Koch Industries billionaire David H. Koch is the wealthiest man in New York City, with a net worth of $31 billion. His fortune is built on polluting the climate system...Well, he probably started small, though. Maybe by tapping ashes into a fish tank, or throwing Coke cans out of car windows. Now, nobody short of Barack and the Super Friends can stop his villainous plans!
What I always wondered about these bad guys, ever since the days of watching Super Friends
sprawled on the living room floor of a Saturday morning, was "Why is the supervillain trying to blow up the planet? What do the bad guys stand to gain from that? Who pays the Legion of Doom, anyway?"- Split Moon in half with giant sonic earthquake laser, causing both halves to slam into the Earth.
- ???
- Profit!
I don't think you are alone in wondering Tam, thought the same thing myself as a kid. I also wondered why given that Luthor was a super-genious, why his plots had huge flaws. That's the problem with average intellect writers coming up with super genious plots.
ReplyDeleteAt least with Wile E. Coyote, "Suuuper Genious" was meant in sarcasm, or is that irony?
All i ever wanted was a stick of gum like Aquaboy had so i could swim underwater.
ReplyDeleteCIII
I wondered the same thing about the early Bond villains. Some were dirty commies, which I can understand.
ReplyDeleteGoldfinger, on the other hand, never made any sense to me. The guy was a rich smuggler with lots of gold. If that was me, I would worry about avoiding taxes and not getting caught. When a British Agent shows up, I cool it and maybe hide out in Fiji with the Kennedys.
Underpants gnomes?
ReplyDeleteThere is the "I hate everything and want to burn it down to alleviate the fires in my heart and the voices in my head" aspect to supervillians, but that can be fixed by taking a nap in the garage with the car running a lot easier than by planetary destruction, so most potential supervillians die off long before they reach a significant level of "super."
ReplyDeleteOr they become city-level bureaucrats and inflict only petty annoyances on locals, living out their lives as small, crushed souls.
What is a "Climate system"?
ReplyDeleteFolks like Koch will be blamed by the ruling socialist party for all evil now.
ReplyDeleteI suggest immigrating, going Galt with non-US investments, and just laying on a hot beach somewhere, and having sweet young things bring you drinks all day, while you watch the US crash on your iPad.
. . (http://www.draftresource.com/mytake/2012/11/07/koch-as-supervillain/)
ReplyDeleteStating that something makes sense does not make it so. Stating that the climate is changing (it is) doesn't make anyone's statement about why the climate is changing de facto truth. "Let's spend another few hundreds (thousands?) of megawatts of energy to build another new, 3% more "efficient" car, instead of assuring the megawatts already spent to build the cars already on the road continue to function, well, for a few extra years" really should appear absurd to everyone.
The ThinkProgress.org article might as well point out that Cash for Clunkers and other Government Motors programs are generating greenhouse gases merely to enrich labor unions and get B. Hussein Obama re-elected.
Stating that David H. Koch of Koch Industries made his money by polluting the climate is propaganda, slanted and twisted persuasive speech, (evilly) meant to destroy the reputation and prospects of someone that met his community's needs, employed countless thousands of people, and enabled a *lot* of people to put food on their table.
I didn't see that the article took any pains to establish whether there would have been more carbon, or less, emitted over the course of Mr. Koch's career if he had instead become a plumber or college professor. And I still want to see the carbon footprint of money spent on government programs from defense spending to welfare and all the rest.
And, by the way, Koch enabled a lot of investors and wage earners, customers and community members, to breath the air of the climate that is changing for various and sundry reasons including the solar changes that are warming all the planets in the solar system.
"Climate System" is Marx-talk for for weather; they systematize everything they can get their hands on and polarize it to make it fit into their bi-polar constructivism - including the Weather, and as with "thesis and antithesis" you have The Marxist Gods: the Sky fighting the Clouds, the Sun gobbling up the Moon, and Neptune fighting Gaia - some kind of perpetual War.
ReplyDeleteAnd now David-Emmanuel Kochstein is in for his regularly scheduled Five-Minute Hate, but the motivators that push Nancy Pelosi's botox-button are simple: power and the perpetual youth serum.
lol. Thanks for clearing that up for me, Not C.
ReplyDeleteI'm with og - where did that person learn to write English?
ReplyDelete"Polluting the climate system"?
"Pollution" is one thing. The climate is another.
Even granting, arguendo, significant human-caused climate change for the negative, the cause is not "pollution" of "the climate system".
(And bracketing entirely the idea that a post-industrial economy - or even an industrial one of the modern era - can run off of unicorn farts and rainbows rather than either fossil fuel or nuclear power, both of which that sort of idjit opposes by reflex...
Want me to care about your opinion about fossil fuels? Support immense increases in nuclear power* - because otherwise you're just broadcasting how completely foolish you are.
* Or, I suppose, push for a slow migration to algae biofuel, which is at least plausible, given enough time and enough hippie tears over "using mother ocean to grow fuel waily waily waily!". No other sources are even plausible.)
"First they came for the Billionaires....."
ReplyDelete"First they came for the Billionaires....."
ReplyDelete1:17 PM, November 07, 2012
The way my old poli sci professor explained it, a communist revolution starts in the lower class. They come up through the middle class and tell said middle class "we're going after those at the top and if you don't join us, we'll kill you too."
I'm waiting for the time we can hunt people at thinkprogress for sport.
ReplyDeleteWell, Tam, you did admit to being an outlier in your social and political opinions, long ago. As Vox Day is fond of saying, MPAI (most people are idiots). The problem is, the idiots get to vote. I seem to recall suggesting to you, that in my ideal republic, you and Roberta would each get two or three votes.
ReplyDeleteThat kind of plan, applied generally, might have prevented what happened yesterday, when my country committed suicide.
Heck, you could just limit the franchise to people who are net contributors and thus have skin in the game.
ReplyDelete"Climate change" is a religiion.
ReplyDeleteIt takes far more faith to believe in predictions years out when those same scientists can't even get things straight 2 days from now.
America is largely divided among the climate/finance camps.
It doesn't take faith to see the financial inevitability of America's fiscal policies, just basic math skills.
Plus sidekicks are a legitimate tax deduction!
ReplyDeletemustanger: Your old poli sci professor was a fool or a liar. Communist revolutions were led by middle class punks, who when they discovered that they couldn't rise as high as they wanted on their own talents, used the lower class to help them supplant the upper class. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro, and Ho Chi Minh all came from families wealthy enough to send them to university.
ReplyDeleteThis is true of most other revolutions, too. The French revolution romanticized the sans culottes and relied on them for cannon fodder, but nearly all the big names in that movement were lawyers - their mistake was that they created such an effective system for "shortening" those above them that they couldn't turn it off when they became the guys on the top. And the leaders of the American Revolution were all lawyers, businessmen, or successful farmers - but we had the advantage that there was no local upper class to supplant (and murder). Our revolutionaries were satisfied to merely overthrew a colonial government that kept all Americans from rising too high.
What markm said.
ReplyDelete@jayson:
ReplyDeleteSport? Is shooting fish in a barrel sport? Fun, maybe. Sport, not so much.
markm, My old poli sci professor covered Ho Chi Minh in a separate class on the Vietnam War... including that he'd been to university.
ReplyDeleteThe "middle class punks" using the lower class like that doesn't surprise me. Currently, as long as the checks keep coming, the lower class may not realize or even care.
And the American Revolution wasn't led by commies. True regarding their professions. They had everything to lose. Most of the 56 signatories to the Declaration of Independence... they did lose it all.
Why is it that the proposed solution for a technical problem is invariably a social one, i.e., place the entire global economy under centralized control? Is it the sterling environmental record of the centrally planned economies, like the USSR and the PRC?
ReplyDeleteAt least North Korea has avoided a large carbon footprint.
Brad K.
ReplyDeleteBut doncha know? ...Only a highly trained government official is qualified enough to release carbon products into the atmosphere...Compassionately.
Incidentally, for a glimpse into the psyche of your basic supervillain I recommend Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Gross. Of course our gracious hostess has already read it, but the rest of you dipshits, get a copy and start on it ASAP!
ReplyDeleteThere will be a test.