Posts Tagged → Al Gore
There is hope: Dinosaurs on the river
One of the reasons I object so strenuously to the fake climate alarmism nonsense is that it not only takes away attention and energy from real, measurable environmental problems, it also is so transparently fake and ridiculous that more and more Americans are beginning to doubt the entire environmental quality cause with which “climate change” is unjustifiably included.
When the public is lied to for five decades, told that the climate sky is falling, and that we have only five more years until… pick your fake end-of-times flooding, crop failure, too hot, too cold, end of oil, end of natural gas etc… and those predictions do not play out, then that public becomes weary and suspicious about everything the climate alarmists say, including the very real problems like loss of farmland, forest fragmentation, invasive bugs and plants, loss of wildlife habitat, loss of wild places. And that is bad, because Americans do need to maintain environmental quality, and improve it where needed. If we lose public support for true environmental problems that have real world solutions, then we will truly and needlessly suffer in the end.
Aside from being wrong about literally everything they claim and then demand, one of the other problems with climate alarmists is that they assume and promote a view of nature as steady state. That is, Nature never changes, it is always a Garden of Eden, except for human intervention. And when humans make mistakes or act greedily, climate alarmists say massive government intervention is needed, to the point where Western Civilization must be turned on its head, democracy must be canceled (for our own good, of course), and government bureaucrats must be in charge of every choice and decision we now make (we can’t be trusted to make “the right” choice). This is yet more nonsense, for the simple reason that Nature heals itself naturally.
How else does Nature recover from natural catastrophes like explosive and polluting volcanoes, floods, huge fires, meteor strikes, tornados etc? Well, Nature abhors a vacuum, and where a gap exists in Nature, some animal and some plant will adapt to exploit it and make room to live and grow in it. Even if the prior plant or animal can no longer live there.
In 2006 something very bad and mysterious was suddenly happening to the Susquehanna River. A hard-fighting smallmouth bass fishery so good (100-200 fish per day per fisherman) that fishermen came from all around the world to fish (and spend the night and spend their money locally) from Sunbury down to the Conowingo Dam in Maryland, was suddenly gone. Vanished. And gone along with the vanished smallmouth bass were the big predacious muskellunge, brown trout from the feeder stream mouths, largemouth bass, fallfish, sunfish, redeye, and shad.
Within just a few years a highly tangible and visible environmental catastrophe had revealed itself as a long stretch of the Susquehanna River literally went belly up and died. Native aquatic insects, the backbone of all life in the water there, disappeared. Up until 2005, you could stand on a late summer afternoon in Harrisburg along the Front Street Greenbelt walk and watch as the entire river surface practically boiled with dimples from rising fish eating hatching mayflies, caddis flies, and stone flies. In 2006 that whole activity ceased. Literally everything in the river died, and it still has not come back.
Long story short, what caused the demise of the Susquehanna River was a perfect storm of every bad thing that could happen to any waterway anywhere. If it could go wrong for the Susquehanna, it did go wrong in just a few short years, and the sum total was a total unmitigated shock and detonation of the waterway.
Several years of drought and unusually warm summers led to unusually low water flows, which left fish exposed and with no where to hide from predators. The over-heated water then developed algae blooms that robbed the water of its oxygen, suffocating fish and prey crustaceans like crayfish. When large summer thunderstorms happened, they overwhelmed and drowned the many community sewage treatment plants along the river, resulting in “Combined Sewage Overflows” up and down the river. These huge torrents of raw, untreated, undecomposed human filth blasted into the low, warm river water. There was no dilution of the mess, because the river was too low and too slow. One can only imagine that the conditions then were ripe for that human excrement to sit in still waters and become a feast for bacteria, which attacked the few surviving fish and left them with open wound lesions. Then viruses appeared, apparently rejoicing in the poor conditions, further attacking the remaining fish. Finally, when Pennsylvania’s shale gas boom started in 2006, there were some documented and suspected incidents of “midnight dumping”, where large tanker trucks filled with well brine or frack water were illegally unloaded into waterways that, of course, went into the Susquehanna River.
With the demise of the river’s fish, native grasses and watercress, the birds that migrated to, lived on, and migrated down the river, had nothing to eat. They also disappeared. Hundreds of egrets and herons, and huge rafts of ducks and geese used to grace the shores and skies above the river around Harrisburg on any given summer or Fall day. Not any more.
In 2005 one of America’s largest Great Egret rookeries flourished on the islands in the Harrisburg Archipelago across from Harrisburg City. My fishing buddy Ed Weintraub and I used to wade half a mile out to fish among the archipelago’s islands, and marvel at the hundreds of these gigantic pterodactyl-looking birds and their enormous nests. The place sounded like what a Jurassic jungle must have been like, with loud screams, cries, grunts, groans, and other weird sounds from the huge birds and their babies assembled in that relatively small place. All the boulders jutting out of the river were coated in bright white bird dookie, as were the trees. The entire place stank to high heaven of rotting fish. It was a natural marvel of human-Mother Nature coexistence that reflected the incredible environmental diversity and health of the waterway, despite it being surrounded by huge train yards and human communities. This all was also eventually lost to whatever was ailing the river.
In 2011, while kayaking and wading the unnaturally smelly river in Harrisburg, I contracted MRSA in a tiny scratch on my leg, and then spent four days on a drip IV in a hospital, successfully avoiding the loss of my leg. The river was deader than a doornail and I almost joined it.
Last week two of us took a nice long canoe trip down river, my first in years, to see how the river has changed. We see a few bass fishermen now, local catfish guides brag about sixty-pounders, and walleye boats are out every day. Something in the river must be improved. It seems to be healing, but it is nowhere near where it was twenty years ago. I know that the West Branch of the Susquehanna is greatly improved from twenty years ago, when acid mine drainage turned its waters an unnatural turquoise blue. Now those old mines are washed out by the subterranean springs that first unleashed the mines’ acid, and the cold water is now clean and actually improving the West Branch.
Large bass and catfish -a more rugged critter filling the void left by the formerly numerous smallmouth bass- scurried out of our shadow, and as we approached the Harrisburg Archipelago, we began to see Great Egrets wading around the upstream islands. Lots of them. A juvenile bald eagle patrolled above. We paddled around and through the Archipelago and were surrounded by cormorants (a federally protected pest), mallards, wood ducks, turtles, a snake, and lots of nesting Great Egrets.
The dinosaurs were back on the islands and so were my hopes for a comeback by the river. No metaphysical cataclysmic environmental or political catastrophes were required for Mother Nature to bounce back. She always does, and she always will, despite what the Al Gore type fakirs predict.
The Rockville Bridge is the longest stone arch bridge still in use in the world. I think it is longer than the Glenfinnan Viaduct in Fort William, Scotland, which I have ridden over in a train. The Susquehanna River is slowly recovering from the many things that ailed her, and is now a delight to experience.
The Real Crisis at Davos is WEF’s Tidal Wave of Bullsh*t
Some people are addicted to adrenaline, to crisis, and to being always on the move, hopping from one phone call to the next to nonstop meetings, followed by the inevitable “Gosh I am so crazed and busy, I am soooo stressed.” As if they did not do it to themselves, victims of their own bipolar, egomaniacal, or cutthroat competitiveness.
These people may be Michelin Man full of peanuts, but at least they are trying to be productive, in their own way. They may bother everyone around them, try to hijack most projects and processes around them, and be the kind of person you try hard to avoid in the parking garage at the end of the day, but they are probably a net-positive force. Maybe by a slim margin, but they are still on the positive side of the equation.
Then there are people for whom shouting “Crisis!” from the rooftops is a purposeful scam. So they can be in control, of the rest of us. These people use the latest manufactured fake so-called “crisis” to make end-runs around collective decision making processes and procedures that would normally bog down over or outright reject such a claim of “crisis” due to a lack of evidence.
In the past sixty years there have been a bunch of fake crises, most of them some shade of environmental or another. Paul Ehrlich (see below) was predicting the end of the world (really, like the entire world would come to a cataclysmic halt) back in the 1960s and 1970s. And when the world did not end in the 1970s, he predicted its demise in the 1980s, 1990s and even in the 2020s! He is still at it, saying pretty much the same thing.
Obviously, the world has not ended and Paul Ehrlich has been wrong the entire time. His crisis is fake.
Paul Ehrlich may be wrong, but nevertheless he is persistent. To his credit, he is not persistently crazy, but rather consistently smart. Like another “the end of the world is nigh!” false messiah, Al Gore, Ehrlich has learned that a foolish soup of the intellectually gullible and the politically mal-aligned reward him whenever he steps up to a podium to declare that capitalism, Americans, gas stoves, cars, whatever the false issue du jour is, are all going to result in the end of the world.
Today the Neo Nazi League World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland has assembled a who’s-who of villains, career politicians, fakirs, weirdos, sycophants, coelacanths, investors, psychics, and actual real Nazis who want to own your body and your soul. The literal Nazi skinhead of the WTF WEF, Klaus Schwab, has declared 2023 to be a year of “polycrisis.”
According to WTF head Klaus Barbie Schwab, there are now so many crises attacking us all at once that the entire Western democratic system of self-rule and self-decision making and self-problem solving must be ended, so that he and his little cadre of Neo Nazi technocrats can fix everything. Yes, Herr Fuhrer Schwab is sounding the alarm on a whole array of (utterly fake) crises that demand America come to a screeching halt. No more gas cars, no more gas stoves, no more meat…”You will own nothing and you will be happy” he says, meaning it more now than ever before.
Herr Schwab’s fake climate and gas stove and environmental alarmism is obviously fake, but his cadre’s lust for power and control is not fake. It is real. Within the WEF WTF’s tsunami of bullshit crisis is a very serious threat to humanity, and this is a real threat and potential crisis that we have seen over and over before: Mass murderers Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, the Democrat Party in 1860-1865 and again now, Julius Caesar, the Pharoah, Nebuchadnezzar, and a thousand other violent tyrants who have claimed the right to govern us absolutely because of some “crisis” or other.
The WTF WEF people may be a bunch of evil thugs who we must resist at all costs, but they do get credit for unabashedly living a pimped out high end lifestyle in broad daylight. Like high and mighty feudal princes of old, they don’t listen to a word of their own demands that they place on the rest of us. They have hundreds of jet airplanes taking individual members to Davos, some of the flights being only twelve miles, with enormous outsized plumes of carbon emissions to each member’s sole ownership and credit. And they have the highest price prostitutes possible (I am not talking about the CNN, NPR, BBC staff, but actual hookers), the best alcohol and the most exotic real meat and shellfish food possible.
There may be a tsunami crisis of BS at the WTF WEF World Economic Forum, but wow, those people nonetheless know how to live high on the hog! Without an apology to anyone…
They must think We, The People are a bunch of idiots.
August 13, 1970 edition of the Orlando Sentinel citing grand environmental fakir Paul Ehrlich. In the intervening fifty three years, none of Ehrlich’s dire predictions have happened. But Herr Klaus Schwab, Al Gore and yes, even Herr Ehrlich are still peddling the same b*llshit
Voting for Fetterman is voting for child molesters & violent criminals
While it is a cold, sad, but irrefutable fact that voting for senate candidate John Fetterman here in Pennsylvania is a vote for child molesters and violent criminals, and failed schools, it is also a sad fact that voting for just about any if not every Democrat Party candidate these days means the same thing.
So extreme has the Democrat Party become that I cannot think of one single Democrat Party candidate running for office anywhere who has disavowed or will disavow the teachers’ unions violent blitzkrieg attack against American children, against kids’ innocence, against American families, against American parents and their parental rights, and for child molesters and pedophiles.
When we consider that the Democrat Party has universally across America produced candidates like John Fetterman who are also totally pro-violent criminals (Fetterman says that violent criminals are actually victims) and anti-police (instead of recognizing there are a lot of great police who keep us safe and only a handful of bad cops), you have to wonder why the hell would any normal American vote for a single Democrat anywhere?
I ask this question as a former Democrat Party member who was active in many Pennsylvania Democrat Party campaigns to the point of serving as the 1988 Al Gore for President campaign’s central Pennsylvania director. But recall that in 1988 Al Gore was endorsed by the National Rifle Association and various pro-life groups. It is not that I left the Democrat Party but that Al Gore and the Democrat Party left me with their extreme positions. They are now so extreme and destructive that only the incurious and the happily unthinking vote for them.
Do not vote for John Fetterman. If you vote for him, you are also voting for child molesters and violent criminals, both of whom Fetterman believes should be roaming your neighborhood at will, without repercussion. Normal people do not believe these things or vote for these things.
