Crazy weather

It was in the 50's yesterday. It got up to 80 today. Still have my fans going to move air around and out of the house. WTF?

-- Badtux the Globally Warm Penguin

Why global warming is a myth

Because the Bible promises to not flood the Earth after Noah, therefore there will be no global warming. Uhm, okay. Nevermind what science says about global warming (i.e., that it's happening). What's that silly "science" stuff ever gotten us, anyhow? Other than indoor plumbing? Well, indoor plumbing and the modern medicine that means most of us survive childhood now, unlike the good old days when most children died before reaching age 5? Well, indoor plumbing and modern medicine and airline travel and computers and the Intertubes we're typing this on. Other than that, science is just way, way overrated, right?

So anyhow, that's nuts, but it's just the rantings of a random religious loonie, you say? Err... NO. That's the rantings of the new (Republican) chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, John Shimkus.

As one of the commenters at that blog says, "adults that have imaginary friends should be considered insane and unfit for political office." Amen, brother :).

-- Badtux the Irreverent Penguin

Tea party supports tea

Texas tea, that is. Black gold. Texas crude. Big Oil. Yeppers, the San Jose Murky News reports that California tea baggers have been spotted waving signs in support of oil companies hoping to get passed Proposition 23, which would overturn the state's strict carbon emissions law. The main funders of the Prop 23 effort are three oil companies -- Valero, Tesoro, and Koch Industries.

This is just more proof that the whole tea bagger phenomenon is a bought and paid for subsidiary of the same oligarchs who got George W. Bush electorated and who are doing their darndest to turn America into Mexico North, where the oligarchs are filthy rich and the rest of us are their servants. The money quote from the article:

"When I see senior citizens out on the street corner holding 'Thank You Valero' signs, it just doesn't jibe," said Jamie Court, president of Consumer Watchdog. "Clearly the tea party is being used, and they are becoming the ground army for the oil refineries. Senior citizens would not come out to defend Valero unless there's some formal structure to get them out there."

You think? Like, duh?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

It is 101F in Santa Clara, CA

And it is 88F inside my house, thanks to the thermal mass of a bunch of masonry for the fireplace and the tile base in the bathroom. I shut up the house at 7AM this morning, when it was 66F inside after the window fans had been running all night pulling outside air through the house. The sad thing is that even 88F feels good compared to the outside temperature...

-- Badtux the Overheated Penguin

Five investigations, five "Not Guilty"

So, did climate scientists rig a study into global warming to show that global warming was happening when it in fact is not? There have now been five investigations into this question, and all five say that the study is sound. They criticize aspects of the scientists' behavior, which they basically call catty and unprofessional, but the science is sound.

Five investigations by scientific investigators, five "not guiltys"... surely this puts the whole "Climategate" thing to rest? Not so fast, padre! These investigations were all done by scientists! Who are, like, these un-American eggheads! None of them were done by Sarah Palin or Rush Limpdick, so they're not valid!

Like with Iraqi WMD, God himself could come down and say "there is no WMD" or "there is no scandal", and the neanderthalic True Believers would still refuse to admit reality. Oh wait, let me rephrase that to remove the word "neanderthalic". I just insulted Neanderthals, I think.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Interesting fact found at World Nut Daily

It seems that the more you expose children to bullshit, the more likely they are to recognize it as bullshit. Apparently they found that children who attend fundamentalist Sunday Schools are more likely to leave fundamentalist churches, defend gay marriage, etc. than children who don't. Probably because if you've been exposed in depth to the actual arguments that these churches use to preach hate against others, you have a far greater chance of figuring out that they're full of shit than if you're motivated by a vague "squick" factor and squicky ads with some surface plausibility if you don't look closely.

Reminds me of my notion that a lot of the kids who are buying the "Lady Gaga" stuff are in on the joke. They know that "Lady Gaga" is a cynical ploy that a frustrated singer-songwriter by the name of Stefani Germanotta came up with when people wouldn't shut up while she was trying to play her pretty songs, and it appeals to their sense of cynicism as well as their liking for bouncy dance music to dance to.

Today's kids are living in a hopeless world. Oh sure, there was the threat of the atom bomb when I was coming up, but after ICBM's and MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) came around, we had hope that they would never be used, and we had hope that we could continue human progress into the future. Today... ah yes, today. They see our government controlled by evil and vicious men who dictate to our leaders what they should vote for and do or else get the Mafia treatment of a cutoff of election funding and the funding of a well-funded opponent. They see our leaders leading us straight into a brick wall threatening mass extinction of most of the human race within their lifetimes due to peak oil and global warming (collapse of technological civilization, which these threaten to do, would kill over 6 billion of the 6.8 billion people on the planet today and pretty much end civilization forever). They see nothing they do being able to change things soon enough to make any difference, so they're, like, "what the fuck, let's dance our booties off to some other cynical young person who gets it."

In the end, that is the worst fallout from the 28 years of Republican domination of U.S. politics that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980: the end of hope. Children born during those 28 years came up knowing that they would have a worse life than their parents, that the good jobs were going to go overseas or be filled with overseas immigrants pulled over to work for cheap and leave only shit service jobs that they'd have to compete with 3rd world immigrants for, that their politicians were either senile morons, genial philanderers, or evil, that the world they died in was likely to be far harsher than the world they were born in, that the chances of dying young due to lack of health care, exposure to the elements, or simple starvation were far higher for them than it was for their parents growing up. What kind of head-fucking that gives a kid is something I don't want to even think about. But it's no surprise that children exposed to particularly high levels of bullshit become more adept at figuring out that it's bullshit... whether we're talking about religious fundamentalists whose kids leave their churches in vast numbers, or our sick culture as a whole.

-- Badtux the Hope* Penguin

* As in, hope I die before the final collapse comes, which seems likely since I am becoming an elderly penguin far more rapidly than I'd like.

Talking point: "The USA has plenty of oil"

Right-wing morons are quick to say that "we don't need Saudi oil, the U.S. has plenty of oil, but the environmentalists won't let oil companies drill for it!" As usual, the right-wing morons are pulling shit out of their ass. Reality is entirely different.

Now, first a disclaimer here. I helped develop some of the techniques for directional drilling that allowed re-drilling so many old oilfields and extracting the last of the oil there. I have talked to a lot of oil industry geologists over the years either as friends or professionally. And here's the deal: 95% of the oil that was here in the year 1900 is *gone*. Kaput, finished, burned. Every single inch of the U.S. continent and continental shelf have been thoroughly thumped and mapped, and 95% of that has been thoroughly exploited. The remaining 5% would be maybe 5 years of oil for the entire USA. Period. That's it. That's what the industry professionals who've actually gone out and *measured* this shit say. That five years of oil is a big heaping load of profit for the oil industry if they were allowed to exploit it and thus they whine mightily about "the environmentalists", but behind the scenes even their own experts don't believe the bullshit their PR people are putting out about how the mean environmentalists are keeping the U.S. dependent upon Middle Eastern oil.

Okay, so that's out of the way. Five years. But then what's this I hear? "There's vast amounts of oil shale in the central part of the USA!" Uh, yeah, there is. But the problem with exploiting that shale isn't environmentalists. The problem is that we simply don't have any economical or efficient way to get that shit out of the ground. Deal is that it isn't really oil, it's *tar*. It doesn't actually flow unless you heat it up with steam. What that means is that you have to make a *lot* of steam to liquify enough of it to make pumping it out of the ground worthwhile. And that takes a lot of heat. Creating that heat takes a lot of energy -- more energy than you'd get from the oil that you got out of the ground. That's okay in some cases -- you can consider it to be a way to convert a lot of solar or nuclear energy into a smaller amount of oil energy, for example, oil still being the most effective way to store energy for transportation while neither solar nor nuclear in their ordinary form are useful for transportation (without being stored in a battery or as oil, anyhow). But then the other component of steam is *water*. And there just isn't any water where the shale is -- that's the high plains. The *DRY* high plains. There's a few rivers that run through it that could be exploited for local exploitation of the shale, but the amount of steam needed would pretty much suck them dry. Somehow I suspect St. Louis would be a bit upset that they no longer have a Missouri River flowing past them... and we're still not talking about sufficiently exploitable oil to make it worth money.

But, you say, there are these companies claiming they're going to make oodles of money off of these oil shales if the environmentalists would just let them do it. Err, can you say "stock scam"? Because that's exactly what it is, a stock scam. These companies are trying to get suckers ... err, "investors" ... to dump money into these bogus "oil drilling schemes". These are the same kinds of scam artists who are trying to bilk evangelical Christians with tales of bogus oil in Israel.

In short, the people propagating the talking point that "the USA has plenty of oil but the environmentalists won't let us drill for it" are scam artists, pure and simple. They are committing fraud, telling lies in order to personally benefit themselves. So next time someone whines that talking point, you're talking either to a victim of one of the scammers who invariably will refuse to believe he was scammed -- or to one of the scammers himself. And which one can be easily told by seeing who benefits from the lie...

-- Badtux the Oil Penguin

It is fuggin' *hot* over here

This penguin took a nice little 4 hour hike today that turned into a 6 hour hike. The reason? It's *hot* here in Sodom By The Bay. As in, when I cranked my Jeep to come home, the thermometer said 102F (granted, that's because the Jeep was sittin' in the sun, but so was I!). And that was at 2800 feet elevation in the coast mountains!

So anyhow, heat slows me down quite a bit, since getting rid of heat is kinda hard for me. I end up taking my time, not blasting away, in order to keep from overheating. And of course drink water and Gatorade powder. 3 liters lasted the whole trip thankfully.

So anyhow, I'm tired. I'll leave you with this thought: Democracy is 10 wolves and 10,000 sheep voting on what's for dinner (since most of the American people are sheep, baaaa!). Learn to like eating grass.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

94F

Crap, I musta brought the desert back with me. It's friggin' *hot* outside. I sure am glad I changed to my summer windshield last night (the small one angled to blast air at me) and wore my mesh-vented gear today, otherwise I'd have a mighty warm ride home this evening!

-- Badtux the Motorcyclin' Penguin

3PM update: *96F*! This in a city where nobody even bothered building houses and apartments with air conditioning until the 1990's, because the climate is generally so mild that you never needed it! "Global warming is fiction", my overheated penguin ass!

WTF is up with this weather?

It's 38F here in sunny Babylon By The Bay. It was 80F here a week ago. What's with this fuckin' weather, dude? Oh well, I like this kinda weather (fat waddling waterfowl, remember?), but tomorrow it's supposed to start raining again. That's good too, but I was hoping to go Jeeping this extended weekend, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen :-(.

-- Badtux the Weather Penguin

Global warming is imaginary

Which is why there will likely be mandatory water rationing in the Silicon Valley next year.

Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Water is the new gold

California Water District cutting water deliveries by 85% due to global-warming-caused drought. Of course, water woes are not new to California. In the early part of the 20th century, the City of Los Angeles turned the "Switzerland of California" into waterless desert by stealing all their water via underhanded activities. But this is a disaster that is unprecedented in California history, because this basically kills irrigation for agricultural uses. Expect much higher prices for vegetables next spring and summer...

-- Badtux the Watery Penguin

Too hot for penguins :-(

Forecast for San Jose is 93 to 104F today. This is ridiculous. This is a city where they didn't even bother putting air conditioning into homes until twenty years ago because it just wasn't needed. But Al Gore is fat...

-- Badtux the Sweltering Penguin

Damn you all to Hell

You're killing the penguins. Global warming has caused rain to replace snow in Antarctica, and penguin chicks cannot survive rain because they have no feathers to shed rain.

This penguin is very sad :-(.

-- Badtux the soon-to-be-lonely Penguin

Washing away

I just spent a couple of hours looking at satellite pictures of what used to be Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana. I remember... but it's all water now. All the land except narrow strips, all the land I remember south of Houma. It's all water now. The land... it's just gone.

But the music remains. For a while, anyhow.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Like the crack of doom

Like the crack of doom, $4.99 gas in Santa Barbara underneath the doomsday sky of the GAP Fire.

-- Badtux the Photo Penguin

Congratulations to President Gore

Congratulations to President Gore for his Nobel Peace Prize for his work popularizing environmental issues, especially the issue of global warming. Taking the general consensus of the scientific community and polishing it up for public consumption is something he's been doing for literally decades now, starting with his 1992 tome Earth In The Balance, and he does it well.

And what does the Never-Right Wing(tm) say about all this? Well, to quote one of their minor troglodytes:

Global Warming is a religion, and Al Gore is their Messiah. Science and the scientific method are bullshit.

Sigh. Where to start. First, science is about things that can be directly observed and measured. The scientific method consists of designing experiments to test directly observable phenomena (such as the temperature of the Earth over time, the effects of CO2 gas upon heat retention inside a greenhouse, the amount of CO2 gas produced by burning a ton of coal or a barrel of oil, the number of tons of coal and barrels of oil extracted over the decades, etc.), then using this data to validate or invalidate a hypothesis such as "human activity of burning coal and oil can cause global warming". However, just gathering data and making hypotheses is not enough. The experimental design must pass muster via peer review to qualify for publication in a peer reviewed journal (and peer reviewed journals will publish pretty much anything that passes a basic laugh test), and the experiment must be independently replicated by other researchers in the area. If, and only if, a phenomenon can be independently validated by the overwhelming majority of researchers in an area as published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, is it accepted as a scientific fact. Human contributions to global warming have passed this muster. Thus global warming is a scientific fact, not a religious one, and the Never-Right Wing Troglodytes are wrong (as usual) to call it religious.

Given that, their next step is to try to discredit science and scientists as a whole by calling it, and the scientific process involved, "bullshit". We have over 500 years of experience saying that this is a lie. You are using one of the product of those 500 years of experience right now. If you want to go back to living in filth picking lice out of your beard, smelling like ripe garbage, losing your teeth by age 30, and with 90% infant mortality giving an average lifespan of 30 years meaning that your family graveyard is full of tiny headstones saying "Baby Republican B April 5 2005 D April 6 2005", fine and dandy. That's a personal choice you make. But personally, I prefer having all these products of science available to me. If science is "bullshit" as the Never-Right Wingers put it, it's "bullshit" that has worked pretty darned well for you and me, my friend, which is all I care about (this is the philosophy known as "Utilitarianism", BTW, if you want to go study Philosophy 101 in college).

If you can find me an alternative to science that works better, tell me about it. Until then, I'm going to continue relying on science and the scientific method to produce the advances in our knowledge that make our life safer and better, because we have 500+ years of experience showing us that it's pretty darned good at doing that. Just one stroll through my family's old family graveyard looking at the dozens of tiny little headstones surrounding every large headstone in the old section of the graveyard is enough to tell me that much.

As for the Never-Right Wingers, when was the last time they were right about anything, whether it was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the genius of George W. Bush? Personally, I will rely on the scientists to do the science. Since I am not a climate scientist, I will rely on the climate scientists using the mechanisms of science (i.e. peer-reviewed papers replicated over time to validate experimental data) to tell me this, not PR people in the pay of oil and coal companies or random ignorant people off the streets or even random former weathermen who are not climate scientists and have never done any climate science. Science. It has a 500+ year track record of working. Right-wing faith-based argumentation, on the other hand... shrug. Only track record it has is of being never right. 'Nuff said.

-- Badtux the Warming Penguin

There is no global warming and the Earth is flat

1. Just as The Heartland Institute ((R) ExxonMobile Inc.) has demonstrated we don't have proof there's global warming, we don't have proof that the world is round.
2. Oh sure there's all those photos, but how do we know that the photos from outer space of the earth aren't fakes? It is all propaganda of the liberal media just l ike global warming!
3. If the earth was round then we would need curved lumber to build our houses. Otherwise our houses wouldn't fit flat on the ground. Try building a matchstick house on top of a beach ball and tell me you can do it with straight matchsticks!
4. Pres. Bush should support a commission that would build a big wand that would extend from the earth out and take a "real" picture of the earth.
5. Teaching our kids that the earth is round is "junk science" and they need to understand that as part of God's master plan, it is flat......
6. The proposition that the earth is a globe moving through space at over 1000mph is referred to as "the orbiterran fallacy". It is demonstrated amply every time we send up a space shuttle. You will note that when the shuttle comes back down, the earth is still there. If it were moving through space, when the shuttle came back down, Earth would be long gone.
7. Also note that when the shuttle lands at Edwards AFB, it lands, rolls to a stop, and stays there. Try landing a pea on a basketball. It will roll off every time.
8. Photos taken from space that purport to show a spherical earth suspended in space are easily explained by the relativistic bending of light rays in the presence of large gravitational fields.

In short: Let's quit making decisions based on junk science, and embrace the truth -- that, just as there is no global warming, the Earth is flat!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

California Burning

The Silicon Valley is hazed in smoke today, as the Lick Fire burns out tens of thousands of acres of the Sierra Diablo, including some of my favorite hiking haunts. The only good news there is that fire is a normal part of the rejuvenation process of those hills. According to people with hunting camps back in those hills who've seen the results of earlier fires in the area, when the spring rains are done, these hills will be covered with grass and be nicely green again, and the wildlife will return better than ever because of all the new forage. In the meantime, my eyes are burning, my nose is itching, and it's just a miserable day outside. I'd get you a photo, but my camera doesn't seem able to take a good one of the haze. It just looks like typical distance fog. But believe me, it isn't.

-- Badtux the California Penguin

War Porn

War. Death, destruction, killing. To quote a great poet, "War. Huh. What is it good for?"

War does not create. War does not add anything. All war does is destroy. All war does is consume. War does not help economies, because everything created to fight wars does nothing to make people's lives better. Instead, the bullets and bombs and weapons are destroyed by the act of using them, as if the output of those factories had simply been thrown into a bottomless pit. War takes wealth, and turns it into murder.

Yes, murder. I use that word. War is murder. War is the taking of human lives. War is blood and guts and dead children lying in streets and the smell of piss and shit and the screaming of women and wails of children as they die in the crossfire. War is starvation and thirst, as the supply lines of civilization that keep civilians alive collapse in a hail of bombs and bullets and children shit their lives out in the street from drinking contaminated water and women are shot in the head and guts as they venture out of their homes searching for water and food for their children. Those who fight wars do not do anything glorious, unless you are the serial killer Hannibal Lector and believe that the removal of human life from this planet is the most reverent and sacred act that can be done. War is organized murder committed by governments in pursuit of whatever interests the leaders of those governments are pursuing.

Those who fight wars stink. Literally. For the warrior, war means that bathing becomes a seldom-done thing. The cake of dirt and rancid sweat and oil turns your hair into an oily greasy stuff on top of your head that, trapped under your helmet, fells like some sort of animal clasping your scalp. The acrid smell of rancid body oil and sweat and dirt is a bitter taste in your mouth (your nose has long since shut down and no longer smells it). Your underwear is filthy with urine and with feces because toilet paper is in short supply on the front lines. Sometimes you lay on top of your shit -- if your squad is pinned down and you can't move and you gotta go, well, it's a case of shovel a little dirt out on one side of whatever hole you're hiding in using the butt of your rifle, roll over, drop pants, dump, wipe with whatever you got to wipe with, roll back over, shove a little dirt back to try to cover it up enough to keep from squishing it all over you when you move around. This is oh so glorious and glamorous. And never seen when the war porn comes on.

If the war porn -- the movies, video games, and books that describe war -- ever tried to reflect the reality of war rather than some airbrushed glamorized fiction, people would run screaming from the movie theatres. Teenage boys would stare in shock at their video games as their brother or sister or mother or father were dismembered by a bullet in front of their face, begging for mercy, begging for a bullet to put them out of their misery. But of course the war porn does no such thing. Instead, it paints war as glamor and courage and bravery, as a glorious quest that turns a boy into a man.

And so we soak in war porn, every day. War porn comes on our evening news, a curiously sanitized pornography where war happens, yet nobody dies, where there are no dismembered bodies of children lying around on the ground after a 500 pound bomb blows up a daycare, where the men fighting the war look like movie stars instead of people who are very much in need of a bath, where the smell is never described. The smell. Ah yes, the smell. It is, indeed, lucky for the war pornographer that television has no way to transmit smells.

And so the death and destruction goes on, and everybody salutes and goes "hip hip hoorah!" as the war porn plays on their movie and tv screens. And the word "war", which should be a filthy word like "cunt", "nigger", "fuck", and "bitch", instead is used as a word for glorious quests like the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, the war on... well, I suppose this is all appropriate, in a way, since the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, etc., involve the mass destruction of thousands of human lives as white American claps and says "Yeah! Another porch monkey caged! Another spic sent to jail! Another sand nigger killed like a dog! U S A! U S A!". But the horror of war is not, of course, what most people think of when they see the word "war" used in this way. Instead, all they see is the airbrushed glamor of the war porn in which they are immersed each day.

And so it goes, in the Delusional States of America, land of the war porn and home of the sheeple...

-- Badtux the Porn Penguin

Comment on this over at the Mockingbird's place