Energy-efficient lightbulbs: Shiny but deadly

In their push to tell the rest of us how to live, environmentalists have forced some really bad ideas on the public.

There are electricity-generating windmills, which are not only unreliable, but whose blades we are now told slaughter birds.

There’s “clean” ethanol, whose manufacture requires changes in land use and farming that raise food prices and actually increase greenhouse emissions.

And now come energy-efficient lightbulbs.

Touted as a way to fight global warming (and cigarettes make you sexy), the twisty bulbs have become popular as replacements for Thomas Edison’s trusty incandescent lights.

Unfortunately, according to studies by the state of Maine and the Vermont-based Mercury Policy Project, the bulbs pose a risk of mercury poisoning if they break. (The mercury is in there to make them shine brightly.)

In an example of the logic-defying tenacity we’ve come to expect from environmentalists, though, the same studies recommend continuing to use the bulbs because the pennies’ worth of energy they save outweighs the risk of mercury poisoning posed by lightbulbs, so long as people take precautions like never, ever, EVER breaking a lightbulb, and properly cleaning up if one of the bulbs breaks.

By the way, the proper way to clean up after one of these bulbs breaks is as follows, from the Maine study:

If a bulb breaks, get children and pets out of the room. Ventilate the room. Never use a vacuum — even on a rug — to clean up a compact fluorescent light. Instead, while wearing rubber gloves, use stiff paper such as index cards and tape to pick up pieces, then wipe the area with a wet wipe or damp paper towel. If there are young children or pregnant women in the house, consider cutting out the piece of carpet where the bulb broke. Use a glass jar with a screw top to contain the shards and clean-up debris.

According to the Boston Globe: “We found some very high levels (of mercury), even after we tried a number of clean-up techniques,” said Mark Hyland, Maine director of the Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management. During several of the experiments, for example, he said mercury in the air was more than 100 times levels considered safe even after a floor was cleaned.

The US Environmental Protection Agency and the states of Massachusetts and Vermont said this week they are revising their disposal recommendations based on the Maine study.

Now that sounds like a bright idea. …

Global warming: The numbers

I’m feeling snarky today because I’m sick of hearing know-it-alls in the media talking about human-caused global warming without lifting a finger to investigate the claims they’ve been spoonfed by the eco-lobby.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most-cited culprit in our anticipated date with doom, its levels supposedly soaring because of human activity.

The mantra is oft-repeated, but less known are the real numbers:

• No. 1 greenhouse gas: water vapor.
• Portion of the atmosphere that is carbon dioxide: 0.03 percent (3/10,000ths).
• Portion of CO2 caused by human activity: 3.207 percent (or 0.0009621 percent of the total atmosphere, or less than 1/100,000th).
• Accounting for the relative effect of water vapor (a gas over which we have no control) and the relative effect of carbon dioxide, portion of total greenhouse effect attributable to CO2: 3.618 percent.
• Figuring effect of carbon dioxide multiplied by man’s contribution to CO2, the portion of the overall greenhouse effect attributable to human sources: 0.116 percent.
• Most-cited actual temperature increase over past 100 years: 0.6 degrees Celsius or about 1 degree Fahrenheit.
• Calculating for human contribution to global warming, the actual temperature increase possibly caused by humans over 100 years: 0.000696 degrees Celsius or 0.00116 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Predicted warming over next 100 years: up to 2 degrees Fahrenheit.
• Extrapolated possible human contribution to global warming over next 100 years: up to 0.0023 degrees Fahrenheit.

Summation: For the crime of contributing 0.00116 degrees to the average global temperature over the past century and possibly contributing 0.0023 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century, Al Gore and the Greens (aka Reds) would sentence us to a world in which the following (and more) are true:

• Gasoline is exorbitantly priced, if it is available at all.
• Declining private transportation, increasing regulation of travel.
• Unreliable energy sources, including regular blackouts.
• Remote control of your household utilities, including banning of fireplaces.
• Heavy taxation, possibly nationalization, of industries that don’t match the designated “carbon footprint.”
• Widespread long-term unemployment due to government meddling in economy and fleeing of industry to foreign, non-Kyoto countries. (See Europe’s current actual experience.)
• Banning or restrictions of hundreds of “greenhouse intensive” products we rely upon, including paper, all plastics, meat, certain plants, building materials, clothing materials, etc.
• Widespread hunger, possible government-enforced famines to reduce carbon footprint of farming and ranching.
• Rising taxation to “provide relief” to impoverished masses created by government policies and to create “busy work,” a la the Great Depression.
• Restriction of medical technologies considered energy intensive, such as MRIs, manufacture of certain drugs, life support for patients in vegetative states, etc.
• Possible large-scale disease outbreaks as public health system breaks down under weight of the poor.
• Further collapse of real estate and banking system as out-of-work families are foreclosed upon.
• Taxation, regulation and possible banning of children. (Yes, it’s already been proposed in Australia. Enforced abortions and sterilization, anyone?)
• Euthanization becomes standard treatment for all potentially terminal illnesses. (See the Netherlands.)
• All the above policies won’t make a dent in global warming.

Try balancing that equation.

Obama nation: The devil you don’t know, Part II

This has been a bad week so far for Barack Obama.

Not only did he become the object of Internet derision for this picture, showing him in Kenyan dress, but he got an endorsement he probably wished he hadn’t from none other than the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan.

It’s not Obama’s only connection to Farrakhan. Obama’s mentor and pastor has long been friends with Farrakhan, so it’s a reasonable question whether Obama has ever met the renowned black racist leader.

On Monday, Farrakhan said of Obama: “This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better.”

Farrakhan also compared Obama with Fard Muhammad, the founder of the Nation of Islam: “A black man with a white mother became a savior to us. …  A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall.”

Obama’s reaction to the endorsement was essentially a shrug of the shoulders. We should want more from a man who would be our leader.

Marijuana U: Oakland Bogarts higher education

As if the San Francisco Bay Area doesn’t have a bad enough reputation already, along comes Oaksterdam University, a new trade school in Oakland that trains its students for jobs in California’s “medical marijuana industry.”

Tuition is $200 plus the price of two textbooks (no word on whether they’re smokable), and students learn things like cultivating pot, which strains of pot (such as the “Dude, That’s Righteous Weed” or the ever popular “I Didn’t Inhale” variety) are best for different ailments (such as real work).

Students also get instruction in the law and how to break it in such a way that neighbors will truly sympathize when the feds haul you away. And, of course, there’s also a lesson on cooking with cannabis, in case anyone gets the munchies.

Said school founder Richard Lee, 45, owner of his own “dispensary”: “My basic idea is to try to professionalize the industry and have it taken seriously as a real industry, just like beer and distilling hard alcohol.” Or midget wrestling.

So far, 60 students have completed the two-day weekend course, which is sold out through May, when the current crop runs out.

To complete the class, students are given a take-home test (unclear if it comes in a plastic baggy or pre-rolled), with the high scorer becoming class valedictorian — or, in the professional jargon, “dude, you’re like totally valedictorian!”

Students taking the course learn lots of helpful information on their way to becoming full-fledged doobie-laureates. For example, they learn the proper use of garbage cans full of plant food, how to upgrade electrical outlets to serve a fan and high-tech (dude, he said “high”) air filter, hydroponic gardening, and important tips like, don’t set booby traps to keep neighborhood kids out of your stash.

Students give various reasons for attending the course, though several mention the horrendous markup they get from their local dealer. One student was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “I see it as a good thing. You are giving back to the community” — plus, dude, have you ever really looked at your hand?

McCain affair: NY Times criticizes itself

One of the weird things about the New York Times is that its staff is so huge (and its shoddy reporting growing so rapidly), it actually has an editor in charge of apologies.

Whenever it publishers a real boneheaded story, like the one last week alleging Sen. John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago, instead of the responsible editors or reporters apologizing, the Times unleashes the ombudsman, who gets to critique the paper’s actions on the paper’s front page.

This past Sunday, we were all treated to just such an outing.

The Times’ ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, admitted the paper had no business publishing the salacious allegations and had no evidence to back up its claims.

Being a Times employee, Hoyt has to cut his fellow editors and reporters some slack just so he doesn’t have to eat alone in the break room, so he insists they were on to a good story about McCain seeming to do a favor for a lobbyist while publicly campaigning against special interest influence.

However, Hoyt said, editor Bill Keller’s insistence that the story was not about an alleged affair was disingenuous:

“I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.”

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign reports that fundraising since the article’s publication is way up.

The Times has been blatantly partisan for years, and a good chunk of the country knows it. Any time the Times gets egg on its face is a blow struck for truth in the media.

Obama nation — the devil you don’t know?

Liberals hate to be accurately identified. Call them socialists for proposing wealth-redistribution schemes (tax the rich), call them unpatriotic for acting against American interests (not renewing FISA), call them pawns of big corporations (global warming), and you’ll get an indignant response that is about as genuine as a crocodile who just polished off a family of four protesting being called a maneater. UPDATE 10-24-08: Obama has denied it, but a 1996 newsletter proves it — the Democrats’ candidate was a member of a socialist political party dedicated to changing American society.
Click here.
UPDATE 09-03-08: They threatened TV station owners, they tried to have the Justice Department arrest the sponsors, but Obama’s goons haven’t stopped this blog from posting the Ayers video the Dems don’t want you to see. Click here.

They don’t even like to be called liberal — the PC term is “progressive,” as if any part of their agenda would mark progress by any sane measure. Now comes Barack Obama, liberal chameleon par excellence. The man presents himself as a blank slate and through vacuous platitudes like “change” and “hope” invites his followers to write their own version of what he stands for. But throughout the campaign, clues have come out about the real Obama, and the picture they start to form is not a pretty one, and it may even portend dire consequences should he ascend to the Oval Office. There were the little things, like not wearing a flag pin like other candidates, or not putting hand over heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, or the way his wife said last week that she had never been proud of her country before. There was the confusion about his religion, how he was born Barack Hussein Obama, attended a Muslim school according to his own book, was raised by a Muslim stepfather, but now claims to be a Christian, though his is a decidedly radical church. Then there are the people he claims as role models: the anti-Semitic pastor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who admires Louis Farrakhan; his self-described mentor “Frank,” who turns out to be the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis. Also consider some of the people he has been associated with: communist college professor William Ayers, with his wife Bernadine Dorhn, was a founder of the Weather Underground, a group that planted bombs at the Capitol and Pentagon and committed robberies in the seventies. In 1995, Obama attended a function at their house. According to the New York Sun, Ayers and Obama served together on the board of the nonprofit Woods Fund for three years beginning in 1999, and they have also appeared jointly on two academic panels, in 1997 and in 2001. In 2001, Obama accepted a $200 contribution from Ayers, according to officials with his campaign. On the day the Twin Towers were destroyed, 9/11/2001, Ayers was quoted by the New York Times: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers, who was never convicted of the Weather Underground bombings, is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Obama’s inclinations also appear in his choice of staff. According to columnist Debbie Schlussel, despite Obama’s campaign denouncement of Louis Farrakhan, Obama continues to employ a number of Nation of Islam members in high positions. When a former associate of Obama’s raised objections to Nation of Islam acolytes being put in positions of power, “Mr. Obama’s position was that he saw nothing wrong with the Nation of Islam and didn’t think it was a problem.” If true, then Obama’s denouncement of Farrakhan is a transparent lie. According to Schlussel, the same informant says that Obama is strongly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. The Web site of Palestinian activist and Obama acquaintance Ali Abunimah features photos of Obama and his wife attending a fundraiser for the late Edward Said, an adviser of Yasser Arafat’s. The accompanying article documents Abunimah’s dismay that Obama publicly changed his stance on Israel to win Jewish votes and contributions. And there is his opposition to fighting against terrorism, with his express plan to plunder the U.S. military budget to pay for his $800 billion (and counting) of proposed new spending. Obama’s following is almost cultlike in its character and in its inability to tolerate discussion of what the man truly stands for. And Obama himself isn’t forthcoming. But there are plenty of signs that whatever is truly in Obama’s heart, the good of the country is not at the top of the list.

Berkeley aftermath: Reining in the radicals

At least one Berkeley official gets it.

After the recent embarrassment over the city council’s decision to send the Marines a letter calling their recruiters uninvited, unwelcome intruders in the city, Councilman  Gordon Wozniak is seeking to put some controls on the city’s radicalism.

Wozniak, who opposed the anti-Marines measures, plans to ask his colleague to approve a resolution that all items from the city’s Peace and Justice Commission be heard twice by the city council before they are approved, similar to the way many city councils treat all new ordinances.

The commission, the most prolific and controversial of the city’s 45 council-advising panels, is the originator of the anti-Marines initiatives that got the council in trouble.

Wozniak said: “When the council makes statements in the name of the whole city, there should be more opportunity to comment before a decision is made. In terms of the Marines Corps recruiting station, some of the nasty language could have been caught so we wouldn’t have suffered this embarrassment.”

His proposal would be simple common sense for most cities, but not so much for the hippie haven that is known locally as Berserkeley. Among other proposals from the Peace and Justice Commission that have been adopted by the city are: one asking the United States to treat illegal drugs as a health issue; condemnation of  Firestone Natural Rubber Co. for its Liberia labor practices; a call to withdraw California National Guard troops from Iraq; a demand to prosecute former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on war crimes charges; and a declaration naming May 15 war resistance day.

Councilwoman Dona Spring, who joined the council’s socialist majority to tell the Marines to get out of town, doesn’t want anything slowing down the town’s verbal diarrhea. “(Wozniak’s proposal) needs to be defeated,” she said. “It makes no sense at all. It’s discrimination. Don’t hold the Peace and Justice Commission responsible for the Marines item. The city council passed it. If you don’t like it, just vote ‘no.’”

A sane person would have noticed that Wozniak did just that, to no avail.

It’s also a chuckle to hear a liberal crying about a minor rules change being discrimination after what Berkeley put the Marine recruiters through.

The likelihood that Wozniak may be able to put a much-needed leash on the city of Berkeley may be no higher than the likelihood of Al Gore telling the truth, but it’s encouraging to see that there’s still somebody in Berkeley with the intelligence and guts to fight the fanatics.

McCain affair: NY Times orchestrates a scandal

Much as I love a good political scandal, the story making the rounds today, allegations that Sen. John McCain’s aides thought he was having an affair with a lobbyist during the 2000 campaign, says more about the newspaper breaking the story than it does about the senator.

The story published by the New York Times brings up the affair allegations and rehashes well-known incidents from McCain’s past, including his entanglement in the Keating savings and loan scandal two decades ago. The story is rife with innuendo and unnamed sources as it discusses issues such as McCain’s use of lobbyists in his campaign (something every candidate does).

What the New York Times doesn’t tell you, though, is that journalists across the country have known for months that the Times reporters were working on the story and that Sen. McCain himself had been told about it in December, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Drudge Report late last year reported that Times editor Bill Keller had met with McCain to discuss the story. McCain denied the Times’ allegations at that time.

But the story sat for two months.

On Jan. 25,  the New York Times endorsed (back-handedly) McCain for the Republican nominee.

Only now, as McCain nears formally locking up the nomination and the Democrats appear closer to picking their candidate, does the New York Times spring the story.

It’s a textbook example of how the media can manipulate politics and people: Sit on a potentially damaging story about a candidate while promoting that very same candidate, then at the opportune moment go to print and give the opposing party (the one your editors really support) a big boost.

And newspaper editors dare to wonder why circulation is dropping.

Global warming: The coldest winter in decades

More bad news for the global warming scaremongers: The UK Daily Express and Newsmax are reporting that new data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveal that “lost” ice at the poles has returned.

According to Newsmax, the NOAA report shows that polar ice that had shrunk from 5 million square miles in January 2007 to just 1.5 million square miles in October is now back to almost its original levels.

Further, according to the report in the Daily Express,  there is nearly one-third more ice in Antarctica than normal for this time of year, and snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere is at its greatest since 1966.

It appears Mother Nature has become a global warming denier.

Beef recall 15 years in the making?

As the nation’s schools and restaurants revise their menus in the wake of this weekend’s recall of 143 million pounds of beef, the largest recall in history, many critical eyes are turning toward the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA has said the recall was only a precaution, but it raises issues about the safety of the nation’s food supply and whether the alleged slaughterhouse animal abuse is an isolated problem.

The USDA is under fire from lawmakers who are rightly incensed that the agency has been lax in monitoring procedures at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., based in Chino, Calif.

According to the Associated Press, Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, chairwoman of the House Agriculture, Food and Drug Administration Appropriations Subcommittee, said after watching the inhumane scenes on a videotape recorded by the Humane Society, that she was concerned the tape “demonstrates just how far our food safety system has collapsed.”

Consumer group Food and Water Watch has alleged that the USDA has allowed anywhere from 7 percent to 21 percent of inspector positions go vacant in recent years, depending on the district — a charge which USDA spokesman Keith Williams denied.

Although officials so far have said the health risk from the meat in question is small, DeLauro, D-Conn., has asked USDA Undersecretary Dick Raymond for an accounting of how many schools may have received the recalled beef for their lunch programs, as well as affected commercial customers.

The video that led to the recall showed sick cows being moved with forklifts and poked with electric prods, rather than being separated from the healthy cows and tended to by a veterinarian, as required by federal laws. USDA officials have been attempting to soft-pedal this entire event, but a sharp-eyed reader of this blog found a video on YouTube that indicates this may not be a new problem.

The poster of the video on uTube claims the following undercover footage was taken at the Westland/Hallmark Meat Co., formerly called Dairyland.

However, the newscast from 1993 does not actually identify the slaughterhouse by name or even indicate clearly if all the undercover footage was shot at the same place, though the reporter refers to a Chino, Calif., meat plant.

It’s also important to note that the broadcast does not actually come right out and say that abuses were taking place at the plant in the video. However, it certainly raises a question about how effective the USDA has been in preventing animal abuse in the beef industry. Warning, some of the images may be disturbing.