Thoughts in a Haystack

There is a crazy person coming to a polling booth near you!

That would be Paul Schiffer, running for the 16th Congressional seat, who calls himself the "Tea Party candidate." He has now announced, almost a year before the general election, that he "has already written legislation to repeal last Monday's decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency calling carbon dioxide a 'pollutant.'" I think the word for this is "hubris" ... especially since, in 2008, he ran in the Republican primary for the seat and lost.

But you'll love his reasoning:

You know all the dihydrogen monoxide in the Ohio and other rivers in the state? Why should we regulate where it goes or how much accumulates any place? Let's pull the dams and levees off all the rivers in Ohio and see how we do with just letting that lifeblood flow, shall we?

Oh, and too much of a good thing can always be harmful.

And you'll love this too:

True science is violently opposed to 'consensus' of opinion, and devoted to hard, cold, test results that might shatter consensus. Science is based on repeatable experiments. No experiment has ever shown that man-made carbon dioxide affects the Earth's temperature.

Well, science is larger than the laboratory ... repeatable observations count too. And consensus comes from considering all the observations to date. But the very point of the climatologists is that humans have been conducting a long-term experiment in global warming by pumping carbon into our atmosphere and what scientists are doing now is merely reporting on the results of that experiment.

But it is also true that too little of a good thing can be very harmful ... as Mr. Schiffer is demonstrating in the case of intelligence.
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