The inimitable Pierre Elliott Trudeau once said that the government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation. The prefab Tony Blair, however, thinks that where the government really belongs is up the rectums of cattle, and who among us would disagree?
Farmers will be told today they could be penalised if they do not stop their flatulent animals farting so much methane gas. The environment secretary, David Miliband, will tell a farming conference in Oxford that agriculture now contributes 7% of all UK greenhouse gas emissions and more than a third of all emissions of methane -one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases…
Tomorrow, I imagine cows all over Great Britain will be getting a stern talking to. Let’s hope they start with Margaret Thatcher.
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Technorati me!
raincoaster 
HmmmI may put this on my “influential blog” …….
http://www.praguetory.blogspot.com/
Hope you get a chance to see this before it changes … as of 12.30pm GMT you were number 1 in the Grauniad’s ‘Best of The Web’ feature. This post was linked to…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1981522,00.html
Well done!
Not sure how often they update that list so, in case you miss it, numbers 2-5 were Times Online, The Independent. Huffington Post and BBC News.
It was spotted by Nog while he was reading the article I linked to and he noticed your name at the top of the list on the right.
congrats on your success raincoaster.
Maggie, however, was a brilliant leader and will stay in history, or should do, as one of the best leaders the world has known.
That is way too funny! But, in all honesty, how are they going to control cow flatulence? It seems utterly ridiculous. And blaming cows, for god’s sake, when there’s way more CONTROLLABLE stuff out there to start with!
Nice knock on Maggie, BTW.
Thanks.
Well, it figures that the day I get featured on the Guardian the comments and posting functions go down for several hours. Ah well, I shall attempt to recreate from memory the brilliant comment that the WordPress gremlins ate.
newmania, congratulations. You know you’ve arrived when Praguetory is sucking up to you. But you can’t possibly steal this post for your blog: I stole it from the Guardian in the first place! It would destroy your Tory street cred.
Thanks for the heads-up, az. There will be no living with me now! The friend with which I was staying saw it and decided that, although I am heavily addicted to sleeping in, for this I wouldn’t mind getting woken up. And then he printed out that page of the Guardian website, so that I may frame it and bore future generations of raincoasters with tales of the glorious victory. Also, good for 200 hits. I’ll never hesitate to link to my own blog in a comment at Guido’s again!
Philipa, I have a lot of respect for Thatcher, and don’t doubt she’ll go down in history as one of the great leaders. She never for a moment betrayed her principles: my beef with her is that her principles are wrong, cruel, and evil. And she’s a lousy parent. Just look how her son turned out.
This page might be even better to print out as a keepsake because of the article…
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_dawkins/2007/01/post_858.html
Thanks! I have some issues with “Keeping people alive as lab rats” but it’s certainly preferable to killing them off when they become inconvenient.
I read the Guardian everyday R ..know your enemy..also it has shifted appreciably to the right over the years. It used to be a joke( Also read the Telegraph and the Mail natch)…
(I have less than no interest in being a well known blogger)
Then why drop the link to it? Only whore it out when you’re willing to put it out.
That makes sense: all this time it’s not a decline in pirates causing global warming, it’s been the increasing cow population!
So much for tapping industry on the shoulder for a quiet word. So much for encouraging soccer moms to buy a vehicle less offensive than an Abrams main battle tank. No, all we ever needed were some corks!
Of course, there is another population whose rise co-incides oddly with global temperature increase: Politicians. Also a known source of noxious gasses and hot air, though usually from the other end.
But since the cork tree is endangered, I feel I see a harmonious solution.
Indeed. Just tell Dubya there’s oil up there and he’ll be halfway up the colon in no time.
I really don’t want to know how they could tell who’s obeying the law and who isn’t.
Sniff? Light a match in a barn?
I would think that, like humans, diet plays a role in the amount of gas a cow produces. But I imagine there’s only so many things a cow can eat. With that said, if altering the diet achieves little success, then it’s quite moOronic of the government to penalize farmers for matters not within their control.
I remember when I was still in elementary school I got beat out for the main prize at the science fair by some farm nerd genius who had discovered a way to use the gas to make electric power, but damned if I can remember how. It was…uh…more than ten years ago now.
It’s quite common in some parts of the world to scrape surplus manure (the stuff you aren’t fertilising with) into a smallish concrete tank in the ground. Cap with a tight seal, run a copper line to the gas lantern or stove, and Robert is your parent’s sibling.
Wow, I thought you had an electric stove by now! Shows you what I know.
Perhaps you should talk to the neighbours about whether they’d mind you keeping a small herd of potbellied swine on your porch.
Though given where you live the neighbours have probably already set up an energy futures trading scheme on just such a premise.
And in fact there’s another benefit: Once production declines, the source goes off to become pork Fu Jhon.
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Ah yes. The methane issue. Down here in the dairyland of California, I smell the problem. But the problem isn’t straight from the cow’s ass in the way of a big fart. Its the manure and the wash-down systems that carry away the cow waste to a lagoon, where it sits and it ferments and it causes all manner of misery if one lives within a mile of it.
I would be just as disgusted by any factory spewing its noxious fumes into my breathing space. Dairymen? Deal with it before everyone breathing decides to deal with you.
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