There was a bunch of fear yesterday when the earthquake hit northern Virginia near Washington, D.C.

In fact, when Wall Street heard about the earthquake, the Dow rose over 300 points. Which says a lot about the economy. When there’s a chance that something will stop Obama and the Democrats, the market goes up.

There were reports that the Washington Monument was tilting, but that was not true. Washington politicians, though, were found to be crooked, but it’s too early to tell if the earthquake is to blame.

But the earthquake did do some isolated but terrible damage: it interrupted Obama on the golf course and made him miss a putt. Really.

So, despite early fears, the earthquake did little overall damage. Unlike Barack Obama and a Democrat-controlled Congress. Their damage is still being assessed.

Anyway, you don’t normally hear about earthquakes in that region as happened yesterday. Most earthquakes are in Japan, California, or other places foreign to America. Why on earth (or under earth) did one occur where it did?

I dunno.

Some people — mostly scientists — will tell you that earthquakes are caused by the plates of the earth moving in different directions or at different speeds, building pressure, and suddenly releasing, but I think they’re making it up as they go along. We need to find out what causes earthquakes, then stop them. Or use them to our advantage, like Gene Hackman tried to do in that Superman movie (the first one).

So, what causes earthquakes? Or, failing that, what caused yesterday’s earthquake?

Here are the leading candidates:

• Global warming causes them.
• Global cooling.
• Witches.
• Maybe it’s the Tea Party. They caused everything else that’s wrong, so perhaps it’s them that caused all the devastation yesterday.
• George Bush.
• More witches.
• The Titans bowling. Or maybe that’s thunder.
• The Titans dropping their bowling ball.

Maybe it is the whole tectonic plates thing. Or maybe Teutonic plates. Probably so. I never did trust the Germans.

You may recall a week or so ago when word came out that Cleveland was putting high-tech trash cans out that would rat out people who don’t recycle.

The trash cans have chips inside that can tell when you take the recycle can to the curb … and when you don’t. And that’s the key. When you don’t … and if it thinks you’ve gone too long without taking out recyclables, it will contact the city and tell them. Then they send a trash cop out to look around in your trash.

I don’t think I like the idea. Because, well, what has Cleveland ever done that was a good idea? No, really. Okay, they signed Jim Brown to play football, but that was 53 years ago. And he quit playing football after nine years. Even a bad-ass like Jim Brown couldn’t stomach Cleveland for too long.

Smart trash cans isn’t along the line as sign-Jim-Brown-to-play-football smart. It’s stupid. The trash cans are smart, but the whole idea is stupid.

Really, do you want your trash can calling and telling on you? I bet even Oscar the Grouch wouldn’t want a tattle-tell trash can.

But, maybe, just maybe, we can use that technology for something good instead of narcing on you about recycling.

For instance, we could put those chips in Obama’s golf clubs. Then, if he goes too long without taking the clubs to a golf course, then me might be in Washington trying to screw up the country some more. It could call someone who would send him a free pass to a golf course. As long as Obama is hitting the links, he’s not hitting the economy in the nuts.

There could be chips placed on Democrat Congressmen. When too many get together at one time, you know they’re planning something bad. So, it would call Fox News or Andrew Breitbart and they’d show up with a camera, scaring the Democrat Congressmen back into their little holes in the ground.

They could put one on Rosie O’Donnell. That way, whenever she showed up somewhere, it could call anyone in the area so they could run away.

One on Al Gore could call the police whenever he got near a masseuse.

One on Barney Frank could call the police whenever he went out in public.

One on Roman Polanski could call all the parents of teenage girls so they could hide their daughters.

One on Ron Paul could call everybody whenever he went somewhere. His supporters would all show up, and the rest of us could go somewhere else, confident that we’d be free of them for a few minutes.

So, maybe we could take the technology Cleveland is using to play trash police and put it to some good use.

This needs mentioning, since “Earth Hour” is Saturday at 8:30pm

Help Soylent Green celebrate Alpha Proxima Day.

Which, as we all know, is the day where you turn on enough lights in your house to outshine both Alpha and Proxima Centauri

Yes, I know that for the IMAO readership, EVERY day is Alpha Proxima Day, but feel free to make a special effort Saturday night, because a bunch of eco-dipnuts and their gullible and trendy college-age acolytes aren’t going to be doing their part to keep America’s generators humming and her power plant workers securely employed.

Hey, here’s a thought. If you live next to someone who actually participates in Earth Hour, cut their power lines so that when they go to turn their lights back on at 9:30, the electricity that they just denigrated will appear to have gotten their rude little message and granted their wish to live forever in the dark like cavemen.

Maybe next time they won’t take electricity for granted.

I got a spam from World Wildlife Fund asking me to save the Amur Leopard:

What a cutie! Let me open up my wallet!

But wait… what if they’re secretly planning to use my money to save an UGLY endangered species?:

ewwwwww… them’s for stompin’, not for savin’…

I think I’ll save my money… just to be safe.

Is it to crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women?

Possibly.

But the anguished wails of hippies mourning over dead trees is, at the very least, a close second:

[YouTube direct link]

[hat tip: American Digest]

Some stuffy Brit said:

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources.”

Being made of meat myself, I find that remark offensive.

Somewhere back when That One was suckering people for their votes, he mocked McCain’s proposed summer gas tax holiday because it would only save “about 25, 30 dollars“.

“Tax breaks for mind-bogglingly wealthy Ultra-Yuppies?”

Now that he’s President, he’s offering a National Park Fee holiday, where – on three select weekends this summer – you won’t have to pay to get into any National Park.

Fees range from $3 to $25.

Now, I hate slipping the government even the thinnest of dimes for anything, so I’m all for ANY instance of not having to render unto Caeser. However, I’d like to point out that this program is utterly useless, other than as a political publicity stunt.

I’ll explain.

It’s like those schemes to punish oil companies for high gas prices by not buying gas on some particular day. People don’t actually use less gasoline, they simply shift the date of purchase to a day earlier or later than normal. The same amount of gasoline is sold either way, so oil companies don’t lose any money.

In this case, nobody’s going to make a special trip to a National Park on “no fee” day. All that will happen is that some people who were going to visit National Parks this summer anyway (mostly tree-hugging, Obama-voting liberals who only like nature when somebody else pays for its upkeep) are going to re-schedule their visits for the free weekends. Total visitorship won’t increase. Tourism won’t increase. And the government will go deeper into debt because it still has to pay National Park staff the same wages whether it collects fees or not.

So what he SHOULD do is permanently double the fees on all National Parks.

Why?

Because going to a park is a choice, just like smoking, and he raised taxes on that, even though it disproportionately affects the po’ folks who vote for him.

Also because park-goers are a HUGE burden on our health care system. They get lost, need rescuing, starve, dehydrate, break legs, get eaten by bears, and get itchy bums while being naughty in the poison ivy.

I think it’s about time they paid their fair share.

Not sure how this found its way to my inbox, but I got an e-mail suggesting that I should put some sort of retarded greenie ‘cool badge’ on my blog. This one caught my eye:

“Green. It’s the new black”

Are you f@#$ing kidding me?

As a humor-hack of the lowest order, I can certainly appreciate beating to powder the dessicated bones of a 26-year-old meme, however, I can’t help thinking they should’ve worked just a little harder to include a miniscule smidge of honesty.

I expect a lot of readers feel the same way, so to kill time on a weekend, your assignment is to fill in the blank in the following sentence:

“Green. It’s the new _______”

I’ll get you started, you keep it running in the comments:

* Socialism

* Dumbass

* “We Are The World”

* Smug

* Purse-Chihuahua

* Vietnam

* Fingerstache

* Endandered Species Act

* Multiculturalism

* iPod

* Change

Your turn…

The mental image I will have in my head from now on, any time I hear the word “green“:

When it is broken down, the philosophy of environmentalism is the philosophy of life on earth without humanity at all. Green becomes the color of a forest that grows over unmarked graves.

Here’s a visual aid for the mental-image impaired:

Obama can ride around in his 8 gallons-to-the-mile limo and blather on about how the whole world can just live off wind, solar, and unicorn power, but a Canadian hippie who actually TRIED to live without petroleum had this to say:

If there is any conclusion I have it is that sustainable and renewable energy sources cannot support our current lifestyle. What people think is a small amount of energy is actually quite the opposite. Think of it this way. A liter of gasoline will drive a car about 25 kilometers -now push your car that distance and see what one liter of gasoline is actually worth.

By the way, did you know that dead bug buildup on windmill blades can significantly reduce their efficiency? “Windmill blade bug scrubber” is just one of the millions of green jobs Obama plans to create.