Tuesday
22Apr
Time Out: Getting Lost on Purpose
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 10:28Politics and the usual depressing subjects need to be offset sometimes with more pleasant stuff, or we'll go nuts. Please, no comments about it being too late for me.
There I was over the weekend, cleaning out the workshop. 23 years worth of accumulated junk and treasures, in serious need of organizing/burning/tossing, and I was not happy doing it. By Sunday mid-day, the overload was too much. Had to decompress.
So, I got on the bike, filled it up with gas, and pointed it in the general direction of the Gulf of Mexico. Rode until I ran out of pavement, doubled back a few dozen times, putted down narrow lanes through the coastal marshes, waved at fisherpersons, found places I never knew existed, ate doughnuts, smelled the sea air, and eventually, near dusk, put the sun at my back and rode east until I saw a familiar road.
Sometimes being lost is the best thing.
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Reader Comments (5)
Nice. Sounds good for th' soul.
back when gas was affordable...
and everybody i knew was young & dumb...
we'd get 4-6 friends together and just take off...
no plans... no destinations... sometimes we had to work just to get home...
... but i swear, every trip is still considered as the best times of my life!
i recommend that everybody sleep on a beach for a week...
. . . just once in their lifetime.
how do I post this?A New 'Green' Body Count Begins
By Steven Milloy
Fox News | Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Food riots caused by rising food prices have erupted around the world. Five people died in uprisings in Haiti, perhaps the first of many casualties to come from the fad of being "green."
Food riots also broke out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. The military is being deployed in Pakistan and Thailand to protect fields and warehouses. Higher energy costs and policies promoting the use of biofuels such as ethanol are being blamed.
"When millions of people are going hungry, it’s a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels," an Indian government official told the Wall Street Journal. Turkey’s finance minister labeled the use of biofuels as "appalling," according to the paper.
Biofuels have turned out to be a lose-lose-lose proposition. Once touted by the greens and the biofuel industry as being able to reduce the demand for oil and lower greenhouse gas emissions, biofuels have accomplished neither goal and have no prospect for accomplishing either in the foreseeable future.
The latest research shows that biofuels actually increase greenhouse gas emissions on a total lifecycle basis. Add in that taxpayer-subsidized diversion of food crops and food crop acreage to fuel production has contributed to higher food prices and reduced food supply, and biofuels turn out to be nothing less than a public policy disaster.
The situation is not likely to get any better any time soon, as cutting the farm subsidies and tariffs on sugar cane-based ethanol imports that have fueled the ethanol craze seems to be yet another third rail of U.S. politics.
Biofuel proponents hope the reliance on food crops to produce biofuels is temporary, and they point to a future where non-food biomass (such as corn stalks and grasses) is used to produce so-called cellulosic ethanol.
But in addition to the fact that the technology for producing cellulosic ethanol on a cost-effective basis is nowhere near ready for prime time, the greenhouse gas footprint of cellulosic ethanol likely will be far worse than that of corn-based ethanol.
It’s one thing to transport relatively compact corn kernels to be processed into ethanol; it’s quite another to transport bulky biomass. The bulk problem would require a multitude of cellulosic ethanol plants to be built around the country — a project that could be quite costly and difficult to locate given the phenomenon of NIMBY-ism and the problem of plant emissions making it more difficult for states to comply with federal air quality standards.
States that don’t meet those standards don’t get their much-needed federal highway funds. Food riots are only the tip of the green iceberg. We might also expect energy riots to erupt one day.
The world has an ever-growing population that needs more and more energy, but the greens are doing everything they can to constrict the world’s energy supply.
As the Sierra Club campaigns to shut down our coal-fired electricity capabilities, the Natural Resources Defense Council campaigns to prevent nuclear power from taking its place. The demise of coal-fired power and the blockage of increased nuclear power will increase the demand for supply constraints on, and the prices for, natural gas.
But then again, environmental advocacy group Earth First perhaps is helping to alleviate the looming natural gas crisis by campaigning against power plants that use the fuel. In a recent campaign against a South Florida power plant, an Earth First campaigner stated that the environment ought not be threatened "so that people can fuel their greedy energy desires." "Just say 'no' to electricity," seems to be the bottom line of eco-think.
Even wind power is becoming more and more politically incorrect. Environmentalist-friendly Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley this week announced that wind farms will not be allowed on state lands because they are eyesores.
Considering eco-activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s long-standing opposition to a wind farm off the coast of his family’s Hyannis Port, Mass., compound as well as environmentalist concerns that wind farms kill wild birds, it seems that the future of wind power is uncertain.
The environmentalist effort to tie our energy policy knots already is producing results. The availability of electricity in the Washington, D.C., area is so fragile that Maryland officials already are planning for summertime rolling blackouts starting in 2011.
In California, officials are so concerned that a recent state legislative proposal would have provided local utilities the power to control thermostats in new homes and businesses. Although this effort failed, it’s not that hard to imagine that, one day, all homes will have their electrical use controlled by local utilities — no doubt run by your local green energy czars.
Millions in the developing world have died and continue to do so from the greens’ campaign against pesticides such as DDT. Nothing less should be expected from their new campaign that threatens global food and energy production.
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Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com and the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams.
[THE SHAME FOLKS,is that if elected-JOHNNY MCCAIN will do NOTHING to stop this,as he,s on the lunatics side-the algore side on this,and soon folks-very soon,MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE NEEDLESSLY OF STARVATION-MILLIONS!! ,jco P.S. let alone the rioting etc. thats already occuring due to this biofuel lunacy ]
Jim, welcome aboard. A better place to post the article above might be in the general discussion area, which allows members to create their own topics for others to discuss. Posting it here among comments (on another topic) will less likely get the response it may merit.
Also, you might want limit the actual article to a few sentences or a couple of paragraphs and then link to the story, to avoid any issue with free-use laws (and to save on storage space--we are moving to a new server soon but right now we're using rented services).
One other thing: I set up another forum for you to post the many jokes you know. Check the Discussion link and you'll see it and the general discussion topics. I know it doesn't look quite like a forum yet, but give us time...we'll get there. Thanks.
is that code name for Jimmmco?