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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

“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.

“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.

“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…

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:

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.

Once the earth is fully paved, you’ll be able to save gas by driving directly to wherever you want to go.

1) Save the rainforests! The wood will come in handy for building re-education camps for right-wing extremists.

2) Build a windmill. Not only will it provide electricity, it’s also good for killing birds, which you can fry up on your solar panels. Mmmm… fried eagle.

3) Encourage everyone you know to ride bicycles, then steal their tires and burn them to heat your house.

4) Save the whales! We may need to start using their oil again.

5) Plastic bottles last forever in a landfill. Coat them with several layers of lead paint before throwing them out to keep BPA’s from leaching into the groundwater.

6) Only buy organic vegetables which use no pesticides. Being pre-chewed by bugs makes them easier to digest. Sorta like being fed by a mama bird.

7) Eat fish only from mercury-contaminated waters. If you don’t, then mercury will accumulate in their bodies until they become completely made out of liquid metal and begin assuming the form of loved ones in order to hunt us down and kill us.

Don’t drive when you can bike. And lubricate the chain with whale oil.

9) Instead of throwing away food scraps, toss them into a compost pile in your back yard. The compost can be used to replenish soil nutrients in your garden, while the compost pile itself will attract rats, which you can shoot for target practice and leave where they lie to create more compost. Circle of life!

10) Support the Endangered Species Act, which protects animals with dwindling numbers so that their population can recover so that they can be taken off the list so that they can be quietly hunted to extinction without jack-booted government thugs interfering with the natural order of things.

If saying “yes” to lunatic environmentalists on Earth Hour is a slippery slope, what’s at the bottom of the slope?

*stands*

*applauds*

Well done, Alex.

To which I respond with a heartfelt “bite me”.

I’m going to celebrate Human Achievement Hour, instead.

In response to which I’m sure the 21st century hippie losers will snivel “Oh yeah? What’s there to celebrate? What have human beings ever achieved?”

Got 3 minutes?:

Personally, I’m going to celebrate by taking a minute to appreciate the taken-for-granted miracles of human civilization that surround me:

* Sure, the elves had that freaky little “vision pool” going on, but my 40-inch plasma flatscreen does the same damn thing, except in hi-def.

* The computer I’m writing this on (with LIGHT!) contains exactly zero natural or organic materials. I’ll bet that stupid hippie Steve Jobs cries himself to sleep every night just thinking about that.

* If I jump in my SUV right now, I can be 60 miles away from here an hour later. Basically it’s just really slow teleportation.

* If wolves could do that, I’d stop hunting them from airplanes just out of respect.

* I’m gonna play a CD. Look! I’m making music… with LIGHT!

* My cell phone… actually, I’m gonna turn that off because you’re busy reading, and having it pop off with “It’s Raining Men” right now would probably annoy the crap out of you.

* SIT! my domesticated dog, son of wolves who weren’t hunted from airplanes.

* Twitter… is just self-indulgent twaddle. The hippies can shut that down if they want. Of course, if they did, they might get bored and do stuff that leaves big, carbony footprints. You know, like work or bathing.

* Zo – totally not a slave anymore.

How are YOU gonna celebrate?

—————————–

PS – Regarding the last Earth Hour post… I wasn’t able to rework the Earth Hour video with appropriately ominous background music, because I still don’t have video skills or software. However, if you have some time to kill, you can do a manual mashup that I thought worked pretty well.

Load up the Earth Hour video, pause it at the 30 second mark, and mute the sound (click the speaker icon to the right of the time stamp).

Download this mp3 of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Fire it up and pause at zero seconds.

Start the music then the video as near simultaneously as you can, and watch the Earth Hour video.

How’s that?

UPDATE 3-28-09:

Krig the Viking suggests another excellent mashup:

Pause the Earth Hour video at 26 seconds, and start Holst’s “Mars: The Bringer of War” (at 0 seconds).

It’s like these old, dead, music guys knew this was coming.

Not that her writing’s not rife with excellently-stated points, it’s just that she never once constructed a sentence that could stand alone without its surrounding context.

But I break that rule now, because something unspeakable is looming on the horizon, and quoting Atlas Shrugged is the only adequate way I can think of to put my abject horror into words.

Earth Hour 3 approaches.

Please indulge me:

“There were not many lights on the earth below. The countryside was an empty black sheet, with a few occasional flickers in the windows of some government structures, and the trembling glow of candles in the windows of thriftless homes. Most of the rural population had long since been reduced to the life of those ages when artificial light was an exorbitant luxury, and a sunset put an end to human activity. The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls, and power-conservation rules.

[...]

The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations – and that the lights of New York had gone out.”

These hedonistic luddites want to symbolically roll back every inch of human progress since Edison was awarded US Patent #223,898 on January 27, 1880.

Which makes me want to screw light bulbs into every orifice of the aforementioned luddites and then hardwire them to 120 volt AC.

But I’ll settle for some symbolism, because, unlike them, I respect and admire the customs, foundations, and institutions of human civilization.

What I’d LIKE to do, is re-work that video so that the soundtrack reflects the disgust and revulsion a thinking person should feel at the sight of the world’s greatest cities being plunged into darkness.

Problem is, I have no video-editing skills. Or even software.

Some I’m begging the readership to throw in on this one.

If you have an idea for an appropriate soundtrack for this video – like theme music from Friday the 13th, or REM’s “End of the World As We Know It”, or just screams of terror – toss it in the comments.

If you have video-editing skills and can re-do the auditories to better match this video atrocity, then put it together, upload it to YouTube, and drop a link in the comments. And don’t feel like you have to use the WHOLE video – at over 3 minutes, it’d be kinda tedious and unwieldy to work with. Slice, dice, edit, chop, mix, and match at your convenience.

If I have to settle for merely textually skewering these neo-hipster eco-tards, I’ll make do. But if y’all can help me whip up something a little more multi-media, I’d take it as a kindness and be much obliged.

“Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.”

[hat tip: Freemon Sandlewould]