You Read it Here First

You know that 500-pound “bigfoot corpse” those clowns in Georgia claim they have in a cooler in Georgia? Well, it’s a fake.

I guess you’re wondering how I know. Here’s how.

1. I am old.

2. I am not a moron.

Thanks for your time.

More

Breaking news: Janet Reno is missing.

Ho Hum I Felt a Sprinkle

Man, that was fast. This morning the TV weatherpersons were saying the tropical whatever down by the DR was dying. Here it is only a few hours later, and the damned thing has gone past depression, straight to named storm. On the up side, it still appears doomed to drag its sorry behind up the length of Cuba. I am somewhat disappointed, but I see no need to stop gloating.

When it leaves Cuba, it will be a tropical storm, at best. Fine by me. A little rain. A little wind. You can’t compare it to a hurricane. And tropical storms don’t have much effect on important things like power lines. It’s a funny thing, but around here, the power goes out during lightning storms (because Florida Power & Light is run by squirrel monkeys), but a light hurricane doesn’t have much effect, and that means a tropical storm won’t, either.

The computer models are looking great. Only one takes it near enough to me to make it a problem. And the forecast doesn’t show it turning into a hurricane. NOAA says it may drop 12″ of rain on Cuba. My response? BFD. I’ve seen 14″ here in Miami, on a completely ordinary day. Oooooooooooo scary. Hold me, Al Gore. My yard may become damp.

By this time in 2005, we had had five tropical storms and four hurricanes, and Katrina and tropical storm Jose were forming. This year is a joke, just like last year and 2006. Drink that tasty bathwater, hippies. Your storm plague just isn’t happening. Also, the Beatles suck, and George Bush will never be impeached.

See if You Can Make it Rain on the Hippies

Nothing is quite so beautiful as an August weekend in Miami, with a failed tropical depression somewhere to the southeast. That is the situation in which I find myself at present.

Hurricane…oops, I mean “tropical storm”…no, wait, “tropical depression”…wrong again…”Invest 92L” is wandering toward Hispaniola, packing weak winds and a moderate amount of rain. After that, it will take the long route across Cuba, losing power the whole way. Once that’s done, it will pop out in the Florida Straits or over the southern Bahamas, where almost nobody lives. If it manages to become a real storm after that, it will be a big surprise, but it will probably be too far offshore to do any damage.

I have to say it again. I love the word “invest.” We never heard it before 2006. At least not in relation to weather. We used to have hurricanes, tropical storms, tropical depressions, and sometimes “tropical waves.” But no invests. Why is that? Simple. Global warming turned out to be a crock, the epidemic of killer storms failed to materialize, we ran short of significant tropical weather events to panic about, and TV journalists and greenies needed a device to help them save face. We’ve had two slow seasons in a row, we are in the midst of a third, and four years ago, these boobs were telling us to expect twenty man-caused hurricanes per year. So now whenever it rains off the coast of Africa, they put up fuzzy, vague satellite photos of the wet area, and they tell us it’s an invest. And they say we need to “keep a close eye on it” in case it turns into a monster storm, which will require us to “hunker down.”

Translation: “we cannot justify our salaries or our existence.”

Whenever I hear the ridiculous phrase “hunker down,” I picture people squatting in their living rooms like chimpanzees. Here’s what it really means. “Close your shutters and buy five bags of ice.”

What if things get even slower, and we don’t even have invests? What will TV weathermen use to scare us and pump up their salaries and persuade networks to pay for fancy gear? I know. Whenever it drizzles for a few minutes, just west of the Azores, they’ll call it “a tropical booboo.” “This tropical booboo by the Cape Verde islands may become an invest by the middle of the week. Hunker down and quit using toilet paper.”

I know I shouldn’t gloat, but you have to understand something. For several years, liberals have been actively rooting for hurricanes to develop. That’s no exaggeration. It’s like the war in Iraq. The more bodies come home, the more Congressional seats liberals gain, so Democrats wept and squirmed when the troop surge worked, and the liberal media sat on (and still sits on) the story. The more hurricanes we have, the more credible the global warming myth becomes, and the more control liberals can exert over our lives. So a slow season is a catastrophe.

The big problem with this attitude–there are a few, but this is the biggest–is that hurricanes are very BAD. As a person who has experienced 180 mile-per-hour winds and who has been through at least five hurricanes, I can tell you that a hurricane is nothing to root for. They kill people. They destroy homes. They disrupt lives. They spawn crimes of opportunity, and they lead to gunshot deaths. Only an effete liberal could be happy about things like that. Theory is fun, but sometimes you have to remember that human beings are not just pixels on a monitor. We suffer and die. Our welfare is more important than the need to prop up Al Gore’s fatuous lies. Thinking of people as abstractions is what leads to leftist delights such as killing fields and purges.

Katrina was one of the greatest things that ever happened to the American left. It also killed hundreds of people and destroyed a major city. Call me crazy; on the whole, I think we sustained a net loss. I wonder how many liberals would trade their Congressional majority for the undoing of Katrina. Let’s face it. Very few. If you can hope your country loses a war, no catastrophe can reanimate your withered, vestigial empathy.

Pretty soon I’m going to have to put the graph up. You may remember it. I mean the graph of hurricane frequency versus time of year. We are nearly at the mid-point of the hurricane season. The historical graph shows that storm frequency peaks sharply in the middle of the season. We have probably seen almost 50% of this year’s activity by now. After September 30th, our chances of a storm will drop off to a very comfortable near-nothing. And the greenies will have to drink their bathwater yet again. And yes, I know they don’t really bathe. B.O. and funk are good for Gaia, the big lifeless clod of dirt God gave us to subdue and enslave and deplete for our benefit and amusement.

Nuts on the left actually blamed George Bush for the hurricanes of 2004 and 2005. Look it up; they were completely serious. If he caused the storms, he also gets credit for the calm weather we’re having now. Wow, Mr. President, way to stop those hurricanes. The left concedes that you control the weather, so obviously, you are the reason our roofs aren’t blowing off. And thanks for all the sunshine. My Key limes and plantains have never looked better. I’d appreciate it if you could cut the humidity on October 1st. We need a little rain for the Biscayne aquifer, but after that, we can do without the sticky nights.

There is no wave of killer hurricanes. The polar bears are not drowning, and they never were, and they never will be. Global warming is not happening, to any significant extent. And Al Gore is still a liar and an energy-wasting hypocrite. Nice things to know, as I coast into another sunny South Florida weekend.

Now You Can Relax

I keep forgetting to mention this.

Are you wondering who it is that you are reminded of when you hear the Obamessiah’s voice? Well, wonder no more. It’s Jose Ferrer.

You Can Help

If you want to shoot Linda SOG a few bucks to help her pay for her tumor procedure, Sondra can help. Go to Sondra’s site, donate money via her Paypal link, and put “LindaThon” in the subject box.

Sondra promises not to blow it on thongs. Not ALL of it.

More – Obama School Charity Opens

I just checked the URL for Baldi’s nonprofit. She established it to benefit a Kenyan school Barack Obama promised to help but subsequently forgot about. The site is up, and you can see it here.

Shhh

Moxie is blogging again. Once in a while.

Maybe if you go read, she’ll keep it up.

Boycott Their Stuff ASAP

Referred to me by reader aelfheld, who heard about it from Barb at Quid Nimis:

I Know how Ford Prefect Felt

I have discovered that I was insane to think I could find a spotting scope that would enable me to see .17 HMR holes in a target 300 yards away. That’s a bummer. I guess this is why people shoot prairie dogs. They’re like little furry Shoot-N-Cs. They’re a certain size before you shoot them, and then they expand and maybe cartwheel on impact, confirming your accuracy. That’s decent of them.

Trail Glades is only a hundred yards long, and they have no prairie dogs. However they do have iguanas. I was shooting a few weeks back, and I saw motion in front of me, and when I looked down, a very disturbed ten-inch-long iguana was looking up at me from a position between me and my target. He took off before anyone could nail him. Which was a good thing, because he wasn’t even big enough to make a decent corn dog.

I am still waiting to see a python out there.

While I was looking at scopes, I discovered something else. Some scopes are actually telescopes. Yes, I realize that any spotting scope is technically a telescope. But some models are sold to amateur astronomers (and perverts) as well as shooters. Naturally, I ended up looking at telescopes.

I can’t believe how they’ve changed. For a relatively low price, you can get a telescope that will allow you to see Jupiter’s stripes.

Looking at telescopes made me sad. It made me miss my mother. When I was a kid, she bought me a Tasco refractor. I believe this was not too long before the Comet Kohoutek fizzle. I used to set it up in my backyard, and I looked at Jupiter and Saturn and Venus and the moon. She would come out and sit in a patio chair and smoke Viceroys and look at the things I found. She really enjoyed that. It’s kind of neat to see for yourself that Saturn really has those funny rings. My dad was not big on spending time with kids, and he spent way too much time in the house, watching TV. But my mother had a wonderful natural curiosity, which she probably learned from her father.

Soon after I got my telescope, Mike decided he had to have one, too. His parents got him one, and we used to take our telescopes down to the bay and look at boats and islands and Miami Beach.

So now I want a telescope. I’m not going to buy one, but I want one. It would cost about four hundred bucks, and I would use it twice.

I have no idea what happened to my telescope. I guess it disappeared along with my oil paints. When you come from a broken home, you lose a lot of stuff stable families manage to keep. There is a lot of moving around, and every time, something gets lost or stolen, or there just isn’t room for it.

The problem with amateur astronomy, as I see it, is that there are about five things up there you can hope to get a good look at, and once you’ve seen them, you’ve seen them. They would cost me eighty dollars apiece. That’s a bit steep.

I rooted around on the web for amateur astronomy photos. Mostly, they’re not great. The resolution is not high. But some are interesting. It’s possible to take shots of the international space station as it crosses in front of the moon and the sun. That makes for some fun photos. Here’s a space station shot, if you want to see what I mean.

Am I the only one who finds space frustrating? When I was a kid, they used to wheel TVs into school classrooms so we could see live video from Apollo missions. Then the shuttle was interesting for a while, and then the government decided to cancel the program. I think it’s because we realized there was no way we were going anywhere else. Mars, maybe, but if we want to go farther than that, we’re going to have to make discoveries that change our understanding of physics considerably. If we could travel at the speed of light, it would still take over eight years to visit the nearest star and return, and it’s not like we could land there and look around. Maybe I’m wrong; do we know if Proxima Centauri has planets?

We realized we were not going to be getting phasers and transporters any time soon, and we were not going to get to shoot Klingons with our photon torpedoes. That had to suck a lot of the wind out of the space program’s sails. Even if it was solar wind.

Frontiers used to be much less intimidating. Once man learned how to sail, we were able to go just about anywhere. Scholars claim the Vikings and the Chinese made it across the Atlantic before Columbus. Whether they did or not, we were sailing all over the Old World many centuries ago. The Apostle Paul had no trouble getting from Israel to Italy and maybe Spain. We figured out how to travel anywhere on the planet, and then we managed to get into space, and then we landed on the moon. And then we looked past the moon and realized we had reached a point of very sharply diminishing returns. We were at the edge of a very deep moat. It’s hard to get excited about spending a big percentage of your tax revenues to go to a couple of crummy little planets from which you can bring back nothing of value.

It’s not breaking out of Alcatraz that kills you. It’s the swim to San Francisco. That pretty much describes how space travel works, if Proxima Centauri is San Francisco.

Maybe we have reached a point where practical efforts are of much less use than theoretical research. If we study and improve physics long enough, maybe an answer will come to us, and after that, building the means will start to make sense. But we aren’t going to get anywhere shooting comparatively slow rockets up there over and over. I wonder how much energy it takes to push a ship eight light years, within a human lifetime. For all I know, it requires a chunk of fuel the size of the earth. Maybe God has provided a key, and we can find it if we look long enough and hard enough.

In any case, I guess I can forget spotting my own shots at 300 yards.

So to Speak

Sometimes I’m glad I have a scientific background, because I can help people with scientifical questions.

My answer to this one is in Agent Bedhead’s comments.

So Sorry

While I should have been doing something else, I happened to end up reading about Mount Everest. I think it happened because a headline about the recent K2 disaster caught my eye.

K2 is in Pakistan. It’s the world’s second-highest mountain, but it’s harder to climb than Everest. One reason is that the surrounding terrain is farther from the summit. I guess that makes sense. You could have a plain at 25,000 feet and then a 4,000-foot climb, and it would be easier than climbing to 28,000 feet from 5,000.

I’m always horrified when I read about mountaineering. I hate the cold. I’m not in love with heights. I can’t imagine deliberately injecting myself into an environment where, if something goes wrong, I could lose my fingers and toes. Apart from that, it looks like a filthy business. How do you wash your hands at 20,000 feet? When you relieve yourself, do you just keep the residue on your hands and gloves until you get home? Probably. And what if you’re taking a popular route, like one of the more touristy Everest paths? People bag their waste these days, but that wasn’t always true. There must be a lot of frozen filth up there.

Another type of trailside debris that would be troubling: frozen bodies. There are about 120 dead bodies up there. They’re heavy, so they’re not easy to bring down. And some can’t be found. One of those is a guy I went to high school with. I was told that he didn’t listen when they told him to stay with the sherpas. Wandered off and presumably fell into a crevasse. After what I’ve seen about this place, well, first of all, I wouldn’t go. But hypothetically, if I were there, you better believe I’d treat every word that fell from my guides’ lips as though it were gospel. Maybe Everest seemed safe to him because thousands of tourists had been to the top. On the other hand, some people just don’t like taking advice. Maybe the same thing that makes you risk your life on a frozen mountain will also drive you to ignore safety warnings. A few added risks make for a better story when you get home.

You never see the bodies when you see Everest on TV or in a magazine, but various websites say some of them are right on the trails and that you have to step over them to get to the top. Imagine what it has to be like for people who know them and who continue to climb. Imagine going to work every day and seeing a dead co-worker sitting in his chair as you walk to your office. And the families! It has to be very unpleasant, knowing that tourists are parading past the stiff, dried-out bodies of your loved ones every year.

I just read about an Austrian who died on Everest. His name was Markus Kronthaler, and his brother Georg led an expedition just to retrieve his body. Markus died near the top, and his brother and his porters had to get close to the top to retrieve him, but they refused to climb a few extra meters and take the summit. They did that to make a point. Shockingly, many people who climb Everest feel no obligation to help others who are in trouble. Because it would endanger them as well? Partly. But also because…climbing Mount Everest is expensive. How expensive? One outfit charges $65,000 per person. That does not include airfare or your personal equipment, so call it, what? Maybe $85,000? I don’t get it; I don’t know what you could do for another person over the course of a few days that would justify a price like that, but I suppose people are willing to pay. Maybe it’s a supply and demand thing; lots of rich people want to go, and there are only so many spots. And it looks like one result is that guides are reluctant to stop and help climbers in trouble. The people who pay them get angry, and it hurts business! So some leave people to die, and this is considered acceptable.

Even worse, some people pose for photos with the dead, and some corpses have been stripped of various items by souvenir hunters.

Imagine a similar situation down here near sea level. Let’s say you go diving with a group. And you get your hand stuck in some coral. And while you’re breathing the last of your air, a guide swims by and ignores you, because the people paying him will be angry if they don’t get to dance with the tame sting rays or whatever. That is essentially the moral structure we’re talking about. I suppose it would happen regularly, if a scuba excursion generated $65,000 per customer. Unbelievable.

Markus Kronthaler couldn’t be helped, but his brother felt that leaving him up there unnecessarily, in plain view of other climbers, reflected a very poor code of ethics. So he spent money on a climb, and he went and got the body, and he refused to climb to the summit. Good for him.

One experienced alpinist has said that it’s unfair to take the risk of climbing Everest and expect to be rescued. Does that really make sense? Isn’t it better to say that it’s wrong to blow $65,000 on an ego trip, unless you’re prepared to abandon it in order to save a life? Think of the two sides of the equation. If you keep climbing, what do you get? A story to tell your friends at cocktail parties. What does the person you didn’t help get? Frozen extremities and slow death from hypothermia, plus the knowledge that no one tried to help. Seems like a very small benefit with a very high price.

I think I’ll stay down here with the oxygen and the grocery stores and the ambulances and cable TV. If other people want to pay sherpas and guides to carry their inexperienced selves up Everest, that’s up to them, but there are a long list of things I don’t want to happen to me, and one of them, I’m afraid, is freezer burn.

Nonprofit About to Get Going

Don’t forget; Baldilocks is still working to get help to the Senator Obama Kogelo School, a little school in Kenya which Obama promised to assist. You remember the story, I’m sure. He was in Kenya in 2006, in his father’s former village, and he said he would help the school get going, and then he stiffed them. Baldi’s dad came to the US on the same plane as Pops Obama, and she would like to see to it that the school gets the assistance it was promised. At last report, she had collected over $3000. So that makes the score Baldilocks: $3000; Obama: 0.

The site for her nonprofit is not up yet, but when it is, you will be able to find it here.

It’s fun to embarrass Obama and show how he mistreated these people, but the real point here is to help. Who knows? Maybe he’ll get wind of the site and take up a collection of his own, using his outstanding contacts and Internet fundraising methods. That would certainly be more efficient than relying on GOP bloggers and readers. Babs Streisand could put things right with a single check.

Of course, one problem with tying his Internet collections to this project is that jihadists and the communist Chinese probably aren’t all that excited about donating money to African charities.

Pedal Your Tricycle Back to the Faculty Lounge

I am not a political pundit. I don’t know everything. But I have good instincts, and I’ve been right a lot. And I have a wonderful feeling.

I think Obama royally shafted himself over the last month.

1. He was completely wrong about the troop surge, and he wasn’t man enough to admit it.
2. He took a stupid position on offshore drilling and then changed positions in a way that was obviously driven by poll numbers.
3. His ego has gotten so bad, even the liberal press is making fun of him. People are finally starting to realize what a clown he is. Imagine four years of this effete former academic.

Ann Althouse got annoyed when I said I was horrified by the prospect of a law professor running the country, but I stand by what I said. Ask any lawyer. Ivy League attorneys don’t teach law for a relatively paltry hundred grand a year because they want to. A lot of them have no choice. Law schools are asylums for the idiot-savants of the profession. The people who graduate summa cum laude and then have to bail after six months at the public defender’s office, because they can’t hack it.

Sure, there are exceptions. But they are unusual, and there is no evidence that Obama is one of them. Some successful attorneys teach part-time because they enjoy it, or because they feel they have to “give something back,” or because it feeds their egos. But if you go to law school, you will find that most of your teachers are socialist nutwads who couldn’t find their way to the courthouse if you slapped a label on them and turned them over to Federal Express. Many of the profs at my law school had never even passed a bar exam!

They were pathetic, or at least the ones with big egos were. Far-left kooks who went straight from law school to…law school. Goofs who loved pretending to be brave and rebellious, while working tenured jobs with outstanding benefits, and while toeing the administration line with a scrupulousness worthy of OCD. College is the only place where you can rebel by doing exactly what people in authority tell you to do.

They worked fifteen hours a week and pocketed two or three grand for it, while mewling and puking about the evils of capitalism. I know you think I’m kidding when I say fifteen hours a week, but honest academics admit that it’s true.

That’s part of the background of the Obamessiah/Neobama. An idyllic oasis in which theory is everything, because the real world never intrudes. It’s only in places like that that socialism seems to make sense. Unplug Obama from the Matrix and turn him loose in the real world, and he’s going to greet reality the way a bug greets a windshield.

He’s in trouble. How do I know? The Oracle told me.

Here is Fausta, with more.

It’s B. Hussein Obama, Tying his Shoes

Chris Muir has progressed from satire to blasphemy. He has slandered the Holy One.

By the way, the correct term for criticizing an Obama–any Obama–is “hating.”

I just can’t believe we could have a pencil-neck like that for a President. Have you seen his arms? Jimmy Walker could beat the snot out of him. He looks like Olive Oyl.

And I still can’t get used to the idea of a President with a head the size of a grapefruit.

We are at the Gates of Hell

Did My Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy originate “Obamateur™”?

I certainly hope so.

The scariest thing about Obama is that he taught at a law school. No one who hasn’t been to law school can understand how inept and effete law professors are. They are among the most helpless, incompetent people in society. You have to know the species to understand.

Bennigan’s Files its Last TPS Report

I just read about Bennigan’s going bankrupt. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise. I haven’t seen a Bennigan’s ad in ages.

The story was particularly interesting to me, because my cousin used to manage for Bennigan’s. He told me that if you wanted decent food, and you had to choose between Bennigan’s and T.G.I. Friday’s, you should go with Friday’s, because they actually tried to cook food a human could eat. He said the beef they used at Bennigan’s was something called “utility grade.” Like, if you don’t eat it, you can use it to make a sturdy doormat.

There are eight grades of beef, and all but three sound horrifying. Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, and Canner. Think about the lousy choice steaks you’ve had, and then try to imagine all the things that have to be wrong with a piece of meat before they drop it four more grades.

Now, I am not claiming I know for a fact that they used this stuff, or that the food was generally bad. I do know that my cousin worked for them and claimed Bennigan’s was purely “a money machine,” and that making good food was not a priority.

As for Friday’s, I have two problems with them. First, it is REALLY hard to find anything on their menu that isn’t fried, yet which I consider worth eating. Coming from the guy who thinks pig skin is candy, this is a harsh indictment. Second, they always smell awful. Like rancid grease. Like water in which Michael Moore’s baseball cap has been boiled.

You can make good food with cheap ingredients. Apart from stuff for the cookbooks, I’ve become obsessive about it. When I pay over two dollars per pound for meat, I feel like a sucker. But maybe I’m a little more skilled than some of the people who write recipes for commercial kitchens. Also, I’m a Southerner, and I’ve lived around Cubans a lot, so I have unnatural advantages. You can feed ten Cubans royally for about twenty bucks. Maybe this is why Cubans are so successful. The annual food budget for a family of four is about three hundred dollars. The rest of the income goes into real estate and business leases. And Uncle Sam gets about a dollar and a half. Or he ends up paying THEM.

I think the Bennigan’s story goes to show what happens when people start showing up for work without enough pieces of flair. If the CEO had worn maybe 97 bits of flair, including a codpiece studded with flashing blue LEDs spelling out “PARTAY,” maybe this would not have happened. In fact, when Obama wins the election, I hope we’ll start seeing a little flair in the White House. Like big buttons reading, “KISS ME I USED TO BE A MUSLIM.”

And of course, here I am once again, putting all these great ideas in the public domain instead of trying to get paid for them.

I would say Obama is cutter and McCain is choice, whereas Ronald Reagan was prime, and Jimmy Carter was canner.

I guess that makes Ron Paul Spam, which is appropriate, considering his enduring status as President of the Internet.

I’ll be hosting a wake for Bennigan’s at the nearest Bombay Bicycle Club, after which I plan to feign a heart attack and skip out on the bill.