Once you realize this, everything changes. You no longer worry about the earth running out of energy resources, because you realize there are no energy resources — there never were — there are only various forms of matter that our minds, the mind of man, transformed into energy resources for our pleasure and convenience. These will never run out as long as we’re here because the mind is limitless and will invent more.
You no longer worry about pollution, because you know that once free people become annoyed by it, other free people will fix it with cleaner fuel-burning methods and filters. Where are the pea soups of London? Where are the smogs of Los Angeles? Where are the snows of yesteryear? All right, I was just curious about that last one.
You no longer worry about the earth, because the earth is here for us, not the other way around. The earth is just our living space — for now. We should keep it reasonably clean and pleasant. But a carping obsession with spotless housekeeping turns you into a scolding fishwife — or an environmentalist — and makes life less comfortable for man, not more.
I’m a lifelong outdoorsman. I hike. I fish. I run through the woods acting out scenes from Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Or I did before the restraining order. I understand that a reasonable caution for the good of the environment should balance the profit motive of those excellent people who provide us with all the wonderful energy we need. I believe we can begin to achieve that reasonable caution by burying every environmentalist we can find up to his neck and then pouring honey on his head to attract the ants. You like ants, don’t you? So there’s a good way to celebrate Earth Day!
I love ants. And the “environmentalists” don’t love the earth as much as they hate humanity.
I celebrate Earth Day by working hard to spread humanity beyond it.
As for our moral, ethical, and intellectual superiors in the Democratic Party who don’t appreciate this one bit, here’s a question:
If you don’t want to talk about dogs, why did you bring up dogs?
Now: Add up the number of days you’ve yammered about Romney’s dog. Take that sum and add 1. Find a calendar, count out that number of days from today, and mark the date. That’s the day I’ll consider not hurting your feelings anymore by bringing up the fact that Obama eats dogs.
I think that it’s the best strategy for Romney to ignore this and continue to focus on the real issues, but it’s also useful to mock this eminently mockable president at every opportunity, something that had the usual suspects like Jon Stewart done four years ago, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
I forgot to set it last night. It’s just another miserable day in the continuous living hell that is Barack Obama’s America. And Romney has promised to do nothing on this crucial issue, either. Like Tom Friedman, I wish that Mike Bloomberg would run for president, so we’d finally have someone in the White House who cares about people like me, and will take care of serious problems like this.
[Update a while later]
More idiocy from Tom Friedman — he thinks the problem with America is that the government is gridlocked. Even ignoring all the legislative lunacy over the past decade that puts the lie to the notion, gridlock is the only thing that saves us from even worse laws.
[Update a few minutes later] More thoughts from Yuval Levin:
The fact is that the legacy of the Great Society, especially but not exclusively in the form of the two health-care entitlements of the Great Society, Medicare and Medicaid, now threatens the fiscal future of the government and therefore the economic future of the country. The design of those two entitlement programs was not well thought out in the mid-60s, and in more recent times has been a primary driver of the inflation of health costs that is at the core of both the health-care financing crisis and the government’s fiscal woes. It is far worse than the usual kind of legislative screwup. Medicare and Medicaid, structured as they are, are just the kinds of “bad laws” passed “through haste, inadvertence, or design” that Alexander Hamilton warned against in Federalist 73, and thought the constitutional system’s various restraints would protect us against. The elite governing consensus of the mid-60s represented a failure of those constraints that resulted in a number of costly errors. It was that period, not our own time, that marked a breakdown of our constitutional system. Continue reading My Alarm Didn’t Go Off This Morning→
Here’s the list of Obama campaign bundlers for the first quarter of the year. You know whose name isn’t on it? Elon Musk. I’d like to see the list for previous quarters, so we’d know if Christian Adams is far too trusting of his Congressional source.
It was, in a certain sense (and putting Russia and Japan to one side), a “western civil war” between the Anglophone democracies and Continental Fascists – but for some reason that’s far less congenial an interpretation to EU myth-makers.