himself).

When all is said and done, Hatch could face several years in prison and oodles of fines after which he’ll be lucky if he if he can call himself a thousand-aire. On the up-side, being a homosexual in prison is like being a fat guy at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Bon appetit, Mr. Hatch.

While things at work have been very hectic the last few days (Honest, they have!), I have been falling further and further behind on my usual daily reading and even further behind on my blogging. I did manage to pick up on a couple of articles yesterday and wanted to pass them along.

The hurricane has been dominating the news lately. (While I really enjoy Fox News’ political and war coverage, I truely hate their habitual sensationalism.) We’ve seen everyone from Rev. Jesse Jackson to the average Joe sleeping under an over-pass pointing fingers this way and that over Katrina and the resulting devistation. News flash!! George Bush didn’t create this hurricane. I’m not even comfortable calling it an “act of God”. If you know much about theology than you should know that all natural disasters are the result of a sin cursed earth, but I digress.

My hero, Ben Stein, wrote a short column (which you can read here) clearing up the muck of passing the buck for Katrina.

In other non-news, a friend sent me a great article on “Peace Mom” Cindy Sheehan. I know she’s been out of the public eye for a week or so. (Thank God Almighty!) But this was just too good to pass up. Mark Steyn’s piece on the “Peace Mom” is really well written and makes tons of sense. (He fails to mention the rumors I’ve heard about Sheehan calling Bush a “Zionist” and the fact that her sit-in is inspired more by anti-semitism than by pacifism, but, like I said, that’s only a rumor… for now.)

It is always flattering when you see a design very much like your own published by someone else. (Insert some inane quip about plagery and flattery here.) But, recently, someone used a similar 50’s design with a very non-50’s color scheme over at CSS Zen Garden. The end result… Happy Days meets Monkey Hurlage. Peeeee Yeeww!!

See it if you dare.

Check out CSS Zen Garden.

There is a gas station by the highway where I live. I’m sure you have a similar one in your neighborhood. It’s the gas station that no one ever goes to because the prices are ridiculously high, sometimes nine cents a gallon more than the station just up the road. That gas station, this weekend, posted a price of $2.69 a gallon for regular unleaded (87 octane). Great googly moogly! What is going on here.

I remember the big price scare after 9/11/01. The economy was tanking fast and everyone thought that the rag heads were going to turn off the taps and starve the U.S. of oil. Gas shot up from around $1.15 up to $1.85 in Colorado Springs (as I remember it). I made a pact with myself, that I would not buy gas for more that $1.80, and I pulled it off. I only had to ride my bicycle a couple of times and I managed to hold out until gas came back down. It only took about a week for folks to realize that the oil wasn’t going anywhere and that there was no need to stock pile the stuff.

So, what the heck is going on now? The war in Iraq? Nope. Oil has been flowing freely from Iraq for over a year now. Besides, Iraq isn’t that big of a supplier on the global scale. Terror threats? C’mon, how many times can we cry out for that wolf? The news occasionally blames labor strikes here or there. Rubbish! Even if one entire refining company stopped producing, the others would just step in and make all that money for themselves.

Okay, well, then it must be simple economics, supply and demand, right? That’s what I thought until today. I’d heard that Asian countries were growing fast economically, and that they were starting to buy more cars and drink oil as fast as they could ship it in. That may be true, but that’s no why oil is over $65 a barrel. You may say, “It’s the economy, stupid!” to which I would replay, “Hey, that’s not very nice, and besides, it’s wrong, stupid.”

I submit the following news blurbs:
From rfcnet.org, a Washington based lobby group:

“The economy is continuing to grow, but not as fast as the cost of gasoline. Consumer confidence is down because people are spending money on gasoline they would rather spend on everything from better steaks to new furniture … Oil experts say that the fundamentals indicate the price of oil should be at $38 to $40 a barrel, yet oil futures are trading in the mid $60 range … There is so much oil the refineries can’t even keep up with it and we are running out of storage space. Tankers are sitting offshore unable to unload because storage facilities are full.” ¹

From mosler.org, an economics think-tank:

In the past few months, Morgan Stanley has been accumulating warehouse space in the Netherlands to store its hottest new property: oil … With the stock market proving lackluster, the oil market has been a godsend for the banks, which describe it as the new Nasdaq … Speculators have helped to drive oil prices to near record levels … Oil is the talk of the City with many millions of pounds being made every day … [The oil futures market] acts as a benchmark for the price of oil … If prices on the futures market rise too far above the so-called physical market [mentioned above to be around $40 a barrel], oil users such as airlines and petrol dealers pull out, so prices fall … However, this traditional equilibrium has been rocked by short-term speculators dipping in and out of the futures market. This has led to sharp rises in the price and far more volatility. Meanwhile, banks such as Morgan Stanley are also beginning to move into the physical market to buy oil or even entire oilfields. ²

So, who is driving up the price of oil? Are those dern camel drivers pocketing all your hard earned money? Well, to some degree yes, but not any more than usual. A small group of investors and banks are making hundreds of millions of dollars off of schleps like me and you by artificially inflating the price of oil. Mohamed is not ripping you off, Morgan Stanley (and their peers) are!!

The problem is that oil investments (called “hedge funds”) are out of control.

The International Energy Authority recently criticized the role of speculators. They have also been attacked by French and American government ministers. Alan Greenspan, chairman of America s Federal Reserve Board, said that speculators had caused oil prices to surge … A senior executive at one oil firm said, “This is the hottest oil market I have ever seen. There has been a massive increase in hedge-fund activity … [investments] have doubled recently.” … Hedge-fund insiders therefore say that oil is an excellent short-term bet. ²

Yes, the world is using more oil, but it’s interesting to me that the people making the most noise about a possible shortage are the same people who are raking in millions on oil investments.

Now, before you storm the bank with torches and pitchforks, let’s talk about what can really be done to save our economy from the same folks who orchestrated the big crash in the 1920’s (and the great depression that followed). I don’t have a hundred million dollars to spend on oil futures and even if I did, no one investor could restore the market. In fact, even the President of the United States does not wield enough power to correct the market (even though he is taking most of the heat for it).

The oil market will crash. Any artificially inflated market does (ex. margin stock in the 1920’s and dot-com ventures in 2000). However, I’m not sure that our current growing economy can wait for the market to correct itself.

Governments world wide could do a lot to cut this trend short, by being honest with people about the real cause of the price hike. I don’t believe this would instantly return us to $1/gallon nirvana as some do:

This could all be stopped in one day and the price of oil could drip $20 a barrel … if Treasury Secretary John Snow would hold a news conference and simply tell the truth about the oil reserves on hand and how the hedge funds are manipulating the markets. ¹

Would it help? Sure. Some investors would see that oil prices are artificially high and pull their money out of funds which are heavily invested in oil to avoid losing money on the inevitable crash.

Consumers, believe it or not, probably have the best chance of breaking this market. I know we can’t all ride our bicycles to work. Nor can we effectively boycott gasoline. There are some movements out there to stop buying from the biggest producers (ExxonMobile). That may have some impact, but probably not enough. The consumers that can impact the market are the big consumers: Airlines, utilities, shipping companies, etc.; the folks that buy gas by the millions of gallons. If the airline industry alone were to band together and demand lower priced contracts, it would put a strain on the market bubble.

Maybe, just maybe, between industry demands, intelligent investors, and government exposure, this bubble will burst and we can all get back to the great American past-time guzzling gas at reasonable prices.

So what can you do today? Do what you can to buy less gas: drive smart, car pool, travel as little as possible. Let the big consumers know that want to see lower prices. Contact major airlines and other big fuel consumers and let them know that you will support companies that fight for lower fuel prices and that you will withhold your buying power from companies that don’t. Contact your government representatives (House, Senate, White House, Treasury Dept., and Energy Dept.). Ask them to expose the truth about oil reserves and real cause of these painful prices. You may not have a loud voice, but a chorus of thousands of quiet voices will be heard.

No this time, I really mean it. In the last few days I have run across some new technologies that just plain rock (or RAWK or r0XX0r or whatever linguistic mutilation you prefer).

For starters, you know how bloggers (like me) are always posting links to news stories or funny pictures or whatever and the URLs that they post are often three miles long and don’t come out right when you try to copy and paste them into an email to every friggin’ person in your address book (usually with a subject like “check out this funny link”) that people like me delete without even opening because we think it’s spam or some virus from that distant relative that we never talk to but that still sends us stupid forwards of funny pictures that we saw back in 1998 but they just found for the first time and they think it’s some new hilarity that they must share with the world? (Whew. Got carried away there.)

Well, there’s a web site out called TinyURL.com. You can go there and copy an above described URL into a form. TinyURL will turn that big behemoth of slashes and ampersands into a tiny URL… literally. Then all you have to put in your soon to be ignored email or blog post is something like http://tinyurl.com/7aods instead of its equivalent…
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2005018313812.gif

Is that cool or what?!

Second… I’m a late to catch on to this (as usual), so if you’ve already heard about out, just smile and nod the same way you do when your dad tells you a joke you’ve already heard him tell three times.

You’ve probably heard of flickr, an image hosting web site that makes it easy for the huddled masses (who don’t have their own web site) to share images with family and friends. Well, flickr has a feature called “Tags”. When you upload your picture to your flickr account, you can give it multiple “tags” which are basically key words associated with the image. Then, you can search for tags on the site, and find all sorts of pictures that have the same tag. It’s a pretty simple concept, but a powerful way to find content that you would not normally be able to find. It’s also a great way to waste the morning! (Such as trying to think of weird words and see what pictures are thus tagged, like “spork” for example.)

Finally, you have most likely heard of “widgets” (and I’m not talking about the abstract economics term). If not, let’s just say that they’re cool little programs that run on your computer and inform or entertain you while you work. If you are a Mac junky, you’ve lived with widgets for some time now.

Widgets have made the jump to the PC mainstream and with a quick download from Konfabulator.com you can get all sorts of cool widgets running on your machine. My current favorite is called Scribbler. It saves your last twenty copies (as in copy and paste) and allows you to paste things that you may have copied a while back. There are also widgets for tracking the weather, stocks, news, etc., or even silly ones like a little bug that wanders around your screen while you work.

I loves me some cool tech!

Pardon me for a moment while I vent some serious frustration. I know I’m about a month late on this and that a google search on the topic will yield thousands of bloggers with the same opinion, but I just have to get this off my chest.

<rant>I know that this is an established bit of Americana, but could someone tell me please why mass media insists on latching on to some rich kid’s personal tragedy and dragging it out for months on end under the pretense of journalism?! Every time I see that Holloway girl’s face on the news, I want to puke! The kids dead, okay? It’s sad, yes. It’s mysterious, I suppose. But it stopped being news after the first report. It’s been two months and she’s still making headline news. GAAAH!!

Civil rights groups are up in arms (and I feel rightly so) about the fact that the rich, pretty, blonde, white girl has been headline news for months, but literally hundreds of poor, minority kids go missing every week and are lucky if they make it onto a milk carton. The media coverage has even ruffled the feathers of some media watchdogs who say the disproportionate coverage is bad journalism (*gasp*).

This morning, while peacefully munching my Cheerios, I was driven to rage and was thiiiis close to putting a .25 caliber slug in my TV when Good Morning America ran yet another Holloway story. That alone, was maddening, but not ragening (no, it’s not a real word, but it should be). The rage came when I switched over to CBS only to find them running a story on… SCOTT PETERSON!!! AAAHHHHH!!!!
</rant>

Thanks, I feel much better now.

The New York Times reports that clever, humorous or even biting satirical t-shirts “have suddenly become the hipster’s preferred mode of expression.”

Suddenly?! Dude, I so hate New Yorkers. Just because they have “discovered” something new to them, they assume it’s new to the whole world. Where were they in 1989 when I started wearing freaky t-shirts (and even designing and producing my own)!? My old friend Galyn and I used to dazzle our summer school class mates with our bizarre fair of t-shirt madness. Ahh, those were the days! “Big Spotted Hoodoos” and “Fat Ugly Hula Girls”. I think I still have my hula girl shirt. I’ll dig it out and get a digi pic as soon as I get home! Then I’ll have to update this post with it, so check back later!!

The t-shirt trends have meandered through history, but they are no more potent now than they were back in my day (or even earlier, lest we forget the t-shirts of the sixties and seventies). In fact, many of today’s t-shirt “giants” are nothing more than unapologetic rip-offs of the previous generation. Charlatans!!

So, New Yorkers (and all you teenagers) who think you’re so groovy for “discovering” hip t-shirts, I have only one thing to say to you… PBPBPBBPBPBPBBPBPP!!!!

Here is the complete article. (It requires a log in. It’s free to register, but you can use mine: darkmanwork@hotmail.com / nytsucks)