Lord Ridiculous

If you haven’t seen it already, here’s Peter Sinclair’s latest installment on Lord Monckton, a man I had the pleasure of breakfasting with (or near) in Copenhagen.

800 Years

Here’s a nice video from the LA Times on the logging of the Tongass Forest, and specifically covering a proposal by Murkowski and Young to transfer up to 85,000 acres of Tongass forest to Sealaska Corp., which, as it happens, is owned by 20,000 members of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Tribes. So this is actually an interesting twist on forestry battles, raising questions about native american sovereignty and local versus corporate exploitation of forests. The full article is here.

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The new proposal would give Sealaska not only prime forest lands on northern Prince of Wales Island — much of it already designated for timber harvest by the U.S. Forest Service — but $60 million worth of roads the Forest Service built over the years to open up the region for logging.

The proposal has drawn fire in a way hardly seen since the early settler days, pitting many of the non-Native homesteaders, fishermen and eco-tourism operators against Native leaders, who say that after decades of outside companies exploiting the Tongass, it is time for Alaska Natives to get more than the leftover lands nobody else wanted.

Picking on Bobo

It’s a pretty busy day for me, so I’ll outsource my Bobo picking. Here’s this brilliant gem from Matt Taibi:

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.

Gotta agree with that.