Tonight at 6pm I'll be keeping my weekly date with Hugh Hewitt, live coast to coast at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific. We'll be talking IRS, ISIS, HRC for POTUS, and all the other acronymic debris of the week.
EPA Employees Told to Stop Pooping in the Hallway
This is the Denver, Colorado EPA office, in case you're wondering. Confronted by feces in the hallway, the bureaucracy did what government usually does when it finds everything's full of s**t. It called in a "consultant":
Confounded by what to make of this occurrence, EPA management "consulted" with workplace violence "national expert" John Nicoletti, who said that hallway feces is in fact a health and safety risk. He added the behavior was "very dangerous" and the individuals responsible would "probably escalate" their actions.
So "workplace violence" on US Government property now covers everything from Major Hasan opening fire while shouting "Allahu akbar!" to environmentalist bureaucrats defecating. The government seems to take the latter more seriously than the former, judging from the EPA statement:
EPA's actions in response to recent workplace issues have been deliberate and have focused on ensuring a safe work environment for our employees. Our brief consultation with Dr. Nicoletti on this matter, a resource who regularly provides our office with training and expertise on workplace issues, reflects our commitment to securing a safe workplace.
There is, as it happens, a pronounced coprophiliac streak in the environmental movement. As I wrote in Maclean's seven years ago:
Sheryl Crow, meanwhile, recently proposed that when it comes to, ah, other waste products, her environmentally conscious fans should only use a single sheet of bathroom tissue per visit. I fell asleep three minutes into Al Gore's Live Earth extravaganza, so I don't know whether she turned up to perform some new consciousness-raising song on the theme -- sheet music, as they say in Mexico -- but a celebrity fundraising cover of 'All We Are Saying is Give One Piece a Chance' is surely a project all Hollywood can get behind.
As it turns out, Miss Crow is a bit of a paper tiger on the eco-bathroom front. In 2005, MTV got Cameron Diaz to host a series called 'Trippin", in which she and her A-list chums went to Tanzania, Honduras, Nepal and whatnot and praised the environmental friendliness of village life. 'I aspire to be like them,' Drew Barrymore told viewers after spending a few days in a remote Chilean community unburdened by electricity or indoor plumbing. 'I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome.' Does a Barrymore crap in the woods? Not in John, Ethel and Lionel's day. You can understand why Cate Blanchett's so opposed to leaf blowers if they're blowing any leaves from round Drew's stomping grounds.
Has Miss Barrymore been anywhere near the Denver office recently? Faced with all this fecal matter, the EPA might have done better to ask Nobel Poop Prize winner Michael E Mann to whip up a horse hockey stick showing that there's more excrement in the EPA hallway than at any time over the last thousand years. Mann's own science has, after all, been described by Professor Wallace Smith Broecker as, er, approximating the same condition as the EPA hallway.
Meanwhile, if you would like to help me climb out from under all the excrement Dr Mann and his lawyers have left in my own hallway, by chipping in for a personally autographed book or our exclusive range of Mann vs Steyn trial merchandise or one of our gift certificates, I promise to give him the hosing-down Big Climate's Augean Stables are long overdue for.
~#We'reGonnaNeedALongerHashtag: Boko Haram has defied Michelle Obama's awesome piece of cardboard and kidnapped another 60 Nigerian girls. Apparently, going viral on social media doesn't do anything for you when you've been sold as a sex slave to some guy in Chad. As Kate McMillan says, that was #SoLastMonth.
The Nigerian novelist Teju Cole calls it "the White-Savior Industrial Complex", which seems to have replaced Kipling's "White Man's Burden". Let's face it, "burden" is kind of a bummer, isn't it? "Take up the White Man's Hashtag" is something we can all fit in between chai refills.
