Dept. of Ain't That the Truth

From the brilliant xkcd:

"The Relentless Pedantry of Nutrition and Ecology"

Althouse's vivid phrase.  More from this post:

“There’s a generation that will be less interested in gardens,” says Daniel J. Stark, executive director of the public gardens association, “but that generation is incredibly interested in what’s happening with the planet. Recently, my own two daughters, and a friend, were reading me the riot act about cutting down some trees.”

Mr. Stark’s daughters are 4 and 8.

 "So dad proclaims what his little daughters will be interested in. Incredibly interested in. They'll be all about saving the planet. Greenness! Wellness! Save that tree, but not because it is beautiful, so it can absorb the nefarious CO₂."

Oh, save me my holy loving God, if that's the attitude of our future leaders.  But as The Divine Miss A notes, there is hope that "Maybe the kids will rebel against the Puritans of the older generation who have misappropriated so much of their precious time with morality lessons. It could be a whole movement, returning to the hedonistic love of the beauty of nature."

Just because a bunch of propaganda is repeated endlessly to a child does not mean the child will believe it as an adult. I'm a living example.

On to DC!

I'll be on my way to Washington DC in a few hours.  Don't know how light blogging will be for the next 8-9 days, but I'll try to give some impressions.

(World's biggest phallic symbol?  Or just an expression of Man's highest aspirations?)

Best Spam Comment Ever?

Since the advent of word verification on comments, I still occasionally get spam, and it would seem that some fool is actually placing these manually, on at a time, often on two-year-old posts.  Some appear to have come from China and some from Korea, though I have no doubt this is equal opportunity spam--any idiot on the planet can do it.

Some just say something like:  "Great post!  I am also interested in GOLD Jewelry," or whatever.  Some have a whole paragraph of nonsense.  Today, though, I got this on a two-year-old post (dude, nobody reads those except through Google refs that don't justify your effort, believe me):

(Links excised)

Ancient Greek philosophy was divided into three sciences: physics, ethics, and logic. This division is perfectly suitable to the nature of the thing; and the only improvement that can be made in it is to add the principle on which it is based, so that we may both satisfy ourselves of its completeness, and also be able to determine correctly the necessary subdivisions. All rational knowledge is either material or formal: the former considers some object, the latter is concerned only with the form of the understanding and of the reason itself, and with the universal laws of thought in general without distinction of its objects.  Formal philosophy is called logic. Material philosophy, however, has to do with determinate objects and the laws to which they are subject, is again twofold; for these laws are either laws of nature or of freedom.  The science of the former is physics, that of the latter, ethics; they are also called natural philosophy and moral philosophy respectively.

 Educational spam; hallelujah!

More Smoking Guns, Less Crime!

kaching:

My Kind of Federal Agent

Our Lawless Department of Justice

Time to clean out the stables:

A lesser-known provision also obliged the states to ensure that no ineligible voters were on the rolls — including dead people, felons, and people who had moved. Our current Department of Justice is anxious to encourage the obligations to get everyone registered, but explicitly unwilling to enforce federal law requiring states to remove the dead or ineligible from the rolls.
In November 2009, the entire Voting Section was invited to a meeting with Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes, a political employee serving at the pleasure of the attorney general. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Motor Voter enforcement decisions.
The room was packed with dozens of Voting Section employees when she made her announcement regarding the provisions related to voter list integrity:

We have no interest in enforcing this provision of the law. It has nothing to do with increasing turnout, and we are just not going to do it.

Jaws dropped around the room.

Yes, please do read the whole thing.

Down with Doom, or Maybe Not.

Matt Ridley:

I now see at firsthand how I avoided hearing any good news when I was young. Where are the pressure groups that have an interest in telling the good news? They do not exist. By contrast, the behemoths of bad news, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and WWF, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year and doom is their best fund-raiser. Where is the news media's interest in checking out how pessimists' predictions panned out before? There is none. By my count, Lester Brown has now predicted a turning point in the rise of agricultural yields six times since 1974, and been wrong each time. Paul Ehrlich has been predicting mass starvation and mass cancer for 40 years. He still predicts that `the world is coming to a turning point'.

Yes!  I was there too, growing up in the 70s.  The economic system was collapsing, or so I would read on a regular basis.  Yet, here I am at 50, and reading the economic system is collapsing again...maybe they're right, this time.  Maybe:

Making Amends:  A Mini-Manifesto.  I suggest you read this too, from the excellent Fran Porretto.  Any student of history knows that things do actually go to hell periodically.

Thesis.  Antithesis.  Synthesis.  I am the synthesist.