Slactivism Strikes Again

Once again, the enviro-nuts of the world have made their annual grand useless obeisance to Mother Gaiea in the form of “Earth Hour.” As the AP fawningly reports:

Europe’s best known landmarks — including the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and Rome’s Colosseum — fell dark Saturday, following Sydney’s Opera House and Beijing’s Forbidden City in joining a global climate change protest, as lights were switched off across the world to mark the Earth Hour event.

In the United States, the lights went out at the Empire State Building in New York, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, among many other sites in the Eastern time zone.

Millions were expected to turn off lights and appliances for an hour from 8:30 p.m. in a gesture to highlight environmental concerns and to call for a binding pact to cut greenhouse gas emissions. This year’s was the fourth annual Earth Hour, organized by the World Wildlife Fund. (emphasis mine)

Here’s a clue, Einsteins. Turn off lights and appliances when you’re not using them. Period.

Doug Powers (filling in admirably while Michelle Malkin is on vacation) reveals what he and so many of us normal people do on a regular basis, celebrating “Earth Hour” every day:

We don’t leave lights on in rooms that nobody is in. We keep the thermostat fairly low (mostly because I’m usually too hot). We carpool when possible. We don’t waste gas. We pick up trash alongside the road when we’re walking. We volunteer to clean up the riverwalk, and we plant trees because we like trees — not because we’ve fooled ourselves into believing that planting trees is helping make Streisand’s environmentally-unfriendly concert tours carbon-neutral…

After Earth Hour is over, I pledge to turn my lights off for a full eight hours or so, just like we do every night, no doubt while Al Gore’s pool filter is still whirring away and outdoor flood lights protect his property. But during Earth Hour, we’ll have so many lights on that my family will have tan lines by the time the 60 minutes is up. I realize I’ll probably get hit with an Obamacare tanning bed tax, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay.

Meanwhile, Watts Up with That reports that Earth Hour was a wild success in North Korea, with nearly 100% participation–and includes a photo to prove it.

“The WWF sponsored Earth Hour has already come and gone in the Korean time zone, and the North Korean proletariat has claimed a stunning victory over its evil capitalist neighbor, South Korea.

Oh, wait… Seems it is always that way.”

Once again, a useless gesture carries more weight, gets more publicity, and garners more enthusiasm and adulation than the actual daily practicing of what is being preached for an hour. In other words, style over substance.

Stoutcat

We Must All Be Sentinels, Lest We Lose What’s Left Of Freedom

 

“Living history is more treacherous than merely witnessing it.”

As a somewhat impudent young man when I was in school, I didn’t really apply myself to history class. After all, history was about things that happened in the past, and I was contemptuously obsessed with “now” and what mysteries lay ahead.  But when a “D” on my report card in history caught my parents’ eyes, they knew it was time to make sure I appreciated the significance of understanding history and, more importantly, our place in it.

My mother’s contribution was the short but time-tested phrase, “Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I’ll get back to that in a moment. But my father chose to deliver his message in his own words, and those are the ones that ultimately haunt me to this day. He said, “We must all be sentinels to history, or else this fragile freedom we enjoy will be snatched away from us… and we won’t see it coming until it’s too late.”