Month: February 2007

Al Gore’s energy consumption hypocrisy. AN OSCAR FOR HYPOCRISY? So asked Simon Jester as he sent along this story about Al Gore’s home energy use. Of course it’s no surprise that Gore, that famous liar and scion of a political family, lives a “do as I say, don’t do as I do” lifestyle. But this is pretty funny, coming the day after his hot-air documentary won the Academy Award: The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh—more than 20 times the national average. Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh—guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year. As a result of his energy consumption, Gore’s average monthly electric bill topped $1,359. Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s energy consumption has increased from an average of 16,200 kWh per month in 2005, to 18,400 kWh per month in 2006. [Wolfesblog]

And that’s not even mentioning how many times Gore travels by air in a given month. From a post on the Magnum Photos Blog:

Right now, by occupying this one coach class seat, I am personally accountable for the release of about eight metric tons of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. That is roughly the same amount as the total CO2 emissions if I drove a Hummer H2 SUV every day for an entire year, based on the American suburban annual average of 19,300km.

I’d be willing to bet that if you took into account their homes, air travel, and general lifestyle, you’d find that the Hollywood ecofreaks who voted for Gore’s propaganda film are responsible for more carbon dioxide emissions than at least half of the population of the Earth–and even half of the US population.

The Scofflaw Demographic. What scofflaws need now, and what the majority of our population will wish for in the future, probably at the point where the government finally does try to seize every handgun or require every citizen be fingerprinted and have his or her DNA sequenced and recorded in a permanent database, or when every financial transaction, no matter how trivial, must by law be processed electronically, by a credit card company, or when traffic at lighted intersections is tracked by remote cameras, or when our employers begin forcing us to piss in cups as a condition for keeping our jobs (wait a minute…), is a refuge from the unrelenting psychological, political, legal, religious, economic and physical coercion we are daily subject to at the hands of our employers, our governments and everybody in-between, and from the over-politicization of every facet of our lives. And the only place to find this refuge will be far from our cities.

Scofflaws, like their predecessors during the previous prohibition, believe the drug war is a big mistake, as are the extreme measures law enforcement is taking to prosecute it. They would like to see the Park Service and Forest Service and BLM acknowledge that there is a segment of the population which cannot enjoy our public lands with a ranger looking over their shoulder. They would also like to see the RAT stomped dead, and legitimate roads left open.

So why should the great well-adjusted, sophisticated, domesticated, citified majority care what becomes of scofflaws, who are beyond the normal distribution curve for non-conformity? Because the scofflaws are the canaries in the coal mine. Every day there’s news about the police tangling with extremists of one kind or another—home-grown terrorists, religious fanatics, hardened criminals and racists. But scofflaws, for the most part, don’t have an economic or ideological agenda beyond just wanting to be left alone. And when the authorities start going after scofflaws with as much zeal as they do these other classes of criminals, the simple desire not to be molested by our own government will have become criminalized, for all of us. [New West Network]

Paul Purged from Pajamas Poll.

Commenter "jf" notes in the post below that Pajamas Media has eliminated Ron Paul from its weekly online straw poll. This is odd, considering that Paul had a 2-1 lead over his nearest competitor in last week's poll, and came in the second the week before.

Pajamas Media says it's implementing a new policy where only candidates who garner one percent or more of the vote in the previous month's Gallup poll are eligible for its online poll. But Paul wasn't listed as an option in Gallup's last poll. I don't know Gallup's reason for not including him. But even if Gallup's people don't find Paul credible, he obviously does have quite a bit of credibility with Pajamas Media's readership.

The only other candidate eliminated from the Republican field by the new policy is former senator Fred Thompson, who hasn't even announced.

Seems like a strange policy that eliminates the previous week's top vote-getter. It's even stranger when you consider the fact that the only real use of a straw poll from Pajamas Media would be to determine which candidates might be resonating with the blogosphere. On the right, the blogosphere skews libertarian. So Paul's ascendancy makes perfect sense. Hiding the fact that he's popular with the Internet right robs the poll of its only real utility.

Taking Paul off the list of options I guess makes the unscientific poll look more credible, in that its results are vaguely similar to those of national, more scientific polls. But you have to wonder why PM's editors would even bother with an online poll if they're just going to switch policies when they get results they don't like.

NOTE: Some commenters have noted that some Paul supporters had cheated the poll with bots and artificial voting. True. But according to the PM post on the "ballot stuffing," those votes were deducted from the candidate totals, and Paul still did very well. What's more, it isn't as if PM purged Paul from the poll to punish his supporters for their malfeasance. Supporters of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney did the same thing, and both of those names are still in the poll.

[Hit and Run]

The best comment on this comes from Jim Henley:

By utter and absolute coincidence the famously prowar PJM banned the only strongly antiwar Republican from their straw poll after he won it. Who knows how such a thing could happen.

I received a letter today from some government agency called the “Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control” stating that a nearby business had applied for a permit to sell alcohol, and giving me an address where I could request more information or send a protest. However, the letter omitted any address I could write to protesting the existence of the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.