Minutes count when saving Earth

Editor
Show the world you still have a working brain. On March the 29th

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Lorrie Goldstein

Thu, March 27, 2008

Minutes count when saving Earth

By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN

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This Saturday, March 29, starting at 8 p.m., 24 “global cities,” including Toronto, will be participating in “Earth Hour.” The aim is to encourage people to turn their lights off for an hour to promote awareness of man-made global warming.HERE IS MY ITINERARY:

8:00 p.m. — Turn off lights before leaving house — naked — mindful of George Monbiot’s warning in Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, that the campaign against global warming is a campaign in favour of austerity. In this light, I have decided to give up clothes, the manufacture of which is a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

8:01 p.m. — Hug tree.

8:02 p.m. — Lecture next-door neighbour about his stupid idea of holding community barbecue to celebrate Earth Hour, noting burning charcoal, propane and natural gas to heat barbecues emits GHG. Angrily ask neighbour why he is cooking chicken and hamburger, given that meat production is a major source of GHG. Demand neighbour serve chicken and hamburger to guests raw, noting food poisoning is a small price to pay for preventing cataclysmic climate change and making the world safe for Al Gore.

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8:05 p.m. — Run screaming from climate denier neighbour chasing me with spatula yelling “you !@$%$#$ idiot, get off my property!!!!”

8:10 p.m. — Hastily enter car, using keys strategically hidden for this purpose in hair. Drive to Hwy. 401 entrance ramp, refusing to turn on headlights in tribute to Earth Hour, ignoring frantic warnings by climate denier fellow motorists that my headlights are off.

8:15 p.m. — Travelling at 100 clicks per hour in centre lane of Hwy. 401, with no headlights, turn engine off in order to coast to stop, making important symbolic statement about car travel being a major contributor to global warming.

8:20 p.m. — Drive quickly away from 35-vehicle crash immediately behind me, caused by climate denier motorists foolishly driving on highway at speed limit with headlights on, attempting to avoid my stopped vehicle in centre lane with headlights off.

8:25 p.m. — Contact David Suzuki Foundation by cell phone, challenging them “to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing into jail” so-called environmentalists who self-righteously lecture everyone else about reducing their carbon footprint, while having fathered five children in two marriages, perhaps because they missed the Environment 101 class in university about Zero Population Growth.

8:30 p.m. — Contact Nanticoke coal-fired electricity-generating station by cell phone, pretending to be Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, demanding to know why GHG and pollution-spewing plant hasn’t been shut down as I promised voters in 2003. Challenged by switchboard operator to provide proof I really am Dalton McGuinty, I promise not to raise her taxes.

8:35 p.m. — Attempt to evade capture by climate denier Ontario Provincial Police officers chasing me down highway in cruisers, after climate denier Nanticoke switchboard operator contacts them complaining about some lunatic pretending to be the premier of Ontario.

8:40 p.m. — Place call to family from holding cell at OPP headquarters, asking them to come down and bail me out on numerous charges. Also ask them to bring clothes.

8:50 p.m. — Lecture climate denier OPP sergeant while leaving station that he should replace incandescent light bulbs in holding cell with fluorescent lighting to save planet.

9:00 p.m. — Return home. Take prescribed sedative. Go to bed.

Toronto Sun

Show the world you still have a working brain. On March the 29th

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Five Tips on Manipulating Fools

From the Editor:
This could be why we, all those fighting wind farms, are having a hard time informing the average person about the realities of the wind industry. We are asking them to read and think. Two things they don’t want anything to do with.

1. Dumb it all down
Make things really simple, even if they weren’t particularly complicated before. Idiots want the payoff of having a skill or “knowledge” without the unpleasantness of having to study or practice. You need to oversimplify life, convince them by summarizing and redacting, knowing that anything requiring education or even common sense to grasp will go completely over their heads. They need the comfort of being told that there are certain things they don’t have to know. They want the difficult issues of life taken from their hands. Boil complexity down to black and white and they will follow you into the jaws of hell out of relief and gratitude.

2. Terrify them
Every single human is terrified of the unknown. Some of us try to learn in order to deal with it, while some go into denial, and others choose to just remain fearful. Morons tend to avoid the first option, due to a tendency to not understand shit and to be bored by the sheer difficulty of reading. The third option makes people pliable. Note that we have already established that they are not fond of thinking, fear only makes that worse. Simpletons usually know very little of history, and cannot understand long-term goals, making them very much like sheep. Myopic and ignorant. You can convince them to do anything as long as you make the alternative irreversible and dangerous.

3. Be one of them
People want a face they can relate to. If you are selling a product you need a spokesman, Al Gore and David Suzuki in the case of global warming, not just a logo. As has already been stated in this post, morons have trouble with understanding things. Therefore if you tell them something, they need to know if they like you before they decide whether or not to go along with it. It’s an easy way to make difficult decisions. You buy from the salesman who makes you laugh and feel generally comfortable, not the one who merely tells you lots of stuff about the product. You listen to a preacher because he makes you feel good, feel at home, not because what he says makes sense. What intellectuals usually fail to grasp is that stupid people really are not interested in knowing things, truth is not important to them, therefore things like good reportage, thoughtful writing, accurate analysis, logic, cannot sway them one way or the other.

4. Isolate intellectuals
You really don’t want them on your side unless they are all the way on YOUR side. You do this by stating an outrageous principle, or doing something outrageous in a way that only the smart people will find it offensive. You camouflage your motives, but not all the way, you let the intelligentsia peek inside. Intelligent debate is a meritocratic, the smart will grasp, the dumb will fall by the wayside. You wind up with smart people buying the same books, visiting the same websites, posting on the same messageboards, watching the same movies. They become identifiable because they aren’t with your flock. You get an intellectual apartheid wherein your enemies can be rounded up or intimidated without menacing the whole population.

5. Be very visual
The subtle joke does not work, for the fool you need the crass, loud sight-gag. Anything you use to harness the fool population must be something they can see. Fools need to see blackened lungs to stop smoking, they need to see concentration camps to know that their government was evil, Kaposi’s sarcoma to know why condoms are important. They need pretty pictures and flashing graphics, for evidence of this surf My space randomly for a while, read the profiles with the pretty pictures and big fonts.

Dirty writer

Wind Power is an Illusion

From the Editor

The Govt. is just as bad as the wind industry. They know wind power is an illusion. The illusion is going to cost the Ontario taxpayer big time. Make sure no one gets a majority on Oct. the 1oth. A majority govt. is nothing more than a four year dictatorship of which you can’t do anything about.

LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF ONTARIO

Monday 10 April 2006

Mr. Garfield Dunlop (Simcoe North)

My concern is that we’re creating this illusion out there that we’re doing all these wonderful things in power.

One of the things that really was amazing is that the government is counting on the total capacity of the wind power generation as fact. This all ties in to our need for power, so we don’t have another blackout, another natural disaster. To date: Melancthon Grey wind project, which is 67.5; the Kingsbridge wind project, 39.6 megawatts; Erie Shore’s wind farm, 99 megawatts; the Prince wind farm, 99 megawatts; and the Blue Highlands wind farm, 49.5. That’s a total of 354.6 megawatts. The minister keeps saying that’s how many megawatts she has coming on-stream.1730

The reality is that in this book put out by the Independent Electricity System Operator — which I think is a government body, part of the old Ontario Hydro — it says, under an asterisk at the bottom, “For capacity planning purposes, wind generation has a dependable capacity contribution of 10% of the listed figures.” So of the 354.6 megawatts that Minister Cansfield talked about today, according to our own Independent Electricity System Operator, we really only have 35 megawatts, if you consider 10%.

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