April 2024 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

April 28, 2024April 29, 2024

Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be . . . College Students

Students spray paint pro-Palestinian messages at a protest encampment at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., April 28, 2024. (David Ryder/Reuters)

Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings in a song admonished mothers to not “… let your babies grow up to be cowboys”. As the saying goes, that was then, this is now. It’s not cowboys that we ought to be worried about. It’s college students. College is in the process of demolishing itself. Look no further than the Ivy League. From there, a degradation has taken root that has spread like a cerebral small pox epidemic, infecting the vast majority of campuses. They’re proving themselves to be embarrassments. The rot extends right through the administrations to the faculty and passes into the students. Beware, parents, your kids may leave the house leaning right but may return with a criminal record for defacing veterans’ cemeteries.

To be fair, not all of higher ed is an intellectual cesspool, but the problem is so pervasive that it has begun to besmirch nearly anyone with a degree on their resumé. Add Sociology or Humanities or English Lit or any of the “soft sciences” and their paper bio could be well on its way to the circular file.

The recent antisemitic pro-Palestinian encampments and protests are telling us the time of day. The fixation with the “marginalized” now includes a sanction for the genocidal butchery of 10/7. So warped is the thinking that the charge of “genocidal butchery” has become monopolized by those who committed actual “genocidal butchery” – the kind that you saw with your own eyes on 10/7 – and daily perform war crimes using civilian human shields, not shirking from hiding their military caches and facilities in and under schools, hospitals, orphanages, and housing complexes. Thus, savagery is excused. The natural apprehension about civilian casualties is distorted to pardon unspeakable barbarism in practice. What a warped universe.

Israeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. — sraeli soldiers carry the body of a victim of an attack at Kibbutz Kfar Aza, in southern Israel, on October 10. (Violeta Santos Moura/Reuters)

Hamas terror attacks — Hamas body cam photo of terrorist shooting indiscriminately into a house in Israeli kibbutz near Gaza border. (Israel Defense Forces via AP)

Don’t expect many of today’s college students to get it, having been raised on a steady diet of the oppressor/oppressed falderol throughout K-grad school, from public and elite prep schools all the way to the identity-mongering college curriculums. The curriculum of entire college academic departments, many of them mandatory for graduation, are based on this narrow little looking glass. The kids’ minds are forced shut, unable to exercise any kind of self-examination.

Student demonstrators occupy the pro-Palestinian "Gaza Solidarity Encampment" on the West Lawn of Columbia University on April 24, in New York City. — Anti-Israel tent encampment at Columbia University

Pro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the 'Gaza Solidarity Encampment' at Columbia University in New York on April 24. — Pro-Palestinian student protesters continue demonstrations on the eighth day of the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ at Columbia University in New York on April 24. (Fatih Aktas/Anadolu/Getty Images)

For instance, a radicalized Columbia faculty senate in a 62-14 vote on Friday (4/26/24) approved a resolution to investigate the administration of an already weak and vacillating college president for finally taking action against an illegal campus encampment and student-led pogrom targeting Jewish students. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn wrote of a strikingly similar situation in his three-volume The Red Wheel, a novelized account of the socio-political setting leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. He’s got the same mix of characters of academic adults and youths who’ve been radicalized. There’s something about the violent potential in socialism.

Not that all socialists are militant fanatics, mind you. It’s just that socialism is a systematic critique of a society, and there’s few things more thrilling for those immersed in a bubble divorced from realities, for four years or in a life of tenure, than the exciting prospect of overthrowing everything. Bulls in china shops are electrifying things to be for such young and stilted minds. The narrow-minded don’t know that they’re blinkered because they don’t know or understand or appreciate any alternatives. These are the reincarnated “comrade children” of the Khmer Rouge, alongside their adult abettors. Welcome to Columbia’s faculty senate and a chunk of the student body. The best and brightest or the worst and barbaric?

Not surprisingly, the faculty is as extreme as the youths given the fact that they curated this mess. It doesn’t take much to uncover the concomitant antisemitic student rage. Take, for instance, Khymani James, leader of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) cell who announced (see #1 below), “Zionists don’t deserve to live.” Such bombast would be treated as isolated anecdote until one notices that the school’s Jewish students were advised to stay home due to rampant Jew-hatred on campus (see #2 below).

Khymani James, shown in this photo from 2021

Ya think? This neo-Marxist antisemitism is in the academic ether, and in more than faculty offices and campus greens. George Washington University exploded and since the Jacobins also control the Washington, D.C., city government, the city won’t help the school enforce its rules. It declined the school’s request for police assistance. In the worst governed cities, we find the worst behavior. Get out of DC if you can and move the college to more civilized environs. The nation’s capital is a hot mess, and has been for quite some time.

As usual, Texas is showing how to handle the miscreants. The Austin chapter of the Palestine Solidarity Committee called for another one of these campus intifadas and were promptly arrested and carted off. UT’s Office of the Dean of Students declared to the group, “The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere.” Enough said. Call momma for the bail money.

Pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrate at the University of Texas on April 24, in Austin, Texas. — Pro-Palestinian protesters on the campus of UT, Austin

Yale and Princeton followed suit in showing more backbone than Columbia. As soon as the tents went up on Princeton, the school authorities ordered them down “now”. Down they went and the waifs then resorted to their usual standby, a sit-in. Yale’s campus police did the work of clearing the foolishness by arresting around 45 (see #4 below). Mom, expect a call.

Los Angeles’s USC constructed a pickle for itself. It’s got the usual intifada circus on campus but it is happening at graduation time. They really stepped into it when they chose a self-styled pro-Palestinian activist to be the valedictorian, Asna Tabassum. This one is a real winner. Her Instagram profile links to a pro-Palestinian website that proclaims,

“Zionism is a racist settler-colonialist ideology. One Palestinian state would mean Palestinian liberation and the complete abolishment of the state of Israel.”

USC student Asna Tabassum speaks to ABC News, April 16, 2024 (Video screenshot)

The choice of speaker amid the broader call for intifada ignited a real hornet’s nest. The school canceled the school-wide graduation (see #4 below).

How did this person get into a position to be valedictorian? Good grades, high GPA? Well, today, given rampant grade hyper-inflation, they have as much value as the Turkish lira (54.8% inflation). Watch her tying herself in knots in an attempt to avoid the charge of Jew-hatred. Like many of her fellow protesters, she is a contortionist in concocting a hypothetical distinction between venom for Zionism and antisemitism. It’s a difference without a difference.

An overly inflated GPA must be the culprit since one need not be a genius to see that a one-state “river to the sea”, with the obvious right of return, would lead to another wholesale slaughter of the Jews. Just take today’s Iran and graft it onto the narrow trip between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Combine the Sharia viciousness of Hamas and gross misgovernance of the PLO and see what you get. Get the idea?

Living cheek by jowl with people who’ve been raised on a steady diet of characterizations of you as evil incarnate isn’t a recipe for kumbaya (see #5 below). Sorry, Miss Tabassum. Ditto for the munchkins in our classrooms. Parents, another four years in a neo-Marxist bubble isn’t necessarily a pathway to betterment for your offspring. As the song goes, mommas don’t let your babies grow up to be . . . college students. Beware, oh, beware.

May be an image of 3 people and text that says 'RANIRZ LASVFGASFEVITN-JOURNAL 2024@CREATCRS.COM FROM FROMtheRIVER the RIVER か the SEA SUPPORT HAMAS HAMAS ERRORSTS STUDENT PROTESTERS ADVINISTRATOS NISTRA ΓM WITH STUPID SEE EENOEVIL. NO EVIL. X@Ramireztoons HEAR NO EVIL. EVIL. michaclpramirez.com'

RogerG

Sources:

1. “‘Zionists Don’t Deserve To Live’: Meet The Leader Of Columbia University’s Anti-Israel Encampment”, Kassy Akiva, The Daily Wire, 4/25/24, at https://www.dailywire.com/news/zionists-dont-deserve-to-live-meet-the-leader-of-columbia-universitys-anti-israel-encampment
2. “Columbia rabbi warns Jewish students to go home, don’t come back to campus because of ‘extreme antisemitism’”, Doree Lewak and Isabel Keane, New York Post, 4/21/24, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/columbia-rabbi-warns-jewish-students-to-go-home-don-t-come-back-to-campus-because-of-extreme-antisemitism/ar-AA1nouyc
3. “George Washington University Suspends Students for Organizing Anti-Israel Encampment”, James Lynch, National Review Online, 4/27/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/george-washington-university-suspends-students-for-organizing-anti-israel-encampment/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=second
4. “USC Cancels Graduation Ceremony over Anti-Israel Protests”, Brittany Bernstein, National Review Online, 4/25/24, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-cancels-graduation-ceremony-over-anti-israel-protests/
5. An accurate window into what Israel is facing can be found at the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) at https://www.memri.org/

April 26, 2024April 29, 2024

Grandma Is a Lefty

These four climate cases are changing how we can tackle climate change - Greenpeace International — The Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen)

Here’s a story that caught my eye a while back. In March, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared that the Swiss government is a human rights abuser on a par with Iran, North Korea, the CCP, et al. How did the ECHR get to this judgment? Do the Swiss possess a pervasive secret police that piles people into dark, dank prisons never to be heard from again, like the CCP does to the Uyghurs? No. Switzerland became a target of opportunity for the usual assemblage of lefties that crops up from time to time to shout and litigate their way to imposing their views on everybody else.

This one, the Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen), made up of lefty oldsters, brought suit against the Swiss government for not capping greenhouse gas emissions. In a story in the NYT (see below) on the Court ruling, it read in part,

“By not acting ‘in good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner,’ the ruling said, the Swiss government had failed to protect its citizens’ rights”.

The Court became a legislature. A legislature is the legitimate place where partisan contests are settled, among the people’s elected representatives, not a court. The “climate change” brouhaha is, most emphatically, a battle of competing viewpoints. There’s much to debate about the issue; there’s much unsettled about the issue. If the people want caps on such emissions, their reps can pass a law. If they want to remove the caps, they can do that also. The Court, instead, took the partisan opinion of a partisan group of lefty old folks and made their opinion a matter of law where there is no law.

May be an image of 4 people — The European Court of Human Rights

Remember that’s the complaint of the lefty grandmas. They want a law even though their elected reps have chosen not to make one. Rather, they have taken their little opinion and wrapped it into a lawsuit that asked the Court to act as if there was one. The tortilla for this partisan burrito was “human rights”. According to the ECHR, the opinion of a narrow group of lefties is to be shoved down the throats of the entire population of Switzerland, just under the guise of “human rights”. Now, it’s a “human right” to handcuff, and impoverish, a people against their will.

Without doubt, the so-called “caps” that have been morphed into a “human right” would turn the people’s lives upside down. Getting real, the “caps”, and its cousin “decarbonization”, would mean more intense electrification – i.e., reliance on a grid made more unstable by greenie generation (wind, solar, tides, you name it). The costs of the “transition” are mammoth. As a result, a lot of somebodies are going to be “ground down by the wheel of history” (a little Bolshevik lingo).

Tractors stop traffic in the Netherlands in protest of enviro rules — Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway, near Rijssen, on June 29, 2022, against the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans. (Photo by Vincent Jannink / ANP / AFP)

If the “caps” are a “human right”, is avoidance of the costs of the caps also a human right? Increasing the financial stress on a beleaguered population must be a threat to human rights. Ipso facto, the Senior Women for Climate Protection are human rights abusers. Should they be incarcerated to join the Uyghurs to protect our right not be subjected to their nonsense? The logic is inescapable.

Lefty grandmas are no different from lefty youngsters shutting down the colleges in an exercise of Hamas-love.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “In Landmark Climate Ruling, European Court Faults Switzerland”, Isabel Kwai and Emma Bubola, New York Times, 4/9/2024, at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/world/europe/climate-human-rights.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap

April 20, 2024

It Makes No Sense

Ukrainian strike — Emergency personnel work at the site where an apartment block was heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike in Dnipro, Ukraine on January 15, 2023. (REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne)

What makes no sense? The denial of aid to Ukraine, of course. Recently I listened to an interview of Ryan Zinke (R, Montana) regarding the four bills that were introduced by Speaker Mike Johnson to provide aid to Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and our defense industrial base. Zinke’s skepticism about supporting Ukraine is, to put it mildly, incoherent. Why single out Ukraine? It’s bonkers.

MT-Sen: Trump To Nominate Rep. Ryan Zinke (R) For Interior Secretary Position — Ryan Zinke (R, Montana)

A person can be forgiven for concluding that a good chunk of the Republican caucus is scared, maybe petrified, of the screeching minority in the part of the party most infected with Trump Personality Disorder (TPD), people like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia) and Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky). They threaten to oust Johnson for simply putting Ukraine aid on the floor for a debate and a vote. Shrill, fire-breathing fanatics have outsized influence in a paper-thin Republican majority in the House, ironically a consequence of Trump’s ludicrous 2022 endorsements (he would like to shift blame to abortion).

What is TPD? These are people who, like Trump, confuse theatrics for common sense. It’s a form of political personality that treats stridency, bluntness, and coarseness as the virtues of a statesman.

Thomas Massie Joins MTG's Motion to Vacate as Opposition to Mike Johnson Grows over Ukraine — Rep. Thomas Massie (R, Kentucky) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia)

But why the hostility to Ukraine? Zinke provided the usual humdrum about needing to secure our borders, our depleted munition stockpiles, and Ukraine corruption. Yet, the first two excuses are ridiculous. Money and supplies going to Israel and Taiwan, which he supports, also steer resources away from our border and weapons inventories. As for corruption, is Ukraine any more corrupt than, say, Chicago, our teacher unions, any of our unions, defense contractors, our litany of eco-industries with both hands in the public purse, et al?

The corruption angle is a ruse to hide an affection for Putin by loud-mouthed zealots who’d never win the spelling bee. It’s all tied up in the Russia hoax melodrama of 2015 to 2019. The left scapegoated Hillary’s 2016 loss on Russia, so the dimwitted Trump enthusiasts quickly discovered their inner Putin. “They’re against him, so we must be for him” is the dictum. The door was thus opened to a love for authoritarian public cleanliness, physicality in political persona, Potemkin visits by Tucker Carlson, and the balderdash of Candace Owens’s rantings — and a willingness to leave Ukraine dangling.

A Ukraine flag on a Trumpkin’s house became as incongruous as the tortoise besting Usain Bolt in the 100 meters.

Ditto for the thought process in the donkey party’s embrace of Ukraine-love. Their own “for ‘em/against ‘em” dialectic led them to replace their LGBTQ+ rainbow flag with Ukraine’s. Russia gave us Trump, in their disturbed thinking, so let’s inflict Ukraine on the Russians. That’ll teach ‘em. It’s, frankly, astounding to watch them after they spent the later years of the Cold War siding with the Russians.

Where’s all that stuff about partisanship ending at the water’s edge in foreign affairs? Hogwash.

Is the MTG caucus aware of the new Axis? It’s not hyperbole to notice the similarities between Germany/Italy/Japan circa 1939 and Russia/Iran/China circa 2024. There are more 1939 similarities in this new triumvirate of evil than during the Cold War (the bipolar U.S. v. Soviet Russia), including a rehash of “American First” isolationism – another Trump legacy. They might concede Iran to a lesser extent, but their cyclopic monovision really only sees China. Thus, as in der Fuhrer gobbling up the Rhineland, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, they are willing to return Europe to a battlefield, just eighty years later. Their myopia, alongside the rank pusillanimity in other parts of the Republican caucus, is a cloning of a combination of Britian’s Neville Chamberlain and U.S.’s own Charles Lindbergh throughout the party. Is anyone noticing that we’ve been down this road before?

German soldiers being welcomed into the Sudetenland by its German population. | Deutsches heer ... — German soldiers marching into the Czech “Sudetenland” in 1938

Pass the Ukraine bill, and damn The Squad, the TPD Republicans, and the cowardly in GOP ranks.

RogerG

April 8, 2024April 9, 2024

Fashionable, Ignorant Thought Swamps the Climate Change Discussion

Climate and Environmental Activism | Royal United Services Institute

H.L. Mencken in his usual blunt way in 1926 put it succinctly about democracy: “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” “Individual ignorance” runs up and down the social pyramid. Frequently, clichés, banalities, pandering, sloganeering, and no real debate dominate much of the public discourse. Mencken’s right. For proof, look no further than our 2024 choices for president.

H. L. Mencken Biography - Childhood, Life Achievements & Timeline — H.L. Mencken

The tendency is no truer than in the discussion about “climate change”. The fad-thought making the rounds is that the “debate is settled”; there’s no need to have one because “97% of scientists agree”. But that’s not the debate. You might get 97% agreement on a paper-thin subset of the “climate change” issue such as the belief that man’s production of greenhouse gases has warmed our atmosphere. But that’s not what we’re debating. No bill or policy is just about that.

Let’s be clear. We’re debating whether to turn our lives inside out and upside down. Fundamental technologies and entire ways of life that took decades, over a century to develop are being scheduled for the ash heap in less than 30 years. Their efficiencies and cost-effectiveness are to be discarded in a frenzied dash to . . . nothing, or the incoherent, incongruent, or the menacingly weaker. That’s what we’re debating, whether we should even go down this path.

If you go beyond the “97%” banality, you’ll run into questions like, “Is it really catastrophic?” Or, “Is it really out of alignment with other periods in the earth’s geologic history?” Or, “Would it be better to adapt rather than force mitigation in gargantuan measures that’ll ruin the lives of millions if not billions of people?” Or, “Ought we to really ‘decarbonize’?” Or, “Is that the only choice?” Or, “Is it even feasible?” I could go on.

Just looking at the economic aspects of the faddish treatment of the issue, trouble slaps you in the face. To my friends who see economics as mere rank materialism, think again. Poverty is an economic condition, and one to be avoided, if rotting teeth, malnutrition, disease abatement, clean water, widespread emphysema from the burning of candles and animal dung at the family hearth, etc., matters. Bad economics lead to bad conditions for our fellow human beings.

Let’s face it, eco-obsessions are a luxury for the well-off. And these people show just as much ignorance as the poor mother unknowingly drawing polluted water from the same infected well in East Africa. They might care about her plight, while they throw up roadblocks to her people developing beyond the charity of those denizens of the Google campus in California, or the half-wits occupying beachfront estates in Malibu and Martha’s Vineyard.

Buttressing the roadblocks are inane arguments about the economic costs of global warning. But everything has a cost. Think about this: What are the costs of averting the costs? One facile model sets a decline of 2% in GDP from global warming. Well, what are costs to GDP of the mitigations to “decarbonize”? If it’s in the 5-7% range as one study put it, we avoid 2% by paying 5-7%. Mmmmm, interesting.

If you want a real debate, have one. Access views beyond the ignorant thought police. They exist. Here’s one from the Hoover Institution. You might find it enlightening. Check it out below.

RogerG

April 5, 2024April 9, 2024

More Proof of California as a Mental Institution

Whew, California has a $20 minimum wage. Think of it, wages determined by politicians. Command a “living wage” by proclamation and all good things will happen. Right? No. Watch for a cascade of unintended consequences. The cartoonist Michael Ramirez, as usual, captures the moment.

May be an image of burger and text

Prepare for a new wave of U-Haul rentals out of the state.

RogerG

April 4, 2024April 5, 2024

The Insanity of Our Moment

Lack of action on climate change has sparked protests (Photo: Getty) — Climate extinction?

Obviously, Facebook, and probably much of the techie universe for that matter, is enthralled by hair-on-fire climate alarmism. So much so that they put a “context warning” on a cartoon that was attached to one of my recent posts about the EV craziness sweeping the halls of power, a politicized professoriate, their young charges mobbing the public square, and the beautiful people in the culture. It’s crazy, just think about it. I’ll explain.

Some people are braving the hostility of today’s unofficial (and official) Inquisition who, like Galileo, just stepped forward to say, “Wait a minute!” There are voices out there other than the lefty Union of Concerned Scientists. One such voice is the Cornwall Alliance (https://cornwallalliance.org); there are others. They raise some glaring questions that few if any denizens in big media newsrooms would know enough to ask.

Right off the bat, Cornwall and most others don’t deny the existence of man-caused (anthropogenic) climate change – i.e., global warming. They assert, however, that the doom-mongering is not science. One should never say “the science says”. “Science” has no vocal cords. It’s a method that comes close to “trust but verify”, or “where’s the beef”, or simply “prove it”. Waiting for “science” to say something treats the whole endeavor as if it were a homogenized mass of one mind. May as well put up a huge picture of Mao to represent all of China, er “science”, in one fell swoop. People that wallow in “the science says” aren’t scientists and wouldn’t know which end of the telescope to use, or explain a hypothesis, or how to conduct a fitting test for one, the essence of science. Thus, it’s easy for the scientifically illiterate to jump to doom.

Such stunted science-minds would never consider, or ask, the following:

* What is the nature of the warming? Much of the available evidence indicates that the warming is concentrated in the upper latitudes and affects average daily low temperatures (mostly at night) and not the highs.

* What are the actual effects of the warming? Are they all bad? No, and on balance, they are likely to be positive. Warmer global temps in the upper latitudes extends the growing season and expands the amount of the earth’s surface for agriculture. The growing season starts earlier and ends later. Plants love CO2. Conversely, history shows that bad things happen with cooling (the Black Death, famine, for instance).

* What about droughts? They come and go, and are sensitive to localized conditions, like cold/warm water currents. El Nino is a result of warm ocean water; La Nina is born of cold. Warm water warms the air above it and warmer air has more room for more water vapor for more rain. The jet stream accommodates and sends it to one area and away from another. One place is in drought, and another can’t handle the deluge. The cycles are called “decadel” because they come and go every 7-12 years on average. Welcome to nature, and not a soccer mom’s preference for an SUV.

* Are the scare stories of an avalanche of “extreme weather” accurate? No, the evidence suggests that our current weather patterns haven’t varied from the historical record going back in time using tree rings and core samples. If anything, they prove that climate, and its short-term equivalent, weather, varies around a mean, sometimes quite dramatically, and also that climate (long term weather patterns of at least 30 years) has never been steady-state. The earth wobbles on its axis; the orbit slightly shifts; and solar radiation jumps up and down. And we have always put in and taken out stuff since we ventured out of the cave. Variation, like all of nature, is the chief characteristic of our weather and climate.

* Is the nation of Micronesia, or the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard, about to disappear in rising sea levels? No, because we are talking about inches in the single digits covering centuries if not thousands of centuries. It’s manageable. Talk to the Dutch who’ve been dealing with holding back the North Sea for at least a half of a millennium or more.

So, why are our science semi-literates in power so gung-ho to ruin our lives? Simple, for them, Chicken Little is a divine oracle. The apocalypse is nigh. For them, we can’t adapt our way out of the doom. For them, we must mitigate, and that means turning our lives upside down, declaring war on fossil fuels, and erecting the Soviet to oversee our wants and desires.

Actually, we can adapt, not mitigate, because their Chicken Little is essentially a witch doctor. A sea wall can handle a few inches of rise in coastal waters protecting Obama’s mansion investment on Martha’s Vineyard and Oprah’s luxurious enclaves in Montecito (Santa Barbara) and Maui. Receding ice sheets in the polar regions is more than compensated by more land open for farming and a longer growing season. Feeding more people sounds good to me. More greenery from more CO2 has a tremendous upside.

This war on fossil fuels throws common sense out the window. What do we gain (benefits) by handcuffing millions and billions of people to a crippled grid and treating the possession of an SUV as a war crime? What are the costs? The forced exchange of what works for what doesn’t will mean that more people will enter the ranks of the poor. Pencil it out. We’ll have less CO2 in the air and more filth and poverty on the ground. It’s insane.

Yep, this is our moment of insanity.

RogerG

Sources:

* Additional YouTube presentations on green matters, the other side to the debate:

1. Michael Shellenberger, “Why renewables can’t save the planet”, at https://youtu.be/N-yALPEpV4w?si=-frZCso5LEaCVNIj
2. “’What Percent Of Our Atmosphere Is CO2?’: Doug LaMalfa Stumps Entire Panel With Climate Questions”, Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Ca.), 2023, at https://youtu.be/bJfrKNR3K2k?si=9Cn0wiMwaqa8DQfe
3. Stephen Hayward, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming”, 2014, at https://youtu.be/RZlICdawHRA?si=WiZZs82W58z6D0ns
4. A balanced assessment of EV’s: The Car Guys, “THE BIG EV LIE. Why They Won’t Save the Planet & All About Dirty Electricity”, 2021, at https://youtu.be/sytWLB4-W-M?si=34ck2aFrRkRiql9n
5. Pete Buttigieg’s slick glibness. Watch him skate around the immense problems associated with an EV life. One key problem is generating the electricity to make it all work. He talks about the grid but not about the sources for an immense expansion of the necessary generation of the electricity. “’Which Uses More Electricity…A Refrigerator When It’s Running Or Electric Car When It’s Charging?’”, in questioning of Buttigieg by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky), 2023, at https://youtu.be/avi9iBC8opU?si=LoSEVadXpLZK09J1

* This is not a comprehensive list but is a sample of a robust debate that exists outside attempts in the media to quash it. Real science cannot be suppressed.