Varifrank: Captain America Calling

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Captain America Calling

Quote:
"The sympathy was muted in some corners by a sense that the United States reaped what it sowed, since the country is seen as the main contributor to global warming.

Joern Ehlers, a spokesman for World Wildlife Fund Germany, said global warming had increased the intensity of hurricanes. "The Americans have a big impact on the greenhouse effect," Ehlers said."

Its my guess that Mr. Ehlers also feels that women who wear short skirts are just “asking for it” and that O.J.'s wife Nicole Simpson "had it coming".

Since India and China also producing greenhouse gasses (at a rate far greater than the US by the way),when disaster strikes their shores will Europeans simply sit and opine that, “they had it coming”?

Perhaps if the United States turns its industrial power into something like that of most European countries and goes into the creation of chocolates, fancy pastries and Lego blocks, it too can produce no pollution so we too can also look down our noses at disasters around the world and say “oh its ok, they had it coming”. What a luxury it must be to be European, where being from a group of countries with a negative population growth and no industrial power with 12 per cent unemployed gives you the moral superiority to sit on the sidelines while other people die and say “too bad for you but you had it coming”.

Remember that this is the same group of people that called Americans “stingy” over the Indonesia tsunami disaster, for which Europeans also didn’t twitch a muscle to help and yes, once again blamed America for casing in the first place. I think I see a trend here.

There are literally thousands of times that Americans could have said to the world “You had it coming" but we don’t do that, we Americans say “how can we help you”, even when its for people we don’t like. Rest assured, we wont get support from Europe for this disaster, even though there are a million of our citizens that are homeless and displaced and a once great city is no more, because Europe likes to dispense its aid to people who prequalify under their scale of "those who deserve our help but arent too far away and have skin color and speech patterns remarkably similar to our own". I'm still trying to get a list of countries outside of Europe that Europeans have helped, but it seems that Europeans only help when the mood strikes them, and that seems a mighty rare event indeed something akin to the orbital period of the Hale-Bopp comet. Maybe "helping others" actually creates greenhouse gasses and thus not helping is a good thing? sure, in the minds of some Europeans, thats probably true.

The burden of being an American is that unlike the rest of the world, we live with the fact that there is no America for us to run away to or seek help from if things go bad. In this disaster we again see that for America, the only people in the world that we can count on are the ones represented by the stars in the flag. The rest of the world couldnt give a fig for America, unless of course, the rest of the world finds itself in need our help. Now that we need their help, where are they? Where is the UN? Where is the French Aircraft Carrier Charles De Gaulle? Wheres that great force of peacekeeping called the Canadian Armed Forces?

Oh, I forgot, "we had it coming". Yeah, I heard that same thing back when Mohammed Atta killed 3,000 people in New York. Funny how we always "had it coming" when things go bad, but we "dont deserve it" when things go good.

Just keep in mind that we don’t have to help the rest of the world. We don’t have to be the benevolent force in the world that we are. We’ve turned our back on the world before, and in the blink of an eye, we can do it again. Just remember that the last time we turned our back on the world, 52 million people died in a war that spanned the globe. Our dead are buried in every European country, people from America having lost their lives bringing Europe the freedom it now enjoys. The men buried in those cemetaries could have stayed home. The men who flew in the Berlin Blockade and died could have refused to fly. There were more than a few people who could have said to the Germans "you deserve it"; instead they flew, dropped food and sometimes they even died in the process. Why? Why did we do that?

Because thats who we are.

Goodbye Europe, its been good to know you, and thanks once again for reminding me why I'm eternally grateful that my family was chased out of that grand continent. From what I’ve seen this week from the French press, I think the best part of France is now under 20 feet of water on the banks of the Lower Mississippi.

We will rebuild. We will go on. And yeah, when Europe is in need some day, we will come and help.

Because that’s who we are.

Posted @ September 01, 2005 01:29 AM | Current Affairs

Joern Ehlers, a spokesman for World Wildlife Fund Germany, said global warming had increased the intensity of hurricanes. "The Americans have a big impact on the greenhouse effect," Ehlers said."

Wow, Joern went and became an instant expert on the intricacies of global warming and it's causes. Much different from an interview I read in Discover magazine recently with William Gray, one of the top hurricane researchers of the past few decades:

You don’t believe global warming is causing climate change?

G: No. If it is, it is causing such a small part that it is negligible. I’m not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and ’40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle ’40s to the early ’70s. And there has been warming since the middle ’70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced.

That must be a controversial position among hurricane researchers.

G: Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical as hell about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us. If you don’t know anything about how the atmosphere functions, you will of course say, “Look, greenhouse gases are going up, the globe is warming, they must be related.” Well, just because there are two associations, changing with the same sign, doesn’t mean that one is causing the other.

With last year’s hurricane season so active, and this year’s looking like it will be, won’t people say it’s evidence of global warming?

G: The Atlantic has had more of these storms in the least 10 years or so, but in other ocean basins, activity is slightly down. Why would that be so if this is climate change? The Atlantic is a special basin? The number of major storms in the Atlantic also went way down from the middle 1960s to the middle ’90s, when greenhouse gases were going up.

Why is there scientific support for the idea?

G: So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more. Now that the cold war is over, we have to generate a common enemy to support science, and what better common enemy for the globe than greenhouse gases?

Are your funding problems due in part to your views?

G: I can’t be sure, but I think that’s a lot of the reason. I have been around 50 years, so my views on this are well known. I had NOAA money for 30 some years, and then when the Clinton administration came in and Gore started directing some of the environmental stuff, I was cut off. I couldn’t get any NOAA money. They turned down 13 straight proposals from me.

http://www.discover.com/issues/sep-05/departments/discover-dialogue

Posted by: Hudson21 at September 1, 2005 07:28 AM

According to the National Hurricane Center of the National Weather Center, there are fewer, not more, hurricanes today than years ago.

There have been only 14.4 hurricanes per year since 1951 compared to 19.2 hurricanes per year from 1851 to 1950. And only 5.6 severe hurricanes per year in the last fifty years compared to 6.1 severe hurricanes per year in the previous hundred years.

The radical environmental movement is in the process of switching from predictions of disaster from global warming to predictions of disaster from more extreme weather. It is not true, however, that there is more extreme weather now.

The real agenda of the radical environmentalists is attacking capitalism and America.

Go to http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml

to see the table.

Posted by: thedragonflies at September 1, 2005 10:44 AM

A few weeks ago I wrote a real angry post about the Europeans titled "On the EUnuchs." I ended it pragmatically. "If the time eventually came, we would not abandon you to the consequences of your appeasement. Not because you've earned yet more American blood shed on your shores, but because it is in our interests. Like Canada, you are a naive and ingrateful little brother, who must be protected form his own impulsive and self-defeating desires."

But honestly, I'm so sick of them every now and then I feel as if I just wouldn't care. Even if it was the equivalent cutting off our nose to spite our face.

So sick of them.

Posted by: Cutler at September 1, 2005 04:41 PM