(reposted from 2012)
Not content with ruining an hour of your life on March 25th, the greenies are back at it again less than a month later with “Earth Day”, which is like some sort of hippie Christmas or something.
Yeah, leave it to the Watermelons to pick a day for celebration when it’s still too cold to hang out in the back yard wearing an apron and grilling steaks. There’s a reason the 4th of July falls on the 4th of July every year, people.
Since no one you know or like knows anything about Earth Day, I’ll get you up to speed so that if you end up talking to a liberal today, you can dish some knowledge and then act like he’s a total moron for not already knowing these…
15 FUN FACTS ABOUT EARTH DAY
1) Earth Day was invented by Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, on April 22nd 1970, in an valiant effort to make people spend their time caring about the environment instead of snickering at his first name.
2) Earth Day is celebrated every year on April 22nd, which, coincidentally, is Russian dictator V.I. Lenin’s birthday. Although Lenin was too busy being dead to directly participate in the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, visitors to his tomb that day swear they heard chuckling.
3) An early supporter of the Earth Day movement was “Population Bomb” author Paul Erlich, whose work presciently predicted the widespread famines and food riots that killed millions of Americans during the Reagan years.
4) One of the most popular Earth Day activities is to reduce usage of water – a rare and precious commodity which few living people have seen outside of pictures – of which barely 400 quadrillion gallons currently remain.
5) Most Earth Day functions you will attend put out “recycling bins” to collect plastic water bottles. This reduces waste and pollution by having the containers hauled away separate from the garbage bins by 20-ton diesel trucks that get 3 miles to the gallon.
6) On Earth Day 2005, over 1000 people stood on a Canadian ice floe to spell out the words “Arctic Warming,” which, unfortunately, local polar bears mis-read as “Free Crunchy Meat Snacks.”
7) The EPA offers a free newsletter with handy Earth Day tips such as “Keep appliances in good working order.” Which is completely useless advice as it doesn’t tell you whether to use a fork or a knife to fix your toaster.
8) Some folks enjoy writing “6 word essays” on Earth Day, like “Many nations. One planet. Our home.” Mostly people who portrayed Indians in westerns during the 1950’s.
9) In preparation for Earth Day, teachers are encouraged to help children learn about global warming by periodically poking them with an “alertness stick” during a screening of “An Inconvenient Truth”.
10) One of the biggest crises addressed during the first Earth Day celebrations was ozone depletion. We don’t care about that any more.
11) Sadly, although Earth Day was founded on an ideal of environmental justice, American law schools still hand out very few degrees to spotted owls.
12) On Earth Day 2003, students in the UK set a world record by planting 4100 trees, which were later cut down by men who skip and jump, like to press wild flowers, put on women’s clothing, and hang around in bars.
13) One of the watchwords of Earth Day is “reuse.” If you see a hobo begging for change using an old Slurpee cup, give him a big ‘ol Earth Day hug of thanks.
14) On the first Earth Day in 1970, activists spilled oil on the sidewalk outside the U.S. Department of the Interior to protest against offshore drilling, completely destroying the crab-fishing industry in the DC metro area.
15) The EPA was founded shortly after, and because of, the first Earth Day in 1970. Since its inception, the EPA has saved enough electricity to power 2 million homes by enforcing laws that prevent power plants from creating that electricity.
Final thought:
Every time someone makes a list of Earth Day activities, they’re really just telling you how you can make hippies cry by doing the opposite.
[YouTube direct link] (Viewer #189,480)
Sometimes I hug the tree before cutting it down. But only to tie a pull rope around it.
Celebrate INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION DAY with drag races, tractor pulls, barbecue contests, and bonfires!
Earth Day marches: Virtue Siegheilling.
Re: #3:
Ah, that benefactor of the human race, Paul Erlich….
Please notice in the fourth- and third-to-last paragraphs, Chinese Communists sound sane compared to the modern American left!
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“When China finally scrapped its one-child policy after more than three decades of brutality, almost no one lamented its passing. But Paul R. Ehlich, a Stanford-educated biologist and author of the 1968 fear-baiting classic The Population Bomb, was upset. On Oct. 30 [2015], Ehrlich took to Twitter and in a comment on the decision, wrote (in all caps): ‘Gibbering insanity – the growth-forever gang.’
“It’s hard to imagine anyone clinging to the one-child policy and hoping it would remain in place. The merciless birth limits formally launched in 1980 turned procreation into politics, pitted neighbor against neighbor, and resulted in countless forced abortions and sterilizations. Baby girls were aborted by couples desperate for male heirs; others were given away to childless relatives or put up for adoption. Couples who defiantly kept their “illegal” children were financially crippled by fines, lost their jobs, and in some cases had their property taken away.
. . .
“In the wake of the post-World War II baby boom, Ehrlich’s apocalyptic visions easily gained traction. The United Nations declared 1974 World Population Year and that summer, representatives from 137 countries gathered for the first global meeting of government officials to discuss population policy. The meeting was held at the Sala Palatului, a massive Soviet-style concert and conference hall in the Romanian capital of Bucharest. Battles lines were quickly drawn: wealthy world powers advocated aggressive population control measures, while developing nations felt the overpopulation threat was being exaggerated and were resentful of attempts to set a world population limit.
“The population debate resulted in strange bedfellows, with the Vatican and the Soviet Union and China all resisting the push for population targets. The Vatican and several Latin American countries balked for religious reasons, while the Communists resented the idea of manpower as a liability rather than an asset. They also saw in the debate a replay of time-worn habits: colonial and imperialist countries trying to meddle in the governance of the third world.
“And indeed, the United States was pushing for limits that it saw would never impose on itself. Caspar Weinberger, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, at the time, was there at the global meeting advocating replacement fertility as a target for the planet, essentially 2.1 children per couple, to be achieved by the year 2000.
“In the opposing camp stood Huang Shuze, China’s deputy health director and loyal attendant to strongman Communist Chairman Mao Zedong. Huang presented Beijing’s views on population to the conference with no-holds-barred Maoist moxie. He told the delegates that Western superpowers were raising a ‘false alarm’ over an alleged population explosion, and painting a ‘depressing picture of the future of mankind.’
“ ‘The creative power of the people is boundless, and so is man’s ability to exploit and utilize natural resources,’ Huang said. ‘The pessimistic views spread by the superpowers are utterly groundless and are being propagated with ulterior motives.’
“But China performed a 180-degree turn between the time of the Bucharest meeting and the next major UN conference on population in Mexico City in 1984, ten years later.
. . .
“As Ehrlich’s many dire predictions failed to come to pass — England did not cease to exist by 2000, for example — he faded from the headlines. But when an Ehrlich-style fear of a ‘population bomb’ came to China, a place whose mandarins brook little dissent, it tragically produced policy that was to remain stubbornly unchallenged for decades, and would drive the country’s family planning regime well into 2015.”
— ‘A Brutality Born of Helplessness’ — How overblown Western fears of a ‘population bomb’ helped birth China’s hated one-child policy.
Alexa Olesen / foreignpolicy.com / November 3, 2015
I heard a fake “news” report today saying that people were demonstrating today “in defense of science”. Seems like science 101 to look at all the predictions from the first earth day and realize that EVERY one of them was WRONG, not just slightly wrong but so wrong that in a sane universe, the people who made them would be ridiculed to death and so would the people today who can’t be bothered to look it up and say, wow, maybe these people are just full of $hit. Instead, we have a country filled with people who can’t even read a clock…who were taught by the same people who should be ridiculed to death. Certainly not a coincidence.
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