What Is This World Coming To?

Last year it was revealed that Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for climate change (I thought climate change was ’science’) was among the nation’s worst energy hogs. Al’s carbon footprint was twenty times that of the average American household.

Gore countered by claiming that he buys ‘carbon offset credits’ (which is really nothing more than buying stock in ‘green’ companies. Even after it was revealed that Gore has a majority stake in Global Management, which sells the ‘offsets’. So in essence, Al Gore offsets his carbon footprints by buying stock from himself.)

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

This year, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research conducted another study of Al Gore’s domestic carbon footprint. Although Gore claimed to have invested a little cash since to make his home more energy efficient, it seems that the problem isn’t that his home is an energy hog. It’s the people who live in it.

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations – at a cost of $16,533. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

By contrast, President Bush has been criticized harshly by environmentalists for his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and its mandatory cuts on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.

An April 2001 article in USA Today described the president’s 4,000-square-foot single-story limestone house in Crawford as an “eco-friendly haven.”

“Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into purifying tanks underground — one tank for water from showers and bathroom sinks, which is so-called ‘gray water,’ and one tank for ‘black water’ from the kitchen sink and toilets,” it said. “The purified water is funneled to the cistern with the rainwater.”

In addition, “the Bushes installed a geothermal heating and cooling system, which uses about 25 percent of the electricity that traditional heating and air-conditioning systems consume.”

Sometimes, when I am watching the news, I become less certain of my grip on reality than is intended by the programmer. This occurs most often when I am watching TV opinion programming.

Guest host ED Hill was filling in for Bill O’Reilly when she was tasked with promoting an upcoming ‘debate’ between two people on the issue of gender: “Next week! Do husbands create more housework for wives? We’ll debate it.” Debate it? Let me settle the question. Yes. No matter what. No matter if the guy is a neat freak to the level of requiring therapy. The only way a husband could not create more housework for his wife would be if he lived next door. Conversely, wives create more housework for husbands. Nobody lives without leaving a trace.

Now that that’s settled, perhaps I might offer a suggestion for a better use of O’Reilly’s valuable airtime.

The Mad Mullah Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is hell-bent on developing a nuclear weapon he can fire at Israel in order to bring about the return of the Mahdi to lead Islam in the conquest of the West in a great end times victory that ushers in the Islamic Millennium. If it takes blowing up Israel and even Iran to wake the Mahdi, well, everybody’s got to go sometime, right? How is a guy with a suicide bomb different than a country with a suicide bomb? Let’s debate that.

Russia continues to supply Ahmadinejad with nuclear materials under the transparent fiction that oil-rich Iran requires nuclear energy to meet its peaceful domestic needs. The genocide in Darfur continues unabated. The UN babbles on about how America caused global warming, while we’re still running space heaters all over the house to keep warm in April. How about a debate on the ’settled science’ that isn’t?

Israel is conducting national emergency drills in preparation for an expected massive rocket attack from Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, including the eventuality of some of them carrying chemical or biological warheads.

The lunatics are in charge of the asylum in the Congress, Hillary wants to be in charge in the White House, and Obama thinks the only thing that will sweeten the bitterness of the churchgoing, gun-toting, xenophobic racists who inhabit the blighted Bible Belt is a bit of Jeremiah Wright’s preachin’.

Why not talk about that? Instead of a debate over the obvious about nothing. I need an Alka-Seltzer.

The London Sunday Times is reporting that the internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.

“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.

The Internet, (as we know it), has been around since about 1990, making it only 18 years old. And it is already obsolete.