The Gods of Liberalism are Ancient

J. Matt Barber's column today at CNS News points out a spiritual truth about liberalism.

He mentions a sermon he heard a few weeks ago at Rivermont Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Lynchburg, VA by Pastor John Mabray:

In his sermon, Pastor Mabray illustrated that, although they've now assumed a more contemporary flair, the fundamentals of Baal worship remain alive and well today. The principal pillars of Baalism were child sacrifice, sexual immorality (both heterosexual and homosexual) and pantheism (reverence of creation over the Creator).

Ritualistic Baal worship, in sum, looked a little like this: Adults would gather around the altar of Baal. Infants would then be burned alive as a sacrificial offering to the deity.

Amid horrific screams and the stench of charred human flesh, congregants – men and women alike – would engage in bisexual orgies. The ritual of convenience was intended to produce economic prosperity by prompting Baal to bring rain for the fertility of "mother earth."

To revisit the key point I bold-typed above, modern liberalism and ancient paganism are strikingly similar in their practice of child sacrifice, sexual license and reverence of creation over the Creator.

These are some points I know Pastor Steve Hickey at Voices Carry has preached and taught on before.

And, as Barber points out, the ancient gods are in ascension in America right now:

Nonetheless, the aforementioned pillars of postmodern Baalism – abortion, sexual relativism and radical environmentalism – will almost certainly make rapid headway over the next four to eight years, with or without help from the Christian left. The gods of liberalism have a new high priest in Barack Obama, and enjoy many devout followers in the Democratic-controlled Congress, liberal media and halls of academia.

There is indeed nothing new under the sun. The human race keeps doing the same old stupid thing and repeating the same old sins.

Which points out another area where liberalism is dead wrong: we aren't evolving up morally any more than we are evolving up biologically.

Orphans of the Corn

Al Gore as you've always seen him before: Earth first (with him and his elitist friends as proxy) and the little people last.


From our friends at Americans for Limited Government.

Climbing Mt. Hoaximanjaro

It seems to be national Media Global Warming Scare Week, at least at NBC. They're making a mountain out of a molehill at Mt. Kilimanjaro, claiming the ice is melting there because of the mythical global warming. Just one problem: it isn't.

As the video below explains in part, there are a number of factors involved in the loss of ice at Kilimanjaro, including natural cycles, deforestation in the area, geography...and who knows, maybe the fact that it's a volcano could have something to do with it, too.

Reuters talked about this last year. But as Stuart Shepard says, we can always count on our "trusty" media to never let the facts get in the way of a good story...or a good scare.

In his Stoplight® video commentary, Stuart Shepard explains why NBC's Ann Curry didn't need to climb a mountain this week to discover what's happened to the snows of Kilimanjaro.

EPA Hijacks Your Lawnmower

You didn't know you were an environmental ravager just because you mow your yard, did you?

Yeah, you thought that bad feeling you get when you know the grass needs mowing was just because you didn't want to get out there in the hot sun and push that mower around. You didn't realize it was a guilty conscience over destroying our only fragile planet!

CNS News reports the environmental wackos will hijack your lawnmower and take it where no lawnmower has gone before in 2011.

Gasoline-powered lawnmowers blamed for summertime air pollution will have to be cleaner under new rules from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The regulation issued Thursday requires a 35 percent reduction in emissions from new lawn and garden equipment powered by engines under 25 horsepower.

I don't know about you, but I'll sleep so much easier in 2011, after I know these regulations are in place.

Whew! Disaster averted!

DNC Green Plan Turns a Little Brown

The Democrats made a lot of their plan to have a "green" convention.

However, as I've pointed out before, it ain't easy bein' green.

Now cnet news says it didn't go off too well.

They mentioned those kookie wooden card keys I discussed, plus said that bicycles weren't allowed in certain areas--meaning they had to use golf carts (undoubtedly powered by that icky coal-powered electricity) and other planet-wrecking vehicles. Check out the pics of idling limos and SUVs in the cnet piece.

Even though they were trying to be as "green" as possible, they still generated a lot of trash, and needed

900 volunteers to monitor waste cans and perform the trash-separation, thereby taking them away from tasks that might be more productive.

In the case of people working for a Democrat function, I'm sure it wasn't too productive, no matter what it was. But what about the average citizen. We don't have time for all this sorting crap.

They also issued

"lean 'n' green" catering guidelines that say food described thusly must not be fried and shall contain three of the following colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple, and white.

I don't know about you, but it that the way you want to live your life? Having a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington, on top of all the other meddling they've done already, telling you what color of foods you can eat???

Man, even when these people are looking for votes, they can't help but show what a bunch of nutcases they are.

Greening Thwarted at Democrat Convention

It seems the greening of the Democrat Convention has malfunctioned.

According to the New York Sun, instead of the usual plastic card keys, the Sheraton hotel was going to provide keys made of something called "sustainably-harvested wood" to their environmental wacko patrons.

Of course, like most environmental wacko plans, it didn't work out too good and after a bunch of complaints about card keys that didn't work, they whipped out the plastic again.

I have a question, though.

How do you have a "green" activity that kills something green? Trees are green, right? And you have to kill them to harvest their wood, right? So how do you manage to call killing a tree "green?"

I would imagine the tree huggers are mortified to hear about this. Can you hug a "sustainably-harvested tree?" Can spotted owls live in "sustainably-harvested trees?"

Is it to say that, if we replace the tree we killed with another tree, then that's "sustainably-harvested wood?" If so, then why do the environmental wackos have to go so bonkers over logging? After all, we have more trees in America now than we did at the time the country was founded.

Is it the typical liberal difference, such as how Al Gore can fly all over the planet in an effort to stop people from traveling too much, or lives in a house that burns 20x more electricity than the national average?

Is it that if you kill a tree for a products used by a tree hugger, then it really isn't the same as if we killed the tree for a regular old capitalist resource consumer?

It's so hard for me to keep up with the twists and turns of liberal logic...

You are Getting Green...Veeery Green

If the American Psychological Association hadn't already tipped their hand that they care more about promoting a liberal agenda than examining the facts, they've definitely done so now.

As you may have heard, last week the APA came out with the outrageous statement that abortion isn't hazardous to women's mental health. This was soon refuted by a statement from 100 scientist, medical and mental health professionals, as well as a statement from APA member Dr. Rachel M. MacNair who called the report a "politically-motivated exercise" which ignored evidence that didn't fit their pro-abortion agenda.

Now the newsletter from WeGetIt.org, a group that takes a Bible-based approach to environmental stewardship, draws attention to a USA Today article last week which says the APA wants to put the head-shrink on you to make you be more "green":

Armed with new research into what makes some people environmentally conscious and others less so, the 148,000-member American Psychological Association is stepping up efforts to foster a broader sense of eco-sensitivity that the group believes will translate into more public action to protect the planet.

"We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do," says Yale University psychologist Alan Kazdin, association president. "We know what messages will work and what will not."

According to the piece, they're pretty worried about this silly "truth" and "fact" and "contrary evidence" stuff slipping into news coverage and getting people off the approved mantra of greenness:

By editing CNN and PBS news stories so that some saw a skeptic included in the report, others saw a story in which the skeptic was edited out and another group saw no video, Krosnick found that adding 45 seconds of a skeptic to one news story caused 11% of Americans to shift their opinions about the scientific consensus. Rather than 58% believing a perceived scientific agreement, inclusion of the skeptic caused the perceived amount of agreement to drop to 47%.

American Psychological Association leaders say they want to launch a national initiative specifically targeting behavior changes, including developing media messages that will help people reduce their carbon footprint and pay more attention to ways they can conserve. They want to work with other organizations and enlist congressional support to help fund the effort.

Imagine that: just 45 seconds' coverage of a different explanation is enough to lead 11% of believers to doubt Al Gore's faerie tale.

They seem to believe all this contrary stuff such as solar activity, natural cycles, flawed global warming data, etc. is too confusing for people. How shameful that some skeptics (like a list of 31,000 scientists, among others) want to disturb people's peaceful dreams of global catastrophe with something as icky as reality.

So pushing a liberal pro-abortion agenda wasn't enough for the APA; they had to find another liberal cause to promote: radical environmentalism.

As for the APA's credibility, if they have any left, it seems to be headed for the door.

Now Environmentalists Stop Border Control

Environmental extremism is standing in the way of more than just America's energy needs.

From CNS News:

Interior officials have not accepted a proposed finding in an environmental assessment produced for the U.S. Border Patrol that putting towers with radar, cameras and communications equipment on Interior Department lands would have no significant impact, said Mike Friel, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

It seems the environmental extremist-ridden Interior Department is worried over the impact the fence will have on the "fragile desert lands." (Reminds me of the tears shed over the barren wasteland otherwise known as ANWR)

It's high time we woke up to the fact that we can't afford to coddle and appease environmental extremists anymore. No energy source is ever good enough and no product of modern life is ever safe enough.

While there are probably a few sincere rank-and-file environmentalists, the modern environmentalist movement has turned into nothing more than an anti-American opponent of law, order, prosperity and progress.

It's Not Easy Bein' Green

Living "green" and thinking green and building green and doing green and being green are supposed to save the planet, right?

The National Center for Policy Analysis has a piece by Todd Myers, director of the Center for the Environment at the Washington Policy Center, which looks at the results from schools in Washington state that were built "green."

Supporters of green schools claimed the schools would save 30-50% in energy costs, reduce absenteeism by 10%, and even bring better test scores (perhaps they were too modest to predict Middle East peace as another result).

So is "building green" the wave of the future and the way to save our fragile, human-pillaged planet? Not really.

The results:

- In no case was the green school the most energy-efficient in the district.

- In some cases the green schools were more efficient than the most recently built nongreen school, but the difference between them was often very small.

- In no case were the energy costs for a green school 30 percent less than at comparable schools as supporters had projected.

Apparently the student body was equally unimpressed, since it also didn't do much for absenteeism, either. In three green schools, absenteeism was actually higher than the overall district rate.

The moral of the story: before you spend money for a ticket and jump on the "green" bandwagon, make sure the vehicle is actually going to go somewhere.

Gas-Guzzling Environmentalists

This video comes courtesy of Michelle Malkin and Americans for Prosperity.

Just another example of that hypocritical "Good for thee, not for me" garbage we get all too much from environmental extremists, and liberals in general.

Check out the bicycles and solar-powered cars the "environmentally conscious" arrived in. What?! You don't see any?!

Darn it, couldn't find a bus!

(Now this is my kind of environmentalism! Sign me up!)

Environmental Extremists Oppose Refinery Expansion

Apparently some people in America aren't too concerned about paying more than $4.00 a gallon for gas.

CNS News reports that while BP wants to expand a refinery in Whiting, Indiana, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is fighting the expansion.

So what if the expansion increased gas and diesel production by 1.7 million gallons a day. So what if the expansion created 2,000 construction jobs and 80 permanent jobs.

Now, I've never driven through Whiting, Indiana, but I have driven through and stopped in Billings, Montana many times. Driving along I-90, refinery infrastructure is about all you see. I had family living not to far from there a few years ago, and the last I knew, people weren't dying in the streets and the vegetation looked pretty healthy. No apocalypse to be found.

The United States hasn't built a new refinery in over 30 years due to the massive regulatory and permit boondoggle. It is fantastically expensive and time consuming, thanks to bureaucracy and pandering to environmental extremists. Meanwhile, our refining capacity is pretty much maxed out. And a disaster (Katrina?) in the wrong place could seriously set us back.

Hyperion is looking to build a new refinery near Elk Point, South Dakota, but that effort has also been hindered by environmental extremists with connections to California environmental groups. For now, the citizens of that area aren't buying the extremism; last month voters gave the green light to necessary zoning changes with 58% approval.

The Elk Point project plans to employ about 4,500 workers to build the facility, permanently employ 1,800 people, and process 400,000 barrels of oil a day.

None of that matters to earth-worshippers. No energy supply will ever be clean enough to make them happy: they don't like coal, they don't like oil, they don't like nuclear, and they don't even like wind power (kills birds and makes the skyline icky).

As long as we pander and kowtow to environmental extremists, keep your wallet handy. It's time to do to them what their extremism merits: ignore them.

Meanwhile, the rest of us have a great nation to run. (Unless you like paying nearly $100 to fill your gas tank).

Half of U.S. Oil is Off Limits to Drilling

According to CNS News, a report on the United States' oil reserves has been prepared for congress.

The good news: we have LOTS of oil. The bad news: myopic energy policy prevents us from using about half of it.

The report, which was produced at the request of Congress by the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Land Management (BLM), said there are 279 million acres under federal management where oil and gas could potentially could be extracted.

More than half of it is totally off-limits to drillers.

"The total onshore resource is 31 billion barrels," said BLM's lead scientist Richard Watson, who authored the report. "Of that, 19 billion barrels are currently inaccessible or 62 percent. A little over 2 billion barrels, or 8 percent, is accessible under what we call standard lease terms."

If you add in the 85.9 billion barrels of oil that lie offshore, as determined by the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, there are 117 billion barrels of oil on lands owned or managed by the U.S. government.

But all expansion of offshore oil recovery is currently off-limits.

Adding in what's available on privately held land, the figure rises to 139 billion barrels of oil, according to the government - more than the known oil reserves of Iran, Iraq, Russia, Nigeria or Venezuela, respectively.

When you consider the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, throw in another 7.7 billion barrels.

So we have huge amounts of oil here in the United States; we could likely have gas for a dollar a gallon or less, if we simply ignored environmental extremists and tapped our resources.

It isn't just that huge areas are off limits for drilling. Many others are hindered by regulation and permitting.

"The permitting process is very slow, very cumbersome," he said. "What happens is that the window of opportunity to operate on some lands is very limited. Usually you are talking about areas where they have winter-use restrictions, where there can be no activity, to allow for migratory birds or animals."

With horizontal drilling, a lot of oil can be tapped with a very small presence on the land surface.

With directional drilling, producers obtain the rights to drill on land adjacent to the forbidden turf, drill down a short way, then drill horizontally - if they are allowed to.

"Directional drilling has revolutionized the industry," he said. "You don't ever want to tap into other areas that are not your property, but directional drilling has allowed the industry to reduce its footprint. From one well-pad, you can get a number of wells drilled."

This is why the huge reserves in ANWR in Alaska could be tapped with a very small drilling facility (2,000 acres out of millions of acres). But no; even that isn't good enough for environmental and animal rights extremists.

Environmentalists are probably quite happy having you pay $4.00 a gallon for gas; they're of the "spread the misery" lobby, not the "lift everyone up" lobby.

But if you're unhappy paying $4.00 a gallon for gas, maybe it's time to put the heat on your elected representatives.

Green Fakers

A little environmentalist humor to brighten your day, on this day we celebrate the passage of the zoning vote for the Hyperion refinery at Elk Point, what may be the first new refinery in over 30 years.



HT to Human Events.

Polar Bear Pawns of Environmentalists

Yesterday the Interior Department capitulated to radical environmentalists and rejected scientific evidence by adding the polar bear to the list of “endangered species.” This was enacted on the basis of presumed warming of the polar ice caps which theoretically may infringe upon the migratory range of the bear. This marks the first time that the Endangered Species Act has been used as a means to enforce reductions of green house gasses, i.e., carbon dioxide. The ramifications of this ruling are yet to be fully realized, but the wording and provisions of the ESA leave little doubt that the effect will be far-reaching. As habitat loss is the principal concern with declining species, the ESA may designate specific zones as protected habitat and enforce any and all activities that may impinge upon that protected habitat. By including polar bears, whose population today is UP 40% from 1974, as “threatened” or “endangered” because of some highly-disputed warming of the north pole, anything that can remotely contribute to the unproven theory of man-made global warming falls within the purview of the environmental regulatory agencies and is subject to enforcement up to and including heavy fines and imprisonment. Furthermore, the ESA also has a provision that allows citizens to sue the government over suspected violations. Every mining operation, lumber company, steel mill, airline, automotive manufacturer, power plant, and virtually anything and anybody that does or potentially can produce carbon dioxide is now under threat of lawsuit and enforcement by a bloated bureaucracy encouraged by ill-informed and malicious busy-bodies.

Those of us who have argued for development and exploitation of U.S. energy reserves, building of new refineries and nuclear power plants as a strategy for energy independence have effectively been trumped. To the list of things contributing to the rising cost of energy we can now add polar bears (and the environmentalists who seek to harm the United States)!

UPDATE: The Senate Committee on the Environment and Public works released a statement by Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.)that addresses this issue:

Inhofe Says Listing of Polar Bear Based on Politics, Not Science “With the number of polar bears substantially up over the past forty years, the decision announced today appears to be based entirely on unproven computer models.”