With DNC in mind, city bans carrying urine, feces

Poo and pee dominated a public hearing Monday on a new law that prohibits people from carrying certain items if they intend to use them for nefarious purposes.

What other purpose might there be for carrying these “products”? I’d say monger away. This is a law whose time has come!

Representatives from some of the groups planning large-scale protests during the DNC this month said the ordinance was unnecessary and accused city officials of fear mongering.

No Pun intended? 

“The intent of this ordinance is to try to smear protesters and make them look as if they are somehow criminal or somehow going to engage in some kind of gross conduct,” said Glenn Spagnuolo, an organizer with the Re- create 68 Alliance.

The ordinance makes it illegal to carry certain items, such as chains, padlocks, carabiners and other locking devices. It also prohibits the possession of noxious substances. Two of the most frequently used examples of a noxious substance are a bucket of urine and a “feces bomb.”

Police have to prove that people carrying such items intend to use them to block public access or emergency equipment or to thwart crowd control measures.

“Our intent for this bill is not about suppressing or chilling First Amendment rights,” he said.

“Young man!”

“Yes Officer?

” Just exactly what do you intend to do with that shit?”

“Exercise my first ammendment rights?”

“Put down the poop son. Before I get pissed!”

It all makes sense.

Of course, as usual, if you read this blog you’re years ahead of science.

The other day, we noted that the “universal consensus” behind Man-Made Global Warming is, er, not really universal.

And over at American Thinker, we also see that it’s not consensual:

First, the editors of APS newsletter Physics and Society invited [man-made global warming skeptic] Lord Monckton to present them a paper explaining his disagreement with the AGW findings of the IPCC.  And the former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher happily accepted the offer, submitting a brilliant, must read article excoriating the UN lapdogs, both for their deliberately obscured methods and their gross exaggerations of green house gas impact on global temperatures.

But once Lord Monckton’s paper started getting attention?

But a few days later, Monckton’s paper was suddenly and inexplicably branded with these scurrilous prefacing words, emphasized in red:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”

An outlandish disclaimer, particularly considering that the paper had been reviewed by one of APS’s own scientists, and all requested clarifications were duly incorporated by the author. 

In other words – if you can’t beat ’em, lie about ’em. 

…but the notion that there is “universal consensus” among scientists on  the subject is:

“There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

 Science is so complicated.

Lileks and I were talking last Saturday on the NARNII show about the real “Two Americas” in this country. There’s a pessimistic America that believes the nation is spinning into a vortex of decay, global warming, and rich-vs.-poor civil war on the one hand – an American that thinks the rest of America needs its soul “saved” (not to name any names here). And there’s an America that is optimistic – that retains the spirit of its immigrant forefathers who came to this land to find a new, better life.

One America thinks our best days are behind us, and gets a secret tingle up their leg watching The Day After Tomorrow (“That’ll teach you to drive SUVs and ignore Mother Earth!”), and believes that we’d better quit nattering about freedom and the market and liberty and just hush up and listen to our older, wiser betters in China and India. One America sings “America: F*** Yeah!” with simultaneous comic irony and pit-of-the-gut sincerity.

One America voted for Jimmy “Malaise” Carter, Walter “Sure, I’ll Raise Your Taxes” Mondale, Michael “Look At Me In My Tank” Dukakis, Algore, John Kerry and Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, and quietly waits for the inferno to overtake them; many of them even avoid having children, either because their thoughts of the future are so dismal or, in extreme cases, because they believe the human race should voluntarily extinct itself. The other America elected Ronald Reagan, flocked to see Rambo, waved the flag at times that made that other America blanche with embarassment, bought Smith and Wesson Model 29s and dared you to pry them from their cold, dead hands, and quietly contributed to the downfall of a genuinely evil empire, leaving the world a much better place than it’d been ten years earlier.

Now, I believe a couple of things:

1. The world’s going to run out of oil. Not real soon, but eventually.
2. The free market – assuming it’s allowed to be free – will anticipate and react to that inevitability faster than government will. People will adapt their behaviors in the short run (as they are today with gas prices); as the supply of oil contracts, the market will present alternatives.
3. The market will present these alternatives long before government can mandate them. Long before the government can lay a half-mile grid of trolley tracks in every American city, industry will have developed an electric or fuel-cell car, running from something we do have in great profusion – nuclear-generated electricity, waste material, paperwork from failed Tic programs, whatever.
4. Government actions will exacerbate the problem.

Let’s go back to optimism for a bit.

James and I were talking about how crushing pessimism was one of the dominant leitmotifs of American pop culture over the past fifty years. We also noted that next week’s Minnesota Street Rod Association convention at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds (at which the NARN will be broadcasting!) harkens back to an era when America was profoundly optimistic – where the sky, and beyond, was the limit. Cars were big, brawny, cheery and optimistic.

I noted, in contrast, that this is the face of the current American car-buying public (or at least the stereotype of it):

Now, the Prius is a perfectly fine car – Toyota builds a good vehicle, yadda yadda.

But I noted that other car makers had tried their hands at building hybrids – Honda, Volvo et al – and gotten dicier results in the hybrid market; they’d made the “mistake” of merely building hybridized versions of their regular cars. In other words, their “normal”-looking hybrids failed in the market, while Toyota dealers can’t keep the dorky-looking Prius in stock.

The reason, of course, is that the people who are concerned about “global warming” today want to be seen doing the vehicular equivalent of wearing a hair shirt. They want to drive a car that looks like a rolling cockroach, thus to feel closer to the nature into which they feel we are all about to decay anyway.

My statement; America – at least, the part of America that flies the flag and hears “God Bless the USA” with a certain tingle of pride even as they cringe at the mawkishness, the America that flies the flag on June 14, right-side up, no flame involved – will take the notion of alternative transportation into their hearts only when electric vehicles look like this…:

…only when hybrids look like this…:

Only when a ride on a light rail train looks like this:

…rather than some exercise in self-abnegation and penitence to Mother Earth (like Michelle Obama envisions for us…):

Then – when the idea of “alternatives” are seen not as expressions of shame, of crabbling about after the crumbs of our betters, of finding comfort in societal doom, but rather of progress rather than decay, of skill and prowess rather than doom – then, America will embrace these ideas.

So sign me up for the first electric Porsche 914.

Er…maybe the first one in the third year of production, anyway.

Never mind that the models used to predict it can’t even retroactively predict the past; forget that the “universal consensus” on the topic doesn’t exist.

In the religion of Manmade Global Global Warming, everything that happens proves the hypothesis – and everything that doesn’t happen proves the hypothesis.

Including the tragedies that, horrible as they are, are a pretty normal part of life on the Great Plains:

The evidence for the consequences of global warming is appearing with alarming frequency. This morning’s headlines are filled with tales of deadly weather: “At least four people were killed and about 40 injured when a tornado tore through a Boy Scout camp in western Iowa on Wednesday night”

Scumbags.

Gary Miller has the best introduction to Bogus Doug’s evisceration of Brian Lambert’s call for media censorship of the global warming debate:

Doug Williams demonstrates why he is duty-bound to never again take 6 months off from blogging by offering this extraordinary post on Brian Lambert’s global warming pronouncements.

In the span of just a few paragraphs, Doug demonstrates Lambert’s unfamiliarity with the scientific method. 

But don’t take Gary’s word for it.  Read Doug’s post.

A highlight:

Brian Lambert has written a screed a bit wordier, but no sillier about conservatives. But we shouldn’t mock. He’s in his terribly serious mode, you see. He’s trying to explain that he – failed media critic Brian Lambert – has figured out the high holy scientific truths journalists ought to respect.

The ethical challenge for journalists and journalism (as opposed to infotainment personalities in “the media”) is stark. It means accepting what the best available science has now concluded is fact about global warming — that it’s happening and human activity is an aggravating if not principal cause — and pulling the plug on spurious “debate” engendered by conservative ideologues, much like what credible news organizations have done with Holocaust-deniers and creationists.

Of course to anyone with a degree studying science as opposed to journalism it’s a grand load of hooey on it’s face. What exactly is a phrase like “accepting what the best available science has now concluded is fact about global warming” supposed to mean? Real science hasn’t “concluded” that any future predictions – about global warming or anything else – are “fact,” because that’s not how science works. And “pulling the plug on spurious ‘debate'” is about as blatant a rejection of the scientific method as one could propose.

Doug shows in tall block letters the scientific illiteracy which is so comical when coming from a cartoon like Lambert – but so dangerous from actual reporters:

It’s child’s play to find leading experts in climate science dissenting from the IPCC report. Yet that’s not something Lambert even finds relevant. Because “for journalists the debate phase has ended.” Science goes in story phases, don’t you know. It’s not really about the search for truth, it’s about framing the narrative. I don’t think he intended to be nearly so honest, but wow is that ever telling.

The other telling thing here is how Lambert has drifted into the position that journalists should trust the scientific pronouncements of political scientific bodies. I know he thinks this is a special and singular scientific issue unlike any other before or likely to come after. But that just illustrates his naivety. Especially in the modern age, scientific funding is driven to a large extent by crisis-mongering. If Lambert is suggesting – and it seems he is – that in the case of a crisis journalists must abandon their skepticism, he’s calling for journalists to become little more than government propagandists. And what could possibly go wrong there?

Read the whole thing.

And Gary was right, Doug; I hope you’re good and rested.  We’re gonna need you.