The Monday Nut

The last bastion of true manliness has fallen.  The weenies have stormed the final fortress, removed the testicles of the warriors and declared estrogen the hormone of choice.

The Super Bowl has promised to “offset it’s carbon footprint.”

<Insert moment of silence in lieu of a vicious slew of vulgarities>

So, even the NFL has decided to jump on board the bandwagon.  Once the playground of MEN, it will soon be replaced by a  bunch of pasty-faced vegans throwing frisbees (in a non-competitive way) being cheered by hirsute goth-chicks sporting Troy Polamalu’s hair under their arms.

How is it that the league which gives us just what we desire the most (gladiators beating the holy hell out of each other) for 20 weeks of the year is suddenly deciding to give an ant fart about its carbon footie print? Why is it necessary to cow-tow to a small group of people who define a “clip” as the thing they use to ensure their joint works to the precious last toke?

The NFL is carnivorous, people! It is a half step and one law away from being cannibalistic.

 To me, it’s like Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett putting on dresses and entertaining Santa Ana’s troops with a Vaudeville routine. What has happened is that the Green SS has infiltrated the upper levels of NFL management.  They have an Environmental Program Director, Jack Groh, and he wants to make sure that all his vegan soy-sucking, carrot-toting friends know that the NFL “cares.”  I guarantee that the next thing we see from Mr. Groh is a ban on tailgating because of all the carbon dioxide from the outdoor grills.  Perhaps they will even bring nutritional directors to provide veggie substitutes for brats and sausages, as well as Perrier instead of beer.

Save us G.O.D (Grand Old Dikta) from our pussified selves and deliver our grand pasttime from the demons of green!

A recent report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization states that 37 countries are facing food crises due to conflict and disasters.  ”In addition, food security is being adversely affected by unprecedented price hikes for basic food, driven by historically low food stocks, droughts and floods linked to climate change, high oil prices and growing demand for bio-fuels.”

 For the purpose of this post, I’m gonna leave the climate change comment alone, as well as the high oil prices (duh) and conflicts.  So, what’s left? 

Growing demand for bio-fuels. I’m gonna make a prediction here.  Land that was once used to feed the world is now going to be employed to feed bio-fuel capable cars and the egos of environmentalists.  We will be facing even worse food shortages in the years to come and people will die.  It’ll just be another monument in the Environmental Hall of Shame.

The credo of the EHS?  “Planet matters.  People don’t.”

The Ethanol wing of the EHS will be located right next to the DDT wing and you’ll be able to read the names of millions that died in the name of protecting the environment.  Once again, we are ignoring the basic survival needs of the poor so Americans and Europeans can feel good about themselves.  The DDT wing of the EHS is a glaring example of how we have literally murdered millions of innocents based on politics…not scientific fact.

Banning DDT in the United States and abroad was heralded as the first major victory of the environmental movement.  Yet, three million people die each year from malaria, a disease that had been controlled by the use of DDT.  In even harsher terms, a child dies every 30 seconds from malaria in the Third World.

For all the claims against it from the environmental movement (especially Ms. Rachel Carson) there is absolutely no scientific proof of the negative effects of DDT on the environment.  Science knew and proved to the courts in 1972 that DDT was safe, but a spineless EPA Director (William Ruckelshaus) caved to pressure from the little green men in his head and banned DDT anyway.  This one decision has killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined.  But what the hell, they’re just poor people that aren’t Americans or Europeans, right?  We had to do something to protect those poor birds whose egg-shells were thinning because of DDT!  Only problem was, that little piece of priceless information was also absolutely false.

Surprisingly, and somewhat covertly, the world is going back to DDT especially in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Even the ultra-liberal NY Times seems to be okay with it, but one thing is missing.  An apology from all the people who spent years and years ensuring that poor children had no access to protection from malaria in the name of protecting the environment from an enemy with no teeth.

Mark my words, as you are filling your gas tank with ethanol, someone is gonna be starving to death and the environmental wackos don’t give one little damn about it. More later on whether ethanol and bio-fuels are actually all they are cracked up to be.  A study from Harvard suggested they might actually cause more damage than good.

The latest green idea is to not only reduce your carbon footprint, but reduce your imprint on the earth after you die as well.  My life plan is now complete.  Guilt will follow me all the days of my time on this earth, into the ground, and into the afterlife. It’s good to have goals, especially ones so easily attainable.

The concept of green burial was presented on NPR today with information from the Green Burial Council presented by the reporter.  I’ll sum up the GBCs mantra with this quote from their Executive Director: “Green burial provides us with a way of getting in sync with the natural process of death, decay, and regeneration, rather than having to stave it off, as conventional deathcare demands.”

Please note that my spellchecker underlined the word “deathcare.” I hate it when people create new words.  Hate it hate it hate it.

So, the new thing is to have your corpse wrapped in tissue paper and put directly into the ground.  No coffin, no vault, no headstone.  But!  There’s plenty of allegory to take into the ground with yo dead self.

You have practiced environmentally sustainable deathcare!  You have “used the burial process as a means of facilitating the acquisition, restoration and stewardship of natural areas.” You have protected funeral workers and little children (dirt-eaters) from formaldehyde poisoning.  You have made your last act “really mean something.”

Dammit!  I was hoping for a meaningless death.  How disappointing. Fine, then at least bury me upside down so I can make at least one impression upon the earth that means something. Knowing my luck, I’ll drown somewhere and clog a drain.  Or, my family won’t be able to afford to rent the GPS unit from the cemetery and will never come visit my flat stone marker in the middle of Farmer Brown’s field. Hopefully my wife will know enough not to plant flowers next to it that are not part of the local ecosystem.  There’ll certainly be fines for stuff like that.

This is beyond me.  According to NPR, this is popular in Europe already.  I guess that means it HAS TO BE GOOD since everything that comes out of Europe is WAY BETTER than anything we do here in America.  When is it going to end?  Why does everything have to encourage ethical environmentalism?

You’ve invaded every other part of my life.  I guess invading my death is just a natural progression. There’s so many other reasons NOT to do this…  Let me know what you think they are.

Years and years ago, I worked for a now defunct NGO called The Hudson River Valley Greenway Council.  It was my first real paying job out of college and I could have made substantially more money as the weird cross-eyed dude who buffs the mall floors at night, but I had a professional sounding title and some good networking contacts for later on in life.

As we sat in a meeting one day, all the people who got to speak out loud…and me; pondering unique ways to convince every living soul that preserving land along the Hudson River was DAMNED IMPORTANT, a question arose.

Q: Why can’t we get more minority and lower class support for our efforts?

A: Because they don’t give a shit, nor will they ever. 

The silence at the table made me realize I had actually used my “outside voice.” Oops.  Now I had to explain myself to break through the fog of contempt. So, elucidate I did.

Because they are poor.  This is a game for rich people.  Poor people don’t have the time to worry about such things.  They worry about keeping their job, or staying alive, or keeping their kids off the street. The river is not something they see as a community resource because they don’t use it themselves for anything.

Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! I knew my opinion was not desirable, and all the rich people around the table took their sweet time insulting me over the next half hour.

But, I digress.  Fact is, I was actually right.  I was vindicated a few weeks later during a “Round Table Discussion” on minority issues in which this particular topic was brought up.  An intelligent man named Reverend Al Sharpton (pre-T.B.) brought up the point that minorities (and for that matter all poor people of all colors) don’t care about the environment because they are too worried about everything else in their lives to be concerned about whether or not the river is pretty, or if rich people get a nice place to ride their bikes on the weekends.

I was vindicated!  HA-HA! 

Lesson #1 learned.  You never get no damn credit for something you said “ago” where you was right.  But you do get the blame when you was wrong.

The environment is still a rich man’s game.  I’m sorry, but it really is.  Sure, we can tell all the kids in the inner city about how important trees are, and about CO2 emissions, and about baby fur seals.  Fact is, some of them dodge bullets to get home and won’t give a damn about something they’ll likely never get a chance to see.  Even middle class members are faced with daily dilemmas that are frankly more pressing than worrying about an owl in a forest somewhere that can’t seem to possibly live in some other tree.  Sure, we should buy a Prius, but we bought the minivan to truck our brood around and we’re stuck with the payments and higher gas prices.

I dunno.  Maybe I’m off my rocker, but it really seems to me that only the rich can afford to worry so much about the environment.  Me, I worry more about many other things.  Sure, I’ll tell a pollster that the environment is important, but in the end I just can’t afford to play the games.

Please comment and expand on this…

Bjorn Lomborg is one of the most reviled men in the world.  Say the name amongst some of your liberal friends, and you’ll see a reaction akin to a weasel getting a high colonic.  However, much of what he says just makes good, plain, common sense. ”Lawks a mussy, Mr. Rhett! To say such things!”

The thing that gets me the most is hearing, to coin a phrase, “the rest of the story.”  Here’s an example that’ll freeze your mind. 

1. A tree produces oxygen through the process of photosynthesis as it grows and lives.  (“Who are you? Dick F-ing Tracy,” right?  Well, plow on, Gentle Reader)
2. When that tree dies and decomposes, precisely the same amount of oxygen is consumed.  In other words, everything it made it uses up.

Whoops! So, in a forest untouched by dirty dirty dirty human hands, a tree is actually taking oxygen away? How come no one ever told me?  Does this mean that timber companies that go in and take out old growth trees might actually be saving oxygen?  Well, that could be a scientific stretch and I’ll leave that to smarter people than I, if there are any…

Well, if you made it this far, and were good enough to ignore that last comment, let me give you another example.  In his book “The Second Law of Life,” John Schmitz talks at length about entropy and thermodynamics.  He’s one of those people that’s smarter than I are.  Anyway, he discusses recycling as a politically and socially wonderful idea…but a scientifically horrific one from the standpoint of energy consumption.  In a nutshell (sorry), there is a tremendous LOSS of energy during the recycling process that is not made up in any way.  Remember, energy cannot be created, it can only be used…and think of these things:

1. Fuel costs for trucks
2. Energy required to melt glass or plastic
3. Energy required to reprocess

I’m not saying stop recycling…but I am saying “Why didn’t we know it was such a terrible waste of energy?  I thought that was one of the things we were trying to save!”  Then again, I guess I am saying…stop recycling and figure out a better way!

Logic will win some day!

Huh!? Snort, wheeze, burp…  Did I fall asleep there for a second?  My apologies. 

Now, what was I saying?

Here’s a phrase I absolutely hate…  Insert tab A into slot B.

Just kidding.  Actually, the phrase I am talking about is “Communing With Nature.”  I keep seeing that from the green crowd, and it always seems to follow some statement about how we humans have destroyed the planet because of our greed, selfishness, idiocy, yada-yada-yada.  I just love how so many people seem to think that we need to “Become one with Mother Earth,” or that we should “return to Ghia’s bosom and live as we were intended to.”

Yes, these are actual phrases said by actual people.

Problem is…  If we live as we were intended to, we would be PREY.

Nature has teeth, claws, venom, crushing coils.  Humans have…  Well, shoot.  We have nothing.  That makes us food.  In the end of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, a group of eco-terrorists are left to “live” in the jungles of South America, without guns or any other weapons.  One of the good guys asks his colleague how long he thinks the eco-freaks will survive…the answer was not more than a couple days.  I would be surprised if they all made it through the first night.

Mother Nature is not some wondrous being to be worshipped.  She can be a real bitch sometimes, and anyone who thinks that they are going to “commune” with her and live through it will get their wish to become “one with the Earth.”  I guarantee 90% of these people are hippies who live in some metropolitan area and do some weekend hiking or rock climbing.  They have no clue that living in the wilderness, communing with nature means one thing…SURVIVE.

I also bet most of these “communers” are people who think hunters, gun-owners, and the NRA are just a bunch of rednecks and neanderthals.  But, I bet the moment one gets treed by a pack of ravenous coy-dogs, or even a wandering black bear; the first thing they would think is “God, I wish I had a gun!” 

Oops, sorry…  Remember, you don’t worship God.  You worship Nature, and Nature wants you for dinner.  Please remove yourself from the branch, and let Nature take its course… or appetizer depending on how big you are.  I bet vegans are no more than a mouthful, maybe a pre-appetizer.