If you have read much of Dean’s blog, you may, like me, have gotten an astonishingly pervasive impression that Dean is a brilliant Renaissance man who must have eighteen or nineteen post graduate degrees in a broad spectrum of human arts and sciences. He comports himself as an expert on nearly everything, and while he rather neatly avoids coming out and directly stating that all left wingers he knows are deranged and subhuman dolts and traitors to not simply America but all humanity, his style, in which he implies that all left wingers regard him, and anyone who agrees with him about anything, as ‘right wingers, cranks, and lunatics’, is one in which he manages to strongly state such extreme opinions through implication, while preserving the invaluable capacity to deny ever actually saying any such thing if someone should cry ‘foul’.

In the above quoted passage, Dean implies, without actually directly stating a single specific thing anyone can really pin him down to, that people who think global warming is an actual honest to God threat to the Earth’s ecostructure, and human life in general on the planet, are nutballs. He further implies that these nutballs are somehow controlling the public agenda on this issue and deliberately marginalizing all opposing voices, again, without actually coming out and saying anything that anyone could really grab onto and point to as Dean Esmay firmly voicing an actual opinion or view on this. He is, in short, being snarky, as I understand what snarky is… strongly indicating that he thinks one side is vastly superior to the other side, without actually planting any sort of flag that he might be strongly refuted for in the future.

Now, here’s my thing: unlike Dean, I do not have any advanced scientific degrees. And I admit, I don’t know if Dean has any advanced scientific degrees either. I assume he must, because he is clearly capable of evaluating which of several groups of scientific claims he himself thinks are valid and correct, as opposed to belonging to nutball asswipes who should all just shut up and stop crying, and I myself wouldn’t have the effrontery to make such an evaluation without being capable of understanding what the hell all these scientists are talking about, which, other than on a very basic level, I’m not.

So Dean doubtless has various doctorates and masters in chemisty and biology and solar physics and global ecology and I don’t know what the hell all else, because quite clearly, he’s able to look at a lot of different scientific findings and somehow emerge from that morass of data absolutely knowing, in his heart of hearts, that the presence of mankind and mankind’s technological artifacts has done absolutely nothing that is in any way significant towards altering the mean ambient temperature of our globe, or, if mankind has done something to effect such an alteration, Dean apparently knows without the slightest shadow of a doubt that this alteration means nothing and will have absolutely no deleterious effects. In fact, Dean strongly implies that it may be having many beneficial effects, in his choice of what quotes he wishes to include (and exclude) in his entry.

Now… I don’t know about any of that. Honest to god, I don’t. Which, if any, effects carbon dioxide (and carbon monoxide, and other human derived waste gases) actually has when pumped in excessive amounts into our atmosphere, I would have to simply defer to those more knowledgeable than I about. It seems to me that if we keep putting a whole lot of the gas that we ourselves cannot actually breathe into the atmosphere, while continuing to chop down and destroy the various intensely forested areas that turn that gas back into the gas we DO breathe, we’re probably doing ourselves little if any good. But, well, that’s just something that occurs to me is common sense, and common sense is always suspect in a scientific discussion, and never ever helpful when discussing anything with a conservative.

I am, however, going to say a few other things that strike me as common sense in regard to ‘global warming’:

According to a quick look at a website called GeoHive, it seems there are between four and five billion human beings currently living on the globe. Now, Leonardo da Vinci apparently once stated that most men were little more than machines for turning food into shit, and, well, sometimes I’m in a mood to agree with Leonardo (especially after reading Tuxedo Slack’s blog) while other times I’m not (Dean Esmay, whatever else he may be, is certainly at least a little bit more than merely this, and I’ve been privileged to know a few people in my life who were considerably more than simply offal production machinery). However, in that vein, it can’t be denied that what human beings, and pretty much all other biological lifeforms caught in our particular physical cycle of entropy are, are organisms that turn one form of energy into other forms of energy as a byproduct of the process of living.

Which is to say, human beings take stored chemical energy, in the form of nutrients, and turn them, at least partially, into radiant heat energy, in the form of body heat.

All of which is my happy little way of saying, there’s four to five billion of us on the planet, and we’re all radiating 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (give or take a little statistically insignificant metabolic slippage) all the damn time, at least, until we die. That’s 394.4 billion degrees of heat radiating into our environment that wouldn’t be there if humans were not presently overcrowding the globe.

I’m not talking about greenhouse emissions, now, because again, if I were to talk about greenhouse emissions I’d have to take the word of scientists, and like Dean, I’d have to pick which group of scientists I wanted to agree with, and unlike Dean, because of course he’s very enlightened and knowledgeable and I’m one of those leftie bastards who dismisses everyone who disagrees with me as a right winger, a crank and a lunatic, I’d probably pick which group of scientists I sided with based on my own political and economic beliefs… which is to say, if I were a left wing nutjob who thinks government’s only legitimate purpose is making the world a better place for all, or at least most, of its inhabitants, I’d probably side with those who see ‘global warming’ caused by the human presence on the globe as a problem that has to be addressed. On the other hand, if I were a right wing illuminatus who is absolutely determined to see government’s only legitimate purpose as being ‘keeping things from getting worse’, which would mean I believe there are no real problems and the world (Dean’s World, as it were) is just fine the way it is (the kind of stunningly myopic and sociopathically selfish reality tunnel only the affluent can afford, which is why nearly every rich person you’ll meet is a conservative), then I would doubtless choose to side with the group of scientists that says ‘pish tosh, lots of extra heat in the atmosphere is GOOD for us, and it’s a good thing, too, because if it weren’t, my petroleum stock options might be in some danger of taking a hit and that would be just awful’.

However, I don’t want to simply pick a group of eggheads based on which of their statements best fits my own political and economic reality tunnel, and I can’t understand much of anything any of them say, or fact check them knowledgeably myself, so I’m going to stick with what I can do, which is say that 394.4 billion degrees of body heat radiating into the atmosphere every second of every day is probably having some kind of effect on our ecology that our ecology wouldn’t be experiencing if there weren’t four billion humans currently living on the globe.

And, since excess heat… which is to say, more heat than the current biosphere has evolved to accommodate usefully… is rarely GOOD for any kind of process that I’m aware of… I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if all this excess heat IS having some kind of impact on our global ecology, it’s probably a negative one.

Now, when you think about all the houses that we heat in the winter on this planet, and all their radiant waste calories, and when you think about our internal combustion engines, which number in the hundreds of millions, and all their waste calories, and you think about the various power generation plants scattered across the globe, and all their waste calories… hmmm.

See, as I understand it, all of these things, what they do is, they take one form of energy… generally, inactive forms of energy stored in chemical form (humans use the term ‘fuel’ for these chemicals) or forms of energy that don’t create excess heat (like the kinetic energy of a moving body of water, for example) and they turn it into, basically, heat energy, because heat energy is pretty much what we use to run our machinery, at one end of the process or another. So, basically, what mankind does, in addition to simply taking stored chemical energy (in the form of, like, Snickers bars) and through the simple process of metabolism, transform it into, among other things, waste heat, is take various forms of non-radiant energy (a great deal of which is simply stored as various naturally occurring substances like petroleum and coal) and transform it into heat energy. A lot of that heat energy we use for various purposes, but a significant percentage of it we radiate outward into our immediate environment as waste.

I suspect that with four to five billion people doing this, and hundreds of millions of human created heat producing artifacts also doings this, every second of every day, all this excess heat energy, that without humanity would simply remain stored as various other forms of energy on the globe, is probably having an effect on our eco system.

I also strongly suspect, again, since I’ve never heard of and cannot easily imagine any sort of natural physical process that benefits from excess heat, that this effect is a negative one.

Whether it’s such a negative one as to merit words like ‘catastrophic’, I don’t know. But I think it’s really retarded to state that either there’s no real appreciable effect from any of this at all, or, most likely, the effects are actually beneficial. How many recipes are you aware of that, if you put them in the oven at 500 degrees into of 400, and then leave them there for a hundred years instead of 45 minutes, come out better?

Yeah, that’s a ridiculous analogy, I know. But if there’s a process in this particular universe that benefits from the application of extra heat… or that even isn’t unduly harmed by, you know, several billion degrees of it… I’d like to know what it is.

Now, I realize I’m not really talking about what Dean was talking about, because he’s pooh poohing the notion that extra carbon emissions into the atmosphere have any kind of negative effect on our planet’s ecostructure, and I didn’t talk much about extra carbon emissions. However, Dean’s scientific friends seem to be trying hard to sell us on the idea that these extra carbon emissions do indeed cause an increase in global mean temperature, but, you know, that’s good. So… if we toss the extra carbon emissions in with all the waste heat I’m talking about… that simply wouldn’t exist if humanity did not, also, exist… I’m thinking there’s a problem.

Dean Esmay, however, would probably respond to that in the same way the airport official did to Herkimer Hermulka:

”Not unless there’s a problem.”

BRING IT ON

From behind the most sophisticated sensor array in human history, a screen of billion dollar fighter jets and a phalanx of heavily armed bodyguards, half a planet away from the people he’s taunting, our unelected jefe issued the above bold challenge to those of differing cultures and creeds who may be displeased enough with his foreign policy decisions to initiate a violent response to same.

From what I presume is a comfy chair in an air conditioned room in front of a functional high tech telecommunications device currently plugged in to a working electrical grid, half a planet away from the geographic region he is about to make fulsome statements regarding the condition of, Dean Esmay firmly and unconditionally states:

Iraq Continues To Go Well

This is, like Jane Craig’s POV on Tom Grunnick’s ability to anchor a newscast, not opinion.

Or so it seems, from the lack of conditioners in Dean’s straightforward assessment of an area that, as far as I know, he has never so much as laid actual eyes on, much less stirred a single digit, extremity, or protuberance of his own in the sandy soil of.

Dean continues in this interesting vein:

Now, I simply don’t know what to say about this. Honestly, I don’t even know for certain that Dean has never actually been to Iraq, nor can I be absolutely certain that he is not, currently, hunkered down in a storefront somewhere in downtown Baghdad, with his entire family hunched miserably behind him, tap tap tapping away into a battery powered laptop, waiting for the maybe two hours of electricity his area might be lucky enough to get that day so he can upload this glowingly positive account to the Internet. Perhaps Dean spends ten or twelve hours a day on foot patrol in Iraq armed only with an 8mm pistol, wearing a loathed national symbol prominently displayed on his uniform, never certain when some 10 year old is going to walk up to him with a big smile on their face and a bigger bomb strapped to the small of their back. Perhaps he comes home every day to his lightless stinking airless hovel, unsure of how he’ll feed his family today, uncertain if his female relatives will even still be there, or if maybe some Shi’ite mob caught them while Dean was out and dragged them out into the street and stoned them to death as godless infidels because they weren’t sweltering to death in burq’as.

So, I don’t know. If Dean has even the slightest shred of an actual idea what the U.S. military forces currently in Iraq are going through, or what the Iraqi civilian population is currently going through, or what they were going through before under Saddam Hussein (when, at least, the power worked in the parts of the country Saddam wasn’t mad at at the time, and women could safely walk the streets without worrying about irate male mobs coming up to them and performing forcible cliterectomies on them with pieces of broken glass) so he can actually make that comparison knowledgeably, then I defer to him in this regard.

If, on the other hand, Dean, like me and several million other windbags, is simply flatulating an opinion gathered from TV and the Internet viewed on the other side of the globe about something he has no actual first hand experience of whatsoever, well, I respectfully suggest that his use of words like “by any measure, the invasion was a success” and especially “things are going swimmingly well”, in regard to a situation in which coalition soldiers keep getting killed, and Iraqi civilians live in a state of constant chaos, unrest, and terror, many of them without most civilized amenities or even an assurance of enough food and water to keep them alive from one day to the next… are ill considered.

In fact, I suggest Dean’s use of these phrases, without any conditional phrases to soften them, without any indication that he thinks there is the slightest chance that his opinions might not in any way accurately reflect the actual state of events in Iraq at this moment, make him the reigning asshole of the Western World… or at least, the biggest one I’m currently aware of in the blogosphere.

My view is this: many… dare I say most… Iraqis seem to be without electricity, or food, or water, or any sense of security in their homes or their persons, because my country decided to blow a lot of their shit up for reasons that seem to be turning out to have not a great deal of actual merit to them, when examined closely after the fact. This seems, on the face of it, to be a decrease in the general quality of their life (which I grant you, was not as high as ours here in America) that existed prior to my government’s decision to go over there and blow a lot of their shit up for said increasingly specious reasons.

In addition, a lot of Iraqis, soldiers and civilians, got killed in, and continue to be killed during, the current military involvement in Iraq.

Further, many American soldiers have died in Iraq. Dean suggests that just as many of these soldiers would have died of natural causes if we had not sent them to Iraq, and I don’t know, that seems like a great big heaping helping of horseshit to me, but maybe he’s right. Nonetheless, when he speaks of traffic accidents and cholesterol related deaths he is speaking of statistics and potential. When I speak of American soldiers who have been killed in Iraq, I speak of sons and daughters and husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers who are cold and stiff and never going to kiss or hug or be kissed or hugged again, because they were in Iraq and they did not have to be there.

Now, Dean seems to think that all this can best be summed up by phrases like ‘swimmingly well’. In my opinion, this is foolish if not cruel, ignorant if not actively heartless, absurd if not actually grotesque, sickening if not actually reprehensible, and, abandoning cadence and rhythm for simple honest judgement, completely and unutterably contemptible.

I, on the other hand, think that a lot of dead human beings who don’t have to be dead, and a lot of live human beings currently suffering from things they don’t need to be suffering from (and that Dean Esmay almost certainly isn’t) is… I’m going to go out on a limb here… a bad thing.

Perhaps even an evil thing.

It may be a necessary evil. I don’t think it was at first, but now, having gone over there illegally and immorally and inflicted an enormous amount of unnecessary harm on distant strangers and their land, I feel my country and my government and I, myself, have an obligation to try to undo and repair some of the astonishingly egregious damage we have all done. So the continuing occupation does strike me as a necessary evil, and I think some of my tax dollars at least should be spent trying to fix the problems the invasion caused. The fact that the occupation is a necessity AND an evil created by the wickedness and corruption of my government in the first place both sickens and saddens me enormously, but that's neither here nor there; the situation is what it is.

By no means, however, would I describe such a pile of rotting corpses, and such an intensification of human suffering directly caused by my government, to be a process that was ‘going swimmingly well’.

But I’m a fucking liberal, and a namby pamby bleeding heart asshole who doesn’t understand global politics, or even accept that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

In fact, I think that people who use terms like ‘omelets’ when they’re really talking about large numbers of actual human lives should probably be hung up and flogged in public.

But, again, that’s just me. Your mileage, as always, may vary. Dean Esmay’s certainly does.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.