schachterrific!

Here’s a story that’ll give you gas….

High rates of obesity in richer countries cause up to 1bn extra tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions every year, compared with countries with leaner populations, according to a study that assesses the additional food and fuel requirements of the overweight. The finding is particularly worrying, scientists say, because obesity is on the rise in many rich nations.

“Population fatness has an environmental impact,” said Phil Edwards, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “We’re all being told to stay fit and keep our weight down because it’s good for our health. The important thing is that staying slim is good for your health and for the health of the planet.”

You gotta be freakin’ kidding me! Get a life, people. It amazes me how a whole segmwnt of our society actually derive their income by working to make the entire world feel guilty for living….

This clip speaks for itself….

The free internet is about to go the way of the dodo bird, From American Spectator:

New York’s legislation… (requires) …online retailers to collect state and local sales tax if they had affiliate advertisers within the state. (It depends on what the meaning of physical presence is?) Affiliate advertisers basically consist of websites, often run by small businesses or organizations like the Parent Teacher’s Association, that carry advertisements from other online retailers, like Overstock.com or Amazon.com. As a result of the massive administrative costs that the law would have imposed, Overstock.com immediately terminated its relationship with approximately 3,400 affiliates. Jonathan Johnson, Overstock.com’s president, explained that “New York’s law made the cost of doing business with affiliates based in New York prohibitively high.”

That’s why New York is at the bottom of the list of states when it comes to personal freedoms….

Loyola Economics Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo takes a withering look at how governement uses the big lie to manipulate the populace in this great article from the Mises Institute:

The purpose of government is for those who run it to plunder those who do not. Throughout history, governments have used violence, intimidation, coercion, and mass murder to enforce this system. But governments’ first line of “defense” is always a blizzard of lies — about its own alleged benevolence, altruism, heroism, and greatness, along with equally big lies about the “evils” of the civil society, especially the free market.

The current economic crisis, which was instigated by the government’s central bank and its boom-and-bust monetary policies, among other interventions, has once again been blamed on “too little regulation” and too much freedom.

Will Americans ever catch on to this biggest of all of government’s Big Lies?

Read the rest here.

Yep, the Daily New is having a contest to see who can come up with the best flyover photoshopped image of Air Force One, a really nice way to bring home the point of how unnecessary the flyover actually was. You can find it here.

My favorite?

Hudson River Emergency Landing

Jonathan Jarvis is a designer who works for UNICEF. While there, he worked on finessing motion diagrams as a method of interpretation of complex issues.

Here is his take on the global credit crisis.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

A ten year study of 100,000 galaxies now offers compelling proof for the existence of ‘dark matter’. What’s more,

Saying that “the universe we see is really quite structured,” one of the lead researchers explained that the 10-year “census” of galaxies near our own Milky Way offers powerful evidence that this invisible dark matter “seems to hold the galaxies together.”

Stuff like this always makes me wonder if we are all part of something much larger, much grander than our puny little world  and our ant-like existence. Are super-novas an example of a galactic ‘viral’ attack? Are black holes the ‘tumor’ of galaxies? Or is it all much bigger even than that?

Read the details here. Better yet, here.