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Proof Lileks is Brilliant

He agrees with me. :-)

It's amazing how brilliant someone sounds when they say something that you've said yourself a million times, but with new and different words.

The movie Silent Running is a "peaty slab of crap" he says. And I'm all... that's brilliant! "Peaty slab of crap" is exactly the phrase I've been looking for all of those times when I wanted to express just how stoopid that movie is. How often can you use the word "stoopid" without it getting old? Peaty slab of crap!

Or it could be that the movie itself is brilliant, if you look at it from the right direction. The proper direction. If you look at it as a skewering of the modern environmental movement it's got every single thing it needs. Lileks mentions the most egregious detail...

"Gosh: you’re orbiting a planet beyond Jupiter, and there’s insufficient sunlight to keep trees happy. Who could have seen that coming."

Because Silent Running is a movie about the environment that was written, produced, directed and acted by a cadre of self-righteous gaia lovers who had never in their entire lives so much as attempted to plant a tomato. These are the Earth Lovers and Tree Huggers that condemn "factory" farms and scold us all to buy organic and think it's beautiful when third world people undertake "sustainable" hand labor and live in mud huts in harmony with nature and see themselves as virtuous for buying a few of these products while they live with modern convenience, flush toilets and air conditioning.

I wasn't much past my teen years when I saw the movie Silent Running, but it left an impression. I knew that plants needed various light levels, among other things. I knew the tomatoes wouldn't grow under the trees. I knew that the shaded understory had different trees growing in it than the sun drenched canopies. And I could not conceive of any adult person competent to get through their day without assistance not knowing what I knew.

And yet, they exist.

They walk among us.

Oh, and did you hear Al Gore is back to lecturing us about the planet? Do you suppose that HE has ever grown a tomato?

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